The Blair Witch Project

In 1999, a found footage documentary showed audiences the terrifying last days of 3 intrepid filmmakers before they disappeared forever. Thanks to the popularity of the film, their mothers received condolence calls and police offered to reopen their case - there was just one problem… they were actors and they were very much alive. ‘The Blair Witch Project’ shattered box office records thanks in no small part to its brilliant viral marketing campaign. But while studios made millions, its incredibly talented young stars were essentially left for dead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong? Special spooky month, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a seminal classic of the found footage genre that punches well above its weight and held up remarkably well upon rewatch. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my diligent, tireless, fearless co-host, who has not let me get lost in the woods yet. Thank you for that, Lizzie. Lizzie Bassett.

• 2:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you. You're welcome, first of all. We have gone camping together before. Fun fact, Chris actually left that camping trip early.

• 2:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I did.

• 2:44Lizzie Bassett?

  David and I stayed behind, and David and I did get lost.

• 2:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, you did.

• 2:50Lizzie Bassett?

  And I'll be honest, it was one of the scariest nights of my entire life. It is horrifying to be lost in the woods at night.

• 2:57Chris Winterbauer?

  That is the closest this podcast has ever come to not happening, because...

• 3:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, big old fight.

• 3:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Either one of you wasn't gonna make it out, both of you weren't gonna make it out, or the relationship wasn't gonna make it out. Like, those were all...

• 3:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Fortunately, we all did, but it was very scary.

• 3:11Chris Winterbauer?

  All the stronger for it, yes.

• 3:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and, you know, part of the reason I bring that up is because I had no idea how disorienting the woods are at night.

• 3:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 3:23Lizzie Bassett?

  And not like, you know, car camping, like, there's some light and stuff, like, the deep, we were deep in the Sierra Nevadas, backwoods, and it's, without anything going wrong, it is completely terrifying, because nothing looks like it does in the daytime. And I bring that up because today, we are covering The Blair Witch. Project and special just for you all. I have brought as much snot as Heather Donahue has in her famous shot because I am still recovering from my child's daycare plague. So that's just an added bonus for you all. Chris, I'm sure you'd seen the Blair Witch

• 4:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Project before, but tell me a little bit about the first time you saw it and what you thought upon rewatching it for the podcast.

• 4:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Did not see it in theaters. We were 10 when this movie came out, so we were a bit young, but shot within a couple of years of that, probably 11 or 12. I did not appreciate it when I first saw it. The group dynamics were somewhat lost on me. The slow burn of this movie, I did not appreciate at all. This movie actually, I think, does incredible character development, given the resources that they have. I did not appreciate that. The ring was much more up my alley at that point in time. This less so. I've rewatched it a couple of times since. Every time I've been more and more impressed with it. And now it's the first time I've seen it since working in Hollywood. I was blown away. I

• 4:52Chris Winterbauer?

  thought it was so good. It held up so well. It is so restrained and it is such a, an indelible reminder of the fact that the human imagination will always be able to trump whatever Hollywood can show us and that you cannot beat a sound in the darkness in terms of what my brain will come up with as the source. And so I really, I thought it was tense and scary. Again, I thought the actors actually were all just firing on all cylinders. Really, really good performances, believable, felt like real people. I know we'll talk about the way in which this franchise let them down, I think, in a lot of ways.

• 5:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's a common thread amongst a lot of found footage horror films. And I have a minor connection to a different one. But anyway, all to say, I've long been a fan of found footage horror films and all of them have, they've tend to devolve more toward the schlocky, jump scary sort of stuff. And even something like Rec out of Spain, which I really loved, is still more found footage action, right? As opposed to this is truly found footage. Oh, my God, we're just gonna watch these people die in the woods, which or not, because they are lost. And

• 6:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 6:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It's really mature and impressive and assured. And I'm really excited to talk about it.

• 6:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I am right there with you. I think this movie is phenomenal.

• 6:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's, we will talk about this. In many ways, it is unlike anything that came before it. I think it is unlike really anything that came after it because they truly did not understand what was so successful about this movie as they have tried to continue the franchise. And even as you pointed out, as they have tried to continue in the sort of found footage footsteps of this. So I did not see this in theaters either. As you pointed out, we were too young. I didn't see this until in its entirety. I had seen bits and pieces of it, obviously, you know.

• 6:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Or you'd seen it spoofed, right?

• 6:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I'd seen it spoofed a million times. I had seen clips of it. I have seen, you know, Heather's very famous monologue. And just a note, I am going to refer to her as Heather until chronologically, the point at which she does change her name, because she does change her name. So just a heads up. But I had seen all that. I'd never seen it all the way through. And David had me watch it a couple of years ago, and I was so blown away because it was so beyond what I had expected this movie to be. It's so heavily spoofed. And you know, all I'd ever heard is like, oh, the camera work. It's, you know, make you barf, make you sick. It's just like, it looks so shaky. It's so, you know, it's so ridiculous. It's so hokey. No, it's not. No, it is not. I think, yes, it's handheld camera work.

• 7:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure, it's shaky. There are moments where you can't see some things. But I actually think, and we're going to get to this, I think the camera work in this movie is remarkable.

• 7:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's very intentional.

• 7:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Who's doing it? Yes, yes. So we're going to talk about that. But the smartest thing this movie does is they don't show you the witch. They don't show the monster.

• 7:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Which the reboot infamously does to, I mean, it's well executed, but it deflates everything that's come before.

• 8:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I mean, the most brilliant thing about the Blair Witch is that they do not show you the Blair Witch. They don't even, well, they did try, which we will talk about, but you don't see it. And the choice to just never show it, even at the end, I think is so brilliant. To your point, the character development, the way that the dynamics of the group change, which as we're going to discuss, is both a function of what the actors brought to the table and what the directors very smartly changed during the shoot and were able to also change in post-production. You probably know this, but it was in the Guinness World Book of Records for the

• 8:47Lizzie Bassett?

  top budget box office ratio for a long time, based on the ratio of $1 spent for every $10,931 made. It was overtaken, though, by Paranormal Activity in 2009, which I also love. I think Paranormal Activity is great. So, some basic info. The budget, I'm just gonna put it up here, because I think everybody knows this, extremely low budget. It's somewhere between $35,000 and $60,000. There's a lot of dispute around that. We could not find a very concrete source as to how much it cost, but pennies is the answer.

• 9:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And I believe there are some higher numbers floating around, but that is after it had been bought, is my understanding.

• 9:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Correct. And we're gonna talk about that, yes. It is directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. It stars Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard as Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard. Released July 30, 1999, it was rated R, and the IMDb logline is, "Three film students vanish after traveling into a Maryland forest to film a documentary on the local Blair witch legend, leaving only their footage behind."

• 10:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Might I also just say, we discussed the R-rating briefly during Interview with the Vampire, and I said, you know, I defend...

• 10:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Why is this rated R?

• 10:09Chris Winterbauer?

  That was my point. This, now, in terms of how scary it is, sure, I guess, but...

• 10:15Lizzie Bassett?

  This is PG-13 for sure.

• 10:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I think this is a great PG-13 film.

• 10:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it's for language.

• 10:22Chris Winterbauer?

  It is for language, but my point is, to me, this is actually an excellent example of the type of gateway horror that 13, 14-year-olds...

• 10:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Hundred percent.

• 10:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Should be allowed, in my opinion, to watch, because...

• 10:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 10:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Not only is it not graphic, it's a pretty good "don't fuck around in the woods" warning for kids!

• 10:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Chris Winterbauer?

  You could get lost.

• 10:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 10:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know.

• 10:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, pay attention. Don't be an asshole, you know, if you, if you get lost.

• 10:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 10:51Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, so let's dive into this. I want to get this out of the way. Right at the top, we mentioned the found footage format. Chris, can you explain what found footage refers to in terms of movies?

• 11:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure. It's a structural conceit in which the filmmaker is presenting you with the idea that this footage, this film, was captured by real people, non-actors, and it was subsequently found. Now, it could be that it was then edited to the best of the attempts of whoever found it, and it is now being presented to the audience, or in other instances, it plays out in more or less real time. Rec would be an example of that. Out of Spain, the famous zombie apartment building found footage film. And there are various formats, you know, that it kind of plays within and mixed media. But yes, broadly speaking, captured by real people.

• 11:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Perfect. So, we have to acknowledge, no, The Blair Witch Project did not originate the found footage format. You actually can really trace the genre's origins all the way back to October 30th of 1938. Chris, do you know what happened on that date?

• 12:01Chris Winterbauer?

  In the United States or internationally?

• 12:03Lizzie Bassett?

  United States.

• 12:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I don't know. I was gonna say Hitler invaded Poland.

• 12:09Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I don't know. What happened on October 30th, 1938?

• 12:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Orson Welles released his groundbreaking broadcast of The War of the Worlds.

• 12:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Very cool.

• 12:17Lizzie Bassett?

  So very quickly on this, if you are not familiar, Orson Welles aired a dramatized version of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds in a primetime radio slot. But the way that he did it was groundbreaking. It had never been done before. He used the format of a radio news broadcast to tell the story of Martians invading the world. So to Chris's point, it was portrayed and done so very well that it sounded like a news broadcast that was being interrupted. Now, he had aired an intro at the top of the program introducing himself, the show, his Mercury Theater company, and in fact, it was airing as part of CBS's weekly Mercury Theater on the air program. But the problem was, this intro ran at 8:00 PM and many listeners didn't switch over to his channel until about a quarter past

• 13:01Lizzie Bassett?

  the hour. So while Wells did not intend for people to believe his broadcast was real, many did. And for a brief moment, it was terrifying. As we will find out, The Blair Witch Project very much did intend people to think that it was real. So the first official found footage film is generally thought to be 1961's The Connection, directed by Shirley Clark. And the first found footage horror film is 1980's Cannibal Holocaust, which I suppose we may have to cover at some point. I really don't want to.

• 13:30Chris Winterbauer?

  I really have been avoiding it, too. I know people have requested it.

• 13:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Really don't want to.

• 13:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It does not interest me particularly, and I apologize.

• 13:36Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a lot of like animal harm in it, and I don't want to watch it.

• 13:40Chris Winterbauer?

  It's pretty gnarly. So apologies to fans out there. We may be slow to get to that one.

• 13:45Lizzie Bassett?

  And also, Chris, you mentioned The Ring. Even Ring You, the original Japanese film that would spawn The Ring, had come out a year prior to The Blair Witch Project and arguably updates the found footage format to some degree. So why was it that The Blair Witch Project turned found footage into a blockbuster genre? And Chris, as we're going to see today, timing is everything.

• 14:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 14:09Lizzie Bassett?

  So let's dive in. Our two co-directors and co-writers and co-everything are Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick. So let's talk about them briefly. Myrick was born and raised in Sarasota, Florida. And growing up in the mid to late 70s, he was always very fascinated with UFOs, cryptids, and the paranormal from a very early age. My kind of guy.

• 14:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:30Lizzie Bassett?

  He'd also always been freaked out by the idea of stick figures hanging from trees. That's where that came from. Sanchez was five years younger than Myrick and born in Havana, Cuba. He moved to Spain when he was very little and then eventually settled in Maryland with his family around four years old. He took a lot of camping trips in the Shenandoah National Park. And Chris, I don't know if you've been getting served all of these videos on TikTok and Instagram about the creepy shit that happens in Appalachia, but I sure have.

• 14:54Chris Winterbauer?

  I stay off TikTok for fear that it will reveal to me something about myself that I don't want to know.

• 15:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It will.

• 15:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 15:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's revealed to me that I apparently love looking at ghosties in the mountains.

• 15:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, you do.

• 15:06Lizzie Bassett?

  That's all I'm getting.

• 15:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I remember you told me some story about like a baby doll being left on a string in the middle of a road.

• 15:13Lizzie Bassett?

  That's my favorite ghost story ever.

• 15:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I know.

• 15:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I'll share it with you all at some point if you want to hear it. The area is rife with cryptid sightings.

• 15:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Can you explain briefly to people what a cryptid is?

• 15:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, a cryptid, it's, it's a critter. It's a unidentified critter. It is a mystical.

• 15:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Folkloric mythical creature, like a yeti would be a cryptid, for example, or Mothman would be a cryptid.

• 15:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I love, Mothman's my favorite.

• 15:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Mothman is the best.

• 15:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I love him. He just wants to warn them about the bridge.

• 15:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Apparently, Chris, it is not advised to answer any calls you might hear from outside your house at night when in Appalachia, all of which to say, it's a spooky place to camp. And there were plenty of strange noises and people lurking around to scare a kid on camping trips. So the two met in the early 90s while at the University of Central Florida School of Film. And one thing they really bonded over was they just did not find horror movies scary anymore. In fact, it's very fitting that we just covered a nightmare on Elm Street because they had just seen the latest installment in the franchise, Freddy's Dead, The Final Nightmare. And they were not impressed.

• 16:16Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, diminishing returns with that one.

• 16:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 16:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I stand by New Nightmare, but other than that.

• 16:23Lizzie Bassett?

  So they really didn't care for slashers. And what freaked them out instead were things like the Patterson Gimlin film. Have you ever seen this, Chris?

• 16:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I have. It's a famous shaky cam shot of a big old yeti loping across the river in Humboldt County, California.

• 16:41Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. It's one minute of yeti.

• 16:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. And there's also a really fun found footage film kind of built around that called Willow Creek, directed by Bobcat Goldthwait.

• 16:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Not The Legend of Boggy Creek? Because that was another one they really liked.

• 16:54Chris Winterbauer?

  No, that's not the one. I haven't seen that one, but I liked Willow Creek has a 15 minute uninterrupted tent scene that is very much an homage to the Blair Witch Project. That's very well done.

• 17:06Lizzie Bassett?

  So they also gravitated towards formats that played with the idea of truth, like the Belgian, I guess, very, very dark mockumentary Man Bites Dog, and particularly Leonard Nimoy's docu-series In Search Of, which was basically Unsolved Mysteries before Unsolved Mysteries.

• 17:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, you'll notice Cannibal Holocaust is not on their list, and that's because neither of them had seen it or really heard of it. They actually count themselves very lucky that they hadn't, because if they had, they probably wouldn't have pursued Blair Witch, because they might have felt like the concept had been done. But fortunately for us, they started noodling on the idea of making a fake documentary about a crew that goes out into the woods to investigate a legend.

• 17:46Chris Winterbauer?

  And Cannibal Holocaust is, just to be clear, a fake documentary crew, college-age students, but they're doing it down in the Amazon. And it's much more gore horror than it is. It really is, in terms of taste, it's diametrically opposed to the Blair Witch Project.

• 18:02Lizzie Bassett?

  But setup is very similar, yes.

• 18:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 18:06Lizzie Bassett?

  So in 1994, they both graduated. And at that point, they dropped their idea for The Woods Movie, which is what they were calling it. But fast forward to 1996, and Sanchez was in a very tough spot financially. He reached back out to Myrick to restart their idea, and Myrick agreed, "This is the best idea we've had yet." So they start working on it in earnest. And over the years, the Blair Witch Project had a lot of iterations. An early concept was to make a documentary horror where the crew discovers a creepy house full of spooky symbols, and kind of the whole thing is a haunted house. It would be one take where you're winding through the halls with them. They also knew that they wanted to shoot on film, so they considered setting it in the 70s and having the footage be found, you know, many, many years later.

• 18:48Lizzie Bassett?

  But period pieces are expensive, costumes, et cetera, and so is film. So they moved it up to the early 90s and came up with the conceit that the filmmaker would want to shoot the documentary on film, but that they would shoot their BTS content on a digital camera. So that's why they get the best of both worlds there, which is very smart.

• 19:05Chris Winterbauer?

  And the film is black and white, which is more affordable than-

• 19:08Lizzie Bassett?

  It's black and white, which is cheaper.

• 19:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So it's all very smart. It ties in. It all makes perfect sense.

• 19:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. They also initially considered the legend to be some kind of monster or cryptid. And one has to imagine that that would have involved seeing the monster. Again, they toss this because of the cost of special effects, costumes, and everything. Instead, they turned to two things that really fascinated them, the Salem Witch Trials and the Bermuda Triangle. This informed the lore that they built out for the Blair Witch, particularly the idea of a concentrated area in which bad things are happening and where time and space seem to be manipulated by something or someone else.

• 19:47Lizzie Bassett?

  They came up with the scares first, so walking in circles, arriving in the same spot, the stick figures, sounds getting louder every night. And by 1996-ish, towards the end of the year, they created a 35-page treatment that covered the basic idea: character descriptions, plot beats, but no dialogue, because they always knew that they wanted this to be basically completely improvised.

• 20:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Curb your enthusiasm, Mr. Blair Witch.

• 20:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 20:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Could you imagine Larry David in The Wards with Heather? You dropped the map?

• 20:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I can't believe it hasn't been done yet.

• 20:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello, dear listeners. We wanted to take a moment to give you a heads up that on Friday, we're going to be airing a special bonus episode that will be covering both Natalie Wood's life, her still pretty mysterious death, and her final film, Brainstorm. We will be discussing the film Brainstorm quite a bit over the course of the episode. So if you would like to watch it prior to that episode releasing, go ahead and do it. You have until Friday to watch it. And again, that's Brainstorm. It is Natalie Wood's final film. We will talk to you then. We recently moved into a new house and realized that our bedding desperately needed a refresh. So I took my own advice. And before spending all our money on a luxury bedding brand, I went to Quince. And let me tell you, we now have the crispest, coolest, most beautiful

• 21:05Lizzie Bassett?

  organic percale sheets and duvet covers that we've ever had. I've bought quite a bit of bedding from Quince, and it's all super high quality and has lasted for years without paying the brand markup. Now, obviously, you shouldn't stop at bedding. You should also refresh your closet with elevated everyday essentials that you will wear over and over again. Think cozy Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at 50 bucks, cashmere scarves, responsibly sourced down jackets, and 14-karat gold jewelry. I genuinely love Quince, and I shop here for everything. I walked out the door the other day and realized every single thing I was wearing was Quince, down to my socks. Did I mention their socks are great, too? Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available

• 21:48Lizzie Bassett?

  in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was what went wrong. It's the best way to support the show.

• 21:59Speaker 02

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

• 22:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Because they wanted this to be improvised and also because they had approximately $0, they knew they wanted unknown actors for this project. So in August of 1997, they posted the following casting breakdown to Backstage Magazine. "Attention, casting, improvisational feature film. HFP is holding an open call for The Black Hill Project, non-union, with pay, travel, and meals. Shooting October to November for three weeks in Maryland. Seeking women and men, 18 to 25, with natural look. Extremely challenging roles," in all caps in bold. "To be shot under very difficult conditions. Saturday, August 23rd, 1 to 7 p.m., 3rd floor, Musical Theater Works. Callbacks midday, Sunday, by selection only."

• 23:20Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a good ad.

• 23:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it was a good ad. I don't think they realized how good an ad it was, but it read a lot more enticing than they had anticipated. And much to their surprise, there were lines out the door and down the stairs for this casting.

• 23:34Chris Winterbauer?

  They're actually paying people?

• 23:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 23:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I bet you there's a lot of backstage stuff that's, "Student film. Bring your own lunch. See you on Sunday."

• 23:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, so that's what Michael C. Williams said, is he was like, "So much of the work I had done was completely unpaid, that I saw this and it was like, oh, it's shit, it's paid."

• 23:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And they're gonna feed me and they're gonna house me in a tent in the middle of the woods, but still.

• 23:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So Sanchez and Myrick gave attendees an information sheet that said, quote, "If you don't like camping, being in the woods, sleeping in sleeping bags with strangers, don't audition." At least they were upfront about that. Anybody who showed up with a ton of hair and makeup was pretty much immediately sent home. And also, if it seems weird that this many people showed up to an audition like this, to Chris's point, A, it was paid, and B, this was the absolute financial heyday of independent films making it big. Think Reservoir Dogs, Slacker.

• 24:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Sex, Lies and Videotape.

• 24:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Clerks, yeah.

• 24:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And if I may, I, when I was in film school, we would host these auditions for student films. These are five to seven minute student films, the vast majority of which are not particularly good because we're all learning, you know, to be clear. And we would get dozens of people who would take time out of their day to come and audition for these roles, many of whom are wonderful actors who are completely overqualified to be working with us because it, you know, work is hard to come by. And at least with a student film, you know that the project's going to be completed and you're going to get a copy of it for your reel. And so the bar is so low, unfortunately, you know, for a lot of these jobs.

• 25:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally. The directors told actors that the audition starts as soon as you walk in the room, and they meant it. They would immediately throw a scenario at the actors like, "You're at a parole hearing. Why should we let you go?" And if they didn't start the scene on the spot, they were out. So 22-year-old Heather Donahue, who had just graduated from drama school in Philadelphia, blew the team away by really freaking them out because they asked her the parole question, and her response was, "I probably shouldn't be released."

• 25:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Cool.

• 25:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Great answer, Heather.

• 25:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 25:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, little fun fact about her, her mom was very afraid that this was a snuff film.

• 25:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I would be too.

• 25:49Lizzie Bassett?

  And so she did send her with a butcher knife to the shoot. Yeah, I know, it is a little sketchy.

• 25:55Chris Winterbauer?

  It's two male directors, two male co-stars.

• 25:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, there's no other women.

• 25:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, I don't know who else is on the, you know, who's running sound, but you know, we're going to go shoot in the middle of the woods. But then what's really interesting is her character, I would argue, if you just put it on paper, would be the most male-coded, right? Because she's a little mansplaining arrogant.

• 26:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Let's talk about that.

• 26:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, yeah, because it's so cool that it's played by a woman, I think.

• 26:19Lizzie Bassett?

  It was intended to be three men.

• 26:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 26:22Lizzie Bassett?

  But I think Heather very much blew them away and they were very smart.

• 26:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Lizzie Bassett?

  And they added her and they gave her that role, which her direction was to be like a take no bullshit. You know, don't let these guys walk all over you filmmaker. We're going to get to some of the complications that that caused in a little bit, but that was, I think, a very smart choice on the part of the filmmakers.

• 26:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. While her character can be infuriating, you completely understand why she's motivated to do what she does. And so I think it really works.

• 26:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I think we do now. I think we have more sympathy for her now than perhaps 1999 audiences did, which we will also talk about.

• 27:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. Yeah, I found all of them. Actually, I found Michael to be the, the sound operator. I had the hardest time with him in this watch.

• 27:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, speaking of him, so he worked at an ice cream shop in Queens and was auditioning on the side when he showed up to the auditions and got the part. And Joshua Leonard probably had the most experience out of all of them. He had acted a bit as a kid, but he had become fascinated by early nineties indie film and enrolled in a course at the New York Film Academy, ended up taking a job at the academy shortly thereafter. Fun fact, this job allowed him to borrow equipment on the weekends, just like in the movie.

• 27:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:37Lizzie Bassett?

  So he actually couldn't make the initial in-person auditions, but he was so interested in the project that he kept contacting Myrick and Sanchez. And he actually just showed up at the callbacks. He got hired because of his persistence, because of his acting skill, and also because of his filmmaking experience. And crucially, his ability to run a camera.

• 27:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 27:56Lizzie Bassett?

  So you might be wondering, where did they get the money they used to make the film? Again, reported as anywhere from 25K, 30K, 60K. It's all over the place. Well, they'd scraped together money from personal funds, credit cards, and thanks to a demo reel they put together called the Blair Witch Tapes, they'd gotten a few investors as well.

• 28:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Evil Dead style, right? Like it's Sam Raimi going out selling shares.

• 28:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And then in August of 1997, John Pearson, who is an indie film producer who had discovered quite a few other very successful indie filmmakers, helped them get the Blair Witch tapes onto IFC's show Split Screen, which he produced and hosted. And according to production designer Ben Rock, they paid the guys like you would for seven minutes of television. So that obviously doesn't equal the whole budget, but what it did was it covered enough to make it possible for them to film Phase One. Chris, what do you think Phase One was of this project?

• 28:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Phase One. Is it all of the stuff in town?

• 28:57Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's a trick question.

• 28:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it is.

• 28:59Lizzie Bassett?

  It's them in the woods because that was not supposed to be the whole movie. So

• 29:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh.

• 29:05Lizzie Bassett?

  let's get into this. That was just supposed to be Phase One. Myrick and Sanchez debated between filming in Florida and Maryland because those were the locations they knew they had resources.

• 29:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 29:17Lizzie Bassett?

  And by resources, I mean, they settled on Maryland because Sanchez's girlfriend's house was close to Seneca State Park where they would film.

• 29:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. When you're making something like that, it's like, do we have an apartment we can shoot in? Do we have parking for people? Those are invaluable resources when you're making something this scale.

• 29:34Lizzie Bassett?

  They also liked that Maryland was at least kind of close to New England if they're going with sort of a Salem Witch Trials vibe.

• 29:41Chris Winterbauer?

  There's some skinny little trees out there, but yes, that is true.

• 29:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. It's giving cereal. It's not giving Salem Witch Trial.

• 29:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 29:49Lizzie Bassett?

  So they set aside $500 per week for each actor, which means these actors were paid around $1,000 total for their almost two weeks of work that they did on the Blair Witch project. They also required each actor to sign a 1.5-page deal memo. But one particular clause in this one and a half-page deal memo did catch their attention. Should the project net Haxson Films, that's the production company of Myrick and Sanchez, over $1 million, the actors were entitled to a 1% participation in profits in excess of $1 million.

• 30:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 30:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Myrick and Sanchez, of course, also knew they wanted to use the actors' real names in the film. And on paper, this makes sense. They know they're going to be improvising and basically filming 24/7 for the entire shoot. So they didn't want to have the added layer of them having to remember a fake name. But because of this, Part of the deal memo required that the actors give the filmmakers in Hacks and Films the right to use their real names for the purposes of the film.

• 30:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Including promotion, et cetera, and yeah.

• 30:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Correct. And as you would, as a 20 something actor excited about what is probably your first feature film, they all signed it.

• 31:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, when you see that number of million dollars on the deal memo, you probably think, that would be so cool, but that's not going to happen. The bet, you're really thinking,

• 31:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 31:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Maybe we play in a film festival, maybe this gets me my next audition.

• 31:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 31:21Chris Winterbauer?

  There's no way you're looking that far around the bend.

• 31:24Lizzie Bassett?

  That's exactly right. So crucially, the actors were also told that their footage would likely only account for 10 to 15 minutes of the film. The rest would be documentary with talking heads. And as far as I can tell, this was their intention going into the production.

• 31:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 31:41Lizzie Bassett?

  The deal memo was copied from a book by Blair Witch producer Greg Hale without the help of a lawyer. Again, this makes sense. They don't have any money and there's no reason to think this will ever be a big hit. Speaking of Greg Hale, he had the brilliant idea to forego a typical set and just dump the actors in the woods. So Hale had met Myra Con Sanchez in film school. Most of the people that worked behind the scenes of the Blair Witch Project had met in film school. But he'd also served four years in the military. And at one point, as part of his training, he had basically been put into an immersive experience designed to show the trainees what it would be like to be in a POW camp. Even though he knew it was an exercise at a certain point, because it was so immersive, he crossed over into

• 32:23Lizzie Bassett?

  being genuinely scared. So Hale's like, let's do that, but this time for theater.

• 32:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Sanchez was concerned, but not for the reason you might think. Chris, why do you think he'd be hesitant?

• 32:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, aside from safety issues?

• 32:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, don't worry about those.

• 32:42Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. I don't know. I mean, that's all I can think of is safety issues at this point. What's the concern?

• 32:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, in order for Hale's plan to work, they would have to turn quite a bit more control than they had anticipated over to the actors.

• 32:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Ah, yes. Right. You kind of are leaving them alone and coming back to collect the footage.

• 33:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly. So not only are they improvising all of the dialogue, this also requires them to shoot everything themselves because you want them to be able to do 360 shots, which means you cannot have any crew members around.

• 33:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Lizzie Bassett?

  It also means no regular check-ins with the directors and almost no contact with them during the eight-day shoot. So Hale suggested, all right, here's a workaround. We're going to have a system where we use GPS to track the actors and also they will use it to help them navigate, even though GPS was really bad in the 90s. But this way, the crew could essentially follow the actors unseen and be able to drop off film, batteries, notes, and pick up the previous day's tapes.

• 33:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 33:44Lizzie Bassett?

  So they mapped out the park and Myrick and Sanchez proceeded to create an emotional obstacle course for them. Josh, Heather, and Mike were given a two-day crash course in camera work, and Heather spent time researching Wicca and how to stay alive in the woods. Meanwhile, three days before the shoot began, Sanchez and Myrick still did not have an ending. They finally noodled something up, but apparently the idea would have required an art department, which, again, they barely had. So they were told they needed to come up with something that would not require any makeup, special effects, props, nothing. And that is how they came up with the idea of one of them just standing in the corner of the room. Production design was led by Ben Rock, who was asked if, quote, Blair Witch Project were to happen, what's the least amount of money you could live on? And he

• 34:29Lizzie Bassett?

  answered honestly, $300 a week. And they were like, you're hired.

• 34:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Sold. Greenlit.

• 34:36Lizzie Bassett?

  He made the stick figures based on ancient runic figures and also, of course, the effigy in 1973's The Wicker Man.

• 34:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Lizzie Bassett?

  And we mentioned that two-day crash course. Neil Fredericks served as the director of photography. And in addition to teaching the actors over the course of those two days, which honestly, I don't want to diminish what he did there.

• 34:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Lizzie Bassett?

  He did a really good job. His job was basically you have 48 hours to teach them everything you possibly can in terms of what they're going to need to know about how to operate both the 16-millimeter film camera and the camcorder that they have. Exposure, lighting, everything. He's also keeping everything tuned up. He's bringing them batteries. I understand he did not shoot the portions in the woods where they're filming themselves, but he did a lot to prepare them for this. Fredericks tragically died just five years after the Blair Witch Project while filming a movie called Crossbones. This is really sad. He had tied himself to a Cessna 206 plane to capture a shot, and it crashed into the ocean, and he was unable to untie himself and drowned.

• 35:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Jesus Christ.

• 35:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Early October 1997, the production team arrived in the park and mapped out the route they wanted the cast to take. They also discovered the Griggs House, which is the house that's used at the very end. It's in a different park, Patapsco Valley State Park. And Ben Rock told Dread Central, "Nothing about it seemed safe."

• 35:58Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 35:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Graffiti tags covered the walls, and clearly homeless people had been living there. There were no rails on the stairs going up three floors, so when climbing the creaky stairs, it was best to hug the walls. Every surface would smear or blot its residue onto you or your clothes, so leaning against walls or touching anything was a bad idea. And the basement, a tiny brick-enclosed tomb with a low ceiling. In the dark, cold humidity, we tried to read the graffiti off the walls through my flashlight beam, despite the dust we kicked up in our frozen breath and the sense that at any second, a ghost, or the devil, or a meth head, or a raccoon might tap us on the shoulder or attack us. It's perfect.

• 36:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:37Lizzie Bassett?

  And by October 23rd, 1997, it was time to go.

• 36:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Heather, Josh and Mike were given walkie talkies, a Hi8 video camera, and a 16mm film camera, camping gear, story prompts, and plopped in the middle of the woods by themselves.

• 36:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Put a couple lizards in a jar and tell them to fight. Shake it up. Anybody else do that as a kid? Nope, just me?

• 37:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's exactly what they do here. So they were instructed to hike from point to point, stopping only to pick up fresh batteries, supplies, and food left for them by the crew. They would also, as we said, drop off the old tapes to be reviewed by the directors. But because this was basically a 24/7 film shoot, Myrick and Sanchez didn't really have that much time to review the footage. Sanchez told Backstage Magazine, "The greatest challenge was staying on top of everything. It was just a 24-hour-a-day shoot. So, once we started, there was this timeline that we had to maintain. The end of the shoot was going to happen on that hour of that day. We had to continue to build and plan stuff ahead of time and direct and write directing notes and watch footage and get up at 2 o'clock in the morning to go scare the actors.

• 37:46Lizzie Bassett?

  So it was a matter of always trying to keep ahead of the actors." I just want to point out, it's 24/7 for the actors as well.

• 37:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 37:53Lizzie Bassett?

  And they're not sleeping in hotel beds.

• 37:55Chris Winterbauer?

  No. This is kind of like George Lucas's dream right now. He doesn't have to talk to the actors. He doesn't have to be on set with the actors.

• 38:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 38:04Chris Winterbauer?

  He just gets sent the footage and he gets to go and edit it and do his fun thing.

• 38:07Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. So they would sometimes creep up to listen in on the actors, but for the most part, they had almost no interaction with them during the filming. And they will say this, that they really did not do a lot of typical directing of the actors. The actors agreed to remain in character the entire time only if one said the safe word, taco, and they all agreed to break, could they drop the act? But it turns out, when you're cold and hungry, because the crew keeps leaving less and less food for you because they're running out of it, and then they figured, hey, let's just use it to our advantage, and you can't sleep because there's noises outside your tent every night and dropped in the woods alone, it's not really that much of an act. They'd always had some conflict in mind when they drew up the plot points and scenarios,

• 38:51Lizzie Bassett?

  but they got quite a bit more than they had bargained for. So as we said, the direction Heather had been given from the beginning was to be a no-nonsense director who did not take any bullshit from anybody. In the film, Chris, who do you see her butting heads with the most?

• 39:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael, who's the sound operator who

• 39:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Correct.

• 39:09Chris Winterbauer?

  has rented the DAT, the digital audio tape, and he's got the rented equipment and he's the first to say, like, basically, I didn't sign up for this shit, you know, sort of thing.

• 39:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. So I was very interested to discover that it was not Mike that she was butting heads with during the shoot, but instead it was Josh who was constantly fighting with Heather in the woods. One of the only times the actors asked for the directors to step in was when Mike and Josh actually reached out to Myra and Sanchez and asked them to please have Heather tone it down. They gave her the note, and she did, for what it's worth. She took the note very well. But the conflict levels did reach a potentially dangerous place, which you can see a little bit of when Josh finally explodes at Heather in the final film, in that sort of, what's your motivation? What's your motivation? Argument.

• 39:57Lizzie Bassett?

  That was real. I mean, that's real frustration. Like, yes, what they're doing is incredible, because, yes, they are staying in character and they're staying in the scenario, but they are so fucking pissed off at each other at that point.

• 40:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. And he's telling her to turn off the camera, right? Like, this is

• 40:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Chris Winterbauer?

  the big... And she can't, both because her character wouldn't, but also because she can't, right? Her job is to keep filming.

• 40:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, they explicitly told them, do not ever turn the cameras off. So they had initially planned for Mike to be the one who would disappear. But because of what they were seeing in the tapes, they pivoted and instead removed Josh. They left a note for him saying, quote, "When everyone goes to bed tonight, stay awake. Once you're sure they're asleep, leave the tent. If anybody wakes up, tell them you're going to take a piss." None of them had any idea this was going to happen, although apparently Josh was very relieved to get the fuck out of there. He left, took a really long shower, got stoned, and went to Denny's.

• 40:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Nice.

• 40:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is amazing.

• 40:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Grand slam.

• 40:56Lizzie Bassett?

  That's honestly all I want to do right now. He did not like, love the experience. He said he was less scared than he was more uncomfortable. He told The Guardian, "Your body would have finally warmed up the sleeping bag enough for you to fall asleep and then you'd hear baby noises outside. It was more annoying than anything else. We've got to act now." This was a really smart move on the part of the directors. It totally changes the dynamic between Heather and Mike. Heather and Mike also had no idea they were going to wind up at that house. Per usual, they had been told to hike in a certain direction, and much to their surprise, they popped up in this creepy-ass, derelict, you know, shack. Production had blocked certain entrances so that they would force Mike and Heather's path into the house, and

• 41:36Lizzie Bassett?

  they placed radios with Josh's voice broadcasting to guide them where to go. When Mike got to the basement, two PAs grabbed him and just told him to stand in the corner. And when Heather got down there, the PAs grabbed her and put her camera on the floor. Apparently, the first time they went through this, she was so scared that she started hyperventilating and shaking, and she had to be calmed down by the crew, which is understandable. It's really scary. I can't imagine just having two, like, black-clad PAs crawling out of the corner to be like, "Heather, put your camera down."

• 42:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I don't know if they sound like gremlins, but yes.

• 42:10Lizzie Bassett?

  They have to.

• 42:12Chris Winterbauer?

  One of the things that I think is so smart about this pivot is that when the crew first starts, Josh seems like the peacemaker, right? And so it's unexpected, but it feels natural when he finally snaps. And you realize, oh, he's long fuse, but he will snap. And then the unexpected alliance between Mike and Heather is really satisfying because they have to rely upon each other, and we know that they hate each other. And the fact that Josh, because he's the peacemaker, this idea that he's the one susceptible to the curse and the witch, is also really interesting, and I think supported by the way that the characters are developed.

• 42:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 42:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So again, great character dynamics. It totally works. It tracks really nicely, in my opinion. And I think that it works to the strengths of all the actors. There's an insolence to Mike, you know, like that sarcastic, annoying pessimism. He plays it so well.

• 43:11Speaker 02

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

• 43:48Lizzie Bassett?

  So a couple other fun facts about the filming. The teeth and hair in the little bundle of sticks delivered to Heather, those are real teeth and real hair.

• 43:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Who's teeth?

• 43:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Supplied by a dentist.

• 43:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, okay.

• 43:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know.

• 44:00Chris Winterbauer?

  There we go.

• 44:00Lizzie Bassett?

  He's got him from a dentist. Yeah.

• 44:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I hope that kid got $20 a tooth for...

• 44:07Lizzie Bassett?

  They look like adult teeth.

• 44:08Chris Winterbauer?

  What are you gonna do with my teeth, Dr. Franklin?

• 44:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, donate it to science.

• 44:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Don't worry. Have you seen Poltergeist?

• 44:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you know about my weirdest, the weirdest job I ever had, right?

• 44:19Chris Winterbauer?

  No. What was the weirdest job you ever had?

• 44:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Surely you know about this. Very brief aside, it is applicable here to the question of where does one get human teeth? I very briefly covered for a friend when she was off to shoot a film somewhere. This was a long time ago when I was between writing jobs. And the job was to drive around to dentist's offices in Los Angeles County, and sometimes Orange County, and offer them cash to buy the teeth that had precious metals in them.

• 44:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, nice.

• 44:48Lizzie Bassett?

  And so I had just jars of teeth.

• 44:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Were you, was it like you were working for like a pawn shop or something? What was, who is...

• 44:55Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it was like a cash for gold type thing.

• 44:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, okay.

• 44:58Lizzie Bassett?

  And then you, yeah, you would bring it back to the tooth boss, and they would just give you a check for all of the teeth that you had collected.

• 45:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Nice.

• 45:05Lizzie Bassett?

  But I had to keep them in my car and in my house. Like lining my bathroom was just a bunch of jars of, bunch of jars of teeth. All of which, just to say, if you have a tooth extracted, you do not know where that thing is going.

• 45:15Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 45:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Because dentists, they got something up their sleeve, and it's your teeth. All right, so... One of the cameras had even been bought at Circuit City and because their budget was so tight, they returned it.

• 45:26Chris Winterbauer?

  That's the move. It's the Guitar Center move. David and I were in a band in high school. It's like, oh, you need a good amp for this show? Let's buy it and return it afterwards. It's what you do.

• 45:35Lizzie Bassett?

  They did it.

• 45:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 45:36Lizzie Bassett?

  They got the 500 bucks back. And remember the big reveal that Mike kicked the map into the creek?

• 45:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:42Lizzie Bassett?

  That was not planned or scripted. That was just something that Mike did. And he held on to that information until just the right moment. Also, Heather's very famous monologue, completely unscripted.

• 45:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 45:56Lizzie Bassett?

  She was just told that she knows she's gonna die, so it's time to make amends. Zero direction on how to shoot it, meaning that iconic shot and the framing and everything was all her.

• 46:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Ties back into the parole thing too, right? That kind of recognition of guilt. This is my fault, you know, to the families of Mike and Josh. I'm so sorry, you know?

• 46:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. And I am calling out the fact that like, they're not getting any direction on how to shoot this stuff. Intentionally, it's not to diminish the work that the DP did, because again, I think that his job was actually very hard on this. But he did cede control to the actors.

• 46:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:34Lizzie Bassett?

  And sometimes there were problems, like Heather keeping a camera zoomed in by accident for like, almost a whole day, which resulted in unusable footage. But for the most part, they did a really incredible job, considering none of them, with the exception of Josh, had any experience with filmmaking. That is amazing when you watch this movie.

• 46:51Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. And yet it's still amateur enough that it really strikes that perfect balance, right?

• 46:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 46:59Chris Winterbauer?

  It's intelligible enough that I can track what's going on and I am scared, but it's amateur enough that it doesn't break the reality of these are, because sometimes found footage films, you can tell.

• 47:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Look too polished?

• 47:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, like, oh, the camera's really pointed right here, right now. Oh, they really knew to pan here, right now. That never happens in this movie.

• 47:19Lizzie Bassett?

  No, because they don't know to do that. No one's telling them.

• 47:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 47:22Lizzie Bassett?

  So filming wrapped on Halloween, 1997, and I'm sure everyone was relieved that it was done.

• 47:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 47:28Lizzie Bassett?

  But for the actors, the nightmare was just beginning.

• 47:32Lizzie Bassett?

  The original idea was that this would be presented as more of a standard documentary. As we said, what was shot in the woods was only phase one.

• 47:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Then you have like the interview with the sheriff and the interview with the experts.

• 47:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly. So the premise was someone discovered the footage after the case went cold. It was turned over to Heather's mother, who reached out to Hacks and Films to try to make sense of it and turn it into a doc. So they hired an actress who looked like Heather, an actor to play a detective. They shot fake newscasts, fake in search of type episodes. But over the course of the eight months that Myra and Sanchez edited this, the movie started to take an entirely different shape. They had over 22 hours of footage to sift through, which was a daunting task for them. They were working full-time jobs trying to do this. But as they worked their way through it, they began removing everything except for what was shot in the woods.

• 48:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 48:20Lizzie Bassett?

  They ended up abandoning what was originally supposed to be over 50% of the film. And it wasn't until shortly before the film Sundance premiere that Heather, Michael and Joshua even learned that the footage they shot would not be 10 to 15 minutes of the film, but instead the whole fucking thing. They did not know. So the edit was additionally stressful because they had this deadline looming to submit it for the Sundance Film Festival. And just before the edit wrapped, the filmmakers did something else very smart that was also motivated by having no money. At the time, EarthLink would apparently give you a website for free.

• 48:55Chris Winterbauer?

  EarthLink?

• 48:56Lizzie Bassett?

  So they launched www dot blairwitch dot com.

• 49:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:02Lizzie Bassett?

  And Chris, what do you know about the internet in 1999, 1998?

• 49:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Fragmented, uh, GeoCities, Angel Fire, Slow, the Wild West dial-up.

• 49:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Dial-up, yeah.

• 49:15Chris Winterbauer?

  But also it feels so authentic, right? Whenever you go to any website.

• 49:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, yes.

• 49:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And so I feel there were a number of these types of sites and it did seem like, oh, this is, this is real. This could be real. This could be a real website or these are real people, you know? There was something unvarnished about the internet at this point in time. It's like what I imagine the dark web is, although I'm sure it's not. I've never been.

• 49:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, no, it's a lot worse. I think, yeah, it's also worth calling out, this was the peak of the dot com bubble. Only about thirty six to forty percent of America had access via their home or their work. But it is right at the tipping point where, yes, it's not quite accessible to the majority, but it is becoming part of the daily life for the people who use it. So I said, timing is everything. This is the timing. It's the internet. The site was pretty rudimentary, but it had some info about the project, some fun spooky Blair Witch lore, and information about the filmmakers, AKA Sanchez and Myrick, clearly showing that the movie was indeed a movie.

• 50:21Lizzie Bassett?

  So the film got into the Sundance Film Festival and premiered on January twenty third, nineteen ninety nine, too. Not a lot of fanfare. Audiences really liked it, but they got basically zero interest from distributors, except for one, Artisan Entertainment.

• 50:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 50:37Lizzie Bassett?

  They were pretty small at the time, but they had just had success one year earlier with Darren Aronofsky's debut feature, Pi, which also came out of Sundance. So Artisan offered them one million dollars for the Blair Witch project, including the rights to spinoffs and sequels. Now, because they had very limited options, and that probably sounded like a lot of money, Myrick and Sanchez said yes. One of Artisan's early requests was that they find an alternate ending. They were like, people are not going to be happy with a guy just standing in the corner. Myrick and Sanchez really pushed back on this. They did not want to film the alt ending. So they took the money that Artisan had given them to shoot those endings. I believe they did shoot some additional options, but they did something else.

• 51:21Lizzie Bassett?

  They replaced some of the really shaky handheld footage. So some of the stuff that you see is not shot by Heather, Josh, or Mike. And I believe this is actually when they tried to capture footage of the Blair Witch running in the background of certain shots. And it was just a guy in long johns and white pantyhose running around the woods. But when they got the footage back, he did not show up. So you just couldn't see him. So that's why there's no witch.

• 51:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:46Lizzie Bassett?

  But the big thing they did was they captured those interviews about Rustin Parr.

• 51:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Those were not in the original Sundance cut.

• 51:55Chris Winterbauer?

  That's so crucial because this is, it's a curse movie more than anything, right? And the setup of what the Blair Witch really is, is it's this manifestation of violence, right? This man had murdered these children, but he puts one in the corner and then he kills the other one. So that one doesn't watch and it's very brutal and intricate. And it sets up the ending perfectly.

• 52:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 52:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And you understand, oh no, it's Josh under the influence of the Blair Witch. And it kind of, everything ties together really nicely. And those interviews are really well done.

• 52:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I love those.

• 52:28Chris Winterbauer?

  The mom that who's like, it's not real to the little girl. Then she turns to the camera and she goes, it is real. It's really good.

• 52:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I love those. I know. Those people are wonderful. I love the two guys fishing. They're so much fun.

• 52:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh yeah. And right there over there, it was very Fargo-y, right? With those two guys. Yeah. It's great.

• 52:45Lizzie Bassett?

  With their like Maryland Delco accents. It's great. So that was all added after.

• 52:52Lizzie Bassett?

  So they came back, they made their case to Artisan, who was like, okay, fine. If that's really what you want to do, but it's going to cost you millions at the box office. And Myron and Sanchez are like, millions?

• 53:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Great.

• 53:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Cool. So in addition to giving the filmmakers honestly, a surprising amount of creative control, the smartest thing Artisan did was the way they marketed the film. Couple of fun things. They aired a fake documentary called Curse of the Blair Witch on the SyFy Channel right before the film came out.

• 53:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I missed the SyFy Channel and it was like hokey and B movie. It was great.

• 53:24Lizzie Bassett?

  It was so fun. They created missing posters with the actors' faces on them and would drop them on people's cars after the screenings. They also had their interns hand out these missing posters at bars and cafes while asking people casually, what do you know about the Blair Witch?

• 53:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I definitely at age 10, some friends and I thought this was real. When the movie was coming out, it was just like, it was pitched to me as, did you hear about this? These three kids-

• 53:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 53:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Fucking disappeared in the woods. And there's a movie about it.

• 53:57Lizzie Bassett?

  That was very much their intention.

• 54:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And I was like, no way. That sounds so scary.

• 54:05Chris Winterbauer?

  So scared.

• 54:06Lizzie Bassett?

  So they leaked word of the movie to MTV and ain't it cool news? They had IMDb list the actors as deceased.

• 54:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 54:15Lizzie Bassett?

  And most crucially, they completely revamped the website. So suddenly, any mention of this not being a real documentary was removed. Instead of Sanchez and Myrick, the filmmakers were now listed as Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams. Also included some pretty real looking fake documents, police reports, news articles, and photographs of evidence all popped up on the site. It's estimated that within a year of the original website launching, 2 million people had visited it.

• 54:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 54:45Lizzie Bassett?

  So the Blair Witch had birthed the viral marketing campaign.

• 54:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, sources differ pretty wildly on this, but Artisan likely spent somewhere around 1.5 to 2 million dollars on marketing and post-production. I believe that included a $340,000 complete sound remix.

• 55:03Chris Winterbauer?

  The sound is really good in this movie because it's, you can understand it.

• 55:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 55:08Chris Winterbauer?

  What's really cool is that obviously the DAT and the camcorder are the only two devices capturing sound, and therefore, whenever you're in the perspective of the 16mm film camera, you're hearing sound from a different perspective, which then becomes really disorienting when Heather goes into the house at the end.

• 55:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:26Chris Winterbauer?

  It's really cool. It's a really, really neat conceit that they come up with.

• 55:30Lizzie Bassett?

  It's entirely, I think, budget-driven and convenience, but they do it very well.

• 55:35Chris Winterbauer?

  But then it's very well executed in the mix.

• 55:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Very well. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I wonder what the initial Sundance screening of this was like? It must have been pretty rough.

• 55:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Not that it wouldn't be fun, especially at like a midnight screening, but I bet you it was pretty rough.

• 55:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 55:51Lizzie Bassett?

  So other sources do say the amount they spent on marketing may have been way higher, but I'm inclined to believe this because a lot of the marketing they're doing is not a super heavy money lift.

• 56:01Chris Winterbauer?

  That also might have been what they did leading to the release, at which point, after the movie starts performing well, they probably reinvested a lot more money to keep it going.

• 56:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. In May of 1999, it premiered at Cannes, but the stars of the movie were nowhere to be found. In fact, they were banned from appearing because they're dead, right?

• 56:21Chris Winterbauer?

  It was the Disney Voices of the Animated Characters dilemma, right? Back with Snow White.

• 56:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm. On July 14th, it premiered with a limited release, and on July 30th, 1999, it opened wide. Now reportedly, somewhere around 50% of the original viewers thought it was real found footage of a dead documentary crew. It got so bad that Heather's own mother was receiving condolence cards for her daughter's death, and a police officer reached out to the filmmakers about the case. But Artisan had a problem. Three problems, really, Chris. Josh, Heather, and Mike were not dead at all, though they were starting to feel like it.

• 57:05Speaker 02

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

• 57:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Once the movie had been in market for a bit, Artisan did drop the "are they really dead?" gimmick and allowed the actors to do some press, but it was becoming pretty conspicuous that the stars of one of the biggest movies of the year had no money. Heather was driving her shitty car to her temp job when it broke down literally underneath a billboard of her face, and Josh ended up serving his own agent food at a catering gig just a few days before he appeared on The Tonight Show, to which apparently his agent was like, "What the fuck are you doing? What's happening here?" And he was like, "I don't have any money."

• 58:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I knew not particularly well, but Katie Featherston, the lead and co-lead in Paranormal Activity. I helped her film a little project when I was in film school and she's wonderful. She's really nice. She's a really good actor. She's very funny.

• 58:28Lizzie Bassett?

  She's great.

• 58:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I think she told me the story of how shortly after Paranormal came out, she would be, she was, I believe, waiting tables and people had seen that movie and they would say, excuse me, like, are you the woman from Paranormal Activity? And I'm sure some of them thought, is this a viral marketing thing? You know what I mean, in some way? And she's like, no, I, that movie was made for $12,000. I, you know, I do think eventually she made money on the back end, but those checks don't clear right away. And so, yeah.

• 58:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I hope she did. She did better than these guys did. So, in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Heather said something like, quote, "I'm the poorest famous person in America right now." And Artisan did not like that. They immediately reprimanded her and banned her from saying anything like it again. She hired a publicist who was promptly banned from booking her on any more interviews. Joshua Leonard was cast in another indie film and he was slapped on the wrist for that. You're not supposed to be an actor. You're supposed to be dead. So why are you in this movie?

• 59:28Chris Winterbauer?

  So go die.

• 59:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. On top of all of this, Heather was on the receiving end of some good old fashioned misogyny, people attacking her for being annoying. And their hate was directed at her because it's her real name in the film. It was by no means what any of them had signed up for. By August, The Blair Witch Project broke $100 million at the box office. So Heather, Michael and Josh were holding on to hope that they were gonna see at least some of that money. Instead, to commemorate the success, Artisan sent each actor a fruit basket.

• 1:00:02Chris Winterbauer?

  There it is.

• 1:00:04Lizzie Bassett?

  You motherfuckers.

• 1:00:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 1:00:07Lizzie Bassett?

  $100 million.

• 1:00:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I hope they all get sucked into a house and have to stand in the corner as one by one, they're beaten with fruit baskets.

• 1:00:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Seriously.

• 1:00:20Chris Winterbauer?

  What assholes.

• 1:00:20Lizzie Bassett?

  So Heather would later tell The Guardian, quote, "It's a strange thing to get no credit where credit is deeply due." By strange, I mean shitty. We were supposed to be really scared, so we weren't actors. All of us were formally trained. We improvised all dialogue from an outline, but we weren't writers. We shot it and independently provided the impetus for many of the scenes you see in the film, but we were not directors. While this work became record-breaking profitable, what we were was dead.

• 1:00:50Lizzie Bassett?

  She makes such a good point here. They're doing everything.

• 1:00:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Everything. Without these three people, this movie does not work. It does not happen.

• 1:01:02Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the curse of found footage, which is, they have done such a good job in creating a reality that does not exist. The fact that you can't see the artifice makes people assume they weren't really acting because their acting is so seamless.

• 1:01:17Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so good. Yeah.

• 1:01:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And then Artisan, because they can only see the value of what they've added, which is a marketing budget. Anything that gets in the way of their own profits is obviously, it needs to go. And that includes the people that created the very, it's the whole capital versus labor debate, like played out in real time. Without the labor of these three, this movie does not exist, but because Artisan has the capital to market it, we're gonna step on you as we make a ton of money off of it. It's ridiculous.

• 1:01:48Lizzie Bassett?

  It's awful. At the end of the summer, the actors received a performance bump in the low five figures. It was enough for Michael C. Williams to spend a little bit more on the cocktail hour at his wedding.

• 1:01:59Chris Winterbauer?

  For reference, like they probably each got 10 to 20 grand.

• 1:02:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't even think they got 20.

• 1:02:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So like the 10 to 15, let's say, you know?

• 1:02:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07Chris Winterbauer?

  That is.

• 1:02:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Insane.

• 1:02:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:02:12Lizzie Bassett?

  So the experience with Artisan for Sanchez and Myrick had been very positive in the lead up to the film's release. Again, they gave them a lot of creative control, but once it was making hundreds of millions of dollars, the tides turned for them too. Artisan immediately wanted to capitalize on the success and release a sequel. Sanchez and Myrick were hesitant, but pitched the idea of a prequel instead. And according to Sanchez, this might've looked quite a bit like Robert Eggers, The Witch. Where we get an origin story for the Blair Witch herself. Artisans like, yeah, sure, fine, whatever. We don't care, but it has to come out in October of 2000. It's December of 1999.

• 1:02:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Sanchez and Myrick are like, no, you need to slow down. They were especially concerned about the franchise being overexposed, which is smart. And Artisans like, fuck you, we're doing it live. And they pushed on without the directors. Josh, Heather and Mike were also never approached about their involvement in Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, and yet their faces sure do appear in it and in all the promo material for it. So right before Blair Witch 2 came out, Heather rounded up Josh and Mike and hired a lawyer to try to block the release of the film until they were paid for what they considered to be unauthorized appearances in it. But Artisans like, eh, you remember that one and a half page deal memo you signed?

• 1:03:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Cause it gave the filmmakers and therefore us the rights to do whatever the hell we want with the quote unquote characters, names and likenesses. Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows came out in October 27th, 2000 to extremely bad reviews and pretty also bad to mediocre box office return. It made about $47.7 million compared to Blair Witch's almost $250 million worldwide gross. But Heather, Mike and Josh didn't drop their suit. They came back and sued Artisans for over $4 million each in damages. And they did indeed incur damages to their careers from the way that Artisans had handled this.

• 1:04:06Lizzie Bassett?

  According to Heather, quote, "The very presence of our names, pictures, portraits and voices in and connection with Blair Witch 2 creates confusion. People believe I was involved. And I had to individually with each person that asked me, set the record straight." Meanwhile, Myrick and Sanchez were also pissed that Artisans may have been inflating marketing costs in order to reduce the supposed profit. Haxton Films was technically entitled to $250,000 for every $2 million. The film grossed above 10 million. And as we know, it grossed way more than 10 million. So they ended up settling with a payment to Haxton Films of, I've seen anywhere between 25 and 30 or 40 million dollars. Now, the math here, anywhere in that range really is about right for the worldwide gross of Blair Witch, based on their original deal.

• 1:04:52Lizzie Bassett?

  In 2003, Lionsgate acquired Artisan. Myrick and Sanchez wrote a sequel for Lionsgate. Ultimately, it was determined that it would have cost too much money. Myrick told The Week, "That's part of the duality of Blair Witch. All we want you to do is shoot another $35,000 movie that makes another 140 million at the box office. What's the problem?"

• 1:05:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:13Lizzie Bassett?

  From this point on, Myrick and Sanchez were effectively out of the loop for good. Now, in February of 2004, Heather, Mike, and Josh received a $300,000 settlement from Artisan, paid out over several years. Worth noting, again, the original deal memo said they would receive 1% participation in profits of anything Haxson earned over $1 million. So if Haxson got a payment of 30 to 40 million dollars, that would mean they are entitled to $300,000 bare minimum. And this took five years for them to get even this.

• 1:05:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Something else this settlement got them, though, was that Lionsgate was no longer able to use their names and likenesses without their permission. So in 2016, Lionsgate released Blair Witch, a sequel following Heather's supposed younger brother, was directed by Adam Wingard. According to Heather in Variety in 2024, when Lionsgate first came to her about the film, they fully intended to use her name and likeness again, until she politely reminded them about the settlement, and they took her out of it completely. She was happy with this and felt like, for the first time, they were actually concerned about disrupting her life, and they did the right thing. Reviews on this one were mixed to "bad," but it was moderately successful at the box office.

• 1:06:29Lizzie Bassett?

  So in April of 2024, Lionsgate announced plans at CinemaCon to reboot the Blair Witch project with Jason Blum's Blumhouse producing. Now Joshua Leonard was pissed because A, his, Heather, and Mike's faces, particularly others, were all over the announcement at CinemaCon, but he hadn't been given any heads-up that this was happening. And he'd been trying to get Lionsgate to set up a charity screening of The Blair Witch for artists without healthcare for over a month at that point, and no one had returned his calls. In fact, Lionsgate hadn't given a heads up to any of the actors that this was happening. And, look, I can see how that might not be standard to give regular actors

• 1:07:12Lizzie Bassett?

  a courtesy call before a sequel that they're not involved in is coming out, but these people literally wrote, starred, shot, essentially directed this film, not to mention the fact that you are using their faces all over the material.

• 1:07:28Lizzie Bassett?

  So the three main cast members released an open letter to Lionsgate requesting consultation on future projects and residual payments, quote, "equivalent to the sum that would have been allotted through SAG-AFTRA had we had proper union or legal representation when the film was made."

• 1:07:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Michael Williams told Variety, quote, "I'm embarrassed that I let this happen to me. You've got to put that stuff away because you're a fucking loser if you can't, because everybody's wondering what happened and your wife is in the grocery line and she can't pay because a check bounced. You're in the most successful independent movie of all time and you can't take care of your loved ones."

• 1:08:03Lizzie Bassett?

  And Heather pointed out in the same article, quote, "Is there value there or not? If there's value, compensate us accordingly. And if there's no value, then just stop using us."

• 1:08:14Lizzie Bassett?

  So where are they now? Michael C. Williams left the biz to become a high school guidance counselor. Good for you, Mike. Joshua Leonard kept up his career as an actor and filmmaker starring in movies like Hump Day, If I Stay, and directing and starring in Fully Realized Humans, among many other credits. And as the only one who maintained an arguably successful career in the film industry, you might think Joshua would be hesitant to speak out against a company as big as Lionsgate, but you would be wrong. He told Variety, quote, "I don't need Lionsgate to like me. I don't care that they know that I think their behavior has been reprehensible. I don't want my daughter to ever feel like anything is more valuable than her self-worth."

• 1:08:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Heather continued to try acting after the film's release, but her career eventually fizzled out. In 2007, she retired from acting, moved out of Los Angeles, and became a cannabis grower. She released her memoir Grow Girl in 2012 about her unusual career pivot, and it got pretty good reviews. Good for you, Heather.

• 1:09:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Lizzie Bassett?

  In 2020, she legally changed her name to Ray Hans because of how deeply she regretted the decision to let the filmmakers use her real name in Blair Witch. And bizarrely, it's not just the Blair Witch franchise that has continued to exploit her performance. In Todd Field's 2022 Tar, starring Cate Blanchett, Ray's iconic screams from the finale of Blair Witch certainly seem to be what you are hearing when Cate Blanchett is running, jogging through that park, and hears someone screaming. You can watch videos on YouTube that sync up the Blair Witch finale audio with the Tar audio. It is pretty undeniably her voice. It's very strange.

• 1:09:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I wonder why Todd Field's decided to use that.

• 1:09:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It's really weird. And Ray went to Lionsgate to inform them of this usage. And instead of looping her in, they just went without her and sought their own settlement from focus features without including her. Eduardo Sanchez went on to have a very successful career as a TV director. And for his part, Byrick worked more in the documentary space, but has also written and directed a few features. And the two have not worked together since The Blair Witch Project. So, Chris, what went right?

• 1:10:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Artisan Entertainment.

• 1:10:29Lizzie Bassett?

  They actually, I mean, listen, the marketing was very smart.

• 1:10:32Chris Winterbauer?

  No, they did a good job on that front.

• 1:10:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but then they were assholes.

• 1:10:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Morally bankrupt individuals. And, you know, it doesn't surprise me, from Lionsgate either, from any studio. I think we've learned over time, you have to pry every earned cent away from these corporations.

• 1:10:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, from their cold, dead hands.

• 1:10:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I would like to give mine, look, I'll steal it. I'm giving it to the three actors/writers/ cinematographers/ directors. And as Myrick and Sanchez, it's an incredibly creative conceit, an idea that they came up with. It's a really inventive way of doing it. But as you mentioned, Lizzie, man, with an open casting call in New York, they landed.

• 1:11:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Does three perfect people, not only for these roles, but to do all of the other jobs that needed to be done.

• 1:11:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And what an alchemy there. And it's so deeply frustrating that these people, not only did they not benefit from this film.

• 1:11:39Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it actively hurt them.

• 1:11:41Chris Winterbauer?

  It set their careers back. And so, you know, you're getting reprimanded for being in an independent film after this. That's ridiculous, obviously. You know, you're being reprimanded for speaking to the press. You're being reprimanded for X, Y, and Z. And you're having to expel all of your energy and probably money on trying to recoup what you are owed. And for anybody who might say, well, eventually they were made whole. Timing is everything.

• 1:12:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Not really.

• 1:12:05Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I'm just saying, even if somebody were to say, you know, as you mentioned, Lizzie, 300,000, that's 1% of 30 million. Okay. It was not paid out in an appropriate, timely fashion. And therefore, they were unable to take advantage of that windfall to support career decisions that they could have made.

• 1:12:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:12:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Being an actor is so hard. Pursuing any creative pursuit is hard because you do not know when you will get paid again for that creative pursuit. Therefore, you are working other jobs. You are attempting to put food on the table and make your next rent payment. And if you, again, are waiting on a $300,000 check that may come and eventually comes in five years, you know what you're not doing in those five years? Is taking other opportunities that you might not be able to afford. Because, again, you don't have the money to take a break from your waiting job or whatever it is. So.

• 1:12:58Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. Also, you're extremely famous and you have no security. You have no ability to pay for that unless it's out of your own pocket. Like, this is a nightmare.

• 1:13:07Chris Winterbauer?

  And I just think, again. These corporations are not our friends. And corporations are important and they serve important functions in our society and they employ a lot of people. But at the end of the day, you know, HR exists to protect the corporation. These attorneys exist to protect the corporation. The corporation exists to protect the corporation. The corporation exists to provide a monetary return for its shareholders at the end of the day. It doesn't give a shit about anything else. Like David Zaslove has enriched himself to the tune of $350 million as Warner Brothers has axed movies and lost money. You know, because the corporation exists to enrich people who are invested in it, not to benefit anybody, you know, on the creative side.

• 1:13:48Chris Winterbauer?

  And so, again, it is a brutal lesson, but it goes to show this is why you need representation, good representation. This is why you need unions, effective unions. This is why regulation is important to protect people, again, from not being able to reap the reward of, you know, the fruits of their labors. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous.

• 1:14:09Lizzie Bassett?

  It is ridiculous.

• 1:14:10Chris Winterbauer?

  So.

• 1:14:12Lizzie Bassett?

  That's a very important lesson that I think all young people need to learn is that nobody in business has your best interests at heart.

• 1:14:22Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 1:14:22Lizzie Bassett?

  No one. Don't believe them when they say that, you know, oh, but we're a family, you know? This is like, never, never. If you hear that, run for the hills because it's not true. I'm not saying don't trust people, but I am saying protect yourself. And to Chris's point, get a lawyer, have somebody look at the contract, even if it's, you know, Cousin Vinny, but like have somebody look at it.

• 1:14:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Cousin Vinny was pretty good. That would be a.

• 1:14:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Cousin Vinny was really good.

• 1:14:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say, that's a pretty good lawyer.

• 1:14:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. All right, so my what went right, since you gave it to really, truly the, the big, the what went right for this movie. I will give it to Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick because what they did in the way that they set this up, and frankly, in the way that they were willing to relinquish control to the actors, because that's hard, was really smart. It was really well done. Their ability to pivot, both while they were shooting, in terms of them pulling out Josh, even their ability to pivot in the edit and realize that, you know, half of what they shot, we don't need. That's so hard to do. And I don't want to diminish what they did on this movie. What they did is really remarkable,

• 1:15:32Lizzie Bassett?

  particularly in the post-production of it. So I think they are a big what went right on this as well. And I would just like to end the episode by saying, I know that there has not been resolution yet to the discussion about these three, as you said, actors, cinematographers, directors, writers, receiving some kind of compensation for this forthcoming Blair Witch project franchise entry. And I would just like to say to Lionsgate and everyone involved, please, for the love of God, do the right thing. They are not asking for a ton. They're asking for like the baseline stag residual payments. Give them to them. Please.

• 1:16:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think they heard you. I think they were stuffing dollar bills in their ears to block you out.

• 1:16:19Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. That wraps up our coverage of the Blair Witch.

• 1:16:22Chris Winterbauer?

  May I give a quick shout out? I saw Eduardo Sanchez's, I don't know if it was his second film, but it's called Altered. It's an alien invasion cryptid movie. It's pretty fun. It's a pretty fun B U horror movie.

• 1:16:36Lizzie Bassett?

  He's a really good director.

• 1:16:37Chris Winterbauer?

  You guys should check it out. Yeah, I agree. I think Sanchez and Marek are such talented storytellers because they found the story and they had the confidence to stick with it and follow it. I also just wanted to give a shout out to one of my favorite pseudo-found footage horror films that I think is really scary, Noroi, N O R O I, The Curse. It's a Japanese horror film from 2005. Highly recommend it, especially if you guys like something like The Wailing out of South Korea recently. I think it's great. And again, it's a little closer to what you're talking about, Lizzie. It's a little more polished than a Blair Witch, but it still, I think, works very well. So highly recommend it. And again, pay people, let them participate in the success of what you are creating.

• 1:17:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Generosity is one of the most attractive qualities

• 1:17:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:17:25Chris Winterbauer?

  in a person or an endeavor.

• 1:17:27Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not gonna hurt you. It will help you in the long run.

• 1:17:32Chris Winterbauer?

  And there is nothing less attractive than miserliness.

• 1:17:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:17:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And artisan, yes, great marketers, and they will hopefully, because of this podcast, always be remembered as the people who screwed over three hardworking, talented actors who made them hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 1:17:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, screwed them over so hard, so much harder than anybody ever deserved. And there's one other lesson, I think, from this episode that I want to call out to any, any creatives out there, which is just because something has technically been done before does not mean you shouldn't try it.

• 1:18:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Lizzie Bassett?

  The fact that they said, you know, had we seen Cannibal Holocaust, we probably wouldn't have made this, like, don't let that stop you. Just because a format exists, what you make does not have to be the most original piece of content ever made in every possible way. It needs to be a good piece of content. It needs to be a good story. It needs to be told well, and that's what these guys did. So just don't let it stop you. If you've got a good idea, make the good idea.

• 1:18:30Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. There are four easy ways to support this podcast. Number one, leave us a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you're listening on. Number two, tell a family member or a friend about the Curse of the Blair Witch and this episode. Number three, you can join our Patreon. Head to www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with lovely listeners like you. You can join for free and get musings, updates, corrections. You can join for $5 and get an ad-free RSS feed. I'm gonna jump to the fourth way to support this podcast, which is you can also now subscribe on Apple. So if you're interested in our bonus episodes, we just dropped a

• 1:19:16Chris Winterbauer?

  review not too long ago about Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. If you'd like to hear that in its entirety, you can sign up for $5 a month on Apple, or again, you can do it through Patreon, whichever platform you prefer. Back to Patreon, for fifty dollars, you can get a Heather Up the Nostals shout-out, just like one of these.

• 1:19:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I just want to apologize, Adam Moffett, Adrian Benkaria, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman.

• 1:19:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm so sorry, Ben Schindelman, it was really nice to meet you at the live show.

• 1:20:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith. It's all my fault that you're patrons of this podcast. C Grace B, Chris Liel, Chris Zucker, DB Smith, David Friscoanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Shybo, Ellen Singleton, M. Sodia, Evan Downey.

• 1:20:43Lizzie Bassett?

  I insisted, it's all because of me that we're all here right now. Film It Yourself, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, Grace Potter, Half Gray Hound, Jake Killen, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, Jen Mastromarino.

• 1:21:13Lizzie Bassett?

  What was that? What was that? What was that?

• 1:21:17Lizzie Bassett?

  J.J. Rapido, Jory L. Piper, Jose Salto, Kay Kanaba, Kate Ellington, Kathleen Olson, Wendy Elgashlager McCoy. I am so sorry, I'm so sorry. Felicia G. Lonrelad, I love you, Lena. Lydia Howes, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate the Knife, Nathan Centeno, Rosemary Southward. I'm scared to close my eyes. I'm scared to...

• 1:21:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Open them, rural juror. Sadie, just Sadie. Scary Carrie, Soaman Chinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, and the Provost's family.

• 1:22:11Chris Winterbauer?

  The O's sound like, oh god, we're gonna die out here. All right. Thank you, guys, so much for joining us. Make your art, pay your collaborators. Lizzie, what do we have coming for the good folks at home next week?

• 1:22:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. It's Halloween!

• 1:22:35Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. And I'm gonna tell the story of how my brother-in-law accidentally started a gang because of this movie. And I'm only half kidding.

• 1:22:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Which one? The French one?

• 1:22:47Chris Winterbauer?

  No, not that one. That would be more interesting. No, The Birth of the Loomis Crew, as it was known.

• 1:22:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Amazing. Can't wait.

• 1:22:58Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys. We'll see you next week.

• 1:23:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  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, with research from Laura Woods and additional editing from Karen Krebsaw.