Hulk (2003)

A decade of development hell, enough writers to take down a gorilla (maybe even a Hulk), and a director dealing with daddy issues. This week, Chris and Lizzie smash into the origins of Ang Lee's Hulk, a brooding mid-aughts Marvel misfire that's just a bit misunderstood. They'll discover the Hulks that almost were (animatronic!), the Hulks that we deserved (Steve Buscemi!) and the Hulks that came to be (Ang Lee gettin' that rage out). *CORRECTIONS: Hulk #1 was released in March of 1962 (not May, as stated), but carried a cover date of May. In the comics, Bruce Banner was helping the military develop a Gamma Bomb, not Gamma Rays. The 1994 production of "Fantastic Four" (Roger Corman), which Chris references, was created solely to prevent the rights of the characters from being reverted to Marvel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone what I would call a misunderstood mid-ots misfire that may have motivated the mothering of the MCU. As always, I'm Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host, back from maternity leave, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how you feeling?

• 2:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm feeling like I just had a baby.

• 2:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Fantastic.

• 2:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Feeling great, feeling great, ready to talk about this. Honestly, I'm excited that this is the one that I'm back for. What a movie. They did it. They made it a movie.

• 2:38Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, we're going back. I think a lot of folks recently have said, you guys need to go back to your roots. You need to go back to some misfires, some box office bombs.

• 2:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 2:48Chris Winterbauer?

  And even though I like, I like this movie, I will defend this movie and elements of this movie.

• 2:52Lizzie Bassett?

  I didn't hate it.

• 2:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it was not a hit by any means.

• 2:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I can see why.

• 2:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, there are some problems that we'll discuss. Lizzie, though, had you ever seen Ang Lee's Hulk before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching for the podcast?

• 3:06Lizzie Bassett?

  So I'm sure that I did. I probably saw it in theaters because I believe my mom had a pretty big crush on Eric Bana. So I think I saw a lot of Eric Bana content in theaters. I saw Black Hawk Down.

• 3:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Lizzie Bassett?

  In theaters, although that was because I was in love with Orlando Bloom.

• 3:19Chris Winterbauer?

  There are a lot of attractive men in Black Hawk Down.

• 3:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, a whole bunch.

• 3:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Hot Men Down.

• 3:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Hot Men Down. Yeah, working title. So I think I saw it in theaters and I didn't have any memory of what it was like. I mean, not a memorable movie, I have to say. Like, for a child, I don't think that this would particularly stand out. I'll tell you, though, what went wrong, Chris. I'll tell you right away.

• 3:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Tell me.

• 3:44Lizzie Bassett?

  It's Sam Elliott's mustache. Who did that? They trimmed it.

• 3:47Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a military mustache. I know.

• 3:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so bad.

• 3:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a little too high.

• 3:51Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so high.

• 3:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Too much lip.

• 3:52Lizzie Bassett?

  If you haven't seen this movie.

• 3:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It shows, I literally didn't recognize him. And I was like, who is this man with Grinch That Stole Christmas lip underneath his mustache? It's Sam Elliott. They trimmed it so high that you can see like the bottom of his top lip and it's horrible. I couldn't look away.

• 4:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It is accurate to our men in uniform. Thank you for your service, but Lizzie's not having it. I understand.

• 4:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't do that.

• 4:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, that is one thing that certainly went wrong. They turned a sex symbol into a not so sexy sex symbol.

• 4:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's not hot in this and it's hard to make Sam Elliott not attractive. It's also hard to make Eric Bana not attractive and somehow they do that as well. Even though they try to make him and Jennifer Connelly nerds, which also does not work.

• 4:34Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 4:34Lizzie Bassett?

  But I, just before we start, I just want to say, I understand on paper, why this movie should have worked and why it should have made sense. I understand what the pitch was.

• 4:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 4:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that they were going for full blown comic book before someone had really done that on screen, maybe. And unfortunately, it is completely humorless. And I think that that is what kills this movie.

• 4:59Chris Winterbauer?

  I couldn't agree more. And we're going to get to all of the specific reasons why it ended up being that way. And I would argue, one of the biggest detriments to the film, as you say, is the fact that it's humorless. When, as we'll discuss, Eric Bana can be very funny.

• 5:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and he's not having any fun in this.

• 5:15Chris Winterbauer?

  He's not having any fun here. So we'll talk about it. As we've said, there's a lot about this movie I actually really love. I really respect. There's a lot about the visuals that I think is really interesting.

• 5:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, as you mentioned, it's really trying to do interesting things to blend the comic book medium with the film medium that I, I think is really respectable. But of course, it came out at a time when superhero movies were finding their footprint. And this did not fit the mold.

• 5:40Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 5:41Chris Winterbauer?

  But if you'll allow me a brief bit of housekeeping before we get started. Guys, if you missed our announcement last week, we are finally going weekly.

• 5:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Woo!

• 5:51Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Lizzie came back from maternity leave and we decided, let's work her to the bone. And so we will now be gracing you with four episodes of Behind the Scenes Chaos a Month, rather than two. Now, with that being said, that does mean we're taking this more seriously. It's no longer a side hustle. It's a hustle hustle. And we would deeply appreciate it if you guys could help us spread the word about the show. Tell a family member, tell a friend, help us grow this thing so we can bring you even more stuff.

• 6:18Lizzie Bassett?

  And- Another way to support us is we do have some sponsors and you will hear us talk about those sponsors on this show. If you like what you hear and you want to try something, please use one of our codes. It helps us. It is an amazing way to support us. It's a great way to get some discounts and deals. So if you feel like it, listen out for those codes and go ahead and do some shopping on us, except we're not paying for anything. You are, but we really appreciate it and it's just such a nice way to support us.

• 6:48Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Now, I would also just like to mention, if you're new to this podcast, this is not a film criticism podcast. This is a film appreciation podcast. If you are looking for film criticism, we might recommend something like Unspooled with Amy Nicholson. We do like to offer our opinions. We hope you take them lightly. We're not trained critics. We are also not film historians. That being said, we take pride in presenting the most accurate information possible, and so are researchers. If you spot an error in our research, feel free to send us a correction at [email protected], especially if you worked on one of these films that we're discussing.

• 7:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 7:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I love being right, but I hate being wrong more. And so I want to be wrong for as little amount of time as possible. So corrections are always welcome. All right. Housekeeping over. Lizzie, let's get back to Hulk. Now, as we'll learn, this movie endured over a decade of development hell, gained and shed writers faster than the Hulk gains and sheds weight through his transformations, and was released less than six months after Sam Raimi redefined the superhero genre as very much not whatever the hell Hulk was.

• 7:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 7:52Chris Winterbauer?

  But first, the details. Hulk is a 2003 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name, directed by Ang Lee, written by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, James Sheamus, John Terman, and Michael Franz, among many, many more, as we'll learn.

• 8:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Never a good sign.

• 8:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Nope. The film stars Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas, Nick Nolte, and of course, Australian Eric Bana as the titular Hulk slash Dr. Bruce Banner. Released by Universal Pictures, it was intended to spark a franchise, but of course, that Never happened. I would argue it remains a unique film in its approach to adapting a comic book for the big screen. And as always, the IMDb logline for the film reads, Bruce Banner, a genetics researcher with a tragic past, suffers a lab accident that makes him transform into a raging, giant green monster when angered, making him a target of forces seeking to abuse his power.

• 8:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Pretty good, Lizzie, I'd say.

• 8:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Pretty good, although it is leaving out all of the insert shots of jellyfish abuse, of which there were way more than I expected.

• 9:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, starfish abuse, jellyfish abuse, just cutaways to lichen on

• 9:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Chris Winterbauer?

  rocks in the desert.

• 9:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Also being abused, yeah.

• 9:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, comic book movies by David Hughes, coverage from Variety, The New York Times, The Rest of the Trades, The Telegraph, and more, interviews with Ang Lee, Eric Bana, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Michael Franz, Jonathan Hensley, John Terman, Gail Anne Hurd, and Avi Arad, Comic-Con coverage of the movie, and more. The question remains, how did the producer of The Terminator and the director of Sense and Sensibility?

• 9:37Lizzie Bassett?

  And Crouching Tiger.

• 9:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, but I'm starting with Sense and Sensibility. I love Sense and Sensibility.

• 9:43Lizzie Bassett?

  That's my favorite of his movies, for sure.

• 9:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It's an amazing adaptation.

• 9:47Lizzie Bassett?

  But in terms of why they hired?

• 9:49Chris Winterbauer?

  We're getting there.

• 9:50Lizzie Bassett?

  It wasn't that.

• 9:50Chris Winterbauer?

  We're getting there. And an Australian stand-up slash sketch comedy actor come together to produce the mother of all Marvel movies dealing with daddy issues. And to answer that question, Lizzie, we got to go back to Hulk's humble origins. Now, as discussed, the film would end its trajectory to the big screen with a gnarly fight for credit amidst its many credited screenwriters, so it's only fitting the character would begin with one, too. Lizzie, are you familiar at all with the character Hulk from Marvel Comics?

• 10:22Lizzie Bassett?

  No. I mean, I've seen like, you know, the Lou Ferrigno-

• 10:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course.

• 10:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Hulk, but I'm not familiar with his history.

• 10:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, he debuted in May of 1962. He was the creation of writer Stan Lee, who you can see in the film.

• 10:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 10:36Chris Winterbauer?

  He's exiting the Berkeley Nuclear Lab with Lou Ferrigno, and artist Jack Kirby. And which of these two men should get the most credit for his creation is disputed. Stan Lee says that the Hulk was his idea. He wanted to create a heroic monster. His inspiration was the 1931 pre-Hay's Code Frankenstein, starring Boros Karloff. He added tragic depth and complexity by pulling quite liberally from Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which this is, I mean, come on, it's-

• 11:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 11:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It's right there.

• 11:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Hulk was, according to Lee, an alter ego of Bruce Banner. Now, Jack Kirby, for his part, says he came up with the concept and the name and brought them to Stan. His inspiration, also Frankenstein, and that apocryphal tale that I feel like we all hear about the mom whose child gets stuck under a car.

• 11:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Chris Winterbauer?

  And in like, the rush of adrenaline, she can lift the car up. And so, as Kirby later put it, "It suddenly came to me that in desperation, we can all do that. We can knock down walls, we can go berserk, which we do. You know what happens when we're in a rage? You can tear a house down. This woman proved to me that the ordinary person in desperate circumstances can transcend himself and do things that he wouldn't ordinarily do. I've done it myself. I've bent steel." Quite the quote from a comic book artist, but who knows, maybe he has. Regardless of who birthed him, Hulk was born with a very key characteristic missing, and that was his green skin. He was originally gray in the first issues of the comic book.

• 12:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 12:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he was like a big gray monster, and he looked a lot more like Frankenstein. It was unfortunately too difficult to consistently print the same shade of gray, so Hulk became green. And a few of the rules were a little different. At first, he could only transform at night, then he got blasted with another batch of gamma rays, and then he gained the ability to transform during the day. Anytime you need newer powers, just hit him with some more gamma rays.

• 12:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 12:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Stick him in the microwave, you can give him whatever you want.

• 12:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, so gamma rays were part of Hulk's story from the beginning?

• 12:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. Gamma rays are a universal-

• 12:37Chris Winterbauer?

  We can justify anything via gamma rays in this world.

• 12:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Later, they added the fact that transformations were actually triggered by stress and trauma.

• 12:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 12:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Repressed trauma became a part of the character.

• 12:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Emotional injury.

• 12:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Far more devastating than physical injury is.

• 12:56Lizzie Bassett?

  As they tried to seriously explain in this movie, yes.

• 13:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Dr. Green Eyes Betty Ross tells us in this film. All right. You mentioned Lou Ferrigno. Hulk first appeared in television, not in live action, but actually in an animated series, The Incredible Hulk, 1966. And then a decade later, in November of 1977, he made his live action debut in a TV movie, The Incredible Hulk, which starred bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk. Lou Ferrigno, if you didn't recognize him, exiting the Berkeley Nuclear Lab is an enormous man.

• 13:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 13:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he was six foot five at the time, like 270 pounds. He was known as Arnold's foil in the Mr. Olympia competitions. And you may have seen him in Pumping Iron, the documentary about them both competing in bodybuilding. The character was called Dr. David Banner in this instance because they thought Bruce was too effeminate.

• 13:48Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 13:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. I think Bruce is a very masculine name. It's a like Bruce.

• 13:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It's like a man, man name.

• 13:54Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. Well, regardless, his name was Dr. David Banner. Ferrigno apparently beat out Arnold Schwarzenegger for the role. I would take that with a grain of salt. I, I don't know if that's true.

• 14:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Imagine Arnold as the Hulk?

• 14:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I, yeah, he would have been great. It would have been funny.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  I'm Dr. Bruce Banner.

• 14:13Chris Winterbauer?

  He did apparently replace Richard Keel. Lizzy, you'd recognize him. He's that seven foot one tall actor who played Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker from the James Bond films.

• 14:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 14:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Within a month, there was already a sequel, The Return of the Incredible Hulk. And by March of 1978, Ferrigno and his co-star, Bill Bixby, were making it back into a TV show. So this version of the Hulk lasted five seasons and it was canceled in 1982. And it was responsible for one of the most iconic lines associated with the character. Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me angry. So this was not part of the comic. This was the creation of TV writer, producer Kenneth Johnson.

• 14:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm. Was Hulk Smash part of the comic?

• 14:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I believe so.

• 14:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 14:57Chris Winterbauer?

  And like Hulk Clap, which creates like a windstorm that he does.

• 15:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Not as good.

• 15:01Chris Winterbauer?

  No, Hulk Clap. There were three more TV movies after the show was canceled. 1988's The Incredible Hulk Returns, 1989's Trial of the Incredible Hulk, and 1990's Death of the Incredible Hulk. Two more animated series, both called The Incredible Hulk. And there was, of course, the live action spoof, the Troma film, The Toxic Avenger, which I'm not sure if you've seen, Lizzie, but is totally ridiculous and very fun. Anyway, the point is, there was a lot of Hulk in the world. He was very popular. He was well known. He had a fun catchphrase. It was only a matter of time before the Hollywood studios came knocking. All right. December of 1992. What's happening in Hollywood around this time, Lizzie? Any ideas? 92, 93, 94?

• 15:45Lizzie Bassett?

  A rebirth of sort of action franchises?

• 15:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, absolutely. But also kind of the birth of modern CGI.

• 15:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah, duh.

• 15:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, you've got like Terminator 2.

• 15:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Should have gotten that right. Jurassic Park, yes.

• 15:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. So in December of 1992, Variety reported that Universal and Marvel were in talks about producing a live action Hulk film. And it wasn't the only Marvel property under consideration. Here are a bunch of other announcements from that same article. Terminator 2 director James Cameron hopes to produce, direct, and write the live action Spider-Man feature for Carol Co. Sources say the budget, currently at 60 million, could be the highest ever for a feature film. And they are confident that this project will hit screens regardless of what ultimately happens to the financially troubled Carol Co. Obviously, it did not hit screens and Carol Co. went out of business within a few years.

• 16:33Lizzie Bassett?

  And James Cameron will take care of that budget situation with Titanic.

• 16:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Columbia Pictures is developing The Black Panther to star Wesley Snipes. Now, he did go on to star in the adaptation of Marvel's Blade, which, speaking of, rapper LL Cool J is developing Blade: The Story of a Black Vampire Hunter. Oliver Stone is in early discussions about doing a live-action Elektra assassin, which of course would end up starring Jennifer Garner in the early 2000s. Yep. And two studios have made competing offers for a live-action film featuring the popular Ghost Rider, which Nicolas Cage would end up playing 10 years later.

• 17:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 17:09Chris Winterbauer?

  There was a live-action Fantastic Four announced. This actually got made. It's like a German-American co-production and was never released. So it's like a film that exists in limbo somewhere in Germany, in a vault.

• 17:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 17:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, just disappeared. Point is, Marvel films were hot. Why? I think three reasons. One, 1989's Batman. So Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, moody, PG-13, exploration of a moneyed vigilante. It nearly 10xed its $40 million budget at the box office, and its sequel, Batman Returns, did incredibly well. Then you also had Ron Perlman, and I believe Carl Icahn, not the actor Ron Perlman, the investor Ron Perlman, they had taken Marvel public. It was a private equity play in 1991, and it seems like they were just trying to liquidate as many licensing deals as possible. So they were probably just going to the studios saying, "Which characters do you want? We just need cash."

• 18:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Would you like Elektra?

• 18:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. "You want an Elektra, Oliver Stone?" All right. Plus, comic books were minting it on the small screen. The Halloween of 1992 debut of X-Men: The Animated Series on Fox Kids became a breakout hit. Liz, you probably remember this from your childhood.

• 18:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah. Watched it, loved it.

• 18:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Fantastic. So this is an era of kind of the revenge of the nerds. Comic books are coming into the fore, pop culturally speaking. And it's around this time in 1994 that screenwriter Michael Franz, who had just written 1993's fantastically over-the-top Cliffhanger, which-

• 18:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 18:34Chris Winterbauer?

  -just one of my favorite John Lithgow performances, so good, met with Universal and Stan Lee. So Franz claims that a producer attached to the project, it's unclear who, wanted, quote, "Hulk versus terrorists."

• 18:47Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 18:49Chris Winterbauer?

  France thought this was a terrible idea. To the producers' credit, this is the era of blank versus terrorists.

• 18:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, what is it? Patriot Games versus the IRA?

• 19:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Patriot Games, Speed, True Lies, Blown Away.

• 19:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Die Hard.

• 19:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Die Hard, even Cliffhanger, kind of. It's a heist movie, but they're, you know, kind of terrorists.

• 19:09Lizzie Bassett?

  It's back when terrorists were fun, before they got a little more real and significantly less fun.

• 19:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Pre 9/11, as they say. Now, France wasn't interested. Now, as mentioned earlier, James Cameron had been partly responsible for this gold rush of comic books. When Cameron's interested in something, I think a lot of people become interested in it because he's done a very good job predicting the future of this industry. But it was his ex-wife, Gail Anne Hurd, who would actually get one made. Now, depending on the source, sometime in 94, 95, Hurd, who, if you are unfamiliar with her name, you know her work. She is such a prolific producer. She got The Terminator made, she produced Aliens, The Abyss, so many more films. Along with her then newlywed husband, screenwriter Jonathan Hensley, he had just written Die Hard with a Vengeance. Speaking of the versus terrorists storylines, they're officially attached to produce.

• 19:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Hurd has said that she was working on Hulk as early as 1990, so it's possible she was courting Marvel this whole time. But it wasn't until like 94, 95 that it was official.

• 20:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 20:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So, they make a big decision here. Hulk is gonna be created via CGI by Industrial Light and Magic.

• 20:15Lizzie Bassett?

  It makes sense. I mean, I, yeah.

• 20:18Chris Winterbauer?

  So this is a character who had either existed in animated form or had been played by an actor. And they're saying, no, we're gonna do it with CGI, which, like you said, it makes sense. Jurassic Park had come out two, three years earlier. And it kind of blew the doors off what people thought could be accomplished with computer animation. And the dinosaurs were kind of green. So it makes sense that they think, hey, we could make this big green monster. We should have T-Rex.

• 20:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, as you see in the end result, they make the sort of classic mistake of early CGI, where they try to do completely CGI, I think. And as we've said many times before, it doesn't quite look as good as when it ends up being a hybrid the way that it is for a lot of Jurassic Park.

• 20:57Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll talk about that. And I have a couple of thoughts on why some shots don't hold up quite as well, but some, I think, hold up very well.

• 21:03Lizzie Bassett?

  It doesn't look terrible. I do have to say, the transformations don't look that bad.

• 21:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, I assumed that Jonathan Hensley would be writing the script, but apparently the studio wanted to bring in a heavy hitter for that role. It's also possible he was busy with Armageddon, which he was writing, and we're going to cover that at some point.

• 21:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 21:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Woo. It was around this time that Universal exec Carr D'Angelo tipped off the baby green screenwriter John Terman that there was a Hulk movie in the works. Now, you might not know John Terman's name, but you might know his father, Lawrence Terman, producer of The Thing and The Graduate.

• 21:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 21:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So John was looking to get into the room, and he had one advantage his competition didn't. He was a big comic book fan. And so when he came in, he could speak to the film aspects of the script with the execs, but then he could also speak to the comic book side of things with Stan Lee, who was also in the room. So he thought there's no way he would get this job. In fact, he was so confident that he was never going to see anybody involved again, that he brought his copy of Hulk number one. And at the end of the meeting, he said to Stan Lee, quote, "I'll never see you again. Could you please sign this?"

• 22:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 22:07Chris Winterbauer?

  End quote. Stanley did. And then, of course, to his surprise, Terman got the job. Now, Lizzie, it was a dream come true. Until it wasn't.

• 22:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Knew that was coming.

• 22:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Because it's Hollywood.

• 22:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Chris Winterbauer?

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• 23:08Chris Winterbauer?

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• 23:27Chris Winterbauer?

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• 25:04Chris Winterbauer?

  So, by October of 95, Variety reports that Turman had written the Hulk screenplay for Universal. But Turman says he spent two years on the project and wrote roughly 10 drafts, which would move the timeline out to roughly 1997. And it's at this point that the studio said, "We gotta bring in some fresh blood." Let's go back to somebody that already said no: Michael Franz. So, Michael Franz, in the meantime, had written a draft of The Fantastic Four. It would end up becoming the Chris Evans version, released in the 2000s. Marvel was happy with it, and they said, "Michael, come on, come on, come on. The terrorists are out. Come do our..." Hulk with us. Please, please, please. So France comes in, he says, okay, fine, I'll do it. There's no more terrorists. Let's, let's rock and roll. And they get a great director, Joe Johnston, who, if you guys are unfamiliar,

• 25:48Chris Winterbauer?

  came from a visual effects and design background. I believe he was the creative designer in charge of the Lonnie and Falcon. He of course directed Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. He would go on to do October Sky, Jurassic Park 3, Captain America, the first Avenger. But I think most important to this movie, he had directed Jumanji, which was obviously a very visual effects heavy movie early in the VFX revolution. Now unfortunately, Michael Franz was fired before he wrote a single word of this version of the script. So in April of 97, Variety announced that Johnston was officially attached to direct and that Jonathan Hensley would be writing the script. So France doesn't know exactly why he was fired. He assumes it's because Hensley and Johnston had already worked together on Jumanji

• 26:32Chris Winterbauer?

  and they looked at each other and said, why do we need this other guy? We could just do this ourselves. But he was paid. So Michael Franz got paid for a job he didn't do.

• 26:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Best case scenario. Yeah. No work done, money in pocket, move on.

• 26:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And he may have dodged a bullet. Joe Johnston bailed on the project three months later. He went to go shoot October Sky, then called Rocket Boys. So the studio announced Jonathan Hensley would write and direct as his first feature film. So it would be a first time director for an enormous Marvel VFX heavy movie.

• 27:05Lizzie Bassett?

  And directing your own screenplay. That's just all around not a good idea. Also, listeners, I apologize if you hear some adorable coups in the background. That is David and my progeny.

• 27:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Just making another podcast in the background.

• 27:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Just cooing it up.

• 27:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Cooing it up. You're right, Lizzie. It would be risky to have a first time director whose wife is producing it, right? And direct the film. And so eventually they would hit some roadblocks. But at first, it seems like they actually had a really cool version of the film in mind. You mentioned mixing CGI and practical effects. And that was actually the goal. They were going to do a primarily animatronic Hulk and close ups and CGI for the wide shots. Not dissimilar from something like Jurassic Park.

• 27:49Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 27:49Chris Winterbauer?

  If you guys want to see this work, you can actually Google search animatronic Hulk, you know, late 1990s, or you can go to bloodydisgusting.com and look up the interview with makeup master Steve Johnson for the practical effects driven Hulk. It's really cool. They made these like 20, 30 foot tall models and they were building these kind of mechanical. They almost look like Terminator 21000s, you know, exoskeletons, endoskeletons that they were going to build the Hulk around. It's very sophisticated stuff. It's a very different vision of the movie, obviously. It was going to feature the abomination or the super Hulk, I believe it was called at the time, 30 foot Hulk villain. And they said, okay, we're going to shoot in early winter in Arizona, release summer of 1998.

• 28:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And of course, those plans are up and in the wind in a matter of months because they keep bringing in more writers. Zack Penn of Last Action Hero rewrote a Turman draft. Jonathan Hensley, the writer director, took another crack at a brand new version from scratch. Then he reworked it with J.J. Abrams, his co-writer on Armageddon. That draft was rewritten by Scott Alexander and Larry Karazowski. They had recently written Ed Wood and the People vs. Larry Flynt. And they would go on to write a bunch of stuff for, for example, Tim Burton later in their careers. So in October of 97, Variety reported that filming had slipped to April of 1998, but pre-production had begun. This movie is happening. Hulk had not yet been cast, but they were working on casting a couple of the villains.

• 29:14Chris Winterbauer?

  And then in March of 1998, Universal finally pulls the plug and they shut down production. But $20 million had been reportedly spent on development, computer effects and prosthetic work, which at first I didn't believe, but then I saw the models that they had built.

• 29:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:27Chris Winterbauer?

  It's amazing. I absolutely believe that they had spent that much money.

• 29:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my God.

• 29:32Chris Winterbauer?

  And it seems like part of what happened was that the gold rush over Marvel Comics was coming to a slow. So Fox's Fantastic Four, written by Michael Franz and to be directed by Christopher Columbus, was abandoned by Columbus after the budget apparently reached $165 million.

• 29:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my God.

• 29:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Which would have rivaled something like Titanic at the time. And Fox was having second thoughts about Bryan Singer's X-Men, although that movie would end up getting shot and. Unexpectedly jumpstarting that franchise. So it seems like a few things were happening at once. One, Universal was terrified of a $100 million price tag. So that number had always been discussed and Hensley said by the time they were approaching production, Universal was saying it's gotta be $25 million less. And they couldn't figure out how to get the budget down $25 million on short notice. So it may have just been,

• 30:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Chris Winterbauer?

  This is an excuse to shut down the film. There was also a regime change at Universal, which as we know, is always a great way to get your movie canceled. So Casey Silver, head of the studio, was out and Hensley said later that his projects were shut down as a result. But I just want to be clear, Casey Silver wasn't officially pushed out until November of 1998 and this was shut down in March. So it's entirely possible that like he was losing power and had to shut this down. But it's also possible that he shut this down because

• 30:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Chris Winterbauer?

  He was under pressure and this movie was not trending in the right direction. Plus, there were a couple of comic book flops that were giving people second thoughts. Lizzie, you remember a fun little film called Batman and Robin by Joel Schumacher?

• 30:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 30:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah. Well, that one with Batman's nipples on the breastplate infamously was released in 1997 to dismal reviews and pretty bad box office receipts. And so even though Blade was a success, that wasn't released until August of 1998. Too late to save Hensley's Hulk. So Hensley left the project. He was unwilling to just whittle it down to nothing. And he said it was miserable. He said he felt like he was letting everybody down. He had a full staff, first AD, production designer, stunt coordinator, cinematographer. They'd scouted the locations, they'd done the pre-vis, he had storyboarded the entire movie and he had to walk away.

• 31:35Lizzie Bassett?

  That sucks.

• 31:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So brutal, so brutal.

• 31:38Lizzie Bassett?

  That's so much work.

• 31:39Chris Winterbauer?

  He left, but producer Gail Anne Hurd stayed on. And it turns out, the third time's the charm with screenwriter Michael Franz.

• 31:51Lizzie Bassett?

  He's back.

• 31:52Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Michael Franz couldn't get enough, or maybe they couldn't get enough of him. They brought him back in and for eight months, he traded treatments and conference calls with producer Gail Anne Hurd, Marvel Studios founder Avi Arad, who had taken control of Marvel Comics. After its bankruptcy, he'd seized it from Ron Perlman, Marvel producer Matt Edelman, and Universal executives Mary Parent and Stacey Snyder. It seems like they were trying to make a movie by committee and nobody could figure out what this movie was. So, as Franz put it, "Somewhere, someone within the Universal hierarchy wasn't sure if this was a science fiction adventure or a comedy, and I kept getting directions to write both."

• 32:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, well, it shows.

• 32:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Franz even claimed that he believes there were discussions about turning Hulk into a Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler movie, which kind of makes sense, given the mask.

• 32:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I kind of want to see that.

• 32:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 32:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Not Adam Sandler as much. Jim Carrey, I feel like there's a version that could work.

• 32:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Punch Drunk Love?

• 32:49Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 32:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Adam Sandler with anger issues? I don't know. Just saying. You never know. Apparently, he was asked to, quote, "Come up with a lot of jokes about the so-called wish fulfillment aspect of it. You know, the guy at the burger counter who blows your order and is rude to you when you complain. Wouldn't you like to Hulk out and get him?" To which I say, "I don't really think I want to watch a movie about the Hulk beating up minimum wage employees at McDonald's."

• 33:11Lizzie Bassett?

  No, the burger guys. That's not what you want.

• 33:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 33:13Lizzie Bassett?

  You want him, like, going after your stockbroker or somebody who's been embezzling from you.

• 33:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, my stockbroker.

• 33:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I want white collar Hulk.

• 33:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I have a stockbroker.

• 33:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't have a stockbroker either. I'm just saying. I don't know. What do you do in the 90s?

• 33:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Bruce Banner, lab tech at a college, calling up a stockbroker.

• 33:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Famously rich.

• 33:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Swindling him. All right, whatever Franz was doing, though, it was working. Universal seemed happy. Happy enough that in July of 1999, Variety reported that Hulk was now on a fast track with Michael Franz writing the script, and they just needed a director. All right, Lizzie.

• 33:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Call up the guy that made Sense and Sensibility.

• 33:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you blew my reveal here. Because relative to its modest $17 million budget, it's hard to find a film that had a bigger impact in the year 2000 than Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon.

• 34:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, which is awesome.

• 34:08Chris Winterbauer?

  It's awesome. Do you remember seeing it at the time?

• 34:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 34:11Chris Winterbauer?

  It was kind of like The Matrix.

• 34:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 34:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And that kind of blew the doors off of what you thought you could do in a movie.

• 34:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's beautiful. It was totally awesome.

• 34:19Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's a wuxia martial arts film, which we discussed briefly as a genre in Big Trouble in Little China. And it was patiently rolled out by Sony Pictures Classics and ended up making over $200 million worldwide. It was a runaway hit.

• 34:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 34:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It was also a huge critical success. It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and it won four: Best Score, Best Cinematography, Art Direction, and Foreign Language Film. Ang Lee was also nominated for Best Director, and it was nominated for Best Picture. So this was like a huge, huge success coming out of China. And it ushered in a brief renaissance of cross-Pacific filmmaking. And it also established Ang Lee as a fantastic and fantastical director of action, not just melodrama. And so he'd obviously done a lot of comedy/drama. If you think about The Wedding Banquet, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm.

• 35:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Sense and Sensibility, which also won an Academy Award, at least one.

• 35:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. So some could see the potential for someone like this to helm something like Hulk.

• 35:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 35:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. As film critic James Berardinelli wrote at the time, "Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon unfolds much like a comic book, with the characters and their circumstances being painted using wide brushstrokes. Subtlety is not part of Lee's palette. He is going for something grand and melodramatic, and that's what he gets."

• 35:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:38Chris Winterbauer?

  "It's also important to understand a bit of Ang Lee's upbringing because it so informs the themes he brings to Hulk." So, Lizzie, if you had to say, what's the main theme of Hulk?

• 35:48Lizzie Bassett?

  The government's bad? I don't know.

• 35:51Chris Winterbauer?

  What about within families? What's the main theme of Hulk?

• 35:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, don't trust your dad if it's Nick Nolte.

• 35:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Just sins of the father, right? Maybe you would describe it as like

• 36:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 36:01Chris Winterbauer?

  overbearing fathers between Nick Nolte and Sam Elliott.

• 36:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Overbearing father who

• 36:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 36:07Lizzie Bassett?

  breeds his own Hulk child.

• 36:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 36:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Indeed.

• 36:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Long before, he was an acclaimed period melodrama director. Ang Lee was growing up in Taiwan after his parents fled China after the Chinese Civil War. He described his mother as submissive and his father as an authoritarian that everyone was trying to please. As he put it, "My late father, Shang Lee, was a traditional Chinese authority figure. My father represented the traditional Chinese patriarchal society. I was always living in his shadow. That was my big thing. I was shy and docile and never rebellious. But he taught me how to survive and how to be useful. He was a stately man who was very pragmatic, the headmaster of a high school. I don't know if that was a good or a bad thing." And Lee did attend that high school where his father was headmaster. But Lee was not a good student.

• 36:54Chris Winterbauer?

  He got poor grades and felt artistically repressed. His father wanted him to have a respectable profession like teaching, but Lee failed the entrance exam to become a teacher. He says he was too nervous. So he deviated from this path and he attended the Taiwan University of Art. He studied cinema and theater and he fell in love with acting.

• 37:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 37:15Chris Winterbauer?

  So in 1978, the 23-year-old Lee moved to the United States to pursue a BA in theater at the University of Illinois. He loved acting, but he pivoted to directing because he worried his English would limit his opportunities performing in the United States. So he went on to earn his MFA in film production at NYU. He made a thesis film, Fine Line, that won Best Director and Best Film

• 37:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 37:40Chris Winterbauer?

  at the university festival. And he was on his way and nothing happened

• 37:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Chris Winterbauer?

  for a few years, but he had a little bit of good luck. He married Jane Lin, a microbiologist he'd met at the University of Illinois in 1983. They had their first son a year later, right around when he was graduating from NYU. They welcomed their second Son in 1990, and he was basically a stay at home dad for about six years while his wife was working and he was trying to get into the industry. He got an agent, he pitched, but nothing stuck. He would write, cook, pick the kids up from school and hope for a big break. And it just took time. So he's in his 30s and his big break comes not from Hollywood, but from his home country of Taiwan. So he won first and second place in a screenwriting competition put on by the Taiwanese government

• 38:29Chris Winterbauer?

  for his screenplays Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet. Lizzie, have you seen these movies by any chance?

• 38:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I have not seen Pushing Hands. I think I have seen The Wedding Banquet. I can't remember exactly.

• 38:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so they are his first two films. So the Taiwanese government basically connects him to a Taiwanese studio, which ended up funding these first two films. They also referred him to a US production company called Good Machine, co-founded by James Seamus. So Lee comes in and pitches Seamus Pushing Hands and Seamus tells him exactly why he hasn't had any success until this point. Ang Lee, you are terrible at pitching. Just so bad at pitching. So good at directing, so good at writing, so bad at pitching. So in Seamus, Lee finds an enduring collaborator and they would go on to work all the way through The Hulk and later.

• 39:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 39:18Chris Winterbauer?

  So they shoot Pushing Hands for no money, then The Wedding Banquet for almost no money, and that leads to his first English language opportunity, Shane Austin's Sense and Sensibility.

• 39:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is truly, truly wonderful. If you've not seen it, cannot recommend it highly enough. It is great.

• 39:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely.

• 39:34Lizzie Bassett?

  And very subtle and very funny.

• 39:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 39:36Lizzie Bassett?

  In a lot of ways that unfortunately do not translate to The Hulk.

• 39:40Chris Winterbauer?

  No. Now, oddly enough, his limited skills with English may have helped him on Sense and Sensibility. As he later said, because I couldn't speak English very well, I'd give very blunt and direct directions. The actors would be shocked by this, but they figured it was because my English was bad and I didn't know any better. So they tolerated it. But the better my English became, the less I could get away with it. I had to become more civilized like everybody else. So I really like that he used that to his advantage.

• 40:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that. I wonder how much Hugh Grant was putting up with though.

• 40:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Famously has a bit of a short temper.

• 40:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, probably not much.

• 40:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Over the next five years, he bounces between English and Chinese films across genres. And yet, after each success, his father would tell him, now it's time to do something real. So this is somebody who's

• 40:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 40:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Oscar nominated.

• 40:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Bigger and bigger. And his dad is still saying, okay, come on, let's put away the cameras. Let's get a teaching job. Let's do something practical.

• 40:37Lizzie Bassett?

  That's insane.

• 40:39Chris Winterbauer?

  In the interim, more writers had been brought on to Hulk. Francis' script was rewritten by Michael Tolkien of Deep Impact, and then David Hayter, who'd just written X-Men. And whatever Hayter did to it, Lee and Seamus responded to this draft. So Ang Lee signed on. Now, it's important to mention that even though Lee was coming off of a big hit with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hulk would be by far the biggest budget movie he had ever directed. And it stands to reason, he may have been a little nervous because his last big budget American film had been a flop. And that is 1999's Ride with the Devil, a $38 million Western starring Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, Jeffrey Wright, and Jewel.

• 41:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Huh.

• 41:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Which, based on its box office receipts, you have not seen.

• 41:28Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I have not.

• 41:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Nor have I. It was received tepidly. It made very little. But to his credit, Lee says he liked to be uncomfortable behind the camera. I feel that in order to do my best work, I have to put myself in a place where I don't know much about what I'm doing. A place where I could feel as if I were making my first movie. If I feel like I'm repeating something or repeating myself, I actually feel more frightened than I would in taking the risk of doing something new.

• 41:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I think his filmography reflects that pretty clearly.

• 41:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. The quote's actually really funny. It goes on to say that he views it like taking different lovers, something he can't do in real life because he's married, so he does it in film.

• 42:00Lizzie Bassett?

  You better not, because that lady funded everything while you were writing screenplays.

• 42:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. And I think he's saying it tongue in cheek.

• 42:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 42:07Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a very funny quote. So Lee has a very specific vision for this movie. Bruce Banner and his alter ego would represent a Greek tragedy. This was going to be a psychodrama, not necessarily a comic book movie. His references included King Kong, Beauty and the Beast, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, Faust, the father figure, and quote, "a lot of Greek mythology."

• 42:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that does come through for better or worse.

• 42:36Lizzie Bassett?

  It does. And there is an exact ripoff of a King Kong shot in this as well, where he lifts up Jennifer Connelly in his hand.

• 42:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think that shot looks really good.

• 42:45Lizzie Bassett?

  It does.

• 42:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Ang Lee was clear. This was going to be an Ang Lee film through and through. And Universal said, great. I think in part because nobody knew what a comic book movie was at this point.

• 42:55Lizzie Bassett?

  No, and also like he was a huge name as far as directors go. I mean, that was a recognizable name to a lot of people at this point.

• 43:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And I mean, again, as we mentioned, Crashing Tiger Hidden Dragon was

• 43:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 43:06Chris Winterbauer?

  fantastic.

• 43:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And action-packed, et cetera. Lee knew this was a unique opportunity. I think for a filmmaker, it's a rare chance you can do a personal film on a big canvas. So Lee is putting a lot of himself into this movie. And what could be more personal than a repressed young man's battles with his authoritarian father? And the future that this father has created for him. So Seamus got to work on the script and Lee got to looking for his alter ego. Who would play Bruce Banner?

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• 44:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Lizzie, you said that your mom had quite the crush on Eric Bana, which I'm sure many an American mother or housewife or woman did in the early 2000s. But in the early 1990s, few in Australia would have pegged stand-up comedian slash sketch comedy goofball Eric Bana as a future Hollywood superstar. Have you ever seen his sketch stuff?

• 45:12Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I had no idea.

• 45:14Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, I'm just gonna, I wasn't planning on it, but I have to share it.

• 45:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Chris Winterbauer?

  So this is a character that he calls Poeta, who is a quote "rev head", which is like a mulleted redneck from the western suburbs of Australia who likes cars, basically. There is so much about this that I do not understand because I'm not Australian.

• 45:35Lizzie Bassett?

  God, I want to go to Australia so badly.

• 45:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 45:42Speaker 05

  Hello, kids. Today, I'm gonna be reading to you from this top little book, right? It's a great little novel, and it's called Snow White and the Seven Little Dwarfies. Here we go. Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young princess who lived in a beautiful castle on the side of a beautiful lake full of beautiful fish. It's pretty boring, isn't it? I've got a better one for you. Once upon a time, like last week, there was this chick, right? Who was a real spunk, and her name was Cheryl White, right? But all the blokes called her Snow White, because whenever they asked her out, she'd say, "Snow White." Classic. Snow White looked like this. Bit of a spunk, eh?

• 46:27Speaker 05

  Pretty flexible, too. I'll give you a tale. So anyway, Snow White lived in a one-bedroom flat with her cousins, the Seven Little Bogans. They was lazy, dribbling.

• 46:41Speaker 05

  Dope it. Prof. Cause they finish year nine. Basher and Kev. And they all worked damn at Lorna Park on the Dodgers, right? And they all reckon Snaiwatt was a top bird. And she liked him so much, she used to make him biscuit on toast every night. Everyone loves Snaiwatt, except the wicked old dragon. Dragon, dragon, dragons. Who worked in the fishing.

• 47:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Anyway, I could, I could go on.

• 47:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know half of what he's saying, but I love it.

• 47:07Chris Winterbauer?

  No, exactly. He just wanted where he's an ant farmer. It's so stupid. It's so funny. And he's just a, he's a total goofball.

• 47:14Lizzie Bassett?

  He is, he's a very attractive goofball. I wouldn't say looking at that, that it's surprising that that guy is gonna go on to become a bigger star.

• 47:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Not that he's gonna be a bigger star. I would say a brooding star is a little surprising because he's such a goof.

• 47:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 47:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So as the film is developing across the nineties, Eric Bana is on no one's radar.

• 47:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, was Black Hawk Down kind of his intro to the US?

• 47:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes and no. So we'll get to that in just a second. So Johnny Depp had apparently been the studio's top choice during the Joe Johnson era. Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

• 47:52Lizzie Bassett?

  He's also so slight.

• 47:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I know.

• 47:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Whatever.

• 47:54Chris Winterbauer?

  It could have worked. I mean, who knows? I wouldn't have guessed Mark Ruffalo back in the day, but then.

• 47:58Lizzie Bassett?

  He's great, yeah.

• 47:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And he put on some weight for Fox Catcher and he got that kind of wrestler's pose and he works really well. Billy Crudup was apparently Ang Lee's first choice, but turned the role down.

• 48:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Who looks so much like Eric Bana?

• 48:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he would have been really good.

• 48:14Lizzie Bassett?

  He would have been really good.

• 48:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, if you think about him too, as like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, right? I definitely think he could have done it. And he also has a humor like Eric Bana. I wonder if he could have brought it out a little bit more. Who knows?

• 48:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he was maybe a little bit more established too at this point.

• 48:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh yeah. You think of something like Almost Famous, he absolutely was. Apparently he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2020, Ang Lee is one of my favorites, but I just didn't understand his particular telling of it. So I'll say kudos to Billy Crudup. That must've been a really difficult thing to say no to.

• 48:46Lizzie Bassett?

  There was something else we covered recently that he backed out of because he didn't understand it. American Psycho?

• 48:51Chris Winterbauer?

  That might have been. Yeah, that would have made sense.

• 48:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I feel like he is pretty good at being like, I like this. I like the people, but I'm, it's not for me.

• 49:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's very discerning. Well, somebody else who it wasn't for, Tom Cruise

• 49:04Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 49:04Chris Winterbauer?

  was reportedly approached. Speaking of slight actors, I love Tom Cruise, but don't see him in this.

• 49:09Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 49:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And apparently, and I'm guessing this is because so much of the screen time is taken up by Hulk in his CGI form, that Ang Lee tested a version using character actors. And so he apparently screen tested Steve Buscemi and Jeff Goldblum.

• 49:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Both of which I would watch.

• 49:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Totally.

• 49:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Although, I don't know if you've been watching The Studio, but there's an entire episode of The Studio about how Steve Buscemi is not marketable.

• 49:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, no, I know. Exactly. Yeah, he's gonna headline the new Scorsese film, his last movie. Of course, Edward Norton was also considered, he apparently met with Lee but passed also not fully understanding the script. And of course, he would take on the role for 2008's reboot.

• 49:52Lizzie Bassett?

  So he makes a lot of sense, especially considering Primal Fear.

• 49:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and American History X.

• 49:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Between those two movies, that one, that one, it makes the most sense so far.

• 50:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And it makes sense that they went back to him, you know, after this film, when they rolled it into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now, you wondered what brought Eric Bana to the fore. And I think for mainstream audiences, Bana, I agree with you, was starting to be more recognized in the United States through his turn in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. But it was his role in Andrew Dominick's 2000 film Chopper, which if you have not seen, is, it's one of my favorite Australian crime films of all time. He plays criminal turned author Mark Chopper Reed, and he is so, so good in this movie. He put on probably 30 or 40 pounds, based on what I am remembering of the film.

• 50:45Lizzie Bassett?

  He's a big guy, isn't he?

• 50:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, he's tall. And he's like doughy in this. And he's, he is so funny and so intimidating and goofy and terrifying at the same time. He is so good in this movie. If you guys have not seen Chopper, I Still think it's his best performance to date.

• 51:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I haven't seen it. I'm gonna watch it.

• 51:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it's so good. And he is absolutely fantastic. And he goes from, ah, I'm just a charming, hey, you guys got some cash for me? Can I hang out? To, I'll give you 20 seconds to get to the door, or I'm gonna pull out my gun and shoot you, mate. And just goes, turns on a dime, you know, shooting people and then apologizing to them after the fact. You know what it is? It's very Sopranos in tone. And it's so good. And he's so funny in it.

• 51:27Lizzie Bassett?

  He can be scary, for sure.

• 51:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely.

• 51:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I think we see later in like Munich and

• 51:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 51:32Lizzie Bassett?

  some other performances. And not in this, not in Hulk.

• 51:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, in Chopper, he really taps into his humor. And he really, it's clear he understands the character without winking at the camera. And he knows like, oh, this guy's gonna come off kinda dumb and kinda funny here, but I'm gonna turn it at the end of this scene.

• 51:48Lizzie Bassett?

  There's only two people in this version of the Hulk that I feel understand the assignment. Do you know who they are?

• 51:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Josh Lucas.

• 51:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, 100% Josh Lucas.

• 51:58Chris Winterbauer?

  His heel turn performance is so good in this movie.

• 52:01Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great. One of my favorite lines in the entire thing, I have to pull it up for you, was some guy asking him, should I neutralize? And Josh Lucas going, no, we can't do anything with Goop.

• 52:12Chris Winterbauer?

  So good. So good.

• 52:15Lizzie Bassett?

  And?

• 52:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Nick Nolte?

• 52:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 52:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 52:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, those two.

• 52:18Chris Winterbauer?

  We're gonna get to Nick Nolte.

• 52:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 52:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so fun. All right. So Ang Lee saw Chopper, and I can tell why he fell in love with Bana. Bana's so good in it. And he makes a lot of sense. And I think it's easy to see why the production felt like he would bring the duality that you mentioned with somebody like Edward Norton to this role. Easy charm, offset by outbursts of extreme but casual violence, is how I would describe him in Chopper.

• 52:45Lizzie Bassett?

  He's also very attractive, which I do think is kind of a weird choice for Hulk.

• 52:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I wouldn't describe it as a necessity for this superhero in the way that other ones are.

• 52:56Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it's not like Captain America, right? Where he needs to be the poster for the United States military, for example. So you'd think this would be an easy yes from Bana. But he thought it was risky, not the least of which because he would have to agree to it without seeing the script. As he said in 2021 on Marc Maron's podcast, there wasn't a script, it was an unknown genre, and he considered himself a character actor.

• 53:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 53:21Chris Winterbauer?

  And this wasn't necessarily the type of role he was looking for.

• 53:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Which, by the way, fully reflected in the parts that he had taken up to that point. And I think in a lot of ways since too.

• 53:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Hector in Troy, you know, Second Banana, for example. Munich as part of an ensemble, right? I think he's attracted to roles where he blends in a little bit more and he's not front and center on the poster.

• 53:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and that are more transformative. He doesn't strike me as somebody who wants to be like Eric Bana on screen in the way that I think now we kind of see Tom Cruise. Not that we saw him early on that way, but.

• 53:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I agree. In the end, I think he wanted to work with Ang Lee and it was an opportunity to do something different. Now Jennifer Connelly, who would win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress days before filming began for her turn as the steadfast love interest of a mentally unstable scientist in A Beautiful Mind, signed on to play Betty Ross, the steadfast love interest of a mentally unstable scientist.

• 54:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 54:14Chris Winterbauer?

  And Hulk. She said that when she first met Lee, she asked him why he wanted to make the film and he said, quote, "I don't know, but here are some of my ideas." And she said that she just found those ideas intriguing, creative and kind of brave, so she signed on to the project. I think she does a lot of heavy lifting in this movie with just her eyes.

• 54:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Look, she does her absolute best. I feel like she is just extremely watchable always. She's so beautiful. She's a great actress.

• 54:39Chris Winterbauer?

  She's one of the most beautiful people on the planet.

• 54:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, she does her absolute best with almost nothing to work with. So, good on you, Jennifer Connelly.

• 54:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. Sam Elliott seems to have been a Gale and Hurt selection, perhaps. As she later said, quote, "I'm in love with Sam Elliott."

• 54:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Who isn't, except for that, some of the things he says.

• 54:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. On screen, Sam Elliott. Sam has that kind of authority, but he has a twinkle in his eye. We did not want General Ross to be a cardboard cutout of a bad military guy. And you know, with Sam Elliott playing General Ross, that there is going to be something humane at the heart of the general.

• 55:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that comes through.

• 55:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Totally. And then they ruined it with that mustache of his.

• 55:14Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so bad.

• 55:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. You mentioned Josh Lucas. I love Josh Lucas. I really like him as an actor. I really like him in this movie. I think he does such a good heel turn.

• 55:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 55:24Chris Winterbauer?

  As a villain. He was fresh off Sweet Home Alabama, which I kinda like with him and Reese Witherspoon.

• 55:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And A Beautiful Mind, where he plays-

• 55:31Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 55:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Russell Crowe's nemesis turned friend at the end. He was brought on to play Talbot. Quick side note, can we give him, can I, I'm creating an award for us, Lizzie. The inaugural James Marsden Best Looking Guy From Your Hometown Award. And these are guys that I would argue are too handsome to be a character actor, too character actor to be a leading man.

• 55:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 55:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Other potential nominees, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode, James Badgedale.

• 55:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 55:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Aldous Hodge, and I would argue Glenn Powell for a moment maybe was gonna be there.

• 56:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm taking Aldous Hodge out of the running.

• 56:01Chris Winterbauer?

  He's beautiful, but he hasn't been a lead yet, so I just, I'm throwing it in there, but.

• 56:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, fine.

• 56:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I mean, he's gorgeous and he's built like a frickin' tank.

• 56:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 56:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It's ridiculous. I remember when I saw Invisible Man, I was like, those arms aren't real. Come on. What are you doing? CG arms? Ridiculous. All right. You've mentioned him, my favorite bit of casting, Lizzie. Let's talk about him.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Nick Nolte.

• 56:24Lizzie Bassett?

  David said this as we were watching it, which I loved so much, is that this entire movie is just Nick Nolte's mugshot. And that is absolutely accurate. He looks like a mess. He's having a blast. I love Nick Nolte in this.

• 56:38Chris Winterbauer?

  He plays Bruce Banner's father, Dr. David Banner. Nolte claims he had sworn off mainstream movies, and I looked through his IMDB. It's consistent with that claim. The Thin Red Line was his biggest film leading up to Hulk, and that wasn't exactly mainstream-

• 56:51Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 56:51Chris Winterbauer?

  as we know. So I'm just gonna read the quote from Nolte about his meeting with Ang Lee, which I would pay a thousand dollars for a video of this.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  When he came to my house to talk about it, I can't see this.

• 57:05Chris Winterbauer?

  The whole time. When he came to my house to talk about it, he said, "I don't know how to make a comic book. I know how to make a Greek tragedy. Right away, my ears perked up. I asked him if he thought Eat, Drink, Man/Woman," that was Ang Lee's third film, "was based on King Lear. And he said, "Yes." "So I took him up to my lab, and I pricked his finger, put the blood on a slide, slid it under my dark-field microscope, then projected the image through a camera onto high-def. We watched his red cells floating around, and they look like jewels. Blood is very much alive. It shakes. It shimmers."

• 57:43Speaker 02

  It's far more interesting to watch than the universe. It was silent in the room for a while. And Aang said, "Can you do that in color?"

• 57:51Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a real quote from Nick Nolte.

• 57:54Lizzie Bassett?

  So Nick Nolte, playing himself in this movie.

• 57:57Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so good. I love it.

• 57:59Lizzie Bassett?

  That is crazy.

• 58:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm sure Ang Lee just thought, can you bring your lab to set? Can we shoot in your house?

• 58:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It's fantastic. So, production begins in March of 2002. It spans Northern California, Arizona, Utah, and the Universal lot. Now, there's not a ton of onset drama on this film. Much of that's going to come with the release, but we'll talk fun details. First, Eric Bana is doing his first leading role in a big budget Hollywood film, and Ang Lee doesn't want to show him dailies. So this was a very nerve wracking experience for him.

• 58:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:28Chris Winterbauer?

  So Bana had to ask the producers, basically every day, you know, did you see dailies?

• 58:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 58:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Have the dailies. Sorry for my Australian accent, Eric. Nick Nolte apparently eventually did see the dailies and convinced Bana, you're brilliant, don't worry about it.

• 58:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 58:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, there are some really fun Nick Nolte moments that we should just, it's just so much fun, Nick Nolte, we gotta highlight. First of all, Nick Nolte carried an oxygen tank around with him on set. He'd take a hit. Okay, I'm ready to go. And then they would do a take. And everyone assumed Nick Nolte had some sort of health problem that required use of an oxygen tank.

• 59:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Why would you assume that?

• 59:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, one day, he took a hit in private with Bana and said, I don't really need this. Just makes them think you're fucking crazy and they pay attention.

• 59:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Nick Nolte, for ya. He claimed himself that he basically ranted for three hours to prepare for one of his intense scenes. Quote, "I was still finding it, working on it, but I kept passing out. And I got so dizzy, Ang very patiently came up to me and said, do you think it's time to string two sentences together? I said, not quite yet." Animation supervisor Colin Brady said Nolte would go around and touch everything on the set before shooting each scene. And Nolte himself said that he covered himself in food in order to work with the dogs on set. So there's obviously three dogs, including a poodle. Here's his reasoning. I work with dogs a lot. I just smeared myself in food. That's what you eventually do. The trainers tried to hide in bushes and the dogs would run into the bushes and find their trainers. So I just took all that food they gave me

• 59:58Chris Winterbauer?

  and rubbed it all over me. You couldn't see it. It was night and I had it in my hands.

• 1:00:06Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like a little kid hiding candy from his parents. It's so good.

• 1:00:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know if that is what you eventually do, but you know, whatever.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  The scent was so strong, it'd stick to me like glue. I learned that trick on Down and Out.

• 1:00:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:00:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Nick Nolte, what a treasure. Also, apologies, my Nick Nolte accent sounds like Alex Jones. I just can't do anything else. Speaking of dogs, there's a midpoint dogfight scene, Lizzie, that I'm sure you remember at the cabin. Huge fight scene. This was incredibly expensive, upwards of $16 million. And it was roughly a third of what Lee had originally imagined. So everybody had to rein him in because he didn't know how expensive animating all of this would be. And my guess is shooting Crashing Tiger Hidden Dragon in China, where your production costs are probably going to be 10 to 20 cents on the dollar.

• 1:00:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Of what they are in the United States because of the differences in the cost of labor. I'm sure he just thought like, this shouldn't be that expensive. I just did wire work with actors floating through trees for months. And they're like, no, no, no, no, we have to pay people, you know, 5, 10x what you had to on the last film. Now, Ang Lee wanted Hulk to be nude during that scene, but this was abandoned because they kept needing to put dogs, trees and rocks into every shot to hide his genitals. As he was running around, you know, hiding the Hulk's huge, hulky member.

• 1:01:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Speaking of, let's talk about the Hulk's shorts.

• 1:01:28Lizzie Bassett?

  The Hulk's basketball shorts, yeah.

• 1:01:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Basketball's exactly. So these were a big conversation throughout production. As VFX supervisor Dennis Murren said, who we've discussed before, he's a veteran ILM VFX supervisor. Quote, "We realized we couldn't show his stuff, so we figured when he's in a government immersion cell, those were military stretchable pants." So those are military grade basketball shorts.

• 1:01:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 1:01:50Chris Winterbauer?

  But earlier on, it was more difficult to rationalize, so we figured he just wears stretchy pants.

• 1:01:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Me too.

• 1:01:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, seriously. It's like Lululemons. One thing that did help, Ang Lee rediscovered his love for acting. No, he doesn't have a cameo, but many, if not most, of the Hulk's movements are based on Ang Lee's performance in a motion capture suit.

• 1:02:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:02:14Chris Winterbauer?

  As Brady said, one of the VFX animating supervisors, "Aang gave an amazing performance, and even after reviewing all the takes, we decided that his performance was best. Even the tank sequence, we built these miniature props and brought in a stunt guy and an ex-football player and shot several motion capture sessions, beating the heck out of these tanks and smashing them up. And while all the physical motion was correct, the acting wasn't there, but Aang gave good angst. Even the Hulk beating up the tank with the turret was 99% Aang."

• 1:02:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:02:45Chris Winterbauer?

  And I just love that, like, the repressed artist, right? Like, living under the authoritarian father is released through his Hulk performance on this movie.

• 1:02:54Lizzie Bassett?

  That's awesome.

• 1:02:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I just would love to be on set watching Ang Lee let everything out in a motion capture suit, playing Hulk. It's so cool.

• 1:03:01Lizzie Bassett?

  That's also cool to have, you know, given up acting to a certain degree because of a handicap that was out of your control and then to be able to come back in this capacity and, and kind of hide in a way, like hide in plain sight. That would be really fun.

• 1:03:13Chris Winterbauer?

  He's, you know, I don't want to get like emotional early. It's gonna get to the end. He's such a brave person.

• 1:03:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Chris Winterbauer?

  To me, he's taken so many risks throughout his career and obviously he'd like traveled to a different country to pursue this career and obviously his spouse too, in supporting him is really, that's a remarkable part of his story. But, ah, man, to be brave enough to get up on set and put on, and those suits were so, you're wearing like tight Lycra, basically, in front of everybody with the ping pong balls on you. This was very new. Like, Andy Serkis had just started pioneering this with Lord of the Rings. And he just said, screw it. And he, he's willing to get up there and do it himself. Like, what a cool, creative person he is.

• 1:03:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Anyway, all right. While the Hulk was CGI, Lizzie, as we've discussed, the destruction of his environments was largely practical. And this is actually where I think the movie really holds up. When he's smashing things, those things being smashed are largely real. So as Michael Lantieri, a special effects supervisor, meaning special effects, physical effects on set, later said, "We destroyed the entire lab, which was giant. Those are real walls that are coming down and real windows that are being broken, real lab equipment that's being destroyed. They took 12 cars and rolled them down Telegraph Hill in San Francisco and tipped the cable car." So I think one of the reasons, and I rewatched the 2008 Incredible Hulk as well, and even though the animation had gotten more detailed and sophisticated,

• 1:04:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I actually think the 2003 version, for my money, looks better because all the environmental destruction is real. So the only thing that's being animated is the Hulk in these scenes. Anyway, I just thought it was really remarkable that they did all of that physical destruct, you know, they committed to it in the way they had in something like Jurassic Park. All right. Now, Nick Nolte shenanigans notwithstanding, it seems like things progressed roughly on schedule and on budget, but there was one big and unexpected hiccup. On May 3, 2002, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man opened wide. The Columbia-backed Marvel adaptation was a smash hit.

• 1:05:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Chris Winterbauer?

  And seemingly overnight, set the new blueprint of what a Marvel movie could and perhaps should be. I'm sure you remember seeing it at the time, Lizzie.

• 1:05:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And the problem is, the Hulk couldn't have been any more different. Spider-Man was buoyant, accessible, grounded. It was rooted in your kind of stereotypical coming-of-age hero's journey tradition.

• 1:05:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Very funny.

• 1:05:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Very funny.

• 1:05:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Campy elements to it.

• 1:05:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 1:05:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Has a lot of recognizable young actors.

• 1:05:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Chris Winterbauer?

  That the audience, you know, from James Franco to Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. It was not brooding Shakespearean Freudian borderline Oedipal, perhaps very different.

• 1:05:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Chris Winterbauer?

  From Hulk.

• 1:05:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, the Hulk is a lot of lot more adult actors regardless of the actual age. The people that are in this Jennifer Connelly, Eric Bana, like those are names that we're going to be recognizable to 30 plus audience members based on what they've been in previously.

• 1:06:12Chris Winterbauer?

  So Seamus caught the movie in June Spider-Man. He called Lee and said, I think we have a problem, but the train had already left the station. Hulk entered post in late summer, early fall of 2002. Editor Tim Squires, who was Oscar nominated for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, was brought on to cut the film. And one of my favorite parts of this movie is the transitions.

• 1:06:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:06:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I think they're very fun. Lizzie, can you talk a little bit? Did you notice anything upon rewatching it?

• 1:06:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I mean, I think that what he's trying to do is so clearly to replicate what transitions on the page in a comic book look like on screen here. It is a little jarring at first. I was getting shades of Battlefield Earth, which if you haven't seen, there's a lot of like, you know.

• 1:06:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Star wipes.

• 1:06:57Lizzie Bassett?

  PowerPoint transitions.

• 1:06:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:59Lizzie Bassett?

  This is much better than that. And there are parts of this that look great. I don't think we've really seen anything like it where he's using kind of perspective in the way that a comic book would, where characters are sort of back to back on screen, but they're talking to each other from across the room. It's visually very interesting. I don't know that it works, but yeah, he's just, he's trying to really bring the page to the screen here.

• 1:07:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, Lee took a very experimental approach in post and he'd been experimental since film school with his editing. And he basically told Squires, just do whatever you can think of. Anything is fine. And then Squires proliferated that further and told the VFX editors, try anything. And some things started as jokes, but then they made it into the film. And the same was true with the score. So Ang Lee brought in composer Michael Dana, who had scored the Ice Storm for him a few years ago. I know, not the name you see in the credits. We'll get to that.

• 1:07:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And Dana's score was unconventional and global. Japanese taiko, African drumming, Arabic singing.

• 1:07:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, there is some of that. There's some of that still in the desert sequences.

• 1:07:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. They go like Arabic singing when they're going into a US military base in the desert.

• 1:08:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Arizona.

• 1:08:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Are we in Iraq? What's happening?

• 1:08:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh oh.

• 1:08:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Well, Lee wanted it to have a global feel. And in a way, it feels like he was kind of playing the father, right? That he never had. He's allowing his children to express their creativity, but someone was gonna have to pay for his sins.

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• 1:09:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, our producer, David, Lizzie's husband, once shared a story about a composer at a roundtable. And the rough tale goes, the composer was instructed by his director on a particular film to make the music of a specific scene faster. And every time he brought it back, the director would just say, no, it needs to be faster. It needs to be faster. Until finally, the composer realized what the director was really trying to tell the actor was to run faster, but he couldn't. So he could only change the music at this point.

• 1:10:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:10:02Chris Winterbauer?

  In March of 2003, just three months out from Hulk's release, Universal watched a cut of the film, and they promptly fired Michael Danna. Now, for his part, Dana blames it on the studio just being shocked by what they'd seen. The movie was not what they expected. The music wasn't what they expected, but they could only change one of those things. So, one of his tracks did make it into the film, "Mother", but Universal needed somebody much more experienced in the superhero blockbuster genre. And of course, they bring in who, Lizzie?

• 1:10:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Danny Elfman.

• 1:10:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Danny Elfman. The oingo boingo frontman turned composer, as I'm sure you know, Lizzie, had been behind Burton's Batmans, as well as Men in Black, and of course, most importantly and most recently, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. A little bit of a, if you can't beat 'em, hire 'em, in this instance. And Hulk looked like it might be his biggest challenge yet. At first thought, this was impossible, but the opportunity to work with Lee, and it seems like he genuinely liked the movie, convinced him to try. He had 37 days to write two hours of score. For a movie of this size, he should have had at least 100. Things didn't start well. He describes the first week as pure hell. Everything he brought to Lee, Lee would just say,

• 1:11:17Chris Winterbauer?

  "This sounds like a Danny Elfman score. This sounds like Batman." And Elfman agreed with him. He was like, "I gotta try something new. I gotta do something I haven't done before." But at the same time, Lee needed Elfman's expertise. He was more experienced with big budget films.

• 1:11:29Lizzie Bassett?

  And you hired him for a reason, and he has a very small amount of time to do this.

• 1:11:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So eventually Elfman tells Lee, "There's no way I can give you 100% of what you want. To do that would require a lot of exploration and learning about each other, but we just don't have the time." So it seems like they both agreed, "We just need to kind of paint broad with this score, and we need to get it done." Now Elfman wasn't completely satisfied with the score, but he does point out the main titles is working particularly well to set up the film as "This is not a lightweight cartoon action movie", which I think they do. It's very, very moody, kind of the opening credits, which was exactly the problem. But you wouldn't know that, Lizzie, based on the public's reaction to their first sight of the Hulk. I don't know if you remember this, I actually vaguely do. Universal dropped the first teaser trailer for the film during the 2003 Super Bowl, months ahead of the film's release,

• 1:12:16Chris Winterbauer?

  and everybody thought Hulk looked really goofy, because he was so green and the VFX weren't finished yet.

• 1:12:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:12:24Chris Winterbauer?

  As Newsweek wrote at the time, "Universal executives decided to give the world its first peek at their big green gamble during the Super Bowl in January. The next day, they were the ones turning green. Comic book lovers and web geeks decreed that Hulk looked puffy and fake. Never mind that the movie's June 20th release was six months away on eternity at ILM, or that marketers had futzed with some shots in a misguided attempt to give the trailer more juice. The buzz was set, and it was bad." And I do remember this, actually. People were confused because the tone seemed dark, and yet they picked all these daylight shots of the Hulk that felt kind of goofy and out of place, including Bana looking at him in the mirror. I don't think a lot of people knew who Bana was at this point either.

• 1:13:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, there was also a somewhat public fight over who would be credited for the film's screenplay. So, Lizzie, we've talked about this briefly before, but when a film wraps, the studio sends the Writers Guild of America a notice of tentative writing credit, basically how they feel the credits should be attributed to the people who've worked on the film. But any writer on the movie can demand that these credits be arbitrated and suggest alternative credits. I've actually been through this process, so I can speak to it a little bit. Basically, the Guild brings on three anonymous writers to act as judges, and they compare each writer's drafts with the final shooting script to determine who wrote what. And in this instance, we have five writers claiming credit, and all of them have multiple drafts. So, they have to compare the shooting script with multiple drafts from five different

• 1:13:50Chris Winterbauer?

  writers, and then try to decide who gets what percentage of screenplay credit. Obviously, nobody's going to be happy in a situation like this. As The New Yorker put it at the time, "The perceived capriciousness of the Guild rulings fuel screenwriters' chronic dissatisfaction. Arbitration often pits a low-paid first writer, the one who had the idea and roughed out the plot, against an A-list rewriter, one of a small group of writers paid $300,000 a week to close a film and make it shine." And this is more or less true of Hulk. If you think of like John Terman getting his first big break writing it, then somebody like Michael Franz, who was a little more experienced doing a rewrite, and then you have somebody like Seamus, who has decades of experience doing the polish for Ang Lee.

• 1:14:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So Turman claimed that he was responsible for the father-son storyline. The studio wanted to nix it. And he says he believes that that was kept in because Ang Lee liked it and he should have credit for that. Michael Franz claims he was the one who humanized Bruce Banner and took him out of the military setting. And he was the one who came up with the idea that he should use gamma ray technology to heal and not to hurt. And then Seamus said, no, I should get full credit because I rewrote the whole thing for Ang Lee and this is my movie. So the verdict comes down in April by a two to one vote. The writing credit for the Hulk was established as screenplay by John Turman and Michael Franz and James Seamus, story by James Seamus. Seamus was furious. He had to share the credit.

• 1:15:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Franz was furious at Seamus for implying that he should get sole credit. And Turman was mad that he didn't get the story credit.

• 1:15:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, nobody's happy.

• 1:15:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Nobody's happy. But maybe they wouldn't want that association for much longer.

• 1:15:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Hulk premiered on June 17th, 2003. In attendance were many associated with prior iterations of the character, including writer producer Kenneth Johnson, who had created Hulk's catchphrase. Now, I want you to take this quote with a grain of salt because he may have been salty that he wasn't involved. But as Johnson put it, at the end of the premiere, the lights came up and everyone was sneaking out of the back door, trying not to talk to anybody because it was just so bad. And he goes on to, I'm not going to finish his quote because he says something kind of disparaging about Ang Lee that's hearsay from a Variety reporter. But the point is, nobody knew what to make of this movie.

• 1:16:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:07Chris Winterbauer?

  It was very long. This was two hours and 20 minutes. The pacing is slow. It's very brooding. It's very artsy. It's very dreary.

• 1:16:17Lizzie Bassett?

  It's just a tonal mishmash. Like, nothing, nothing really comes together. You know, there are fun performances in it, like we said, from Josh Lucas and Nick Nolte. Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly are in like a completely different movie. None of it matches with what they're trying to do visually in terms of what other movies I think did do successfully visually, like Sin City or even Kick Ass and trying to sort of mimic the comic book elements of it. This tries and it just doesn't get it.

• 1:16:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. And even though I think, for example, I think the sequence when Hulk escapes the military facility and he's jumping across the desert and being chased by helicopters, I think that stands up as a fantastic action sequence. I actually love the weightless way that he jumps.

• 1:16:58Lizzie Bassett?

  It's fun.

• 1:16:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it looks beautiful. But as you said, the movie's just trying to do so many things at once.

• 1:17:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:04Chris Winterbauer?

  That is hard to keep track of, and I like the movie and I can, you know, recognize that. So Hulk opened wide three days later on June 20th, 2003. It ended up grossing 245 million against its roughly 140 million dollar budget. So not super successful.

• 1:17:20Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:17:21Chris Winterbauer?

  It was one of the top 20 highest grossing films of the year and Universal tried to splice the numbers in a way that felt compelling. They told CNN, only 19 movies have ever opened to 60 plus million and none have been in June. It's the biggest June opening ever. But the problem was the budget was so high.

• 1:17:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Chris Winterbauer?

  That even though that's true, it just didn't have the multiplier it needed. So Hulk had a historic 70% drop off in ticket sales between its first and second weekends, which just goes to show you, the hype was high, but word of mouth was really bad. And then it had the lowest box office to budget multiplier of any major Marvel release since 1986 is Howard the Duck. So its budget multiplier was 1.79, meaning it did 1.79 times its budget at the box office. For easy reference, you want that to be at least two to get you anywhere near break even. For comparison, Blade had done 131 million against 45. X-Men did 300 million

• 1:18:14Chris Winterbauer?

  against 75. Blade 2 did 155 million against 54. Spider-Man did 825 million against 140. So this is grossing, you know, a third of Spider-Man. Daredevil even did 180 against 78. X2, which was released later in 2003, did 407 million against 110. So Hulk just lagged all of its peers.

• 1:18:38Lizzie Bassett?

  It is so funny because I feel like this is such a nebulous time for comic book adaptations. And it's interesting that all of those movies are hitting between Spider-Man and Batman Begins, which I feel like are the two that kind of end up catalyzing what you can do. With a comic movie.

• 1:18:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I think X-Men and X2 also.

• 1:18:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:19:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Are the successes, you know, in that, in that time period, not X3. Now, reviews were mixed. Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars. Rolling Stone gave it an overall positive review. Oddly enough, Lizzie, they criticized Nolte. They said he was laboring under the impression that he's playing King Lear as a mad scientist, who pushes the psychological subtext too hard and spoils the fun. I disagree.

• 1:19:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Let him work. He is the fun.

• 1:19:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, go for it. Put that oxygen tank in frame. Now, The New York Times called it incredibly long, incredibly tedious, and incredibly turgid. I don't 100% agree with the incredible adjective affixed to the front of those, but it is long.

• 1:19:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait till they see later Marvel movies. They just get longer.

• 1:19:41Chris Winterbauer?

  The year was dominated by the triumphant X2 X-Men United. Hulk fell by the wayside, although I still think it holds up much better than something like Daredevil or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which we will get to, which is another comic book adaptation that ended the career Sean Connery, more or less. A planned sequel was scrapped, and Universal let its option on the character lapse. Ownership reverted to Marvel, and 2008's The Incredible Hulk with Ed Norton became the second film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, although I would argue did not solve the problem of how do you bring this character to the big screen in his own film?

• 1:20:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Since then, he's always just been a supporting character in the stories of other characters. Now, Bana hopped around. Lizzie, as we discussed, I think he was most comfortable in supporting or ensemble roles. He never really returned to the superhero genre, and his bankability was questioned after Troy, which was also a flop.

• 1:20:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Chris Winterbauer?

  But he did turn in, I would argue, a career second-best performance in 2005's Munich. I still think nobody's figured out how to use him quite as effectively as Andrew Dominic did in Chopper. He's so good. You guys gotta see it.

• 1:20:45Lizzie Bassett?

  He needs to be a villain.

• 1:20:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. No, he's very good in Star Trek as a villain.

• 1:20:49Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. He is fun in that. But I mean, I would love to see him, bring him back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, if he would do it, bring him back as a villain.

• 1:20:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure. But Hulk's failure to spark at the box office hit no one harder than Ang Lee. He grew depressed and considered, for the first time, retiring from filmmaking. Maybe it was time to do something real, as his father had long said. But it was his father who had set him straight. As Lee put it, he told me to just put on my helmet and keep going. That was the very first time he encouraged me to make a movie.

• 1:21:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:21:26Chris Winterbauer?

  His father died two weeks after that conversation.

• 1:21:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, man.

• 1:21:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Two years later, Ang Lee hoisted the Best Director Oscar for his work on Brokeback Mountain.

• 1:21:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:21:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And that concludes our coverage of Ang Lee's Hulk.

• 1:21:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you, Chris. I never would have watched this voluntarily, and I really did enjoy it.

• 1:21:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's a very fun time capsule.

• 1:21:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It captures a moment of experimentation with superhero films that we have left far behind.

• 1:21:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:21:55Chris Winterbauer?

  There was none of the top-down control that there is today, which has yielded some great movies. Don't get me wrong. And it's an interesting moment right now for comic book films with the rebirth of Marvel through Thunderbolts and whatever their new phase is, and James Gunn's Superman, which is coming out this summer at the time that we record this, which I think looks great.

• 1:22:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I think it looks good, too. I think this may have sort of marked the rebirth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, obviously kind of beginning them with Iron Man.

• 1:22:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Where they started to really find their footing and find what works. What we're seeing now is that the things that they thought worked aren't working really anymore. So I am interested to see what Superman turns up, because I think we may be entering yet another era of superhero adaptations. I want to say, Chris.

• 1:22:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Please.

• 1:22:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I think there's a version of this movie with Eric Bana that would have worked great, but they don't get to it until the last maybe four minutes of this movie. And that is the very end where he is a scruffy scientist working maybe somewhere in the Amazon, somewhere vaguely South American, Central American. And, you know, he's there, sort of Doctors Without Borders, saving people, trying to get them medicine.

• 1:23:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Lizzie Bassett?

  And then some people come in to take, you know, people hostage. And he says, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry. And I'm like, I will watch that.

• 1:23:14Chris Winterbauer?

  And give him kind of like a devil may care attitude.

• 1:23:17Lizzie Bassett?

  He's wearing like an Indiana Jones hat.

• 1:23:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's roguish and, and he's funny and he's sardonic.

• 1:23:22Lizzie Bassett?

  That was it.

• 1:23:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. And I think that was the sequel they were trying to set up, more or less.

• 1:23:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:23:27Chris Winterbauer?

  But they never got the chance to do it.

• 1:23:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Lizzie, what went right?

• 1:23:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Come on.

• 1:23:36Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, I mean, I I'll let you do Ang Lee.

• 1:23:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 1:23:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Because I suspect that that's what you want to do. So I am going to give it to Josh Lucas and Nick Nolte. I would love to give it to Eric Bana. I don't think he goes right here. I don't think that's his fault at all. But yeah, I'm going to give it to the two that I think are having the most fun on screen, which is those two. And whether or not they were in the same movie as anybody else, I don't care because they were extremely fun to watch and I hope we're having a good time. It sure sounds like Nick Nolte was smearing himself with food so the dogs would eat him. So yeah, I will give it to those two, even though Bana and Connolly and Sam Elliott, they're doing a great job.

• 1:24:13Chris Winterbauer?

  They're trying their hardest, but I agree. It's it's hard. Lucas and Nolte are given the leash to go in that direction.

• 1:24:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:24:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Whereas the others aren't.

• 1:24:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I will give mine to Ang Lee because I had no idea how personal this film was. It is an easy film to make fun of, as many people do. I think there is a lot to admire about this movie and about the artistry that went into making it.

• 1:24:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:24:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I think, I will die on this hill. I think the animation overall is fantastic, especially for 2003. And I would argue, one of the only reasons some shots are a little jarring is more of an art direction issue than an animation issue, which is if you look at the way that Hulk is animated now, they have toned down the green substantially because he stands out so much from his environment when he is bright green.

• 1:25:06Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 1:25:07Chris Winterbauer?

  They didn't do that in this adaptation.

• 1:25:09Lizzie Bassett?

  He's like flubber colored in this one.

• 1:25:10Chris Winterbauer?

  They said he is bright green in the comics. He is going to be bright green and they don't try to hide it. Go to the 2008 version. They put him behind things. They shoot it only at night. They edge light him. It's just like they're, you know, they're doing every trick in the book to make sure he looks as hyper realistic as possible. And Ang Lee's like, okay, no, it's like he's in the middle of the road in San Francisco at noon. He's going to be front lit and that's what he's going to look like. And to me, that takes courage, courage from the VFX artists, courage from Ang Lee to get in that motion capture suit. So kudos to Ang Lee for pouring his heart into a movie within. A genre that can at times feel a little heartless, especially at this point in time.

• 1:25:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:48Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, some of these movies could feel like popcorn cash grabs and, and this was not that.

• 1:25:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's interesting you bring up, you know, the, having the courage to kind of show Hulk in full color in the middle of the street and like, hey, this is what it would look like if a radioactive gigantic man were there. And yes, it does look silly, but it reminds me of one shot in Sense and Sensibility, actually, when they're getting out of the carriage, going into a banquet and they step down into the mud and like their shoes are getting covered in mud puddles and horse poop, basically, which is not something you typically see in a Jane Austen adaptation, but it's absolutely what would happen if you're trying to climb out of a carriage in England in the, you know, 19th century and trying to get into the ball. So I think that, I think that he carries that willingness to show reality through all of his films, no matter how fantastical they may be.

• 1:26:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Guys, if you are enjoying this podcast, there are four very easy ways to support us. First, just hit follow on whatever pod catcher you are using, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, whatever you prefer, just hit that follow button and we will populate in your feed every week now because we're weekly. Two, leave us a rating and review on whatever platform you're using. This is really helpful for discovery and, you know, lets people know we're not crazy or too annoying. Three, tell a family member or friend about the show word of mouth. It just works. It's always better than us harassing people, trying to get them to listen to us. And of course, if you really want to go above

• 1:27:18Chris Winterbauer?

  and beyond, you can join our Patreon. You can join for free. We often post articles, links and things that we reference in episodes just for everybody to check out. If you'd like to vote on movies that we're going to cover in the future, we have a $1 tier. For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed. So you will hear none of the ads that you are listening to now. And for $50, you can get a shout out just like one of these. So I'd like to invite Mr. Nick Nolte and his oxygen tank back to the studio for this set of shout outs. Thank you to our Full Stop members. Here we go.

• 1:27:54Speaker 02

  Cameron Smith. Ben Schindelman. Casey Boogie Simmons. You need to give me my strength back. Scary Carrie. The Provost Family. Where the hoes. Sound like hoes. Zack Everton. Galen. David Friskalanti. Adam Moffat. Filmit yourself, that was my downfall. Doing it myself. Chris Zaka. Kate Ellington. MXodia. We're gonna have to watch that timber of yours. C. Grace B. Jim Mostra Moreno.

• 1:28:39Speaker 02

  Christopher Elner, I know you put food on yourself too, just like I did for my dogs. Blaze Ambrose. Jerome Wilkinson. Lauren F. Lance Stater. I tried to improve on the limits in myself. Nate the Knife. Half Grey Hound. Brittany Morris. Willa Dunn. Darren and Adele Conkling. Richard Sanchez, my son is unique. Andrew McFagelbagel. Matthew Jacobson. Grace Potter. Ellen Singleton. J.J. Rapido. Jewish Reece Samot.

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

  Sadie. Just Sadie. Adrian Pangaria. Brian Donahue. Chris Liel. Kathleen Olson. Brooke. Steve Winterbauer, that's my father. Blame him for all this. Don Scheible. George Kay. Rosemary Southward. Tom Kristin. Jason Frankel. Somon Chinani. Michael McGrath. Lon Relod and. Lydia Howes.

• 1:30:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow. Thank you, Mr. Nolte, for stopping by. Please stop touching the things on set. All right, guys, we will be back in a week.

• 1:30:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yay.

• 1:30:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Believe it or not, and we are covering

• 1:30:21Chris Winterbauer?

  What's that, Lizzie? What is it gonna be?

• 1:30:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Goldeneye.

• 1:30:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Goldeneye, and I am very excited. Guys, tune in this Friday. We are gonna be dropping a primer on the origins of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and the character. I think it's really interesting, and it'll give you a great foundation going into the mid 90s retooling of the franchise around Remington Steele star Pierce Brosnan, noted television actor Pierce Brosnan, who is, you know.

• 1:30:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I love him.

• 1:30:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I love him. It was the Bond of my childhood. I'm really excited to talk about it. Give that a listen on Friday, and we will see you in a week. And we're just excited to be here weekly for you guys. We can't wait to burrow deeper into your ear holes.

• 1:31:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:31:02Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, and with that, bye.

• 1:31:11Speaker 07

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