The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' was supposed to launch a franchise... Instead, it was a production so toxic it ended a legendary career—and shoved one of the most influential comic writers of all time into a legal nightmare. This week, Chris and Lizzie break down how 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' collapsed under the weight of ego, chaos, and truly terrible luck. From devastating floods that destroyed entire sets to a power struggle between director Stephen Norrington and star Sean Connery that nearly turned physical, 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' was doomed from the start. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

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• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:04Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a somewhat misbegotten misfire of a mashup of Victorian villains and heroes in an attempt to cash in on the superhero train that was just leaving the station, a film I have deep affection for. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, what film do you have for us today?

• 2:29Lizzie Bassett?

  A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or confusingly LXG, as it was also marketed, and as I'm gonna refer to it across this episode because the title's too long.

• 2:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Does Sean Connery's Alan Quatermain ever say League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?

• 2:47Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I don't think anyone does.

• 2:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Moriarty does.

• 2:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 2:50Chris Winterbauer?

  When he welcomes him. But I don't believe that Alan, Alan Quatermain, I don't believe he does. I'm so excited. This has been a long requested film, and Lizzie finally said, "I will pluck the poison apple from the tree and we shall eat it together." Let's get into it.

• 3:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, had you seen The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen before now? What were your thoughts upon rewatching it on your birthday for the podcast?

• 3:14Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Yes. So, I had seen The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen before. I'd only seen it once before, and I saw it in theaters when it first came out. I will take you back ever so briefly, Lizzie, because it is a somewhat funny story. I was known a little bit amongst my friend group as the person who was most into movies of my friends, and I would get into debates with my friends over movies. Notably, I remember getting into a yelling match with one friend about The Rock not being as good as Glory as a movie, which I stand by.

• 3:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 3:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I was shouted down by all of my friends.

• 3:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 3:46Chris Winterbauer?

  All of my friends were saying, "The Rock is way better!" And I said, "You don't understand film!" We were 12 or 13 at the time. And so, the trailer came out for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and I wasn't super familiar with the characters they were riffing on. Some of them, Dorian Gray, Mina Harker, I was more- Familiar with, but Alan Quatermain, to this day, remains the character I don't have much experience with.

• 4:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Couldn't tell you, and I've tried.

• 4:11Chris Winterbauer?

  But I loved Blade and the trailer. I thought the trailer looked amazing. I thought like, I really thought, this is awesome. It's steampunk, it's Victorian age, it's got action, it's got prototypical Nazis. It's an unusual time period that they've chosen to dive into. And so I really, really hyped it up. And I got some friends to go see it in theaters.

• 4:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 4:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's one of two instances in my life. The other was Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, where I lost a lot of credibility after dragging people to the theater. You don't understand, Donnie Wahlberg's a great actor. Have you seen The Sixth Sense? And then, yeah, that one didn't go over that well.

• 4:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Donnie Wahlberg is a great actor.

• 4:49Chris Winterbauer?

  He is a good actor.

• 4:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Dreamcatcher did involve someone like pooping some kind of evil worm into a toilet. And I think that's where I bailed.

• 4:56Chris Winterbauer?

  As my friend said, why did you take us to the Butt Buster movie?

• 5:02Chris Winterbauer?

  So, um, anyhow, let's talk about League of the Ordinary Gentlemen, the movie you're here to discuss. So I remember feeling a little let down personally when I saw it the first time. Did not hate it by any means. And rewatching it, my feelings are kind of much the same. There's actually a lot I appreciate about this movie. I think there's some really, really great practical effects work. Some pretty incredible miniature work. I like a lot of the design choices in the movie.

• 5:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 5:26Chris Winterbauer?

  I do think it starts to feel a little desaturated, I think, by the end. But I do like a lot of the design choices. The miniatures are really cool. It hearkens back to a time when there was like a bit more of a silliness in these movies that I appreciated. And I think this movie suffers in a few areas for me, but I want to start with, you know, the good. And again, I love some of the design choices. Nemo's car and submarine, for example, very fun. I actually think Sean Connery gives a pretty fun, you know, somewhat scenery chewing performance. Like, I like seeing Sean Connery just beat people up, just impale a man on a rhino horn.

• 6:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Something he does in his daily life.

• 6:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And so I think, you know, despite having some affection for this movie, it, in my opinion, falls short of its aspirations because I still I think it's a really fun idea. I really like the idea of this movie. And I have a couple of thoughts as to why, but one thing I was thinking is this movie, if it had just leaned 10% like campier and more fun thrill ride, I feel like we would have landed in the territory of The Mummy from 1999.

• 6:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And it feels like we're almost there and we just don't quite get it. And it made me appreciate someone like Brendan Fraser, who brings such humor to the roles that he takes on. And Rachel Weisz, for example, as well, who's also very fun. It felt like that movie, everybody understood the assignment, which was-

• 6:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Everyone in that movie got it.

• 6:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, let's make it fun. And then on the same token, it doesn't have the heart of a film that actually visually exists in much the same world, which was 2004's Hellboy, which is only a year later. And I feel like Hellboy actually accomplishes a lot of the things that this movie is trying to do. So it feels like it doesn't have quite the heart and it doesn't have quite the humor. And so as a result, we get a spicy pancake, as one of our patrons responded. We like spice, we like pancakes, we don't necessarily like them together.

• 7:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Sometimes I do, if it's a scallion pancake.

• 7:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, all to say, there's a human quality to this. And even though I, for me, it falls short of its aspirations. I just saw this, there's this new mini series on YouTube. It's not even a mini series, like three minute AI slop videos that Darren Aronofsky is making about the American Revolution. It's insane. I thought the headline was fake. And I watched one of them and I thought, this is so much worse than The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, because there's nothing human about this at all. And then when I watched League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, even as moments maybe fall flat or the story doesn't entirely come together, it feels like such a, you know, you can see the humanity in every frame and the fact that they clearly built a lot of these sets. I know there is a lot of CGI in the movie,

• 7:58Chris Winterbauer?

  but there's a lot of practical qualities to this movie that I really enjoyed. So, and my last thing I'll say is, I think part of the issue is that there is no one to play off of Sean Connery that feels like his equal on screen.

• 8:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, well, there's a reason for that.

• 8:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think a lot of the actors are doing their absolute best with these characters, perhaps because I don't know them, Sean Connery stands out too much or vice versa. But there seems to be an imbalance on screen. So, those are my thoughts.

• 8:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I think this movie could be titled The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Colon Human Error, because yes, it's very human. It doesn't work, but it's not terrible by any means. I really like the idea, as we're going to come to understand, this was existing IP prior to the movie, someone we have talked about before. I love the idea of a bunch of, a Justice League of Victorian, you know, superheroes coming together. It's so fun. I have no problem with that. I think a lot of the production design looks great.

• 8:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I think the fight choreography is really good. Nemo's fights in particular are really, really fun. But you're totally right. They miss the mark on the tone. And I think we will come to understand why very quickly over the course of this episode. The story is also just a total mess. Again, there are very concrete reasons for that, which we will come to understand that are not present in the source material. And I do want to call out, I actually think that most of the League does a wonderful job in this. I think Nasseruddin Shah as Nemo is great for me. He's one of my favorite parts of this movie. Jason Fleming as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, really fun.

• 9:30Chris Winterbauer?

  I really liked Jason Fleming.

• 9:32Lizzie Bassett?

  He holds up next to Sean Connery.

• 9:34Chris Winterbauer?

  And I actually liked the way they designed his character.

• 9:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Really?

• 9:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I thought it was fun.

• 9:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Were 90% of his body is arms?

• 9:40Chris Winterbauer?

  That's fine. I thought it was cool. I was like, this is fun. This is great. I don't care. It's great. I'm in. I liked the villain that has only one giant arm at the end. I was like, this is cool. This is fine.

• 9:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I thought he was great. I think Peter Wilson is fun as Mina Harker, even though there are some problems there that we'll get to. But you know, it's a misfire, but it's a misfire that comes in guns blazing. And I do appreciate that about this movie. So I had seen this at some point. I believe I rented it because I thought it was Mystery Men by mistake. And I weirdly liked Mystery Men, which I haven't watched since I was like 12, that I don't know if it holds up. But that was my experience of watching The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when I was young and thinking, what the hell is this? Like, what, what happened? Same as you, I didn't know who most of these characters were. I may have known who Dorian Gray was,

• 10:35Lizzie Bassett?

  which the fact that both of us were able to recognize him is something to keep in mind as we move forward over the course of this episode. I do think he's one of the weakest parts of this movie. He doesn't really work for me.

• 10:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I think Stuart Townsend is either miscast or the character is not quite well-written. It doesn't work, like you said.

• 10:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I would argue both. Yeah, it doesn't work. Don't think it's his fault necessarily, but yeah, that's a weak point. But, you know, going into this, I was like, oh, my God, this movie is going to be so bad. It's going to be absolutely like, this is going to be unwatchable based on, you know, what sort of the lore is around this movie. And then I started watching it and I was like, well, you know, this makes no sense. There are moments that jump around. There are moments of editing that make no sense. There's a moment with Mina early on, like in her first reveal and fight sequence where her hair is like up in a perfect bun. And then it's down and like Bella Swan vampire dresses, and then it's back up in a perfect bun. And it's been two seconds total over the course of that.

• 11:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, there's also Dorian Gray getting shot 7,000 times and then the next cut, his suit is fine.

• 11:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It's fine.

• 11:38Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a lot of that. It is fine. But it's just clear that like, something went wrong big time, which we're gonna talk about over the course of this episode. Couple of other things I really wanted to shout out. I love Sean Connery's little like baby bonnet that they put on him in the snow. I don't know if you noticed his little knit. Infant's cap. Really liked that. I liked their snow costumes in general. I actually like the costumes across the board. I think they're very fun in this.

• 12:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I also like, let's make sure Sean Connery doesn't come off as racist in the opening. So we'll make him say, I've watched a lot of friends die, white friends and black friends.

• 12:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Which somehow made it worse.

• 12:16Chris Winterbauer?

  It did make it worse. I never would have thought of it if they hadn't brought it up.

• 12:22Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. I don't want to waste any more time talking about this movie in terms of, you know, what I thought. What I thought is, I didn't hate it. I'd watch it again. It is insane and the story truly makes negative sense. But, you know, they tried something and I will always appreciate that. So let's kick off with the basic info. As always, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was directed by Stephen Norrington with a screenplay by James Robinson. It is based on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic books by Alan Moore and illustrator Kevin O'Neill, or graphic novel, I believe it was combined into several volumes. It stars Sean Connery, Jason Fleming, Naseeruddin Shah, Peter Wilson,

• 13:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Richard Roxburgh, Shane West, Stuart Townsend, Tony Curran, and many more. It was released July 11, 2003, and the IMDb logline is, "In an alternate Victorian Age world, a group of famous contemporary fantasy, science fiction, and adventure characters team up on a secret mission." Even the logline can't decide like how to qualify the motley crew they've got here. So to talk about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, we do have to talk about its author, Alan Moore. Now, if you want a detailed history of who Alan Moore is, please go back and listen to our episode on V for Vendetta where Chris went into a lot of detail on Moore. But Chris, could you give us a very brief explanation of where Alan Moore was by the 90s and sort of what kinds of things he had worked on?

• 13:48Chris Winterbauer?

  By the 90s, he's entering his 40s. He's from England, working class family, hopped around job to job. Late 1970s, he decides to follow his art into an artistic career, starts working for Marvel UK, and very quickly is recognized as a precocious and unique talent within the comic space. So he goes on to create V for Vendetta, for example, in the 1980s, very much like an anti-fascist story. He is an anarchist, a self-described anarchist, Alan Moore, in the traditional sense. And Moore finds- Ends himself, despite writing some very successful comics for DC, which ends up being the publisher of V for Vendetta, he finds himself at odds with his publisher,

• 14:33Chris Winterbauer?

  specifically over rights issues. And he is very much a believer in the artist and the creator having control over their work, which is obviously not something that a large corporation necessarily is going to feel the same about. And so he had a very, I believe by this point, Lizzie, I'm not sure what exact date you're talking about. He'd had a very public rupture with DC. And then he would end up coming back to them.

• 14:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That's exactly right. He's probably the most famous for two comics, both of which were written in the eighties, both of which fell under the DC umbrella. You mentioned one, which is V for Vendetta, and the other is, of course, Watchmen.

• 15:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 15:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, you mentioned the breakup with DC. There were two things that really, really pissed him off. One was that DC had chosen to label its adult-themed comics as suggested for mature readers, and this included a lot of Moore's works. He really did not like that. The second was that the agreement he had signed with DC gave him the rights back to both Watchmen and V for Vendetta, but only once they went out of print. And he came to realize that that was essentially meaningless, and he felt like he had been tricked because DC had no intention of ever stopping reprints of either book. So he severed ties with DC, and he'd bounced around a few independent publishing houses before he landed at Wildstorm Studios. And he was given his own imprint under Wildstorm, called America's Best Comics. And it's here, under his own imprint,

• 15:48Lizzie Bassett?

  that Moore wrote The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, among other titles. Over the course of the late 90s, film producer Don Murphy had become very interested in adapting some of Moore's work. Don Murphy, huge film producer, Natural Born Killers, tons of other stuff. He had already acquired the rights to From Hell, Moore's graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, which would later become the 2001 Johnny Depp film of the same name, which I secretly really enjoyed. Chris drugs, like, he doesn't know. Never seen it?

• 16:13Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I saw it. I will be honest, in my mind, Sleepy Hollow and From Hell are kind of the same movie.

• 16:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, you schmush them together, and I like the costumes in both.

• 16:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I schmush them together. They're great, but I have trouble separating them in my mind. I need to re-watch.

• 16:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, one's England, Chris, you dodo. The other one's New York.

• 16:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Anything outside of California is just, who cares?

• 16:34Lizzie Bassett?

  So From Hell ironically spent quite some time in development hell. And it was during this period around early 1998 ish that Don Murphy first became aware of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. So Murphy told Comic Book Resources, I was on the phone one day going over some From Hell information with my friend Alan. I just happened that day to say, Dootsky, what else are you working on? By the time he was done pitching me, my jaw was on the floor. Okay, that's the coolest thing I've ever heard. So Murphy optioned the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when it was reportedly just a three-page treatment. That early optioning of this idea is important and it will come back to bite Mr. Moore in the buh talks to foreshadow one of our future episodes. By June of 1998, Murphy had League of Extraordinary Gentlemen set up at 20th Century Fox and

• 17:18Lizzie Bassett?

  the comic still hadn't been published. And then to add insult to Moore's previous injury, and you teed this up, Chris, at the end of 1998, Wildstorm sold to who?

• 17:30Chris Winterbauer?

  DC.

• 17:31Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right, DC. Now DC did actually acquire the rights to some of the characters that had been released under Moore's America's Best Comics imprint. So why is the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen streaming at a discounted price, I might add, on Amazon and other streaming platforms and not on HBO, which of course is owned by Warner, which owns DC? Chris?

• 17:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, first of all, I did buy it because it was only $1 more to buy it. And I was like, I could watch this a lot. And then I watched it once and I thought, I kind of want my dollar back. But Warner owns DC, yes, but 20th Century Fox is owned by Disney. And so presumably this could end up on, is it an orphan, Lizzie? Could it end up on Disney Plus?

• 18:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's a bit of an orphan. The rights of this are a little strange. I think that they have remained with Fox as far as I understand it. And in terms of Alan Moore, I think what happened here is that he was able to kind of create a firewall around the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where he said, you're not getting this. And DC did not manage to get the rights to the League. So Alan Moore, at this point, really wanted to think of his work as entirely separate from any film adaptations. He told Comic Book Resources, quote, "As long as I could distance myself by not seeing them enough to keep them separate, take the option money." I could be assured no one would confuse the two. This was probably naive on my part. As we'll learn later in the episode, it was indeed naive. Let's talk very briefly about the comic itself, which did begin releasing in 1999.

• 18:56Lizzie Bassett?

  It was designed as sort of a Justice League of Victorian era literary protagonists assembled by the British government to protect the interests of the empire. And in the League, you've got, of course, Alan Quatermain, protagonist of H. Ryder Haggard's 1885 novel, King Solomon's Minds. Not familiar? Captain Nemo of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Dr. Jekyll from Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Holly Griffin from H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man. Now, Chris, do you notice anything right away about the characters I just listed off?

• 19:29Chris Winterbauer?

  All possibly public domain by this point?

• 19:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I think, yes, that's not where I'm going.

• 19:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 19:34Lizzie Bassett?

  So, two things. One, The Invisible Man, he's not named Holly Griffin in this movie.

• 19:40Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 19:40Lizzie Bassett?

  So keep that in mind. The other thing is I left a member of the League off. Who did I just leave off?

• 19:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Mina Harker?

• 19:46Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right, Mina Harker.

• 19:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom Sawyer?

• 19:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, hold on now. Hold your horses. Let's talk about Mina Harker first. So, yes, I left off Dorian Gray, Tom Sawyer, and Mina Harker. Let's start with Mina, who, by the way, is Mina Murray in the comic, important because she's divorced Jonathan Harker's ass after the whole Dracula incident. And second of all, she's not in the League, Chris. She is the leader of the League, which makes the title make sense. It is a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. She is not a gentleman.

• 20:15Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 20:16Lizzie Bassett?

  But they are her gentlemen. So, all of a sudden, it makes sense. She's also not a vampire.

• 20:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I was wondering about that. I didn't mind that she was a vampire, I guess.

• 20:30Lizzie Bassett?

  It makes no sense.

• 20:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And she's in the sun a lot in this movie. I don't know. I didn't really understand what we were doing with that.

• 20:37Lizzie Bassett?

  She's Blade.

• 20:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, that's true. She's a Daywalker.

• 20:40Lizzie Bassett?

  She's a Daywalker. Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu, originally created by Sacks Romer, I believe only appears as the Doctor in the comic, but both of them feature as villains. The comic is quite complicated, but Volume One does assign- Eventually follow Mina Murray as she assembles the League and they complete their mission given to them by MI5 agent Bond, relative of James Bond, of course, to retrieve a stolen Kavirite engine from the Doctor. Kavirite being a fictional anti-gravity substance created by H.G. Wells in his novel, The First Men in the Moon. It's eventually revealed that Bond's superior at MI5, previously only referred to as M, is indeed supervillain Professor Moriarty, who wanted the Kavirite engine for himself and is in an underground turf war with the Doctor.

• 21:22Lizzie Bassett?

  The League saves the day and Mycroft Holmes takes over at MI5. Now, that is a massive oversimplification of a very, very complex series of graphic novels that really does not pander to its audience at all.

• 21:38Lizzie Bassett?

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• 22:21Lizzie Bassett?

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• 23:06Lizzie Bassett?

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• 24:27Lizzie Bassett?

  But back at Fox, they're very excited about the property that Don Murphy has brought them, and it immediately had a lot of internal support. This makes sense. Many of these characters are recognizable and they either were easy enough to get the rights to for most of them, or they were in the public domain. So this seems pretty good if you're looking for something that has existing IP. Murphy was a self-professed Anglophile and he pushed hard for a British screenwriter and director. Now, an initial screenwriter was hired. I don't know whether or not that person was British, but they struggled with the script and after about a year, they got the boot and Murphy brought on James Robinson. So Robinson was a British author of American comics, best known at this point for DC's Starman revival in 1994, for which he had earned an Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story.

• 25:12Lizzie Bassett?

  And that series had ended right before he started. Working on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And the script ran into a few issues right away. Issue number one, Fox could not get the right to H.G. Wells, the Invisible Man. According to Don Murphy, quote, "The Invisible Man is not in the public domain. I don't know how the comic book manages to use the Invisible Man, but they do." When it went to Fox's lawyers, the H.G. Wells estate is still copyrighted. However, the idea of "an invisible man" is a public domain idea, which is why we have a different last name than Mordin. I love that. He's not the Invisible Man, he's an invisible man.

• 25:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I was wondering if it had something to do with Universal because of their use of the Invisible Man, like as a Universal Monsters property. But obviously, that's not right. That's interesting.

• 26:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It has to do with the actual source material. I don't know.

• 26:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I was wondering if that's why Mina Harker was changed. Anyway, there's some overlap with the Universal world with some of these characters, right? And so that's why I was curious. You have this rival studio that made a lot of money on their Monsters in the 30s and whatnot. And so I was curious if there was some sort of studio tete-a-tete going on.

• 26:20Lizzie Bassett?

  No, that's interesting about Mina. I don't think they would have rights to her based on, I don't know.

• 26:24Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I don't think so either. I guess I'm just saying like, oh, you're infringing on our Monsters world in some way.

• 26:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. So The Doctor, also known as Fu Manchu, was also dropped because the heir to the character's creator, Sax Romer, had already optioned Fu Manchu elsewhere. But apart from these issues, according to Robinson, the early screenplay was excellent. It had a turn of the century league preventing a flesh-eating gas from being introduced into the New York City subway system. But we're right around mid 2001 at this point. And Chris, what happened in the fall of 2001?

• 26:55Chris Winterbauer?

  The Twin Towers fell in the worst terrorist attack on US soil in history.

• 27:01Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right, September 11th. So suddenly, the studio was very concerned, I would say understandably, about the movie featuring a terrorist attack on the New York City subway system.

• 27:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 27:11Lizzie Bassett?

  So Robinson had to rethink pretty much everything in what at this point was a very New York City-based story. This required a pretty hefty rewrite, moving the story to Europe, replacing the poison gas with a mad bomber. I don't know why you had to replace the gas, but anyway. And it was during this rewrite that 20th Century Fox exerted quite significant creative control over the material. Now Fox had a very specific request for this very British comic. Throw in a dash of the old USA. They wanted it to appeal to American audiences, so they requested an American character resulting in who, Chris?

• 27:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom Sawyer.

• 27:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's got black friends too. Yeah, it's.

• 27:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like, it's fine. I guess it's just.

• 27:54Lizzie Bassett?

  He doesn't fit in with the rest of the group.

• 27:56Chris Winterbauer?

  He doesn't fit in.

• 27:57Lizzie Bassett?

  In any way.

• 27:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I would argue both he and, in my opinion, Alan Quatermain are the two that like, don't really fit in in this world.

• 28:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally. I don't know why Alan Quatermain's there. He's a good shot as far as, and then, you know, they add the thing here where it's like, he can't be killed. But Tom Sawyer, loosely based on Mark Twain's less popular sequel, Tom Sawyer Detective, which sounds like it's not real, but it is, in which a teen Tom solves a murder.

• 28:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Please let that be True Detective, season five. Just please let it be Tom Sawyer Detective.

• 28:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Teen Tom Detective. Dorian Gray was also added, or more accurately massively expanded, since Don Murphy says he does appear in a few panels of Moore's original comic. I haven't read it, I can't for sure confirm that, but he's certainly not part of the league. Now Robinson did tell the LA Times, quote, "As brilliant as the graphic novel is, it is not a movie. And unfortunately, the reading level of the world has declined. So introducing the literary characters was something that had to be dealt with head on." Now, I think it's interesting, both you and I, when we saw this, when we were, you know, 14, 15 years old, maybe one of the only characters we knew was Dorian Gray. I'm guessing that's why his addition is in here.

• 29:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I feel like at least the name, the picture of Dorian Gray, you've heard. At least for me, he was associated with the idea of immortality.

• 29:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 29:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I understood that.

• 29:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I think he's an easy character to recognize quickly.

• 29:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Dorian was. Mina Harker by name was not, but I obviously understood the vampire element. And then it was Dr. Jekyll.

• 29:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 29:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And Mr. Hyde. And you can understand the shorthand of an invisible man.

• 29:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 29:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And Nemo, I had seen 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I hadn't read it. But I'd seen the version from the 50s with, I think, Kirk Douglas. So I kind of knew that story, generally speaking. But Alan Quatermain was-

• 29:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Still couldn't tell you.

• 29:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Just make it James Bond. I know they can't.

• 29:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, they can.

• 29:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Lizzie Bassett?

  But of course, the biggest crime here is what they did to Mina. According to illustrator Kevin O'Neill, quote, "They changed the whole balance by marginalizing Mina and making her a vampire." I mean, what the hell is she doing there? Why is she there? Quatermain is in charge. The whole thing falls apart and lacks cohesiveness. According to one of Moore's friends and colleagues, Scott Dunbier, quote, "I remember Moore telling me a story about the producer calling him up and excitedly telling Alan about a scene with Mina using her vampiric powers to climb a wall and bite someone on the neck. And Alan told me, he replied, 'That's an interesting interpretation of my work.'"

• 30:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And she's kind of just used for, like, sexual harassment comic relief in this version and-

• 30:26Lizzie Bassett?

  And she's literally the leader of it in the comic. Yeah.

• 30:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. And it's also a bummer because I agree. I do think Peter Wilson gives an interesting performance. She plays it almost as if she's a little detached or aloof at first, which is interesting when she then engages with the vampiric qualities, you know, towards the end. But then they try to shove in a love story that doesn't work at all with Tom Sawyer and it just-

• 30:45Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 30:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it ends up distracting, I think, from the finished product.

• 30:48Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very strange. But Chris, something else happened thanks to September 11th. The director that Don Murphy had had his eye on for years was finally available. So let's meet Stephen Norrington. Stephen Norrington was born in the UK around 1964, and not a ton is known about his early life. But by the mid 80s, he'd made quite a name for himself working in special effects and special effects makeup on films like Gremlins, Aliens, The Witches, Return to Oz, Split Second, many more. But by the late 80s, he thought, "Ah, I think I'd like to try something else." And according to makeup artist Dave Elsie, quote, "Steve became a very good makeup artist, but halfway through his career, he said, 'I'm not gonna do this anymore. I'm gonna become a director.'" And everybody said, "Ha, good luck with that. You can't just change careers."

• 31:32Lizzie Bassett?

  So anyways, he went off and he became a director. Now, Norrington knew he needed to work with material that he really cared about, so he started writing it himself. And this resulted in his directorial debut, 1994's Death Machine, a low-budget Terminator-esque film starring Wormtongue himself, Brad Durif.

• 31:47Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 31:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Not a ton of people saw it.

• 31:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Sorry, Lizzie, do you know who else is briefly in this movie?

• 31:52Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 31:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I have seen Death Machine. I saw it a long time ago. Rachel Weisz has a very small part in Death Machine.

• 31:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, interesting.

• 31:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, anyway, tied into The Mummy. I think she was very, very, very young.

• 32:01Lizzie Bassett?

  She would have been, yeah.

• 32:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Five years before The Mummy, so.

• 32:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, nice. Well, luckily, it didn't matter that not many people in the audience saw it because some important people at New Line Cinema did. They were looking for a director for one of their upcoming films, an adaptation of the comic book Blade. Now Blade screenwriter David S. Goyer told Cinefantastique in 2002, quote, "Norrington had made one very small film that very few people had seen, but we liked the fact that he had this kind of insane, crazed energy and that he was coming out of left field. It wasn't the usual choice. Because of that, he elevated what in a way was a glorified B-movie." So I want to stop for a second and talk about Blade because I think it is important to today's story.

• 32:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I rewatched it for this episode, and man, is it fun. It is so good. It's so tight.

• 32:49Chris Winterbauer?

  It gets the tones.

• 32:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. It just nails the tone. It looks just right. It is campy in a really delicious way. The timing is so funny. Yeah, Chris, what's your take on Blade?

• 33:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it's interesting because it almost, okay, Guy Ritchie, right, Snatch, around this time, too. There's this sort of winking, rebellious, mischievous, anti-establishment British quality to it. And then Wesley Snipes gives this almost like blaxploitation performance at the center of it, too.

• 33:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 33:16Chris Winterbauer?

  And they work so well together. And you also have Steven Dorff as the villain.

• 33:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I love campy little Steven Dorff in this.

• 33:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Campy little Steven Dorff. And the movie has some, a couple of special effects that have not aged well. Steven Dorff getting sliced in half and the blood pulling his body back together at the end. Doesn't look great.

• 33:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Whatever.

• 33:33Chris Winterbauer?

  But the costumes are great.

• 33:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 33:36Chris Winterbauer?

  The practical effects are great. The swordplay is fantastic.

• 33:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 33:40Chris Winterbauer?

  And it proved that you could do a fun, R-rated superhero film. Well before I think we really even knew that that was commercially possible. And one thing that I do think is interesting, just to pivot for just if you allow me one cul-de-sac. I think it's so interesting that I think Guillermo del Toro very successfully took the tone from the first Blade and elevated it even further with Blade 2. And then it's so interesting that he was able to pull off, in my opinion, with Hellboy, what Norrington ultimately was unable to with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And so it's just like an interesting connection of worlds and fates there.

• 34:14Lizzie Bassett?

  I think there's a flexibility to Guillermo del Toro that Norrington doesn't have, as we're gonna get to. But, point being, Blade is excellent. It works really, really well. It is a tight, cohesive, fun movie. And it worked very well at the box office. It was released in August of 1998, ended up grossing over $131 million on a $45 million budget. Now, Chris, you've covered a bit of Marvel on the podcast. Are you able to explain sort of briefly where Marvel was prior to Blade?

• 34:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I think briefly, so Marvel was involved in the 90s in like effectively corporate warfare over the soul of the company. There was a big corporate proxy fight going on. I believe Carl Icahn was on one side of it. And in the end, they started licensing the rights to their characters very liberally in order to generate cash as quickly as possible.

• 35:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, they were going bankrupt, right?

• 35:11Chris Winterbauer?

  They were going bankrupt. And so in the early 90s, you have a gold rush a bit of superhero IP being sold. And that was to a certain extent off the success of something like the X-Men animated series that Fox had made. And they started selling off all of, again, licensing all of these characters. And there were all of these announcements of, you know, Spider-Man is going to be made by James Cameron is an example that we discussed. And most of these projects did not come to fruition with few exceptions. And the most successful was Blade. I believe it was the first successful Marvel comic book adaptation. I think we'd had The Punisher before that with Dolph Lundgren. We'd had Howard the Duck in 1986, which was a big old duck condom flopper. So.

• 35:55Chris Winterbauer?

  All to say Marvel, all of a sudden, I think there is a proof of concept that Marvel can be adapted. But at this moment Marvel has actually, I believe, lost a lot of the rights to their characters, at least in these licensing deals in the short term. And they don't have the strength or position within the marketplace to get them back and make the movies on their own. And so this is the period where Marvel movies are being made by all these other studios.

• 36:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Couple of important things to call out. One is that the leadership had pretty much entirely changed at Marvel. They're coming out of legal battles, as you pointed out, they're coming up out of bankruptcy. It's interesting that Blade is the thing that ends up kind of lifting them out at the tail end of this. Because out of all the characters that were being discussed as being adapted, Blade is one of the least well-known. So what you have with this movie is a proof of concept for an R-rated superhero movie that did a bang-up job at the box office with a character that not as many people were familiar about. And it didn't matter. It did really, really well.

• 36:55Lizzie Bassett?

  So, you know, a lot of people credit X-Men with kind of the reboot of this type of superhero franchise. It's really Blade.

• 37:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 37:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Blade is what made X-Men possible. In fact, that's basically how they got X-Men greenlit, was the success of Blade.

• 37:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I always see it as, yeah, Blade walks so X-Men can jog, so Spider-Man can run. You know, like those seem like the stepping stones, you know, into that.

• 37:18Lizzie Bassett?

  That's exactly right. But there's something else remarkable about Blade, which is that Stephen Norrington was given an enormous amount of creative control on this. Probably because, again, this movie was a gamble, it wasn't that expensive, and Blade was not the most well-known character. Norrington would later tell Rewind Zone, quote, "Blade is a significantly more effective film than League of Extraordinary Gentlemen because the music and picture are so tightly interlocked." And that's because he really like got his fingers in every single pot and had a massive amount of control over it. But not everyone was a fan of how much control he exerted on set. Cinematographer Theo Van San said the following in an interview with Flashback Files, quote, "The director of Blade was a young Brit, a genius when it came to film, but he had no social skills whatsoever."

• 38:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's something we will hear multiple times across this episode. "He was very arrogant. He had done one great little film with no money at all, so during our meeting I became a little arrogant." As well, because I had done a fucking lot, but we had a good meeting and I decided to do it. But when they got to set, Van Sand was disturbed to find that Norrington was, quote, "really exploiting the power that came with his first big Hollywood opportunity." As a young, well-educated arrogant Brit, he could be really vicious. For me, that's not a problem. I can deal with that. I'm next to him creating this film, but don't touch my crew. They work hard for their money, but he did abuse them several times. He talked to my gaffer as if he was nothing. I had warned him. When it happened again, I walked off. Half the crew followed me. Still, after a success like Blade, it was inevitable that Hollywood would be knocking at Norrington's door

• 38:47Lizzie Bassett?

  for his next project. But the thing is, he didn't really care. He turned down almost every offer he got. He was particularly leery of three-picture deals, not wanting to be trapped by any one studio, and he would only accept one-picture deals. So, in May of 99, he was attached to direct an adaptation of Brother Termite through James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment. But while this was awaiting an official greenlight, Norrington directed and fully post-produced The Last Minute. And he told Ain't It Cool News, quote, "It's a very personal movie from a script I wrote, and I got to do it exactly the way I liked. It really helped me develop as a filmmaker. I am grateful to Matt Justice, my producing partner, two executive producers who greenlit the picture on my terms, making it possible for me to have the all-time dream filmmaking experience."

• 39:31Lizzie Bassett?

  So his version of the all-time dream filmmaking experience is he does everything.

• 39:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it's interesting that he's setting up with James Cameron. Again, I know that didn't come to fruition, but that is kind of the Cameron mentality. I don't think Norrington would have had that experience working under James Cameron necessarily.

• 39:46Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 39:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, should shout out Brother Termite. I believe the concept, or they pulled a scene from it, to do the concept work for motion capture for Avatar, if you remember in our Avatar episode.

• 39:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So The Last Minute grossed $3,639 worldwide, but it also basically had no theatrical release. I don't think this had an expectation that it was going to make a lot of money. As for the Blade franchise, Norrington stuck to his one-picture rule and turned down Blade 2, which, as you pointed out, went to Guillermo del Toro. Next, he was attached to Ghost Rider, but that never materialized with him at the helm. It was around this time that Don Murphy had begun approaching him about the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But initially, thanks to Ghost Rider, he said, no, thanks. I'm sorry. I'm unavailable. Murphy tried again when Ghost Rider fell apart, but Norrington was again booked. This time on a Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Lopez thriller called Tik Tok about

• 40:40Lizzie Bassett?

  a terrorist blowing up LA shopping malls before Christmas. And this one seemed like it was definitely gonna move forward until, yes, we're back at September 11th. According to Theo Van San, Norrington's chosen cinematographer for the project, who apparently was back for more after Blade. He said, quote, "After the attack on the Twin Towers, my agent called the studio and asked if they were going to pull the plug. And the second in command there said, no, no, in June, everybody will have forgotten about this. So we'll continue with pre-production. But no mall wanted us to film there because of the terrorist storyline. At a certain moment, the project crashed, of course. No, we're not gonna forget about it in June.

• 41:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe the slogan after was never forget.

• 41:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, you idiot. Anyway, finally, Don Murphy got his wish and Norrington signed on to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in no small part because he thought this one might actually get made.

• 41:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and you know, you have to work at a certain point, too.

• 41:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's been years. And he was also drawn to the film's, quote, "potential for world building and an exhilarating lack of concern for boring realism." All right, behind the camera, the team was assembled. The script was a script, and now it was time to cast the League. First up, Sean Connery as Alan Quatermain. Now, I'm gonna do a lot of Sean Connery over the course of this episode, and it's gonna be bad, and you're just gonna have to listen to it. Sorry about that. So since we have not talked about him extensively on the podcast before, let's get a brief history of Sean Connery. He was born August 25th, 1930, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He grew up in a working class family and enlisted in the Navy following World War II. And after three years in the Royal Navy, he took up professional bodybuilding,

• 42:19Lizzie Bassett?

  famously competing in the 1953 Mr. Universe pageant. It should be noted that Connery was a big guy, over six foot two, with a very muscular build. But eventually, he realized he wanted to give acting a shot and landed a small role in a Production of South Pacific, and then he took on the lead in that production. And he starts picking up TV from here, notably a production of Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight, in which he played washed up boxer Mountain Rivera. Then he starts to pick up a few film roles, but in 1962, at the age of only 32, Connery was rocketed to superstardom thanks to what film, Chris?

• 42:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Doctor No? Was that the first?

• 42:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, the first official James Bond movie, Doctor No. And Connery was pretty much an icon from here on out, starring in six official Bond films and one unofficial. But he didn't stop at Bond. He took on other iconic roles in The Untouchables, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and my personal favorite Sean Connery performance, The Hunt for Red October. Sorry, The Rock.

• 43:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Where he plays a Scottish Russian man.

• 43:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and I liked it.

• 43:18Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great. He, no, he's had, and he's had some great, you know, The Rock, I love, as you just mentioned, and some good dramatic roles. Finding Forrester, I thought was good. It was later, but yeah.

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• 44:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Listen, I think Sean Connery is a good actor and a very fun on-screen presence. He was also an asshole. In November of 1965, Connery famously gave an interview to Playboy magazine in which he stated, quote, "I don't think there's anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman, although I don't recommend doing it in the same way you'd hit a man." He recommended you give her a good old open-handed slap, but stop short of punching her in the face. Eh, he added. "If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I'd do it." Now lest you think this was just the 60s, in an excellent Barbara Walters interview from 1987, he doubles down. Let's give it a watch, Chris.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Years ago, you did an interview, which may come back to haunt you. You know what I'm gonna say, right?

• 45:22Speaker 05

  No.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  Okay. You did an interview in which you said, "It's not the worst thing to slap a woman now and then." As I remember, you said you don't do it with a clenched fist, it's better to do it with an open hand. Yeah, remember that?

• 45:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. I didn't love that.

• 45:36Speaker 05

  I haven't changed my opinion.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  You haven't?

• 45:38Speaker 05

  No, not at all.

• 45:39Speaker 04

  You think it's good to slap a woman?

• 45:41Speaker 05

  No, I don't think it's good.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  You don't think it's bad?

• 45:43Speaker 05

  I think it must... I don't think it's that bad. I think that it depends entirely on the circumstances and if it merits it.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  But what would merit it?

• 45:50Speaker 05

  Well, if you have tried everything else, and women are pretty good at this, they can't leave it alone. They don't, they wanna have the last word, and you give them the last word, but they're not happy with the last word. They wanna say it again and get into a really provocative situation. Then... I think it's absolutely right.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  To give her a good slap?

• 46:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 46:20Speaker 04

  What if she gives you a good slap back?

• 46:23Speaker 05

  Well, then you get into another area. I mean, then maybe she's getting to like it, and then it becomes something else. I don't know. But, no, no, seriously, I think that it's the last resort. He's not gonna do it because he wants to do it.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Wait till people see this interview. You're gonna get mail.

• 46:42Speaker 05

  I might get some female.

• 46:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. By the way, I highly recommend watching that Barbara Walters interview. She does an amazing job of really buttering him up before she goes in for the kill there.

• 46:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And then they just slap each other at the end.

• 46:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Barbara's fast, you know? He also talks a lot in this interview about how much he hates golfing with women. Like, an enormous amount of time is spent on that. Now, six years later, he tripled down in Vanity Fair, saying, quote, "Sometimes there are women who take it to the wire. That's what they're looking for, the ultimate confrontation. They want a smack." Later, he would say all these remarks were taken out of context. I think, as we just saw, they were not. And in 2006, after his first wife, Diane Solento, came forward with a memoir detailing emotional and physical abuse in their relationship, Connery finally said, quote, "My view is I don't believe that any level of abuse against women is ever justified under any circumstances, full stop." Sure. So why am I telling you all of this? Well, I think it's an important window into Mr. Connery's psyche,

• 47:43Lizzie Bassett?

  particularly as it pertains to people he doesn't see eye to eye with. This is not a man who relishes disagreement, and particularly does not relish disagreement from someone he considers his subordinate. Now, we have discussed this in the Lord of the Rings episode, but Chris, what role did Sean Connery famously pass on?

• 48:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Gondol.

• 48:03Lizzie Bassett?

  And why did he pass on it?

• 48:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think he even read the script.

• 48:07Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he did. He read the book and the script. Oh, you don't remember this?

• 48:10Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, no, I'm totally blanking.

• 48:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He read the book and the script, and he came back and he said, "I don't get it."

• 48:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's right. That's what it was, yeah.

• 48:19Lizzie Bassett?

  He didn't understand it.

• 48:20Chris Winterbauer?

  They, like, sent it to him in the Caribbean or something, and it took forever to hear from him. And they literally said, "This is not exactly accurate, but something like, we will give you 10% of the net proceeds of the movie."

• 48:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, Chris. This reportedly cost him somewhere around $350 million because he passed on this role.

• 48:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Lizzie Bassett?

  He also reportedly passed on a role in The Matrix for the same reason. "I don't get it."

• 48:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I believe they offered him the role of the architect in The Matrix.

• 48:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah.

• 48:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think it was Morpheus.

• 48:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Chris, Sean Connery didn't like women, but he did like golf and money. So the next time a script came across his desk... That he didn't get. He thought, God damn it. If I don't understand it, that probably means it's a goldmine. Unfortunately for Sean, that script was the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And unfortunately for the film's budget, he came on board for $17 million, which is an enormous chunk of the movie's $80 million budget. 80 million is about in the middle. You'll see 85, you may see 90, you may see 75. 80 to 85 is about safe.

• 49:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Regardless, over 20%.

• 49:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Over 20%.

• 49:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Roughly 20% of the film's budget.

• 49:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Now, thanks to that whopper of a fee, and you pointed this out, they did not have money to cast really any other known faces in this movie, which is how we wind up with Stuart Townsend as Dorian Gray, also loader related, probably best known for being fired from the role of Aragorn and replaced by Rigo Mortensen.

• 49:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know if fired is exactly the right way to put it. It seems like it was.

• 49:52Lizzie Bassett?

  He says it was.

• 49:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, but my understanding, if I'm remembering our episodes correctly, there was a pretty mutual sense of this isn't working.

• 50:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I believe that. But to hear him tell it, what he said was, I was there rehearsing and training for two months, then was fired the day before filming began. After that, I was told they wouldn't pay me because I was in breach of contract due to not having worked long enough. I'd been having a rough time with them, so I was almost relieved to be leaving until they told me I wouldn't be paid. So yeah, that does sound like it wasn't working out very well. He had also played Lestat in Queen of the Damned, but again, not a super well-known actor at all. Peta Wilson came on as Mina Harker, and she actually replaced Monica Bellucci, who dropped out very close to filming. She had to drop out due to Tears of the Sun running over schedule. She was also exhausted from back-to-back shoots at that point.

• 50:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Peta is an Australian actress. She's not super well-known in the US, probably best known internationally at this point for her starring role in the Canadian series La Femme Nikita, which ran from 97 to 2001. Despite the admittedly horrible changes they made to Mina's character, as I said, I think Peta is pretty fun in this. I think she does a good job.

• 50:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I do too. I do think Monica Bellucci would have been a bigger draw because, for example, 2003 would have been.

• 51:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, she's recognizable.

• 51:07Chris Winterbauer?

  She's very recognizable. Obviously, she's, you know, something like irreversible, but then within mainstream US cinema, you would have had the release of The Matrix Reloaded.

• 51:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 51:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And she has a very noticeable role in that movie.

• 51:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. You also get Shane West as Tom Sawyer. Now, West was very much in the running at the exact same time as this. To play John Connor in Terminator 3 when he was auditioning for LXG. Because of this, he kind of didn't give a shit about the LXG audition and came in with that energy, which worked for the character. Outside of Connery, West was probably the most well-known actor in the film, even though, again, he was not at all a huge star at this point. He had starred on Once and Again, and of course, alongside Mandy Moore in A Walk to Remember.

• 51:47Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 51:48Lizzie Bassett?

  That's millennial affront in our stars for all you youngins out there.

• 51:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, Dracula 2000.

• 51:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 51:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Which was, I believe Gerard Butler's first big role as well.

• 51:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I've seen that because my mom loved Gerard Butler and she bought it on DVD.

• 52:01Chris Winterbauer?

  It's kind of like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in a lot of ways.

• 52:04Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a similar tone, but it actually works better because Gerard Butler has more of a sense of humor.

• 52:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and then one of my favorite Shane West performances, I believe he's in the beginning of Ocean's Eleven as one of the actors playing themselves with Rusty doing the poker scene.

• 52:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he can be funny, too. He doesn't really get to do it in this, but I think Shane West is funny.

• 52:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, he doesn't, but he can be pretty self-aware and meta in that way.

• 52:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but just like Sean Connery, when Shane West read this script, he was confused. But he told Black Film, quote, "I got more interested after reading the comic book and seeing that my character was not in it because I could take this as an opportunity to create something." That totally makes sense to me. He, of course, did not get Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Nick Stahl played John Connor in that, but he did get LXG. Yay.

• 52:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Would he have been that much better off in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines? I know that movie made more money, certainly, but I don't think Nick Stahl's career was done a ton of favors by that film.

• 53:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I don't think that was Terminator. I think that had to do more with personal problems. I actually think Nick Stahl was teed up to be a pretty big star after that.

• 53:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, okay. And to be fair, Claire Danes certainly did well after Terminator 3.

• 53:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think it would have been more beneficial to Shane West's career, for sure. Nasiruddin Shah came on board as Captain Nemo, and believe it or not, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was the first major Hollywood production to actually cast an Indian actor as Nemo since the silent era. So at least they got this right, and he is wonderful in it. As I said, I really love his fight sequences. I think he brings a gravitas to the role. And by the way, he was very well known and very prolific star of films in India. He'd also been in Monsoon Wedding. He just was not well known in the US.

• 53:41Chris Winterbauer?

  That could be a really smart way to cast the movie is, okay, we can't afford giant American names, but maybe we can make the box office appeal internationally a little bit more, strengthen it by casting big names from other countries, you know?

• 53:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I wonder if that's what they were doing with like Monica Bellucci too, because she was a big star. Yeah, in Italy, for sure.

• 53:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Richard Roxburgh came on as M, the Phantom in Moriarty, and I really like him. He's not used very well in this, but he's a fun villain, as we saw in Moulin Rouge, among others. And of course, Jason Fleming joined as Dr. Jekyll. I actually think he is maybe the most successful performance in this movie.

• 54:15Chris Winterbauer?

  He acquits himself very well, and it's actually a pretty convincing dual performance, I think.

• 54:19Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's fun when they start kind of working together at the end.

• 54:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 54:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Henry. Henry. Yeah, it's good.

• 54:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I want to give a quick shout out to some of the below the line folks who did a great job on this movie before we dive into the filming. Production designer Carol Spear, costume designer Jacqueline West, cinematographer Dan Lausten, and stunt coordinator Eddie Perez. Shout out to all of you. So on June 28th, 2002, principal photography kicked off in Prague. They did great success filming from hell there. It makes sense. It looks beautiful. It's, you know, old world Europe. It's very cheap. Totally understand why this movie would be shot there. The city of Venice was built outside of former heavy machinery factory in Prague, as well as some recreations of Nairobi. But Chris, in August of 2002, after only about a month of filming, it started to rain, and not just normal rain.

• 55:08Lizzie Bassett?

  The Czech Republic was struck with one of the largest floods in its entire history. It destroyed more than a thousand homes, kilometers of roads,

• 55:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Jesus.

• 55:17Lizzie Bassett?

  dozens of bridges, 50,000 people were forced to evacuate, 17 people were killed. The damage would take two years to rebuild, and prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, this flood was the costliest disaster to hit the city in generations. By August 15th, the floods had shut down tourist attractions and the unthinkable had happened. They had stopped production of the country's two most famous beers, Pilsner and the original Budweiser. And things did not go well for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen either. 60% of the crew were at a Hilton, which ended up getting evacuated because the lobby flooded with over a foot of water. $7 million worth of sets were destroyed, including Nemo's Nautilus, which took 6,500 hours to build.

• 55:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Holy shit.

• 55:59Lizzie Bassett?

  It caused more than two weeks of delays to the shooting schedule and it scattered cast and crew across the continent after various emergency evacuations because to be clear, this flood did not just affect the Czech Republic, it was widespread across Europe. I think Germany was actually the hardest hit, so they were literally getting moved from location to location and being evacuated again. Even Sean Connery was evacuated from The Four Seasons and rescued only his golf clubs. According to cinematographer Dan Lausen, who would go on to be who's go-to cinematographer? We've mentioned him a couple of times across the episode now.

• 56:32Chris Winterbauer?

  James Cameron?

• 56:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Guillermo del Toro.

• 56:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, he's his DP.

• 56:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 56:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I didn't know that. Very cool.

• 56:38Lizzie Bassett?

  He said, quote, "For me, it was a fantastic movie to do because it was a huge movie, my first really big American movie." Director Steven Norrington is a very clever guy. "It was a tough shoot because it was raining for like nine months and we had a big flood and people were losing their homes while we were shooting. It was really bad." Steven Norrington did a really great job on the whole concept. But Norrington says the flood itself wasn't the problem, it was the studio's reaction to it. He told Rewind Zone, quote, "The studio didn't want to give us money to cover the delay caused by the floods. They wanted us to find funds from within the existing budget, which meant cutting things we had already committed to." So I think this is where we start to get into the what the fuck is happening territory in terms of losing the plot over the course of this movie, is they literally just, they

• 57:22Lizzie Bassett?

  cut scenes that were like crucial to character development and story.

• 57:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, one really jarring example for me was, most of the team has been assembled and all of a sudden you just jump to Paris and Mr. Hyde is running across the rooftops and they're chasing him. "We have not established that we are trying to find this guy. We have not established who this person is." It just drops you in and I think you're familiar enough with this character that you kind of just roll with it and keep moving. "I have no idea why we need him. I have no idea how they got here." And then the story just keeps going. Again, it just feels like there was five minutes excised of exposition that would have been helpful.

• 57:59Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a lot of that and I think that that is due at least in part to this flood, although I would argue this is probably the biggest issue. Norrington did fight hard for scenes that he believed were crucial to the film, including one sequence involving all world leaders in the background that he said was really pivotal for the movie, as well as character-defining scenes, as we said, exposition and some large-scale set pieces. He said, quote, "I was surprised to discover how steely, rigid and inflexible I could be in my defense of the movie's content, viewing it in hindsight as a clue that I wasn't temperamentally suited to being a Hollywood filmmaker." Now, I think this is interesting because I wonder, had there been a more flexible, and I wonder if this is what he's hinting at, had there been a more flexible director in his position,

• 58:43Lizzie Bassett?

  could they have been better at compromise and finding ways to fill some of these gaps versus Norrington just being kind of all or nothing about what was able to be captured?

• 58:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. I think it's really hard to say. I was trying to look at, it's such a two-way street, and I was trying to look at other films that were being produced at Fox around this time, you know, and you have something like X2, which was extremely successful, but Brian Singer was notoriously difficult to work with for the studio and to manage.

• 59:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, way worse than Steven Norrington, yeah.

• 59:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So the question is maybe, does Norrington fall into a middle zone? He's not flexible enough, but he doesn't have the clout of a singer to be the asshole that he's being.

• 59:21Lizzie Bassett?

  But he's not an alleged sexual predator.

• 59:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course. I'm saying though, just in terms of the working relationship between him and the studio, he could have fallen into a bit of a weird gray zone where he's, if he had had more power, the inflexibility could have actually worked in his favor and he could have played chicken.

• 59:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Which it did on Blade.

• 59:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Which it did on Blade, and he could have played chicken with the studio and gotten what he wanted, but because he didn't, maybe the studio also didn't have full faith in this movie at the end of the day, we don't know. You know, maybe they'd seen dailies from the first month and they just kind of thought, well, this is going to be an also-ran this year. I just think it's really difficult to say.

• 59:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It is. Now, the production shifted to Malta while delays and rebuilds continued in Prague, and it was in Malta.

• 1:00:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Nothing seems to go well in Malta when we're covering these movies.

• 1:00:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, it was in Malta, but Steven Norrington. Sean Connery to punch him in the face. You see tensions between Norrington and Connery had been simmering since the beginning of production and they were getting worse. One day, Norrington had delayed production by a full day because an elephant gun didn't look right. The two got into a fight, resulting in Norrington's unusual request. Now Sean Connery declined. News leaked almost immediately with the World Entertainment News Network reporting the incident on August 26th of 2002, but Don Murphy flat out denied it, saying, quote, "Quite exciting." And then did the legendary boxer, meaning Connery, who once took out Johnny Stompanato, punch Steve? Did Steve challenge him to two out of three? Maybe Stuart Townsend was the referee.

• 1:00:49Lizzie Bassett?

  The way to confirm that W E N N have bad sources is after the flood, we went to Malta. We didn't stay in Prague and fight. And five of the Prague sets are ruined, not just one, so happily, just more nonsense from the web. And after looking at the dailies and seeing what this film is destined to be, I'd be surprised if some of the cast and crew were sick of the director. Quick little sidebar here, do you know what he's talking about with Johnny Stompanato and Sean Connery?

• 1:01:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I do not.

• 1:01:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, I'm gonna tell the story because it is fascinating. And listeners, if you would like to hear more about Johnny Stompanato and Lana Turner, let me know because we can do an out of frame about them. So in 1957, it's five years before James Bond on the set of Another Time, Another Place, Sean Connery's co-star was Lana Turner, who was dating real life mob enforcer Johnny Stompanato. Stompanato was a jealous piece of shit who didn't like rumors that were flying in the tabloids about Connery and Turner on set, so he flew to London, went to the set, pulled a gun on Sean Connery and told him to stay away from Lana Turner. At which point Sean Connery grabbed the gun, disarmed Stompanato, and knocked him out with one punch. Lana Turner then called the Scotland Yard and had him deported for breaking gun laws.

• 1:01:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, this then later on results in the actual murder, or rather justifiable homicide of Stompanato at the hands of Turner's 13-year-old daughter. Pretty crazy. Again, if you guys would like to hear more about it, let me know, we can do an out of frame. But yeah, Sean Connery really did do that, to the point where Later on, he actually was afraid of Mickey Cohen and had to change hotel rooms. He didn't really know who he'd punched in the face, I don't think.

• 1:02:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Lizzie Bassett?

  But I mean, it's impressive.

• 1:02:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I mean, I will say in his 70s, he is doing some pretty impressive stunt choreography

• 1:02:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:02:28Chris Winterbauer?

  in this movie. He looks very, he looks like he can beat up these younger guys, you know, in this film.

• 1:02:33Lizzie Bassett?

  100%.

• 1:02:34Chris Winterbauer?

  He remained a very big, big man, you know, later in life.

• 1:02:38Lizzie Bassett?

  But here's the thing, Chris. 20 years after Don Murphy said, no way, no how, this did not happen. Stephen Norrington confirmed that it did indeed happen. And he quote, invited Sean Connery to punch him in the face.

• 1:02:53Chris Winterbauer?

  It is funny how you can tell Don Murphy is covering because that quote is too long.

• 1:02:58Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 1:02:58Chris Winterbauer?

  He should have just said, that's ridiculous. Nobody punches each other on a movie set and left it at that.

• 1:03:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 1:03:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And instead he said, this movie shall go down in the annals of the greatest films of all time. I would be stunned if anyone had anything bad to say about anybody because it's going to be Oscar glory here until the end of time.

• 1:03:11Lizzie Bassett?

  That's how you know it's a big time lie and a big time flopper.

• 1:03:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Norrington quit the movie immediately after Sean Connery said, no. And then he came back about 30 minutes later when the studio said, okey dokey, we will sue you. And this was far from the only fight between the two of them. In a 2011 live chat through Empire Magazine, Jason Fleming was asked, were the bust ups between Sean Connery and the director, Stephen Norrington, as bad as they're made out to be? And he said, they were worse. They were worse.

• 1:03:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Lizzie Bassett?

  You know that feeling when someone in your class is getting told off and your toes curl in your Black Clark's shoes? That's how it was every day. Then he said, my favorite bust up was on the set of Venice. The league had to walk from Captain Nemo's boat, the Nautilus, down the street, Magnificent Seven style. At the end of the take, Sean shouted out to Norrington, what? You want us to do that again? And Norrington replied, for $18 million, I don't think it's too much to ask. He walked down a road, to which Connery's reply is unprintable.

• 1:04:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I would love to know what it was because I bet it was funny.

• 1:04:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm pretty sure if you just pulled all of the insults from the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy sketch that Sean Connery says to Alec Trebek, it was probably more or less capture what he said in that moment.

• 1:04:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:04:31Lizzie Bassett?

  By October, Entertainment Weekly had visited the set and their report was not good. Reporter Benjamin Svetke visited the set on the outskirts of Prague and wrote, quote, "Connery had been stuck in his trailer for the last four hours, waiting for Norrington to finish fidgeting with camera angles and fussing with the lighting." Another crew member told Entertainment Weekly, "He's not used to be kept waiting on a movie set. I mean, he's 72 years old and he's Sean Connery." Another crew member, "The director doesn't know what he wants. He shoots an enormous amount of film. He'll do 10 setups when you usually only do two. Most of this movie is going to end up on the cutting room floor if it ever even gets finished." For his part, Norrington says, "I did know exactly what I wanted. I wanted a lot of coverage because you need a lot of coverage to edit a movie freely," which that's how

• 1:05:14Lizzie Bassett?

  he had shot stuff in the past. And he definitely admitted that his stubbornness extended to the relationship with Sean Connery. And it sounds like he particularly ruffled Sean Connery's feathers because he didn't give a shit about who he was. Movie stars did not impress Stephen Norrington, and that's not something Sean Connery was used to.

• 1:05:32Chris Winterbauer?

  This reminds me of Michel Gondry on Eternal Sunshine with Tom Wilkinson, for example, but also obviously Jim Carrey, who, Connery did not ask Carrey to punch him, but he did ask him, "Are you going to punch me?" at one point on that movie.

• 1:05:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Different than asking Sean Connery to punch you, which I would not recommend doing. Norrington wanted to be able to improvise and experiment, and Connery wanted him to show up with a plan, execute that plan, and then let him go golf at the Four Seasons. Connery told The Times, quote, "On the first day, I realized Norrington was insane." Svetke wrote, "The mood on set is so bleak that the cast and crew don't even bother to lie to a visiting journalist about how swell it's all going. I've never been on a set as tense as this, offers a frazzled stagehand. Everybody just wants to go home." But according to Jeffrey Goddick, a VP of Marketing at Fox, it was all worth it because, quote, "He'd seen all the dailies and can tell you this movie rocks."

• 1:06:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I miss the early 2000s.

• 1:06:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I do. I will say, actually, I'm gonna offer a counter view to something I said earlier. Thinking about it, it's totally possible that I could see being pretty excited by the dailies of this movie.

• 1:06:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Because if you think about some of the sets they've built and some of the set pieces that they have.

• 1:06:48Lizzie Bassett?

  A lot of which are practical.

• 1:06:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So for example, Nemo's vehicle driving through the streets of Venice, I believe, taking out the pillars.

• 1:06:55Lizzie Bassett?

  That's miniatures.

• 1:06:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, and it looks awesome. I think that looks really cool. So maybe they did genuinely think this movie's gonna rock. If we can just make sure Sean Connery does not punch Stephen Norrington or slap any of the women on set, we will be in good shape.

• 1:07:11Lizzie Bassett?

  I would be more worried about him slapping the women. Evidently, he is more inclined to decline punching the men.

• 1:07:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's think about Stephen Norrington. He's a bit of a woman.

• 1:07:20Lizzie Bassett?

  He's a bit of a bitch. Now, November 24th, 2002, LXG wrapped filming. And a couple of really cool effects I do want to shout out. You just mentioned one of them, that sequence where Tom Sawyer races through Venice to save it and/or arguably destroy it as much or more than the Phantom Bomb.

• 1:07:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a classic superhero trope. Destroy the city as you save it.

• 1:07:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, didn't save anything. But yes, you're totally right. That is miniatures.

• 1:07:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks really good.

• 1:07:44Lizzie Bassett?

  They created one-fifth scale miniatures of the city's buildings, which weighed almost 1,000 pounds each. They built special scissor lifts that would lift and collapse the buildings in real time as they're moving the remote control car through it. It looks awesome.

• 1:07:58Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks great.

• 1:07:59Lizzie Bassett?

  It really looks great. I did see one source that they actually had to do this sequence twice because the original version didn't work and resulted in a scrambled hiring of a new effects shop. But regardless, whoever did this, it looks awesome.

• 1:08:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:11Lizzie Bassett?

  And then the other one I want to call out, and this is thanks to a fun Corridor Crew video where they were going through a bunch of different VFX. The scene where Rodney Skinner and Invisible Man first appears and you see him put the white.

• 1:08:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great. It's so good.

• 1:08:24Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so good. When you see him put the white paint on his face.

• 1:08:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And you see the reverse through the back of his head.

• 1:08:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And it looks awesome.

• 1:08:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Can you guess how they did some of this when it looks like he's painting his face with the white, at least from the front?

• 1:08:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I assumed that they put his head inside of some sort of like, like they painted it and then he's actually removing the paint.

• 1:08:45Lizzie Bassett?

  That's exactly right. He's got blue paint on him.

• 1:08:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay. And then he's removing it with some sort of like solvent or something.

• 1:08:51Lizzie Bassett?

  And there's white underneath it to expose the face. Yeah. Which is really cool. It works really well. You know, some of it is 3D models, like the, when he turns and you're seeing it from behind, that's a 3D model. But yeah, it works great. Let's move into post-production. In a 2007 interview, Sean Connery said, "Shaven Norrington was given $85 million to make a movie in Prague, but unfortunately, he wasn't certified before he started because he would have been arrested for insanity. So we worked as well as we could and I ended up being heavily involved in the editing and trying to salvage it." And this unfortunately, Chris, was true. Sean Connery was heavily involved in the editing of this movie with Norrington reportedly only supervising edits on three of the movie's

• 1:09:34Lizzie Bassett?

  seven reels. And according to two people who worked on this film, he essentially opted out of all directorial duties, including adding new VFX and addressing any studio notes. Norrington basically confirmed this. He framed it more as though he was pushed out at this point versus him opting out. This makes a lot more sense to me. Sean Connery had had it with him. I think he, you know, swung his dick around and took over post-production. Of course, the studio is going to side with Sean Connery in this situation and not Stephen Norrington. Norrington even said the composer was, quote, "uninterested in taking notes from me" and he finally just threw his hands up and I think he gave up. Soon after filming completed, Norrington had actually written a letter to producers who were developing

• 1:10:18Lizzie Bassett?

  new projects for him, informing them he was done. He would never work on a Hollywood production again. On June 30th, 2003, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen premiered in Las Vegas at the Venetian. Sean Connery arrived in a gondola. Stephen Norrington arrived not at all. When asked by reporters where the director was,

• 1:10:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Sean Connery replied, check the local asylum.

• 1:10:42Chris Winterbauer?

  He really is milking this. I think he actually genuinely thinks he's insane. Like, I don't think it's a joke anymore.

• 1:10:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's a joke. I think it's, it's not a joke. I mean, he hates him.

• 1:10:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Did you hear the one where I called him a nut job?

• 1:10:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's just like, that's the most insulting thing he can think to say is that like, you're not in touch with reality, which Sean, arguments could be made, you are not in touch with reality. But Norrington wasn't in the Vegas psych ward. He was actually, Chris, watching from the crowd. Steven Norrington drove to Las Vegas to his own premiere to watch it all unfold from the sidelines. He said, quote, "It cracked me up watching Connery in the suits, having to explain to reporters why the idiot director was not at the event." But something else happened to Norrington in the crowd that day. He asked the person next to him, "What's the premiere for?" And they replied, "Oh, uh, it's that new Johnny Depp movie, Pirates of the Caribbean." Because yes, when The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

• 1:11:41Lizzie Bassett?

  opened wide on July 11th, 2003, it was directly competing with Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl.

• 1:11:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Which was not expected to be a huge hit.

• 1:11:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. So LXG landed in second place with 23.2 million and Pirates took the top spot at 46.4. Immediately, questions arose about why the fuck Fox would pit LXG against Pirates and Fox said, "No, no, this was intentional. It was to provide a highbrow alternative for discriminating moviegoers looking for an original film, not a sequel or a film that began as a theme park ride." Which is not true. This is not original IP. And also, I think as we learned-

• 1:12:21Chris Winterbauer?

  This is a movie based on a comic based on nine books.

• 1:12:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, right. And also, I think they thought Pirates of the Caribbean was gonna tank. That's what everybody thought.

• 1:12:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Most people did. I think even internally Disney was very concerned, if you remember our, you know, conversation about it.

• 1:12:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly. I'm sure Fox was like, "This is a sure bet. Pit it against that trash fire. We're gonna do great."

• 1:12:43Chris Winterbauer?

  All the coverage is gonna be about Johnny Depp and his sinking pirate ship.

• 1:12:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:12:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And it doesn't help that- Both take place at sea for a large portion of the film. And so.

• 1:12:52Lizzie Bassett?

  It also doesn't help that Shane West is kind of a poor man's Orlando Bloom in some ways. Like they have a similar dynamic of an older actor and then the sort of young up and coming whippersnapper. But Bloom was coming off of Lord of the Rings and had way more name recognition. And a bunch of 12 year old girls who really loved him, including me.

• 1:13:12Chris Winterbauer?

  They did. They did.

• 1:13:13Lizzie Bassett?

  So on August 12th, 2003, Sean Connery returned to Prague for the European premiere of Alex G. On a promise to the Czech Republic's then president, Connery said, on a handshake, I said, if the film was any good, I would bring it to Prague. I like that he thinks it was good. He donated 37,000 pounds around there in proceeds from the screening to flood victims. So that was nice. Roger Ebert gave it one star, as did many other critics. Here's what Ebert had to say in his review. I don't really mind the movie's lack of believability. Well, I mind a little to assume audiences will believe cars racing through Venice is as insulting as giving them a gondola chase down the White House lawn.

• 1:13:51Lizzie Bassett?

  What I do mind is that the movie plays like a big wind came along and blew away the script and they ran down the street after it and grabbed a few pages and shot those. Since Oscar Wilde contributed Dorian Gray to the movie, it may be appropriate to end with his dying words. Either that wallpaper goes or I do. It's pretty good, Roger.

• 1:14:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:10Lizzie Bassett?

  LXG would make around 66 million dollars domestically and 179 million worldwide. So it was not a big time flopper. It did make its money back and maybe even a little bit on top, especially if you consider DVD sales where I think it was pretty strong.

• 1:14:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I would imagine after DVD, it probably did. Okay.

• 1:14:27Lizzie Bassett?

  It did. And yet it was regarded as an enormous critical bomb. Now, in September of 2003, things got worse for the league when Fox was hit with a 100 million dollar lawsuit from Academy Award winning producer Martin Poll. He won for The Lion and Winter and screenwriter Larry Cohen. They accused the studio of stealing the idea for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But Chris, how could this be when it was based off of Alan Moore's IP? While much to his chagrin, Alan Moore was named in the suit. The suit said that Poll and Cohen had pitched the idea to Fox multiple times. Between 1993 and 1996, under the name Cast of Characters. They alleged that instead of Don Murphy's story about falling in love with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen while developing From Hell,

• 1:15:08Lizzie Bassett?

  that Fox had retroactively hired Moore to write it as a cover for plagiarism. Now, if you know anything about Alan Moore, there's no way that that is true. Here's what Moore said while being interviewed by Ian Winterton. "Some plaintiff in America, some screenwriter, had apparently sent some screenplay around with an entirely different bunch of Victorian characters to the one portrayed in my book, but who did have some similarities to those in the film, which had one or two Hollywood additions, Tom Sawyer, characters like that." Apparently, the only way this person could have any chance of the case getting into court was to actually claim this unlikely string of circumstances where the head of 20th Century Fox had stolen this guy's ideas and phoned me up and suggested that I write a comic book purely to disguise his theft of this guy's ideas.

• 1:15:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, as soon as I heard that, I was appalled because I don't get my ideas from Hollywood screenwriters. "In my own medium, I am fairly well-respected and I really could not stand for the interference that I was stealing ideas from a second-string writer, especially a medium that I don't have a great deal of respect for." Here's the tricky thing, and Moore is hinting at it in that quote. According to comic book resources, that Cast of Characters screenplay did have similarities to the resulting film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but they were the elements that were exclusive to the film.

• 1:16:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 1:16:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Remember the things that Fox insisted they throw in? Tom Sawyer, Alan Quatermain as the leader of the League, Dorian Gray. Basically, the suit had no merit against Moore's comic, but it may have had some against the actual film, and Fox settled out of court. But this experience was enough to make Alan Moore want nothing to do with film adaptations of his work ever again. In fact, he vehemently did not want it adapted, period, because of this. Anything he owned the rights to, he vowed never to sell to a studio. Anything he couldn't control, like V for Vendetta and Watchmen, he asked for his name to be removed from the credits and publicly detached himself from the projects. And by the time HBO's Watchmen aired in 2023, he revealed he had donated his entire royalties to Black Lives Matter. As for Sean Connery, Chris, he was done with-

• 1:17:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Movies too. A year later, he pulled out of a World War II thriller set to be directed by Brett Ratner, and his rep said it's because he's writing his memoir. But this memoir never materialized. In 2005, Connery told the New Zealand Herald that he had lost "a stonking amount of money" by pulling out of a deal to have a ghostwriter do a tell-all book about his life. And in 2006, Connery officially announced his retirement while receiving a lifetime achievement award from AFI. And not even Steven Spielberg could lure him back for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with Connery saying, "I spoke with Spielberg, but it didn't work out. It was not that generous apart, worth getting back into the harness and go for. And they had taken the story in a different line anyway, so the father of Indy was really not that important.

• 1:17:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I had suggested they kill him in the movie. It would have taken care of it better." And Norrington, well, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen truly soured Hollywood for him as well. He told Rewind Zone in 2025, "I like the idea that LXG broke me so fundamentally I could never work with studios again. It sounds a bit like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, but broken? Nah. Wised up, more like." He reminisced on the project and how frustrating it had been. Though Fox had been almost too willing to throw money at certain problems, they were not interested in some of the more experimental, cost-saving creativity that he'd been able to exercise on something like Blade. He did acknowledge the other side, saying, "Look, it's not reasonable for me to expect that film financiers should give me their money without them being involved in the process. If I was financing a movie, I'd want to be involved, how my money was being spent."

• 1:18:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Ultimately, according to Norrington, the biggest problem was that Moore's LXG was "a dark, cynical, and provocative adult work, but the movie was always going to be a PG-13 kid-friendly romp propped up by a well-loved movie star." I think that's spot on, from everything I understand about the comic. Norrington has not made a feature film since, despite being attached to various projects that either fell apart or were made with other directors like Clash of the Titans, the Crow reboot, many more. 20th Century Fox has attempted to reboot it many times, including a pilot and a female-centric feature take, which I wonder if that was just correcting the wrongs to Mina Murray. And as of 2022, there was allegedly a feature reboot for Hulu in the works, but that has yet to materialize, nor is it even really present on IMDb.

• 1:19:17Lizzie Bassett?

  So, I think that wraps up our coverage of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

• 1:19:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, thank you for shedding a little light on a film that cost me a heck of a lot of credibility in my peer group 23 years ago.

• 1:19:31Lizzie Bassett?

  What went right?

• 1:19:33Chris Winterbauer?

  A few things. I will give my what went right to the miniatures team, whichever one was

• 1:19:40Lizzie Bassett?

  You bastard.

• 1:19:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Finally hired. I steal it from you. Those shots do look great. You know, I am simply not as erudite and educated as Roger Ebert. I thought, driving through Venice, sounds good to me. And it was great. So I, I enjoyed those miniature scenes and shots quite a bit. And there are some effects in the movie that I actually thought were just perfectly fine and, and held up just fine after 23 years. And those were all of the physical effects, the practical effects in the film, I thought, held up very well.

• 1:20:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm going to give my what went right, since you took the effects team, which I did think did a great job, to Alan Moore. Every time we cover something that is based on his work, I realize how much I like so much, not all, obviously, of what he's done. And he really creates these worlds that do adapt so well to film and TV. And I think that what he created here totally could have, like particularly a mini series. You know, you see something like Penny Dreadful doing kind of a similar thing, and it worked really well. I just always find myself loving his material. I think it's sad that he probably has never watched HBO's mini series of Watchmen that did air in 2023, because it was beautiful.

• 1:20:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think he'd like it.

• 1:20:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Really?

• 1:20:54Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think he likes anything that's been adapted, period, of his work.

• 1:20:57Lizzie Bassett?

  That's fine.

• 1:20:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying I don't think he would like any of it. I just, that's the sense I get from him.

• 1:21:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that may be true. I don't know. To me, that one felt like, even though it, you know, diverted in ways from the source material, that it, it seemed to me like it understood the heart of it. But yeah, I just, it makes me want to read more of his works. He's a fascinating, complicated, at times problematic person, but I love the stories that he tells, and I love these worlds that he builds. And I'm sorry that he doesn't want them to be adapted, and I do understand that, but they make for good adaptations a lot of the time. So my what went right is Alan Moore's crazy, crazy brain.

• 1:21:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good.

• 1:21:35Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, Chris, if people would like to support this podcast, how could they do that?

• 1:21:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Just a few easy ways. If you guys are enjoying this show, we deeply appreciate you listening. That's the number one way to support us, and you're already doing it. If you would like to go a step further, leave us a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you're listening to us on. Make sure that you hit follow or subscribe so you're getting all of our new episodes every week. If you want to go even further and get more from us beyond our every Monday releases, you can join one of our subscription service feeds. You can do that through Spotify or Apple. It is called the What Went Wrong Special Features option. For $4.99, you will get at least one bonus episode. These are typically reviews of new films that release on Fridays, so you get at least one bonus episode a month. If you'd like to go even further, you can join our Patreon.

• 1:22:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Head to www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast, and for $5, you get the bonus episodes, plus you get an ad-free RSS feed. So that means you can listen to all of our episodes with no ads. If you want to go even further, you can join our Full Stop tier and get a shout-out just like one of these from Sean Connery himself. Go ahead, Lizzie.

• 1:22:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Gladly. Angeline Renee Cook. Adrian Peng Korea. Ben Schindman. Blaze Ambrose. Brian Donahue. Have your chicks the local asylum, Brian. Brittany Morris. Brooke. Why do you only have one name, Brooke? Cameron Smith. C Grace B. Chris Liel. Chris Zucker. David Friskalanti. Darren and Dale Conklin. Don Schible. Ellen Singleton. M Zodia. Evan Downey. Are you a local lunatic, Evan Downey? Felicia G. Film it yourself. Frankenstein.

• 1:23:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Full Grey Hound. Galen and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids. Grace Potter. Half Grey Hound. James McAvoy. Jared, pronounced "er" again. Don't tell me how to pronounce something, Jared. Jason Franco, JJ Rapido, Jory Hillpiper, Jose Emiliano Salto de Georgio, Retrain the Tripmea, Jose, Karina Carnaba, Kate Ellington, Catherine Olsen, Amy Elgashlager McCoy, that's a good Scottish name right there, Amy, Lazy Freddy, Lena LJ, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Mariposas Humans, Matthew Jacobson,

• 1:24:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Michael McGrath, Nate the Knife, Nathan Centeno, Rosemary Southwood, Roja, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott O'Shea, Salmon Chai Nani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, The Provost Family, The O's Sound Like Hoes, There Is No Spoon. Why is there no spoon? I don't get it. Similar to The Lord of the Rings, which I also do not get. I don't, I don't get much. All right, Chris, would you like to tell the people what we have coming up next week?

• 1:24:50Chris Winterbauer?

  We have a movie that could be called The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of What Should We Do About Encroaching Fascism? We're covering Casablanca, which is one of my favorite classic Hollywood films. And I think a really important movie to cover at the moment that we're at right now, and a very unexpected success. And so I'm really excited to dive into it. And the where and the, and the who, and the who wrote it, and the timing of the film, and everything about it, and where Warner Brothers was, and the Humphrey Bogart of it all. It's gonna be a fun time. So I'm excited to dive back. I know we've been doing some more modern films so far this year.

• 1:25:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think it'll be fun to dive back 75, 80 years to Casablanca.

• 1:25:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I can't wait. All right. Well, we'll see you all next week. Here's looking at you, kid.

• 1:25:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Bye.

• 1:25:43Speaker 06

  To support What Went Wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS feed. You can also visit our website, whatwentwrongpod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by Karen Krupshaw.