WHAT WENT WRONG - Bad Santa

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

When 'Bad Santa' hit theaters in 2003, audiences got a filthy, chaotic Christmas classic. What they didn’t get was the movie director Terry Zwigoff or producers the Coen Brothers intended to make.In this episode, Chris and Lizzie uncover how Bob Weinstein became the real villain of 'Bad Santa'—seizing Zwigoff’s cut, alienating the Coens, and waging war on anyone who tried to protect the film. Plus: why Billy Bob Thornton was nowhere near the first choice to play Willie, and why Zwigoff’s controversial director’s cut is the Christmas miracle you absolutely need this year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone the feel bad, feel good movie of the holiday season. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my ever-misanthropic co-host. Just kidding. That's Billy Bob in this movie. Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing this evening? I'm doing great. And I am, honestly, unbelievable. I'm unbelievably excited to talk about bad Santa, which is the movie we have.

Not only is this our first of the Christmas season, and we are doing a couple of Christmas episodes, this episode and the next episode. And then for the second half of December, we have a little surprise in store for you all that truly is. We've already told them what it is. That's true. I'm sorry. The Christmas gift of James Cameron.

We're going to do a lot of James Cameron. It's going to be a very Cameron Christmas for the last two weeks of December. Yep. Aliens and Avatar. What he gives his wife every year for Christmas. No. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, Lizzie, I am also really excited.

I had never in a million of years would have thought that you would have picked bad Santa. Not that there's anything bad about this movie or that I wouldn't, but I just wouldn't have expected it. So I'm excited and explain yourself. I will explain myself. So you know what? I also would not have expected to pick bad Santa. But what happened was, you know, we knew we wanted to cover some Christmas movies. And so I was looking around, doing some digging, trying to figure out what I wanted to do.

And this movie kept popping up. I was just like, I don't know. Like what are we even going to talk about here? Had you seen it? No. And I also realized that I did not know this was a Terry's Wygoth movie at all. Yeah. For some legitimate reasons.

I didn't know that. And so I started to dig into it. And it's just, it is honestly one of the more fascinating behind the scenes fights I think that we have ever covered. We get the introduction of the Cohen brothers to the podcast. They're going to enter the chat for the first time on this episode. They kind of entered the chat, to be fair, on Evil Dead. That's true.

Sam Ramey was, like, forcing one of them to carry film for him and making him as bitch. But fair enough. They're going to enter it a little more substantially today. We have a tussle with the other Weinstein, Bob. Oh. But most of all, Chris, this is a really fascinating study in the power of editing, I think. Well, that's my question. Or suspicion.

It's long been my suspicion about this movie. Yes. So this is my question for you. A, what is the first version of this movie that you saw? And B, what did you watch ahead of today's podcast? I believe I've only ever seen the theatrical cut of Bad Santa. Because I believe that's what's available on streaming. I saw this movie when it came out.

So that's the theatrical, yeah. And I believe I saw the version I watched felt true to what I watched in the theatrical cut. Let me ask you this. In the version that you watched, was there a sequence where third, Merman Merman, one of my favorite names ever for a character, learns how to box with Billy Bob and Marcus. Yes. You watched the theatrical cut. That's what I thought.

So you would talk to me about the directors versus theatrical, and I actually specifically sought out the theatrical. And I have a theory that I want to test with you. I have not looked up anything about this movie. I don't know anything about it. Oh, great. Oh, you're in for a wild ride. So I first saw Terry's Weigoff. I think many people, Ghost World, was the introduction for a lot of folks with Terry's Weigoff.

But I did watch the Crum Document. that he made. Yes, I watched that for this. I really loved it. Yeah, why, and I watched it a long time ago. My wife's parents are big Terry's Wygoth fans. And I love that. That makes sense. And they like crumb and they Ghost World. If you were to look at a photo of my wife in middle school, you'd be like, oh yeah, she loves Ghost World. Like, she totally loves Ghost World. Oh my God, I want to see. Yeah. And they were big Ghost World fans. Anyway, this was long before I ever met my wife, but I had seen Ghost World and I really liked it. And I was into Todd Salons at the time and what I would call like. Oh, he's going to come up. Like dirtbag cinema is what I've always called it.

I believe it's actually called American eccentric cinema. It includes like Wes Anderson and the more mainstream Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jones relative to these folks. But anyway, I got into this like very anti-traditional type of cinema. And then when Bad Santa came out, I feel like it was marketed as this like raunchy wedding crasher style R-rated comedy. And then I saw that Terry's Wigoff directed it. And I was like, what?

It would be like Todd Salon's directing Superbad. Like it just didn't make sense to me. And then when I saw the movie, it feels so torn between those two worlds. There are moments of melancholy that feels so Terry Swigoff. And then there are also these just stupid moments that feel so national ampoon. And so I always have wondered, like, was that just a concession he made? Or as you mentioned, was there a fight? All to say, I actually really like this movie.

I do too. It's really funny. It has great performances at the center of it. And it is sweet at the end of the... the day, although I don't think it's overly saccharin. So yeah, I'm just excited to learn about it because I'm a fan. Well, I watched both the theatrical cut and the director's cut for this episode. I unfortunately could not find badder Santa, which is the unrated version. Right. I feel okay about that because I did do quite a bit of digging into what is in that version. My understanding is that it's not a

huge departure from the theatrical. It's kind of just what they were doing in the early 2000s when they wanted to, you know, release like a... It's like more nudity and cursing, basically. It's more F-bombs, that's it. That's pretty much all that's in there. There might be some extended things, but not a ton. Yeah. I'm very excited to talk about this.

The theatrical cut, I agree with you. It feels confused. And I still really enjoyed it. It's fun. I love Billy Bob Thornton. He's great. He holds this movie together, even though he's a total piece of shit. Yes, he really does.

He is, you know, he manages to convey... He's just a... But he also manages to convey a real sweetness by the end. That's true across both versions. But I will tell you, the timing for me in the theatrical cut is very strange. It feels like they're holding on some takes too long. They're not doing enough another. Like the comedic timing feels a bit off.

And tonally, it's strange. It's a bit of whiplash. And as you'll learn, there's one director who you haven't mentioned yet, who is involved and is part of the reason why you're mentioning national lampoons. you're mentioning, like, I'm not going to say the movie that he directed immediately after this because it'll give it away. But, yeah, I love Terry's Wygoth. Ghost World was my introduction to him. I also really enjoy Art School Confidential.

It's such a weird movie. I love it, though. No, it's good. And it captures it. I have heard it captures the vibe of 80s, like, art school existence very well. It captures, like, acting school vibes quite a bit. Like, even there's similarities there, which is maybe why I loved it so much. A very weird job.

Malcovich performance. It's like, it's just a very weird movie. And again, it's like within that the salons, the milieu of, you know, characters that are, it's this like very difficult type of personality. I actually feel like Paul Giamatti existed in this world a little bit. Like, did you see American Splendor in the early 2000s or like even sideways has a little bit of this vibe? Totally. So I'm with you. I think they're great. I miss this vibe. The thing that strikes me about Terry Zweigoff's films, honestly including Bad Santa, particularly the director's cut, is that he is not afraid to show characters who are pieces of shit, but you can tell he still cares about them. He still likes them. These people aren't necessarily great. They don't have some big

revelatory moment where they change and, you know, for the better and update their lives. They just kind of like go about their days and generally are garbage to people a lot of the time. But they're also like human, very human and doing sometimes really miraculous things, also a very strange Jim Broadbent performance and Art School Confidential that I always have enjoyed. If you look at Terry's Weigoff's filmography, he's directed five films. Right. We're going to talk about all of them. We're going to dive into his backstory quite a bit because I think it's important to understand what happens on Bad Santa. But Bad Santa is just nothing like the other four films. I should clarify, The theatrical cut of Bad Santa is nothing like the other four films.

And I will tell you, Chris, I highly recommend you watch the director's cut because not only is it honestly an amazing movie, it is a Terry's Wygoth movie through and through. And it is enormously different. Without changing the plot or the basic structure of the movie, it is a completely different movie. So as a Christmas exercise for everyone, I recommend watch them both. We'll put it on. Back to back. Because it's a big winner in our household, apparently. All right.

Well, let's get the info out of the way. So this is directed by, of course, Terry's Weigoff. The budget was around $23 million. I've read anywhere between $18 and $23 million. Executive produced by the Cohen Brothers, among others, written by Glenn Ficarra and John Riqua, released November 26, 2003, and it is starring Billy Bob Thornton as Willie T. Soak's, Tony Cox,

as Marcus, Brett Kelly, as Thurman, Merman. Lauren Graham as Sue. Also, the name reveal comes so late in the movie. That's also one of the funny. Your name is Thurman. Yes. Bernie Mac as Jen and, of course, John Ritter as Bob Chippeska. And I have to say, the last thing I'll say before we get into this, those two, Bernie

Mac and John Ritter. Oh, my God. It felt like there was some improvisation going on in fun ways. I can't tell. Some of the dialogue is so funny in this movie. and they're so good when they're talking about the sexuality of man. Oh, my God. I was crying, laughing.

God forbid, I tell the president what he does. Yes. I mean, I also just, some of the lines that Thurman has, Grandma, are you spry? Like, there are just so many random, funny lines. Also, Cloris Leachman is the grandma. The cast of this is absolutely amazing. She is amazing.

But it made me sad that we lost both Bernie Mac and John Ritter, you know, too young for both of them. They are genuinely comming. geniuses and it is on display, particularly for me in the director's cut. They're good in both, but there's just some faces that John Ritter makes that, like, I can't get out of my head and they make me laugh every time I think about them. The IMDB logline is a miserable con man and his partner pose as Santa and his little helper to rob department stores on Christmas Eve, but they run into problems when the con man befriends a troubled kid. Okay. So let's start with Terry Zweigoff. And bear with me,

going to be a little bit more background maybe than we'd normally do, but I think it's important. So he was born in 1949 in Appleton, a very small town in Wisconsin, to a family of Jewish dairy farmers. And he told the New York Times that they were probably the only Jewish dairy farmers in the entire state. His earliest memories of Christmas were mostly happy ones. He actually did have a decent amount of experience with the holiday. His uncle had married a non-Jewish woman, so they had a tree and they celebrated and he really loved it when he was very little. But this was tempered by his experience with his parents. His parents were not religious at all. In fact, he said his mother's religion was fear. And in one of the only photos he has of himself as a child on Christmas, he was opening a flashlight as a present.

And he explained that his mother told him it was, just in case the lights go out. And he's four. You know what? It's never too early. It is too early. To teach your child about the precarity of the power grid. Yeah. Yeah. It might be a little too early. He also actually never visited a mall Santa because his mother was afraid to take him, not because he didn't want to go. Because of the Santa or because of the mall? Unclear. I'm not sure. But clearly there's more to explore with his relationship with his mother that we don't have time for. Can I share just one like parent overstepping or not parent, this was a grandparent, but putting a little too much fear in a child. My mom will deny this when I was very little. Probably eight or nine. And my grandma, my mom's mom was from Puerto Rico, was visiting. And we were all like at the mall.

And it was me and like all my, I only have girl cousins and sisters. So, was the only boy and I hated going to the mall and they would all go shopping. And I said, I got to go to the bathroom. Mom says, you got to wait so I can take you. And I said, no, like I'm a grown man. I'm eight years old. I can go to the bathroom by myself. And and my grandma, rather to just say, no, Tata, as we call her, turns to me, you know, Christopher, listen. And she says, back home, a little boy, I heard about went to the bathroom without his parents. And when he was in there, he stayed in there. He didn't come out and they finally sent in someone to find him, and someone had slit his throat from ear to ear. I was just like, what?

Oh, my God. And she said, and that's why we always go with our parents. And then that was it. We just moved on. So anyway. And you never went to the bathroom again. I haven't. Yeah. I've been holding it for years. Yeah. Well, I don't think Terry's mother went that far, but his family did pretty swiftly move to Chicago, where he experienced a kind of weird, like half Christmas, half Hanukkah situation, probably pretty common, especially in non-religious families, to celebrate both. But it sounds like their heart wasn't really in either. And he also found Chicago to be pretty grim and grimy. In the early 70s, he graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison, majoring in psychology, and then headed straight for San Francisco. And this is where he started working as a printer for an

underground comic book outfit. And that is how he met Robert Crum. So you mentioned the documentary Crum a little bit. Are you familiar with Robert Crum? Just some of his work. I mean, I guess he's probably most famous for depictions of very, like, large, sturdy, sexualized women and the small men who yearn for them. Yes. That's how I would describe Robert Crane. There's a lot of those. A lot of those. Yeah, he was, you know, a huge artist in the underground comics movement in the 60s. It was the countercultural movement of the comic book world that was really standing up against the repressive comics code authority, which we've actually talked about in a couple of our superhero episode. You will recognize his drawings for sure, I think. Some of the most famous are Fritz the Cat. As Chris pointed out, a lot of them are very sexual. They're very strange. Ralph Bokshi, who came up during our Lord of the Rings episode, was kind of a contemporary of Crum on the animated side and directed the Fritz the Cat movie based on the comics character

by Crum. So Crum and Zweigoff became very good friends to the point where Zweigoff met Crum's strange and complicated family. But in 1985, Zweigoff broke into film making with the documentary Louis Bluey about obscure blues musician William Howard Taft Armstrong, aka Louis Blue, Armstrong. And he had met Louis Bluey while writing an article about him, and he found him so interesting that he was like, someone needs to make a documentary about this guy. And everyone said, no thank you. Who is this man? And so Zweigoff was like, whatever, all right, fine, I'll take all of my savings and I'll do it myself. And so that's what he did. And this movie really gets his name out there in the documentary space. I mean, it's not like super

well known, but a lot of people really liked it. So he kept coming back to Robert Crum, and in particular, Crum's family. And he thought that they would make an excellent documentary. Crum had really enjoyed Louis Bluey, so he agreed. So starting in 1985, Zweigov spent six years filming what would become Crum, another three editing it. And a lot of what he captured was pretty disturbing, much of which ends up on screen, particularly in regards to his brother, Charles, who is mentally ill and who very sadly would commit suicide before the film came out. But in 1994, it did come out, and it absolutely blew critics away. It won the grand jury prize for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, best nonfiction film at the National Society of Film Critics. So many critics put it on their list

of the best films of the year, but it came at a cost. Zwaigoff told NME, quote, I was averaging an income of about $200 a month and living with back pain so intense that I spent three years with a loaded gun on the pillow next to my bed, trying to get up the nerve to kill myself. That's a taste of Terry's Weigoff's style, I would say. Yeah, and I think it's interesting. There's a lot of really interesting documentary work from this period. American movie would come out a few years later, which I've also referenced. It's like the American eccentric documentary is how you might describe it.

It's these looks at artists who are viewed as really incredible, but very outside the mainstream. I feel like the movie Junebug kind of does something a little similar with some of their characters. I love that movie. It's a great movie. Like that art dealer who's interested in the folks in these rural areas who are doing remarkable yet probably schizophrenic work. Outsider Art, yeah. Yeah, outsider art, yeah. The thing that's kind of remarkable about this documentary is, and I think about Zwagov's work in general,

he is not afraid of showing the bad and the good. Yeah, it's a very warts and all approach. Big time. stuff in this where you're like, ooh, that was rude or weird or bad or, you know, a little like sexual harassy or, you know, but he asks you to watch it all and take it as a whole. And I think that's what's so remarkable about his work. There is something a bit gray gardensy about it, too. Totally. But the thing that he had a lot of trouble with was working with Robert Crum, who was his close friend, was really difficult. He didn't make it easy on Zweigoff. He kind

refused to play along when Zweigoff needed him to tell a story he'd already heard or repeat a line to camera, he just wouldn't do it, he'd make fun of Zweigoff. You can hear little bits of this in the documentary where you can tell this guy was just a giant pain in the ass to make this with. And to add insult to injury, considering this movie took almost 10 years to make, it did not get a best documentary nomination at the Academy Awards. Neither did Hoop Dreams, by the way, which caused quite a lot of ruckus, because everybody agreed those two were some of the best documentaries of the year. this is actually the year the Academy was forced to change the way that documentary nominations work. Little fun fact, Roger Ebert was the one who found out that apparently the way they used to screen

documentaries is that everybody had a flashlight in the audience and they could just blink the flashlight when they were done. And if everybody's flashlights were up or a majority of flashlights were up, they would just turn the movie off. So Hoop Dreams got like 15 minutes and Crum got like maybe 50 minutes. It's horrifying. It's really bad. But they don't do that anymore because of this year, actually. So all of these difficulties in terms of making this documentary and also the lack of recognition that it ended up getting, it does end up pushing him towards narrative features. I think mostly he had a lot of difficulties working with non-actors because of the unwillingness to do what he needed them to do. And he was getting a ton of feature scripts thanks to Crum. And according to

Terry, they were all terrible. But then his wife, Melissa Axelrod, gave him a copy of a graphic novel that she really loved, and it was Daniel Klaus's ghost world. Yeah. This would have course, become his real breakout hit, 2001's Ghost World starring Steve Buscemi, Thoroughburtch, Scarlett Johansson. It's so good. Honestly, it's probably one of my, I would say, top 20 favorite movies for sure. Certainly coming of age movies, like if I were to just limit it to that category. Yeah, it's great. Great Bouchemy performance. So good. So sweet. This was like Trees Lounge, this. This is a peak indie Bouchemmy back in the day. Yeah. Plus Conair. Of course, where he's. Yeah, also peak indie Bouchemy. Yes.

It's being deep shabes at his best. Yes. So this time, though, he did get an Oscar nomination alongside Daniel Klaus for adapted screenplay. Right. A little fun fact. Later, when Zweigoff received the script for Juno to consider for directing, he turned it down because he felt like it was just a gross imitation of Ghost World. It has, I can see the inspiration, the vibes. You know what I mean?

I think because Jason Reitman is who's a great director, but he's so much more of a traditional director than a Zweigoff, it doesn't. feel like Ghost World that much to me in its final, you know, iteration. Agree. So, Swigoff was officially a success, but he refused to play along with corporate America over and over again. Yeah. He's not a fan. No. This guy's like, I survived on $200 a month with a loaded gun next to my pillow. There's nothing you can offer me. That's exactly right. Yeah. And you mentioned Todd Salons. He famously turned down a Gap Billboard campaign that would have paid $10,000 or more alongside, quote, hip young filmmakers like Todd Salons and Spike Jones. And he did so because he said, quote, I'm sure they never even saw the film.

If they saw that film, it'd be clear to any thinking person, this is the last guy who's going to endorse the Gap. It's like six years of my life went into making some big statement against, like, corporate consumers and sweeping the planet and ruining the Earth. I said I wasn't interested. I hate having my picture taken. And to be on a billboard, I can't imagine anything more embarrassing. But I also find it hilarious that Gap wants to put on a buildboard Todd Salons, who, I guess maybe this is before happiness.

But his movie, one of the main plot points is the pain between a father and son because the father will molest the boy's friend but won't molest the son. Oh my God. Like, this is Todd Salon. I don't think they did. The movie ends with the son masturbating successfully for the first time in the last movie of the film is him happily turning to his mom and saying, I came. Like, that's the end of happiness. And that's a Gap ad. I came in my gap pants.

Oh, all right. Well, sometime in 2002, Zweigoff was sent two different and yet similar scripts. One was Bad Santa. Okay. And the other was another very different Christmas movie that would also make it to the screen very close to the same time as Bad Santa. Any guesses? 2003, 2003? Both were 2003.

They were literally three weeks apart in terms of their. release and they both involve mall santas. They both involve mall santas. It's not the family stone that was before this. I love the family stone. It's a big one. It's a big, I'm like, I don't know, jingle all the way that was too early. I don't know. What is it? Tell me, I'm blowing it. Elf. Oh, that's right. I forgot he was offered elf. Yes. I actually now remember that because it, again, is so insane. Yes. But also that sounds kind of great. Can you imagine a Terry's why I got I think it would have been amazing. But he hated it. Would not have cast Will Ferrell. Like, you couldn't. No. And Will Ferrell was attached and he thought Will Ferrell was super funny. And his wife was

like, you should do this. This is going to make millions of dollars. And he said absolutely not. He did not find it funny at all. He didn't relate to any of the characters. He felt that it was full of contrived silliness is what he said. Which it is. I still really like Elf. I love Elf. But I totally, like, elf is great. It's not his thing. It's not his thing at all. Maybe if James Conn had Ben the elf. Then. Right? Like, raging alcoholic. Yeah. Terrified. Then it works. Well, on the other hand, he loved Bad Santa. So let's talk about the original script.

Writing partners Glenn Fikara and John Rico had been working as a writing team for Angry Beavers on Nickelodeon. I loved Angry Beaver. This was like the peak weirdness. Cat dog. Angry Bevers. Rocko's Modern Life. Then there was obviously Ren and Stimpy. Early SpongeBob. Oh, yeah, very strange. Very strange. Excellent. All around.

So in 2001, these guys broke out with the movie Cats and Dogs. I don't know if you remember this. It's about literal cats and dogs in a war with each other. Son, theaters. I'm sure I did, too. And at some point in the early odds, they met the Coen Brothers. And as any young writing duo would, they shot their shot. Oh, of course.

They were like, we want to write a movie for you two to direct. And the Coen brothers were like, bah. No. They said, we only direct scripts that we have written. But they had an idea, Chris, that they've been kicking around for a while, and they said, why don't you guys write this and we'll produce it? So Glenn and John are like, great, what is it? And Joel and Ethan Cohen tell them, quote, we have this idea for a movie we want you to write. It's about a bad Santa. He drinks

beer and stuff. That's it. I would have assumed that their contribution actually would have been the small town caper crime element of it. No. That's awesome. This was the entire log line. I love how they're like, he drinks a lot of beer. They're like, he's bad. He's a bad Santa. And these guys are like, okay, sure, you got it. They did say that they wanted something similar to the bad news bears, but they had one major requirement. It needs to be a redemption story, but the redemption must not come until the very end. This is important.

Glenn and John agreed to take on the project. They decided to turn it into a dark comedy with, as you pointed out, a bit of a crime caper involved. And they still very much wrote it with the hope that the Coens would break their rule and direct, but when they read the final script, they obviously still declined to direct it. They did, however, do a pretty substantial writing pass on the screenplay. This allegedly added in a bunch more jokes, cut out anything that they felt crossed a line, including apparently a bunch of Down syndrome jokes that I'm very glad did not wind up in the final cut here. There is still one. Yeah, there is. Those are rough. Yeah, the M word. And, well, he uses a lot of R words in this movie, obviously.

As everyone did in the early 2000s, yes. And that honestly is like the least funny part of this movie for sure. But there were way more that were cut. So they also asked John and Glenn to write it specifically for an actor that they had just worked with, who they thought would be perfect for the lead. Do you know this? Oh, no. I assumed it was the man who wasn't there. Well, it is the man who wasn't there. That is the movie they had just done. Oh, but they're writing it for Gandalfini? That's right. James Gandalfini. Oh, who makes more sense as a Santa physically?

Yes. But the Billy Bob voiceover, like, so the man who wasn't there is all Billy Bob voiceover, right? And it's so good. I actually really love that movie. and also Scarlett Johansson to connect to Ghost World. But anyway, I always assumed, oh, they must have written it for him because he has that wonderful laconic drawl that they're going to use. But that's so interesting. No, James Gandalfini.

So the rhythm of the dialogue was written for James Gandalfini, which is very different than obviously the way that Billy Bob speaks. And there is some debate as to how much the Coen's changed in the script. Swigoff says 90% of what's in the film is John and Glenn. Others have said the Coens have more input than that. It's very hard to tell, especially because of how chopped up this thing ends up being in the final product. But they're great writers, so I don't doubt that a lot of it is them. So since the Coens weren't going to direct it, they start sending the script around town,

and that's where it landed with Terry Zweigoff's agent. His agent sent in the script with a note saying, quote, you're going to love this, but it'll never get made, so don't get your hopes up. But Zweigoff did indeed love the script, especially the dialogue. He really loved the precision and the crassness, and one line in particular, won him over. It's one of Bernie Macs, and it's sweet Jews for Jesus. He loved it. Bernie Mac has some good lines in this movie.

He's got some amazing lines that I cannot repeat here because I would be canceled. Also, your soul is dog shit is one of my favorite lines that... Yes. I mean, Tony Cox is also so funny in this. Every once in a while, she gets up and plays soccer with her tits is another great line. Also, this is pricks fix. That sequence is way funnier in the director's cut, I will tell you. There's a lead up to Pricks Fix that makes it make more sense.

So Zwaigoff figured, you know what, I've been sent a bunch of clinkers. It's not going to get better than this. Plus, he's going to get to work with the Cohen brothers producing. He's like, I can learn a ton from them. This seems like, you know, a win-win. So with him on board, they start shopping it around to a bunch of studios, all of whom said, absolutely no. Yeah.

In fact, Universal told one producer exactly why they'd passed on the script. They said, quote, it was the fouling. disgusting, misogynistic, anti-Christmas, anti-childering thing we could imagine, which is exactly why that producer they were talking to, greenlit it. And unfortunately for us all, that producer was Bob Weinstein. He snatched it up from Miramax's genre-focused subdivision dimension films. We mentioned them briefly, I think, with The Crow. So a few months later, Zweigoff received a call from Bob saying Harvey had seen Ghostworld,

loved it, wanted to work with Zwegoff, so they were off to the races. This is a little weird, by the way. I don't know why he would say my brother has. seeing Ghost World because Bob is the one who is involved in this. Harvey isn't really, but anyway. Maybe Harvey had the bigger name at the time. Maybe. I don't know. Who knows? So this is going to go great, right? 100%. From what we learned with Peter Jackson's experience with Bob on Lord of the Rings. He's going up. Great notes. Easygoing guy. Like, keep it loose. Chill dude. Scott Rudin, another really chill guy. Just a bunch of these chill guys at the time.

So once officially on boards, Zweigoff did make some adjustments to the script. He removed a bunch of flashbacks that were depicting Willie as a child with his father. Good idea, as we just discussed on Frankenstein. Yes, you don't need it. All of his tweaks are really good. He rewrote the sequence in which Bernie Mac's character is killed, making it way more violent. By the way, what do you remember about that sequence from the theatrical cut? I don't know he's dead until they say he's dead. Exactly.

Yeah, I think they broke his legs. Let me tell you this. You know he's dead in the director's cut. Big time. They run over his head with the car. Right. Anyway, so he toned down a lot of elements of redemption throughout the story, and he added the scene where Willie yells at the woman during his lunch break, which was inspired by David Sedaris's The Santa Land Diaries, which was a great moment. He then showed it to his wife, who helped to inject some warmth into it, and then he's got a script that everybody's really very happy with. Now, we know that they wrote the part with Gandalfini in mind, and he was the Cohen's first choice. He didn't work out. I could not figure out why, but again, he was in the midst of shooting Sopranos at this time. It might have been really difficult to schedule things. I think Sopranos, it's difficult to schedule things. I think he was in a tough mental spot, as we later learned with his work on the Sopranos. Yeah. And he was in some pretty difficult negotiations with HBO throughout the Sopranos, I believe, they basically said, we're going to give you a bunch of money to not do other things.

Oh, interesting. That was more on the television side, so that may not have had anything to do with this. But his shooting windows were limited, I know. Yeah. He didn't say anything about this. I don't think it was like a not wanting to work with them, but he did not work out. So Jack Nicholson was also considered, but reportedly was already committed to something's got to give. So that wasn't going to work.

Robert De Niro was on board to do this, but he also fell through. Robert De Niro was like, could he be a bad grandpa? Could we do that? And they're like, actually, yes. In 20 years. Yes. But finally, there was one name that everyone agreed would be absolutely perfect. It was not Billy Bob Thornton?

No, dude. Billy Bob's the bottom of the barrel choice on this. And I don't know why. No one thinks of him. Who was it? It's another Bill. It's Bill Murray. Yeah.

This is, what, within two years of Lost in Translation? Yes. Probably Broken Flowers is going to be somewhere around this time. He's kind of the ultimate misanthrope. He's the OG. Of course. I mean, Nicholson would have been really good, too. Yes.

Well, look, Zweigov's very excited about this. I think for all the reasons you just said. But he was told, forget about it. He's never going to return your phone call because, famously, he had fired his agents in 2000, reportedly because they called him too much. And you had to leave him a weird voicemail to get a hold of him. You had to leave him a voicemail, yes, and he'd never checked the messages. So it was impossible to get a hold of him.

But much to Zweigov's shock, Murray responded within a week and said, Just tell me the time and place and I'll show up. Wow. So by February of 2002, he was supposed to be in final contract negotiations, but when the time came to sign the contract, he just disappeared. This has happened. a number of times. Yeah. Yes. So Zweigoff told the New York Times, it got to the point where I left a couple messages saying, if you want to do this thing, great. And if you don't, just let me know because I have to

move on. But he just disappeared. I can't blame him. If I had that kind of money, I'd be doing the same thing. I'm just not in the mood today. Sorry, find somebody else. No, Terry, you would not be doing the same thing. This is a dick move. You can respond to somebody who is trying to make a movie that would revolve entirely around you. But even Ghostbusters, I remember, there was a lot of concern. Was he going to show up to shoot that movie? So finally fed up with waiting for Bill Murray. The script made its way. Waiting for Bill Murray. The last choice, Billy Bob Thornton. And he, as you pointed out, had also just worked with the Cohen brothers on the man who wasn't there. And he loved collaborating with them. You could have gone to him eight people ago. And this was actually not his only Christmas

movie this year. You may remember, he also plays the Gross American President in love actually. That's right. He does. Must have been really feeling the Christmas spirit this year. Might I humbly suggest that of all the actors mentioned, I would argue for whatever reason, Thornton has the weird sexual energy necessary to really bring this role to life. 100%. He is the only one of everyone we just mentioned that I think could and did pull this off. Can I, it's, this is very crass. That guy fucks. That's what I think when I see. Bob Thorne, especially in this role. Listen, no one can explain it, but everyone agrees with you.

It's just true. So his manager called him and said, wait until you read this script. I've never seen anything like it. And initially, Billy Bob thought it sounded like a career ender. But once he finished reading it, he couldn't stop laughing. And so finally, they had found their Willie T. Soak. They didn't even bother to update the dialogue for poor Billy Bob. So he's reading like James Gandalfini, New York dialogue in a Southern accent.

And also the fact that he is so damn thin just makes it even funnier. It's true. He looks so wrong. And you're right. It is amazing. So the entire thing hinges on the fact that he works with a little person. That's what's also so funny about it is that Tony Cox's character is so essential then as a result, right? But Billy Bob is so essential to him because he has the ability to get into the safe.

It actually makes it a greatly dependent relationship. It works really well. And I also, you end up having a lot of sympathy for Tony Cox's character, Marcus, because Billy Bob is such a mess that he is dragging around and completely supporting. A nightmare. A total nightmare. So casting Thurman-Merman Pruved even more difficult. Now, to hear Terry's Wyghoff tell it, it was the studio who was pushing for a more Disney-esque child actor. It's just a more generically cute kid. To quote, Bob Weinstein in the Irish Times, quote, Terry can drop dead. That's not how it happened. The Coens wanted Angus T. Jones from two and a half men. That makes a lot of sense.

Terry, Billy Bob, and I all said, are you? kidding because they had all fallen in love with eight-year-old Vancouver-based Brett Kelly, who had a couple of very small credits to his name, but this was not a Hollywood kid. This is very much like a real kid, and he's so cute and weird, and I love him, and I'm so glad that they did not go with Angus T. Jones. Nothing against him, but like, Spygdorf pushed hard for Kelly and got him against the Cohen's wishes, although I do want to say all of the oral histories and commentary around this movie, the Cohen's declined to be involved in. So anything you're hearing is coming from Billy Baum Thornton, Zweigoff, and Weinstein. I totally buy that Zygoff wanted

Kelly. I don't buy that Weinstein did, but that's my point. I think Weinstein picks the winner after the fact. A hundred percent. Potentially. It's also worth mentioning, you know, I think salons very famously broke ground for just normal looking kids with in a lot of, I mean, there's obviously like gummo and kids and the Harmony Corinne stuff, but with Welcome to the Doll House and Heather Moderato. That was such a great example of casting someone who doesn't look like your traditional, you know, young Disney princess,

and she's so good in that movie. Like, that movie works because of her. I think it works really well here as well. But Chris, probably the most difficult part to cast in the entire movie was Marcus. Peter Dinklage auditioned, but was deemed not funny enough by Zweigoff, which I don't, he's very funny,

so I don't know how that went. But maybe not at that point in his life. He would have been a very young man. He's an elf, and he's amazingly funny an elf. Okay, so that's true. Yes, it's fine. He wound up in...

Peter Dinklage did fine. I was thinking of the station agent, but yeah, you're right. Elf, he was the same year. I'm an idiot. Yeah, he's very funny. Yeah, you're a big idiot. Get out of here.

But anyway, you know, look, parts for little people were and still are very hard to come by. So the number of people who auditioned for this role was just astronomical. But perhaps the most shocking actor to audition for the role was...

Gary Oldman, fresh off of Tipto. I'm just kidding. It's honestly weirder than that. Oh, okay. It's Mickey Rooney. There's a movie there. I don't know if it's good.

I don't know if I want to watch it. Mickey Rooney, at 82 years old and five feet, two inches tall, would have been a weird choice for a lot of reasons. I thought you were going to say, DeVito. That's who I was thinking would be...

That makes way more sense than 82-year-old Mickey Rooney. but he really wanted it. Hey, it's a great script. It is a great script. Shoot your shot. They had a problem, though. I'll read you this quote from John Riequa in a collider interview.

The whole thing is that Mickey Rooney, he'd be doing the scenes, and you know, the profanity was at the time the most F words in any movie. And Mickey Rooney would be doing the scene, and the time would come for him to say, fuck. He would just go and pause, and then he would go on. And then another, like a shit, and he paused. And he would go on. And then Terry said to him, uh, Mickey, why aren't you? you saying the dialogue and he goes, there's a lady present. Mickey, there might be some women present when you film the scenes. This is how Mickey made sure women didn't get hired in Hollywood.

Yes, like what are the sets you're working on that there's zero women involved? Anyway, needless to say, they had to let Mickey down easy. Yeah, that's tough. It's not the right fit. Not the right fit. One actor did immediately impress Terry's Weigoff and that was Tony Cox. He had not broken out in any big roles yet. He had just been in me, myself and Irene opposite Jim Carrey, but he really was looking for something bigger because, as we discussed, there are not a lot of roles for little people. So he went all out for this audition. And Alabama-born Cox would later tell CBS, quote, in 23 years working as an actor at that time, I had never seen a role like that. Those are the roles you dream of. And it went great. Terry Zweigoff was laughing his ass off during

the audition. Zweigoff told Cox afterwards, though, I have good news and bad news. The good news is, that was a great reading. The bad news is, this role wasn't written for an African American. Feels like a weird, you don't need to tell him that. Also, just rewrite it, which to his credit, Tony Cox told the Irish Times, quote, my heart sank. I thought, well, why did you call me in? But he said, I have to rethink this. And all I could do was hope that that was true.

So not a great interaction, but in Terry Zweigoff's defense, at least his response was, this isn't how this character is written. I don't want to just slot you into a character and expect you to do it without any changes. I actually want it rewritten for you. And Billy Bob's like, could I get some of that? And he says, shut up, Billy. Go away. And they're like, no, absolutely not. Last choice goes to down. But Zweigoff was up against a bigger hurdle than just tweaking the character, which again, to be clear, he was not opposed to, which is that the Coen brothers really hated Tony Cox for the part. And again, I have to say, their commentary is not available on this, so take all of this with a grain of salt. But apparently they wanted Danny Woodburn, best known for Seinfeld at the time.

And now this is according to Zweigoff in an interview with the playlist in 2012. Quote, they said they couldn't see the guy being black. I said, I don't see the guy being black. I think the fact of him being three foot six is the overriding characteristic. I don't think it matters. I just think this guy is really funny in the part. And they thought that would ruin the film. Weird.

Really weird. I looked into this a lot. He's not the only one involved in this who said that this was the issue here. So, I don't know. It's a strange thing to push back on in this character. Terry's Weigoff spelled it out pretty much perfectly there. Like, the important thing is that he's a little person. Yeah, that's the whole plot mechanism. Right. Right. Is the elf element to it. Right. I don't know why it would matter at all that he's black. But Terry's Weigoff does not give up. And finally, Finally, the Coens relented, and according to Terry, they told him, well, you're the one who asked to direct it, so good luck. That is what it is. Now, because we can't do an episode involving the Weinsteins without Harvey's horrible troll paws getting into everything, we also have to talk about the role of Sue because it almost went to Mirro Sorvino. Oh. Terry's Weigoff really wanted to cast her, but in a now-deleted tweet from 2017, here's what he said happened. Quote, I was interested in casting Mira Sorvino and Bad Santa, but every time I mentioned her over the phone to the Weinstein's, please note that is plural, I'd hear a click. What type of person just hangs up on you like that?

I guess we all know what type of person now. He ended the tweet with, I'm really sorry, Mira. Harvey's lawyer would later claim, this was Bob's project through dimensioned films. Harvey had nothing to do with it, but that's complete bullshit, especially because we know from Peter Jackson that both Weinstein steered him away from Mirisorvino and Ashley Judd. It's pretty hard to believe, obviously, I wasn't in the room, but that Harvey Weinstein would not be involved in these kinds of decisions. Yeah, and I mean, again, all Lauren Graham, wonderful actress. She's great.

Big Gilmore Girls fans over here, my wife, me through my wife. There's a, especially at the time, I think, kind of like gravitas to, Mira Sorvino that she's a movie star, right? Like, Lauren Graham was a TV star, and she's a movie star, and Billy Bob was kind of a movie star, but there's so many reasons why Mira would be so good in this, A, she can do anything, right? She'd proven she could do. Yeah, she's an amazing actor. Comedy, drama, everything.

But B, I think she has that pedigree. She's an Oscar winner at that point in time. Yes. Well, as you said, the role went to Gilmore Girls, Lauren Graham, who I do think is really great in this part. And I will tell you, in the director's cut, her character is, one of the ones that is extremely better served by that edit. It makes way more sense.

She's not, she's pretty nonsensical in the theatrical one. She's just a girl with a Santa Fetish. Yes, and like that's not lost in this one, but they're just the way that it's edited, the takes of her that he kept in, it's a better performance in the director's cut, and obviously that's nothing to do with her. That has to do with how they edited it. Reportedly her audition was the Fuck Me Santa scene, and she had to hump a chair. Now, on the one hand, gross.

other hand, I kind of understand needing to see that the actors can do that kind of physical comedy and not shy away from it. And she didn't. She also really loved being in the movie, loved Billy Bob, said that he was delightful. Pretty much everybody, maybe with the exception of Terry's Wyckoff, really liked Billy Bob. We'll get to that. Of course, we have to mention, I think, probably my two favorite performances in this entire movie, which is John Ritter as Bob Chupeska and Bernie Mac as Jen Slegel. We're basically in their own movie, just the two of them. And I would watch it for a hundred years, yes. They're amazing. And you may have noticed the film is dedicated to Ritter.

He had been friends with Billy Bob Thornton for a long time. I have to imagine that's probably why he wound up in this movie. They had met shooting the sitcom Hearts of Fire. And then, of course, Billy Bob cast him in Slingblade, which he is so, he's maybe my favorite part of that movie is John Ritter. So filming kicked off July 8, 2002. But before they could even roll cameras, chicken pox struck. Brett Kelly. Not the chicken I was expecting.

No. Brett Kelly came down with the pox and had to be sent back to Canada because Billy Bob Thornton had never had it and was not immune. Didn't want to get shingles. Didn't want to get shingles. Get out of here. Oh, no. Kelly almost lost the part because of this. And he had to go find a doctor who would write him a note saying he wasn't contagious so that he could go back.

And he went to a bunch of doctors. Somebody finally did it. So he was able to get back. Also 11 days into filming, Billy Bob announced his divorce from. Angelina Joe Lee. And as far as I understand it, this was a very amicable split pretty much due to their lifestyle differences, but probably not a fun time for Billy Bob. Also, wasn't this when she was picking up with Brad Pitt on Mr. and Mrs. Smith? No, that comes later. Okay. So unrelated, or perhaps related, Billy Bob decided to take a pretty method approach to playing Willie.

Drinking heavily? Yeah. Okay. He had previously experimented a bit on the man who wasn't there with method acting. And to hear Ethan Cohen tell it, quote, it was very entertaining watching Billy Bob give haircuts between takes. The sad thing is that Billy Bob actually thinks he's good at it. He's like one of those guys who trains to be a boxer for a boxing movie and then thinks he can beat people up. Oh, he's Mark Wahlberg. That's from Far Out magazine. He's a Mark Wahlberg. Everybody actually enjoys hanging out with. Well, he's not claiming that he would have given those terrorists on 9-11 really good haircuts and gotten them not to crash the planes. No, he's not. So he would later crap all over method acting, this is Billy Bob, saying, quote, I've been poor, I've been rich, I've been

moderate, I've been left, I've been right. And so anytime I play a character, I don't go sit in a closet for three fucking weeks to become a dark guy. People want there to be a science to acting, and that science is interesting. It makes it seem so fucking smart. And I believe you're either a good actor or you're not. And yet, he did lean into the character of Willie on set. According to Tony Cox, he once said to Billy Bob, you really look like you're high. Are you hi and billy bob said every day tony cox said i don't know if he was teasing he's a hell of an actor i think he was not joking based on what we're about to learn now in the scene where he shows up on the escalator when it kind of dumps him up at the top of the stairs he was in fact completely and utterly

hammered he told people tv i drank about three glasses of red wine for breakfast then i switched over to vodka and cranberry juice, and then I had a few bud lights. And by the time I got to that scene, I barely knew I was in a movie. So here's Billy Bob on the Dan Patrick show explaining what happened next. There's a scene in bad sound on an escalator. And I remember that day, I'd kind of overdone it. Did you have somebody there to catch you in case you fell? Well, there was this poor girl, she was a PA. A runner or whatever. And she was in charge of starting the key on the escalator when they rolled. Because the idea is the Tony, he's waiting for me and I'm late and all this kind of stuff. And I end up with a broken liquor bottle in my hand at the top of the escalator. It kind of dumps me out up there.

And I said to the girl, because this was in the morning. So as soon as I got to work, I went to work. Went to work. and so I told her I said look I'm on the verge of maybe passing out here and so if you don't mind just nudge me when they call action will you because I'm going to lay down here for a minute I wasn't supposed to be laying down the scene and they started up the escalator and she couldn't wake me up evidently and so it kind of dumped me out up there and I woke up and I'm like, oh yeah, I'm in this movie, you know.

And so I stumbled up there and I beat up this plaster of jackass and all this kind of stuff in the scene. Yeah, it worked out nicely. Not for that poor PA who's traumatized for life. Did you see the Colin Farrell interview recently on Colbert where he talks about showing up basically drunk on Minority Report. It's pretty funny if you guys want to go look it up. They're both very charming men. Now, Zweigoff was not quite so impressed. It's not what he had in mind for that scene, but he did get what he needed, so I don't think he fought Billy Bob on it.

But he would later tell the New York Times, to quote the late great Leo McCarrie, I can't say that I bask in the memory of it. Ultimately, I was able to get from Billy Bob what I needed, and I hope that by now he appreciates what I brought to the party. These two, I do not think I don't even think Billy Bob realizes that they didn't see eye to eye is the impression I get. But Terry's Weigoff, I do not think, had a particularly good time working with him. Yeah. Just because of the partying. And again, like, Billy Bob owns up to this.

He told the Irish times a couple of times I was drunk, but not every day. I showed up with a hangover a few times. There were times when I'd be with my pals until 3.30 a.m. and have to be at work at 7. So I wasn't the most pleasant guy to be around. Does work for the character in the end. It does. But I can see how that would be unpleasant.

Would not be fine. In his autobiography, the Billy Bob tapes, a cave full of ghosts. Thornton said, quote, There's the title. I know. He said, quote, I was single. It was after Angie and I had split up. We'd have 30, 40, 40, 50 of the cast and crew here on school nights when we had to be at work at 7. It was probably the craziest time I ever had.

He referred to it as a pretty dark set. But he also said, if I could go back to any time in my life and relive it, it would be when I was making the Alamo Bad Santa or when I was working for the Arkansas Highway Department back in 1970. And that is the first time I have thought about the alamo since I saw it in theaters. I did not remember the alamo. You forgot. Well, so he enjoyed himself on this. And one good thing did come out of the movie for Billy Bob. He met his sixth and current wife, Connie Anglin, through her sister, who was the makeup artist on set.

So he said, I needed somebody to meet me because I was going through kind of a lost weekend. Do you know what I mean? I don't, Billy. I don't. I kind of do. I also don't. But he got a happy ending. Even though this is set in Arizona, it's shot all around Southern California.

And fun fact, the mall is the same mall used in Jackie Brown. So filming wrapped in September of 2002, and other than Billy Bob being a drunken loon, it went pretty well. Everyone on set mostly got along. Terry's Wygoff was very happy with what he shot. The problems really started in post-production. September of 2002. Oh, just clocked that.

Okay, continue. Yeah, it comes out November of 2003. 13 months later. Which could mean nothing, but it can mean something. It means something. It actually had an initial release date slated for December of 2022. That's what I was wondering. Which would have been tight, but possible.

Or like go for a summer comedy release. I just like there's a couple of ways you could release it. Yeah. Well, by all accounts, Zweigoff was thrilled with the cut that he had. It was faithful to the script, which he really liked. And he liked the writers. He wanted to, you know, do right by them with the movie. It was dark.

It was not necessarily, you know, a yuck-y-old. of a watch, but that's what he wanted. And again, that's also exactly the way it was written and exactly what the Cohen brothers had asked for with this initial prompt. But when the movie went into test screenings, Bob Weinstein freaked out. Why? Well, it depends on who you ask, Chris. According to screenwriter John Riqua in the New York Times, quote, the audience went ape, but they gave it a terrible score. They were like, this thing needs to be buried in a hole, but I loved it. Now, according to Weinstein, the test screenings were disastrous. But Jeremy Smith, aka Mr. Beeks, who was at the time writing for Ain't at Cool News, saw one of the original test screenings in Pasadena, and he told a very different story to slash film later on.

He said, quote, the worst part of being in that test audience was realizing that the deck was heavily stacked against Terry Zweigoff. I participated in the 20-person focus group and watched in horror as people who'd howled at the film were coaxed by the moderator into declaring Willie unlikable, which he was by design, to the extent that he needed redeemable, qualities. One of the best studio comedies of the post-new Hollywood era was ruined that night. I can actually say from experience, I've seen almost this exact same thing happen. Really? I can just share it now. When we did moonshot, which is no bad Santa, I'm not saying it is, but we did moonshot. And on the first test screening, people seemed to like it. And it was an audience picked out, you know, who should like a young teen rom-com. And the moderator's just doing

his job, I'm not suggesting otherwise, but the problem becomes that the company that you hire to moderate things, because this is an independent company, they are looking for, I think in a sense, they want to justify the expense, right? So it's like, they want to provide you with a lot of information. So they really pick at everything. Right. And what started very well, spiraled extremely quickly on the issue of, is this character likable? And a lot of people thought Cole's character was funny, Cole Spouse. And then one person said it kind of feels like the movie's making fun of him, which we were, and he was in on it. Cole, by the way, he thought it was funny too. The whole joke is he's dumb, like in the movie. But wow, everybody started going right

down that direction. And the mandate after that test screening was we can't make fun of his character. And look, would it have been a fundamentally different movie? Probably not. But we lost some pretty funny jokes that were about him being dumb. I believe it. I'm kind of bummed, you know, because people laughed at them. Yeah. And then later they said, oh, yeah, but we were making fun of him, and we probably shouldn't do that. It's an interesting thing, and I'm sure it's very common. I have a slightly different take on what I think may have happened here. And I could be totally wrong. This is complete conjecture. I do not believe that audiences hated this movie so much that it needed to be completely reworked. I don't believe that every test screening came back this negative,

especially because there are people who were in those test screenings who said that they did not. Well, so it just depends on what the bar is, right? If they're saying it has to be a 90 and it's doing an 82, you know what I'm saying? It's like you can kind of set it any way you want. This is my Detective Bassett take on this from what I have read. Very famous, Detective Bassett. A famous detective, yes. Detective Besay, if we're going to go the Cliso route.

I am guessing that it left people feeling weird, as it should. It's a Terry's Wygoth movie, and I'm betting that they didn't do test screenings for his other Terry's Wygoth films like this. No, Ghost World was not tested, I'm guessing. No, he doesn't tie things up neatly in a little bow, as we have discussed. And he believed he had made a great film. Jeremy Smith very much agreed. Many people in that audience agreed. What I think happened is Bob Weinstein saw the cut and freaked out when he realized what he had bought.

I think he wanted reshoots and potentially was able to swing the narrative of the test screenings in that direction. Again, I don't know this. This is just me kind of making a guess. But from what people said about those test screenings, it feels almost intentional the way that the moderation was directed. And I don't know. But I know that Bob Weinstein really did not like what he saw. And he's a very powerful man. Also, it could have been just divisive in general with the audience, right?

Which would make sense. Loved it. And half the audience was really weirded out by it. Totally. Which, by the way, would yield a terrible score. But that's why some of these scores are kind of useless unless you really drill down on them. Right, and also, if your criticism is, oh, Willie's Unlikeable, it's like, sir, that's the movie you bought. So that should not be a problem.

But unfortunately, what Bob Weinstein wanted, Bob Weinstein got. They bumped the release way back to Q4 of 2003, and he insisted that they needed to make Willie seem much more redeemable, much sooner. He told Zweigoff, quote, we're not trying to ruin your movie, but there's absolutely no heart in it. So we put a little heart in it. We didn't make it vanilla. We weren't trying to make it not so good, Santa. and when he says they put a little heart into it, what he means is they went around Terry's Weigoff

and hired Todd Phillips. Oh. One month before his breakout with old school. Director of one of my least favorite movies the last 10 years. Yeah, you love Joker. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I actually did enjoy Joker.

Joker 2 is terrible. I, whatever. I thought Joker 2 was better than Joker 1. Chris, you're on drugs. Get out of here. No, but it's so different. You know what? Look, Todd Phillips is a good director, and he's obviously an extremely successful director.

I mean, if the hangover films have made a billion dollars, I liked the hangover. But he's kind of the antichrist to Terry Zweigoff. And I feel like he is the studio version, right, of Terry's White. He's like the version that's affected to the studio. And now he's going to, like, make sanitized but seemingly dirtbag movies. And Terry's Wiggaf's like, I make real dirtbag movies. It's true. Yeah.

And I'm curious, can you spot? the sequences in the theatrical cut that Todd Phillips directed. And to be clear, they did try to get Terry's Wagg off to do the reshoots. He said, no. He was like, I'm not doing this. And that's when they bring in Todd Phillips. Well, you mentioned the boxing scene. Yes, which when you think about it is big, it's so clearly Todd Phillips.

Kicked in the nuts. Yes, everyone's kicked in the nuts. Also, Billy Bob looks a million times healthier in all of the reshoots. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, the part where he gives him the stick is really weird. And I kind of see like that's... The stick is still in there.

That's right. That's Terry. The Christmas pickle? Yeah, the Christmas pickle. That feels like Terry. It's like kind of sweet, but also really weird. But there's another gift. Is it the elephant at the end?

No. No. Okay. The whole admin calendar sequence. Oh, where he fixes it? Yep. Hmm. Is all Todd Phillips.

The candy corn? Yes, the candy corn and the advent calendar. I did think the candy corn was kind of funny. I'm not saying those scenes aren't funny. They're not necessary. I will tell you when you watch the director's cut, you don't need them. The boxing sequence is the one that really stands out to me because it feels like the movie goes in a completely different direction

for one scene for kind of no reason. So Zweigoff in that 2012 playlist interview said, quote, the studio wanted to mess with it and make it more mainstream and pour some fake sentiment on it for the people that stumble around the mall. Go to Target someday and look at who your target audience is. Look at the people who are out there going to films

and you realize you are totally fucked. You don't want to do anything these people like. Some of them, I go to Target, Terry. Target all the time. I love Target. I like your movies. But yeah, I listen, I get it. But this is how we wind up with the theatrical cut.

There actually also was a whole sequence that had Sarah Silverman in it. We'll see why later, but does not make the final cut. So after getting exactly what he asked for from a very different director, Bob Weinstein, is like, great. It's time to show the Cohen brothers what we've got here. And Chris, how do you think that went? I'm guessing it didn't go well, but I don't, you know. It went about as badly as it could possibly go. I'm wondering why they hadn't seen it yet.

Or maybe they had seen it earlier, but now they're being shown. Well, they'd seen Terry's cut. Oh, they had. Okay, good. Yeah, yeah. I was like, I thought, sorry, I misunderstood you. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it did not go well. No, they're seeing the cut that Bob Weinstein has redone with the reshoots.

He shows it to them. They lost it. It's like when George Clooney reveals the dildo machine. Yes. Burn after reading. And you're like, this is what you've been talking about this whole time? Yeah, they said, you've turned it into American Pie, and according to Zweigoff, they told him it was a piece of shit now. It devolved into a screaming match with everyone yelling, fuck you, no, fuck you, to each other over and over again.

And at this point, the Coens basically were just like, we don't want anything to do with this. Oh, man. And they back away completely from the movie after seeing Bob Weinstein's cut. Billy Bob seemed a little bit more understanding, at least of the Weinstein's power. he basically was like, listen, if a studio is pouring millions into a movie, you kind of have to do what they're asking. But Terry's Waggoff's like, wait a minute, I actually don't have to do what they're asking because I have Final Cut. Chris, can you explain Final Cut? How has this not come up yet?

Terry, well, Final Cut means who has contractual control over the final version of the film that is sent to distributors and screen for the public, commercialized monoccurals. at the end of the day. It's very unusual, especially now, for a director to have final cut. It's usually reserved for the blank check podcast covers them, you know, the big, big autour directors who have a hit early in their career and the Spielbergs, maybe the, like the Finchers, the Nolens, for example. The PTAs. Not the Zweigoffs, necessarily. That's right. But you know what? He was right. He did have final cut. And in fact, he had taken a pretty substantial pay cut in his salary in order to get it as part of his contract because he was adamant that he needed it. But Bob Weinstein doesn't care.

No. He is so powerful at this point in Hollywood that he continued to push his version of the movie, even though legally Terry's Wyghoff should have been able to tell him to fuck right off. But Terry would have had to take him to court. Yes. So that's exactly what happens. Weigoff goes to his lawyer and is like, what the actual hell, I took a pay cut to get this in my contract.

And she's like, yeah, if you want to actually fight him on this, you would have to hire outside litigators at $35,000 a day, and my office doesn't do that. Swigoff could not afford that, because he's not a Weinstein, and so instead, he went to the DGA. A DGA arbitration followed, and the end result allowed Zweigoff to complete a final edit of Bad Santa that at least got it a little bit closer to his original version. He told the playlist, a lot of what they shot, they tested, and it didn't work, so they got rid of it right away. Then I got to work to push it closer to my original version. It was damage control at that point.

So that's how we get the theatrical cut of Bad Santa. It is a weird mishmash. That's what I was going to say. It actually, it could be so much worse based on what you're describing to me. I think he did a pretty remarkable job. And I agree. I think that he, to be honest, he could have been a total stick in the mud and probably tried to cut way more than he did, and he didn't.

I think he just wanted to be done with this at this point. Yeah, he could have done the Allen Smithy and he could have, he could have gone to the DJ and said, take my name off of it. Yeah, and he didn't. Or give it to Todd Phillips. You know, Phyllis wouldn't have directed enough to get the credit. No. That's brutal.

Yeah, but kudos to him. He finished the job. He didn't love what the end result was, but he did it. Yeah. Now, tragically, on September 11th of 2003, before Bad Santa was even released, John Ritter passed away from a heart attack during rehearsals for eight simple rules for dating my teenage daughter. He was only 54 years old. Swigoff said he was the sweetest, kindest guy, and so quick and funny.

He had this facial expression that was so funny, I couldn't stand it. I told him, John, I'm going to have to move 30 feet back because I can't keep trying to muffle my laughter behind the camera. He's so funny. He's such a good straight man. It's ridiculous. He's amazing. I really love and very much miss John Ritter.

Wasn't Bernie Mac also like 53 when he passed away? Yeah, he was not old at all. Both of them were lost way too soon. Bernie Mac, I believe, passed away in 2008. So not very far behind this at all. Yeah, no, I knew it was a few years later. On November 26th, 2003, that's a lot of the end. Santa was finally released in theaters.

Again, only a couple weeks behind both Elf and Love Actually. It debuted alongside the haunted mansion, the missing, and timeline, and no one really expected Bad Santa to do much of anything, especially because it had been such a mess to make. But did you just listen to those three movies you listed? Yes, I did. Holy crap, a murderer's roll of stankers. I love all of them, with all of my heart. They are my little stinky children.

I saw all of those movies in theaters. Wow. All of them. And I was excited. And they're bad. Even at 14, I thought, oh, these are great. But, Chris, as you pointed out, and much to everyone's surprise, bad Santa massively exceeded expectations, bringing in over $76 million worldwide on a budget of somewhere between $18 million and $23 million, depending on the source. Now, you might hear that number and be like, well, Elf made like, you know, whatever, over $200 million.

Elf is not rated R. This is a really impressive turnout. Elf is a four-quadrant family movie. This is a hard-ar anti-family movie. Hard-R. Anti-Family Santa Robbing Mall's movie. And it made $76 million worldwide. You know what I also think this proves without having seen the director's cut. But the core concept is so good. Yes. You want to see it, right? And I think the Directors' Cut would have done just as well. It has nothing to do with the redeemability of Billy Bob Thorne's character. It is... I completely agree. Yeah, I kind of want to see the movie about the fucked-up Mall Santa. Like, that sounds great. We're going to come back to the director's cut in a minute because it still, it takes quite a while to come out. So obviously, not everyone was happy with many shocked that Miramax's parent company, Disney would allow such garbage to be released.

I know. Especially when they had declined to release Fahrenheit 9-11, I believe. But bad stuff. Santa's fine. I get it. But also, Disney bought Miramax in the first place, and it's pretty hard to believe they didn't know anything about the Weinstein's. So there's that. And people were also mad that the film ruined the sanctity of Christmas, but as Billy Bob Thornton points out in his autobiography, well, first of all, I've read the Bible, and I promise you, it doesn't mention Santa Claus anywhere. So you're getting your stories mixed up. Santa Claus has nothing to do with Jesus, other than for some reason, they made some arbitrary birthday for Jesus and tied Santa Claus into it. Thank you, Billy. Thank you, Billy. Spot on. I also think this movie is all about the spirit of Christmas. I do. It kind of is, yes. Well, it's at least sort of.

It's somebody's Christmas. I think, especially when you watch the director's cut, it's very much the lesson that he learns is about greed, which is an interesting one for Christmas. It's a found family movie. Yes. Right? Which I always love found family movies. I also am a big Crampus fan. I love Grampus.

I love Christmas lover. Well, Chris, you and all the critics because they loved this movie. It did really well. both critically and commercially. I remember being surprised at how good I thought it was when I saw it when it first came out. I really thought this is going to be, you know, like a Todd Phillips movie.

It's going to be like old school, right, or something like that. It's going to have a few funny scenes. Old school's pretty good, but yeah. Old school's fine, but it's not, I don't think it's bad Santa is my point. I agree. In 2004, Miramax capitalized on the success of the film with a home video release called Badder Santa.

And this is, of course, you know, going with the unrated trend for raunchy comedies at the time. It's a marketing gimmick, yeah. They did it with the girl. Girl Next Store because I bought it and I was like, there's the same number of main amount of nudity in this movie. Of Booms and this one. Where's Alicia Kuzmurt's nudity in this way?

I actually really like the Girl Next Store. It's kind of a sweet movie. It's good. It's expected to be very raunchy. Yeah, and it's just very sweet. Anyway, it was just such a way to get people. It was a way to get Target people to buy more DVDs, which worked. It was a big thing.

Yes. So we keep talking about it. It's finally coming. In 2006, three years after the movie came out, Zwegoff released his director's cut. And according to Jeremy Smith, again going by Mr. Beeks at the time who wrote for A&A Cool News and saw that original test screening, the director's cut that was released comes very close to what he saw, but it wasn't exactly it. We may never know what that audience really saw, but here's an excerpt from his original review. I am hopeful that Bad Santa's move to 2003 is not indicative of some internal vote of no confidence at Dimension.

After all, we're well aware of the Weinstein's predilection for shelving films that aren't absurdly easy to market. and then shelving a select few that are. Yes, Terry's Wygoff's film is going to piss off a hell of a lot of people, but there is an audience out there primed for something this mean and tasteless. I mean, he'd hit the nail on the head there without being behind the scenes at all. This review was actually published again when Roger Ebert chose to screen the director's cut at his annual overlooked film festival. Ebert said, quote, since we are presenting what Terry's Weigoff describes as the world premiere

of his director's cut, my review of the R-rated version of the film would not apply. Mr. Beaks of Ain't at Cool News saw a test screening of an early uncut version, which Swigoff tells me was about as close to my version as any test audience got to see. So I want to talk about the director's cut just a little bit here. I actually, I'm shocked by this. People hate the director's cut. People on Reddit are like, it's mean, it's dark, the tone is weird, why would you ruin a perfectly good theatrical cut? I couldn't believe that commentary because I had the complete opposite experience. with the director's cut of this movie.

I do not agree that it's, quote, unquote, meaner or even necessarily darker. Like, yes, you see Bernie Mac, you know, get his head run over. And, like, there's things like that that, sure, verge on a quote unquote, darker movie. But it's kind of, the original movie is dark. The original movie is mean. This one just tonally makes sense over the course of the whole movie. All of the characters make sense. The motivations make sense.

The timing is better. comedy is better. It's 10 minutes shorter. It's like five minutes shorter. It's hands down, without question, as far as I'm concerned, a substantially better movie. And honestly, it's a great movie. Like, everyone should watch this. There's some pretty big changes. There's no narration at the top of it, Chris. He does exactly what we've been asking every director to do. He just drops you right into it. Fantastic. There's no sequence where Willie is talking to Marcus in the bar about like, I'm going to get my life together. And Marcus is like, you're just going to wind up in Florida again.

Don't need that. Just cut straight to Florida where he's already been there. And it's Christmas time again. I was wondering about that. Yeah, because it does delay things in a weird way when we get that. There's so much in the theatrical cut that when you actually watch this next to it, you don't need it. And this moves so much faster. It's so much zippier.

Lauren Graham's character is actually like, there's like a beautiful sadness to her that's very much missing from this version. to me, it's actually not a meaner cut because these seem much more like real people and that ends up being more heartwarming in some ways at the end. But that would make your average Reddit user pretty uncomfortable. That's true. That's true.

Maybe I was in the wrong forum. Yeah, I mean, it's too bad. It's funny. I wonder actually if the final director's cut is also shorter than the original test cut. Yeah, maybe. My theory, again, just from personal experience, so when we shot Worm, we had like a gap

between when it was released after, we did a film festival run, and there was a big gap because nobody was mine in it. And between when it, then and when it finally got bought, and during that gap, we, like, trimmed. Because I just had some distance from the movie,

and all of a sudden I could see, like, oh, yeah, you don't need these scenes. I think we cut over 10 minutes of the running time. I don't think that's why it sold. But my point is, like, when you get that perspective on the movie, I do think it tends to just tighten up in most instances, because the things that you thought were important, you realize, wow, yeah, no, people will get it. We don't need that. Right. Maybe. All right, so let's do

a little, where are they now, Chris? Despite the behind-the-scenes drama, Rhett Kelly, had a great time on set. In a 22 interview, he called Billy Bob Thornton, one of the nicest people, even to this day I've ever worked with. He said on the weekends, we'd go over to his house. I'd be hanging out with his kids swimming in the pool. He was very welcoming and made me and my whole family feel at home the entire time we were shooting. Also, this movie did not really dramatically change his life. He never moved to L.A. His family never moved to L.A. And after filming, he returned back home to Vancouver. Zweigoff has only made one movie since Bad Santa. And as we discussed, it's art school confidential, which I think we both really enjoyed, but it failed to make

the same waves as really any of his previous films had. My recollection was that it was kind of his his worst received movie critically and commercially. It was, which I think is sort of surprising, because I did really enjoy it. I mean, I need to rewatch it. I liked it, but it's also my least favorite of the movies I've seen of his. I haven't seen Louis Blu. Yeah, I think that's fair. So 13 years after Bad Santa, Bad Santa 2 was released, and it absolutely bombed. Zweigoff had no involvement in it. His lawyers did call him to say he was entitled to some financial compensation. And he's like, yay, how much?

And then they were like, oh, actually that part of the contract just expired. So $0.0. Terry, get different lawyers. Clearly. He has had many projects that have failed to fully materialize over the years, including a series with screenwriters John Rieckin, Glenn Fekara. So it seems like they kept in touch and liked each other. They've obviously gone on to be incredibly successful,

both writing and directing movies like I Love, Philip Morris, Crazy Stupid Love, and many, many more. Yeah, Crazy Stupid Love is the one that I always think of when I think of them. And it's so weird because that movie, I like Crazy Stupid Love a lot, basically just on the comedic interactions between Ryan Gosling and Steve Correll, which are fantastic. It's great. But that movie's very conventional compared to something like Bad Santa.

Also, I believe John Requa is a... working on the Guys and Dolls version that Rob Marshall is doing. So we'll have to see how that turns out. Since 2003, it sounds like Swigoff has mostly only kept in touch with Tony Cox from the cast. They talk every month and it said that they're great friends. However, he has addressed any tensions with the Coen brothers, telling Vanity Fair, quote, one thing I beg you to keep in this interview that everybody cuts out is that I think they are the greatest writers and directors alive today. And they were very, very nice to me. All that ever gets printed is that we had a disagreement over casting. That gets played up as he hates the Cohen brothers.

I generally like their stuff. Gee, now, of course, I have to get nitpicky. I like their dramas more than their comedies. Put it that way. Thanks, Terry. Totally fair. Well, that wraps up our coverage of Bad Santa. I hope this inspires people to watch both versions.

I hope this inspires people to watch all of Terry's Wygoth's films as a Christmas present to yourself. I really love him. I loved him more after learning about the making of this film. I love that he didn't abandon it. Yeah, Chris, what went right? I have to give mine. I'll let you take Mr. Zweigoff. I'll set him aside. I'm going to give mine to Billy Bob Thornton. Yeah, I think he deserves it. Yeah, you know, I get, he is weird casting from a lot of perspectives. Physically, he's not obvious, although I do think it makes for a great joke. Yes. He's not a star in the way some of the other folks, you know, were a star.

at the time. And Billy Bob never did ever really break out as a top tier. You know what I mean? Like, he's going to headline the movie. I mean, you have things like Friday Night Lights and the Alamo. They're all more ensembley in my mind. But he's a great actor. He's a great actor. And man, is he well-suited for this role? And he, I mean, I'm sorry. I'm sad to hear that he was dealing with a lot and dealing with a divorce. And I'm sad to hear that that was stressful for Terry Zweighoff because he was dealing with his alcohol abuse. It seems to have worked because it's a really good performance. It's one of my favorites of his. I agree. I think he's wonderful in this. It was nice learning more about him. I couldn't find anybody really saying a bad thing about him. I mean, obviously, him showing up drunk on set

is not good and not professional and irritated Terry's Weigoff. But as a person, in terms of, like, as a human being to other human beings, all I could find was that he was very kind. Yeah. And that makes me happy because I do love me some Billy Bob. Yes, I do have to give my what went right here to Terry's Weigoff. I think he could so easily. have walked away from this project so many times, and he didn't do it. And I really appreciate that. I also appreciate that, at the end result, he did keep some of the stuff that they had reshot. He didn't say, no, my way or the highway at that point, even after going through a DGA arbitration. And I understand that he qualified it as damage control, but I think he did the best he could,

and I think he actually did a pretty generous job with that theatrical cut. I just think he's a remarkable director. I miss his work. I would love to see what he would do today. And I really hope that something that he's working on comes to fruition because I think we need a little Terry's Weigoff. I think we need to be more comfortable with the warts and all approach to storytelling. So that's my what went right. I really enjoyed researching this. I really enjoyed watching all the different versions. And yeah, I would encourage you all to put on a bad Santa Marathon this Christmas. Thank you, Lizzie, for walking us through the Mall of Misanthropy. The Mall of Missingthropes, as we'll call it.

That is the Terry Zweigoff Cinematic Universe. Next week, we have a movie made by a bit of a misanthrope, it turns out. We're talking Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. That movie was the only Christmas movie. Terry Zweigoff really liked. It's a good movie. It is a good movie. And it's got a very interesting development history.

production. It came out at a very interesting time, and I'm excited to talk about it. And then I'm excited to get into a James Cameron Christmas. A James Cameron Christmas, what we all want. What we all want under our tree. The whole avatar box. An angry, angry man. Very excited. All right, guys, if you're enjoying this podcast, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can just tell a family member or a friend, hey, check out what went wrong. It's pretty good. You can leave us a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to us on. If you are interested in bonus episodes. We now offer bonus episodes through Apple. You can subscribe through the app 499 a month and you will get all of our bonus reviews. We just did one on Giermo del Toros Frankenstein.

We are going to be covering James Cameron's Avatar Fire and Ash pretty soon. If you guys are interested in even more content, you can join our Patreon. It's www. patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with your listeners like you. You can join for $5. Get an ad-free RSS feed, which you can listen to. on Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen to podcasts, and all of our bonus episodes, of course. And for $50, you can get a bad Santa-style... Billy Bob shout-out.

Billy Bob, Pisa Cole in your stocking shout-out, just like one of these. All right, all right, let's see here. Adam Moffat, Adrian Pang, Korea. God damn it, are you fucking with me? Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Shindleman, Blaise Ambrose Brian Donahue

Brittany Morris Brooke Cameron Smith C Grace B All right next God damn it next This is not the DMV Chris Leal Chris Zaka

The hell kind of name is David Friskillante D.B Smith Darren and Dale Conklin Don Shibble Ellen Singleton Sweet Jews for Jesus M Zodia

Evan Downey Felicia G Film it yourself Better filming yourself. Santa's not going to film it for you. Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kids. Want to see some magic? Okay, let's watch you disappear. Grace Potter, Half Greyhound, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel,

JJ Rapido, let's wrap this up. Jory Hill Piper, Jose Salto, Karina Kanaba, Kate Elrington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Elgeshlogger, McCoy. Merry Christmas or whatever. Wanda L.J. Lydia Howes. Matthew Jacobson. Michael McGrath.

Nate the Knife. Nathan Santeno. Rosemary Southward. Rural juror. Sadie. Just Sadie. Scott O'Shita. Soman Chianani.

Steve Winterbauer. Suzanne Johnson. The Provost family. The O's. Sound like O's. What? You're my fucking mom now? You know, I'm

on my fucking lunch break. God damn it. There is no spoon. There is no spoon. Merry Christmas or whatever. Why don't you wish in one hand, shit in the other and see which one fills up first. Happy holidays.

All right, guys. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next week for Jimmy Stewart. It's a wonderful life. It's a wonderful life. It's going to be full of terrible. Full of terrible Jimmy Stewart's presence. We have a week to work on it.

All right, guys. See you. then. Bye. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at what went wrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman.

This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by Karen Krubsaw.