Citation Needed - The Making of Apocalypse Now

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Production problems—among them bad weather, actors' poor health, and other issues—delayed the filming of Apocalypse Now, increasing costs and nearly destroying the life and career of its director, Francis Ford Coppola.

And welcome to citation needed. The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick and I'll be staring into the abyss tonight, but I'll need a platoon of the finest men podcasting and offer. First up, two men who remember when the horrors were the Reagan administration, Cecil and Noah. Yeah, back when Ali North did the up down, up down, up down, left, right, left right, a B, start. Yeah, yeah. Imagine who I would be now

if Nancy had told me to say yes to drugs. And also joining us tonight, two men whose dinky lifestyle would have made even this trip a delight. Heath and Marsh. Yeah, I mean, when you don't have to worry about going on vacation during the school's holidays,

you can get a great deal on an extended glamping trip in the Philippines jungle. We had a great time at Kurtz Yertz. Kurtz Yertz. True, they did. That's a dream. It was a nightmare. A snail's crawling along.

The whole thing. Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons. Patrons, thanks to you, Marsh's tell-all book about Cecil's

onset behavior is delayed another day. But it's coming, patrons. It's coming. And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around until the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell us, Marsh, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon or event we'll be talking about today.

We'll be talking about the making of the movie Apocalypse Now. And Cecil, you gazed into this heart of darkness. Are you ready to tell us what you found? So I'm not sure why I was thinking about war the other day, but it just got me thinking about one of the best, if not the best war movie ever made Apocalypse Now.

And while that movie is a masterpiece, the production of that film, to get it to the theater, was a fiasco worthy of a citation-needed episode. The production was over-budget, on location for twice as long as expected. It had to deal with disaster after disaster. Even the director, Francis Ford Coppola, said

when it screened at the Cannes Film Festival, we were in the jungle, there were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment. And little by little, we went insane. Okay, I heard it. That felt like one of those things you say and people point to it later when you're like, I don't know, like 85 getting sued for harassment or whatever.

Anyway, I'm thinking about doing Megalopolis next time. Right through production. All right. But now, if we're going to do an episode on that one, it needs to be six hours long and take 14 years to record, okay? And we know just how insane it was because someone was filming the whole time. It was Francis's wife, Eleanor Coppola. She had been shooting behind the scenes footage throughout the entire production. And that footage was later edited into the documentary Hearts of Darkness of Filmmakers Apocalypse,

which is an excellent documentary. There's also a bunch of articles on this all over the web and even a YouTube series on the subject and this is a shout out to Cinema Tyler who put together a 27 part YouTube series on the film in the making of the film. There's so much to talk about when it comes to the making of I'm certainly going to have to skip stuff for space

but check the documentary out if you want a little more in detail on this. Right, but 27 parts. I checked the guy did 10 and a half hours in that series on how Coppler took too long to make a movie. I'm not going to do a series how that's way too long to spend criticizing a single movie. We do an hour and a half show on a single

broken episode. I just want to point three hours long. We're getting it down to like 50%. We do a two hour episode on 45 minute movies sometimes. Eli's about to swoosh, do it into like a podcast about this podcast about the making of the making of. A lot of glass houses. So, listen to the director's commentary.

So now for those, you who haven't seen the film, I just want to say it isn't for everyone. Oh, it is too. Now, grab the kiddos and let's get it on a big screen. Okay, so here's a quick synopsis. So you know what we're talking about here. The film is loosely based on the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The protagonist, Benjamin Willard, is a captain in the army, and he's asked to travel up in Vietnam to kill Colonel Walter Kurtz. Kurtz's Green Beret, who set himself up as a god king with a local tribe of people. the story follows Captain Willard up the river on a Navy patrol boat with a small crew. They encounter all kinds of difficulties along the way and we're introduced to new characters as they try to overcome all these challenges. And then when they finally reach the colonel, Willard kills him and then leaves the compound and the local tribe watches as he goes. So the tribe that worshipped him as a god king just stand by and watch as his assassin walks away.

Like take note literally any other government on earth. If you can just get one of your naval ships up the Potomac, you can put an end to all of this. Amazing. Ah, shit, Martin Sheen's still alive and everything. Hey, man. He'd do it, too. I think he'd have to lose.

Yeah. For a cheap. Yeah. The screenwriter was a John Millis, and he's something of a dick. Every interview this guy gives, he seems like a complete jackass. And it tracks because he's a pro-war Republican.

He actually describes himself as further right than most Republicans, something like an anarchist who thinks there shouldn't be government at all. In any case, he took this on as a personal challenge when his USC professor suggested that no screenwriter had ever successfully adapted the novel Heart of Darkness for the screen, so he set about doing it. Yeah, that challenge still stands, by the way, this movie has nothing to do with Hartman. Okay, so this guy's pro-war, but with an anarchy-themed military. Got it. Amazing.

So that guy wrote a really coherent script that captured the anti-imperialist theme of Joseph Conrad's book. Is that what happened? Originally, the script was meant to be directed by George Lucas in a cinema verite style. It was supposed to be shot in Vietnam while the war was still happening. Jesus. Which seemed pretty dangerous. And so Lucas worked on developing for years, but eventually Star Wars took a over his life and the project fell to Coppola.

I feel like he was slow walking. Like, oh, no, I can't go to Vietnam. He's great. Anyway, somebody goes to make her Pongtong. He actually introduced style walls while the Empire War was going on as well. He was too late because it happened to be able. Guys, I'm pretty sure

we're on the other side of the yub-yub on this. When Coppola took over, he scrapped most of it because the original script was pretty much a hero movie and it was about how awesome special forces are and how they saved the day in the end. So he wrote a lot to reflect the anti-war narrative that eventually made it into the script. The script was rewritten multiple times to our production

and didn't even have an ending when they film most of it. Okay. I mean, the U.S. military does the same thing, kind of. That's cool. The casting was also something of a mess. Originally, Orson Wells was asked to play the antagonist Kurtz, but he turned it down.

Oh, the role of the fat, ego-mad insane person? Why ever didn't he want that part? I was saying it's a shame, though, given the shit he put him through on the set of the third man, I feel like this episode could be twice as long if Orson Wells had been in it. Anyway, Lee Marvin was also asked

probably best known for his he was one of the stars in the dirty dozen. Marlon Brando eventually accepted the role, but he wanted $2 million up front plus a percentage of the gross to the television rights, which ended up earning him around $9 million. Gene Hackman was originally asked to play the character who would become Kilgore, but Coppola wanted to pay him in points rather than a flat fee, and Hackman wasn't interested in

that arrangement. He later told the Chicago Tribune that it was a tough call because he had such a high regard for Copela as a director, but he didn't think that he should work for points. So they recast the role with Robert Duvall and changed the character's name from the somewhat on the nose, Colonel Carnage. to kill gore. Oh yeah, the far less on the nose kill gore.

Yeah, I suppose Colonel Murder Gut Spiller was dismissed for something way too foreign or something. I told you Millis was an idiot. He wrote this whole thing. All right. So the first choice

for the protagonist was Steve McQueen, but he didn't want to leave America for three weeks. Jokes on him, they left America for about a year, pinning that for later. Well, Al Pacino was offered the part and he turned it down

because he had shot a film in the Dominican Republic jungle and he got sick and so he wasn't interested in a sequel to that. They also approached Robert Redford, James Kahn, Keith Carrotene, Tommy Lee Jones, Nick Nolte and even Robert De Niro and then Clint Eastwood. And Robert DeNorro and Clint Eastwood both

didn't want to be away from America for that long. Okay, well now I will be forever haunted by the greatest comedy that could have been Apocalypse Now starring Nick Nolte. Oh, gosh, Colonel Kilmore. I don't know. Eastwood and McQueen just didn't want to leave Carter alone with the country for that long?

Or what was this all about? McQueen was actively dying, so he didn't want to do it. Oh, there's that. Yeah. That's on him. Sad. He should have walked a salt path. That's on right.

They asked Martin Sheen to play the role, but then he had already committed to a film in Italy, so he wasn't available. So they settled on Harvey Keitel. They shot with him for a while, and then after reviewing the dailies, Coppola decided Keitel wasn't working and he fired him. He felt Keitel couldn't play Willard as the passive withdrawn character that the role required. He then reached back out to Sheen, who was now available and then took the role. No, no, no, we said withdrawn, not in withdrawal. You know what? It's

fine. It's fine. But Cecil, you might say, problems with casting are pretty common in Hollywood. Why is this different? Well, it's because it was shot on location in the film. Philippines and they had to reshoot some of the movie because of these casting decisions, adding to the overall cost of the film. They initially wanted to shoot the film in the United States and use United States Army equipment. But in order to do that, the U.S. Army had to approve this script. And they weren't going to do that. So they had to look elsewhere. Yeah, guys, we're going to pass on this script. But have you offered the part of the fat, insane guy to Orson Wells?

I feel like you would like you would like this. Well, I'm not thinking I had a Cecil's narrative here, but the part of Colonel Kurtz wasn't supposed to be a fat guy. It was not. It was not. Yeah. So they settled on the Philippines, which looked enough like Vietnam, and it was run by Ferdinand Marcos, a dictator who had the country under martial law. Marcos had a large fleet of American military helicopters that he was willing to rent to Coppola

with one small caveat, as long as they weren't needed to fight the rebel insurgency in the south of the country. And that was a problem because they, frequently were. Helicopters would sometimes get called away mid-shot to go fight the insurgents. And because they were in the middle of filming, they would just occasionally fly off wearing American military markings. So somewhere in the Philippine jungle, rebels were getting attacked by helicopters with US Army stars painted on the side, which really sort of matches the energy of the movie, if we're being honest. Yeah, I mean, it also matches the energy of American foreign policy over the last

50 years of being honest. So it's so true. Philippine history for the 50 years before that too. So this bred all kinds of problems with shooting the film. If they had worked with the United States government, they would have had one consistent crew assigned the film, same pilots responsible for flying and maintaining the aircraft every day. But instead, every day, there would be new pilots on set who had to be briefed on the

shots and caught up on what they had missed for the previous days. And then even when the pilots got up to speed, there was another problem. These are military pilots. They're not movie pilots. So Coppola was shooting on a widescreen format that was wider but lower than the people who were shooting the film were used to. So the pilots kept flying too high and out of the frame. They would literally have to stop the shoot, bring the pilots to the ground, and they would have to explain to decorated military aviators that they needed to fly lower so they could stay in the shot. on a good day Coppola could only get 15 helicopters together at once

and even then half of them might disappear off to fight rebels before the day was done and all of this ate up an enormous amount of time and money yeah it honestly just sounds like it would have been quicker and cheaper for Coppola to just reinvade Vietnam still a bigger win than Megalopolis so quick while we lower the volume on that before we give Trump any ideas we'll take a quick break for some apropos of nothing. Uh, Mr. Coppola?

Yes, you must be the new pilot. Come in, come in. I can't tell you how excited I am to work with you, Mr. Coppola. I've seen all your movies. Well, you are too kind. Let me walk you through the shoe. Uh-huh, of course. Right.

So, as the rebels are firing on our heroes, they climb up onto the copter, and then they take off. Got it, sure. But then, the lovely. locals, they have a bazooka, and they say, freeze. So you do. I'm sorry, that wait, so the helicopter freezes? Yep, but then it turns real slow, and at the last second, bang, shoots the guy are dead. Sorry, one of the characters on the helicopter does this, or? No, no, no, no, no, the helicopter. The helicopter turns real slow and then shoots someone. Yeah, and feel afraid to say,

say no to this, but could the helicopter blow on the gun as well? Mr. Coppola, the helicopter can't do any of this. He had not the freeze or the gun or the turn or none of it at all. Oh. Okay, I guess we could save you for Megalopolis then. So you needed to blow on the gun, you say? Yes, like a cowboy. Not, yeah, like a cowboy, sure.

Okay, what about London? Oh, no, that's easy. So Mrs. Sholley Shank has a niece there, who she can write to, and then she'll just take it to anyone in town. I see. There you guys. What's you doing? Yeah, what's with the map?

Well, I was complaining to Marsh about my bill from Big Wireless, but it turns out he doesn't even have a cell phone. What? Yeah, you just don't need one in England. I just write a letter to someone in town. I see. Well, if you can't write a letter to everyone in your country, you should try Mint Mobile. What's Mint Mobile? Oh, come on.

I've got like four points on the show this year. you. Write a letter about it. Mitt Mobile is here to rescue you with premium wireless plans starting at 15 bucks a month. All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Bring your own phone and number, activate with ESIM in minutes, and start saving immediately. No long-term contracts, no hassle. And have you actually tried it?

I sure have. I switched to Mint Mobile when they became a sponsor. I love how I get the same great service for a fraction of the price. That's why I, Noah Lutians, personally endorse Mint Mobile. All right, Noah. sold. Where do I sign up? If you like your money, MintMobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash citation. That's mintmobile.com slash citation. Up front payment of $45 for three-month five-gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month. New customer

offered for first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and freeze extra, see MintMobile for details. All right, Noah, thanks. Hey, hey, Marsh, what if you wanted to talk to the king? Oh, it's dead simple. I do not want to do that. No, yeah, that makes sense. Sure. Yeah. And we're back. When we left off, we were finally discussing a horror I could relate to on this podcast, the Hollywood casting process. What happened next, see dogs? Do a pigeon sound.

All right. Another real issue was the weather. Of course, you can't control the weather on location, but the weather was both unpredictable and powerful. And they had built a lot of these sets early in production, only for most of those sets to be destroyed by Typhoon Olga. Production designer Dean Tulliveris,

here's a quote from him. He remembers it, quote, it started raining harder and harder until finally it was literally white outside, and all the trees were bent at 45 degrees. End quote. Cast and crew were stranded because of the storm, unable to traverse the roads to the production site because they had been completely washed out.

Much of the construction was destroyed, including the Playboy Bunny set, which wiped out an entire month of scheduled shooting. Okay, so at this point, I feel I need to make a clear that I never bothered watching Apocalypse now. And apparently, the Playboy Bunny Set is past my ability to just bluff my way through this. What? All right, so, Mars, I was trying to think of a lie I could tell you that would be like the most disappointing if you ever got around to watching it. But I feel like just not answering you and just leaving it at Playboy Bunny set is the best I could manage.

I need you to picture elderly Marlon Brando in a Playboy Bunny. So to make matters worse, the production is a playboy bunny set. I'm not. So to make matters worse, the production was already over budget and behind schedule when the typhoon hit. And now they had to shut down for two months and rebuild what they lost. Most of the cast and crew were sent back to the United States while the reconstruction took place. Oh, and 374 people died in the typhoon. So complaining about your fake temple getting water damage is kind of a bad look. Yeah, sorry about your village as well.

Do you know what a Playboy Bunny is? No, we'll just talk about your thing then. I'm just sad for other reasons, too. The jungle itself is a pretty harsh environment. Add to that some Hollywood actors were not used to these kind of conditions, and you pretty much got a hell on earth scenario. The water wasn't safe to drink. It was hot pretty much with 100% humidity.

It was muddy, like knee-deep muddy, and it was full of bugs and parasites. Well, Hollywood's used to bugs and parasites at least. There was a lot of rain, which might not have been a typhoon. level all the time, but one crew member said that it rained like it was mad at you. Rough. Yeah, and then you like ask it, and the rain's like, if you don't

know why I'm raining, I'm telling you. You're like, Jesus, fucking Christ, how do we solve this? One cast member, Damien Leake, who played the machine gunner in the film, said that getting off the plane, the humidity hit him like a wet mop, and he was from New York, so

he knew humidity. Also, his name was Leak. Another cast member, Sam Bottoms, who played the blonde kid on the boat, got hookworm there and he claims that it wrecked his liver. Okay, so you contract hookworm from contact with infected human feces. That's what Sam Bottoms got, while Damien Leak was complaining about how wet everything was. Maybe stop getting you cast from the apt-ronym casting agency. At this point, Kilgore sounded downright subtly, yeah.

So conditions were so bad and morale-suff. solo that one crew member would make the three to four hour drive to Manila on weekends just to check into a hotel near the airport and sit there watching the planes fly back to the United States. Just watching them. That's

how bad it was. Huh. Yeah, I wonder what the harrowing movie, the autistic guys who always hang out of my local airport have been filming this entire time. Jesus Christ. The sets themselves were something of a controversy. For one scene in the movie, they needed severed heads for a pile of severed heads. You know, like

do. Well, they decided to use extras who would be buried into the set with only their heads sticking up on the ground. And so they had to sit there all day from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and the heads were covered with umbrellas when they weren't filming them. Also, they had some dead bodies on the set. Okay, yeah, let me guess. They forgot to dig up the head guys during one of the typhoons. Yeah. The pertinent question is whether they started with some dead bodies on the set. So the dead bodies, according to one of the designers, they had a whole tent of dead bodies supplied to them from someone who was supposedly also supplied them to medical schools. Turns out he was a grave robber, so they had a whole dust up with the local authorities because of it. Okay, my severed head guy said he had a dead body

guy. Yeah, okay, yep, no, I'm hearing what I said this now. They didn't film any dead bodies in the actual film as far as we know, but they did make one Filipino worker, was killed on set during construction. Okay, but then why did they have all the dead bodies for? If not for filming. He just did want them, but they got confiscated. Marlon Brando's personal trainer. I want like,

we're for the guys in a tank. Mix them in with the M&Ms. I want only green M&Ms and dead guys. Are they getting cheez-in-stall? Yeah. Of course, just don't get on cheez-its. Okay.

So for the end sequence, there's a bunch of native people, standing on these long, thin canoe-like boats. Well, the makeup people had to paint each one individually because they had a white face and the paint that went down past their shoulders. And each set of makeup was individual and unique. The dozens of people took over six hours to paint with makeup. At one point in the scene, an explosion goes off in the water and the natives aren't supposed

to react. Well, when it went off during filming, all the natives dove into the water to collect the fish that were stunned by the explosion so they could sell them at market ruining the makeup. They had to scrap a lot of the tape and the planned footage because of it. Okay, people, can we wait for crafty? I think they're doing Taco Tuesday today. I think, oh, they're in the water. The set area also had a small island on it.

And the set designers, they wanted to create what they were calling Monkey Island. So they bought 30 monkeys that could not swim, and they brought them out in cages to the island. they released the monkeys and they started to head back to their boats to get more set pieces and the monkeys had gotten together and formed a war party what the monkeys terrorized the set designers making them huddle in one part of the island trying to fight them off hey is that is that fucking marlin leading the war party what are you doing i got the matzos that's not that got them from the best part of this story is the non-swing monkeys they walk to the shore dive into the water and swim to the other bank and disappear into the jungle.

Okay, at least everyone got to watch Brando trying to swim as a monkey in method. That was fun to watch. Also, to get back onto Monkey Island, you have to prove yourself to three old pirate captains. It was a whole thing. Fucking hypnotic banana puzzle alone made it not worthwhile. Martin Sheen and Coppola both had breakdowns on set. one of them was actually filmed. Martin was a heavy drinker and a smoker,

and on his 36th birthday, they filmed the infamous hotel scene where Sheen has something of a breakdown. He's actually super drunk during that scene, and that is his blood from punching the mirror. Sheen actually had a pretty severe heart attack while filming, too. He walked,

or probably most likely crawled, a quarter mile for help. The person that he ran into gave him last rights in a language he didn't speak, so that's comforting. Coppola also something else and he has no idea

He said anything really It was the hand motions Yeah right now As long as you cross yourself Whether as long as you cross yourself I love the West Wing Do you talk to your dad alone?

I will love the Westing Eventually I will love the Westman No I love it now Coppola Also had some Breakdown moments He called this project The Idiotasy

And he had an epileptic seizure On location He had to mortgage his home to help fund this after the studio money ran out, and he declared three times that he was planning to kill himself on set. Yeah, and then theaters would have been denied the two and a half weeks of Megalopolis they got. So what a loss that would have been. But before we feel too bad for Coppola, we should note that he was a prodigious spender.

Remember how Steve McQueen didn't want to leave America for three weeks? Production ended up running over a year. During that time, Coppola had a posh compound that he stayed in, while in the Philippines, and he had all kinds of luxuries flown in. He filmed an entire set on a French plantation where he insisted that the white wine be served ice cold and the red wine exactly at 58 degrees. He hired people to cook an actual French feast, and then he scrapped the whole thing in the original release of the film. His cinematographer Vittorio Starraro wasn't happy with the new Kodak film stock that had just come out, so he developed a technique called flashing. And you take the

negative and you get to get the contrast you wanted. And he had to ship every single role of film to Rome to be processed before developing. Coppola fully supported this without hesitation. Besides writing the actual script, he also hired Michael Hare. He wrote a celebrated book about Vietnam called The Dispatches to write the voiceovers. And when Sheen was unavailable to record the narration, they got the next best thing. Joe Estevez, his brother. Huh.

So, oh, and if you also, if you want another reason not to feel bad for Copeland, it's his fault we have Nicholas Cage's Hollywood career Brando was his own disaster he showed up on set weighing three bills they didn't have a uniform that he could fit into and he had to they had to really get creative to film him dressing him in black and filming him mostly just his face in shadow

he was scheduled to be on set for a short amount of time but he decided not to memorize any of his lines to make matters worse Coppola had to read the entire script allowed to Brando while 900 cast and crew members sat and waited. Instead of learning the script, he wanted to actually improvise the character. Yeah. Okay. So one of my favorite moments is when we finally see Brando in this movie, like two and a half hours in is when he finally shows up. And it really felt like Martin Sheen was improvising back to fuck with him. So Martin Sheen's character just got captured. And Brando makes him describe the mission. Sheen watches Brando, drag himself up

out of a bed to do the fucking scene and he's just pouring sweat and Martin Sheen says they told me you had gone totally insane and that your methods were unsound Brando says are my methods unsound and she says

I don't see any method at all Yeah and then he added Also I didn't write your work on the waterfront of that river here in Vietnam speech Yeah so either Coppola wrote that in as a joke like a

meta joke or maybe Sheen improvised it. Either way. It's good roast. Brando was asked to shave his head and he refused and then he just came onto the set the next day after reading Heart of Darkness with his head shaved inspired by the book. Rumors are that he was unbearable to work with but other people say he was fine.

Heart soul of the movie. The real tension came between Brando and Dennis Hopper who plays the photojournalist in the film. Hopper was only cast two weeks before his scenes and was reportedly supplied cocaine by the production to help him get into character. The two men evidently hate each other so

much, they wouldn't be shot in the same scene together. I also, I read that there was supposed to be a fight between Martin Sheen and Colonel Kurtz in the original script before they saw what shape Marlon Brando was in. And ever since I learned that, I feel like we were cheated out of the great comedic finale that movie deserved.

Let me sit on you. There's a moment. So in the movie, in the movie, he takes a banana and he throws it at Dennis Hopper and he calls him a mutt. Well, evidently, Brando had improvised that the night before. And so for

the rest of the day, when Hopper came in to film the second half of that, he had to get bananas thrown at him all day long. He's getting pelted with bananas. Shot after shot, after shot. Anyway, okay, so speaking of drug use, there is a lot of that too. Sam Bottoms, in a lot of his interviews,

basically said that he was literally doing any kind of drugs that were available, dropped acid, it did speed. ate mushrooms, smoke weed, and rounded all that out with cocaine. And like I said, Hopper was hopped up on all kinds of stuff throughout the filming and beyond. See, again with the afternames. One article from Screen Rant said that Hopper got Lawrence Fishburn, who was 14 at the time of filming, and had lied about his age to get the role hooked on heroin.

So that could be total bullshit, you know, citation needed and all. Okay, but I hope he offered him two syringes, one red and one blue. the final film had miles of tape that needed to be edited and they shot more they had shot 1.5 million feet of film which is just under 250 miles the film was masterfully put together by editor walter merch who during post-production essentially invented 5.1 surround sound merch and his sound editors also had no usable recordings of the weapons or the jungle ambiance from the shoot so they had to recreate the entire jungle soundscape from scratch. The film went on to win two Oscars and best cinematics,

for best cinematography and best sound, and shared the Palm Door, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but it's French, so I don't care at Cannes, where it was shown as work in progress, which is essentially unheard of at the time. It had made 78 million during its initial release,

so Coppola's Napal Valley wine estate was saved at the can screening. When asked about the production, Coppola said we were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment. Little by little, we went insane, which honestly tracks. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

Whenever possible, do cocaine with Dennis Hopper. Oh, that's what I learned. Yes. And are you ready for the quiz? The horror. The horror. All right. I have one for you.

Cissela. What should be the next great movie with Trouble Production that you do an episode about? A. Jaws which tripled its intended budget and ended Spielberg's career in almost every other timeline. B, Wizard of Oz in which the asbestos snow was not the most dangerous thing on set. It must be a great one. C, the Shining, which basically violated the Geneva Convention all over Shelley DeBoe. Or D. Street Fighter, the brilliance of which will only be clear in a longer historical lens. It is obviously D Street Fighter, which is brilliant. Thank you very much.

So, Cecil, we've established that this movie exclusively cast from the Abdomen Talent Agency. So which other members of the film crew had ironically apropos names? Is it A, the cameraman who caught an STD in a Filipino brothel who was called Mike Cockburn? Is it B? One of the actors that got buried in the ground to play one of the severed heads, who was called Philip Tahia. Does it see, the costume designer

who contracted a tropical disease while on set, she was Ivy Bola. Or is it D? I've on a tinkle, but it burns. Or is it D? Honestly, I couldn't figure out Ivy Boller until I heard you say it. You didn't have the accent. Yeah, exactly.

Or is it D, one of the actors who dived into the river to collect the trout that were killed by that bomb blast Lawrence Fishburn Okay, I just want to let you know this cast does not like puns. I know this because I say them every week. But I do.

And so I have to say, fucking crowning achievement of Philip to Hear. Fucking believable. Absolutely genius. It's B. It is B. You're right. I think. Cheers.

All right, Cecil. It's obvious that you're all going to write a tell-all book based on a piece of classic literature about how hard I am to work with one day. So what's it going to be called? Heart disease of darkness. Animal Farm

with pH. It's funny if you read it. C. Moose knuckleberry fin. Or D. Very specific for my generation. The taker. You win me over every time with nut,

knuckle. So moose knuckle very thin at C. Fantastic. I'll take it. All right, Cecil, one more for you. When Brando went method and tried to become the leader of that monkey army, which he very clearly did, what did he make everyone call him that day while he was doing the method? A. Mandrill Sergeant.

D. I.I. Captain. C. Curious George Patton. D. Robert E. Leamer. Or he. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

They're so good. It's got to be secret answer F all the above. Okay. Correct. That's true. In the German dubbing, he was called a chimpanzee. Fantastic. All right, well, Heath, you made the most monkey.

In the Ugandan version, he was Did he, I mean. All right. Well, Heath, you made the most monkey puns this week, which means you are this week's winner. Fantastic. Let's hear from Noah next week. All right. Well, for Noah, Heath, Cecil, and Marsh, I'm Eli Bosnick. Thank you for hanging out with us today.

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