Halloween

Paint your leaves yellow and orange and scatter them across the yard, because it's springtime in Pasadena and Halloween is coming to town! Chris & Lizzie plumb the depths of the real Michael Myers, how John Carpenter's career was saved by UK audiences, and why you should never show anyone your movie without music. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:04Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 2:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a genre-defining slasher made by a Renaissance man who can be behind the camera and behind the keyboard. As always, I'm your host, Lizzie Bassett, here with my co-host, Chris. And Chris, what do you have for us on this Halloween?

• 2:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I have Halloween. Somehow, the first movie ever called Halloween, which is crazy when you really think about it. And the filmmakers were as surprised as anybody that that name was available, as we will get to. It is a classic, Lizzie, as you mentioned, credited in large part with revitalizing the slasher subgenre of horror. I am assuming you had seen Halloween before. And this is perfect to culminate our spooky months with Halloween, only four days from Halloween. What are your thoughts upon watching it or re-watching it for the podcast? How has this movie evolved with you? Tell me. Walk me through it.

• 3:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I love this movie. I had not seen this movie growing up because my parents were just very averse to the idea of a slasher. And it was just not, that was not the kind of horror that they enjoyed. They were much more psychological and/or religious horror. That's what I got exposed to at an early age. So I kind of grew up thinking that this movie was probably pretty dumb. And it wasn't until I was in probably my early twenties that I finally watched it. And I began to just really fall in love with John Carpenter. I love him so much. I think this movie is remarkable. Yes, it's a slasher. Yes, you know, there's some things that may read as a little bit hokey today, but honestly, not many. I think this movie

• 4:06Lizzie Bassett?

  holds up incredibly well. The thing that I noticed upon this viewing for the podcast is that I had never appreciated how great the cinematography is in this movie, which of course it is Dean Cundy, who went on to become, I believe he did Jurassic Park and Apollo 13 and you know,

• 4:22Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 4:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Everything.

• 4:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Escape from New York.

• 4:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, of course, one of my, one of my favorites. But yeah, this is so great. And I love, I love that you're kind of seeing John Carpenter beginning to establish the John Carpenter cinematic universe as early as Halloween. You know, you've got the thing appearing on the TV in this movie. And we talked about this a little bit in Nightmare on Elm Street and you know, the question was kind of posed like, you know, why didn't Heather Langenkamp break out since she was the final girl in Nightmare on Elm Street the same way that Jamie Lee Curtis did in Halloween? And upon rewatching it, I think the answer is Jamie Lee Curtis. Like I, I do support your theory about the villain

• 5:04Lizzie Bassett?

  in this movie is so faceless and personalityless on purpose, which I, I really enjoy about this franchise and this movie in particular. But Jamie Lee Curtis is so good. Like she is just clearly a star from the second she shows up on screen. No disrespect to Heather Langenkamp. She doesn't pop off the screen in the same way that Jamie Lee Curtis does. So all to say, I loved this movie. I loved rewatching it. What about you, Chris?

• 5:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I'm excited because we have slightly different opinions here. I think Halloween is fine.

• 5:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa.

• 5:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I,

• 5:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Wrong, bad and wrong.

• 5:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I, I, I, I'm sure most people will agree with you. I did grow up watching this movie. Again, as I have mentioned, I have a bias because when I saw Scream, it exploded my brain. And once I had seen a slasher deconstructed, I had a hard time watching. What had preceded it. I do agree with a lot of your praise. I think it's very elegantly set up. It's very naturalistically shot. As you say, Dean Cundy cinematography is really beautiful, especially the daytime scenes.

• 6:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 6:14Chris Winterbauer?

  That pepper the first act of the film. I agree. Jamie Lee Curtis has a very easy and believable screen presence. She does not feel, she never feels forced. She feels extremely natural. And this was her first theatrical feature film. I think the movie has a really interesting use of POV throughout it. I think Hereditary later pays homage to a trope that's somewhat set up in the film, which is the classroom exploration of the theme of the film that's being ignored by the protagonist. So they're talking about fate and

• 6:46Lizzie Bassett?

  And Twilight, New Moon, obviously.

• 6:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Twilight, even Nightmare on Elm Street does something not dissimilar when they discuss Hamlet and Heather Langenkamp falls asleep. But all of that to be said, again, the movie just feels a little lumbering to me in the same way that Michael is lumbering to me. And as, I'm a huge John Carpenter fan, but I tend to like his zanier films. I actually kind of prefer Assault on Precinct 13, which was his movie before this. I love The Thing.

• 7:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, can we agree that The Thing is his best?

• 7:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Probably, yeah. Without giving it much thought, I would probably say that is his best film. Big Trouble in Little China is, you know, one I'm a big fan of.

• 7:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Love it.

• 7:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I Like the Fog, Prince of Darkness, a lot of people are not fans of. I do really like it. I understand the importance of this film and there are flourishes that I really do like, little grace notes, like Michael's mask coming off and the kind of desperate, childlike pulling down to, you know, hide his face at the end. Donald Pleasence, I think, gives a really good, fun performance and lends some gravitas to the movie. Donald Pleasence, who plays Dr. Loomis.

• 7:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 7:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael's sick shooter toting psychiatrist.

• 8:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 8:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So all to say

• 8:03Lizzie Bassett?

  This evil has left.

• 8:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. While I appreciate a lot about this movie and the place that it holds in cinematic history, it's not one that I go back to, to re-watch very often. That being said, I really love the story behind how it was made, the research that my sister put together for us to talk about today. And I do have one funny Halloween story, kind of. My brother-in-law, back in high school, watched Halloween with his friends and they loved it. They loved it because they thought it was so cool that Dr. Loomis was strapped. They thought that was awesome. So they started a fake gang called the Loomis Crew,

• 8:50Chris Winterbauer?

  and they would blast the Halloween theme song from their cars while they went like this, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, and made finger guns. And it got so out of hand that the Fairfield Police Department added the Loomis Crew to their list of official gangs, not knowing that it was a bunch of dumb high school boys referencing Halloween.

• 9:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That's incredible.

• 9:10Chris Winterbauer?

  So that's my one Halloween story.

• 9:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, there's a couple other things I think we would be remiss in not mentioning right at the top, which is that, Chris, are you aware of The Real Housewife, who has a role in this movie?

• 9:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 9:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 9:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Kyle Richards.

• 9:24Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right, Kyle Richards, yes, who plays Lindsay and did, again, he returned in the most recent franchise entry.

• 9:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Sorry.

• 9:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I watched mostly because of The Real Housewives.

• 9:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I watched all three of them. Kyle Richards was good.

• 9:40Lizzie Bassett?

  She was good. She's a good actor. That is something that I always forget, is she's a good little actor. She does a great job in this. She's very cute.

• 9:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Eight years old.

• 9:48Lizzie Bassett?

  So have to mention the Bravo connection for anybody who's not familiar. And the only other thing I'll say is that this movie really takes its time with the killing spree, which I appreciate. Obviously, you get a kill right up top. You get some boobs, you get a kill right up top. What do you need? And then you have to wait like 50 minutes.

• 10:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's not until the third act that the killing starts again, really.

• 10:11Lizzie Bassett?

  And I think that's really successful. And I think that, you know, he's a slow killer, which is also...

• 10:16Chris Winterbauer?

  He is.

• 10:17Lizzie Bassett?

  I really like. He's so slow.

• 10:20Chris Winterbauer?

  He's very slow.

• 10:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Like an ice skater.

• 10:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He's strong.

• 10:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Chris Winterbauer?

  But he's slow. It's a slow burn. I appreciate that as well. You know. Just maybe pick it up a hair. Maybe we go 10% faster.

• 10:36Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. I do want to start us thematically in a place that I feel one of the reasons this film was so successful is because of babysitters. And I think babysitters hold a unique place in American society, especially, I think, for folks that grew up in the 70s, 80s, 90s. The use of the high school babysitter really became a mainstay. And I think has petered out a little bit, but when we were growing up, at least I remember a couple of high school babysitters quite fondly. And I'm curious, Lizzie, if you had babysitters or babysat when you were in high school?

• 11:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, definitely. I think frequently my cousin babysat me and she was quite a bit older. So that was a more responsible choice. But I babysat some children when I was like 13, 14 years old. And these were like, you know, two year olds. And I don't think that's a good idea.

• 11:35Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 11:35Lizzie Bassett?

  In retrospect, also have to call out Annie, world's worst babysitter, literally the worst one you could hire and also a terrible friend. And then the best babysitter is Lori.

• 11:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Who needs Michael when you got friends like these?

• 11:50Lizzie Bassett?

  They're terrible. They're terrible. Lori is a great babysitter. And we did bring up the final girl in the Nightmare on Elm Street episode. And, you know, this movie kind of crystallizes the idea that the final girl is the one who is sort of is pure and is the one who's good.

• 12:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 12:06Lizzie Bassett?

  And all the other sickos die.

• 12:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I do think Carpenter and Hill have said it was not their intention to make any sort of commentary on sexuality. And I think what they're doing is they're trying to create a shorthand for responsibility, which is Jamie Lee Curtis is the responsible one.

• 12:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Is that true, though? Because Michael's first kill is directly related to his sister being sexual. So I don't know that I buy that.

• 12:32Chris Winterbauer?

  They have, that's just what they've said. They've said that Laurie not having sex was not meant to be a differentiating factor on the basis of sex, but rather, I think what they're getting at is she's being responsible. She's with the kids.

• 12:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 12:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. She's skeptical. She does not just let people into her home unless it's other children.

• 12:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Unless it's Kyle Richards, which is understandable.

• 12:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 12:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 12:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. And that's where I do think this movie does something interesting, which is these babysitters are both, we see them as vulnerable, but I think as children, we see them as these almost mythical protectors, you know what I mean, of us. And so it does something, I think, interesting in pitting Laurie Strode against this automaton, right? Who's gonna bust down the door and there's no adults to help and Dr. Loomis is about as effective as Bob in one battle after another.

• 13:23Lizzie Bassett?

  He's just walking up and down the street.

• 13:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 13:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Actually, that's not true. He's mostly just standing outside of Michael's house for the majority of this movie.

• 13:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And just saying like, hey, get out of here, you kids. And then he's just waiting.

• 13:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Calling the cop and going, he's not here yet.

• 13:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Well, this was not a chic production, as we'll learn.

• 13:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 13:41Chris Winterbauer?

  But before we get there, the details. Halloween is a 1978 horror film directed and co-written by John Carpenter, co-written by his then-girlfriend and longtime collaborator, Deborah Hill, with music composed, as you mentioned, Lizzie, by John Carpenter at his

• 14:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Diddy, diddy, diddy.

• 14:02Chris Winterbauer?

  cord keyboard, or the Moog, or whatever he's at. It was produced by, of course, John Carpenter, who was uncredited, and Deborah Hill, along with Erwin Jablons, who is an executive producer, and Mustafa Akkad, who was an uncredited executive producer. It stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, great name, I will say, fantastic protagonist name in her feature debut, Nick Castle and Tony Moran, and maybe some other people as Michael Myers.

• 14:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 14:32Chris Winterbauer?

  A really, really clutch Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis.

• 14:38Lizzie Bassett?

  He's great.

• 14:38Chris Winterbauer?

  PJ Souls as world's second worst friend, Linda, and Nancy Keys, then Nancy Loomis, as world's worst friend, Annie.

• 14:49Lizzie Bassett?

  I noticed the last name. Was that just a total coincidence?

• 14:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. We'll get to it. Yeah, it is. It's an interesting coincidence. And obviously, Billy Loomis later would be named after

• 14:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 14:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Dr. Loomis. But Dr. Loomis's name comes from a different character from a different movie that we will get to. Charles Cyphers as Sheriff Brackett, and as you mentioned, future Real Housewife, Kyle Richards as Lindsay Wallace. It was released by Compass International Pictures, an Aquarius releasing on October 25th, 1978. And as always, the IMDB logline reads, 15 years after murdering his sister on Halloween night, 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again. Yeah, that's pretty much it.

• 15:38Lizzie Bassett?

  AKA, South Pasadena. This did make me very homesick because it's, it is very clearly Pasadena.

• 15:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It is Pasadena.

• 15:46Lizzie Bassett?

  And I love it.

• 15:47Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to Halloween, A Cut Above the Rest, the documentary, Halloween Unmasked, the documentary, The Films of John Carpenter by John Kenneth Mir, the book, John Carpenter, The Prince of Darkness by Jules Boulanger, and many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews of those involved in the film. Now, how did, Lizzie, a low-budget horror film, very low-budget horror film, with, whether you like it or not, a pretty thin plot, and one of the slowest-moving villains since the introduction of The Mummy in early Hollywood, become the seminal slasher that came to define the subgenre? And what went wrong?

• 16:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, we gotta go back, Lizzie. We gotta start with a man who's as synonymous with horror as basically anybody, I would argue, anybody except Wes Craven. And that is John Carpenter, right? If you think of the, who are the two horror masters of, let's say, 1975 to 2000 or so, I feel like it's those, those two guys are.

• 16:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Top of the pantheon.

• 17:01Lizzie Bassett?

  For sure.

• 17:02Chris Winterbauer?

  But John Carpenter did not grow up in a house of horrors. He didn't even grow up in a strict fundamentalist house like Wes Craven. He grew up in a wonderful house of music.

• 17:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm not surprised.

• 17:14Chris Winterbauer?

  He was born in New York. He moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky when he was five. He was an only child and he and his family lived out in a log cabin in the woods on the grounds of the University of Western Kentucky. His dad taught music history and theory. He was an accomplished violinist. He was in the university orchestra. He accompanied for local plays and even performed in studio sessions with the likes of Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Brenda Lee. And young Johnny Carpenter would go and listen to them play. And he grew up in this really supportive environment. His parents would tell him, try your hand. And his father once gave him this blank sheet of music paper. He sat down, filled it out with little notes and then he played it for him on the piano.

• 17:57Chris Winterbauer?

  And it sounded terrible, but they were always really encouraging of young John. He described music as being second nature, but he wasn't a natural, I think, like his dad. He tried the violin, but he did not have a talent for it. He was unable to play. As he later said, "It was a very sad, sad situation." But operating a camera, a lot easier than the violin. And by the time he was eight, John Carpenter thought, maybe I want to be a director. But Lizzie, he was not inspired by the films you might expect. The first movie he ever saw starred Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.

• 18:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, the African queen.

• 18:38Chris Winterbauer?

  The African queen, which we just covered. He was four years old when he saw it. The image of Bogart with all those leeches on him just stuck with him. And a year later, I mean, of all the imagery, that's the one.

• 18:51Lizzie Bassett?

  That would be what John Carpenter remembers.

• 18:53Chris Winterbauer?

  A year later, he watches 1953's It Came From Outer Space in 3D and he was hooked. He daydreams about the movies he wants to make and then he sees Forbidden Planet in 1956 and it seals the deal.

• 19:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Partly because it has an all-electronic score, which totally blows his mind. So he starts making 8mm films with his friends. And by 14, he's making 40-minute genre movies. Revenge of the Colossal Beasts, Terror from Space, Gorgo vs. Godzilla, Gorgon the Space Monster, La Gee monsters in this universe. But Hollywood was a long way away from Kentucky. He falls in love with the Beatles. He grows out his hair, which he would keep long. It's still long. He's missing most of it, but what he has is long.

• 19:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. I've seen John Carpenter live in concert, and he sure does have some long, stringy hair and a ponytail.

• 19:47Chris Winterbauer?

  He does. He's studied English and history at Western Kentucky University. He plays bass, sings with a band called Kaleidoscope, but deep down, he's restless. He wants to make movies. So two years in, he transfers to USC Film School, flies across the country, lands in Los Angeles. And as Miley Cyrus once said, "I hopped off the plane at LAX with a daydream and my cardigan. Welcome to the land of fame excess. Am I gonna fit in?" Well, John Carpenter didn't have a cardigan. Laurie Strode would in Halloween. But, Lizzie, he had a map. And he got off the plane and thought, "USC doesn't look that far."

• 20:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So he decided to walk from LAX to USC.

• 20:33Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very far.

• 20:35Chris Winterbauer?

  How far do you think? How long do you think it would take to walk from LAX to USC?

• 20:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's probably six miles. Is that right?

• 20:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Nine and a half miles.

• 20:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 20:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Three and a half hours walking at a good clip. It's actually 14 and a half driving miles because of, you know, turns and whatnot. He finally makes it to USC, and he feels out of place. Because USC wants their students to make meaningful, personal films. They're an art school. And John Carpenter says, "I wanna make money. I wanna make big movies. I wanna make commercial movies." Much like Zemeckis, right? With later experience. Or even, I've heard Paul Thomas Anderson, when he showed up at, I don't know if it was Columbia or NYU, and they were like, "Terminator 2 is not a real movie." And he's like, "Terminator 2 is one of the best movies ever. Get the fuck out of here."

• 21:26Lizzie Bassett?

  It's true.

• 21:30Lizzie Bassett?

  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, 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

• 22:12Lizzie Bassett?

  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 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.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 23:14Chris Winterbauer?

  So, the school did host some retrospectives with commercially successful directors, including John Ford and Howard Hawks. Did you see Howard Hawks's name on the television screen?

• 23:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I did, yes, for The Thing.

• 23:29Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. He produced The Thing from Another World, the 1951 black and white film, which John Carpenter would later remake as The Thing, arguably his best movie. Now, Carpenter loved Howard Hawks. He was an Oscar-nominated, genre-agnostic writer, producer, and director. Some of his credits that you guys might know: His Girl Friday, the original Scarface. He is prolific. This is what Carpenter wants: complete control.

• 23:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Commercial budgets, every genre, comedies, westerns, noir. He actually doesn't mention horror, which is interesting. But the seeds were there because his first credit is a seven-minute black and white film he made at USC called Captain Voyager, which you can see online. It has almost no dialogue. It's about a peeping Tom, wearing a cape and balaclava, who lurks around the neighborhood at night and then gets shot by a woman who spots him in her window. There are several point-of-view shots where you can hear him breathing heavily. Sound familiar? Mm-hmm, most of Halloween, yes. Mm-hmm, and just John Carpenter experiencing his fantasy as he's filming.

• 24:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he would actually breathe heavier than that, just trust me. Now, his most famous film school credit is a 20-minute short film called The Resurrection of Bronco Billy. Carpenter did not direct this, but he did co-write the story, which is about a young man who lives in the city and dreams of becoming a cowboy. He also scored and edited the film. So as you mentioned, Lizzie, he's a Renaissance man from the get-go. Now, The Resurrection of Bronco Billy won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Short Film, and the producer of the film mentions Carpenter by name when accepting the Oscar. And so we really have the sense that Carpenter is this wundikind, right? He was a, comes from this musical household, his parents tell him he can accomplish anything,

• 25:23Chris Winterbauer?

  he shows up in Los Angeles, walks to USC, gets an Oscar, he is on his way. And then, everything grinds to a halt. So, he decides it's time to make a feature film. Well, it starts as kind of a long short film, but this will eventually become a feature film. Lizzie, have you ever heard of the movie Dark Star? No. Okay, so Dan O'Bannon, who would go on to write Alien, perhaps most famously, and John Carpenter decide to make this sci-fi comedy called Dark Star.

• 26:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Described as waiting for Godot in space and they are filming it piecemeal, literally. So they get, I heard a thousand dollars, maybe $6,000 from USC and decide to shoot 45 minutes or so. And this is going to be Carpenter's directorial calling card. They'd make like 10 minutes of it, screen it for family and friends, potential investors, raise more money, shoot 10 more minutes. And by the way, this movie is actually pretty fun. It's very low budget, but you can see it owes a lot to Stanley Kubrick. There is so much Dr. Strangelove to this movie. There is so much 2001 Space Odyssey. There's like a self-aware bomb in this movie that the main character is having a conversation with at the end, trying to get it not to detonate. And the bomb realizes that it can only be

• 26:43Chris Winterbauer?

  certain of its own existence. And so therefore it has to detonate itself. It's very absurd. It's very fun. It's definitely low budget, but you can kind of see its influences and you know, it wears all of these influences on its sleeve. This process of raising money and shooting 10 minutes at a time goes on for four years.

• 27:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my God.

• 27:03Chris Winterbauer?

  It is like walking from LAX to USC. During this time Carpenter drops out of USC. At one point he thinks they're done, but then the movie's too short, but it's too long to be as short. Carpenter's composing the score, but the investor who funded post-production wants reshoots. It's a complicated, complicated story that we will get into when we cover the film. Long story short, they finish it. It releases in LA in 1975 and it makes basically no money. And Carpenter's crushed because I think he really thought this was going to be it. Like he had gotten here. Everything's going well. He's going to make his first feature and the studios are going to come calling. He's going to be the next Howard

• 27:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Hawks. But making it in Hollywood is hard. It's like learning the violin. It's really hard. So he lands an agent. The agent sends him out on these generals at the fringes of Hollywood, people with sketchy money and weird projects that they want made. And Carpenter's terrible at selling himself. So none of these are going anywhere and the studios aren't calling and he's taking checks from his dad to stay afloat. So he shifts to writing. And over the next few years, he puts directing on pause and he writes a bunch of scripts. And it turns out he's good at it and a number of them get made. And I just want to talk about a couple that are relevant to our story. So Eyes of Laura Mars. Have you heard of Eyes of Laura Mars? Have you ever seen it?

• 28:28Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 28:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Eyes of Laura Mars was released in 1978, so same year as Halloween. It was directed by Urban Kirchner, stars Tommy Lee Jones and Faye Dunaway. And it's the story of a woman who can see through the eyes of a killer. It's like a reverse Peeping Tom.

• 28:43Lizzie Bassett?

  I have heard about this. I've never seen it.

• 28:45Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what's funny? You think as a package, Kirchner, Tommy Lee Jones, Faye Dunaway, and it's a good logline. And the movie just, for me, it didn't really come together. I still think it's a, would be an interesting movie to remake. And then he directs this TV movie called Someone's Watching Me, which was actually also released in 1978, and is about a woman tormented by a mysterious stalker. Think we're picking up on a theme? Maybe a secret interest of Mr. Carpenter's here? Unclear.

• 29:14Lizzie Bassett?

  John, what are you doing between the hours of 9 and 11 PM at night in your neighborhood?

• 29:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Breathing heavily. Now, the most important script that he would write during this period of about six years was actually written in eight days. It was a modern day Western about a group of cops and prisoners trapped in a police station that was being shut down, defending themselves against a local gang. It was inspired by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo. Carpenter called it The Anderson Alamo, because it takes place in a little town called Anderson. And then he called it The Siege, which makes sense because they talk about it being a siege in the movie. And finally, the suggestion of his distributor, the name changed to Assault on Precinct 13. Have you ever seen Assault on Precinct 13?

• 30:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I have not, but I know I need to.

• 30:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It's good. It's really fun. It's kind of like a nasty little, it's not quite an exploitation film, but it's more in the vein of like an Escape from New York, for example.

• 30:14Lizzie Bassett?

  One of my faves.

• 30:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and I think you can kind of see where Carpenter has a real strength, in my opinion, and that's in ensemble films. And I think he does a good job managing a lot of the characters. Importantly, it does feature Nancy Loomis, who would go on to join the cast of Halloween as a young woman who's working the telephone.

• 30:35Lizzie Bassett?

  And sorry, he wrote this but did not direct it.

• 30:37Chris Winterbauer?

  He wrote it and directed it.

• 30:38Lizzie Bassett?

  And directed it, okay.

• 30:40Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. And Charles Cyphers, who would go on to play Sheriff Brackett in Halloween. And of course, art director Tommy Wallace, who would go on to do production design in Halloween. And perhaps most importantly, his assistant editor and script supervisor was a woman named Deborah Hill. Now, Romance Blooms between Hill and Carpenter, production wraps, they start dating. Assault on Precinct 13 was released in November of 1976. And it flopped. Got mixed reviews. Strike two. Carpenter is devastated. I'll read you the quote. "It was the second time I'd had a film make no money.

• 31:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I tried not to get too upset or take it too personally, but no one wanted me as a director. I went back to writing. Writing was opening a door to another door to another door. It was keeping me alive and paying the bills. But I was programmed for failure. Assault didn't do a thing."

• 31:41Lizzie Bassett?

  It's since become a classic, though, right? It's been remade?

• 31:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It has become a classic, and it was remade with Laurence Fishburne and Ethan Hawke.

• 31:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I didn't love the remake, but it's, it's fun.

• 31:52Lizzie Bassett?

  I think I actually have seen the remake. Anyway, continue.

• 31:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Carpenter may have regretted Precinct 13 in the moment, but he would not regret it long-term because without it, Halloween probably never would have happened. So a year after Precinct comes out, Carpenter's wrapping production on that TV movie, Someone's Watching Me. He's hanging out in the commissary at Warner Brothers and a stranger walks up to him and they say, "Hey, Assault on Precinct 13 is breaking attendance records in the UK."

• 32:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 32:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Carpenter goes, "How is that possible?" And it's possible because of a man named Erwin Yablons. He was the pushy distributor who insisted on the name change to Assault on Precinct 13. Now, he ran an upstart indie distribution company called Compass International Pictures, but he was actually an experienced Hollywood operator. He had worked in sales and distribution at Warner Brothers, and he had even worked on distributing Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo.

• 32:57Chris Winterbauer?

  He hopped from Warner Brothers to Paramount and became known as the president's brother when his younger brother Frank Yablons was promoted to the president of the studio in 1971.

• 33:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say, yeah, so they are actually related.

• 33:09Chris Winterbauer?

  They are brothers.

• 33:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 33:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Nepotism did not work in his favor. In 1975, Frank was canned, and two weeks later, Erwin went too. It was a huge blow. They'd just started producing, so Erwin decides he's gonna form a distribution company. To be clear, Frank is not involved in this. This is just Erwin. They had fewer than 10 employees. By 1976, they had distributed exactly one movie, but they knew how to market themselves. They'd put announcements in the trades. "Compass International, making big moves." Hollywood Reporter says, who knows if it's true? And that's when he got a call from John Carpenter's agent about Precinct 13, which was looking for distribution.

• 33:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And unlike the studios, Erwin thought Carpenter had the goods. Here's his quote. "I was excited. This was a movie that I could sell. Carpenter was obviously a very talented guy, and I wondered how the major studios had not seen what I had."

• 34:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Quick question, just for clarification, sorry. So you said he insisted on the name. Was the name different in the UK?

• 34:17Chris Winterbauer?

  No. So Carpenter's agent connects with Erwin after production has wrapped. Precinct 13, I believe, cost around $100,000 to make, which is incredible. That is one-third the budget of Halloween, and it's an action movie.

• 34:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's nothing.

• 34:33Chris Winterbauer?

  The movie needs distribution. Erwin gets on board before it distributes in the United States and insists on the name change. I believe it was actually going by the name The Siege when Erwin comes on.

• 34:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 34:46Chris Winterbauer?

  The movie flops in the United States, and that's when Erwin gets creative. He finds all these revenue streams that he'd never been aware of when he was at a big studio, because big studios would never need these revenue streams. Non-theatrical rights, school screenings, cruise lines, prisons, the new line cinema model of distribution. So basically, cobbling all this together, he's able to meet payroll, and then he takes the movie to, it's a film festival in Milan, I will do my best to pronounce this name, Mercato Internazionale del Film del TV Film del Documentario. It is an international cinema and television market held annually in Milan.

• 35:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's got something that could sell. It has sex, action, little dialogue, there is interest. And by sex, I mean there's some women in the film. There's not actually really any sex in this movie. But, he realizes, hey, maybe we don't have to just distribute movies like this, maybe we could make movies like this. I could raise a hundred thousand dollars. And that's when he's approached by a tall man in his 50s named, Michael Myers.

• 36:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh no, how slow is he?

• 36:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And he kills him!

• 36:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, well, what did this actual Michael Myers man do in order to deserve being the namesake of one of the most infamous slow-moving serial killers?

• 36:16Chris Winterbauer?

  He killed a lot of people.

• 36:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 36:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Just kidding. No, he didn't know. He actually asked John Carpenter, "John, was there something about me that inspired you to create this mindless lumbering automaton murderer?" And John said, "No, of course not. I just wanted to pay homage to you, because without you Assault on Precinct 13 never would have been successful, and Halloween never would have happened." And, I mean, I guess it's a compliment, but it feels like a little bit of a weird one. But maybe to John, he's like, what an honor. You are now synonymous with one of the greatest villains in cinema history. Sure. So I guess I can see that. Myers works for a distributor called Miracle Pictures and he wants to talk about Precinct 13.

• 37:03Chris Winterbauer?

  They agree to meet at the end of the week. It's the day of the meeting. Erwin's sick. He wants to go home. He thinks about cancelling, but then the phone rings. Myers is already in the lobby. Classic slasher material there. He can't bail. So he goes downstairs. Meyer says, look, I want to take Assault on Precinct 13 to the London Film Festival and then do a UK release. So in November of 1977, Assault on Precinct 13 becomes the surprise hit of the London Film Festival. And it's in this moment that Erwin knows something that nobody else does. He knows something that John Carpenter doesn't even really know. He knows that John Carpenter is a good director. That's right.

• 37:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And he decides, I gotta get him to make a movie with me before he figures it out. Because then I won't be able to afford him. So Erwin has an idea for a movie. It comes to him on a long flight. He knows he wants to do horror because comedy is too divisive. The quote he has is, you know, you tell a joke at a dinner party. A third of the people think it's funny. A third of the people don't laugh and a third of the people think it's offensive. But if you run in with a knife at a dinner party, everybody gets scared. His justification, horror is unifying, humor is divisive. Great. He decides the movie should be about a killer who stalks vulnerable teenage girls as they babysit even more vulnerable little kids. Basically, the whole film. And The Flourish, it takes place on one night Halloween.

• 38:32Chris Winterbauer?

  And he decides, I want to call this movie Halloween. But then he says, Erwin, don't be an idiot. There has to already be a movie called Halloween. So he calls John Carpenter and he pitches him The Babysitter Murders. That's going to be the title. Erwin, go back. Yeah. So Carpenter says,

• 38:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, fine, I'll do it. Because he's unemployed and has nothing else to do. They meet at the local hamburger hamlet, they talk over details, not over hamburgers, but apparently tuna fish sandwiches.

• 39:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Ew, guys!

• 39:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Maybe they're great there. I don't get it, but they're into it. Carpenter's pretty blasé, until Erwin reveals... Actually, we can call it Halloween, because I did some research and nobody's ever called a movie Halloween before. And I did some research, and I think the only horror movie that used a holiday in its title was, Lizzie, Black Christmas.

• 39:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 39:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Until that point in time. There are about 100 movies named Christmas something made, you know, until this point. None named Halloween.

• 39:32Lizzie Bassett?

  That's crazy. It's also a very smart device, the way that he uses it at the end of the film, where, you know, she's banging on the neighbors' doors and they're not answering, theoretically because it's Halloween and kids are acting up and doing crazy shit and they think it's a prank, so...

• 39:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 39:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Very well done.

• 39:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Carpenter also thinks this is a cool idea. He says, "I can do it. I need four weeks and $300,000." Which is a really low ask, but it's a lot more than what he'd done Precinct 13 for. He'll write, he'll direct, he'll compose and produce the music. All he wants, a $10,000 fee and 10% of the profits.

• 40:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 40:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Along with complete creative control.

• 40:19Lizzie Bassett?

  That's a pretty good deal.

• 40:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Erwin says, "For $300,000, you can have whatever you want, John." Because that's a steal. Now, where that $300,000 actually came from is a bit difficult to pin down. So Erwin and Carpenter take the movie to another USC grad, director and producer Mustafa Akkad. He was actually a mentee of Sam Peckinpah and an immigrant from Syria, and he'd long been interested in bringing stories of Islam to the United States. He faced a lot of resistance in Hollywood, so for his big desert epic, Lion of the Desert, he got some unique financing.

• 41:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Specifically Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya gave him $35 million to make this movie about the Second Italyo-Sanusi War starring Anthony Quinn and Oliver Reed.

• 41:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 41:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, that movie flopped hard. I think it made $1 million against its budget, but one source did suggest that Halloween was financed by leftover funds from Line of the Desert, which would mean that Halloween was technically financed by Gaddafi. Muammar Gaddafi was the autocratic leader of Libya for 40 years until the Arab Spring?

• 41:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, so it's safe to say not a cool guy.

• 41:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Probably not. Had access to a lot of money, sovereign wealth. I don't think this is true. This is just what it said on one Halloween resource website because Line in the Desert wasn't shot until 1979. That timeline doesn't actually make sense. I would like to debunk that. I do not think that this was financed by leftover funds from that movie because that movie was made after Halloween. A Vulture retrospective says that Irwin and Akkad split the budget between their respective companies, Compass International and Falcon International, but the AFI states that Akkad advanced the entire budget. I don't know which one to believe, but it was independently financed. There is not a big investment group.

• 42:24Lizzie Bassett?

  They got the money. Whether they got the money from a dictator is...

• 42:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, exactly.

• 42:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, no, potato, potato.

• 42:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Potato, potato. Hollywood has taken money from worse.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 43:18Chris Winterbauer?

  We may not know who paid for it, but we do know who wrote the first draft. And it wasn't John Carpenter. It was Deborah Hill. Oh. Now, Hill had Hollywood in her blood. Her father, Frank Hill, had worked in art direction, but he left that to become a salesman. And Deborah took the opposite approach. She got a degree in sociology. She worked as a flight attendant. She moved to Jamaica. She wrote liner notes for albums. And then she came back to California, started working as a P A, climbed the ranks. And this was a quantum leap. She's going from script supervisor and assistant editor to being a credited producer and writer on a feature film. It's a big deal. And Carpenter needed her. He needed her humanity.

• 44:01Chris Winterbauer?

  As she said, "The story was a complete 50/50 collaboration. I wrote the first draft, laying in the kids, the teenagers, and John came back with a pass for the Sam Loomis character. All the stuff about evil is really John." Which makes a lot of sense. I do think Carpenter is very good at writing, you know, the dialogue amongst men, for example, in some of his films, but I do think his best movies have, we talked about this with The Thing, which was written by the screenwriter who had done Bad News Bears and does an exceptional job setting up the characters really economically. And while I think Carpenter is a really good director, I do think when he brings in another screenwriter, his work really shines. Yeah. So Hill sets the story in Haddonfield, Illinois, an homage to her hometown of Haddonfield,

• 44:46Chris Winterbauer?

  New Jersey. She likes the idea of exposing what's underneath the veneer of the suburbs, and she pulls from her personal experience as a teenage babysitter. And so for Michael Myers, Carpenter decides he wants a villain that's more mythical force than human man. And if Myers seems robotic, Lizzie, that's intentional. Are you familiar with a movie that came out in 1973 that had a big influence on the likes of Jurassic Park and became a very popular HBO series not too long ago? Written by Michael Crichton?

• 45:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait, my Coca- oh, oh, yes, yes, Westworld.

• 45:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Westworld, that's right. About a theme park gone awry with robotic cowboys.

• 45:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it's Pirates of the Caribbean, where they actually do start eating the passengers.

• 45:36Chris Winterbauer?

  They do. Now, Carpenter also pulled from personal experience, he had taken a psychology class in college and he'd visited a mental institution in Kentucky. And he did say, and this is a slightly insensitive quote, but he did say that Dr. Loomis's line about the six-year-old child with devil eyes was inspired by an encounter that Carpenter had had with a severely mentally ill 12 to 13-year-old kid. Children are not possessed by the devil. I hope that child got the psychological help that they needed. So they crack the structure and then they make a list of scares and they just start weaving these scares methodically into the story. And Lizzie, you mentioned the name Sam Loomis. It does not come from Nancy Loomis, it comes from Psycho.

• 46:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's right. Of course.

• 46:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So Tommy Doyle was named after Lieutenant Thomas Doyle from Rear Window in one Hitchcock reference. And then Dr. Loomis and his nurse Marion at the beginning of the film come from Sam Loomis and-

• 46:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Marion Crane.

• 46:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, from Psycho.

• 46:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Halloween's biggest Psycho connection is-

• 46:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of the original screen queen, Janet Leigh.

• 46:49Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Janet Leigh, who had been nominated for her work on that film for an Oscar. And of course, Jamie Lee's father is Tony Curtis.

• 46:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Star of Some Like It Hot. And if anyone is not familiar with Janet Leigh, or if I've for any reason not seen Psycho, she is famously in sort of a, what Nightmare on Elm Street is playing on, she is the person you think you're following at the beginning of the movie. She's the one who's stolen the money and she is the one who is very famously murdered in the shower.

• 47:18Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. She had a hard time showering after that famously as well.

• 47:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I had a hard time showering. I saw Psycho way too young and I took only baths for a really long time because I was really afraid that someone was gonna come stab me in the shower.

• 47:30Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm not a bath guy, not a fan of baths.

• 47:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Love a bath.

• 47:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Gotta be standing. I was scared of pools after seeing Jaws, like pools, oceans, I was, I was afraid of those after Jaws, for sure.

• 47:41Lizzie Bassett?

  There's no sharks in pools, Chris. And there's no psychos in my shower.

• 47:45Chris Winterbauer?

  You can't know that for sure.

• 47:46Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 47:46Chris Winterbauer?

  You just can't. You cannot know that for sure. All right. Jamie Lee Curtis, Lizzie, was not who John Carpenter had in mind for the role of Laurie Strode. In fact, Jamie Lee Curtis didn't seem to be what anyone had in mind. A few years earlier, she was eyed for the role of Regan in The Exorcist.

• 48:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's right.

• 48:07Chris Winterbauer?

  But her mom, Janet, said, "No, no, no. No, no, no."

• 48:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Good for mom.

• 48:12Chris Winterbauer?

  "You're too young. You're not gonna be in this schlocker movie. No." Now, Janet Lee, to be clear, was not against Jamie Lee doing genre work. She would later be very supportive of her work in Halloween, and she would even make some cameos in the series. I think she felt, "You're too young. This movie is extremely adult." No.

• 48:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, to be fair, it requires extreme, far more adult content of Regan than this movie does of Laurie Strode. And Laurie Strode's older than Regan.

• 48:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, she would have been, I believe, like 13 at the time.

• 48:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm. And she's what, 19 in this?

• 48:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, she is. All right. So Carpenter and Hill start casting, as Jamie Lee is fired from her first big role. Lieutenant Barbara Duran in the comedy series Operation Petticoat. She was distraught, but she was also available. Now, Carpenter wanted a different nepo baby, Lizzie, 24-year-old Anne Lockhart, daughter of June Lockhart, granddaughter of Gene and Kathleen Lockhart. But Lockhart turned him down and moved on to Battlestar Galactica, the 1978 version.

• 49:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 49:22Chris Winterbauer?

  So Deborah Hill says, "John, I got just the actress for you," and she brings in 19-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis. And Carpenter falls in love for three reasons. One, she had innocence. Two, she had strength. Three, the girl he really wanted turned him down. So we're going with you, Jamie.

• 49:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it ends up being a really fun commentary to use her, because her mother is sort of the OG screen queen.

• 49:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, I'm glad you mentioned that because no one was more excited than producer Erwin Yablons.

• 49:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm sure.

• 49:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Who immediately finds a photo of Janet Leigh doing the famous scream in the shower from Psycho, puts it next to a photo of Jamie doing a scream, and they send it out to every newspaper in the country.

• 50:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 50:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Brilliant marketing. All right, let's talk about the rest of the cast briefly. So PJ Solz lands the role of Linda, world's second worst friend. She's fresh off playing Norma, one of Sissy SpaceX's tormentors in Carrie.

• 50:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I knew I recognized her and her big 70s hair. Another question for you, why does everyone's hair in the 70s look so good and full? What were they eating that we're not eating now? Lead?

• 50:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Microplastics were not a thing? I don't know, probably lead, lead.

• 50:39Lizzie Bassett?

  We all look like shit now. They looked great.

• 50:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Great hair, violent tendencies. Yeah, exactly.

• 50:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Great hair.

• 50:46Chris Winterbauer?

  And Nancy Loomis, who had been in Assault on Precinct 13, along with Charles Cypher's, joins, Charles Cypher's plays Sheriff Brackett in this film.

• 50:56Lizzie Bassett?

  And Nancy Loomis, by the way, is great. She's very fun.

• 50:58Chris Winterbauer?

  She's really good.

• 50:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Really, really good.

• 51:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And she's good in Assault on Precinct 13, too. I do think that she and PJ Solz, like, it's weird.

• 51:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Curtis looks older than she is, I think, a little bit, but she, I don't know, they all feel a little old.

• 51:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Nancy Loomis looks older, but it's okay.

• 51:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Nancy Loomis looks older, yeah, exactly. The way they treat her as if she's younger, I think, makes it work fine.

• 51:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm actually glad that they all look a bit older because this movie is so sexual in the way that it handles the teenagers, that it's a bit easier to stomach that you're not looking at someone who looks like Heather Langenkamp, for example. They look like they're in their 20s.

• 51:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I agree. And like you mentioned, there's so much nudity asked of these actresses that it starts, you know, I have a hard time watching Euphoria, for example, at times because you have to, you remind yourself, this is supposed to be a 17-year-old, and we're getting a lot of shots of your boobs right now, and it's a little weird as a 36-year-old man. All right.

• 51:57Chris Winterbauer?

  As everybody tells me, shut up, Chris. Shut up. It makes sense for the story.

• 52:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Sam Levinson does not agree.

• 52:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Future housewife of Beverly Hills, Kyle Richards.

• 52:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 52:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Lands the role of Lindsay. She's only eight years old. And like Nightmare on Elm Street, Lizzie, the young actors all worked for scale. So the only way we're going to get this movie in under budget is if everybody's doing it for scale. With one exception, if there's one role in this movie, Lizzie, that you're going to break the bank for, who is it?

• 52:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Dr. Loomis.

• 52:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Dr. Loomis. And the first choice was not Donald Pleasence, but instead Peter Cushing, who's probably best known now as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars.

• 52:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 52:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Darth Vader's number two.

• 52:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 52:41Chris Winterbauer?

  In Star Wars, the original trilogy. He was a veteran of the British Hammer horror films alongside Christopher Lee.

• 52:49Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. Of course, played Dr. Van Helsing.

• 52:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm. And Baron Frankenstein. And Carpenter was a huge fan of Cushing and he thought, this guy's accomplished. I believe at this point, Star Wars had been released. That was 1977. He's just been in this huge movie, but he's an experienced genre actor. So he calls his agent and he's, oh, man, we want Peter. And his agent's like, yeah, um, Peter's above this, to be honest, so it's a pass. And Cushing never got asked. He never got past his agent. So Carpenter goes to Cushing's former co-star, Christopher Lee, who would of course later be part of Star Wars, playing Count Dooku in the prequels and Saruman in Lord of the Rings. And Christopher Lee turns down Halloween. Now Deborah Hill says that she and Carpenter later ran into him at a party and he said,

• 53:37Chris Winterbauer?

  meaning Lee said, it was the biggest mistake of his career. Take that with a grain of salt.

• 53:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, think about it, though. He'd done it at that point, like seven of the Hammer Dracula films, I think.

• 53:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I think seven or eight.

• 53:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 53:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 53:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Probably tired.

• 53:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Probably tired, but Halloween became such a franchise and Pleasence did return, you know what I mean?

• 53:55Lizzie Bassett?

  True.

• 53:55Chris Winterbauer?

  To a few of them. So like, he could have, that's a lot of work is the point, you know, that he passed up on.

• 54:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Now Erwin was happy that it didn't work out because he didn't want this to feel like another Hammer horror film. And he had a different actor in mind. Back when he was at Paramount, he distributed a Western called Will Penny, which starred Charlton Heston. Charlton Heston actually calls this his favorite movie that he's ever worked on, and he got great reviews in it. It was directed by Tom Grease, who's John Grease's dad.

• 54:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 54:23Chris Winterbauer?

  You guys would remember as Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite.

• 54:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Or the guy in the closet from Real Genius.

• 54:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Or The White Lotus, most recently, Tanya's dastardly ex-husband. It co-starred Slim Pickens.

• 54:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 54:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzy, fan favorite, and Donald Pleasence played one of the film's villains. So as Erwin later said, "That character had stayed with me for years, and I suggested Pleasence for the part of the obsessed doctor. My feeling was that he would give the character a quirky originality and a sense of dignity." That's exactly right. That's exactly what he does.

• 54:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree also that this character is so funny because he's like, A, he says, you know, he's like, "You can't understand the evil that Michael has. You don't, you don't know what he's capable of." And it's like, "You don't either, sir. You just said he hasn't spoken a word in 15 years. So how do you know?"

• 55:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I know.

• 55:15Lizzie Bassett?

  "What he's gonna do? Has he been coloring his plans for you?" One wonders if, had Michael had a better, more compassionate therapist.

• 55:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 55:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Would we be in this place?

• 55:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Most of the movie is Dr. Loomis, like, kicking rocks and wandering around going, "I hope that Michael shows up at some point."

• 55:34Lizzie Bassett?

  His, his whole plan is literally just, "We're at his house, let's just wait at his house." And then he just walks down the street looking for something amiss.

• 55:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Eventually, he'll get bored of killing these babysitters and come home to take a nap. Like, "I'll kill him then." I do love when he's talking to the sheriff and Michael just drives behind him.

• 55:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 55:54Chris Winterbauer?

  At the corner. So Donald Pleasence, he was 58 at the time that the film was getting made, agrees to take on the role, much to Carpenter's surprise. But he wants $25,000. So Yablons increases the budget to $325,000.

• 56:10Chris Winterbauer?

  So they'd get Michael Myers at a great price. Carpenter hires Nick Castle, an old USC friend who had helped write The Resurrection of Billy Bronco and who had played an uncredited alien in Darkstar. But Castle remembers his hiring a bit differently. Here's the quote. "When I found out that John was going to be shooting Halloween pretty close to my house, I went down there and asked if I could stick around the set because at that time I was trying to get my own pictures off the ground as a director." He said, "Okay, fine, but as long as you're gonna be here, why don't you do something?" And he said, "Here, put this on, you'll be the guy running around, the killer." And I said, "Fine, do I get any money?" And he said, "Yes, $25 a day."

• 56:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it's so low. It's so low. And Castle probably said, "Deal." And I'm thrilled, I'm getting paid. What are you guys making? Nobody tells him.

• 57:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 57:03Chris Winterbauer?

  He was available, he was cheap. And Lizzie, he also had a family lineage working in his favor. His dad was a choreographer for Fred Astaire.

• 57:11Lizzie Bassett?

  What, damn. Again, there's 12 people in Hollywood in the 70s and they all had kids and they're all in Halloween.

• 57:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Now Carpenter liked the way that Nick Castle walked, but he didn't like his face, so he cast a different actor for the brief moment when Myers removes his mask. Tony Moran, who, and I agree with this, he has a more, quote, "angelic" look. He looks like a giant child in that moment, which I think is effective.

• 57:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Is there a makeup effect on his eye?

• 57:37Chris Winterbauer?

  There is, from when, because Laurie pokes him through the mask with the clothes hanger before that.

• 57:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, the child version of Michael, very cherubic, very angelic.

• 57:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Very effective.

• 57:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that sequence is great, although, who has a knife of that size in their kitchen? It is like a four-foot machete that he's just pulled out.

• 57:57Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a sword. It's one of those classic turkey carving swords.

• 58:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 58:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, let's talk about the mask a little bit. Because it was described two slightly different ways in the script. Here's the first description. "A large, full-head, playtex rubber mask, not a monster or ghoul, but the pale, neutral features of a man weirdly distorted by the rubber."

• 58:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, nailed it.

• 58:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Here's the second description. "A Halloween mask made of rubber with the grotesque features of a man." Meh, pretty close.

• 58:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, have you ever seen the movie Eyes Without a Face?

• 58:29Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 58:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, you'd like it. Really good French film, 1960s. This woman becomes disfigured. She wears this blank, full-face mask. I'm sure you've seen the image of her. It's got the eye holes are too big. Her whole rest of her face is covered. Her mouth is closed. It's very much referenced in Good Night Mommy. Have you seen that film?

• 58:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah, with the bandages.

• 58:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm. Also, that Almodovar movie, The Skin I Live In. Very much referenced in that.

• 58:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, I have to watch this because I love Good Night Mommy. Not so much the American remake. And, you know, I had no idea.

• 59:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Check out Eyes Without a Face. Good movie. Now, Myers almost wore a clown mask.

• 59:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that makes sense because he does as a child.

• 59:13Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Production designer Tommy Wallace goes shopping at a magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard, and he finds two options. The first is that classic Emmett Kelly sad clown mask with the big downturned mouth. And the second is a blank mask. He's trying to find a blank mask. So he goes to look at the masks of people and tries to see which one has the least amount of features. Richard Nixon looks too much like Nixon. Spock looks too much like Spock. And then he finds, Lizzie, I'm sure you know this.

• 59:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I do know it. William Shatner.

• 59:44Chris Winterbauer?

  William Shatner. And it just looks kind of blank. And so he takes it off the shelf, takes it home, cuts the eye holes bigger, takes off the sideburns, darkens the hair, paints it white. They bring both masks to the office. They try the clown mask first, and it works. Like, it looks, it'll be scary. And then they put the blank mask on, and it is apparently terrifying.

• 1:00:07Lizzie Bassett?

  It is terrifying.

• 1:00:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Wallace said that's when he knew that Halloween was going to be a very scary movie. But there's one person who disagreed. Erwin Yablons, he said, "I think it's dumb. I think it's phony. I don't think this works at all." He's admitted he was wrong, and that was his one wrong instinct with this franchise. But there were other people with doubts, Lizzie. Donald Pleasence was feeling a little doubtful about this movie he'd signed up for. So he sits down with John Carpenter before filming starts, and he lays it out. "I don't understand the script. I don't like this script. I don't know who my character is. The only reason I'm doing this is because my daughter thought your movie was cool. So tell me why I'm doing this." And John Carpenter's like, "Uh, uh, uh."

• 1:00:52Chris Winterbauer?

  His most expensive actor just told him he hates the script, doesn't understand his character. He must have come up with something. Pleasence sticks around, and Carpenter later realizes, "When we became friends, he wants to find out how much you want to do the movie. He wants to find out how passionate you are, so that's his little trick." Pleasence didn't actually mean any of it. He just wanted to make sure that Carpenter could stick by his guns if he was gonna work with him.

• 1:01:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Rude.

• 1:01:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is like, on the one hand, I get it, but yeah, terrifying. What is like-

• 1:01:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Traumatic.

• 1:01:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So traumatic. Why do you want to make this movie? It sucks. Go.

• 1:01:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Probably how he therapized Michael.

• 1:01:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and then he went back to his keyboard and, "Doo doo doo doo doo." Yeah, played by himself. So, they only have three weeks of pre-production, which is crazy. Production starts in March of 1978. As you mentioned, Lizzie, much of it is shot in Pasadena and South Pasadena, along with West Hollywood, and the schedule is tight. Twenty-two shooting days, of which Donald Pleasence is only available for five.

• 1:01:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:01:51Chris Winterbauer?

  So they've got their biggest name for five days. And after day one, Jamie Lee Curtis is convinced she's gonna get fired. She knows she sucks. She goes home, the phone rings, her roommate answers, "Jamie, it's John Carpenter." Oh my god, it's Operation Petticoat all over again. John's gonna let me go.

• 1:02:14Chris Winterbauer?

  She picks up the phone and Carpenter goes, "Hey darling, it's John. I just want to tell you how happy I am and how fantastic you were today. And I just know it's gonna be amazing." End quote.

• 1:02:25Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very nice.

• 1:02:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And she said that no director does that, but John did that. So kudos to John. Now Carpenter wasn't always that hands-on or verbose with all of his actors. They didn't all get the Jamie Lee Curtis treatment. Nick Castle kept asking for Michael Myers motivation. "John, where's this guy coming from?" And Carpenter said, "Nick, don't act. Just walk."

• 1:02:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, he doesn't have a motivation, basically.

• 1:02:52Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 1:02:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's just a monster.

• 1:02:54Chris Winterbauer?

  That's what Carpenter wanted, right? He says Myers should be blank so the audience can project their fears on to him. That's the goal.

• 1:03:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, he's the shape.

• 1:03:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Castle does appear maskless very briefly, Lizzie, during the mental institution escape. You can see his face for a brief second. And shooting that scene was brutal. It's 3 a.m. He's barely dressed. He's getting repeatedly hosed down with cold water because it's supposed to be raining. I also want to mention, that's one of my favorite moments directorially is when they pull forward and you see the other patients wandering.

• 1:03:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that.

• 1:03:24Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, do they let them out at night? It's very eerie, really well done.

• 1:03:27Lizzie Bassett?

  The nurse is like, "Since when do they let them wander around?" Yeah, it's great. It's very, very well done. The sort of realization that the gate has been broken down and that, you know, Michael has escaped happens very slowly.

• 1:03:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It does.

• 1:03:39Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's a very, I think, smart way to get all the exposition out. Not that you need much for Michael.

• 1:03:45Chris Winterbauer?

  And they avoid showing the institution.

• 1:03:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:03:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is also very smart.

• 1:03:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's just a fence.

• 1:03:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It is.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:04:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the $325,000 budget is barely enough. Everybody's wearing multiple hats. Deborah Hill, that is her hand grabbing the knife in the POV opening when Michael Myers stalks and kills his sister.

• 1:04:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:04:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, that's little Deborah's hands, not a child's hands.

• 1:04:50Lizzie Bassett?

  A little boy's hand.

• 1:04:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Michael Myers was played by multiple crew members, including the dog trainer, stunt man.

• 1:04:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm glad it was a dog trainer, because the way that that dog went limp really upset me, and I was, I hope the dog was fine.

• 1:05:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm pretty sure that's because it's the dog trainer.

• 1:05:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, good, good, good.

• 1:05:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Holding the dog, yeah, in that instance, as he said, "Sleep."

• 1:05:13Chris Winterbauer?

  The dog goes limp very convincingly in that scene.

• 1:05:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I know, it's an amazing actor dog. That's why I was a little nervous.

• 1:05:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Maybe a sedative was used. I don't know. I didn't find anything about that. Also, production designer Tommy Wallace did also play Michael Myers. And there were a lot of struggles, Lizzie, like making springtime in Los Angeles look like fall in Illinois.

• 1:05:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm sure you noticed how verdently green everything looks in this movie.

• 1:05:40Lizzie Bassett?

  There's also at least one shot where she turns one corner, it's very dry and sunny, and then she turns another corner, and it's soaking wet.

• 1:05:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. That being said, great pains were taken to avoid palm trees. There are a cobble visible at the beginning of the film, but I think they overall do a very good job, especially compared to Nightmare on Elm Street, where they just say...

• 1:05:57Lizzie Bassett?

  They don't even try.

• 1:05:58Chris Winterbauer?

  "Here's the Venice canals of Springfield."

• 1:06:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, also, you know, South Pasadena famously has stood in for the East Coast, and particularly New England, many, many times. You know, Mad Men, Don Draper's house in Austin, New York, you can drive right past that. That's in South Pasadena. Father of the Bride is there. So if you want to shoot for East Coast fall, that's kind of your only option in the LA area.

• 1:06:24Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. And you could go to, like, Sierra Madre, for example.

• 1:06:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, which they do, I think, in this.

• 1:06:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. One of the big things that they were trying to do was get some sort of brown into the frame. So they had a team of six to eight people on leaf duty. They actually painted a lot of paper leaves, autumn colors. They put them in front of a fan, scattered them across the yard, rake them up, bag them for the next scene. And that's why in every single shot and scene, you see like the equivalent of a bunch of freeway trash of paper leaves on people's perfectly green yards. And they couldn't find any pumpkins. The jack-o'-lanterns in the movie are squashes that are painted orange because, again, we're not in season. But the mood on set was light and happy. Unlike Nightmare on Elm Street, there wasn't a lot of top-down pressure. Jamie Lee Curtis said there were basically

• 1:07:14Chris Winterbauer?

  15 to 20 people on set at any given time because everybody's doing multiple jobs. Almost everybody's under 30 years old. The cast shares one Winnebago. And Curtis said it was magic. A friend of somebody cooked the food each day and we all ate on the ground together. And so it sounds like the actual production itself was Pretty fun. A pretty pleasant experience. And then we got to post-production, and things got a little nerve-wracking. First, John Carpenter doesn't know how to end the movie. So Carpenter actually shot two versions of Loomis's reaction to Michael Myers disappearing. And this was actually because Donald Pleasence asked him, "How do you want me to play this?" So in the first version, Pleasence goes, "Oh my God, he's gone, like a great Scot." And

• 1:07:56Chris Winterbauer?

  in the second version, he goes, "Oh my God, I knew this would happen." And Carpenter really liked the second version. Yeah. He knew that's the version we gotta go with. And then the montage that ends the film was not in the script. They found it in the editing room to show all the places that Myers had been or could be. Evil is everywhere, which also left the door open for a sequel. You gotta. Which was not intentional, according to Hill and Carpenter. They just wanted to give the movie a creepy ending. Now, according to production designer Tommy Wallace, they used nearly every foot of film that they shot. So the shooting ratio of a film, right? The number of feet that you shoot versus the actual length of the finished film.

• 1:08:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Makes sense. They didn't shoot for very long.

• 1:08:40Chris Winterbauer?

  No, and so, you know, we've talked about films with a shooting ratio of 50 to 1, meaning for every one minute of finished footage, you've shot 50. I would guess this is something a lot closer to, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5 to 1, single-digit ratio.

• 1:08:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. Very economical.

• 1:08:55Chris Winterbauer?

  The honeymoon phase ended as John Carpenter started to show the movie to people. He showed it to an executive and the executive said, "This doesn't work. It's not scary at all." Nancy Loomis saw it and she thought, "Holy shit, this movie's completely forgettable." And you know what the problem was, Lizzie?

• 1:09:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Music?

• 1:09:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It didn't have any music.

• 1:09:16Lizzie Bassett?

  There you go. You need John Carpenter going, "Bee-dee-dee, bee-dee-dee, bee-dee."

• 1:09:21Chris Winterbauer?

  This is conjecture. Carpenter must have done so much blow because he wrote this score in three days.

• 1:09:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, it kind of sounds like it.

• 1:09:31Chris Winterbauer?

  It does.

• 1:09:32Lizzie Bassett?

  In a great way. I love it, but yeah.

• 1:09:35Chris Winterbauer?

  He didn't even score the picture. He just wrote the themes blind in a room and then flew them into the editing suite. And he's like, "This goes here. This one kind of goes here." And it generally worked really well.

• 1:09:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, you mentioned the main title theme. It's iconic. It's arguably the most iconic theme in 5'4" outside of Mission Impossible. The dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. It's a piano riff based on his dad teaching him 5'4" time on the bongos when he was 13. He sat down on the piano, he played it, and then he then called his dad and played it for him. And it, of course, became one of the most iconic pieces of music in Hollywood history, arguably.

• 1:10:14Lizzie Bassett?

  You only need three days and four pounds of cocaine.

• 1:10:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Erwin might have been doing some stress relief cocaine as well because he is desperately trying to get a major studio to distribute this movie. He sets up a screening and he invites Paramount, Warner Brothers, Columbia. Nobody shows up. They didn't even show up. It's not like Paramount turning down Nightmare where they watched it. It's just Erwin sitting there waiting for them to come.

• 1:10:41Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:10:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Nobody comes. So then they screened the movie at some local colleges. At UCLA, a third of the audience apparently walked out. At USC, one of these douchebag film students asks why they'd waste the chance to make a movie on a disgusting horror story. To which, accomplished cinematographer Dean Cundy politely says, "We're trying to do something fresh with a genre that's a little stale." And Deborah Hill says, "Yeah, we kind of hope it'll become a classic." And the student says, "That's pretentious and ridiculous."

• 1:11:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. And that student was Bradley Cooper.

• 1:11:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry, that's a reference to Bradley Cooper appearing in the audience of Inside the Actors Studio.

• 1:11:19Chris Winterbauer?

  That is. Bradley Cooper, I think at this time, would have been two years old. But he still might have said that. He was precocious.

• 1:11:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, I could see it.

• 1:11:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, it seems like that student was right. At first, they had no distribution. They were lost at sea. But sometimes, Lizzie, you gotta walk from LAX to USC.

• 1:11:38Lizzie Bassett?

  You gotta.

• 1:11:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Because it's the only way. So Erwin sells the movie one city at a time. And he starts in Kansas City on October 25th, 1978.

• 1:11:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, great barbecue.

• 1:11:52Chris Winterbauer?

  The first night goes okay. Opening grosses are about $200 per theater, according to the AFI. And then the ticket sales just kept going up. Within a week, daily grosses were between $1,600 and $2,000 a day. Audiences were returning to see it again and again. They were talking back at the screen, like in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

• 1:12:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:12:15Chris Winterbauer?

  They rushed the movie to New York and Los Angeles for Halloween. It plays the San Diego Film Festival. And Deborah Hill and Jamie Lee Curtis led a screening at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Arts.

• 1:12:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:12:27Chris Winterbauer?

  On November 10th, 1978, The Hollywood Reporter claims that Halloween had made $2 million in the United States and another $1 million in advance sales from foreign markets after a single screening at... The Mercado Internazionale del Film, del TV Film, del Documentario in Milan.

• 1:12:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Is back.

• 1:12:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Where Yablons had first met Michael Myers years earlier. Two weeks in, Halloween had nearly 10xed its $325,000 budget. And it found an unexpected friend in Roger Ebert, patron saint of low-budget horror films, whose positive review started with a Hitchcock quote, "I enjoy playing the audience like a piano," to which Ebert says, "So does John Carpenter. Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to Psycho."

• 1:13:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 1:13:21Chris Winterbauer?

  An apt comparison. Now, it wasn't all positive. Lizzie, could you imagine any criticism that Halloween might receive, perhaps from female critics?

• 1:13:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. I mean, there's some unnecessary, one could argue, potentially unnecessary toplessness. And the majority of the movie is just Michael Myers stabbing young teenage girls. Well, not the majority. The majority of the kills are Michael Myers stabbing young teenage girls, although he does kill a boy as well.

• 1:13:48Chris Winterbauer?

  That's true. And he also chokes one of them to death.

• 1:13:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, well, he stabs her too. They're sort of, they are treated.

• 1:13:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Step, step.

• 1:13:56Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what he does. He does a choke, choke, step, step. Yeah, I mean, look, I find it very hard to believe that there is no commentary on, you know, teenage girls' sexuality and boys' sexuality, to be honest, in this movie, because they're murdered for doing the sexes. You can't tell me otherwise. I've seen it. I watched it. That's what it is.

• 1:14:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, that was a major criticism of the film. The one female character who did not die was the one who was not sexually active. And again, for years Carpenter and Hill have denied that this was intentional.

• 1:14:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Which, I guess, fair, because he does try to kill her. He's just really bad at it if you haven't had sex. If you have had sex, he's very good at it, or maybe you're just very slow to react.

• 1:14:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It's, once you have sex, you are bad at defending yourself.

• 1:14:42Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what I mean. Yes.

• 1:14:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. Got it. So, in late November, the Rivoli Theater in New York had to pull Halloween to make room for Universal's big Christmas release, Steven Spielberg's 1941.

• 1:14:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoops.

• 1:14:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Which flopped so hard, they said, "Eh, you're out of here."

• 1:14:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Halloween's back.

• 1:15:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Two weeks later, they put Halloween back.

• 1:15:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is great. Halloween grossed roughly $50 million in the United States.

• 1:15:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Damn.

• 1:15:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And nearly $70 million worldwide. I presume, given his 10% profit participation, John Carpenter became a millionaire. After this film. It was the most lucrative independently-produced film of all time for 12 years. Do you know what surpassed it, Lizzie? It didn't have as low a budget, but it was just independently-produced.

• 1:15:32Lizzie Bassett?

  1978 would have been 1990.

• 1:15:34Chris Winterbauer?

  You're never gonna guess it. It would have been 1990, yeah.

• 1:15:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm not gonna get it?

• 1:15:39Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 1:15:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, what is it? What is it?

• 1:15:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

• 1:15:43Lizzie Bassett?

  There's literally no way I would have ever gotten that.

• 1:15:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Even if Michael Myers was chasing you and your life depended on it.

• 1:15:49Lizzie Bassett?

  And he's so slow. Yeah, still wouldn't.

• 1:15:50Chris Winterbauer?

  He is slow. He'd catch me eventually. All right. Alongside Toby Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween is, as we discussed, credited with revitalizing the slasher genre. Now, even though Deborah Hill and John Carpenter claimed they never planned a sequel, Halloween spawned a hell of a franchise. There were

• 1:16:09Lizzie Bassett?

  So many.

• 1:16:10Chris Winterbauer?

  A dozen more movies, two reboots, and the Laurie Strode saga seemingly came to an end with the somewhat miserable, in my opinion, Halloween Ends, released in 2022.

• 1:16:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Pretty not good.

• 1:16:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, I'm thrilled. Jamie Lee Curtis, get the bag. Jamie Lee Curtis is great in those movies. All the actors are great.

• 1:16:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:16:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I did not enjoy those films.

• 1:16:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I, you know what? I was fine watching it. But again, I was watching it mostly for the novelty of a Beverly Hills housewife being in it.

• 1:16:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Kyle Richards is good in it. Jamie Lee Curtis did appear in most of these films, but I would argue, for the most part, transcended the franchise. She became a star and a sex symbol in her own right, independent of Halloween. The movie did mark the end of Carpenter and Deborah Hill's romantic relationship, but it solidified their professional partnership. They went on to make several more movies together, including a couple of Halloween sequels, but also a few favorites of mine. The Fog, which I really like. Escape from New York, which is great. And Escape from LA, which is one of the best so-bad-it's-good movies of all time.

• 1:17:11Lizzie Bassett?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:17:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's just, to this day, contains my biggest, like funniest, map blunder. So when they show the map of Los Angeles and it says La Canyada up to the north, I thought they were making a joke that Canada had been taken over by Mexico and it was La Canada when I was a kid, because that's how dumb I was.

• 1:17:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Little did you know.

• 1:17:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Little did I know. La Canyada, real place that I can't afford to live.

• 1:17:36Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 1:17:37Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, moving on. Carpenter achieved, for the most part, the directorial status that he'd sought, but he never enjoyed the genre malleability that Howard Hawks once did. He squarely worked inside the horror and action genre, I would say, although he did try to make a Western for a long time. Hill also went on to create one of the first big female producing partnerships when she joined forces with Linda Opst, and some of their movies included The Wonderful, The Fisher King, Clue, which we just discussed on Unspooled,

• 1:18:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:18:09Chris Winterbauer?

  and Adventures in Babysitting.

• 1:18:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, great. What a fun tieback.

• 1:18:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Which was Chris Columbus's directorial debut. Deborah Hill passed away from cancer in 2005. She was only 54 years old.

• 1:18:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:18:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Financier Mustafa Akad died that same year in the 2005 Aman bombings in Jordan. He was 75 years old. And in 2006, Halloween was added to the National Film Registry. Like Michael himself, the Halloween franchise collapses occasionally, but never stays down. The brand has threatened to swallow up the original work, yet Halloween the film retains a stature apart from Halloween the franchise and the empire, and its presence in the National Film Registry is a testament to its singular and continuing power. And I'm sure we'll get another reboot any day now.

• 1:18:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah. Of course. Of course, because Michael's never done.

• 1:19:02Chris Winterbauer?

  He's never done, but I have to ask you, in his origin story, what went right?

• 1:19:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I think a lot went right. As we discussed, I really enjoy this movie. I am gonna stick with it, though, and give it to Dean Cundy for the cinematography on this.

• 1:19:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I think

• 1:19:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Good one.

• 1:19:19Lizzie Bassett?

  it could have looked so hokey, particularly the way that they were shooting this, whether it's, you know, the shot from when he, at the very beginning, when he puts the mask on, all the POV shots. I think the way that he just establishes space and quiet in the frame and in this movie is really fantastic. And I just don't think it would be as scary or as successful without him behind the camera. I really, it's worth looking at it to see, you know, what he blooms into in terms of Jurassic Park and later things. I think you can see a lot of it starting here.

• 1:19:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. He is a generational talent behind the camera. And that was one of, I completely agree with you. One of the first things I felt, actually, it's in the slow dolly in on Jamie Lee in the corner of the classroom. It's such a beautiful shot. And like, she looks so beautiful.

• 1:20:12Lizzie Bassett?

  A lot of them are beautiful. Like when she's standing outside and you sort of these shots, also the way that they capture him appearing and disappearing and him just like just exiting frame. Yeah.

• 1:20:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's very simple. Well, yeah, when he's in the clotheslines outside of in her backyard, it's a great shot. Yeah, it's a really, really wonderfully shot movie. And especially in when you know the budget they had and how quickly they must have been moving and how little time he probably had to light. It's, it just reinforces the creativity because it's an economically shot movie, too.

• 1:20:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's what you get the sense of with a lot of his early work, including Assault on Precinct 13. I would like to cheat and give a tie.

• 1:20:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:20:50Chris Winterbauer?

  So Deborah Hill, because I think, I would imagine if Carpenter had tried to write the teenage girls in this movie, it might have felt very different.

• 1:20:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think the kids are really well-written and they don't try to act older than their age. They're just little kids. I think, you know, the girls are well-written. And that, most of the movie is you're just hanging out with these babysitters.

• 1:21:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Like dreading what's going to come next. So in a lot of ways, she wrote a lot of the meat of the movie. And then I want to, on the flip side, give it to Donald Pleasence, who has some of the most insane dialogue.

• 1:21:24Lizzie Bassett?

  He sure does.

• 1:21:25Chris Winterbauer?

  You are ever apt to hear and yet totally grounds all of it. And it's, it's believable. And I kind of buy his character. And when he says like, you have the wrong feeling. Like, he just says so many weird, "Death has come to your little town, Sheriff." I met him 15 years ago. I was told there was nothing left, no reason, no conscience, no understanding. And even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong, I met this six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes, the devil's eyes. It's so over the top, but the way he delivers it.

• 1:22:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it's great.

• 1:22:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so earnest and yet also he kind of throws it away a little bit too, because he's almost too busy to be talking to the sheriff and it totally works. And he is wonderful. And I think without him, opposite Jamie Lee, I don't know. I just don't think the movie would work. And so I would like to give it to him, too.

• 1:22:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. And obviously, we love Jamie Lee.

• 1:22:23Chris Winterbauer?

  We do.

• 1:22:23Lizzie Bassett?

  But she has enough. She doesn't need her own what went right yet.

• 1:22:27Chris Winterbauer?

  No, we'll give it to her with any number of films that follow this one. All right, Lizzie, that concludes our coverage of Halloween. Would you like to tell the folks at home what we have coming their way next?

• 1:22:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. A natural follow-up, I would say.

• 1:22:43Chris Winterbauer?

  This is, this is what I throw on after Halloween, every time I watch it.

• 1:22:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. You know what? I'm very excited because we are actually entering into our first directorial double feature. And it's double man. It's man on man, meaning Michael man. And we are starting next week with The Last of the Mohicans. I'm very excited about this one. It's a really interesting story. I also, I love that movie.

• 1:23:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It is like, in a dark sense, maybe kind of a Thanksgiving movie.

• 1:23:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh.

• 1:23:20Lizzie Bassett?

  That was not the intention.

• 1:23:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm just saying, you slotted it into November, Lizzie.

• 1:23:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Unfortunately, it is in November. That's not what we were, what we were intending. But yes, it does star, hey, it does star a lot of Native Americans. And we are going to discuss over the course of that episode, how its portrayal of Native Americans on camera, and then also treatment of them off camera, was a big point of discussion in Hollywood at the time. And how it differed from Dances with Wolves.

• 1:23:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Spoiler alert. So that will be next. And then the week after that, we will be covering Chris.

• 1:23:54Chris Winterbauer?

  When you feel that heat around the corner, it's go that ass. That's the quote that we should use.

• 1:23:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. Every film bro's favorite movie, Heat. Yes.

• 1:24:02Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a great movie.

• 1:24:04Lizzie Bassett?

  It is great. It is great.

• 1:24:06Chris Winterbauer?

  We will first discuss The Theft of America by the colonizing Puritans. And then The Theft from the Banks by Robert De Niro, Tom Sizemore, Val Kilmer, Wang Gro. I am excited. It's gonna be Heat. Michael Mann's Heat. One of the greatest love stories put to the screen, in my opinion.

• 1:24:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Man on man.

• 1:24:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it really is. Two men addicted to each other who ultimately can't live without each other.

• 1:24:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Amazing.

• 1:24:32Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think it's a beautiful movie. So I'm excited to talk about it.

• 1:24:35Lizzie Bassett?

  And I meant our double feature will be man on man, mano a mano.

• 1:24:39Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Man on man on man. That's right.

• 1:24:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Man on man on man. Please do that. That's good.

• 1:24:47Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the musical we're gonna write.

• 1:24:49Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys. If you're still enjoying this podcast somehow after that, there are a few easy ways to support us. Number one, you can leave a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you're listening on. Five stars, five stars. Number two, you can tell a family member, tell a friend, hey, guys, check this podcast out. It's pretty good. Number three, you can subscribe for bonus content on Apple Podcasts. That's right. If you go to our page on Apple Podcasts for $4.99 a month, you can get at least one bonus episode a month. We just did a review on One Battle After Another. And we have a review coming up very soon of Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, starring very beautiful giant man, Jacob Elordi.

• 1:25:31Chris Winterbauer?

  If you are interested in even more content, you can join our Patreon. Head to www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. You can join for free. For $5, you get bonus content and an ad-free RSS feed. And for $50, you can have your name shouted out by Dr. Loomis himself like this.

• 1:25:52Speaker 04

  Hey Lonnie, get your ass away from there. I told everybody. Adam Morfatt, Adrian Pangkorea, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Gracebee. He was doing very well last night. Chris Liel, Chris Zucker, DB Smith, David Friskalanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Scheible, Ellen Singleton, MXodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G. He's gone. He's gone from here. The evil is gone. Film it yourself. Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids,

• 1:26:35Speaker 04

  Grace Potter, Half Gray Hound, Jake Killen, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, Jen Mustremarino, JJ Rapido, Jory Hillpiper.

• 1:26:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, now from the sequels.

• 1:26:48Speaker 04

  I shot him six times. I shot him in the heart. Jose Salto, Kay Canaba, Kate Ellington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Olgerschlager McCoy, Frankenstein, Lonrelad, Lena LJ, Lydia Howes, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath. I am talking about the real possibility that he is still out there. Nate the Knife, Nathan Centeno, Rosemary Southward, Rural Juror, Sadie, just Sadie, Scott O'Shea, Salman Chainani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, and the Provost's Family, where the O's sound like O's. And just when you think he's dead. No, he's not. He's still breathing. Look at him.

• 1:27:32Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we will see you next week for The Last of the Moheagans.

• 1:27:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Run away fast.

• 1:27:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Stay celibate.

• 1:27:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:27:40Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the only way you're surviving.

• 1:27:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, bye.

• 1:27:48Speaker 05

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