Practical Magic

Despite its all-star cast, when ‘Practical Magic’ landed in theaters in 1998 it was a critical and commercial failure. The blow was particularly devastating for director Griffin Dunne who had tried to exorcise some very personal demons via the film. This week, Chris and Lizzie discover how the Owens sisters went from box office poison to home video magic. Find out how Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman got involved, how the film fooled Barbra Streisand, who built those beautiful sets, and why an actual witch tried to burn the whole movie down. Come back on Friday for our subscriber-only review of ‘Practical Magic 2’! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

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• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:05Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a series of unfortunate events that could have been avoided had people made more practical decisions with their magical abilities. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined here by a squinty Lizzie Bassett, who does not agree with that assessment whatsoever. Lizzie, what have you conjured up for us this evening?

• 2:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

• 2:31Chris Winterbauer?

  She's been humming that since we got on the Zoom.

• 2:33Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. That's because, obviously, we have the classic film Practical Magic to talk about today. That's because Practical Magic 2, which looks even magic-er.

• 2:46Chris Winterbauer?

  That old Hollywood classic.

• 2:48Lizzie Bassett?

  That old charm. The even magicker Practical Magic 2: Electric Boogaloo is hitting theaters, so we thought, why not go back and revisit the original film? And it was a wilder ride than I expected. Chris, you know, I got a little teaser that you didn't love this movie, so I'm very curious. What was your experience with Practical Magic prior to watching it for this podcast? And how has it been rewatching it for this episode?

• 3:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So I think for a long time, I thought Practical Magic and Hope Floats were the same movie.

• 3:20Lizzie Bassett?

  They're not, though they are connected.

• 3:22Chris Winterbauer?

  No, they came out the same year and they star the same actress. And I prefer Hope Floats, so.

• 3:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, Forest Whitaker would be thrilled.

• 3:31Chris Winterbauer?

  So I, I saw this in high school. It was on TV on occasion. The image of the upturned apple cart at the beginning of this film is forever burned in my mind, and I think it's a movie that looks really good. It looks very nice. I like the cinematography. I love the setting, and I'm queuing into something or building into something, as Lizzie can already tell. I don't remember thinking much of it when I watched it in high school. I don't remember if I watched it with my sisters. You know, they loved like Halloween Town and, you know, we watched all those movies, The Craft, et cetera. So I rewatched it with Carmella and did not love it, didn't really like it, to be honest, although I love so many of the elements of this movie. The cast is overqualified at every turn. They're all lovely.

• 4:13Chris Winterbauer?

  The setting is picturesque, cozy, inviting, cottage core, invented presumably because of this movie. I think it looks great. I think it has some very good special effects. I think the growing rose bush, for example. I think the ghost effects are very fun. I had a music teacher, who, piano teacher, who once asked, if you had to choose between playing the right note or staying in time, what do you choose? And I stupidly said, playing the right note. And he said, no, because if you're out of time, every note is wrong. And that's kind of how I felt watching this movie, which is it's such a structural disaster, candidly, that I never felt settled in the story. It is at turns incredibly quickly paced, to the detriment, I think, of the characters,

• 4:56Chris Winterbauer?

  and then at others, seemingly glacially slow, as we slip into a weird, charming woman returns from, you know, big town life to small town life. But there's also a dead guy in our backyard we're ignoring for this chunk of the movie. And so the way I feel about it is that its charms are many, really, truly the best ingredients you could ever find for a witch's brew, and yet it is less than the sum of its parts. However, Lizzie, I'm coming with an however, because Lizzie got a little short, not short, just disappointed, she was disappointed in my reaction when we were on a Zoom the other night.

• 5:28Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I just said, everything you're saying is technically correct. It just happens that you're wrong.

• 5:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, actually, her words were, that is your penis talking. Those, that's exactly what she said.

• 5:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I stand by that.

• 5:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And I looked down and, and he has not said anything in a long time, so let's just get that out of the way. But to be fair, but I didn't want to be dismissive, because this, when I went online, I saw that this movie remains atop many a listicle, many a millennial listicle of the best witchy films. And I was surprised because I had such fond memories of, you know, Death Becomes or The Witches of Eastwick, for example. So I went back, Lizzie, and between our last conversation and now, I watched The Witches of Eastwick, Death Becomes Sir, and The Craft, in order.

• 6:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 6:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And I understand why Practical Magic is the one that has endured, even though I do think structurally, it's actually maybe the most flawed of the three.

• 6:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, for sure.

• 6:17Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the most timeless in its feel. And it is a movie that I can actually imagine enjoying it more, not watching it from the beginning to the end, and just saying, I'm going to sit down for this 30-minute stretch of this movie. I really like this 30-minute stretch of this movie. I'm not going to concern myself with how it ties into the grander narrative, all to say, I don't love this movie, but I do appreciate why it is enduring and why it, of all of those movies, is the one that is ultimately getting a sequel. I leave it there.

• 6:44Lizzie Bassett?

  That's totally fair. I have a very different relationship with this movie. I watched this, obviously, you probably know this, this movie did not do well in theaters. It was a pretty enormous bomb. It got a second life, big time, as many movies have that we've covered on this podcast through home video and also cable, where you mentioned watching it as well. But I think primarily it was home video. That is where I found it. You know, we rented this, we had this on VHS, I'm sure I had this on DVD later. And I just watched this movie so many times, like you. I remember specific images. I remember the apple cart, I remember the bicyclists, I remember the house, the kitchen, the midnight margaritas. I do have a bone to pick with that.

• 7:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I can't think of anything worse than to be woken up to be fed a margarita. That's not what I want.

• 7:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I will take waterboarding over that at this point in my life.

• 7:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I would take margarita boarding. I don't want that. We're too old.

• 7:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 7:39Lizzie Bassett?

  So I didn't even really remember the story that well. I did, like, I know what happens, but I remember snapshots of it. And upon rewatching it for the podcast, you're correct. Structurally, this movie is totally a mess. The problem is, I don't care. It's still totally fun for me to watch. I enjoy every performance in this movie so much, particularly Sandra Bullock and Aiden Quinn. I think the two of them are remarkably good in this, although I didn't realize, he doesn't show up until halfway through this movie, and he's in it for like 30 minutes.

• 8:11Chris Winterbauer?

  It's over halfway through the movie. That's the end of the first act.

• 8:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 8:15Chris Winterbauer?

  You've got a problem.

• 8:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Well.

• 8:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, you can tell it's adapted by a book. There's an easy fix, you're not going to like it, but there actually is an easy fix that would help with the Aiden Quinn storyline quite a bit.

• 8:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 8:26Chris Winterbauer?

  You have to get rid of her first husband and the kids. You don't need them. They serve no function in the story. You can jettison them entirely.

• 8:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you can't do that.

• 8:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 8:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's a horrible pitch, but anyway, we will continue. Chris, professional writer, I prefer this movie and the mess that it is. All wish to say, it's not technically a good movie. I'm aware of that, and yet I completely love it. I enjoyed it from beginning to end this time. I will watch this a million more times. I think what I like about it, and maybe why it has endured of all those movies that you mentioned, is that this is very much the softening of The Witch. This is the Nora Ephron-ing of The Witch. It's making it so accessible and beautiful and human in a way that I actually do think was pretty remarkable. It's the same reason why Anne Rice's vampires appeal to me, I think, is that it is applying

• 9:19Lizzie Bassett?

  a very human, reasonable, empathetic perspective to witches. And I really like that. I do think there is a version of this movie that I might have liked quite a bit better. But in order to talk about that, we have to get into it. So our main sources for today are a great oral history of the midnight margarita waterboarding scene in Rolling Stone, many, many other articles and retrospectives, and also The Friday Afternoon Club, a family memoir by Griffin Dunn, which brings us to the details. As always, this is directed by Griffin Dunn, written by Robyn Swickard, Akiva Goldsman, Adam Brooks, and it is, of course, based on the 1995 novel Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman.

• 10:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Because yes, this is a book-to-screen adaptation. And remember, you still have a little bit of time to get in your reading for our box office book club, happening for all of our subscribers right now, Apple, Spotify, and Patreon, that will be happening during the month of October. We are covering four book-to-screen adaptations, so go join so you can hear more discussion just like this. It stars Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stoker Channing, Diane Weest, Aiden Quinn, Goran Visnic, Evan Rachel Wood, notably not coming back for Practical Magic 2, Camilla Bell, and more. Margot Martindale. Love that.

• 10:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I love Margot Martindale, and some of my favorite moments were Margot Martindale in the shop.

• 10:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Chris Winterbauer?

  She's always great as a lovely, small-town firebrand.

• 10:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I remember the shop also having such a bigger part in this movie than it does. It's barely in it.

• 10:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, but Gwyneth stole that shop and turned it into Goop.

• 10:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, let's be honest.

• 10:56Lizzie Bassett?

  It's Goop, for sure. It's just that Goop doesn't actually have magic, or does it? Now, it cost around $75 million. It was released on October 16th, 1998.

• 11:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a good release date for it.

• 11:07Lizzie Bassett?

  It is a good release date. The IMDb logline, as always, is "Two witch sisters raised by their eccentric aunts in a small town face close-minded prejudice and a curse which threatens to prevent them ever finding lasting love." So, Chris, we have to start by talking about Alice Hoffman, the creator of the story. She was born in 1952 in New York City. When she was eight, her parents divorced. Her mother, a social worker and teacher, was left to raise her and her brother alone with some help from Hoffman's Russian grandmother. Now, of her childhood, she told The New York Times, "Unhappiness was trapped in the house like a bubble. My mother was a teacher and a social worker, and my father wasn't there. My brother was the smart one. I wanted to be a veterinarian, but I didn't think a girl could do that. I never thought that somebody like me could grow up to be a writer. I thought I'd cut hair or be a secretary."

• 11:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, her dad walked out the door to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back, but he did leave behind a box of books. And so, reading fairy tales and myths really became a way for her to escape the instability that she was experiencing. It sounds like she also grew up in a pretty rough area that had a lot of drugs running through her neighborhood, a very high-crime area, and she really felt that reading saved her life. She also said that, quote, "The idea of urban or suburban magic was brewing under my skin." So she began writing stories, too, about people who lived in different cities, had different names, but who felt just as frightened and lost as she did. And despite how much she loved reading and writing, she didn't consider either really a viable career. So she finished high school early, didn't really plan to go to college. She works a series

• 12:37Lizzie Bassett?

  of odd jobs, including one at a book factory that apparently lasted less than a day. And eventually, after a few years of jumping from one job to another, she did enroll in night classes at a local college. When she graduated, her brother, who was living in San Francisco, suggested she come join him in California. And she's like, "Sure!" But she really had no ambition, and the only thing she liked to do was read and write. So she applied for writing fellowships and scholarships. And much to her surprise, she was awarded a fellowship to study creative writing at your alma mater, Stanford University's Graduate Program, under Albert J. Gerard, who she later said was arguably the greatest writing teacher in the country. The course's study list was overwhelmingly filled with dudes and only included work by

• 13:20Lizzie Bassett?

  two female writers, Flannery O'Connor, my personal favorite, and Grace Paley, who was her favorite. She felt that she proved that women could write right alongside men and that women's lives were worth writing about. So, during the fellowship, one of Hoffman's early short stories was published in a literary magazine, and the story caught the attention of an editor named Ted Solotaroff, who asked her if she happened to have a novel in the works. And she said, "What does any writer say when they ask you, 'Do you have a book?'"

• 13:47Chris Winterbauer?

  In the works? It's already written.

• 13:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 13:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Let me just give it a quick

• 13:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 13:50Chris Winterbauer?

  two-to-six-week perusal for typos.

• 13:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Just scrub it.

• 13:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And I will get back to you.

• 13:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Just polish it.

• 13:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, it might get lost in the mail.

• 13:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Just give me a little time.

• 13:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, let me just... Oops, I spilled some coffee on it. She did not have a book.

• 14:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Nope.

• 14:02Lizzie Bassett?

  But she said, "I absolutely do," and she started writing it that day. She said on Substack, quote, "I had read enough fairy tales to know that such a monumental, life-changing chance is offered only once, and at least that's how it went in the stories. If I didn't accept the challenge, it might never come again. And six months later, I had a manuscript." So he passed on it, but he did recommend her to an agent named Elaine Markson, who sold the manuscript. And in 1977, at the age of 21, she had published her first novel called Property of, which is about a teenager who falls in love with a charismatic gang leader and then, of course, struggles to maintain her values. This is a theme that she would really return to throughout her work. It's the importance of women gaining and maintaining their independence. I think we see that in Practical Magic as well.

• 14:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, over the next 18 years, she published 10 more novels, to which Colleen Hoover said, "Hold my beer," and published 105. By the early 90s, she was an established author, and she was really waiting for the right idea to come along for her next novel. Now, she liked to write down a list of potential titles, and there was one that she had written down that she always loved, and it was Practical Magic. But it was just a title. She had no idea what the story was. But in the summer of 1993, Chris, she walked into a shed on a marsh in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where she owned an antique farmhouse, as one does. And she said that Sally, Jillian, Franny, and Jet walked in after her in that shed, ready to tell their story.

• 15:26Lizzie Bassett?

  She says writing Practical Magic was unusually intuitive. She explained, "To the Enchanted Living magazine, I don't know what the book is, but I'm going to write it. I've never had that happen to me before. When I first sat down to write it, I felt like the characters had arrived, and that's really a rare thing." In 1995, it became her 11th novel. Practical Magic was published, and this one was a massive literary success, bigger than anything she'd written before. So, of course, Hollywood came knocking in the form of producer Denise De Novi. She had just produced Heathers, one of my all-time faves, and a huge run of Tim Burton films, including Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns. She'd actually run Tim Burton Productions before founding her own production company, De Novi Pictures.

• 16:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, when she left her partnership with Burton, she decided that she's going to focus on making female-driven content. And so she signed on to produce Practical Magic at Turner Pictures and called up Robin Swyker to adapt the novel for screen. And this makes a lot of sense. Robin had just adapted Little Women and was either working on or was about to start adapting Matilda.

• 16:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Do you know whose mom she is?

• 16:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, shoot. I did know this at one point. Tell me.

• 16:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Her husband's Nicholas Kazan.

• 16:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's right. It's Zoe Kazan.

• 16:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Her daughter's Zoe Kazan, yeah.

• 16:36Lizzie Bassett?

  She's also a relative of Elia Kazan, right?

• 16:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Zoe's Elia's granddaughter, I believe.

• 16:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 16:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Damn.

• 16:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Nicholas is one of his sons.

• 16:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Noted, perhaps not great to work with Elia Kazan. Zoe Kazan seems lovely, and Robin Swyker is a great writer.

• 16:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, very. Makes a ton of sense for this job.

• 16:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, should be noted that she would be called to adapt other supposedly unadaptable material later, like Memoirs of a Geisha, the Jane Austen Book Club.

• 17:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

• 17:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 17:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Oscar-nominated for that.

• 17:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. So it seems like if anybody is going to pull this off, it's going to be Robin. And it started really well. Like Hoffman at Stanford, Swyker was interested in the idea of women being deeply connected to the life force around them. And her starting point with this adaptation was thinking about how the community needed the Owens witches the same way the world needed women. And her plan initially was to stay faithful to the novel, but around page 75, she hit a wall when she realized that, quote, "There's just no magic here." Part of the issue was the setting, because the thing is, in the book, they don't live on a beautiful, small-town island. They live in the Boston suburbs. And in her view, Bostonians wouldn't just gossip.

• 17:45Chris Winterbauer?

  We live in Soudy.

• 17:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Soudy, yeah. Jamaica Plain. It doesn't have the same ring.

• 17:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Lizzie Bassett?

  In her view, Bostonians wouldn't just gossip and scurry out of their way. They would actively try to drive the women out. That's fair. That's true.

• 18:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Dave Portnoy's not having it.

• 18:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 18:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Get out of here.

• 18:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Can you imagine the Barstool Sports articles on the Owens sisters?

• 18:08Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 18:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, so she figured, fine, we need to move the story somewhere stranger, more isolated, somewhere where magic could be a bit more a part of daily life. So she relocated the story. It's now in a charming coastal town, supposed to be in New England, although, of course, we know that's not where it is, but we'll get there, somewhere that it was believable that maybe generations of women had lived as witches, and the town would kind of just whisper about them, but maybe not set the house on fire the way they might if they were in the outskirts of Boston. So the problem was, though, once she changed the setting, the rest of the story also had to change, because the more she wrote, the further the screenplay moved away from Hoffman's novel. Now, one big change involved the daughters. Hoffman's novel focused a lot on the daughters,

• 18:54Lizzie Bassett?

  who were teenagers in the book, and then the dangers that teenage girls experienced. A couple of examples of this. One, in the novel, Jimmy's ghost actually stalks Kylie, who was aged around 13, and Antonia, about 16, following them around and hiding in the bushes. There's another scene where Kylie is chased by a group of drunken men one night on the way back from her best friend's house, things that I think more literally express the threat that women, even young women, feel. And Robin felt that putting those moments on screen risked becoming exploitative. There's a big difference, you know, between reading about a situation and watching it play out on screen, especially if you're talking about a 13- and 16-year-old girl. I get it. So she cut much of that material. She made both girls younger.

• 19:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, the aunts were another major challenge, because, Chris, Alice Hoffman had written them speaking in unison, just because. And in the novel, they weren't particularly defined independent of each other, which is a fun, you know, literary device in terms of the book. Obviously, it's not going to work on screen. Robin went to Alice Hoffman for help, and she said, "I'd like to know a little bit more about them. They're not twins, right? Is one going to be older than the other? Can you give me some sense of maybe who the older one might be?" And Alice Hoffman basically said, "Too bad, so sad. I've never thought about them as different people," and gave her nothing. So she told Robin, "You know what I was thinking about when I was writing them? I was thinking about the animated movie about Sleeping Beauty and these three fairies that were floating around."

• 20:20Lizzie Bassett?

  And then I imagine she just floated out the window and went off onto the marshes.

• 20:26Chris Winterbauer?

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• 21:11Chris Winterbauer?

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• 22:37Lizzie Bassett?

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• 23:47Lizzie Bassett?

  This is not an easy job. And while Robyn Swiker had wrestled with the adaptation, they just went ahead and started casting. Now, a few years earlier, Sandra Bullock had broken out in what movie?

• 23:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Speed was probably her big breakout.

• 24:00Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right, 1994.

• 24:02Chris Winterbauer?

  But lest you forget, Demolition Man, very fun movie from 1993.

• 24:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 24:06Chris Winterbauer?

  You can forget it, it's fine.

• 24:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I most did, I think. But it is fun. So 20th Century Fox, of course, though, wanted her back for what sequel that we will certainly cover at some point?

• 24:17Chris Winterbauer?

  The only movie that she was in in 1997, Speed 2: Cruise Control.

• 24:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Can you explain the premise of Speed 2: Cruise Control?

• 24:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 24:26Lizzie Bassett?

  For anyone who doesn't know.

• 24:27Chris Winterbauer?

  They're on a cruise ship, and if they go slower than six knots, they all die. Although, okay, we make fun of this movie. I didn't see it in theaters. I definitely saw it like when I was very young on VHS. You know, it's got Willem Dafoe in it. Jason Patrick replaces Keanu Reeves, I think, in that one.

• 24:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, because Keanu had the ability to say that.

• 24:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Keanu said, I think he like had to pay money to get off of that movie.

• 24:51Lizzie Bassett?

  He did. We will cover it.

• 24:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It does have an amazing stunt, special effects sequence at the end of the film when the giant cruise ship does eventually, spoiler, crash into a dock. That is pretty impressive. But aside from that, you can probably skip it.

• 25:03Lizzie Bassett?

  It's pretty bad. And so when they said, hey, Sandy B, come on back for the cruise ship, she said, do I have to? And they said, contractually, yes. So she was stuck. But to sweeten the deal, they offered to bankroll her dream project, which was Hope Floats.

• 25:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Lizzie Bassett?

  But just as everyone had predicted, Speed 2: Cruise Control bombed. And after this, she really changed the way that she selected projects, and I would imagine also the way she read contracts. She really wanted to look at the movie as a whole instead of just looking at her part. And she made a promise to herself that she was not going to say yes to anything that came her way. At this point, she could be more selective and only choose projects that she believed in, one of which was Practical Magic. She's one of the first people to sign on. She signed on to play Sally and also came on board as a co-producer alongside De Novi. In November of 1996, Turner Pictures, of course, folded into Warner Brothers after the Turner Time Warner merger. None of this is new. So Practical Magic was now property of Warner Brothers. And they already had a director in mind, Griffin

• 26:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Dunn, age 42, who was fresh off directing Meg Ryan in Addicted to Love. And they were very happy with his work on that. And so they opened their development vault to him and said, hey, take your pick. What do you, what do you want to work on? But as he's going through all the scripts, he got a call from an executive, and they're like, you know what? You don't actually need to read those. We have a project that is perfect for you. Sandra Bullock's already attached to it. She's personally vouched for you. They had met a couple of years earlier at Sundance. Chris, why do you think that Hollywood felt Griffin Dunn was the perfect director for Practical Magic? Has to do with the movie he just directed?

• 26:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I never saw that movie. He's worked with women?

• 26:44Lizzie Bassett?

  That's it. You nailed it. You don't need to have seen the movie. It's just that he's worked with women.

• 26:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Skip it.

• 26:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Skip it.

• 26:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it's devilish and man again.

• 26:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So following that movie, the industry was like, well, hot diggity dog, this man can direct a woman.

• 27:01Chris Winterbauer?

  He knows how to talk to women.

• 27:04Lizzie Bassett?

  In fact, he's spoken to at least one.

• 27:06Chris Winterbauer?

  We need to talk like actual Hollywood. We're being rude to whoever has those accents because they are better people than these executives.

• 27:13Lizzie Bassett?

  That is true. He said to Metaphor, quote, "At the time Practical Magic was made, the studios were run by men, and I was characterized as a quote-unquote 'woman's director.' I was entrusted because I had a certain sensitivity." So let's talk about Griffin Dunn, because I did not know a lot about him before this. And what an interesting man. He's going to come back again later this year. So he was born on June 8, 1955, also in New York City. He was the oldest child of Ellen, Lenny, Beatrice, and I am embarrassed to say, I did not know this, Dominic Dunn. Yes.

• 27:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, the writer.

• 27:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, Dominic Dunn. And if anybody doesn't know who Dominic Dunn is, we're going to talk a little bit about this. But a little bit of frame of reference, Nathan Lane played Dominic Dunn in the Menendez Brothers, Ryan Murphy show that was on Netflix. He's a very famous writer, journalist. We'll talk about him a little bit more. He had two younger siblings, a sister, Dominique, and a brother, Alex. Now, he was also the nephew of the writers John Gregory Dunn and, do you know this?

• 28:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Joan Didion.

• 28:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Joan Didion.

• 28:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn co-wrote Panic in Needle Park, which was Al Pacino's first lead role.

• 28:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 28:22Chris Winterbauer?

  The Jerry Schatzberg film, which I just watched for a dog day afternoon. And I quite liked. If anybody's interested, you should check it out.

• 28:28Lizzie Bassett?

  So in his 2024 family memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, he described how surreal it was growing up in this world. Because this is not just, I mean, this is the literary world. These are Hollywood connections, to your point. He's always in rooms with movie producers, actors, writers. Reportedly, he once walked in on Judy Garland in his bathroom going through the medicine cabinet when he was a kid.

• 28:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Checks out.

• 28:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it does. He once watched Warren Beatty play piano while Ida Lupino ran a game of charades. And then also, there was a time when he was pulled out of the water by Sean Connery. I guess if anybody's.

• 29:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And he gave him a smack for falling in there in the first place.

• 29:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Thanks, Sean. Also, Elizabeth Montgomery, who would of course later star on Bewitched.

• 29:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 29:12Chris Winterbauer?

  We just talked about on Your Wish's primer.

• 29:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that was his babysitter.

• 29:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 29:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Weird.

• 29:17Lizzie Bassett?

  He also met Carrie Fisher as a teenager and they were friends for the rest of her life. But all of this excess and privilege really embarrassed Griffin. He said, quote, "I saw the downside first and I saw it relatively young. My father was the first to talk about his superficiality, his social climbing, the importance he placed on getting invited to parties and having celebrities to his house for parties. I found the clinging to celebrity and the name dropping uncomfortable and I found myself embarrassed for my father, which is a terrible feeling."

• 29:43Chris Winterbauer?

  There was kind of like a, maybe I'm just thinking of the Nathan Lane performance, but like a Capote-esque quality to the way that, like, you know what I mean? He seemed attracted to the scandal and that sort of thing.

• 29:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I think that is very fair. I think it's completely realistic to draw the comparison between Capote and Dominic Dunn. So as soon as he could, Griffin moved to New York to pursue acting and he took a job at the popcorn stand at Radio City Music Hall, hanging out with the Rockettes while auditioning for off-Broadway plays. Again, be nice to your ticket takers, your popcorn stand people. You don't know who you're buying popcorn from. And also just be nice. Meanwhile, the Dunn family was falling apart. In the early 1970s, Dominic Dunn had just produced Ash Wednesday, starring Elizabeth Taylor. When very drunk at a dinner party, he made a fat joke about Sue Mengers, who's come up quite a bit here. She was one of the most powerful talent agents in Hollywood. And according to Griffin's memoir, his father

• 30:34Lizzie Bassett?

  said something along the lines of, "Should they ever make a musical of Sue Mengers' life? It should be called When the Fat Lady Sings." Yoiks. He was too drunk to realize that a Variety reporter who was paid to cover the movie was within earshot. The next morning, Variety ran an article about Dominic's drunken rant. Sue Mengers blackballed him, no one wanted to touch him, his work dried up, and his drinking and drug habit spiraled out of control. By 1979, he'd hit rock bottom, put himself in self-exile, retreating to a small Oregon town, and that's where he really taught himself how to write. More on Dominic in a little bit. There was also Griffin's younger brother, Alex, who was struggling with crippling mental health issues. His mother, Lenny, was diagnosed with multiple

• 31:18Lizzie Bassett?

  sclerosis. And meanwhile, Griffin was just trying to make a name for himself as an actor. He made his debut with a small role in The Other Side of the Mountain, but really couldn't find steady work. But he did bond with other frustrated actors like Amy Robinson and Mark Metcalf, and together the three made a pact. They were not going to wait around to get hired. They were going to make their own opportunities. So they started searching for plays to perform in or be involved with. And Amy had just read Anne Beatty's debut novel Chili Scenes of Winter. She was convinced it could be a film, and she thought she and her friends could be the ones to produce it. Through a series of pretty remarkable events, they actually got Anne Beatty to agree to give them the option for their novel, even though they had never made a movie before and no one had ever, ever heard of them.

• 32:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Dunn said, "Our blind luck continued," because Hollywood was then going through a period of pretending it wanted to work with women directors. Though really, the list of acceptable hires was limited to three who were currently in vogue, all coincidentally named Joan. Joan Darling, Joan Tewksbury, and Joan Micklin Silver. We had the good timing to get to Joan Silver, who had directed an independent gem called Hester Street, to write and direct their film.

• 32:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Didn't Carol Kane get an Oscar nomination for that?

• 32:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's right.

• 32:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, she was nominated for Best Actress. We just talked about her in Dog Day.

• 32:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Carol Kane. They cast John Heard as the lead in this film. They renamed it Head Over Heels. The studio marketed it as a wacky rom-com, which it was not. The movie itself flopped, but it did establish this trio of Griffin Dunn, Amy Robinson, and Mark Metcalf as ambitious young filmmakers who were making their own opportunities. So Dunn caught John Landis's attention, and two years later, he was cast in An American Werewolf in London, something we will be covering at the end of this year. Worried that the fame might overwhelm him, and I imagine probably also thinking about the experience he'd have with his father, he turned down most teen comedy acting offers after American Werewolf, and then co-produced Baby It's You alongside Amy. But at the same

• 33:13Lizzie Bassett?

  time, his sister Dominique had just broken through as an actress with a supporting role in what movie, Chris?

• 33:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Poltergeist.

• 33:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Poltergeist. That's right. She had also just dumped her very toxic boyfriend, John Sweeney, who worked as a chef at the very exclusive LA restaurant, Ma Maison. And on the night of October 30th, 1982, Dominique was at home practicing lines with actor David Packer for the miniseries V, when Sweeney showed up demanding to be let in. Dominique decided to step outside to talk to him. She tried to avoid a scene, closed the door behind her, and once outside, John attacked her and strangled her. As she was being strangled outside, David Packer, inside the home, locked the front door, hid in the bedroom, called the police, and then left a message on his roommate's answering machine that said, "If I get murdered tonight, John Sweeney did it." When the police arrived, Dominique was lying outside on the ground. She was unconscious and brain dead. She was put on life support,

• 34:05Lizzie Bassett?

  and by November 4th, her family made the horrible decision to take her off of it. She died at 22 years old. The day after the funeral, her mother received a phone call from a woman who said, "Mrs. Dunn, I'm afraid you're now a member of a club that no one wants to belong to." On the other end was Doris Tate, mother of Sharon Tate. Before Dominique's trial began, Dominic Dunn met Tina Brown at a dinner party, and he spoke to her about his daughter's death. Tina Brown was in the running at that point to become the editor of Vanity Fair, and she said, "Keep a daily journal of the trial. If I get the job, I will publish your account." In August 1983, Dominique's trial began, and according to Griffin Dunn, the judge took an immediate dislike to the Dunn family.

• 34:46Lizzie Bassett?

  He barred testimony from Lillian Pierce, Sweeney's former girlfriend, who of course he had beaten so badly that she ended up in the hospital. He also prevented the Dunn family from testifying about certain violent behaviors they had witnessed from Sweeney. Sweeney's legal team was funded by the owner of the restaurant that he worked for. We talked about this a bit more in Poltergeist, but basically, this got characterized as a quote-unquote "crime of passion" rather than a premeditated murder, and the Duns were especially horrified when Sweeney's lawyer quoted Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, quote, "Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself." Throughout his sister's trial, Griffin kept working. He took a role in Amy Heckerling's Donnie Dangerously, which we talked about before. It, of course, did not do very well. And it was on the set of that movie that he learned the jury had reached a verdict.

• 35:30Lizzie Bassett?

  He said that Michael Keaton could immediately sense that something was wrong. And that's because the jury, having never been shown the full picture, acquitted John Sweeney of second-degree murder and convicted him only of voluntary manslaughter. He got a sentence of six and a half years, and he served two and a half. And in March of 1984, though, Tina Brown did stay true to her word, and she published Dominic Dunn's account, "Justice, A Father's Account at the Trial of His Daughter's Killer." This was also, I think, a watershed moment in the way that crime was covered in America. Maybe not at the same level as In Cold Blood, but in some ways, close to it. He was offered a position at Vanity Fair, became a star reporter. Meanwhile, Griffin Dunn starred in Scorsese's After Hours, which he co-produced, and it didn't do as well as he'd hoped.

• 36:13Chris Winterbauer?

  That was an Amy Robinson connection, because she produced that, and she-

• 36:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 36:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, one of her only acting roles was Mean Streets.

• 36:19Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 36:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Which I had re-watched recently, and she's really good. And I was surprised that she decided she didn't want to act, and she just produced.

• 36:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he seemed to be reaching a pretty new level of stardom, but as his agent put it, he also began making pretty self-destructive choices. He starred in Who's That Girl alongside Madonna in '87, which was a box office total disaster. And during this period, he said, "He felt as if my luck had run dry and I had only misfortune awaiting me." He's also constantly worrying about his brother's mental health, his mother's physical health. But of course, meanwhile, his father is on the rise. In 1989, Dunn starred in Me and Him, which he called a career-killing movie and a near fatal blow. However, he met his wife, Carrie Lowell, and together they welcomed his only child, Hannah Dunn. And then he took a hiatus from acting. In 95, he made his directorial debut with Duke of the Groove,

• 37:10Lizzie Bassett?

  a short that earned him an Oscar nomination. And following that, We Are Now Caught Back Up, he directed Meg Ryan in Addicted to Love. So it's around 1997, and he'd just read The Practical Magic script. And on paper, seems like a great opportunity. Best-selling novel, major producer, Sandra Bullock attached to star. But there was a problem. He had no interest in any of it. Magic, witches, nothing. He told Rolling Stone, quote, "I had to deal with my lack of real passion or even interest with magic and witches. It just wasn't an interest for my wheelhouse. So I almost turned it down." But he didn't want to walk away. So he started to think about what part of this story, what element of this story, could he find himself interested in? What do you think it was that stood out about practical magic that may have been personally impactful for Griffin Dunn?

• 37:55Chris Winterbauer?

  It's what Tarantino did with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's a chance at revisionist history, in a sense. There's an abusive boyfriend who's nearly going to strangle Nicole Kidman's character, but in this instance, there's a sibling there to intervene. And then they kill inadvertently, you know, in the movie, Jimmy. So there's a bit of a, it actually, weirdly, it falls almost into the rape revenge fantasy category of films to a certain extent.

• 38:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways, in Glorious Bastards is the same thing. It's, yeah.

• 38:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I was thinking about that, the Tate murder, you know, being avoided. But yes, absolutely. The just, what if we just gunned Hitler down? And like, that said, fuck it.

• 38:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 38:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And you know what? Good call.

• 38:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. He said, quote, "I thought about the women in my family. I thought about my grandmother, who was from Mexico, a very tough, shrewd woman who had been through a lot, and her daughter, my mother, who was also a terribly strong woman who had sickness, she had multiple sclerosis. And then I thought of my daughter. I thought of the three generations of women in my life and their strengths and their humor, and then I understood the script." He also said, "My grandmother was a cattle rancher and my mother grew up on a cattle ranch. She was obviously sick, but incredibly strong in spirit, passed that spirit of strength on to my sister." So with that in mind, he signed on. But he did find himself clashing with screenwriter Robin Swickeard over how dark he wanted to take the movie. Robin told the rap, quote, "He had some personal experiences in his life, a loss that really colored the film for him, and I think that he was ready to express some of that creatively."

• 39:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, you hit the nail on the head. He wanted to explore the domestic violence element of this storyline. Dunn kept telling Robin that he wanted it to be The Exorcist. He's like, "Watch The Exorcist. I want it to feel exactly like that." To which she would reply, "You know, this is a story about two gentle witches with romantic problems who helped their neighbors."

• 39:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 39:40Lizzie Bassett?

  So.

• 39:41Chris Winterbauer?

  You can feel the Robin Swickeard discord at the end of the day with some of the tonal inconsistencies from sequence to sequence, you know?

• 39:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. It became too much and Robin did eventually leave the project. She actually apparently has never even watched it because she hated this so much.

• 40:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't blame her. I think if you look at the tone, not that she couldn't do his version, she's obviously talented enough, but I think if you look at Little Women and then you look at Matilda, which is kind of a witch movie, I know it's not explicitly stated, but it is.

• 40:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Chris Winterbauer?

  It's sort of gateway violence to an extent, right? With Miss Trench Bowl and whatnot. And there's a gentleness to the awakening of magical powers that is at odds with the level of violence that is eventually portrayed in Practical Magic.

• 40:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I will say, you know, I hadn't watched this as a full blown adult, I don't think, like, not all the way through, at least. I was pretty surprised by how dark this movie gets with all of the domestic violence elements of it. Now, that being said, I like that part of this movie. I think it's important. I think it's interesting. I think it differentiates it from a lot of other films.

• 40:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't disagree. I don't ultimately think the two gel quite well enough at the end of the day, but I don't mind those plot elements.

• 40:59Lizzie Bassett?

  No. And he really wanted to push it as far as he could in this direction. And with Robin off the project, of course, you get Akiva Goldsman, Adam Brooks, and they seemed more willing to, the men were more willing to go in that direction. So he also started thinking about what actress has some dark energy, someone who could go toe to toe with Sandy B. And that, of course, landed him on Nicole Kidman. According to Sandra, Nicole was the perfect person for the gig because, quote, "Our energies are so opposite that we needed what the other person had." I agree. I really love these two together. And also, this is before Nicole Kidman, like, tried to start seeming nice with the roles she was taking, which I wish she would stop doing. I'm sure she is a very nice person, but she plays a cold, hard psycho so well.

• 41:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Go watch Malice.

• 41:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Malice, yes.

• 41:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Go watch To Die For.

• 41:47Lizzie Bassett?

  That's one of my favorites.

• 41:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I love To Die For.

• 41:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 41:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, that should be the sister film of Drop Dead Gorgeous.

• 41:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Because also Kidman wants to be a world famous broadcaster in that movie.

• 41:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but she's just straight up evil.

• 42:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, she's Denise Richards.

• 42:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 42:03Chris Winterbauer?

  That's like what, you know, is so fun about it.

• 42:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Chris Winterbauer?

  But yeah. And even something like Portrait of a Lady or The Peacemaker, she's not soft, you know? She's, she's hard in these roles.

• 42:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Portrait of a Lady, that's the Jane Campion one. I think a lot of people have not seen that. That is such a beautiful movie. I really love it. Great Martin Donovan performance in that as well.

• 42:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:22Lizzie Bassett?

  So yes, of course, at this time, to your point, she'd just done Dead Calm, Malice, To Die For.

• 42:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, Dead Calm, yeah.

• 42:28Lizzie Bassett?

  She was in the middle of what movie, which was dragging on forever and had taken her away from a bunch of other projects.

• 42:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Eyes Wide Shut.

• 42:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Eyes Wide Shut.

• 42:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Should be shooting for 700 million years.

• 42:39Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 42:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 42:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Almost as long as the contract for the Sea Org.

• 42:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not her fault. Turns out her husband can't act.

• 42:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Just teasing. He just can't walk through a door.

• 42:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 42:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Do it again, Tom.

• 42:49Lizzie Bassett?

  He disagrees.

• 42:53Lizzie 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 Krispy 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.

• 43:36Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 44:02Lizzie Bassett?

  So she agreed to do Practical Magic. I mean, part of it was because she'd been on Eyes Wide Shut so long that she didn't have that many more offers coming in. She's also, you have to remember, more of a new star than Sandra Bullock is.

• 44:16Chris Winterbauer?

  And she had worked way less. If you look at how many films they did, so I went through both their filmographies from like 90 to 99. And Kidman, even though she's got some great roles in there, had been working at about half the clip of Bullock. Bullock did six or seven films in 1994.

• 44:32Lizzie Bassett?

  While You Were Sleeping, right? Speed.

• 44:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. While You Were Sleeping, Speed, A Time to Kill, Speed 2, Hope Floats, Practical Magic. I mean, there are a bunch of other movies in there that I didn't even remember.

• 44:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Chris Winterbauer?

  But those are the hits.

• 44:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and I mean, part of it also is that the movies that Sandra Bullock was taking were big box office blockbusters.

• 44:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Nicole Kidman was not doing that.

• 44:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Aside from Batman, Batman Forever.

• 44:52Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 44:52Chris Winterbauer?

  But yeah.

• 44:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Stoker Channing was cast as Aunt Frances, Diane Weest as Aunt Jet. These are obviously both seasoned actresses at the time. Weest was also a two time Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actress for Hannah and Her Sisters and Bullets Over Broadway.

• 45:07Chris Winterbauer?

  And Stoker Channing was about to go on to the West Wing after this.

• 45:10Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. A little fun fact about this is that Stoker Channing actually lied about speaking French in order to secure a free trip to Paris to dub the movie for its release in France. And in hindsight, she admitted it was one of the stupidest things I've ever done in my entire life.

• 45:25Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a young person choice, so good for you.

• 45:28Lizzie Bassett?

  For making it when you're not that young.

• 45:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I love that she's like, "I am an idiot."

• 45:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Merde.

• 45:36Lizzie Bassett?

  She said, "I'm sure the minute I left, they hired someone else to do it, right? But I made a real horse's ass of myself."

• 45:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, God, I just would love, the French ADR like recordist. I would love their smoking the cigarette. Just like, oh, God, do we have to roll on her again?

• 45:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Mon dieu. So Aiden Quinn, of course, was cast as investigator Gary Hallett. Griffin Dunn pictured a Gary Cooper kind of guy for the part, someone who had a vibration of being good, honest, and decent. So I think Aiden Quinn, he fit the bill right away.

• 46:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Lizzie Bassett?

  But as for Jimmy, the original script had written him as a country western shit kicker, a redneck kind of guy from Texas.

• 46:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Brad Pitt, Thelma and Louise.

• 46:15Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 46:16Chris Winterbauer?

  He's available.

• 46:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. He would have been, I think, more in line with how this is written in the book, or even...

• 46:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Matthew McConaughey in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, one of the sequels. I can't remember which one he was in.

• 46:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 46:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Could have been that too.

• 46:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, or even Christopher McDonald, who we just talked about on Thelma and Louise. Like, he's a little weasely, but like, that kind of just shitty, shitty energy.

• 46:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Danny McBride, how old is he? Let's get about him.

• 46:40Lizzie Bassett?

  He looked 45 when he was 18. He would have been fine.

• 46:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Lizzie Bassett?

  But Dunn just didn't feel that the character as written was dangerous enough. And he also felt that it was far too stereotypical. He's like, "We have seen this before." Again, Thelma and Louise, we did just see it.

• 46:53Chris Winterbauer?

  But Eastern European.

• 46:54Lizzie Bassett?

  That's exactly right. I've never seen that.

• 46:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, now, will Liam Neeson have a special set of skills he'll use to destroy every man in the Balkans eventually? Yes.

• 47:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Chris Winterbauer?

  But that's fine.

• 47:06Lizzie Bassett?

  But not yet. So he saw Croatian actor Goran Visnic in Welcome to Sarajevo, which came out in 1997. And it got Dunn thinking, you know, Eastern Europe, it's the home of Dracula.

• 47:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Magic.

• 47:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, magic. So he called up Goran to come in for a read.

• 47:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a good villain.

• 47:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I actually think he's fucking awesome in this movie. I love his performance. His performance in this is one of the highlights of this movie for me, and it's one of the most memorable in the whole thing.

• 47:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Lizzie Bassett?

  But Chris, when he showed up to read for this movie, it became immediately clear he did not speak English.

• 47:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Hey, you can teach him.

• 47:42Lizzie Bassett?

  He learned his lines phonetically.

• 47:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Lizzie Bassett?

  It didn't matter. It didn't matter.

• 47:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I think Annette Armus did that for her first, like, three American movies, something like that.

• 47:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Good on you.

• 47:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Lizzie Bassett?

  You don't need to be able to speak it as long as you can. Acted and he could.

• 47:57Chris Winterbauer?

  It's true.

• 47:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Apparently, even with the fact that he was speaking in very broken English and had clearly just learned his lines phonetically, he was so menacing that it all worked. He's also, he's a big guy. I think he's like six foot four. I mean, you can tell he's towering over Aiden Quinn.

• 48:12Chris Winterbauer?

  He must be because Kidman's.

• 48:13Lizzie Bassett?

  She's almost six feet.

• 48:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly. And he dwarfs her in this movie.

• 48:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Makes her look small. Yeah. So Dunn rewrote the character of Jimmy to be sort of ambiguously Eastern European. I think in this, they said that the last name is Bulgarian.

• 48:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Here is the only issue I find with this casting choice. They make allusions. They call him basically vampiric at a couple of points.

• 48:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 48:35Chris Winterbauer?

  They use that word. Because we are in a world in which witches exist, I actually thought he was like the witches of Eastwick, right? Like Nicholson's character is the devil in that movie. I actually assumed for a moment, I thought, oh, have I forgotten this? And he's actually a vampire in this movie? That's actually how I felt.

• 48:53Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I think I made the same assumption and he's actually not.

• 48:56Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's the only thing that, again, in a movie where the rules of the world are never really explicitly explored in a way that I think can be a little destabilizing. I'm not sure what the respective powers of people are. It was another layer of ambiguity that I ultimately found more confusing than helpful.

• 49:14Lizzie Bassett?

  You know what I think they're doing? I think in the movie, they are kind of trying to walk the line of suggesting that perhaps he is a vampire because there are so many lines about that. Cowboy vampire, Dracula free, like there's, you know, he's from Transylvania. There is all this stuff that I wonder if they were trying to push that as far as they could without altering the actual lore from the book. And I agree with you. It muddies the waters quite a bit because I, maybe because I watched this when I was young, I assumed that that was the case, that he was something supernatural and that's how he's able to operate in the spirit world, the way that he does. But.

• 49:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Who knows?

• 49:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know. Also, because his eyes open before they stab them with the needles during the spell.

• 49:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, we're playing fast and loose here with the Wiccan, so I didn't know what the rules were.

• 50:01Lizzie Bassett?

  When I stab a dead man in the eyeballs when I'm trying to bring him back to life, typically the eyes don't open until I've jab jabbed them with the needles, just saying.

• 50:09Chris Winterbauer?

  A little jab jab, Jabberwocky.

• 50:11Lizzie Bassett?

  A little Jabberwocky. So with the cast locked in, Griffin Dunn was like, I should probably do a little bit of research about witches. So he hired a witch consultant, Chris, recommended by a friend of the friend to show him some of the tricks of the trade and they hit it off. She was, by Griffin's account, enormously helpful. She educated him on the training, skills, artifacts, literature, anything he needed to understand about white magic, which of course supernatural turned towards the good, which is why what happened next was surprising. As Dunn learned more, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman also became very curious about the magic. They kept asking him, what, what has the consultant said about this? What about this? What about that? So he had an idea. He's like, you know what?

• 50:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Why don't we fly the witch consultant out to Los Angeles? We'll put her up in a nice hotel, invite her to come watch some rehearsals, introduce her to Sandra and Nicole. They're dying to meet her. They can ask her questions in person. What could possibly go wrong?

• 51:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So many things.

• 51:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't want this person's input anywhere near my set.

• 51:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Turns out, Chris, you don't want this person anywhere near your set. So Griffin had his producer book a nice hotel and call the witch to set it up.

• 51:21Chris Winterbauer?

  If you give a witch a nice hotel.

• 51:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Turns out, if you give a witch a nice hotel, you gonna get cursed. Here's what happened next. Dunn told Vulture, quote, "I had my producer make her a reservation and call her," and the witch goes, "You're not gonna buy me off with a hotel room. I want a percentage of the movie."

• 51:41Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 51:41Lizzie Bassett?

  "I'm going to have my own practical magic cookbook."

• 51:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It's practically magic, how good these recipes are.

• 51:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And he said she was paid quite well.

• 51:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course.

• 51:51Lizzie Bassett?

  And apparently she said, "I want an additional $250,000." The producer told her, "That's just not possible." And she goes crazy and scares the shit out of the producer. This is a quote. She says, "I'm going to put a curse on you. I'm putting a curse on this movie. I'm putting a curse on Griffin." So the producer comes back to my rehearsal white as a ghost and she tells me, "That call did not go well." She's really, really angry. I had no idea what happened, so I get back to my office on the Warner Brothers lot and I listen to my voicemail. And I will try to do my best, how he described this, as a very low growl. "How dare you sic that shrew on me? You think you can buy me off? Well, let me tell you something.

• 52:34Lizzie Bassett?

  There is a land of curses." And that was the voicemail.

• 52:39Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, Lizzie, again, if you want to get your way in life, you have to go full Denzel at the end of Training Day. And that means I'm putting cases.

• 52:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Turn them all in.

• 52:49Chris Winterbauer?

  On all you bitches.

• 52:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 52:51Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's what she's doing, but instead of cases.

• 52:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Curses.

• 52:54Chris Winterbauer?

  It's curses.

• 52:56Lizzie Bassett?

  What if Training Day had a magical element? I'm just going out there.

• 53:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Look, if anyone could do it, it's Denzel.

• 53:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Absolutely.

• 53:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe it 100%.

• 53:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Have you ever seen Fallen?

• 53:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Fallen's great.

• 53:07Lizzie Bassett?

  He's in a demon movie. It's pretty good. I like that movie a lot.

• 53:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, I'm sorry, it actually wasn't the end of the voicemail. She then started speaking in tongues. And he.

• 53:18Lizzie Bassett?

  He was like, he hung up. He was like, fuck this, I'm not doing this. And within minutes, turns out she wasn't lying because Warner Brothers had been served. The witch was suing the studio within minutes. He gave the voicemail to the studio's legal department and even they were too freaked out to listen to it all the way through. So they were just like, fuck it. And they paid her off. They paid her an undisclosed sum to make her go away. But the whole experience haunted Griffin so much so that later on in production, he actually couldn't help wondering if perhaps the witch had been telling the truth. But he was determined not to believe in all that, Chris. And he actually added the line, "Curses only have power when you believe them," to the movie as a way to try and convince himself that this witch was not cursing him personally.

• 54:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Which by adding the line, he proves that he believes in the curse.

• 54:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, buddy, poor Griffin. He's had a rough time. But witch curses aside, production, of course, had to keep moving. And Swiker's rewrite had left them with a pretty big location problem because remember, she moved this from a Boston area suburb, from Bean Town, witch town, to a coastal town or island. They needed somewhere that had a New England aesthetic. Of course, you have to tie this to the Salem witch trial somehow, but it also had to be sunny enough for an early spring shoot, which actual Massachusetts was not at all. California would have been ideal, except it was reeling from what weather pattern that came in 1997, 1998 that's coming back this year, baby?

• 54:44Chris Winterbauer?

  El Nino.

• 54:45Lizzie Bassett?

  El Nino, El Nino. Yeah, we're scared of it.

• 54:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Do you like having sweat between your Gucci balls? And you will love El Nino. Here it comes.

• 54:59Lizzie Bassett?

  El Nino, it was bad. It flooded everything, particularly the coastal communities in California. But producer Mary McLaglin suggested Washington State.

• 55:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Hell, yeah.

• 55:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, not exactly famous for sunshine, but she specifically said the San Juan Islands, more specifically San Juan Island itself and the protected inland waters of Puget Sound. And when the team arrived, they were like, this is it. This is the right location. But what they had not found was the Owens' house, which makes sense because there's like five houses on these islands. You do not have a lot to choose from.

• 55:31Chris Winterbauer?

  San Juan's a little more populated than the other islands. Yeah.

• 55:35Lizzie Bassett?

  But still, not a lot.

• 55:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Friday Harbor is a big harbor.

• 55:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 55:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 55:39Lizzie Bassett?

  So Dunn brought in Robin Standifer and Stephen Alish of the studio Roman and Williams for the job. Their first decision regarding the home was to really reject the sort of witchy cliches that they felt Hoffman had written in her novel. And in Hoffman's book, the Omens were described as having, you know, a black wrought iron fence that circled the yard like a snake. Inside the house, there's no locks, no mirrors, three locks on each and every door. It's dark in every room, even at noon, cool all through the heat of July. There's green tinted window glass.

• 56:08Chris Winterbauer?

  You can see why De Novi went after it too, though, because it's got Burton-esque qualities to the way it's described in the book.

• 56:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Absolutely. It's very much giving Edward Scissorhands dark vibes, but that's not what they wanted to do. They wanted the Owens' women to have a sophisticated taste. They said, "These are the kinds of witches who read house beautiful and live in homes like the ones in Giant or The Magnificent Ambersons. It was inspired by East Coast lighthouses and Victorian homes." They said it had to be clean and white, not fading and cobwebbed. And this was really important to Griffin Dunn because he wanted a very noticeable contrast between dark and light. And as we already know, he was trying to focus far more heavily on the dark than we get in the end result. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman told Collider that his earliest cut was more of a 50/50 between Sandy and Nicole. And this haunting of Nicole was the counterpoint to this emergence of Sandy.

• 56:59Lizzie Bassett?

  It was more of a ghost story. It was really beautiful. So keep that in mind. That's what they're shooting. The designers couldn't find any houses on San Juan Island that would match what they had in mind. So they'd said, "We're just gonna build it." They found a plot of land on a cliff, close enough to Coopville, which is where the little town is that you see in the film.

• 57:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Sorry, that was Goochville? Was that what that was, Lizzie?

• 57:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Goochville, yes. Otherwise known as Goochville. Sorry to Coopville.

• 57:28Lizzie Bassett?

  However, the plot of land that they found was actually native land. So there were a bunch of restrictions. You could not dig into the ground.

• 57:34Chris Winterbauer?

  They're going to turn this into Poltergeist all of a sudden if they're not careful.

• 57:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you've got a witch, you've got native lands, you better be careful. They had to build essentially the shell of a home up on a platform without digging into the soil at all. They also had to agree to take it down immediately as soon as filming ended, which they did. It took them about six months to build the exterior of the home and the gardens.

• 57:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 57:56Lizzie Bassett?

  The interiors, of course, those are separate on a soundstage. The production design of this movie.

• 58:02Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great.

• 58:02Lizzie Bassett?

  It is so beautiful. It is truly like the crowning achievement of this movie. And I think is maybe the biggest influence on sort of cottage core, you know, witchy decor today.

• 58:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It's that and the location.

• 58:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 58:15Chris Winterbauer?

  The location they scouted is perfect. It's wonderful that it's on the cliffs. It's great they chose San Juan Island. You know what it reminds me of from a build perspective is the Bates Motel.

• 58:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, very much.

• 58:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Which we just talked about because that also.

• 58:26Lizzie Bassett?

  It's that very Victorian design with the widow's walk at the top. Yeah.

• 58:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 58:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I love it.

• 58:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And that was the build as well. You know, that was on the universe a lot, obviously, so not on location, but still.

• 58:35Lizzie Bassett?

  That's a good point. I wonder if there was a bit of that here in terms of inverting the sort of idea of a spooky house. Because the Victorian house, it is thought of as being very haunted and spooky. And then they make it on top of that, this very bright, white, cheery design. It was very smart. Also, they made almost everything that you see in this movie. The tincture jars, the pressed flowers. Apparently Stephen actually did etchings of plants. Like those are done by hand by the production designer that are all over the house. They also sourced tons of antiques all over the country. It is a remarkable job. A couple of additional facts just about the production design because it really was so good. Griffin Dunn actually received so much praise about it that he didn't love it. Because he was like, did you like the movie?

• 59:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Or did you just like the production design?

• 59:21Chris Winterbauer?

  I liked the production design.

• 59:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I think a lot of people did. He said, quote, "It would be like if you saw Lawrence of Arabia and then said to David Lean, 'Who is that brown camel in the movie? I love the color of that camel.'"

• 59:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it's not exactly true. It's like if you saw it and said, "I liked your trains quite a bit in that movie, sir, and the way they blew up."

• 59:40Lizzie Bassett?

  I liked that sand with no little plants in it.

• 59:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, Ben Stiller and his wife, Christine Taylor, were so impressed with the Practical Magic Home that they asked Robin to remodel their home. And according to Dunn, this movie was the reason why Robin and Stephen's work moved from production design to interior design. It was because Ben Stiller and his wife hired them.

• 1:00:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Christine Taylor, victim of a witch in the craft.

• 1:00:04Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. It's all connected. So production got to work making over the town of Goochville, AKA Coopville. False fronts went up, new signs appeared. Coopville Liquor became the speckled hen grocery. It's so funny because you can totally tell that all of the signs are obviously put up for this movie. They paint everything super duper white. It's all like fake little signs.

• 1:00:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Every day is a farmer's market. Yeah, no, it's aspirational.

• 1:00:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. But meanwhile, Dunn couldn't stop thinking about that witch and her threat to curse the film. So just in case, he actually went and got himself an exorcism.

• 1:00:42Chris Winterbauer?

  There we go. I was waiting for the exorcism to come back.

• 1:00:45Lizzie Bassett?

  You wanted it to be like The Exorcist, Griffin. You got it. You got it. He said it was simple, new agey, mostly chance and smoke, and about as silly as the idea that someone would curse you over the phone. He spent about a hundred dollars on it and he figured not going to hurt anything. By April of 1998, the house was ready. Filming was about to begin. But of course, news of the witch cursing the set had leaked all the way back to Sandy and Nicole, who couldn't stop talking about it. And he was determined to keep a lid on it because the last thing he needed was a distraction on set. But it didn't help that just a few days before filming, the father of a crew member died of a heart attack. And immediately, people on set were like, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God, the witch killed him. The witch killed him." He was very old, but perhaps the witch killed him.

• 1:01:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it was probably the bacon or something, not the witch.

• 1:01:33Lizzie Bassett?

  It was the season of the vichy. In early April 98, the cast arrived in Washington State to begin one month of shooting across Whidby Island and San Juan Island. They started in Coopville, spent about a week shooting the small town scenes. Sandra Bullock is in most of those, so they were expecting her to be there. Nicole Kidman really is only in like one scene there. So they didn't think she was going to be around. But much to their surprise, both Nicole and Tom Cruise spent the whole time walking around town.

• 1:02:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Really?

• 1:02:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:02:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's so cool. That's so interesting.

• 1:02:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, they hung out.

• 1:02:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom's walking around, just wondering if Stanley liked his performance and I was watching.

• 1:02:09Lizzie Bassett?

  He's walking through doors all over Coopville.

• 1:02:12Chris Winterbauer?

  He's just ruminating. Walking, "Could I have, could I have done that better, sir? If I came into your shop a little differently this time?"

• 1:02:18Lizzie Bassett?

  It seemed fine, Tom. Local kids were actually hired to be the chanting children. So those are local Coopville children. And a local biking group is the one that bikes through the scene and accidentally almost kills her husband.

• 1:02:30Chris Winterbauer?

  That's impressive. That's a real stunt.

• 1:02:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 1:02:32Chris Winterbauer?

  That they did. Those bicycles seem to go quite close to that poor fellow.

• 1:02:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Very fast. Residents were paid $40 a day to be extras and retailers were paid $30 a day for the disruption, which the community was not very happy with because that's not very much.

• 1:02:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, as we pointed out, everything was painted white. Locals apparently would say, "Don't stand in one place too long. Anything that doesn't move gets painted white." And on set, Dunn did learn that coming from a family of women didn't automatically make directing a whole cast of them easy. He told Vulture in 2017, "The women in the movie became such a strong group that they actually all had their periods at the same time, I remember, during a full moon." And they were joking, "Okay, Griffin, it's going to be a little rough the next couple of days. This coven might be turning on you." None of it felt terribly unfamiliar to me. Hasn't that been totally debunked that that is a thing in terms of period syncing?

• 1:03:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Was he?

• 1:03:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, my period expert.

• 1:03:24Chris Winterbauer?

  You're asking the wrong guy.

• 1:03:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Ask your penis real quick. What does he have to say about it?

• 1:03:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I could ask my sisters.

• 1:03:32Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's totally a myth. It's a myth. I'm like 99% sure this is not true.

• 1:03:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's more just like there aren't that many days in the month that at some point they're going to start overlapping.

• 1:03:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it reminds me of, you have a classroom of a certain amount of size. There's.

• 1:03:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:03:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It becomes like almost a statistical certainty that two people will share the same birthday, even though it's far fewer people than 365 or something like that.

• 1:03:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 1:03:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know.

• 1:03:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, be quiet.

• 1:03:57Chris Winterbauer?

  And now to Chris for women's sexual wellness.

• 1:04:03Lizzie Bassett?

  For the most part, though, this shoot went really pretty quickly. The only exception was there was some friction between the locals in the studio over parking space. And for that final scene, production did invite the residents to actually turn out in costume as the townspeople. So those are locals, yeah.

• 1:04:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 1:04:19Lizzie Bassett?

  And just as they promised, the day after shooting, the house was torn down, much to the dismay of Barbara Streisand. Do you know about this?

• 1:04:26Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know about this.

• 1:04:27Lizzie Bassett?

  She tried to buy the house. She called the production and was like, "I'll have that house, please." And they were like, "It's not real."

• 1:04:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Barbara, it's popsicle sticks. You can't live here. I'll take it. What do you want for it?

• 1:04:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, she was crushed to find out that it was never real. And then she built it in her basement. You know about her basement mall of baby dolls, right?

• 1:04:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 1:04:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, Barbara.

• 1:04:53Lizzie Bassett?

  So after Washington, they moved to LA to film the interior scenes. This includes midnight margaritas, anything inside the house. He chose Harry Nilson's song Coconut. He said, quote, "I remember vividly the first time I heard the song was in a discotheque in the Hamptons when I was an apprentice one summer for a stock company. I must have been about 16 years old because I just got my driver's license. I was too young to actually be allowed to go in the thing, but whatever. And the song came on and I became possessed." It's the perfect song for this scene. It is such a good one.

• 1:05:21Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a great needle drop for the scene. Also, doesn't Paul Thomas Anderson use Harry Nilson's "One" as the beginning of Magnolia? Isn't that the needle drop after the intro?

• 1:05:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:05:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so Harry Nilson getting a lot of play in 98, 99 with needle drops here.

• 1:05:34Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 1:05:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Nicole Kidman, this is how you know she's more fun than Tom Cruise. She brought along tequila for the scene. So in case you watched it and wondered, "Hey, was everybody shitfaced drunk during this?" The answer is yes. They indeed were. They got very drunk as they danced around for hours on end while Griffin Dunn filmed on a Steadicam. The next scene, though, was the hardest to shoot by far. It was the exorcism. It took three days to film. It was very difficult for Nicole Kidman, who was determined to make it as real as possible, to the point where she actually burst a few blood vessels in her face because she was slamming her head into the ground so hard over and over again. You can see it. Her eyes look quite red.

• 1:06:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman really bonded on set. They remained close friends and still are today. Kidman said of Bullock, "She's very down to earth, has a great sense of humor. We just managed to click. It wasn't anything that had to be forced or anything like that. I'm a very tactile person, so I always touch people and hug and everything. And she was really open to that." Nicole, I don't know that we would get along.

• 1:06:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Things not to be if you're a man on a movie set.

• 1:06:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:06:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Sean Lassiter, I'm a really tactile person. Please leave, sir.

• 1:06:38Lizzie Bassett?

  You are not Nicole Kidman. Please get out of here.

• 1:06:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Practical Magic was edited by Elizabeth Kling and initially Dunn had hired Michael Nyman, who did the piano and gattaca, to write the orchestral score. And according to Nyman, he delivered one that was lyrical, ironic, sexy, funny, sleazy in some places, scary in others, and very arthouse. He actually said that it was, quote, "The best score I think I've ever written for a film that engaged me not at all," meaning he did not love the film itself.

• 1:07:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of like saying your girlfriend lives in Canada. Like, "Best score I ever wrote, you can't hear. Sorry." But, you know.

• 1:07:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you can hear bits and pieces of it floating around online, but you sure can't hear it in the movie. And that's because they did an early test screening with the score and it was a disaster.

• 1:07:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I'm guessing because I didn't see his name in the credits.

• 1:07:26Lizzie Bassett?

  That's correct. Warner Brothers decided they hated the whole movie and one of the first things that got axed was Nyman's score. Nyman said, quote, "Not realizing I had six weeks to work on the score and they had two years to work on the film. So I was the whipping boy."

• 1:07:40Chris Winterbauer?

  And to be fair, I did Nyman. By the way, his score may have been wonderful.

• 1:07:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm just teasing. But this is the classic composer, last person in, first person out. A great roundtable story that I can very quickly say, a composer says, he's with a director and the director keeps saying, "Make the music faster, make the music faster."

• 1:07:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:07:56Chris Winterbauer?

  And what he realizes, the director's trying to tell the actor to run faster and they no longer can. And the only mechanism through which they can make the scene feel faster is the music at this point.

• 1:08:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly. So of course, it was Alan Silvestri who was brought in to compose an entirely new score that sounded a lot more commercial.

• 1:08:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Silvestri, who had done Death Becomes Her.

• 1:08:15Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. I love Death Becomes Her. I didn't see it until like maybe a year or two ago and it's so good.

• 1:08:19Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very totally different.

• 1:08:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, big time. It's very funny. Of course, the film does include two Stevie Nicks tracks. That can't have been cheap. If You Ever Did Believe, written in the 70s, and then Crystal, first recorded with Lindsey Buckingham singing the lead. And for Practical Magic, Stevie Nicks, of course, sings the lead for the first time. This was worth whatever they paid for it. Having Stevie Nicks show up at the end of this movie is pitch perfect. But as Practical Magic moved through post-production, Dunn's original cut, which we discussed, Akiva Goldman described it as being much darker, I think pushing farther in a ghostly direction and also focusing more on Nicole Kidman. It became caught up in a broader marketing dispute at Warner Brothers, who did not know how to sell this film. And so any problems that he had managed to avoid during filming were of course waiting for

• 1:09:03Lizzie Bassett?

  him in post-production, which happens all the time. And the biggest concern was the darkness at the center of his film. Now to Dunn, the whole point was, quote, "Really the family and the idea of how a curse can be passed down through a family. The way we inherit the dysfunctions and afflictions and beauty and trauma of previous generations. I understood the terror of domestic violence. It had touched my own family. I found that the more real I made it, the stronger, the more mystical moments became, like Goran's resurrection." So I think the better movie maybe would have been one that pushed in the direction that he was trying to go. I think the problem, to your point, is that they were dealing with existing source material and it didn't actually make sense with the existing source material. Like, I think he could have made an amazing movie that was entirely separate.

• 1:09:48Lizzie Bassett?

  But it is so sort of incongruous with the rest of what was present in the screenplay.

• 1:09:53Chris Winterbauer?

  My guess is that whatever his version was, was not working, at least to the level that the studio felt confident in or, you know, comfortable releasing. And if it's not working, their strategy became, our best bet is to lean into a tone.

• 1:10:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Chris Winterbauer?

  That will be as accessible as possible to as broad an audience as possible. And time has kind of proven that that may have been the right decision based on the enduring power of this film despite a lackluster initial response. So again, but that's just speculation.

• 1:10:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. For Griffin Dunn, the sort of glaring differences in the tone of this movie didn't bother him. An example he gave is the midnight margarita scene. You know, it's reminiscent of the way that boozy nights can go, where things are really fun and really silly, and then all of a sudden they get very heavy and scary. And of course, that also makes sense, given his life experiences and watching his father go through everything that he went through. I agree with him. I think that that sequence is one of the most successful ones in this movie. I do wonder if his cut may have been better than what we wound up with.

• 1:10:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Who knows? It would just be guesswork to say. I will say, I again, find the end of that sequence confusing when they start digging at each other because we're in a world where the magic is so ill explained to the audience. I wonder, are we under the influence of something here? Is there?

• 1:11:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, definitely you are. I think that's clear.

• 1:11:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. But I'm saying like, to what extent? Like, Sachar Channing and Diane Ousley eventually admit that they cast a spell on Sandra Bullock to make her fall in love with this man. They effectively took away her consent, which then led to this horrible tragedy. And it's swept under the rug in two sentences. I don't think it's that the two can't coexist. It's that they alternate with such rapidity that unlike something like, you know, An American Werewolf in London, which I do think has that tonal juxtaposition, we're not allowed to kind of like settle into one for any particularly decent period of time. And that's why I feel a little more jumbled when I watch this movie.

• 1:11:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think that's fair. It also sounds like he pushed some of the scarier moments in like very scary directions, like the sequence where they put the needles into Jimmy's eyes. That was supposedly like really scary.

• 1:11:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I like all that stuff a lot.

• 1:11:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I do too, but it's cut way down in the final result. It was apparently quite a bit scarier.

• 1:12:01Chris Winterbauer?

  More graphic, yeah.

• 1:12:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. They also had a huge problem with his original ending. He actually had a longer, very music-heavy sequence where the Owens women leap from the roof and then float around. And then Warner Brothers was like, absolutely not. What the fuck am I looking at? Just have them jump off and have their feet hit the ground. The end. When it was time to preview Practical Magic, Griffin Dunn was seated behind Warner Brothers CEO Bob Daley. After the scene where Jillian and Sandy dig up Jimmy's body from a rose bush, Daley turned to the guy sitting next to him and muttered, "I wish the kid would just pick a tone." Practical Magic was released on October 16th, 1998, alongside Bride of Chucky and Beloved. It did lead the weekend, making around $13 million, but it ended up grossing about

• 1:12:42Lizzie Bassett?

  $68 million worldwide on a budget of about $75 million. Now, as we know, that does not include the marketing. So this was a certified big time flopper. And the reviews were quite harsh. Roger Ebert called it "too scary for children and too childish for adults" before asking, "Who was it made for?" Time Out called it "a film with neither heart nor mind." New York Times Janet Maslin wrote, "Despite a transcendentally silly storyline and a lot more frou-frou touches than the traffic will bear, it's liable to work as escapism for anyone who thinks Little Women has too much grit." Janet's mean. Miss Maslin, if you're nasty. I do like a lot of her reviews, but they are scathing. One of the biggest critiques was, unsurprisingly, the tone. But looking

• 1:13:27Lizzie Bassett?

  back, both De novi and Dunn argued the problem was less about the tone and more about who was watching it and when. Of course, you don't agree with this, but Denise De novi told people, quote, "It was the days where female characters were usually the wife or girlfriend, and it was very tough to get a movie made with one female lead, let alone all of them. So we had kind of a tough reception. It was also a time when 98% of critics were men who didn't really click with the movie. So it did not get great reviews." Now, I don't think that's fair necessarily. As we've discussed, there are very valid critiques being made there about the tone and the issues with this movie. But I will say, I do think it was made for women. Like, this is primarily enjoyed by women, I believe.

• 1:14:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure.

• 1:14:04Lizzie Bassett?

  And, you know, it's hard to put your finger on what we love about this so much, but I did love it as a little girl. I still love it now.

• 1:14:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, no. And I think, you know, that was kind of what I was trying to express was, I see a lot of flaws when I see this movie, but I also see a lot of really lovely elements. And so even though for me, the flaws tend to outweigh those elements, I can see how somebody else would have a different balance. You know what I mean? When they come to this movie completely. I don't know if it's entirely fair just to chalk it up to sexism. I was looking at the reviews for The Craft, for example, Death Becomes Her, The Witches of Eastwick. These were all movies ultimately led by women.

• 1:14:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I do think Practical Magic has more of a sisterhood vibe that is, again, gentler. There's even like a coming out, you know, sort of verbally stated, she's coming out, sort of allegory, queer allegory to this movie. So I don't want to fully equate them. However, interestingly, those movies were all, even though they all received mixed reviews, they were somewhat better received than Practical Magic.

• 1:14:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Chris Winterbauer?

  At the time. And those were even before Practical Magic.

• 1:14:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree with you. I think the thing that is coming out of this is that this must have been a very disorienting experience for Griffin Dunn. And I understand why it would be and why he would feel this way about it. You know, he poured so much of himself and his own personal experiences, obviously with his sister, into making this. And I really admire what he did and what he was trying to do. But to do that and then have all the reviews come back basically just saying like, "Pick a lane, bud," would be very hard, especially when he starred in something like An American Werewolf in London, which to your point, very much mixed jokes with horror in a way that I don't think had really been done prior to that. And so it totally makes sense that this would just be a really jarring experience for him.

• 1:15:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. But I do think one of the things that it speaks to is, at least at the time, I think it was more disorienting to see kind of twee mixed with horror as opposed to jokes mixed with horror, maybe.

• 1:15:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Although to that end, you could look at Burton a little bit. Edward Scissorhands is kind of, you could see it as, you know, in a sort of like a similar space, you know, tonally to something like this. I don't know. I see some of the criticism as unfair. I think the degree, the harshness of the criticism, that's how I would describe it. It seems excessively harsh.

• 1:16:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:16:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Along that axis, even though I would tend to fall on that axis myself.

• 1:16:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, I think the thing about Edward Scissorhands and Burton's work that maybe made it more palatable early on is that it's also heightened.

• 1:16:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. This feels much more grounded.

• 1:16:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that is very hard to do, which, you know, credit to number one enemy of the podcast, John Landis. He is actually very good at.

• 1:16:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, American Werewolf in London is much more heightened too, especially the ridiculousness of the dream sequences.

• 1:16:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:16:42Chris Winterbauer?

  And like the Nazi werewolves and all that stuff. Yeah, you feel like you're in a kind of insane world in that movie in some ways.

• 1:16:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So following the release of Practical Magic, which Dunn really was not happy with the way this had gone. He didn't feel very proud. He perceived it as an enormous failure. He was handed a lot of chick flick scripts after this. Every project he tried to develop really struggled to get off the ground, so much so that he actually gave up on directing major studio films. But by the mid 2000s, Practical Magic was developing a coven following, if you will. He first realized this through his teenage daughter, whose friends would quote the film all the time and freak out when they learned who directed it. By 2023, he proudly told the story of Paul Rudd, his Hudson Valley neighbor, walking up to his restaurant table because Rudd's son's girlfriend was obsessed with Practical Magic and had

• 1:17:31Lizzie Bassett?

  to meet him. I can't believe Paul Rudd is 100 million years old because he looks 12.

• 1:17:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I just love the idea of Paul Rudd. "Hey, man, my son's girlfriend loves..."

• 1:17:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Loves Practical Magic.

• 1:17:44Chris Winterbauer?

  "And I thought the production design was great."

• 1:17:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Griffin Dunn's, "No."

• 1:17:50Lizzie Bassett?

  He really pivoted back into acting, starring in TV shows like Jill Soloway's I Love Dick and This Is Us. He did direct the documentary Joan Didion, The Center Will Not Hold. Also, he's a great actor. I really love Griffin Dunn as a performer.

• 1:18:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Griffin Dunn's lovely. I also, again, the sequences themselves, I think, are quite well-directed in this movie.

• 1:18:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I still love this movie.

• 1:18:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And I understand why. And again, I agree. I understand why it endures beyond those other ones we've talked about.

• 1:18:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Watching it now, and also knowing this, it does feel so chopped up. I really do wonder what a slightly longer cut would have been, what it might have given us.

• 1:18:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think this movie should have been, honestly, probably like two hours and 10 minutes, like 25 minutes longer, probably.

• 1:18:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. And I think his cut, I don't know this for sure. I suspect his cut was longer. And I just wonder what else was in there.

• 1:18:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, two hours, probably.

• 1:18:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. I don't think they did us any favors by cutting it out. I'll put it that way. Now, over the years, there were, of course, a bunch of attempts to revive Practical Magic. In 2010, Warner Brothers and ABC Family tried to develop a prequel series. That never happened. In 2019, HBO Max tried to develop a series based on Hoffman's prequel novel, The Rules of Magic, that also never came to fruition. Dunn was, of course, never approached about any of the potential projects, but he said that he would be interested in returning to the material if asked. But it seems he was not asked, because in early 2025, a Practical Magic sequel was officially announced to be directed by Suzanne Beer. Evan Rachel Wood also did not return. I think we'll save this discussion for the review

• 1:19:20Lizzie Bassett?

  episode that we will do on Practical Magic 2, because there's some interesting conversation, particularly around her not returning for the film. So, Chris, that wraps up our coverage of Practical Magic, ahead of Practical Magic 2. What went right?

• 1:19:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Many things went right in this movie. I would like to give mine to 90s movie star Sandra Bullock.

• 1:19:44Lizzie Bassett?

  She's so great.

• 1:19:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Who is, I think, oddly underrated as an actress. I think she ended up on some, unfairly, she ended up on some sort of snarky shit list when she won her Oscar for The Blind Side, which I think she's given better performances than that. I think she would agree. I think she would say, if I could have won for a role, it probably wouldn't have been that one. But my point is, she is ridiculously attractive. She's incredibly charming. She's super funny.

• 1:20:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Chris Winterbauer?

  She has a remarkable ability to be self-deprecating, but also very strong in her roles. She can make fun of herself and then come off extremely competent and confident in the same breath. And I think that's really hard to do. She does it in Speed, she does it in this. Miss Congeniality, I don't think, works with anybody else besides her.

• 1:20:30Lizzie Bassett?

  She is so good in that movie.

• 1:20:33Chris Winterbauer?

  She's so good. And I gotta say, when she was running into town, I was like, damn, Sandy.

• 1:20:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. I know.

• 1:20:41Chris Winterbauer?

  You're so hot.

• 1:20:42Lizzie Bassett?

  She's so hot. She and Nicole Kidman are like as hot as I think anybody could ever get.

• 1:20:48Chris Winterbauer?

  But mostly Sandra.

• 1:20:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:20:50Chris Winterbauer?

  No offense. I just, but she, she has to do so much. In 10 minutes, she falls in love, has two children, her husband gets hit by a car, she moves in with her aunt. You know, it is a not-so roller coaster.

• 1:21:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. And she nails all the emotional beats. You really feel it.

• 1:21:05Chris Winterbauer?

  She does a great job. I understand why they chose to focus this movie around her character and her.

• 1:21:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think that a lot of that is a testament to Bullock as an actress, and so I'll give it to her.

• 1:21:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I have to give this to the production designers. I think that it's just incredible. I mean, it really inspired its own aesthetic. And I think that aesthetic has been revived, you know, in the age of Instagram, and especially as we're all now discovering that perhaps we need our own homesteads in order to survive. I don't know where we're all going, but I guess make yourself an Owen's sister's garden, just in case, you know? You never know when you might need some potions.

• 1:21:42Chris Winterbauer?

  So you can die alone.

• 1:21:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, absolutely. You don't know what beetles are in your house.

• 1:21:47Chris Winterbauer?

  El Nino can flood you in your garden.

• 1:21:49Lizzie Bassett?

  So Barbra Streisand can try to buy your popsicle sticks. No, it's beautiful. They did an incredible job. Just the detail of it, it looks so lived in.

• 1:21:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:56Lizzie Bassett?

  It is amazing. If Barbara wants to buy your house, you've done a great job. So congratulations to them, this movie. The look of this movie has endured and will continue to. And also, good on you, Griffin Dunn. You took a big swing, even if it wasn't 100% a home run. So many people love this movie, including me. So that wraps up our coverage of Practical Magic. And as we said, please come back. If you're not already a subscriber, you can subscribe on Apple or Spotify or Patreon for $5 a month. And you can listen to our review episodes, and we will be talking about Practical Magic 2. The trailer is a trailer. I can't wait to see it.

• 1:22:37Chris Winterbauer?

  When we were watching the first one, Carmella said, wait, the little girls in the sequel to, she thought that the one sister was Joey King in Practical Magic 1. It does look like her. Yeah. And so I thought, no, but Joey King's great casting. And I love Joey King.

• 1:22:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I do, too.

• 1:22:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm excited to see the new one. My biggest disappointment, and actually, this would be another one, right? I love the way this movie shot. I love the way that movies in the 90s, they had moved away from some of the overlit movies of the 90s, like even something like The Craft, arguably even Scream a little bit, or certainly, you know, Go Back to Death Becomes Her. And I think this movie was kind of like we'd peaked on our ability to, you know, light film in a big Hollywood way, and it felt so great and romantic. And we moved into digital. And look, I'll withhold judgment until I see it on a big screen, but when I watched the trailer, the biggest thing that I missed was the look of the first film, I felt was maybe a little bit missing, but let's

• 1:23:25Lizzie Bassett?

  We'll see.

• 1:23:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Put a pin in that. We'll see.

• 1:23:27Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 1:23:28Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. If you folks would like a curse placed upon your house, for $50 a month on Patreon, you can get Lizzie as the witch consultant cursing our most supportive fans.

• 1:23:41Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  A plague on both your houses.

• 1:23:44Chris Winterbauer?

  It's also Stripe from Gremlins.

• 1:23:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have one voice. So, yeah, here we go. Here we go.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  Thrice, the brindled cat hath mewed. Thrice, and once the hedge pig whined. Harpier cries, 'tis time, 'tis time. Adrian Benkaria, Alex Barrett, Angeline Renee Cook, Anthony Thomas Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris Brook, Cameron Smith. Round about the cauldron go in the poison, then trails throw. Toad that under cold stone days and nights has thirty-one. Sweltered venom, sleeping god, moil thou first in the charmed pot. See, Grace B., Chris Leal, Datem Three, David Friskalanti, Darren and

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Dale Conkling, M. Sodia, Evan Downey, Felicia Chee. Film it yourself. Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kids. Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. Filet of a fenny snake in the cauldron boil and bake. I have nude toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog. Adder's fork and blindworm sting, lizard's leg and owlet's wing. For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hellbra spoil and bubble. The cast and crew

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  of Winna Triptah Brown Town, half gray hound James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, Johann Georg Gunnarsson, John D. Wilshire, Jori Hill Piper, Karina Kanaba, Amy Ergerschlag McCoys, Lena LJ, Lizzie Bassett is pretty damn fabulous, too. Lousy Susan, Lydia Howes. Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. Mandy Rarleson, Mark Bertha, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Mike and Clemmie Burbridge. Nate Full Stop,

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  Ashley, Nate the Knife, Petrie Peterson, Rosemary Southwood, Roger, Sadie Just Sadie, Solman Chinani, Steve Winnebauer, Suzanne Johnson, the Provost's family. They all sound like ahhhhhh.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

• 1:26:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Fantastic. Thank you, Lizzie. Remember, curses are only real if you believe in them.

• 1:26:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:26:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And can you tell the fine folks at home what we have coming next week?

• 1:26:44Lizzie Bassett?

  We got a little taste of Resident Evil coming at you next week. This is another doubleheader, where we're doing the oldie and the newie.

• 1:26:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. And not gonna try to tell you it's great when we go into it, but it is a lot of fun.

• 1:26:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't care.

• 1:27:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's a very interesting story.

• 1:27:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:27:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm very excited to talk about Resident Evil.

• 1:27:03Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 1:27:04Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll talk to you guys in a week.

• 1:27:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

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