WHAT WENT WRONG - Beetlejuice

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

Lydia dies in a fire at the hands of a winged homicidal maniac?! ‘Beetlejuice’ (1988) started off as a gruesome, offbeat horror film, but it became the quirky classic we know and love thanks to Tim Burton, script doctor Warren Skaaren, an incredible production team, and the Beetle-Guy himself: Michael Keaton. Find out why missing her audition got Catherine O’Hara her part, how Harry Belafonte’s music made it into the final cut, why Michael Keaton almost didn’t take the job and so much more. HelloFresh - For FREE breakfast for life go to HelloFresh.com/freewrong Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to what went wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one. Let alone a good one that's this weird. Yep. As always, I'm Chris Woonerbauer, joined by people's host Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how you doing tonight? I'm good. I didn't expect people's hosts to take on for you the way that it has, but, you know, that's... Limited imagination. Maybe just as weird as Beetlejuice, which, as you just pointed out, is really, really strange. Maybe weirder than I had remembered. I'm sure you've seen it before now, but what was your sort of initial reaction to seeing this again?

I saw it when I was very young, a couple of times in college on substances, I'm sure, at various points. And it's one of those movies that you, you know, you'll walk by a room. it's on television or something like that, and you'll sit down for a scene or two. And there's some obviously very famous moments and set pieces and incredible sight gags and practical effects. Re-watching it, it feels like a pinball machine, and you're just careening from one moment to the next with no sense of narrative direction. I don't say that disparagingly, but it feels like it was written almost stream of consciousness,

if that makes sense, because it really just feels like, all right, then this happens, and now this happens, now they're dead, and now here's the Ljuse, but he's not really going to come back until the second half of the movie,

and you just kind of go with it because it's so wonderfully inventive, and every single moment explores a new element of the underworld, you know, or ghost rules through such kind of fun, dark, like, gothically whimsical terms. Anywho, I really enjoyed it. Very insightful, Chris. Yes, you got a lot of things in there

that we're going to talk about in the episode today. I also really, really enjoyed it. I thought it was great. To your point, doesn't make a lot of sense. It doesn't follow any traditional narrative structure. Just keeps making up new rules as it goes. Yes, it does. Yes, it does.

That's actually something when we start talking about the writers, but I'll share it now when they were trying to figure out how to get the Maitlands from the attic into the sort of DMV-type afterlife. They were getting so frustrated because nothing made sense. And one of them was like, what do you want me to do? Just draw a door? And the other one was like, yeah.

Great. That's what they did. It works. So as always, let's get into the basics. It is written by Michael McDowell and Warren Scaron. They have the screenplay credit with Story by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson, directed by Tim Burton, starring Alec Baldwin, Gina Davis, Winona Ryder, Jeffrey Jones,

Catherine O'Hara. Noted sex criminal, Jeffrey Jones. Chris knew that this time. Chris knew it this time. If you listened to our Howard the Duck episode, he didn't know it then. But you know what? We all learn things. We do.

Catherine O'Hara, Dick Cavett, Robert Goulet, Glenn Shattacks, and of course, Michael Keaton. It was released March 30th of 1988, and as always here is the synopsis from IMDB. The Spirits of a Decease of, couple are harassed by an unbearable family that has moved into their home and hire a malicious spirit to drive them out. That's like from a plot perspective, I suppose, that's all you need to know.

Although... That's all you can write. Like, I don't know how else you would explain what is happening in this movie. The fun of this movie has little to do with the plot. I sort of agree. I think the basic conceit of it is very fun. It is. The idea that pesky ghosts are trying to get rid of even peskier humans is a, is a,

fun setup. Exactly. I do want to shout out some of my main sources for this episode. There's a really cool book called Burton on Burton, which is really just a long form interview with Tim Burton that's edited by Mark Salisbury. Very quick to read, very fun. If you're a Tim Burton fan, I highly recommend it. It's got a lot of really fun drawings from really all of his movies. And a very great oral history of Beetlejuice from The Ringer, written by Alan Siegel, among many others, but wanted to shout those out. So, Chris, have you ever had bad neighbors? Not like this, but once a lot of children in the apartment next to me. That was it.

Nothing terrible. I've never had anything awful. Nothing to call the police about. Okay, that's pretty good. Yeah. Well, the story of Beetlejuice does begin with bad neighbors in Medford, Massachusetts, to be exact. But before we get to the neighbors, let's talk about a man named Michael McDowell.

It was the mid-80s, and novelist Michael McDowell wanted to write a supernatural blockbuster a la recent smash hit Poltergeist, as one does. Now, horror was very much in his wheelhouse. He had already dabbled in TV, writing for George Romero's, Tales from the Dark Side, anthology, and an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And as for his novels, he frequently wrote in the Southern Gothic genre,

possibly my favorite genre, and has been described by horror king, Stephen King, as the finest writer of paperback originals today. So pretty cool guy. Yeah. He's also the first to admit that he was very much a commercial writer. He just kind of cranked shit out, like nonstop. James Patterson, just going for it.

Crank him out, yep. So back to the neighbors. McDowell and his longtime partner, Tufts Professor Lawrence Sinellick, were annoyed by something their neighbors did. Kind of unclear what at this point. But that gave McDowell the idea of reversing the typical ghost story. It's what you said at the top. What if the ghosts were good and the people in the house were real pieces of crap?

So that's where the idea of a bioexorcist is born. Also, a little fun fact I came across, McDowell's MFA thesis at Brandeis was entitled American Attitudes Towards Death, 1825 to 1865. Colin, not great. I don't know, they might have been okay with it at that point. Yeah, Colin, let's just not talk about it. Colin, it happens faster. Yeah.

So really, he was pretty primed to create, I think, the sort of boring, mundane afterlife that we see in this. By the mid-80s, he'd been splitting his time between the East Coast and Los Angeles, which is where he met Michael Bender, who was, I believe, a producer and entertainment lawyer, and then writer-producer Larry Wilson. Wilson was just coming off of a stint as a story analyst at Paramount. Interesting, as this one we will discuss has very little narrative. And he'd been kicking

around Hollywood in some studio development positions, but he was looking for material that could really be his own versus shepherding someone else's material through the system. So he and McDowell began working on the Beetlejuice script together at that point. Early iterations of Beetlejuice are very, very different. than what we wind up with on screen. First of all, it was spelled B-E-T-E-L-G-E-U-S-E, Beetle-G-E-G-E-E-E-E-O-G-E-E-E-O-Goose. As it's spelled on his gravestone, right, in the film. Yes.

We do see it across the film, obviously not in the final title. Betel-Gos. Betel-Gos. That is the correct spelling. It is named after a star in the Orion constellation, also known as Alpha Orionis. But that doesn't sound as fun as Beetle-Jose. No.

By the way, the name change in terms of the spelling to the title, bit of a Hollywood mystery. It's not exactly clear when that change was made, but it seems safe to assume that it was done to avoid confusion and mispronunciation, which they kind of play with in the movie, too. Or someone was just saying, hey, write this down, it's Beetlejuice, and then somebody wrote it down phonetically, and who knows, that came.

Well, he does charades it out phonetically in the movie as well. I did. I have to admit, I vaguely knew that there was a star or something astronomical called Beetlejuice and stupidly thought it was named after the movie. So there we go. No. Second of all, it was way, way darker and scarier. The Maitlands, that's Alec Baldwin and Gina Davis, died a very gruesome and horrifying death, which was described in like horrific detail. Great. So there's actually a remnant of this in the final. When she walks back into the house and she's holding her arm and she says, like, my arm feels funny or it feels numb. That's because in the crash, her arm gets crushed and she gets trapped. And that's how she drowns.

Like, in the final film, it's suggested. No, it's funny. Exactly. Yeah. Like, the dog just jumps off the beam. That moment is amazing. Also, in some of the earliest drafts, Lydia, played by Winona Ryder, died in a fire. at the end so she could be with the Maitland's,

which is also kind of hinted at in the final. And she's not the only Diet's daughter. She had a sister named Kathy, who was apparently ripped apart by a squirrel version of Beetlejuice. Whoa. Yeah. That's something. All right.

Fair enough. Which brings me to the beetle guy himself. The original Beetlejuice, Chris, was a homicides. suicidal, terrifying, winged demon who takes the form of a small Middle Eastern man. So changed a bit. Problem, problematized. They problematized it. That's interesting.

I wonder, you have Stephen King, you have it, you have, you have, you know, these horrifying, supernatural, demonic elder god-style creatures. and it seems like they were playing in that Lovecraftian vein originally. Totally. I like the weird sexual deviant chaos agent that we ended up with much more personally. Oh, for sure. Why they started in this particular corner of the multiverse of monsters. Well, don't worry. This one is also a sexual deviant, albeit more of an upsetting one.

Oh, did I not mention he's a pervert? He's worse. He's more focused on sleeping with Lydia versus marrying her, which is alarming as she is 15. You can actually read early versions of the script that are strange. He refers to Lydia as Lolita. And at one point when Barbara points out that she's 15, Adam says, but acts 35.

So, yikes. Ooh. Also, this did keep coming up across research. his dialogue was written in what one could only describe as a racist vernacular. Of, like, Jafar? Like, what are we talking about? It's a bit of a mishmash of sort of, let's just say it needed to be changed, and it was. Yeah.

So with the draft complete, Wilson went to an exec that he knew at Universal and showed them the script. They called him, and they were like, we want to meet. And he is thrilled. Yeah, no. He's like, oh my God, fantastic. So he takes the meeting and the executive is like, this is actually verbatim, what they said, what are you doing with your career, this piece of weirdness, this is what you're going to go out into the world with, you're developing into a very good executive, you've got great taste and material, why are you going to squander all that for this piece of shit? Oh.

Wow. What would you say if somebody said that to you? I think I would just stand up, nod, and leave the room. There's nothing to say at that point. I would never work again. I would say beetle juice, beetle juice, beetle juice, beetle juice. Yeah. And Hope he came and diddled that guy because there's nothing to do.

Hope he ripped him apart as a squirrel. Yeah. Well, you know what? It didn't deter Larry Wilson at all. Fortunately, he was also friends with a woman named Marjorie Lewis, who was an exec at the Geffen Company, and she had a very different reaction to the script. She loved it so much that she actually threatened to quit if her boss wouldn't buy it. So the same week that Larry got absolutely shat on, the Geffen Company picked up Beetlejuice. Probably a great sign that it's eliciting such polarizing responses.

Yes. Obviously, you want some positive reinforcement, but the last thing you want is everybody says, it's good. It's fine. I liked it, right? It's great if you can get somebody passionate behind it and know that you might upset some people. So follow your heart, Larry Wilson. That's true. And it continues to elicit those responses. Follow your twisted little pervy heart, my man. Meanwhile, a young American filmmaker was kicking a few ideas around at Geffen's parent company, Warner Brothers. His first feature had been a commercial success and he was looking for his next project, but having a hard time finding it.

The film was Pee Wee's Big Adventure, and the filmmaker was, of course, Tim Burton. Chris, have you ever seen Pee Wee's Big Adventure? I have. I've seen most, if not all, of Tim Burton's movies, I believe. I love Peewee's Big Adventure. I do, too. It's a great time.

He also, if you can find it, he did a Frankenweeney short. Oh, sorry. Okay, that's really fun. It's like 30 minutes long. I think Disney produced... Shh. Shut your mouth. Shut your mouth. Shut your mouth. Shut the fuck up.

You're coming off stupid. Shut up. Anyway, I liked Pee We's Big Adventure, so... But it's, and it's interesting because there is a little bit of an edge to the happiness in that movie, which actually makes sense that you would want to bring that little bit of sunshine, but know that he could still infuse that gritty underbelly that Beetlejuice is calling for. Well, I think what we're going to see as we go through this episode is that Beetlejuice is really the first thing that begins to solidify what we now know as the Tim Burton aesthetic, which is really cool to see it come together. So since this is our first time covering Tim Burton, I do want to kind of go back and give some background on his life prior to peewee.

So, Chris, you may already know this, but if you had to guess, where do you think that Spooky King, Timothy Walter Burton grew up? I thought he grew up in L.A. in Bourbon. You're the worst. He grew up in sunny, hot, dry, Burbank, California in 1958. Chris, is no fun. The sewers of New York. Thank you. A New England farmhouse. So he grew up loving monster movies like Godzilla and was blown away by the revolutionary stop motion of the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, not the first time that has come up on this podcast. I think that had an effect on a lot of people.

Ray Harry-Hausen. That's right. But he was particularly blown away by the works of Vincent Price, who we will see pop up continuously across his career. He did not do very well academically, but as we know, he was extremely gifted at visual arts, and at 18 years old, he won a scholarship to Cal Arts. By the way, maybe I'm dumb. I didn't realize that Cal Arts was co-founded by Disney and that he was a huge part of the formation of that school. I didn't know that either. Yeah, it's a Disney school. So Burton was attending a program there funded directly by Disney Studios that was designed to find and train

the next generation of Disney animators. The way that he explained it is basically they'd been using the same guys since like Snow White at this point. So they were all old and or dying. And so Disney was like, we got to get new ones in here. I'd heard that Walt Disney himself had wanted his animators to go back to school at a certain point. I don't know. I didn't know. I didn't. didn't know when that had happened. Maybe that's concurrent to the development of this. I think he's dead by the time this happens. Great. Yeah. Or he's frozen. Yeah. Sending brain signals via cryotube. That's right. So Burton ended up getting chosen out of the program to work for Disney in 1979. While there, he worked on movies like The Fox and the Hound,

although he did struggle with the look of the Disney animals, reportedly saying that his foxes looked, quote, like road kills. Yeah. So they put him on the background. They were like, I bought you paint the trees, Tim. Yeah.

And I'll paint them red with blood. While there, he met fellow animator Rick Heinrichs, who worked on Burton's short film, Vincent, with him, which was about a young boy who believes he is, Vincent Price.

It was narrated by Vincent Price. That's cool. Yes, very cool. The short actually got a theatrical release and a decent amount of critical acclaim, but Disney didn't really know what to do with it. It was very strange compared to what they'd been making. Sure.

He then goes on to make a version of Hansel and Gretel for the Disney Channel starring an all-Japanese cast. So... What? I don't know. I want to find that movie. That sounds great. It's something.

Tim Burton's all-Japanese Hansel and Gretel? Yes. That sounds amazing. So he then makes the short film that you mentioned, Chris, which is Frank and Weenie, which starred Shelley Duvall. It's very cool. I think you can find it. And she clearly agreed and saw something in him

because she brings him on board to do an episode of the show that she produced, Ferry Tale Theater. At this point, Burton has left Disney. And Frankenweene is what really starts to gain him some attention. If you can't tell by the name, it is a retelling of Frankenstein, but involving a dog. Which he eventually made into a feature film like 10 or so years ago, I want to say.

So someone who worked at Warner Brothers had seen Frankenweeney and was friendly with Burton, so she showed the film to Paul Rubens, aka Pee Wee Herman. And apparently Paul and the producers were basically just like, do you want to make our movie? Great. Yeah. He said this was like one of the easiest movies he's ever gotten was Pee Wee's Big Adventure. It was his first feature film at 26 years old.

Wow. And it seems like he really got to run wild within the world of Peewee. Of course, he's still contained by this existing. franchise. Also, a lot of the cast were groundlings and improvisers, instead of being frustrated by the fact that the scenes could change from day to day, Burton actually really loved it. And he found himself starting to storyboard less in order to allow more room for the actors to play. And that's something that we're going to see a lot of in Beetlejuice and beyond, is that he's not a particularly strict director when it comes to this stuff. Got it. Most importantly, maybe most importantly,

To score Pee Wee's big adventure, Burton went a rather unconventional route. He hired a musician who he really liked, but who had never scored a movie before, or worked with an orchestra before, and that is Oingo Boingo frontman, Danny Elfman. Yep. Oingo Boingo. Weird science, himself, Danny Elfman. That's right. So when it came out in August of 1985, despite absolutely terrible reviews,

like really, really bad reviews. Pee Wee made money. On around a $6 or $7 million budget, it made over $40 million worldwide. So at this point, Tim is pretty undeterred by the critical response. Later that year, he directed an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, called The Jarre,

and it was written by horror writer Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson, which brings us right back to Beetlejuice. Oh. So Burton had actually been working on a script for Batman at Warner Brothers at this time. But he was discovering that they were happy to pay him for the script, not so happy to greenlight the movie.

None of the other scripts coming across his desk were appealing. He was being fed plenty of bad comedies, including Hot to Trot, which if you're not familiar, is a Talking Horse movie. I am not familiar. Can we do it with an all-Japanese cast? Tim Burton could. Like it's right up his alley.

Yep. Also, fun fact, he was. was working on Nightmare Before Christmas at this point. Wow. So two of the movies he was going to end up doing, he's already developing. I wondered about that because his releases are so stacked from like 1988 to 1999. He basically does a movie a year for that stretch. Yeah. I think he had a lot of these ideas kind of germinating. And then once we hit Beetlejuice, it's very fast from there on out.

So when the Beetlejuice script got dropped in his hands, He loved it right away for all the reasons everyone else had found it very hard to love. He said, quote, it had no real story. It didn't make any sense. It was more like stream of consciousness. That script was probably the most amorphous ever. But remember to Tim, those are all good things. Now he can play.

Now he can fill in the whole world. Yeah. But, of course, with a director in place came the script notes. The studio starts messing with Beetlejuice quite heavily at this point. Right. Does his name have to be Beetlechips? They hated the title, which we will get to. Burton said that Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson, quote, got beaten down by the constant questioning. He recalled having script meetings that, quote, felt like I was in court giving depositions.

Apparently these would last for 24 hours over the course of two days, and they were just questioning every single element of the script, which Burton said, was not necessarily. productive. No, especially if it's a movie where it's like you've got to go by feel, if that makes sense. Beetlejuice, let's be honest, it's a vibes movie more than anything else. It's exclusively a vibe. It's just vibes. And the vibes are great. But those don't always translate on the page.

No, I think on the page this would be really hard, to be honest. So I don't totally blame them. As you guessed, Chris, they also hated the title. And they did pitch many other options, including House Ghosts. I thought... Don't say you like that. No, no, no. It's terrible.

I almost pitched a house full of ghosts as like the stupidest title that you could come up with. There's one dumber, which is one that Tim Burton pitched as a joke, which is scared sheetless. And he pitched and they were like, that's not so bad. We could just like, don't you dare. Never pitch. Never pitch. There is no idea bad enough that you can risk people taking it seriously. Never do it. Never do it.

Thankfully, at the time, Burton shared an agent with screenwriter Warren Scaron. Now, Scaron came on board, and he really is who brought us the Beetlejuice that we see today. He was primarily known as a script doctor. Chris, do you want to kind of explain what that is? It is a medical professional? No. So a script doctor is somebody who a studio will bring in, and this is directionally correct, and they will take a pass on. a script. Typically, it could be, I'm coming in to rewrite the dialogue, or I'm coming in to take a pass on the structure, or they want a little bit of a tune-up on the romance, for example. So there are a number of, it's like a strategic strike that they bring the script doctor in for, because they also

tend to be extremely expensive. Yeah, they're very good at what they do. They're very good at what they do. And even in the late 80s, early 90s, you could be talking tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for weeks' worth of work. And so Scott Frank, for example, Scott Frank, who did the Queen's Gambit, and I believe he wrote the final draft of Minority Report, I believe he was a very sought-after script doctor in the 90s in early 2000s.

He also wrote out of sight, and I think Logan in 2017. So they're extremely good at what they do. They can kind of take the clay of somebody else's idea and convert it into something that feels like it roughly fits three-act structure. Well, I'm sure Warren was not cheap, considering he had just come off of fixing up the top gun script. So he was very successful, very good at this. And he really is responsible for, I think, making a lot of this movie make sense.

He combined Lydia and her sister into one character, did not kill her off. Let's not incinerate the 15-year-old. Killing kids is always a difficult cell, no matter what the tone. Sure. He also goes ahead and makes Beetlejuice less of a homicidal lech and more of an endearing lech, which, you know... But he's not even that endearing. Like, what I do still like about it is...

Oh, God, love him. He's disgusting. No, you do because of how awful he is, though. Yeah, he's terrible. I would argue it's mostly Keaton's performance that makes him lovable. Yes, I agree. And he also clarified what Beetlejuice's powers were and how he worked, so to speak, which is very important.

It also sounds like the introduction of music at the dinner party, an ending came from Warren. But it was not Harry Belafonte. The movie ended with Lydia lip syncing to When a Man Loves a Woman. And side note, the only reason we end up with Harry

Belafonte is that many of the R&B tracks they originally tried to license were too expensive. Apparently, it was Catherine O'Hara who eventually suggested Calypso music and Jeffrey Jones, who built off of that and suggested Deo.

It's a great way to end it, and it's fun with the football players and everything. It's great. Oh, it's so fun. Also, turns out Harry Belafonte's music was extremely cheap. Really? It was so cheap, which is why it's all over the entire movie. You might notice that it pops up in a bunch of places. I have a feeling like Tears for Fear is in Donnie Darko.

There are a number of movies where you notice that it's one band's catalog kind of across the whole movie, and you have to imagine they buy one and they go, is it really? Or did they forget a zero? Is this what it is? And then they just say, great, we're going to buy the whole thing. Just drop them in. Literally. This is like a Costco sale. So Warren worked pretty closely with Michael McDowell on this draft with Larry Wilson then stepping back into more of a producer role. That is why you see Wilson get the story by credit versus McDowell and Skaren getting the screenplay by. Now that they have a script that everyone is happy with, Tim Burton had someone very particular in mind for the role of. Beetlejuice. And Chris, I don't think there's any way you're going to guess this one, but I'm going to give you a chance anyway. Who do you think it was? It makes no sense. Can you just give me an age range? Older. They would be older at this time. I don't know.

Sean Connery. They have one working eyeball. What? I tried to guess the most random person I could. You did it. You did it because the answer is Sammy Davis Jr. That's insane. I never would have guessed that. I'm pretty sure he famously had a glass eyeball, but I will double check that. I believe you. And okay. I mean, he's an incredible performer. Oh, he's amazing. Extremely dynamic. Musical numbers would be no problem if that were part of the story. Which it wasn't. No. Just want to point out.

If it weren't. But it could be. Yeah. Yeah. So I wish I could tell you why. But I don't know. Hey. When you know, you know.

Well, he knew. I think he was just a huge fan. I did see in the foreword to Burton on Burton, Johnny Depp, who writes the forward, said that Burton is, quote, without a doubt, the finest Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator on the planet. So. I wonder if he just was like,

you know, reading out scenes, for example, to see how they were feeling. And he was just like, I can only do one thing, Sammy Davis Jr. And then he's like, well, I guess Beetlejuice is Sammy Davis Jr. Okay. That could be it. I don't know. If the character was originally described as a petite man of color. Middle Eastern man.

I was trying to be a little bit more woke about it. But yes, a petite Middle Eastern man. You can't be woke when they're trying to cast Sammy Davis Jr. as a petite Middle Eastern man. I know. But that was Hollywood in 1988. So I'm just saying it makes a little more say. I did not put two and two together. So that makes a little more sense.

Yes, that was the earliest iterations Tim Burton had been reading. Got it. But anyway, Tim Burton brought this idea to David Geffen, who reportedly had an absolute his seat. Music producer originally, David Geffen. Yeah. Yeah, he lost his mind. And apparently was not very kind in this meeting.

Danny Elfman would make more sense if you look at him for the role of Beetlejuice than Sammy Davis Jr. I guess that's true only because Sammy Davis Jr. is actually very sweet, and I feel like that wouldn't work with Beetlejuice because he's so gross, you know? Yeah, exactly. Once Geffen calmed down, he revealed who he did want, Michael Keaton. So at this point in the late 80s, Keaton, not exactly selling like hotcakes. So this is an interesting one for him to pull out.

He had had hits in the early 80s, like Night Shift, which was kind of his breakout. Super fun movie. Very fun. And Mr. Mom, which I also really like. Yeah. But he'd failed to really find his footing after that, and it started some real box office bombs like Touch and Go and the Squeeze, which you've probably never heard of. No, because, yeah, most of his run was...

TV. Starting with Batman. Yeah, and then it was like Batman Returns, The Paper, Multiplicity, All 90s. All kicks off from Beetlejuice. Yeah. And I mean, prior to Night Shift and Mr. Mom, he'd spent about a decade on guest roles on TV and also, like, you know, several episode arcs across different TV shows. So Burton was not really familiar with Keaton's work, but he agreed to meet him. And after that conversation, he was sold.

But Michael Keaton was not. He turned down the role because he just didn't get it, which, by the way, if you're looking at Beetlejuice on the page, I actually think is totally fair. Sure. He told Rolling Stone in 1988, I went home and thought, okay, if I would do this role, how would I do it? You clearly don't create him from the inside out, meaning what motivates this guy, his childhood or whatever? You work from the outside in. So Tim Burton gave him another call and Keaton started, as he said, working from the outside in. Quote, then I started thinking about my hair. I wanted my hair to stand out like I was wired and

plugged in. And once I started getting that, I actually made myself laugh. And I thought, well, this is a good sign. This is kind of funny. Then I got the attitude. And once I got the basic attitude, it really started to roll. Reportedly, he called up the wardrobe department to see if they and Burton were on board with him looking like he'd shoved his figure in an electrical socket and simultaneously had mold growing all over him. And they said, yep. And with that, Keaton signed on.

Wow. And he kind of came up with so much of the iconic look of the character. So much of it. So much of it is him. Crazy. It's not just this. We're going to get to more. But yeah, the way that Beetlejuice looks, moves, acts speaks.

it is Michael Keaton. Now, Lizzie, when you do your Michael Keaton impression, remember, he has that teeny little lisp right there that you got to catch. Come on, guys, when I was going to sign on the Bebel Juice. I think I would need the fake teeth. So apparently, this was not uncommon that people who they approached about being in Beetlejuice just really didn't get it. One of the only people who responded positively right away and loved it was Gina Davis. Cool. Yes. And Burton admitted that's one of the big reasons he cast her because he was like, I'm not totally sure that I get the movie, but it would be good to have someone on set who does. She's like, I know, I get this. And he's like, could you explain it to me?

Yes. He's like, that's good. I'm going to hire you. And also, remember, we don't have the Tim Burton aesthetic at this point. So again, I think it would be really hard to look at Peewey's big adventure, plus what is on the page here and have any idea what it's going to end up looking like. But Davis was already doing pretty out there stuff. She had done The Fly in 1986 with Jeff Goldblum, and that movie is bonkers. Disgusting. Horrifying.

It's great. It's really fun. So she's pretty fearless, it seems, like, with her, you know, movie choices at this point. I don't care for the chunks that fall off of Jeff Goldblum in that movie. It's not for me. No. Other actresses considered for Lydia Dietz reportedly included

Sarah Jessica Parker, Brooke Shields, Lori Loughlin, Diane Lane, Justine Bateman, Molly Ringwald, Juliet Lewis, and Jennifer Conno.

Alyssa Milano apparently made it pretty far. I actually, I think Winona Ryder is perfect. I think there are a lot of great options on that list. I agree. There's a lot of fun ones.

Jennifer Connolly had done Labyrinth, for example. She's not weird enough. I'm just saying. I know. Easy on the eyes. Sure. We see how Chris would cast his 15-year-old.

So, moving on. When he was 15. Apparently, Burton initially heard that Wynonna didn't want to do it because of the satanic elements, so he assumed that she was, like, hyper-religious. Turns out, no one knows where that came from because she did not have a problem with it, and she absolutely did want to do it.

Hail Satan. He had seen her in the film, Lucas, and really liked her. And by the way, I didn't realize this. 1988 is a crazy year for Wynonna Ryder. Beetlejuice, Heather's, and the lesser-known 1969 are all released that year. She goes on to starring Great Balls of Fire the following year,

then Edward Scissorhands and Mermaids the year after that. Just cranking them out. Yes. Which is even more insane when you realize that Wynonna Ryder was 15 years old at the time of filming for Beetlejuice. She's so cute. I love her in this. She's great.

It also compare her at 15 to the actors in Stranger Things, for example, which obviously she's in. She looks 20 years older than them at 15 than they do at 15 to me. I guess that's true. And also in Heather's, I was really surprised to find out she had just turned 16 when they filmed that. I thought she was older than that. Yeah. I would have assumed she was in her early 20s at that point. Yeah, me too.

She's not. I think she's maybe one of the youngest people in that. Yeah. So Delia Dietz, her stepmother, was originally played by someone completely different, but who also made a lot of sense for the role. This is an easier one to get, Chris. Do you have any guesses? No.

No, I'm not. I'm tired. I'm sorry. We just had a baby. No excuses. Play like a champion. Fay Donaway. No, it's not right.

Who is it? Actually, it is someone who did pop up in our Chinatown episode. It's Angelica Houston. Oh, she does make a lot of sense. Yes. Yes. Totally. Which is, she's great.

She's great. So she had to drop out due to an illness pretty last minute, and Catherine O'Hara replaced her. But O'Hara's casting is hilarious, as to be expected. Apparently, David Geffen kept calling her personally, saying she needed to do the movie, probably because their original star had just dropped out. And Catherine O'Hara had no idea who he was, so she kept blowing him off. Isn't she Canadian?

She's Canadian. Yeah. Canadian National Treasure, Catherine O'Hara, who has no interest. in David Gavin. Nope, doesn't know who he is. Also didn't know who Tim Burton was. And apparently when no other work was turning up, she got depressed enough to say yes to the audition.

I suppose I'll do this Beatle juice. Yes. I just picture her as Moira Rose in this next sequence because she travels to L.A., gets completely lost in her rental car, cannot find her way to Burbank at all. There's no cell phones, obviously, no GPS. She shows up like many, many hours late. to a note on Tim Burton's door that said,

I'm sorry, I waited as long as I could. So she's just like, fine. And she goes back to Toronto. And then a couple weeks... Wait, so she just went home? She just went home. He never saw her. She just turned around and went home.

And then a couple weeks later, they just called her and said she had the part. He loved you. It's like he were never there. O'Hara told the Newarker, it's a good trick. If you're bad at auditioning, just don't go.

I love her so much, and I'm happy that that moment of her from this movie is now trending on TikTok, where she says, If you don't let me go out of this house. Very Joanna Gaines. It's really great. Yeah, she's amazing. Alec Baldwin was cast as Adam Maitland, but he seemed to really not get the movie pretty much the whole time. He's just Jack Donegie in this movie. Chris, that is not incorrect.

He confessed to GQ somewhat recent. that, quote, when we did Beetlejuice, I had no idea what it was about. I thought, my, all of our careers are going to end with the release of this film. Maybe we're all going to be dead. Honestly, it totally works because he has this wide-eyed straight man approach to the role that is very fun. He's kind of the innocent of the two. And it's charming, actually, that he's the more innocent one between him and Barbara, in a sense, which I also like. It does work. Yeah. I don't think he had any idea what he was doing. No, absolutely not.

Which is fine. I also got the impression that he didn't really fit with Tim Burton's aesthetic. He described the director as very heads down and quiet, always doodling. But Alec Baldwin himself admits that he was more of a neurotic actor at this time. At that time. I'm just imagining the scene in The Departed where he's talking to Matt Damon. He's like, good, you getting married? Proving your cock still work, having a kid, blah, what?

Like him talking to Tim Burton that way on the set. Yeah, Tim Burton is like, please leave me a little. so I can draw my corpse dogs. Please just leave me alone, sir. I need to get back to my coloring book. He did at least seem to think that Michael Keaton was pretty funny. Juno, their very grumpy caseworker, is played by Sylvia Sidney, an Academy Award nominated Old Hollywood Star, who was absolutely stunning as a young woman. You should look up some pictures.

She was also apparently just as funny off camera as she was on. When Michael McDowell's partner, Lawrence visited set, I guess she had received a gift basket with a pineapple in it. and she apparently just looked at him and said, What the fuck am I supposed to do with a pineapple? Great. Which I love. So Burton assembled a team of some familiar faces during pre-production,

including cinematographer Tom Ackerman and visual effects consultant Rick Heinrichs, who he had worked with on Frankenweeney. There's actually a lot of Frankenweene alums on this movie. And some new folks like production designer Bo Welch. There was a benefit to Michael Keaton's casting taking so long. According to cinematographer Tom Ackerman, it gave him, Bo, and art director Tom Duffield time to really pull together the vision for Beetlejuice and make sure that it all worked. He actually mentioned something like 20 weeks of

pre-pro because they were waiting so long to get the casting together. Wow. I mean, talk about an unexpected blessing. Yes. For example, like an independent feature, you're going to get maybe, you know, eight weeks prep is standard at the high end. So I think that's why it looks so good. It looks great. The house looks great. underworld bureaucratic nightmare is really fun. Yeah. Also, this team is extremely complimentary of Tim Burton. It sounds like he definitely comes to the table with a vision, but he also, as the best directors that we've seen on this show, do, hires people that he trusts, and then he listens to them. He really lets them run with things and seems to enjoy kind of watching the vision unfold,

both for the production team and for his actors. Also, Bo Welsh met his wife on set because his wife is Catherine O'Hara. Oh. And Tim Burton played matchmaker. He got Bo to ask her out when she complained to Burton that he hadn't done it yet. And Bo apparently said, really? Not even realizing that he was allowed to talk to the actors. And he's professional. I like it. That's right. Very good. Professional, successful man. Yes, and they've been happily married for many, many years. Principal photography began on March 11, 1987 in East Corinth, Vermont, where they captured all of the external shots of what was supposed to be Connecticut. Both the bridge and the house, which was really a three-sided shell, were built on site for the film.

Wow. Apparently, one of the hardest things to pull off in the whole movie was the bridge, where the Maitlands die. They had to build it on site in Vermont, and they had to build a huge dam to make it work up the river. But evidently, thunderstorms kept coming through breaking the dam and just washing the whole bridge away. Wow. So they built that entire, is that kind of cloud? Classic Northeast Red Barn-style covered bridge. Yeah, which a car is driving over, so it had to be functional.

I know. Yeah, exactly. They also cut the road into the hill for the Maitland's house because there wasn't one there. And they built the house backwards, starting with Delia's crazy renovation, and then removing that to go back to the original house front. Out of the around $13 million budget, only $1 million was allotted for special effects, which for a movie like this is not very much. No. By the way, you will see both $15 million and $13 million listed.

I'm going with the latter because that's what's cited in Burton on Burton. Because they had such a small budget, they were determined to do as many effects in camera as possible, which I think you can tell from watching the movie, but which works really, really well. Yeah. It has a very handmade quality. Yeah, and they lean into that, which is smart. Yeah.

Some of the only effects that were done in post-production were the sandworms, and I would have to imagine the shrinking, both Beetlejuice's head and the Maitlands. So do you remember the scene at the beginning when the Maitlands come home and realize they don't have a reflection in the mirror? Zero VFX. Here is how they did that. They took the flat that had the fireplace on it,

flipped it around so that it was facing the opposite direction, took the reflective glass out of the mirror, put in translucent glass, so now it looks like it's peering into their living room, and then just shot Alec Baldwin and Gina Davis from the other side of the flat, looking through what was basically a window. Right. It's so smart, but so easy.

Also, the moment where Gina Davis is holding Alec Baldwin's head, it's entirely in camera. He is literally kneeling behind a card that is cut out around his chin. And he's just going, Jesus Christ, what the hell is this movie? Yeah, he's so confused. What am I doing right now? Evidently, the first pass at Michael Keaton's makeup was too horrifying even for Tim Burton. Makeup artist Vei Neal initially copied the drawing that Burton had made,

but Keaton ended up looking filthy and disgusting. So she asked Burton to let her do her own thing, and he said, go for it. She ended up leaning further into the pastels that he wanted across the afterlife. Keaton is also the one who apparently requested bad teeth and a broken nose. They couldn't find any broken nose prosthetics, so they ended up gluing swollen lips to either side of his nose. Wow. And, of course, at his request, them teeth are fake.

They're great. They're huge. They're so big. Burton loved working with him on this character, and it sounds like a lot of it was built with just the two of them kind of messing around. Also, I love this. The mold that you see growing around his face and his hands, it is the kind of moss that you buy for a model, just like the one Adam Maitland built in the movie. The makeup artist actually sent a PA off to a hobby shop to go get it. Now, you may have been able to figure this out, Chris, by how completely unhinged Michael Keaton's performances in this movie, but a lot, if not most, of Beetlejuice's dialogue is improvised.

It had to be. It's just Keaton saying, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it, I got it. I got it. No, no, no, no, I got it. It's amazing. One of my favorite moments in the whole movie when he's holding Alec Baldwin and Gina Davis and he spits into his suit pocket and says, I'm saving that one for later. came out of nowhere. So good. He also only ends up having about 17 minutes on screen in the final product.

It's between him in Beetlejuice and Anthony Hopkins and as Hannibal Lecter as biggest impact relative to screen time in a film. 100%. I completely forgot that he is basically not in this movie. Yep. And he also was on set for like two and a half weeks total. He told Rolling Stone, you just show up on the set and just go. Oh, fucking nuts. It was rave acting. You raged for 12 or 14 hours, then you go home tired and beat and exhausted. It was pretty damn cathartic. Seems like he had a really good time.

Dick Cavett was only on set for about three days, but he had an absolute blast. He was apparently surprised that Tim Burton offered him a role since he'd only ever really played himself prior to this. And apparently we might have Dick Cavett to thank for the disgusting shrimp grabbing faces moment in the dinner scene. So the way they were doing that, because again, they had no money, is that the special effects team was hiding under the table with their arms shoved up the shrimps. And they weren't nailing the face grab because they couldn't see the actor's faces at all. Apparently, in one of the first takes, a giant shrimp hand just punched Catherine O'Hara right in the face. Canadian National Treasure, Catherine O'Hara.

Canadian National Treasure, they slapped her with some shrimp. Shrimp slapped and Los Angeles film set. Yep. So Cavett suggested filming the grab in reverse instead, starting with the shrimp hands on their faces. And he says he's not sure if the reverse shot made it in the film. And he's very humble about figuring it out. But Tim Burton seemed pretty happy with it. And I think it is the one in the movie.

Because the movie is relatively low budget and interiors were shot on a smaller lot at Culver Studios. It sounds like they had a lot of creative freedom. No suits breathing down their necks. And I think it really shows. It's just so much fun. Post-production? Pretty smooth. I would imagine because so many of the effects were done in camera versus waiting for posts, there's not a ton to do at this point. Now, early test screenings of the film were quite mixed, with some audiences loving it, and others really not on board.

There was one enormous difference between the cuts that those audiences were shown. Chris, can you guess what it was? There's an element that was missing from one version. It's something that really ties the room together. as it were. I'm completely blanking. I don't know. It's Danny Elfman's score. Really? Yes.

They tried testing it without the score. I think they must have had temp or something. But it was unequivocal. The audiences that saw it without his score said that it was just way too weird, that they did not enjoy it, didn't like it with the music. People loved it.

Interesting. Of course, the studio gave them the exact opposite note of what these screenings indicated, saying that the score was too dark. This was a cool one to watch with David, because obviously he is a composer, and he made a really good point, which is that Tim Burton and Danny Elfman are maybe the only director-composer combo, where they really are one unit, maybe because they came up together.

Their first feature was together. But it's just like their aesthetic is so glued to the other one. Absolutely. You just see it. Oh, it's Tim Burton movie, Danny Elfman. Right, of course. Immediately what you think. Well, you know what a Tim Burton movie sounds like, and it sounds like Danny Elfman scores. It's true.

Something else that the test screenings revealed was that the audience really loved the scenes in the afterlife waiting room. So since the movie did not really have any kind of clear ending, that's when Burton goes back and adds the scene with Beetlejuice in the waiting room, getting his head shrunk by the shaman or shaman, as Meredith from Housewives of Salt Lake City would say. The witch doctor. Which doctor, that's right. Yes. Now, Chris, you might have wondered, like David and I did, how a movie where the title character grabs his crotch, honks it like a horn, and says, nice fucking model could possibly be PG. Yep. You're not alone, but I discovered that the answer is, it was the 80s, man. That's it.

It was the 80s, man. Although this was post-invention of PG-13. Yes, it was. PG-13 was introduced in 1984. after Gremlins and Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom because parents were pissed that they took their kids to see those two. Although Gremlins, not for the reason you think, my understanding is that it's because of the story

that, is it, Phoebe Cates' character tells about how her father died in the chimney as Santa Claus? It was less about the gore of gremlins exploding in microwaves or going in blenders. It was more about daddy dying in a chimney. That is worse than a blended gremlin. Yeah. Indiana Jones was

A man pulling another man's heart out of his chest. Still beating. To be clear. Yeah. So at that point, Spielberg pushed for an additional category between PG and R with the first recipient being John Milius's Red Dawn. Red Dawn. Yeah.

I love Red Dawn. It's so stupid. It's great. It's so much fun. No, to be fair to Beetlejuice, I looked this up. PG stood for parental guidance suggested some material may not be appropriate for preteens. I think that's correct. for this movie.

Yeah. But preteens are appropriate for Beetlejuice. Oh, God. Sorry. It also does seem that PG-13 wasn't as widely used until the 90s. Yeah. And at this point, it seems like this was not an issue, and Beetlejuice fell squarely in the PG realm.

So, nice fucking model, Hong Kong. Fair enough. The film premiered March 30, 1988. And as with many of our favorite movies that we cover on this show, reviews were mixed at best. The New York Times said, it's technically sophisticated and so amiable and well-meaning that it seems rude to point out that, like, some of our public figures, it's more of a bore to watch than to describe. I don't agree. I would agree with the first stretch of that analysis. I don't find it a bore, but I had nothing else to add. I just ended a sentence with the word

But Chris is tired. We had a baby two weeks ago. I'm a little loopy right now. The perfect time to watch Beetlejuice. Yes. Roger Ebert was a little nicer, but also really didn't like it very much. And one of the most common criticisms of the movie was that Alec Baldwin and Gina Davis' characters were too boring to really care about.

Alec Baldwin appeared to be on the side of the critics here. According to Tim Burton, quote, Alec kind of badmouthed the movie and me. And while I think he did a good job, I don't. don't think he saw it for what it was, and I don't know what he saw. I think that's a very classy response to Alec Baldwin being a rude a-hole. Well, I wonder if Baldwin thought, I need to get ahead of this. Yeah, he seems like... I'm not condoning it. I'm saying, though, he... This was relatively early in his career, you know, because I went, Hunt for Red October

was a couple years later, and then Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, a couple years after. after that. So I just wonder if you thought, man, this is going to be, this is the creative equivalent of me doing a softcore porno at the beginning of my career that I'll need to explain, you know, and so he decided to do damage, unnecessary damage control in some way. I think that's right. I think he was trying to get ahead of it. Also, I just checked in my favorite Alec Baldwin movie is also after this, which is, of course, malice. Oh, yeah. If you've never seen malice listeners, go watch it. Yep. One of the best, Alec Baldwin, playing Alec Baldwin.

It's a great, like, women as psychopaths secretly movies. Yes, featuring excellent psychopath, Nicole Kidman. Yeah. Watching Beetlejuice again, also knowing that Baldwin was maybe the only one on set who really didn't get it, it made a lot of sense. Like you said, Chris, he does work in context, but it also seems like he's in a totally different movie from everyone else. And he has this almost, like, put on.

sincerity that's a very like try-hardy. Yeah, he's like, come on, honey, we got to figure this ghost thing out. And everybody else is just like, weird, zany, Zachy. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's just Alec Baldwin being like, I think this is going to ruin my career. Shouldn't we try to leave this place? Also, along with Jeffrey Jones, Baldwin was not asked back for the sequel, which could have more to do with Rust, but who knows? Yeah. But guess what? It didn't matter what any of these critics or Alec Baldwin thought because audiences absolutely loved it. Nobody cared that it didn't follow a typical three-act structure. It was fun and it was funny. And in the end, Beetlejuice was a major box office success, pulling in almost $75 million on a $13 million budget. It also continued

to perform on home video with the rising popularity of the VCR, and it was the first DVD Netflix ever rented out. Really? Yes. Wow. Shout out to our researcher Sarah for that little tidbit. That was fun. Yeah. Went through the mail first. Yes, it did. Interesting. It won an Academy Award for Best Makeup. And it made Harry Belafonte a bunch of money with Dale receiving substantial airplay 32 years after its initial release.

And the Beetlejuice soundtrack spending six weeks on the Billboard top 200 charts. So let's do a little Where Are They Now? Burton used the bankable success of Beetlejuice to finally. get Batman greenlit, and the rest is history. As you pointed out, he just cranks out hits from here on out. He would re-team with both Michael Keaton and screenwriter Warren Scarin for Batman, though Scaram would tragically die of bone cancer just one year later. Jeez. Burton would also work with Michael McDowell again as a writer on The Nightmare Before Christmas. Cool.

McDowell's partner, Lawrence Sinellick, said that his influence was all over the final cut, despite rewrites, even down to the brothel that Beatle. juice goes to in the model. The brothel is so... The brothel's amazing, which is apparently based on a series of 19th century French stereograph cards of devils doing various things

in hell. Great. Again, remember, Attitudes on Death from 1825 to 1865. I feel like I've seen those cards. They're like, it's got the little mustache, he's got the horns, it's like the ink line drawings. I think so, yeah. Yeah. So sadly, as time went on,

McDowell's workaholic tendencies did get the better of him. He worked too hard, played too hard, and began relying on alcohol and cocaine to get him through. His partner Lawrence told him that he couldn't come home to Massachusetts until he got clean, which he did. But then in 1994, McDowell was diagnosed with AIDS. He passed away in 1999 at the age of 49. Jesus. So young. Yeah.

Beetlejuice did, of course, spawn a franchise after this with an animated series running from 1989 to 1991. And there's, of course, been talk of a sequel for many years. many many years. Scarren's Beetlejuice 2, which was his final screenplay before he passed away, featured The Ghost with the Most in a love triangle.

And screenwriter and Burton collaborator Jonathan Jems also wrote one called Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian. Okay. Why not? I don't need a lot more than that. We are in Hawaii.

That sounds fun. But of course, this Friday, we finally will get the long-awaited sequel, Beetlejuice, Beatlejuice, featuring most of the original cast, minus Jeffrey Jones for obvious reasons, plus Jenna Ortega, Justin Thoreau, Willem DeFoe, Monica

Balucci, and many, many more. I am very excited. Very excited. I think it looks fun. They've also set it up for Beatles Juice, Beetle Juice, Beetle Juice. Oh, of course. They have to. Right. So, of course. Just checking. Yeah, I'm very excited. And Keaton's spoken pretty glowingly of the sequel, if you listen to some of the interviews that he's given. Yeah. And he's... I think he's pretty honest. I was going to say, he's pretty brutal when it comes to his own work. I think one of the quotes was like, I've been in some pretty good movies, but this is really good, you know, and I was like, you were in Spotlight, man. You were my favorite Batman. You've been in a lot of great movies. So I'm very excited to see it. I think it looks really fun. Yeah, he's wonderful. Maybe you can escape the baby for a couple

hours and go see it. I'll see it in like three years. Great. All right. Well, that brings us to what went right, Chris? I love Tim Burton. When we cover Ed Wood at some point, I'm going to give it to Tim Burton. I have to give it to Michael Keaton. Yeah. Because sometimes an actor, as you said, can take something that is ephemeral and small and does not have a high page count and turn it into something absolutely unforgettable.

and he does that in this movie. It's a remarkable performance. It's so unhinged. It's so fun. I love that he improvised a lot of his dialogue. I love that he came up with so many elements of that character. That character should be so stupid. It should be so annoying.

It should be so offensive. And it is all of those things. And yet still, we kind of like him. Totally. That's such a testament to Michael Keaton. Also, just Michael Keaton, the comedic performer. I think he's done so many great dramatic roles, but we forget he's such a good comedic performer. So funny. And I remember him in the other guys when he did that supporting role as

like their police captain. Yeah. He's working at Bedbath and Beyond. And he's so good as the funny straight man. So I'm here for it. Michael Keaton, he's amazing. I'm excited to see him reprise the role this Friday. Lizzie, how about for you? Well, since you didn't give it to him, I will give it to Tim Burton. I think this movie is so cool to watch, kind of going back and understanding the trajectory of his career, because I think this is really where we get to see Tim Burton's aesthetic be born. This is the first time that he has the resources to do it. It's the first time he really has the full team in place to make it happen. There's so many things that we see again and again across his career that start here,

whether it's the black and white stripes, you know, model villages, graveyards. You actually, if you look at the top of, you remember the carousel that Michael Keaton has on his head at the end?

If you look at the very top of it, it has a little Jack Skellington on it. And I think that's just because he had all these drawings and ideas in his head that he hadn't had the chance to really bring to life yet. And this is the first time that we get to see them. David pointed out the door

in the wedding ceremony. It looks straight out of Batman. It's just really, really cool. And I think that he does what the best directors we've talked about on here do, which is that he hires people that he trusts and he likes for their own aesthetics. And then he really believes in them to take his direction and run with it. And he seems extremely open to people bringing their own ideas. So I think when we say the Tim Burton aesthetic, yes, obviously he's driving it. But he's also hiring the right people that are adding a lot to it, whether it's Danny Elfman or Bo Welch or the cinematographer

or Rick Heinrichs. He's working with these people over and over again for a reason. So I came away from this really liking Tim Burton and just really admiring what he was able to do on this. To that end, I forever assumed he wrote this movie, which obviously he didn't. So I think it's rare to find a director who is able to imprint their own voice on. a film without smothering it when they didn't write it as well. Yeah. David Fincher comes to mind. But then you have somebody like Wes Anderson.

Wes Anderson has to be written by Wes Anderson. You know what I mean? To work. Totally. He's amazing. So it's incredible that Burton's able to have such a heavy visual style while approaching a script he didn't write. Certainly went right on this one.

I agree. This is such a fun movie. Well, Lizzie, what are we doing next? Next up, we actually have a special guest so that Chris can take a little break and take care of his brand new Bebe. Yep. We will be bringing back what went wrong alum Naomi Lind, who appeared on our 50 Shades of Gray episode. Yep. She is an excellent actress, writer, researcher, extraordinaire, and she's coming to bring us a very interesting one, which apparently was just an enormous shit show.

And that is Shakespeare in Love. I can't wait. I think she's going to get into a lot of the history of sort of the control that the Weinstein Company and Miramax had over Hollywood at that time and particularly over the Oscars. So that's going to be a very, very interesting one. I am very excited. I do not love that movie. No. Sure don't.

It's going to be a fun time. one of the least deserving of the Oscar winners. Yeah, I can't believe she beat Kate Blanchett, but I'm sure we will talk about it more in two weeks. So come back for that. That's going to be fun. All right. Chris?

Now it is time. Are you going to do them as Beetlejuice? I'm actually pulling up a clip of his voice so I can just get it right fresh in my head. Give me one second. Let me ask you something. Is this a relationship probably solidly for all? All right, that seems like it's good enough. All right, so if you really want to support this podcast,

I need you to do something. You got to tell somebody about it, tell anybody about it, tell anybody that you want about it, okay? And then if you want to support this podcast, you can read it as a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, okay? And if you really want to support this podcast, go to www.w.w.com. So I'm going for everyone about podcasts.

And now we've got to talk about the full stop patrons. Is this just awful? Should I stop? Or do I need to continue? No, no. Keep going. Okay. All right. Thank you so much for supporting this podcast.

It's really great. Brittany Morris. This sounds like the godfather doing Beal juice. Keep going. Do it. No, no, keep going. Come on, come out, give on. Maybe it's a little lower.

Brittany Morris. Darren and Dale Conkling. Jake Killen. Gang. Andrew Me Fagglebeagle. Matthew Jacobson. Grace Potter. Ellen Singleton.

Do a three Samant. Lackland Morrow. Scott Kerwin Sadie Just Sadie Brian Donoghue Adrian Peng Korea Chris Leal

Kathleen Olson Leah Bowman Steve Winterbauer Don Schibel George Rosemary Southford Tom Kristen Shaman Chayaniani

Michael McGrath This has been truly miserable for me to do for the last two minutes Oh God, let him Stop. Hi.

Good job, Chris. Thanks. I think you're all going to cancel their memberships right after that. Thank you guys so much for supporting the podcast. Since that was unintelligible, you can go to our Patreon, www.com. What Wrent Wrong Podcast. If you would like to vote on upcoming episodes, we have a Halloween poll out, or if you would like to listen to the show, add free, we can have an RSS feed that you can get access to,

or you can pledge $50 a month and have your name read out in an offensive impression just like that one on a biweekly basis. Lizzie, anything else that we need to say to the beautiful people before we let them go. Nope, can't wait to see you all in two weeks for Shakespeare in love. And he wouldn't be with that movie. We will talk to you then. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at what went wrong.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing Music by David Bowman.

Additional research for this episode provided by Sarah Bound.