Pod Insights WHAT WENT WRONG The Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood (with Daisy Eagan) About this episode When Natalie Wood drowned in 1981 she was only 43 years old. Thanks to films like ‘West Side Story’, ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, and ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ she was an icon, but she’d been out of the spotlight for almost a decade. Wood was in the midst of filming her comeback, ‘Brainstorm’, when she, her co-star Christopher Walken, and her husband Robert Wagner took their yacht out for Thanksgiving weekend. What happened that night depends on who you ask… and when you ask them.
Join Chris, Lizzie, and special guest Daisy Eagan from Strange and Unexplained for the first episode of our bonus series 'Out of Frame' where we’ll investigate the darker, more obscure corners of Hollywood history. In this episode we’ll find out if Wood’s death sank her final film, or if ‘Brainstorm’ had something to do with her death.
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Transcript 13,411 words · 7 speakers
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1:57 Lizzie Bassett? Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong. Except this isn't going to be your standard episode. This is the first episode of a new bonus series called Out of Frame, where we'll be focusing on the obscure and sometimes dark corners of Hollywood and also taking a little more time to discuss the off-camera lives of some of your favorite on-screen stars. Today, we're investigating the mysterious death of Hollywood icon Natalie Wood and how it intersects in some very strange ways with her final film, Brainstorm. I'm here as always with my lovely co-host, Chris Winterbauer, but because this is essentially a true crime episode and we are not true crime experts, we've enlisted the help of an actual expert. We have Daisy Egan here with us today of Strange and Unexplained.
2:42 Lizzie Bassett? Their show is in the fifth season. It covers true crime and paranormal activity. It's excellent. If you have not listened, you absolutely have to. The research is just top notch. I really love the writing. It's so fantastic. Daisy's also an actor, so kind of preacher naturally equipped to handle this episode. Daisy, thank you so much for being here with us today.
3:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, thanks so much. I'm so excited. I really love your show. I, it's so fascinating. And as somebody who's made a couple, a couple of pretty small movies, it's, it's just fascinating to see sort of the insides of it. And it's true, they are so hard to get made. And anything can go wrong at any time. It's a great, great show. I really like it.
3:27 Lizzie Bassett? Well, thank you.
3:28 Speaker 02 Good job, you.
3:29 Lizzie Bassett? Good job, you.
3:30 Speaker 02 Thanks.
3:31 Lizzie Bassett? You must go listen to Strange and Unexplained if you all haven't. It's really good, although honestly, some of your episodes have freaked me out quite a bit.
3:36 Speaker 02 Oh, good.
3:37 Lizzie Bassett? And you, you have another connection to today's episode, which I believe you've worked with Christopher Walken before.
3:43 Speaker 02 I sure did.
3:43 Lizzie Bassett? Oh, my God. Okay, I can't wait.
3:45 Speaker 02 Ah.
3:47 Lizzie Bassett? So before we jump in, as I said, we're gonna be talking about Natalie Wood, her death and her last film. So, Chris and Daisy, A, what do you all know about Natalie Wood going into this? And also, did you get a chance to watch Brainstorm, her final film?
4:05 Chris Winterbauer? Daisy, please.
4:07 Speaker 02 Sure. I did watch it. I watched it on Sunday. I had no idea what to expect. Zero. What I knew of Natalie Wood was obviously her, her big, you know, miracle on 34th Street and West Side Story. Thank you. And I actually worked with Marnie Nixon, who, who did the singing of, well, at least Breakfast at Tiffany's. And I guess she did West Side Story as, as well.
4:36 Lizzie Bassett? She did West Side Story. She's come up before in our Sound of Music episode. That's amazing.
4:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, she's, she was an odd duck, too. Lovely, lovely woman, but weird as a $3 bill. Yeah. So, so that she's incredibly beautiful. I mean, I just, and her performance as a child, because I was a child actor. That is hard. That is hard to get a performance like that. And it was so different from the other kids of that time. You think of like Leave It To Beaver and sort of, I don't know, ah, golly gee, kind of acting. And then that wasn't her. She was very natural and immensely watchable and just incredibly beautiful.
5:19 Lizzie Bassett? She was all of those things, Chris.
5:22 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah, I knew her early work better. Miracle On Thirty Fourth Street, The Searchers, Through West Side Story, less Rebel Without A Cause, less what she did in the 60s. I don't know that period of her work quite as well. And I know she took a bit of a break from acting in the 70s. And, you know, she dedicated herself to motherhood. And so then watching Brainstorm was interesting because I was actually pretty unfamiliar with Natalie Wood at that age.
5:50 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
5:51 Chris Winterbauer? And so she's very beautiful, as you mentioned. She's a very captivating, natural performer. And even the 80s can feel a little stiff in terms of performance sometimes, but she is grounded and Walken is too, I think, to his credit. I mean, like Cliff Robertson stands out a little more as a little more stodgy or stylized. Couple things, she, Olivia Colman reminds me of her.
6:14 Lizzie Bassett? Yes.
6:15 Chris Winterbauer? I don't know, more Natalie Wood, excuse me, at the time of Brainstorm than earlier in her career. And in terms of the movie Brainstorm, the movie, I think, is structurally a bit of a mess and it doesn't entirely make sense. But it's so interesting how, even though I think it's relatively obscure, you can see how it influenced so many movies that came after it and television shows. Severance is one that comes to mind, obviously, but then Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Matrix.
6:48 Lizzie Bassett? Even visually with the, like, helmets they have on in Brainstorm in terms of Eternal Sunshine.
6:52 Chris Winterbauer? As they try to sell the Apple Vision Pro and the V3, but I did. The movie, I think it struggles. It's trying to figure out, is it a movie about a scientific breakthrough? Is it a Cold War thriller? Is it a love story? And the element that works the best is Natalie Wood and Christopher Walken experiencing each other's memories.
7:12 Lizzie Bassett? Yes.
7:13 Chris Winterbauer? And there's like kind of a little romantic interlude. That's actually very moving.
7:16 Lizzie Bassett? I agree.
7:17 Chris Winterbauer? And I think that one of the reasons it works so well is Douglas Trumbull, the director, who I know we're not going to talk about very much, so I'll just briefly. I want to know.
7:24 Lizzie Bassett? We actually will talk about him a bit, so you can hold on to that.
7:28 Chris Winterbauer? Well, he's like a special effects master. That was his background. And he did, if you guys are unfamiliar, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He worked on 2001: Space Odyssey. He does something interesting in this movie with the way that he films the memories.
7:42 Lizzie Bassett? Yes, he does. And we're going to talk about that as well.
7:44 Chris Winterbauer? And you'll explain it.
7:45 Lizzie Bassett? Well, I'm actually going to make you explain parts of it. So just get yourself ready.
7:50 Chris Winterbauer? If you guys watch this movie, it looks very beautiful. It's a striking departure from the standard scenes. And I actually think it's very effective. And again, Natalie Wood and Christopher Walken fill those frames really beautifully. And it actually does feel like you're stepping into memories. And it's very, very moving.
8:06 Lizzie Bassett? I agree. I agree that this movie is a mess. I really liked it. If you have not seen this.
8:12 Chris Winterbauer? I did too. Yeah, it's worth watching.
8:14 Lizzie Bassett? Very much worth watching. 100%. It felt like this had influenced a lot. Just so you all know, this is the logline on IMDB. Researchers develop a system where they can jump into people's minds. But when people involved bring their personal problems into the equation, it becomes dangerous, perhaps deadly. That's like a, that's not a great logline for this, to be honest. If I'm going to sell you on it, I would say, basically, yeah, they developed the Apple Vision Pro, you know, long before it exists. But what they do is they figure out a way to record someone's POV, including their senses. So sight, smell, sound, touch, everything.
8:53 Lizzie Bassett? And then the person who is watching it is also experiencing all of those senses. And, you know, they go for it in this. Like, one of the first things that happens is that someone essentially records POV porn while using it.
9:08 Speaker 02 And my favorite thing is that he basically comes himself silly.
9:12 Lizzie Bassett? Yes.
9:13 Speaker 02 He comes himself into like a midlife crisis.
9:16 Lizzie Bassett? He does. He can't stop. And he's like having flashbacks to it when he's in the middle of conversations, which is so creepy and weird. And then, yeah, he's just like, I'm gonna go golf for the rest of my life.
9:28 Speaker 02 He's like, I came enough. I was about to go.
9:30 Lizzie Bassett? Which is amazing. But the big sort of turning point in this movie is that Louise Fletcher, who of course played Nurse Ratchet, she's an Academy Award winner. I think she's phenomenal in this movie.
9:41 Speaker 02 Must taste like an ashtray. But yeah, she's phenomenal.
9:45 Lizzie Bassett? She is an absolute chimney, just constantly smoking cigarettes. But she has a heart attack and she recognizes that it's happening and recognizes that she may not have time to get help. And so she hooks herself up to the machine and she records her own death. And that is really the point of this movie is that this tape exists of her death. Should they watch it? Can they watch it? Will they let Christopher Walken watch it? What are they using this technology for? Of course, the feds want in. They want to MKUltra people with their memory machines.
10:16 Chris Winterbauer? And this should happen 30 minutes into the movie, and this happens almost an hour into the 90 minute movie. So to show the structural problem.
10:23 Speaker 02 I said to my, my husband at one point, I was like, wow, the pacing in this movie is wild.
10:29 Lizzie Bassett? And yet, whatever, you know, I enjoyed it.
10:32 Speaker 02 I did. At the end of it, I was like, wow, I'm actually, I liked that. I was surprised.
10:36 Chris Winterbauer? It's very inventive.
10:37 Lizzie Bassett? I think she's wonderful in it. She's beautiful. I grew up loving Natalie Wood. And, you know, I thought of her as like one of the most beautiful women in the world. I watched West Side Story all the time when I was little. I love Gypsy. That's probably my favorite Natalie Wood performance, actually.
10:53 Lizzie Bassett? And if you haven't seen Gypsy, it's really long, but it's worth it. Absolutely fantastic. So let's dive in. We're going to talk about Natalie Wood's death, all the confusion, rumors, why mystery continues to surround it to this day. And we're going to talk about Brainstorm, which really should have been kind of a big deal as her final film, but got buried after she died. Did Natalie Wood's death sink the film? Or did the film have something to do with her death? We are going to find out today. And so strange that this movie has to do with someone recording their own death.
11:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:26 Lizzie Bassett? All right, so it was released September 30th, 1983. The director, as Chris said, was Douglas Trumbull. We're not really going to get into the screenplay too much. The cast, it stars notably Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson, and many more. If you don't know who Natalie Wood was, little brief background. She was born in 1938 as Natalia Zakarenko in San Francisco, California. And although her birth certificate listed her as Natalia, she was called Natasha as sort of a nickname. Her parents, Nick and Maria, were Russian immigrants. And they were really counting on their daughters, Natalia and Lana, to sort of help them achieve the American dream.
12:10 Lizzie Bassett? Now, this is going to come into context in just a moment, but Maria had another daughter, Olga, from a previous marriage, making Natalia her second born child. But she did not stay Zakarenko for long. Her father changed their family name to Gerdin in 1939 in an attempt to improve job prospects by moving them away from the end of the alphabet.
12:31 Speaker 02 Gerdin.
12:32 Lizzie Bassett? Listen, if it doesn't make any sense to you, it is worth noting that Nick was a raging alcoholic. So I don't know if there's a ton of sense to that. However, her mother was an extremely intense stage mom. Later on, when Natalie was achieving success, Maria famously said, quote, "God created her, but I invented her."
12:55 Speaker 02 Oh, so it's fitting that she was in Gypsy.
12:57 Lizzie Bassett? Very, very fitting.
13:00 Lizzie Bassett? Now Maria was also extremely superstitious. As we said, she was born in Russia, but she was raised in China after escaping the Bolshevik Revolution at five years old. And while in China, at a pretty young age, she visited a fortune teller. The fortune teller told her that her second child would become a great beauty famous worldwide. But most importantly, this woman told her to beware of dark water because someone was going to drown. And this is not something that's made up after the fact. Both girls, Natalie and her sister Lana, avoided water pretty much their whole lives because their mother told them this story constantly.
13:36 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
13:37 Lizzie Bassett? Maria did not swim. She avoided water as well. And understandably, Natalie developed a very deep fear of water that was due to her mother repeating this story. Natalie's home life was extremely turbulent, as you might be able to guess. According to Suzanne Finstead, author of Natasha, the biography of Natalie Wood, Natalie was, quote, "groomed by her mom to succeed at all costs, to be a pleaser to do whatever directors and producers, even co-stars, wanted her to do."
14:04 Speaker 02 Ooh.
14:05 Lizzie Bassett? So by 1943, Maria had successfully pushed Natalie, at this point still Natasha, into the spotlight. And she made her acting debut at four years old in an uncredited role in Happy Land. And an RKO executive named William Gertz gave her a new stage name, Natalie Wood, at this point. By 1946, she was stealing scenes from Orson Welles in Tomorrow is Forever, and she'd firmly established herself as a very high-earning child star, about $1,000 a week, which would be around $15,000 a week today.
14:36 Speaker 02 Wow.
14:37 Lizzie Bassett? One year later, at eight years old, she becomes a household name, thanks to Miracle on 34th Street.
14:43 Speaker 02 She was only eight?
14:45 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
14:46 Speaker 02 Whoa.
14:47 Lizzie Bassett? She's eight. She's so cute.
14:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, she's so cute.
14:50 Lizzie Bassett? And also, she thought that the actor playing Santa was the real Santa Claus the entire shoot. And they didn't, they didn't bother to explain that to her.
14:59 Speaker 02 That must have been so strange for her to have to say to Santa's face.
15:02 Lizzie Bassett? That you're not Santa?
15:03 Speaker 02 Santa, yeah. That must have really been tough.
15:07 Lizzie Bassett? Yes. Well, she did it. She's a great actor.
15:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:10 Lizzie Bassett? Things are now going to take a disturbing turn. In 1954, at the age of about 15, she allegedly engaged in a relationship with a 38-year-old Frank Sinatra. The two had been set up by her mother, allegedly bartering Natalie's virginity to try and help her career.
15:31 Speaker 02 Oh, my God.
15:32 Lizzie Bassett? According to Sinatra's valet, he was nervous about the situation because it was unclear to him whether Natalie was 15 or 18. Frank, don't do it.
15:41 Speaker 02 Ask her and also don't do it. And also, you're 38. So even if she is 18, like.
15:46 Lizzie Bassett? Old blue eyes. I don't know that he's ever shown up in a particularly positive way across this podcast.
15:55 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah, nice voice, bad guy.
15:58 Lizzie Bassett? I think so. Regardless, he did become something of a paternal figure to her for the rest of her life.
16:04 Speaker 02 Do we know if they, if he, do we know if anything happened?
16:08 Lizzie Bassett? I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. So one year later, and this is according to Natalie's sister, Lana's memoir, Natalie was assaulted by Kirk Douglas. Natalie kept this secret for years until she was 22, and it allegedly happened at the Chateau Marmont after their mother dropped both girls off to meet with him. Why are you dropping your daughters off at a bar to meet with Kirk Douglas?
16:32 Speaker 02 I knew, like, I didn't know this, but I knew this was gonna, like,
16:35 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
16:36 Speaker 02 I was like, well, she was in, and I'm still really shocked and disappointed.
16:42 Lizzie Bassett? It's pretty bad. It's a lot worse than I understood. Also, Kirk Douglas probably deserves his own episode of this because there's an awful lot out there, allegedly. Anyway, he's dead.
16:54 Speaker 02 How dare you?
16:56 Lizzie Bassett? In 1955, she earned an Oscar nomination for Rebel Without a Cause. And in 1957, she married fellow movie star Robert Wagner, who I believe was 20, I think he was 27. I think she was about 19. They had met a couple of years earlier when, again, she was a teenager, he was in his mid 20s. So they became Hollywood royalty immediately, and understandably so, because I want you guys to look at a picture of these two.
17:26 Speaker 02 Oh my god.
17:27 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
17:27 Chris Winterbauer? Quite the pair.
17:28 Lizzie Bassett? I mean, they are.
17:30 Speaker 02 What a Hollywood couple.
17:31 Lizzie Bassett? Stunning.
17:32 Speaker 02 Yeah. And they look this, I mean, they do look the same age.
17:35 Lizzie Bassett? They do ish. She, she looked quite a bit older than she was, I think.
17:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:40 Lizzie Bassett? Even when she's eight.
17:41 Speaker 02 Right. She was incredibly precocious and, and beyond her years.
17:45 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah. I mean, compared to Frank Sinatra, their age gap is totally fine. So unfortunately, this marriage did not last. As her star skyrocketed with the 1961 release of West Side Story, her marriage deteriorated.
17:58 Speaker 02 Wow, what a surprise.
18:00 Lizzie Bassett? In 1962, she and Robert Wagner divorced. Now rumors swirled publicly that she'd had an affair with her Splendor in the Grass co-star, What Went Wrong alum, Chris, who is it?
18:11 Chris Winterbauer? Oh, I don't know.
18:12 Lizzie Bassett? It's Warren Beatty.
18:13 Chris Winterbauer? Warren Beatty, okay. Well, you know, according to Warren Beatty, he did have a lot of sex.
18:18 Lizzie Bassett? That's true. So she chose to never formally dispel these rumors, but that may be because, again, allegedly, according to three of her friends and her sister Lana Wood, this was to protect Robert Wagner. Because again, gonna say allegedly a lot in this episode, the rumor was that she had come across him in bed with another man and that that had been the impetus for the divorce.
18:46 Chris Winterbauer? Warren Beatty.
18:46 Lizzie Bassett? Warren, no.
18:48 Speaker 02 I was like, wait a minute, hold on. We're gonna stop.
18:53 Lizzie Bassett? No, no, no. She did, she overdosed on sleeping pills following this, although many believe that was more of a cry for help than anything else. And Robert Wagner does obviously deny all of this.
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21:25 Lizzie Bassett? After this, she became extremely reliant on her therapist. Chris, you mentioned this. This is where the break in her acting career happens. She actually even turned down the role of Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde because she did not want to be away from her therapist that long to be on set.
21:40 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
21:41 Lizzie Bassett? In 1969, she married producer Richard Gregson. She has a child by him, Natasha Gregson Wagner. She's, spoiler alert, she gets back together with Robert Wagner. But this marriage didn't last either. In 1971, they got divorced. And by 1972, Natalie and Robert Wagner had reconciled. And they had their own daughter, Courtney, two years later. Now, Chris, you also mentioned this, but by all accounts, extremely devoted mother to both of her children. And she really ends up taking a break for like most of the 70s.
22:12 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah, that's what I remember was she was kind of out for almost 10 years.
22:15 Lizzie Bassett? Yes. Yeah, around seven years, I think. She takes a pretty long break. In the mid 1970s, director Douglas Trumbull, who, as you mentioned, was a special effects wizard. He had worked extensively on 2001: The Space Odyssey and The Andromeda Strain. He would go on to work on Blade Runner. He was experimenting with a new process called show scan that was designed to make audiences feel more immersed in the movie. Chris, you can probably explain this better than I can, but show scan involved projecting 70 millimeter film at 60 frames per second, producing brighter, sharper images due to a narrower shutter closure. And then projected onto a very, very large screen. Does that make sense, Chris, whatever I just said?
22:57 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah, so 70 millimeters, so traditional 35 millimeter film, right? That's the diagonal measurement from one corner to the other. So 70 millimeters is actually, and I'll get the math wrong, but it's more than double the size of 35 millimeters. So when you blow it up, when you project through it, the grain is far finer than on, when you project through 35 or 16, for example, millimeter film. So you can get a much sharper image, which you can see if you watch the film even on Amazon or whatever today. The scan is really beautiful. Wide screen, so you can project it on a larger, larger screen. And then
23:39 Chris Winterbauer? So 60 frames per second would traditionally be considered over cranked, right? So you film and project at 24 frames per second. That's where basically the human eye stops seeing stuttering in the film. So if you record slower than 24 frames per second, you see strobing because your eye can actually pick up on the gaps between the film. The reason you stop at 24, it's because it's cheap, right? Everything about this is meant to be done affordably. So 24 is the least number of frames per second that you can have where your eye doesn't notice the stuttering, so it looks smooth.
24:14 Lizzie Bassett? Great, so he's just doing everything he possibly can to make this as expensive as possible.
24:18 Chris Winterbauer? Exactly, much larger film and two and a half times as many frames per second. And then with shutter angle, it's just, long story short, it's a shorter shutter speed. And so there's less motion blur as a result, and so it's a sharper image. And so what he's basically doing is early high def, what would become high definition television, that's really like what HDTV became with 60 frames per second, high definition. Like, he's doing it back in the early 80s. To really gorgeous effects because it still looks like film. It is film. One last thing, Peter Jackson was attempting something similar with The Hobbit when he wanted to do 48 frames per second instead of the traditional 24.
24:58 Lizzie Bassett? Get out of here, Peter Jackson, with your Hobbit. No one wanted that.
25:02 Chris Winterbauer? They've done these studies where they've shown, I believe Trumbull even did this, where he hooked people up to an EEG machine to see how their heart rate responded to the same images at higher frame rates. And he had concluded that people have a stronger emotional response to the high frame rate images. But it actually, it can break the reality in the sense that it also doesn't feel like a movie anymore because it's not at the motion, it doesn't have the texture that we're used to either. So it's a fine line that you're walking. I think he treads it very well. I don't think The Hobbit works. I think this movie works very well.
25:35 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
25:35 Chris Winterbauer? For reference.
25:36 Lizzie Bassett? Well, so Chris, you mentioned that everything he's discussing here is very expensive, not least because what he's pitching here would actually require the movie theaters to retrofit their screens, to have an ability to project, as you said, a much, much larger image. Paramount's like that, that's way too expensive. People are not going to do this. We're out. So they put the project in turnaround. It gets effectively shelved, but he was still under contract at Paramount. And this is where Star Trek: The Motion Picture came in. He stepped in and agreed to take over the special effects in exchange for his freedom from Paramount, essentially. So at this point, he takes Brainstorm to MGM and he changes his pitch. Theaters don't need to retrofit for show scan anymore, but he's going to film the
26:21 Lizzie Bassett? movie in both 70mm and 35mm. Now, Chris, you referenced this, but what you're seeing, for all of the POV virtual reality shots, those are in 70mm film with stereo sound. When it cuts back to quote unquote "reality," it dips back to 35mm. The idea being that the POV virtual reality shots are clearer and more immersive than actual reality, which I think is a really cool idea, and I think it's very effective in the movie.
26:52 Lizzie Bassett? So Trumble casts Christopher Walken, fresh off his Academy Award win for The Deer Hunter, and Louise Fletcher, also pretty fresh off of an Academy Award win for Nurse Ratchet and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Cliff Robertson, also an Academy Award winner. But his casting in this was a little controversial. Fun fact, he had exposed a financial scandal at Columbia when the president of the studio cashed a check in his name that was forged. And Robertson actually ended up getting blacklisted because he outed this guy for doing this.
27:23 Speaker 02 Right, of course.
27:24 Chris Winterbauer? Future Uncle Ben. With great power comes great responsibility.
27:27 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah, he made a comeback. Of course, he also casts Natalie Wood as Dr. Michael Brace's estranged wife Karen, Christopher Walken's wife, in the movie. This was meant to be her big return to movies. And according to her agent at the time, quote, "Brainstorm was her first major movie in a long time. She knew it wasn't a solo star turn nor a fabulous script, but it was MGM, not an independent, not TV. Here she wouldn't have to carry the film, and Natalie was still beautiful. She wasn't ready to play mothers of 30-year-old actresses." I'm
27:58 Speaker 02 Fair enough.
27:59 Lizzie Bassett? Fair enough.
28:00 Speaker 02 How old was she at this point?
28:02 Chris Winterbauer? Forty three.
28:03 Speaker 02 Forty three?
28:03 Lizzie Bassett? I think that's right. Also, this movie sounds like it's gonna make a splash. It's introducing, you know, cutting edge technology. Honestly, on paper, this looks a lot better to me than Avatar. So, you know, Trumble wanted the cast to study the concept of life and death at an experimental research facility by taking a hallucinogenic drug that apparently simulated death. And unsurprisingly, the MGM lawyers said, no.
28:27 Speaker 02 Oh, good.
28:29 Chris Winterbauer? Do you know what research facility that was?
28:30 Lizzie Bassett? The Assaline Institute?
28:32 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah. Have you watched, have you watched the finale of Mad Men?
28:36 Lizzie Bassett? Uh, yeah. Oh, is that where?
28:38 Chris Winterbauer? Do you know where Don Draper ends up at the end?
28:40 Lizzie Bassett? That's what it is?
28:41 Speaker 02 Is that like culty place?
28:42 Chris Winterbauer? My understanding is that's, they're riffing on, that's the Assaline Institute. Yeah. It's up in Big Sur.
28:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's the one.
28:49 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah, you can go there. I believe they might still offer this, because I had some friends in college who wanted to do this, and none of them actually did, I don't think. You can stay more or less for free, but you have to
28:59 Speaker 02 Like a work study?
29:00 Chris Winterbauer? Like a work study, basically. Maybe it's just for college students, I'm not sure. It had, it has a weird vibe. It was not for me.
29:06 Lizzie Bassett? It might be good, unless I'm gonna leave with the next world-changing Coke campaign. We'll see. So filming began in September of 1981, and the cast all got along really, really well, particularly Natalie Wood and Christopher Walken.
29:19 Speaker 02 Oh, boy.
29:19 Lizzie Bassett? Daisy, as we mentioned, you have worked with him before. So tell me, what do you remember about him? What was your experience, just of him, like, as a personality? I think this experience changed him, which we're gonna get to.
29:32 Speaker 02 Well, yeah, I mean, I, I also think that this experience had to have changed him because, God bless Christopher Walken, but that man lives in an alternate universe. He exists on a different plane of reality from everybody around him. And I'm not a psychologist, but I would imagine that, you know, whatever went on, which I guess we're gonna hear about.
29:57 Speaker 02 Had a massive effect on him.
30:01 Chris Winterbauer? It is interesting how grounded he is in this movie.
30:03 Speaker 02 Yes. Do you notice about Christopher Walken that he always, always has a slight smile on his face, like a little evil twinkle, like a mischievous-
30:13 Lizzie Bassett? Sometimes it's inappropriate. Like, I still like it, but there's times in this movie where it's like his kid is getting institutionalized and there's a little tiny smile and you're like, no, all right.
30:21 Chris Winterbauer? Or the government's, you know, gonna militarize his products and Louis Fletcher is saying, what is wrong with you? Do you not understand what's happening? He's like, it's fine. It's great.
30:29 Speaker 02 It's okay.
30:30 Lizzie Bassett? That's actually the weirdest line in this whole movie is that, like, she understands what's happening. Their project's being taken away from them. The feds are coming in and she's like, you really don't get it, do you? And then they, they kind of all walk out of the room and he just like sort of looks at the camera with a half smile and goes, I don't get it.
30:48 Speaker 02 Yeah. In the show that I was in with him, there were some very sad moments and he still had that look on his face. And I remember just being like, what's happening over there? Do you want to hear some fun Christopher Walken stories?
31:02 Lizzie Bassett? Yes.
31:03 Speaker 02 I mean, that's what I'm here for. So I'm going to tell you the one that everybody who has worked with Chris will tell you. This is no big revelation, but he carries half eaten apples and pickles in his pockets. And he wears this cotton, long cotton, black trench coat. And he'll just, in the middle of a conversation, pull out a half eaten apple or pickles, covered in lint, and just eat it. No matter where, where we are in the world. So that's one thing. He, he wore these really bizarre rubber shoes, black rubber shoes. And one day, one of our castmates, he came in and she said, Chris, what are those shoes? And he goes, they're my rocket ship shoes. Just, he was, he lived somewhere else.
31:49 Speaker 02 As far as I know, in any production he's doing, he has them type up a script with no punctuation. Which explains his cadence, I think.
31:58 Lizzie Bassett? Interesting.
31:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:01 Lizzie Bassett? I do love Christopher Walken. Interesting. So this is from Louise Fletcher. She said that he was crazy and a lot of fun. He'd do crazy things on the set, like dropping his pants. I don't know why he did that, except to just maybe give himself a shot in the arm, give himself some energy of some kind that he needed. He would do shocking things right before the take to create an atmosphere, kind of like mooning everybody. It was fun. So this is like very fun, very energetic. It sounds like very connected to his castmates, which I think is interesting. But apparently Trumble became so focused on the special effects that he kind of loses control of the cast, which I think big time comes across in this movie. It feels like all of the actors are in different films.
32:45 Lizzie Bassett? And apparently, everybody started looking to Christopher Walken for direction, including Natalie Wood. She was particularly drawn to his pedigree, and she was very interested in anyone who had studied at the Actors Studio, which he had. So MGM is hearing some of this from set. They're already getting a little worried about this movie. Additionally, by October of that year, rumors had again started to swirl that Wood, who spent most of her time on the North Carolina set, hanging out in Christopher Walken's trailer, was having an affair with Christopher Walken. Worth noting, her sister Lana is adamant that she would not have risked her second marriage to Wagner with an affair, especially after all of the Warren Beatty rumors the first time around.
33:26 Lizzie Bassett? She seems to think that, at most, this was potentially an emotional affair, which, as we're going to see in a second, Robert Wagner kind of backs up. So Wagner caught wind of the rumors. He took a few days off from filming Heart to Heart and flew to the North Carolina set. In his memoir, Pieces of My Heart, Wagner wrote, "During those couple of days, the little bell in my head went off. Christopher Walken was a very exciting actor and a very exciting guy who delighted in taking great risks. The bell wasn't exactly clanging, but I was aware that I didn't have her full attention. She was more involved with the movie than she was with her family. And the thought occurred to me that Natalie was being emotionally unfaithful. I chose not to confront her with my feelings. I flew back to my series, and Natalie continued production on Brainstorm."
34:12 Lizzie Bassett? I can't tell what the deal with this memoir is, to be honest. It comes out in, I believe, 2008. And while this initial read to me feels potentially very honest, very, you know, sort of like a, he's bearing his soul, talking about this experience. The more I started to look into this, and I think the more we'll get into the story of what happened, I do wonder if there's a bit of retrofitting happening here, whether intentional or not, who knows? So in November of 1981, Brainstorm paused for Thanksgiving break. On November 27th, this is Thanksgiving weekend, Wood, Wagner, and Walken went sailing off the coast of Southern California near Catalina Island.
34:55 Lizzie Bassett? They were aboard Wagner's yacht, Splendor, named after Natalie's film Splendor in the Grass. Weird? Is that weird to anybody else? The movie that they kind of got divorced over because of Warren Beatty affair rumors? It's weird to me.
35:06 Chris Winterbauer? It's got cuck energy.
35:10 Lizzie Bassett? It's got something. So the boat's full-time captain, Dennis Daverne, was also aboard. Important to note here, according to Finstead, her biographer, and several other sources, Natalie was terrified of open water. And although her family often went out in the splendor, she refused to go jet skiing, she would stay on board, reading scripts, and she never took the dinghy out alone. There is not one instance of her doing that. According to the documentary Natalie Wood, What Remains Behind, she'd invited multiple friends, not just Walken, to join them on the trip, but they had all declined. Walken likely accepted only because he was in LA filming, but he wasn't from there and he had nowhere else to go on Thanksgiving.
35:54 Lizzie Bassett? So realizing she was about to be stuck on board with her husband and the man who her husband maybe thinks she's having an affair with, she made one last-ditch effort to get her friend, Delphine Mann, to join them. But unfortunately for everyone, it was Mann's son's birthday that weekend, and so she too declined. And it would just be the three of them on board the yacht. The first day, the boat docked on shore and all three went out shopping and drinking Catalina Island. It's very cute. I don't know if you've ever been. According to Daburn, again, the captain, Wagner was getting increasingly annoyed by Wood and Walken's banter and the attention that they were giving to each other. But that night passed uneventfully back on the yacht. However, the second night, things took a turn. All three of them and Daburn
36:39 Lizzie Bassett? had dinner at Doug's Harbor Reef on Catalina Island. This would be Natalie Wood's last time setting foot on shore. They drank a lot. Witnesses reported the group getting drunker and drunker. At one point, this is interesting, either Wood or Walken threw a glass at the wall, apparently a Russian tradition post cheers. We're going to come back to this because there's another glass breaking and I wonder if this is another case of sort of memories getting mixed. In fact, they drank so much that the night manager of the restaurant was concerned enough about them being able to get back to the yacht safely in their dinghy that he called the harbor patrol and asked them to keep an eye on the group. But they did make it back. At 10:30 PM on November 28, they left the restaurant
37:22 Lizzie Bassett? and boarded the Splendor. From this point forward, the only initial information we have about the evening comes from Wagner, Walken, and Daburn. But the one thing we do know for sure is that they kept drinking. At some point, Natalie Wood also took a painkiller and a motion sickness pill. This on top of the alcohol would have caused slurred speech, unsteadiness, and slowed reflexes. The next piece of information, according to Robert Wagner, is that he and Walken got into a fight. He said the argument centered around Walken encouraging Wood to pursue her career in Wagner's mind at the expense of her husband and her family. He also said Natalie was not part of the argument and that he thought she'd gone to bed. He returned to their cabin, according to him, at around 11:00 PM or midnight,
38:07 Lizzie Bassett? and when he got there, she was not in bed. She was missing.
38:10 Speaker 02 I, can I just say, I hate this. Like, you know what I mean? I hate it. I know it's going to happen and I don't want, like, I'm like, isn't there a way that it could not happen? I'm so mad.
38:21 Lizzie Bassett? It's awful. So, he informed the captain, and then they noted that the boat's dinghy was also missing. According to Daburn, in a revised police statement, which we will come back to, he wanted to look for Natalie immediately and advocated that they turn on the boat's searchlights, but Wagner would not let him. Again, this is according to Davern, but he said that the reason was Wagner didn't want to disturb the other boats. There were probably potentially over 50 boats moored at this time. So there were quite a lot of other people not too far from them. Walken apparently remained asleep through all of this. Either of you guys think it's weird? Nobody woke him up?
39:02 Speaker 02 Yes. Unless he was completely blackout drunk, passed out and, you know.
39:07 Lizzie Bassett? That is possible. I think it's strange. I think you would at least try to get him up or check his cabin or something, especially if you're looking for her. It wasn't until 1:30 a.m. that a ship to shore call was made and another two hours before the Coast Guard was called at 3:30 a.m. Six hours later, her body was discovered floating face down about a mile from the Splendor and 200 yards off of Blue Cavern Point, and the dinghy was wedged into the rocks in the cove.
39:37 Lizzie Bassett? She was wearing a nightgown and wool socks. I would say reasonable for going to bed at night on a boat in the winter and a down jacket. What do you guys make of what she's wearing?
39:50 Speaker 02 I mean, if she was going to sleep.
39:53 Lizzie Bassett? Yes.
39:53 Speaker 02 She had her nightgown and her socks on and then she was, and then she was, you know, I don't know, out of her mind drunk and was like, I'm gonna go get something. And, and, you know.
40:04 Lizzie Bassett? Put the jacket on.
40:05 Speaker 02 Isn't making proper decisions. And yeah, puts her jacket on and for some reason gets in the boat, the dinghy.
40:13 Lizzie Bassett? Sure, maybe. I guess the thing that strikes me as potentially odd about this is no shoes, which I guess could have been kicked off, come off in the water. Sure, that's possible, but they don't ever turn up. And the jacket is maybe a little strange because that says to me that she intended to be outside. But if she's not wearing shoes, potentially did not intend to go very far.
40:34 Speaker 02 Unless she was, unless she was really just making really poor choices.
40:39 Lizzie Bassett? That's a good point. And as we're going to get to, she was absolutely blacked out drunk.
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42:00 Lizzie Bassett? So all three men told the police that they assumed Wood had of her own volition left the boat on the dinghy. Couple of reasons that this does not make a ton of sense. She hated water and she couldn't swim. We all know this at this point. She was known to avoid the dinghy. This was not a calm day at sea either. It was extremely stormy and the water was very, very rough. But again, Daisy, as you just pointed out, she probably was not in a particularly logical state of mind. So that could all go out the window.
42:28 Speaker 02 Because also she'd had a painkiller on top of the drinking.
42:32 Lizzie Bassett? Yes, and a motion sickness pill. So Thomas Naguchi, aka The Coroner to the Stars, what a title, ruled the death accidental. Even though the autopsy noted superficial bruises on her body, there were also some scratch marks on the dinghy, and the dinghy's motor was in neutral. So it had drifted to the cove. It had not been driven. But both the dinghy and her body were where the current would have taken them. The scratches on the dinghy, that doesn't seem that crazy to me. He theorized that she'd tried to untie the dinghy but had slipped and fallen, which would account for some of the bruises. That she then would have tried to get out of the water and back into the dinghy, but wasn't able to, which again, that would account for the scratches on the outside of it. Now, he did dig deeper into her dynamic with Wagner,
43:17 Lizzie Bassett? but chose not to release that information to the press at the time because he was under fire for revealing too much about William Holden's death, particularly including his intoxication. So we've mentioned this, but she was very drunk that night. She had a blood alcohol level of 0.14%.
43:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:36 Lizzie Bassett? Two weeks after her death, the case was officially closed and ruled an accident.
43:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's very fast.
43:42 Lizzie Bassett? So at the time of the accident, here's what Wagner said happened. Natalie must have taken the dinghy to try to row to shore, potentially to call her daughters. It wasn't until his 2008 memoir that he mentions the argument with Walken. That was not part of the initial statements at all. Walken, for his part, denies the argument between himself and Wagner ever happened. And this is the biggest problem with this entire case is that Robert Wagner's story constantly changes. This is where he's landed over time. Quote, "There's only two possibilities. Either she was trying to get away from the argument, or she was trying to tie the dinghy. But the bottom line is that nobody knows exactly what happened." So according to him, option one is that she didn't want to hear him
44:26 Lizzie Bassett? fighting with Christopher Walken and was trying to take the dinghy to escape to shore.
44:31 Speaker 02 But also, if she, let's say she did try to get in the dinghy and fell, right? And that's what the bruises came from. Wouldn't she be yelling?
44:39 Lizzie Bassett? Yes, she would. And that we're gonna come back to that as well.
44:42 Speaker 02 Screaming, I mean, she's terrified of the water.
44:45 Lizzie Bassett? Well, so, yes, I agree with you. But again, I think the problem we keep running up to here is that she was extremely drunk. So there is a possibility, if you hit your head, you may be unconscious and not able to yell.
44:56 Speaker 02 Oh, sure. But did she have, like, a contusion on the head?
45:00 Lizzie Bassett? Not that I know of. Option two, this is more believable to me. The dinghy was loose and banging against the boat, so she got out. Out of bed to try and tie it down. That one I could see. You're drunk, you're trying to go. Yes, and then fell. You're drunk, you're trying to go to sleep. Again, the clothes she's wearing makes sense. She's got her nightgown socks, so she's in bed. Like you said, pull on the down parka. You go up, you try to re tie the dinghy to the boat. You slip. That one, I, I think that is completely possible. For now, there are some complications we're going to get to in a minute. I do want to say both of Natalie Wood's daughters do not think that Robert Wagner had anything to do with their mother's death. And they are adamant about that.
45:43 Lizzie Bassett? So let's talk about Captain Davenport and his version of events. Initially, he supported Wagner's original police statement. But remember, I mentioned there was a revised one. Well, in the early 90s, Davenport started calling Natalie's sister Lana. And while drunk, he would repeatedly tell her Natalie's death wasn't an accident. Come the 2000s, he starts publicly changing his tune. And in his 2006 book, Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendor. This guy is also gross. He came right out and said he thought Wagner was involved in Natalie's death. Now, very worth noting, this man, his reliability is very questionable. He has never stopped trying to sell this story to the media and has admitted to lying to the police about his initial statement.
46:27 Lizzie Bassett? So take everything he says with a monumental grain of salt. See, Captain Davenport is highly questionable. But all these changing statements around the mid 2000s were red flags to investigators. And in 2011, they reopened the case of her disappearance. And again, that's
46:44 Speaker 02 2011?
46:45 Lizzie Bassett? 2011, because remember, Robert Wagner's memoir comes out around 2008. So that coupled with this guy who's been trying to bring this back up, the cops are like, okay, you two are telling totally different stories. You've both changed your story. We're going to look into this again.
47:00 Speaker 02 All they had to do was shut the fuck up.
47:03 Lizzie Bassett? Literally all they had to do, shut your pie holes. That's it.
47:06 Speaker 02 Nothing.
47:07 Lizzie Bassett? Can't do it.
47:08 Speaker 02 Wow.
47:08 Lizzie Bassett? The only person who did that was Christopher Walken.
47:12 Lizzie Bassett? So the police talked to numerous people who had been reluctant to come forward during the initial investigation. And most critically, Davenport gives a whole new statement to the police. Now, he says that he did indeed hear a screaming argument, but it was not between Wagner and Walken. It was between Wagner and Wood. And the content of the argument was strikingly similar to Wagner's account of the argument with Christopher Walken, except this time, he was arguing with Natalie Wood directly about the attention that she was paying to her career. Now, again, interesting what the context of brainstorm is because memory across this story is so flexible and fluid. There are also accounts that he and
47:52 Lizzie Bassett? Wood had had an argument at dinner of similar context. So, again, you don't know. Like, is that what Davenport is remembering? Who knows?
48:01 Speaker 02 But was Davenport at the restaurant?
48:03 Lizzie Bassett? Yes, he was at dinner with them.
48:04 Speaker 02 Okay.
48:05 Lizzie Bassett? But Davenport claims that this was on board the boat, and he heard thumping, shouting, and things breaking. And critically, the last words he heard Wagner say were, "Get off my fucking boat." And that's when Robert Wagner came in and told him Natalie Wood was missing. According to Davenport, Wagner also insisted that Davenport move into his guesthouse right away and told him not to speak to anyone.
48:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:30 Lizzie Bassett? It's tough because like, the most incriminating things that we have come from that man. And he is just, he's a mess.
48:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:37 Lizzie Bassett? So while Wagner and Davenport, again, as you pointed out, have been yapping about this night for years, Christopher Walken has not. He cooperated with police during the initial investigation. He has never wavered from his initial theory, which is that he had no idea what happened that night because Natalie was alone. He told Playboy in 1997, quote, "She had gone to bed before us, and her room was at the back. A dinghy was bouncing against the side of the boat, and I think she went out to move it. There was a ski ramp that was partially in the water. It was slippery. I had walked on it myself."
49:09 Lizzie Bassett? Again, I think that's the most believable version of the story. So my question is, why do these two keep changing things up? At least that's what Christopher Walken said publicly. Privately may have been a different story. According to Finstead, again, the author of Wood's biography, she talked to at least one source who had information that Walken had told a friend he too heard the fight between Wagner and Wood that night, but he would not talk about it on the record ever. So let's go back to brainstorm because I see Chris drifting off into the abyss.
49:40 Chris Winterbauer? I'm here.
49:41 Speaker 02 Was filming not finished at this point?
49:45 Lizzie Bassett? It was not finished.
49:46 Speaker 02 Okay.
49:47 Lizzie Bassett? But there wasn't much left. There were three weeks of shooting left and Natalie Wood had actually finished all of her major scenes. There were only two left and they were quite minor, which is why it was surprising that MGM immediately shut down production. Apparently within hours of her death, and this is a quote from Douglas Trumbull, "The studio declared force majeure and filed a $15 million insurance claim to recoup their losses on the movie and that they were terminating the production on the movie. I was taken into a meeting with then MGM president Freddie Fields and he said, Doug, it's over, terminated. I was notified that I was fired and everyone on the crew was fired and the entire cast was fired. They also locked the sets and would not let anyone in or out without express permission."
50:30 Lizzie Bassett? Chris, Daisy, any guesses why MGM did this?
50:34 Chris Winterbauer? They just think they'll make more money through the insurance payout than they will on the box office.
50:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's what it sounds like. Yeah.
50:39 Chris Winterbauer? And they don't have to spend whatever's left to spend on production and post-production. They don't have to spend and so they'll just make more money.
50:47 Speaker 02 That's right. It's like a husband killing a wife. Like, yeah, it's just the insurance.
50:52 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah, I mean, it's just opportunistic. It's just, you know, David Zasloff's doing it right now.
50:57 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah. And of course, they'd heard that their, you know, things on set maybe weren't great, that he was losing control of the cast. So, yeah.
51:03 Chris Winterbauer? Well, they're seeing dailies. I mean, and they know the script. I mean, I think they probably knew this is a tough commercial sell.
51:09 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
51:10 Chris Winterbauer? And despite Walken and Fletcher's pedigrees, it had been a long time since Wood had been on screen. Neither Fletcher nor Walken are going to be box office draws. You know, they're critically acclaimed actors.
51:23 Lizzie Bassett? It's her last film. You've got a pretty big marketing opportunity there and they just don't care.
51:28 Chris Winterbauer? I'm not saying I agree with their assessment from an ethical perspective.
51:32 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
51:32 Chris Winterbauer? I do not, I think-
51:34 Speaker 02 But it's also- It was her last film, but it was also like she'd been out of the game for a while.
51:40 Chris Winterbauer? Right. That's the thing. It's not the last film of somebody that you've been watching consistently for a long time.
51:46 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah. Well, yeah, you're both spot on. They had $675 million in debt, thanks to a string of box office flops. And they just decided to pull the plug. But Trumble is like, uh, fuck you. So he rewrote the script to remove Woods' two remaining scenes. And he locked himself in the editing room, cutting together a version of what they already had to show them he could easily finish the movie without her. And he's like, surely they're gonna see. And so he brings up this cut and they're like, mm, no, no, sir.
52:19 Chris Winterbauer? You'd have to take it to the insurance company.
52:21 Lizzie Bassett? And he does, Chris. So Trumble took it all the way to the insurer Lloyds of London. He presented them with the revised script and the cut, saying, we can absolutely make this movie. And they sided with him over MGM, giving him $2.75 million to complete the film.
52:41 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah.
52:42 Lizzie Bassett? MGM still tried to weasel out of this by offering it to other studios around town. But when they realized that, hey, people might actually want to buy Natalie Wood's last movie, they're like, just kidding, it's ours. We want this. And they strike a deal where Lloyds financed the rest of the film for a percentage of the profits. Now, Trumble was very much on MGM's shit list for this. He'd cost them their $15 million insurance settlement. And as Chris pointed out, additional production costs. He said he was afraid to get on the planes that they chartered for him.
53:13 Speaker 02 Ah.
53:14 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
53:15 Chris Winterbauer? That may be hyperbolic.
53:17 Lizzie Bassett? Okay, he was serious. Perhaps.
53:20 Speaker 02 He's a, he's a drama queen. We love him.
53:24 Chris Winterbauer? Exactly. He's a magnificent technician and a pioneer within film. Who may have been prone to a bit of exaggeration.
53:33 Lizzie Bassett? I love him.
53:33 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah.
53:35 Lizzie Bassett? On February 8th, filming did start again and the vibes were understandably quite bad.
53:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:41 Lizzie Bassett? He was able to finish it pretty easily without her. He modified one scene that she was supposed to be in, replacing her with a lab assistant. He cut her from another. Wood's sister Lana was brought in as a body double for some long shots and profiles that were still missing. And this is fun. One of the final scenes where Walken, I believe, is being chased, Sass Master Trumbull filmed that in the hallway outside the offices of the MGM executives who had tried to shut production down.
54:09 Chris Winterbauer? That's funny. I will say too, the vision of Hell at the end.
54:14 Lizzie Bassett? Oof.
54:15 Chris Winterbauer? Also.
54:16 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
54:17 Chris Winterbauer? You can see influences throughout, like Event Horizon later, you know, things like that as well.
54:22 Speaker 02 It was the, it was the death experience.
54:25 Lizzie Bassett? Was really cool, I thought.
54:26 Speaker 02 It was really cool. And in that moment, I thought, is this based on a short story? It was very, very much like a short science fiction story, but it wasn't. It was an original screenplay.
54:36 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah, the angelic stuff at the end was.
54:37 Lizzie Bassett? That was pretty beautiful. And I actually thought the sequence you're talking about with Hell, it almost looks like people are encased in human hearts, which I thought was intentional because she just had a heart attack.
54:49 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
54:49 Lizzie Bassett? And it was really disturbing and creepy. And Daisy, you've done something on, you've done an episode on near death experiences. I wonder if any of them mimicked what you see in the movie in terms of like pulling back.
55:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, this one guy definitely actually had an experience where he, he was convinced he was tied to a slab and being tortured by demons.
55:14 Lizzie Bassett? Oh, no.
55:16 Speaker 02 It was wild. And he had an op, he had an option at one point, apparently, like of two doors at the end, I guess. And then he went through the one where he was alive again.
55:28 Lizzie Bassett? Oh, I'm bad at those games. I would pick the wrong door for sure. Well, the film was released on September 30th, 1983, to essentially zero fanfare. Walken did almost no interviews to promote it, did not receive any major marketing push. Despite its budget of over $18 million, it grossed only $10.2 million in North America. And the critical reception was pretty mixed. Although some people, I think, did recognize that technologically and sort of ideologically, there's a lot to this movie that's very advanced. All right. Remember I mentioned the investigation was reopened in 2011? Yeah. That is because it's more than just Davenport and Wagner who we're talking.
56:14 Speaker 05 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work.
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57:24 Lizzie Bassett? Stockbroker Marilyn Wayne's yacht was more just 50 yards from the splendor on the night of Natalie Wood's death. She told police in 2011, "Not at the time." Quote, "A woman's voice crying for help from drowning awakened my husband and he awakened me. 'Help me, someone, please help me, I'm drowning,' we heard repeatedly. Alarmed, I called out to my son, who also heard the cries, and looked at his digital watch, it was just minutes after 11:00 PM." She also heard a man's voice, slurred and aggravated, saying something like, "Oh, hold on, we're coming to get you." Just after that, the woman's cries stopped. A few days later, she found a note in her client mailbox. It allegedly said, "If you value your life, keep quiet about what you know."
58:11 Lizzie Bassett? Additional witnesses came forward saying they too heard yelling at around 11:00 PM, but had assumed it was coming from a party on another boat. In 2012, her cause of death was changed to drowning in undetermined factors, and this time, the medical examiner was, quote, "unable to exclude nonvolitional, unplanned entry into the water." Additionally, you pointed this out, Daisy, the lack of head trauma and location of the bruises seemed to indicate that they may have happened prior to her entry into the water. Couple of things here that I think are worth noting. One, she heard someone saying, "Hold on, we're coming to get you." That's the weirdest thing in this whole story to me. Who is "we"?
58:53 Lizzie Bassett? They feel pretty confident that that's Robert Wagner, who they thought they heard. So who is he talking about?
58:58 Speaker 02 I mean, there's so many factors here. Like, it's so many years later that these people come forward. I know, maybe they felt threatened at the time, but there are ways to, like, come forward quietly and anonymously, and you'd think that somebody would. And yes, there are a lot of them, but, like, to your point before, memories get distorted over time.
59:21 Lizzie Bassett? Totally.
59:22 Speaker 02 You can add things in, you can take things away. I do wonder if she, you know, if she came out, maybe he was being, maybe he was throwing a tantrum, you know, a drunken tantrum, and she came out and put her jacket on and was confronting him, you know, "You're being a baby," whatever it was. And maybe she slipped, or not.
59:46 Lizzie Bassett? I think I agree with where you're headed. In 2018, her death was classified as suspicious, and Wagner was officially named a person of interest. Again, both their daughters maintain they do not believe Wagner was involved in her death, but Lana Wood feels very differently and always has. She remains convinced that Wagner absolutely had something to do with her sister's death. She believed he may have knocked her unconscious, panicked, and placed her in the water. To me... I think that's potentially the most believable version of events. It could explain the exchange that the stockbroker heard, especially if Wood had come to briefly after being placed in the water.
1:00:30 Lizzie Bassett? I don't know. Again, she could have also slipped. They're all so drunk.
1:00:35 Speaker 02 But also, if she'd slipped and he was there, you would have heard him yelling, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God."
1:00:41 Lizzie Bassett? Well, some, they heard someone saying, "We're coming to get you." I don't know. I, I think there's totally a version of this where it is just a bizarre accident that they are so drunk that they can't figure it out.
1:00:52 Speaker 02 I think the other problem with that, though, is the gap in telling anybody, the gap in going to look for her. Like, if she slipped, if it was an accident.
1:01:03 Lizzie Bassett? And you saw it or were there.
1:01:05 Speaker 02 And you saw it, then you.
1:01:06 Lizzie Bassett? You would get her immediately. You would call the Coast Guard.
1:01:09 Speaker 02 Right. And if you didn't see it, but you noticed that suddenly she wasn't in her bed, or whatever your story is, then you'd go look for her. You'd put the lights on. You're not going to be like, "Oh, I don't want to wake the neighbors." That's absurd.
1:01:21 Lizzie Bassett? Well, the LA detectives who reopened the case would agree with you. They felt that his story did not make a lot of sense, particularly the hours after her death were what didn't track for them.
1:01:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:01:33 Lizzie Bassett? But according to Wagner's rep, both Lana and Captain Davenport are, quote, "despicable human beings capitalizing on the accidental death of a beloved member of the Wagner family," which.
1:01:41 Speaker 02 Right, of course.
1:01:43 Lizzie Bassett? Sure, I get it. The saga continued in 2020. That biographer Suzanne Finstead released a revised version of her biography containing new evidence from a Dr. Michael Franco, who was an intern at the LA Coroner's Office at the time in 1981. He claimed that he saw bruises and cuts on her body that in his mind suggested she had been pushed off of something she was clinging to. And according to him, his superiors told him to drop it. But in 2022, after the last remaining detective following the leads retired, the investigation came to an end. And though the case technically remains unsolved, Wagner was cleared of all wrongdoing.
1:02:22 Lizzie Bassett? Now, for his part, Douglas Trumbull never really directed another feature film again. He did successfully repurpose showskin technology for theme park rides, most famously the Back to the Future ride. We have him to thank for all those ones with the big screens and the moving platforms that always make me want to barf.
1:02:39 Speaker 02 The Goofy's Soaring Above America.
1:02:41 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
1:02:42 Speaker 02 That's what, that's what the memory sequences reminded me of.
1:02:45 Lizzie Bassett? Well, great. That's what it's used for. He also did go on to create the opening sequence in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life that shows the Big Bang, and he passed away in 2022 at 79 years old. So where does everybody sit at the end of this strange journey?
1:03:04 Speaker 02 Listen, I think Chris not talking about it and refusing to, to ever talk about it is, that's weird to me. You know, it's, it's one thing to, to say like, listen, I was asleep. I don't know what happened and it's, and I'm devastated. It's another to be like, I'm not going to talk about this. Like, why? You know?
1:03:28 Lizzie Bassett? To his credit, he may have been pressed about it so much, and it sounds like they did have a very close relationship. Whether it was romantic, we don't know.
1:03:37 Speaker 02 Sure, sure.
1:03:37 Lizzie Bassett? So if you lost someone like that and you had had to give multiple police statements, you know, you maybe did a couple, you've been asked about it in numerous interviews. I can see not wanting to talk about it, but I don't disagree with you that it is strange how closed lipped he has been about it.
1:03:55 Speaker 02 And I do wonder if this whole schmigaggy is why he's so weird.
1:04:02 Lizzie Bassett? I think this must have been an unbelievably traumatic experience
1:04:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04:05 Lizzie Bassett? for everyone on board that boat. And we're never going to know what happened because Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken are, as far as we know, right, that she may have been alone. That's what they both say.
1:04:21 Lizzie Bassett? And we just don't know.
1:04:23 Speaker 02 I don't know. If you're, if you're deathly afraid of the water and it's nighttime, like, it seems to me, even if you're drunk and something's banging against the boat, first of all, you're not going to care. You're drunk enough, you're going to fall asleep, I think.
1:04:37 Lizzie Bassett? I agree.
1:04:38 Speaker 02 But also, go to the captain.
1:04:40 Lizzie Bassett? Right.
1:04:40 Speaker 02 Like, can you fix that? I don't want to go to the side of the boat. I'm, it's nighttime and I'm terrified of water.
1:04:46 Lizzie Bassett? Yes, but again, the problem with this whole entire story is that they are all, all of them, extremely wasted. So I don't even know if you can really trust their statements from the beginning because they're so drunk. I mean, the accounts from people on shore that these people were schlammered before they even left to go back to the yacht and they continued drinking when they got there. So who knows? We are never going to know. It is so strange. The thing that stands out to me, again, is what that woman came forward with in 2011, that she heard someone say, hold on, we are coming to get you. And I would love to know who she meant.
1:05:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. Unless in his drunken hysteria, he just suddenly started referring to himself as we.
1:05:39 Lizzie Bassett? I don't know. Or unless that stockbroker's also making shit up. This, this is such a frustrating case and such a frustrating story because everyone's memory is flexible.
1:05:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:05:49 Lizzie Bassett? She was such a beloved, beautiful, public figure. I think everybody wants a piece of this story to a certain degree. The one that I don't understand is Robert Wagner. Shut your mouth.
1:06:00 Speaker 02 Just stop talking. I can understand, I mean, I don't agree with it, but I can understand the captain being like, I'm going to try to make some money off of this and, you know, capitalize on it. But like, shut up, dude.
1:06:12 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah. Chris, what's your hot take?
1:06:15 Chris Winterbauer? Uh, anything's possible. I have no idea. My instinct is...
1:06:22 Chris Winterbauer? I discount almost entirely any new recollections post.
1:06:29 Lizzie Bassett? I think that's fair.
1:06:30 Chris Winterbauer? Like that 2011, I'm like, whatever. Unless they have diary entries from the time. Exactly. Unless there is some contemporaneous accounting, this, you know, I have held on to this memory like amber for 40 years.
1:06:44 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
1:06:45 Chris Winterbauer? And now I'm going to tell you, okay, maybe everything we know about memory is that it is hands down the worst form of evidence that you could possibly use if you actually want to get to the truth.
1:06:56 Lizzie Bassett? Yes.
1:06:57 Chris Winterbauer? Of a matter. And so that's why I just, anything, it's not to say it's not possible. I just discount it drastically.
1:07:04 Lizzie Bassett? Well, and I think it's so interesting that this was her last movie because one of the most fascinating parts of this movie to me is when they sort of realize that as they're seeing each other's memories, I think Christopher Walken points out, he's seeing Natalie Wood's memories of himself, but what he says is that wasn't me, that was you. Like, that wasn't really what had happened. That was you, the way that you believed it and saw it was a reflection of you. It was not me. And I, I agree with you, Chris. As tempting as it is for me to be like, ooh, they heard something, they said it, you're right. That's a really long time.
1:07:44 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah. Here's how, I'll present one option that it's going to sound extreme, but is entirely possible. It is possible that Robert Wagner was drunk. It's possible that he was so drunk that he pushed her off the boat. It's possible that in his drunken state, he made a conscious decision, fuck her, I'm not going to help her. I'm not saying this, this is, this, by the way.
1:08:04 Lizzie Bassett? Everything is conjecture, everything. Yes.
1:08:06 Chris Winterbauer? Exactly. I'm just suggesting. And it's possible that since then, in his mind, he has completely rewritten the narrative.
1:08:14 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
1:08:14 Chris Winterbauer? And he actively remembers an argument with Christopher Walken, and he has no recollection at this point of her, of shoving her off of the boat. That is entirely, that happens. People repress memories, erase memories, replace memories. What's so, there's, yes, there, it is possible there is a version where he is a guilty man and has been actively changing his narrative to cover his own tale. There is also a version where the story he tells himself. Has changed over time and he has felt compelled.
1:08:47 Speaker 02 Become his truth.
1:08:47 Chris Winterbauer? Become his truth, right? And he's he's felt compelled to present that to the public at various touch points. And that's not to let him off the hook by any point. My, my, my point is simply that's what's frustrating about stories like these where there's very little actual physical evidence, right? Everything, even her injuries are, well, it could have been this, or it could have been this. And so I just think, again, anything unfortunate, like the, the, the tragedy was the circumstances of Natalie being on the boat.
1:09:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:09:22 Chris Winterbauer? Being drunk, being in an unhappy relationship.
1:09:25 Speaker 02 Yeah. Also that her career and her motherhood and her family was being used against her.
1:09:33 Chris Winterbauer? Right. When she already very much sacrificed her career for an extended period of time in order to make herself available to her children.
1:09:39 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. He's off a series regular on a TV show. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's just so cliched and it's so boring. And it's like, get another, get another complaint, dude. Like, you know?
1:09:51 Chris Winterbauer? But it is, it is the attention thing, right? That's what it comes down to. It's, it maybe she's getting more attention than me, but also just really, it's that need to be the object of somebody's every desire. And that's, I mean, we see it now in the trad wife thing, I think, big time. But this, I don't, I think it's a mistake that we've fallen into, maybe men more so than women, to expect, to be, to expect to be worshipped in some way by our partners, as opposed to in a good, balanced relationship where we care about each other and want to help each other succeed.
1:10:32 Speaker 02 Also, don't marry a Hollywood star. Right. If you're worried about not getting enough attention or that her focus, like, she's gonna be busy. Yeah.
1:10:41 Chris Winterbauer? Well, I think there's could be like a power play component to that too, where he thinks, maybe, you know, I'll marry her and then she'll sacrifice her career for me. And that means I'm that much better. And, you know?
1:10:50 Speaker 02 Of course.
1:10:50 Chris Winterbauer? Or maybe, you know, they're young and they fall in love and he's dumb and he doesn't fully think it through. That's also entirely possible, you know?
1:10:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:10:58 Chris Winterbauer? You think it, we're, we're in love. It'll work out. And then you get older and...
1:11:01 Speaker 02 It'll work out a second time. Yeah.
1:11:04 Chris Winterbauer? No, seriously. Yeah. And then you realize, no, it's hard work and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, not that she didn't do the hard work, she obviously did.
1:11:11 Speaker 02 I also think that it's part of what's sad about this story. I mean, what's devastating about this story is her childhood and what happened to her in her childhood and that that got has gotten superseded by her tragic death. Because I think the story of the abuse that she endured at the hands of her mother and at the hands of people in Hollywood is an important story because it keeps getting repeated over and over and over and over. And I don't know what the solution is because there doesn't seem to be, I mean, people keep getting hired who do these horrible things, but.
1:11:51 Chris Winterbauer? Well, now it's even worse. I feel like with social media.
1:11:54 Speaker 02 Social media.
1:11:55 Chris Winterbauer? You can become a star outside of the Hollywood system as a child.
1:12:00 Speaker 02 And this was exactly the reason that my mother, my parents, but my mother was so hesitant about me being an actor.
1:12:10 Speaker 02 And it and my career took off much faster than anybody could have anticipated. But it was theater and it was it was localized and this was before social media. So I wasn't, I wasn't everywhere because of it. I was, I was a star in New York. I was a star on Broadway, but not all over the place. And I booked a TV show when I was, I guess, 12 with Linda Lavin and she wouldn't let me go. I mean, she was sick and there was nobody to go with me to Hollywood, but her thing was like, you're not going there. That place is the devil's playground and I'm not letting you go there as a young girl.
1:12:54 Speaker 02 And I also, you know, looking back, there are roles that I think I lost.
1:13:01 Speaker 02 At a very young age to girls who were prettier than me. And I, that's disgusting.
1:13:07 Lizzie Bassett? Yeah.
1:13:08 Speaker 02 Because the reason, like, why does it matter if a, if a, if an 11 year old girl is pretty? Well.
1:13:13 Chris Winterbauer? Hollywood.
1:13:15 Speaker 02 Right. And so it's a, it's a really scary industry, especially for children.
1:13:23 Lizzie Bassett? I agree. I was most disturbed, I think, about what I learned about her early life.
1:13:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:13:30 Lizzie Bassett? And her mother and just what a strange, what a strange and dark existence she had had. And that fortune teller thing is so weird.
1:13:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:13:41 Chris Winterbauer? It is, but, but.
1:13:42 Lizzie Bassett? Chris, get out of here.
1:13:45 Chris Winterbauer? You know, the experiment, put a thousand people in a line and you have them all flip a coin. And whoever has heads sits down and the rest.
1:13:53 Lizzie Bassett? You think that fortune teller, just every single person that came into their fortune telling hut was like, beware of dark water.
1:13:59 Chris Winterbauer? No, that's not the point.
1:14:02 Lizzie Bassett? One day I'm gonna get it right.
1:14:04 Chris Winterbauer? Put a thousand people in a line, have them flip a coin. Everybody that gets heads sits down and you just keep repeating that until there's one person left. And that last person will have flipped heads 10 times in a row. And they'll say, I had a feeling, I had a feeling, I just, by the fifth one, I knew it was gonna be me. And it's really compelling, but you're not interviewing the 250 other people who flipped it three times in a row and said, I had a feeling this was gonna be the one, you know? Uh, I just think, yes, it's odd, it's, it's unusual.
1:14:35 Lizzie Bassett? It's very specific.
1:14:37 Chris Winterbauer? Sure. There's also 8 billion people in the world.
1:14:40 Lizzie Bassett? All right. Chris, get out of here. Thank you so, so much, Daisy.
1:14:44 Speaker 02 Thank you.
1:14:45 Lizzie Bassett? For joining us on this journey. Please go listen to Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Egan. It is really wonderful.
1:14:51 Speaker 02 Thank you.
1:14:52 Lizzie Bassett? It's especially good during this spooky season, very appropriate, but appropriate year round as well. Go give it a listen. Again, it's Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Egan, and thank you very much for being here.
1:15:03 Speaker 02 Thank you so much. This was super, super fun.
1:15:05 Lizzie Bassett? And if you all enjoyed this little exploration that took us outside the boundaries of a film and the way that we would typically cover one, let us know and hopefully we will do some more of these. That's it for now.
1:15:16 Chris Winterbauer? Thank you, Daisy.
1:15:19 Speaker 06 Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, video content, and more. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman, with research from Laura Woods.
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