Cutthroat Island

It's the film that fin(n)ished Carolco! Or so we've been led to believe... This week, Chris & Lizzie seek to uncover who really scuttled Carolco Pictures - was it Geena Davis and Renny Harlin? Or was Cutthroat Island a mere scapegoat? Plus, Matthew Modine takes his lumps (on set and after), poop tanks infect the crew, and Michael Douglas dodges a trip to Davy Jones' locker. Go to surfshark.com/wrong http://surfshark.com/wrong or use code WRONG at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

  12 celebrities, one Don, and cold, hard cash. From the producers of The Traitors comes The Mob, a new Hulu original series coming to Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ on October 26. 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

• 1:16Lizzie 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 new Hulu original series The Mob premiering October 26 on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

• 1:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a very expensive one, that sank to the bottom of the ocean, all so Pirates of the Caribbean could drunken Jack Sparrow run away with the booty. I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do you have for us today?

• 2:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm glad you didn't say run away with Keira Knightley's booty. I don't know why that's what I thought you were going to say.

• 2:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I would never, I would die.

• 2:29Chris Winterbauer?

  You would never. And I should walk the plank for even suggesting it.

• 2:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 2:33Chris Winterbauer?

  We have Cutthroat Island, a film that has been recommended, suggested, implored by our audience to be covered many a time. And finally, I decided, you know what? It's time for me to leap off of an exploding barrel, Rennie Harland-style, and cover this movie. And this is a really fun story. It is one that is going to take us to, I mean, the edges of the earth as far as Hollywood financing is concerned, and I hope we can dispel the many rumors around this movie because it is not the tale that we have been told, or at least the tale that I have heard and internalized myself, and I will first express what that is. So, Lizzie, before we dive into myth versus reality, fact versus fiction, what was mere

• 3:18Chris Winterbauer?

  stories of piracy on the high seas with Cutthroat Island and what actually happened? I have to ask you, what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

• 3:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I'd never seen this movie before. I knew that it, well, let's say, I thought I knew that it was an unmitigated disaster, and all I'd ever heard was, you know, this is in the top 10 movies usually that pop up when you look for like, biggest box office disasters, biggest money losers. And so I thought, okay, well, this is just gonna be terrible.

• 3:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 3:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Like, this movie's gonna be really bad, I'm gonna have to just soldier through. And that was not the case at all. You know, is it the best script in the world? No.

• 3:57Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 3:58Lizzie Bassett?

  No, not at all. However, it's really, really fun, and I really enjoyed both Gina Davis and Matthew Modine, although he's strange in this world. He's much more suited to a Stranger Things universe than he is to a, whatever this is, 18th century pirate universe. 18th, 17th?

• 4:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I'll double-check it right now.

• 4:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Who knows? You know what? It doesn't matter.

• 4:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 4:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I thought all of the explosions were incredible, and boy, were there a lot of explosions.

• 4:26Chris Winterbauer?

  17th century.

• 4:27Lizzie Bassett?

  17th, okay.

• 4:28Chris Winterbauer?

  There you go.

• 4:29Lizzie Bassett?

  There you go, I thought it might be early.

• 4:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, maybe one too many explosions, except that they were really fun to watch. Every time they exploded something, which is, I would say, about every five minutes, something explodes in this movie, something large and expensive. Gina Davis, I thought, was really great, particularly with the stunt work that it looks like she is doing. I don't know if we're gonna get into that, but there's a couple of action sequences in this where they're not cutting away, so I assume it is her doing a lot of this, and I thought that was really impressive, and I've always really liked Gina Davis. Also, she and Matthew Modine are just super hot, so that helps and is fun to watch. Frank Langella, eaten every piece of scenery, thoroughly enjoyed that. I loved King Charles. I hope that monkey was paid appropriately. He was a star. And yeah, I just, I don't know that this deserves to be besmirched to the way that

• 5:12Lizzie Bassett?

  it has been for all time, but the thing that I could not get out of my head when watching this is how much Pirates of the Caribbean DNA is in this movie. It's crazy.

• 5:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they just said, "Let's just do it better."

• 5:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 5:24Chris Winterbauer?

  "Let's do this."

• 5:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Literally, they just said, "What if we had a slightly better script?"

• 5:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Not even that much better. "What if we had a slightly better script and we add ghosts, and that's it?"

• 5:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, better dialogue.

• 5:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, funnier dialogue, yeah, sure.

• 5:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Lizzie Bassett?

  There's some better actors. But it's, okay, it's better, it's better, but it was so very clear that this movie set the stage for Pirates of the Caribbean in a big, big way that I didn't understand before watching this. So I'll hold the rest of my thoughts there, but yeah, I really, I really enjoyed this. This does not deserve the legacy that it has acquired.

• 5:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 5:55Lizzie Bassett?

  One complaint.

• 5:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 5:57Lizzie Bassett?

  The number of times they punched Gina Davis in the face. It was one too many.

• 6:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, no, I'm 100% fine with that.

• 6:02Lizzie Bassett?

  You're fine with that?

• 6:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, if this is gonna be a female pirate, like a woman pirate in this world.

• 6:06Lizzie Bassett?

  It is equal opportunity face punching. I will tell you that.

• 6:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly, let's just, let's just lean into it.

• 6:11Lizzie Bassett?

  They did.

• 6:11Chris Winterbauer?

  She gets shot, she gets punched in the face, she gets thrown off a cliff, you know? I mean, that's what would happen, supposedly, to a pirate or... Anne Bonny. I thought I had seen this at some point. I've seen scenes of this for sure at some point. I don't know if I'd ever watched the whole thing through, and I had the same experience. I think this movie has a lot of highs, great, as you mentioned, practical effects, stunt work, explosions, some fun cinematography, some great aerial cinematography, great horseback riding scenes, especially earlier when she's running the horse across the submerged sandspit at the beginning.

• 6:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very fun, I thought. Fantastic production design, great costumes. I agree. I think the story is fine. I think the dialogue, I don't think that the...

• 6:52Lizzie Bassett?

  There's not much story.

• 6:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't think that the, with the exception of Frank Langella, I don't think that the actors feel well-suited to the dialogue and vice versa, and so the dialogue feels a little caught in between, are we modernizing it, are we not modernizing it? So that, I think, is a little tough, but as you mentioned, when we're in the more physical scenes, I think both Gina Davis and Matthew Modine really shine in this movie. They're, as you mentioned, both very attractive, tall, strong people, and we'll talk about some more tall people, many tall people, and very tall people in this episode.

• 7:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, wasn't Frank Langella huge?

• 7:21Chris Winterbauer?

  He's also tall. But the story that I'd always heard about this movie, and the, you know, the reason I wanted to cover it is that, like you said, I heard that this was an unmitigated disaster, it was a runaway production, and because this movie, which was such an Icarus-esque endeavor by Harland and Davis, who were married when they made this movie, that sank Coralco, the company behind it, and it was their folly. And as we'll learn, this movie did not slit the throat of Coralco. In fact, it may have merely been a scapegoat to cover up the inevitable scuttling of a shockingly leaky ship, as it were.

• 8:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 8:01Chris Winterbauer?

  But first, Lizzie, let's get into the details. So Cutthroat Island is a 1995 swashbuckler directed by Rennie Harland. We have not covered Rennie Harland yet. I'm very excited to talk about him a little bit today. Written by Robert King and Mark Norman, from a story by Michael Frost Beckner, James Gorman, Bruce A. Evans, and Reynold Gideon, and executive produced, most importantly, by Mario Kassar. It stars, as you mentioned, Gina Davis as Captain Morgan Adams, Matthew Modine as William Shaw, Frank Langella as Dog Brown.

• 8:33Lizzie Bassett?

  The stupidest name ever.

• 8:34Chris Winterbauer?

  They say Doc Brown, but Dog Brown.

• 8:37Lizzie Bassett?

  And they spell it D-A-W-G.

• 8:39Chris Winterbauer?

  A-W-G, I do. Maury Chaykin as John Reed, Patrick Malahide as Ainsley, Stan Shaw as Mr. Glasspool, and many, many more. It was released in the United States on December 22, 1995, distributed by MGM but produced by Coralco. And as always, the IMDb logline reads, "A female pirate and her companion race against their rivals to find a hidden island that contains fabulous treasure."

• 9:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Cutthroat Island.

• 9:07Chris Winterbauer?

  That's it.

• 9:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I wanted to shout out one additional actor who I actually thought was great in this and reminded me tonally very much of, I think, where they land in Pirates of the Caribbean, which was Angus Wright as Captain Trotter, the captain.

• 9:18Chris Winterbauer?

  The British guy.

• 9:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, who at the end.

• 9:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Who changes sides at the end.

• 9:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I thought he was really great.

• 9:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 9:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Very fun to watch.

• 9:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he understood the assignment.

• 9:24Lizzie Bassett?

  He did.

• 9:25Chris Winterbauer?

  For sure.

• 9:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Not everyone did.

• 9:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops by James Robert Parish, very fun book we've pulled from it before, Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey, and Dying of Politeness: A Memoir by Gina Davis.

• 9:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Gina.

• 9:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Lizzie, we're gonna cover more Gina Davis shortly.

• 9:46Lizzie Bassett?

  We are.

• 9:47Chris Winterbauer?

  But we're gonna take a departure from her, and we're gonna head back to the year of 1990. As the colonial Brits cursed the Pirates of the Caribbean in The Pirates of the Caribbean later, oh, well... Hollywood studios were cursing the name of one man, Mario Kassar. Now, he was the producer behind some of the biggest action comedies of the 80s and early 90s. I'm sure you've heard of First Blood, Rambo 2, Rambo 3, Total Recall. Couple of bangers in there, and then just a couple that made a lot of money.

• 10:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Chris Winterbauer?

  He seemed to have a treasure map to box office success. Each of these movies made over $125 million worldwide. Total Recall pulled in over a quarter of a billion dollars, and Rambo 2 did a cool 300 million. Kassar was rolling in it. And like any good pirate, he had a ship. You could find him at Cannes, throwing parties on his 203-foot yacht. Or back in LA, driving around Bel Air in a stretch limo, license plate Carolco. Now, Carolco had only been around for 15 years or so, but by the early 90s, they were known for cutting big checks to attract bigger names to their movies. Like the $16 million they paid Sylvester Stallone to do Rambo 3, which was more than the entire budget of First Blood.

• 11:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Or the $10 million they gave Arnold Schwarzenegger to do Total Recall.

• 11:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, that paid off.

• 11:10Chris Winterbauer?

  They gave Michael Douglas $10.5 million for Basic Instinct, with another $4.5 guaranteed.

• 11:18Lizzie Bassett?

  For Basic Instinct? I mean, yeah, I guess. Listen, that's not Michael Douglas's finest erotic thriller role. That obviously goes to Fatal Attraction, but fine.

• 11:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it is part of the triumvirate of "Michael Douglas is so sexy, he literally drives women insane" trilogy.

• 11:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait, what's the third?

• 11:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Disclosure.

• 11:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yes, of course, yeah. A fun genre, that doesn't make sense.

• 11:42Chris Winterbauer?

  A fun genre, when we determined that women were the problem in sexual harassment cases in the workplace.

• 11:48Lizzie Bassett?

  And not Michael Douglas.

• 11:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. These were record-setting salaries. Mario Kassar called them "the Carolco premium." And it wasn't just for actors. Basic Instinct's scribe Joel Esterhaus was paid $3 million for that script. Producer Erwin Winkler made out with a cool $1 million. But most important to our story, Carolco also wanted big-time directors, Lizzie, reliable captains to steer their ships into the terrifying waters of physical production, like James Cameron, your personal favorite, who sailed off to direct Terminator 2, now in pre-production, for $5 to $6 million.

• 12:23Lizzie Bassett?

  My favorite. I love T2: Judgment Day.

• 12:26Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great. Paul Verhoeven's attorney told the LA Times at the time that they had asked for, quote, "a staggeringly large amount of money on Total Recall." And Mario just said yes. This was great, great for talent. No better a time to be a gun-for-hire on the high seas of Hollywood, but it was driving up prices for the Hollywood studios. And Kassar wasn't just doing this with the established stars. He was paying above-market for up-and-coming talent, too, like one Rennie Harland. Lizzie, how familiar are you with the man known as Rennie Harland?

• 12:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Not. I mean, cliffhanger.

• 12:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Cliffhanger, great example. You've probably seen Deep Blue Sea, or at least the scene where Sam Jackson gets eaten by a shark.

• 13:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no, I've seen it. I've seen it.

• 13:07Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great. We need to cover it. So, he's come up a lot on the show, and I would describe him as a man of extremes. He is famous for some massive hits. Cliffhanger is a great example, but some massive flops. Cutthroat Island would be a great example. But back in 1990, he's 31 years old, and he is on his way up. And Lizzie, I cannot paint you a good enough picture, so I need to show you one. I would like to show you Rennie Harland at the premiere of Wild at Heart.

• 13:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, he has Laura Dern on his arm, which is going to help anybody in the, I'm guessing this is late 80s. This is amazing. So he, I mean...

• 13:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, please describe him.

• 13:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know if it gets better than this circa 1990, if that's where we are.

• 13:51Chris Winterbauer?

  It's 1990, yeah.

• 13:52Lizzie Bassett?

  1990. He is a very attractive blond man. He has long, luscious, unbrushed, Fabio-esque locks falling around his shoulders. He is wearing really a fabulous black leather jacket, motorcycle jacket, some just great JFK Junior baggy trouser pants, obviously a black t-shirt. He's got a scruffy beard, and then, of course, he has Laura Dern on his arm, who has maybe the most insane shoulder pads I've ever seen in this picture. She's got like a David Byrne suit on with a miniskirt, but it feels very serious. So, anyway, it's the most 90s picture I've ever seen. I love it.

• 14:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, I would point out, Laura Dern looks short in this photo with Rennie Harland.

• 14:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and she's probably wearing heels, and she's quite tall.

• 14:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And she's quite tall. Rennie Harland's 6'4".

• 14:37Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 14:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Big, big Nordic man.

• 14:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Just an important question. Is that an earring? No. I can't believe he doesn't have an earring.

• 14:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, maybe we can't see the piercings he has. I don't know.

• 14:47Lizzie Bassett?

  He has to have at least one.

• 14:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So he'd started out as a commercial director. He made the leap to the feature film Born American, which was made in Finland, and it was supposed to star Chuck Norris, who was backed out when financing got shaky and was replaced by his son, Mike Norris. And the IMTV logline reads, "A trio of vacationing American students cross the border from Finland to the USSR during the Cold War and are soon imprisoned after a skirmish with Soviet soldiers."

• 15:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Hell, yeah.

• 15:17Chris Winterbauer?

  It did surprisingly well in the United States, and Rennie Harland roundhouse kicked the front door of Hollywood down. He comes to the US, and he gets hired to direct two low-budget horror films. On the one hand, you have a movie called Prison. I've never seen this movie. Here's the IMTV logline. "The spirit of a long-dead prisoner returns for revenge, haunting the prison's new governor." Now, it's produced by Erwin Jaublons, who, he did Halloween, which we discussed.

• 15:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Brother of Frank Jaublons, right?

• 15:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, that's right. And it starred Viggo Mortensen.

• 15:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Viggo?

• 15:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It did not make an impact at the box office. But on the other hand, he also directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which we just talked about on Tank Girl. It was made for $6 or $7 million, but it made nearly $50 million at the box office. It became the highest grossing nightmare film yet. And then in 1990, two more movies and two more extremes. On the one hand, he has The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, starring Andrew Dice Clay. Again, I have never seen this movie.

• 16:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Never heard of it.

• 16:21Chris Winterbauer?

  IMTV logline reads, "A vulgar private detective is hired to find a missing groupie and is drawn into a mystery involving a series of murders tied to the music industry." It did not recoup its budget.

• 16:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 16:31Chris Winterbauer?

  On the other hand, you have Die Hard 2: Die Harder.

• 16:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Great title.

• 16:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is on the poster. It's not technically the title, that's technically the tagline. That made $117 million at the domestic box office alone, well over 200 worldwide. Now, the trend I started to notice, and this isn't necessarily a strike against Harland, but if I were going to offer him a job, I might say, "This guy does really well when he steps into a franchise, and perhaps not as well, or his movies don't tend to do as well when they're originals." So far.

• 17:02Lizzie Bassett?

  That seems to continue, too, right? He's got Exorcist: The Beginning in 2004. I think that did decently well, didn't it? I didn't love it, but...

• 17:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a mixed bag, but let's continue forward. So, I would simply suggest a studio might lord this over a young director, right? The young director might come in to negotiate and say, "Look, I have these two big hits." And the studio might say, "Well, that was really Bruce Willis, and that was really Freddy Krueger." Not Carolco. They decided to pay Harland $3 million to direct a hurricane movie called Galeforce, which I want to see Rennie Harland's twisters so bad. And suddenly, everyone in Hollywood, Lizzie, could feel the winds of change. Sorry, not sorry. If Rennie Harland was getting $3 million, then more established directors wanted $4, $5, $6 million. Harland told the LA Times, "It changed everything.

• 17:51Chris Winterbauer?

  People started questioning their fees. I'm very happy about it. Directors are the ones behind the movies. They're as important as the stars." I like that he took this as a compliment or as a positive spin, because an offensive way to take it would be everyone saying, "If Rennie Harland's getting $3 million, why am I not getting more?"

• 18:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Everyone's going, "Who?"

• 18:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm glad that he took it as like a proletariat, sort of solidarity, workman's style, like, approach to this. The question remains, how could Carolco afford to, quote, "pay a lot more money"? Where is this treasure coming from, Lizzie? And to answer that question, we need to rewind a few years. So, Carolco was founded in 1976 by two men, Mario Kassar and Andy Vayna, who we discussed on a couple of other episodes, because he later formed Synergy and did Tombstone, for example. Now, they had met in 1975 at the Cannes Film Festival. We discussed Vayna before, but back in the mid-'70s, he was a 30-something Hungarian businessman based out of Hong Kong. He'd fled Canada from Hungary, reunited with his parents in California. He went to UCLA, and at this point in the mid-'70s,

• 18:53Chris Winterbauer?

  he owns a wig manufacturing company, two movie theaters, and just launched a foreign film sales business called Pan Asia Films. Just a real smorgasbord of business interests.

• 19:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that makes me sweat just thinking about that.

• 19:04Chris Winterbauer?

  We have one podcast that I'm pitting out right now. So, Kassar, on the other hand, was in his mid-20s, a little bit younger. He was born in Beirut in Lebanon. He had family ties to the film business through distribution. His dad worked in film distribution. He got a start selling the rights to European movies to Asia and the Middle East for commission. Then he would start buying the rights himself, using a loan from his godfather, who was a banker. And again, to be clear, at this point in time, really up until 1975, Lebanon was known as the Switzerland of the Middle East. It had an amazingly robust financial sector. So it makes a lot of sense that it would be a portal or a passageway through which both film financing and distribution could run. Now, Carolco was the name of a defunct company from Panama. We could not figure out what they originally did,

• 19:48Chris Winterbauer?

  but Kassar and Vayna buy that name, and they form their own company and start buying up the rights to European movies and selling them in Asia. And there are some funny quotes with them about the movies that they would buy and sell, and, you know, basically they're buying for a dollar, selling for 100, you know, over in Asia, just based on somebody's name. So by the early 80s, they're back in LA. They have a small office in Melrose, two desks facing each other. Vayna's wife and Kassar's girlfriend are their secretaries, and they start producing their own movies. And key to their strategy is foreign pre-sales to independent distributors abroad. Basically, here's the package. We've got the script, the stars, the director. Here's the budget, here's the price. You pay for your region, the right to distribute in advance, and then we use that money to fund the budget.

• 20:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So if you don't have studio financing, or you're not going to do a negative pickup, or you can't do equity financing, you pre-sell the rights abroad, and then you can fund the film that way. They're an independent operation, but in the US, they have a partnership with TriStar Pictures. Now, Lizzie, any good pirate knows that you need a name that will travel and a way to protect your loot, and they had both. So to sell their movies abroad, they needed big-name talent. Arnold, Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro. And to protect their treasure, they need tax shelters.

• 21:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't we all? Yes.

• 21:02Chris Winterbauer?

  So in the mid 1980s, a tax attorney named Peter Hoffman became the president of Carolco. And according to the LA Times, he used his, quote, "arcane tax skills to take advantage of a 28-year-old clause in the US tax code that enables American corporations operating overseas to shelter much of their foreign income through subsidiaries set up in places like the Netherlands, for example." Side note, director Uwe Boll from Germany has been in the news with his terrible movie that I'm not even gonna name right now.

• 21:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, the Army Hammer thing?

• 21:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. People have often wondered, how did he continue to make movies for so long, even though they all lose money? Apparently, it is, he took advantage of this tax loophole in Germany that sounds not dissimilar from this for 20 years, and it allowed him to get, you know, 50% on the dollar back of everything. All right, sidebar done. A few years after Hoffman became president, Andy Vayner left the company. We couldn't find a direct, quote, "confirming" this, but some sources claim that he was more cautious than Kassar, and he was worried about the sustainability of their business model. But at this point, Lizzie, the business model seemed to be working. So you mentioned Terminator 2, amazing movie. It grossed $517 million. It was the highest grossing film of 1991, the third highest grossing movie of all time,

• 22:14Chris Winterbauer?

  behind just Star Wars and E.T., the Extraterrestrial. Basic Instinct made more than $320 million. But these movies were not cheap. T2 was $100 million, Basic Instinct was $50 million, but there was a method to the madness. As he later said, Kassar, "It's easier to raise $100 million than $5 million." When you say, "Oh, I need 2 or 3 million," people say, "Why don't you fund it yourself?" But if you say, "I need 100 million, because it's got this or that in it," they get excited. It's more attractive. Their ego gets higher. The small amount of money worries people.

• 22:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I feel like Basic Instinct is a clue, because that movie does not need to cost $50 million. Like, when you, you're talking about Terminator, T2, sure, that, I understand why that cost what it cost. Basic Instinct is basic, as it were. Other than the people in it and what you paid the people, which is a massive inflation, that movie does not need to cost $50 million at that point at all.

• 23:08Chris Winterbauer?

  I bet you Basic Instinct has, if you just run the quick napkin math numbers, 20 to 25 million, and above-the-line costs alone, between Verhoeven, Esterhouse, Douglas, and Stone?

• 23:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And the lion's share being Douglas in that instance, it's a massively inflated above-the-line situation.

• 23:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Huge. I mean, that thing probably could have been made for under $30 million, no problem.

• 23:30Chris Winterbauer?

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• 24:13Chris Winterbauer?

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• 24:33Lizzie Bassett?

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• 25:14Lizzie Bassett?

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• 25:39Chris Winterbauer?

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• 26:24Chris Winterbauer?

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• 26:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, the Carolco Premium

• 26:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 26:53Chris Winterbauer?

  is catching up to them. So in 91, they lost $265 million.

• 26:59Lizzie Bassett?

  That's a lot of dollars.

• 27:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And they were being investigated by the IRS. Over the next couple of years, there are more losses, layoffs, all sorts of attempts to attract investors. They sold the TV rights to their film library. And by the end of 1992, they made a deal with the French bank Credit Lyonnais, which also happened to own MGM. They'd taken them over in a restructure. And as part of the deal, MGM would get distribution rights to Carolco's films for the next five years as soon as its deal with TriStar expired, beginning in 1994, which would be, of course, right before Cuthbert Island in 1995. Okay, now, Lizzie, I know what you're thinking. When are we gonna keep talking about Rennie Harland's hurricane movie, Gale Force?

• 27:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, can't wait.

• 27:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It got canceled. So

• 27:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 27:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Harland stayed in the Carolco family. He made Cliffhanger, which you mentioned with Sylvester Stallone. We are absolutely gonna cover it. Also, they did a remake, reboot, requal that theoretically coming out this year, although that's been tied up in weird financial headaches. But that movie had production shutdowns, it went millions of dollars over budget, and yet, not a bad word from Harland. As he told Variety in 1992, "Mario and I don't talk money. We've had no problems with it, and I love working with him. He doesn't interfere."

• 28:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:06Chris Winterbauer?

  So Harland likes that Mario does not seem to creatively interfere with him. Now, this lack of interference, Lizzie, allowed Harland to carry out one of the craziest stunts ever put on film. Do you remember the stunt where stuntman Simon Crane ziplines between two planes? Do you remember that scene?

• 28:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, of course. I vaguely remember this movie, but that I will never forget.

• 28:24Chris Winterbauer?

  They really did that. So Simon Crane

• 28:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, clearly.

• 28:26Chris Winterbauer?

  He was on GoldenEye. We discussed him on that film, when we discussed the bungee jump sequence. He nearly died, and it cost $1 million to do this, and it still holds the record, the Guinness World Record for most expensive

• 28:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Stupidest stunt.

• 28:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly. Most expensive film stunt performed in the air. It was peak 90s action movie shit.

• 28:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And, Lizzie, there was one person who wanted in on peak 90s action movie shit. Any guesses?

• 28:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Actor or director?

• 28:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Actor. Who was on the outside looking in and wanted in. She's the star of this movie.

• 28:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, Gina Davis. Gina Davis.

• 28:58Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. She was having arguably a more meteoric rise than Rennie Harland even. But before we get there, let's do a quick backstory, and you can go more into it than we do, Thelma and Louise. So she was born Virginia Elizabeth. She grew up in Massachusetts. Her mom grew all of their food in a one-acre garden.

• 29:14Lizzie Bassett?

  That's awesome.

• 29:14Chris Winterbauer?

  She bathed one time a week.

• 29:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 29:17Chris Winterbauer?

  She and her brother fought over who would use the bathwater first. She later said, "My parents probably would have been Amish. Had they heard of being Amish, their lives would have changed not a bit."

• 29:26Lizzie Bassett?

  What were they?

• 29:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Just seems like frontiersmen.

• 29:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 29:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Basically, homesteaders.

• 29:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:31Chris Winterbauer?

  She also said that when she was three years old, she told her parents, "I am going to be an actor." She studied acting at Boston University.

• 29:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I know, my alma mater.

• 29:39Chris Winterbauer?

  But she didn't graduate, unlike Lizzie. She moved to New York and wanted to become a model. She was working as a salesperson at Ann Taylor, my mom's old favorite place to shop on her hunger.

• 29:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 29:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And sat in the window display with a couple of mannequins as a joke. She would sit very still, she didn't blink, she tried not to move her chest when she breathed, but every once in a while, she would move robotically, and people started gathering outside the window to try to figure out if she was real. They were like, "She has to be real. She has arm hair." So she shaved her arm hair. And they said, "She has to be real. She doesn't have a plug." So she attached a cord to her leg, so it looked like she was plugged into the wall. Now, she did work as a model, but a lot of the jobs used her as a body double for somebody else's face or just a hand model. This wasn't a runaway success modeling career. She auditions for a movie and she books it. Do you know what her first movie role was, Lizzie?

• 30:26Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I don't.

• 30:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Tootsie.

• 30:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's right. Yes, I forgot about that. I love Tootsie, although I know that there are some problems, but.

• 30:35Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll cover it. Now, when she was on Tootsie, she didn't know that you were only supposed to come to set on just the days that you were filming. So Gina Davis came to set every single day.

• 30:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 30:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And Dustin Hoffman took her under his wing, brought her along to watch dailies, and then she took off. So Lizzie, let's talk about her run from 1986 to 1992. The Fly, 1986, Jeff Goldblum.

• 30:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Beetlejuice.

• 30:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Beetlejuice, 1988, and The Accidental Tourist that same year. And yes, people are going to scream to the heavens that I didn't mention Earth Girls Are Easy and Transylvania 6500, which are both cult films, also with Jeff Goldblum, and of course, they were a couple in the late 80s. The point is, she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Muriel Pritchett in The Accidental Tourist, less than five years into her acting career at this point in time.

• 31:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Crazy.

• 31:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And then she co-stars in two more back-to-back hits in the early 90s. Lizzie, do you know which two movies these are, female-driven films?

• 31:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, one is certainly Thelma and Louise.

• 31:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 31:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know the other one.

• 31:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Sports movie.

• 31:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, A League of Their Own.

• 31:35Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. So it's the early 90s, she's in her mid-30s, and she's looking to do something different. As she later wrote in her memoir, "I had wanted to be in an action movie for a long time. I love nothing more than going to a theater to see one on its opening Friday night. One of my goals is still to be a kick-ass villain in a Marvel movie or in a Wonder Woman movie. The baseball of A League of Their Own had convinced me that my body was no longer my enemy."

• 31:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 31:58Chris Winterbauer?

  So she spoke about how she felt that her height was almost something that she had to apologize for earlier in her career. And she would lie about her height when she was going out for modeling jobs, for example.

• 32:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, because she's six feet tall, right?

• 32:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, she's very tall.

• 32:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Chris Winterbauer?

  So she wanted to do more physical roles. She liked firing a gun in Thelma and Louise, for example. And so her agents say, "Well, if you want to do action, you should probably meet Rennie Harland." So they meet.

• 32:23Lizzie Bassett?

  We'll talk about this more in Thelma and Louise, but it is interesting because I feel like if you look at her earlier roles, just the way that she's moving in those, Thelma and Louise and A League of Their Own. But I think particularly Thelma and Louise, there's a big departure in terms of how she holds herself and also how she's being shown on camera, too. You can tell she's very tall in both of those movies.

• 32:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they cast her opposite some tall men. I mean, she and Alec Baldwin, I think, are close to the same height in Beetlejuice. And then Jeff Goldblum is obviously, I think he's 6'4" as well.

• 32:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 32:51Chris Winterbauer?

  And we'll get to her co-star here. Frank Langella, 6'4", Gina Davis, 6 feet, Matthew Modine, 6'4".

• 32:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Matthew Modine, 6'4", wow. I didn't realize he was that tall. Okay.

• 33:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Me neither. So this meeting, she goes to meet Rennie Harland, and it goes well. It goes really well. So as she later said, "The meeting went on for much longer than it probably needed to. It's tough to meet men anyway, but when you meet a Nordic god, well, well, you fall in love." So Davis and Harland soon start dating. I believe basically Davis, Goldblum, Harland, and Dern all like swapped, basically, because Goldblum started dating Dern and then Harland married Davis.

• 33:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And they're all giant, giant people.

• 33:33Lizzie Bassett?

  The good news is they all seem to like each other still, too.

• 33:35Chris Winterbauer?

  They do all seem to like each other, yeah, well.

• 33:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe not after this, but.

• 33:38Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll talk about, I don't know how things ended between Davis and Rennie Harland, but yes.

• 33:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Davis and Goldblum at least are on good terms.

• 33:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It seems so. So a couple of months later, she's on the verge of landing her dream action role. In May of 1993, Variety reports Davis' eye's pirate role, but not Cutthroat Island. The movie was called Mistress of the Sea. It was based on a 1964 novel about the adventures of Anne Bonny, 17th-century buccaneer. It was a Paul Verhoeven movie, Lizzie, but by July, Verhoeven walked away. There were reports that Harland might replace Verhoeven, but eventually both he and Davis left the project. By August, they were both attached to another pirate movie at Karolko called Cutthroat Island. According to Davis's memoir, it went down like this. Quote, "At the same time that Verhoeven was trying to put his project together,

• 34:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Rennie was also preparing to make a pirate movie called Cutthroat Island starring Michael Douglas. Michael told Rennie he wanted a woman with a name to play the female pirate captain, and Rennie implored me to come on board, as it were. I was still floating around Verhoeven's project, but at dinner with Rennie and his producer, Mario Kassar, Mario begged me to join Cutthroat and offered me a lot of money, which is how Mario Kassar had gotten the script in the first place. So let's talk about where this script came from, Lizzie, and how it nearly became a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. So back in the early 90s, screenwriters Michael Frost, Beckner, and James Gorman had a year-long deal with Disney, and they had to write a handful of scripts, and one of them was about pirates. So Beckner went and studied pirates at the Huntington Library, shout out Huntington Library, great botanical gardens, too.

• 35:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he got to work. He wanted to give it the runaway train energy of a buddy comedy movie, gives the script to his writing partner, Gorman, he doesn't love it, too much sword fighting. So Beckner throws it out and they start over. They watch every pirate movie they can find. They're drinking rum while they're doing it. Basically, they wanted to take all the cliches from pirate movies and make them fresh. Like, what if the sword fighting was in a burning warehouse instead of on a ship? And here's how the script, at least in this first draft, more or less went, or second draft, I guess. "We open on Cutthroat Island in the aftermath of a huge battle. There's a cave on the island, and we've got three men that have hidden the treasure. A Spaniard, a British privateer, and a pirate. There's a double cross. These three divide up the map to the treasure between them.

• 35:51Chris Winterbauer?

  We jump forward in time. A pirate's telling the story at a bar to our protagonist, Shaw, the Matthew Modine character in the eventual film. Shaw imprisons the man and steals the money. He thinks the story was fake, but just in case, decides to look into it. The Spaniards become a governor, the British guy's a doctor, and a man named The Scar is hunting them for the map pieces. Most importantly, tell me if this reminds you of a character from Pirates of the Caribbean. Shaw can't swim, rig a boat, sail a ship, doesn't drink, and can't shoot straight."

• 36:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, Jack Sparrow.

• 36:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. He's basically a stand-in for a contemporary person trapped in the pirate world. He teams up with the British doctor's daughter, Morgan, who doesn't know that her dad had been a brigadier. And across the movie, she arcs into the role of a pirate.

• 36:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, so this is big-time Pirates of the Caribbean.

• 36:37Chris Winterbauer?

  A few other important details. Cutthroat Island was extremely difficult to get to. It had a volcano. The treasure map was not printed on a scalp. The missing piece was part of a lullaby that Morgan's father had sung to her as a child.

• 36:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a lot less disgusting, but I've preferred that.

• 36:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Also kind of reminds me of the story of the boy that comes with Orlando Bloom at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean. The tone was darker, and it was, according to a number of people, a lot closer to Pirates of the Caribbean. Also, Shaw was the main character. Morgan, the female role, was second billed. Several producers at Disney were on board, and they took it to Michael Eisner, and they said, "We can do a Pirates of the Caribbean movie based on the ride using this script." And he said, "No, we are not going to mix our rides with movies." And then they did that for about 15 years straight, a few years after this. Anyway, back to Karolko. According to the LA Times, Beckner's agents let Karolko see the script before mailing it out to the studios,

• 37:36Chris Winterbauer?

  and Mario Kassar immediately forked over $2 million for it with no competitors.

• 37:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 37:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And then nothing happened. Beckner reportedly met with Karolko to discuss potential script changes, but they never reached a consensus, so the focus became, "We need to find a director who can find the right direction for this movie." There were reports that they were considering Kevin Reynolds, who had just done Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and swore he would never work with Kevin Costner again, and then he would go and make Waterworld with Kevin Costner immediately afterward.

• 38:06Lizzie Bassett?

  And then he really swore he would never work with Kevin Costner again?

• 38:10Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. He said Kevin Costner should direct his movie so he can always work with his favorite actor, Kevin Costner.

• 38:14Lizzie Bassett?

  And then Kevin Costner said, "You got it, buddy."

• 38:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he said, "I will go build a ranch and shoot Horizon for the rest of my life on it."

• 38:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:23Chris Winterbauer?

  The project never got off the ground, in part, Lizzie, because Karolko was on the brink of bankruptcy. But also because Hollywood was very wary of the pirate genre. We talked about this on Pirates of the Caribbean and in our Pirates primer. But it had been a long time since the golden age of pirates in Hollywood, the 30s and 40s. The 1962 adaptation of Mutiny on the Bounty was a troubled production.

• 38:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Big time.

• 38:47Chris Winterbauer?

  It did not make its money back. Robert Shaw's Swashbuckler, nearly released in 1976 under the title The Blarney Cock, flopped. Same with Yellowbeard, and Roman Polanski's Pirates had made just $6 million against a $40 million budget. Even Hook, I didn't know this, Hook was actually considered by the studio a bit of a failure. They say it fell short of their expectations, even though it made $300 million worldwide.

• 39:14Lizzie Bassett?

  It was very expensive.

• 39:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It was, and they were expecting a bigger hit out of Spielberg. So in 1993, the tides seemed to be turning. Mistress of the Sea was in works at Columbia, as we discussed. There was another pirate film, female pirate film, called Anne of the Spanish Main, with Timothy Dalton and Mercedes Ruhl attached over at Miramax.

• 39:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Love Timothy Dalton.

• 39:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, Timothy Dalton, as Shaw.

• 39:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 39:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Would have been, he is so dashingly dastardly.

• 39:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, there's something very sinister about Timothy Dalton, and I feel like that would have been good.

• 39:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree, and no disrespect to Matthew Modine, who I think is a wonderful actor.

• 39:49Lizzie Bassett?

  He is.

• 39:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Timothy Dalton is very funny.

• 39:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Very funny.

• 39:52Lizzie Bassett?

  He's funny, but he can also be scary, and I think that that's missing a little bit from this with Shaw.

• 39:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. That was his bond, the living daylights. He was a dark bond before we had a dark bond, you know?

• 40:02Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he's my favorite Heathcliff.

• 40:04Chris Winterbauer?

  That's true. He's a good Heathcliff.

• 40:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Very good.

• 40:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So Kassar needs a big star to sell Cutthroat Island to foreign distributors. So enter Michael Douglas' basic instinct. Douglas is interested. He's done something like this before. What movie, Lizzie?

• 40:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Romancing the Stone?

• 40:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Romancing the Stone, exactly right. The Michael Douglas is-so-sexy-he-turns-women-into-horny-psychopaths genre was starting to drive him in.

• 40:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Same. He said he wanted a positive change away from the dark films he'd been doing. Also, it didn't hurt that he was offered basically 12 or 13 million dollars to do the movie.

• 40:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So meanwhile, Davis and Harland signed on for a lot less, but still hefty price tags. So 3.5 to 5.5 million for Davis, five and a half for Harland. I think this makes a lot of sense because at this point in time, she's second billed to Michael Douglas.

• 40:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna ask, okay, so Shaw is still the main character.

• 40:53Chris Winterbauer?

  She is not the lead. Shaw is the lead.

• 40:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 40:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So at this point, according to Davis, she said that she signed on to the project reluctantly because, quote, "Almost all the daring do was carried out by the men in the story." In fact, at one point, she was tied up in the hold for 30 pages. Interestingly, Keira Knightley also complained that she didn't get to do a sword fight in the first Pirates of the Caribbean, and then, of course, she got to do it later on. But again, it's just interesting that it feels very Pirates of the Caribbean-y in many ways. The Verhoeven project's shaky, she's getting a big pay bump, Rennie Harland's begging her, so she says yes to the movie and yes to Rennie Harland. They get married in an elaborate three-day ceremony, line dancing, elephant rides, hot air balloons, and a special song written by a Finnish composer called "The Gina and Rennie Waltz",

• 41:38Chris Winterbauer?

  which was almost drowned out by the press helicopters hovering overhead.

• 41:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 41:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 41:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Elephant rides.

• 41:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 41:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't want to do that at a wedding.

• 41:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And line dancing.

• 41:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 41:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. Now, there's one problem, Lizzie. Michael Douglas is not happy with the script. He's pushing for rewrites, which pushes the shoot date from January of 1994 to June of 1994. Karolko brings in two more writers, Bruce A. Evans and Reynold Gideon. These guys are Oscar nominated. They had adapted Stand By Me.

• 42:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 42:07Chris Winterbauer?

  They also wrote Starman, for example. Now, we couldn't find a direct quote from Douglas on this, but he reportedly wanted Evans and Gideon to ramp up his role and tone down the violence. I think he wanted something a little closer to Indiana Jones.

• 42:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 42:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And how playful the tone would be.

• 42:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Or Romancing the Stone. That's a similar tone there.

• 42:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. This is consistent with what Rennie Harland at the time said he wanted to do with his career. Quote, "My goal now is to make an event movie that will take me away from violence and toward broad-based family movies. It's just more interesting for a director to create a whole world for the characters instead of people just shooting each other." And then he said, "Hold my beer, here's some guns."

• 42:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 42:44Chris Winterbauer?

  By January of 94, he told journalists the movie would be PG-13. He said the shoot would take 85 days. They were considering locations in the Caribbean, Thailand, and Europe, and that they had tested computer-generated shots to recreate the 17th century pirate ships. Meanwhile, Michael Douglas was rounding out his From Hell sex trilogy with Disclosure, so the start date, start date moves again to September. In the interim, Gina Davis and Rennie Harland push for another round of rewrites on the script. Nobody's happy with the script. Enter Susan Shilliday, the scribe behind Legends of the Fall. Maybe they're hoping for a more sensitive, female perspective on the characters. She did not receive credit on this movie. I cannot speak to the work. We obviously have not read this draft.

• 43:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently, her draft was not well-received in particular by Michael Douglas.

• 43:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 43:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Mid-July of 1994, Michael Douglas abandons ship. So there are conflicting accounts as to why he dropped out. Davis has said, and Douglas said at the time, that he didn't have the time, coming off of Disclosure, to learn the sword fighting and the stunt work that he would need to do going into Cutthroat Island.

• 43:48Lizzie Bassett?

  He might have also just been tired. I mean, and it sounds like he wasn't super stoked on this, but he's coming off of a kind of crazy run at this point.

• 43:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. In 1996, he told the New York Times, "They had a hard time searching for who Shaw was. I just was not comfortable with the part. The combination of not seeing it on the page and not knowing where it would go, I was feeling uncomfortable and I wanted out."

• 44:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That's apparent in the end result, I would say.

• 44:12Chris Winterbauer?

  The same article quotes an anonymous executive source who said, quote, "It was becoming Rennie's film for Gina. Michael got upset when he realized that was happening, but I don't fault him. It was an impossible situation." In fact, when she learned that Douglas was out, Gina Davis says that she and Harland, quote, "Cried for joy, jumping up and down in excitement", end quote. But Lizzie, that's not because she wanted this to be her movie. It's because she didn't want to do the movie at all.

• 44:40Lizzie Bassett?

  And they thought it was done.

• 44:41Chris Winterbauer?

  They thought the movie was gonna die when Michael Douglas walked off. Quote, "You see, Rennie knew that Karolko was going belly up before Cutthroat Island even went into production. Now, without Michael, the reason to make the movie had gone away, which was actually a very good thing for both of us."

• 44:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 44:59Chris Winterbauer?

  So her agent calls Mario Kassar and says, "Hey, uh, Michael's out. I don't think this is happening. Gina's out." And Kassar says, "Absolutely not. She has to do this movie no matter what. What did I offer her? Five million? Make it eight."

• 45:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yikes.

• 45:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It wasn't just the money. According to Davis, she had a legal obligation to continue that Michael Douglas didn't. Multiple sources confirm, he was never officially attached. She was.

• 45:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. I mean, even though she was kind of, in some ways, at the apex of her career here, he still was a substantially bigger star.

• 45:36Chris Winterbauer?

  She couldn't believe it. She said, "The ludicrous thing was that the only reason I was there was because of Michael. I never wanted to carry the movie." Even Rennie Harland later said, "We begged to be let go. We begged that we didn't have to make this movie. Gina was scared, mindless, about headlining this film. We felt that a pirate movie with a female lead was suicidal, but we were contractually obligated. And they were at the mercy, Lizzie, of a delusional captain." So, why did Mario Kassar want to make Cutthroat Island? Well, Lizzie, it was the last movie that Karolko had left. So in the spring, just before Douglas left the project, they cut ties with their only other movie heading into production,

• 46:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Crusade, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Paul Verhoeven directing. It was this massive, gritty reimagining of the Crusades never got made. The story goes, Karolko asked Verhoeven to promise the budget wouldn't get any bigger. They'd already spent $13 million in pre-production. The overall budget had ballooned from 60 or 70 million to $120 million, which would have made it one of the most expensive movies of all time. If you remember, Lizzie, I believe Jurassic Park was 60.

• 46:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 46:47Chris Winterbauer?

  In 1993. Verhoeven said he couldn't promise that the budget wouldn't go up, so Kassar cut ties. He relinquished the rights to Crusade to Schwarzenegger in exchange for not having to pay the actors $15 million salary, which he was on the hook for. Thank God Arnold took that IOU instead.

• 47:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Karolko couldn't afford to make both movies. In reality, they couldn't afford to make any movies at this point. But I think they figured, if we made one, and if it was a hit, maybe we could survive. Plus, Kassar had already pre-sold the foreign rights to Cutthroat for somewhere in the 50 to 60 million dollar range. So he technically had half the budget, you know, or a little more, already lined up. And if he made the movie, he got a $1 million fee, which probably didn't hurt.

• 47:37Lizzie 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 a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog Q. Mars knows he needs a celebration too,

• 48:22Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 48:47Chris Winterbauer?

  So Crusade's dead, Karolko's taking on water, Douglas is out, but Mario Kassar says, "We are going down with the ship, and I will bring you Gina Davis and Rennie Harland with me if I have to." Cutthroat Island is getting made, no matter what, so let's go find a new leading or second-billed man in this case. Enter the poor Matthew Modine.

• 49:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 49:10Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what I mean? It's like, he is not a poor witness to any of this. He doesn't know what's going on.

• 49:14Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he's nowhere near as established a star, if at all. I mean, what had he been in prior to this?

• 49:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I think Pacific Heights was probably the most recent big thing that he had done with Michael Keaton, but that was a few years prior. Let's get to Matthew Modine in one second. Are there any folks who you would imagine may have been considered, who were popular around this time? Just think big names. I mean, you can, I'm sure you can guess a number of them.

• 49:35Lizzie Bassett?

  1994?

• 49:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, I don't know. Tom Cruise?

• 49:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 49:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Alec Baldwin?

• 49:41Chris Winterbauer?

  He was not on the list that we found. It's entirely possible, though, because they'd worked together before.

• 49:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe they didn't want to deal with him. That might be why he wasn't on the list.

• 49:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I am gone.

• 49:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Um, I don't know. Tell me the rest.

• 49:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Liam Neeson, Keanu Reeves, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Keaton, Ralph Fiennes, Gabriel Byrne, Charlie Sheen, and Kurt Russell.

• 50:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say Kurt Russell.

• 50:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Kurt Russell, to me, makes a lot of sense.

• 50:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 50:03Chris Winterbauer?

  He was just off of Tombstone. I think he was also dead off of that movie.

• 50:07Lizzie Bassett?

  He's also tired.

• 50:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 50:09Lizzie Bassett?

  But he has that sort of devil-may-care, like, I don't give a fuck attitude that would have played very well, I think, with this.

• 50:16Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's also played an incompetent action hero to great effect in Big Trouble in Little China.

• 50:20Lizzie Bassett?

  That's honestly his thing.

• 50:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. He's like, "I'm not very good at this, but I do that really well." So Kassar finally books Matthew Modine. He's 15 years younger than Michael Douglas at this point. He's a well-respected actor, but he's not nearly as famous as Michael Douglas.

• 50:36Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he's so cute.

• 50:38Chris Winterbauer?

  He has strong pedigree, right? He had starred in Birdie back in 1984, which won the grand jury prize at Cannes.

• 50:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Full Metal Jacket.

• 50:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course, Private Joker and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. But around town, I did not know this, Lizzie, he was kind of known as the guy who had turned down the role of Maverick in Top Gun.

• 50:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I do vaguely remember this. Yeah.

• 50:57Chris Winterbauer?

  He actually didn't agree with the movie's pro-military message, and that's why he turned it down, which I gotta say.

• 51:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Go Matthew. Yeah.

• 51:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Mad props for standing up for what you believe in.

• 51:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, because in case anybody doesn't know, Top Gun, the franchise as a whole, is literally like a recruitment tactic.

• 51:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like a recruitment vehicle.

• 51:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, for the Navy. Always has been.

• 51:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm. From the get.

• 51:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 51:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Karolko booked him for less than $1 million.

• 51:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Oy.

• 51:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Finally, they'd be saving some money.

• 51:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 51:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Which they then promptly set fire to in pre-production.

• 51:27Chris Winterbauer?

  By this point, locations had been secured. They were gonna shoot in Malta and then in Thailand. Rennie Harland tried to stress his intentions to the crew with a staff memo. I would like to read you an excerpt dated July 25th, 1994. "No sequence of setting that you've seen in movies before is good enough. Any idea previously used has to be reinvented now and then cranked up 10 times. I don't want big, I want huge. I don't want surprising, I want stunning. I don't want fast, I want explosive. I don't want accidents, I want disasters. I don't want dirt, I want filth. I don't want a storm, I want a hurricane. I don't want hills, I want mountains. I don't want groups, I want crowds."

• 52:08Lizzie Bassett?

  "I don't want accidents, I want disasters" is my favorite tagline.

• 52:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Could have been the tagline for this movie.

• 52:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think he should have ended with, "I don't want groups, I want crowds." That actually seems like the most reasonable ask on this entire list. It also reminds me of, what is this, a school for ants? It needs to be at least three times as big. But I think what he really wanted was a better script. He later said, quote, "There was no real script for it. Sometimes you have the right star and the right director and the money, and you just want to go ahead even if you don't have a good script. That's what happened with Cutthroat Island."

• 52:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I get it.

• 52:43Chris Winterbauer?

  I completely get it.

• 52:44Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so hard to pull all of this stuff together. And when you have the momentum, I can imagine.

• 52:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And to get a green light, it's nearly impossible.

• 52:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, like, it would be really, really hard to pull the plug on something when you have the money. Like, when the money is there, you probably think, well, we can fix this, you know, as we go.

• 53:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I think there are very few filmmakers who have the wherewithal, the discipline, the courage to turn down an opportunity like this, you know?

• 53:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And you could probably count them on one or two hands.

• 53:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I wouldn't, I'd be like...

• 53:13Chris Winterbauer?

  I would have made Cutthroat Island 100%. 100%.

• 53:17Lizzie Bassett?

  And it would have been way worse than what it turned out as.

• 53:20Chris Winterbauer?

  The dialogue, to be fair to me, I think the dialogue might have been a hair better and everything else would have been 1,000 times worse. 1,000 times worse.

• 53:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Mine would have been worse, for sure, way worse.

• 53:29Chris Winterbauer?

  No, you would have had a couple of good zingers. You would have had some good zingers. I know you, Lizzie. You would have had some good zingers.

• 53:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Thanks, Chris, but no coherent plot.

• 53:36Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no. And the explosions just wouldn't have been as good.

• 53:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 53:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's just be honest.

• 53:40Lizzie Bassett?

  For sure.

• 53:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the real tragedy was that Rennie Harland had a script that he wanted to make with Gina Davis. It was called The Long Kiss Goodnight.

• 53:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yes.

• 53:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Written by Shane Black. He found it and he set it up at New Line after he agreed to do Cutthroat. So he had to do Cutthroat first before they could go do The Long Kiss Goodnight. So the script for Cutthroat gets reworked again, this time by writer Robert King.

• 54:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Did this damage The Long Kiss Goodnight? We just talked about this very briefly on 10 Things I Hate About You, where people thought, which makes sense, because Shane Black, Gina Davis, thought this was gonna be a huge hit.

• 54:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Lizzie Bassett?

  And then it's kind of a dud, although it's a good movie.

• 54:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, we'll talk about it at the end. This movie had a long shadow on the people who worked on it, unfairly so.

• 54:22Lizzie Bassett?

  That sucks, because it's not bad.

• 54:24Chris Winterbauer?

  No. So writer Robert King, he came in to do more rewrites. He's most known now, he works with his wife on The Good Wife and The Good Fight, for example. Both shows I really, really enjoyed.

• 54:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 54:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Harland was not satisfied, but Kroko couldn't afford more rewrites. They are out of money. So Harland brought on Mark Norman, who was actually a writer from the OG Mission Impossible TV series, amongst many other credits, and paid him out of his own pocket to continue working on the script. He's paying presumably hundreds of thousands of dollars

• 54:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Chris Winterbauer?

  to get this script into better shape. And shooting gets delayed again to Halloween, October 31st, 1994, is the start date, which just is an

• 55:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 55:02Chris Winterbauer?

  ignominious

• 55:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Good omen.

• 55:03Chris Winterbauer?

  start date, yeah. So meanwhile, the crew is hard at work at Malta.

• 55:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, nothing goes well in Malta. Anytime we've

• 55:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Nothing goes... Cocaine, mannequins. Oliver Reed died in Malta on Gladiator.

• 55:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Literally, anytime Malta has come up, and it comes up somewhat frequently, it does not go well in Malta.

• 55:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, well, Oliver Reed will also be here in Malta, and we're gonna talk about him in just a moment, because he was almost on this movie.

• 55:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no. This does not need Oliver Reed in it.

• 55:31Chris Winterbauer?

  No. I want to stress the scope of what the crew pulled off on this movie, because their work is underappreciated. They built two ships with a total of 80 working cannons.

• 55:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you can tell. It looks great.

• 55:44Chris Winterbauer?

  At a cost of more than $1 million per ship, they built replicas of those ships in Jakarta, Indonesia. They sailed them to Thailand for filming there. In the end, there would be more than 2,000 costumes, over 300 firearms, 600 swords, 250 daggers, and 60 to 70 custom-made axes. Candidly, until Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, I don't think that anyone had made this level of arsenal and outfit for a movie in quite some time.

• 56:09Lizzie Bassett?

  It looks great.

• 56:10Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 56:11Lizzie Bassett?

  The costumes, they're so layered. Everything's very rich, all of the weaponry.

• 56:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks lived in, too. It looks dirty. I thought that was, they're like, let's get funky. It's great.

• 56:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 56:21Chris Winterbauer?

  They made facades for 1,000 feet of buildings. Harland arrives in Malta in August of 1994. He comes face to face with the sets and the costumes for the first time. We don't know why, but he was apparently not thrilled with the sets, so they tore them down and rebuilt them. And there were some other unanticipated costs. So, for example, there was a European law that prevented the production from shipping out the horses by boat, so they had to be flown out,

• 56:44Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 56:45Chris Winterbauer?

  which was double the initial plan. I don't know, I don't know.

• 56:48Lizzie Bassett?

  What plane are you putting horses on? Like, a military?

• 56:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Probably like a C-130, yeah. Military transport plane would be my guess.

• 56:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, god, I don't want to be on that plane. Horses are so beautiful, but...

• 56:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, a hollowed-out 747 is also enormous. It could have been that, too.

• 57:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. Horses from a distance, A+, horses on a plane, I don't want to be on that plane.

• 57:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Horses on a plane, sequel to Snakes on a Plane. There were rumors that Rennie Harland spent $15,000 to get his dog through customs, which, you know, at the end of the day, whatever, that's his money.

• 57:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, sure.

• 57:19Chris Winterbauer?

  But also that he shipped over his security team from Cliffhanger, his Mercedes-Benz, and dozens of cases of V8 vegetable juice, which apparently he and Gina Davis both really liked. Which, I mean, look, hey, you don't want to get scurvy, so there's that.

• 57:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, Elizabeth Taylor's shipping her chili from Ohio or whatever it was. No, Hollywood, it was Jason's chili, yeah, so, I don't know.

• 57:37Chris Winterbauer?

  That's true. Stuntmen come in from Poland, carpenters from Italy and England, but not everybody stuck around. So producer David Nichols by this point had already quit. He was replaced by Joel Michaels. Art director Wolf, I think it's Kroger, it might be Crager, from The 13th Warrior, Lizzie, was either fired or quit due to scheduling issues in this instance.

• 57:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 57:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Camera operator Nicola Peccherini, who's a prolific camera operator, Steadicam op, second-unit cinematographer, was fired for reportedly not getting along with Harland. More than 20 crew members walked out in solidarity. According to The New York Times, he later said that he had been complaining about ill treatment of the crew on difficult scenes that were never used, and the production problems were only beginning. They had to rent a bunch of the lighting equipment and camera equipment from Italy. The American crew apparently didn't know how to use them.

• 58:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, god.

• 58:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Meanwhile, Mark Norman, the writer that Rennie Harland had brought on and paid out of his own pocket, is doing last-minute rewrites, handing off new scenes on the day that they're being shot. And, Lizzie, actor Oliver Reed is showing everybody his penis.

• 58:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I wish I could say I'm surprised I'm not.

• 58:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Do you know which character he was supposed to play originally?

• 58:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm guessing it's the uncle, not Frank Langella, but the other one, Mordecai.

• 58:48Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 58:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 58:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Mordecai, yeah. He was replaced because he was getting drunk, getting into fights, and taking off his pants.

• 58:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's called the Oliver Reed special. That's what you get when you hire Oliver Reed.

• 58:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And according to one source, he dropped trowel in front of both Rennie Harland and Gina Davis in an attempt to basically say, "You can't tell me what to do."

• 59:06Lizzie Bassett?

  My god.

• 59:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Matthew Modine later said that Oliver Reed thought he was a spy, meaning Matthew Modine, and punched him when he was drunk. Some of the stunt guys told Modine that Reed had a tattoo on his penis, so Modine asked to see it while they were at a restaurant in Malta, and Oliver Reed just pulled his penis out, and there it was.

• 59:22Lizzie Bassett?

  That one's on you, Matthew Modine. If you ask to see Oliver Reed's penis, you're gonna see it, for sure.

• 59:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. There's a pretty gross story that Vic Armstrong, incredible stunt coordinator, who worked on this movie, told. Basically, it seems like the straw that broke the camel's back was that Reed was just suggesting very grotesque things into the script, including when Gina Davis comes to him in the whorehouse. He was basically suggesting that he should be masturbating at the beginning of the scene and should reach climax during the scene. And I'm gonna leave it there, because it's just, it's pretty gnarly.

• 59:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm good.

• 59:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And Rennie basically said, "I've gotta get rid of him. We cannot have this in the movie." Because if you think about, he's trying to make something PG-13. Oliver Reed is never gonna allow that to happen, and he's gonna make an unsafe, you know, working environment, and he's wildly inappropriate.

• 1:00:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, like, you don't need Oliver Reed. He's a major liability. It's not like he's an enormous name. He is a known quantity at this point. Like, yeah, he's great in Gladiator, he's great in Oliver Twist, but please remember, in Oliver Twist, he plays a murderous drunken psychopath and is extremely convincing.

• 1:00:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So Oliver Reed walks the plank. He's gone.

• 1:00:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:00:27Chris Winterbauer?

  But that was far from the only gross thing to happen during production. They were shooting, obviously, on two massive water tanks at Malta Film Studios for a lot of this. And at one point, the sewage system failed and contaminated the water tanks, but they kept shooting, so people got sick.

• 1:00:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, god.

• 1:00:41Chris Winterbauer?

  At another point, cinematographer Oliver Wood fell off a crane and into one of the tanks. He was a very successful cinematographer.

• 1:00:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Was it a poop tank at this point?

• 1:00:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It was apparently not the poop tank.

• 1:00:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, well, at least there's that.

• 1:00:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he would go on to do the Bourne trilogy. He actually broke his leg and had to be replaced by Peter Levy, who had done Predator 2 with Harland. So they lost their DP and had to replace him midway through the shoot. And this is an extremely physical shoot.

• 1:01:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Modine and Davis did a lot of training. They're climbing ropes, learning to ride horses. And according to Davis, she did six months of fencing lessons.

• 1:01:11Lizzie Bassett?

  You can tell.

• 1:01:12Chris Winterbauer?

  And of course, Vic Armstrong is heading all of this.

• 1:01:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, you can really tell. And that, early on in the movie, the sequence where she ends up, I can't remember exactly what's happening. She's like on a cart and she jumps off the cart into a structure, runs through... The structure and then busts out the window on the other side. Into the cart again. I rolled that back and watched it twice because that is Gina Davis. If you watch, you see her face coming out the window, rolling down the roof, her giant like spider leg body onto the cart. That's her.

• 1:01:42Chris Winterbauer?

  So there's a little movie magic there. That we will talk about towards the end of this episode. But to your point, yes, quote, the director happened to be my husband and he was like, of course she can do it. And that somehow gave me the confidence. She did a lot of her stunts. During rehearsals, she's struggling to nail her horseback riding scenes. Her stunt double was a man named Angel Gomez Fernandez. And she says that he told her, what if you just act like you know how to ride? And suddenly she looked like she knew how to ride, even though she put it, quote, it was always the horse who was fully in charge. So she just had to kind of take a leap of faith with a lot of these things. So here's how it was supposed to work with the horseback riding. Harland would say rolling and then action over the walkie talkie. She then kicked the horse with her heels and the horse would run. But the horse started learning the commands. So the horse would start running when the walkie talkie went off and Harland said rolling.

• 1:02:27Chris Winterbauer?

  So they had to start whispering their commands. And another time Gina Davis got thrown from her horse when it veered to the left unexpectedly. She was not hurt. But one of her silicon bra inserts, she called them silicon breast enhancements, not an implant to be clear. Shot out from her shirt and disappeared into the sand. And I'm guessing this was molded to her body in some way because the second AD Howell Caldwell had to launch a super secret search party to find it without telling anybody exactly what it was. He was very discreet and very much gentleman. Which I'm sure Gina Davis appreciated.

• 1:02:58Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm sure it was custom because you'd need the costumes to be fitted around that and stuff. Yeah.

• 1:03:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah. Now Matthew Modine had his fair share of injuries and near misses, one of which you can see on film when you watch this movie. So one day they're filming with the water cannons. The spray launches a board with a nail sticking out of it through the air. Modine turns at the last minute and it slices along the back of his head. So he gets stitches.

• 1:03:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Jesus.

• 1:03:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Then on the day he gets his stitches out, they're filming the escape from the brothel. Remember they jumped from the second story onto a bunch of barrels that then explode as they're running away from it.

• 1:03:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. How could I forget?

• 1:03:31Chris Winterbauer?

  If you watch that scene, Lizzie, it's 42 minutes and 48 seconds into this movie. If anybody wants to see it. One of the barrels gets launched directly at the back of Matthew Modine's head and hits him exactly where the stitches had just gotten taken out.

• 1:03:43Lizzie Bassett?

  My god.

• 1:03:44Chris Winterbauer?

  You can actually see Stan Shaw, who plays Mr. Glasspool, who's running right next to him, reach over and touch Matthew Modine. You know, as if to say, hey, are you okay in this shot? It's in the movie. Apparently as soon as he got out of the frame, he threw his sword down and screamed, I don't want to play anymore. I want to go home.

• 1:04:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:04:04Chris Winterbauer?

  There was another close call when one of the ships caught fire. Shooting was paused for three days. But the most dangerous stunt was filmed in Thailand. Lizzie, is there one scene or stunt that you would imagine would be particularly daunting? To do, perhaps involving a cliff on this film?

• 1:04:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah. It's when they're dangling off the cliff on the ropes because they've just come up from the cave full of the treasure.

• 1:04:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And Morgan jumps off the cliff and he catches her by the hand.

• 1:04:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And then they release themselves just in time for the tide to hit the rocks at the bottom.

• 1:04:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So according to Davis, they did their closeups first on land as they're hanging there, talking to each other. Then they get put in harnesses and dangled over the actual 300 foot cliff for the wide shot. That is really Matthew Modine and Gina Davis.

• 1:04:52Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I'm not doing it.

• 1:04:54Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, no. They have the cameras above and the harnesses are held by wires, not the ropes themselves. So the ropes are props effectively, right? She said they're instructed to, quote, sit into the harnesses, putting their weight directly on the wires, not on the fake ropes that they were holding. And Gina Davis starts to freak out. She says that she started to cling desperately to the rope, which made me feel like my arms were the only thing keeping me from falling to my death. Which meant that her dialogue did not match the closeups. So then, after they shot that, they had to redo the closeups on the land to recreate the fear that they had felt when they were hanging off the side of the cliff. Now, Lizzie, they did that jump and catch for real.

• 1:05:31Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 1:05:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So that fall and grab, they are on wires over that cliff. And stunt man Claudio Pacifico did the cliff jump and was caught by the other stunt man. That is crazy.

• 1:05:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. Yeah, I'm good. I'm so glad that people are able to do this. It couldn't be me, would never be me, but it looks really good.

• 1:05:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Wouldn't be me. Now, a big element of this story from the trades at the time was what was Rennie Harland and Gina Davis's working relationship like? On this movie?

• 1:05:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 1:05:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Was he making this movie for her? Was she getting preferential treatment? And I think we can unravel some of these suppositions, although it's still somewhat murky. So on the one hand, producer Joel Michael said, naturally, anyone with good sense would have been concerned about a situation where the director was married to the star of the film. That's a pretty strong union to be dealing with, but I can't compliment Rennie and Gina enough over how professional they were. The name of Gina Davis's memoir, Dying of Politeness, she has always said that politeness was the thing that got in her way in many situations. And she was always afraid of, you know, bringing shame upon her parents or embarrassing them in some way. So I, I tend to believe that she was probably extremely professional. On the other hand, though, Matthew Modine felt that Harland gave Davis a lot more attention than him and that perhaps he was too focused on the explosions. Quote, it's the first movie I've worked on where the director never really spoke to me.

• 1:06:44Chris Winterbauer?

  It was frustrating and Rennie spent a lot of his time just trying to find new ways to blow things up. He likes to blow things up.

• 1:06:49Lizzie Bassett?

  That tracks with what I watched.

• 1:06:51Chris Winterbauer?

  And in a press interview for the movie, Davis letter said, Rennie was always fixing Matthew's hair and saying, you know, can you open your shirt a little more? Maybe we should have some oil on his chest, things like that. And I was like, hey, what happened to me? I'm married to the director. The sense I get is that Rennie Harland was probably not very engaged with the actors and was more engaged with the stunts and the explosions. So, shooting wraps in March of 1995. Here's the thing, Lizzie. According to Harland, they were only 10 days over schedule.

• 1:07:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Two weeks over schedule? That's not so bad.

• 1:07:19Chris Winterbauer?

  He told the LA Times, the last number I knew the budget to be was about 85 to 90 million dollars or a little less. I do not know what the final was with all the insurance and completion bond costs.

• 1:07:28Lizzie Bassett?

  That's not that crazy for what that looks like.

• 1:07:30Chris Winterbauer?

  This movie went over budget, but it's all on screen. And Rennie Harland claims, and Davis backs this up, that he cut between 15 and 20 million dollars in expenses and set pieces by reworking the script again with his own money while they were on set.

• 1:07:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I believe it. And also like the ships, the stuff that they're filming on water, the ships exploding. I mean, a hundred percent, this looks like almost a hundred million dollars.

• 1:07:55Chris Winterbauer?

  The point is, it doesn't seem like it went disastrously over schedule or over budget. Matthew Modine did tell a funny story about finding an entire room filled with unopened crates of V8 juice towards the end of the production. But that wouldn't be more than a few thousand dollars. Based on the final result, I'm actually guessing that the dailies were reassuring.

• 1:08:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think so. I think so much of this looks really good. Really the only failing is that the story is not super strong and some of the lines aren't that great. But like, otherwise it's pretty fun. Yeah.

• 1:08:25Chris Winterbauer?

  The stunts look great. The explosions look great. The scope is there.

• 1:08:28Lizzie Bassett?

  The actors are very charming.

• 1:08:29Chris Winterbauer?

  They hold the wrap party in Thailand on April Fool's Day. Now, we don't have a ton of information about post-production on Cutthroat Island, but here's what we know. There were four credited editors. If you look on IMDB, I think two of those are assistant editors. They're listed as editors. But Derek Brecken and Florent Retz were both doing a lot of assistant editing work around the time. So I think we can set aside. There were not four active editors on this movie. There was veteran editor Ralphie Winters. I mean, Winters is a huge name. Ben Hur, Gaslight, Quo Vatus, Pink Panther. This was his last credit, actually. He was in his eighties. He'd won two Oscars, been nominated for four more. My guess, I am just guessing, is that he was brought in later in the process to help with the cut. Because I think Frank J. Uriosty, who we've discussed on this podcast before, was probably the lead editor.

• 1:09:14Chris Winterbauer?

  He cut Cliffhanger for Harland. He'd also done Die Hard, Tombstone, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, Roadhouse. There's also Burt Lovett. He's uncredited and he had done Predator 2 for Harland. I'm guessing again, he was brought in later in the process to maybe help after they felt like the cut maybe wasn't quite working.

• 1:09:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, totally. It could have been any mix of that. Any one of them could have been.

• 1:09:35Chris Winterbauer?

  My suggestion though is that, you know, don't look at this and say, oh my God, there were five editors. There was one main editor. You know, I think it's miscredited on IMDB. The music though, which I think is a high point, was written by composer John Debbney. Now, he was nearing 40. He's a prolific television composer. In the late eighties, he'd started composing for indie films and theme park attractions, including the Phantom Manor Disneyland attraction. He scored his first live action studio feature in 1993, my wife's secret favorite movie, Hocus Pocus.

• 1:10:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 1:10:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Classic. Wildly inappropriate movie for children.

• 1:10:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Just Sarah Jessica Parker's boobs alone. Yeah, they are at her eyeballs.

• 1:10:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And just constantly calling the boy a virgin, the whole movie.

• 1:10:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I love it.

• 1:10:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Debbney said he was very surprised that Harland reached out and that he had heard his music. But I actually read online that he was not the first choice. He was actually replacing composer David Arnold, who Lizzie would do Independence Day. And had just done Stargate. For Roland Emmerich. Now, I couldn't figure out exactly why Arnold left the project, but I did read that Debbney very intentionally was hearkening back to you know, golden age composers and folks who had done a lot of pirate movies like Mikolos Rozja. He had done Spellbound, Double Life. He did Ben Hur, for example.

• 1:10:52Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, listen, you again, go watch this and Pirates of the Caribbean back to back.

• 1:10:56Chris Winterbauer?

  The music in this feels very close to what Zimmer will do or Klaus Baudel in Pirates. Yeah.

• 1:11:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Big time.

• 1:11:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Couple of the references, Eric Wolfgang Korngold. He did Captain Blood, The Seahawk, The Sea Wolf, Max Steiner, of course, the, you know, father of film music. And then Alfred Newman, Lizzie, who we can never get away from. He did The Black Swan.

• 1:11:13Lizzie Bassett?

  The Newmans are everywhere.

• 1:11:14Chris Winterbauer?

  So Debbney didn't give an exact timeline, but he said that the score needed to be done quickly, which would be consistent with potentially replacing somebody else. So at this point MGM is handling Kuroko's distribution. This is the last movie that they're going to be doing together. So let's go out with a bang. Let's release the movie in June of 1995. Let's take advantage of summertime, get ahead of the 4th of July weekend. Apparently Rennie Harland says this is unrealistic. The movie's not, I mean, they wrapped on April 1st. They would have to be done with the movie by June. That's just two months.

• 1:11:43Lizzie Bassett?

  No, that's insane.

• 1:11:44Chris Winterbauer?

  He says to MGM, we can't do this. And they say, well, uh, really? Cause Mario Kassar is saying that we totally should do a summer release. Because things at Kuroko have gotten worse, Lizzie. There's a lot of bad press about their financial situation. They've been laying off staff. They're considering selling the rights to all their movies and scripts and everybody has been blaming it on Cutthroat Island. Eventually the release gets pushed to late July and then again to the end of December. Which raises a lot of eyebrows because the holiday release date.

• 1:12:13Lizzie Bassett?

  That's a bone garden. Yeah.

• 1:12:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It's also loaded with prestige fare. It's not, this is a summer action movie, not some sort of Oscar.

• 1:12:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I should specify, it is a bone garden for this kind of movie. It's a strange place to drop it.

• 1:12:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Trailers had actually already gone out announcing the summer release date. But there was another piratesque film that would be opening in July. Lizzie, what big time flopper that we have covered that was shot on the ocean came out in 1995 in the summer.

• 1:12:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Waterworld.

• 1:12:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Waterworld. So well, there's water. Released on July 28th of 1995. I would have assumed that it would suck some of the negative attention away from Cutthroat Island.

• 1:12:49Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's a harbinger of doom for Cutthroat Island.

• 1:12:53Chris Winterbauer?

  You're smarter than I am, Lizzie. People just kept comparing them and equating them. They are both water-based movies with massive budgets and production problems that the media loves to write about.

• 1:13:02Lizzie Bassett?

  They're both better than they deserve the legacy of.

• 1:13:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Totally.

• 1:13:05Lizzie Bassett?

  I would actually argue that this is maybe in a lot of ways more impressive than Waterworld. I think this is better than Waterworld.

• 1:13:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Especially when you think about the fact that Waterworld costs almost 70% more than this movie.

• 1:13:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Waterworld was the way bigger mess. It went way further over budget.

• 1:13:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's not as good.

• 1:13:22Chris Winterbauer?

  It cost $175 million on the low end, is what I've read.

• 1:13:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:13:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Reviews were mixed, and it did flop, although, again, to your point, Lizzie, not nearly as hard as people like to remember.

• 1:13:32Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:13:32Chris Winterbauer?

  It brought in $264 million worldwide against its $175 million budget. Let's just say $250 million budget, including marketing. So it probably lost $100 to $125 million, somewhere in that range.

• 1:13:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Which it made back with its theme park show.

• 1:13:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And on home video. It did really well on home video. So, listen to our episode from more on Waterworld. The point is it casts a shadow over Cutthroat Island, and the situation is already very dark. In November of 1995, just one month before Cutthroat Island is to be released, Korolko files for bankruptcy protection. Mario Kassar resigns. They're talking about selling the film library to 20th Century Fox. And Cutthroat Island is an orphan, dead in the water.

• 1:14:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:14:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Earlier in the year, MGM had said that they planned to spend at least $30 million promoting the film, which would already be pretty low based on a $100 million movie.

• 1:14:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Chris Winterbauer?

  By fall, that number had dropped to $18 million. I would have to guess that it fell even lower. Gina Davis says that one day before the film was released, the LA Times ran a huge article about how expensive it was, including a claim that they'd had the shoelaces made by hand. And Gina Davis points out, there were no shoelaces. They were all wearing boots.

• 1:14:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Chris Winterbauer?

  But it didn't matter. Cutthroat Island was released on December 22nd, 1995. It was a bloodbath. The high seas of the box office, Lizzie, were patrolled by far more powerful ships. Ships like The Toy Story, The Jumanji, The Father of the Bride Part II, The Heat, The Golden Eye, and many, many more.

• 1:14:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:15:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Cutthroat Island earned just under $11 million domestically.

• 1:15:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Is that total?

• 1:15:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I could not find a reliable foreign number. I saw $6 million international, so 17 total, but I could not verify that $6 million number, so I'm just sticking with the domestic of $11 million.

• 1:15:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Holy shit. That's bad.

• 1:15:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It was pulled from theaters after two weeks. Matthew Modine specifically requested that the trades not be delivered to his hotel room in LA where he was doing press. But when he woke up the day the movie was released, there they were piled up outside his door, and he made the mistake of reading them.

• 1:15:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no. Don't look, buddy.

• 1:15:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Critics were generally unimpressed, but the headlines really focused on Gina Davis playing a pirate. "A Lady Pirate of the Caribbean: Extravagant Demolition with Woman as Top Pirate." The New York Times said, "It's not possible to believe that Miss Davis is the highly respected captain of a pirate ship, and it's not even fun to try."

• 1:15:52Lizzie Bassett?

  What? I'm sorry, that's stupid. Like, one of the elements of this movie that actually I think works very well is Gina Davis as a pirate captain of this ship. First of all, we know there were female pirates. We know that there were several of them that were very successful. And I actually think she does a pretty good job and is pretty believable as, not only is she physically imposing, but in terms of the way that she sort of mans the ship and captains the crew. So that, that's bullshit.

• 1:16:18Chris Winterbauer?

  It's New York Times again, just dropping the ball.

• 1:16:20Lizzie Bassett?

  They're stupid and wrong every time.

• 1:16:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, caveat, moonshot. The consensus seemed to be that Davis and Modine lacked chemistry.

• 1:16:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:16:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know if that's true, or if it's the fact that the script was clunky, which they also called out, the dialogue. They said that the movie didn't know who its audience was. I think that's fair. I think Pirates of the Caribbean tonally lands in a slightly more successful place. And which, of course, that's ironic considering the movie had spent $3 million on its script.

• 1:16:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, at this point, if not more. Roger Ebert's review was actually much more positive. He gave it three stars out of four. And yet, it was actually maybe the harshest. I'd like to read this quote. "I saw it because that was my job, and having seen it, I grant its skill and award it three stars on that basis. But unless you're really into pirate movies, it's not a necessary film. Sorry." Basically, a lot of folks recognized the technical achievements of the film, but they viewed it as excessive. Gina Davis said that basically, in the LA Times review, Kenneth Turn wrote, "Full-sized ships, impressive waves, thousands of costumes, accurate down to the shoelaces, anything and everything an unreasonable amount of money could buy has been press-ganged into service here." Gina Davis later said he got the shoelace line from the LA Times article that had run the day before. So again, it's just how this narrative snowballs.

• 1:17:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Matthew Modine later said, "I didn't want to kill myself, but I wanted to hang myself in the bathroom so that when the cleaning lady came in to do the room, she'd find me and say, 'Oh, my God,' and call, because I wanted people to know that that's how much it hurt, that I did the very best that I could on the film, as did everybody that was working on the film." So Gina Davis and Rennie Harland jumped straight into, Lizzie, The Long Kiss Goodnight.

• 1:17:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:52Chris Winterbauer?

  A bit of a proto-atomic blonde slash Bourne Identity slash Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Very fun movie. I like it.

• 1:17:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's good.

• 1:18:00Chris Winterbauer?

  It actually did do better than Cutthroat Island, but it got pretty mixed reviews, and it did not break even at the box office. And it didn't help that writer Shane Black mused after the fact that, quote, "It might have made more money if it had been about a man." But of course, that quote was pulled out of context. His full quote explains that he originally wrote it about a man, then realized it only worked with a female lead. He thought it was better with a female lead. I think what he's suggesting is, in light of some of the failures of female-driven action films, Tank Girl, Cutthroat Island.

• 1:18:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. That it's not a problem of the actual film. It's a problem of the

• 1:18:35Chris Winterbauer?

  The audience.

• 1:18:35Lizzie Bassett?

  environment and the audience. Yeah.

• 1:18:36Chris Winterbauer?

  The Long Kiss Goodnight did go on to find a substantial cult audience, and that movie, I think, has found its place in the world. But Korolko sold its film library in early 1996 to Canal Plus for $58 million. And by mid-1996, Cutthroat Island was deemed a record-setting flop. Assuming a budget of $100 million and a marketing spend of 18, it lost at least $100 million. The Guinness Book of World Records has claimed, as of April of 2012, that it was the biggest box office flop of all time, pegging the net loss at $105 million. That was passed by John Carter.

• 1:19:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And other films. I don't think that's exactly fair. Mario Kassar pre-sold the foreign rights for a reported $50 to $60 million, in theory, cutting the loss in half. Now, did those folks lose their money?

• 1:19:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:19:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, 100%. But, you know, you could cook the numbers slightly differently. The point is, unlike Waterworld, Showgirls, other flops of the time, Cutthroat Island didn't find a second life on home video. I don't know if it was just the movie. I don't know if it's the fact that Korolko shut down before it was released.

• 1:19:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I have a theory about that.

• 1:19:36Chris Winterbauer?

  And it was orphaned. What's your theory? Tell me your theory.

• 1:19:38Lizzie Bassett?

  My theory is that it's actually a little too good to land in the same place as Waterworld and Showgirls.

• 1:19:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It's not the car crash.

• 1:19:45Lizzie Bassett?

  No. Like, Showgirls and Waterworld, I think, are on a similar level. Showgirls in particular is so crazy.

• 1:19:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Showgirls is insane.

• 1:19:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That it holds a certain cachet because of how nuts it is. And to a certain extent, Waterworld does too, just because of how

• 1:20:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Just because it's fun to watch Kevin Costner just, like, suffer through the whole thing.

• 1:20:05Lizzie Bassett?

  And his little vagina gills on his neck.

• 1:20:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:08Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a lot. Those two totally make sense as cult classics. This one is, like,

• 1:20:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It's competent.

• 1:20:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Pretty decent, and that, I think, is why it falls through the cracks.

• 1:20:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It reminds me of that Verhoeven quote where he says he'd rather make the worst movie.

• 1:20:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:20:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Or the best movie, as opposed to a middle-of-the-road movie. And he famously went and collected his razzies for Showgirls.

• 1:20:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Cutthroat Island, which, Lizzie, was translated to Throat Surgery Island in Finnish.

• 1:20:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:20:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Would eventually find its fans. As Gina Davis later said, "What made up for all the bad reviews was that Quentin Tarantino really liked the movie. When I met him years later, he told me he'd watched one of the action scenes involving a carriage over and over again to figure out where the stunt was, because it looked as if I had done this impossible stunt myself."

• 1:20:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it does.

• 1:20:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And this is the stunt that you mentioned, Lizzie. So, let's talk about it briefly.

• 1:20:57Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. If it fooled Quentin Tarantino, I feel a little bit better.

• 1:21:00Chris Winterbauer?

  It fooled everyone. So Corridor Crew cracked it. So, it's two shots. The shot of her coming out of the window. Her face is obscured by the glass and her hair as she quickly rolls. And that is done by a stunt performer.

• 1:21:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:21:14Chris Winterbauer?

  And the minute the stunt performer lands in the seat, it morph cuts.

• 1:21:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:21:20Chris Winterbauer?

  You can actually see the slight interpolation between the frames. It morph cuts to Gina Davis sitting up in the carriage going forward.

• 1:21:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, because she whips her hair up when

• 1:21:29Chris Winterbauer?

  She whips her hair up, yes. It's so hard to detect.

• 1:21:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:21:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so well done. I had to watch this, you know, Corridor Crew video and watch them go frame by frame and watch them point it out. You guys can see it online. But it's an amazing stunt, and she did so many of her stunts on the film. I don't want to take away from those.

• 1:21:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, well, that looks great.

• 1:21:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Matthew Modine later said that the Duffer brothers told him they thought it was one of the best pirate movies ever made.

• 1:21:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 1:21:51Chris Winterbauer?

  And as you mentioned, Pirates of the Caribbean pulls from this film quite liberally. Now, Rennie Harland and Gina Davis divorced in 1998, reportedly because Harland had slept with Davis's assistant and fathered her child.

• 1:22:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, dear.

• 1:22:03Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll leave that one there. He has worked prolifically ever since, although often at the fringes of Hollywood. And he's never really ventured into that family-friendly arena he described before embarking on Cutthroat Island. Gina Davis's career, on the other hand, slowed down dramatically. So from 1997, the year after The Long Kiss Goodnight, 2008, she only acted in two feature films, Stuart Little and Stuart Little 2. She had a short-lived TV show, The Gina Davis Show, and she later told Vulture she was getting offers, quote, "But for nothing meaty or interesting like in my 30s." She was frustrated that Thelma and Louise in A League of Their Own hadn't sparked a run of female buddy comedies.

• 1:22:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:40Chris Winterbauer?

  She said instead it was, quote, "More psycho bitch roles." Candidly, the roles opposite Michael Douglas at the time.

• 1:22:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:47Chris Winterbauer?

  She said that she started watching children's shows with her daughter after her daughter was born, and she was stunned at how few female characters there were. I didn't know this. It took like 20 years for Sesame Street to introduce a single female character. Did you know that?

• 1:22:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, puppets are famously not women.

• 1:23:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I know, but like, you could, and

• 1:23:05Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm kidding.

• 1:23:06Chris Winterbauer?

  If you breed them enough times, you should get a female puppet eventually.

• 1:23:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's like in Jurassic Park, but the opposite.

• 1:23:10Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 1:23:11Lizzie Bassett?

  If all the puppets are male, at some point, they'll produce a female puppet.

• 1:23:16Chris Winterbauer?

  That's exactly right. So she decided to do something about it. So in 2004, Gina Davis founded the Gina Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

• 1:23:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:23:23Chris Winterbauer?

  She spent years gathering data on female representation in TV and film. She took her findings and continues to take her findings to executives across Hollywood with one goal, to create more roles for women on screen. In 2015, she founded the Bentonville Film Festival, which I've never been to, but I've heard great things about.

• 1:23:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Is that in Bentonville, Arkansas?

• 1:23:40Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 1:23:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 1:23:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Focuses on films featuring underrepresented cast, crew, and stories. And she has said that despite how it turned out, Cutthroat Island was tremendous fun. And I can say, having gone through her filmography, although I cannot speak about how she feels about the roles, Gina Davis has worked far more in her 60s than she did in her 40s. And I wish her all the mediaest and best roles going forward.

• 1:24:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Gina Davis.

• 1:24:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And that concludes our coverage of Cutthroat Island. I hope I have dispelled the shroud of fog around this not-so-flopper. Yeah, it was a huge flopper, but the movie's pretty good. So, Lizzie, I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:24:14Lizzie Bassett?

  The stunts, the special effects in this are absolutely incredible, but I would like to give what went right to the costume department and the production design team. Because truly, this movie is, the tapestry is rich. I mean, everything looks lived in, everything is beautiful, there are so many layers, you can really see the money on screen. I love the way they dressed Gina Davis. She looks hot, but it's very practical. It seems like she could move in the stuff that she's wearing. I don't feel like she's overly sexualized in this movie in terms of the clothes they have on her at all. So huge shout out to those departments. This movie looks beautiful.

• 1:24:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. That was maybe gonna be mine. And I, I wanna shout out Gina Davis.

• 1:24:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:53Chris Winterbauer?

  And Rennie Harland, I think the movie's well-directed, too. But I would like to give my what went right to John Devney. I listened to his music after the fact, and I was listening to it in comparison with some of the other references that he made. I think his score is so good in this movie. I actually think it's under in the mix. I think the music's a little low. I think that with the Klaus Bedeldt or, you know, Hans Zimmer, depending on how you wanna interpret it.

• 1:25:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:25:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Score in Pirates of the Caribbean, they actually Mickey Mouse the music a little more to great effect. And I wish they had done that a little more in this movie. I think it could have helped with the tone. And I think his music's great.

• 1:25:22Lizzie Bassett?

  It is. And again, like, there is a blueprint here for Pirates of the Caribbean that they ripped handily, and the music is a big part of that. Because it feels like an updated version of the swashbuckling music from the sort of, you know, epics of the 50s and 60s. And I think that they end up building on that in Pirates of the Caribbean in a way that, of course, is very memorable. But yeah, the music in this is great.

• 1:25:45Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Lizzie, thank you for going on that journey of over the seven seas of Hollywood with me. If folks are enjoying this podcast, how can they support it to get more throat slit on Cutthroat Island?

• 1:25:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you can leave us a rating or review. You can tell a friend or family member that you like What Went Wrong, and maybe they will, too. Send them a specific episode for a movie that they know people seem to like that as an entry point. You can now, on both Apple and Spotify, become a subscriber. And with that, you will get at least one bonus episode every month, usually it's more. You can take it up a notch, and you can join Patreon. You will get all the bonus episodes there. Also, for $5 a month, in addition to that, you get an ad-free feed. And then, if you would like to take it up one more cutthroat notch, for $50 a month, you can get a swashbuckling shout-out, just like one of these.

• 1:26:35Chris Winterbauer?

  There once was a ship we all didn't know, and the name of the ship was the Carol Co. Her captain paid a premium. I take the money and run. Run, boy, it's a bending ship. The IRS is here to audit. Michael Douglas got too sure, but Gina's still on board. Rennie Harland, he wanted more, exploding barrels and guns and swords. Matthew Moding did his best, and Gina lost a brust. They say they sank the Carol Co., but we all know that story ain't so. The man who did's named Mario, so leave my Gina alone. The wind's picking up, boys. Let's do the roll call. Make sure we got all our Full Stop supporters on board.

• 1:27:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Adrian Pangkorea, Alex Barrett, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Leal, Kovadiner, Dayton Three, David Friskalanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Emzodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G., Film It Yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, The Cast and Crew of Win a Trip to Roundtown, Half Grey Hound, I have the biggest man crush on Chris Winterbauer, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapidow, John D. Wiltshire, Jory Hill Piper, Jose Emiliano Soto de Giorgio, Karina Kanaba, Kate Ellington, Kathleen Olson, Amy

• 1:28:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Olgerschlager McCoy, Lena LJ, Lousy Susan, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate Ashley, Nate the Knife, Rosemary Southward, Rural Jer, Sadie, Just Sadie, and the Provost Family, where the O's sound like O's. Oh, Cutthroat Island is pretty entertaining. The stunts and the sets and the ships are amazing. Pour one out for the lost souls sailing on their way to Cutthroat Isle.

• 1:28:34Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. Thank you very much.

• 1:28:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you.

• 1:28:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, it's my episode, but what are we heading into next week?

• 1:28:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not Pirates. It's Kings. It's Three Kings. It's the movie, the apocryphal film, in which David O. Russell may or may not have been punched in the face. I am so excited that we're gonna be talking about Three Kings. I really like this movie.

• 1:28:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a great movie.

• 1:28:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I am very excited to talk about it. I watched Gunga Dean when we were gonna cover Temple of Dune, and I thought, wow, it was Three Kings before there were Three Kings. And so, let's get our butts to the Gulf War and be soldiers of fortune.

• 1:29:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Let's do it.

• 1:29:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I look forward to it, Lizzie.

• 1:29:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Can't wait. It's David O. Russell, so certainly a lot's going wrong.

• 1:29:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, I just have to imagine Spike Jonze just having a real tough time.

• 1:29:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, for sure. All right, we'll see you next week. Bye.

• 1:29:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Bye.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  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.