War of the Worlds (2005)

This week, Chris & Lizzie try to unearth the truth behind 2005's War of the Worlds - was it an unmitigated, Cruisian PR disaster? Or was Tom Cruise's bizarre press tour merely a scapegoat? Plus, how Steven Spielberg and company put together a $135M sci-fi epic on a 10 month turn-around, how a couple of B-movie mockbusters beat it to the box office, and yet another concept album throwing a wrench in the works. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Twelve 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, will the most powerful

• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:04Chris 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. Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them a little good one.

• 1:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello. Chris, I think you're lagging a little bit. I'm having trouble hearing you.

• 1:52Chris Winterbauer?

  What about now? Is that better?

• 1:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 1:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay. Here we go. Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another-

• 2:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Cue David.

• 2:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Come on.

• 2:04Lizzie Bassett?

  David, can you get him inside, please?

• 2:06Chris Winterbauer?

  I'll go grab him.

• 2:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Jesus, dude, turn your input down.

• 2:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh, shit. Sorry. Carmelo's calling me. Give me one second.

• 2:17Lizzie Bassett?

  All good.

• 2:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Hey. Yeah. We're about to record.

• 2:22Chris Winterbauer?

  No, we're recording.

• 2:24Lizzie Bassett?

  What is going on?

• 2:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Slow down. What are you talking about?

• 2:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, if you need to go, it's totally fine.

• 2:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah, no. Okay.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Go in doors immediately. Lock all doors and windows and turn off AC. Stay inside until further.

• 2:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 2:40Chris Winterbauer?

  We have to go.

• 2:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Where's Bob?

• 2:42Chris Winterbauer?

  We need to go right now.

• 2:42Lizzie Bassett?

  No, wait, where are we going?

• 2:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. You just need to go.

• 2:45Lizzie Bassett?

  No!

• 3:07Lizzie Bassett?

  And action.

• 3:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a movie that asks the question, what if the aliens just poop themselves to death? I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do you have for us today?

• 3:36Chris Winterbauer?

  How do you do the Tom Cruise scream? I feel like this is when we got into peak Tom Cruise scream mode.

• 3:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God.

• 3:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It was this into Mission Impossible 3, which I love both of his performances in both of these movies. I do also love that you believe that the orange goo that comes out of the ship at the end is their collective diarrhea.

• 3:52Lizzie Bassett?

  You can't tell me that's not diarrhea. You can't tell me.

• 3:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, no! We have to run! And then they all just die.

• 4:01Lizzie Bassett?

  The end of this movie is literally just the aliens get... Montezuma's revenge.

• 4:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Turns out that the tripods are giant cruise ships. They get hot to virus and they die. Okay, that is not a joke. That could be a very serious pandemic that we all need to deal with. We are talking about the 2005 science fiction disaster film War of the Worlds, directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise. Some good running, some great running in this movie.

• 4:23Lizzie Bassett?

  This feels like the beginnings of Tom Cruise running as well.

• 4:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I mean, he had run before this for sure. I mean, he's run since All the Right Moves.

• 4:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but he's really enjoying it in this one, you know?

• 4:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it's the chest out, you know?

• 4:35Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the bounce.

• 4:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the lightness of the feet.

• 4:38Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a great onscreen runner. You can't argue with it. Lizzie, had you seen the 2005 Steven Spielberg War of the Worlds before? And what were your thoughts upon watching it or rewatching it for the podcast?

• 4:50Lizzie Bassett?

  My answer is I don't know. I thought I had not seen this, but then upon watching it for the podcast, there were certain scenes where I was like, this feels weirdly familiar. Maybe I did see this. But regardless, this was my first time really, I would say, taking action, having an actionable viewing of War of the Worlds. And you know what? I had in my head that this movie must be really bad because I think I remembered a lot of perhaps what we're going to talk about, the press surrounding this movie that maybe was less related to the actual reviews of it than I realized and more related to other things. And so in my brain, I was like, oh, this is gonna be a mess. And then it started and I was like, this is pretty good.

• 5:36Lizzie Bassett?

  And, you know, I think the practical effects are excellent. The practical sets are excellent. The main problem, which is not really their fault, is that the technology for CGI was not where it needed to be for them to rely on it as much as they do in this movie, I think. Some of it looks fine. Some of it doesn't hold up quite as well. But I think the performances across the board are really excellent, particularly Dakota Fanning, who is acting circles around absolutely everyone else. I have one bone to pick with this movie, though. They set up both a Chekhov's gun and a Chekhov's gun. Chekhov's crane operator and they never deliver on the crane operator.

• 6:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm so glad you bring this up. I have a big theory about this.

• 6:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, great. I can't wait to get to it because I literally was like, well, that's gonna come back. And then it never does ever.

• 6:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 6:28Lizzie Bassett?

  If anyone's not familiar with the term Chekhov's gun, what we are referring to is the thought that if you introduce a gun at the beginning of a play, in the case of the original terminology, in the first act, that it inevitably will appear by the end as part of the climax.

• 6:41Chris Winterbauer?

  It will go off by the end.

• 6:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it will go off by the end. So you introduce something, the anticipation is that it will or must come back. And this never comes back ever. The gun does come back, actually, but come on, he's a crane operator. Some other thoughts that I had. Why does Tom Cruise keep smiling at the aliens? That's a big question I had for the whole first act of this movie. Also, he's maybe the worst onscreen father ever. Every other scene, he's just leaving his children behind in the midst of a disaster and then seems to remember vaguely that they're there, at which point he, you know, jauntily bounces back to them on his feet. Why are the aliens so bad at zapping Tom Cruise? They seem to be able to get everyone else around him. He's zigging and zagging.

• 7:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He's zigging and zagging. He's very fast.

• 7:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, he's very fast. That's fine. All right, I'll accept that. Does anyone want to be in Tim Robbins' basement?

• 7:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, absolutely not.

• 7:30Lizzie Bassett?

  The answer to that is no, absolutely not.

• 7:34Lizzie Bassett?

  And then, uh, "Not my blood, not my blood," one of my favorite lines. And then the last thing I'll say is, in movies like this, I do find myself wondering, what is the point at which I would just lay down and die? Because certainly it is before the end of this movie. I am gonna self-immolate along with what I thought that brother had done.

• 7:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it's interesting because in the original book, in the H.G. Wells book, at the end of the book, effectively, that's what the hero, the narrator, does. You know, he's a writer. It takes place, obviously, in the south of London. He basically decides, I'm just going to go and let the aliens kill me, but they've pooped themselves to death when he arrives, as you say. And so...

• 8:08Lizzie Bassett?

  That's literally what they're do- you can't tell me that's not what they're doing.

• 8:11Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I do agree with you, but it's interesting that you mentioned that because that is basically the end of the book. And I think if I can jump in, for me, like, I really like this movie, but I agree it's got some jumbled elements perhaps, and it feels like...

• 8:22Lizzie Bassett?

  The end.

• 8:23Chris Winterbauer?

  The end.

• 8:23Lizzie Bassett?

  They don't set up the end super well. Well, which I know we will get to. The last thing I just want to say very quickly is that the reason I'm saying that, and maybe this is what you're getting to, but like this movie is harrowing.

• 8:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 8:34Lizzie Bassett?

  In terms of it does not let up.

• 8:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It's gnarly.

• 8:38Lizzie Bassett?

  It's gnarly and it does such a good job of building the tension across so many of these sequences that I literally just thought to myself, I think I'd be okay being dead. Like I, I think I would just be like, ah, just lay down.

• 8:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So yeah, I think it really for about, especially for the first 90 minutes, I would say, right? It's a two hour and 15 minute movie and the first 90 minutes is what you would call a divorced dad road trip, like a weekend with divorced dad movie, mixed with an alien disaster movie.

• 9:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 9:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is like dad is wholly incapable of keeping milk in the fridge, let alone keeping us safe from the aliens. I really like that. And we'll talk about some of the specific choices they make with Cruz's character, where he's at in his career when this movie's made. And then you get the obligatory, you know, we're hiding out in the basement with the weird prepper guy, you know, sort of sequence with Harlan Ogilvy played by Tim Robbins, where it doesn't feel like the movie's on a sure footing. And then

• 9:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Chris Winterbauer?

  In the end, it kind of feels like the movie that Spielberg and Cruz and company wanted to make, which I do think they do for most of it, which is a movie that adheres to the thought that the truth is we would run, right? Like we would not be brave. We would like try to protect our families and we would run. And it kind of, from a cinematic perspective, it's exploring almost a cowardly response. Again, a very normal response, but a cinematically cowardly response to an alien invasion. And I really like that. But it almost doesn't feel like they have the courage of their convictions at the very end.

• 9:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Lean all the way in.

• 9:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Because the very end almost feels like what Cruz's character Ray Ferrier would experience had he died and he had like, you know, was having a vision from heaven. Because it's such a picturesque, perfect ending. And it almost feels like Spielberg can't commit to the darkness of what they've set out to. And he has to go back towards the Spielbergian sort of schmaltz at the very end of the movie. But I really love so many elements of this movie. As you mentioned, Lizzie, the set pieces are great.

• 10:22Lizzie Bassett?

  They're really good.

• 10:22Chris Winterbauer?

  The scene where the car gets jacked from them.

• 10:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Is an awesome scene. And when he loses the gun and you realize, oh my God, that's a blessing.

• 10:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Because he would have gotten himself killed because he does not know what he's doing. The ferry sequence is great. I love. I'm fitting the actress's name who's in Abbott Elementary.

• 10:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Is like trying to get on the ferry with him and she loses her grip on him and you know, he leaves her behind. Like, I think it does a really good job of subverting a lot of disaster movie tropes in a big way. Again, until kind of the very end of the movie, which is fine.

• 10:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. And I also think, so for anyone who's not familiar, the very end of this movie, basically you learn that the aliens were all killed by an amoeba. Like, they die by diarrhea on their spaceships.

• 11:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Which, again, that's how the book ends. That's how every adaptation of this has ended. Yeah.

• 11:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. But I think the reason that this one feels unnatural is that they shift to that so abruptly and they don't even show it happening. Someone just says, oh, the machines were behaving erratically and then they fell over. It's like, you don't even really see that. So it feels like a very sharp left turn at the end versus getting used to it, getting to witness it more in real time along with Ray. You don't really get to do that. It just feels very tacked on.

• 11:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. But let's get into it. Just a couple of other thoughts that I had. I really think that this is like Spielberg doing a love letter to a lot of other movies as well. One of my favorite parts is when he steps out of Harlan Ogilvy's basement and it's the clear Wizard of Oz stepping into Technicolor moment and everything's red from the kind of like weird root-like plant that the Martians are seeding our planet with. There are so many loving homages to the 1953 film. Those are also present in some of his earlier work. I would argue there's a shot that we'll get to from the 53 film that he basically recreates an ET in a specific way. But I really think what's interesting about this movie, as you mentioned, Lizzie, is that you remember the bad press around this movie.

• 12:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 12:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Right? It's like, the story I think a lot of people remember about War of the Worlds, or the story at least that I've been told and then have internalized, is that this movie was at some level a failure and at some level it was because of erratic, perhaps, behavior from Tom Cruise on the press tour of this movie, as well as just generally speaking, public behavior.

• 12:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Is this the couch jump?

• 12:35Chris Winterbauer?

  We will get to the Oprah Winfrey couch jump, which happened on the press tour for this movie.

• 12:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 12:39Chris Winterbauer?

  This is a very specific moment in time. This is when some specific internet outlets were birthed. YouTube came online right about this time. And what I want this episode to be about is almost a debunking episode about what is the truth behind War of the Worlds? Going all the way back to the first known adaptation, the first notable adaptation done by Orson Welles. So let's get into it, Lizzie. First, the details. War of the Worlds is a 2005 science fiction disaster film directed by Steven Spielberg. The screenplay is credited to Josh Friedman and David Koep, based on the novel by H.G. Wells. It was produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Colin Wilson, and it was brought to life by a bevy of stalwart Spielberg collaborators.

• 13:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm sure you saw the names in the credits, Lizzie.

• 13:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Chris Winterbauer?

  The music, John Williams. Cinematography, Janis Kaminsky. Editing, Michael Kahn. Costume design, Joanna Johnston. Production design, Rick Carter. These are people who have worked with Spielberg for a decade or more. It stars Tom Cruise as longshoreman Ray Ferrier, Dakota Fanning as his daughter Rachel, Justin Chatwin as his surly son Robbie, Miranda Otto as his barely there ex-wife Mary Ann, and Tim Robbins as Harlan Ogilvy. As always, the IMDb, we'll get, hold on, I have a theory on Tim Robbins. The IMDb logline reads, "An alien invasion threatens the future of humanity. The catastrophic nightmare is depicted through the eyes of one American family fighting for survival." Which I feel like reads more like a logline for Signs.

• 14:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Well, there's a lot of similarities. Well, I shouldn't say that. There are circumstantial similarities, and yet Signs handles it very differently.

• 14:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Very differently. If I may propose an alternative, "An alien invasion threatens the future of humanity." Tom Cruise runs.

• 14:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:25Chris Winterbauer?

  That's your movie. So today, Lizzie, as I mentioned, we're going to talk about aliens, of course. We're going to talk about belief, and we're going to try to get to the truth with all of this.

• 14:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 14:35Chris Winterbauer?

  What is the real story of War of the Worlds? We have to go back in time to a Sunday, which everybody knows is the scariest day. As my wife calls it, the Sunday scaries, as you're staring down the barrel of a Monday. In fact, it was a Sunday, the night before the scariest night of the year, Halloween, and it was a very scary year, 1938. A lot of the world was staring down the barrel of fascism, as we've discussed many a time. Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. Japan continued its military offensive into China. Nationalist forces under Franco were making gains against the Republic in Spain. But in America, we were like, we got a couple of oceans here separating us from the rest of the world. We're going to the movies. We're listening to the radio.

• 15:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And the Mercury Theater had a recurring spot on CBS opposite famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his puppet Charlie McCarthy. Although it is actually called the Charlie McCarthy Show, so was Edgar the puppet or was Charlie the puppet? It's an open-ended question. Anyway, who, Lizzie, wasn't an innovative up-and-comer in his early twenties, working with the Mercury Theater, founder of the Mercury Theater at the time?

• 15:43Lizzie Bassett?

  That would be Orson Welles.

• 15:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Orson Welles. And he decided to put "A Welzian War" on the radio. H.G. Welles's "The War of the Worlds." Different spelling, no relation. The science fiction novel chronicled a Martian invasion of Earth, and it was 40 years old. It had been published back in 1898. But Orson had a fresh angle, Lizzie. What was his idea?

• 16:05Lizzie Bassett?

  His idea was to dramatize it as though it were a real radio broadcast. Now, to be clear, he was not intending, I don't believe, to trick people into thinking it was genuinely real. He wanted to use the format of news broadcasts to tell the story.

• 16:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I listened to it in preparation for this episode, and it's really fun.

• 16:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 16:23Chris Winterbauer?

  But to be clear, it's really only the first half. It's just until the intermission.

• 16:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 16:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And then after the intermission, you go into a more predictable, like traditional radio play with a narrator and other actors. So he asked Howard Koch to write the script, yes, of Casablanca, which we discussed. In the form of a news broadcast. And after three days, Koch tells Wells's producer, John Hausman, this is hopeless. Hausman tries to reach Wells, he can't. So he goes back to Koch and says, Wells wants you to stick with it. Keep going. It worked for a few more days, some actors pitch in, and then Wells adds some changes that bypassed the CBS legal department because they had already done the legal review. And on Sunday, October 30th, 1938, the broadcast of Orson Welles's adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds was beamed

• 17:06Chris Winterbauer?

  to the nation. Now, the story that you and I, and I believe many of our audience have heard, is that nearly everyone believed that this was real. They missed the opening disclaimer and the intermission. Mass hysteria ensued, people fainted, fled, died by suicide. Or did they? Now, Lizzie, have you listened to the broadcast before?

• 17:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 17:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great. It's really fun. It's electric. I do think they do a great job of making it feel real by doing those. And now, returning to the live band, musical interludes, right? And it feels as if it's just percolating slowly and then all of a sudden it explodes. So, the first half, as I mentioned, plays in near real time as Martian cylinders land in New Jersey. Heat rays from tripods lay waste to nearly 7,000 soldiers. And the war, of course, isn't much of a war at all. In the book, you know, it's as much a war as there would be between men and ants, or as Harlan Ogilvy says in the movie, men and maggots. But far fewer people were listening than we've been led to believe. And even the people who did tune in, and even the people who did initially think it was real news,

• 18:10Chris Winterbauer?

  didn't seem to panic. Some of those who were initially duped quickly realized they were listening to fiction. How, Lizzie? How could they know?

• 18:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Because they were familiar with Orson Welles, or I don't know.

• 18:20Chris Winterbauer?

  No, they just looked outside. They said, I don't see any trampods out there. Or they changed the station and they realized that other news stations were not reporting on this.

• 18:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 18:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Or they checked the broadcast schedule in the newspaper and the description said, a dramatization of Orson Welles. So, yeah.

• 18:38Lizzie Bassett?

  What I had heard was that there was another program on a different channel that aired directly before this, and that that was a big deal, and that that was the reason. That many people had missed the disclaimer that aired at the top of this. So that there was some initial confusion from people who tuned in, but that it was not to the extent that we are led to believe.

• 18:58Chris Winterbauer?

  No, and there was also, again, at the intermission, you would hear another disclaimer.

• 19:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 19:03Chris Winterbauer?

  This is an adaptation. A lot of people just enjoyed the show. According to one source, of the 1,770 people who wrote to the main CBS station about the broadcast, 1,086 were complimentary and roughly 40% of the letters sent to the FCC were supportive of the broadcast. But on Halloween, 1938, the next night, War of the Worlds dominated the news, thanks to the newspapers. Headlines claimed, "Thousands terrorized, listeners in panic, people pray for safety." One source claims that the newspapers were intentionally sensationalizing the news in order to put radio in a bad light. Would this have happened if it were in a newspaper? No, get rid of your radio, read more newspapers. That's not to say that nobody panicked.

• 19:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 19:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Radio stations and newspapers did get calls from people trying to figure out the truth. Is this real? Is it not real? And there were a couple of unfortunate coincidences that made the broadcast more believable. My personal favorite, in the town of Concrete, Washington, great name, home to 1,000 people at the time, they lost power during the broadcast.

• 20:03Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 20:05Chris Winterbauer?

  That would be tough.

• 20:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 20:08Chris Winterbauer?

  There were also alleged eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the rockets from Mars, which, you know, it's like my daughter, who just makes up stories about everything.

• 20:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 20:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Last night, I'll share this briefly. We do this walk every night before bed to try to get some energy out of my son. And Nora just insists on touching this fuzzy cactus. And I'm like, you're gonna get pricked, you're gonna... Sure enough, she comes back, she's like, ah, ah. She's got all these little cactus spines in her hand. And I was like, do you touch the cactus? She goes, no, it was the grass. And I go, no, those are cactus spines. She goes, a spider threw them at me. I'm like, what? And so I start pulling the cactus spines out of her hand. I go, what did we learn? And she goes, don't touch the cactus.

• 20:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Amazing.

• 20:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Little turd. Anyway, the point is, the FCC launched an investigation, but there was no punishment, there was no formal action. They made an informal agreement. We're gonna avoid the fake news format going forward. And then 2016 called and said, hold my beer.

• 20:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Chris Winterbauer?

  So Orson Welles moves on to Hollywood. But the question is, what if War of the Worlds had beaten him there? Would the radio broadcast be remembered or taken seriously at all had it hit the silver screen first? And it's kind of interesting that it didn't. I think we sometimes like to think of the IP invasion of Hollywood as a modern phenomenon.

• 21:16Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 21:16Chris Winterbauer?

  We talk about this all the time, Lizzie. We tell people, like, there's a rich history of IP being used in Hollywood. We just discussed a movie, adaptation of a book, Edna Farber's Giant. And you mentioned, she was adapted, how many times in the 30s, for example? Although you said like, every one of her books, basically.

• 21:32Lizzie Bassett?

  10 out of 12, I believe, of her books were adapted. And if you look at silent film, that's almost all existing IP.

• 21:38Chris Winterbauer?

  That's exactly right. So studios have been chasing material for over a century. Back in the 20s, Broadway plays Pulp Fiction, religious literature, Shakespeare, and science fiction was ripe for the picking. So Paramount reportedly bought the rights to the novel in 1925, basically 13 years before Orson's broadcast. And there was precedent, you know, think of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, for example, or even something like, you know, Frankenstein, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So there are plans for Cecil B. Demille to direct. Roy Pomeroy drafts an outline, but it doesn't go anywhere. I don't know why, but the movie just never took off. Then at some point in the early 30s, Alfred Hitchcock expressed interest in the property. This is before he had come to the United States and started working a lot, you know, in the United States with David O. Selsnick. That one doesn't

• 22:22Chris Winterbauer?

  go anywhere. And that actually makes a lot of sense. This is a British property. The book is originally sent nearer around Surrey in southern England. Next up, Russian director Sergey Eisenstein pioneers the theory of montage. And he directed, you know, big movies, Battleship Potemkin, right? I think 1925, that was his second film. That's an enormous film for the time. By the way, if you've never seen a photo of Sergey Eisenstein, I was reminded that he is 100% the inspiration for the crazy haircut of the main character in David Lynch's Eraserhead. Lizzie, look him up really quickly.

• 22:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.

• 22:55Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks like he was like, that joke of Sean Penn has been electrocuted every day since 1975 is sets about search ya since time.

• 23:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Chris Winterbauer?

  So another screenplay gets written, but that doesn't go anywhere. And after the 1938 broadcast, Paramount decides, we can't make this movie right now. Lizzie, why could you not make War of the Worlds in 1939?

• 23:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Because you are seemingly inevitably headed towards World War II.

• 23:19Chris Winterbauer?

  World War II starts.

• 23:20Lizzie Bassett?

  World War II is happening. We're not in it.

• 23:22Chris Winterbauer?

  It's happening. We're not participating.

• 23:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 23:24Chris Winterbauer?

  And in fact, there's a lot of resistance to participate in their government organizations. And Senate committee is designed to prevent propaganda from making it feel like the United States should join the war. So this would be a very dicey movie to make at the time. So let's fast forward to 1951. America, thanks in no small part to the Nazi scientists brought to the US in Operation Paperclip, is experiencing a scientific boom. And Hollywood is entering the golden age of science fiction in Hollywood. To be clear, in literature, it predates this by two decades. But in Hollywood, the public is captivated by the idea of space travel and the atomic bomb. And in 1951, we get some really important releases. So The Thing from Another World, RKO, and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

• 24:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 24:08Chris Winterbauer?

  20th Century Fox.

• 24:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Michael Rennie was ill the day the earth stood still. I was just listening to Rocky Horror. Of course, that is from science fiction double feature off of that movie's soundtrack, which lists almost all of the sci fi classiques from this era.

• 24:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. Things come full circle at Paramount when they assign George Powell, prolific science fiction producer of the 50s, to make War of the Worlds. Now, he had been DeMille's protege, and the resulting film was released in the United States in late August of 1953. Powell produced, Barry Lyndon wrote the screenplay, and Byron Haskins directed. Lizzie, have you ever seen the 1953 The War of the Worlds adaptation with Gene Barry and Anne Robinson?

• 24:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I have not, no.

• 24:51Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very fun. It's very hokey from the time. It actually has really fun special effects. There are a couple of key changes from the book. They move it to California, just outside of Los Angeles, and then eventually in Los Angeles. The main character is a scientist, not- A writer as he is in H.G. Wells's version. They give him a love interest played by Ann Robinson, who's, I believe, effectively a nurse instead of a wife that he's trying to get back to because they wanted to give it like an active love, you know, sort of element. But in a lot of ways, it's much more accurate than the Spielberg version. Like, the aliens are closer, although smaller, to the way that they're described in the Wells version, although they do make a couple of important changes. They give the aliens the three fingers. They have tentacles in the Wells version. You can see the influence on E.T. from the 1953 version, for example. And it was, you know, kind of innovative.

• 25:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It won a special effects Oscar, you know, and it was nominated for sound and editing. It's a real, like, staple of this era.

• 25:45Chris Winterbauer?

  This podcast is sponsored by Bilt. Guys, Lizzie and I don't always agree on everything. For example, she loves a good Sally Bowles-style pixie cut, and I say, "Godspeed." But we do agree that housing is expensive. Rent, mortgage, it doesn't matter which one you're paying. It stings every month, but Bilt can make it feel a little bit better. Let me explain. Bilt started out rewarding members on their rent, and now, as of 2026, Bilt members can also earn points on mortgage payments wherever they live. Every housing payment earns you points. You can use toward flights with top travel partners like United and Hyatt, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, and so much more. Personally, I redeem my points for Amazon.com, which I use to order Blu-rays of the movies that we watch on this podcast. But here's what I think the most underrated part is. Bilt members also get access to a neighborhood concierge. It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes,

• 26:30Chris Winterbauer?

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• 26:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats, and I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&M's, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles. But they also have salty snacks, easy-to-make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween movie night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispie treats and peanut butter M&M's. And because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all-time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making- Making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog Q.

• 27:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Mars knows he needs a celebration too, so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice Dental Chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at Mars Global, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited-time Halloween offerings.

• 27:56Lizzie Bassett?

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• 28:41Lizzie Bassett?

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• 29:40Chris Winterbauer?

  So the era of science fiction as, you know, kind of the Hollywood B-movie crop, staple crop ends arguably in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which really takes sci-fi to the next level.

• 29:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 29:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And movies like War of the Worlds, which I think scratched an itch for large-scale destruction and effects, morph more into the disaster genre, which we've talked about. And you get movies like Earthquake and Airport and Airport 77 and The Swarm.

• 30:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Poseidon, Tower of Terror.

• 30:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno.

• 30:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, sorry, not Tower of Terror. Towering Inferno, yes, I got all the titles wrong.

• 30:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Tower of Terror, Poseidon Boat, Big Boat, Haunted Virus on the Seas. But of course, we have aliens, right, returning in the late 70s. Could you name a couple of movies, Lizzie, from around that time that involve aliens?

• 30:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Alien.

• 30:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Perfect. Alien.

• 30:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Alien.

• 30:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Alien.

• 30:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Shortly thereafter, The Thing, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.

• 30:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Even Star Wars, to a certain extent. You know, it features many aliens. You mentioned John Carpenter, remade Thing from Another World.

• 30:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's The Thing.

• 30:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, there were always rumblings of War of the Worlds. Like, let's remake War of the Worlds. This is a book that people know. It's been around for nearly a century at this point. The movie has not been remade since 1953. I think people forget, you know, a lot of movies that are frequently remade, there tends to be about a 15-year cadence.

• 31:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 31:04Chris Winterbauer?

  It's about 15 years every time.

• 31:06Lizzie Bassett?

  If you look at A Star is Born, it might be like 20-ish years.

• 31:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, 15 to 20 years go by and the studio perks up, right? And they say, all right, we gotta do it. Now, in the early 90s, Steven Spielberg buys one of the last surviving War of the Worlds radio scripts. I can find no evidence of this, but I am convinced that the discovery of E.T. by Elliot, along with the alien design, was directly influenced by the 1953 adaptation. But what we do know, Lizzie, is that Steven Spielberg loves aliens.

• 31:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Me too. I gotta tell you, aliens are right up there with vampires for me. I will watch almost anything with aliens in it. I love them.

• 31:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, War of the Worlds, they are alien vampires.

• 31:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Chris Winterbauer?

  In the Wells version and in- And the Spielbergers and they suck.

• 31:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 31:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I drink your milkshake.

• 31:49Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. They literally drink the human milkshakes and then spray them everywhere.

• 31:53Chris Winterbauer?

  They do.

• 31:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Can I shout out one alien movie very briefly? If no one has seen this, it was a small movie. I can't remember how many years ago it came out, but it's called The Vast of Night.

• 32:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's excellent. One of my favorite alien movies. So if you're an alien fan.

• 32:06Chris Winterbauer?

  The Vast of Night is very Spielbergian in many ways.

• 32:09Lizzie Bassett?

  It is. Yes, very much.

• 32:10Chris Winterbauer?

  In a Close Encounters kind of way.

• 32:12Lizzie Bassett?

  In a Close Encounters kind of way. It's really, really good. There is a particularly incredible oner in that movie. That deserves more attention than I feel like it got. So watch The Vast of Night.

• 32:21Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it got some good attention. It's a great indie film. I believe his second film is coming out soon. And I will double check that and we can promote it.

• 32:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 32:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Now Spielberg also made his first alien movie at a young age. He was 17. It was called Firelight. And it depicted an alien attack on Earth. He was massively inspired by some Golden Age of Sci-Fi movies. The Day the Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers from 1956. But his love for aliens, Lizzie, goes beyond the movies because young Stevie Spielberg wanted to believe. He had a deep rooted belief that we have been visited this century. Quote, "I was a real UFO devotee in the 1970s and really into the UFO phenomenon from reading. For me, it was science." End quote.

• 33:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Was it Chariot of the Gods?

• 33:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know if it was Chariot of the Gods, and here's why. I think it had more to do with perhaps the books of Jacques Vallée. Have you read any like Passport to Megonia, for example, from 1969?

• 33:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I haven't read them.

• 33:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Cause you know, in Close Encounters, the character played by Francois Truffaut, the French scientist at the beginning of the movie who shows up?

• 33:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 33:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So he's inspired by Jacques Vallée.

• 33:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it. Okay.

• 33:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And to be clear, Jacques Vallée, not just a ufologist, although I think a lot of people know him from that. That's how I knew him. Uh, but also internet pioneer, astronomer, computer scientist, venture capitalist out of the Bay Area. The point is, what's interesting about him in particular is he actually does something that I think you mentioned signs, but that M. Night Shyamalan really taps into in Signs, which I love.

• 33:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I do too.

• 33:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Passport to Megonia, it explores the potential links between UFOs, cults, religions, demons, angels, ghosts, cryptids.

• 33:56Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, what if all of these are manifestations of the same sort of thing being perceived in different ways? And what I think is so interesting about that is when everybody complains about signs and the fact that these aliens have landed on Earth and they're, you know, sensitive to water, it's like because they're actually demons. And that ain't aliens. It's demons and angels. Cause you know, it's all about religion. And so they're sensitive to water because they're a little fiery demons.

• 34:20Lizzie Bassett?

  So it's holy water. Okay.

• 34:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Holy water. Yeah, exactly. Cause he's a priest. Cause it's Mel Gibson.

• 34:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, look, I think it's one of the few paranormal type things that I will even allow myself to entertain.

• 34:31Chris Winterbauer?

  It's fun.

• 34:31Lizzie Bassett?

  And at this point, it feels less like entertaining, considering the government is like, yeah, there's aliens.

• 34:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And there's like, there's definitely something going on. My wife's reading Annie Jacobson's Area 51 right now. A lot of the stuff about that is it's really, you know, downed Russian spy planes and whatnot. But I like the idea that there's stuff that we don't understand out there.

• 34:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Definitely.

• 34:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And that the explanation is not just some religious, you know, allegory.

• 34:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. And I also, you know, you're talking about sort of like archetypes, cryptids, all these things. I think that's why Ancient Aliens is so fun and why The World of Worlds is so fun is because these things, they're not new. They actually are like more ancient than we are. And that exerts this kind of control over humanity that's almost a relief in some ways. Cause it's like, oh, this was all set up before we even got here.

• 35:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly. And it's funny because Spielberg in this movie makes a specific choice to imply some sort of ancient aliens connection by having these machines have been buried underground for so long.

• 35:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 35:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is not part of the H.G. Wells book. Let's get back to the nineties. Spielberg buys the script and says, oh man, this would make an amazing movie. And I think in part, it's not that he's, maybe he'd forgotten that this movie existed. I really think it's the timing, right? He's just made Jurassic Park. He has just brought dinosaurs to life. He also just made Schindler's List. You know, maybe he's ready to make a war movie. He will go on to make Saving Private Ryan very shortly after this. The technology's ready, but Roland Emmerich beats him to the punch, Lizzie, with what movie that we're going to cover later this summer?

• 35:55Lizzie Bassett?

  We will not go quietly into that good night. We will not vanish without a fight. Independence Day.

• 36:01Chris Winterbauer?

  One of the best speeches a president's ever given.

• 36:02Lizzie Bassett?

  That's my president.

• 36:03Chris Winterbauer?

  That's my president. Bill Pullman, independent.

• 36:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Truly, I would nominate him in a heartbeat.

• 36:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So Spielberg moves on, but as H.G. Wells puts it in his book, "Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regard to this intellectual property with envious eyes." So around the same time that Spielberg's toying with the idea, of course, a lot of other people are thinking about War of the Worlds. Screenwriter Peter Briggs turned it into a spec screenplay. Now, he's probably best known now for adapting Hellboy with Guillermo del Toro. But back in the early 90s, he was very known for Aliens and Predators. Specifically, he wrote an early draft of Alien vs. Predator, based on the Dark Horse comic that sold to 20th Century Fox. Now, that movie would languish in development hell for years, and it would not get turned into a film until, you know, I think, early to mid 2000s.

• 36:47Chris Winterbauer?

  But Briggs, who must have been a glutton for punishment, decides that he is going to do a spec adaptation of War of the Worlds that is faithful to the period.

• 36:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Cool.

• 36:56Chris Winterbauer?

  1898, and he even incorporates research material he pulled from the University of Indianapolis that Wells had cut before publishing it. For example, Wells's hero was supposed to die in a blaze of glory after using explosives to take out one of the tripods in the original version.

• 37:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, which happens in this movie.

• 37:12Chris Winterbauer?

  But then he changed it. So spec scripts are almost never made, as you know, Lizzie. They're often used as calling cards or samples. And in fact, Briggs would use this as a sample. But Briggs's agent sent it to Paramount, who owns the rights, the cinematic rights, for War of the Worlds. And according to Briggs, they flipped out for it. Why? Because Kenneth Branagh had just approached Paramount about adapting War of the Worlds also. So Paramount says, "Oh, great. Perfect timing. Here's a script." And they sent Briggs's script to Kenneth Branagh. And Branagh, who was also working with actor Brian Blass, loved it. They say, "This is great. Let's go make it." And then they hit a snag. And it's the same damn snag we hit on The Iron Giant,

• 37:55Chris Winterbauer?

  which is that this damn movie had been turned into a concept album in the 70s, and the rights got all screwed up. So back in the late 70s, musician Jeff Wayne decided to do something unusual. He turned War of the Worlds into a concept album. Took a few months, but he was able to lock down the rights. In fact, quote, "Except for the book and movie rights, the latter of which are owned by Paramount, I own everything else, including, as best as we could determine, merchandising."

• 38:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, dear.

• 38:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds, that's the full title, was released in 1978. And Lizzie, it's narrated by Richard Burton.

• 38:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Hell, yeah.

• 38:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It's really fun. I listened to the whole thing. The music's awesome. The narration, Richard Burton's voice is great.

• 38:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he does have a great voice.

• 38:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Honestly, it's kind of a blast. I'm not a big fan of concept albums generally. They're just not my style, but I-

• 38:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's gotta be better than space jazz.

• 38:48Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it's just, yes. No, this is, it's really fun. Here's the thing. War of the Worlds was public domain in the United States, but not in the UK. And European copyright law had just changed. The book was originally set to become public domain 50 years after the author's death. Wells died in 46, so that means it would become public domain in Europe in 1996. Perfect timing. But then that period got expanded to 75 years. So the merchandising rights get stuck with Jeff Wayne for another 25 years. So according to Briggs, they get Jeff Wayne into a room to try to make a deal. They're saying, Jeff, we want to make this movie. And he says, I will sell you these rights on one condition. You make this movie a musical. The project died.

• 39:33Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I wish they'd said yes.

• 39:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Briggs claims that in 1998, an executive at Cruise Wagner Productions, which is Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's production company, which they formed in 1992, reached out about the script. Now, I don't think this necessarily means Tom Cruise was asking about it. This is just an executive at his company.

• 39:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 39:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Their job is to find material that would be suitable for Tom, you know, to star in or to produce. And I think War of the Worlds makes a lot of sense for this type of stuff that he's doing. So War of the Worlds was perfect, except Jeff Wayne. And they say, yeah, you know, we can't do anything with this. But Jeff Wayne may have inadvertently protected the property because Hallmark was also interested in turning The War of the Worlds into a probably not super high budget miniseries.

• 40:21Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 40:22Chris Winterbauer?

  But they couldn't get past Jeff Wayne, so that version also died.

• 40:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Did the aliens come home for Christmas and realize that their true love has been in the bar all along?

• 40:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they realize it was the guy that they went to high school with, who's like, wears flannels and he's pretty hot.

• 40:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Chris Winterbauer?

  It was only a matter of time before Hollywood's biggest star made a movie with its biggest director. Now, that was not War of the Worlds. Lizzie, when did Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg finally hook up?

• 40:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That would be Minority Report.

• 40:54Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. One of the greatest science fiction films, in my opinion, ever made.

• 40:58Lizzie Bassett?

  That's great.

• 40:59Chris Winterbauer?

  An enormous, commercial, and critical success that Yann DeBont will always say should have been his movie. I believe the story is that Yann DeBont was originally supposed to direct that and Spielberg was going to direct The Haunting. And then they, Spielberg was like, what if we flipped?

• 41:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Stole Minority Report.

• 41:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Yann, that's your fault.

• 41:19Chris Winterbauer?

  So for Spielberg, I'm guessing it was a welcome turn after the somewhat muted reception of 2001's AI, artificial intelligence. And I'm guessing these two men probably bonded over the fact that both of them didn't have a great time working with Stanley Kubrick in their respective endeavors with Eyes Wide Shut and AI, artificial intelligence.

• 41:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 41:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, for Cruise, it was perhaps also a nice distraction from his divorce from Nicole Kidman. Although I think based on the timing, that divorce happened basically concurrent to, or maybe even after the filming of Minority Report, which had a lengthy post-production process. But the point is, these two knew they wanted to run it back. I mean, Minority Report was a total success. It was a huge success.

• 41:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Very good.

• 41:59Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Cruise, Spielberg pitched three ideas, and the third idea was the War of the Worlds. Now, Cruise loved science fiction films. He hadn't starred in a lot of them, but he loved them. And I want to read you a quote, Lizzie, and I want you to put yourself in the mindset of, I just listened to that amazing primer on Scientology that What Went Wrong released on Friday, which we recorded 10 minutes ago.

• 42:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 42:22Chris Winterbauer?

  So here's the quote. "You look at science fiction and the role that science fiction has actually played in our culture because they were dreaming and pushing for the space race. It was the science fiction writers during that pole fiction era that were writing about space and then creating that, trying to get them to not think about blowing each other up." End quote.

• 42:40Lizzie Bassett?

  So he's talking about our supreme leader.

• 42:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Maybe. It's possible that there is an allusion here to the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, who, when he published Dianetics, positioned it as an alternative to nuclear proliferation and escalation.

• 42:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 42:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And if you guys don't know, L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific pulp science fiction writer. In fact, the most prolific author of all time, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Now, Cruz and Spielberg already had another project in development together, Lizzie. It was called Ghost Soldiers, and it's kind of a perfect synthesis of both of their sensibilities, at least as an audience would see them. It's the story of a group of Ranger volunteers who, in January of 1945, set out to rescue over 500 POWs in a Japanese camp in the Philippines. It's basically Saving Private Ryan meets Mission: Impossible. It makes a lot of sense, and writer Josh Friedman had, as of January 2002, already written the first draft. A little bit on Friedman. He'd studied film at USC in the 90s. He got an agent, dropped out, sold a spec script called Dead Drop

• 43:39Chris Winterbauer?

  that eventually became the 1996 movie Chain Reaction, which I've never seen, starring Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman, and Rachel Weisz. I will watch it for her. The IMDb log line reads, "Two researchers in a green alternative energy project are put on the run when they are framed for murder and treason." Interesting, there are actually kind of a few of these weird sort of like alternative energy thrillers from the time. I'm also reminded, did you ever see the Val Kilmer movie, The Saint?

• 44:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 44:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Where he plays like the master thief who's attempting to steal the cold fusion technology or whatever.

• 44:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Anyway, the point is, the story goes, nine other writers worked on this script, and all that was left was a single line of Morgan Freeman's dialogue. Would you like to hear the one line that was left of Josh Friedman's doing?

• 44:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 44:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, here we go. I'm your friend. That's it.

• 44:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm your friend?

• 44:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm your friend, Eddie.

• 44:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yikes.

• 44:29Chris Winterbauer?

  That was the only line left, but it didn't matter. The project changed his life. He was hired to adapt Ghost Soldiers. I think this was actually before Spielberg and Cruz were attached, but Ghost Soldiers died in development. There may have been too much competition. You had The Great Raid at Miramax.

• 44:42Lizzie Bassett?

  You gotta change that title.

• 44:44Chris Winterbauer?

  It's also possible that, you know, Spielberg, he'd been involved in Band of Brothers, which had come out around this time. Maybe he was thinking, I gotta move on from World War II. He also, I believe, was developing Munich, which was going to follow the murder of the Israeli Olympians at the 1972 Munich Olympics. So he may just have wanted to move away from this arena. Again, it didn't matter for Josh Friedman, because the point is Spielberg says, hey, why don't you tackle War of the Worlds? But he doesn't want to do it as a period adaptation. So, Lizzie, what happened at the beginning of the 2000s that seemingly changed the course of everything in the United States and has continued to define us and certainly changed a lot of movies in Hollywood?

• 45:21Lizzie Bassett?

  September 11th.

• 45:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So Spielberg said, quote, "These films came out in response to our fears about the Soviet Union and a possible nuclear war." He's talking about the original War of the Worlds. "Now, in the shadow of 9/11, it felt that War of the Worlds had a special significance. I think I made this picture because I thought this story's time had come again." So he tells Friedman, "I want you to do a post 9/11 take on War of the Worlds." And Friedman goes off and writes it, crossed 2002 and 2003. Hands in the script, silence. Paramount decides they don't want to pay him any more steps. They don't green light the movie. He says he left and went on to other projects. Now, I don't think that's because Paramount didn't want to make this movie. I get the sense that it's because Spielberg and Cruise wanted to bring on a different writer. And let's talk about the first writer that they considered.

• 46:07Chris Winterbauer?

  It's possible they considered him before Friedman. It's possible this came after. We could not nail down the timeline, but we do know that it is a director who also loves Aliens, Lizzie. He loves Aliens, he loves mystery boxes, he loves aliases. It is...

• 46:21Lizzie Bassett?

  J.J. Abrams.

• 46:21Chris Winterbauer?

  J.J. Abrams. Aliens and aliases. And Super 8 is obviously a very Spielbergian alien movie that he would later make. So sometime in 2003, he gets a call. Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, and Paul Wagner want to meet you. And he says, "Is this a prank?" And they say, "No, come in." And they bring him in and they say, "Do you want to write War of the Worlds?" And he says, "I can't, because I am stuck making this show called Lost." And I have no idea what's happening. We don't have a script. And he was so busy on Lost that he had to say no to War of the Worlds. He said he felt like he had committed career suicide. Here I was, doing this pilot that I- I didn't have a script for when instead I could have been working with Spielberg and Cruise.

• 47:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Little did he know, Lost would become not only the most expensive pilot of all time, but one of the most successful shows at the time. Abrams is out. Spielberg needs a sure thing. He needs the man who'd helped him make the dinosaurs walk the earth.

• 47:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Jurassic Park.

• 47:19Chris Winterbauer?

  David Kep, come here. Yeah, that's the song.

• 47:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So Josh Friedman and David Kep are around the same age, but they were at very different points in their career. Lizzie, you mentioned Jurassic Park. Since 93, let me just read you some of the films that David Kep wrote between 1993 and 2003. Jurassic Park, Carlito's Way, that was the same year. The Paper, Mission Impossible, The Lost World, Stir of Echoes, Panic Room, Spider-Man.

• 47:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, just some small movies.

• 47:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Just a few little indie flicks. So some sources say that Spielberg discarded Friedman's script, but we'll get into that in a little bit. So in January of 2004, Spielberg, Cruise and Kep meet to talk about the story, and they establish a couple of things. Number one, Cruise's character, he's just gonna be a dad with a blue collar job. We're gonna show him being really good at that job, but it's not gonna come back later.

• 48:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 48:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, can I give you my theory?

• 48:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 48:08Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that originally, in the third act.

• 48:11Lizzie Bassett?

  There had to have been something.

• 48:12Chris Winterbauer?

  He was going to operate one of the tripods.

• 48:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, of course.

• 48:16Chris Winterbauer?

  It's exactly set up for that. Like, that is why he is doing it. He was gonna operate it to dump their diarrhea.

• 48:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 48:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Or whatever.

• 48:23Lizzie Bassett?

  He was gonna hit the diarrhea dump.

• 48:26Chris Winterbauer?

  But it was clearly set up for that.

• 48:27Lizzie Bassett?

  It has to be.

• 48:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And then they just clearly abandoned. They decided, we're not gonna do that. And I'm glad they actually didn't do that because that would have been too heroic for the character.

• 48:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Chris Winterbauer?

  But also then you didn't need.

• 48:38Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 48:39Chris Winterbauer?

  The extended sequence of him dropping.

• 48:42Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so weird and funny because they make a point of showing how good and adept he is at operating the controls of this crane. There's no way it wasn't supposed to come back.

• 48:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Here's my theory. They cut it from the climax and they said, should we cut it from the beginning? And they said, this guy's kind of such a shitty dad for a lot of this movie.

• 48:59Lizzie Bassett?

  He should be good at something.

• 49:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He should be good at something at the beginning.

• 49:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 49:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And they kept it. Or Tom Cruise had been like, I just learned how to operate a crane for the last six months. Like, I'm gonna do it in this.

• 49:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 49:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Either way, it's fine. They also agree about what they don't want in the movie. They said no destruction of famous landmarks, no shots of world capitals, no scientists or government officials as main characters. I think that's really cool.

• 49:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 49:21Chris Winterbauer?

  This is gonna be an anti-alien invasion movie. They take all the tropes that we normally see and they say, we don't wanna see them. It's gonna be big, but intimate with a very specific point of view. If Ray doesn't see it, we don't see it. And I, I think that's really effective. They feel like ants. They really feel like ants. Like even if there is a plan to deal with the aliens, we have no idea what it is. And of course, Lizzie, by the nature of the source material, the aliens are gonna be mean. And as we discussed in Temple of Doom, Spielberg always seems to be suffering a little bit of cognitive dissonance when he's dealing with material that is darker than his normal sensibility. And he has a quote here that I think is interesting. He says, "My true nature makes me want to make E.T. and Close Encounters, but the audience in me wants to make War of the Worlds.

• 50:04Chris Winterbauer?

  For the sheer excitement, nothing comes close to warfare between the human race and an extraterrestrial one. It's bigger than life." And it's interesting that like, I think there's the movies that he feels are maybe more in his wheelhouse, which could be in E.T., for example, as opposed to the movies that he really remembers fondly from his childhood, that really like made him want to go make movies, for example, which maybe had a bit more of an edge to them. But what's interesting too about it, Lizzie, is that, do you know that E.T. started as a much darker movie?

• 50:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I vaguely remember us talking about this, yeah.

• 50:31Chris Winterbauer?

  You talked about this on Poltergeist a little bit.

• 50:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And we will talk about this when we cover E.T., but it originally was supposed to be a dark sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind called Night Skies.

• 50:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 50:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And then it, of course, became something very different. So Cap starts working on the script and Spielberg's very secretive about it. He would only hand out sections. And according to Cap, quote, "Like only five people read the whole script." He would only give people portions of the script. And then, after 50 years of rumblings, false starts and roadblocks, the War of the Worlds gets an adrenaline shot right in the ass. Cruise and Spielberg are at this time, two of the busiest men in Hollywood, and they've got a couple of big movies lined up. Tom Cruise has Mission Impossible 3, or MI3, and Spielberg has what will become Munich. So after Abrams turns down War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise calls him up, starts inviting him to concerts and get-togethers. others. Abrams starts returning the favor. Abrams says, it's like we were dating. I ended up inviting him to my birthday party.

• 51:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom shows up and he is the nicest guy in the history of all time to my friends, especially my most cynical friends. Everyone sees it and gets it. He's a sweetheart. He's real. It was the most normal fun time. End quote. Lizzie, like your face was like, what's he doing? What's he doing? What is your first thought? What's he doing?

• 51:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know.

• 51:43Chris Winterbauer?

  My first thought was like, is he recruiting him?

• 51:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 51:46Chris Winterbauer?

  To Scientology? That was my first thought, but no.

• 51:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't feel like Tom Cruise has to do that. He's up to something else.

• 51:53Chris Winterbauer?

  He is up to something else.

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• 52:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Love the crown molding.

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• 52:43Chris Winterbauer?

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• 53:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Abrams' agent calls him after Cruise and Abrams have been dating for a while, and he says, "Are you aware of the conversations?" And he says, "What conver-- we're not dating, what conversations?" And then he says, "No, no, no. This conversation is that Tom wants you to direct Mission Impossible 3," which would be a huge move for J.J. Abrams. We are now in the summer of 2004, so David Fincher had been attached to that film briefly, then Joe Carnahan, and now Cruise wants to bring on Abrams. The movie's been delayed, and Paramount's like, "We need our next Mission Impossible." Spielberg has decided to postpone Munich to take another crack at the script, and so all of a sudden, they have a very brief window where Cruise is available before Mission Impossible 3, because Abrams is working on Lost and needs to get up to speed, and Spielberg's

• 54:21Chris Winterbauer?

  waiting for the script on Munich. And so they decide, "What if we just make this really tiny indie film called War of the Worlds during this break?"

• 54:31Lizzie Bassett?

  This $130 million indie film?

• 54:34Chris Winterbauer?

  So in August of 2004, Variety reports, "Following 48 hours of frenzied negotiations, War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg, has been set on a crash pre-production schedule." $130 million budget, they have just 10 weeks of prep, less than half of what they would normally get for a movie this size.

• 54:52Lizzie Bassett?

  That's crazy.

• 54:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, they need to hit a November 2004 start date for filming. It's August of 2004, and they're gonna hit a June of 2005 release.

• 55:04Lizzie Bassett?

  That's some Twilight New Moon timeline there.

• 55:06Chris Winterbauer?

  That's 10 months.

• 55:08Lizzie Bassett?

  That's crazy.

• 55:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Kathleen Kennedy later said Spielberg turned to her and said, "Don't freak out when you look at the script. Just recognize that there are three people in the movie. That's the heart of the film. And every now and then, there are 1,000 people running in the background," end quote.

• 55:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 55:21Chris Winterbauer?

  So on the one hand, I think Spielberg is sensitive to this, in a sense, because he said, you know, "This wasn't a cram course for War of the Worlds." He said, "This was my longest schedule in about 12 years. We took our time." I think he means production schedule, like shooting schedule.

• 55:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 55:35Chris Winterbauer?

  This is a crazy tight delivery in terms of prep and post-production, because he also said, "I've never prepped a movie this quickly."

• 55:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 55:43Chris Winterbauer?

  To make it clear, I'm not phoning it in. You can see it in the movie. He's obviously not phoning it in. This is a crazy tight timeline. So how does he pull it off? Well, obviously, he's not going to do it alone. He brings in, as we mentioned, a lot of the people he's worked with before. Composer John Williams, his cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn, costume designer Joanna Johnston, production designer Rick Carter. As you mentioned, Lizzie, the sets in this movie, the builds.

• 56:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Really great.

• 56:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Amazing.

• 56:07Lizzie Bassett?

  That airplane crash, that when it crashes into the suburban neighborhood, that one's particularly incredible.

• 56:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's fun too, because it's also just what J.J. Abrams does on Lost in the pilot. Also stunt coordinator Vic Armstrong, we should mention, who we just talked about on Temple of Doom. And of course, Industrial Light and Magic. So they basically rolled off the Star Wars prequels onto War of the Worlds. And one of the first calls that Spielberg made was to Dennis Murin, VFX supervisor, who we've talked about on a number of episodes. But one of the next calls was to a man named Dan Gregoire. Spielberg had met Gregoire at Skywalker Ranch sometime in 2003, where he was doing something that had been done for a couple of years, but was still pretty new in Hollywood, pre-visualization. So Lizzie, we've talked about pre-vising before, basically creating a digital pre-visualization. Think a very rudimentary animated version of what a sequence will look like in a movie.

• 56:57Chris Winterbauer?

  And he was doing this with George Lucas on Revenge of the Sith. And he was doing it digitally, in many instances, on a laptop, and it would take a matter of hours, not days, to render this thing out. And so this process allowed Lucas to basically look over his shoulder and like direct the scene right there. And so for War of the Worlds, one of the ways they were able to kind of move quickly is Gregoire would take photos throughout location scouting. He'd recreate the locations on his laptop, and then Spielberg could, quote, "fly the set," meaning, you know, he could explore the set, and nail his angles before they ever got to set. And Lizzie, we talked about how meticulous Spielberg is with storyboarding. This is obviously taking that to the next level.

• 57:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. It's essentially 3D storyboarding.

• 57:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. And, you know, he would then send these to ILM, and ILM could get a head start on mapping out their effects. But I also want to be clear, this was not, I don't think this was entirely new to Spielberg. I've seen the pre-vises for, do you remember in The Minority Report when the spiders are going through the apartment to find him in the bathtub? And it's that amazing crane shot going over all the rooms?

• 57:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm 99% sure. Sure, they prevised that entire sequence because that's used with a motorized crane that they're doing that with. So I believe he's used this technology before, but never to this extent.

• 58:02Lizzie Bassett?

  And did you say that Dennis Murin was the one at ILM who was heading this up?

• 58:06Chris Winterbauer?

  No, this was Dan Gregoire, who's then sending things to Dennis Murin at ILM.

• 58:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I could be wrong. I'm pretty sure Dennis Murin was also heading up the team behind the T2 in Terminator, which makes a lot of sense, given the tentacled creature that appears later.

• 58:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, Dennis, he's a veteran. He's done everything. So they're also setting up crews to work simultaneously on the east and west coast. So basically, they're going to shoot east coast first for location work and then they'll come back to LA after winter break to shoot, you know, stage work and anything remaining. And Spielberg has to consistently resist the huge temptation to go bigger, right? And this may have in part been why they omitted potentially a, we could not verify scene in which he operates one of the tripods, Tom Cruise.

• 58:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm just, it has to be that.

• 58:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It has to be.

• 58:50Chris Winterbauer?

  But one example, the big hillside battle, Lizzie, right? Where Justin Chatwin runs off, you're not my real dad. He goes up the side of the hill and Tom Cruise is trying to pull him back and we're seeing the tanks, you know, along the top of the hill.

• 59:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 59:01Chris Winterbauer?

  He had actually prevised going over the hill and seeing the full extent of like the quote, war of the worlds, right? But we never do in the final film because he had to commit to the personal point of view of the family, which I actually think is a really effective story choice. Yeah. It's like, I like that Cruise never sees over that. He doesn't go over the hill. You know, it's consistent with his character. Also 10 months, Stephen, 10 months. So let's talk about casting briefly. So Cruise is obviously in from the start, but we should note that audiences were just starting to get a taste in a sense of the non-heroic Cruise. So like, if you go back to Cruise's origins and especially you look at, you know, some of his roles in the 90s, he played some really complex characters in a really interesting way. You think of something like Rain Man in the late 80s,

• 59:40Chris Winterbauer?

  or even Jerry Maguire in the 90s, pretty flawed individuals. And then in the early 2000s, as we discussed in our primer a little bit, you see him move a little bit more into. More of the Mission Impossible world of, you know, something like The Last Samurai, for example.

• 59:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Safer roles, for sure.

• 59:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Somewhat, or, you know, more popcorn. But he had just done Michael Mann's Collateral, which came out in August of 2004, where he's not only an antagonist, but he's the Silver Fox antagonist, which is a totally no look for Cruise.

• 1:00:07Lizzie Bassett?

  He's good in it.

• 1:00:07Chris Winterbauer?

  He's very good. So I wonder if Cruise at the time was wanting to explore darker roles, because if you look at something like Collateral and War of the Worlds, these are two movies where he's playing far more dark or flawed characters than some of the other movies around it.

• 1:00:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, but they're not like, you're talking about the early exploration of his parts and you're thinking of things like Rain Man or Interview with the Vampire, where he's really pushing himself and trying to do things that are very different from Tom Cruise. I would argue with both Collateral and War of the Worlds. He is fully in the lane that he will, I think, remain in, where he's kind of always Tom Cruise. But yes, he is definitely, he's, he's mean Tom Cruise in this one. He's angry Tom Cruise.

• 1:00:48Chris Winterbauer?

  He's angry Tom Cruise. So around the same time, Trey's report that Dakota Fanning, 10 years old, has been cast as his daughter. And for Dakota, Tom Cruise, schmom Cruise. She'd acted across Sean Penn in I Am Sam, Denzel Washington in Man on Fire, Brittany Murphy in Uptown Girl, Mike Myers in The Cat in the Hat, and Kevin Bacon in Charlize Theron in something called Trapped that I didn't even know was a movie. The point is, even when the movies weren't great, although Man on Fire is, in my opinion, Fanning was always praised as a natural.

• 1:01:16Lizzie Bassett?

  She's amazing.

• 1:01:17Chris Winterbauer?

  And as you mentioned, she's a scene stealer in this movie.

• 1:01:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Chris Winterbauer?

  He basically, I'm sure Spielberg gave her the tape of Willie Scott and said, scream that much, but make it more watchable for Lizzie.

• 1:01:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:01:28Chris Winterbauer?

  So the main two roles are set. Now, I read, you know, the remaining cast wasn't set until a month out from shooting. I don't think that's that unusual. That's not that unusual in my experience.

• 1:01:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Not from what we've seen.

• 1:01:38Chris Winterbauer?

  No. Early October, Tim Robbins is in talks to join the cast. You could argue he'd peaked in the 90s, The Player, Shawshank Redemption, and a lot more, but he's making a comeback. Lizzie, he just won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Do you remember which movie?

• 1:01:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Was it Mystic River?

• 1:01:50Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. And they said, play the same character in this movie.

• 1:01:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no. Except this time, it's aliens.

• 1:01:57Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. So he'd also worked with Tom Cruise, Top Gun, and he'd never worked with Steven Spielberg, which is kinda crazy to me. I would imagine he would have totally crossed paths with him, but he hadn't. So this was the first time.

• 1:02:08Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, I actually, while I find the basement sequence with Tim Robbins to be strange on many levels.

• 1:02:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It feels out of left field. I always loved Tim Robbins. It just feels like a bit of a non sequitur in this movie.

• 1:02:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it feels like a little bit of a weird distraction.

• 1:02:22Chris Winterbauer?

  He's just not set up. You know what I mean? He just kinda comes out of nowhere.

• 1:02:25Lizzie Bassett?

  No, but I will say, I do like them opposite each other because of the size difference. Because there are a couple of moments where they are, you know, physically at odds. And it's like, it's very clear in that moment that like, I'm sorry, Tom Cruise, you are not overpowering Tim Robbins.

• 1:02:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Human giant Tim Robbins.

• 1:02:43Lizzie Bassett?

  He's huge. And like, that is interesting to watch because in those moments, it's like the character of Ray, clearly recognizing, I cannot physically overpower this person, so I'm gonna have to figure something else out. And he does, and he bludgeons him with a shovel.

• 1:02:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. He's also not like wispy thin the way he was in the 90s too, like.

• 1:03:00Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he's big.

• 1:03:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Tim Robbins has thickened out by this point in his career. So he's an imposing person. But Robbins was an early choice, along with Australian actress Miranda Otto.

• 1:03:10Lizzie Bassett?

  This is what I was gonna say at the beginning, is that Miranda Otto's entire role in this movie is just to look hot pregnant. For Tom Cruise to be like, it's a good look on you. And she's like, really? And he's like, yeah.

• 1:03:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, let's talk about it. What was she most famous for right at this moment, Lizzie?

• 1:03:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Lord of the Rings.

• 1:03:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Lord of the Rings, Ewen, Lord of the Rings. Not a man, die, now school. So she happens to be on a quick trip to LA, and her agent calls and says Steven Spielberg wants to meet you. Again, she thinks this is a joke. She's also pregnant. So she meets Spielberg and she says.

• 1:03:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, she's actually pregnant.

• 1:03:41Chris Winterbauer?

  So she says, I had to say to him, I don't know if I can do this because I'm pregnant. And Spielberg says, no, that's great, because there's barely any relationship here to begin with. And it gives it something if you're pregnant. And so they wrote it into the movie. They just wrote her pregnancy into the movie.

• 1:03:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It's just that it's such a weird line, but yes.

• 1:03:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. But I think what they were trying to do again is like, he's kind of such a derpy, deadbeat dad for a lot of this movie. Which again, I really like, that I think they wanted to say, he's not resentful of his ex-wife in that way. Like, he's fallen short as a father, but I like. That they said they don't need to be fighting or have baggage. You know what I mean on that front?

• 1:04:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, she seems to get along with him decently well.

• 1:04:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And like he's moved on and I like the new husband is just like, I'll be outside because you guys have to do your thing. I liked that element of it. It felt like actually a realistic, mature portrayal of divorce as opposed to what you normally get in the movies.

• 1:04:27Lizzie Bassett?

  And also when the brother is like, you just chose Boston because you're just trying to dump us on mom so you can leave and fend for yourself. And Tom Cruise is basically like, correct.

• 1:04:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Lizzie Bassett?

  It's like, yeah, you really don't want to be with these kids.

• 1:04:40Chris Winterbauer?

  That's true. Also, fun thing, Lizzie, you haven't seen the 53 version, but her parents, who are just at the very end of the film, that's Gene Berry and Ann Robinson, who are the two leads from the 53 version.

• 1:04:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:04:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I thought that was really nice. Last but not least, Justin Chatwin as Robbie. So Spielberg said he looked for a long time to find somebody who threw a baseball as poorly as Tom Cruise. I'm just kidding. Justin throws it way better. Wow. Michael Khan, give him an Oscar for the way he edits around Tom Cruise's throwing motion in this movie. It's tough. It's like in The Natural, Robert Redford's son at the end of the movie. And you're like, so he's not a natural.

• 1:05:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:05:18Chris Winterbauer?

  That's okay. Anywho, Justin Chatwin, it's interesting. They say they searched far and wide, which I'm sure they did, but we couldn't find any other names that they considered. And Chatwin also had a Spielberg connection by way of DreamWorks. So his big debut was in the 2005 film, The Chum Scrubber, which was an independent film directed by Ari Posen, which featured Jamie Bell as the lead, Lou Taylor Pucci and Rory Colkin, all of whom also could have been great in this role. So I wonder if somebody just gave Spielberg the DVD of The Chum Scrubber and was like, pick one.

• 1:05:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Pick one.

• 1:05:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Who knows?

• 1:05:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, I always confuse that one with Thumb Sucker, which also stars Lou Taylor Pucci.

• 1:05:55Chris Winterbauer?

  But that's the Mike Mills one.

• 1:05:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:05:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I like both movies. I prefer Thumb Sucker. I like Thumb Sucker quite a bit.

• 1:06:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It's good.

• 1:06:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Anyway, Chum Scrubber was distributed by Go Fish Pictures, Art House Distribution, arm of DreamWorks. Also, I believe it was produced by your favorite guy, Lawrence Bender.

• 1:06:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:06:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Quick note on DreamWorks, company founded in 1994. We've talked about it, Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen, SKG. Not a financial runaway success. Geffen later admitted they came close to bankruptcy twice. They had planned to build a Backlot in 2000, that fell apart. They took huge losses on Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.

• 1:06:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Hundred and twenty-five million dollar loss. Shrek 2 underperformed on DVD. Cat in the Hat bombed. I just want to make the point, while Spielberg is prepping for War of the Worlds, DreamWorks Animation was spun off into a separate company. And for much of 2005, DreamWorks was negotiating a deal with NBC Universal, parent company of Universal Pictures, to buy DreamWorks. And if you remember, Lizzie, Universal was the home of Amblin, Steven Spielberg's production company, and where Steven has made, you know, many of his biggest hits, obviously, going back to Jaws. More on that in a bit. So they have a 72-day shoot across Connecticut, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and California. For the crashed plane, they paid $60,000 for a decommissioned Boeing 747. Much like in Lost, they spent $200,000 to transport it from Victorville, California,

• 1:07:10Chris Winterbauer?

  to Universal Studios. They've used a helicopter and a series of lorries escorted by the police, and you can still see it on the tour at Universal.

• 1:07:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Have you seen it, Lizzie?

• 1:07:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 1:07:19Lizzie Bassett?

  It's fun.

• 1:07:19Chris Winterbauer?

  One of my favorite things is if I have a general on Universal, and I like walk the backlot and see the tour, and I'm like, I wonder what they think I do. And then I'm like, nothing, you're going to a general. Anyway, they had one plane, but they had 60 different versions of Ray's Leather Jacket. And although we couldn't find an exact number, they had a lot of extras, who may have been preoccupied by the notion that just maybe they'd get to be acting across Tom Cruise, the biggest movie star in the world. And it was not easy work. They are screaming and running from imaginary tripods. It is cold, it is icy, they are soaking these environments with water, because it's supposed to always look rainy. And there's a bit of an apocryphal story that may confirm our instincts about Steven Spielberg's sensibilities. Quote, "Steven Spielberg personally instructed extras to look more frightened,

• 1:08:02Chris Winterbauer?

  explaining that they should turn around and think, 'Oh, fuck,'" to which someone said, "Mr. Spielberg, isn't this movie rated PG-13?" To which he reportedly said, "PG-13 movie, R-rated director."

• 1:08:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:08:17Chris Winterbauer?

  If that's true, that's the funniest line I have ever heard.

• 1:08:21Lizzie Bassett?

  That is very funny.

• 1:08:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Cool, Dad. It's just something like that. Dakota Fanning turned 11 on set. Tom Cruise reportedly gave her a cellphone as a birthday present, which I can just say as a parent is a terrible birthday gift. Do not give my kid a phone.

• 1:08:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Ask her parents first.

• 1:08:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the bigger concern was not the cellphones that Tom Cruise brought to set. What do you think he may have brought to set, Lizzie, that may have caused a stir?

• 1:08:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, I don't know.

• 1:08:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Scientology.

• 1:08:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:08:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Specifically, a Scientology tent. So if you guys missed our primer on Scientology and its history, Tom Cruise joined the practice, the faith, the religion in the 1980s. He was introduced to it by his first wife, Mimi Rogers. He kind of distanced himself from the religion, relatively speaking, during the 90s while he was married to Nicole Kidman. They divorced in 2001. He was brought back into the fold. You mentioned he received a very prestigious medal from them that was videotaped and later released in 2008.

• 1:09:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, very important medal.

• 1:09:12Chris Winterbauer?

  He was very much the, obviously, the face of Scientology at this point. The Scientology tent was there just in case, according to Cruise, anybody wanted to read some religious material or get an assist. Now, in Scientology, an assist is sometimes described as spiritual first aid. They're performed at disaster sites to, quote, "help the individual overcome the effects of loss, shock, and trauma, and speed recovery by addressing the spiritual and emotional factors related to illness and injury."

• 1:09:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God. I can't imagine the conversations on the production team when they found out that Tom Cruise wanted to bring a Scientology tent. You gotta let him do it, but...

• 1:09:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, a less generous interpretation of what an assist is is you're proselytizing to people when they're most vulnerable.

• 1:09:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. Praying on the weak.

• 1:09:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Like when they've been standing in the cold all day, hoping for a chance to work with their favorite actor. Maybe you go to the tent, hoping you can talk to Tom Cruise. We don't know that. I'm just suggesting it. When he was asked about the tent before the film's release, Tom Cruise said, "I also had a cappuccino tent on set, and I made sure the crews were well-fed, too. And if somebody wanted an assist from a Scientology volunteer, it was there for them. People are curious about it. They're always asking me about it. They want to know what Scientology is." Now, to be fair, I have no doubt that he was very generous with the crew and the cast.

• 1:10:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's a known thing about him.

• 1:10:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Every story I've heard is very consistent, that he is very generous with the people that he works with, to the point, you know, learns everybody's names, he's very formal, very polite with everybody. He seems very dedicated to his work and the people he works with. But either toward the end or just after filming, he invited 20 film execs to a four-hour tour of three Scientology facilities in LA. I don't know who went. I don't believe Steven Spielberg did.

• 1:10:44Lizzie Bassett?

  There's no way.

• 1:10:45Chris Winterbauer?

  While Cruise was trying to turn L. Ron Hubbard's vision into a reality, ILM is doing the same for Steven Spielberg. And from start to finish, they have seven months to complete- All of the special effects for this movie.

• 1:10:55Lizzie Bassett?

  That's insane.

• 1:10:57Chris Winterbauer?

  They're working in parallel with production. So Gregoire is on set with a backpack with his pre-biz gear. Spielberg's team make sure that they shoot the effect-heavy sequences first.

• 1:11:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Which on the one hand is great for ILM, but that's really hard for production when you only have 10 weeks of prep. Right? So it's like you have to balance the needs of posts and the needs of the production team.

• 1:11:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's hard on the actors too, to have to jump directly into that.

• 1:11:19Chris Winterbauer?

  It's hard on everybody. It's just so hard. So he would shoot and edit, then deliver the shots to ILM. They'd send them back to review and approve during production. Now, again, he's done stuff like this before. If you remember, Lizzie, he's approving Jurassic Park visual effects shots while he's on the set of Schindler's List.

• 1:11:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Chris Winterbauer?

  In Poland. So the entire film, from prep to delivery, had to be finished in 10 months. The DGA standard for a director's cut, Lizzie, do you know how many weeks it is?

• 1:11:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it nine weeks?

• 1:11:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It's 10 weeks for a movie of this scale. For a smaller budget movie, it's six to eight weeks. They had 12 weeks for all of post-production. Edit, sound, score, effects, color, mix, delivery.

• 1:11:56Lizzie Bassett?

  This is bananas. Was this like an exercise in can we do it?

• 1:12:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Spielberg and ILM were moving fast. The problem is, Lizzie, two independent studios across town were moving even faster. Because I buried the lead. There was not one War of the Worlds film released in 2005. There were not two War of the Worlds films released in 2005. There were three.

• 1:12:18Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 1:12:18Chris Winterbauer?

  War of the Worlds films released in 2005. So if Scientology can feel a bit like a Pentecostal knockoff ginned up by a prolifically pulp or hacky pulp writer, perhaps it's only fitting that Tom Cruise's A movie would be effectively ripped off by a pair of savvy B movie distributors. While they're making War of the Worlds, Pendragon Pictures was making the classic War of the Worlds, described as the most accurate of the three adaptations occurring. It's directed by Seattle filmmaker Timothy Fiennes, whose previous project was called Bug Wars.

• 1:12:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:12:54Chris Winterbauer?

  If you've not seen it, which Forbes called "a lesbian exploitation sci-fi turkey that got shown in one theater in 1997." Now, I did read on one Reddit thread that Heinz had actually gotten a modern adaptation of War of the Worlds greenlit, but it was canceled due to 9/11. But I also read that Heinz may have made all of this up because like L. Ron Hubbard, he was a bit of a fabulist. And at one point, he claimed to have raised $40 million from early Microsoft employees to make his version, which just doesn't pass the sniff test.

• 1:13:23Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:13:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Heinz may have been a bit full of it, but UAV, an obscure distributor of DVDs, had turned the business bullshit into an art form. The plan, Lizzie, ship 60,000 copies of Heinz's War of the Worlds in mid-June, just as Paramount was launching into their heavy marketing for Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and then hoped that people would say, "This one looks good enough at the video store."

• 1:13:47Lizzie Bassett?

  How were they getting away? Was the thinking just that they were not gonna sell any merch, so it wouldn't matter?

• 1:13:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's just the DVD.

• 1:13:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, cuz it's public domain. Okay.

• 1:13:56Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Forbes, this was nothing new for UAV. They said the company, quote, "Trolls backlogs for old or independently produced movies that ride the coattails of big studio releases, sharing a star or a theme. Then it sells those movies to retailers to push alongside the Hollywood material." For example, 20th Century Fox released the DVD for Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe. UAV licensed and redistributed Prisoners of the Sun, a 1990 film in which Crowe had a small role, but they made sure to put his face on the box of the VHS.

• 1:14:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, so they're just little parasites.

• 1:14:28Chris Winterbauer?

  They were also known for distributing animated movies that essentially ripped off Disney movies. So not The Lion King, but Kimba the Lion Prince.

• 1:14:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:14:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Not Hercules, but The Amazing Feets of Young Hercules.

• 1:14:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Schmercules?

• 1:14:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Hercules Schmercules. Now, DreamWorks and Casenberg had long been accused of stealing from Pixar and Disney. Think Ants in a Bug's Life, The Emperor's New Groove, and The Road to El Dorado, Finding Nemo, and A Shark's Tale. But UAV took it to another level, or maybe down a few levels of the bridge of total freedom. And this strategy was about to spread like a virus through aliens poorly equipped for our environment and cause diarrhea. In the late 90s, indie film studio The Asylum was established to make and distribute horror films on DVD as quickly as possible. They would acquire horror films and distribute them. But they were being crowded out by companies like Lionsgate, which were offering better terms to low budget filmmakers. So they started making their own movies.

• 1:15:25Chris Winterbauer?

  And the typical shoot was nine days. Now, in the spring of 2005, they were taking their time with a special project, their own adaptation of The War of the Worlds. Instead of nine days, Lizzie.

• 1:15:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Eighteen days?

• 1:15:40Chris Winterbauer?

  They had 14 days.

• 1:15:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa, big money.

• 1:15:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Steven Spielberg was making a movie faster than he ever had. Director David Lat was getting more time than he'd ever experienced. He even had two days of pickups.

• 1:15:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa.

• 1:15:55Chris Winterbauer?

  It was luxurious. Now, Lat said the movie was originally called Invasion, and the idea was just to write a sci fi epic and kind of pull from every kind of Invasion movie, including War of the Worlds. But oddly, he had the same instincts as Spielberg. And my understanding is they decided to basically, oh, they're doing War of the Worlds? We should do War of the Worlds. Before his War of the Worlds was released and before the Spielberg one was released, here's what Lat said. "You could go any way with this material. You can make a quarter of a billion dollar epic adventure film, which is what I think DreamWorks is going to bring to the table. Or you could follow Wells's journey, which is a more personal reflection and drama in a lot of ways. If we had more of a big budget, it may have gone bigger, which may have ruined the film in a lot of ways." What's so interesting is he actually has the same instinct

• 1:16:39Chris Winterbauer?

  with the material that Spielberg did.

• 1:16:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And to be clear, Lat wasn't just doing this as a cash grab. He was like Tom Cruise in Scientology. He really believed in this movie. Quote, "I'm so proud of this movie. I really wish I could enter it into some festivals. It's coming out next month, though, and it'll be out on the shelves before any of the next big festivals run. We are doing a theatrical screening, and I can't wait to see it on the big screen. I watched this movie last night. It's available on YouTube." For shot in 14 days and for what they're trying to do, like, are the effects terrible? Yes. Like, are they laughable sometimes? Yes. The main cast is not bad. It is totally entertaining. Like, this movie, I had a totally fun time watching.

• 1:17:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:17:19Chris Winterbauer?

  For what it was, you know what I'm saying? Like, as like a Sci Fi Channel original movie, basically, is like what this is kind of comparable to. It's fun. And Lizzie, it's got Spielbergian DNA because the lead is C. Thomas Howell.

• 1:17:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:17:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Who debuted in E.T. as one of Elliot's older brother, Michael's friends.

• 1:17:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

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• 1:19:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm sure this was very annoying for Spielberg and Paramount. They had not just one, but two, like, knockoffs coming to the fore.

• 1:19:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:19:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Right as they're releasing their movie. But it's not illegal. As you mentioned, Wells's novel was public domain in the United States. So the studio's lawyers warned UAV. They said, "Look, if you distribute it in Europe or in Asia, we will sue you because we maintain our copyright there."

• 1:19:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:19:42Chris Winterbauer?

  But UAV said, "Look, our movies don't and can't compete with studio movies." And Paramount basically agreed. But they were still upset. They were worried that it was going to confuse people into buying the wrong DVD.

• 1:19:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Which it did, right?

• 1:19:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, but, Lizzie, Paramount had a bigger concern.

• 1:20:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Scientology.

• 1:20:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom Cruise.

• 1:20:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Tom Cruise is jumping couches for Scientology.

• 1:20:04Chris Winterbauer?

  So in 2005, Tom Cruise had started to become a lot more open about his affiliation with Scientology and his belief in Scientology. He was really becoming a vocal advocate for Scientology.

• 1:20:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Because, why?

• 1:20:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Well.

• 1:20:16Lizzie Bassett?

  He fired someone.

• 1:20:18Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. In 2004, Tom Cruise parted ways with his longtime publicist, Pat Kingsley.

• 1:20:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:20:25Chris Winterbauer?

  And who did he replace her with, Lizzie?

• 1:20:26Lizzie Bassett?

  His sister.

• 1:20:28Chris Winterbauer?

  His sister, Leigh Anne Devette. Now, my understanding, I was reading this interview with Amy Nicholson, is that this was a bit more of a mutual parting of ways in that Cruise wanted to be more open about his Scientology beliefs.

• 1:20:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and she's like, "I'm not doing it."

• 1:20:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And Kingsley said, "Yeah, like, I don't know how to manage that. I don't think you should do that," is my guess. You know, that was her approach. And so they parted ways, whereas Leigh Anne Devette was a Scientologist. And so in hiring her, Cruise was fully embracing that aspect of his life. So they start the press tour. And in April of 2005, while Cruise and Spielberg were in Germany promoting the movie, a reporter asked Cruise why he set up the Scientology tent on set. To be clear, this is an interview with Cruise and Spielberg, so they're both sitting there. I'd like to read an excerpt from the magazine. I don't know, the name of the magazine is, I believe, Der Spiegel, and so this is not the interviewer's name. I'm just gonna say Spiegel has the magazine's name. So here's a question. "We visited one of your locations near Los Angeles, and we were amazed to find a fully-staffed tent of the Scientology organization

• 1:21:23Chris Winterbauer?

  right next to the food tents for the journalists and extras. Cruise, what were you amazed about? Spiegel, why do you go so extremely public about your personal convictions? Cruise, I believe in freedom of speech. I felt honored to have volunteer Scientology ministers on set. They were helping the crew. When I'm working on a movie, I do anything I can to help the people I'm spending time with. I believe in communication." Spiegel, the tent of a sect at someone's working place still seems somewhat strange to us. Mr. Spielberg, did that tent strike you as unusual? Spielberg, I'm sure dying inside.

• 1:21:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I saw it as an information tent. No one was compelled to frequent it, but it was available for anybody who had an open mind and was curious about someone else's belief system. He's very good in an interview. Cruise, the volunteer Scientology ministers were there to help the sick and injured. People on the set appreciate. I have absolutely nothing against talking about my beliefs, but I do so much more. We live in a world where people are on drugs forever, where even children get drugged, where crimes against humanity are so extreme that most people turn away in horror and dismay. Those are the things that I care about. I don't care what someone believes. I don't care what nationality they are. But if someone wants to get off drugs, I can help them. If someone wants to learn how to read, I can help them. Context again, Cruz at one point claims that Scientology did cure his dyslexia.

• 1:22:38Chris Winterbauer?

  If someone doesn't want to be a criminal anymore, I can give them tools that can better their life. You have no idea how many people want to know what Scientology is. Spiegel, do you see it as your job to recruit new followers for Scientology? Cruz, I am a helper. For instance, I myself have helped hundreds of people get off drugs. In Scientology, we have the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. I'll stop there. So, look, aside from the claims, the problem is the conversation ends up becoming entirely about Scientology. It's not about the movie, which is what they're there theoretically to promote.

• 1:23:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, because unlike Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, it turns out, is actually really bad at interviews. When he is let off the leash.

• 1:23:18Chris Winterbauer?

  When he's off the leash, yes.

• 1:23:19Lizzie Bassett?

  He is really bad at it. Like, he doesn't understand how to evade.

• 1:23:24Chris Winterbauer?

  At least at this moment in time, there's like a particular run right here where he keeps kind of getting himself in trouble. And I don't doubt that he believes the things he says, and that's part of the problem here.

• 1:23:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, I'm just putting it in the context of promoting the movie. What's going wrong, you know what I mean, with promoting the movie?

• 1:23:40Lizzie Bassett?

  What's going wrong is that he doubles down and he's immediately on the defense in a very offensive way.

• 1:23:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Lizzie Bassett?

  He's very aggressive. He's very intense. So it comes across poorly. And also, like, this reporter has a very valid point. Like, this, having a religious presence, you know, on a working set is not a good look.

• 1:24:00Chris Winterbauer?

  My personal opinion is it's wildly inappropriate, that no one, I would never want to have any sort of religious sect on any, in my workplace, wherever I go.

• 1:24:09Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:24:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, there could be exceptions. You could work for a religious institution, obviously, or something like that. That's very different.

• 1:24:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Or if you need a consultant or advisor because of the nature of the film that you're making, fine, but that's a very different situation.

• 1:24:20Chris Winterbauer?

  A month later, on May 23rd, Tom Cruise appears on what television show, Lizzie?

• 1:24:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Oprah.

• 1:24:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Oprah. Now, again, he's supposed to be promoting War of the Worlds. And again, I do think Amy Nicholson makes a really good point. In this interview she did with Brooke Gladstone, when she was writing her book on Tom Cruise, Oprah is the one who keeps pushing him to talk about Katie Holmes.

• 1:24:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 1:24:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And he goes for the bait. And she does basically encourage him to get on the couch and like, show her how much he loves Katie Holmes. It's interesting.

• 1:24:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know if I agree with that in actually watching the clip, because she seems physically-

• 1:24:49Chris Winterbauer?

  You should watch it again.

• 1:24:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I have. She seems uncomfortable with how much he is kind of in her physical space.

• 1:24:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I, okay. I feel like there's a little bit of like, she knows this is good TV. What's going on here?

• 1:25:00Lizzie Bassett?

  She does, but I think you can tell she is genuinely uncomfortable at the intensity that he's showing, and also the way that he is approaching her.

• 1:25:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, the timing was not great, regardless of who wanted it, in terms of promoting War of the Worlds. This is the same month the Huffington Post and the Press Hilton site launched. It's one week after YouTube posted its first video. And so these things are going viral. And then a week later, Lizzie, and we talked about this on the Big Flop, on June 1st, 2005, on Access Hollywood, he criticized Brooke Shields for using antidepressants.

• 1:25:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Then, five days after that, the LA Times ran an article called "Control Switch On", with a big photo of Cruise's face. And it's making this point that Cruise had, quote, "returned to normal after the string of unusual behavior, including couch jumping", but that the new normal was kind of different because it included this openness about Scientology that was here to stay. And all of this is a distraction, in the studio's eyes, right, from War of the Worlds. And there's more distraction, like Pendragon Films is the classic War of the Worlds being released on DVD. And so people are thinking probably, oh, wait, uh, is this the real War of the Worlds? Or is that the real War of the Worlds? It's interesting. It's not dissimilar from 1938. Is this real? Is this fake? As, you know, we think about Orson Welles. And then Scientology continues to come up.

• 1:26:15Chris Winterbauer?

  June 24th, Tom Cruise is on the Today Show, five days out from the film's release. Lizzie, what does he do here?

• 1:26:21Lizzie Bassett?

  You're being glib, Matt. You're being glib.

• 1:26:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He's criticizing psychiatry, and he uses the word "glib" quite a bit.

• 1:26:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Which, to be fair, is Matt Lauer glib and also a predator? Yes.

• 1:26:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Turns out- You're being glit, Matt. Why don't we talk about that button in your office that locks the door?

• 1:26:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, if only he'd gone there.

• 1:26:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So, again, the criticism of psychiatry is not just a Cruzian belief. That is very much a scientological belief that he is promoting.

• 1:26:43Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a core part of the religion.

• 1:26:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Paramount does not seem like he can keep Scientology out of the promotional tour for War of the Worlds. They did keep Josh Friedman out of it, the original screenwriter. So, he had not been given credit on any of the marketing materials, but he actually sought WG arbitration to maintain his credit on the film, and he got it. So, my understanding is that Cap and the studio pushed for sole credit for Cap, but Friedman, he clearly contributed enough that the WGA awarded him partial credit.

• 1:27:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Chris Winterbauer?

  The marketing's done. His name's not on it, but maybe it didn't matter, because, Lizzie, the reviews actually weren't great. Roger Ebert gave War of the Worlds two stars. He called it big and clunky. He said it lacked the zest and joyous energy we expect from Spielberg. And he said it was almost Spielberg imitating himself. He called out the tentacle scene in the basement as basically the same as the raptor scene in the kitchen, but just not as good. He does use the mirror kind of much in the same way, and he really hated the tripods. The New York Times was more positive. They reminded us that, quote, "Cruz remains adept at playing, either with or against type, depending on how you look at it. A jerk brought low by circumstances beyond his control," which is praise in the most damning way. Generally speaking, the set pieces and effects were praised, but there was a warmth and humanity

• 1:27:52Chris Winterbauer?

  missing from the movie, is what the critics seem to kind of generally say. But the audiences didn't seem to care about Cruz's antics or the absence of that amblin heart. So, War of the Worlds opened huge, Lizzie. $65 million the opening weekend. It opened on June 29th. It broke Cruz and Paramount's respective single-day box office record, held by Mission Impossible 2. It was Spielberg's fastest film to hit $100 million, beating out The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

• 1:28:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:28:18Chris Winterbauer?

  But perhaps no one was more excited than the folks at Asylum. On June 28th, 2005, one day before Paramount's towering tripod hit theaters, they released H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds on DVD. And as the story goes, Blockbuster ordered 100,000 copies from them.

• 1:28:33Lizzie Bassett?

  God damn it.

• 1:28:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the one version I heard was that it was by accident. They thought they were ordering the Paramount one. I don't think that's true. We could not find a primary source on this. We believe it's because Blockbuster knew this strategy worked, and people would rent the mockbuster and not go to the theater.

• 1:28:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I buy that. I don't think that somebody would have to go through multiple checks and balances before making an order like that. There's no way everybody signed off on that.

• 1:28:54Chris Winterbauer?

  So War of the Worlds broke records, made $600 million worldwide.

• 1:28:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:28:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Some people say that it bolstered Steven Spielberg's career after the dip of The Terminal. Yeah, this was a wildly profitable movie.

• 1:29:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's crazy. That's not what I thought at all.

• 1:29:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I think there's this perception around it. Let's get into this a little bit. So it brought in like almost three times what Collateral did, and Collateral was also a successful movie for Tom Cruise. But it seems like War of the Worlds was like the beginning of the end for nearly everybody involved. So Lizzie, Spielberg and Cruise never worked together again.

• 1:29:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you only bring a Scientology tent to Steven Spielberg's set once.

• 1:29:26Chris Winterbauer?

  So Spielberg pivoted immediately to Munich, which underperformed and was controversial. Tom Cruise did partner up with J.J. Abrams to crank out Mission Impossible 3, which became the lowest grossing film in that franchise.

• 1:29:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:38Chris Winterbauer?

  The NBC-Universal deal for DreamWorks fell apart after GE lowered their offer. So Viacom enters bidding late in the game. This is Sumner Redstone. And all of a sudden Spielberg and Geffen find their company in the hands of the Viacom chairman, who is not a friendly face in the way that Universal was. That relationship would not last. That's a story for another day. And the fever pitch around Tom Cruise and Scientology reaches its height in November of 2005 with the release of Have You Seen the Trapped in the Closet episode of South Park?

• 1:30:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:30:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It literally shows the secret Xenu story.

• 1:30:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Like verbatim.

• 1:30:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Of Scientology with a disclaimer that says this is what Scientologists actually believe, and it makes jokes about Tom Cruise being trapped in a closet. A few months later, Cruise's 14-year relationship with Paramount came to an end. Sumner Redstone blamed Cruise's public behavior. He said, quote, "It's got nothing to do with his acting ability. He's a terrific actor, but we don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot."

• 1:30:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:30:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the asylum pivoted and launched an entirely new strategy based on the success of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, their next movie, King of the Lost World, released one day before Peter Jackson's King Kong.

• 1:30:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:30:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And their latest movie, Master of the Universe, releases on the day of this recording, two weeks prior to Travis Knight's Masters of the Universe.

• 1:30:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:30:51Chris Winterbauer?

  But Lizzie, I want to take us back for one second to 1898, when two US newspapers published unauthorized serializations of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. One moved the action to New York, the other moved it to Boston. H G Wells was pissed because that wasn't true to his story. And it brings us back to this idea of truth and the real versions of things and what people believe. I think one of the reasons that we're collectively, generally, since it's a very small religion, very allergic to Scientology, as you mentioned in our primer, is that it's very new. And it doesn't feel real as a result, right? It doesn't have the weight of the older religions that preceded. And you mentioned Mormonism. I think that's one of the criticisms of Mormonism very much. It's like, come on, you found these gold bars in New York in the 19th century?

• 1:31:36Chris Winterbauer?

  This doesn't make any sense. It's not consistent with the way that we viewed religion. And I think that follows a lot of the new movements and groups and cults, you know, that we discussed in our primer episode.

• 1:31:44Lizzie Bassett?

  What's funny is that they're actually both very consistent with the way that, you know, quote unquote, biblical texts are at times revealed to prophets. It's just that they didn't, I think they failed to capture the correct way to update it for modern times.

• 1:31:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, or maybe their timing's wrong by a couple thousand years. But it brings us around to kind of like these stories and what we're told and what we choose to believe. And what I had always heard is that Tom Cruise's adherence to Scientology and his outlandish behavior on some of these talk shows and whatnot, and the expression of his beliefs is what led to this dissolution of his Paramount agreement, that this is what they terminated his deal with Cruise Wagner Productions. I don't think that's true now. So in 2005, Paramount released some major flops, Lizzie. The Weatherman, Aon Flux, Get Richard Diatrians, Sahara, Bad News Bears, Elizabethtown. And they had one big hit, War of the Worlds,

• 1:32:40Chris Winterbauer?

  which by one measure was responsible for nearly 40% of their theatrical revenue from that year. So one measure of their theatrical revenue was 1.5 billion, War of the Worlds, 600 million. In 2006, much of the same story was true. Mission Impossible 3, yes, lowest grossing of the franchise, their biggest hit as a studio for that year. So what really happened between Tom Cruise and Paramount? It wasn't Scientology, it was business. So per the Financial Times, the cost of Cruise Wagner's overall deal was minimal, five to eight million dollars a year. In fact, Cruise didn't take an upfront fee. For acting or producing in movies, which would be $35 million or so per movie if he was both acting and producing.

• 1:33:21Chris Winterbauer?

  What he did get was 22% of the gross revenue on theatrical and TV licensing. And more important, 12% of the DVD receipts, and that was the sticking point. So the way this works, Lizzy, I did not know this. Most writers, stars, directors don't get a direct portion of DVD revenue. They get a portion of a royalty. So when that DVD revenue comes into the studio, 80% goes to the studio's home entertainment subsidiary. And then 20% is set aside as like a royalty pool that the other people then participate in. So that 20% is treated as gross. So if you were to get 12% on DVD receipts normally, it would be 12% of 20%.

• 1:33:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:33:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Which would be 2.4%. Cruise was getting 12% of 100% accounting. He was getting actual 12% or, you know, 60% of that 20% basically. He made over $70 million with that deal on the first Mission Impossible. And he made like $30 million plus on the second Mission Impossible DVD sales alone. The problem was that the third Mission Impossible didn't make enough money at the box office.

• 1:34:24Lizzie Bassett?

  To justify that deal.

• 1:34:26Chris Winterbauer?

  For the fact that Cruise would control so much of the DVD receipts. So they said, drop your DVD fee or we're going to cancel your overall deal at the studio. Cruise wouldn't back down from his numbers. So they said, great, we're not going to re-up. And then Paramount blamed his public antics as being the reason for why they let him go.

• 1:34:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting. I mean, there is some truth, though. This did massively damage Tom Cruise's reputation in a way that didn't seem possible prior to this time. And like, if you look at where his career goes after War of the Worlds, it takes a pretty big dip until about 2011. In 2011, it starts to come back with Mission Impossible, Ghost Protocol. And then it's a slow grind back up to, you know, Edge of Tomorrow, things like that. But in some ways, it kind of never recovered. You know, obviously, he's one of the biggest stars in the world. I'm not talking about financially speaking. But in terms of people thinking of Tom Cruise as like one of the greatest actors.

• 1:35:28Lizzie Bassett?

  That's changed. I think we think of Tom Cruise as Tom Cruise and people have decided that they're willing to accept that, especially as he's hurling himself off of cliffs on motorcycles and things. But this took away a lot of the mystique and it's almost like he had to become okay with just saying, I am who I am. This is me. You don't get anybody else. And I'm going to play it very safe. Obviously, I'm still hurling myself out of helicopters, but safe in terms of, you know, the types of roles that he's taking from here on out. And we really don't see the nuance or the challenges that he gave himself earlier in his career.

• 1:36:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think it's so interesting that it's hard for me to tell if the tail's wagging the dog, you know what I mean, on this sort of thing? Because I wonder, I'm not endorsing Tom Cruise's proselytizing, but I wonder if we would have the same perception of him had the studio, had Sumner Redstone not said, this guy is committing creative suicide by behaving in the way he's behaving, right?

• 1:36:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, because of the way that this stuff played on, you mentioned Perez Hilton, but like, this was-

• 1:36:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, no, I know. But I'm saying it continued to be a story because-

• 1:36:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Because they dropped him.

• 1:36:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Because they dropped him. It was all of a sudden, what before, there was always a question, right? Where it was like, well, does it matter? Because he seems untouchable, right? He's like a movie star. He will always make the money. So as a result, I feel like there was always the opportunity for this thing to go away, in theory. But then when Paramount said, again, publicly, they're saying, you're so weird, we're going to drop you. All of a sudden, it was like, oh, my God, yes, he must be, he is crazy, right? Like, I feel like it was the confirmation that everybody was kind of waiting for at the time. And yeah, I think people, I mean, yes, I completely agree with you. His reputation took a huge hit after this movie. He was persona non grata for years. I mean, it was really Tropic Thunder-

• 1:37:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that began-

• 1:37:12Chris Winterbauer?

  -that started to bring him back-

• 1:37:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:37:14Chris Winterbauer?

  -in 2008.

• 1:37:15Lizzie Bassett?

  And he did also, am I correct in thinking he did rehire Pat Kingsley? Isn't that right?

• 1:37:20Chris Winterbauer?

  No, he hired somebody else.

• 1:37:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Not her.

• 1:37:21Chris Winterbauer?

  He fired his sister, and he did not rehire Pat Kingsley. I can't remember the gentleman's name, but he did bring on some. It was kind of a disaster, is my understanding, with the end of it.

• 1:37:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:28Chris Winterbauer?

  And he brought in somebody else after that.

• 1:37:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, it's very interesting, because the fact is, everybody was aware that he was a part of this prior to this moment. And then you have- In this moment, Tom Cruise reaching this level of success where he is comfortable enough to go, this is me. Like, this is what I believe. This is what I'm really like. And the whole world went, ew.

• 1:37:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, what's funny is, again, it is unusual, and I do find it off-putting in the interviews. Like, there's an intensity and a conviction that is very, like, it's just very odd to me. But what's weird is, like, the couch jumping thing, for example, I think people would now almost find it endearing. You know what I'm saying? Like, we're almost through the looking glass, in a sense, compared to that moment.

• 1:38:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe.

• 1:38:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:38:13Lizzie Bassett?

  But I think it's hard to rankle it with, like, what we now also know about allegedly what went on in terms of his relationships with both Nicole Kidman, but particularly Katie Holmes. What I kept thinking when I was watching Going Clear was, damn, he's so charming, because I forget, I forget all of this shit about Tom Cruise. And that's what made him successful. It's not that the information wasn't available. It's that it was so easy to forget it or brush it aside, because he is so charming and charismatic when he understands how to turn that on. But when that laser is pointed in the wrong direction, and he is actually allowed to sort of expose this element of himself, it is so disconcerting.

• 1:38:55Lizzie Bassett?

  And, look, I think he's an amazing actor. He's an incredible movie star. I love watching Tom Cruise. And then I watched Going Clear, and I'm like, I am so uncomfortable. I'm so uncomfortable. Yeah, it's such an interesting moment. And it's interesting that, that we all forgave him, you know, and welcomed him back.

• 1:39:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, I gotta ask you, what went right on this one of the three War of the Worlds that was released in 2005?

• 1:39:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm gonna give it to Dakota Fanning, because I think her performance grounds this movie in a way that you really, really need. She's so good at projecting genuine fear in a way that's really endearing and feels very human. It feels like the way that a child would react in these situations. She's not overdoing it. I think she is so impressive in this movie, especially given the scale of it and who she's working with. So I will absolutely give it to Dakota Fanning. I think she holds it down.

• 1:39:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Great choice. I want to give mine to the department heads that have been with Spielberg for so long. You know, in making this movie in 10 months, yes, Spielberg had to make decisions very quickly, but it's John Williams, Janis Kaminsky, Michael Khan, Joanna Johnston, Rick Carter, Vic Armstrong, Dennis Mirren.

• 1:40:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Who pulled that off?

• 1:40:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh my God, they pulled. These guys and gals and everything in between are amazing.

• 1:40:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And kudos. This movie does not look rushed.

• 1:40:18Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:40:19Chris Winterbauer?

  At all. And so just incredible work. All right, Lizzie, if folks are interested in supporting this podcast and they want to visit our tent, so to speak, how can they do that?

• 1:40:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you can tell a friend or family member, hey, do you like Scientology? Well, forget about that and come on over here and listen to What Went Wrong instead. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you're listening to this on. You can now subscribe in both Apple and Spotify and there you will get one, at least one, bonus episode every month. You can also go a step further and join our Patreon where for $5 a month, you get those bonus episodes. You also get an ad-free feed as well as a really lovely fan community. We love engaging with everybody over there. And then if you want to go clear, if you want to go to the operating satan level, full stop, you can for $50 get a shout out just like one of these.

• 1:41:10Chris Winterbauer?

  It was late November of 2004. I was an extra on the set of War of the Worlds when something happened that defied all earthly explanation. I haven't talked about it since, but friends, this is a true story.

• 1:41:27Chris Winterbauer?

  It was the end of the day.

• 1:41:31Chris Winterbauer?

  We were almost wrapped. A beam of light shone down and suddenly Martian tripods attacked.

• 1:41:48Chris Winterbauer?

  We were all running and screaming. Steven Spielberg shouted, "Don't stop filming." And at that moment, the Martians pooped their pants.

• 1:42:05Chris Winterbauer?

  The Martians could not believe

• 1:42:09Chris Winterbauer?

  that it could end like this.

• 1:42:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So Tina Science and Alagite Tenbe went for an assist. Help me. Help you. And Tom said, I've conquered dyslexia, drug abuse, and I've saved Hollywood. Surely, I can cure the Martians of this.

• 1:42:42Chris Winterbauer?

  But no matter what he tried, the Martians died and died.

• 1:42:51Chris Winterbauer?

  And before you get all high and mighty, hear me tell, every other major religion tried and failed as well. And now let us remember those who fell before the aliens pooped themselves. Adrian Pan Correa, Angeline Renee Cook, Beatrix Erhardt, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Leal, Daniel P., David Friskalanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Schiabel, M. Zodiac, Evan Downey, Felicia G., Film It Yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, the cast and crew of Win a Trip to Brown Town, Half Grey Hound, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, John D. Wilcher,

• 1:43:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Jory Hillpiper, Jose Emiliano Salto Del Giorgio, Karina Kanaba, Kate Elrington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Olgerschlager McCoy, Lena LJ, Lousy Susan, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Mary Post's Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate Ashley, Nate the Knife, Rosemary Southward, Rural Juror, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott Oshida, So Man Chineanee, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, and the Provost Family, The O's Sound Like O's. And as we stare down Disclosure Day, listen closely to what I say.

• 1:44:14Chris Winterbauer?

  If someone says they have answers, they don't. Not even me.

• 1:44:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, next week.

• 1:44:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm so excited.

• 1:44:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Can you tell us?

• 1:44:31Lizzie Bassett?

  We are going into the legend of Beowulf with The Thirteenth Warrior.

• 1:44:37Chris Winterbauer?

  We've talked about this kind of since the beginning of the podcast. It's been a long time coming. We actually didn't think there was enough. And then

• 1:44:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, there's a lot.

• 1:44:44Chris Winterbauer?

  There's maybe too much. Turns out there's 13 warriors, too much.

• 1:44:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, so we're gonna dive into that next week. It's a VHS that for some reason I owned and watched all the time.

• 1:44:54Chris Winterbauer?

  I loved this movie.

• 1:44:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So when Rotten Tomatoes was first made, I was shook to my core to see that this was not fresh.

• 1:45:01Lizzie Bassett?

  I was stunned.

• 1:45:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm so excited, guys. Go watch The Thirteenth Warrior. Go read the book or isn't it Eaters of the Dead?

• 1:45:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:45:08Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's the Crichton book it's based on.

• 1:45:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a longer title than that, yeah.

• 1:45:12Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Lizzie, I'm very excited. Thank you, guys, for listening. Until next week.

• 1:45:15Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, bye.

• 1:45:17Speaker 05

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