Die Hard

How did a tennis pro, a theater nerd, and a TV actor redefine the action genre? Because they had nothing left to lose. This week, Chris and Lizzie dive deep into 1988’s quintessential Christmas film: from Bruce’s receding hairline and an unfinished script to Rickman’s inability to hold a gun and Joel Silver’s desire to just blow shit up, this production had more problems than a McClane marriage. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Chris Winterbauer?

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• 2:16Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, oh, and happy holidays!

• 2:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Dear listeners.

• 2:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 2:23Lizzie Bassett?

  It's that time of year, the most wonderful time of year, when we have to talk about what is a Christmas movie. It just is. It just is. I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what are we talking about today?

• 2:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, I'm so excited that we are discussing my favorite Christmas movie. It is a Christmas movie. We'll prove to you that it's a Christmas movie.

• 2:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very clearly a Christmas movie.

• 2:51Chris Winterbauer?

  And that is, of course, Die Hard. But Lizzie, before we do that, because it is the holiday season, in the spirit of Christmas, or Hanukkah, or whatever you celebrate, I got you a little something.

• 3:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm so excited. I love presents. I have it. Can I open it?

• 3:06Chris Winterbauer?

  You may open it.

• 3:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 3:10Lizzie Bassett?

  What it... Wait, you got me multiple somethings?

• 3:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Is one for David?

• 3:14Chris Winterbauer?

  One's for David, one's for you.

• 3:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Lame.

• 3:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure, they're both for you.

• 3:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it's a mug.

• 3:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 3:24Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a mug.

• 3:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it's great.

• 3:30Chris Winterbauer?

  That's one. You gotta open the next one.

• 3:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, well, the first one is a mug of Alan Rickman from Galaxy Quest.

• 3:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Dr. Lazarus.

• 3:38Lizzie Bassett?

  We'll keep it forever. For the record, I didn't get Chris anything.

• 3:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Nope. It's just like any other Christmas. Just kidding.

• 3:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, these are great. It is Bruce Willis in the air shaft from Die Hard. These are amazing.

• 3:54Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, those are drawings.

• 3:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 3:57Chris Winterbauer?

  By this incredible artist, Brian Buzdaka. His website is www.bryandrawsmovies.com. So Brian actually caught our episode on Galaxy Quest. He sent me a picture of the Alan Rickman mug, and I thought it was incredible. And so I asked him if he would do a Die Hard mug for the release of our episode. So that Die Hard mug is an official What Went Wrong tie-in, technically.

• 4:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God. It's so good.

• 4:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Right? So, guys, go to www.bryandrawsmovies.com.

• 4:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And get your Bruce Willey in an air shaft mug ASAP because it's awesome. And thank you, Brian.

• 4:38Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so great.

• 4:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and he has a ton of other, I mean, so many movies. The Birdcage, Ghostbusters, he just did The Fall Guy. He's done so many movies that we've covered, so many movies we're going to cover. There's a great Big Lebowski one. Check it out. And it's not just mugs. He's got all sorts of prints available as well. So thanks to Brian for this fun collaboration.

• 5:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and that is Brian Draws Movies, and that's B R I A N, not B R Y A N. Thank you, Brian.

• 5:07Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Lizzie, this is a podcast about how it's nearly impossible to make movies, let alone a good one. And I think this is a very good one, and it was nearly impossible to make. This is not just a Christmas classic, it's a what went wrong classic. I'm really excited to talk about it. But before we get there, I'm assuming you'd seen Die Hard before. What were your thoughts upon first watch and rewatch?

• 5:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I have seen Die Hard many times. I always knew that I enjoyed it. It's one of those movies that I feel like you mostly saw on TNT, that they would start, you know, playing it on repeat around Thanksgiving. But watching it now in full as an adult, this is a perfect movie. It's absolutely perfect. It is a perfect action movie. It's a perfect Christmas movie. I just couldn't help thinking the whole time that like, we really don't make movies like this anymore. And I wish that we would. I loved it. I loved it. I love Alan Rickman, the ultimate villain. I love that Russian ballet dancer who somehow escapes a neck chain situation inexplicably. And I love Bruce Willey.

• 6:18Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, well, before we begin, guys, we need to give a huge thank you to our patrons who selected this movie in one of our polls. Guys, if you're interested in helping decide what we cover in the future, join our Patreon. For a dollar, you can vote on movies that we cover. For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed. And for $5, you can get a shout out like the ones that are going to come at the end of this episode. Of course, I also need to shout out my two favorite sources for this episode. Die Hard: The Ultimate Visual History by James Mottram and David S. Cohen. This is a really, really, really cool, not hokey, not kitschy book. Includes an incredible amount of information about the behind the scenes of the film, storyboards, diagrams, photographs.

• 7:02Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a really well-made, beautiful coffee table style book, but with a ton of information. And then, of course, The Last Action Heroes by Nick DeSemlian. Tons of interviews. There's a lot of fun stuff about this movie. As always, Lizzie, let's talk details. Die Hard is a 1988 action film directed by John McTiernan, written by Jeb Stuart, his debut screenwriting credit, actually, and Stephen E. De Souza, based on the 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe. The film stars Bruce Willis, or Bruce Willie, as he's colloquially known, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia, Reginald Vel Johnson, and many more.

• 7:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Produced by Charles and Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin, Beau Marx, and Joel Silver. Distributed by 20th Century Fox, the IMDb log line reads, "A New York City police officer tries to save his estranged wife and several others."

• 8:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Like 100 hostages. And he does.

• 8:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Taken hostage by terrorists during a Christmas party at the Nakatomi Plaza in Los Angeles. Period. End of story. That's the movie.

• 8:14Lizzie Bassett?

  It's perfect.

• 8:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It's perfect. Also, Christmas is in the goddamn log line. It's a Christmas movie.

• 8:18Lizzie Bassett?

  There's literally, we were watching this and immediately David was like, "Okay, they're using jingle bells in the score from the very beginning." Like, there's no question. Why is this even an argument? Who started this?

• 8:29Chris Winterbauer?

  The bearer bonds are like snow that come down.

• 8:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Who's drunk uncle started this? Somebody at a table just wanted to fight. That was it.

• 8:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Die Hard, Lizzie, is of course so synonymous with the action genre now, as you've mentioned. TNT repeats growing up. It's hard to imagine that at one point, it really felt like a film no one wanted to make or see. And yet, it kind of was. So, how did a first-time screenwriter, a TV comedic actor, and his theater kid villain, make arguably the most influential action film of all time? And more importantly, Lizzie, what went wrong? David, cue an action stab.

• 9:12Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. We gotta start with the screenplay, of course. And much like John McClane, our story features an unexpected hero. And that's Jeb Stewart.

• 9:24Chris Winterbauer?

  It's 1980. He's 25 years old. He's two years out of college. And he's working as a tennis pro in South Carolina.

• 9:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 9:34Chris Winterbauer?

  He's from Arkansas, and all he wants to do is be a writer. And nobody cares. He gets rejected by every publication he sends his writing into. Bear in mind, he doesn't want to be a screenwriter. He just wants to be a writer. It actually got to the point where his father, who was a minister, and his high school sweetheart, who he'd married, staged an intervention. They said, Jeb, you're not gonna be a writer. You gotta find a career path. And it can't be teaching tennis. And it can't be writing.

• 10:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no. The two things he loves.

• 10:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. So they send him to take a two-day aptitude test at a university in North Carolina. Basically, it's this PhD student who's running this test that will tell you, you know, it's like those things our parents or maybe you took in high school that says, you're going to be a carpenter because you said, I like wood. And that's as sophisticated as it gets. So he takes the test. And at the beginning of the second day, the PhD student comes up to him, and he says, amazing news. It's, we're only one day through, and you have tested off the charts to be, and he guesses, Lizzie?

• 10:37Lizzie Bassett?

  A screenwriter.

• 10:38Chris Winterbauer?

  A florist.

• 10:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's nice. What a lucrative career.

• 10:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. So Jeb, depressed, is sitting in the waiting room flipping through a magazine, and it's the Hollywood issue of Time Magazine. And it includes this article about a screenwriter who'd been working for 10 years and made $250,000 a year despite never getting a movie made.

• 11:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 11:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Which happens all the time, right? You're doing rewrites for the studio, developing projects, and they just never get greenlit. So Stuart thinks, quote, "Wow, there is a career predicated on failure, and I've got that down pat."

• 11:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I love Jeb Stuart. He is great. So he decides he's gonna go to film school. This is all happening in real time, by the way. He's in the waiting room at this university in North Carolina. And the only school that is relatively close to him that has a program that's still accepting applications he can find is Chapel Hill, where he did his undergrad. And the application is due the next day. So he tells the PhD student, "I can't finish this aptitude test because my wife's father is gravely ill." And then he gets in the car, drives five hours back to South Carolina, and he tells his wife the amazing news. "Honey, I've scored off the charts to be a screenwriter."

• 11:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 12:00Chris Winterbauer?

  So gets back in the car, drives five hours to North Carolina, cajoles some last-minute recommendations from old professors. He gets his application in, and he gets accepted to do his master's in, I believe, screenwriting or film at Chapel Hill. Then he doubles down, and he moves with his wife to California to attend Stanford's Screenwriting MA program. So he gets another master's in screenwriting at Stanford. He wins the Nickel Fellowship in Screenwriting, which was not associated with the Academy yet. It was the year before it was associated with the Academy. It actually started at Stanford, oddly enough. And money is crazy tight because he has been in school for four years now.

• 12:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, as a screenwriter.

• 12:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. And so he has $120,000 in student loan debt in the mid-1980s. Which would be $300,000 now.

• 12:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I bet his wife is thrilled.

• 12:55Chris Winterbauer?

  She is not. She's also pregnant with his first child. So through this MA program, he meets Ernie Lehman. Ernest Lehman, he's a six-time Oscar nominated writer. You know his work if you don't know his name. West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? North by Northwest, many more. He tells him, I'm broke. And Lehman says, write an action movie or a thriller. They do well overseas because you don't need that many subtitles. So he writes a script called Going West in America. It's a crime thriller about an FBI agent tracking his son's kidnapper. But his son is born two months early. Not the FBI agent Jeb Stuart's real life son.

• 13:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And Lizzie, the hospital bills add another quarter million dollars to his debt.

• 13:48Lizzie Bassett?

  No, no, no, no. $250,000 added?

• 13:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Added. I thought it was total and my sister said, no, no, no, added.

• 13:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God.

• 13:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Unbeknownst to Stuart, Julian Blaustein, who is an accomplished producer, but also the head of the MA program and his advisor. He produced The Day the Earth Stood Still and a bunch of other movies. He sends the script Going West in America to Ben Benjamin, a real person, an agent at ICM International Creative Management. Benjamin likes the script and invites Stuart down for a meeting. He says he goes into this room and all these agents are saying, oh, my God, this is the best script we've ever read. Blah, blah, blah. It's so amazing. And Jeremy Zimmer walks in. He's an agent there and he says, I don't think we're going to sell this script. It's got problems in the third act and it's a little dark, but it's a great calling card and it'll get you tons of work.

• 14:41Chris Winterbauer?

  So Stuart says, this is my guy because I agree with him. The script is not perfect. It needs work. He's been his agent ever since. And I like that story because I like good, good agent stories. Uh, reminds me of Peter Jackson's manager in Lord of the Rings. If you guys don't remember.

• 14:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Loyal representation. We love it on this show.

• 14:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. So Lizzie, Stuart says, I need work. Any work. I will do anything. So they get going west optioned. He gets a little bit of money for a rewrite, but it goes into development hell. So Zimmer helps him get a four picture deal with Disney. Amazing, right? Four-picture deal.

• 15:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it was a four-picture deal for the WGA minimum, which basically meant that Disney could milk him for four scripts at like $30,000,000 per script. And remember, he's got hospital bills and he got his wife pregnant again. Jeb, what are you doing? Lizzie's face as her brain leaks out of her ear right now.

• 15:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, his poor wife.

• 15:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. So it's early 1987. She's pregnant with their second child and he has this window of non-exclusivity with Disney. It's basically six weeks out of the year where he can also work on non-Disney projects. And he says, Zimmer, for the love of God, get me something to pay the bills. So Zimmer calls producer Lloyd Levin, who's the head of development for Larry Gordon of Lawrence Gordon Productions at Fox. If you guys don't remember, Lawrence Gordon, huge prolific producer, Field of Dreams, would end up doing Waterworld, which we did an episode on. He says, Lloyd, I need something for my client. And Levin says, look, we've got this adaptation of a book called Nothing Lasts Forever that's going nowhere fast. How quickly can your client turn around a draft? So Zimmer calls Stewart and says, how quick can you be?

• 16:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's like, I can be so fast, I'm starving. He literally said, I would have taken the Dead Sea Scrolls if they offered it to me.

• 16:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 16:35Chris Winterbauer?

  So all Stewart has to do, Lizzie, is transform this awesome, dynamic book about a down-on-his-luck cop just trying to save his wife on Christmas, right?

• 16:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Wrong, because Nothing Lasts Forever is a dark nihilistic, mostly interior dialogue-driven story following a 60-year-old man named Joel Leland, who's a private detective divorced as he tries to save his daughter from German terrorists, although it was still set on Christmas Eve. But more than anything, it's a detective story, Lizzie, and it's also a sequel, technically. So novelist Roderick Thorpe, like Jeb Stewart, was a no-name kid with dreams of being a big writer. He'd won some awards in high school and college, but then he ended up selling cars. He worked at a haberdashery, selling hats, founded a catering company, but most importantly, he worked at his dad's PI agency.

• 17:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And so in 1966, he published The Detective. A book about a guy named Joe Leland. He's a World War II pilot turned detective. And that book sold 300,000 copies and got turned into a movie in 1968. Lizzie?

• 17:44Lizzie Bassett?

  It doesn't have like Frank Sinatra in it?

• 17:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Frank Sinatra plays Joe Leland. Exactly. The film was modestly successful. And then in 1979, he was inspired by a dream he had after watching The Towering Inferno.

• 17:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:57Chris Winterbauer?

  From 1974, which you can obviously see the influences of that movie on Die Hard. And he publishes Nothing Lasts Forever, which is a sequel to The Detective. And this time, Joe Leland is in his 60s and he's working as a security consultant. So not a lot for Stuart to relate to, you might say. So Stuart makes some quick changes. Joe Leland became John McClane. Here are some details from the book that Jeb had to rework. Stephanie Gennaro works for Klaxon Oil, not Nakatomi Corporation. The building is still overtaken by German terrorists, but they're not thieves. They are actually German terrorists in this instance.

• 18:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's revealed that everybody in the company, including Leland's daughter, is corrupt. Leland kills the terrorists one by one.

• 18:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I thought you were about to say Leland kills his daughter.

• 18:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Hold on. One by one. Many of the terrorists are young women and the group is led by a man named Anton Gruber. And I think the inclusion of women in the terrorist group is very much an allusion to like Patty Hearst, the Simeonese Liberation Army, or the Weather Underground, for example, that they had female members. In the end, much like the end of Die Hard, Gruber holds a gun to Gennaro's head and Leland shoots him in an attempt to save his daughter. But both Gruber and Gennaro fall out of the building and die. And then Leland finishes the job the terrorists set out to do by throwing $6 million in cash out the window, effectively disillusioned with the world. And it just ends on this really dark note.

• 19:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And Fox says, great, they bought the rights before he'd even finished the manuscript. And this iteration of the film, obviously well before Jeb Stuart was involved, actually managed to attract a very well-known actor and director. Now, Lizzie, aging action hero, 60s, 70s, 80s, also a director, steely, steely stare.

• 19:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm drawing a complete blank.

• 19:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Clint.

• 19:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, duh. Jerk.

• 20:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Clint Eastwood was attached, according to some sources, to direct the film, but it never came to be. And Stewart needed to figure out a new, fresh angle on the movie, fast. He was actually working on two projects during this time. Another job at Paramount, and then he would go to Disney during the day. So basically, he was writing 24 hours a day, and he just couldn't crack the script until fate intervened. And Lizzie, I'd like to play you a clip of Jeb talking about what gave him inspiration for Die Hard. And I was trying to really adapt the novel. And, um, and, you know, in my personal situation, I had a fight with my wife one night.

• 20:44Chris Winterbauer?

  My office was down at Disney. I was living in Pasadena. And instead of apologizing, I get in the car and I take off to go back to my office. Was nearly in an accident, pull over to the side of the road, and suddenly I realized that's, that's Die Hard. It's not about a 65-year-old man who comes to LA and drops his daughter off the top of a building. It's about a 30-year-old guy who has a fight with his wife, and he should have said he's sorry because bad shit can happen after that. And so for me, you know, the movie just sort of takes off from that, from that particular part. He buries the lead a little bit, too. He, I read a different interview. I didn't have the audio for it. A refrigerator box fell off the back of a truck, and he thought there was a refrigerator in it, and he couldn't break in time, and he drove through it.

• 21:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And it happened to just be cardboard.

• 21:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 21:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, which is terrifying. So he really thought,

• 21:35Lizzie Bassett?

  He was gonna die.

• 21:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm dead. I'm gonna die. And I, the last thing I said to my wife, we had a fight. And so that night, Stewart goes home. He writes 30 pages. He's never written an action film before. He wrote a thriller, but he's never written an action film before. And by June 24th of 1987, he had a first draft. He sends it into the studio on a Friday, goes to Carmel with his family. He comes home on Sunday. He's got a voicemail from Saturday. The project was greenlit. First draft of his first studio assignment. Project gets greenlit 24 hours later.

• 22:08Lizzie Bassett?

  That's nuts. What, what, did they have to make this movie? I mean, I'm sure it was good, but what, how?

• 22:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's talk about it. So Fox sets a budget at 28 million, which ain't nothing.

• 22:21Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 22:21Chris Winterbauer?

  With a summer 1988 release. They just got a first draft in the summer of 1987.

• 22:28Lizzie Bassett?

  What's happening?

• 22:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Fox had a bit of a hole in their schedule, roughly the shape of Arnold Schwarzenegger's broad shoulders.

• 22:41Chris Winterbauer?

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• 25:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So, in 1985, 20th Century Fox had released Commando. In 1986, they'd done John Cameron's Aliens. And in 87, they again made a movie with Schwarzenegger with Predator. But going into 1988, it seems like they didn't really have anything on the slate. And now, the summer action blockbuster was a relatively new phenomenon, and the competition was heating up. Warner Brothers had Steven Seagal's masterpiece, Above the Law. Universal had the criminally underrated Midnight Run. And TriStar looked ready to blow everybody away with the double whammy of Stallone's Rambo 3 and Schwarzenegger's Red Heat. They had nothing, and here comes this Die Hard script, and they're like, it's great. It's like a Shane Black script.

• 26:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It's fun. We can plug Stallone in and we'll mint money off of this thing. We're in the middle of Cobra and Rambo and Rambo 2 and Rambo 3 will come out in 88. So... They turn to the tag team of Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver. So Silver used to work for Lawrence Gordon. Have you heard much about Joel Silver, producer?

• 26:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Not a ton. I mean, I'm familiar with the name, but.

• 26:33Chris Winterbauer?

  He's like a famously extravagant, large man who is rumored to have worn his pajamas around the lot many times.

• 26:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Love that.

• 26:42Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get into some of his antics on this film. He'd gotten his start under Gordon at his company. And at this point, he's on a publicity tour in Europe for both Lethal Weapon and Predator, which had come out in 87. So he's on a friggin' hot streak right now. So Gordon pulls Silver in. They're gonna produce Nothing Lasts Forever. That's the working, you know, the title at the time, because it's the book. And Silver comes in with big ideas from the get-go. Some of them great, some of them maybe not so great. So first off, he comes in and he tries to fire Jeb Stuart. So.

• 27:16Lizzie Bassett?

  No, the guy who you greenlit the movie off of based on only 30 pages?

• 27:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Here, here, I actually like Silver's explanation, even if I don't agree with him. Quote, "Within five minutes, Silver said, 'It's nothing personal, but you're going to get fired. You are fired. This has nothing to do with the script. I love the script, but I don't know you. I gotta make a movie, and I gotta make a movie fast. This is how it's gotta be."

• 27:41Chris Winterbauer?

  So he felt that he needed someone he could trust to turn things around quickly because they were under such a tight production schedule. But Lawrence Gordon kept Stuart on the project for at least the next few months, probably recognizing he was fast and good and cheap.

• 27:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. I was gonna say, like, what you've learned so far is that he did this for pennies on the dollar very quickly and that you all greenlit it after 30 pages. So, sorry, Joel, but not on board with that.

• 28:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So Stuart would eventually be supplanted or supplemented by Stephen Ida Souza, who was a Silver collaborator. We'll get to him in a little bit. Now, Silver did have some, I think, really good ideas that helped the movie, including a new title. So it's from Silver that we got Die Hard. And by "from Silver," I actually mean it was from Shane Black because. It was the title of a script he was writing that would become The Last Boy Scout with Bruce Willis in the early 90s. And Silver was like, yeah, I'm gonna need that Die Hard title, Shane. And I don't know what, I don't know if he bought it off of him, or if he, you know,

• 28:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Just took it.

• 28:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Just took it and gave him something else, but that's where Die Hard comes from. So everyone loved it, except author Rodrick Thorpe. He was upset that his novel's name was being replaced by a brand of car battery. If you didn't know, Die Hard is a car battery band.

• 29:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm not familiar with cars or batteries, so no.

• 29:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Jill Silver told him to shut up, and he said, quote, "The best thing that ever happened to your book is this movie," end quote.

• 29:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't think he's wrong.

• 29:10Chris Winterbauer?

  He apparently also came up with one of the film's most iconic set pieces. And that is, of course, blowing up the top of the Nakatomi Tower.

• 29:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, big moment, very explosive, lots of fire.

• 29:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Stuart says, "I don't want to do this. I don't want to show John McClane failing. I don't want to allow innocent people to die." And Silver says, quote, "That's not my problem. My problem is, I'm not gonna make somebody pay $12 for a movie ticket, stand in the rain in Westwood for two hours outside the theater, and then the top of the fucking building doesn't blow up. That's your problem," end quote.

• 29:42Lizzie Bassett?

  He is right about that.

• 29:43Chris Winterbauer?

  So Stuart adapted a scene from the book in which Leland escapes gunfire by wrapping himself in a fire hose and jumping from the roof. And again, I love that sequence. It's so over the top, and it's so fun.

• 29:56Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very Mission Impossible before Tom Cruise was throwing himself off of, off of buildings. It's great. It's very tense.

• 30:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Plus, Stuart didn't have to figure out how to blow up the top of a building. That was the director's job, and they had somebody in mind who'd spent the last year or two blowing up Detroit. And that is, of course, Dutch director and What Went Wrong alum, Paul Verhoeven.

• 30:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 30:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, do you know what movie he was fresh off of in the late 1980s?

• 30:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it Robocop?

• 30:25Chris Winterbauer?

  It is Robocop.

• 30:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh!

• 30:27Chris Winterbauer?

  But Verhoeven passed. I don't know if he was involved in Total Recall yet, but that would become his next movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger. So Silver goes to Predator director, who he just worked with, John McTiernan. And John McTiernan said, "I'm good." And passed, and passed, and passed again. Because making Predator was terrible. We're gonna cover it likely early next year, you guys. I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say, shooting a sci-fi shoot 'em up in the jungle with a half a dozen roided out dudes was not a great time. But more importantly, McTiernan wasn't nearly as bullish on the script as everybody at Fox seemed to be.

• 31:11Chris Winterbauer?

  There were some problems with the script that would be fixed with McTiernan's input. As he said, "The hero was, I don't know, a super cool, suave, asinine gentleman. It was standard TV movie superhero fare." End quote. So McTiernan really pushed for McLean to be an everyman in this movie. And it really seems like that shift really started with McTiernan. Stewart aged him down. McTiernan pushed him toward, "He can't be a superhero. He has to just be a normal guy."

• 31:42Lizzie Bassett?

  And makes total sense, given the way that they're pushing the movie anyway. Also, he's a New York cop. It's not like...

• 31:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's not a commando, like every other guy in the 1980s.

• 31:50Lizzie Bassett?

  And yet somehow, he also is.

• 31:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, no, by the end, absolutely. Plus, he didn't like that the villains were politically motivated terrorists. He thought terrorism was depressing, not entertaining. So he wanted to change that to make them actually thieves in the end, which I think is fun. Use the terrorism as a front, but really, you're after the negotiable bear bombs.

• 32:13Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great. That's something else that I love about this movie is like, there are so many ways that they could have cut corners, and they actually don't. Like, all of the terrorism stuff and their plot, for the most part, it makes sense. Like, what they're trying to do makes sense.

• 32:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, when he calls for the release of the other prisoners, and he's like, "End of Sri Lanka." And the guy looks at him, he's like, "I read about them in Time."

• 32:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. It's amazing.

• 32:35Chris Winterbauer?

  So funny.

• 32:36Lizzie Bassett?

  It's really good.

• 32:37Chris Winterbauer?

  So Silver and Gordon keep calling McTiernan and he finally agrees if he can change the script to his liking, he'll do the movie. And remember, they have no time at this point. So they say, no problem. Go for it. So here are some of the changes that I thought were really fun that McTiernan made to the script. One, McLean sat in the front seat of the limo in his version to show that it was his first time riding in one, makes it more down to earth. As I mentioned, the terrorists are not actually terrorists. They're just thieves.

• 33:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. They just want the money.

• 33:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Exceptional thieves.

• 33:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 33:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Klaxon Oil became Nakatomi Trading. They say it was not intended to take a shot at Japan, but instead reflect current anxieties about Japanese companies buying American companies and buildings. The Tiffany Building in New York, the Exxon Building in New York, Union Bank of California in LA had all sold to national Japanese corporations. And of course, Sony was about to make its big move into Hollywood as this was all happening. And most interestingly, McTiernan was really romantic about the script. And I think he really wanted to maintain the husband-wife relationship. He said he viewed the story as a Midsummer Night's Dream-style story. It takes place over, quote, "one festival night, Christmas," during which all the princes become asses and all the asses become princes.

• 33:58Chris Winterbauer?

  And in the morning, the two lovers are reunited and everyone goes back to their regular lives. But the world is better for the crazy thing that happened on that Midsummer Night.

• 34:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Wait, one thing, though. So this is, this whole movie heavily centered on Christmas, but we are not releasing it at Christmas. We are releasing it in the summer.

• 34:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 34:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 34:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Lizzie Bassett?

  And nobody is like this. All right.

• 34:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Nope.

• 34:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 34:24Chris Winterbauer?

  It's all good. That's just, it is, we need a summer tent pole blockbuster.

• 34:29Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's gonna be Christmas themed, and here it comes. Great.

• 34:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. Because it takes place in LA, so there's no actual snow. So it's fine.

• 34:37Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 34:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So Stuart spoke very highly of McTiernan and his approach to modifying the script and said that it made working for Silver much easier. McTiernan was his shield. He basically had to explain to Joel Silver why scenes or moments were important and how he'd make sure they were cinematic, because Stuart had written in, I think, a lot of good emotion into the script. Of course, Lizzie, as we've discussed, a director is nothing without his crew. And McTernan brought in some amazing department heads on this movie.

• 35:08Lizzie Bassett?

  I noticed a What Went Wrong alum.

• 35:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Why didn't you tell me which one you noticed?

• 35:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I noticed Senior Got Scalped By A Lion, Yann DeBont.

• 35:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Mr. DeBont was eager to jump onto this film. And then he was eager to yell at John McTernan all the time when he thought he was fucking it up.

• 35:25Lizzie Bassett?

  He also did that Helen Hunt in Twister.

• 35:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course.

• 35:28Lizzie Bassett?

  What a man.

• 35:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yann DeBont, noted Mad Men, What Went Wrong alum, director of Twister, cinematographer of Roar.

• 35:35Lizzie Bassett?

  And director of Speed, yes.

• 35:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, of course, which we haven't covered yet, but yes, director of Speed. Came in to shoot the film and he and McTernan agreed they wanted to make it much more grounded and less slick than the action films of the 80s that had come before Die Hard, so.

• 35:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Which it is and which it does make it a lot more timeless, I think.

• 35:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. So they were adding lens flares, which at the time, DPs were trying to avoid. They shot with vintage lenses. They went handheld for a lot of the movie, which was kind of unheard of. It's a 70-pound Panavision anamorphic rig that Yann DeBont is carrying. And he's like, this is fine. I carried a lion during Roar. Now, he and McTernan butted heads a lot during the shoot. Apparently, McTernan later said, quote, "Yanni is very opinionated and very certain. We used to scrap like cats and dogs and terrorized the crew," end quote.

• 36:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Again, after being actually scalped by a lion. If you've not listened to our episode on Roar, go back and listen to it. I think he maybe at this point, he earned it.

• 36:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. And I think they clearly were happy with the result because McTernan eventually is the one who recommended him for Speed.

• 36:41Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. Okay.

• 36:42Chris Winterbauer?

  So there must not have been any ill will harbored. And if anything, McTernan must have recognized this guy should probably be directing. But I think the movie looks great. So, great job, Yann. Production designer, Jackson DeGovia, along with art director, John Jensen, set designer, E.C. Chan, and assistant art director, Craig Edgar, brought Nakatomi to life. And they had no time. They came on eight weeks before production began, principal photography began. Construction crews worked in three shifts. Some people were working double shifts and they were building 24/7. And they needed to make everything sturdy enough for the stunts and the explosions because they were blowing up everything.

• 37:22Lizzie Bassett?

  And I assume they're building this on a backlot?

• 37:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so most of this was shot on the Fox lot and we'll discuss the portions that weren't. The biggest set in this backlot build was the $1.5 million Nakatomi atrium.

• 37:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 37:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is where the waterfall is and the main party is happening and they blow it up at the end. It was designed to look like Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water for two reasons. One, evoke Japanese influence because it's the Nakatomi Tower. Two, Joel Silver, big fan of Frank Lloyd Wright, owned two houses that he designed. So.

• 37:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 37:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Why not? Costume designer Marilyn Vance was a prolific vet. She'd worked with McTiernan on Predator. She'd just done De Palma's The Untouchables, which the costumes are impeccable in that film. Amazing coats, trench coats, suits, just Tommy guns hidden under everything. Really liked that movie. And she's the one who came up, Lizzie, along with some input from Alan Rickman, on McLean and Gruber's contrasting styles. So she picked the wife beater for McLean because she didn't believe that he would wear an undershirt and a shirt on top of it. And then she, along with Rickman, came up with the idea of the custom tailored Armani suit that he wears because the terrorists are financially motivated and sophisticated.

• 38:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 38:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's such a good study in contrast between the two of them. A classical education. And then you have, you know, "Yeah, man, I'm Bruce Willis."

• 38:48Lizzie Bassett?

  So funny.

• 38:49Chris Winterbauer?

  "Hopping on the streets."

• 38:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Barefoot the entire time.

• 38:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly. Doing the toe flexing.

• 38:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 38:53Chris Winterbauer?

  "Son of a bitch." In fact, Vance shrewdly convinced Fox to fly her out to Italy and France to shop for the terrorist outfits. So those are all legit European threads.

• 39:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 39:05Chris Winterbauer?

  But of course, perhaps no one below the line was quite as accomplished as casting director Jackie Birch. Lizzie, I'll read you a few of her credits. 16 Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Commando, Predator, The Running Man.

• 39:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 39:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So like the perfect combination of ensemble and action film work.

• 39:25Lizzie Bassett?

  And a lot of comedy. Yeah.

• 39:26Chris Winterbauer?

  A lot of comedy. And obviously, Paul Gleason is one of the funniest characters in this movie, who of course plays the principal in The Breakfast Club. And he has some of the best one liners in this thing. Guess we're gonna need a couple more feds. He's just so deadpan. And I'm guessing, you know, that was a Jackie Birch hire. But she had her work cut out for her. Let's talk casting diehard, Lizzie. If you had to guess, do you think Bruce Willis was at the top of Fox's list for this film?

• 39:57Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I think our sweet Bruce Willy was at the very bottom of the bargain basement.

• 40:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. Bruce Willy once joked himself that he was Fox's 50th choice for the role. That might have been too high.

• 40:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no. He was mostly known for moonlighting at this point, right?

• 40:12Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about what he'd done. But yes, moonlighting was absolutely what most people knew him for. So the first offer, I'm not gonna make you guess it, because you'll never guess, went to Frank Sinatra, believe it or not.

• 40:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I tell you what, Chris, and listeners, I am working on an episode that will be dropping in the new year that features a surprising amount of Frank Sinatra.

• 40:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I would imagine.

• 40:37Lizzie Bassett?

  And not so thrilled to hear his name come up here, because he's a pain in the ass.

• 40:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. Well.

• 40:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Old blue eyes.

• 40:46Chris Winterbauer?

  It was just an obligatory offer. Apparently, there was a stipulation in his contract.

• 40:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Because he'd starred in The Detective.

• 40:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Don't worry, Sinatra passed. He said, quote, "I'm too old and too rich."

• 40:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, though, do we kind of want to see Frank Sinatra dragging himself around Nakatomi Plaza? A little bit, yes.

• 41:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, absolutely. According to Jeb Stewart, next up was Clint Eastwood.

• 41:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 41:10Chris Winterbauer?

  But Jeb Stewart also said, like, "I didn't really understand what they were doing, because I just rewrote the movie for a 30 year old." And Eastwood was.

• 41:18Lizzie Bassett?

  At least in his 40s at this point, right?

• 41:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, at least in his 40s. And what Stewart said is, "That's when I realized the studio had no idea what movie we were making."

• 41:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 41:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Which remained true through marketing, as we'll get to.

• 41:29Lizzie Bassett?

  And also, they're doing the classic thing of assuming that you have to have a big name in the role in order to sell the movie.

• 41:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, let's talk about some more big names, one of which is, I'm sure in your research, Paul Newman.

• 41:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 41:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Too old. Arnold Schwarzenegger, too huge. It's like, "I'm a normal New York City cop."

• 41:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Straight out of Vienna?

• 41:52Chris Winterbauer?

  JPKA, motherfucker.

• 41:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I prefer Roy Rogers.

• 41:56Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I am not one of the German terrorists. I am different.

• 42:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. I'm just a New York cop.

• 42:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Again.

• 42:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Just so ridiculous. I mean, they'd have to flip it so it's New York terrorists and a good German cop.

• 42:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Which makes no sense.

• 42:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Sylvester Stallone, who kind of makes the most, I don't think it would work because I don't think he's great with wisecracks, as we learned. Tango and Cash is a tough watch for that reason.

• 42:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I still didn't hate it, but yes.

• 42:27Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it's a fun movie.

• 42:28Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a fun movie, but mostly because of Kurt Russell. Yeah, he's not, he's not quick. The wit is not quick with Stallone, even though he's great at a lot of things.

• 42:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I love Stallone, and actually Copland is like my favorite example of when he's amazing. And it's kind of when he can lean into the perceived slowness or ophishness of his character and then subvert it.

• 42:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 42:50Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what I mean? At the end of the film.

• 42:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 42:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Richard Gere, I mean, I know he'd done an officer and a gentleman, but he's too much of a pretty boy for this, I feel like. This one is the one that kind of made sense to me. James Caan.

• 43:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It's kind of interesting. Like, I don't think it works, but of these, I think it works the best.

• 43:10Lizzie Bassett?

  He'd be so much angrier and scarier.

• 43:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, oh, my fucking wife! Yeah, a lot more F-bombs.

• 43:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh huh.

• 43:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, James Caan agreed that he would have been too scary because he said, "I read the script and this guy's running away for the first 25 pages." And he passed.

• 43:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Not James Caan.

• 43:27Chris Winterbauer?

  No, James Caan, he just runs in and ends up like Sonny in The Godfather and just gets shot 100 times. All right. So unlike the action films that had dominated the 80s, Rambo first blood notwithstanding, McLean didn't engage with the action in a traditional way. At the beginning, he plays it smart, right? He flees to the other floors, he tries to reach the police, he tries to escape, he appeals to the authorities, he connects with Al by throwing a body out the window. The first terrorist he kills, which is not the ballerina, is entirely by accident.

• 44:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. He's not trying to kill him.

• 44:01Chris Winterbauer?

  No, he's just trying to survive and then he breaks his neck on the stairs.

• 44:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Chris Winterbauer?

  So it makes sense in a way that they would go to someone who was not an action star. And in 1987, 32-year-old Bruce Willis was not even a movie star, let alone an action star. So, Lizzie, he'd starred in one movie, which was called Blind Date. It was moderately financially successful, kind of a rom-com. Actually has some shades of Bonfire of the Vanities in a weird way. In this film, ironically, he plays a white collar worker who works for a Japanese conglomerate. So odd flip to Die Hard eventually. He was also known as the Seagram's guy. Lizzie, I'd like to play you a little clip of Bruce Willis singing with that Bruno

• 44:49Chris Winterbauer?

  voice about Seagram's wine coolers.

• 44:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Hey, my fellas. Look here. Seagrim's, golden wine cooler. Seagrim's, golden wine cooler. It's wet and it's dry. Golden wine cooler. My, my, my, my. Golden wine cooler. Me and the boys. Love, love, love all the time. Golden wine cooler. It's wet and it's dry. Golden wine cooler. That ad is unhinged because I don't, I've never thought like a bunch of blue collar dudes hanging out, playing the blues on their porch are gonna be drinking wine coolers.

• 45:38Chris Winterbauer?

  You didn't think a bunch of white guys singing the blues drinking wine coolers?

• 45:41Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a lot that's incongruous about that. Also, he has so much hair.

• 45:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Well, he was, of course, Lizzie, best known for his turn as David Addison, private detective, opposite Cybill Shepherd in the very popular TV series, Moonlighting. Now Willis's casting in Moonlighting could be its own episode. He was a no-name before the show. He was one of two, or I read, 3,000 actors who were read or considered by creator Glenn Gordon Karen, who had to fight the studio through multiple screen tests to get a ABC to sign off on Willis. And the studio's concern was that they didn't believe that he and Shepherd would have believable sexual chemistry, which ironically was the one thing that really drove that show. The audiences totally believed they had sexual chemistry.

• 46:24Lizzie Bassett?

  And when, so that had come out and he was already a big star by the time, from that, by the time we're talking about Die Hard?

• 46:30Chris Winterbauer?

  He was a known TV star.

• 46:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 46:32Chris Winterbauer?

  By the time that film came out. So he has this devil may care, cracking wise screen presence, but not much easy had come for Bruce Willis. He was actually born in West Germany and he was then raised in New Jersey. And he had actually turned to acting as a way to help his stutter. He did a stage production and realized his stutter went away when he was reading his lines. So like Roderick Thorpe and Jeb Stuart, his professional life was littered with stops and starts. He was a security guard at a nuclear plant. He did transportation for DuPont Chemical Factory. And of course, he worked as a private investigator very briefly and then was a bartender for many years, trying to get his acting career off the ground.

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• 48:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So, moonlighting is this huge break, but Willis is kinda like stuck in television, right? He's trying to get into the movie business, but it's hard to transition from the small screen to the silver screen. But according to casting director Jackie Birch, Joel Silver happened to be on a plane with Bruce Willis's agent at this time. And so, the agent got a copy of the script and slipped it to Willis, and Willis passed. It's rumored that it's because he couldn't fit the production into his moonlighting schedule, which is when the producers got a huge miracle, which is Cybill Shepherd got pregnant, which shut down moonlighting for 11 weeks, which opened a window of availability for Bruce Willis.

• 49:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's like, "Hey, Bruce, come on, join in." But he still hesitated, because apparently Demi Moore, who he was dating and would soon marry, didn't like violent films.

• 49:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Demi, you're gonna go on to do the substance.

• 49:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And G.I. Jane, and so many other movies. Now fortunately, Lizzie, his agent was able to leverage the situation into an offer that Willis couldn't refuse. Willis's agent, smartly realizing what a bind Fox was in, demanded an outrageous $5 million fee for his client's services. Somehow, Die Hard needed Willis more than he needed them. Lawrence Gordon took the offer to Fox chairman Barry Diller, who reportedly asked him, "Are you out of your fucking mind?"

• 50:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Chris Winterbauer?

  The answer was that they were out of fucking time. For reference, I did read that Schwarzenegger had been paid $3.5 million for his turn in Predator, which was after Terminator and Commando. So Willis getting five for his first starring action role-

• 50:21Lizzie Bassett?

  That's insane.

• 50:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It was unprecedented, and it actually rippled throughout Hollywood and caused a complete redrawing of the map of what Hollywood stars were gonna be paid. The New York Times ran a whole article on his paycheck. They said, "20th Century Fox has paid Bruce Willis $5 million to star in a movie. For Hollywood, the result is equivalent to an earthquake. The map of movie star salaries must now be redrawn." Apparently Richard Dreyfuss fired his agent the next day because he was pissed he couldn't get that kind of money and he had an Oscar.

• 50:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Again, would I watch Richard Dreyfuss trying to take out Alan Rickman in Yakuza Plaza? Yes.

• 51:00Chris Winterbauer?

  We're gonna need a bigger gun. It wasn't just Fox that didn't believe in Willis. Even moonlighting creator Glenn Gordon Karen, who'd gone to bat for Willis to bring him onto his show, said, "They're gonna laugh you off the screen. That's a Schwarzenegger role." Willis didn't care. He started working out and attending AA. Okay, couple other fun facts on casting before we get to our villain. Holly Gennaro, played by Bonnie Bedelia, full name Bonnie Bedelia Culkin, her nephews are Macaulay and Karen.

• 51:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 51:28Chris Winterbauer?

  She'd won a Golden Globe for her performance as a drag racer in Heart Like a Wheel, and Birch wanted Willis's supporting actors to compliment him, wanting performance who gave depth, warmth, and credibility. Which I think is interesting, because the reason I think she's so good opposite him is actually because she's not that warm. She's tough, just like he is, and she can kind of go head to head with him and with Hans.

• 51:49Lizzie Bassett?

  She can. I also like that she never doubts him, though. Like, as soon as she understands what's happening, there is no inkling that she thinks that he can't do this, which is really impressive.

• 51:59Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. All right, Al. Reginald Vel Johnson, who of course would be known for

• 52:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Family Matters.

• 52:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Family Matters. For years, but that happened after this. He was ready to leave acting when Die Hard rolled around. There were other, much bigger names that were being considered: Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne. Vel Johnson was living in his mom's basement and was considering transitioning to advertising, and let's hear him talk about the audition process.

• 52:27Speaker 06

  The actor that had that role, the role that I played, was supposed to be...

• 52:32Lizzie Bassett?

  You can say it.

• 52:33Speaker 06

  Can I say it?

• 52:34Lizzie Bassett?

  You can say it.

• 52:34Speaker 06

  Was supposed to be Gene Hackman.

• 52:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Really?

• 52:36Speaker 06

  Yes, it was. But something happened and he didn't do it, and they decided to cast an unknown actor. It was the last day of the casting. When I came into the room, it was Wesley Snipes. And I said, "Wes, he's cool, you know." So he said, "Well, you go first." So he went first, and I listened at the door to him auditioning. I never told him that.

• 52:57Speaker 06

  Now you know Wesley, I did that. So Bruce Willis, he said, oh, well, let's get that guy. And he pointed me out and that's how I got the role. But, you know, no one knows that.

• 53:06Lizzie Bassett?

  He's so good in this movie. I, both Wesley Snipes and Gene Hackman do make sense for that part. But I think what's so great about him is that he is not as well known or established. And, you know, this is, his part is supposed to be a cop who has been off the street for many, many years and is sort of down on his luck and not confident in himself. And he just really nails all of that.

• 53:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think they do a lot of unexpected casting choices in this film. And that's one of the reasons it works so well. And of course, no one could have been less expected than Alan Rickman. Literally, because this was his debut Hollywood film at 40 years old.

• 53:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Chris Winterbauer?

  So, actually 41. So obviously, like, think bad guys from the 80s, right? Like Schwarzenegger in Terminator, Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, Dolph Lundgren in Rocky, or even some of the smarmier guys, like Brian Dennehy in First Blood, Kurt Wood Smith in Robocop. They are not dashing. They are not debonair. They're not donning Armani. Enter Alan Rickman. He's 41. He broke out only two years earlier in theater with his Tony-winning turn as Vicomte de Valmont. I hope I got that right. In a London theater production of Le, it's The Dangerous Liaisons.

• 54:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Les Liaisons dangereuses.

• 54:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Perfect. One of his co-stars claimed audiences left the show wanting to sleep with him.

• 54:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I bet. He's pretty attractive.

• 54:31Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll leave that there. He was actually not even considered for the role that he'd won the Tony for when they did the movie adaptation because he was considered too obscure. That's how obscure he was at this point in time.

• 54:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Didn't he have a whole career before acting?

• 54:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I know. He worked in graphic design for a while. And then I don't think he even went to acting school or preparatory academy or whatever until his 30s. So he'd definitely come to it late. Total newbie to Hollywood. But Jackie Birch, casting director, knows that he's perfect because in 1987, he'd read for a part in the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi Cold War buddy cop movie, Red Heat. Did you ever see that one, Lizzie?

• 55:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure didn't. Nope.

• 55:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Me neither. He didn't win that role, but when Birch read Die Hard, she knew he was perfect for Hans Gruber. So she actually reached out to him and Joel Silver had seen him in a play and also thought he was very good. So they flew him to LA for an audition. And the biggest thing they had to get over was that when he held the gun, he let his wrist go limp.

• 55:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Do I hurt it, Mark Chris? And so they had to fix that. He tapes for the studio and producers. Two days later, he gets the job. And even though he was a newbie to Hollywood, he brought a lot of ideas to the table. So he's the one who kind of reinforced the slicked back look of Hans. He basically says, I'm not going to get my hands dirty. I've got these huge guys around me. They're going to do everything.

• 55:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 55:56Chris Winterbauer?

  He's also the one who more or less came up with the idea that he and Willis or McLean needed to be able to make each other laugh because the characters were written to be so cartoonish that they would have to find some humanity bouncing off one another. And I really think that Bruce brought this blue collar energy, which was true to his upbringing. And Rickman brought this classical education to his character, which was true to his upbringing. And they just reinforced what was already there and really made it sing and kind of lifted it off the page.

• 56:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And also, I will say, because David and I had this discussion while we were watching it. I think Alan Rickman's accent in this is very good. I feel like some people are like, oh, he barely sounds German. He just sounds British. But like, having known some German people who learned to speak English in England, it's like, kind of spot on perfect because it's not overplayed at all.

• 56:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I read at least two accounts from German speakers saying Rickman's accent is excellent.

• 56:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Chris Winterbauer?

  In this film.

• 56:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Because it is, it's just a hint. And like, you hear it periodically, but it's there. And it's, you know, sort of an affectation across the whole thing.

• 57:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I agree, watching it. And I defer to our Germanic friends.

• 57:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna share a story. I'm sorry. And David, you can obviously cut this out. But it relates to doing German accents. So Chris, as you know.

• 57:20Lizzie Bassett?

  This is, I'm gonna get in trouble for this one. As you know, I went to acting school. And I think maybe sophomore year, our, our actual like final exam for a dialect class was that we had to use IPA, the internet, the international phonetic alphabet to translate a monologue and basically be able to like teach the class a specific accent using that monologue.

• 57:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 57:43Lizzie Bassett?

  So I had chosen a monologue from The Reader, which is obviously a German accent. And when we got there, the teacher was like, great, pair up. And so I paired up with one of my best friends, Chelsea Yakura Kurtz, who is of Japanese descent, and she had chosen a monologue from Memoirs of a Geisha. And what we didn't know was that our teacher had a surprise up her sleeve, which was that you would not be presenting your own monologue, but in fact, you would be learning your partner's monologue.

• 58:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh.

• 58:12Lizzie Bassett?

  And so I did not get to do my German accent that I had worked so hard, but I instead had to do what was certainly a racially offensive Japanese accent from Memoirs of a Geisha. And Chelsea, I've never forgiven you. And that's the end of my story on the German accent.

• 58:28Chris Winterbauer?

  And what is acting school if not an opportunity to just be blatantly racist all the time?

• 58:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, they give you a lot of that.

• 58:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they give you a lot of license. All right. So Lizzie, even though Die Hard was greenlit off of a first draft, it was heading into production in the fall of 1987, very incomplete. According to McTiernan, they had 35 pages of shootable script and did not know key details, like they didn't know what the terrorist getaway plan was at all. The ambulance?

• 58:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Neither do you until the last like four minutes of this movie.

• 59:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, we'll get into that. So by October, Joel Silver officially brings in screenwriter Stephen E. D'Souza to lighten the script. Look up his credits, he's written a ton of action films and punched up a ton of action films. Says he can write anything he wants, as long as it doesn't require the crew to build any new sets. So D'Souza meets with Willis, he expands McLean's working class background, he then meets with Rickman, he elevates Hans, makes him a little more arch. One key addition. Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker.

• 59:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 59:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So D'Souza claims the line stemmed from a chat with Willis about their mutual appreciation of the Roy Rogers show and Roy Rogers' movie, King of the Cowboys. In it, he covers the Bing Crosby song that includes the lyric, "Yippee-ay-oh, ki-yay." Willis says, "We had a really adult conversation about what the proper way to say it was. Was it yippee ki-yay or yippee-tay-yay? I'm glad that I held on to yippee ki-yay." So that was a Willis D'Souza special.

• 1:00:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Clearly. Although I will tell you, not my favorite line in the whole movie. I think the one that made me laugh the hardest was when he finally gets a hold of the emergency line to the police and the woman is like, "Sir, this is a line for emergencies only." And he goes, "No fucking shit, lady. Does it sound like I'm ordering a pizza?"

• 1:00:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, it's a D'Souza line.

• 1:00:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Damn, that one's great. That one's great.

• 1:00:21Chris Winterbauer?

  He also added, "Ho, ho, ho." Underneath, "Now I have a machine gun," to the shirt. He added the idea that the terrorists had to break seven locks to get to the vault to justify the movie's runtime. And one morning, he got called back at 2:00 a.m. while they were shooting Willis crawling through the air vent because they were using a real air vent and it took Willis so long to crawl through it that they needed to add dialogue to the scene.

• 1:00:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:00:42Chris Winterbauer?

  So D'Souza came up with, "Go to the coast. We'll get together, have a few laughs." And then Willis came up with, "Now I know what a TV dinner feels like."

• 1:00:50Lizzie Bassett?

  All great.

• 1:00:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Willis also improvised the "Hi, honey" at the end of the film. I really like that one as well when he comes in. And Willis and Bedelia improvised a marital argument in front of D'Souza, which became the basis of their bathroom argument at the beginning of the film.

• 1:01:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:01:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course, no last-minute change was more inspired than the Bill Clay scene when Gruber and McLean meet face to face for the first time.

• 1:01:14Lizzie Bassett?

  I love this scene.

• 1:01:15Chris Winterbauer?

  "Oh, no, don't shoot me. Don't shoot me."

• 1:01:17Lizzie Bassett?

  If you haven't seen Die Hard, listeners, at this point, what happens is that Hans Gruber realizes he's come face to face finally with John McLean and he decides his best bet is to impersonate one of the hostages. And Alan Rickman does also pretty spot-on, like weird, American accent. And he's very squirrely and so gross.

• 1:01:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Where he's been so sleek this entire time. It's, it's

• 1:01:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, his hair falls down in his face, everything. Rickman had insisted that they be able to make each other laugh. And D'Souza overheard Rickman speaking in an over the top American accent on set one day. So he rewrites the scene, which existed, but it was between Willis and a different terrorist, Theo, who's hacking the safe. So who's American.

• 1:02:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:02:04Chris Winterbauer?

  So it changes the tone of the scene. We'll return to that scene in a moment because the no getaway plan thing has ramifications to that scene that are interesting. Now, there are some big tensions on set, Lizzie, notably between Bruce Willis and John McTiernan around the blocking of the scene. So you block a scene. That means you figure out where the actors are going to stand. Then you light the scene and then you bring the actors back in to shoot the scene. But Willis would come back in once the scene was lit and he would say, no, I don't think he'd stand here. I think he'd stand over here. And he'd change the blocking and he did it over and over again, and it would cause them to fall behind. So Silver confronts Willis and according to McTiernan, Willis admitted that he was trying to avoid being backlit because his hair was thinning and he was really self-conscious about it.

• 1:02:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Which, by the way, you can tell in certain shots of this that they have spray painted his hair on to this. Just let him be bald.

• 1:02:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Which he eventually does and he becomes arguably the first action hero movie star that's bald in American history.

• 1:03:01Lizzie Bassett?

  And he looks great.

• 1:03:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Silver reassured him, along with McTiernan, it's our job to make you look good. Alan Rickman was also really nervous on the film. Apparently he at one point heard that studio executives were concerned about his acting. According to Silver, there was worry that Rickman couldn't be the bad guy because he seemed too weak. This was at the studio level, not in, within the production. He did, of course, still struggle with guns, Lizzie. He kept flinching or blinking when shots were fired. Bang, bang. But Silver and DeBont, actually, in particular, stood up for him, recognizing what a breath of fresh air he was to the genre.

• 1:03:35Lizzie Bassett?

  He's great. He's very funny and just, and also scary and evil.

• 1:03:39Chris Winterbauer?

  We spoke earlier about how most of this shot on a backlot, but a lot of it was actually shot on location in a real skyscraper, which of course is the Fox Plaza Tower, which Is right next to the Fox studio. You can come visit LA and see it. But they did consider shooting this in Houston. There's cheap labor, lots of buildings under construction. Until Jeb Stuart literally points from the conference room they were sitting in on the Fox lot at the Fox Plaza Tower and says, that's what I was looking at when I was writing this thing. It seemed like the perfect fit. It was commissioned to be Fox's corporate headquarters. It was still under construction. It was walking distance from the soundstage. But it was a working office space.

• 1:04:18Chris Winterbauer?

  So they literally had to stop production from time to time to go downstairs and apologize to the lawyers that they were going to be firing machine guns again. And there was a ton of concern about damaging the studio's new headquarters. They flew in extra Spanish marble, literal tons of it. That matched the exterior of the building in case of any damage. They had to build miniatures to do all of the explosions. I mean, there's amazing videos online. And if you check out that book, The Making of Die Hard, The Visual History, you can see all the photographs. They built a 25 foot tall miniature replica of the building for the top of building explosion scene. They made a 20 foot forced perspective miniature for the chair bomb in the elevator shaft, which I also love that scene.

• 1:05:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And the producers actually considered blowing out the office floor for that chair bomb scene, the actual office floor of the Fox Plaza, because it was under construction. Instead, they did a combo of special effects and visual effects. They rigged the building with light bulbs to give the initial flash that you see. They watered down the sidewalks outside to add more reflectivity. They threw in some smoke and some pyrotechnics, and then they did the actual explosion on the scale model. But Lizzie, they did do one thing for real. Is there something in here that you noticed that might be dangerous? The use of a particular vehicle, especially in the 1980s in Hollywood?

• 1:05:40Lizzie Bassett?

  A helicopter?

• 1:05:42Chris Winterbauer?

  A helicopter. As we covered in the Twilight Zone movie, they were shooting with helicopters, which had just caused

• 1:05:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Arguably, one of the most horrific incidents in Hollywood history. Not only were they shooting in the middle of the city, but this was just a few years after the tragic deaths of Vic Morrow, Micah Dinley, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen. After John Landis and his production violated labor law to work two child actors at night, allowed the helicopter to fly far too low, and, as the National Transportation Safety Board later said, failed to establish direct communications and coordination between the pilot, who was in command of the helicopter operation, and the film director, who was in charge of the filming operation.

• 1:06:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Chris Winterbauer?

  So this is shortly after that. John Landis's trial, I believe, had just ended. Steven Spielberg had publicly disavowed him. They got permits from the LAPD. It took months to get all the planning done. They have Vietnam-era Huey helicopters. And McTiernan was not like Landis, and he was hyper-concerned about safety. Joel Silver was not. Jeb Stuart later said, "The LAPD told Joel Silver that they could not bring those helicopters in on the deck, as it's written in the script. Joel said, 'Absolutely, we will, of course, not do that. We'll keep it well above 1,500 feet, then to the helicopter pilots. Bring them in as low as you possibly can.'"

• 1:07:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:07:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Which you can see in the film. I mean, the shots are incredible. McTiernan originally planned for three runs of the helicopters coming toward the building, but only ended up doing it once. So that's the only take that you see in the film.

• 1:07:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, it looks amazing, but that would be scary to do that right after what happened on Twilight Zone.

• 1:07:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Which he said, "It wasn't long after that helicopter accident in the Twilight Zone, and that put the fear of God into me. After the first run, I said, 'No more.' If something had fallen into the intake of the turbine, we could have had 75 people killed."

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• 1:08:48Chris Winterbauer?

  The shoot did have its accidents and the actors did a lot of their own stunts. So Val Johnson, Reginald Val Johnson, actually did his car stunt scene because McTiernan didn't want to have it look too slick. So Phil Johnson said, sure, I'll do it because he thought he was going to get fired if he didn't. He did it in two takes. He was fine.

• 1:09:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:09:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Alan Rickman suffered a terrible injury in his first shot on the film, which is after he addresses the group of hostages. He jumps off a three-foot ledge just down to the floor below and he tore a ligament, it felt like, in his knee. Went to the doctor. The doctor said he was going to be out for six months. They put a brace on his leg for the rest of the day to finish the scene. He stood standing on one leg, but luckily he just tore the cartilage in his knee. So even though he was in pain, he could still work for the rest of the shoot.

• 1:09:35Lizzie Bassett?

  That's so embarrassing.

• 1:09:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. Now, he also agreed to do his fall at the end of the film. So when you see him falling, there was a blue airbag underneath him that they replaced, but the airbag was 40 feet beneath him. So they did a 40-foot free fall and they said that they would release him on three, but for one of the takes, they did three or four total, they released him on one instead. And that's the take in the movie.

• 1:10:02Lizzie Bassett?

  40 feet?

• 1:10:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Lizzie Bassett?

  There's no way. There's no way I would do that.

• 1:10:07Chris Winterbauer?

  He said he wouldn't do it now. He just had no idea what he was doing. And he actually, there's a funny interview of him later saying like, he basically volunteered to do it, thinking, what's the big deal? And then he saw how high it was, that he had to climb back up and do it again, and he regretted it. So for the long shot of Hans falling, where Paul Gleason says, I hope that's not one of the hostages. That's stuntman Ken Bates. He fell 318 feet from the real Fox Plaza.

• 1:10:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I thought it had to be because it's very clearly a person. They're still moving like as they're falling down.

• 1:10:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's on a descender, which is a harness, a cable and pulley system. You can see how it works really well on The Fall Guy, if you guys have seen that film.

• 1:10:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Ryan Gosling does a descender in that one. The ventilation shaft jump was performed by stuntman Key Johnson. He was supposed to catch the first ledge but missed, and so they kept that take in the movie. So that was actually an error that they kept in the film. And then Willis actually rode the top of the elevator himself.

• 1:11:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:11:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Is that a real elevator that he was?

• 1:11:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:11:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Willis did a bunch of stuff on this film. He wore prosthetic feet like the hobbits for a lot of his scenes. You can actually see them in a couple of scenes. And his most dangerous stunt was shot first. That was when he wrapped himself on the fire hose and jumped from the building. So it was actually a five-story jump off the top of a parking garage, again, onto an airbag. And they covered his bare skin in gel to prevent him from catching fire because they were doing the explosion above him. And he said when he landed, he thought everybody was going to come over and be like, you did so good. But they all ran over terrified because apparently he came very close to missing the airbag. And they thought their lead actor was going to die on the first shot.

• 1:11:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:11:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Again, Ken Bates did the long shot using a decelerator rig. Willis also claimed that he lost hearing on the production, saying that he has two-thirds partial hearing loss just because there were so many gunshots and so many explosions. They probably didn't know a ton about, you know, hearing protection at the time. Now, it's been claimed that Willis worked simultaneously on Moonlighting and Die Hard. He said maybe it was a day of overlap at the end of the shoot, but it was a really, really difficult production. He's acting by himself for a lot of these scenes. He actually asked Phil Johnson to come to set to read lines with him, just so he didn't have to do them alone. But Phil Johnson actually said, like, when he had to do his scenes, Bruce wasn't there. But that is because Bruce was planning his wedding with Demi Moore in the middle of this production.

• 1:12:30Chris Winterbauer?

  They actually got married during the production of Die Hard.

• 1:12:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:12:34Chris Winterbauer?

  McTernan actually asked to Susan to add more scenes to give Willis a break. So like Holly telling Gruber that people need to use the bathroom, that scene was added in during production. Holly and John's children, shots of them at home, those were added in production. And of course, like continuity was a nightmare. Vance had 17 versions of Willis's outfit in various states of distress because they were not shooting it, you know, in order. So they were constantly switching the tank top out. And at some point, the Secret Service showed up because Ronald Reagan was planning on setting up an office at Fox Plaza Tower.

• 1:13:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh oh.

• 1:13:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And they had to be like, hide the machine guns. The Secret Service is coming right now. So Fox needs a movie for summer of 1988. They don't wrap filming until February of 1988. So they have less than five months to finish the movie. McTernan hires Frank Uriosty, who'd cut Robocop, but it was their first time working together. And McTernan sometimes felt like he was listening more to Silver than to him. But to his credit, Uriosty said he was just trying to protect the movie. And the studio was always saying it was too long. And they always wanted to cut the first 19 minutes of the movie because the action doesn't start until basically 20 minutes in, when the terrorists come up the elevator. And they're like, ah, can we cut some of the marriage stuff? And he said, no, that's the only thing that's going to make people care about these characters.

• 1:13:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So he fights to keep that in. They bring in a second editor just to keep things moving. It sounds like overall, it was a collaborative, you know, process, if a little paranoid. But Fox is panicking. And they get another reason to panic when the MPAA gives the film an X rating.

• 1:14:07Lizzie Bassett?

  For what? The boobs?

• 1:14:09Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, that's PG. The scene in which Takagi is murdered.

• 1:14:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, they do show him getting his head blown off.

• 1:14:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so they recommended cutting frames.

• 1:14:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It's been claimed that Silver told him to cut the frame, show it to the MPAA, then put him back in. They did not do that. And the Foley team actually had to remove sound effects they added of McLean removing the glass from his feet because the sound was too gross and it was like grossing people out. That scene was also pretty graphic.

• 1:14:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, we discussed the script changes and the ambulance at the end. So, Lizzie, as we've seen, the movie ends with this ambulance appearing in the back of the terrorist's truck, coming out and like, this is their plan. They're going to escape in the ambulance.

• 1:14:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is funny because so many terrorists pile out of that truck at the beginning when Alan Rickman comes out of it and there's no ambulance in there.

• 1:15:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, yep, and that's why they cut a scene. So, they didn't come up with the idea for the ambulance until they were already shooting. They'd already shot the scene of the terrorists in the truck and they'd shot a scene of the terrorists synchronizing their matching watches. This is important, so they cut that scene. But later, in the Bill Clay scene, McLean figures out it's Hans Gruber because he recognizes that he has the same watch as the other terrorists he's killed. So, that gets cut from the scene and now all you have is McLean seeing the name Clay on the directory behind Gruber's head. It's a bit tenuous, you know what I mean? How it's explained, but

• 1:15:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Chris Winterbauer?

  you kind of have to just go with like, oh, he just figured it out.

• 1:15:45Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the way I read it was I actually read that differently, that Alan Rickman had seen that and that's how he knew to use the name. And so it was like a confirmation. So, it kind of worked for me because at that point I was like, oh.

• 1:15:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I think the watch would be more clear. And there's also the thematic through line of the Rolex that Holly has been given, which obviously he takes off her hand when Gruber falls out the window at the end, signifying that she will give up her career for him. I'm just kidding. But, yeah, they had to eliminate that to make things make sense. So. The movie is barreling towards its release and the marketing department is also freaking out because Willis's second feature film, Sunset, comes out in the interim. It is not a hit. The public learns about his $5 million paycheck and are furious. He's in a public feud with Cybill Shepherd. No exact reasons are known. Some people think they had an affair.

• 1:16:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Some people say they both were big divas on the project.

• 1:16:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, all I know about Cybill Shepherd is that Martha Stewart hates her. So if you can get in a fight with Bruce Willis and Martha Stewart, something's going on.

• 1:16:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, yeah. Some people say that Willis was frustrated by the schedule changes, which stemmed from her pregnancy, which I don't fully buy because that kind of allowed him to do Die Hard. Regardless, Willis's reputation was at an all-time low and audiences could not see him as anything other than a comedic actor. They were even laughing and booing when his name came up at the trailer that the studio had put out before other films. The poster, which featured Willis's face equal to the size of Nakatomi Tower, which is what's on like the DVD now, was the lowest testing poster that 20th Century Fox had put out to date. So they ran a new version with the building big and Willis's face small, and some ads didn't even print Willis's name at all.

• 1:17:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:17:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. But there were hints that they had something. There was an internal screening at Fox with 15 executives, and it was a hit. And the first sneak preview for a real audience got a standing ovation. So Fox played it a little conservative. It released on June 15th as a limited release and then went wide on July 22nd, 1988. It earned a respectable $7.1 million its opening weekend. Not a huge number for it likely went over budget, so let's say $30 million film would probably lose money. Came in third behind Coming to America and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Great weekend, I would say. But Bruce had legs. It was never the number one film at the box office, but it spent 10 weeks in the top five.

• 1:18:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:18:21Chris Winterbauer?

  It was the biggest action film of 1988, the seventh highest grossing film overall, and brought in $140 million worldwide and of course was a huge hit on VHS. And Lizzie, it crushed Stallone's Rambo 3 and Schwarzenegger's Red Heat, also released that year.

• 1:18:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And both of these guys must have been feeling the heat because Stallone reportedly visited Joel Silver on set to see what was going on, even though he'd passed on the role, and he even came to the LA premiere. Schwarzenegger had a different approach. According to Willis, they ran into each other at a restaurant called Ivy at the Shore after release, and Schwarzenegger said, Willis, know why you'll never be an action star? And Willis said, no, Arnold, why not? And Arnold flexed his biceps and said, Toothpick arms. I totally believe that story.

• 1:19:11Lizzie Bassett?

  For sure.

• 1:19:11Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Robert Davy, who played, or Robert Davy, I can't remember how you pronounce his name, who played one of the feds that says, reminds me of Saigon, eh, slick? He's the white fed. He was a friend of Arnold's and Schwarzenegger watched the movie with him and loved the movie. So I think it was just good natured ribbing. And the three of them, by the way, along with Demi Moore, opened Planet Hollywood together in 1991.

• 1:19:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Oops.

• 1:19:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So, well, we'll do a what went wrong about that. Die Hard, of course, ushered in a new type of action hero. It set the stage for Jason Bourne, John Wick, The Everyman. It's also, I think, a huge contributor to the Dunning Kruger effect, which, Lizzie, is like our misconceived notion that we can do things that we can't, right? We overestimate our abilities. So like men who think they can fight bears, for example, or Mark Wahlberg, who thinks 9/11 would have gone different if he had been on the plane.

• 1:20:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I always forget about that, and it blows me away.

• 1:20:06Chris Winterbauer?

  If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn't have gone down like that.

• 1:20:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:20:10Chris Winterbauer?

  There would have been a lot of blood in that first class cabin, and then me saying, okay, we're gonna land somewhere safely. Don't worry. The film did receive overall mixed reviews at first, but it has been reevaluated throughout the years as one of the greatest action films of all time. It's the subject of a lot of interesting analysis, themes of masculinity, populism, failures of the state, bureaucracy, allusions to the Odyssey, many, many more. Let's talk about the aftermath briefly, Lizzie. Willis's career was set. Despite hiccups like Bonfire of the Vanities, he was arguably the major action star of the 1990s. As we mentioned, he's the first one to have gracefully transitioned into bald-dom.

• 1:20:52Chris Winterbauer?

  McTiernan was similarly hot, although his career would more or less end a decade later with The Thirteenth Warrior, a movie that we definitely have to cover.

• 1:21:01Lizzie Bassett?

  I secretly like that movie.

• 1:21:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I love, I do too. I think it's kind of a blast.

• 1:21:05Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's fun. We owned the VHS and I watched it like all the time.

• 1:21:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Antonio. Rickman was, of course, on everybody's radar for every bad guy role available. Couple of my favorites, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and eventually, of course, Harry Potter. Val Johnson landed on Family Matters. Did not have to go into advertising. Of course, since we can't have nice things, Die Hard did eventually become the ludicrous action franchise. It's so effectively subverted. I like the sequels, though. My wife laughed so hard at the tagline for Die Hard 2, which is Die Harder.

• 1:21:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, Die Harder is incredible. I do also like Live Free or Die Hard.

• 1:21:43Chris Winterbauer?

  I do too. But, Lizzie, since this is, at its core, the story of a man doing right by his wife, it's only fitting that we end with screenwriter Jeb Stewart, who, had it not been for a little or big white lie he told his wife regarding that aptitude test, we never would have gotten the greatest Christmas film of all time. So, after 20 years of marriage, Jeb Stewart's wife, his partner, became very ill, and he knew that she was dying. And so, not wanting any lies to be left between them, he told her that nearly two decades prior, he had lied about scoring off the charts for screenwriting, and that he had actually been meant to be a florist, and she just smiled and said

• 1:22:28Chris Winterbauer?

  that she knew. Because after he left to go fill out his application, the administrator, PhD student, called the house and asked her if her father was feeling better. And when she had no idea what he was saying, he filled her in. And over all those years, through all of the master's programs and debt that he racked up, she'd never said a thing.

• 1:22:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. Just like Mrs. McLean in the movie, she never lost faith in him.

• 1:22:59Chris Winterbauer?

  She didn't. Only John could piss a man off that much. So, Lizzie, that concludes our coverage of Die Hard. I hope you enjoyed listening as much as I did looking into this film.

• 1:23:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I did. I loved it.

• 1:23:14Chris Winterbauer?

  As always, we have to talk about what went right. And there's so much to choose from, even though so much went wrong on this movie.

• 1:23:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Do you want me to go first?

• 1:23:21Chris Winterbauer?

  I would love for you to start.

• 1:23:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I have to go with Alan Rickman. He's such a surprising choice for this, and he's just so perfect. And I love how bitchy he is in this. I just love him. And I love that this, you know, brought him forward to be able to do everything from many other villain roles to Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility. He's a treasure that we lost too soon, obviously. So Alan Rickman, loved him.

• 1:23:54Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. And of course, Galaxy Quest.

• 1:23:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:23:56Chris Winterbauer?

  One of my favorite roles for him and just one of my favorite movies. Since you gave it to Rickman, I'll give it to Willis, his counterpart. I, you know, Willis, he's an interesting actor. He's obviously got a complicated reputation over the years. I think it's been softened a lot in recent years. I think he's most interesting when he lets down the facade, the bad boy, cool guy facade. And I think what works so well about this movie is that that facade is really up for a lot of the first half of the film. But he lets it down in key moments, like when he turns to the mirror and calls himself stupid for arguing with his wife and says, real mature, you know?

• 1:24:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And then later, when he admits that he was wrong and he's, and you know, he never said he's sorry. And Willis, vulnerable Bruce Willis, I mean, I still think The Sixth Sense is an incredible performance. It's an amazing thing. And I think that, you know, there's something so kind of tragic about his arc. Here's someone who came to film to help him speak and had to leave it when he lost the ability to speak and.

• 1:25:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And now I'm gonna get, you know, emotional. My grandpa has the same thing that he does. But anyhow, I think that this movie only works with somebody who believes or can act as if they're invulnerable, but then can reveal that they're really not. And I think Willis is good. When he's at his best, he can do that. And he did this. He did that in this movie so effectively. So Bruce Willis, you went right and die hard.

• 1:25:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Agreed. Beautifully said. Um, there's one thing, listeners, that we did want to tell you before we sign off here and head into our Full Stop supporters, which is that David and I are having a baby. We don't know exactly when, because apparently these things come whenever they feel like it. Some medieval medicine is telling us sometime around the beginning of 2025. With that in mind, we are trying to make sure that we don't have any gaps in coverage for you all. But you may miss me on a couple of episodes. We will have some guest hosts coming up in the new year. But then I'll be back. I'll be back with a screaming infant behind me and I can't wait.

• 1:26:21Lizzie Bassett?

  And there were so many opportunities in this episode, Chris, because you kept talking about pregnant people that I could have brought this up, but nope, just waited till the very end. But that's it. We appreciate your support and your patience. And sorry, go ahead, Chris.

• 1:26:32Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I was gonna say, now you have to join Full Stop because...

• 1:26:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, because there's another what went wrong baby being added.

• 1:26:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Another baby.

• 1:26:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Just like Jeb Stewart.

• 1:26:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Just like Jeb Stewart. Son of a bitch. All right, guys. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast, really just truly, and your kind messages. It means the world. We love making this show. We want to keep doing it for years and years and years. There are so many movies to cover. Sweet. Good Lord. We have a list of 500. That's not an exaggeration. So. If you'd like to support this show further, of course, tell somebody about it, scream it in their face, do a Hans Gruber impression, ask them where the detonators are. If you would like to go a step further, leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music. We were featured on there recently. If you'd like to go a step further, join our Patreon, www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast.

• 1:27:25Chris Winterbauer?

  You can join for free. You'll get some updates on the podcast and scheduling. You can join for a dollar when, at that tier, you can vote on movies that we will cover. For $5, you'll get an ad-free RSS feed. And of course, for $50, you will get a shout-out like these. We've had a lot of good ones recently. Gremlins, Yoda, George Lucas, Bradley Cooper, Star is Born. And Lizzie, what are we doing today for the good people?

• 1:27:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I've heard that Bruce Willis is in the house.

• 1:27:51Chris Winterbauer?

  What?

• 1:27:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's Bruce. Wait, I think it's Bruce and Hans.

• 1:27:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, sure. I'll bust out my German accent from acting school. Let's see if I can match Alan Rickman's.

• 1:28:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's do it. Willa Dunn, come to the coast, have a few laughs. I heard it's your birthday.

• 1:28:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Willa. Happy birthday to you.

• 1:28:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Hey, guys. She's 10. That's why she gets the birthday shout-out. If you're over 10, don't email us for a birthday shout-out.

• 1:28:27Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. We will only give birthday shout-outs to children, not adults. Jerome Wilkinson, I will assume that it is not your birthday. Lance Stater, Nate the Knife, Lena, Andrea, Ramon Villanueva Jr. It's a very difficult name to say in this accent. Half-Grey Hound, good for you. Chris Erna.

• 1:28:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Blaze Ambrose, Brittany Morris.

• 1:28:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm just a New York cop.

• 1:28:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Darren and Dale Conkling. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker. Jake Kellen. Andrew McFagel Bagel. Matthew Jacobson. Grace Potter. Alan Singleton. I've said I've loved you 100 times. I've never said I'm sorry.

• 1:29:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Jerry Sri Samant. Give me the Detonators. Scott Gerwin. Sadie. Just Sadie. Brian Donahue. Adrian Pang Korea. Chris Lille. I'm losing it, Chris. Get in there.

• 1:29:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Kathleen Olson. Leah Bowman. I'm a fan of Roy Rogers myself. Steve Winnebauer. Don Schiabel. Did you buy my album? George. Rosemary Southward. Mark Demetrick.

• 1:29:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Tom Kristin. You asked for a miracle. I give you the FBI. Somon Shinani. Please also give me the Detonators. And Michael McGrath. If you could hand over the Detonators as well, that would be great. Thank you.

• 1:30:03Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys. Thanks for sitting through that. Wasn't our best work, but we're going to improve. We are coming back at you in one week with a special Below the Line interview with Warren Drummond, an incredible storyboard artist who's worked with a number of directors that we've covered on this podcast, including John Singleton. That's going to be releasing on December 23rd, so come back to check that out. We will be dark on December 30th, and then we are back in action for 2025, January 6th, with what could be argued as kind of another Christmas film, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which is a crazy bonkers fun time. Not for Tom Cruise, but it was a crazy bonkers fun time for all of us.

• 1:30:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm very excited for that.

• 1:30:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, return to normal programming, January 6th. We will see you then.

• 1:30:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Happy holidays.

• 1:30:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Happy holidays.

• 1:30:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Ho, ho, ho. Now I have a machine gun.

• 1:31:02Speaker 06

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong, and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.