Tank Girl

This week, Chris and Lizzie explore the mid-90's full metal misfire, Tank Girl, a movie bursting with creativity that deserved better than it got. From Ice T believing he'd be playing a stripper to Lori Petty knowing she'd gotten the part (even when she explicitly hadn't) and director Rachel Talalay fighting the studio to protect the dildo cut, this one's a doozy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

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• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:04Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a post-apocalyptic 90s needle-drop phantasma of tanks. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do you have for us today? That's my best Lori Petty. It's not very good.

• 2:22Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, there we go.

• 2:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I need to work on it.

• 2:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I didn't know. We have Tank Girl, a movie that has long been requested on this podcast. And we thought with the upcoming Supergirl, a female-driven comic book adaptation, we thought we could go back to one of the few littered corpses of the graveyard of female superhero adaptations that for decades Hollywood unfairly held up as examples as to why we could never, never, ever allow women into the creation of these properties and/or create properties based around women, which is obviously not true. But Lizzie, we have to start with a simple question, which is, had you ever seen Tank Girl before? The answer, it seems like,

• 3:07Chris Winterbauer?

  is no. And what were your thoughts upon watching it for the podcast?

• 3:11Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I had never seen Tank Girl. I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. I decided not to really look into this. You know, I know it's a famous bomb. I know it is a woman director, and I know we're going to get into all of that. This movie is bonkers in the truest sense of the word. We watched it last night. Look, is it the most amazing movie I've ever seen that was completely unfairly maligned? No, there are a lot of problems with this movie. That being said, every individual part of this movie is so fun. They don't quite work all together, I don't think, but Lori Petty is wonderful.

• 3:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Naomi Watts, looking honestly better than she's ever looked in this movie. She's amazing. She's so clearly a movie star. It's really fun to see her very young in this. The production design, by Catherine Hardwicke, I noticed, is, I think, the standout part of this movie. It's so great. It's so fun. It just immediately sets you in the world. It's so poppy, and it does genuinely feel like it is designed with the female gaze in mind, and I really appreciated that. And then, you know, honestly, when they were gonna go into the Ripper Den, I was like, this is, this is gonna be bad. There's No way this is not going to be bad. And yet, it was my favorite part of the entire movie.

• 4:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the best part.

• 4:35Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the best.

• 4:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It's kind of the only part of the movie that really works.

• 4:39Lizzie Bassett?

  It does. I agree. I was not ready for Ice-T as a jacked up mutant kangaroo. And then when it happened, it was incredible. And I wish that had been the whole movie, was them teaming up with the Rippers, because that section is so fun. It works so well. And somehow, they make a romance between her and one of the radioactive kangaroos, like, kind of work. Played by Jeff Coburn, who I know from Sons of Anarchy, and also as the creepy landlord on New Girl. He has a great voice. You'll recognize it right away.

• 5:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, The Pit, season two of The Pit.

• 5:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that's right. Sorry. Also, The Pit. He's great. I always like when he pops up. And then I really thought that the animation in this was quite fun. I did like that element of it a lot. I have a big bone to pick with Amazon. I don't know if you watched this on Amazon, but we have refused to pay for premium, so we still get ads. They put an ad in the last, like, 10 seconds of this movie. So it broke up the final animation sequence. And then we were like, oh, there's, there's more. It must be so much more, because they put an ad right here. And it comes back, and it's like, and then it was just the end credits. And we were like, are you kidding me? So whoever did that, and I know it probably wasn't a person, whatever robot did that, you done wrong.

• 5:58Lizzie Bassett?

  You done wrong by tank, girl. And I hope she comes to get you. Also, she's really bad at her job. She doesn't operate that tank super well. Seems like the tank operates itself. She's horrible at keeping watch. Anyway, Chris, what did you think?

• 6:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I will say, if they had gone with Rachel Talalay's original cut of the film, you would have more than 10 seconds to watch after that ad had played by Amazon. So we will talk about that. Yeah, I saw this at some point in high school. It was a movie that played on television sometimes. I believe we rented it at some point, just because we were fascinated by the cover of the DVD. Didn't think anything of it. Not even 100% sure we finished it. It was very, very strange.

• 6:38Lizzie Bassett?

  It's really slow for a chunk of. The like second act.

• 6:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I was unfamiliar with the graphic novel, which I did read the issues from 1988 to 1990, which were, I believe, the ones that Talley had read before optioning this and we'll get into that process. Yeah, look, I appreciate, like you said, so many elements of this movie. I do think the production design is really good. The costume design is great. I actually really like that at the beginning of the movie, when she comes to the weird house compound, you know, where they live. It's not bleak and windswept and everybody's depressed because it's post-apocalypse. They're having fun and, you know, fooling around and it's goofy because that's how people would act, you know, even at the end of the world supposedly. But the anarchist tone of the graphic novel feels so at odds with the paint by number story that has been created for the movie.

• 7:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I couldn't even totally tell you the story, to be completely honest.

• 7:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's just very basic. I'm conflicted about Lori Petty's performance. I think she lays a lot of groundwork for what Margot Robbie will eventually do.

• 7:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep, as Harley Quinn.

• 7:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Harley Quinn, and I would argue actually like Harley Quinn, who came after Tank Girl, owes a lot in some ways to Tank Girl, especially this performance.

• 7:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Big time.

• 7:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And while I like Lori Petty's performance, if you were a fan of the comic, I could see people being frustrated by the portrayal of Tank Girl in this movie. It's very different. It's a little different than in the comic.

• 7:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's so gradingly persistent, I would say. It doesn't, like Naomi Watts's performance as Jet Girl actually feels just significantly more successful, unfortunately. I think they don't give her like any nuance to play with in this.

• 8:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I think some of it is, as we'll get to, Rachel Tally gave Lori Petty a lot of leash to do what she, you know, wanted. And Lori Petty did not have a lot of time to prep for this role. And so I do think, all things considered, she does a very good job.

• 8:26Lizzie Bassett?

  She's always fun to watch.

• 8:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's a fun character in its own right. Yeah. I think this movie is let down by a lack of story.

• 8:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 8:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Really, when it comes down to it. And that's really it, because it has so much other fun stuff to it. And it's got a great soundtrack. As you mentioned, the needle drops are great.

• 8:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, so good.

• 8:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, the dust shower portishead sequence is one of my favorites.

• 8:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Amazing.

• 8:46Chris Winterbauer?

  That should be the tone of this movie is the dust shower portishead sequence.

• 8:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Multiple Bjork's.

• 8:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, so just give me the Bjork's, all the Bjork's. So, a flawed but very fun movie that I do think deserved better than it received, but I don't think it's a mystery as to why this movie perhaps didn't work when it was released. But let's dive into it because it is a crazy story. It's a really interesting story and it, I think, is a good reminder of a couple of pernicious trends in Hollywood that we've run into from time to time while making this podcast. But before we begin, Lizzie, you were about to say something.

• 9:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say, this has a connection to The Thirteenth Warrior.

• 9:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Which connection is that?

• 9:27Lizzie Bassett?

  That is, Graham Revell did the original score for this, and he did the original score, original, original score of Thirteenth Warrior, and then-

• 9:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Before Goldsmiths came in.

• 9:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting. Alright, well, sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Tank Girl, DVD special features, Entertainment Weekly's 2020 behind the scenes retrospective of the film with director Rachel Talloway, Entertainment Weekly's interview with Naomi Watts on the difficulties of her first 10 years in Hollywood, and many, many more articles, interviews, and retrospectives with those involved in the film. So, Lizzie, how did a pseudo shitpost-style comic born from the not-yet-fully-developed brains of three British bandmates become a bit of a lesbian rallying cry and an initially ill-fated feminist film that eventually found a cult following? And what went wrong? Now, Lizzie, in perhaps one of the funniest sections, in my opinion, of Superbad, Jonah

• 10:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Hill's sass recounts his youthful obsession with drawing what?

• 10:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Penises? Is that what it was?

• 10:24Chris Winterbauer?

  That's exactly right. Big, feeny penises.

• 10:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 10:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a very weird section of the movie. It's very funny. Jamie Hewlett, one of the co-creators of Tank Girl, according to his future Tank Girl collaborator, Alan Martin, had the same problem. Now, if you don't know, Lizzie, Jamie Hewlett would later co-create the band Gorillaz.

• 10:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 10:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. But for now, in the mid-'80s, he drew, quote, "huge penises on any paper he came across," end quote. It was the mid-1980s, and they were students at art college in West Sussex. Martin was in a band with future comic book artist Philip Bond, and one of their favorite songs- was called Rocket Girl. They met Jamie, Philip and Jamie got on famously. Martin had some penis drawing reservations, but the three started working together on their own fanzine called Atom Tan. And one day Jamie drew a quote, "gratty looking heifer of a girl, brandishing an unfeasible firearm." End quote. Another friend was working on a headphone design based on the type used by World War II tank drivers. Martin snagged one of the reference photos of a combat vehicle

• 11:27Chris Winterbauer?

  from his room, gave it to Jamie, who then quote, "stuck it behind this grotty girl illustration" and added a logo which read "Tank Girl." End quote.

• 11:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Now I want to see the original Tank Girl.

• 11:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, let me show you an original.

• 11:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, let me see.

• 11:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Boom.

• 11:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 11:41Chris Winterbauer?

  "Grotty looking heifer," according to them.

• 11:43Lizzie Bassett?

  I would not describe her as a grotty looking heifer. Rude.

• 11:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So, if you've read Tank Girl, Lizzie, or if you were to read Tank Girl or buy the box set, as I did, this all checks out. The art is fantastic. The story is very thin. There is basically no overarching story. This is extremely episodic. And it definitely feels like it was written by boys, for better or for worse. As Jamie Hewlett later said, quote, "We went into Tank Girl wanting to push the limits a bit and say stuff nobody said, use words that nobody allowed us to use in comic books, and get over this sort of pathetic censorship. You can't show a nipple, but you can show someone being stabbed to death." End quote. And they did show a lot of people being stabbed to death. And they tried to show nipples at every turn. And instead, she has Post-it notes on her nipples that say like, "Fuck censorship."

• 12:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It's funny, but it's very outlandish and sophomoric in many ways. Between getting shitfaced and lighting their farts on fire, their words, not mine, these three got Atom Tan off the ground. And in 1987, Tank Girl was born with that illustration that I just showed you, Lizzie. Now, she would end up looking pretty different in later iterations. On the one hand, Hewlett later said that he wanted to make, quote, "an antidote to the usual portrayal of women in comics. Most female characters are really boring, so I wanted a shock to have someone who drinks and fights." On the other hand, Martin said, quote, "We wanted to upset people." They basically were shitposting with this comic in a big way.

• 13:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Chris Winterbauer?

  So Tank Girl takes a step towards wider distribution in 1988 with an appearance in the debut issue of British Comics magazine Deadline. I would like to show you how much she's changed. In my opinion, we are much closer to what Charlize Theron will look like eventually in Mad Max Fury Road.

• 13:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:27Chris Winterbauer?

  That is her first appearance in Deadline.

• 13:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, big time. She's got a shaved head, she's got some earrings, she does have the cigarette hanging out of her mouth, the Band-Aid on her forehead, but she looks very, very simplified.

• 13:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And I would argue younger, bigger eyes, more feminine in some ways.

• 13:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Cuter, for sure.

• 13:45Chris Winterbauer?

  There is a doe-eyed quality that is at odds, in a kind of fun way, with her psychopathic tendencies. Also, as you can see, Lizzie, on the very first page, we meet the kangaroos, the rippers.

• 13:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I love them.

• 13:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, who she is dating, Booga, one of them.

• 13:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 13:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Immediately.

• 14:00Lizzie Bassett?

  And I assume it's the kangaroo at the very front who has a motorcycle leather jacket on and a t-shirt that says beer.

• 14:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I'm not actually sure if that is Booga.

• 14:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I love his outfit.

• 14:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, but yes, he has a great outfit. I do think what's clear about these comics is that Tank Girl does not have a moral code, at least not initially. She is effectively a mercenary. She runs people over constantly, innocent or not. She is kind of good at her job, but fucks up a lot, too. She always has a way out. She does drive her tank terribly, but because it's a comic, the tank can do absurd things, like fly through the air and land on a building and blah, blah, blah. It's very absurd, it's very funny. I mean, she ends it like in one episode, she makes a deal with the devil and tricks the devil, you know, and wastes her wish on a giant can of beer, like, it's very absurdist.

• 14:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 14:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So in 1990, Penguin Books published the first Tank Girl novel, and the Daily Telegraph described her as, quote, "The trendiest cartoon character in town." Now, she's about as anti-establishment as you can get, as we said, but she's part of a bigger trend. So comics geared toward adults are proving so popular that mainstream publishers are trying to cash in. And Tank Girl, Lizzie, is not just resonating with the man-boys. An article in the Evening Standard called her, quote, "The archetypal 90s girl, the new woman," end quote.

• 15:17Lizzie Bassett?

  The new woman.

• 15:18Chris Winterbauer?

  The new woman.

• 15:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Mowing down everyone left and right in her tank, as women are known to do. Why, Chris? Because women are bad drivers.

• 15:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Women be crashing their cars.

• 15:30Chris Winterbauer?

  ID Magazine ran a feature about girls imitating Tank Girl.

• 15:34Lizzie Bassett?

  By crashing their cars?

• 15:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Martin and Hewlett may not have been thrilled about their new groupies. Hewlett told the Evening Standard that, quote, "They were really horrible, really naff. The only similarity with Tank Girl was that they were bald and they drank a lot. After that, we really felt she should stay a comic character." So these guys were not exactly feminists at the end of the day?

• 15:52Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it doesn't seem like they liked the girls that much.

• 15:56Chris Winterbauer?

  But it was the fact that Tank Girl burped and farted out loud that actually appealed to a lot of women.

• 16:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Chris Winterbauer?

  In 1988, a group of lesbians protesting Clause 28, or Section 28, in the UK, held up a banner that included an image of Tank Girl on the message, "Clause 28, stop it." Lizzie, we talked about Section 28 during our coverage of V for Vendetta. This was basically a law that stated that local authorities in England, Scotland, and Wales, quote, "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting sexuality or promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." It was very much a response to the AIDS crisis, and it was a very, very, very homophobic law that was passed under Margaret Thatcher.

• 16:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Margaret Thatcher, the original Tank Girl.

• 16:41Chris Winterbauer?

  The Iron... The Iron Lady, the Tank Girl.

• 16:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Tank Girl had broad appeal. Deadline publisher Tommy Astor said, "The boys love her, the girls love her." In London, there are even weekly lesbian gatherings called Tank Girl Nights, and Margaret Thatcher said, "Only at my house."

• 16:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Only at 10 Downing Street.

• 17:01Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. As early as 1990, Hewlett and Martin had plans for four more books and, hopefully, a movie. 1991, Tank Girl lands in the United States by way of Dark Horse Publishing, and that Christmas, director Rachel Talloway was gifted a copy by her 18-year-old stepdaughter. "On the one hand," she thought, "this is amazing. I'm hip enough to receive this as a Christmas present." That's a direct quote. "On the other hand," she thought, "this is me. I am Tank Girl." So on the one hand, she's like, "I'm not that hip," but on the other hand, she's like, "I'm pretty darn hip." Now, Rachel Talloway isn't a beer-guzzling, kangaroo-boning sociopath, to my knowledge, but she's definitely a risk-taker. Do you know anything about? Director Rachel Tallel, Lizzie.

• 17:41Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I don't.

• 17:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I did not either. She was born in Chicago, but raised in Baltimore. She then studied math at Yale.

• 17:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa.

• 17:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. She then turned down a job at IBM to work as a production assistant on John Waters' polyester.

• 17:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 17:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, this was the first Waters film to get an R rating instead of an X rating. So it's a little more mainstream than some of his other stuff, but still, turning down a job at IBM, and they say, what are you gonna do? I'm gonna go PA on a John Waters movie?

• 18:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, she did grow up in Baltimore. That's the ultimate Baltimore celebrity, so.

• 18:13Chris Winterbauer?

  That's true, but still, that's pretty crazy.

• 18:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, it may as well have been the irradiated Australian outback relative to IBM. As Waters told EW in 2016, quote, "She," meaning Tallel, "was thrown into a world of complete lunacy that I don't think Yale had prepared her for."

• 18:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, probably not.

• 18:32Chris Winterbauer?

  It was very much an independent movie. The neighbors were calling the police, trying to get rid of us. We were the only movie that had scary hairdressers working on it. I mean, they're doing up Divine on that movie, so you gotta be prepared, but she handled it really well. Now, if she could handle John Waters, she could handle Freddy Krueger.

• 18:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 18:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So she applied for an accounting job at New Line Cinema. Did she know how to do accounting? No. Could she figure it out? Yes.

• 18:57Lizzie Bassett?

  She went to Yale for math. Yeah, I think she's got it.

• 19:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and as we all know, New Line Cinema was the popsicle, sticks, and glue mini-major of the 1980s, started by Robert Shea in New York out of his apartment. And in 1984, they released what breakthrough horror film that we have covered, Lizzie?

• 19:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Nightmare on Elm Street.

• 19:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good. A Nightmare on Elm Street. She climbs the ranks to producer and takes on A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 as a producer in 1988. She also produced Hairspray and Crybaby.

• 19:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 19:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So in seven years, basically, she's gone from PA on a John Waters film to producing, you know, B horror movies in Hollywood. It's quite the trajectory.

• 19:35Lizzie Bassett?

  And arguably, like, two of the biggest John Waters movies ever, Hairspray and Crybaby.

• 19:39Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. So she marries British producer Rupert Harvey. He's best known at this time for the 1988 remake of The Blob and Critters, I would say. I think that was 1986. It's a horror B-movie household.

• 19:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Love it.

• 19:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And Tallel got her first chance to direct with 1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, which was the sixth Freddy Krueger film.

• 20:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 20:01Chris Winterbauer?

  In seven years, which is so crazy.

• 20:08Lizzie Bassett?

  We recently moved into a new house and realized that our bedding desperately needed a refresh. So I took my own advice. And before spending all our money on a luxury bedding brand, I went to Quince. And let me tell you, we now have the crispest, coolest, most beautiful, organic percale sheets and duvet covers that we've ever had. I've bought quite a bit of bedding from Quince, and it's all super high quality and has lasted for years without paying the brand markup. Now, obviously, you shouldn't stop at bedding. You should also refresh your closet with elevated everyday essentials that you will wear over and over again. Think cozy Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at 50 bucks, cashmere scarves, responsibly sourced down jackets, and 14-karat gold jewelry. I genuinely love Quince, and I shop here for everything. I walked out the door the other day and realized

• 20:50Lizzie Bassett?

  every single thing I was wearing was Quince, down to my socks. Did I mention their socks are great, too? Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was what went wrong. It's the best way to support the show. Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats, and I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&M's, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles. But they also have salty snacks, easy-to-make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween

• 21:35Lizzie Bassett?

  movie night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispie Treats and Peanut Butter M&M's, and because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all-time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice, because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog, Q. Mars knows he needs a celebration, too, so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice Dental Chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors, because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at Mars Global, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited-time Halloween offerings.

• 22:22Chris Winterbauer?

  A couple of numbers really quickly on this franchise, Lizzie. The first Nightmare on Elm Street film, as we've discussed, grossed nearly $60 million against its $1 to $2 million budget. It was an enormous, unprecedented, unexpected success. The sequel, Freddy's Revenge, grossed $30 million, also very cheaply made. The third film, Dream Warriors, my secret personal favorite of all of them, grossed $45 million. The fourth, Dream Master, $50 million. The fifth film, The Dream Child, took a stumble, grossing just $22 million against its $8 million budget. So it was the most expensive so far and made the least amount of money. And then Talalay helmed the sixth film, which cost around $10 million, but the box office performance rebounded. So her film grossed $35 million, so it grossed 50% more than its predecessor.

• 23:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, most of these, besides the first couple, have received pretty bad reviews. But I mentioned the box office performances to give context to this quote from Talalay. "Coming off the Nightmare on Elm Street films, the three directors before me all went on to huge action films. I was not afforded the same opportunity, and I feel that was absolutely to do with my gender."

• 23:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep, agree.

• 23:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, I want to, again, let's support this comment, because I do think it's true. At least two of those directors, that's very much the case. So, Lizzie, we've discussed Rennie Harlan. We've not covered one of his films yet, but like, Deep Blue Sea, cannot wait until he gets a Deep Blue Sea, Cutthroat Island, just many a bomb. Director of Dream Master, which was the one that came two films before Talalay's, was slated to direct Alien 3.

• 23:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Alien Cubed.

• 23:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Alien Cubed, that's right. Left that film because it was taking too long and immediately moved on to Die Hard 2 with a $60 million budget. So that was his next film. Stephen Hopkins, he was the director immediately prior to Talalay.

• 24:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, the one that didn't do well.

• 24:04Chris Winterbauer?

  The one that was the least financially successful, moved on to Predator 2.

• 24:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 24:08Chris Winterbauer?

  With a $20 to $30 million budget. Now, I do want to be fair to Chuck Russell, who was the third director, I believe she's talking about. He directed Dream Warriors, which did do really well, and I think was also decently critically received. And he went on to do the Blob remake, which was not that expensive, and he wrote and directed it, and that was very successful. And then he did The Mask. Which wasn't that expensive and did very well.

• 24:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:32Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he did Eraser in 1994. So his trajectory makes more sense to me.

• 24:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 24:37Chris Winterbauer?

  But she's totally right about Rennie Harland and Stephen Hopkins. So what's obvious is that she is operating in a world dominated by men. The action space, the horror space, very much so at this point in time. She's effectively an internal hire for the sixth nightmare, which is no easy task, right? She spent a decade working at New Line to get this opportunity. And it seems unlikely, unlike with these other directors, that a studio is going to call her to helm a big budget action franchise. They're not saying Predator 3, come on, let's do it. Put a woman in the lead role. Like, no, it's just not going to happen. So Talley is going to have to try to kickstart her own. Now, as soon as she read Tank Girl, she knew that she wanted to option it. But what would you imagine the problem is? What do you need to option something?

• 25:22Lizzie Bassett?

  She doesn't have any money.

• 25:23Chris Winterbauer?

  She doesn't have any money. She doesn't have studio money. She doesn't have anybody backing her. So she's trying to option this on her own. She reaches out to Tom Astor, the owner and publisher of Deadline, the magazine which had featured Tank Girl, where she premiered. And she spends roughly a year trying to procure this property. Now, remember, Lizzie, early 90s Hollywood's experiencing a bit of a comic book gold rush. James Cameron's going to direct Spider-Man. It's going to be crazy. Wesley Snipes, he does actually play Blade, you know, eventually. But everybody's snapping up all of these comic book properties. We talked about how even V for Vendetta, you know, and Watchmen were snapped up at this point in time, even though they wouldn't be made for many, many, many years. So Talley has neither the money or the muscle to compete with the studios. Tom Astor reportedly traveled to the US several times before striking a deal with her.

• 26:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And Talley said she was about to give up because there was so much competition and no decisions. And then Astor calls her up and says, we'll go with you. The reason? Talley just wouldn't leave him alone.

• 26:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 26:18Chris Winterbauer?

  So he just broke down eventually and said, it's fine, just take it, it's fine, it's fine. Now comes the fun part, pitching Tank Girl to studios. Now, she had never pitched her own project before. She is internal at New Line up until this point. And now she's trying to sell a hyper violent, burping, farting, female mercenary who fucks a kangaroo.

• 26:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. It should sell itself.

• 26:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I kind of love just how much of a swing it is. You know what I mean? If you really think about it, it's so fun. So there's one man in Hollywood, Lizzie. There's one man in particular that likes a tough woman with a gun. Who is it? We've talked about him a lot.

• 26:55Lizzie Bassett?

  James Cameron.

• 26:55Chris Winterbauer?

  James Cameron, Jimmy C. and the Concrete.

• 26:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 26:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, in a lot of ways, Tank Girl is kind of like incompetent Linda Hamilton from T2. Like, in a very fun way.

• 27:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 27:06Chris Winterbauer?

  So it makes sense. She'd start with James Cameron. He loves action and he loves women. He actually has been very supportive of women filmmakers, especially, you know, his wives.

• 27:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I actually think he writes female characters pretty well.

• 27:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Aliens, Terminator 2.

• 27:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, not True Lies, but the other ones.

• 27:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Elements of Titanic, I would say.

• 27:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah, I agree. So Talley goes into Lightstorm. By the way, Cameron also makes sense because Cameron is very interested in like military machinery. You know, he has the APC, obviously, in Aliens. He ends up using Harrier jets in True Lies shortly after this. And we have Jet Girl in the comic and we have Sub Girl in the comic. And James loves a sub, as we know.

• 27:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, loves it. Can't wait to go underwater.

• 27:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like, James, you got the sky, you got the land, you got the water. There's women in all three, you know? It's just really.

• 27:54Lizzie Bassett?

  And they're all holding guns.

• 27:55Chris Winterbauer?

  You can hang out with all of them. But you gotta wear a kangaroo suit. So she goes into Lightstorm, which is his production company. And she's pitching it passionately. She gets to the end and the executive looks at her and says, we already have a film with a female lead. One, a film, can't have another one. We already have one. One's enough. We're good. Talley's crushed.

• 28:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Do we know what that was?

• 28:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Based on her comments, we suspect it was Company of Angels, which is a movie about Joan of Arc, which was to be directed by Catherine Bigelow and actually was supposed to star Sinead O'Connor.

• 28:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow. That's.

• 28:26Chris Winterbauer?

  I know.

• 28:27Lizzie Bassett?

  That's like.

• 28:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It sucks because it would have been perfect at Lightstorm.

• 28:31Lizzie Bassett?

  It would have.

• 28:32Chris Winterbauer?

  James. Cameron, the technology, all of his interests, it feels like such a good fit. And also like Bigelow could have maybe helped in some way to help like mentor in, I don't know.

• 28:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe I'm handing out too much credit where it's not due, but part of me feels like that mandate probably didn't come from James Cameron. Like, I have a hard time believing.

• 28:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't know. That may just have been the executive thinking, I don't want to pitch this up.

• 28:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. That's what it sounds like to me because just looking at his, what he actually makes and produces, having a female lead is something that he does not seem to be opposed to at all.

• 29:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I agree. So I just, I don't know. To me, this is the road not traveled. That's the most interesting of the ones that we're talking about because it just feels like such a natural fit. But it wasn't meant to be. So Tale goes to Amblin at Universal, Steven Spielberg's production company. If the pitch goes great, the exec seems into it. He's yes ending, like we could do this, we could do that. And then at the end, he says, I'm really flattered. You think I'm hip enough for this, but we're not.

• 29:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Which I think is true. That's, that's fair. That's definitely fair.

• 29:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So at the end, she tells this to Hula and Martin, the creators of the comic, and they apparently made T-shirts that said, too hip for Spielberg.

• 29:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 29:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Which I did think was pretty charming. She moves on to the third pitch and she has a breakthrough. It's executive Don Steele. She loves the pitch. Don had a reputation of being a total hard ass, but at one point she stood up on a chair and went, I am Tank Girl. I will have this project. The only problem, Lizzie, is Don Steele is an executive at Disney.

• 30:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And Tale did not trust that Disney would make the Tank Girl that she wanted to make. This is an R-rated Tank Girl. This is a burping, farting, sword stabbing, vulgar, you know, fully realized flawed Tank Girl. So she passes on Disney and I buried the lead though, Lizzie, because she didn't have to settle for Disney. Tale's Tank Girl received not one, not two, but apparently three offers to be made.

• 30:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 30:31Chris Winterbauer?

  They end up going with MGM, United Artists, who offered them the biggest budget, $25 million. This is almost exactly what Kathryn Bigelow had on 1991's Point Break for reference, and they had a real chance. Champion at the studio, Lizzie. Which maverick producer often takes risks on projects that the rest of the town won't? That we've discussed many a time, whose dad was in Shane.

• 30:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, Alan Ladd Jr.

• 30:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Laddie, that's right.

• 30:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Laddie.

• 30:57Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Laddie at MGM says, "Great, let's do Tank Girl." But, things are changing for MGM and perhaps for Talalay. So, in the early 90s, MGM United Artists is in a state of flux. Aside from 1991's Thelma and Louise, they hadn't really had a major hit since the mid to late 1980s. In 1992, the studio was acquired by a French bank and the bank, quote, "approved its plans to move back into the big leagues of movie making" and agreed to support its business plan, calling for substantial film production. But, this means there's going to be a lot of pressure on the bigger budget movies that are getting released under this new mandate. At the same time, more or less, Talalay's second film, Ghost in the Machine, which there's not much information about online, it's not a film that she wrote,

• 31:41Chris Winterbauer?

  it was in development hell for a decent period of time, I believe, at Fox, stars Karen Allen. It is a serial killer movie with a cyber technology twist to it. It was released in 93, it flopped critically and commercially. So, I believe, you know, it's tough timing in terms of her reputation as a director.

• 31:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Trying to get Tank Girl off the ground.

• 32:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 32:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So, in England, Tom Astor worried that MGM would abandon Tank Girl's humor and links with British culture. His quote, "I hope they don't turn her into a bald babe with a gun, the female Arnold Schwarzenegger." End quote. Now, the studio did not want to work with the original creators, Hewlett and Martin. They wanted an established screenwriter on this movie, as studios always are wanting to do. But Hewlett and Martin, Lizzie, did still have a voice in the process. They sent a lot of notes, including pages of just British swear words. "Just make sure you get all these in, get them all in." I'm not going to read you them, they're very offensive. And to give an example of their influence, in the original opening sequence, Tank Girl was riding a horse. And they were like, she would never ride a horse. A horse is so conventional.

• 32:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So they changed it to a water buffalo. And I liked the water buffalo.

• 32:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that was a good note. I thought it was fun.

• 32:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I like that, but it made me so sad when it died.

• 32:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, it was pretty brutal.

• 32:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It was terrible.

• 32:55Chris Winterbauer?

  The screenplay, Lizzie, would be brought to life by Teddy Seraphian. Now, he's a bit of a mystery, but we'll share what we've been able to find out. He was in his late twenties and kind of born into Hollywood. His father was director, actor, writer, Richard C. Seraphian. He did Vanishing Point amongst many other films. And his mother was director Robert Altman's sister.

• 33:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 33:18Chris Winterbauer?

  His brothers, director, actor, producer Darren Seraphian, and his sister is Karen Seraphian, a producer who is now a senior VP at Pixar.

• 33:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 33:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So he studied film in college and decided to take writing seriously in his late teens and early twenties. He worked at a pizza shop in Westwood where a lot of actors also worked. So he got to read several big scripts before they were made into movies. And his first opportunity was a bit of a nepotunity, as they call them. According to Teddy, his brother Darren got the rights to a book called Man Plus, a sci-fi novel about NASA building a genetically altered man to live on Mars. It never got made. It sounds a little like it had a fly-like body horror vibe to it.

• 33:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 34:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He was 21 years old and all of a sudden, he's in all these big studio meetings. Next, his dad says, hey, can you give me input on this project I'm working on, the opening to this project I'm working on called Solar Crisis? He does, and his dad's like, you're pretty good at this, son. And so soon, he searched ghostwriting pages for his dad that his dad's submitting as his own. And then his dad comes clean and tells the producer, hey, by the way, my son wrote those pages. So then he gets an agent, and then he writes a script called William the Magnificent, which Steven Spielberg buys while he's working on Schindler's List. Now, neither William the Magnificent nor Man Plus would make it to the screen. But in 1992, these projects are in progress. And to be clear, for all I know, Teddy Seraphian was a wundikind and an uber writer, and the only, you know, exposure to his work that I have is Tank Girl now. But I do think it's worth noting that his meteoric rise-

• 34:45Chris Winterbauer?

  And his position within the industry stands in stark contrast to someone like Rachel Talalay, for example.

• 34:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Chris Winterbauer?

  So he lands the job. He was paid handsomely because he'd just been involved in a different bidding war and he was busy. He said he was writing Roadflower, which became The Roadkillers in 1994, Tank Girl, and rewriting William the Magnificent, all at the same time. But Rachel Talalay didn't seem concerned. In fact, she said she wasn't particularly interested in the mechanics of the story. Maybe should have been a little bit more.

• 35:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Chris Winterbauer?

  She'd even get frustrated with execs when they would ask her about Tank Girl's motivation and backstory. To paraphrase Talalay, if you're asking those questions, you aren't the audience for this movie. Which, to be fair, is-

• 35:25Lizzie Bassett?

  True to the comic.

• 35:26Chris Winterbauer?

  It is true to the comic. That's exactly right.

• 35:28Lizzie Bassett?

  It's also what's massively missing from this movie. I mean, you brought up Fury Road and Furiosa and like, it's such a similar situation and in many ways of like, very, very similar story in terms of, you know, trying to rescue these girls.

• 35:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:44Lizzie Bassett?

  And yet, Mad Max Fury Road is, I mean, it's, it's a movie. It's a story.

• 35:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It's one of the best action movies of the last 20 years.

• 35:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it is. And it all hinges on Furiosa and her motivation.

• 35:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that this movie ends up in a bit of a no man's land where all of the plot points feel so perfunctory and just obligatory and that it's effectively lip service that, you know, they're paying to them.

• 36:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 36:07Chris Winterbauer?

  It does not feel like anyone cares about them, including Tank Girl at the end of the day.

• 36:11Lizzie Bassett?

  The individual elements are really cool. Like, I love the device that, you know, you can use to suck all the water out of someone's body and the idea of a-

• 36:20Chris Winterbauer?

  The succuflina.

• 36:21Lizzie Bassett?

  -holographic head. Yes, the succuflina.

• 36:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 36:24Lizzie Bassett?

  All of that is like, so fun.

• 36:26Chris Winterbauer?

  I was not a fan of the hologram.

• 36:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I guess a fun idea. I mean, it didn't make any sense.

• 36:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I was like, where's his brain? What's going on?

• 36:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I asked similar questions, but you know, like, in theory, it's very fun.

• 36:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It is, I agree. I don't mind the elements, they just don't cohere-

• 36:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Nothing connects.

• 36:41Chris Winterbauer?

  -in a way that feels like it has momentum, I would say. She was involved in the script, to be fair. There were elements of the comic that she wanted to include, but she couldn't due to budget constraints. And the big omission here, Lizzie, Subgirl. So, Subgirl's technically in the movie, so Anne Cusack's character who they visit-

• 36:56Lizzie Bassett?

  This is the redhead?

• 36:57Chris Winterbauer?

  The redhead, yeah.

• 36:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 36:58Chris Winterbauer?

  That's Subgirl technically, but they didn't have enough money to represent the sub because they weren't working with James Cameron, who would insist that they, this, we're gonna get a submarine, we're gonna get everybody's submarine, right?

• 37:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I would like to film this, actually, by the wreckage of the Titanic. Which will involve me going down in a one man summary.

• 37:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh, we're gonna need somebody to clean out that sub when I get back to.

• 37:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Gross.

• 37:19Chris Winterbauer?

  She also created an email address for the movie reportedly to stay on top of online chatter about the project and learned that a lot of Tank Girl fans were worried that she was gonna be Hollywoodized. But I do think Talley was sensitive to that fact and wanted to make something that was relatively close to the comic. But Lizzie, how could she be Hollywoodized if the studio was holding an open casting call? So can you describe what an open casting call is as opposed to like a typical casting call or a closed casting call?

• 37:46Lizzie Bassett?

  It means that they put out a notification somewhere, often in the trades or, you know, somewhere else.

• 37:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Just on a goddamn telephone pole.

• 37:56Lizzie Bassett?

  On a telephone pole. They're on, what is it called? Backstage? Is that what they show up on now?

• 38:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's like Craigslist.

• 38:02Lizzie Bassett?

  It's like Craigslist for actors. And it just says, "Come one, come all. If you wanna audition for this, you can audition for this." And that means you get to experience the hoi polloi in a way that I imagine is exciting and also probably exhausting for the casting directors. But it's a chance for people that are not represented by agents or managers to get in the room versus a typical casting call that is arranged by your representation. You don't get to just walk in there if you wanna try out for the part.

• 38:30Chris Winterbauer?

  I think this is most often done, especially now with child actors. So if you're looking for, you know, when they were casting Harry Potter, for example, back in the mid 90s.

• 38:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Makes sense.

• 38:40Chris Winterbauer?

  They do an open casting call because, you know, you don't know where you're gonna find kids. Or for example, when they were doing Game of Thrones and they were trying to cast the kids.

• 38:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very unusual that they do a casting call for a lead actress like this.

• 38:52Lizzie Bassett?

  It is very unusual. And sometimes, yes, I think that they mean it and they have actually found people that way. Sophie Turner on Game of Thrones, I know, was located that way. I also feel like this can sometimes be a PR stunt.

• 39:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Very smart, Lizzie. Hold that thought.

• 39:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. So the studio suggested doing three open casting calls: London, LA, New York. Talley said they were, quote, "terribly fun." And Lizzie, people showed up. The London casting call had lines-

• 39:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I bet they did.

• 39:18Chris Winterbauer?

  That were three or four hours long. This is my favorite. "One woman came in wearing a chastity belt and took a power sander to it."

• 39:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 39:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Sparks flew and security had to come usher her out because they thought she was gonna start a fire.

• 39:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Give her the job.

• 39:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, two Spice Girls met in line at the auditions. Did you know this, Lizzie?

• 39:40Lizzie Bassett?

  No!

• 39:41Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, can I play you a little, a little quick video?

• 39:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Please!

• 39:44Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, let's see.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Hi, my name is Victoria Adams Wood. I'm 19. Um, I don't look at all right for this part, but I'm an actress.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Hi, my name is Jerry, like Tom and Jerry, but spelled differently. I'm a jack of all trades, got a quirky sense of humor. The five girls finally...

• 40:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait, it was Posh and Ginger? Those are not the ones I would have guessed.

• 40:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, so Ginger and Posh met in line at the auditions for Tank Girl.

• 40:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That is so fascinating. I would have guessed, you know, like Scary Spice and Sporty Spice, for sure.

• 40:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I think actually Victoria, like, if you look at the original Tank Girl photos, and she says I'm not right for this part, but I don't know, I kind of, I could kind of see it a little bit with any of them.

• 40:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I could see Baby even.

• 40:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure, sure. Baby, yeah, definitely. Talalay jokes that Tank Girl is the reason that the Spice Girls exist.

• 40:31Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing.

• 40:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is pretty fun. But the truth is, as you already sniffed out, you little truffle pig.

• 40:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Hey!

• 40:40Chris Winterbauer?

  You beautiful truffle pig.

• 40:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you.

• 40:42Chris Winterbauer?

  The open casting call was a publicity ploy. Back at the studio, Lizzie, we need a name, we need a star, we need Madonna?

• 40:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah.

• 40:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Talalay claims that Madonna wanted the role. I totally believe that.

• 40:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I do too.

• 40:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe that. She's like, no, I'm gonna go make this Guy Ritchie movie that's gonna flop. Anyway, when Laurie Petty read the script, she was coming off of arguably the strongest run of films in her career. We've covered one of these movies and we just mentioned it.

• 41:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Point Break.

• 41:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Point Break. Also, A League of Their Own, and... Hold me like the river Jordan, and I will then say to thee that you will free Willy, free Willy!

• 41:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Free Willy, oh!

• 41:22Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. She had also recently had a setback. She'd been let go from Demolition Man. She said that she and Sylvester Stallone did not work well together, oil and water. I think a number of people have had some troubles with Sylvester over the years. And Joel Silver had told her, or said, that in full hair and makeup, she looked like a, quote, "muff diver." Joel Silver...

• 41:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Cool guy.

• 41:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Cool guy.

• 41:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Professional cool guy.

• 41:50Chris Winterbauer?

  The movie she was currently working on was not of quite the same caliber as the prior three. Polly Shore's in the Army now, but we all gotta work. I've also never seen it, and I did like Biodego secretly.

• 42:02Lizzie Bassett?

  My god.

• 42:02Chris Winterbauer?

  She thought Tank Girl was awesome. And in fact, she knew she was gonna get the job. She even covered the inside of her trailer with images from the comic. She auditioned, she was like, I got this. And they reached out and said, you don't got this. We're going with someone else. And her co-stars tried to console her. And they were a bit freaked out by her reaction. And she said, don't worry, I'm gonna be Tank Girl. And they said, Lori, you didn't get the part. She said, don't worry, I'm gonna be Tank Girl. And they said, Lori, you're crazy.

• 42:38Chris Winterbauer?

  In the meantime, the role landed with English actress Emily Lloyd. Lizzie, do you know Emily Lloyd?

• 42:45Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 42:45Chris Winterbauer?

  You do know her. I didn't know her name either. Do you remember Jesse Burns, I believe is the character's name in A River Runs Through It?

• 42:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Barely. Okay, I'm looking at a picture. I-

• 42:55Chris Winterbauer?

  You gotta look at her from the time period. Her look changed.

• 42:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I am. Not super familiar, but I can totally see the Tank Girl.

• 43:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. If you guys look up Emily Lloyd in the late 1980s or early 1990s, there's a lot of photos she was dating Danny Houston, I believe at this time. I mean, I think she has a great look for Tank Girl.

• 43:11Lizzie Bassett?

  She does.

• 43:12Chris Winterbauer?

  A great look for Tank Girl. So I can completely see why they, you know, zeroed in on her. And even though she's not very well known now, she was a pretty big deal in the late 80s and early 90s. So her father was British actor Roger Lloyd Pack, best known for playing Trigger in Only Fools and Horses from 1981 to 2003. But Emily Lloyd had broken out in 1987 with her turn in the film Wish You Were Here. She was only 16 when they filmed, and she got rave reviews. She moved to the United States when she was 17. In 1989, she stars opposite Bruce Willis in the movie In Country. And according to some sources, she turned down the lead role in Pretty Woman.

• 43:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, okay.

• 43:54Chris Winterbauer?

  She then has a turn in A River Runs Through It as Jesse Burns, which really put her on the map stateside. But she mentions in her memoir that she'd suffered a number of big setbacks prior to the Tank Girl auditions. She had been replaced in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives. After suffering health problems, she was replaced with Juliette Lewis. In that movie, and I'd like to read a quote from her memoir. She was also replaced on the movie Mermaids with Cher. One thing said scheduling problems, one said that she and Cher didn't get along, another said health problems.

• 44:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Was she the Winona Ryder part?

• 44:23Chris Winterbauer?

  She was, yeah.

• 44:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 44:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So I want to read a quote from her memoir. What sometimes surprises people is that throughout my turmoil, I have tried not to doubt my own ability, but my nerves and anxiety have been debilitating. I've always known that when my head is in the right place, I'm capable of producing a stellar performance, end quote. I don't know this for a fact, but it seems like there is a pattern of her getting in her own head on these productions, even when she's landed the role, let alone auditioning, that seems to create some friction with the director or perhaps a co-star. And she was then replaced in a couple of instances. So as Lloyd would later write, Tank Girl, though, looked like the perfect fit on paper. Wisecracks, bags of sex appeal, and a dark sense of humor.

• 45:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Plus, a female director supportive of her ideas, so not Woody Allen. She would be the lead, so she wouldn't be answering to a bigger star like Cher, possibly. And this movie did have a producing trio, Richard Lewis, Penn Desham, and John Watson, who was one of my producing professors at USC, behind Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and Backdraft, which were two extremely successful, financially successful movies. It's based on IP, this seems like a sure thing. Emily Lloyd was really into it. She said that she wanted the character to be like Sid Vicious. She imagined his version of Sinatra's "My Way" as Tank Girl's theme song. She really wanted the punk elements of the character to come through. I really think about kind of the Wachowski's sensibilities in something like Bound or The Matrix, for example. It feels more akin to what she's describing.

• 45:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and also worth noting, she's British and, you know, the British punk scene was very different and meant something very different.

• 45:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Sex Pistols.

• 45:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Right there than it did here.

• 45:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. So, Lizzie, who's the most recognizable actress in this movie now?

• 46:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Naomi Watts.

• 46:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Booga. No, Naomi Watts. But at the time, she was relatively unknown in the United States. Tank Girl was gonna be her first big American movie. Now, Tawley says that her audition for Jet Girl was amazing from day one, but Watts says that she had to audition nine times over two months. I do believe that Tawley loved her, but the studio wanted a name, so they kept bringing her back in. Now, they wanted a name. They didn't get one for Jet Girl. Naomi Watts did get the role, but they almost got one for Subgirl. Lizzie Courtney Love came in to audition for Subgirl

• 46:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Fun.

• 46:35Chris Winterbauer?

  shortly before Kurt Cobain's suicide in April of 1994. So she turned down the role. After some time passed, she came back to Tawley, though, and asked if she could help supervise the soundtrack.

• 46:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah.

• 46:46Chris Winterbauer?

  And so that's why she is credited as executive music coordinator. And I believe a number of the needle drops that you mentioned were actually selected and sent to Tawley by Courtney Love.

• 46:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Excellent needle drops in this movie.

• 46:57Chris Winterbauer?

  And Tawley said she's kept like a bunch of the napkins and things that, you know, Courtney Love would send her with ideas scratched on them at all hours. Now, we won't talk in depth about all of the awesome rippers, but we have to talk about Ice-T.

• 47:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It's insane.

• 47:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Ice-T is great in this movie.

• 47:12Lizzie Bassett?

  He's great.

• 47:13Chris Winterbauer?

  He's so funny. This is before Law & Order. And his first movie, in which he didn't play himself, was New Jack City from 1991. Mario Van Peebles, Wesley Snipes. That movie, co-written by the father of a classmate of me and David's. It was the only person, well, we knew two people who had parents who worked in Hollywood, Matt Wright's dad, Thomas Lee Wright. Anywho, what's up, Matt, if you're out there? He says for this movie, he was paid scale. I believe he was paid $26,000 on New Jack City. New Jack City made a ton of money.

• 47:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Chris Winterbauer?

  That leads to a role in Ricochet with Denzel Washington, produced by cool guy

• 47:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Joel Silver.

• 47:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Ice-T goes in expecting the big bucks. But when he goes into Joel Silver's office, Silver says, "Ice-T, you've done one movie, which means you're getting paid scale again."

• 47:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:59Chris Winterbauer?

  So a couple of years later, he gets a call about another role. And I can't do a good Ice-T impression, so let's just hear it from the man himself, Lizzie.

• 48:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I would love to. I hope Coco's there.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  I'm up there. I'm getting paid. I get a call from my manager. He goes, "Yo, they want you to play a stripper in Arizona." I'm like, "What? The hell fucking yeah. Yeah, I'm with that." So that night, I did like a thousand sit-ups.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Because I've always been kinda in shape, you know what I'm saying? So I was like, okay, I got to get my LL Cool J buffness on now. Watch this. So I'm in there trying to get swole real quick. And, uh, and, uh, the next day, they send me a picture of a kangaroo.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  And they say the movie's called Tank Girl. I'm like, kangaroos? Look at this. What kind of stripper am I? Like, what, I got a pouch? What the fuck is happening? So I'm sitting there. And so I'm like, I don't, Lori Petty, this, that, that. And they told me Stan Winston was doing it. And I was like, okay, I don't know. Am I going backwards? And when they told me how much money they was paying me, I was like...

• 49:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I love Ice-T.

• 49:27Chris Winterbauer?

  So what Lizzie's reacting to is when he says, when they told me how much money they're paying, he gets up and starts jumping like a kangaroo. Lizzie, they paid him a million dollars.

• 49:37Lizzie Bassett?

  As they should. That was a worthy investment.

• 49:41Chris Winterbauer?

  For reference, Emily Lloyd wrote in her memoir that her paycheck was going to be $500,000.

• 49:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Ice-T was getting paid double what the lead act... He's like sixth billed in terms of number of lines in this movie.

• 49:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 49:55Chris Winterbauer?

  That's crazy.

• 49:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Can I also just say LL Cool J is maybe the first actual, like, celebrity, celebrity I've ever saw in the wild.

• 50:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, really? In real life?

• 50:04Lizzie Bassett?

  In real life. It was, uh...

• 50:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I loved him in Deep Blue Sea as the chef.

• 50:07Lizzie Bassett?

  He's great. He's so nice. He was at like a, they hosted a dinner for all of the BU upcoming graduates, our senior year of college, out in LA with a couple of celebrities. And LL Cool J was one of them. And I remember going up to like the cheese table to grab my cheese plate. And I looked next to me and there was just a mountain of a man grabbing like a bunch of cheese. And it was LL Cool J. And I was like, oh my God. Deep Blue Sea.

• 50:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Deep Blue Sea.

• 50:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Anyway, he's huge.

• 50:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Don't kill my parrot. All right, they've got Ice-T, and as he mentioned, they need the help of a very specific special effects and makeup artist

• 50:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:42Chris Winterbauer?

  to turn him into a kangaroo. Enter Stan Winston Studios. Now, Talele has said they couldn't actually afford Winston. I heard one story, I couldn't verify this, that she had sent out basically open letters saying, "Any special effects artist out there willing to help me turn these men into kangaroos, let me know." And Winston agreed to do it at, you know, half his pay. He decides to do the movie anyway, and his team's extremely busy. They're making The Rippers at the same time that they're working on Interview with the Vampire, which we've covered, and Congo, which we need to cover.

• 51:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 51:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Guerrilla lasers. Now, they have mechanical ears, as you see in the movie. Some of them have mechanical muzzles. And they have to make the makeup prosthetics flexible enough that you can still see the expressiveness of the actors underneath as they're doing it.

• 51:23Lizzie Bassett?

  It's kind of amazing.

• 51:24Chris Winterbauer?

  It's some of the best prosthetics work of the 90s. It's so good.

• 51:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 51:29Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks amazing. They're so expressive. Like, Ice-T is funny because he can be deadpan in this costume.

• 51:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you can still see his face.

• 51:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It's crazy.

• 51:37Lizzie Bassett?

  It actually is really amazing, and they look like the actors that are playing them just enough that you're able to identify the ones that you know. And there's a couple that are identifiable.

• 51:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I actually think these look better than Jim Carrey looks as the Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

• 51:51Lizzie Bassett?

  100%.

• 51:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Which, that's nuts. And that was a few years later, and they did a great job with The Grinch. I just think this work is so good. I really want to highlight it. Now, they don't just need kangaroos. They also need a post-apocalyptic landscape, so they need a production designer. Studio sets up a bunch of meetings with big-name production designers. One day, this woman walks in, bursting with enthusiasm and ideas. Two things we shouldn't let women have, Lizzy.

• 52:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 52:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Books, tear sheets, props. Who was she?

• 52:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Catherine Hardwicke.

• 52:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Catherine Hardwicke. Now, Talele has said that when she hired Hardwicke, Hardwicke wasn't in the union yet. We couldn't actually verify this. Tombstone came out in late 1993. She did Tombstone in 93. Tank Girl shot in 94. I would have guessed she was union by now. It's possible that she wasn't, depending on the timing. But the point is, she's very much up and coming. And according to Talele, one of the producers or executives threw Hardwicke's resume on the desk and basically said, "How dare you!" Insult me by choosing her over the big names that I shared with you. So Talley sets up a meeting with that executive and producer and Hardwick to meet so they can get to know each other. And what also helps is that Hardwick had recently designed a statue about women in film called Four Ladies of Hollywood that had a full spread in the LA Times, which gave her more credibility. Also, she just did Tombstone in the middle of the desert.

• 53:01Chris Winterbauer?

  They're gonna shoot Tank Girl in the middle of the desert.

• 53:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a great fit.

• 53:04Lizzie Bassett?

  So Tombstone looks fucking great.

• 53:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Tombstone looks great. Hell, to make.

• 53:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 53:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Looks great.

• 53:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Looks great.

• 53:11Chris Winterbauer?

  As Talley's team put together the look of the movie, Emily Lloyd works on Tank Girl. According to her, United Artists hired her a personal trainer. The fitter I became, the more energized I felt. And before filming started, I began looking for other projects to line up. And at some point before filming, she takes a vacation in Mexico. I will paraphrase Lloyd's version of events from her memoir, because this is where things start to get a little weird and hard to piece together. She claims that by happenstance, she stayed at the same hotel as Teddy Sarafian and his brother Darren. She insinuates that maybe Rachel Talalay had a quote "thing for Teddy." To be clear, Talley is married, and may have thought that Teddy and Lloyd were fooling around because they were at the same hotel, which Lloyd has said they were not.

• 53:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And then she says that Talley was subsequently frosty when she found out that they were staying at the same hotel. She also says that maybe Talley was just dealing with pressure. I really can't make heads or tails of this. Then, when Lloyd returned to work, she claims that Talley suddenly claimed, "You need to shave your head." Lloyd asserts that when she'd been offered the part, she'd asked, "Do I need to shave my head?" And Talley had said, "No." Lloyd reportedly then met with an artist and photographer and used a latex bald cap to model some punk looks for the character. And I'd like to show you an image, Lizzie, of what that might have looked like. So this is more Lloyd's version of the character. Could you describe it for our audience, Lizzie? And we'll put this on our Patreon.

• 54:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, she's got a shaved head, you know, very dark 90s lipstick eye makeup, and then basically just like a shock of pink mohawk that kind of goes down the side of her head, like a sideways mohawk that extends into sort of a side pony braid. It's actually pretty cool looking. That being said, and I know this is just a test. But you can tell she's wearing a bald cap.

• 54:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, even in the low resolution image that we have. So Lloyd claims that she wanted the character to work. She invested a lot of energy into getting into shape and was, quote, fired for a personality clash. According to Talalay and Petty, Lloyd was let go because she did not want to shave her head. In 1995, Talalay was asked about it and said, I'm not allowed to talk about that. The lawyers would kill me. So let's jump to production assistant Carrie Bailey, who's a guy who has published some sections from his alleged journal from the production. He also supports the idea that Lloyd was ultimately let go over her reluctance to shave her head, although I think it's a little more complicated than just that. And there's a photo here from his Instagram of him with Naomi Watts, I believe, from the

• 55:40Chris Winterbauer?

  production. So yes, he did work on the production.

• 55:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 55:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I'll read a couple of excerpts from his journal, May of 94. Apparently, everyone wants to shave Emily's head for the part, and she is reluctant. That's one entry. Drove Emily to MGM today for what was supposed to be a quick read through of the script, but she hauled herself up with Teddy Sarafian for four hours to go over the script pages. I only mention that because it does seem like she was still very invested in the movie at this point in time. Early June, Emily had a bald cap on for some of the tests today, and it looked awful. The hair situation is really getting out of hand. The next day, went to take Emily to MGM for rehearsals. After about 10 minutes, we left and I took her home. Once again, she was in tears. Apparently, Rachel told her to shave her head or don't do the film. Two days later, Emily was let go for breach of contract or something like that. She didn't shave and she was gone like that. Current word has Lori Petty as Tank Girl, end quote.

• 56:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Can I just say this? I appreciate that it sounds like Emily Lloyd has been honest about the fact that, you know, she has struggled with her own kind of self-esteem and getting in her own head about these projects. We don't know what the deal is with them being at that hotel. I just don't see that being a reason to get rid of your lead, especially when we know Rachel Talalay had, as you pointed out, a long and extensive career and road getting to this position. And that seems extremely unprofessional, which makes it a bit surprising to me. I don't want to totally discount Emily Lloyd, but. All I'll say is this, I can absolutely see a world in which I get the perfect star that I want. She asks, do I have to shave my head?

• 57:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I go to some hair and makeup team and they're like, no, we can totally try a bald cap. It'll be fine. And I'm like, great. And I come back to her and I say, no. And then you do the tests with the bald cap. It's not fine. It doesn't look right. And you have to say, I'm really sorry, we do need you to shave your head. That makes complete sense to me. And I also understand Emily not wanting to do it because it seems like a lot of the roles she was getting were very sort of cute, sweet girl roles. And shaving your head could potentially cost you those. So I understand both sides of it. My guess is that this was, it sounds like it was about her shaving her head or not shaving her head. And I guess my point is it doesn't necessarily mean that Rachel Talalay was being deceptive. If she did, in fact, tell her that she could shave it in the first place.

• 57:54Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. That's more or less the conclusion that I came to. Lloyd, in the end, basically says, look, we met my agent, me, the United Artists execs at United Artists. We picked out a look in Vogue that we agreed on. I was supposed to have a hairstylist come to my house to, you know, do it. And I'll read the quote. The hairdresser arrived on time, but then she said there was a dinner she wanted to go to. I told her not to worry. We could do it first thing in the morning. When Rachel found out she took it that I was being difficult over the whole shaving thing, she rang me and told me I was getting fired. And again, it's like, that may be true, but the context that's being omitted here is if this has been dragging on and we're three weeks out from shooting, sorry, you cannot push that to the next morning.

• 58:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I just, I don't fully buy it. There doesn't seem to be a full understanding of what's at stake here either. You know what I mean? I agree. The whole she's into Teddy thing, it just doesn't pass the sniff test with me either.

• 58:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:45Chris Winterbauer?

  But I do want to mention it because it is, you know, her account of the story.

• 58:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 58:49Chris Winterbauer?

  What we do know is that the rumor about who would be replacing Emily Lloyd was true.

• 58:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It was Lori Petty.

• 58:55Chris Winterbauer?

  They called her up as she had somehow known they were going to. She accepted the role, came in to get her hair done and basically said, do whatever you want. So they shaved her head and they gave her 40 different wigs and hairpieces across the movie.

• 59:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I do want to say is a lighter ask of Lori Petty than it was of. Emily Lloyd, Lori Petty already had short hair as part of her look. It's something she was very comfortable with. Like, this was not a situation that was going to damage any parts Lori Petty could get at all.

• 59:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now, according to production assistant Carrie Bailey, principal photography only slipped a couple of days after the transition from Lloyd to Petty. And if his diaries can be believed, Lloyd was let go on June 11th, and they were filming two weeks later.

• 59:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 59:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So they replaced their lead two weeks out. They shot through the summer in White Sands, New Mexico, at an abandoned mall in Phoenix, at a semi-abandoned copper mine in Tucson, and an abandoned bowling alley in LA. Just everything was abandoned.

• 59:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Semi-abandoned is the one I have some questions about.

• 59:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, you know what that means.

• 59:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't.

• 59:51Chris Winterbauer?

  There's some secret people living down there, some old people.

• 59:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 59:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, at the abandoned mall, Petty did, at one point, go to change her clothes in an abandoned store, got locked inside for half an hour. And she said that it felt so long that she thought, "Well, they'll find my bones." In New Mexico, they'd reportedly get notices like, "There might be a test bombing tomorrow." And at the mine in Arizona, there were times when they would suddenly smell something awful and discover there had been a toxic chemical release, so they had to evacuate the area. One crew member accidentally started a fire when trying to age a mobile home. I'm guessing they were using like a blowtorch on the side or something like that.

• 1:00:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Chris Winterbauer?

  The whole thing went up in flames. And the hardest part, though, Lizzie, was the heat. Just like on Tombstone, shooting in Arizona and New Mexico was like shooting on the surface of the sun.

• 1:00:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Talalay later said, "It was hell. We spent the middle of the summer in a copper mine. It was physically hellish, working 16 hours a day in 110-degree heat. We were always filming in some filthy, dirty patch, climbing some hill on the heat, trying to keep everybody together." According to Bailey, one of the accountants passed out in a Walgreens, woke up worried that she had lost bladder control and was taken away in an ambulance.

• 1:00:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Not the worst thing that happened in that Walgreens that day, by the way.

• 1:00:54Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 1:00:55Lizzie Bassett?

  You ever been in a Walgreens? It's rough.

• 1:01:04Chris Winterbauer?

  The Rippers had it the worst.

• 1:01:05Lizzie Bassett?

  I bet.

• 1:01:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Talalay said it was like each of them was wearing a couch. And they had a posse of people from Stan Winston Studios helping them operate their ears. Every time one of these guys walked on the set, they would have two to three support people coming with them. So for the eight Rippers, there were 16 to 24 support people. They would move their ears, run their tails, put- Their clothes on, you find yourself asking who's Ice T's ears? And suddenly out of the woodwork, some guy with a little radio controlli thing raises his hand. It's incredibly time consuming. It also made it so they couldn't go pee because they had to take the costume off to go pee. But the good news is even though they were drinking so much Gatorade, it was so hot and they were sweating so much that they didn't really have to pee.

• 1:01:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yay.

• 1:01:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Their call times were often around 3 a.m. The whole dressing makeup process only took three hours, which I actually think is pretty impressive.

• 1:01:51Lizzie Bassett?

  That's amazing.

• 1:01:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Petty said the rippers were almost always in costume. In fact, if she would see them outside of costume, you know, outside of filming, she didn't recognize them for a minute. It would take her a minute to like lock in and recognize them. Talley said Ice T will tell you it was the worst experience of his life next to being shot. It was horrible. According to Bailey, toward the end of the shoot, Ice T did say, there's no way I'm doing a sequel. They can let someone else act and all do the voice. But Petty said he never complained during the shoot and she said that people would ask him, how come you never complain Ice? And he'd reply, better than prison.

• 1:02:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. It's true.

• 1:02:24Chris Winterbauer?

  And he took the role seriously.

• 1:02:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Chris Winterbauer?

  He did. He'd push back on anything he felt didn't fit his character, including refusing to do the dance circle. He felt that his ripper would not do the dance circle. He was the only one that wouldn't do the dance circle, which I do think worked.

• 1:02:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I noticed.

• 1:02:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Sometimes he had to be reined in. One scene ended and he, you know, did a frustrated improvised line. He was like, women. And Talley said, well, we can't really end this feminine treatise with you saying women that way. And he said, I don't suppose I could change it to bitches. They're like, no, we probably can't do that either, Ice T.

• 1:02:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, I prefer that to the one ripper that is just constantly trying to sexually assault Naomi Watts.

• 1:02:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, the like weird auto hump that's going on.

• 1:03:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:03:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of Naomi Watts, Ice T was assertive and Naomi Watts was not. Talley said that she sometimes had to physically pull her out from behind Lori Petty because she would just hide behind her. And she said, Naomi, you can be shy, but you have to be on camera.

• 1:03:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:03:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Bailey said it got to the point where Talley, quote, walked over to her and said, you're going to have to act in this scene. And then walked away and Naomi responded with an, oh, well, okay, sort of expression. But Watts says her confidence grew across the production in part because Lori Petty was extremely confident. To the point where she improvised a bit, and then she improvised a lot. Talley said she ad-libbed all the time. There were a lot of times when I would give her a martini and stick her in the tank and would say, "You're fighting the bad guys. Go for it." And I do think, Lizzie, unfortunately, this does kind of like add to the aimlessness of the movie, even though it's fun.

• 1:03:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like, she's definitely not operating this tank, you know what I mean?

• 1:03:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:51Chris Winterbauer?

  As she's going through it. But there were reminders that what they were doing was dangerous. Like, one time when Talley called action, the tank driver started up too fast and Petty got knocked off the top and into the wheel well. The tank caused a lot of problems. So no disrespect to the wonderful folks who provide production vehicles, but if you've ever worked with a production vehicle, they break down at the minute you call action, the car won't start. It's just what happens every time. The tank in Tank Girl was clunky. It was hard to maneuver, it would get stuck in the sand and die. It moved slowly and it couldn't reverse.

• 1:04:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:04:21Chris Winterbauer?

  And so they couldn't really do the dynamic action that Talley wanted. She needed more action, so what did she do? What did you mention? How does the movie end? What type of sequence does it end with?

• 1:04:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Animation.

• 1:04:30Chris Winterbauer?

  They added some animated inserts. I love the animated inserts in this movie.

• 1:04:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I do too.

• 1:04:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Make the whole movie animated. They're so good.

• 1:04:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:04:38Chris Winterbauer?

  The tank in the comics does some wild stuff. As Talley said, "You can't put a real tank on the pinnacle of a building, or make it fly through the air, or turn it upside down." Now, I saw one rumor before I started on this episode that Peter Chung, who had done Aon Flux, did the animation. And there are some similarities in the style, I guess, but that's not true. The animation was provided by animator Mike Smith. He'd been primarily a commercial animator, but broke into features with animated sequences on Natural Born Killers and here on Tank Girl. And I think he does a great job.

• 1:05:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:05:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Especially if you read the comic. The animated sequences in this movie really match the tone of the comic, I think. And Tank Girl matches the tone of Tank Girl in the comic. Now, fun fact, Lizzie, he'd also spent some time on Francis Ford Coppola's Vineyard in Napa while storyboarding his Never Made Pinocchio adaptation.

• 1:05:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:05:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I love videotape of that Coppola shouting at him about the existential crisis of being a wooden boy. Now, Talley couldn't afford much CGI either. What you see in the movie, for the most part, is optical effects and miniatures. I actually think the miniatures on Jet Girl's jet look really good in this movie.

• 1:05:37Lizzie Bassett?

  They do.

• 1:05:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Some of the CGI holograms of Malcolm McDowell's CGI face. Don't hold up quite as well. Towards the end of production, things get a little harder. Lizzie Talalay got pregnant. And during production, she's fatigued and dealing with morning sickness at the end of production. And then she heads into post as she's going to like her second and third trimester, which is crazy.

• 1:05:57Lizzie Bassett?

  That's rough. You're so tired.

• 1:05:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And the one thing harder than battling the heat is battling the studio, especially during a regime change. So during production, Alan La junior left United Artists. He got replaced by John Calley, who according to Talalay, just did not understand Tank Girl. It got so bad that she called her lawyer and said, I'm gonna quit multiple times. And he said, you can't. If you do, no one will fight for this movie. And she realized she couldn't just will the studio to do what she wanted. And eventually she had to start giving in to some of the things that they wanted. What may have made this process even more painful, at least according to production assistant Kerry Bailey, is he says that the studio actually liked the director's cut. Quote, "The studio heads screened the director's cut of the movie today. They proclaim, we have a hit on our hands."

• 1:06:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Later, Jim, the editor jokingly counters with, "If studios knew what a hit was, they wouldn't make anything else." Which is true and funny.

• 1:06:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So she fought to keep the opening song. One executive thought the singer's voice was too gritty. That song is Girl You Want by Devo, performed with singer Jule Bell. And to keep Tank Girl's rocket bra. Now, in the end, Talalay says Calley made her shorten or remove several shots, including Tank Girl in her bedroom with a wall of dildos.

• 1:07:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah, too bad.

• 1:07:07Chris Winterbauer?

  During the semi-truck tank chase sequence, Tank Girl puts a condom on a banana and throws it at the villains. Tank Girl being tortured by Malcolm McDowell in sub-zero temperatures. Apparently Calley thought Petty looked ugly in the scene. Talalay pushed back because the scene had tested well. A lot of people liked the scene. So instead of completely removing it, you just cut it down to the one shot at the end where they come in and she's like been tied up for a long time. And she's very cold, which removes the effect that she's resisting.

• 1:07:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Makes sense.

• 1:07:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Cause you're like, why are her eyes ice blue and her teeth are silver? Like it doesn't, there's stuff missing. Also that eye color changes. There's a lot that seems to be missing from this.

• 1:07:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, there were shots that more directly implied that Tank Girl slept with Booga, but those were removed. In fact, Stan Winston had created an entirely naked Booga suit, complete with a big old kangaroo wee-wee.

• 1:07:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, we really, we were robbed of a lot here.

• 1:07:55Chris Winterbauer?

  We want the Booga cut.

• 1:07:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. The kangaroo wee-wee.

• 1:08:02Chris Winterbauer?

  The original ending featured Tank Girl, Sub Girl, Jet Girl, Sam and the Ripper standing outside as it finally started to rain, but they cut that and replaced it with the animated sequence that you see in the movie. The way that Bailey remembers it is that they had a couple of test audience screenings with mostly a 14 to 24 year old audience. And the test cards weren't great, but they seemed to like it more than the test cards suggested. And then with each viewing, they changed the movie more and more to try to bid and cater to a younger crowd. So they would try to age it down and as a result, they would cut things that might lead to an R rating.

• 1:08:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:36Chris Winterbauer?

  In the DVD commentary, Talley estimates there's about an hour of unused material, but the studio also added some things. So a couple of the shots when Tank Girl reveals her tank were not shot by Talley. They were actually shot by another director for a promo and then they cut them into the movie. And Talley protested and they basically said, if you whine about this, we're going to replace you.

• 1:08:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:56Chris Winterbauer?

  We're going to fire you on this movie. One good change that came of these test screenings was that they did have Hulot come in and do the animations for the title sequence at the beginning of the movie and the interstitial comic book stills that you see throughout the movie, which I do like that tie it into the feeling of a comic book. But the cherry on top, Lizzy, was that even despite all of these cuts, which neutered Tank Girl in so many ways, the movie got an R rating.

• 1:09:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Why?

• 1:09:21Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. This is so brutal. Talley felt this was uncalled for and due to the fact that the film starred a woman, which I don't know about that, but-

• 1:09:30Lizzie Bassett?

  What was the criteria that got this an R?

• 1:09:32Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll talk about it. I did a little research into this. So there's one F-bomb, that's part of it.

• 1:09:37Lizzie Bassett?

  You can usually get away with one in a PG 13, though.

• 1:09:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Let's dive into it. So I wanted to try to compare Tank Girl with a few other movies from roughly the same time. I don't want to just go off of the MPAA rating because they're just giving a rating. I wanted to try to find a more objective measurement. So there's a website called Kids in Mind. It's not about ratings. It gives a three number score for three categories: sex and nudity, violence and gore, language. So on those three categories, Tank Girl gets a three out of 10 on sex and nudity. You see a man's butt. You know, there's a sequence at the beginning where she's telling him to strip, et cetera. They're getting humped by kangaroos. You know, there's a little bit, but it's not a ton. A three out of 10 makes sense.

• 1:10:14Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it feels PG 13 for sure.

• 1:10:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Violence and gore, it gets a six out of 10. It is a very violent movie. There's stabbing, there's, you know, blood, there's sucking water out of people. It's cartoonish, but I'm just saying, it's there.

• 1:10:26Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, five or six, fine.

• 1:10:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And language, it gets a five. It has an F-bomb, you know, it has some swearing, it has some innuendo, et cetera. I would like to read you some other films that are PG 13. So GoldenEye had a three, six, and one. Jurassic Park, two, six, and four. I actually think Violence and Gore, Jurassic Park should be a lot higher.

• 1:10:46Lizzie Bassett?

  A lot higher, yes.

• 1:10:48Chris Winterbauer?

  But it's Steven Spielberg. He doesn't do R. Last Action Hero, one, six, and four. I just think the violence should also be higher in Last Action Hero. And Independence Day has the same cumulative score with a two, seven, five. PG 13.

• 1:11:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, wait. How? Because I was gonna say, this and Independence Day actually feel like decent comps to me in terms of the violence.

• 1:11:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. To me, that's the perfect comp.

• 1:11:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Two, seven, five. It's a little less on the sex and nudity, it's a little more violent, and it's the same on the language.

• 1:11:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I would like to point out that there is a substantial, as we will find out when we cover Independence Day shortly, which I'm excited about. I believe there is quite a substantial striptease scene featuring Vivica A. Fox in that, and her incredible physique is on display. As much as you see of the guy in this, you see of her. So that's ridiculous.

• 1:11:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It basically seems like Tank Girl was on the line. But for whatever reason, it got tipped into R. It's possible that the R rating killed them. But it seems like either way, Tank Girl was left in the desert for dead. It grossed just over $4 million against its $25 million budget, which is actually impressive, given that Laurie Petty said it was pulled from theaters after 10 days.

• 1:11:56Lizzie Bassett?

  That's crazy.

• 1:11:56Chris Winterbauer?

  And if box office mojo is to be trusted, that's true. March 31st to April 9th, 1995. Reviews were generally negative and drew comparisons to other films. The LA Times said watching Tank Girl is as disorienting as waking up in somebody else's bad dream. They run on to draw the correlation or the comparison that you did, Lizzie, distantly related to Mad Max, but without any of the brilliance, let alone the madness of that film. Tank Girl seems determined to win friends among the MTV generation. Roger Ebert gave it two stars, acknowledging the efforts that went into giving it a comic book feel. Enormous energy went into this movie. I could not, however, care about it for much more than a moment at a time. And after a while, its manic energy wore me down. I think that's a fair review.

• 1:12:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 1:12:35Chris Winterbauer?

  But Variety, I think, perhaps put it best, or as I would. And this was a generally positive review. What's missing from the mix is an engaging story to bind together its intriguing bits. The New York Times was also positive. They said Tank Girl has a likable brashness, even when breathless, pointless plotting threatens to eclipse the movie's charms. Chief among its strong points is Lori Petty, a buzzcut fashion plate and a Prozac necklace, who brings the necessary gusto to Tank Girl's flippancy. But Hewlett and Martin, for their parts, were not fans. Their contributions, including the opening titles, were added at the last minute, and they realized when they saw it that it didn't really look anything like the original comic.

• 1:13:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Chris Winterbauer?

  But even if it had, it probably wouldn't have made a difference, because they're the first to point out that Tank Girl was extremely niche. Deadline was only selling 20,000 issues a month, which is just peanuts, really. And the character wasn't really well-known in America. So Talley's mission had been to prove that female action movies worked. She thought she could break the glass ceiling, but she later said, "Instead, the glass ceiling crushed me. I thought, I'm going to make this kick-ass, totally out-there female action movie. We're going to show that there's a great audience for it, and instead, it came crashing in on us. It was a hellish experience, and after that, when it didn't sell enough tickets, people said that female action heroes were never going to work, and that was the end of it. It ruined my career. It put me into movie jail. It was a disaster. I couldn't talk about it for 10 years."

• 1:13:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I believe that.

• 1:13:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Lori Petty, created and starred in a Fox sitcom shortly after this called Lush Life. It ran seven episodes, and then she transitioned more into independent film and television. She's probably best known now, Lizzie, for what TV show?

• 1:14:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Orange is the New Black.

• 1:14:10Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 1:14:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Which she's great on.

• 1:14:11Chris Winterbauer?

  She's great on.

• 1:14:11Lizzie Bassett?

  She's always good.

• 1:14:12Chris Winterbauer?

  She's very good. Emily Lloyd, for her part, never really recovered from the stigma of being replaced on three films.

• 1:14:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Chris Winterbauer?

  She had health problems for many years, and she moved into more supporting work. Naomi Watts struggled for another five years, even though I think she's great in this movie, until a seemingly failed pilot became Mulholland Drive and launched her into stardom, and we'll have to cover that film. Now Catherine Hardwicke did become a director in her own right, as we mentioned.

• 1:14:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:14:40Chris Winterbauer?

  And then something changed. In the mid 2000s, people started coming up to Talley and Lori Petty and saying, "We love Tank Girl." And it developed a cult following, to the point where Rizzo Talley actually explored optioning it in 2008. And at one point, Margot Robbie's Lucky Chap did option the rights to Tank Girl, but I don't think anything's to come of it. And I'm not sure if it will, because it does feel very close to her take on Harley Quinn, personally.

• 1:15:06Lizzie Bassett?

  At this point, unfortunately, I think it is too close to both Harley Quinn and Mad Max: Fury Road in order for it to stand on its own again.

• 1:15:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I saw some speculation that Robbie's company may have optioned it to protect against any legal liability for plagiarism, for how close Harley Quinn feels to Tank Girl. You know what I'm saying? So they own the property too. Anyway, by the mid 2010s, Talley said she was no longer embarrassed by it, which I think is great. And for her part, Lori Petty was never embarrassed by it, and neither was Ice-T.

• 1:15:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Good.

• 1:15:40Chris Winterbauer?

  I would like to end with a quote of Ice-T about folks that accused him of selling out.

• 1:15:45Speaker 04

  People like, "Well, you selling out?" Let me tell you, selling out is when you do something that goes against your integrity. "I wasn't selling slaves," or, you know, "I wasn't, you know, what the fuck are you talking about? I have nothing against kangaroos, nothing whatsoever."

• 1:16:01Speaker 04

  You know?

• 1:16:03Speaker 04

  Nothing. So I was like, "Yo, I could do the movie and it'll pay for some things." And it allowed me to build a recording studio. See, I follow Orson Welles, and Orson Welles said he didn't like to act. He acted in order to be able to direct. So I learned from that that sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to be able to do what you wanna do.

• 1:16:31Lizzie Bassett?

  That is fabulous advice, truly, truly fabulous advice for anybody entering, really, like, any professional space. You have to do what you have to do in order to do what you wanna do.

• 1:16:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:16:42Lizzie Bassett?

  As long as it doesn't compromise your integrity. He's completely right.

• 1:16:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, that brings us to the end of Tank Girl. And I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:16:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, for me, what went right is easy, and it's Catherine Hardwicke. I love watching the movies that she was a production designer on. And, you know, full disclosure, like, she also holds a special place in my heart as a director as well. I grew up watching 13 and Lords of Dogtown, and obviously, there's Twilight 2. But I really love the way that she visualizes worlds and creates these sets. And she has a unique talent for it, and that is especially showcased in this movie. It's really fun. So, yeah, I have to say Catherine Hardwicke, and just letting her run wild with it. She's so great.

• 1:17:26Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that's a great choice. I'd like to give mine to Stan Winston Studios and everybody on that team.

• 1:17:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, when I first saw The Rippers, I thought, no, there's no.

• 1:17:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 1:17:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And then they became my favorite part of the movie for a while. So I just have to give it to Stan Winston Studios. That's such an accomplishment. I really think they honored the look from the comic book. I mean, it's slightly different, but that's not an easy task. And it seems stupid, like martial arts kangaroos. I mean, they look close to the characters in like The Warriors of Virtue. You know, they're.

• 1:17:58Lizzie Bassett?

  They look insane.

• 1:18:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vibe. It's so fun, but I liked it. And I kind of just wanted more of that in the movie ultimately. And so that's a real testament to their artistry.

• 1:18:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So I'll give mine to Stan Winston Studios.

• 1:18:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:18:10Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Lizzie, if folks are enjoying this podcast, how can they support it?

• 1:18:15Lizzie Bassett?

  A few easy ways, Chris. You can tell a friend or family member that, hey, what went wrong? It's pretty good. They covered Tank Girl. Haven't seen it? Go watch Tank Girl, listen to the podcast. Or you don't even have to watch it, just listen to the podcast. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to this on. It really does help us. You can also now subscribe in both Apple and Spotify. You will get at least one bonus episode every month. Usually, it's more than one bonus episode every month because we're enjoying doing them so much. They tend to be reviews of movies that are currently coming out. It's such a fun time. We love people going out and seeing these and listening to the episodes. We just did Disclosure Day, so if you join, you can listen to that. And we will be covering Supergirl as well, so you'll be able to listen to that, too. Now, to get everything I just mentioned and an ad-free feed and the fan community, you just have to join.

• 1:18:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Patreon for $5 a month. You get all of that. We love talking to people on Patreon. Yes, it is us talking to you directly. We do not have money to pay for somebody else to do that. And then if you would like to take it one step further, for $50 a month, you can get a Tank Girl shout out, just like one of these.

• 1:19:15Chris Winterbauer?

  We couldn't make this show without the support of our patrons. So it pains me to have to say such horrible things to them. But in the spirit of Tank Girl, we're gonna have to do something so bad that David will bleep all of it out. So without further ado, thank you so much, Adrian Pancrea, you [BLEEP]. Angeline Renee Cook, you [BLEEP]. Ben Schindelman, you gangly [BLEEP]. Blaze Ambrose, [BLEEP] with a chainsaw. Brian Donahue, you absolute [BLEEP] weasel. Brittany Morris, you [BLEEP] stick. Brooke, you blithering [BLEEP] wizard. We appreciate you. Cameron Smith, you're a true [BLEEP] Fonzie. C Grace, B [BLEEP], [BLEEP] [BLEEP]. We love you. Chris Leal, you [BLEEP] wumble.

• 1:19:58Chris Winterbauer?

  David Friskalanti, the [BLEEP] key. Darren and Dale Conkling, a couple of [BLEEP] upits. Don Schibell, you can [BLEEP] a [BLEEP]. And tell me, Mzodia, how does one [BLEEP] a [BLEEP]? Evan Downey, you're a real [BLEEP] ass. Felicia G, you're a cottonhead-y ninnymuggins. Didn't have to bleep that one. Film it yourself, you [BLEEP] bot. Frankenstein, you're an [BLEEP] butt. Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kids, what in the Easter bunnies, white fluffy [BLEEP]? The [BLEEP]astic [BLEEP] of the cast and crew of Win a Trip to Brown Town. Alright, let's mix things up and let's go old school. Half Greyhound, you cockalorum. James McAvoy, you are the definition of a snallygoster. Jason Frankel, you little lickspittle. And JJ Rapido, don't be a fart catcher. John D. Wiltshire, known pettifogger.

• 1:20:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And our favorite mooncalf, Jory Hillpiper. Jose Emiliano Salto del Giorgio, apparently the worst thing you can say to somebody in Australia is just, "No worries, champ." Karina Kanava, you [BLEEP]. Kate Allerton, I remember my first beer. Kathleen Olson, you numpty. Amy Olga Shogga McCoy, kind regards. Someone on Reddit said that was offensive. I don't know. Lena LJ, you f*** trumpet. Lousy Susan, you nonce. Lydia Howes, f*** me sideways and call me the president. Mark Bertha, you absolute f*** magnet. Mariposa's humans, you buggers. Matthew Jacobson, you f*** flaps. Michael McGrath, my favorite f*** canoe. Art f*** clown, Nate Ashley. Okay, back to some old school ones to end the day. Nate the Knife, you're a bed swerver.

• 1:21:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Rosemary Southward, you afternoon farmer. Rural Jur, you're an egg. And now from Henry V. Sadie, you sanguine coward. Scott O'Shea, you're a bacon-fed knave. So Man Chinani, you mad mustachio purple-hued malt worm. Steve Winterbauer, you horseback breaker. Suzanne Johnson, you bombard of sack. The Provost Family, where the Os sound like Os. You are the veriest varlets that ever chewed with a tooth. Straight from the hearts of three ugly a***t mother f*** with faces made for podcasting.

• 1:22:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. Thank you, Chris.

• 1:22:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, man. Tank Girl, just, that's an R rating.

• 1:22:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, loved it.

• 1:22:10Chris Winterbauer?

  If Spielberg had said it, it would have been G, but it definitely R.

• 1:22:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Too hip for Spielberg.

• 1:22:16Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys, we will see you next week for an incredibly special movie. Lizzie, can you tell the fine folks at home what we have coming next? Because, you know, it's been a long time coming.

• 1:22:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, let me just tell you. We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We're gonna live on. We're gonna survive. Today, we celebrate our Independence Day! I can't wait. I'm so excited. It's genuinely one of my favorite movies of the night.

• 1:22:48Chris Winterbauer?

  This is the peak of Randy Quaid's life. Like, this is just, it's great.

• 1:22:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I love Randy Quaid.

• 1:22:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, yeah, this movie is so insane. I definitely thought it was the greatest movie ever made.

• 1:22:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it might be. We're gonna find out.

• 1:23:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I really thought it was like, this is the peak of political fiction. This is so good.

• 1:23:08Lizzie Bassett?

  It's peak Goldblum. It's peak Will Smith. It's peak everybody.

• 1:23:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It really is. Everybody is just batting a thousand in this movie.

• 1:23:16Lizzie Bassett?

  They are.

• 1:23:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I cannot wait. I am very excited to cover Independence Day, and a movie that continues to live on in pop culture, especially, you know, through other shows like Station Eleven, for example. A great example.

• 1:23:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:23:26Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys. We will see you next week. We are very excited. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:23:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:23:32Speaker 05

  What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.