WHAT WENT WRONG - Aeon Flux

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

Hands for feet! Sexy diaper pajamas! Frances McDormand going full ginger! This week, Chris & Lizzie exhume Karyn Kusama’s sci-fi misfire, Aeon Flux. We (attempt to) cover issues of representation in Hollywood, director’s jail, and Charlize Theron’s trajectory as one of cinema’s most legit bone crushers.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong. We are a podcast that explores What Went Wrong behind the scenes on your favorite Hollywood blockbusters and also massive belly flops. And today we are unfortunately talking about the latter. We're going to be talking about a movie that I had never seen before and that I would argue it turns out I didn't need to see. So, Chris, what are we talking about today? Just a reminder, that was Lizzie Bassett. And I'm your co-host, Chris Winterbauer. Today we are talking about the 2005 science fiction action film,

Charlie's Theron vehicle, Eon Flux, which I'm guessing very few of you have seen. But before we get into that, we're talking about this movie for a very specific reason that we want to tee up. So last week, Lizzie alerted me that NetF, Netflix released a movie called The Old Guard, which is a sci-fi fantasy action thriller based on a comic book that stars Charlie Staron, who is ostensibly the Jane Wick of Our Time. The movie's been getting a lot of positive reviews. I loved it.

Fresh Summer Blockbuster. But most notably, it's the first comic book movie to be directed by a black woman. Gina Prince Bythwood, and I apologize if I pronounced that last name wrong. If you haven't seen it, check it out. also, Charlize Theron might actually be immortal. She doesn't seem to have aged between Eon Flex and this movie, even though 15 years have passed between the two of them. If anything, she looks better.

I would argue she's, like, grown into herself a little bit. Yeah, and she's, like, better at fighting. She is. She's gotten very good. So through 10 episodes of this podcast, every single film that we've covered has been directed by a white man. Film directing is obviously one of many jobs where white men are disproportionately represented. In the 92-year history of the Academy Awards, only five.

women have ever been nominated for Best Director, all of them white, and only one of them has won. Catherine Bigelow, right? Catherine Bigelow for Zero Dark 30. Hurt Locker. Sorry, Hurt Locker. Yeah. Only six black filmmakers have ever been nominated for Best Director Oscar. All of them have been men.

So this podcast obviously tends to operate with exceptions at the other end of the filmmaking spectrum. We're often covering movies that tend to be viewed, sometimes unfairly, as failures. And as we built out our list of troubled productions to talk about, the director pool feels just as homogenous as at the Oscar winning side of things. So this week's episode on Eon Flux features our first non-white, non-male director. Yeah. Karen Kusama, who is of Japanese and Caucasian descent. And most recently, she's known for her gritty police revenge story, Destroyer, starring Nicole Kidman.

and that movie's wild, if you haven't seen it. And I think personally that Karen Kusama is one of the most interesting directors working today. She directs a lot of television right now, along with her feature films The Invitation and Destroyer most recently. A lot of people know her from Jennifer's Body, which was like her 2009 Diablo Cody movie. Which I will actually, I will stand up for Jennifer's Body. I will, too. I like it. Yeah, we'll talk about it a little bit. But before kind of her slate of recent success, her hard-fought place in Hollywood,

was nearly lost in the tidal wave of disappointment that was Eon Flux. And I would just like to highlight that a lot of the info on Karen Kusama for this episode was pulled from a wonderful article by Adam B. Very on BuzzFeed published in 2016. Cool. So as we said, EonFlex is a 2005 sci-fi action film. It's based on Peter Chung's early 90s animated series of the same name. So the premise, I think I'm going to get this correct, because it's a little wonky. 400 years after a virus destroyed 99% of the human population.

Oh, good. Charlize Theron stars as a rebel assassin, the titular Eon Flux, living in the last human city, working tirelessly to take down the autocratic government that disappears people seemingly randomly. Yes. The movie costs $65 million to make. It grossed $52 million at the box office, losing Paramount tens of millions of dollars after marketing costs. The tomato meter sits at 9%. It's tied with Fantastic Four is the lowest rated film we've covered on this podcast this far.

It's better. It's still better. So, Lizzie, having just watched the movie for the first time, what were your impressions? I have to be honest because I really like Karen Kusama a lot. Like, I loved the invitation. I think she's great. I was preparing myself to watch this movie to be like, oh, this is going to be like an undiscovered treasure that I never watched because it got such bad reviews and like, I love Charlize and this is

going to be great. Man, it's bad. And I know we're not supposed to say that, you know, but it's not a good movie. It's, I found myself. I mean, first of all, it's very short. It's like an hour and 27 minutes long. and yet it felt like an eternity. Okay, let me take it back

because I feel bad dumping on Aonflux so bad. But you know what? I think that's actually like a great synopsis and we can actually stop there and move into. Hold on. I got to address one more thing right out the gate, which is that there is a woman in this movie. There is a character who has had an elective surgery

to replace, Her feet with human hands. And I just, I'm never going to recover from that. And they only have like one conversation about it where it's horrifying. She creeps around a wall with four hands. And then you realize her feet are hands. And then Charlize is like, how'd the surgery go? And she's like, it's useful.

And it shows her like clutching a gun in her disgusting hand foot. And then it's just never discussed again. And it's one of the most. upsetting things I've ever seen. So that's pulled from the animated show. Oh my God. So Ian Flax, if you want to know why it's so weird, it began its life as a series of animated short films that were a response to something very not weird.

So Peter Chung, the creator of the series, was tired. Specifically, he was tired of drawing babies because he was one of the animators on Rugrats. And so he was super tired of drawing these like stubby babies like all day long. So he created this show, Eon Flux, that follows this like BDSM leather clad assassin. She's way more scandalously clothed in the cartoon. He designed her to be like all lies and long and gangly. And she's basically in every episode, she's either trying to kill or make love to this Trevor Goodchild, the leader of like the last human city.

First of all, I'm sorry, but no king slash leader should ever be named Trevor. It's just not. It's not great. Basically, at the end of every episode, she died in the short series that he made. And then she would just get like reincarnated, unexplained in the next one. There wasn't a lot of logic to the series. And here's Peter Chung kind of on his style at the time as an animator. You can only create in the way that feels the most natural and instinctive to you,

and you have to be true to that. Originally, I started doing animation without any voices at all, because in a sense, I wanted my animation to be pure, but in the end, I mean, it only serves to enrich the experience from the viewer's point of view. So Peter Chung wanted to make something completely original, and he didn't want there to be any dialogue in it. So the original series has no dialogue. It's purely visual storytelling. So even though you don't really understand entirely what's going on, it doesn't matter because you're just watching cool things. That makes sense.

So he created this entirely original, non-directional. non-in-bred thing that was hyper-violent and sexual and nothing like it was being done in the United States at the time like anime was being made like this in Japan but nothing was done in the States and so MTV took notice and MTV had this liquid television animation block at the time and they hired Chung to expand the shorts into a TV series and it seems like it went about 10 or 15 episodes and it added some dialogue at that point but basically the show was popular enough that it started influencing sci-fi films that started changing the movie landscape, specifically the Matrix. So, like, not only did it deal with similar themes, if you look at the visual style of the

matrix, like black leather costuming, extreme haircuts, the physicality of the characters, like Carriand Moss's Trinity feels a lot like in Eon flux. It's clearly influencing these movies that are, you know, going to come out. That's interesting. Peter Chung moves on to other projects, and the Eon property sits dormant for a little while until a character that we're very familiar with on this podcast, steps in and dusts it off. And that is producer Gail Ann Hurd. Gail! From what I can piece together sometime around 1999, Gail Ann Hurd, James Cameron's former producer and wife, decides to try to bring Eon Flux the property to the big screen. Keep in mind that in 1999, the Matrix had just grossed $460 million worldwide, which made it at the time

the third biggest R-rated film ever. behind Terminator 2 and Saving Private Ryan. And just for anybody that doesn't know, Gaylaan Hurd also, I believe, co-wrote the Terminator, and she is also behind the Walking Dead, I believe. So everyone wants to recapture the lightning of The Matrix. And there were a lot of derivative movies that came out around the same time, equilibrium with Christian Bale, et cetera. So Gaylan Hurd pairs with MTV Films and Paramount Pictures

who control the rights to the project, and she commissions a script from the relatively green, writing duo of Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi. And they just did crazy beautiful. The, I think it's like Kirsten Dunst movie from like back in that time. Yeah. But like that's the only all they, but they had a cool pitch on the project. Because basically there's no story right in the original animation. So like they have to come up with something completely on their own because there's like no actual background. They get to work on creating this story from scratch and basically they end up working on the script for five years.

Uh-oh. They end up just takes over their lives for a while. But meanwhile, more importantly, in the year 2000, there's a 32-year-old Asian-American director by the name of Karen Kusama, who's exploding onto the indie film scene with her debut movie Girl Fight. Which, if you haven't seen it, please watch it. It's great. It starred the then-unk-Unknown Michelle Rodriguez as Diana Guzman,

who never acted before. Oh, wow. A troubled Brooklyn teen who focuses her anger into success in the boxing ring. Girl Fight became the indie darling of the year. It won the grand jury prize at Sundance and Karen Kusama won the directing award, which as of 2016, she was the only filmmaker who had won both at Sundance. Wow. She also won the youth prize at Cannes.

She went to the Independent Spirit Awards, and it was the indie film of the year. Here's Karen Kusama kind of on what compelled her to tell this story. unfortunately on Charlie Rose back in the day. I think it's powerful to see women who are heroes and who go through some kind of major transformation on the screen. I think it's exciting to see that. And I just thought this could be kind of, you know, refreshing for an audience. This idea of seeing women as heroes on screen and going through transformation and dealing with like difficult women and difficult characters was pretty unusual at the time. Here was this young, non-white,

non-male director who wanted to bring the story of like a very difficult person to the screen and that person was going to be a woman and a lot of people would tell her like audiences don't relate to difficult women she faced like a lot of headwind you know on that on that front I also I want to briefly call out something that's interesting about that and about girl fight versus eon flux which is that correct me if I'm wrong but in girl fight a lot of it is Michelle Rodriguez really fighting like it's yeah yeah yeah oh yeah she's boxing so so that is something I found really interesting about Eon Flux is that it's and this was kind of a trope of early 2000s action movies to a certain degree but they really hide a lot of the

fighting in cuts and in things that are clearly stunt doubles and it was interesting to watch it in comparison both to Girl Fight where that's certainly not what she was doing and also to the old guard where you can actually see what Charlie's Theron is capable of because getting to see like a single take where it is clearly her and it's not a stunt person, she could rip me limb from limb in like 30 seconds flat for real. Yeah. And it's so much cooler to be able to see that. And it was so frustrating watching Eon flux because you can barely see what they're doing other than like a leg flying through the air. And we're going to dive into that later because that happened for a very specific reason. So Girl Fight had a lot of authenticity. And one of the reasons

that Kusama's, you know, blowing up at this time is that there's this narrative that's true behind her and Rodriguez that's just like as intoxicating as anything we've heard. So Kusama was a graduate of NYU Film School. She worked odd jobs after graduating at 22 to pay the bills. Her thesis film won her awards, but, you know, nothing was happening. So she started nannying. And through her nannying work, she met John Sales, who, S-A-Y-L-L-S, who's a independent film director and producer. she became his assistant and he gradually started to mentor her. She took up boxing at Gleason's gym, which is like a very famous boxing gym in New York. And that's when this idea for Girlfright came to her because there were no like women in this space.

So she wrote the script, rewrote it when Sales gave her some notes on it. And then after like 18 months of shopping it around, Sales basically said, you're fired. Go make your movie. And kicked her out. So she had to go make the movie. but then the issue she ran into is that she said the lead has to be a Latina. And everybody was like, can it just be a white actress? And she refused to back off of this point.

And as a result, she couldn't find financing for the movie. So finally, John Sales and his producing partner, and I believe wife stepped up. And they were like, okay, you know what, fuck it. Like, we believe in you and we believe in the script. And they got IFC to jump on board. And between the three of them, they put up a million dollars. for the movie. Wow. So John Sales obviously believed in Kusama. And then Karen Kusama stuck to her guns. And at an open casting call, Michelle Rodriguez comes in. It's the first open casting call she's gone to.

She's only done extra work. And Kusama finds her and decides to cast her, knowing it's going to be risky. She's, you know, never seen this person, but she knew that there was like something here. And then she delivered a hell of a movie. And I'd just like to share an anecdote that kind of speaks to Karen Kusama's character. So after Girl Fight dominated at Sunday. and sold to screen gems. Rather than go to the festival rap party, she went back to the condo that she and her cast and crew shared for the festival,

and she cooked dinner for them and just hung out with her team, which I thought was very cool. So Karen Kusama has arrived in Hollywood. Like this, she is hot, the next, like, indie, you know, Wonderkin director, and she already knew what she wanted to do next. So that's, like, often, you know, the big question. And she's like, it's this movie.

I wrote it. It's called Invisible X. And then whenever she would describe the movie, movie, the room would go dead because it's a film about a man turning against his will into a woman. It's like a body horror movie about a man becoming a woman, which sounds really cool and really transgressive for the time. It feels like something that could exist today. But again, Kusama knew what she wanted and she wasn't interested in compromising. She wanted a man to play the role and she wanted him to play the role from man to woman. A lot of people were like,

my client won't do it. It's too emasculating. Maybe they do it if like a one, woman would take over the role after the fact. One manager suggested to her that she had the man turn into a dog to make it more marketable. Oh my God. I thought that was hilarious. So Kusama, despite winning awards at Cannes and Sundance and creating this incredible film that everyone loves, she can't find any financing or footing for her new project. Years pass. And by 2003, it's been three years since her movie came out. She's done nothing. And that means she's made no money. Male directors with far less success than her are getting scripts financed. And to be fair, her script is challenging. It's not just, you know, she's not trying to

make something easy on top of it. But I definitely think other people are getting things made. Here is what Kusama says about it in her interview with BuzzFeed. She says, quote, I love this quote. Quote, you can essentially be autistic and be male in filmmaking. My instinct is that being an antisocial woman, who maybe seems like she had a chip on her shoulder or seems like she'd be really hard to work with or maybe seems slightly crazy. That doesn't seem like a good thing. But I feel like there's a promise like this whiff of excitement around men who display those traits as if there's a secret to all of it. Women don't get that free pass, end quote. Yes, 100%. Yeah, it's this idea that like men can be the eccentric genius, but she's going to be the difficult woman. And it's completely unfair. So

she needs a paycheck and she's not going to get it through this. script that she wrote. It's around this time that Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi's script for Eon Flux gets sent out to all the agencies. It gets sent to Karen Kusama through her agent. And the writers have come up with this wild story featuring clones and viruses and for whatever reason, the script that they sent her spoke to her. She's convinced she's never going to get the job, but she says, you know what, fuck it, I'll take the opportunity to pitch on the project. And of course, she comes into her meeting with Paramount, completely prepared. She's got visual references, storyboards, cues, a full presentation,

which is what you'd expect any director would come in with. Of course, all the dudes that came in were just like, we'll have Moby do the soundtrack, and that was like the full presentation. So Karen Kusama basically wins the job in the room, because they're just like, oh, this person has a vision. They're great. Like, we need to go with her. So immediately, though, I think she's wary of her.

situation. The movie was originally budgeted at $110 million, which would have made it the most expensive movie directed by a woman to date just beyond Catherine Bigelow's 2002 film K-19, The Widowmaker, which was $100 million. So the studio comes back after they attach her, and they're basically like, we don't really want to spend $110 million on it. Can you do it for 65? And it seems like she was probably just like, great, that's a lot less pressure to deal with. You know what I mean? But remember, she's going from a $1 million movie to a $65 million movie. And we've seen instances of this, specifically Island of Dr. Moreau, Fantastic Four, where a director jumps from a tiny movie to a big movie.

And Lizzie, how does that tend to go? It doesn't tend to go great. It does go well sometimes. But I also, I want to call out, so I read a New York Times article with Gina Prince Bithwood, director of the old guard, and this is something. thing that she called out. She was like, I'm, you know, it happens so frequently that men have one Sundance hit and then they are sent off to and entrusted with these, you know, $100 million movies. It is very rare that a woman gets that chance. So that's a lot of extra pressure on Karen

Kusama in this situation. She's being forced to be representative of an entire group of people. Yeah. The good news is that she has an ally at Paramount Pictures. So Sherry, dancing is the head of the studio. Yeah. And she really supported the script and Karen Kusama's vision for it. They had decided to lean away from the obvious matrix comparisons to make something closer to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which I think you can see in like the colorfulness of the movie, right?

So like the animated series looks more like the Matrix. It's very drab and monotone and gray and green. The movie is like very colorful. It's very bright. Yeah. Like, I mean, the whole cherry blossom thing for the climax is very Crouching Tricing. or Hidden Dragon. According to Kusama, Lansing wanted AonFlux to be Paramount's Blade Runner, thoughtful adult science fiction. They get Charlize Theron on the project. She just won an Oscar for

Monster. That's right. I read that she got paid $10 million for this movie. That doesn't seem like that much considering she just won an Oscar. Well, I guess it was a lot. Yeah, it was a lot. It was a lot. It was a lot of the budget. And for the time, it was a lot, I think. Yeah. And so this is an interesting example of like from what I can gather pre-production went smoothly they were in prep for a year and then production started started well the only two hiccups I could find were that Kusama wanted to shoot in Brasilia which looked more like the comic book but the producers were like it doesn't have the infrastructure to support a large production so they ended up shooting in Berlin and Potsdam Germany and then filming early on was suspended at one point when Charlie Staren suffered a neck injury during a stunt

sequence and this speaks to your point about the use of stunt. Doubt doubles. So my understanding is that a lot of the film, I think one of two things happened. I think that they might have ended up using more stunt doubles after Charlie Starren hurt herself because I do think she likes to do her own stunts as we've seen in recent years. And then another issue happened that we'll get into in a second. But the trouble really starts in the fall of 2004. So this is while they're shooting when Sherry Lansing, who is the protector of the film announces that she's leaving Paramount. And Donald D.Line steps in as the interim head of the studio.

And when this happens, it's incredibly destabilizing for any film that's in the middle of production, just like any new, like any corporation where a new CEO comes in, projects in process are going to get a lot of scrutiny because the CEO wants to be able to put their stamp on the company and take things in a new direction. You know, often at times they'll change the slate completely. So for Kusama and Eon Flux, this realistically meant one of three things. One, the new bosses would fall in love with her vision and take it on as their own. Unlikely but possible.

Two, they would distance themselves from it and use it as an example of what the old regime had done wrong. Definitely possible. Or three, they would force an edit that would bring the movie closer to their new mandate as a studio. So Kusama can't do anything at this point except edit the movie. She cuts it. She turns it in and it's, I believe, around two hours, maybe a little bit more in the director's cut that she turns in. As you mentioned, Lizzie, the one we watched is like under 90 minutes. Yeah.

It's longer, more deliberately paced and more thoughtful, contains a whole host of characters that we apparently don't even see in this shorter version. That makes sense. And according to Phil Hay and Matt Menfredi, they were like, it matched the shooting script and it honored her vision of the movie. It's not like everything worked necessarily, but it, you know, matches the tone she was going for. Well, and here's the thing, like, she is clearly a capable writer and director, so I don't doubt that that two-hour cut was significantly better than the hour and a half long one. I'm not convinced it would have been like a great movie just based on what I saw, but I think it would have been a kind of coherent, like maybe enjoyable, you know, movie. So Donald D-Line leaves the studio and then another new regime comes in, Brad Gray and Gail Berman. And their new mandate, according to Kusama, meant that they were looking for Eon Flux to become less the blade runner of parents.

and more the Buffy the Vampire Slayer for them, which I don't really know how this movie could become that. Anyway, so the new studio heads watch her cut and word trickles down that basically everyone at the top of the studio is flipping out that they've made a quote $65 million art film. And Kusama's like, yeah, exactly. Right, that's what she pitched. Yeah, and they're like, no way. So at this point, although not formally, Kusama's effectively fired from Eon Flux. They kick her out of the editing room. They bring in a new editing team to recut the movie

to make it into this like hyperkinetic fight scene based sci-fi action film. They pull the emotional storylines out. They recut the action sequences. Well, apparently they shot things intending for them to be cut as like long single takes, a la crouching tiger hidden dragon. But then they recut it in the style of like classic Hollywood action of like cuts on every single punch. There was a gay support character whose sexuality was removed from the project. I thought it was maybe the woman with feet for hands, who's that's my guess, yeah, because she's one of the only other, like serious supporting roles. Right.

So when the new editors were done, they were left with this like ridiculously incomprehensible 71 minute version of the movie. Oh my god. That like literally made no sense. So the editors send it to the studio executives and according to Kusama, the studio directives called her and they basically say, listen, we really fucking hated your version of the movie, but believe it or not, we hate this version more than your version of the movie. So at this point, Kusama gets brought back into the fold and they send her back into the editing room with the

mandate that she needs to combine the two versions into something that makes sense but is closer to the action version. And to add insult to injury, they won't let her be alone in the room with the editor because they don't trust that she's not going to just turn it back into an art film. Wow. So she's effectively being like babysat on top of it, which is just humiliating. Also, we've talked a lot on this about, and as you pointed out, we have covered exclusively male directors to this point. We've talked an awful lot about auters and directors who, you know, fly off the handle and

do what they want and ignore the studio's advice. And yet the studio keeps letting them do it until it reaches a point of no return. she has given no indication to this point that she is not going to follow exactly what the studio says. She did exactly what she pitched. She's like, she's not put up a fight at any point in this. So it's incredibly insulting that they have someone in there watching her when it's like, you have these man babies who are showing you at every turn that they're problematic. She's not done that.

Apparently an executive told her in the editing room to try to assuage her. You shot it, Karen. It's still your alphabet. to which she respond, you can use the alphabet to spell a lot of words. Yeah. Apparently, she considered trying to take her name off the movie. She even raised the issue with the DGA. But ultimately, I think after seeing Paramount try to distance itself from the project,

she decided she didn't want to do the same thing. She didn't want it just to be like, we're all abandoning this thing. And so she kept her name on the project. Wow. She went to the premiere, which is the last time she saw it. She, according to her, drank 10 vodka tonics. was nice and kind to everyone there, went home and puked for six hours straight. Oh.

Aeon Flux opened Eon Aeon. It opened on December 2nd, 2005, to dismal reviews. They did a review embargo, which it never goes well. That's when they don't let the critics see the movie until the day it opens. And it bombed at the box office. You know, as Charlie Staren told Variety in 2017 about the project, we fucked it all up. I just don't think we really knew how to execute it. And it's disappointing, but it happened.

Peter Chung, the creator of the cartoon, also expressed his disappointment in the project, saying, the movie is a travesty. I was unhappy when I read the script four years ago, seeing it projected larger than life in a crowded theater made me helpless, humiliated, and sad. And even Hay and Menfretti lamented that the Kusama cut wasn't what the audience got to see. Both of them said that they really enjoyed Karen's original cut. It seems like everyone that cared about the movie was kind of deeply hurt by the final product. And then this is kind of where things I think get really interesting.

So Karen Kuzama gets a call for her agents shortly after, and they awkwardly inform her in like a sing-song jokey voice that she was now in director's jail or movie jail. And here's her recalling that moment. Quote, maybe it's supposed to sound like a right of passage. This is regarding director's jail. But so few women get any opportunity to have more than just the right of passage, which is a big part, I think, of what re-real. need to be talking about when it comes to women's careers in film. It's the sense that each movie represents some kind of finality, potentially to their career, as opposed to the sense of you have hits and you have misses.

That's called being an artist. I'm very conscious of how frequently great artists in film who are male and are also generally called big personalities get to fail. At this point, Karen Kusama had failed. She'd been the talk of the town for a moment, and now no one would. wanted to talk to her. But some good came of Eon Flux. While working on the movie, she started dating one of the writers, Phil Hay, and they married soon after, and in 2006, they had their first child. Kusama's next directing job was directing an episode of the All-Word in 2007, but basically between

2005 and 2009, she didn't work until she teamed up with Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman to make Jennifer's body. So for those of you have you. haven't seen it, Jennifer's body is about a high school mean girl who accidentally gets possessed by a demon through a demonic ritual and ends up eating the boys of her school to like stay alive. But ultimately it wasn't nearly the hit that the studio expected it to be, you know, right men and Diablo Cody were fresh off an Oscar nomination for Juno and a win for best screenplay. The film was marketed towards teenage boys. Why?

emphasizing Megan Fox's sexuality over the actual theme themes of toxic female friendship that Karen Kusama wanted to make and bring the movie. She wanted to make a movie for teenage girls, and that's what she did. Yeah, that is what it is. And then they marketed the movie to teenage boys. And so teenage girls didn't see it because they were like, why would I want to go see this movie about sexy Megan Fox? And they were like, well, that's not what the movie's about?

And then boys would show up. And they'd be like, wait, what the fuck? This movie's about Megan Fox eating boys. And so everyone lost because they fucked up the marketing. And Kusama was furious. She wasn't blamed for the tepid response. It's not like people said it was a badly directed movie. But career opportunities only dried up, you know, further for her at this point.

And it was once again because no one listened to her and she didn't have control. So meanwhile, Hay and Manfredi, who are still working together, which I thought was cool, are teasing out this tiny indie script in between their bigger studio studio work called The Invitation. It centers around a dinner party in a high-end Los Angeles home where past trauma and personalities explode. And it's very fun and darkly delicious. And originally they thought it could be their directorial debut because it's like one location, you know, limited cast. But I think at a certain point, they both realized

Karen would probably do a better job with this than we would. So they both claim that each of them had the idea of taking it to Karen, and they did. And they sent it to her. She read the script. And she decided to take it on. And she hadn't directed a movie in five years. And she's been traumatized by her past two experiences.

Game Changer Films, a film fund, an initiative aimed at supporting female directors, provides financing, and the total budget is, can you guess, Lizzie? $1 million. $1 million, the exact same amount of money that she made Girl Fight for, 15 years earlier. She has $1 million, a good cast, but the most important thing is Karen Kusama for the first time has complete control over both how she wants to make the movie and then also how she wants to sell the movie.

So the invitation premieres at South by Southwest in 2015 to critical acclaim. It's one of like the hottest indie movies of that year and 15 years later, she's in a similar position as she was with Girl Fight, the thing that she worked so hard for. She starts booking TV gigs, she directs a bunch of episodes of Halt and Catch Fire, The Man in the High Castle, Billions, Casual, and then most recently the outsider. Oh yeah. She found financing for her next project, Destroyer, this dark gritty LA crime film starring Nicole Kidman that we talked about. And she says that she would still love to make Invisible X, her challenging film on Gen. her transformation. And I do too. I really hope someone will pay for it. So Karen Kusama made it through

this crucible ultimately and was able to get back on track with her career. But it was largely and strictly through her perseverance. And so I want to pivot for a second to one of the more frustrating aspects of this that I found when I was, you know, reading about her and the project. So I've been told that one of the more disappointing parts of participating in any system as a minority player is the pervasive view by those in the majority that your work is in some way representative of your entire minority. White men have been allowed to fail and make bad art without the back splash hitting their peers. Oftentimes the backslash doesn't even hit them. And that's not always and is often not the case for underrepresented groups whose achievements and failures are often

used as rhetorical ammo in conversations that grossly generalize. Hollywood right now we're in the midst of a reckoning with how opportunity is distributed, but I think studios are starting to do a great job supporting voices that are too rarely heard, not all studios, but some. But I think that perhaps the most important opportunity is the one that is hardly ever acknowledged, which is the opportunity to fail. And Karen Osama points that out earlier. Artists need to be given equal access to failure, not just success, equal access to

mediocrity, equal access to big swings that result in even bigger misses. Karen Kusama's biggest fear was justifiably that the outcome of each successive film was strictly binary. It would either be a hit and she'd be allowed to continue to play, or it would be a fail and she would be sent home. There's something else I think needs to be acknowledged what you're saying about, like, people need to be allowed to fail. So much of it comes down to the decision makers and the people that actually hold the power in these situations, which up until this point, and frankly, to a certain extent, still at this point,

is a very homogenous group. And it's something that, so I also produce the podcast for IMDB. It's called Movies That Changed My Life. It's also a good podcast, if you guys want to listen. Check it out. And we just had Michael K. Williams on, I believe that episode will air before this one. And he said something where he was like, you know, if you're watching the Oscars and you're mad at the Oscars because it's extremely

homogenous that there's not enough diversity in it, he was like, you're getting mad at the wrong thing because the decisions that led to those Oscars happened three years earlier in a boardroom. And that is what you should be looking at changing, is that boardroom. And he's 100% right. And I think that applies here as well that, you know, every, every sort of judgment that was weighed on her was was came down from that kind of group that that doesn't apply the same sort of forgiveness to women and people of color that it tends to to straight white men. Yeah. Absolutely.

Lizzie, what went right for you in watching Eon Flux? Well, hearing about the project certainly it's it's inspiring to learn about Karen Kusama more and sort of how to do. she kept pushing forward at every turn, even despite years-long periods of, of no work. She's amazing. So that this has been great to learn about. In terms of the actual movie itself, other than the hand feet, which I would argue is an alarming what went right.

I do think this as the beginning of Charlie's Theron's action star career, like whether or not this was good, I do think. it put her on the map as someone who makes sense in a sci-fi world and who is believable as having the kind of strength necessary, I think, to carry a project like this. And through the years, as she's gotten older, she's gotten better. And it's interesting that like the older she gets, the more she's fitting into this world. One quick thing. That is a what went wrong for me. Her pajamas in this movie are inexcusable. Just so everybody knows what she's wearing. is like, it's just like two straps of sparkly beads.

It looks like a black diaper with suspenders hung across it. And they're just like barely covering her boobs. It is the most inexcusable attempt at pajamas. It was also not sexy at all. It was like a diaper. I think Karen Kutama has a real gift with casting as you know, she discovered Michelle Rodriguez. Yeah. Thinking of Nicole Kidman, if you watch her in Destroyer, you're like, who could have even

imagine Nicole Kidman in this role. It's so different. And I think that she was ahead of, you know, this was quote, pre-Furious as this was years ahead of Mad Max when we find, when we were like, oh, wow, Charlie Stern can beat the crap out of everyone. Yeah. Including Tom Hardy. And so I think that probably deservedly there. Yeah, exactly. I think that, you know, she really got ahead of that. And I think also what went right, the character that I think she was going for with Eon Flex was a more complicated character, you know, a difficult character. And she wanted to create difficult female characters that the audience has to reckon with. Yeah, I agree with that.

And I think I also wonder if in the edit they tried to cut it so that she's more of a sort of classic, strong, female hero, because that is like one of the most annoying character tropes. when we see male protagonists have the ability to be completely flawed and more interesting. And I think that's a big trend that we're seeing now is the ability for unlikable, quote unquote, unlikeable women to be at the forefront of more projects. And that to me is really exciting. Because guess what? We're assholes too.

And I want to watch more of that. On that note, I just want to end with a couple of quotes from Peter Chung and Karen Kusama that I think are relevant. Peter Chung, in talking about the failure of EonFlux, said, I'm not naive about the realities of making unconventional films in the arena of mass entertainment. It's possible to make good unconventional films. It's also very hard. In any case, if you're going to risk failure, I say do it boldly with conviction. The problem with the movie is its failure of nerve.

And I think that that is absolutely because of what direction the edit went with, with the studio. Yeah. not Karen Kusama's nerve. And as she told BuzzFeed in 2018, quote, the place I'm in is very much a place of, I am not going away, people. You will have to keep dealing with me

whether you like it or not. Thanks again for listening to this week's episode of What Went Wrong. If you're enjoying this podcast, be sure to leave us a rating and review. If there's ever a film that you want us to cover, drop us a line at what went wrong pod at gmail.com. See you next week.

Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer editing in music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthano Uos.