Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

How did a freshly minted horror maestro, one of Hollywood's most alternative leading men, and the squeaky clean Mouse House join forces to revive the water-logged pirate genre? Join Chris and Lizzie as they brave the fraught production of 2003's surprise summer smash, The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. From explosive studio meetings to actual sinking ships, learn how Disney bet it all on a live action adaptation of one of their oldest theme park attractions. *CORRECTIONS: Tombstone was produced under the Hollywood Pictures banner, which ran parallel to Touchstone at Disney from 1989 to 2001. The Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland opened three months after Walt Disney's death, not before. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Before we dive into the pirate-infested waters of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, we have a brief call to action. We are going to be hosting a Mailbag episode as a bonus episode for our patrons. If you are interested in submitting a question for this episode, there are two easy ways to do so. Number one, you can shoot us an email, [email protected]. Make sure your subject line is Mailbag One, and send along your question. Or you can join our Patreon. Don't worry, you can join for free. And DM us a question through Patreon. Please do not send us questions via Instagram. It's just too hard for us to keep track of. If you guys are interested in submitting a question, again,

• 2:21Chris Winterbauer?

  email us at [email protected] or join our Patreon, www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast and DM us. We'll happily answer questions about the movies we've covered, about the making of this podcast, about the production of films in general, to the best of our abilities, and our struggles parenting children who refuse to sleep. All right, guys, back to today's episode.

• 3:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make a good one, let alone a pretty great one, based on an amusement park ride. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with my co-host, Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what swashbuckling, rafter-stomping, semi-early aughts classic do you have for us today?

• 3:30Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Our buckles are getting swashed with 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean, or Caribbean.

• 3:37Lizzie Bassett?

  The Curse of the Black Pearl.

• 3:39Chris Winterbauer?

  The Curse of the Black Pearl. A late addition to the title, as we'll learn. Now, Lizzie, I'm assuming you had seen Pirates of the Caribbean, along with everybody else, back in the summer of 2003?

• 3:51Lizzie Bassett?

  You betcha, Chris. That would be because I was exclusively in love with Orlando Bloom. So of course I showed up for The Curse of the Black Pearl.

• 4:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, what did you think when you first saw it? And how did you feel upon re-watching it and knowing now that Orlando Bloom is newly single, having just split up with Katy Perry?

• 4:11Lizzie Bassett?

  David, watch out. No, I had a similar feeling that I had upon watching it at 13 years old, or however old I was, which is that Orlando Bloom is the worst part of this movie.

• 4:23Chris Winterbauer?

  We're not trying to be mean. He has to play the most boring character in this movie.

• 4:27Lizzie Bassett?

  He does. I actually think he does a fine job, but he is the least interesting part of this movie. And you know what? Credit to my 13 year old self. Even then I was like, he's hot, but I'm not that interested. I still loved him. Yeah, man, I loved this movie when it came out. I saw it an absolutely bajillion times, you know, when I was eighth grade, ninth grade. I loved it then. And to be totally honest with you, I loved it now. Upon rewatching it, it's great. It's really, really fun. I know it's long. There's one particular sequence where I was like, all right, we can wrap this up. I understand that you're impressed by the fact that they can hop in and out of the moonlight in their skeleton suits, but this doesn't need to be 45 minutes long. But otherwise, it's fantastic. It is really, really fun. It's still

• 5:11Lizzie Bassett?

  a surprise that this movie is good based on the IP. And yeah, I really enjoyed it. But actually, you know what? I should take back my statement that Orlando Bloom is the least interesting part of this movie. The one thing that changed for me between first watch and this watch was that I was no longer so enamored of Captain Jack Sparrow. Maybe that's because it has now been just done to death and it was something that felt sort of fresh when the movie came out. But I just thought he was a little boring, a bit rote, and I was kind of itching for him to get off the screen and for everybody else to get on there upon this watch, which was very different than what I remembered. Chris, what about you?

• 5:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I remember going to the theaters and thinking, there's no way this is going to be as good as I had already heard from some people. This movie's amazing. And I thought, that's ridiculous. This is a Disney Pirates movie. And I loved it. I saw it in theaters multiple times. The sight gag of Johnny Depp, Captain Jack Sparrow, riding his sinking ship into the harbor, remains one of my favorite sight gags of that era.

• 6:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 6:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I put it on, and I want to qualify this. I put it on shortly after getting back from the theater seeing 28 Years Later. And I didn't have a great experience rewatching it. I thought it felt a little slow. It didn't feel dynamic. I agree, Captain Jack Sparrow felt a little trite to me upon rewatching it. And then I realized that's completely unfair, because I had just had this amazing experience seeing 28 Years Later. In a theater with a bunch of people around me and it was so fun and I really loved it and it's so modern. And then I came home and I watched a movie that's clearly designed to be enjoyed with other people by myself.

• 6:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And so I took a couple of days and then I rewatched it and I tried to get in the right mindset for it and I enjoyed it a lot more. It doesn't quite hold up in the way that I remember it, but I appreciated so much about this movie from some of the performances. And I agree, I think Johnny Depp's performance, it feels overdone because we're watching what precipitated a whole run of performances. But as we'll discuss, it was very unique for the time.

• 7:06Lizzie Bassett?

  A hundred percent. I do also think something I didn't recognize because I was too young is how much of a pastiche this movie is.

• 7:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 7:14Lizzie Bassett?

  And how much it borrows from so many other movies. We just talked about this in last week's episode of Braveheart, this movie came up. But one thing that really struck me this time is how massively this borrows from the plot of The Last of the Mohicans. I don't know if you noticed that, but big time, particularly with the relationship between Commander Norrington and Elizabeth Swan. It's almost identical to the relationship between Madeline Stowe and the English commander in Last Mohicans, whose name is escaping me, who's wonderful. But literally like plot beat for plot beat extraordinarily similar, except, well, I won't say what I was gonna say. It's a big spoiler for Last Mohicans, but let's just say their engagement ends.

• 7:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Definitely a dynamic we've seen before, right? The well-suited betrothed.

• 8:00Lizzie Bassett?

  We have, but it really is very specific to this, in addition to a couple of other things that also mimicked it. I would bet you they pulled from that anyway.

• 8:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It wouldn't surprise me. This is very much a kitchen sink movie. And in that kitchen sink, we have some really, really fun things like Depp's performance. I think Keira Knightley's performance is really dynamic.

• 8:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Obviously, Geoffrey Rush, just having a great time. Always loved Geoffrey Rush.

• 8:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 8:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Great visual effects, great practical effects. It's incredibly long, as you mentioned, Lizzie. The story's convoluted and paper thin at the same time, but that's fine because it just whips you along.

• 8:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't care.

• 8:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And the fact that there is a story at all is a testament to the writers who put pen to page and brought this. Vaguely told, as you mentioned, Lizzie, Disney Ride to Life. Now, before we begin, I want to shout out some sources for today's episode. If you guys are interested, there is a lot on this movie out there. We're going to give you all the best parts, I hope, in about an hour and a half, but there's a lot more. So Bring Me That Horizon, The Making of Pirates of the Caribbean by Michael Singer. Disney War, yes, one of our favorite books, comes back by James B. Stewart. Johnny Depp, The Illustrated Biography by Nick Johnstone. Johnny Depp does the stick figure drawings. I'm just kidding. That would be a great book.

• 9:14Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 9:16Chris Winterbauer?

  An Epic at Sea, The Making of the Pirates of the Caribbean, and various interviews, articles, et cetera. One more piece of housekeeping. We are not going to be covering the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial in this episode because it takes place years and years and years after this film was made and released. We will get to it when we get to Aquaman or Aquaman 2, or perhaps the third Fantastic Beasts film, or if we get to the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean, or if they make a sixth one and we get there. So keep an ear out, but just know, we're not going to be talking about that today. Now, as always, the details. The Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl. Is the first in a series of five Pirates of the Caribbean movies, directed by Gore Verbinski,

• 9:58Chris Winterbauer?

  story by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beatty, and Jay Wolpert, screenplay by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer most notably, although many more, and of course, starring Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, Orlando Bloom as the stiff-as-a-board Will Turner, Keira Knightley as the plucky Elizabeth Swan, Geoffrey Rush as the scenery-chewing Captain Barbosa, and I will mention her now because she'll come up later, Zoe Saldana in an early role as Anna Maria.

• 10:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I also want to shout out Mackenzie Crook as one of Barbosa's henchmen with the fake eye. He's always really, really fun, and he's excellent in this.

• 10:38Chris Winterbauer?

  He's so good, and the slapstick energy between him and his partner in crime, or would be crime, Lee Ehrenberg, they make for such a fun comedic duo in this movie.

• 10:47Lizzie Bassett?

  They're wonderful.

• 10:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It was distributed by Walt Disney Pictures by way of their Buena Vista Pictures distribution arm. The INDB logline reads, "Blacksmith Will Turner teams up with eccentric pirate captain Jack Sparrow to save Elizabeth Swan, the governor's daughter, and his love from Jack's former pirate allies who are now undead." That is a complicated setup. It's like two protagonists, a weird backstory and antagonist, but basically the whole movie is just a chase sequence.

• 11:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 11:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So, the question remains, Lizzie, how did a studio on the losing end of the live-action box office battle, an eccentric actor, to say the least, known more for mechanical hands than peg legs, and a newly minted master of horror come together to breathe life into the waterlogged pirate genre? And what went wrong? Quite a bit. Now, we did put out a primer, primer, primer, primer on pirates. If you guys are interested, if you would like to learn more about the backstory of pirates, how they were eventually mutated into the form that we began to experience on screen, and the golden age of pirates, the 30s to the 50s, please give that a listen. But we're going to begin with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney. Lizzie, had

• 12:03Chris Winterbauer?

  you ever, or have you ever been, on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride?

• 12:08Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't think so, because I have never been to Disneyland. I've only been to Disney World. I don't know if they have one there.

• 12:13Chris Winterbauer?

  They do.

• 12:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, well, I don't think I went on it. I think I went on Splash Mountain about 500 times.

• 12:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Got it. Well, I have been on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, once. I believe it was back in 1996, but the ride is much, much older than that. Walt Disney himself came up with the idea for a pirate-themed attraction back in the late 1950s. But his original idea was not a ride at all. Instead, he wanted to make the extremely exciting, pirate-themed walk-through wax museum.

• 12:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Not quite as fun, but he put his team to work. Imagineer Mark Davis was one of the first to get to work on the concept art for the new Pirates attraction. Fun fact, Mark Davis got his start at Disney as an apprentice animator for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. By this point, Pirates were a familiar concept for Disney. In fact, their first live-action feature was Treasure Island, which was released in 1950 and is an adaptation of the classic novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Then in 1953, Lizzie, they had an animated film which features a notorious pirate.

• 13:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Peter Pan.

• 13:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Peter Pan, with Captain Hook. A couple of years after that, when Disneyland first opened in Anaheim, California, it featured a replica of Hook's ship, the Jolly Roger. But Walt Disney was also playing with the idea of creating a New Orleans French district, and the history of the French Quarter is actually strongly associated with pirates.

• 13:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 13:34Chris Winterbauer?

  But Mark Davis said that he had a hard time getting Walt to actually look at his early designs of the Pirates walking museum, and that's because Walt was extremely busy prepping for the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York, where Disney was debuting a bunch of new attractions. One of them was called Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, which featured him getting assassinated. I'm just kidding. Which featured a life-size President Lincoln who could talk, gesture, stand up, and sit down. It showcased Disney's latest robotics technology called Audioanimatronics.

• 14:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't want that. I don't want animatronic President Lincoln just standing up and sitting down in front of me.

• 14:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I want to see it, but I want to see Cole Escola as Mary Todd Lincoln next to him doing an interactive ride. Equally important to our story, if not more important, was what would become arguably the most famous boat ride in the world: It's a Small World. It's a Small World was very innovative. So It's a Small World used a water trough system that created currents to move a whopping 3,000 passengers through the ride per hour. And you know what's great about getting 3,000 passengers through your ride per hour?

• 14:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, money, a lot of money.

• 14:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Money! Cha-ching! A walk-through museum would turn over maybe 500 guests per hour, and it would create a more fractured experience. The story, the guests could pick what they're looking at and walk through at their own pace. They might miss things. So after the fair, Walt scraps the wax museum and he decides to make a boat ride, which makes perfect sense for pirates, to move passengers through separate scenes of full audio animatronic pirates. It's also around this time that Disney decides that this pirate attraction should be in a bigger area. And so Mark Davis needed to make a whole lot more pirates, and he came up with the idea of adding skeleton pirates, simply because he needed to film more space. I also want to note a couple other Disney legends that worked on the ride.

• 15:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Xavier Atencio, who wrote the script, so all of the dialogue and the scenes, and then composer George Burns, who created the very famous song Yo Ho, A Pirate's Life For Me, which was created for the ride.

• 15:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I did not know that. I assumed it was created by actual pirates.

• 15:43Chris Winterbauer?

  No, the pirates were busy dealing with scurvy. They couldn't write it. So on March 18th, 1967, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride finally opened to the public at Disneyland. Three and a half months later, Walt Disney passed away of lung cancer. This was actually the last Disneyland attraction that he oversaw before he died. Let's walk through a quick summary of how this ride progresses. You can watch it online, or you can go to Disneyland, too. So passengers board their boats in Lafitte Landing. They drift through a Louisiana bayou at night. Just before the first drop, they pass under a talking skull that says, "It'd be too late to intercourse, matey."

• 16:24Chris Winterbauer?

  They then drop into dark caverns, go past scenes of skeleton pirates, including one pirate drinking wine, which just passes through his open chest.

• 16:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Cool.

• 16:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Also a moment in the film. Another sitting on top of a massive pile of gold treasure, drift past a pirate ship firing its cannons at a fort across the water and a village. And this is where things get interesting, where more pirates are threatening to drown the mayor if he doesn't reveal where the treasure is. And then things really take a turn where the pirates begin auctioning off women to be their brides. The women are all tied together. There's some light fat shaming of one woman, and the men are all shouting, "We wants the redhead" at one another. Okay. Yeah, I don't think I was on this ride. Then pirates chasing women around the village, except the larger woman, who is apparently chasing the pirates, and one pirate holding the petticoat of a woman who is hiding in a barrel nearby.

• 17:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And meanwhile, a trio of pirates float by, singing Yo Ho, A Pirate's Life For Me. And then there's more pirates singing, completely drunk, celebrating as they burn down the village. And then finally, you go past some pirates locked in jail cells, trying to bribe a dog holding a set of keys in its mouth. Also in the movie. The ride was a hit. A huge hit. Such a hit that four years later, when Disney opened The Magic Kingdom in Florida, guests were extremely disappointed that there was no Pirates Ride here. It turns out, before he passed away, Walt Disney had said, "We shouldn't do this in Florida, because it's so close to the Caribbean, nobody's gonna be interested in it." He was wrong. The guests complained to guest relations. They said, "We want our Pirates of the Caribbean in Florida."

• 18:03Chris Winterbauer?

  So Disney fast-tracks a Florida version of the ride. It opens two years later. A decade later, in 1983, Pirates was an original ride at the opening of Tokyo Disneyland, and they got a very weird idea of what American culture is like. And then it opened in Disneyland Paris, which, by the way, was originally called Euro Disney, which is a much better name. I remember that. Apparently, they changed it from Euro Disney, because it would be like calling it Dollar Disney in America, and Europeans were like... That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, no. Although Disney is the East India Trading Company of the world now, Europeans were confused by the name. So now it's Disneyland Paris. And that opened in 1992. So, speaking of the 90s, meanwhile, back in Burbank, Disney Studios is in the midst of what is commonly referred to as, Lizzie... The Disney Renaissance.

• 18:48Chris Winterbauer?

  The Disney Renaissance. There'd been a dark period after Walt died. The company had struggled to find its footing, but things turned around in the mid 80s, when new leadership came over from Paramount Pictures by way of Michael Eisner. So he became the CEO and Chairman of the Walt Disney Company, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the hero of our Shrek story, became the Chairman of Walt Disney Studios. And it's under their leadership that they start pumping out what are referred to as kind of the modern classics of Disney, starting with The Little Mermaid in 1989. Love The Little Mermaid. It's great. And in 92, they're gearing up to release Aladdin. And Aladdin, like so many animated films, has four credited screenwriters, but we're gonna focus on two of them. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio.

• 19:30Chris Winterbauer?

  So Aladdin was their second produced film after 1989's Little Monsters. And Aladdin was gonna be a big hit.

• 19:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And so they had a fresh idea for their next project. A Gothic swashbuckler about cursed pirates. And, Lizzie, this seems like a no-brainer. A hugely successful, internationally-recognized ride, adapted by two of the screenwriters behind what would become a $500-million Oscar-winning animated hit film.

• 19:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, this just seems like greenlighting. We'll just print the money. But according to Elliott, "We pitched it at Disney as a tie-in to Pirates of the Caribbean, and at the time, Disney said, 'No, I don't think so.'" Rossio expanded upon this and later said that Disney essentially said, quote, "Do a film based on the ride? That's insane." End quote. It may have been an insane idea, but it was not, as it would turn out, an original idea, because a year earlier, somebody else had come up with a very similar version of that exact same idea. 19-year-old Stuart Beatty was an Australian exchange student at Oregon State University. When he was there, he wrote two spec scripts, both of which would be made into feature films,

• 20:44Chris Winterbauer?

  one which was made into a movie released in 2004. It was inspired by Beatty's first experience catching a cab by himself when he started thinking, "Man, I could be some homicidal maniac sitting back here, and here we are, talking like best mates, and you've got your back to me." Any movie about a cab driver and a psychopathic assassin he drives around all night?

• 21:04Lizzie Bassett?

  No. This baby is bribing my brain. What is it?

• 21:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Collateral.

• 21:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Collateral. I knew it.

• 21:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx. That was on the tip of her tongue, guys.

• 21:13Lizzie Bassett?

  It wasn't anywhere near it.

• 21:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the idea for his second screenplay came to him while playing Catch. Quote, "I was told to freeze me with a friend of mine in Oregon, and we were like, 'Let's make a movie.'" Great. What hasn't been done in a while? Pirates. Oh, great. That hasn't been done in ages. And so he decided to write a Pirates movie, but- Pirates were out of style for a reason. As we discussed in the primer, the golden age of pirates was the 30s to the 50s. By the 80s, they're considered outdated. These movies are also very expensive and difficult to shoot.

• 21:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, there's water.

• 21:44Chris Winterbauer?

  There's water, there's guns, it's a period piece, blah, blah, blah. There's kind of a second wave of twists on the pirate genre. You've got things like Hook and Muppets: Treasure Island. There's some straight to video and TV movies, but the general consensus is audiences don't want these movies. And in 1995, that was proven with Cutthroat Island.

• 22:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Which we will certainly cover at some point.

• 22:04Chris Winterbauer?

  We will definitely cover. Rennie Harland directed, Gina Davis starring film that was so miserably received that Carol Co. Pictures effectively went out of business. And so, the pirate genre was considered completely toxic. But Stuart Beatty didn't know that because he wasn't in Hollywood at the time. So, he decides to incorporate elements of the Disney ride and he titles his script, "Quest of the Caribbean."

• 22:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 22:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Eh, not the best name, that's okay. Over the next several years, he shops it around Hollywood. Everybody says, "Kid, this is gonna cost $100 million." Nobody wants to make it. And it's around this time, Lizzie, that people started to finally complain about that Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

• 22:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it all the raping and pillaging?

• 22:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, what was past as quaint and family-friendly in the late 60s was beginning to be seen as a bit misogynistic in the late 90s. And so Disney came up with a really sophisticated solve. They put food in the women's hands, so they could say that the pirates were chasing them for the food.

• 23:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Not for their bodies, great.

• 23:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. They're just hungry pirates. They're just hungry.

• 23:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 23:20Speaker 02

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

• 23:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Around this time, Disney starts to break into the business of turning unexpected IP into feature films, namely their rides. So, they released their first movie based on a ride. Have you seen Tower of Terror, starring Steve Guttenberg and a 15-year-old Kirsten Dunst?

• 24:14Lizzie Bassett?

  I have not.

• 24:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Nor have I. It seems like Disney wasn't particularly proud of Tower of Terror, because it is not available on Disney+ and I believe the only place you can find it online is a ripped copy on YouTube, not unlike The Sweatbox, that amazing documentary about the Emperor's new groove that we talked about. So, not a great start.

• 24:31Lizzie Bassett?

  We are not condoning watching these ripped things on YouTube.

• 24:34Chris Winterbauer?

  No, but should you want to, go ahead to YouTube. The reviews were mixed. Three years later, they released a movie I did see in theaters, Mission to Mars.

• 24:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I saw that one as well.

• 24:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Mission to Mars was technically their first theatrical feature based on a ride, and it owns the ignominious distinction of being the second-best Mars movie released that year behind The Absolutely Bananas: Red Planet, which is a movie-

• 24:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I've also seen.

• 24:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. That movie's best known for, I believe, Tom Sizemore and Val Kilmer wanting to murder each other during the production. Now, Mission to Mars was actually shut down as a ride in 1993, but it was given a $100 million budget. Brian De Palma directed it. It starred Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, and Don Cheadle, but it was a big-time plopper. $110 million, not well-received critically, but Disney says, "You know what? We're gonna take another swing at the live-action genre. Not with Pirates, Lizzy. With The Country Bears." I don't know if you remember this one. It's based on the Disney attraction The Country Bear Jamboree about a singing family of bears.

• 25:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, nope. I missed this one as well.

• 25:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, yeah. It didn't do great, as we'll get to. So, Disney Vice President of Production Brigham Taylor had pitched The Country Bears after visiting the ride with his family. They then greenlit another ride-based movie, The Haunted Mansion, and this is when Taylor toyed with the idea of making a cheap, direct-to-video version of Pirates of the Caribbean. And so, this starts to get developed internally at Disney.

• 26:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Here's what's strange. Of all of the rides that you just mentioned, the one that makes the most sense as a narrative, live-action movie is Pirates of the Caribbean, not The Bear Jamboree.

• 26:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't understand the logic here.

• 26:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Certainly with Tower of Terror and the Country Bears, they would be much cheaper.

• 26:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 26:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Mission to Mars, I can't explain. I'm wondering.

• 26:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Makes no sense.

• 26:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't fully understand it. I think science fiction was popular at the time. If you look around the time of Mission to Mars, you have things like The Matrix, obviously. Minority Report would be shortly after. I think that the combination of it's prohibitively expensive and this genre is considered too risky are what's holding Pirates of the Caribbean back. But Taylor gets a draft penned by Jay Wolpert, who I think is kind of an in-house writer at this point. And he had also written The Count of Monte Cristo for Touchstone Pictures, which was owned by Disney.

• 26:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Starring JC?

• 26:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, Jesus Christ Jim Caviezel. So the new co-chair of Disney Studios, a man named Dick Cook, decided that it was time to get a producer on this project. So Pirates of the Caribbean is gonna happen. We need a producer. And Lizzie, if you want a big budget, band of miscreants, unwieldy vessels, a loose relationship to historical accuracy, and the exploitation of female characters carrying food, you need Jerry Bruckheimer.

• 27:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Call him up. He's available.

• 27:24Chris Winterbauer?

  And yeah, I did just reference Con Air, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and Coyote Ugly in that order. So you guys can check that out.

• 27:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. Pearl Harbor, by the way, written by last week's screenwriter, Randall Wallace.

• 27:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Again, the truth is one thing, and then there's Randall Wallace's truth. Now, Dick Cook gives Bruckheimer an amazing pitch. He says, "You won't be excited, but take a look." And that's it. Cook was right. Bruckheimer was not excited. He read the script. He said, "The script was basically a by-the-numbers pirate movie that I didn't think anybody was interested in seeing." And that's when Stuart Beatty comes back into the picture. So as Stuart Beatty later put it, "That's when they remembered the crazy Australian guy who kept saying for all these years to do it. And by that time, I had sold the script collateral. And so they were like, okay, well, DreamWorks trusts him. Maybe we can trust him too. And so they brought me in and they're like, what do you think?

• 28:19Chris Winterbauer?

  And I said, well, you know what I think. I've been saying this for 10 years. Let me do a draft. Let me show you what this can be. And six weeks later, I had to give them a first draft and they greenlit it." So the movie was greenlit off of Stuart Beatty's draft. But after a couple of drafts, Disney said, we need a pro. We need two pros. We need the guys who had just co-written Shrek, Ted Elliott and Terry Rosio.

• 28:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Absolute money machines.

• 28:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, my God, money machines. And I do want to point out, at this point, Disney has poached three writers from DreamWorks purchased or DreamWorks distributed pictures. And Disney did not like DreamWorks, as we discussed.

• 28:57Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 28:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Or DreamWorks did not like Disney and vice versa. Now Elliott had actually written a pirate movie, which was Disney's 2002 released Treasure Planet.

• 29:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 29:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think Treasure Planet had come out at this point, but the movie's a lot of fun. I will say, though, it was a commercial flop. So I wonder if Treasure Planet had been released earlier, if it would have negatively impacted the development of Pirates of the Caribbean.

• 29:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's very close to the actual release of this.

• 29:21Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. Yeah. So it's by the time Treasure Planet came out, this was well into development and maybe even pre-production. Now, as Beatty put it, the big joke was like Disney kept saying they didn't want ghost pirates. Even though there were skeletons in the ride, Disney said, it's like, you can't do a hat on a hat. Right? You can't do pirates and ghosts.

• 29:41Lizzie Bassett?

  They said, we're gonna put a pirate hat on top of the hat.

• 29:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And so then Ted Elliott and Terry Rosio come in and they go, ghost pirates. And Disney goes, yes, great, great, great. Let's do it.

• 29:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Everybody's on cocaine now.

• 29:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And Beatty makes the joke. And Beatty's very polite in his interviews, but my sister made the point that I think he felt like he got a little bit screwed and squeezed. Like, he had been the one beating this drum for 10 years.

• 30:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 30:05Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he was whisked away pretty quickly.

• 30:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Although, to be fair, we now know that Elliott and Roso pitched it even earlier.

• 30:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and so the other big joke was that Rosio and Elliott had pitched the supernatural element cursed pirates 10 years earlier, and Disney hadn't gone for it then. So again, there's only so many things you can do with pirates. So Bruckheimer has said that it was that supernatural bit that gave the movie the, quote, "little edge that made me think this was something really special."

• 30:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's true.

• 30:33Chris Winterbauer?

  He knew he'd have to convince Dick Cook, who wanted a PG movie, that they could do this as PG 13. Up until this point, Disney had only ever released PG movies. I think in part because PG 13 wasn't invented until the 1980s. And then, once it was invented, PG 13 and R were reserved for Disney's distribution label, Touchstone Pictures. So Tombstone was Touchstone, for example.

• 30:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I will say, this is pretty squarely PG 13. That is one thing that struck me about this time, is I was like, oh, they're murdering people, left and right. They're slit in throats.

• 31:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Honestly, it's kind of great gateway horror, I think.

• 31:11Lizzie Bassett?

  It is, yeah.

• 31:12Chris Winterbauer?

  So as Bruckheimer told Cook, "I don't think your audiences want to see a PG movie of this, but I promise you, it won't be an R." And we pitched him the story, and he said, "Go make it."

• 31:23Lizzie Bassett?

  To be fair, it doesn't sound like the ride where the pirates are trying to either rape or eat the women's food was PG either. So, source material.

• 31:33Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it was until the 90s, right? Tastes changed.

• 31:37Lizzie Bassett?

  You're right. That was fine. That would have been G in 1965.

• 31:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Now, Bruckheimer immediately reached out to his first choice for Captain Jack Sparrow. Lizzie, any guesses as to who his first choice was?

• 31:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Can I get a hint?

• 31:51Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a trick question.

• 31:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it Johnny Depp?

• 31:53Chris Winterbauer?

  It's Johnny Depp.

• 31:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 31:55Chris Winterbauer?

  It was his first choice. In fact, Terry Roscio said later that they were specifically writing the script to woo Johnny Depp to the film.

• 32:02Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes sense. I mean, it feels like it's written for him, to be honest.

• 32:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, there are other names that have been leaked by other sources, and it's possible that executives at Disney, for example, were considering other people. It's also entirely possible that Bruckheimer was in the instance that Johnny Depp would be unavailable, or that he would turn down the film.

• 32:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it would be stupid not to have other people in mind.

• 32:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course. So I'll read you these names. I think a couple actually make a lot of sense. Michael Keaton.

• 32:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 32:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Christopher Walken. I think he's just too old, but he actually would have been great when he was younger.

• 32:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah, yeah, maybe.

• 32:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Jim Carrey.

• 32:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, sure.

• 32:38Chris Winterbauer?

  He's makes the most sense to me. And Matthew McConaughey.

• 32:42Lizzie Bassett?

  It also makes sense. It's a more laid back Jack Sparrow, but yeah, it works.

• 32:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Back when Australian Stuart Beatty was writing his version of the script, he had envisioned an Australian pirate. Lizzie, any Jax from Australia that you can think?

• 32:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah, ooh, mm, the greatest showman himself, Hugh Jackman.

• 33:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Hugh Jackman?

• 33:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, he would have been great.

• 33:06Chris Winterbauer?

  He would have been great. He was famous in Australia and his breakout role had come in 2000 with Wolverine and X-Men. But Disney didn't think he was big enough yet. Depp had obviously been huge for over a decade.

• 33:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, he maybe wasn't big enough in terms of career. I think he was arguably too big physically. It may have not been as fun. He would have been towering over everybody, which I think doesn't quite work with Jack Sparrow.

• 33:31Chris Winterbauer?

  He's definitely that tall. It's funny, if you go back and look at him as Wolverine in the first X-Men.

• 33:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he just looks like a normal, large man there. He hasn't gotten into the...

• 33:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he was pretty thin relative to how he is now.

• 33:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's a big boy.

• 33:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, he looks great. He's got 70,000 abs.

• 33:49Lizzie Bassett?

  This is a double recording day for us.

• 33:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Hugh Jackman, big boy. Now, Bruckheimer really wanted a quote "edgy actor" to pair with this edgy new story idea. He wanted to set Pirates apart from the softer ride-based movies like The Country Bears, which was going to be released that summer. So, he wanted Pirates to be a movie that adults and teenagers would enjoy. And Depp's the perfect fit. Like, he's got this resume of roles in offbeat and pretty adult movies. There's Crybaby, Edward Scissorhands, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Chocolat, and his last movie before Pirates, 2001's Blow.

• 34:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:28Chris Winterbauer?

  He arguably plays a bit of a pirate as a drug trafficker.

• 34:33Lizzie Bassett?

  True.

• 34:34Chris Winterbauer?

  So, fun fact, around the same time that he was in talks for Pirates, he also signed on to play the creator of Peter Pan in Finding Neverland.

• 34:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 34:41Chris Winterbauer?

  So, we get a bit of a double pirate thing here. So, Bruckheimer claims that he flew to France, where he met with Depp and they had lunch for five hours, drank several bottles of wine.

• 34:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I bet they did.

• 34:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And at the end of the lunch, Depp said, "I'll do it." But other sources suggest that Depp didn't fully commit until after a director signed on. And I tend to think that both of these things could be true. He probably said, "I'll do it," and then they sent him a contract and he said...

• 35:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's seven bottles of wine deep and he's like, "I don't remember this lunch."

• 35:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So, Disney... He wants Depp for his pirate-like persona. But Depp is a little hesitant to work for Disney because Disney represents everything that he isn't.

• 35:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 35:15Chris Winterbauer?

  So Disney is interested, but not necessarily committed. And Bruckheimer goes off to find a director who can handle a big-budget, high-risk production of a new version of a dead genre that straddles horror and family fun. It's a narrow target. Enter Gore Verbinski. So Gore was born Gregor Verbinski in Tennessee, but grew up in La Jolla. Before becoming a director, he was a punk rock guitarist.

• 35:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, cool.

• 35:42Chris Winterbauer?

  He then transitioned to directing music videos before taking on a project for Budweiser that would change the course of his career. Lizzie, I would like to play you the very famous Budweiser commercial.

• 35:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it the frogs? I love the frogs. Let me see it.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Bud.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  Bud. Wise Bud.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Bud. Wise. Bud. Er. Bud. Wise. Bud. Er. Wise Bud. Bud. Wise. Er. Bud. Wise. Bud. Wise. Bud. Wise.

• 36:26Chris Winterbauer?

  That's it. That's the whole commercial. It's just a bunch of frogs saying Budweiser.

• 36:30Lizzie Bassett?

  That's amazing. I don't know why it makes me want a Budweiser.

• 36:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Jesse said that the commercial actually sucks. Jesse, it was 1995. None of us knew what was good then.

• 36:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Listen, does it make any sense? No. Does it make me want to go down to the bayou, buy some frogs and have a Bud? Yeah, it does. It does.

• 36:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I'd want a drink of Budweiser with some frogs. It totally works.

• 36:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I know it's not good, but I want to.

• 36:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It also featured frogs made by Stan Winston Studio.

• 36:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 36:56Chris Winterbauer?

  The ad was a massive success. It turned into a five-year-long ad campaign, and Verbinski transitions into directing feature films. Now, he was attached to a different movie first, Con Air.

• 37:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 37:08Chris Winterbauer?

  One of my secret favorites.

• 37:10Lizzie Bassett?

  A classic. I gotta bring my daughter, Miss Bunny.

• 37:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Such a weird movie. I love it so much. That's how he met Jerry Bruckheimer in the first place. That job ended up going to director Simon West, so Verbinski moves on to his debut feature, Mouse Hunt, which I saw in theaters, released in 1997, which the BBC described as a, quote, "anarchic comedy." And it makes a lot of sense that he would eventually direct Pirates. This is another kind of paper-thin slapstick ride of a movie. It stars Nathan Lane and Lee Evans, and it is literally about two men trying to hunt down a mouse in their house. He was then attached to direct Disney's Mission to Mars.

• 37:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh oh.

• 37:49Chris Winterbauer?

  But he left due to, quote, "creative differences," probably not wanting to go to Mars and learn that aliens had created the world. He was also temporarily attached to direct Catch Me If You Can.

• 38:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 38:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Which, of course, Spielberg would end up directing.

• 38:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Great movie.

• 38:03Chris Winterbauer?

  So his second feature was 2001's The Mexican, starring the Americans Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt. The title refers to a pistol. The movie was not very well-reviewed, and while it wasn't a total flop financially, it underperformed drastically compared to what people thought it should do, given the star power of Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts.

• 38:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Who I imagine were quite expensive.

• 38:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So Verbinski's next project would eventually revive his reputation, and that's, of course, the seminal horror adaptation, The Ring, which started the J-horror craze in the United States. It's an adaptation of the Japanese horror film, Ringu, and I think it is a great example of a remake that's close to the quality of the original. I think Ringu and The Ring are both fantastic movies.

• 38:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Also interesting that he went back to people who were not big names for The Ring, and it's very effective.

• 38:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, Naomi Watts and Brian Cox, obviously, and Martin Henderson of the fantastic motorcycle movie, Tork. So Bruckheimer, even though The Ring had not been released yet at this point, knew that Verbinski would be a good fit. In fact, a perfect fit. He had a wide breadth of experience that included practical effects.

• 39:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 39:11Chris Winterbauer?

  The Budweiser commercial. VFX, so both practical and VFX for Mouse Hunt, slapstick comedy, action, and horror.

• 39:19Lizzie Bassett?

  VFX for The Ring.

• 39:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. He's a perfect combination of skills for Pirates of the Caribbean. Verbinski said what everybody else was saying. I thought the pirate genre was extinct. But he was intrigued. He really liked a couple of aspects of this project. One, Johnny Depp. I think it's a great opportunity to work with one of the biggest stars. Two, it's Jerry Bruckheimer. He's gonna have a lot of money. And three, he liked that it was a really big risk. Verbinski has a lot of quotes that he basically is like, this is either gonna make my career or end it. I think that he had this adrenaline junkie quality to him.

• 39:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, it's a big project to take on. It's exciting.

• 39:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So this is when Johnny Depp officially comes on to the project. Johnny Depp likes that this project could be risky, because that is the opposite of Disney. So Verbinski goes to meet him in London, and Depp, again, ever the troublemaker, apparently asks him, what can we do that will really freak the studio out? But Verbinski, instead of trying to push him away from that, encourages him. He says pirates are gross and disgusting. And Depp says, yeah, that's great. I could play the whole part without a nose. End quote. So apparently, the idea was that Jack Sparrow's nose had been cut off during a sword fight, and then it had been sewn back on, turned blue. And then, his only real fear is apparently getting common cold

• 40:36Chris Winterbauer?

  or pepper in his nose, because that would make him sneeze, and that would really hurt. Verbinski knew they would never do this, but Johnny Depp apparently said, you know, hey, I really want to do this. And Verbinski said, see how liberating this is? This could be the end of our careers, but let's have fun. End quote. So in June of 2002, Johnny Depp officially signed on to either make something that would end their careers or propel them into superstardom. Now, Lizzie, there's one little issue at this point. And that is, Michael Eisner is going to shut this movie down. From the get-go, he had major doubts about reviving the pirate genre, about using expensive CGI to make the pirates undead.

• 41:18Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Disney War, "Eisner had groaned when Cook presented him with the notion of a $120 million period costume drama on the high seas, a recipe for disaster. Every recent pirate movie had failed. Why would this be any different? Eisner rejected the idea out of hand. Meanwhile, the producers were doing their best to keep the budget down. So they were developing the story and they come up with this idea that they want sword fighting skeletons. And I definitely think this is both part of the ride and also an homage to Jason and the Argonauts, right?

• 41:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 41:54Chris Winterbauer?

  So the idea becomes, okay, we still want to see the actors' faces. So let's do it like Lady Hawk, pirates by day, skeletons by night. But the producers are saying, no way, there's a lot of night scenes. CGI is expensive. We can't have them as skeletons for every night. So Terry Roscio, and maybe Ted Elliott, but I only saw Terry's name here, comes up with an idea. What if the pirates are skeletons at night, but only when the moon comes out? Can we get away with that? They loved it. Yes, when the budget gets tight, we just put a cloud in front of the moon.

• 42:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 42:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's what we did. What a smart idea.

• 42:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Very smart.

• 42:33Speaker 02

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

• 43:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, there were forces beyond their control that were making matters worse. In July of 2002, Lizzie, The Country Bears was finally released. Was it now? It was. It cost $35 million to make, and it grossed $18 million. The San Francisco Chronicle called it "nearly unbearable," to which I say, "still bearable." Oh. Only nearly. They could have leaned all the way into that pun. Bruckheimer and Verbinski, I think, know that the only way to keep this thing going is if they force it to keep going. They just have to keep going until somebody actually pulls the plug. So they continue casting. Next up, the role of Captain Barbosa. Now, according to some secondary sources, but we could not get a primary source on this, Robert De Niro was offered the role first. Okay, I could see it.

• 43:55Chris Winterbauer?

  But he turned it down because he didn't think the movie would do well at the box office. So the part went to Australian actor Geoffrey Rush, who had recently been nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Marquis de Sade in Quills with Kate Winslet back in 2001. One of the secondary sources implied that De Niro took his role in the movie Stardust, in which he plays a bit of a pirate, because he had passed on this role and felt like, Interesting. "Damn it, I missed the money train. I need to get on the next one." And Stardust didn't do as well, although I really liked that movie. Now, Rush really believed in this project, and he was working with a young actor named Orlando Bloom on a movie called Ned Kelly. When Disney reached out to Bloom... Don't worry, I watched that too. Oh, you did?

• 44:37Chris Winterbauer?

  About the role of Will Turner. And now, of course, Bruckheimer had cast Bloom in Black Hawk Down, and claims that he had talked to him about playing Will Turner way back then. But Bloom said he wasn't interested. Who wants to do a movie about a Disney pirate ride? You know, pirates haven't worked. But Rush encouraged him to take the opportunity seriously. And then, when Bloom learned that he'd be opposite Johnny Depp, I think that definitely didn't hurt. He must have been a pretty hot ticket at that point, because he was coming off of Lord of the Rings. That's exactly right. So Bruckheimer has said he felt that they were lucky to get him, because this was within a year of Bloom exploding off of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Oh, yeah. Which had become an enormous international success.

• 45:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and he was like, the person that came out of this, that teenage girls everywhere were absolutely in love with. Absolutely. They should have been in love with Vigo, but they were in love with Orlando. I actually feel like the boys were in love with Vigo and the girls were in love with Orlando. Why can't we have both? We can have both. Other actors considered Jude Law makes a lot of sense.

• 45:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 45:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Heath Ledger.

• 45:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I think could have been a good Jack Sparrow.

• 45:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Definitely, definitely could have been a good Jack Sparrow. Would have been younger.

• 45:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Ewan McGregor.

• 45:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, also wonderful.

• 45:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Tobey Maguire.

• 45:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean.

• 45:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Spider-Man. I could see it. I don't know if he does accents, but sure. And Christian Bale.

• 46:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 46:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Or as Jack Sparrow. Christian Bale's so good. Christian Bale could do anything. Also, a very young Tom Hiddleston.

• 46:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 46:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Who says that he bombed the audition because he was completely hungover.

• 46:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he would have been great too. Any of those would have been good.

• 46:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Somebody else who thought they bombed their audition, Keira Knightley. She says that it went horrifically and she was only 17.

• 46:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, she's so young. She does not look 17.

• 46:25Chris Winterbauer?

  She is also 17 in Love Actually, which is really weird.

• 46:29Lizzie Bassett?

  She's gotta be 16 in Bend It Like Beckham, which blew my mind.

• 46:32Chris Winterbauer?

  I think she is. The next day after her audition, she gets a call and she says she goes to LA to meet Gore Verbinski and then New York to meet Jerry Bruckheimer. Knightley said of the meeting, quote, "I'd only packed a small bag when I went over to make it because I was convinced they were going to fire me. And I actually went for that audition and I was angry at my agent for sending me to it because I was doing exams at school. I thought there's no way I'm going to get this. This isn't gonna happen. And obviously, because I was so pissed off when I turned up, they were like, wow, she's got real attitude." And that's why it worked.

• 47:02Lizzie Bassett?

  She's great. I really like her in this. I don't think I appreciated her when I was younger watching this, but I think she really holds it down.

• 47:10Chris Winterbauer?

  She does. She's also said that she was very upset that she didn't get to do a sword fight in the first film. Every time she tries to grab a sword, it eludes her. For example, she grabs the two off the mantle. And so she insisted in the follow-up films that she be able to sword fight. And she was allowed to sword fight and she's very proud of her sword fighting.

• 47:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 47:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Even though she'd had Bennett like Beckham, she'd also had a minor part in Star Wars as one of Queen Amidala's body doubles. Vravinsky said she was basically an unknown to him, but he decides to roll the dice. And he said that once they started filming, he was blown away by her, which doesn't surprise me. I think she matches Depp, in my opinion, for spunk and attitude.

• 47:46Lizzie Bassett?

  A hundred percent. For her to be that young is really wild. I mean, the second she shows up, she feels like an enduring movie star, to be honest, more than Orlando Bloom does, which is

• 47:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I think so too.

• 47:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Also hard to do because he was also a big deal at that point.

• 48:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. One more note on casting, just because it's a great quote. Brian Cox, who had of course been in The Ring, "My wife was never meant to have a child." With Kor Vravinsky, was one of several actors considered for Governor Weatherby Swan, which is a role that would go to Jonathan Pryce.

• 48:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 48:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And he wrote in his memoir that he turned his nose up at the part. Quote, and I wish I could get Brian Cox to read this because it would be so funny. "It would have been a money spinner, but of all the parts in that film, it was the most thankless true."

• 48:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 48:34Chris Winterbauer?

  "Plus, I would have ended up doing it for film after film, meaning the sequels, and missed out on all the other nice things I've done." Another, he could have stopped. He could have stopped.

• 48:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, he never does.

• 48:43Chris Winterbauer?

  He could have stopped.

• 48:44Lizzie Bassett?

  He never does.

• 48:45Chris Winterbauer?

  And bless him. Another thing with Pirates of the Caribbean is that it's very much the Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow show. And Depp, personable though I'm sure he is, is so overblown, so overrated. I mean, Edward Scissorhands, let's face it. If you come on with hands like that and a pale scarred face makeup, you don't have to do anything. And he didn't. And subsequently, he's done even less. But people love him, or they did love him. They don't love him so much these days, of course.

• 49:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, keep going. Keep going, Brian.

• 49:15Chris Winterbauer?

  If Johnny Depp went for Jack Sparrow now, they'd give it to Brandon Gleason. I just, Brandon Gleason catching strays there at the end. I don't even know if it's a compliment or an insult.

• 49:24Lizzie Bassett?

  No one knows. He would have been fun.

• 49:26Chris Winterbauer?

  God bless.

• 49:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Good lord.

• 49:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Frank, he would have been like, go marry him, don't marry him. You think I care, you damn children?

• 49:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't care.

• 49:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So funny.

• 49:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. By the way, Jonathan Price is great. It is a thankless role and he brings a lot of sort of sweetness to it, I think.

• 49:39Chris Winterbauer?

  He does. So let's get back to the budget. Bruckheimer is not going to let Eisner kill this movie. Literally, he just called him again and again and again and again, until Eisner finally agreed to meet him. Eisner comes into the meeting fully intending to kill the movie. But Bruckheimer was prepared. He has storyboards and drawings of all the major scenes and he just walks Eisner through the whole movie. And Eisner says, I love it, but why does it have to cost so much? And Bruckheimer counters. Your competition is spending $150 million a film. This may have been a bit of an exaggeration in looking at the movies that he's referencing,

• 50:23Chris Winterbauer?

  but it's definitely directionally correct. You had Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, even Austin Powers. Meanwhile, Sony has Spider-Man, Men in Black, 20th Century Fox has Star Wars and X-Men, and Disney has The Country Bears.

• 50:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 50:41Chris Winterbauer?

  So Eisner gives in. But, and this is important to remember, because The Country Bears was fresh in his mind, he tells Bruckheimer, let's move this away from the park. So the top-down message is loud and clear. Pirates needs to actually be different from the ride-based movies that came before it. And it would be, largely because Johnny Depp was determined to make sure that Pirates was more a Johnny Depp movie than it was a Disney movie. So Johnny Depp insisted that the first read-through not be held at Disney, where it traditionally would take place, probably at a reasonable hour in a producer's office. Instead, it was held in a windowless nightclub called The Viper Room

• 51:23Chris Winterbauer?

  in West Hollywood at 8:30 a.m. It reeked of cigarettes and alcohol. And I just would have loved to been on the wall as the, like, nice Disney executives come into The Viper Room with Johnny Depp to read this script. It was certainly a strange location for a read-through. It was also where River Phoenix overdosed and passed away. And Johnny Depp was a co-owner of The Viper Room, and I believe had been present at River Phoenix's passing.

• 51:51Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. It was a strange Hollywood landmark and certainly a strange place for a read-through of this movie.

• 51:57Chris Winterbauer?

  But one of the things that really helps Pirates of the Caribbean is that Disney embraced the idea of difficult locations. So, as art director Derek R. Hill remembers, when I first got the call, I wondered, are we going real or are we going Disneyland? And it turned out they were going real. One of the reasons this movie looks so good is they shot on location in the Caribbean, specifically the island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

• 52:22Lizzie Bassett?

  It looks great.

• 52:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So this is where they shot Port Royal and Rum Runners Isle, but the local airport could only handle small planes. So when they were building out the sets, they decided to charter a 747 to fly the crew to St. Lucia and then ferry them over to St. Vincent. The team came in with a crew of 400 people, and then they hired several hundred more locals from St. Vincent and the surrounding islands. And because they needed period-specific props and set pieces, they had to research and manufacture pretty much everything back in the United States and then bring it to the island. Now, back in LA, they built Fort Charles at an abandoned oceanarium called Marineland of the Pacific in Palos Verdes. They also built and shot several interior studios in Los Angeles, including the massive treasure cave that we see.

• 53:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Took five months to build that and three weeks to fill it with fake treasure, including nearly a million gold coins minted just for the movie.

• 53:16Lizzie Bassett?

  It looks so good.

• 53:18Chris Winterbauer?

  It does. And you know what else looks great? The ships.

• 53:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 53:22Chris Winterbauer?

  They built the HMS Dauntless and two versions of the Black Pearl. The Black Pearl. The HMS Dauntless and one version of the Black Pearl last time were mounted on barges so they could be towed around. Then the second version of the Black Pearl was built on a gimbal for studio work. If you guys are unfamiliar, gimbal work means the set itself is mounted on a gimbal. A gimbal is a pivoted support that permits the rotation of an object about an axis. So it makes it so you can, for example, simulate that the ship is rocking and have everybody in the set move according to that movement in sync with one another.

• 53:58Lizzie Bassett?

  As opposed to doing the old Star Trek move of grabbing the desk and leaning to one side.

• 54:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Also, the interceptor, the fastest ship, besides the Black Pearl, was a real functioning ship.

• 54:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 54:09Chris Winterbauer?

  They refurbished an old ship called Lady Washington, then sailed it from Port Townsend, Washington, shout out,

• 54:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 54:16Chris Winterbauer?

  to Long Beach, and then from Long Beach to St. Vincent. I believe that is a 4,500 mile journey.

• 54:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, yeah.

• 54:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. They also built miniature versions, of course, we love a good miniature, put them in pools with wave simulators for some of the storms and battle scenes. I think what was most shocking was that Johnny Depp showed up looking like the most bohemian pirate that anybody had ever seen in their entire lives. Now, he had dropped the no-nos idea, but he turned up for hair and makeup wearing gold cap teeth, eyeliner, and a braided goatee.

• 54:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 54:51Chris Winterbauer?

  All his ideas.

• 54:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 54:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Disney executives, who had hired Johnny Depp because they felt he was a very attractive young man, you know, male actor, felt like perhaps they were hiding the selling point of this movie behind a fake tan, eyeliner, gold cap teeth, and generally speaking, a Keith Richards costume, as we will discuss, was very much intentional.

• 55:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's just cosplaying as Keith Richards.

• 55:17Chris Winterbauer?

  So a meeting is held, and a compromise is reached. Johnny, Johnny, you get to keep the goatee and the eyeliner, but you only get three gold teeth.

• 55:26Lizzie Bassett?

  How many did he have?

• 55:28Chris Winterbauer?

  But when shooting began, he just kept shoving them back in. So they started shooting, and he just, he just put the teeth back in. When he opened his mouth, he made wild facial expressions, staggered around the set, gestured dramatically with his hands. So why had Depp decided to play Jack Sparrow like that? He said that he sorted the character out while he was in a sauna. Quote, "He kind of came to life while I was reading the script in extreme heat bordering on 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat was very important to me, the idea of sweltering heat and a guy who's been on the ocean for 10 years. I thought that Jack would have perpetual sea legs from being on the water too much. So land becomes really odd and uncomfortable." You'd think that's a pretty cool interpretation.

• 56:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, not out of the realm of possibility that he would have been drunk a lot of the time, too. I don't think they didn't have a lot of water, probably, so you're probably drinking some low alcohol content beverages quite a bit.

• 56:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's just Johnny Depp, not even Jack Sparrow.

• 56:20Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right, that's not even pirates.

• 56:22Chris Winterbauer?

  He also wanted Jack to appeal to kids and adults, so he channeled Pepe Le Pew, which I definitely think you feel.

• 56:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 56:28Chris Winterbauer?

  And as we mentioned, rock legend Keith Richards. Keith Richards even said later that Johnny Depp sent him a message to cover his behind, basically saying, "Just a heads up, man, I'm doing this, and it's you." Disney was very concerned. The executives are seeing the dailies and they are pulling their hair out. Quote, "What's he doing with his hand? Is he brilliant or is he crazy? Is he a complete homosexual?" end quote.

• 56:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, their biggest concern. Is he gay?

• 56:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I remember the discourse around this movie and it was, "Is Johnny Depp gay? Is he playing this character gay?" That was such a topic of conversation at the time.

• 57:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is, when you re-watch it, so stupid. Because first of all, who cares, obviously. But second of all, he's clearly not. Over the course of the movie, he's expressing interest in multiple women.

• 57:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I wondered if they put that in where he gets slapped four times by women to be like, "This guy fucks. He is straight."

• 57:23Lizzie Bassett?

  This guy, this guy lose pipe. But also, he's going after 17-year-old Keira Knightley when they're on the island, dancing around with rum as well. Although, I will say, that's one sequence where I was like, hmm, this could have really been creepy. And somehow, they managed to pull it off without it being creepy, which I think is a testament to his performance in that. Because he does play it as sort of like, it's less weird uncle and more like fun drunk substitute teacher, if those are archetypes that we're going after.

• 57:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Here's what I would say.

• 57:56Lizzie Bassett?

  That's not right.

• 57:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Obviously, trying to sleep with a 17-year-old on an island by today's standards would be a heinous thing.

• 58:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, listen, don't do that, but you know.

• 58:06Chris Winterbauer?

  16th century, she's halfway through her life at 17, is my point.

• 58:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God, she's nearly dead.

• 58:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the quote that actually makes the most sense is from Michael Eisner. "We've hired the sexiest actor and he looks like this?" Question mark. So Eisner's concern is that the movie's not going to work if they can't capitalize on Johnny Depp's palpable, natural, heterosexual sex appeal. I would argue, Mr. Eisner, the reason he's so appealing across the board is Especially at this time is actually that his sex appeal is almost pansexual. It appeals in almost an androgynous way across all groups.

• 58:39Lizzie Bassett?

  A hundred percent. He's very androgynous. And he's also had a career of playing parts where he's not, you know, stereotypically attractive or handsome and has come across as attractive because of his on-screen persona.

• 58:54Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Eisner, though, reminded everybody that King David, which was Paramount's 1985 biblical epic about David, had failed, and it had failed for one specific reason. Richard Gere had worn a skirt and an earring. Who knows if that's true?

• 59:08Lizzie Bassett?

  That's why it failed?

• 59:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Depp, though, held strong. He said that there were a few people who were supportive of him. In particular, Gore Vorbinski, who always had his back. And he said, "Look, you hired me to do a job. You have to trust me. You have to trust me or you have to replace me." And I think that was the right position. The haggling went on for six weeks. Behind the scenes, Dick Cook is trying to reassure Eisner. He's promising him, "We can use camera angles to minimize his wild appearance and performance," which is ridiculous. Most of his performance has to be captured in medium shots or wide to capture the fun gesticulating that he's doing. Bruckheimer says, "In the end, they cut together some of the footage. They put it to music. They showed it to the executives. And according to Bruckheimer, everything changed when they saw how the character fit into the larger world."

• 59:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it works.

• 59:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Makes perfect sense. The budget was ballooning towards $150 million, and I think that might have been stressing people out. As Vorbinski later said, "The production had a, quote, 'spirit of madness' to it." To start, everybody's really nervous about the story because it is so convoluted. Like, there's a treasure. They stole the treasure. They're trying to return the treasure.

• 1:00:15Lizzie Bassett?

  The necklace has to hit a certain depth in the water, and there is a sonic boom that goes off.

• 1:00:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Are you Will Turner? Are you Booz Stratt Bill?

• 1:00:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Pirates come up. There's a boot strap and a bill. There's, she's the daughter, but she's gonna say his name. Yeah.

• 1:00:28Chris Winterbauer?

  And I know that in the end, it doesn't end up mattering, but I could understand being extremely anxious about it during the production.

• 1:00:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it doesn't make any sense, and that's fine.

• 1:00:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now Elliot and Rossio are on set for the entire shoot, and so they are adding to the script as they go, writing in ideas from Verbinski and the cast. And of course, Verbinski is learning quickly that working on water is impossibly difficult. A couple of examples he gives you, feeding the crew. You start shooting, lunchtime, oh my god, you're four miles out, and you have to allow the ship with all the food to now approach. And it couldn't be close to you at the beginning of the day, because if you shot in that direction, you would see the ship in the background. And of course, nothing stays where you put it. So you start shooting one thing, and the boats start floating away from one another, or the boats start floating in the wrong direction, or the current changes, or the

• 1:01:17Chris Winterbauer?

  wind changes. And as Verbinski says, the result of this is a drastic increase in visual effects shots. So in the end, quote, "This movie has 700 visual effects shots, but there are probably 150 you notice. 500 effects shots are just getting rid of city lights or hotels in the background."

• 1:01:35Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes sense.

• 1:01:36Chris Winterbauer?

  There's an oil tanker driving through the background, and it's going to cost an hour of shooting to wait for it to clear frame. You roll and paint it out later on the computer.

• 1:01:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It was the only way to keep things on schedule. Makes perfect sense. Now, there are a lot of very, very fun, practical stunts and sword fighting scenes in this movie, as you mentioned stomping on the rafters.

• 1:01:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:58Chris Winterbauer?

  The very fun introductory sword fight between Will Turner and Jack Sparrow inside the Blacksmith's Forge. Now, the stunt coordinator on this movie was George Marshall Rouge, who'd worked on the Lord of the Rings films. And the sword master is a gentleman we've discussed before, Bob Anderson, who of course, had helped choreograph The Princess Bride.

• 1:02:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that's right. Which had some of the best sword fighting, as we learned.

• 1:02:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It did. He'd worked on some classic pirate films in the 50s, including The Master of Ballentrae, which starred Errol Flynn. And in recent years, he'd done Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, helping with lightsabers, Bond movies, Zorro movies, The Princess Bride, as we mentioned, and fun- Fun fact, he was a consultant for the fencing scene in the famous Lindsay Lohan twin film, The Parrot Trap. Oh, wow. His greatest credit. Now, Depp has said that the stunt work was, quote, "way more intense than anything he'd done before," and he'd had scissors for hands. So that's saying something. Yeah, but he didn't do much with them to Brian Cox's point. He basically just sat there and looked sad. And it works. It's great. He also had the added task of incorporating Jack Sparrow's

• 1:03:04Chris Winterbauer?

  signature movements into the choreography, which I think he does really well. He seems like he's drunkenly swaying even as he's fighting Orlando Bloom. Yeah. So the sword fights involving the pirates as skeletons were very challenging for the actors and cameramen. They would shoot these scenes live and then do reference passes where the humans in the story were basically fighting air. This is the exact approach, Lizzie, that we discussed in 1999's La Mummy. Yeah. This technique had, of course, been mastered by VFX artist extraordinaire Ray Harryhausen decades earlier on, for example, Jason and the Argonauts. Right. So this is a technique that had been around for quite some time.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

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

• 1:04:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I do want to mention, with all this going on, some of the cast felt that they were falling through the cracks, or, to put it more bluntly, being treated as second-class citizens because they didn't have the clout of the bigger players involved in this project. So Zoe Zaldana, who played Anna Maria, has described the shoot as, quote, "an experience not worth repeating." Oh. She has said flat out, "It's something she wouldn't do again." She said that the shoot was a big machine that was too out of control. And suffered from poor management. She also said, quote, "Those weren't the right people for me. I'm not talking about the cast. The cast was great. I'm talking about the political stuff that went on behind closed doors. It was a lot of above the line versus below the line, extras versus actors, producers versus PAs. It was very elitist.

• 1:05:06Chris Winterbauer?

  I almost quit the business. I was 23 years old and I was like, fuck this. I am never putting myself in this situation again. People disrespecting me because they look at my number on a call sheet and they think I'm not important. Fuck you.

• 1:05:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, good for her.

• 1:05:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It was so bad that she says that years later Jerry Bruckheimer actually apologized to her.

• 1:05:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:05:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I get the sense that everybody was so stressed.

• 1:05:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Stressed, yeah.

• 1:05:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And everybody was probably trying so hard to manage upward that they may have been taking it out downward at the same time.

• 1:05:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I believe it. That's shitty, you shouldn't do it, doesn't matter. But she also would have been probably coming off of Center Stage at this point, is that right? Which was a much, much smaller, I would imagine, very intimate production where she was a way bigger part.

• 1:05:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, this was by far the biggest thing she had done at this point. And she's obviously, what, I don't know, 11th build, 12th build on this movie, maybe?

• 1:06:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Although now she's one of the biggest stars in it, but yeah.

• 1:06:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now Johnny Depp says that he had a much more positive experience, but he did mention that nobody told him he'd actually be steering a ship until they actually started rolling. So Depp is at one point steering the interceptor, I believe. He also didn't walk away completely unscathed. Depp injured his knee when the ropes attaching the interceptor and the dauntless broke. This was an intentional stunt, the ropes were supposed to break, but, quote, "Suddenly the belaying pin snapped and just went straight into my knee at full speed. And what felt like taking a ball peen hammer to the kneecap, and it's the first thing in my life that's ever taken me off my feet." End quote.

• 1:06:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:06:42Chris Winterbauer?

  At some point, the sinking ship that Sparrow rides into Port Royal at the beginning of the movie did fully capsize, but it does not sound like depth was on it. Verbinski later said that this was constant throughout the movie, people saying, "Everything's fine," or "This is safe," and it was definitely not safe, or was not fine, and everything that could sink would sink at some point. Verbinski was struggling. There was at least one meeting between Verbinski, Bruckheimer, Dick Cook, and Brigham Taylor, along with Nina Jacobson, who was a co-chair at Disney with Dick Cook, that literally spiraled into a shouting match. It was so bad that Jerry Bruckheimer, who famously had worked with Michael Bay on a number of movies until this point, told Verbinski that it was the worst meeting he had ever been a part of.

• 1:07:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:07:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Michael Bay, who, when Ben Affleck asked him why NASA would not-

• 1:07:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Just, just, just, just shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up, Ben. Yes, if you've never heard the DVD commentary of Armageddon, it is unbelievable. It's Ben Affleck walking you shot by shot through what a disaster it was to make Armageddon. We will certainly cover that movie, but one of the funniest parts is when Ben Affleck kept asking Michael Bay, "Why, why do these NASA scientists, why do they not have the information?" And every man, Bruce Willis, is the one showing up being like, "You don't know how to drill? Let me show you how to drill." And he kept asking Michael Bay, and Michael Bay just went, "Just shut, just, just, just shut, just shut, shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up. Just do it."

• 1:08:07Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what? You know what? Shut up, Ben. It's so funny. It's amazing. All right. It's no surprise, Verbinski, quote, "quit or came close to quitting at least four times." And there was talk on the set that Disney would fire him. This is according to James B. Stewart's Disney War. So some compromises had to be made. Verbinski fought to keep the ship-to-ship battle between the Black Pearl and the interceptor.

• 1:08:32Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 1:08:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Fantastic. But he did have to lose interior shots of pirates rowing the longboats. Gore, you didn't need them.

• 1:08:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he did not.

• 1:08:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Some sources claim Verbinski had to forfeit several lines and even entire scenes that referenced the ride, specifically because Eisner wanted to distance the movie from the ride. I would say the movie references the ride plenty-

• 1:08:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Chris Winterbauer?

  -now that I've read through the ride and seen the film. So, Lizzie, principal photography wrapped in March of 2003 with a July release date.

• 1:09:04Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 1:09:06Chris Winterbauer?

  700 VFX shots.

• 1:09:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait, really?

• 1:09:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Verbinski and his team pulled 18-hour days to edit the movie. All the while, Eisner is freaking out about how long this movie is.

• 1:09:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This wrapped in March and it released in July of the same year, not one year apart.

• 1:09:26Chris Winterbauer?

  The same year.

• 1:09:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I literally don't know how that's possible. That's a cat's timeline.

• 1:09:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's talk about it. So, Verbinski and the editorial team are working 18-hour days to try to get the edit done. Eisner is breathing down their necks because this movie cannot be over three hours long. It ends up being two and a half hours, basically. Meanwhile, during production, Industrial Light & Magic is holding bi-weekly video conferences with Verbinski and updating shots as they go. So to be clear, VFX has been running in parallel to the production of the film.

• 1:09:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, okay.

• 1:09:59Chris Winterbauer?

  So they're executing shots while you're shooting the film.

• 1:10:01Lizzie Bassett?

  You would have to. I mean, there's no other way to do this.

• 1:10:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, this is obviously the only way to get it done. Even so, it's considered a big rush job for Industrial Light & Magic. They use a bigger team than usual. They pulled 200 artists onto this. And apparently, they used the same animation and modeling software they had just used on Ang Lee's Hulk.

• 1:10:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Looks a lot better in this.

• 1:10:21Chris Winterbauer?

  I think Hulk looks good. One creative method they used to achieve the look of decaying skin was taking photos of turkey jerky, scanning them in, and then grafting that texture on top of the skeletons.

• 1:10:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Ugh.

• 1:10:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It was especially challenging to create the close-up shots of the pirates transforming into their undead forms. Each character had so much detail with all their trinkets and accessories that needed to be retained. The same goes for the movements of the skeleton pirates. Ilim worked from motion capture references of the real actors to be sure that each skeleton moved like its pirate counterpart.

• 1:10:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It really looks pretty good. That is insane.

• 1:10:56Chris Winterbauer?

  It does, and I believe that Pirates honestly may have been, not this one, but the sequel with Bill Nighy in his octopus-human form is arguably like the pinnacle of VFX. Some of those shots look seamless. I cannot believe how good they look. So these movies are very much pioneering into new technological fronts on the VFX side. But it's the music that ended up being a real squeeze. So to score the film, Verbinski first brought in Alan Silvestri, who had done The Mexican and Mouse Hunt. But before they even recorded anything, Silvestri had been asked to leave. It was not anything super dramatic. Basically, Silvestri quickly realized that it's not just a Gore Verbinski film. It's a Jerry Bruckheimer film, too.

• 1:11:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And he would have to serve two masters. And if they were going to finish this on time, it was going to be better. And arguably, it would only be doable if they brought in somebody that Bruckheimer had worked with before. Otherwise, it would take too long to familiarize Silvestri with Bruckheimer and vice versa. So again, Silvestri said, no harm, no foul. And he said that, quote, Jerry Bruckheimer couldn't have been more respectful, end quote. Okay. Composers are often, because they're the last on, given the boot and treated unfairly. It doesn't sound like this was necessarily one of those instances. So Verbinski and Bruckheimer go to frequent Bruckheimer collaborator Hans Zimmer. The only problem, the story goes, is that Hans Zimmer is on The Last Samurai.

• 1:12:25Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's contractually obligated to not do any other movies until that movie is finished. But Pirates of the Caribbean is on an extremely tight timetable. Right. So they hire Hans Zimmer's production company, Media Ventures, which was a big house of composers that Hans was the head of. And they would do commercials in video games and movies. Klaus Badelt was one of the composers in-house at Hans Zimmer's production company. And they technically hired Klaus to score the movie. But again, the story goes, and my understanding is that that didn't stop Zimmer from feeding some core themes to Klaus as he was scoring this. And then Klaus would then go and flesh them out and get them orchestrated and recorded for the film.

• 1:13:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Klaus has said that he only had four weeks to score this movie. So I think that this was more Klaus and Hans riffing on an existing style that they knew that Bruckheimer and Verbinski would like, and not so much, you know, case of plagiarism or anything like that. That being said, I think the Pirates of the Caribbean main theme, "He's a Pirate," sounds quite a bit similar to a couple of other famous Hans Zimmer themes.

• 1:13:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, there's a portion of, I believe the song is "He's a Pirate" on the soundtrack that has the sort of classic theme in it, and it is almost identical to certain tracks on the Gladiator soundtrack.

• 1:13:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, I have to give Reddit some credit for unearthing this connection. I was unaware of the fact that Hans Zimmer had scored a little action film from the mid 90s called Drop Zone, which is a, I think, pretty blatant Point Break ripoff starring Wesley Snipes, and portions of the score are very reminiscent of Pirates of the Caribbean. Or should I say Pirates of the Caribbean can be a little reminiscent of Drop Zone? Anyway, the point is, it evokes many Hans Zimmer moments.

• 1:14:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Listen, Hans does what he does.

• 1:14:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't blame them, and I do think the overall score is wonderful.

• 1:14:18Lizzie Bassett?

  No, if they had 48 hours to make this, I bet I would pull that out of Gladiator 2 and be like, change this note, switch it around a little bit, swirl it in a bowl, and here it is, and it's great.

• 1:14:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. If you guys would like to learn more about the Pirates of the Caribbean score, I highly recommend a video on YouTube called "The Insane Story of Pirates of the Caribbean Soundtrack" by Charles Cornell. Not only will he talk to you in a little more detail about some of the behind-the-scenes machinations, he also does a really great explanation of the actual music behind the score itself. And he explains, you know, how it's similar to these other movies, and why it's similar musically, and why it's just such a great piece of music to begin with. So again, check out Charles Cornell's video, "The Insane Story of the Pirates of the Caribbean's Soundtrack," on YouTube. So the premiere is around the corner, and Michael Eisner, I believe, has to be just downing Tums and Pepsi Day, because he is so stressed about releasing this movie.

• 1:15:11Chris Winterbauer?

  So Disney had taken the actor's measurements for a line of Pirates dolls. The quote is dolls, I believe it's action figures. But they had pulled out of that deal, in part because they thought the movie was too convoluted to be a hit. So they were just worried that nobody's gonna understand this. He was also worried that teenagers would associate the movie with the ride and think that it was for kids, and so this is when Michael Eisner comes up with a late-in-the-game idea. He wants to change the title. It had been called Pirates of the Caribbean until this point, but he said he wanted a title that would lend itself better to sequels like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It sounds like everybody else was against the name change, even other Disney executives. Everybody's like, "Michael, no." And he says, "Yes, we need a subtitle."

• 1:15:57Chris Winterbauer?

  And they're like, "Okay, what?" And I don't know who came up with it, but the idea is brought forth, "The Curse of the Black Pearl", which makes no sense because the Black Pearl isn't curse, nor is the curse about the Black Pearl.

• 1:16:11Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the Aztec gold that is the curse.

• 1:16:14Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right, but I don't think they want to say, "And the curse of the Aztec gold." So-

• 1:16:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Lean in, brothers. If you're gonna put it in the movie, put it on the poster.

• 1:16:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's fine, but when they did put it on the poster, they made sure to put it in very small font. It was like, "Hi, sir, you're happy, but, you know, we don't really want to distract from it." So Pirates of the Caribbean premiered at Disneyland on June 28th, 2003, to somewhat mixed reviews. The Hollywood Reporter said, "Since the Walt Disney Company film based on one of its theme park attractions was the unbearable, not nearly unbearable, unbearable, The Country Bears, Pirates of the Caribbean is surprisingly not bad." So not a ringing endorsement. The New York Times, though, said, "This movie is better than it deserves to be, given its origins, a ride at Disneyland and Disney World." I would agree. But they were not very nice to Keira Knightley.

• 1:17:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Quote, "Miss Knightley is strident and confident in her movement, an ability that makes her all the sexier and alluring, which is fortunate, given that her acting skills aren't quite as devastating as her looks." About a 17-year-old, New York Times.

• 1:17:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't agree. I actually think she's pretty fun in this.

• 1:17:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't agree either.

• 1:17:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Listen, she does a lot of jaw acting. I don't care. Let her do it.

• 1:17:25Chris Winterbauer?

  It's fine. She's also said that she completely lost her privacy at this point in time. She was stalked by men.

• 1:17:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Like-

• 1:17:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And then she was basically told that she had asked for it by being on screen and dressing in whatever people had put her in. This was a gnarly time on that front.

• 1:17:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Terrible.

• 1:17:40Chris Winterbauer?

  If you remembered Natalie Portman and literally receiving mail from men saying, "I can't wait for you to turn 18 and for you to do your first nude scene."

• 1:17:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Ugh.

• 1:17:48Chris Winterbauer?

  When she was 15, 16 years old. Of course, the performance that drew the most attention was Lizzie-

• 1:17:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Captain Jack Sparrow.

• 1:17:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Captain Jack Sparrow. Not Orlando Bloom.

• 1:17:58Lizzie Bassett?

  No, literally forgot Orlando Bloom was in this.

• 1:18:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Robert Evert said that Depp, quote, "seems to be channeling a squash buckling drag queen, but somehow he pulls it off."

• 1:18:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:08Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. And the audiences loved him. It grossed roughly $653 million worldwide.

• 1:18:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:18:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Over 300 in the United States and close to 350 internationally. And this movie, Lizzie, had incredible legs. So we often talk about the first box office weekend, but the big thing to know about Pirates of the Caribbean is that it stayed big at the box office. So for 12 weeks, it was one of the top five highest grossing films at the box office. And domestically, it had what's called a 6X multiplier. And that means that its total box office run in the US was six times what its opening weekend had been. That's incredible. A lot of films have like a 2X multiplier. This movie had a 6X multiplier. And apparently it's because there were a lot of teenage boys and girls who were rewatching

• 1:19:02Chris Winterbauer?

  it over and over again.

• 1:19:04Lizzie Bassett?

  It's fun.

• 1:19:05Chris Winterbauer?

  The Academy Awards agreed that there was something to this Jack Sparrow guy because Johnny Depp was nominated for an Oscar.

• 1:19:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, that is a pirate bridge too far.

• 1:19:15Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, I looked up who else was nominated that year, and I actually think Johnny Depp brings a lot of spunk to a pretty dour round of nominees. Sean Penn in Mystic River, Ben Kingsley, House of Sand and Fog, Jude Law, Cold Mountain, Bill Murray, Lost in Translation. All great performances, but all just very downer. So I don't know, I think it's nice to have an upbeat performance in there. The movie was nominated for a total of five Oscars. Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Makeup, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Visual Effects. Now, of course, Lizzie, Pirates got not one, not two, not three, but four sequels.

• 1:19:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man's Chest, At World's End. That's the last one I saw. Yeah, me too. On Stranger Tides and Dead Men Tell No Tales, but they do make more movies. Bravinsky left after the third film to expand into animation with Rango, and then returned to Disney IP with the misbegotten Lone Ranger. And then he followed that up with a bit of a flop, A Cure for Wellness. He has not directed a film since, but I did see that he has a movie in post-production that I believe is called Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. Hmm, interesting. The franchise came to dominate the careers of, I believe, Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp in particular, nightly expanded beyond the films, I think, more successfully. For sure, yes.

• 1:20:41Chris Winterbauer?

  In the fall of 2017, Disney confirmed that a sixth installment was in early development for the Pirates franchise. No, guys. But that November, a lawsuit was filed against Disney by writers Arthur Lee Alfred II and Ezekiel Martinez Jr., claiming that Disney had plagiarized or lifted elements from their 2,000 spec scripts that they say they had shared with Brigham Taylor before the original Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was in development. Drafts are written, the lawsuit progresses, it's dismissed, the dismissal is reversed, and it all builds to 2022, where Disney settles the plagiarism lawsuit and the terms are undisclosed. So we don't know if there was any merit to the suit or not, or if Disney just wanted to put it to bed.

• 1:21:26Chris Winterbauer?

  During this process, Johnny Depp was dropped from Pirates of the Caribbean by Disney. They did not pick up his option for a sixth movie. Now, he tried to present it in the Depp-Hurd trial, that this was because of an op-ed that Amber Heard had published alleging domestic abuse. A Disney executive testified that this wasn't the case, that they had no idea that this op-ed was going to be published or even existed when he was dropped from the movie. And my understanding, and candidly what I would believe, is that he was let go because he was... Unreliable as a professional presence on set. And I'm guessing at nearly 60 years old, they were probably wanting to refresh the franchise and go in a different direction. Everything was obviously delayed with COVID and then with the writer's strike.

• 1:22:10Chris Winterbauer?

  There were at least two versions of the scripts that Disney was developing in parallel. Jerry Bruckheimer has said that one of them would leave the door open for legacy characters. One of them would not. As of the time of this recording, there is no green light for another Pirates of the Caribbean film, but I would not be surprised if we got a new one by the end of this decade.

• 1:22:28Lizzie Bassett?

  They have to reboot it with younger people. That's what they do. They need a new crop.

• 1:22:32Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. They need a new crop of pirates. What's interesting is that even though Pirates of the Caribbean was a massive success and its sequels brought in billions, it did very little to revive the pirate genre as a whole. There were other pirate films released after this, but none of them had the staying power of Pirates of the Caribbean. And the only example I can think of that's really broken through recently is Our Flag Means Death, the HBO television series.

• 1:23:02Lizzie Bassett?

  And even that's very small, but very funny. I think the reason is that the appeal of this is not actually the pirates.

• 1:23:09Chris Winterbauer?

  There we go. I agree. I think it's a roller coaster ride.

• 1:23:12Lizzie Bassett?

  The supernatural elements are, I think, what makes this. Also, just honestly, the actors they cast, you know? I didn't love it upon rewatch, but it was sort of very novel at the time. I do think Johnny Depp's performance as Jack Sparrow is a big reason that this worked in addition to everyone else, who I do, I think the whole cast is really great in this.

• 1:23:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, speaking of what's great, that concludes our coverage of Pirates of the Caribbean. So, Lizzie, I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:23:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I think a lot went right.

• 1:23:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a long sigh.

• 1:23:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, there's a lot to choose from. I'm going to give it to the writers on this one. I think what Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio did here in terms of being able to extract any story, let alone a fun one, is really pretty impressive. And it holds up, you know, 20-plus years later after release. It is still fun, and I think that that's a real credit to the screenplay and credit to them and to Stuart Beatty, all of whom had pitched this idea and pitched the supernatural element, which I do think is kind of the key to this really working and being something special.

• 1:24:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I'm going to give mine to Gore Verbinski. And I think he reminds me a lot of Robert Zemeckis in some ways. Kind of a jack of all trades, but also interested in pushing the medium forward technologically, it seems like, or at least he was for a period. And I've really liked a number of Gore Verbinski's films. I think The Ring is really fantastic.

• 1:24:39Lizzie Bassett?

  The Ring is great.

• 1:24:40Chris Winterbauer?

  I really like Pirates of the Caribbean. I liked Rango. And so I'm really curious to see what he does next. But more broadly speaking, I'm sure all these people are great at their jobs, but I can't imagine the stress of working on water, trying to explain Johnny Depp's behavior and performance to Disney executives, including Michael Eisner, with, you know, a producer the size of Jerry Bruckheimer over your shoulder as you are attempting to bring this movie to life in a genre that has left the scattered corpses of all of the directors and actors who have attempted it in its wake over the past 15 or 20 years. So I got to give mine to Gore Verbinski. What a risky move and knocked it out of the park.

• 1:25:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. Great job, Gore.

• 1:25:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Great job. All right, guys. That concludes our coverage of Pirates of the Caribbean. Lizzie, can you let the folks know what we have coming up next?

• 1:25:29Lizzie Bassett?

  We have the natural follow up to Pirates of the Caribbean, Chris, and that is Bob Fosse's All That Jazz. But we have a very, very special guest for this episode who we are very excited about. We are joined by Demi Adjeuwibe. He was wonderful. It was a super fun episode to capture with him. So please come back and listen to that. It is a wild film and a wild ride.

• 1:25:55Chris Winterbauer?

  If you guys are enjoying this podcast, there are four easy ways to support us. Number one, you can tell a family member or a friend. Number two, you can subscribe on whatever pod catcher you're using to listen to this podcast. Number three, leave us a rating and review. Or number four, you can join our Patreon. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with audience members like you. Don't worry, you can join for free. We post information, corrections, sometimes musings, mostly by myself, about various films. If you'd like to pay a dollar a month, you can get the right to vote on films that we cover in the future. Today's episode was the result of a poll, a Pirates poll. So come check it out and vote on what films we cover next. For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed.

• 1:26:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And for $50, you can have your name shouted out, cursed like the Black Pearl, just like this.

• 1:26:45Speaker 04

  Arrgh, gather round ye scurvy dogs, for it be time to read the roll call of the Dread Crew Patreon. In the voice of the only one, Captain Barbosa himself. Now brace yourselves, may these army names here to chill the bones and twist the tongue. Slipknots nine, you won't be slipping these nuts when I get you on my ship. Kekanaba, Nathan Centeno, and Daniel Edwin Davies. You'll find yourself in Davy Jones's locker. James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson and Ben Schindelmann. Scary Carrie, aye, we don't say that name twice lest the mirrors crack. The Provost family, that's Provost, like the whale of a banshee in the fog.

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kids, don't be breaking glass on my ship. David Friskalanti, Adam Moffat, film it yourself, yes. Chris Saka, Kate Ellington, MXodia, Sea Grace B, Jen Mostra Marino. I heard tale of the sea shanty she sings that drive men mad with longing. Christopher Elner, Blaze Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, the Rural Juror. Say it three times fast, just to prove that you're literate. Lance Stater, Nathan Knife, that's not a nickname, that's just what he's got in his pocket. Lena, Ramon Villanueva Jr., Half Gray Hound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling. Are they twins or simply cursed reflections?

• 1:28:11Speaker 04

  Jake Killen, it's in the name, stay on his good side if he has one. Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, I've heard her songs. In the dark of the night, but don't be fooled, or she'll lure you into shallow waters and ground your ship. Ellen Singleton, don't let her name fool you. She's never alone. She's got an army with her. J.J. Rapido, Too Fast For The Eye, Jewish Resamant, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, just Sadie, just like Barbosa. This accent's all over the place. Brian Donahue, Adrian Pengkorea, Chris Leo, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, that's David's mom. Steve Winterbauer, my fodder.

• 1:28:54Speaker 04

  Don Schiebel, George K., Rosemary Southward. Tom Kristin, Jason Frankel, Soaman Chanani. Just the man I've been looking for to put the tails of Captain Barbosa down, put pen to paper. Michael McGrath, Lon Relad, and Lydia Howes. Now belay your grumbling and clap for the finest crew that ever haunted a Patreon before. Yar!

• 1:29:25Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Thanks, Jeffrey Rush, for that incredible series of shout outs. Guys, we will see you in a week for All That Jazz. Very excited to talk about it. And until then, bon voyage. Bye.

• 1:29:43Speaker 05

  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, with additional editing from Karen Krupsov.