Bohemian Rhapsody

Between overly involved band members, a completely absent director, and a huge legacy for lead actor Rami Malek to live up to, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ had more than its fair share of problems. This week Lizzie and Chris dive into one of the messiest biopic productions in movie history and discover why it took so long to FINALLY fire director Bryan Singer. 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.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Life can be a lot sometimes. Traffic, taxes, and that dreaded text that just says, "Call me." Why not go where life is good? Escape to Pluto TV. Turn off all your day-to-day problems and turn on the movies and shows you already love, from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy to Dirty Dancing, from Alias to The X-Files. Channel Surf Live TV or browse the menu to find exactly what you're in the mood for. It's all free, no subscription, no credit card, no catch. The best things on TV are free, so escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

  12 celebrities, one Don, and cold, hard cash. From the producers of The Traitors comes The Mob, a new Hulu original series now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. In this unique new reality competition show hosted by the iconic Parker Posey, 12 celebrity contestants are about to become members of a powerful family. For two weeks in a lavish Italian villa, they'll shake down and hustle to win a share of up to $250,000. And every good mob needs a Don. Whoever they choose to lead them will have absolute power deciding who stays and who gets taken out, who makes money and who walks away with nothing. In a game of power where loyalty and trust are the currency,

• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

  will the most powerful reality contestant in TV history be able to keep the family happy? And if they're overthrown by the mob, who will step up and become the new Don? Let the games begin. Watch The Mob, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

• 2:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop. That just so happened.

• 2:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, I'm not gonna keep doing that. And how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone Bohemian Rhapsody. As always, I am Chris Wintervower, joined by my co-host, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing this fine afternoon?

• 2:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm great. I'm really excited to get into this one. I think we both have very strong feelings about it, but I would like to remind you at the top of this episode that a lot, a lot of people love this movie.

• 2:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 2:40Lizzie Bassett?

  And I think that we should do our best to understand why. And I think I can appreciate that. Spoiler alert, Chris and I do not love this movie. But I think the story that you're gonna get today is very, very interesting. It's a lot of what went wrongs, it's a lot of what not to do's, and also some heroes mixed in there, which is nice. So before we get into it, we are of course talking about Bohemian Rhapsody. The story of Queen?

• 3:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Just everybody, the whole thing. Everybody, all the time, all the way through.

• 3:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Everybody Freddie Mercury ever met.

• 3:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Every, everybody Freddie Mercury ever shook hands with, and not so much Freddie Mercury. But that's okay, for $900 million worth of ticket sales, that's okay, so.

• 3:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Holy shit.

• 3:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah, this thing made bank.

• 3:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, good for them.

• 3:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, had you seen Bohemian Rhapsody before? And what were your feelings upon rewatching it?

• 3:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh, yeah, once before and then rewatched it. Yes, we're not here to dunk on movies that you guys like at all. And I guess I'd describe it this way. So I had a professor who once said, if you could choose between having a photograph of someone that you love who's no longer here, or having a recording of their voice, you should always choose the recording of their voice. Because if you play that through a speaker and close your eyes, it is as close to resurrection as you can get. The actual physics of the sound hitting you are not dissimilar from them being in the room speaking to you.

• 4:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 4:05Chris Winterbauer?

  And when I watched this movie, I feel that I have been handed a very well-crafted and loving photograph of a person. And I don't have any sense of the texture of who that person is. And I feel no closer To understanding Freddie Mercury, that the ending of this movie, as I do at the beginning. That being said, I do think the movie improves as it goes on. I thought the first half honestly felt closer, I mentioned this to you, Lizzie, closer to something like Walk Hard than Walk the Line. It almost feels like parody. But I do think, even I had to admit, I thought the movie improved pretty markedly in the back half. And I'm curious if there are any production reasons for that. I have no idea.

• 4:46Chris Winterbauer?

  If the goal of a biopic is to present the facts of somebody's life, then I suppose this movie may have succeeded.

• 4:54Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 4:54Chris Winterbauer?

  It feels, okay, well, it feels like a Reader's Digest sort of approach to telling the story of someone's life. I was thinking a lot about All That Jazz, which I feel, despite Bob Fosse claiming it is not autobiographical.

• 5:07Lizzie Bassett?

  No, we can throw that out the window. We know to a certain extent it was.

• 5:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And after I watched it, I really felt like I knew Bob Fosse. The good, the bad, and everything in between. And after watching Bohemian Rhapsody, I just thought, I'd like to go listen to some Queen. But I don't feel like I know anything more about Freddie Mercury.

• 5:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 5:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Or really the band in general.

• 5:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think that's a beautiful way of expressing, I think, both of our problems with this movie. So I was talking to my mother-in-law last night, who really, really loves this movie, like really love it.

• 5:38Chris Winterbauer?

  My parents also really like this movie.

• 5:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and talking to her, I was like, okay, like, this movie meant something to her. It moved her. She loved it. I don't want to shit on this movie. Like, a lot of people really loved this. And I asked her why. I was like, you know, what was it about this? And I think this movie hinges so heavily on how fucking great Queen's music is. Because the music does all of the heavy lifting for them. It's so good. It's so exciting. Well, the music and, I will say, I think, as we're gonna get to, Rami Malek absolutely works his ass off and does, I think, the best he possibly could with what he had.

• 6:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's maybe more of an impersonation than it is an in-depth performance. I don't even know if that's fair. I think he is so fun to watch. He looks in. Moves so much like Freddie Mercury. And of course, the music you're hearing, it is Queen, it is Freddie Mercury. We're going to get into that a little bit. But I think that's the reason people love this is because they just love Queen. Because Queen is great. The music is great. And like, that just moves the whole thing along. And I think it is enough to ignore, as you put it, the walk hardness of this movie. It's wild when you really pay attention to it. It does feel like they watched Walk Hard and said, "Let's do that, but make it serious."

• 7:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I was also reminded of Braveheart a little bit.

• 7:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 7:05Chris Winterbauer?

  And some of the broadness of some of the choices.

• 7:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I was reminded of your favorite word, Chris, which, as I've been listening back to some recent episodes, you've used a lot, and I appreciate it because I had to look it up, which is a hagiography.

• 7:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 7:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I think this is a hagiography.

• 7:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, let's get into it. This movie became a little bit of an industry punching bag.

• 7:24Lizzie Bassett?

  It did.

• 7:24Chris Winterbauer?

  It's actually, it's weirdly an underdog movie. It became an industry punching bag. It had a remarkably absent director.

• 7:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Chris Winterbauer?

  A horrifyingly complicated editorial process, I'm sure. There's one scene in particular that went, you know, around the internet for the sheer volume of cuts as they're meeting with that manager for the first time. And it's just like, "Close up, close up, close up, close up", out on everybody's faces. And yet, despite all of that working against it, it found its audience. And this movie made an absurd amount of money, as you mentioned, so.

• 7:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Let's get into it.

• 7:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's do it.

• 7:53Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, it was released in November of 2018. It's directed, unfortunately, as we will get to, by Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher, who is uncredited. We will also discuss that as well. With a story by Peter Morgan and screenplay by Anthony McCarren. As per usual with movies of this level, there were many other writers attached to this, but he's the main one. Produced by Graham King and Jim Beach, Queen's real-life manager. Production companies, 20th Century Fox. Starring Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Guillaume Lee, Ben Hardy, Joe Mazzello, Aidan Gillan, Alan Leach, Tom Hollander, and the scene that Chris just referenced, of course, Mike Myers. The IMDb logline is, as always,

• 8:37Lizzie Bassett?

  "With his impeccable vocal abilities, Freddie Mercury and his rock band Queen achieve superstardom. However, amidst his skyrocketing success, he grapples with his ego, sexuality, and a fatal illness."

• 8:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Does he? Does he grapple with those things? It could be argued that it doesn't really deal with those at all. Anyway, the story of this film begins not with Rami Malek, or even with Bryan Singer, or even Bryan May, all of whom we will get to. Instead, it seems to begin sometime around 2008 with a man who was very familiar with a different queen. And that, of course, is the writer of "The Queen" and creator of "The Crown," Peter Morgan. Chris, are you a fan of Peter Morgan's queen content?

• 9:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I watched a little bit of "The Crown"

• 9:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God, I love it.

• 9:24Chris Winterbauer?

  when it was first going around. It's impeccably made. The writing's great. I don't find the British monarchy compelling. It's high-end reality television, right? At the end of the day.

• 9:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I love it. Can't get enough.

• 9:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I totally understand. It's just not for me. So I'm not that familiar with Peter Morgan's work.

• 9:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, pretty much everyone can agree that he was around for the genesis of this project. And he does, as I said, retain a story by credit on the final product. What his basic idea was, which is why he retained a story by credit, is that he wanted to chronicle the lead-up to an eventual performance at Live Aid. Now, I think this is what Peter Morgan does best. He looks at a particular pivotal moment in time for a historical figure, whether that's the Frost Nixon interview for Richard Nixon, or Princess Diana's death for Queen Elizabeth II. And he uses that snapshot to paint a larger picture of that person's life. Those are my favorite kinds of biopics. I do not like something that tries to encompass someone's entire life. I think it's not worth trying to pack into two hours.

• 10:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I think you can learn a lot more by focusing on a specific moment and how someone reacts under pressure in that moment. They touch on this very briefly in the movie, Chris, but the band was in a bit of turmoil. I believe Freddie Mercury was considering doing a solo album at that point. And then, you know, they end up kind of, by some accounts, sort of saving Live Aid. Certainly, the way they painted in Bohemian Rhapsody, that's the case. There's some debate about that, whether it was them or David Bowie or whatever. What do you think about what that version of this might have been?

• 10:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Better.

• 10:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I would tend to agree. I think that, again, the cradle to the grave is a difficult approach for film. It's just the medium isn't built for it, in my opinion, and so that's more appealing to me. And the part of the Walk Hard joke that I made is Walk Hard has that joke of before he goes out there, he's going to relive his entire life in this moment on the stage.

• 11:18Lizzie Bassett?

  It's exactly what they do.

• 11:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, how it sets up in this movie.

• 11:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Now, as I said, everyone can agree that Peter Morgan is here at the beginning of this, but what no one can seem to agree upon is how Sacha Baron Cohen got involved, or when he got involved. Now, to hear him tell the story, Bohemian Rhapsody seemed to begin not with Peter Morgan, but with him around the same time in 2008. In a now infamous Howard Stern interview, Sacha Baron Cohen talked about having worked on the film for about six years before he left the project. So he says that he brought Peter Morgan onto the project and not the other way around. Based on an article in 2018 in People, Peter Morgan seems to kind of back that up. And also that Sacha Baron Cohen had been in talks

• 12:03Lizzie Bassett?

  with the band from the very beginning, and he had a very specific vision for the film. So here he is on Howard Stern explaining it.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  I mean, there are amazing stories about Freddie Mercury, you know. Crazy. Crazy. The guy was wild. I mean, he was living an extreme lifestyle that- Debauchery. Debauchery. I mean, there were, you know, there are stories of, you know, I don't know what you call them, that little people? What is the term?

• 12:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Little people, yes.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Little people with, you know, plates with cocaine on their heads, walking around parties.

• 12:33Lizzie Bassett?

  So he has this vision of this movie being very, very R-rated.

• 12:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Debauched.

• 12:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Debauched, yes. Which, like, does seem to line up with Freddie Mercury's real tastes. And by the way, there are some little people walking around the party in Bohemian Rhapsody. I don't know if you noticed that, but they did not have plates of cocaine attached to their heads. Once Morgan and Cohen were working on the film, Peter Morgan called up Academy Award-winning producer Graham King. At this point, he'd been nominated for The Aviator. He had won for The Departed. He was an enormous fan of Queen and was immediately interested in the project. And he also started meeting with the band as early as 2008. He met specifically with Brian May, the guitarist, and Roger Taylor, the drummer, to try and convince them to grant him the life rights to the story. Now, they were on board for a biopic, but they had one very important condition

• 13:26Lizzie Bassett?

  that's going to prove problematic over the course of this episode. They were very specific about the director. The director had to be just perfect. Mm hmm. And one of the ways it seems that King was able to convince them that they should all do this together was he made it very clear from the get go that this would be a collaborative project with them, AKA, they would have quite a lot of creative control. He done made a mistakey. So, uh oh. Peter Morgan was immediately concerned. He told CinemaBlend, "I'm not sure how much they'll like what I write. I think they'll recognize the truth in it, but it's a series of painful memories for them. I'm essentially writing about the most painful time in the band's history."

• 14:11Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, I don't think he got permission from Queen Lizzie to do the Queen or the Crown. And I guarantee you that she didn't like a lot of what was written there. But I think he is very loving and careful with the characters that he crafts. So I don't think it would have been a disrespectful version at all. Regardless, they all kept plowing along. And in 2010, Sacha Baron Cohen was, as far as I can tell, pretty much officially announced as playing Freddie Mercury in the film, which was at that point titled, what, Chris? What's your guess? It's not called Queen? No. Oh, what's it called? I have no idea. Freddie Mercury. Oh, really? Uh huh. Interesting. Should be a little clue right there as to how things changed. Mm hmm. Brian May said at the time, "We have Sacha Baron Cohen,

• 14:56Lizzie Bassett?

  which will probably be a shock to a lot of people, but he's been talking with us for a very long time." Now, I'm putting a lot of emphasis on this because later on, this will all come into question. In 2011, the film moved over to Sony, at which point Amy Pascal, the then president of Sony, and Sacha Baron Cohen began meeting with potential directors. A former Sony executive confirmed to Vulture that Cohen had been integral to the early development of the film. They also confirmed that, as the working title would suggest, the film focused on Freddie Mercury, not the whole band. It included ups and downs with the band, but it was fully from his POV. Now, early directors considered, any ideas?

• 15:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, man. Danny Boyle?

• 15:36Lizzie Bassett?

  No, although I think he would have been good.

• 15:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, is it musical, like musically?

• 15:41Lizzie Bassett?

  One is, yes.

• 15:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom Hooper?

• 15:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, nailed it. Tom Hooper. And then one that's a little bit more unexpected, but I think could have been awesome. David Fincher.

• 15:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, that version.

• 15:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Can you imagine a Sasha Baron Cohen?

• 15:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 15:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Peter Morgan-written David Fincher? I mean, that's kind of amazing.

• 15:59Chris Winterbauer?

  I think Baron Cohen actually makes a lot of sense and has a theatricality that would have worked really well. I don't know if he can sing, but I don't think Rami Malek sings either, so it's fine.

• 16:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you don't really need to. Nobody can do Freddie Mercury. He is way too tall, which I do wonder if that would have been a problem.

• 16:16Chris Winterbauer?

  He is. It's interesting. Malek fits the physicality a little bit better, but looking at Baron Cohen's face, he looks way more like Freddie Mercury than Malek does. And his energy feels more Freddie to me than Malek's does, naturally.

• 16:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think that's fair. In addition to Graham King, Jane Rosenthal of Tribeca Films joined to produce alongside her very longtime producing partner. You may have noticed this name in the credits, Robert De Niro. And by 2012, a frontrunner was announced to direct. The Queen director, Stephen Frears. However, Frears sensed something was amiss right away. He told Vulture, "You could always tell there would be trouble with the rest of the band because Sasha was so outrageous and they weren't. They were much more conventional." He also referenced Sasha Baron Cohen wanting to do endless naked scenes. Which, like, good.

• 17:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm guessing Freddie was naked a lot back in the 70s and 80s.

• 17:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. But in 2013, after almost six years of development, Sasha Baron Cohen suddenly quit.

• 17:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Both Peter Morgan and Stephen Frears jumped ship immediately after he bailed. I think that's pretty telling that everybody was like, nope, and left as soon as he did. So they've lost their star, their writer, their director, and everyone thinks this thing is just gonna die. But Graham King is like, not on my watch. And he plowed ahead with Brian May and Roger Taylor, now even more heavily involved in the creative elements of the film. They started getting very excited about a new prospect to play Freddie Mercury, a British actor this time, someone whose physicality might match a little bit more. He's very slight, very lithe. Any ideas?

• 17:53Chris Winterbauer?

  No, there is actually somebody that I think would have been wonderful.

• 17:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Who?

• 17:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I think Himesh Patel would have been perfect.

• 17:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 18:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Cause he has big teeth, he can actually sing.

• 18:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I love him.

• 18:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Have you seen Yesterday?

• 18:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Chris Winterbauer?

  He has a beautiful voice. He doesn't have a Freddie voice, but he has a beautiful voice.

• 18:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Fuck on why? Got a bit of a crush on Himesh Patel.

• 18:12Chris Winterbauer?

  He's great. I think he could have been a fantastic Freddie.

• 18:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that.

• 18:16Chris Winterbauer?

  That's who I would have cast personally.

• 18:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting. Well, this was Ben Whishaw.

• 18:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, okay. Who's great too. It's like a little bit of a wispy version of Freddie, but he's a fantastic actor.

• 18:27Lizzie Bassett?

  He is. I mean ethnically, as we're gonna get to, that's interesting, maybe not appropriate casting, but he's an amazing actor. When he was asked about the project by Time Out Paris in 2014, though, he said, actually, I don't know what's happening. It seems to be on a back burner. It was going, there were problems getting the script working. So, the script, here's what Graham King had to say about why this was so hard to nail down. He said, "The reason this took so long to get made is Mercury had a very complicated life, and it's just getting the balance of someone's life story and the band's life story into a two hour and 15 minute film." So Chris, what part of that sentence now sounds different than what we had been discussing?

• 19:08Chris Winterbauer?

  The band's life story.

• 19:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, there we go. So, let's talk about this for a second. I don't begrudge them wanting creative control. I don't begrudge them wanting their stories told too. To me, this is a problem within mistake that Graham King made, because everybody else seemed to recognize, you should not move forward with this project if they are this emotionally invested in the creative elements of it. But I mean, Chris, what do you think? Is it worth trying to plow through?

• 19:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, well, the spoils go to the victor. And with hindsight, of course, he made nearly a billion dollars with this. It was absolutely worth it. He had the opportunity to tell Queen's story, and that's what he did to a certain degree. From a creative perspective, I think that the main problem with this movie is that it is attempting to tell the story of an extremely unconventional person who was beloved specifically for his unconventionality as both a musician and a person through an extremely conventional lens, which is the perspective of the band. And there are some interesting unintended consequences. From a classic story perspective, Freddie Mercury's homosexuality is technically the villain of the movie. If you look at when his homosexuality shows up.

• 20:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 20:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Midway between the end of act one and the midpoint, and then the midpoint and the end of act two. And they try to lessen that with the relationship with Jim Hudson as like the kind of one non- hedonistic gay man who gives him some interest at the midpoint. But I think that, again, the flaw of the film is that Freddie is the driver of the downfall of the band, right? And then he has needed to come back, but then they also want to make it clear that the band was really important and also had ideas and did.

• 20:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, they really want you to know that Brian May wrote "We Will Rock You."

• 20:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, and Brian May's an incredible guitarist.

• 20:48Lizzie Bassett?

  He's amazing.

• 20:49Chris Winterbauer?

  He's amazing.

• 20:49Lizzie Bassett?

  They're an amazing band. Like, none of this is to knock the band.

• 20:53Chris Winterbauer?

  And relative to Freddie Mercury, they are all very boring as subjects for a movie. And I say that as someone who should never have a movie made about them because I would be like watching paint dry. And so that's the downfall, I think, of this film.

• 21:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Very well said.

• 21:50Lizzie Bassett?

  So it's around this time that up and coming British director Dexter Fletcher was in talks to direct the film. Producers were very impressed with his sophomore feature. It was a musical based on songs by The Proclaimers. You know them, of course. Mm hmm. Are you not gonna sing it? I really set you up to sing it. Oh, hold on, hold on. Aren't they? And I would walk 500 miles. Okay, shit. All right, never mind. Anyway, the movie was called Sunshine on Leith. It's very cute. They liked it a lot. Now Fletcher may have only directed two features, but he was not at all new to British cinema. He had been a very successful child and teenage actor in movies like Bugsy Malone, shows like Press Gang. But his childhood was difficult since he became the breadwinner for his family.

• 22:33Lizzie Bassett?

  That's a very strange dynamic to have with your parents. He struggled with drug addiction. He blew through all of his money and he told The Hollywood Reporter, "I became unreliable at work because I didn't trust what I could do. I didn't have any respect for myself, so I didn't have any respect for my work." It wasn't until What Went Wrong hero Alan Rickman stepped in and introduced him to his future wife that he got his shit together. He booked a role in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and then started a real friendship and partnership with producer-director Matthew Vaughn, working together again on Kick-Ass, Stardust, Layer Cake and more. So by 2013, he'd made two small features, both of which had been moderately successful, and he came in with a real vision for what Bohemian Rhapsody could be.

• 23:13Lizzie Bassett?

  He wanted, again, a hard R biopic, written by the road screenwriter Joe Pennall, about an immigrant, a gay man, all the outsider values, as he told The Hollywood Reporter. He actually made it almost up to the first week of pre-production. Wow. And then, just like Sacha Baronco and Peter Morgan and Striven Freers before him, Brian May and Roger Taylor balked at the direction for the film. So Fletcher, Ben Wishaw, even Graham King at this point were pushing hard for script changes, but May and Taylor just would not budge and the delays piled up. So Fletcher and Wishaw left. Even more bad luck hit the production in 2015. Any idea why?

• 23:54Chris Winterbauer?

  The Sony hack?

• 23:55Lizzie Bassett?

  The Sony hack, yes. So, thanks to Seth Rogen's film, "The Interview," a North Korean group hacked Sony. We will talk about that movie. I still can't believe this is a real thing. Of course, releasing quite a few of Amy Pascal's email communiques with Scott Rudin. They included some really just dumb racist jokes about Obama, some nasty stuff about Angelina Jolie, among many others. So, she stepped down, which meant that the Queen biopic had lost one of its highest-ranking champions. But Graham King did not give up. His production company, GK Films, continued to plow ahead, this time with Andrew McCarthen, best known for writing "The Theory of Everything," who stepped in to revise Peter Morgan's screenplay. Of course, with approval from who, Chris?

• 24:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Brian May.

• 24:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Brian May and Roger Taylor.

• 24:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Boom.

• 24:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that's right. Now, McCarthen makes some interesting choices, and I'm saying McCarthen makes these choices. I don't know if he is the one who made these. As I said, there are a lot of other people.

• 24:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. In McCarthen's draft, these choices have been made.

• 24:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. In the draft that gets finalized, this is what starts to pop up. In the film, we see Freddie Mercury being seduced by his manager, Paul Prenter, to go solo, which then causes tensions with the bandmate. In reality, he was not even the first Queen member to make a solo album. Roger Taylor was.

• 25:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:10Lizzie Bassett?

  He had released several before Freddie Mercury's first solo effort ever came out.

• 25:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Hadn't Freddie also been doing some solo work? I don't know if he did an album, but hadn't he been doing solo work before he met the rest of the band members of Queen? They make it seem as if this guy walked out of his dorm and had never sung before and was like, "Here's a poem I wrote. Maybe I can be your lead singer." And my understanding is like, he was trying to be a musician to a certain extent before this.

• 25:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. So, this is a big one. In the movie, as you see, he learns that he's sick shortly before the band reunites for Live Aid, and they kind of use that as almost like motivation for why he wants to do that. In reality, he was not formally diagnosed with AIDS until 1987, and Live Aid was 1985. That's a pretty big leap. And I feel like what that does is it ignores the moment of conflict between him and the band in favor of a moment of sort of internal conflict about these like, quote-unquote, debauched decisions he's made, which, to your point, casts his life in a very different light than I think what Peter Morgan, Sacha Baron Cohen, Dexter Fletcher, everyone was trying to do.

• 26:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that also, because Lizzie, this is something I happened to have looked into at some point in my life, but I know there's a lot of debate about when he knew, like, he may have known as early as 82 because he was showing symptoms, or he could have known in the late 70s. The bigger point is, it would not have been disclosed to the rest of the band, right, until after a, maybe a formal diagnosis in 87, even if Freddie internally was thinking, maybe I do have this, or you know what I'm saying, something like that.

• 26:43Lizzie Bassett?

  So at this point, Sony did still hold the rights to opt in if they liked the script, but they've like, basically dropped the project. So, remember that Howard Stern interview that Sacha Baron Cohen did? He goes on the show in 2016, and he does not mince words. In particular, he referenced one of his first meetings with the band, and I will let him tell this story. Again, this is from his interview on the Howard Stern Show in 2016.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  My first meeting, I should have never carried on because a member of the band, I won't say who, said- Brian May. I won't say who, but he said, you know, "This is such a great movie, because it's got such an amazing thing happens in the middle of the movie." I go, "What happens in the middle of the movie?" He goes, "You know, Freddie dies." Middle of the movie! I go, "All right, I go, "All right, so you mean it's a bit like Pulp Fiction, you know, the end is the middle and the middle is the end?" I go, "All right, that's really, that's a wild, that's a wild movie. All right, that's interesting, I never thought about that." He goes, "No, no, no, normal movie." I go, "So what happens in the second half of the movie?" He said, "Well, you know, we see how the band carries on from strength to strength."

• 27:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  And I said, "Listen," I go, "Not one person is going to see a movie where the lead character dies from eight and then you carry on." That would be just the craziest movie. Guys, guys, we've got to carry on.

• 28:05Chris Winterbauer?

  He's right.

• 28:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that. Normal movie. Normal movie. I guess it's worth noting, a Sony exec did say that no official script ever had Freddie dying in the middle of the movie because that would be insane. I think we can all agree that. But I do believe, Cohen, that that was discussed. Now, at this point, Brian May hit back in the press, saying Baron Cohen was too recognizable. That's why they'd passed on him, that they'd had a nice time, but he'd told untruths. They also start to claim at this point that he was barely involved, other than expressing his own interest in doing the project, and that he was never officially confirmed. But that's not true. Like, you can see very easily that he was really the genesis of this project in a lot of ways. Roger Taylor put it a little bit more bluntly. "I think he would have been utter shit."

• 28:52Lizzie Bassett?

  He said, "Sasha is pushy, if nothing else. He's also six inches too tall. But I watched his last five films and came to the conclusion, he's not a very good actor. I might be wrong there. I thought he was an utterly brilliant, subversive comedian. That's what he's great at." I think he is a good actor. I don't agree with that. Now, they may not have a director or a finished script, but sometime in 2016, in New York City, on the set of Mr. Robot, Rami Malek received a call from Graham King. He had actually already auditioned for Bohemian Rhapsody, and it seemed that King really liked him for it. But they were having trouble convincing the rest of the team, of course, Brian May and Roger Taylor. So they had him send in another audition tape, and he did it. He did not have the part at this point. The film didn't even really have funding, but

• 29:35Lizzie Bassett?

  he didn't care. He started preparing as though he had the part because he was like, "Worst-case scenario, I have a great Freddie Mercury impression, and at least I will be ready." Does he? Oh, buddy. Sorry. So after sending in another recording of himself performing as Freddie at Abbey Road, the producers told him to go meet Brian May and Roger Taylor at Taylor's flat. He assumed, I think safely as one would, that they must have seen the tape that he had sent in, and that's why he's meeting with them. He assumed wrong. Here he is on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, explaining what happened.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Well, they were sent a tape of it, so... And you knew they'd see it? Yeah, I thought they had seen it before I met them. But I met them in Roger Taylor's flat. I met Brian May as well. And I went under the impression that they had seen this tape, but they hadn't downloaded it properly. So I ended up watching them watch me for the first time. In between, you know, they're watching in Best Friend. Yeah, I was like. No pressure. No pressure. Well, how did they take you? They took me?

• 30:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Would be stressful. Would be so stressful. I have to say, he just comes across as so gracious and sweet in really all of his interviews. But he's right, they did take him. They all agreed that they had their Freddie Mercury. So let's talk very briefly about Rami Malek. He was born in 1981 in Torrance, California, to Egyptian parents who had immigrated to the United States. Arabic was his first language. It was spoken at home till he was about four years old. And important to note that Freddie Mercury was, as they show in the movie, born Farak Bol Sahr. He was not born in England, but in Zanzibar, to Indian parents of Parsi descent. If you're not familiar, the Parsi people are Zoroastrians, descended from Persian refugees who settled in India. Rami said, "Not to compare myself to him in any way, shape, or form, but I am a first-generation American.

• 31:29Lizzie Bassett?

  My family came from Egypt and sought a better life for their children in the US. Obviously, like so many people, they would have loved for us to be doctors and lawyers. It was very difficult to convince anyone that I wanted to do this and that I could do this." So in 2006, he got his big break in Night at the Museum, playing Pharaoh Akhman Ra. He reprised this role for multiple sequels. In 2010, he got a recurring role on 24 as a terrorist. But after that, Rami said, "I'm not doing that anymore." He decided he would turn down any roles that stereotyped Arabs. And he actually had to be convinced that the villain in No Time to Die was not religiously motivated. Otherwise, he would not have done it. And then in 2015, he broke out big with what show, Chris? Mr. Robot. Mr. Robot, which I don't know if you watched. I loved it.

• 32:13Lizzie Bassett?

  He won an Emmy in 2016 for Best Actor in a Drama Series and was the first non-white actor in 18 years to do so. So he's on board. Some additional casting, Alan Leach as Paul Prenter. Apparently, he couldn't figure out why Brian May and Roger Taylor were really cold and weird towards him during the whole shoot. And they told him on the last day it was because he looked so much like the real Paul Prenter that they'd been really creeped out. And he does, if you look at side by sides. Guillaume Lee as Brian May.

• 32:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Looks a lot like Brian May.

• 32:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Looks exactly like Brian May. And also, he's not using hand doubles.

• 32:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, really?

• 32:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's him.

• 32:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow, talented guitarist.

• 32:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very, and he learned that. I mean, he could play like some rhythm guitar, but he worked really hard. Joseph Mazzello, AKA Timmy from Jurassic Park, who I love, as John Deacon. You may notice John Deacon not involved in this film at all.

• 33:03Chris Winterbauer?

  About as involved as he seems to be in the movie.

• 33:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, yep. He had stepped away from the spotlight in the mid 90s and, according to Brian May, was thrilled to not be a part of this. Lucy Boynton as Freddie Mercury's girlfriend and eventual wife. She would become Rami Malek's real-life girlfriend after meeting on set. And then, Chris, you mentioned this, but who does Mike Myers play in this movie?

• 33:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Record producer, and I've forgotten, blanking on his name right now.

• 33:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he's the EMI executive who, of course, refuses to release Bohemian Rhapsody.

• 33:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, which is a very funny nod to Wayne's World, is how I read it.

• 33:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Roger Ebert did not think it was a very funny nod. He hated it, in fact, and said that it was basically calling the audience about as dumb as you possibly can for...

• 33:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a pretty big wink, and I think they're doing other things to call the audience dumb, personally, but it is, Mike Myers as British Danny McBride is a very funny, very funny riff.

• 33:58Lizzie Bassett?

  You've also got Tom Hollander as Jim Beach. I always really love him.

• 34:02Chris Winterbauer?

  He's great.

• 34:02Lizzie Bassett?

  And then Ben Hardy as Roger Taylor. Now Hardy got the role because he lied about being able to play the drums. He pulls it off just fine in the movie, good on you, Ben. But really, his in came by way of campaigning, and as we said, lying very hard, to his X-Men Apocalypse director, Ryan Singer. Yay, we're here!

• 34:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Here we go. I was wondering how we would get Mr. Singer into the fold.

• 34:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah, here he is. So all this casting is happening because by November of 2016, Bohemian Rhapsody had been picked up by 20th Century Fox and New Regency, and they finally had their director. Turns out, the man that everyone and queen could agree upon was Brian Singer. Now, if you're thinking, what the fuck? Was he not known for his terrible behavior at that point? No, he definitely was. Here's Jennifer Lawrence, speaking at the Hollywood Reporter's Roundtable about her experience of working with him. And keep in mind, she worked with him on both X-Men: Days of Future Past and Apocalypse, both of which came out prior to Singer being hired on Bohemian Rhapsody.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  It did always just kind of make us laugh about how we are, you know, how we ended up with the, you know, women shouldn't be in roles like this because we're just so emotional. And we're just, you know, so, and it's just, I have seen, I mean, I've worked with Brian Singer. I've seen, I've seen emotional men. I've seen, I mean, the biggest pissy fits I've ever seen thrown on set. I've been, I've watched a man, I've, I've worked.

• 35:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's so telling in that clip, how hard everyone else is laughing when she said, I've worked with Brian Singer.

• 35:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, open secret. You know what I mean? By this point in Hollywood, it seems.

• 35:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, here's a little background on him. Prior to 2016, he was born in 1965 in New York City. He was adopted and raised in New Jersey. He was a horrible student, eventually diagnosed with dyslexia, but didn't matter. All he cared about was making 8mm films with his buddies. One of those buddies was, of course, Ethan Hawke. In 1985, he studied filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts before transferring to Chris's alma mater, the USC School of Cinematic Arts. But lest you think he graduated from your exact program, he did not. He never made it into the production program. He had the degree in Critical Studies. In 1988, he made a short film called Lion's Den, featuring Ethan Hawke and editor John Ottman, who would follow him all the way to Bohemian Rhapsody. This got him some attention from investors.

• 36:26Lizzie Bassett?

  In 93, he makes a feature directorial debut with Public Access, which was a Sundance hit. In 1994, he founded his company Bad Hat Harry Productions and in 1995, he blasts into the mainstream with what movie, Chris?

• 36:40Chris Winterbauer?

  The Usual Suspects.

• 36:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, where he teams up with fellow creep Kevin Spacey. What a pair those two must have been. In the late 90s, having his pick of films to make, he chose Apt Pupil, which was based on?

• 36:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Different Seasons with Stephen King.

• 36:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly, we are in our Stephen King era. Now, I'm not going to dive into this very much because I think we will probably cover this movie because there's an awful lot that went on behind the scenes that was gross, including an actual alleged assault by Singer. But the big thing is, he allegedly made extras as young as 14 years old strip completely naked for a shower scene. Criminal charges weren't filed, civil suits were on behalf of nine minors. He also had become known around Hollywood for his really disgusting parties and predilection for very young men.

• 37:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Young boys in instances.

• 37:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Children.

• 37:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 37:37Lizzie Bassett?

  In 2000, Singer took another major step up in his career with, of course, X-Men. Huge $75 million budget, crushed at the box office. We've talked about it before. He is now a golden goose. He is the auteur who can also bring home many millions of dollars. But behind the scenes on X-Men, he was garnering a reputation as a real asshole. One executive told The Hollywood Reporter later, quote, "His behavior was poor on the movie. We accommodated him on the first movie and therefore we can accommodate him on the second movie and on and on and it created a monster." In 2003, he directed X2. Again, we will cover this at some point, but according to Alan Cummings' memoir, Singer admitted he was taking painkillers and the cast staged an intervention concerned

• 38:22Lizzie Bassett?

  about their own safety on set due to his drug use and generally abusive behavior. They apparently showed up in his trailer in costume, which I would pay so much money to see that.

• 38:31Chris Winterbauer?

  An X-Men intervention would be incredible.

• 38:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. He turned on them, yelling at them for being crap actors, at which point Halle Berry said, "I've seen enough," and delivered the iconic line that he could kiss her black ass as she walked out. Good for her. All right. Fast forwarding to April of 2014. A child actor named Michael Egan filed a lawsuit against Singer and three other entertainment executives for sexually abusing him when he was around 15 to 17 years old in the 90s. He described a party house in Encino where Singer and others allegedly drugged and assaulted underage boys. These allegations pop up right around the same time as X-Men: Days of Future passed, which Singer had returned to direct. He did not do First Class. He responded. He denied the allegations, chalked it all up to a financial shakedown.

• 39:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, I think this is important to remember because of the story we're going to get into. This one is complicated. Michael Egan dropped three of the four lawsuits and eventually dropped the one against Singer, too. He also got indicted for investment fraud, which Singer's team was able to successfully turn around and discredit him with, saying, you know, "This is a shakedown." It got even messier. Egan's own lawyers dropped him, stating the allegations against at least two of the executives were false, and Singer was able to submit documents showing that he was not in Hawaii when Egan had said that he was during an assault. All of which to say, he unfortunately was not credible from a legal perspective. As a later article will point out, there are reasons to believe some elements of what he said.

• 40:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I would not completely discredit him. But in 2015, the documentary Open Secret by Amy Berg came out, detailing alleged child sexual abuse in Hollywood, particularly at the hands of a man named Mark Collins-Rector, who is now a convicted sex offender and who Singer had direct business ties to. He was an investor in his company. It is alleged that Singer was present and participating in these parties. In 2016, X-Men: Apocalypse, which Singer directed, premiered. This was another notoriously troubled production. Olivia Munn was very open about what a horrible time she'd had with him on set. Said at one point, he just bailed for 10 days, texting the actors, "Hey, guys, I'm busy right now, but just go ahead and start filming without me."

• 40:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know what he was busy with, but it just blows my mind.

• 40:51Lizzie Bassett?

  That is wild.

• 40:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 40:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Reports were rampant that writer-producer Simon Kinberg had to step in to direct along with DP Newton, Thomas Siegel, and editor-composer John Ottman. Remember those two, because they're on Bohemian Rhapsody. And yet, that same year, on November 7th, he was announced as the director of Bohemian Rhapsody alongside Rami Malek, starring as Freddie Mercury.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market. Love the crown molding. Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile. Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet? No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen. No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you. Don't you want to see the rest? Okay. Bye-bye.

• 41:47Speaker 06

  Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.

• 41:51Speaker 07

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 42:28Lizzie Bassett?

  If you have the same question I did, Chris, which is, why? Why would you do this? I will try to answer that for you. He famously was not an X-Men fanatic, but it turns out he was a superfan of Freddie Mercury. He had taken a general meeting with Graham King years earlier, and he was totally disinterested until King mentioned the Freddie Mercury project, and suddenly Bryan Singer was obsessed. He called and texted King relentlessly from that point forward, but here is the real kicker. He won over Brian May and Roger Taylor.

• 43:04Lizzie Bassett?

  King had had such a hard time attaching a director that everyone could be happy with. I can totally see him caving on Singer once he had won over the remaining band members. He also had not worked with Singer before. So perhaps you could make the argument, he didn't know how true the rumors were about him. And the reason I went into detail on that case is because as far as many people knew or claimed they knew at this point, the only actual suit against Bryan Singer that they knew about was the Michael Egan case, which of course had fallen apart. I have some questions about that, but anyway, Singer pulled together what must have been a very compelling pitch for Fox because they hired him and they 100% knew what a pain in the ass he was.

• 43:48Lizzie Bassett?

  But this was a new level of passion. He was displaying for the project. Remember, he didn't give a shit about the X-Men franchise, but he did about this. So I think they figured maybe, hey, this will be different. And plus, they weren't putting up all the cash for the whole budget of around 55 million. They were splitting it with new regency.

• 44:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's also a much smaller price point than an X-Men movie.

• 44:08Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a good point.

• 44:08Chris Winterbauer?

  As well. And I'm sure they're justifying it to themselves with, he's the devil we know. That's not a good justification. I'm just saying, I could see them spinning their wheels and landing on that.

• 44:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I think you're right. I mean, I think they had to convince themselves that this was okay. Fox Chairman Stacey Snyder absolutely knew what a pain in the butt he could be. And so she and Vice Chairman Emma Watts sat down with Graham King and Bryan Singer, and they laid out two rules. One, don't break the law. That shouldn't be a rule that you have to give your director.

• 44:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It's probably in your contract too, I would imagine.

• 44:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah. Probably just shouldn't do that. And two is show up to work every day.

• 44:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 44:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Failure to comply will bring consequences. Now Graham King also later gave this quote to Hollywood Reporter. Bryan Singer got this movie greenlit for me. There's no doubt about it. For that, I will always be grateful to him. He must be one convincing piece of crap.

• 45:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm sure he's very convincing. I'm sure he's charming.

• 45:11Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm sure he's very charismatic.

• 45:13Chris Winterbauer?

  He's clearly very talented. He's clearly smart. And he's also, it's allegedly a predator.

• 45:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Take the predator off the table because he was a monster to work with and they knew that at this point.

• 45:28Chris Winterbauer?

  But there's so many, I mean, David O. Russell comes to mind. There's a number of folks who.

• 45:34Lizzie Bassett?

  David O. Russell showed up to work, though.

• 45:35Chris Winterbauer?

  He did, but for example, it's interesting. Jennifer Lawrence makes the point about Brian Singer throwing a hissy fit, which is funny.

• 45:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, she mentions multiple men. Yeah.

• 45:44Chris Winterbauer?

  She does. And I wonder, but she worked with David O. Russell multiple times and I thought had spoken positively, that might be wrong about that relationship, which is interesting considering he screamed obscenities at Lily Tomlin on iHeart Huckabees. And George Clooney punched him in the face because he was being such an asshole to Spike Jones. I guess the point I'm trying to get to is that while I can understand why a studio would hire a director based on the performance of their films and not necessarily the ease or difficulty with which it is to work with that person. At the end of the day, that's kind of an easy decision to make by virtue of the fact that you're not the person that actually has to work with them. The cast and crew are.

• 46:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I just, the thing that I don't understand is this man does not show up to work.

• 46:30Chris Winterbauer?

  That's actually the thing that is the most confusing because I don't know, just is probably a reflection of my deficit of talent. But I feel like I'm drowning when I do show up to work and I'm directing a movie because it's so overwhelming and there's so much to do. Or if you remember Frank Darabont in Shawshank Redemption, feeling like he didn't have a moment to think because he was so busy. I can't imagine missing five days of shooting and then trying to come back into it. That's insane.

• 46:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Hey, guys, just go ahead and keep going without me.

• 46:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, I do feel like texting that every once in a while, but.

• 47:01Lizzie Bassett?

  As we will see, he surrounds himself with very capable, very talented people who, for whatever reason, have been willing to clean up his crap for years. Anyway, back to the film. It was now in full swing in pre-production. And as I said earlier, Rami Malek was working his ass off for this role even before he was officially cast, and he just kept right on going once it was in production. And he did this with basically no input from Bryan Singer, because according to The Hollywood Reporter's inside source, quote, "He was up to his old tricks." In fact, it was the hair, makeup, and costume team who Malek credited the most with helping him discover the character. He said he really started with Freddie Mercury's teeth, and he actually began wearing prosthetic

• 47:46Lizzie Bassett?

  teeth a full year before filming began, and even before the makeup artist Jan Sewell joined the project. He knew that Freddie was very self-conscious about his teeth. He was teased about them, and so he used that to really inform the way that he moved, like hiding them with his mouth, which you can see a lot in the movie. He was so excited when he found out that Jan Sewell would be joining as his makeup artist. She'd just come off of The Theory of Everything and The Danish Girl. They worked together really, really closely with dental FX artist Chris Lyons. What a job to get the teeth, right? Shaving them down millimeter by millimeter. And he spent an enormous amount of time in costume fittings with Julian Day. He really treated this as his rehearsal time, because I don't think he got a lot otherwise.

• 48:29Lizzie Bassett?

  He'd also been working for weeks with choreographers when he realized that that was not going to be enough. Here he is speaking about this moment in an Academy Conversation on the Oscars YouTube channel.

• 48:39Speaker 08

  And I realized, oh, I don't need a choreographer. I need a movement coach. And I had watched, I loved Eddie Redmayne's performance in The Theory of Everything. And I said, who's he working with? And apparently, he's still working with this person, so I couldn't have them. So I had to find my own. Her name was Polly Bennett, and she ended up working with the entire band throughout.

• 49:04Lizzie Bassett?

  So I have a question for you, Chris. How unusual is it that the actor had to be the one to pinpoint that they needed this additional assistance and to bring on Polly Bennett, a movement coach, to work with the entire band at that point?

• 49:19Chris Winterbauer?

  I think to work with the entire band, that seems unusual. I don't think it would be unusual for an actor to say, "Look, I feel like I have a shortcoming in my abilities to do it personally."

• 49:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 49:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Or to bring it to the production and say, "I would like you to hire me a guitar teacher," or whatever it might be. But bringing it for the production itself, that does strike me as unusual. Again, unless the actor is also a producer on the film, which does happen all the time.

• 49:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's not.

• 49:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It doesn't happen here. And one thing I will say is, I don't think Rami Malek's a great fit for this necessarily. I find the vocal performance actually a little distracting, just having heard Freddie Mercury in interviews. That being said, his physicality is really, really, really good in this movie. And if you've watched the Live Aid performance, my daughter went through a Freddie Mercury phase where she was really obsessed with Freddie Mercury. And we would watch Wayne's World, and then we would watch Wembley and the Bohemian Rhapsody music video. He, beat for beat, really pulls off Freddie's stage presence really, really well.

• 50:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 50:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that's a testament to both him and to his movement coach, Polly Bennett.

• 50:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Polly Bennett, who's a huge movement coach, yes.

• 50:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 50:21Lizzie Bassett?

  They watched a lot of Liza Minnelli, by the way, because apparently Freddie Mercury was a huge fan. So Rami Malek said that he actually found it more useful sometimes to watch Liza than to watch Freddie. Now, you can watch 100 Rami Malek interviews for his Oscars campaign, and the one thing I want to call out is that he credits all of these Below the Line folks by name in every single one, and I think he means it. Now, there was one sequence looming large over everyone before the cameras even started rolling, which was, of course, what's the big set piece in this movie?

• 50:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Wembley Live Aid?

• 50:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep. Obviously, the team wanted the sequence to be as accurate as possible. They worked with Queen's archivist to get it down, but Bryan Singer decided he didn't want to just mimic the shots from the actual concert. He wanted to capture it from fresh angles, since you can just watch the normal thing on YouTube. Sure, makes sense. But naturally, something that challenging, I think, would require a really strong director at the helm. But again, they had Bryan Singer, and right off the bat, he was either physically or emotionally MIA. Instead, much of the pre-production fell to cinematographer Newton Thomas Segal. I think how immediately Bryan Singer was absent on this project was a shock even for him. And again, he had worked with Bryan Singer many times before this, but the guy just was not there.

• 51:37Lizzie Bassett?

  So Siegel admitted to working alongside production designer Aaron Hay and A D Jack Ravenscroft to scout all of the locations and essentially handle most of the prep themselves, especially for this sequence. He'd been worried about this particular sequence for very good reasons from the beginning that he explained to The American Cinematographer. He said, quote, "I always felt that Live Aid was going to be the hardest thing to shoot. It's the climax of your movie. It's the opening tease. It has two big obstacles. One is that the concert was done in the middle of the day in an outdoor stadium. At least they came on late in the day, which was a saving grace. The second obstacle is that the stage and the staging was purposely very, very bland. Bob Geldof and the promoters went out of their way to spend as little money on the staging of the concert as possible because they were trying to raise money for Africa."

• 52:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is a really interesting point. He's right. It's not like, it doesn't look good.

• 52:26Chris Winterbauer?

  If you've watched the real thing, it's very plain.

• 52:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Chris Winterbauer?

  He's just walking around with that half mic stand, you know, after he starts on the piano. And of course, being in the middle of the day, they have to composite hundreds of thousands of people into this stadium.

• 52:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is a lot harder to do than in a night scene. If you notice a lot of the earlier concerts they do, they're framed in darkness against a stage so they can hide as much of the crowd as possible.

• 52:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, there's even more problems. They can't use the actual Wembley Stadium because the stadium had undergone major renovations and it didn't look anything like what it did during Live Aid. They also needed comprehensive access to wherever they were going. That would require at least two full weeks of basically uninterrupted access. They're not going to get that at Wembley or even really at a real stadium. And they needed to find somewhere close to London because they were going to work with a bunch of extras and they needed to avoid paying for travel. So Aaron Hay found an old airfield in Bovington? Bovington? Sorry, folks. It's where they shoot Top Gear. And he built a one-to-one replica of the 1985 Live Aid stage, down to the peeling plaster, the fading posters.

• 53:32Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks exactly like it.

• 53:33Lizzie Bassett?

  It looks so good. They did such a good job. Apparently, they actually had to move the build slightly at one point to make sure it didn't interfere with air traffic control at Heathrow.

• 53:44Lizzie Bassett?

  But in early September of 2017, filming finally began. And of course, what sequence do they start the whole shoot with?

• 53:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Wembley? Live Aid?

• 53:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, Live Aid.

• 53:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Honestly, that's kind of a cool way to start the shoot because it's kind of going to set the tone for the whole thing.

• 54:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, good or bad.

• 54:01Chris Winterbauer?

  It's bold. Exactly. It's like, if we don't fall behind schedule, this is going to be great. Or we're going to fall behind schedule and this is going to be a nightmare.

• 54:09Lizzie Bassett?

  So day one was scheduled to just be a rehearsal day. But Rami Malek was immediately suspicious when they told him to arrive in costume and makeup. And it turns out he had the right idea because when the crew got there, the plans changed and they were informed. They were going to just start filming right away. No rehearsals. Here we go. They start with that crane shot that sweeps over the crowd circling back in to reveal him playing the piano. That's a bonkers complicated shot to be the first one. It would take forever to get, and it did. So day two's got to be better, right? No. Their plan was to film one song a day over the course of a ton of takes. And this was supposed to be Radio Gaga, but they're outside.

• 54:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It's England. Weather continuity is an issue. They're shooting one number over the course of a whole day. So the light's going to change. It was a nightmare. And the grueling stop and start continued until Rami Malek actually spoke up and expressed concern about the energy this was going to create for the cast if they kept doing it this way. His point was, this is a concert. It should have the propulsive energy of a concert. And if we're shooting it one song per day, killing ourselves at the exact right lighting, this is going to absolutely fall dead. So he asked Graham King if they could please shoot at least one take of the whole concert, start to finish, in Wide Masters. He told Deadline, quote, "We brought in three cranes with cameras and ran the entire 22-minute set.

• 55:36Lizzie Bassett?

  It was the best take we ever did. You're running on pure adrenaline. My heart is pounding just thinking about it." Where is Brian Singer?

• 55:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it's interesting. There are a few scenes where master shots seem to be missing. I think some of the earlier concert scenes lack a little energy, but the Wembley one is great. The Wembley is really good. It's very fun and it captures the energy of that day from what I've seen, I think, pretty well.

• 56:00Lizzie Bassett?

  That is, I think, due to Rami Malek and Newton Thomas Siegel. Like, that's the two of them coming together.

• 56:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. There's some cool shots in there, like the one from under the piano, from the pedals, under the bench, into Brian May's guitar. That's a cool shot. And I was like, oh, how'd they do that? There are some neat things in there, for sure.

• 56:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Very cool. And throughout all of this, as far as I understand, Singer was technically present, but he was known to get exhausted and then just bail.

• 56:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's like Weekend at Bernie's, just he's like got sunglasses on and his director's chair propped up with a broom.

• 56:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, literally. He's like, I think he was physically there, but they were having to be like, Brian, what do you, do you wanna, no? Okay. And then he would just be like, I'm tired, and he would leave. So from September to October, production moved to London, shooting out interior scenes at West London's Gillette Building, with the concert venues, international locations, you mentioned, Chris, being recreated at LH2 Studios in West London. But in October of 2017, this is when Brian Singer started to go fully missing for days at a time. And again, this is Newton Thomas Siegel having to step in and direct. And he wasn't just missing. When he would show up, he would be incredibly late,

• 57:11Lizzie Bassett?

  which frequently left Rami Malek sitting in his makeup chair for hours after being ready to work at 6:30 a.m. And if he's ready at 6:30, it means he was in that makeup chair at probably 3:30.

• 57:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Prosthetics take time.

• 57:25Lizzie Bassett?

  And also, in case you can't tell, Rami Malek is an incredibly hard worker. And I think he is someone who really respects the team around him as well. So this was pissing him off just more and more and more, I think, very understandably. Because to your point, Chris, it's not just his time they're wasting, it's everyone's time. Needless to say, he and Bryan Singer did not get along. Tensions allegedly escalated at one point to a screaming fight in which Singer threw a microphone sand. Singer said this wasn't true. He said, "Any discussion about fights between myself and Rami Malek are simply an exaggeration of a few creative differences that were quickly resolved. This is normal on a film set, and I think the work speaks for itself." I don't believe him for two seconds.

• 58:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Rami Malek has come out and said he had a horrible time with Bryan Singer, especially since in November of 2017, Rami Malek reportedly filed a complaint with 20th Century Fox about Singer's unprofessionalism and the fact that he, you know, wasn't there. He was not there.

• 58:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 58:26Lizzie Bassett?

  So 20th Century Fox sent some suits to London to keep an eye on the situation, and the Directors Guild also sent a representative to start do some digging. This is what makes me think that Singer may have been more MIA than people are saying if the Directors Guild showed up. But still, after evaluating everything, 20th Century Fox came back and told the cast and crew, "Ah, you're two-thirds of the way done. You think you guys could just like suck it up until the holidays? Just go ahead and push through? And just wrap this guy up?"

• 58:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, yeah, from a financial perspective, right? We've talked about this on other movies from the island of Doctor Moreau. Ford, if you're gonna shut down, right? Or Tombstone would be a more recent film that we covered.

• 59:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 59:04Chris Winterbauer?

  It's gonna be extremely difficult to find a director who's willing to take the job at this point, and you're gonna have to shut down the film for, at minimum, usually a week, if not more, right? To get somebody else up to speed. And it's not that this isn't done, you know, the Lord and Miller on solo being replaced by Ron Howard, for example, but it is very expensive and it's turbulent, and sometimes the two halves of the film that have been shot by different people don't blend seamlessly together.

• 59:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 59:31Chris Winterbauer?

  So this is Fox reaping what it sown with hiring Bryan Singer.

• 59:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but it's them going, "Yeah, we know we made this decision, but if you guys could go ahead and take the fall."

• 59:42Chris Winterbauer?

  No, what they really should have said is unfortunately, Brian May picked Brian Singer for this movie, so we're gonna have to have you guys suck it up.

• 59:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, kind of true. I also just can't imagine how disheartening this must have been for Rami Malek to have stuck his neck out, because like, he was not a huge, huge star at this point. Obviously, big TV show, but like-

• 1:00:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And I'm sure he had high hopes for the movie, too.

• 1:00:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, of course. And so that took a lot of guts to stand up to the studio and say, "You need to come and investigate this."

• 1:00:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and then your concern might go from the, "I was optimistic that this could make my career and that I might get accolades for it," to-

• 1:00:19Lizzie Bassett?

  "This is a disaster."

• 1:00:20Chris Winterbauer?

  "Well, I'm worried that I'm gonna diminish the legacy of somebody who's beloved."

• 1:00:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Who he loved.

• 1:00:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And that would be terrifying, exactly.

• 1:00:29Lizzie Bassett?

  So, production continued with Singer at the helm until Thanksgiving, at which point Brian Singer asked that they halt production so he could fly back to the States for a few weeks. He said, "I'm tired," and he also tossed in something about his mom being sick. And Stacey Snyder was like, "Brian, remember my rules. Do not get on that plane." But Brian Singer probably figured at this point, he was untouchable, because he got on the plane. And so finally, at the beginning of December, they fired his ass. He said in a statement, quote, "I wanted nothing more than to be able to finish this project and help honor the legacy of Freddie Mercury and Queen, but Fox would not permit me to

• 1:01:10Lizzie Bassett?

  do so because I needed to temporarily put my health and the health of my loved ones first." Now, yes, yes, Brian, we understand your mom was very, very sick. That's very sad. But just one little problem, Chris. She was in New Jersey, and just a few days after arriving, Brian Singer was in Los Angeles. So, I don't know how sick she really was. She could have been very sick, but not sick enough that he was actually staying there to take care of her.

• 1:01:33Chris Winterbauer?

  He reminds me a bit of Elon Musk in his kind of spiraling absence.

• 1:01:39Lizzie Bassett?

  It's just weird.

• 1:01:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's unusual.

• 1:01:41Lizzie Bassett?

  It's weird enough that I'm like, something is clearly wrong.

• 1:01:45Chris Winterbauer?

  That's what I'm saying. There's a, I think, some sort of breakdown happening here. Some sort of mental breakdown.

• 1:01:49Lizzie Bassett?

  100%. And I think we will find out shortly what may have been behind it.

• 1:02:00Speaker 07

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:02:37Lizzie Bassett?

  So production officially shut down on December 1st, but Fox didn't stop there. They also shut down singer's Bad Hat Harry production offices that were located on the Fox lot. They basically put his boxes on the street and said, "Get out." Now, at the same time, good old Dexter Fletcher was busy knee-deep in planning for another musical biopic, Rocket Man, which is, of course, Elton John's story, when he got a call from Rami Malek. According to Fletcher in The Hollywood Reporter, Rami was like, "We fucking need you, man. We need somebody. If you come to set and shit on the floor, you'll still do a better job than this guy."

• 1:03:16Chris Winterbauer?

  That's exactly what Dexter did.

• 1:03:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is an amazing quote. Now, producer-director Matthew Vaughn tells it a little differently. He says that Emma Watts from Fox reached out to him and said, "There's been a bit of a ding-dong with Bohemian." Also a great quote.

• 1:03:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Good ones all around.

• 1:03:33Lizzie Bassett?

  And asked if he could help. He watched a cut and he realized, you know what? Singer did a very good job, or Singer cinematographer did a very good job. And Vaughn says, "He just hadn't finished it." So he thought, "You know what? I'm not the man to finish this, but I know who is." Because he and Fletcher were working together on Rocket Man, and he figured stepping in to finish out Bohemian Rhapsody would be a good experience for Fletcher heading into, of course, the glam rock biopic of his own. Fletcher was torn. On one hand, he had absolutely zero time to spare while working on Rocketman. On the other hand, he did want to help and he wanted to be known as the guy who shows up and does the work.

• 1:04:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I think he was really smart about this. They had not found a home for Rocketman yet, and he wanted to be known as the guy you can trust with the money.

• 1:04:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:20Lizzie Bassett?

  So just a few days later, at 8:00 AM on Monday morning, he was on set for Bohemian Rhapsody, ready to finish the job. Now, Chris, you mentioned it seems like there's some sort of breakdown or spiraling happening. At almost the exact same time as Fletcher arrived, Cesar Sanchez Guzman filed another suit against Bryan Singer for having sexually abused him as a teenager. My understanding is that Fox did not know about this when they fired Bryan Singer, but Bryan Singer most certainly knew that it was coming. So back on set, Fletcher had to move at lightning speed to get caught up. Initially, he wanted to bring on his own cinematographer, George Richmond, to finish the job. Poor Newton Thomas

• 1:05:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Siegel had to have a call with both of them and tell them how he'd planned to capture the rest of the film. But then, to his credit, Dexter Fletcher saw an early cut of the film, and he changed his mind. Also, I think Graham King and Rami Malek called the studio and they were like, you have to let this poor man finish this movie.

• 1:05:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm. And also, even though it would have been easier for Fletcher moving forward, it's better for the production to have the continuity of its existing cinematographer.

• 1:05:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I think Dexter Fletcher is a class act, and I think he realized that.

• 1:05:33Chris Winterbauer?

  100%. And I don't think there's anything wrong with him wanting to have the person he normally works with necessarily, right, initially.

• 1:05:39Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I think he recognized that it was his job to finish what they had started. It was not his job to put his spin on this movie. Siegel told the American cinematographer, quote, "There were times when I think Dexter wanted to bring a little more of his personality into the film, but he and Graham realized that wasn't the kind of movie it was. I think his great respect for what we had accomplished up to that point was one of the reasons the film does have a cohesive tone." And it does. Like, the fact that this movie lost its director two-thirds of the way through and somebody else finished post-production, I think this thing looks remarkably good.

• 1:06:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:14Lizzie Bassett?

  By January of 2018, Bohemian Rhapsody wrapped filming.

• 1:06:18Lizzie Bassett?

  And it was still edited by John Ottman, who, as I mentioned, was Singer's possibly most longtime collaborator. Now, as for why this extremely talented editor, and also, he's a very experienced composer, put up with Singer for so long, he has had this to say, "It's weird. It's a double-edged sword. I like being in control of a situation, and as a filmmaker, the fewer cooks in the kitchen to drive me crazy, the better. So I enjoy that part. It's the long haul nature of it. For me, normally, I was doing both editing and the scoring on one movie, and sometimes managing the whole thing. So that's the negative."

• 1:06:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm not sure I fully understand the quote. It sounds like what he liked about it was that Brian Singer left him alone.

• 1:06:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Correct. He liked that Brian Singer wasn't there.

• 1:07:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Which I understand, as a post-production person or supervisor, I can see why that might be appealing.

• 1:07:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he's gotta be really good at it, because he's been handling this stuff by himself. Like, it makes me sad that you're super talented, you don't need to work with this guy. Regardless, he knocked the earliest cuts out of the park, and despite everything with Brian Singer, 20th Century Fox was so impressed that they moved the release date up from Christmas to the first weekend in November. So we talked about this briefly. There's the question from many people, is Rami Malek singing in the movie? Chris, you said no, right?

• 1:07:33Chris Winterbauer?

  My guess was no, but I don't know.

• 1:07:36Lizzie Bassett?

  So the answer is kind of yes and no. The majority of what you're hearing is Freddie Mercury. They used the stems of his vocals whenever they could. Like, of course they did. I don't think there's a version of this movie where you don't use Freddie Mercury's voice.

• 1:07:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, like Johnny Cash can be approximated more easily.

• 1:07:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Bob Dylan can be approximated, not Freddie Mercury.

• 1:07:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 1:07:57Lizzie Bassett?

  There are moments where, obviously, they didn't have any recording to pull from, though, like when he's playing the piano and singing. So in those moments, you are hearing some of Rami Malek's voice mixed in, particularly at the top, and you're actually hearing a decent amount of Canadian singer Mark Martel, who sounds almost exactly like Freddie Mercury.

• 1:08:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I had heard that there was a different vocalist, I didn't know his name, who was involved, and I assumed that was mostly what I was hearing, but I didn't realize how much they were using of the stems.

• 1:08:25Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a mix. They're using a lot of the stems. They are using some of Rami Malek's voice at the beginning of things.

• 1:08:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, to lead in.

• 1:08:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:08:31Chris Winterbauer?

  They do a good job. It's convincing. I think that works really well in this movie. I find his speaking vocal performance a little distracting. I didn't find any of the singing distracting.

• 1:08:41Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it looks right. It fits. I think the sound editing in this movie and the sound mixing is fantastic.

• 1:08:46Chris Winterbauer?

  It's really good.

• 1:08:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, unbelievably, Chris, while Dexter Fletcher was working on Bohemian Rhapsody, Fox passed on Rocketman. Any guesses why?

• 1:08:57Chris Winterbauer?

  They didn't want a competing project?

• 1:08:59Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:08:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I'm not sure. Why?

• 1:09:01Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the same reason they had passed on his pitch for Bohemian Rhapsody. He was adamant this time that the movie be rated R, and Elton John was too, so that it could be more honest about his life.

• 1:09:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:12Lizzie Bassett?

  They declined. Fortunately, Paramount said yes. Fletcher did, of course, get an EP credit on Bohemian Rhapsody, but due to the Directors Guild rules about only crediting one director or one directing entity, Singer retained the only directing credit. Which I guess is fair. I mean, he was there through at least two-thirds of it. It sounds like he didn't do the heavy lifting of actually directing, but...

• 1:09:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I think contractually, it makes the most sense, even if ethically, it doesn't feel like it does.

• 1:09:42Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it feels like the cinematographer.

• 1:09:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, just give it to Newton Thomas Siegel.

• 1:09:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Literally. On October 23rd, 2018, Bohemian Rhapsody premiered at the Wembley Arena, and it was theatrically released in the United Kingdom the next day. And November 2nd, it was released in the United States, opening on 4,000 screens. It was the second biggest start of all time for a musical biopic behind only Straight Out of Compton. It absolutely crushed. Critics, on the other hand, thought it was a pile of shit. According to Daily Beast writer Kevin Fallon, quote, "The film plays fast and loose with facts in a way that suggests the entire project was born out of resentment from the surviving members of Queen that all these years after Mercury's death, the band's legacy is still so married to their late frontman's outsized voice, personality, and celebrity."

• 1:10:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Richard Roper also said, "After years of stops and starts with reports of various high-profile actors, writers, producers, and directors attached to, and then drifting away from the project, the long-awaited, highly anticipated Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody finally arrives in theaters this weekend, and it's difficult to imagine how any alternate universe version could have possibly been worse than this rubbish." God bless his trailblazing soul, Freddie Mercury did not live a PG-13 life, and yet Bohemian Rhapsody takes a very safe and sanitized PG-13 path.

• 1:11:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Despite those reviews, on a budget of around $52 million, it brought in a worldwide gross of over $900 million.

• 1:11:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Unbelievable. It's just, it's limited strictly now to not even Marvel movie. Superman will not hit $900 million worldwide. Fantastic Four will not. They would love it if they did. That's insane.

• 1:11:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, just hire Bryan Singer. Speaking of Bryan Singer, he made upwards of $40 million on the film because of his deal. But the team headed into the awards season saying as little as possible about Bryan Singer. Pretty much immediately, Rami Malek emerged as the film's best shot, I think, at an Oscar. In January, Bohemian Rhapsody won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama. Bryan Singer didn't show his face, of course, but he posted on Instagram, "What an honor. Thank you," Hollywood Foreign Press. Backstage at the Globes, Graham King was asked by reporters about the omission of Bryan Singer, to which he responded, "That's not something we should talk about tonight." On January 22nd, the Oscar nominations were announced.

• 1:12:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Bohemian Rhapsody was nominated for five awards, including Best Actor for Rami Malek, Film Editing for John Ottman, Sound Editing for John Warhurst and Nina Harstone, Sound Mixing for Paul Massey, Tim Cavigan and John Casale, and Best Picture for Graham King. And the next day, The Atlantic dropped an article titled "Nobody is Going to Believe You." It contained a year's worth of investigation into Bryan Singer's alleged serial sexual abuse of young men. Again, I'm going to change that and say, "Boys, children." One of the victims was 13 years old at the time.

• 1:12:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm going to read this quote from the article. "The portrait of Singer that emerges is of a troubled man who surrounded himself with vulnerable teenage boys, many of them estranged from their families. Their accounts suggest that Singer didn't act alone. He was aided by friends and associates who brought him young men. And he was abetted, in a less direct way, by an industry in which a record of producing hits confers immense power." You can, I think, should read this article. It is a really impressive work of journalism. It made me really sad, you know, the, obviously, the article itself, but also if you look at the byline of the journalists who wrote it, Alex French and Maximilian Potter, they are Esquire writers, and this was initially intended to be published in Esquire.

• 1:13:26Lizzie Bassett?

  But it got killed at like, the last minute by the magazine's owner after being vetted for publication because Hearst executives wanted them to find more, quote, "presentable victims" as the ones in the story were, quote, "all troubled." And if you really read the story, they are troubled because they were sexually abused as children. Like, there is a direct line between the abuse that they experienced and the eventual, many of them, drug addiction that they fell into later in life. It's heartbreaking, and god, there's so many. There's so many. Like, this guy and many others, not just Bryan Singer, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, but were operating at

• 1:14:09Lizzie Bassett?

  just a really stunning level of predation on children. Oh, by the way, of course Bryan Singer responded and said, "It's no surprise that with Bohemian Rhapsody being an award-winning hit, this homophobic smear piece has been conveniently timed to take advantage of its success." Fuck you, sir. There's nothing homophobic about that article.

• 1:14:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I also don't think, in the year that they were developing that story, there was much hope that this movie was going to be an awards contender either.

• 1:14:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't think they cared about this movie at all.

• 1:14:39Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 1:14:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Rami Malek did make a statement right away, saying, "As far as I knew, I was considered before Bryan was even attached." I think, as we learned today, that seems true. "So I had my head down preparing for this for about a year ahead of time, and I really never looked up. I didn't know much about Bryan. I think that the allegations and things were, believe it or not, honestly, something I was not aware of, and that is what it is." Again, I think, at this point in time, the most well-known allegation was that lawsuit by Michael Egan, which had been dropped. Weirdly, Bryan May made a now-deleted statement on Instagram, reminding people that Singer was innocent until proven guilty. In February of 2019, Bohemian Rhapsody got four wins at the Oscars, including Best Actor,

• 1:15:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing. Rami Malek did not thank Bryan Singer. Instead, he thanked his mother. He paid tribute to his father who had passed away, gave a shout out to Lucy Boynton, and then to his cast and crew, said, "I love you. You are my equals. You are my betters." And I'm still mad at him for beating Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born, because I do not think that is deserved. I'm sorry. I think Rami Malek, I like him a lot. After looking into this, I respect him. I just don't think those performances are on the same level at all. I don't know, Chris, what do you think?

• 1:15:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Can you remind me of what else was nominated that year?

• 1:15:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice, Bradley Cooper as Jackson Maine in A Star is Born, Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate, and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book.

• 1:16:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Honestly, I would have given it to Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice. He is so convincing, and it is not an impression. He feels like the most lived-in Cheney to me. I just think it's a remarkable performance. And in a year where I believe Dafoe's playing Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity's Gate, Viggo Mortensen is playing Tony Lip. He's playing a real person. Everybody is playing a real person. I know Jackson Maine is not, but he's playing a singer. Bale feels like he disappeared the most into the role, to me personally. So I probably would have given it to him. I think Bradley Cooper would have been a great choice. Malek would not have been my choice, but he wouldn't have been last on my list of that group either.

• 1:16:52Lizzie Bassett?

  No. I just think we're gonna pay for Bradley Cooper not winning an Oscar for the rest of his career.

• 1:16:57Chris Winterbauer?

  No, we're gonna get like 35 more maestros, and it's gonna be what it is.

• 1:17:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't want it.

• 1:17:01Chris Winterbauer?

  He's gonna crawl to that Oscar like Leo in The Revenant.

• 1:17:04Lizzie Bassett?

  No, buddy, please don't climb inside a bear, or whatever he did. Singer unbelievably remained on board as the director for Red Sonja until two months later in March of 2019, when he was finally fired. And I did not know this, but the protagonist of Red Sonja in the original comics is a sexual assault survivor.

• 1:17:26Lizzie Bassett?

  That's it.

• 1:17:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 1:17:27Lizzie Bassett?

  That's Bohemian Rhapsody.

• 1:17:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, what went right?

• 1:17:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, you're the guest. You get to go first.

• 1:17:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, I will go first. I'm going to give mine to cinematographer Newton Thomas Siegel. Steven Poster, who we had the pleasure of speaking to about Donnie Darko, a film that he lensed, has said that the reason he got the Donnie Darko opportunity was Newton Thomas Siegel was in consideration for the role. He couldn't do it, and he recommended Steven Poster. And Steven Poster speaks very highly of him. And so this only makes me like him more that he, you know, he kind of put this thing on his back. I don't know the circumstances of his working relationship with Ryan Singer. I won't speculate about that and why he worked with him for as long as he did, but-

• 1:18:07Lizzie Bassett?

  A ton of people did.

• 1:18:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I can't imagine dealing with an absent director like that and having to make those decisions. And like you said, the movie has a cohesive look, and that is very much a consequence of what's in front of the camera, the costume department, hair and makeup. Kudos to those departments.

• 1:18:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, they show the photos of these characters at the end of the film, and they do do a remarkable job in recreating the past. And I don't mean to diminish that in any way, but Mr. Siegel just clearly directed a lot of this, it sounds like. And that wasn't his job, and he didn't get any credit for it. And it looks great. It is a cohesive movie. It is, I have my own quibbles with choices made, but you cannot tell that it was as disruptive behind the scenes. In fact, I would argue the movie is so much less dramatic than what happened behind the scenes, right?

• 1:18:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 1:18:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So I give my what went right to him. But really, to everybody below the line. Just, you guys all kept the boat running. If anything, it proves, maybe we don't need us directors as much as we think we do. So kudos to all of them.

• 1:19:05Lizzie Bassett?

  I will split mine, because I think that there's two people over the course of this that very much deserve to be recognized. One, obviously, is Rami Malek. I'm with you, Chris. I don't necessarily think that this performance needed to be as celebrated as it was. But what I can celebrate is how unbelievably hard he worked. I can celebrate the fact that he stood up for his cast and crew when he was absolutely putting himself and his own job in jeopardy when he did that. I can respect how much he loves and celebrates his below-the-line teammates and crew members. I think he seems like a genuinely good person who, in a really shitty situation, did the right thing. And then the other person I think needs to be recognized is Dexter Fletcher.

• 1:19:47Lizzie Bassett?

  This was a hard thing to do, to come in and say, all right, I don't know anybody here, but I'm gonna do the last three weeks of shooting. And it seems to me like he recognized that they had been the ones directing this movie, to your point, Chris, up to this point. And he basically had to get out of their way and just help them finish it. And he did that. And I think he did it with grace and with class. And I respect him a lot for the way that he handled this. And I never want to watch this movie again.

• 1:20:17Chris Winterbauer?

  To those of you who do, now you know just how hard it was to make. And hopefully you can appreciate it that much more.

• 1:20:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:20:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, would you like to tell the folks at home what we're, well, I maybe I should tell them what we're covering next week.

• 1:20:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:20:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Because it's one that you guys have been asking for, for a long time, is the incredibly troubled Fitzcaraldo. We are talking about Van der Zog for the first time on the podcast. Very excited. We're gonna have a couple of fun guests that are gonna be joining us. If you guys are interested in supporting this show and you've enjoyed listening to it, there are five easy ways to do it. Number one, tell a family member or friend, hey, you might like this. Number two, give us a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you're listening to us on. Number three, hit subscribe on that podcatcher so our episodes show up every Monday. Just when you're getting ready to go to work, you can listen to how somebody else's workday was that much worse than yours is going to be. Number four, we're

• 1:21:13Chris Winterbauer?

  gonna do a live show. You can head to cheerfulearful.podlifeevents.com, click on the festival button, and then you will see our logo. You can click on that and order tickets for our first live show. We're gonna do two nights, you guys, on October 8th at 9:00 PM, October 9th at 9:00 PM, 2025, doors open at 9:00. You can join us at the Cheerful Earful Comedy Festival at the Caveat Theater in Manhattan. That's October 8th and 9th, 2025, at 9:00 PM. And we are doing a double feature. Our first ever Purple lasers. We're gonna use nukes to blow up some asteroids.

• 1:21:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yay.

• 1:21:53Chris Winterbauer?

  We're doing Deep Impact versus Armageddon.

• 1:21:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I can't wait.

• 1:21:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Should we listen to scientists or should we listen to drillers?

• 1:22:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Listen to the oil rigsmen.

• 1:22:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's gonna be great. We're very excited. We will be there to tell you guys about those films, maybe do a little Q and A, and then hang out for a bit after the show, because our kids will be asleep and we'll be like, freedom. Thanks for considering seeing us. And of course, the last way you can support this show is by joining our Patreon, www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with delightful listeners like you. You can join for free. Just get updates on episodes, musings. For a dollar, you can vote on episodes that we will cover in the future. For $5, you can get ad-free RSS feeds. You can listen to the show with no interruptions. And for $50, you can get a shout-out just like one of these.

• 1:22:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, I think as we learned today, nobody can really impersonate Freddie Mercury or do anything in his style. His style is one of a kind, so I'm not gonna try. I'm gonna read these names with gusto. Angeline Renee Cook, Polly Ho Yen, Evan Downey, Nathan Centeno, Jory Hillpiper, Slipknots9, Kay Kanaba, James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Schindelman, Scary Carrie, The Provost Family, The O's Sound Like O's, Zach Everton, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, David Friskalanti, Adam Moffett, Film It Yourself,

• 1:23:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris Zaka, Kate Ellington, Emexodia, CGraceB, Jen Mastromarino, Christopher Elner, Blaze Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, Ralja, Lance Stater, Nate the Knife, Lena, Half Greyhound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Jake Killen, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, JJ Rapido, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Pangkorea, Chris Leal,

• 1:24:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Dawn Shible, Rosemary Southward, Tom Kristin, Jason Frankel, Solman Chinani, Michael McGrath, Lan Relad, Lydia Howes, Amy Elgashlager, McCoy. Thank you all so, so very much from the bottom of our hearts. Seriously, I cannot believe that we get to read your names every week because... You pay us 50 bucks a month. That's insane. And some of you have been doing it for a very long time. Honestly, your support means everything. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:24:49Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Thanks, guys. Until next week.

• 1:24:53Speaker 09

  Bye.

• 1:24:57Speaker 09

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods with additional editing from Karen Krupson.