WHAT WENT WRONG - Blade Runner (Part 2)

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Harrison Ford gets even grumpier, the producers kill Ridley Scott’s Unicorn, and no one gets a happy ending in the conclusion of our coverage of Blade Runner… except the movie itself.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And welcome back to another episode of what went wrong. Your favorite podcast. I said it. Your favorite podcast. No qualifiers. Your favorite podcast that happens to be about the greatest big film mishaps of all time across films good and bad and everything in between. As always, I'm Chris Winterbauer here with Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing this fine evening? I'm doing great. I will say for those of you to listen to Part 1 of Blade Runner and our wondering how the Celsius is treating me. Not good. I think I've hit the part of it where I'm beginning to crash. So let's see what happens on part two. That's right. That Celsius has lasted two

weeks and Lizzie is just now starting to crash. As Lizzie mentioned, we are diving into part two of Blade Runner. If you have not yet listened, I highly recommend that you listen to part one because I'm not going to go back and give you any information about Blade Runner because I want to incentivize you to listen to more and more of our content, because that's why we're here. That's why we exist. So, once we last spoke, Lizzie, our somewhat intrepid hero, Ridley Scott, sure, the cigar chomper, was on the verge of termination from the project he'd just spent months filming. He was being sued, basically, by a subset of his own production team for going over-schedule and over-budget. However, he did still luckily have the support of Michael Dealey.

an Alan Ladd, Jr. in his corner. They could kind of see what he had accomplished in the dailies, and they knew that the only person who could finish this film was Ridley Scott. And they made the wise decision to support him being able to continue on in editing the movie. But my understanding is technically Ridley Scott was fired. So he was technically removed from the movie, and then they kept him on. And basically, at this point, tandem productions, who, let me make this clear, This is the production group that owns the VHS rights to this movie,

which is so weird to me. How are they the ones jumping in on this? They're the ones. They are now in control of this production. So Tandem and Bud Yorkin are in control, and they don't like Ridley Scott, and they don't like how this movie is going. Before we come back to all of that,

I think we need to talk about this movie's special effects. Yeah, they're amazing. Pretty great, right? You watch, this is the first time you've seen this in a long time, Yes. How would you describe the VFX shots and special effect shots? They're not VFX. There's special effects shots in this movie.

It looks great. I mean, it's up there with Star Wars and Jurassic Park in terms of things that hold up. Well, nothing holds up quite as well as Jurassic Park. But I think that, yes, this is on par with Star Wars 100% where it doesn't, nothing takes me out of it. And I'm watching it, you know, what, 40 years later? Yeah, 40 years. So Blade Runner famously relied. on the services of two extremely gifted special effects technicians to create their entirely

optical special effects. We'll get into that in a second. These two were part of EEG Entertainment Effects Group, which was a partnership between Doug Trumbull and Richard Eurisich. They had famously done the effects for Stanley Kubrick's 2001, 2001 A Space Odyssey, and most recently, Stephen Spielberg's close encounters of the third kind. They actually used all of the equipment and some of the miniatures from Close Encounters of the Third Kind on this movie. Interesting. In order to make the budget work. Trumbull was also a director.

He had directed 1971's Silent Running. He was a pioneering optical effects designer. He was obsessed with creating spectacle. And in fact, he had been creating these like traveling roadshow events, like 70-millimeter traveling roadshow events in the years up until he was brought on to Blade Runner. He basically had quit on Hollywood at this point. The keyword that I'm going to keep using is optical. So this is before the advent of CGI, computer-generated imagery.

Everything you see on screen had to be achieved in camera. So what this meant was that they would shoot things with a series of optical passes. They would shoot the scene once. They would get a mat, meaning like a cutout of something. They would shoot it again. They would add another element. They would shoot it again. So they would shoot these scenes, re-expose the film or stack the film multiple times.

and they would do this by shooting the effect shot on 70 millimeter film, which is twice the size, more than that, even, of 35 millimeter film. And then that would give them the latitude to shoot 12 or 16 passes on one exposure, losing a little bit of quality, right, with each exposure, and still get the amount of detail that they would need for the final shot. So that's like one of the big differences with this movie and other earlier effects shots in movies is this one, like the detail level, right, is what sells those like, big cityscape shots.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. The original budget for the Blade Runner Special Effects was $2 million for 38 shots. Nope. It got expanded to $3.5 million for 90 shots, and which is, that's crazy. Only 90 shots are special effects shots in this movie, which is almost nothing. That's not crazy having watched it because it really, like, you can tell how much of this they just made. And it's a lot.

But relative to new films, This is very few shots. Sure. In fact, Star Wars at the time had way more. And by comparison, in each episode of the new Lord of the Rings series, each episode has more than a thousand VFX shots of some kind, VFX elements of some kind. So those episodes are only an hour each and it has a thousand VFX shots. Yeah, almost all the backgrounds.

Which, again, not saying that's good or bad, just showing the change and the way movies are made. During production, Ridley Scott had pumped every set full of smoke constantly to the point where people were passing out. So in the effect shots of the cityscape, they needed a lot of smoke. The problem becomes you're doing like frame by frame shooting, right? There was shoot one. It was like almost stop motion. Yeah, yeah. And smoke moves constantly.

Yeah. So you would shoot a frame, shoot a frame, shoot a frame, all of a sudden there's flicker because the smoke has moved too much. And so Trumbull came up with this brilliant solution. He basically jerry rigs a shit ton of smoke to tell. to a bunch of fans and smoke machines. He then rewired the smoke detectors so that when the smoke level got too low,

they would trigger the smoke machines to puff more smoke into the room to maintain the right level of smoke in the room automatically. Wow, great for the movie, terrible for everyone with lungs. Yes, but really, like, amazing low-budget hack to figure out this way of doing it. So the Tyrell Pyramids, that you mentioned

to kind of the Aztec element, that's one eight-foot model that only had two sides. And then they would move it around the room to stack it and shoot it, you know, twice. It was basically just a light box with holes for windows and they would put a giant light inside.

Yeah. And at one point, the light caught on fire and it halfway burned down and had to rebuild it. The city skyline, which they called Hades, was an 18-foot-long table with 3D buildings in the foreground

that were like 12 inches high. And then as it got further and further away, they would just use little 2D cutouts, like what model parts get held in. And they would just cut those out and like stack them one after the other. And then they would use force perspective miniatures with different optical passes to lay the cars in on top of it. That's amazing. So it was all done in like a 20 by 20 foot room. They did use some early computer technology. They did motion controlled cameras. But again, it was really an all in camera approach. And one great example is the famous shot of the blimp,

right? Up through the bottom of the atrium in the Bradbury building, which is a crazy shot because you're like, I know they couldn't, like that blimp was a tiny miniature. It was 12 inches across. How do they shoot that up through the roof of the Radbury building? Let's hear the team talk about how they figured that shot out. That Bradbury Atrium shot, I was there that evening with the, we went out to do that plate. And the crew was so busy and so difficult and every piece of equipment was used. And there were cable running everywhere so that when they left the interior of the Bradbury building, it was dark.

It was turned up. And we didn't have time to light that whole thing looking up with the staircases in the elevator and up to the skylight and everything. So we found an angle for that shot. The camera was set up. And Douglas said, just fire when I say so. And I didn't know what he was going to do. He marched through the building and illuminated the building in pieces. So we'd take the lens cap off.

And he'd say, fire. And he'd fire the strobe and that amount of exposure with maybe 20 strobes would go to the 8 by 10. And that built up the exposure that gave us. the upshot. And then John Wash and company mounted that on a large piece of glass and cut out every one of those windows on a mullion. And then that set right in front of the blimp. We just put the miniature blimp behind there and all the light effects coming through the glass were happening right in front of the camera. I don't even, I still don't even understand that. It's basically like leave a camera, leave a, you know, shutter open. Okay.

Right, for a long period of time in very dark circumstances and then shine a flashlight around the room. And then you close the shutter and you'll actually get a sense of what that room looks like because you've exposed light into it. That's basically what they were doing, except they were doing it with an entire building interior. This guy was like running around the building, shining a flashlight, a stroblight in different portions of it. So he did that to light the actual interior of the building. Exactly. Then they take that frame, right? And they put it. print it, they blow it up, think like a photograph, and they print it on to basically a piece of acrylic, and then they cut the glass portions out so that you can see through the glass portions.

So imagine like you printed it like a poster and you cut the glass out. And then they just, they literally on a track, they put the blimp behind it and had the blimp shining its lights through towards the camera and moved the blimp in real time. That upper atrium you're looking at is just like a printout on a piece of glass. That's crazy. With that miniature moving behind it. And that's how they shot it. And it looks great.

I mean, it looks as good as anything you see today. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, these effects guys were just so resourceful. They cannibalized anything and everything they could to make their budget work. They ran out of buildings for the miniature sets because all of the exterior shots, those are all, like, the aerial shots, those are all miniatures. Right.

And so they actually used, if you pay close attention, a model of the mold. Millennium Falcon set vertically as one of the buildings in the skyline. They also used part of the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the top of the police headquarters, as you'll notice. And also they stole the design from Metropolis for its lungs movie to make a lot of the buildings. I mean, who didn't? And the sets they were shooting on were also so small that they actually had to tilt the miniature building sets to a 30 or 45 degree angle to get the camera far enough away to shoot the aerial shots

because the ceiling was too low. Oh, wow. To get the camera high enough to shoot down on it. They also reused explosions that Doug Trumbull had filmed on another film and used those explosions as the flames coming out of the spires at the beginning of the movie that you see. And the way that they did that, I mean, they would run the camera through the spires once. They then would do it again with little white cards behind each spire

with a projector projecting the explosion onto the white card, and then they would mat out the white behind that on the next pass. So each explosion required a different camera pass. So they would do 15, 16, 17 camera passes to lay in all of the different elements. And if they bumped the camera at all once, they had to start over. This is insane. It's making me realize that I have no concept really of working with actual film. and it's so interesting what you could do and had to do with it.

Like, I just don't even know what's possible. I mean, a lot, they pioneered all of this and a lot was possible. It was just really, really time-consuming and difficult and tedious. And by the way, the work that artists do now with computers is equally tedious and time-consuming and difficult in a different way. Yeah. It's just easier to be like computers can do anything when it's really a person behind the computer doing it. Yeah, it's artists for sure. So beyond the special effects, post production was a bitch.

Gee, I mean, I couldn't imagine considering there's like 18 versions of it that exist. Generally not a good sign. Production was hard, post was harder. The first cut of the movie was four hours long. Nope. And was very, very divisive. So some of the producers really saw the genius of it. Some of the producers were like, what the fuck is this movie?

Most specifically, Warner Brothers in tandem really had been a, holding on to the idea that they were getting a Star Wars. You are not getting a Star Wars. So they were unhappy with the cuts that Ridley Scott was turning in. It was ambiguous. It was dark. And it was slow. He had added in a scene with Deckerd dreaming of a unicorn, which you've seen in the final cut,

as a way to imply that he's a replicant. So at the end of the film, Edward James almost leaves him the little origami of the unicorn. And the hints is that his memories are implanted. so Deckerd is maybe a replicant. Lizzie, how does the movie end the version that you saw? He leaves with Rachel. Right. They get in the elevator, right?

And then that's it. The movie's over. That's it's very ambiguous. It's like she has a four-year lifespan. We don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, that's it. Okay.

So nobody liked that at the studio. There's a very famous document that has been released, which is the studio notes that were sent to Ridley Scott on Blade Runner. And, you know, I could read them to you, but I'd rather have Harrison Ford read them to you. Please. I want to share some notes, some editorial suggestions that were prepared

after the screening of a movie I was in. Opening, too choppy. Why is this voiceover track so terrible? He sounds drugs. Were they all on drugs? Decker's at the piano is interminable. Flashback dialogue confusing. Is he listening to a tape?

Why do we need the third cut to the eggs? The synagogue music is awful on the street. We've got to use Vangelis. Up to Zora's death, the movie is deadly dull. This movie gets worse every screening. That movie was called Blade Runner. So basically one of the ideas was to take the movie away from Ridley and have Bud Yorkin edit it.

This was vetoed only because of how time-consuming and expensive it would have been to bring all the film over. And then the alternative was to have Bud and Robin go to London, and this is what ended up happening. These tandem producers went to London and sat and watched over Ridley's shoulder as they edit. And so basically it says Ridley and Crew had three cuts and still have not done what was agreed. Now they should do it themselves.

I'm sorry. I got distracted by reading some of these notes and one that you left out, which is now one of my favorites, is they have put back more tits into the Zora dressing room scene. Yes. I can't tell if they like that or don't like that. Unclear. Unclear. That one was from Alan Ladd. Alan's worried about the boo-boos or he likes the boo-boos.

I can't tell. Might be both. Yeah, these notes are going to give me hives. These are like, so many of these are not, this is what you, a lot of these you would say, these are not actionable notes. Ridley Scott and Michael Dealey, trying to make this work propose reshoots

to fix some of the problems. But Tannam's like, I'm not spending more money on production because Tantam's on the hook for all of the overages. Understandable, yeah. Things reached a boiling point in early March 1982. The movie by this point had kind of been stripped of a lot of its subtlety,

and they decided, okay, we're ready, we're going to do a test screening. I read Dallas, Denver, and San Diego, so one of those might be incorrect, but two of the three, they hosted a test screening there. Okay. The results were, regardless, pretty disastrous. People didn't understand the tone.

They didn't understand the pace. They were confused as to what was happening, and they really didn't like the ending. And the ending shown was the ending Lizzie that you saw, the kind of ambiguous ending. Yeah, they're wrong. It's great. When a movie is confusing, what's the first tool that a studio is going to push for to try to fix it? Voiceover! Voiceover!

And I can say this from experience, voiceover, according to an executive, can solve everything for an audience. And to be fair, sometimes it can be helpful. There are certainly examples where it works. Basically, there's confusion as to where the idea for voiceover came from. Yorkin says it was him. He says that Ridley Scott was totally against it. Ridley actually says that he was open to it. He read the test cards and knew they were in trouble.

What's undeniably true is that the one person that absolutely did not fucking want to record voiceover had made that point from the minute he read that script, Lizzie? Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford. Like Paul Giamatti and Merleau and sideways, Harrison Ford did not want to do voiceover. Yeah, he had to do it because he was contractually obligated. I feel like I'm blacking out. I do not remember voiceover in Blade Runner.

No, there's no voiceover in the final cut. I had you watch the version that has no voiceover. Great. Wanted to make sure I wasn't having some sort of stroke. No, I wanted you to watch the best version, in my opinion. But there was lots of voiceover in the original cut, and we're about to get into that. So three versions of the voiceover were attempted. The first was written by a new writer, Darryl Ponic San, and apparently everyone agreed that it was just trash and it didn't work.

So they threw it away. David Peoples then merged some of his ideas with Hampton Fanchors. They took some of the original voiceover from the first draft of the earlier draft of the script. They had Harrison Ford record that. Ridley Scott then tried to remove as much as he could, but it didn't really work either. So then, Bud Yorkin did a third attempt on his own. Didn't tell Ridley Scott, didn't tell Michael Dealey,

just brought Harrison Ford in, blind, into a recording booth, and had him record voiceover. I would like to play you some clips from the recording sessions. Please. What does Bud Yorkin got up his sleeve? This is just Harrison Ford. This is called unused VO from the recording sessions. It's just Harrison Ford reacting to it.

in real time. Let's just give a listen to a couple. Great. It didn't help me any. Neither did the flake from the bathtub. Nothing helped. Not even booze. I was restless and hungry. I needed the streets and I needed food. Pretty weird. Pretty weird. The flake. Maybe it was a scale. A fish scale. Real or artificial? you need an expert to tell this is bizarre god damn this is bizarre so apparently his performance was so bad

because his heart was not in it that the sound technicians would ruin takes because they would laugh at his line readings and I want to play you an instance of that she told me she loved me too no wrong

she told me it's gonna work great really this method is perfect let's go again Take 11. I figured I wouldn't get the headaches of the shakes anymore. Ah, shit. No, no, no, no. Let's go again.

23. I told her about Badi on the roof, dying, making every second count. I'm breaking my heart here, and he's laughing. Just to give credit where credits do, where is this voiceover, where did you pull up? This is from the dangerous days, making of documentary. The issue is that the voiceover just doesn't work. Yeah, Harry's phoning it in. Yeah.

So that, by the way, that's the final theatrical cut. That is what played in theaters and was originally released in 1982. Okay. That's making a little bit more sense why it maybe wasn't as big a hit. That's not great. It is not great. I want to say one more thing. There is nothing more unpleasant than being involved in, like, bureaucratic political fights

on a creative project, which sounds like exactly what is happening here. So I feel Harrison Ford's pain. Well, apparently Harrison Ford felt really betrayed because he felt like he and Ridley had agreed they would have no voiceover. And then Ridley kind of agreed to do the voiceover. And Harrison felt like he was the only person trying not to do the voiceover.

And everyone else was going. And he was just like, this is stupid. I can't make this sound good. Yeah, it's not good. I feel like even if he's not phoning it in, you can just tell his heart's not in it. And it just doesn't work. It's not, it just tells you exactly what you're seeing on screen.

It's not actually helpful in any way. I don't know why it's there. So the other big change that tandem insisted upon was that the movie needed to have a happy ending now because audiences weren't liking the dark ending. So they wrote in a terrible scene of Rick Deckerd and Rachel riding off into the sunset in a spinner out over the wilderness over pristine landscapes while Decker via voiceover

informs us that somehow Rachel actually has no termination date. They pulled a spinner out of storage, they shot the scene out at Big Bear, and then they sent production executive Catherine Haber, who you remember got them, Rutger Hauer, for a week in a helicopter to supervise aerial photography,

but the weather was so bad that it was unusable, all of the footage. Ridley Scott still has to release this part in the movie, so he's like, I can't make the last shot shit. So he remembers that Stanley Kubrick used a ton of aerial photography in The Shining. But Stanley Kubrick is deathly afraid of flying. So, oh, by the way, listens to our episode on The Shining. So he's like, Kubrick's so anal about it.

I bet you he made them shoot like 50 hours of aerial footage for the beginning of the Shining. So they get a hold of Stanley Kubrick, no small feet. And sure enough, Kubrick sends them a room full of aerial footage over the Colorado Rockies. and this is what Blade Runner used for the theatrical release. Exterior aerial shots from The Shining to end the movie. It was not good. I'm going to just briefly touch on music because actually music went super smooth.

Famously, it was composed by Vangelis. Vangelis, I don't know exactly. I think it's Vingales, according to Ridley. And it seems like he and Ridley Scott had a great relationship, and there weren't any issues that I could find on that front. He gave Ridley a bunch of music that he wrote kind of in the theme of the movie, movie before they shot. And then Ridley would actually put giant speakers out over the set and blast the music to get people in the right mood. And apparently, uh, the cast and crew really loved it.

And everybody seemed to like the music and not a lot of issues with the music on this one. So on to the release, Blade Runner is released June 25th, 1982 and 1300 theaters across the United States. The date June 25th was chosen because Alan Ladd Jr. is apparently that numerology guy from the, uh, rehearsal. His previous highest, two grossing films, Star Wars and Alien, were released on the 25th of May in 1977 and 79. So that was his lucky day. Unlike Alien and Star Wars, Blade Runner, though, was wading into a theatrical landscape that was thick with sci-fi options for American viewers. So, 1982, let's go through some of the other notable releases from that year.

And this is pretty funny. Tron, the Thing. Star Trek 2, The Wrath of Khan. Ooh, the best one. Conan the Barbarian. Mad Max 2, the Road Warrior, Poltergeist, and the dark crystal. Now, you should note,

every single one of those movies was remade or rebooted between 2011 and 2020. Poultergeist was? It was. You didn't see it. Sam Rockwell, Rosemary DeWitt. Every single one of those movies

was rebooted or remade in some former fashion in the last 11 years. I mean, they're all good. And that includes Blade Runner eventually. Now, one film from 1982 was not rebooted or remade, and that's because it's one of the most

successful movies of all times. and no one's going to touch it. What one sci-fi film sucked the oxygen out of the air in 1982 for everyone else, Lizzie? Any guesses? It's got to be E.T. E.T. The movie that most people forget made $619 million. That's so many dollars. And its original run on a $10 million budget.

And then it did another run and made another $300 million. My God. Oh, my God. It was insane. This movie was number one at the box office. for 16 weeks in 1982. It's amazing. And it's the rare movie that you could take a kid to, although it is terrifying in some parts,

that parents don't want to just shoot themselves in the face during. So, you know, absolutely. I get it. And most notably, Tron, The Thing, and Blade Runner suffered the most as the more adult sci-fi films in the room. Unfortunate as The Thing is one of my favorite movies of all time. Yeah, they bombed pretty hard. So the issue really seemed to be also that Blade Runner,

was advertised as a sci-fi action film. You can watch the original trailer. It's very pulse-pounding. People also knew Harrison Ford from Star Wars and Indiana Jones. And then when they showed up, it's slow and pensive and ambiguous and dark. And so critics were divided.

Sheila Benson from LA Times called it Blade Crawler, which I thought was kind of funny. And while the movie was praised for its special effects in world building, some said it was sci-fi pornography. But it had its defenders, too. It's not like it was panned. Some people are like, no, it's complex and rich, and it'll stand the test of time, and they

ended up being right. So at the end of its theatrical run, and I found conflicting numbers, but what I saw was that in its first two weeks, it did $14 million domestically. It ended up basically doing $27 or $28 million domestically. I could not find international numbers, regardless. It was a bomb. It cost $30 million to make. It's probably costing another $15 to market.

It's going to need $90 to break even, more or less. and it makes a less than a third of that. Ridley Scott was a little scarred. I get the sense from this project. He kind of rebounds with 1984's famous 1984 Apple commercial, which guys remember that. Yeah, that's right. He did that.

He did that. It was kind of the biggest commercial ever at that point. I think it was $900,000. And then he kind of had another flop with 1985's legend starring Tom Cruise and Tim Curry, which I'm sure we will cover at some point. Nobody's seen it. Yeah, he had a couple of like mad releases. Someone Watch Over Me, Black Rain.

a Michael Douglas Cot movie. But then he kind of had his comeback in the 90s with Thelma and Louise, and then again later with Gladiator. So go listen to our episode on Gladiator. We talk more about Scott in his career. For the Ladd Company, Alan Ladd, Jr.'s company, Blade Runner, was unfortunately the first

in a series of misfires that led to the quick end of the company. Oh, no. They had like four more films tank in the next year and a half, and by 1984, July of 1984, they were effectively defunct. The company continued

to exist kind of a name only, but everyone had left. Harrison Ford obviously went on to become one of the biggest stars of the last 40 years. And Sean Young famously immediately hopped aboard David Lynch's Dune. Yep. Sci-Fi to sci-fi. She was really successful throughout the 80s, but then she had a really difficult, basically forced exit effectively from the business. This deserves like its own episode, but the high-level stuff I was able to put together, she was cast in Batman as Vicky Vale. that movie would go on to be the fifth highest grossing movie of all time when it released. She fell from a horse early in the shoot.

She injured herself, and she was immediately replaced by Kim Basinger because they wanted to keep their schedule. She was then cast as Tess Trueheart and Dick Tracy, only to be replaced after a week because, quote, she and Warren Beatty didn't get along. She says he made a pass at her and that she rebuffed him and he fired her. Yeah, that tracks. And the last thing is that apparently she and James Woods, and I have no. not gotten to the bottom of this, had an enormous blow-up off of a movie called No Way Out, and he sued her and got her labeled as like an unstable actress, basically.

Oh, no. I want to learn more about Sean Young because I think she's great. I don't want to do a disservice, and there were some wild stories I heard about the James Woods thing, but I want to do more research before talking about that. And kind of most tragically, Philip Dick never saw Blade Runner. He died on March 2nd, 1982, three months before the film's release. Oh, wow. So Philip Dick, he died pretty young, and he never saw any of his projects adapted.

Well, at least he got to see that one little bit of... Exactly. The 20 minutes of footage that he saw, their special effects demonstration, was all he ever saw of his work being put on the big screen. And it was great. Now, obviously, Blade Runner resurfaced, and it resurfaced in a crazy way. It was kind of ahead of its time, obviously, but it basically landed just in... time for the home video, boom. So VHS had just won the format war over Betamax, and it becomes this cult favorite as a rental

throughout the 1980s. And then Criterion released a Laserdisc version of the movie in the late 80s that became like this all-time bestseller. But things really get interesting when unexpectedly, a little-seen version of the film resurfaces like The One Ring. Don't know why I made that reference. Somebody's watching Lord of the Rings. Michael Eric is a film sound preservationist.

And he's the head, I think, of archiving at Warner Brothers at the time. And in 1989 or 1990, he discovers what he thinks is a rare 70-millimeter print of Blade Runner, the theatrical film. And they're called the Todd A.O. VALT. Todd A.O. was a print projection process. I'm not going to get into that detail. I want to say we covered that in Cleopatra. Was that?

Yeah, probably. Because it did like Todd A.O. versus VistaVision, like, that whole, like, cinemascope thing. I think that might have been related to Elizabeth Taylor's one of her many husbands, I think. Yeah. Go check out the Cleopatra episode. It's a good plug. So he basically secures the print for Warner Brothers.

They put it in their archives. And as a result, in May of 1990, somebody pulls it out thinking it's just a 70-millimeter print of the theatrical. And they screen it at the L.A. Cineplexodian Fairfax Theater as part of a retrospective of 70-millimeter print. So this Sunday morning screening is sold out for Blade Runner, and they start it, and all of a sudden, everybody realizes that this isn't the theatrical release. Whoa. Because there's no voiceover. And everyone's like, yeah! So this was a workprint that had been used in one of the sneak previews.

Ridley Scott had cut almost all of the VO, and it had his original dark ending in it. So this is much closer to Ridley Scott's director's cut. Now it's rough. It's not like final sound mix or anything like that. But people watch it and they're like, holy shit. Yeah. This is so cool. So then they set up two screenings of it at the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences,

Ampas, and they sell out both times. And so then Ridley Scott watches it and he's like, oh, I actually kind of like this movie that like I've been trying to like shed for the last decade. Yeah. And so Warner Brothers starts getting. fan mail from all these people. And it's basically the original release the Snyder Cut campaign was for Blade Runner. So Warner's then re-releases a restored print of that version of the movie, and they do a limited release in L.A. at the New Art and at the Castro Theater in San Francisco,

and it breaks box office records for per-screen averages in its re-release 10 years after the original movie has come out. Oh, man. What a vindication for Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford. Yeah. So then Warner Brothers and Ridley Scott are like, okay, let's do an official re-release. But Warner Brothers doesn't want to like spend money on this at this point. So basically they say like, we'll cut the narration, we'll leave in the original ending, and we'll like put the unicorn dream back in. But we're not going to color correct it.

We're not going to remix it. We're not going to add back the violent shots from the international cut that got removed. And they called this the director's cut, even though it wasn't really to the director's cut. Like, it was just closer to the director's cut. And so they actually did on the 10th anniversary of the original release in September of 1992, they did another release in theaters of the director's cut. And its per-screen revenues were the highest in the country. It expanded to 100 theaters.

It made a bunch of money in Europe and Japan and Australia. And the reviews that came in, like, reassessed the movie. And it got a new life. And it made $5 million in its re-release run. And then 10 years after that, in 2000, Ridley Scott takes another look at Blade Runner. And he's like, you know what? Like, we should fucking finish this movie for real. So he hires Charles de Lazurica.

I apologize. That's probably wrong. And this is a, he's a film restorer and like a DVD producer. And they put together Scott's like final cut of the movie. They go back through all the original negatives. They reshoot some of the scenes, including like the Zora death scene originally. used a body double and it looked really bad. So they re-shot her on a green screen and digitally inserted her into the movie.

Wow. They color-corrected all the stuff that wasn't color-corrected. They remixed it. They remastered the Vangelis score. And that's the version that you watched. It's great. It's like the remastered final cut. That's the version to go see.

Which again made like $2 million at the box office when they re-released that in 2007. And of course, the movie was again revived in 2017 with Deneve Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049. But in a weird twist of fate, Villeneuve would also go on to remake Dune, the projects that Scott had left to make Blade Runner. And as history tends to, it repeated itself with 2049, which like the original was a box office disappointment, grossed 260 million against its $185 million budget. I mean, closer to $250 million with their advertising spend. But maybe we'll get a new version of 2049 in the year 2049 in the same way that we got Blade Runner. And so that brings me to the conclusion of what went wrong on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, a movie that really took 20 years to ultimately finish.

Yeah. But got to a good place. It's amazing. It's really amazing. I'm so glad that we did this and that you have me watch that one because I guarantee I saw the theatrical cut and I just, it didn't, nothing about it stayed with me. Yeah. And then this, this version is gorgeous. Yeah.

I think it's the best version in my opinion. Famously, Guillermo del Toro loves the original voiceover because they play it in the documentary. There's a big part in the documentary where one of the producers is like, I like the voiceover, and maybe it's just because they're my friends,

but everyone I've shown it to also says they prefer the voiceover. And I'm like, yeah, it's because they're your friends. Yeah, if they're in the room with you. And then they cut to Guillermo del Coro, and he's just, it's so, he's the only part of the documentary he's in, he's like, I love the voiceover. I listen to my Criterion collection with the voiceover all the time.

And it's so funny. And then they cut to Frank Darabon. He's like, that voiceover is fucking trash. It's a very funny part of the documentary. You guys check it out. It's great. Dangerous Days. Buy the five disc definitive final cut on Blu-ray.

It's actually worth it. I know. Now I kind of want it. It's great. And it's so good. So as promised, we skipped what went right on last week's episode. so we owe you guys a big What Went Right for this week's episode. Lizzie, in your mind,

what went right on Blade Runner? Oh my God. I mean, I don't know, everything. I loved it. I really was like so taken in by this. I guess I'll, I've got to give it to Rutger Hauer because out of everything in this movie that is so beautiful and pitch perfect from performances to, you know,

affects everything, he is stunning and that final monologue so I did know going into this that that line was his and I knew that it's a bit of the story of that monologue but it's still just it's like a gut punch and it's so simple and I guess my what went right is actually the line after when he just says time to die I love how he's just like I'm done well it's also great because it's like that's the bond line time to die like Mr. Bond right that the villain always says but he's saying it about himself, which, like, just takes all the power.

I just, yeah, it's a great line. It reminds me of, uh, I'm finished from there will people, my other favorite ending line. It sounds so good. My what went right, of course, is also Rutger Howard. Yes.

But it's also Harrison Ford a little bit. And so I've prepared a little ending for us, if you'll indulge me. Sometimes when you make a movie, things just line up. Blade Runner was an absolutely, miserable experience for Harrison Ford. He hated it, and in the same way, it was a miserable experience for his character, Rick

Deckerdard, who did not want to be hunting down these replicants. Blade Runner was a transcendent experience for Rutger Howard. It remained his favorite film he'd ever made up until his death, as he would always tell people. He brought an artistry and a joieave to it that illuminated Roy Batty in a way that perhaps no one else could. He seemed to be someone who knew that this was a once-and-a-leaveevevee to it. lifetime experience, perhaps his last experience, someone who knew he was in a way going to die

at the end of this movie. And he wanted to milk it for everything that it was. And the movie works as well as it does for a whole host of reasons from the brilliant cinematography and design to the score and the sound. But I think that really what the movie comes down to is two amazing, opposing performances. Harrison Ford, on the one hand, and Rutker-Hauer. And I think that the circumstances are what allowed them to be so perfectly calibrated. So for me, what went right is that Harrison Ford fucking hated making this movie. Yeah. And Rutger Hauer loved it. I'd like to end with a quote from Rutger Hauer. He passed away on July 19th, 2019. We lost him too soon. But I think he carried this movie deeply, more deeply than anyone else involved, including

Ridley Scott. Here is Rutger Hauer speaking about Blade Runner, at the Centro Experimentali of Cinematography in Milan. This is 30 years after the release of Blade Runner. The one phrase, that one line, it didn't come from me. It came from the poet in me, and there was a poet in Roy,

which doesn't make sense, but there was, right, in the programs. By coming up with that one line to conclude Roy's quest, I was also anchoring myself as an actor in my own, you know, in my own insecure way. And for an audience to carry that, you know, for 30 years with such love, I mean, it cannot really get any better. You know, it cannot get better. Never.

It can't get better. This is one moment and this is 30 years later. It's still the same moment. It's ridiculous. That concludes our coverage of Blade Runner. We hope you enjoyed it. As always, leave us a rating and review if you haven't yet. And please send your recommendations of movies for us to cover. Bye.

What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthani Uos.