Lawrence of Arabia

David Lean's ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made… but behind the sweeping desert vistas was a production as brutal and unpredictable as the landscape itself. This week, Chris and Lizzie break down how a script that was never truly finished—thanks in part to one of its screenwriters landing in jail—left the film constantly evolving even as cameras rolled. Discover why Omar Sharif was a last minute replacement, and why both Sharif and Peter O’Toole were forced to perform their own dangerous stunts on camels that were as temperamental as they were painful to ride. While ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ cemented David Lean's place in cinematic history, it also played a major role in shaping how the world understands the real T. E. Lawrence — for better and for worse. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:52Speaker 02

  And action.

• 1:54Chris Winterbauer?

  525,600 minutes. That's how long Lawrence of Arabia is. Hello, I am Chris Winterbauer here with my co-host, Lizzie Bassett, to discuss the movie that said, "Seven Samurai, hold my beer. I have to cross the desert of Nefud." As Lizzie, I will just lambaste you relentlessly because you got mad at me in jest over how long Seven Samurai was and promptly threw Lawrence of Arabia on the schedule.

• 2:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I thought this is a three hour movie. No, sir. This is a four hour movie. And I loved every minute of it. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing today? Let's get into it.

• 2:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I am so excited. I too love every minute of this movie and I can't wait to talk about it with you because boy, is it interesting. From the real life subject matter, the man himself, all the way through the making of it, as you can probably imagine, given the fact that they're

• 2:57Chris Winterbauer?

  In the desert.

• 2:58Lizzie Bassett?

  It's insane. Like when you watch this movie, you're like, okay, so I know that CGI doesn't exist. So they're just doing all of this. So I can't wait to talk about it because it is truly an incredible undertaking. Chris, had you seen Lawrence of Arabia before? And what was your experience upon watching it again for the podcast?

• 3:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I've seen Lawrence of Arabia before. I think I've seen it twice, once when I was young and did not have an appreciation for it at all. And then I did see it again in film school. Honestly, still didn't have that strong an appreciation for it. So I didn't remember it super well. We rewatched it and it is remarkable for a number of reasons. It feels extremely modern in many ways, although dated in a couple of important ones. The cinematography is amidst the best you'll ever see. One of the reasons for that is it's shot on, I believe, either 65 millimeter or 70 millimeter film. And as a result, when you do that transfer, the amount of detail and the tonal range of that

• 3:59Chris Winterbauer?

  film is so impressive that aside from the lighting techniques, it feels like it could have been shot today. And so some of the shots of the desert really are unparalleled. It's like shooting medium format film as a movie, which is incredible. I think it is so unique in the way that it approaches its hero, who is a very interesting person that I'm sure we'll talk about, T E Lawrence. And it is such an interesting, non-traditional hero in so many ways, and the way in which O'Toole brings that to life. And I'm excited about that. I generally really like Peter O'Toole's performance, although I do think it can veer on somewhat melodramatic. In certain moments, which I know was very much of the time, but I will say that upon rewatching

• 4:43Chris Winterbauer?

  it, aside from all of the technical elements, the movement of the camera, which is incredible. And David Lean does that throughout his earlier filmography. The two things that really felt truly timeless to me, three things Maurice Jar's score.

• 4:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 4:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, it's amazing and you can feel the way it influenced like John Williams, for example.

• 5:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, wait, wait till you hear about the score because your mind's going to be blown.

• 5:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And then Omar Sharif's performance.

• 5:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 5:07Chris Winterbauer?

  And Claude Rains.

• 5:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 5:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Those two in particular, I also think Jack Hawkins is really good as General Allenby. But in particular Claude Rains and Omar Sharif, I thought, wow, these guys are so subtle. They are so modern. They feel so timeless. So more than anyone else, those two performances jumped out at me and I loved it. And I went back and I watched Summertime, which I'd never seen with Catherine Hepburn, that he directed a couple of movies before this. And then I watched Bridge on the River Kwai and that's the three movie, you know, run. And then obviously did Dr. Zhivago. I didn't have time to rewatch that. But what's so cool, I think, if you watch those two into Lawrence of Arabia is you can feel David Lean coming into his own as a director with the way he moves the camera. And you know, he moves from a traditional film ratio in Summertime,

• 5:53Chris Winterbauer?

  which is a lovely little movie into Cinemascope and then into 70 millimeter. And it really just feels like he's expanding his palette with every instance. But the last thing I'll say is like, I know he's known for directing epics, but what he's really doing is he is directing epic character studies. And you can see that with Hepburn in Summertime. You can see that with Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai, Colonel Nicholson, and then you can very much see that with Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. So I love it. I think it's a lovely movie. I'm sure we'll talk about some of the dated elements and things that obviously wouldn't be done today, like brown face, for example, but I'll save those for when we get to that in the production.

• 6:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Beautifully said, Chris. I couldn't say it better myself. You're hitting the nail on the head. It is remarkable because yes, in some ways it is simplifying T E Lawrence a little bit, or at least uncomplicating him. But in many other ways, it chooses a bit of a warts and all approach to this person. And I think that that is unusual.

• 6:48Lizzie Bassett?

  For the time, B, as we're going to learn because of how T E Lawrence had been positioned historically at that point. And C, just because, you know, this is not the way that we typically like to consume our heroes.

• 7:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 7:02Lizzie Bassett?

  And they really don't shy away from it. I think Peter O'Toole's performance in this is wonderful. But I am with you. The person that stands out the most to me in this is Omar Sharif. For many reasons, we will talk quite a bit about him in this episode, but I do just want to call out at the top. It was not unusual at this time at all to have white British actors with blue eyes playing Arab characters, which with a couple of notable exceptions is what you see across most of this movie. You know, Alec Guinness is the big call out here. And as well, there's, you know, Jose Ferrer is in this, Anthony Quinn, who is Mexican American and wearing a massive prosthetic nose. But the thing that struck me the most about watching this is that, A, I am not condoning this at all.

• 7:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I think Alec Guinness actually does gives a relatively lovely performance. He's an amazing actor and I, I think he does the best he possibly could with this. But I gotta tell you, the second he is on screen opposite Omar Sharif, it just highlights every single reason why, you know, obviously racism aside, you shouldn't do this because it is distracting to have a white British man with blue eyes in the role of Prince Faisal. He doesn't look right. He doesn't carry himself the same way. As soon as Omar Sharif enters, you are on location, you are in this world, you are dropped in. And the second these other guys show up, it takes me out of it a little bit every single time. So we're going to talk about how Sharif got cast.

• 8:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Spoiler alert, he was not the original person cast for this role. The thing about this movie is like, yes, it's doing this. It is doing brown face. That's something that was extremely common at the time. But what it also does is it highlights the importance of actually casting for people's real ethnicities and why, from an artistic perspective, that is important.

• 8:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, no, exactly. The way I was thinking about it as I was trying to process it is, you know, there are two vectors, right, along which it's obviously wrong to do blackface in particular, but obviously brownface and Hollywood would do redface, et cetera.

• 9:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Everything, every kind of face.

• 9:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. The, the most obvious vector is the one you mentioned, which is that it can veer into horrible stereotype and demeaning performances.

• 9:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Along that vector, this movie actually, I think, does a decent job in that Guinness is giving a dignified performance. I actually looked up photos of Prince Faisal. Guinness is actually, on just a photographic basis, right, he's kind of a dead ringer for Prince Faisal, but I agree with you, he simply does not bring the knowledge of culture, et cetera, right, that Omar Sharif brings when he shows up. And so obviously, like, that hamstrings the movie in certain ways, despite Guinness's performance. And then, as you mentioned, Lizzie, what's more actually important is the denial of work to people

• 9:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Chris Winterbauer?

  who should be getting these roles. And then you have the perfect example of that in this movie, which is Omar Sharif goes on to become

• 9:52Lizzie Bassett?

  An enormous movie star, yes.

• 9:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Which he should be, and he would maybe, would maybe would not be had he not gotten a role like this.

• 10:01Lizzie Bassett?

  He definitely would not have been in Hollywood.

• 10:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So like Guinness didn't need this role. Like, could there have been someone in the Prince Faisal role that not only could have been artistically even a little bit better, and that is no shade against Guinness's performance, but you nailed it. I couldn't explain it better than you. There's just a feeling.

• 10:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's just not right.

• 10:17Chris Winterbauer?

  And then it's the economic opportunity that's being denied somebody else. We don't need to beat a dead horse, but this is why it's so important to give these opportunities to the folks who should, you know, be getting the opportunity to represent the culture that's being represented on screen.

• 10:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that is really the only shortcoming of this movie, and it's something that was very much of its time. I'm so glad you mentioned Claude Rains. We're not really gonna get into him in this episode, because not a ton went wrong with him.

• 10:42Chris Winterbauer?

  He's so good in this movie.

• 10:44Lizzie Bassett?

  He's wonderful. He's so sort of slimy and inscrutable and just can kind, he just, he goes whatever way the wind blows. And his performance is so small and detailed. I really love him in this.

• 10:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Me too.

• 10:57Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, let's get into it. Lawrence of Arabia is of course directed by Sir David Lean, with a screenplay by Robert Bold and Michael Wilson, cinematography by Freddie Young, who I want to call out because there is a lot to cover here. We're not gonna have time to get into too much, but Freddie Young's cinematography in this is unbelievable. And he was not even the first, second, or like, third choice for cinematographer, and he is just, it's stunning.

• 11:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Can I emphasize right here, when you see Christopher Nolan shooting with IMAX cameras, these 70 millimeter cameras, I believe, are bigger than those. These things are like the size of camels, basically, and he is doing dolly shots in the middle of the desert with these things. It's crazy.

• 11:36Lizzie Bassett?

  It's insane. It is edited by Anne Coates, who we will talk about a little bit, and it stars Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, and of course Omar Sharif. And you'll notice, not a single lady. We'll talk about that as well.

• 11:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Don't think Lawrence was interested.

• 11:54Lizzie Bassett?

  He was not. The budget was around $15 million today, worth around $160 million. So yeah, this is a whappa.

• 12:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 12:03Lizzie Bassett?

  The IMDb logline, as always, is "The story of T.E. Lawrence, the English officer who successfully united and led the diverse, often warring, Arab tribes during World War I in order to fight the Turks." Let's say "successfully" is debatable, depending on how you interpret it. So let's actually talk about the real T.E. Lawrence, because I think it's important. I'm kind of obsessed with him after this.

• 12:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Lizzie Bassett?

  So Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in 1888 in Wales into a pretty unusual family. I don't know if you know this, Chris, but he was the son of nobility, a baronet, but his father had actually cast aside tradition and his marriage in order to be with his mistress. He was like, "You keep the money, ma'am. I just can't do this. I'm gonna be with the woman that I love." And they remained legally married, which meant that he never legally married Thomas Edward Lawrence's mother. So Thomas and all of his four brothers were illegitimate, even though his parents did remain together for the rest of their lives. And Lawrence was an adopted name that they used as sort of a cover. I believe it was a family name on his mother's side. Now, he was very, very smart. He was obsessed with

• 13:09Lizzie Bassett?

  medieval military history. In fact, his thesis at Oxford involved a walking tour through Syria, where he walked 1,000 miles by himself to study Crusaders' castles. And after graduating, he decided he wanted to be an archaeologist, so he headed back to Syria. And while he was digging up Hittite settlements, World War I, of course, was brewing. Now, Germany was determined to get the Ottoman Empire on their side, and a key piece of that strategy was the Baghdad Railway, which was planned to run from Istanbul to Baghdad. To be clear, this is not the railway that he ends up blowing up. British intelligence obviously wanted to know what's going on in this area. So they recruited some intelligence officers. One of them was, of course, T E Lawrence. And he was perfect because he had the cover of being an archaeologist in the area. He has a legit reason for being there. He speaks Arabic.

• 13:54Lizzie Bassett?

  He's familiar with the landscape. So before Lawrence was Lawrence of Arabia, he was a spy. And that is important to remember. In August of 1914, Britain declared war on Germany and many were obviously drafted into combat, but not Lawrence. Do you know why, Chris?

• 14:11Chris Winterbauer?

  I know he was very short.

• 14:12Lizzie Bassett?

  That's it. He was five foot five.

• 14:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Because I knew O'Toole was much taller than Lawrence actually was. Yeah.

• 14:18Lizzie Bassett?

  He's six two. Yes. So that is one of the biggest complaints about Peter O'Toole's casting is that he does not actually look, outside of the shots of him in the traditional garb, where he actually does look quite a bit like T E Lawrence in the face. Physically, he does not.

• 14:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Lizzie Bassett?

  However, as soon as the Ottoman Empire officially entered on the side of Germany, the Brits were like, hype be damned. Get this little guy on our side because again, he's fluent in Arabic. I don't know how many of those are floating around.

• 14:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he was brilliant. I've always wondered if someone like Indiana Jones was slightly modeled as like an Americanized, you know what I mean, version of T E Lawrence or something? Because here's this guy, he's an archaeologist. He's effectively an ultra marathoner.

• 15:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 15:01Chris Winterbauer?

  His greatest strength is his endurance and like his masochistic ability to withstand pain. I mean, the guy's just such a fascinating person.

• 15:09Lizzie Bassett?

  He really was. And so England started to get nervous that the Ottomans might be able to take control of the Suez Canal. They, at this point, began backing an Arab uprising against the Ottomans and they sent Lawrence to basically be their like envoy to Prince Faisal. And in exchange for support, the Brits were of course, promising an independent Arab state after the war. Now, as we learn in the movie, they never really had any intention of making it a truly independent state. How much Lawrence knew about England's intentions is somewhat up for debate, although I will say he almost certainly knew about the Sykes-Picot agreement pretty early on. Of course, in the movie, he finds this out much later. And that is the kind of initial agreement, planning out how The Ottoman-controlled portions of Arabia would be divided between France and England

• 15:53Lizzie Bassett?

  after the war. So a little bit more on that later, but keep that in mind. Now, this is all a massive oversimplification, but he did indeed help bring previously warned tribes together to blow up the Hejaz railway. Take Akaba and eventually Damascus. And just an example of how smart he is, to your point, Chris, do you know why he blew up the tracks and not the trains?

• 16:14Chris Winterbauer?

  So that the tribes could pillage the trains in order to stay motivated?

• 16:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Nope.

• 16:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, then he's smarter than me, clearly.

• 16:24Lizzie Bassett?

  His argument was, we shouldn't destroy their fleet of trains. We should just destroy the tracks because the tracks can be repaired and that will keep them running out to all the different areas that we're attacking. It will cause their forces to dissipate and it will scatter them.

• 16:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. It's very smart.

• 16:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. So his whole idea was for the Bedouin army that he had assembled to make these disparate attacks. So the Turks felt like they were fighting all over instead of just fighting on one front. And of course, it worked.

• 16:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's guerrilla warfare 101, right?

• 16:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you could argue he kind of, in some ways, came up with it.

• 16:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, certainly at a time when like trench warfare, right, seems to be the norm across Western Europe. Here's this guy who's doing guerrilla tactics in the Middle East.

• 17:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. I shouldn't say he invented it. He popularized it or modernized it.

• 17:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. Turned it into a real fun time.

• 17:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, as you see in this movie.

• 17:14Chris Winterbauer?

  He's loving it.

• 17:16Lizzie Bassett?

  He did not. So he did try and arguably mostly fail to help gain the Arab independence that he and England had been promising. And then, of course, the war ended. I made a point of mentioning he's a spy and that is very important because he kind of lied to everybody. So it's a little tough to know what was going on and what his motivations were. During the war, though, he had met an American war photographer named Lowell Thomas. Now, in the movie, they've changed the name to Jackson Bentley, but that's who this is. He had followed Lawrence around, taking some of the most famous photos that we still have of him today. And when the war ended, Thomas was trying to figure out how to make a living. So he decided to tour around New York and London with what was basically a PowerPoint presentation on steroids.

• 17:57Chris Winterbauer?

  The T. E. Lawrence Traveling Road Show.

• 17:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, which did not actually involve T. E. Lawrence. It was just a live show set around the photos that he had taken of him in Arabia that told Lawrence's story, or at least Thomas's version of it.

• 18:11Chris Winterbauer?

  I bet you it was pretty exciting.

• 18:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, people loved it. Apparently, it was pretty cheesetastic. It had a dance of the seven veils. And it did also paint Lawrence as a morally pure, brave, and utterly uncomplicated war hero.

• 18:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Which makes sense. That's what people wanted. They're exiting World War I, which, unlike World War II, arguably didn't really have as clear motivations for a lot of people.

• 18:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, World War I shouldn't have happened. I think we all generally feel about that. Yeah. Franz Ferdinand, why'd you die?

• 18:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that wasn't his fault.

• 18:50Chris Winterbauer?

  You could have held on.

• 18:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Lean left. So this show was an enormous hit. It gave people what they wanted. They wanted to see a war hero. Here, they had it.

• 19:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Lizzie Bassett?

  So much so that a feature film adaptation of his life felt pretty much inevitable. But there's just one little problem. The actual Lawrence wanted nothing to do with this. He was pretty embarrassed by it, especially by the way that it was painting him. And he had used his newfound fame to his advantage initially when negotiating some terms on Faisal's behalf, I believe. But Lawrence was mostly pretty depressed. And this oversimplification of what he had tried, and again, kind of failed to do, was really not helping him. And the only thing worse than a film adaptation of his life, Chris, would be a film adaptation made by an American. And his biggest fear about this was that it would insert a love interest.

• 19:48Lizzie Bassett?

  So he kicked that can down the road. But in 1934, he had a change of heart and he did enter into negotiations for a film about his life with producer Alexander Corda. But he had two conditions. One, it had to be historically accurate. And he guesses what the second condition might have been.

• 20:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Is it no love interest?

• 20:07Lizzie Bassett?

  More specifically, it's no women.

• 20:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 20:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Can I ask you one question about him? Because I've heard this, but I don't know if it's true.

• 20:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 20:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Did he turn down a knighthood?

• 20:18Lizzie Bassett?

  It is true. He, he did refuse a knighthood in person from King George V. And that had to do both with, I think, him being frustrated with the way that he was used during the war, but more so that the British government had not lived up to the promises that they had made during the war. So the no women thing brings us to a question that I think we were all asking after watching Peter O'Toole's, let's say flamboyant performance in Lawrence of Arabia, which is where exactly did Thomas Edward Lawrence land on the Kinsey scale? And the answer is, as with all things about this man, very complicated.

• 20:55Lizzie Bassett?

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• 21:40Lizzie Bassett?

  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. Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats. And I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&Ms, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles. But they also have salty snacks, easy-to-make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween movie night spreads for our friends.

• 22:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispie treats and peanut butter M&Ms. And because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all-time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog, Q. Mars knows he needs a celebration too, so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice Dental Chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at Mars Global, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited-time Halloween offerings.

• 23:08Speaker 03

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• 23:14Speaker 04

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• 23:33Speaker 05

  Get Verizon FiOS because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.

• 23:44Lizzie Bassett?

  It had long been an assumption that T.E. Lawrence was gay. And I think that was probably a pretty common assumption at the time that the movie was made.

• 23:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 23:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, I want to call this out. You may see people calling him a pedophile because of an extremely close and, yes, potentially romantic relationship he had with an Arab teen when he was working as a young archaeologist. This is before anything that we see in the movie. Very sadly, this boy who was known as Daum passed away from typhus when World War I broke out. I think he was only 18 or 19 years old. It's, I think, pretty safe to assume that this relationship was romantic on some level, given that Lawrence seemed to have dedicated his book about his time in Arabia, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to Dome with the following opener. Quote, "I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars to earn you freedom.

• 24:34Lizzie Bassett?

  That seven-pillared worthy house that your eyes might be shining for me when we came." So, as far as I can tell, he's basically saying, "I backed the Arab uprising and tried to win their independence because I loved you and I'm sorry that I couldn't get it for you while you were alive."

• 24:48Chris Winterbauer?

  But how old would Dome have been during the relationship?

• 24:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Like 16.

• 24:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, it depends. Yes, but it depends on, I don't know what the age of consent was. I'm not condoning it. I'm just saying it's a little, it's potentially more complicated than it seems. Certainly more complicated than calling him a pedophile, I think.

• 25:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I don't think that that is a fair representation of him at all, based on what I've read. And it's also quite possible this relationship was never sexual because, Chris, you may know this.

• 25:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I've heard people say that they believe he was asexual and homo-romantic.

• 25:17Lizzie Bassett?

  That's correct. And from what I understand, that is probably the most accurate representation of him, based on his own writings.

• 25:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh huh.

• 25:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Outside of a sexual assault that may have occurred while he was imprisoned by the Turks, which we sort of see hinted at in the movie.

• 25:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Hinted pretty strongly, I would say.

• 25:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 25:36Chris Winterbauer?

  For the time, at least.

• 25:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. He never wrote about engaging in any kind of sexual acts and in fact, wrote explicitly about having no interest in it whatsoever. One of the people he was writing to frequently was E.M. Forster, who was a known gay man. He was not uncomfortable with Forster's sexuality at all. There's kind of no reason to think that he wouldn't have discussed his own. So I think this reading is accurate. But more on the film's take on his sexuality a little bit later. So shortly after his change of heart on the biopic about his life, Lawrence had another heart change. He got cold feet and he tried to pull out of the negotiations, but then... He died.

• 26:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Lizzie Bassett?

  In 1935, as you see in the beginning of the film, he died following a motorcycle accident in which he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles. Lots of theories. People thought he was assassinated. People thought perhaps he had died by suicide. You know, perhaps he wasn't dead at all and he's living on an island with Tupac. As with everything else in his life, we're never really going to know what he was thinking. If you want to learn more about T. E. Lawrence himself and his part in the development of the modern political climate in the Middle East, I highly recommend listening to the four-part series on Behind the Bastards about him. It's wonderful. All right, let's rewind the clock back a couple of years to 1926. Remember Lawrence's book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom? It was not widely released commercially until after his death,

• 26:58Lizzie Bassett?

  but in 1926, there was a very limited release, a subscriber's release, if you will, of the autobiographical book. And one copy landed in the hands of someone we talked about in our African Queen episode, and that is producer Sam Spiegel.

• 27:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I had forgotten.

• 27:13Lizzie Bassett?

  He's a crazy person.

• 27:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And then I remembered your African Queen stories. And I was like, oh, my God, Sam Spiegel, The Desert with David Lean. And also Spiegel did Bridge on the River Kwai, which was also a crazy location shoot. Anyway.

• 27:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. He is a very interesting man. He's an insane person. For more background on Sam Spiegel, go listen to the African Queen episode. Here's a little refresher of really all you need to know for today. He was born around the turn of the century in the Polish region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Very fascinating early life. He narrowly escaped to Pagram, eventually made his way to Hollywood, then got sent right back to Europe to function as a translator for the German and French versions of Universal Films being produced there. 1933, he flees Berlin because it's not a good time to be a Jew in Berlin. And he made his way to London. He kind of conned a millionaire into backing a film, ended up just disintegrating into a series of bounced checks. He actually served prison time for that. And then he smuggled himself back into Hollywood.

• 28:11Lizzie Bassett?

  By 1948, as we discussed, he had teamed up with John Huston for the African Queen, though of course, their professional and personal relationship would sour very much and disintegrate after that film, much to John Huston's chagrin because of what happens next. And then Spiegel goes on to make On the Waterfront in 1954. In 1957, he produced The Bridge on the River Kwai with director David Lean. And since this is the first time we've also covered David Lean, here's a little bit of background that you need on him. He was born a Quaker. I did not know this in 1908 in a suburb of South London. Now, due to his parents' Quaker faith, he was not allowed to attend the cinema as a child, but he did it anyway. He was obsessed with the movies and at 19 years old,

• 28:55Lizzie Bassett?

  joined the Gomont Film Studios as a dog's body. Do you know what that is?

• 29:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm hmm. Like a film courier or something, like a messenger?

• 29:03Lizzie Bassett?

  It's just like the worst position you could possibly have at the studio. It's like anything, anybody else wants to do, the dog's body will do.

• 29:11Chris Winterbauer?

  You're just a P A. You're just the lowest of the P A.

• 29:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I know, but you don't have to call a P A. A dog's body, British people.

• 29:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, they wear a dog costume too.

• 29:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 29:19Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a, it's kind of a thing.

• 29:21Lizzie Bassett?

  So then he landed a job in the cutting room, eventually working his way up to the position of editor. And by the end of the 1930s, he was the highest paid working film editor in British cinema.

• 29:31Chris Winterbauer?

  This makes sense.

• 29:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it does. But in 1942, playwright Noel Coward brought Lean on to co-direct In Which We Serve. This was Lean's debut and it went so well that Coward then hired him to direct his next three films. The last of which, Brief Encounter, earned Lean the first ever Oscar nomination for a British director in 1945.

• 29:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Noel Coward, who had also been a spy.

• 29:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Everyone was a spy.

• 29:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, along with Roald Dahl, we'll discuss next week on Willy Wonka.

• 29:58Lizzie Bassett?

  You know what we should actually do is we should write a musical about the interactions between Roald Dahl, Noel Coward, Ian Fleming and

• 30:05Chris Winterbauer?

  And David Alvey.

• 30:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Chris Winterbauer?

  There's gonna be a lot of women. I'll just let you know now. And they're gonna be having a lot of sex with these men because that's all they were doing.

• 30:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's all they said they were doing.

• 30:16Chris Winterbauer?

  The women confirmed it.

• 30:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, fine.

• 30:19Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a lot of letters about this.

• 30:22Lizzie Bassett?

  So next he directed Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, which starred a young Alec Guinness as Fagin. And in 1955, he directed Summertime, which you referenced. It starred Katharine Hepburn. And this was notable because A, it was in color.

• 30:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 30:38Lizzie Bassett?

  And B, it's shot on location in Italy.

• 30:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, shot in Venice.

• 30:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, in Venice, his first time really getting to do this, and he loved it.

• 30:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It's beautiful.

• 30:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It's much more sweeping in scope, even though obviously smaller than where he will end up. But it's where you begin to see his style really materialize. And then, as we said, in 1957, he directed The Bridge on the River Kwai, which of course also starred Alec Guinness, and which was shot on location in Sri Lanka. And it was a massive commercial success. It became the highest grossing film of 1957 in the US and Canada. It was also a critical success. So obviously, Lean and Spiegel are eager to get another project together. That one went pretty well, even though, you know, there was some crazy stuff in the shoot, but end result, A+.

• 31:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, we're gonna cover it. It's amazing. It has maybe one of the greatest, most tense third acts ever, ever put on film. It's amazing.

• 31:34Lizzie Bassett?

  By the way, Spiegel had literally bought himself a yacht and a Park Avenue penthouse, thanks to Bridge on the River Kwai. So they first turned to the idea of a biopic about Mahatma Gandhi. And they eventually dropped this because they thought it would be presumptuous to try to cram his life into one movie. Nobody tell Richard Attenborough.

• 31:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say.

• 31:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Richard Attenborough said, "Hold my beer."

• 31:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 31:56Lizzie Bassett?

  And according to Lean, Spiegel also, quote, "Didn't think a picture about an Indian would be box office." Ugh. That's probably because Spiegel had his heart set on one man and maybe always had, since he received that manuscript back in 1926. And that was, of course, T.E. Lawrence. Spiegel said, quote, "He was a man of highly controversial character, who actually became a legend in his own lifetime. The hardest problem in the conception of our film was to transpose his self contradictions not to resolve them. Using a script basically compounded from Lawrence's own Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a book of such fascinating detail, you could make a dozen pictures. It's an embarrassment of riches, lacking that blue thread of continuity every picture must have."

• 32:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And a lot of cul-de-sacs on, like, describing camels.

• 32:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he spent a lot of time on them.

• 32:43Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a very, he's a detailed writer.

• 32:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So Spiegel made Lean a very important promise for this movie. They would not start shooting without a finished script.

• 32:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Around 1958 or 1959, Spiegel and Lean cleared the first major hurdle. They secured the film rights to Lawrence's 1926 edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. And that was not an easy task. The rights sat with Lawrence's brother, A.W. Lawrence. T.E., of course, was long dead at this point. And A.W. put up a pretty serious fight and sat through many meetings with Lean and Spiegel, but he finally gave in on two conditions. One, he would have total script approval. And two, he had the right to veto title use if he didn't like what he saw. To which I say, good luck, buddy.

• 33:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, Sam Spiegel's like, come at me in court, bro, you know?

• 33:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. And the push that finally got him over the edge was actually a script analysis by Michael Wilson. Now, Wilson was one of many screenwriters who was blacklisted in 1951, when he refused to testify before HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, of course, led by Joseph McCarthy. Right before his blacklisting actually took effect, he won an Oscar with his collaborator Harry Brown for A Place in the Sun. He then spent eight years in France. He's working on productions outside the studio system, including 1954's Salt of the Earth. And most crucially, after Lean hated the initial screenplay for The Bridge on the River Kwai by Carl Forman, Forman suggested bringing in his friend, Michael Wilson. But you might notice, when the film won the Oscar for Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards,

• 34:18Lizzie Bassett?

  the award went to neither Forman nor Wilson. It went to Pierre Boole, who had written the book on which it was based. Why, Chris?

• 34:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Forman was also blacklisted, wasn't he?

• 34:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Correct. Both writers were blacklisted.

• 34:32Chris Winterbauer?

  He wrote High Noon.

• 34:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 34:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Which was viewed by many as almost anti-American in its sensibilities. And John Wayne hated that movie, and he made Rio Bravo as a response to it. And I believe it's rumored that John Wayne was in part responsible for Carl Forman's blacklisting in particular. I can't speak to Michael Wilson, because John Wayne was very tied into HUAC.

• 34:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, John Wayne, we're coming for you. Just you wait. We're coming for you.

• 34:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, so because Wilson could not actually receive an Oscar for the work that he had done on that film, Lean offered him kind of a consolation prize, and it was writing the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia. Now, it's interesting that Lawrence's brother responded positively to Wilson's treatment because it doesn't seem like Wilson liked T. E. Lawrence all that much. Here's what he had to say in a document dated September 20, 1959, called "Elements and Facets of the Theme." Quote, "In trying to serve two masters, Lawrence betrayed them both. Part of Lawrence's tragedy was his intellectualism. With his inheritance of Western culture, he could never really hope to submerge himself in an alien culture. Did he not serve to introduce into the Arab world the very evils from which he had fled?

• 35:42Lizzie Bassett?

  He was a man who, fleeing blindly from a deadly disease to a healthy land, himself afflicts it with the plague."

• 35:49Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a great analysis, but I wonder if Lawrence recognized that ultimately perhaps in himself a little bit, and I wonder if his brother saw it too. And I wonder if the honesty of that treatment, what would be most offensive to Lawrence would be a hagiography, right?

• 36:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 36:03Chris Winterbauer?

  At this point in time, and his brother would know that. And what's so interesting is I think that Bridge on the River Kwai is oddly such a great warm-up to establishing this character because Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, is very much the man who tries to serve two masters and fails them both in Bridge on the River Kwai, in that he wants to both maintain his Britishness and then build this bridge, and yet he is doing it for the Japanese at the same time. And you know what I'm saying? In the end, he says, "What have I done?" is his last line before he dies, much like T. E. Lawrence.

• 36:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 36:32Chris Winterbauer?

  There's such an interesting thematic through line here, and that analysis is pitch perfect.

• 36:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I think as we're going to get into, obviously, some things change. There's another screenwriter who is brought on who we'll talk about as well. I'm a bit sorry that we don't totally get to see Wilson's take on this because I think he nails it, and I think he also was more interested in this sort of political climate around Lawrence as well than this movie is.

• 36:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's still there on the margins.

• 36:59Lizzie Bassett?

  It is, it is.

• 37:00Chris Winterbauer?

  You get like 75%, maybe 50 to 75% of it, right? Cause you're seeing, and you're wondering, is Lawrence just deluding himself? How can he not see that Claude Rains is going to backstab these people? You know what I mean? Immediately.

• 37:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, the reality is he does know, which we will get into.

• 37:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So I think the movie, it splits the, you know, baby a little bit, but I still think it does a pretty good job.

• 37:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it does. But A W Lawrence apparently agreed with this and granted them the film rights for 22,500 pounds or about $335,000 today. And just six days after Wilson had turned in his first draft, Columbia Pictures held a press conference at Claridge's in London, announcing the next Sam Spiegel, David Lean production. You've all been waiting for it. It's going to be the Seven Pillars of Wisdom and it's going to star...

• 37:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Who?

• 37:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Any guesses?

• 37:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Not Peter O'Toole.

• 37:50Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 37:50Chris Winterbauer?

  He wasn't known.

• 37:51Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not Peter O'Toole. In fact, it's someone who was in a movie that I already mentioned that Sam Spiegel produced, someone who's come up on the podcast multiple times, most recently in the American History X episode.

• 38:03Chris Winterbauer?

  He came up and, no, but it's not Humphrey Bogart. That doesn't make any sense. Who came up? Tell me, tell me.

• 38:09Lizzie Bassett?

  It's me, T E Lawrence.

• 38:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Really?

• 38:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 38:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Marlon Brando? I mean, look, one of the greatest actors of his generation, playing a Brit.

• 38:19Lizzie Bassett?

  He doesn't look right at all.

• 38:21Chris Winterbauer?

  He doesn't look right. He's got the... What O'Toole does bring, I would argue it's actually less that it's flamboyant and it's more that it's fey, his performance, right? There's actually a David Bowie-esque quality. It's almost androgynous. It's a little otherworldly. He seems untouched by the things around him, which makes it such a wonderful reveal when it's shown that like this guy's ultimately an endurance athlete.

• 38:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 38:44Chris Winterbauer?

  The ruggedness of Brando is so wrong for that.

• 38:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's not even the ruggedness. Also Brando is like, young Brando, which this would have been. He's like pretty beefy and hot, which definitely is not right.

• 38:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he would have had to probably lose a good amount of weight. I mean, O'Toole is like rail thin in this movie.

• 39:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Peter O'Toole has literally said in interviews, like, I just can't gain weight. I'm just rail thin.

• 39:04Chris Winterbauer?

  We're like, good for you. Good for you, Peter.

• 39:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Good for you. Good for you. Shut up, Peter. So I don't know how attached Brando really was, certainly not attached enough to announce it because he dropped out shortly thereafter to make Mutiny on the Bounty.

• 39:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Who? Another one we gotta cover.

• 39:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. Reportedly telling Spiegel, quote, "I'll be damned if I'll spend two years of my life out in the desert on some fucking camel," which, I mean, he nailed it.

• 39:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Way to know yourself.

• 39:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So Spiegel turned to his second choice, a then relatively unknown British theater actor, Albert Finney.

• 39:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, oh, really?

• 39:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, yes.

• 39:39Chris Winterbauer?

  What did Albert Finney look like young?

• 39:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm gonna hold that thought.

• 39:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 39:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Because in August of 1960, David Lean spent four days and a rumored 100,000 pounds shooting screen tests with Finney. And I would like to show you Albert Finney as Lawrence of Arabia. Can you see this?

• 39:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, he looks like he's in Star Wars.

• 40:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He's very surly.

• 40:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he's very surly. Same problem I have. He doesn't quite, like, in terms of the face, Peter O'Toole actually looks quite a bit like T. E. Lawrence.

• 40:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I think so, too. I've seen some photos of T. E. Lawrence.

• 40:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Because he's kind of delicate, even though he's tall. Albert Finney is not.

• 40:16Chris Winterbauer?

  You know who they needed? They needed Spike Jonze. You know what I mean? Like a smaller, thinner, honestly, Edward Norton, you know what I mean?

• 40:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Early 90s Edward Norton. He's too tall, but yeah, no, Finney, I love Albert Finney. He's great. It's actually, this is closer to what I would imagine from Brando, weirdly, just despite how different their physicality is.

• 40:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 40:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting.

• 40:36Lizzie Bassett?

  So this was a massive undertaking, as you just saw from the photos that I showed you. There were sets, costumes, there are other actors. They really thought that they had their Lawrence. And Sam Spiegel agreed. He offered Finney the role on one condition. He had to sign a five-year contract with Spiegel. And this was a no-go for Albert Finney.

• 40:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, come on, Sam.

• 40:58Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. Who said, quote, "I hate being committed to a girl or a film producer or to being a certain kind of big screen image." And David Lean even was like, yeah, this was a terrible deal.

• 41:08Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a David O. Selznick deal. It's not a good deal.

• 41:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, he'll show up later, too. So David Lean took matters into his own hands, and he started his own search for Lawrence, and he found him while watching a movie called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. He said, "On screen, I saw this chap playing a sort of silly-assed Englishman with a raincoat casting for trout," and this was, of course, Peter O'Toole. Now, O'Toole was of Scottish and Irish descent, but he had grown up in Leeds. He studied at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, which, if you don't know, is like the drama school. He was 28 years old when Lean saw him and had just finished a first season at the Royal Shakespeare Company, so massively classically trained actor. He also came with a strong recommendation from Katharine Hepburn.

• 41:52Lizzie Bassett?

  But he had a bit of a reputation that preceded him, and it wasn't good. He was known as a hard-partying, unreliable, heavy drinker. And Sam Spiegel was super-duper not a fan. Here's why. When they had been auditioning actors many years earlier for Suddenly Last Summer, Peter O'Toole had come in and he had read for a role. Now, during the screen test, in which he was apparently playing a brain surgeon, he turned to camera, spiked the lens, and said, quote, "It's all right, Mrs. Spiegel, but your son will never play the violin again."

• 42:27Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very funny.

• 42:29Lizzie Bassett?

  It's funny. Sam Spiegel really didn't like it.

• 42:32Chris Winterbauer?

  I was, you know, when you mentioned he was a hard partier.

• 42:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Big time.

• 42:36Chris Winterbauer?

  What is he? He was 30 years old when he shot this movie?

• 42:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, about. Yeah.

• 42:41Chris Winterbauer?

  He can, he at times looks a lot older.

• 42:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it'll age you.

• 42:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I think generally, he, he has bags under his eyes that make him look a little older, and he's a gaunt, you know, but he looks a little weathered, which, so I'd forgotten that at the beginning credits, which I love that opening shot with the motorcycle, you know, off-frame, and they do the title card that way. When it says, "Introducing Peter O'Toole," I thought, I was, I'd totally forgotten that.

• 43:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Because he looks older, yeah.

• 43:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Because he looks older, but he was actually a little younger. Anyway, it's just an interesting, interesting time.

• 43:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Indeed. David Lean was like, this is it. This is our Laurence. So Sam, suck it up. Get it together. And also Tik Tok, we gotta get this show on the road. Can we please, please just cast this drunken crazy person? And Sam Spiegel's like, fine. But he asked Anthony Nutting, a former British diplomat who was serving as an advisor on the film, to have just a little sit down chat with old Petey. And Nutting told O'Toole, quote, "If you don't stay sober, you're going to leave Jordan on your ass. You're the only actor we've got. And if you get bundled home, then there's no film. That's the end of the film and that's probably the end of you." And I have to imagine Peter O'Toole said cheers. But he agreed to do it. In November of 1960, he was offered the part for a fee of 12,500 pounds,

• 43:57Lizzie Bassett?

  which is nothing.

• 43:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I'm guessing this movie took a long time to shoot too.

• 44:02Lizzie Bassett?

  So. Yeah, it straight up took two years. Marlon Brando was correct.

• 44:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he was probably making like two pounds an hour.

• 44:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Yeah. It was also nothing compared to what some other people were being paid on this. Jose Ferrer, who played the Turkish Bay, which as you remember, is a very small role.

• 44:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Almost a cameo, basically.

• 44:20Lizzie Bassett?

  It is a cameo. He was paid double.

• 44:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And I'm guessing Guinness and even like.

• 44:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Quinn and stuff. And Jack Hawkins was one of the biggest British actors of the 50s. I'm sure he got a lot.

• 44:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Everybody was paid more than Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif. Everyone. Everyone was paid like their salaries put together, basically.

• 44:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 44:37Lizzie Bassett?

  So O'Toole was also required to learn how to ride a camel before showing up to set. And he only had a couple of weeks to do it. Now, speaking of extremely not Arab people playing Arab people, Sir Laurence Olivier was originally cast as Prince Faisal. But he dropped out. I would say, thank God. I find his Othello particularly difficult to watch. And this led to Alec Guinness getting the role instead. Now Guinness, as we've mentioned, frequent David Lean collaborator. At this point, he'd been in Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and of course, The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he won a BAFTA, Golden Globe and Oscar. But here's the thing. He and David Lean really hated each other on that movie.

• 45:16Chris Winterbauer?

  That's, yeah.

• 45:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Hated each other.

• 45:18Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a great shot where he's on the bridge and he's pouring his heart out. It's like at the end of the movie to General Saito behind him or Commander Saito or whatever his name is. And the camera's just pushing on his back and it's incredibly modern, right? Nowadays, you wouldn't blink an eye. And my understanding, the story I've always heard is that Alec Guinness was like, why is the camera not on my face? Because this is my big moment. And yeah, I don't, I don't think they liked each other at times.

• 45:42Lizzie Bassett?

  They did not see eye to eye on this. To your point, I think David Lean had a much more modern interpretation of how to tell stories and how to develop character.

• 45:53Chris Winterbauer?

  And move the camera. Yeah.

• 45:54Lizzie Bassett?

  And move the camera. And Alec Guinness really wanted to bring more character. He wanted to bring more depth, more humanity. And David Lean was like, nope, pull it back. More, more, more boring and dull, please, Alec. You're not doing it right. At one point, they didn't speak for 48 hours. And Guinness later wrote that Lean, quote, surrounds himself with sycophants and has no sense of humor. Probably true, but I think David Lean did know what he was doing. But Guinness agreed to give it one more go and he did sign on to Lawrence of Arabia. Fun fact about Alec Guinness. I don't know if you know this. He had actually played T E Lawrence in a theater production of the play Ross by Terrence Rattigan, which was also about T E Lawrence. Ross was an alias that he used later in his life.

• 46:39Lizzie Bassett?

  And at one point, this was an early rival production to Lawrence of Arabia. But Sam Spiegel had threatened legal action against them if they pursued a feature film. So they were not able to get financing. This, I mean, this actually doesn't seem that shady to me, considering Spiegel had the film rights to Seven Pillars.

• 46:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I actually think young Alec Guinness would have been an exceptional T E Lawrence.

• 47:01Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 47:02Chris Winterbauer?

  He was just too old at this point.

• 47:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So Anthony Quinn, as we mentioned, was brought in to play Auda, who I believe was a real person. And of course, Anthony Quinn, he is Mexican-American. He is not of Middle Eastern descent. That is a wild prosthetic nose on him. He was one of the biggest movie stars in this movie at the time, and he was kind of brought in as like the big American movie star. Mm-hmm. Also, remember that yacht that Spiegel bought? Well, he put it to good use. For a year leading up to production, while casting was happening, Lean, Spiegel, and Wilson lived on the yacht floating around Europe and working on the script. Now, do I want to be on a yacht for a year? Yeah, maybe. Do I want to be on a yacht for a year with my coworkers? No. Rude. I don't think you want to be on a yacht with me either.

• 47:46Lizzie Bassett?

  One, I was saying, one of your coworkers is your husband. That one I'd be on a yacht with. So you're picking out one person you don't want to be on a yacht with? No, I meant more my phone, like my office coworkers. You don't count. You're my friend. So. This is your job. What coworkers are we talking about?

• 48:07Lizzie Bassett?

  It's okay. I understand. It's true. So Nutting, the guy whose job was partially to yell at Peter O'Toole, was also negotiating film locations, and he managed to convince King Hussein of Jordan that the movie would help boost tourism if he let them shoot there. And David Lean was thrilled because he always wanted to shoot on location, and this happened mostly in and around Jordan. Sam Spiegel encouraged him to consider the cost-saving benefits of Southern California, but the reality is, he was very concerned about being able to even get into the country if they filmed in Jordan because he was Jewish, and he was correct. There was a very good chance at this point, due to the political climate in the region, that he would not even be allowed in. But Nutting was like, no problemo, I'll just get you a visa that lists your religion as Anglican, and bing bang boom,

• 48:52Lizzie Bassett?

  you're in. And Spiegel was pissed. He was like, no, I'm not Anglican. I'm not ashamed of my religion, to which Nutting apparently replied, Sam, just shut up. Here's your bloody visa, which does suck. But as the start date drew nearer, David Lean and Sam Spiegel came to an unfortunate realization as they floated around on their yacht. They really hated Michael Wilson's script. Mm-hmm. According to Lean, it was too American, to which I say, what does that mean, brother? Based probably lines like that.

• 49:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Based on where they land, I wonder if they felt like it had maybe, I don't know, humanized him too much, or like veered in a cowboy direction, what?

• 49:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm imagining, I'm imagining George W. Bush as Lawrence of Arabia. We're gonna go in there, we're gonna teach these, teach them about, teach them about democracy, make sure they don't get them nuclear weapons, and it's gonna be great. Mission accomplished. Like, as you see Lawrence just walking.

• 49:54Lizzie Bassett?

  With a banner of such mission accomplished behind him. Yeah.

• 49:58Chris Winterbauer?

  And then Omar Shreve throws a shoe at his head.

• 49:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 50:00Chris Winterbauer?

  All right.

• 50:01Lizzie Bassett?

  So they unceremoniously fired Michael Wilson, and in his place, they hired Robert Bolt, who was a playwright who had just premiered A Man for All Seasons. He would go on to, of course, write the screenplay for this. So he started rewriting Wilson's script, and he was a staunch anti-imperialist and pacifist who viewed military leaders like Lawrence as just not great guys all around. In fact, he described Lawrence as a, quote, "romantic fascist," and also rewrote the character to be a lot more flamboyant than Wilson had. Now, they would come around to a slightly more sympathetic portrait of Lawrence by the end of production, but this is where Bolt kind of started. It sounds great, but there was one major problem, which is that Robert Bolt was taking his sweet-ass time with a script that needed to shoot in like, a month. And so Sam Spiegel realized, he's

• 50:46Lizzie Bassett?

  gonna have to break the promise that he made to David Lean and break probably the top what went wrong rule of all time: they would start shooting without a script.

• 50:55Chris Winterbauer?

  It's, it's the number one rule. It's the number one rule we've come across. Gonna do it next week with Willy Wonka.

• 51:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Can't wait.

• 51:01Chris Winterbauer?

  You just can't do it, but they do it. It's Tobias Funke. It's never worked for anyone else, but maybe with us.

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• 51:29Speaker 03

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• 52:21Lizzie Bassett?

  So they were supposed to start filming in Jordan in February, but it actually started three months later in May, and they still didn't have a final shooting script. Now-

• 52:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And I'm sure it's getting hotter and hotter.

• 52:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God, it is so hot. David Lean's plan was to shoot mostly in chronological order, partially to give Peter O'Toole's performance a sense of discovery, so he could, you know, discover the character. But I also suspect it was to buy some time because they didn't have a finished script. So for the first month of shooting, there were only three actors on set. Peter O'Toole, Zaya Moya Dean, who plays Taffas, Lawrence's guide at the beginning of the movie, and Maurice Ronay, a French actor who was playing Sheriff Ali. Now, here's the thing. When you look at a picture of Maurice Ronay, he doesn't look all that different from Peter O'Toole. He had a little bit darker hair, but he had green eyes and is clearly a French white guy. And even with this small cast, shooting was off to a rocky start.

• 53:16Lizzie Bassett?

  The first thing they filmed was the first time we ever see Lawrence traversing the desert. It's that crazy, beautiful shot of the dunes and the tiny little camels coming over the ridge. And to capture this, two 65mm Panavision cameras had been dragged up an almost 90-degree, 500-foot slope on a makeshift ski lift just to get the shot right. But seconds before they started rolling, the first A.D. screamed, "Halt!" There was a paper cup visible somewhere in the desert in frame, Game of Thrones style.

• 53:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah! Well- Can I just mention?

• 53:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 53:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So this movie, which has been restored, right? Liz, you were like, "I bought the Blu-ray."

• 53:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Shut up. I bought the Blu-ray. It's incredible.

• 53:58Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. No, it's incre- it looks amazing. But what's so remarkable is we're watching it on a 4K television, right? Through Blu-ray. And Lawrence is about 12 pixels tall, right? In this screen. You can barely see him. Imagine you are looking through an optical viewfinder. It's a mirror system through a lens and telling your director, "I think we can see Lawrence," right? Because Lean has to decide, is he gonna bring his actor like 100 yards closer? You know what I'm saying? For these shots? There's no, you can't punch in digitally. There's no way to verify this.

• 54:31Lizzie Bassett?

  No, they're doing a lot of guesswork in this.

• 54:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It's crazy. It looks so good. It blows me away.

• 54:37Lizzie Bassett?

  So they just went out and removed the cup. No big deal, right, Chris? Uh, can you think of any problems with what might happen if you need to go out into this shot and remove the cup?

• 54:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Footprints in the sand?

• 54:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Bingo. Footprints in the sand. So they had to have people go out there with little wool booties on. And these were, I believe-

• 54:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I was thinking they were like snowshoes or something, you know, to like get down there.

• 55:01Lizzie Bassett?

  They had 300 Bedouins wearing sandals, who had to go out in the desert with palm fronds and wearing like wool sandals and sweep away any footprints anytime anybody went out there.

• 55:14Chris Winterbauer?

  You need Legolas walking on the snow.

• 55:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, well, they didn't have them. Uh, and thus began one of the biggest pains in the ass of the entire production. So cast and crew also had to wear goggles because of the sand. Unless you're on camera, then you're out of luck. Or unless you're David Lean, who said the goggles disturbed his train of thought. He will come to regret that. Umbrellas had to be brought in to cover the cameras between takes so that they wouldn't melt the film because it was like 120 degrees. It was actually so high that sometimes the thermometers couldn't read the temperature and they had to cool down the thermometers.

• 55:46Chris Winterbauer?

  And the camera is a metal box with a magnifying glass on the front. Like, it's an oven in an oven. It's crazy.

• 55:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. And this particular location, Jebel Tubek, I might be mispronouncing that, I'm sorry, was 150 miles away from the nearest well and had not been inhabited since the 7th century AD, when a bunch of monks abandoned their monastery there. And speaking of things not going quite right, Lean was less and less pleased with Maurice Ronay. His performance wasn't right. Neither was his accent. Both of those things could maybe be fixed, but his green eyes could not, and they really bothered David Lean.

• 56:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 56:24Lizzie Bassett?

  It was at this point that a novel concept popped into David Lean's head. What if we cast someone who's actually Middle Eastern?

• 56:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It's kind of the equivalent of location shooting for David, you know what I mean?

• 56:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 56:36Chris Winterbauer?

  In a sense, it's like the, it's the next evolution he needs to make as a director, candidly.

• 56:41Lizzie Bassett?

  So they shit can Maurice Ronay and they start hunting through headshots of basically every Egyptian actor available. And when David Lean saw Omar Sharif, he said, if he speaks English, bring him here.

• 56:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, he's amazing. His eyes.

• 56:54Lizzie Bassett?

  He's gorgeous.

• 56:56Chris Winterbauer?

  He's got these huge eyes and then these incredible eyebrows.

• 56:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 56:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And so he's so expressive.

• 57:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And very like sweet eyes.

• 57:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, but also.

• 57:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Scary.

• 57:05Chris Winterbauer?

  But brutal.

• 57:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And scary, but he's pitch perfectly cast in having the opposite seeming moral arc of Lawrence.

• 57:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 57:14Chris Winterbauer?

  And I love it.

• 57:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 57:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so, like, we meet him from our Western perspective murdering a man for drinking from his well. And by the end of the film, Lawrence is the warped moral monster and Sharif is the one.

• 57:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Who we know understands the world for the way that it is. And it's so good.

• 57:31Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing. So Omar Sharif was born Michael Dmitri Shalhoub in Alexandria, Egypt in 1932 to Syrian and Lebanese parents. And by the time he was cast, he was already a very established star in Egypt. He'd been acting professionally since he was 22. He was married to one of Egypt's biggest movie stars, Fatun Hamama. And it was around the time that he married her that he had changed his name to Omar Sharif and converted to Islam. And he didn't just speak English, Chris. He spoke Arabic, English, French, Italian, and Spanish. How? I'll tell you how. His mother. Here's what he told The Guardian about his childhood. Quote, "I was a fat little boy when I was 10 years old. My mother, who didn't speak any English at all, said, 'I know the only thing is to put him in an English boarding

• 58:16Lizzie Bassett?

  school. The food will be so horrible that he'll lose the weight. That's how I became an actor. There was also a theater at the English school I went to, so I lost my weight. I became thin. I learned to become an actor and I learned English very well. All this was because my mother didn't like looking at her fat son."

• 58:36Lizzie Bassett?

  He's very funny, by the way.

• 58:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a very Dalian prelude to next week's episode.

• 58:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, true. So David Lean's pitch to Sharif was not amazing. It was basically, hey, can you come and do a screen test for a pretty small part in this movie? It's not really written yet. Also, you're gonna have to travel to Jordan for it. Now, normally Omar would have said no, but it was David Lean and that name alone convinced him. Now, Sharif later said to The Guardian, quote, "When he took me from Egypt, he didn't know me. He just said, I want an Arab person to play this Lawrence of Arabia thing. I want a real Arab who speaks English. All this happened because I had been to an English school in Cairo. So he called me and I went to the desert and he loved me. He actually liked me very much. I was one of the only actors he actually liked in all his life. He hated them.

• 59:21Chris Winterbauer?

  You can feel it. He'd be like Sharif, that becomes the central relationship of the movie. I mean, it's so interesting that you say it was not, the script was not finished because that's the only relationship that actually-

• 59:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, they wrote a lot more in for him.

• 59:32Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say that tethers us in the back half of the movie. And you mentioned again, casting an Arab actor. One of the things that works so well about Bridge on the River Kwai is obviously like General Saito and the other Japanese characters are actually played by Japanese and Asian actors. And then you compare it to something like Breakfast at Tiffany's, right? Which comes out a couple of years later. And obviously like that movie is a little hard to wa- very hard to watch now for Mickey Rooney's performance. So, yeah.

• 59:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, in June of 1961, he officially replaced Maurice Ronay. He was only paid 8,000 pounds and was required to have a mole removed off his face by a plastic surgeon before arriving on set. He was also given barely a week to learn how to ride a camel for his iconic entrance. Let's talk about this entrance briefly. It is one of the greatest entrances in film history where he appears out of a mirage. It is so good. He had to enter from over a quarter mile away. According to Omar Sharif, it may have been more like two miles away.

• 1:00:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe that.

• 1:00:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I do too. He said two to three miles. It was hot as shit because Lean needed a very high sun for the shot. Now, you may notice what looks like camel tracks kind of extending from the well towards where Sharif is. That's actually spray paint on the ground. It was both to sort of guide your eye in that direction, indicate that it's a, you know, a traveled-

• 1:00:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Like a game trail or something. Yeah, that's kind of what I thought. Yeah.

• 1:00:47Lizzie Bassett?

  It was also to help him know where to go because he's coming from, you know, one to two miles away.

• 1:00:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 1:00:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, to obscure Sharif before his entrance, crew had to drive trucks in circles in front of him to kick up the sand, so it looks like he's entering from a sandstorm. It's amazing. And they used a very special lens that David Lean commissioned for this shot specifically. I believe it was a 482 millimeter lens. I've also seen 450 millimeter. I'm inclined to believe the more specific number. You pointed this out earlier, but almost impossible to see what you're looking at in the viewfinder with this thing, especially because he is so far away.

• 1:01:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Here's the thing, too. On a 450 millimeter lens, if you touch the camera while it's rolling-

• 1:01:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, you're gonna completely fuck up the shot.

• 1:01:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It will vibrate so hard that it'll look like he is jumping from the top of the frame to the bottom of the frame. And the camera's running film through it, so it is actually vibrating when you are using it. So like, again, I just don't know how they technologically did this. It's incredible.

• 1:01:46Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing.

• 1:01:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And they have to commission that lens because, again, it's a 70 millimeter piece of film, which is larger than 35 millimeter by like at least two, maybe four X. And so they have to make a lens that can create an image circle big enough to cover that, you know what I mean?

• 1:02:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It's incredible. Huge shout out to Freddie Young on this. The cinematography in this movie is like, it's unmatched. But let's go back to the camels, Chris. They hurt everybody's butts. Peter O'Toole said, quote, "I found after a while my bottom was bleeding from bouncing up and down on this snorting great dragon." So he made a little trip to Beirut on one of their days off, and he bought some pink sponge rubber that he shoved into the saddle to try and make it more comfortable. And it turns out, everyone else thought this was a really good idea, including the Bedouin extras who kept asking him to go out and get more of the sponge rubber so they could jam it into their saddles as well. They ended up calling him the father of rubber in Arabic. They really appreciated it.

• 1:02:41Chris Winterbauer?

  You see the miscommunication on set when they're saying, "If you need a rubber, go to David O'Toole."

• 1:02:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Peter O'Toole, yes.

• 1:02:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Peter O'Toole, excuse me.

• 1:02:48Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's a good thing that O'Toole figured out how to get comfortable on those camels because he was on them a lot. He told NPR's Fresh Air, quote, "I had a stuntman doing all those shots that are miles and miles away." And David Lean said, "Look through the lens, Peter. Look at the stuntman." So I did. And he said, "You see? No poetry." So I found myself being the poet, and I was the one bouncing up and down miles and miles away. But it was all right. I had a transistor radio plugged into my ears, and I had a cigarette going, and I had a little bottle of something in the saddlebag. I was quite comfy. So that is him in those shots that are like two miles away. It's Peter O'Toole just bouncing around on the camel.

• 1:03:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Drunk with a cigarette in 120-degree weather.

• 1:03:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Having a ball. So they spent nine months in the desert in Jordan, according to O'Toole, living in tents. They would shoot for 10 to 12 days straight, and then they would have a few days off, which naturally Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif spent in Jerusalem or Beirut, spending literally all of their money at the poker table. They did this multiple times. They lost everything that they made on this movie, like over and over again. This is my favorite quote from him on this. He said, "We weren't sober, but neither were we unconscious. We were fully aware of the pain and agony of watching all of our pennies go down the Swanee."

• 1:04:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Sounds like a great time.

• 1:04:04Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the thing. In case you can't tell, Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole became very good friends during the filming of Lawrence of Arabia. As we've discussed, David Lean, not much of a director for actors. He doesn't really care about them that much. He's not particularly encouraging, so they really leaned on each other, and I think, you know, very much loved each other by the end of this. And this shoot was a slog. According to Sam Spiegel, they were trying to capture at most one minute of footage a day. In September of 1961, Robert Bolt, who was still not done with the script, was arrested in London. He had been demonstrating on a campaign for nuclear disarmament when he was arrested, and basically the authorities are like, "Hey, if you just publicly apologize and take everything

• 1:04:47Lizzie Bassett?

  back that you said, we'll let you go." But he refused, and so he remained in prison. And it turns out that legally at that time, anything he wrote while imprisoned would have become government property, which meant he could not work on Lawrence of Arabia as long as he remained behind bars.

• 1:05:05Lizzie Bassett?

  So, September 28th, production, now on its 117th day, was shut down. And Sam Spiegel paid a little visit to Bolt in prison. This is what Bolt had to say, quote, "And then all hell broke loose. Sam Spiegel just went absolutely mad. So have these people got to lose their jobs and lose thousands of dollars just so that you can go to heaven when you die?" Was his line, which is an amazing argument. "So after a fortnight, I bound myself over and came out. I felt that although there were very good reasons why I should, I knew that ultimately I should not have come out, and it was simply because Sam had built up the pressure to such an extent that I couldn't hold out." So Bolt apologized, walked back his statements, and was released.

• 1:05:46Lizzie Bassett?

  However, he quickly realized that he had been pretty heavily manipulated. It turns out, production had been shut down anyway, because they were running out of scenes to shoot in the desert. And Spiegel knew that they hadn't planned to resume shooting until December, and they had budgeted accordingly. Bolt called it, quote, "The most shameful moment of my life, and never forgave or spoke to Spiegel again after the film was completed." I suspect what happened here is that Spiegel didn't want the bad press of him being in prison. And probably also was in a hurry to get the script done, but still, this is so shitty. On December 18th, 1961, filming picked back up in Sevilla, Spain. This is where they shot all the scenes that are supposed to be Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, anything that had like, modern architecture, that's Sevilla.

• 1:06:31Lizzie Bassett?

  So David Lean was not happy to be leaving the desert and effectively recreating these locations versus finding more authentic ones. But he did not have a choice. It was way cheaper to film in Spain, plus a lot more comfortable for cast and crew, and Sam Spiegel had frozen assets there, that he could only spend in Spain. So, hooray! But it was not easy. They had to ferry all the camels over from Jordan to the new location. And next, they moved to Almeria, Spain, which is where they filmed the two most incredible set pieces in the movie: Lawrence's attacks on the Hijaz railway and the siege on Akaba. And by the way, this movie basically transformed Almeria. It was just a tiny fishing village, and afterwards, it actually became a pretty major filming location. Cool. In fact, location scout and property master Eddie Faouli, who was like David Lean's

• 1:07:14Lizzie Bassett?

  right-hand man, loved it so much that he opened his own hotel there, which became the stomping grounds for many movie stars, and you can still stay there today. It looks beautiful. So let's talk about Akaba first because this sequence is mind blowing. It is not historically accurate.

• 1:07:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I know I gave Braveheart a lot of shit for the Battle of the Bridge not having a bridge. This is a similar situation, but I don't care. I don't care. It looks amazing. So the entire set was built on a beach called Playa del Algarrobico. And when I say built, I mean, they built all of those tiny little structures. Most of them were just facades and they could only be shot from the land side. If you're wondering how they safely shot this absolutely bonkers sequence, I would like to turn to a scene from Yellowstone to best explain their plan.

• 1:07:59Speaker 07

  Rip, did you figure out how to do this without all us getting trampled? Best we came up with, sir, is like, fuck it.

• 1:08:06Lizzie Bassett?

  There you go. That's essentially the plan.

• 1:08:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I feel like that's also how they shoot Yellowstone.

• 1:08:11Lizzie Bassett?

  It is, yes. It was a mile and a half long charge down a hill of shale. There were 100 camels at the front with Omar and Peter leading the charge and behind them 500 stallions. Now, they'd done a rehearsal the day before. It went okay, but everybody was aware of the fact that like, this was a rehearsal. It doesn't have the same energy. They was stop and start. They're all really scared about how it's going to go on the day. And here is Peter O'Toole on Turner Classic Movies explaining how they actually did it.

• 1:08:42Speaker 08

  We were all very nervous. And I went into this little tent where we were to start the charge and Omar was sitting in a chair and he had his, his black caffir on, but he didn't have the little thing around it. And, and he had his worry beads. And he looked like a nun with a mustache.

• 1:09:16Speaker 08

  I said, what are you, what are you doing, Omar? He said, Peter, I've been working out the odds.

• 1:09:27Speaker 08

  What odds?

• 1:09:31Speaker 08

  Whether the camel will fall over,

• 1:09:35Speaker 08

  or I will fall off the camel?

• 1:09:41Speaker 08

  And what do you decide? That there's more chance of me falling off the camel than there is of the camel falling over? I said, I see. And what do you intend to do? He said, I'm going to tie myself to the camel.

• 1:10:03Speaker 08

  And I said, well, I'm going to get drunk.

• 1:10:15Speaker 08

  And Omar said, oh, I'm going to get drunk too.

• 1:10:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I loved Peter. I've been working out the odds.

• 1:10:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I just, I love the sardonic sense of humor of these people.

• 1:10:29Lizzie Bassett?

  He seems like so much fun.

• 1:10:30Chris Winterbauer?

  They just seem like they were having such a good time together. And despite it being disastrously unsafe.

• 1:10:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Insane, yeah. Peter O'Toole later laughed at a critic who mentioned his, quote, "look of messianic zeal" in this sequence because he was really just terrified and hammered drunk. And if you watch the clip again, knowing that, it's like, yeah. And by the way, by the time the camels hit the water, Peter O'Toole had a broken thumb. He did not know how it had happened. And Omar Sharif was still tied to his camel. So that part of his plan had worked. But unfortunately, he was tied to it upside down because the ropes had slipped and he was just dangling under its belly in the ocean.

• 1:11:11Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, horribly unsafe, but also incredible.

• 1:11:14Lizzie Bassett?

  But it's amazing. So when it came to the train derailment sequences, the first thing Lee noticed was that the desert didn't look right. The sand was the wrong color. And there were little shrubs all over it. So they hired hundreds of locals to come pick out the shrubs. And poor Eddie Fauley had to import massive amounts of yellow sand to try and match the color of the desert.

• 1:11:34Chris Winterbauer?

  And we should mention, they probably destroyed a local ecosystem.

• 1:11:38Lizzie Bassett?

  For sure.

• 1:11:39Chris Winterbauer?

  You cannot remove those plants. Like there's, like deserts have incredibly delicate ecosystems.

• 1:11:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, absolutely. They're like, dump more yellow sand, Eddie.

• 1:11:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Chris Winterbauer?

  The lizards are like, for the love of God, stop.

• 1:11:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Please stop. The production team built a mile of train tracks and they trucked in two early 20th century German and Belgian trains. In order to get the scene where the train completely explodes and derails, they knew there was one way to do it, and that was to completely explode and derail a train. So that is what they did.

• 1:12:10Chris Winterbauer?

  That's crazy.

• 1:12:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:12:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I like, at first I thought, oh, maybe this, this must be miniature.

• 1:12:15Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:12:15Chris Winterbauer?

  But then it's not. Like, it's clearly not. Yeah.

• 1:12:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Sam Spiegel, not happy about this because you only get one shot to get this right. And it's very expensive. They did do a lot of planning to try and ensure that it happened the way that they wanted. They actually placed greased metal plates underneath the sand where they were trying to encourage the train to derail. So it would sort of shoot down that direction, which worked. And they figured it would take 10 pounds of gunpowder to cut through the rails, another 10 pounds to push the train car off the tracks. So they set that up. And when it came time to get the shot, the train conductor had to start up the train, get it going, and literally jump out of the train before it exploded.

• 1:12:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, and David Lean blew up the goddamn bridge at the end of Bridge on the River Kwai, too.

• 1:13:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure did. He loves to blow up a bridge or a railroad trestle.

• 1:13:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, in the other train scene with all the horses, they were supposed to, obviously, catch the horses after they get loose. But if you watched the movie like I did and thought, how the fuck did they catch the rest of those horses? The answer is, they did not. Most of them ran off into the Spanish desert and were never seen again.

• 1:13:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Wild horses.

• 1:13:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:13:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 1:13:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep. One shot at that one, too, because you lost all your horses. But it quickly became clear to everyone that Spain could not provide a vast bleak enough desert for the Turkish massacre scene. So they moved production to Morocco, and Morocco was a nightmare. King Hassan II had pledged a lot of help to the crew, and it did provide a ton of camels and the actual Royal Moroccan Army to serve as extras in this sequence, but every day brought a new problem. There weren't enough camels. The water supply was contaminated with salt. The troops wanted more money, or as we'll learn, any money. It was hot as balls. And in fact, the troops just wanted to get paid, period. But somehow their wages had vanished into a bank account in Paris by some reports, not sure whose.

• 1:14:13Lizzie Bassett?

  They got so pissed that at one point, they started firing live rounds over the heads of David Lean, the cast, and the crew.

• 1:14:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 1:14:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Not great. Not great. They also realized the camel riders in Morocco didn't look anything like the riders in Jordan, so they had to have all of the saddles remade and teach all of the extras how to ride the camels. Everyone was pissed. Everyone also got sick, malaria, enteritis, just random rashes. Morocco was not fun. Plus, it was taking David Lean forever to capture the shots. He was apparently averaging 24 seconds of usable footage a day here.

• 1:14:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And when you're making a movie that's ultimately going to be close to four hours, I mean, you're gonna, it's hundreds of shooting days. It's just, it's crazy. I mean, every frame is a painting. It's beautiful. You can't argue with the results, but I cannot imagine how frustrating that process would be.

• 1:15:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Insane. Sam Spiegel apparently flew in to give everyone a pep talk that basically amounted to, "You're doing great, sweetie, but can you please, for the love of God, go faster?"

• 1:15:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the same as Kurosawa. You know what I mean? All these guys, like, they're getting the notes, and they're like, "Please hurry up. Please hurry up. Please hurry up."

• 1:15:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Looks so good. Good job. Good job. Also, I didn't even get to this, but Sam Spiegel apparently would like fake heart attacks throughout this production when things weren't going the way he wanted them to. And at one point was actually flown across the desert strapped to a gurney by the Red Cross. He was fine. Anyway.

• 1:15:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like Jodie Foster faking appendicitis.

• 1:15:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Toni Collette.

• 1:15:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Toni Collette, that's what it was on your movie sites. Sorry.

• 1:15:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And finally, after 313 days of shooting, production wrapped.

• 1:15:49Chris Winterbauer?

  That's crazy.

• 1:15:50Lizzie Bassett?

  The shoot had lasted almost as long as the actual Arab revolt itself.

• 1:15:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, what was The Shining, 185 days? And that's always.

• 1:15:58Lizzie Bassett?

  It's got nothing on David Lean.

• 1:16:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Lizzie Bassett?

  And they weren't in the desert, although it seems like Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif had a better time than anybody on The Shining did. So back in London, as post-production was about to commence, David Lean, who didn't wear his goggles, actually had to have an operation on his eyeball because he had sand embedded behind his eyelid.

• 1:16:20Lizzie Bassett?

  David, turns out you need your eyes. You're a director.

• 1:16:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Post-production began in September of 1962. And remember that date because Sam Spiegel had already planned to premiere the film at the Royal Film Performance, which was attended by the Queen and was scheduled for December 10th of 1962.

• 1:16:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, good thing your director is an editor.

• 1:16:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he also had an absolute legend to lean on by his side, and that was Anne Coates. She had been working as an editor for about 10 years at this point, though she actually started off as a nurse at a plastic surgery hospital. And she was looking for work when she ran into a friend who was working on Albert Finney's screen test. Lean hired her to cut the early screen tests and was so impressed with her work, he hired her to cut the entire movie. She would go on to edit everything from Murder on the Orient Express, Elephant Man, Lady Jane, What About Bob, Aaron Brockovich, Unfaithful, and her final credit was actually Fifty Shades of Grey.

• 1:17:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:14Lizzie Bassett?

  She had a lot of range. Yeah.

• 1:17:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, this, we should mention, this movie has one of the most famous cuts in the history of film.

• 1:17:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, that is thanks to Anne Coates. Can you explain what you're talking about?

• 1:17:25Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a moment, well, can I briefly mention also, the only great part of Prometheus is Michael Fassbender's obsession with Peter O'Toole's character in Lawrence of Arabia. And like, the trick is mutt minding that it hurts. But there's a moment where Peter O'Toole has lit a match and they're discussing his mission, you know, which is going to be insane. And it does a close up where it's almost a two-shot of the profile of Peter O'Toole's face in the match. And it's perfectly positioned in the frame so that the match is about a third of the way up the frame. And he blows it out really quickly. And you smash cut on that action to a landscape shot, a telephoto landscape shot of the desert with

• 1:18:06Chris Winterbauer?

  a blood red sky as the sun is just breaking the horizon. And it's one of the most breathtaking, modern feeling, match cuts.

• 1:18:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:18:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I would say like, almost like a stream of consciousness match cut, because there's no actual action being matched, right? There's no geography being matched. And yet it is so, it so wonderfully transports you to a time and place and it feels so magical that there's really nothing like it. It's amazing. It takes your breath away, even watching it today.

• 1:18:36Lizzie Bassett?

  You have Anne Coates to thank for that. That was her idea. She introduced David Lean to the idea of smash cuts. And this particular edit was, I believe, her doing. It's amazing.

• 1:18:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Lizzie Bassett?

  She and David Lean worked from 9am to midnight, seven days a week, in order to edit the 31 miles of footage. They ran into quite a few problems. Some of the negatives had been damaged by fingerprints. They actually fingerprinted the entire crew to try and figure out who had done this. It turned out it was someone from the lab. There was a bunch of stuff. The sand that they had brought in to like, post sync, the edit got dumped outside in England where it got rained on, turned into a pile of mud. And according to Coates, the original cut was of course compromised by the speed at which they were forced to do it. She said, "We cut it very, very fast for a three hour, 40 minute version to open for the Queen. We could have done it with another couple of months to get it really trimmed down, maybe by 10 minutes." I love that.

• 1:19:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say, yeah.

• 1:19:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you can't cut much out of this.

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• 1:20:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, you talked about the score, and I am so excited to tell you about this, Chris. Lean wanted to use the same composer he had used from "The Bridge on the River Kwai", but Spiegel had another person in mind, and the biggest problem was that neither of these guys, they felt, were capable of pulling off the Arabian themes. They were both British. So they're like, okay, the Brits will split the British themes and we'll hire Soviet composer Aram Katchaturian for the Arabian themes. But the two Brits screened the film, and they thought it was hot trash, so they declined to be involved, leaving Lean with Katchaturian on the Arabian themes, Benjamin Britten on the British themes, and a young French composer named Maurice Jaur, who would be coordinating the efforts between the two. But... Maurice started writing a little bit of music

• 1:21:31Lizzie Bassett?

  under everyone's noses, just in case he might get the chance to contribute. Lucky for him, Katchaturian could not get permission to leave the USSR, and Britain said he needed at least a year to score something of this scope. So Jhar thought, surely now it's my turn. And Spiegel said, nope, I am hiring Richard Rogers instead.

• 1:21:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:21:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, of Rogers and Hammerstein.

• 1:21:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 1:21:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and the Sound of, didn't he do the Sound of Music?

• 1:22:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, they wrote the Sound of Music, yes.

• 1:22:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, yeah, yeah. But I'm saying like the, the, the music feel. I know, I know he's not right. I'm just trying to think of examples that are not Oklahoma.

• 1:22:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure, yes, of course.

• 1:22:13Chris Winterbauer?

  To try to justify this.

• 1:22:14Lizzie Bassett?

  The King and I.

• 1:22:15Chris Winterbauer?

  The King and I, there we go. Thank you.

• 1:22:17Lizzie Bassett?

  But Richard Rogers turned in some theme options and David Lean was like, what, what, what is this? What is this trash you're serving up to me? And then, as they were going over what he had turned in, one of the pianists who was in the room playing the music pointed out, uh, this is actually an old military march. I know this one. It's not even an original piece of music. And David Lean was pissed. So finally, he turned to good old Maurice Jhar, who had been sitting in the corner the whole time and said, what do you have? And he walked over to the piano and played what would become the main theme of Lawrence of Arabia. And David Lean was thrilled. He insisted that Jhar get the job immediately.

• 1:23:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Jhar was thrilled, I would assume, until he found out that he had six weeks to score the entire film. And he did it.

• 1:23:10Chris Winterbauer?

  It's crazy.

• 1:23:11Lizzie Bassett?

  In a 1984 interview, Jhar said of the experience, quote, "I don't want to bore you with the story, but I barely survived this experience from the physical point of view. Having to do everything in six weeks, I was only sleeping about two or three hours a night. I don't want to have this kind of experience too often."

• 1:23:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Here's what I'll say, having just watched Bridge on the River Kwai and this movie back to back.

• 1:23:34Chris Winterbauer?

  There are two ways in which this movie feels more timeless to me than Bridge on the River Kwai overall. One is obviously the filming technology. They use 70 millimeter film.

• 1:23:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And the other is Maurice Jar's score.

• 1:23:45Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so good.

• 1:23:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, Bridge on the River Kwai is an amazing movie and they use a military theme as score in that movie as well. Like a whistled theme by the British soldiers. It's very effective. But it feels dated in a way that this movie does not. And the other thing that helps, I believe, because he only had six weeks, they probably underscored it a little bit for the time.

• 1:24:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And that is so effective because it just allows the desert to be quiet in a lot of scenes. And the dialogue scenes can just play as dialogue scenes.

• 1:24:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Omar Sharif's entrance. There's almost no music underneath the first few minutes before that.

• 1:24:19Chris Winterbauer?

  It's perfect. Yeah. So I think it weirdly worked in their favor.

• 1:24:23Lizzie Bassett?

  It did.

• 1:24:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I feel terribly for Maurice Jar, but wow, what a score.

• 1:24:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. And of course, he would go on to score Dr. Zhivago, which is like one of the most beautiful film scores of all time and many, many more. But this was his big break.

• 1:24:36Chris Winterbauer?

  And A Passage to India. I think he did David Lean's last film as well.

• 1:24:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he did. So this would indeed premiere on December 10th, 1962, in front of Queen Lizzie herself. Six days later, it had its New York premiere where it received a standing ovation, but David Lean received a warning from, I promised he would come back, David O. Selsnick.

• 1:24:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh.

• 1:24:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Selsnick told him, quote, "They will do to you what they tried to do to me on Gone with the Wind. They will try to make you cut it. Don't let them. I refuse to let them cut Gone with the Wind, which they said was going to be hopeless if it wasn't cut because of the length. They could only get two shows a day. It's made more money than any film ever made. Don't let them touch Lawrence." Selsnick was right on the money. Cinema owners began complaining about the length immediately, saying it would only allow for one screening a day. They can't make their money back. So in January of 1963, Spiegel ordered an additional cut of around 17 to 21 minutes off of the movie. According to a 1989 LA Times article, quote, "The most controversial of the truncated scenes suggesting Lawrence's homosexual

• 1:25:42Lizzie Bassett?

  and sadomanticistic tendencies gained mythic proportion after it was trimmed. The restored and very subtle scene proves an industry tourism. Where there's smoke, there's often just smoke."

• 1:25:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Is the suggested scene when he's being tortured by the Turks?

• 1:25:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:25:57Chris Winterbauer?

  And for our audience, if you're unfamiliar, if you haven't watched the movie in a while, it's he's strapped down, his shirt's been removed and he's being whipped. And he seems to be able to handle it better than at first they're expecting. But then the guard smiles at him and he looks back and he sees the Turkish general or commander, right? With his shirt open, watching from the next room. And there's a suggestion that-

• 1:26:22Lizzie Bassett?

  It's sexual.

• 1:26:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It's sexual. And I think that they're, based on what I know of T. Lawrence, it's suggested to me that maybe he's going to be raped.

• 1:26:28Lizzie Bassett?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:26:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And that's how I read it.

• 1:26:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he writes very specifically in his own works that he was.

• 1:26:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And so I feel like they're trying to suggest that when they can't, this is obviously before Deliverance, right? No one's done this. And so they can't put it on screen, but I feel like that's what they're suggesting.

• 1:26:44Lizzie Bassett?

  It is, yes.

• 1:26:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. But it's very subtle. It's not like a protracted scene.

• 1:26:48Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the thing. It did not need to be cut at all. And in fact, and it's an important scene because it kind of helps with the motivation that he goes into the next Turkish massacre with. Without it, it's a bit weird.

• 1:26:59Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's too subtle, actually. That's why I, the last third of the movie feels a little rickety to me in terms of tracking where he is emotionally. But, you know, again, that may just be me.

• 1:27:09Lizzie Bassett?

  So in 1971, an even shorter version was released theatrically and it seemed that all hope for David Lean's original vision had been lost. But in 1986, a film restorer named Robert Harris pitched Columbia on a restoration. Now, he couldn't get it done due to contractual issues, but Lawrence's super fans, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg could. They rescued the project and in 1989, a fully restored version premiered in Los Angeles, New York and DC. Now, one person who was not in love with Lawrence of Arabia was A.W. Lawrence. It turns out, he actually hadn't seen the final shooting script that Bolt had been writing until July of 1962, which was way too late to address anything, and he really, really didn't like it.

• 1:27:52Lizzie Bassett?

  He felt it had been turned into an anti-war movie, which was not what he had agreed to, nor was it what he had intended. And he fiercely denied that there was any way his brother had taken part in the Turkish massacre, even though it seems like he almost certainly did. But there is one historical distortion that many say does harm the movie a little bit, and I am inclined to agree. In the film, it's implied that Lawrence doesn't know about the Sykes-Pecole Agreement until it's effectively too late, and he's already made all these promises to Prince Faisal. In reality, he almost certainly knew about it long before any of this happened. At the very least, he knew that England was not being genuine in terms of the Arab independence that they were offering, and he probably always knew that.

• 1:28:36Lizzie Bassett?

  He's a spy, like, he is very aware. Also, the Sykes-Pecole Agreement, I believe, was basically public. By many accounts, this tormented him deeply, and he may have actually given Faisal a heads-up about it early on, which is also interesting, because that would have been some kind of treason, I would think, on the part of the British.

• 1:28:56Lizzie Bassett?

  It's one of the few instances in which Lean and Bolt seem to want to uncomplicate T.E. Lawrence. And speaking of another instance of this, as promised, I want to come back to the homoerotic undertones of this movie. When asked by The Washington Post in 1989 if the film is "pervasively homoerotic," David Lean said, "Yes, of course it is." Throughout, "I'll never forget standing there in the desert once with some of these tough Arab buggers, some of the toughest we had, and I suddenly thought, 'He's making eyes at me.'" And he was. So it does pervade it, the whole story, and certainly Lawrence was very, if not entirely, homosexual. "We thought we were being very daring at the time, Lawrence and Omar, Lawrence and the Arab boys."

• 1:29:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, this in and of itself is another oversimplification and sensationalization of T.E. Lawrence. I want to say again, Lawrence was almost certainly asexual, the only sexual... Experience he seems to have had was not consensual. It took place when he was imprisoned by the Turks. I'm not knocking David Lean here. He made a really phenomenal movie.

• 1:29:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think if anything, he's actually kind of misstating what they did, in my opinion. Because I actually feel like what's so wonderful about his relationship with Omar Sharif.

• 1:30:04Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a romantic relationship.

• 1:30:06Chris Winterbauer?

  It's romantic, but it is in like a camaraderie sense, right? And that they are like, it is a romantic, brotherly love. And their estimation of each other grows and their affection grows across the movie. And it is homo romantic, but it's not presented as sexual. And that's really important distinction. And I'm glad they don't tip it in that direction. You know what I mean? In the movie, because that's not honest to the character. Yeah, it just feels like a quote. That's not actually representative, in my opinion, of the final film.

• 1:30:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I actually really like the onscreen relationship between Lawrence and Ali in this movie. And between, you know, I think Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole definitely leaned into it in a way that I'm not sure everybody would at the time. And it is a very romantic relationship.

• 1:30:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Totally.

• 1:30:49Lizzie Bassett?

  In the end, Lawrence of Arabia won seven out of its 10 Oscar nominations and remains, I think it's safe to say, one of the greatest films of all time. That ends our coverage of Lawrence of Arabia. There's so much more that we could have gotten into. I don't have time, but I really loved this movie. I loved diving into it and I want to learn more about T E Lawrence. He's extremely fascinating. Chris, what went right?

• 1:31:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, thank you, Lizzie, for driving us through the desert on this one. It's an amazing story. It's an amazing movie. David Lean's an incredible director. So I actually don't really know his filmography. I've seen Great Expectations, I think, was the one that I've watched that he did. But I don't know his filmography pre summertime very well.

• 1:31:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I want to watch some of the earlier, the Noel Coward stuff I would like to see.

• 1:31:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly. I've seen, you know, summertime through A Passage to India, I think I've seen, including Ryan Soder. But anyway, I want to give mine to just the two actors that I thought transcended all of this. And that is Omar Sharif and Claude Rains. And mostly Omar Sharif, because he's the bigger character in this. He's great. And you can just tell he's a star the minute he shows up. And what a performance. And good job on the production for realizing that you go in a different direction. But just kudos to Omar Sharif for like, he took a small part. And then he turned it into a huge part. And that's really cool.

• 1:32:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and became arguably one of the first Middle Eastern Hollywood movie stars ever. And he was wonderful.

• 1:32:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I have to give it to David Lean. I just think, you know, the dedication to detail, you said, every shot is like a painting. It really is. And he was willing to go live in the desert for, he was there for like, three years, because he was there a year before everybody else was. It's just so beautiful. And I very much admire his, even though he didn't, as Omar Sharif said, he did not like actors, I very much admire his willingness to explore unlikable characters in the way that he does, without trying to stand off some of their rougher edges, for the most part. I love this movie. I'm so glad I owned it on Blu-ray. We must get some kind of projector so that we can watch this on a big screen, because it is phenomenal.

• 1:33:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that wraps up our coverage of Larry of Arabia, or in Friends, Lawrence of Alabia, as the name of Phoebe's sister of the movie she's in. Chris, if people would like to support this podcast, how can they do that?

• 1:33:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Cross the desert of Nefud and tell a family member or friend, What Went Wrong? Pretty good. Give it a listen. Number two, leave a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you're listening on. Number three, subscribe on that podcatcher so that you're getting our episodes every Monday and occasionally Friday. Number four, you can now get bonus episodes through Apple or Spotify. Sign up for our $5 special features program and you will get at least one bonus episode every month. These tend to be reviews of new releases. We just did Project Hail Mary. We've got a bunch of fun stuff coming out for you guys over the next few months with the summer releases. Number five, if you would like even more from us, you can join our Patreon. Head to www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast

• 1:34:01Chris Winterbauer?

  and for $5, you get the bonus episodes, you get an ad-free RSS feed, you get newsletters, extra credit posts, musings from us. And for $50, you can get a Peter O'Toolean shout out, just like one of these.

• 1:34:15Speaker 09

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  Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, "Oh my god, I do not sound like Peter O'Toole," Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Liel, Chris Zucker, David Friskolanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Schiebel, M. Zodiac, Evan Downey, Felicia G., Film It Yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel the Broken Glass Kids, The Cast and Crew of Win a Trip to Brown Town, how far away from received pronunciation is this? Probably pretty far. Grace Potter, Half Gray Hound, James McAvoy,

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  Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, Jory Hillpiper, Jose Emiliano Salto Del Giorgio, Karina Canaba, Kate Ellington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Elgashlager McCoy, Lazy Freddie, Lena, LJ, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Mariposas Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate the Knife, Rosemary Southwood, Ralja, that's the only one that sounds all right with this terrible accent, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott Oshita, Soman Shinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, The Provost Family, the O's still sound just like O's and there is no

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  spoon. Thank you all so much and I'm very sorry for this.

• 1:35:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm sorry for that offensive British accent.

• 1:35:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I mean, there were no women for you to play in this shout out. So we had to go with that. Well, Lizzie, why don't you tell us what we have coming next week? A journey into pure imagination.

• 1:36:06Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. We have, I believe, an oft requested film coming up. We have Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and we have a very special guest expert joining us on this episode. So come back in a week for that.

• 1:36:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, and learn how shooting in a studio can be just as unsafe as shooting in the desert. We're very excited. Thank you guys so much for listening. Until next week, this has been What Went Wrong.

• 1:36:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  To support What Went Wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS feed. You can also visit our website, whatwentwrongpod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by H. Conley.