WHAT WENT WRONG - Cutthroat Island

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

It's the film that fin(n)ished Carolco! Or so we've been led to believe... This week, Chris & Lizzie seek to uncover who really scuttled Carolco Pictures - was it Geena Davis and Renny Harlin? Or was Cutthroat Island a mere scapegoat? Plus, Matthew Modine takes his lumps (on set and after), poop tanks infect the crew, and Michael Douglas dodges a trip to Davy Jones' locker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello 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 very expensive one that sank to the bottom of the ocean, all so pirates of the Caribbean could drunken Jack Sparrow run away with the booty. I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here, as always, with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do you have for us today? I'm glad you didn't say run away with Kira Knightley's booty. I don't know why that's what I thought you were going to say. I would never. I would die before. You would never.

And I should walk the plank for even suggesting it. Yep. We have Cutthroat Island, a film that has been recommended, suggested, implored by our audience to be covered many a time. And finally, I decided, you know what? It's time for me to leap off an exploding barrel, Rennie Harlan-style, and cover this movie. And this is a really fun story. It is one that is going to take us to, I mean, the edges of the earth as far as Hollywood financing is concerned, and I hope we can dispel the many rumors around this movie because it is not the tale that we have been told, or at least the tale that I have heard and internalized myself. And I will first express what that is.

So, Lizzie, before we dive into myth versus reality, fact versus fiction, what was mere stories of piracy on the high seas with Cutthroat Island and what I ever. actually happened. I have to ask you, what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast? Well, I'd never seen this movie before. I knew that it, well, let's say, I thought I knew that it was an unmitigated disaster. And all I'd ever heard was, you know, this is in the top 10 movies usually that pop up when you look for like biggest box office disasters, biggest money losers. And so I thought, okay, well, this is just going to be terrible. Yeah. Like, this movie's going to be really bad. I'm going to have to just soldier through. And that was not the case at all. You know, is it the best script in the world? No. No, not at all. However, it's really, really fun.

And I really enjoyed both Gina Davis and Matthew Modin, although he's strange in this world. He's much more suited to a Stranger Things universe than he is to a whatever this is, 18th century pirate universe, 18th, 17th? I'll double check it right now. Who knows? You know what? doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah, I thought all of the explosions were incredible and boy, were there a lot of explosions. 17th century. 17th, okay, there you go. I thought it might be early. You know, maybe one too many explosions, except that they were really fun to watch every time they exploded something, which is, I would say, about every five minutes, something explodes in this movie, something large and expensive. Gina Davis, I thought was really great, particularly with the

stunt work that looks like she is doing. I don't know if we're going to get into that, but there's a couple of action sequences in this where they're not cutting away. So I assume it is her doing a lot of this. And I thought that was really impressive. And I've always really liked Gina Davis. Also, she and Matthew Modena are just super hot. So that helps and is fun to watch. Frank Langella, eaten every piece of scenery, thoroughly enjoyed that. I loved King Charles. I hope that monkey was paid appropriately. He was a star. And yeah, I just, I don't know that this deserves to be besmirched to the way that it has been for all time. But the thing that I could not get out of my head when watching this is how much Pirates of the Caribbean DNA is in this movie.

It's crazy. Yeah. They just said, let's just do it better. Yes. But let's do this. Literally. They just said, what if we had a slightly better script? Not even that much better.

What if we had a slightly better script and we add ghosts? And that's it. Yeah. Better dialogue. Yeah. Funnier dialogue. Sure. Yeah.

There's some better actors. Okay. It's better. It's better. But it was so very clear that this movie set the stage for Pirates of the Caribbean in a big, big way that I didn't understand before watching this. So I'll hold the rest of my thoughts there. But yeah, I really enjoyed this.

This does not deserve the legacy that it has acquired. I agree. One complaint. Okay. The number of times they punched Gian Davis in the face. It was one too many. Oh, no, I'm 100% fine with that. You're fine with that?

Yeah, if this is going to be a female pirate, like a woman pirate in this world. It is equal opportunity face punching. Exactly. Let's just lean into it. They did. She gets shot. She gets punched in the face. She gets thrown off a cliff.

You know? I mean, that's what it would have. happen as supposedly to a pirate or and Bonnie. I thought I had seen this at some point. I've seen scenes of this for sure at some point. I don't know if I'd ever watch the whole thing through. And I had the same experience. I think this movie has a lot of highs. Great. As you mentioned, practical effects, stunt work, explosions, some fun cinematography, some great aerial cinematography, great horseback riding scenes, especially earlier when she's running the horse across the submerged sand spit at the beginning. It's very fun. I thought, fantastic production design, great costumes.

I agree. I think the story is fine. I think the dialogue, I don't think that the... There's not much story. Yeah, I don't think that the, with the exception of Franklin Jella, I don't think that the actors feel well suited to the dialogue and vice versa. And so the dialogue feels a little caught in between, are we modernizing it, or are we not modernizing it? So that I think is a little tough. But as you mentioned, when we're in the more physical scenes, I think both Gina Davis and Matthew Modin really shine in this movie. There, as you mentioned, both very attractive, tall, strong people.

And we'll talk about some more tall people, many tall people and very tall people in this episode. Yeah, wasn't Frank Langella huge? He's also tall. But the story that I'd always heard about this movie and the, you know, the reason I wanted to cover it is that, like you said, I heard that this was an unmitigated disaster. It was a runaway production. And because this movie, which was such an Icarus-esque endeavor by Harlan and Davis who were married when they made this movie, that sank Coralco, the company behind it. and it was their folly. And as we'll learn, this movie did not slit the throat of Caroleco.

In fact, it may have merely been a scapegoat to cover up the inevitable scuttling of a shockingly leaky ship, as it were. Okay. But first, Lizzie, let's get into the details. So Cutthroat Island is a 1995 swashbuckler directed by Rennie Harlan. We have not covered Rennie Harlan yet. I'm very excited to talk about him a little bit today. written by Robert King and Mark Norman from a story by Michael Frost Beckner, James Gorman, Bruce A. Evans, and Reynolds Gideon, and executive produced, most importantly, by Mario Casar.

It stars, as you mentioned, Gina Davis as Captain Morgan, Adams, Matthew Modine, is William Shaw, Frank Langella as Dog Brown. The stupidest name ever. They say Doc Brown, but Dog Brown. And they spell it, D-A-W-G. Yeah. I do. Mori Chakin is John Reed, Patrick Malahy.

as Ainsley, Stan Shaw, as Mr. Glasspool, and many, many more. It was released in the United States on December 22nd, 1995, distributed by MGM, but produced by Caroleco. And as always, the IMDB logline reads, a female pirate and her companion race against their rivals to find a hidden island that contains fabulous treasure. Cutthroat Island. That's it. I wanted to shout out one additional actor who I actually thought was great in this and reminded me tonally very much. of I think where they land in Pirates of the Caribbean, which was Angus Wright as Captain Trotter, the captain who at the end.

Who changed his size at the end. I thought he was really great. I agree. Very fun to watch. Yeah. He understood the assignment. He did. For sure.

Not everyone did. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to Fiasco, a history of Hollywood's iconic flops by James Robert Parrish, very fun book we pulled from it before. Box Office Poison, Hollywood's Story and a Century of Flops by Tim Roby, and Dying of Politeness, a Memoir by Gina Davis. Gina. Now, Lizzie, we're going to cover more Gina Davis shortly.

We are. But we're going to take a departure from her. And we're going to head back to the year of 1990. As the Colonial Brits cursed the Pirates of the Caribbean in the Pirates of the Caribbean later, well, Hollywood Studios were cursing the name of one man, Mario Casar. Now, he was the producer behind some of the biggest action comedies of the 80s and early 90s. I'm sure you heard of. First Blood, Ran.

Rambo 2, Rambo 3, Total Recall, a couple of bangers in there, and then just a couple that made a lot of money. Yeah. He seemed to have a treasure map to box office success. Each of these movies made over $125 million worldwide. Total recall pulled in over a quarter of a billion dollars, and Rambo 2 did a cool $300 million. Cassar was rolling in it. And like any good pirate, he had a ship. You could find him at Cannes throwing parties on his 203-foot yacht, or back in L.A.,

driving around Bel Air in a stretch limo, license plate, Carolco. Now, Carolco had only been around for 15 years or so, but by the early 90s, they were known for cutting big checks to attract bigger names to their movies. Like the $16 million they paid Sylvester Stallone to do Rambo 3, which was more than the entire budget of First Blood. Or the 10 million they gave Arnold Schwarzenegger to do total recall. I mean, it paid off. They gave Michael Douglas $10.5 million for basic instinct with another four and a half guaranteed.

For basic instinct? I mean, yeah, I guess. Listen, that's not Michael Douglas's finest erotic thriller role. That obviously goes to fatal attraction. But fine. Yeah, it is part of the triumvirate of Michael Douglas is so sexy. He literally drives women insane trilogy. Wait, what's the third? Disclosure. Oh, yes, of course. Yeah. A fun genre that doesn't makes sense. A fun genre when we determined that women were the problem in sexual harassment cases in the workplace. And not Michael Douglas. Exactly. These were record-setting salaries. Mario Casar called them the Carolco premium. And it wasn't just for actors. Basic Instincts scribe Joel Estherhouse was paid $3 million for that script. Producer Irwin Winkler made out with a cool one million. But most important to our story, Carolco also wanted big-time directors,

reliable captains to steer their ships into the terrifying waters of physical production, like James Cameron, your personal favorite, who sailed off to direct Terminator 2, now in pre-production, for $5 to $6 million. My favorite. I love T2, Judgment Day. It's great. Paul Verhoeven's attorney told the L.A. Times at the time that they had asked for, quote, a staggeringly large amount of money on total recall. And Mario just said yes.

This was great, great for talent. No better a time to be a gun for hire on the high. high seas of Hollywood, but it was driving up prices for the Hollywood studios. And Kasar wasn't just doing this with the established stars. He was paying above market for up-and-coming talent, too, like one, Rennie Harlan. Lizzie, how familiar are you with the man known as Rennie Harlan? Not. I mean, Cliffhanger. Cliffhanger. Great example. You've probably seen Deep Blue Sea, or at least the scene where Sam Jackson gets eaten by a shark. Oh, no, I've seen it. I've seen it. It's great. We need to cover it. So he's come up a lot on the show, and I would describe him as a man of extremes.

He is famous for some massive hits. Cliffhanger is a great example, but some massive flops. Cutthroat Island would be a great example. But back in 1990, he's 31 years old, and he is on his way up. And Lizzie, I cannot paint you a good enough picture, so I need to show you one. I would like to show you Rennie Harlan at the premiere of Wild at Heart. Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, he has Laura Dern on his arm, which is going to help anybody in the, I'm guessing this is late 80s.

This is amazing. So he, I mean. Yeah, please describe him. I don't know if it gets better than this, circa 1990, if that's where we are. It's 1990, yeah. 1990. He is a very attractive blonde man. He has long, luscious, unbrushed Fabio-esque locks falling around his shoulders.

He is wearing really a fabulous black leather jacket, motorcycle jacket, some just a great J.O. F.K Jr., baggy trouser pants, obviously a black t-shirt. He's got a scruffy beard. And then, of course, he has Laura Dern on his arm who has maybe the most insane shoulder pads I've ever seen in this picture. She's got like a David Byrne suit on with a miniskirt, but it feels very serious. So anyway, it's the most 90s picture I've ever seen. I love it. Also, I would point out, Laura Dern looks short in this photo with Rennie Harlan. Yeah, and she's probably wearing heels and she's quite tall. And she's quite tall. Rainey Harlan's 6-4. All right. Big, big Nordic man. Just an important question. Is that an earring? No. I can't believe he doesn't have an earring. Well, maybe we can't see the piercings he

has. I don't know. He has to have at least one. So he'd started out as a commercial director. He made the leap to the feature film Born American, which was made in Finland, and it was supposed to star Chuck Norris, who was backed out when financing got shaking and was replaced by his son, Mike Norris, and the IMTV logline reads, a trio of vacationing American students crossed the border from Finland to the USSR during the Cold War and are soon imprisoned after a skirmish with Soviet soldiers.

Hell yeah. It did surprisingly well in the United States, and Rennie Harlan, roundhouse kicked the front door of Hollywood down. He comes to the U.S. and he gets hired to direct two low-budget horror films. On the one hand, you have a movie called Prison. I've never seen this movie.

here's the IMDB logline. The spirit of a long-dead prisoner returns for revenge haunting the prison's new governor. Now, it's produced by Erwin Yablons, who he did Halloween, which we discussed. Brother of Frank Yoblins, right? Yes, that's right. And it starred Vigo Mortensen.

Vigco? Yeah. It did not make an impact at the box office. But on the other hand, he also directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, The Dream Master, which we just talked about on Tank Girl. It was made for $6 or $7 million, but it made nearly $50 million at the box office. It became the highest grossing nightmare film yet.

And then in 1990, two more movies and two more extremes. On the one hand, he has The Adventures of Ford Fair Lane starring Andrew Dice Clay. Again, I have never seen this movie. Never heard of it. IMDB Logline reads, A vulgar private detective is hired to find a missing groupie and is drawn into a mystery involving a series of murders tied to the music industry. It did not recoup its budget.

Yeah. On the other hand, you have Die Hard 2, Die Harder. Great title. Which is on the poster. It's not technically the title. That's technically the tagline, yes. That made $117 million at the domestic box office alone, well over 200 worldwide. Now, the trend I started to notice, and this isn't necessarily a strike against Harlan,

but if I were going to offer him a job, I might say, this guy does really well when he steps into a franchise and perhaps not as well, or his movies don't tend to do as well when they're originals. So far. That seems to continue, too, right? He's got Exorcists at the beginning in 2004. I think that did decently well, didn't it? I didn't love it, but... It's a mixed bag, but let's continue forward. So I would simply suggest a studio might lord this over a young director, right? The young director might come in to negotiate and say, look, I have these two big hits and the studio might say, well, that was really Bruce Willis and that was really Freddie Kruger. Not Carolko. They decided

to pay Harlan $3 million to direct a hurricane movie called Gale Force. Which I want to see Rennie Harlan's twisters so bad. And suddenly everyone in Hollywood, Lizzie, could feel the wins of change. Sorry, not sorry. If Rennie Harlan was getting $3 million, then more established directors wanted $4, 5, $6 million. Harlan told the L.A. Times, it changed everything. People started questioning their fees. I'm very happy about it.

Directors are the ones behind the movies. They are as important as the stars. I like that he took this as a compliment or as a positive. spin because an offensive way to take it would be everyone saying, if Reddy Harlan's getting $3 million, why am I not getting more? Everyone's going, who? I'm glad that he took it as like a proletariat sort of solidarity workman's like approach to this.

The question remains, how could Caroleco afford to, quote, pay a lot more money? Where is this treasure coming from, Lizzie? And to answer that question, we need to rewind a few years. So Carolco was founded in 1976 by two men, Mario Casar and Andy Vina, who we discussed on a couple of other episodes because he later formed synergy and did Tombstone, for example. Now, they had met in 1975 at the Cannes Film Festival. We discussed Vina before, but back in the mid-70s, he was a 30-something Hungarian businessman based out of Hong Kong. He'd fled Canada from Hungary, reunited with his parents in California. He went to UCLA, and at this point, in the mid-70s,

he owns a wig manufacturing company, two movie theaters, and just launched a foreign film sales business called Pan Asia Films. Just a real smorgasbord of business interests. Yeah, that makes me sweat, just thinking about that. We have one podcast. I can't. I can barely do it. I'm kidding out right now.

So, Kassar, on the other hand, was in his mid-20s, a little bit younger. He was born in Beirut in Lebanon. He had family ties to the film business through distribution. His dad worked in film distribution. He got his start selling the rights to European movies to Asia and the Middle East for commission. Then he would start buying the rights himself, using a loan from his godfather, who was a banker. And again, to be clear, at this point in time, really up until 1975,

Lebanon was known as the Switzerland of the Middle East. It had an amazingly robust financial sector. So it makes a lot of sense that it would be a portal or a passageway through which both film financing and distribution could run. Now, Carolco was the name of a defunct company from Panama. We could not figure out what they originally did, but Casar and Vina buy that name. And they form their own company and start buying up the rights to European movies

and selling them in Asia. And there are some funny quotes with them about the movies, that they would buy and sell. And, you know, basically they're buying for a dollar, sell them for 100, you know, over in Asia, just based on somebody's name. So by the early 80s, they're back in L.A. They have a small office in Melrose,

two desks facing each other. Vina's wife and Casar's girlfriend are their secretaries. And they start producing their own movies. And key to their strategy is foreign pre-sales to independent distributors abroad. Basically, here's the package. We've got the script, the stars, the director. Here's the budget.

Here's the price. You pay for your re-sales. the right to distribute in advance, and then we use that money to fund the budget. So if you don't have studio financing or you're not going to do a negative pickup or you can't do equity financing, you pre-sell the rights abroad, and then you can fund the film that way. They're an independent operation, but in the U.S., they have a partnership with TriStar Pictures. Now, Lizzie, any good pirate knows that you need a name that will travel and a way to protect your loot.

And they had both. So to sell their movies abroad, they needed big name talent, Arnold, Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro. And to protect their treasure, they need tax shelters. Don't we all? Yes. So in the mid-1980s, a tax attorney named Peter Hoffman became the president of Coralco. And according to the LA Times, he used his, quote, arcane tax skills to take advantage of a 28-year-old clause in the U.S. Tax Code that enables American corporations operating overseas to shelter much of their foreign income through subsidiary set up in places like the Netherlands, for example. Side note, director Ui Boll from Germany has been in the news with his terrible movie that I'm not even going to name right now.

Oh, the Army Hammer thing? Yeah. People have often wondered how did he continue to make movies for so long, even though they all lose money. Apparently it is he took advantage of this tax loophole in Germany that sounds not dissimilar from this for 20 years. And it allowed him to get, you know, 50% on the dollar back of everything. All right, sidebar done. A few years after Hoffman became president, Andy Vina left the company. We couldn't find a direct quote confirming this, but some sources, claim that he was more cautious than Kassar, and he was worried about the sustainability of their

business model. But at this point, Lizzie, the business model seemed to be working. So you mentioned Terminator 2, amazing movie. It grossed $517 million. It was the highest grossing film of 1991, the third highest grossing movie of all time behind just Star Wars and E.T. The Extraterrestrial. Basic Instinct made more than $320 million. But these movies were not cheap. T2. was 100 million, basic instinct was 50 million, but there was a method to the madness. As he later said, Casar, it's easier to raise $100 million than $5 million. When you say, oh, I need two or three million, people say, why don't you fund it yourself? But if you say, I need $100 million, because it's got this or that in it, they get excited. It's more attractive. Their ego gets

higher. The small amount of money worries people. I feel like basic instinct is a clue because that movie does not need to cost $50 million. Like when you, you're talking about Terminator, T2, sure. I understand why that cost would it cost. Basic instinct is basic, as it were, other than the people in it and what you paid the people, which is a massive inflation. That movie does not need to cost $50 million at that point at all. I bet you basic instinct has, if you just run the quick napkin math numbers, $20 to $25 million, and above the line costs alone between Verhoven, Esther House, Douglas, and Stone, and the lion's share being Douglas in that instance, It's a massively inflated above-the-line situation.

Huge. I mean, that thing probably could have been made for under $30 million. No problem. Well, the Caroleco premium is catching up to them. So in 91, they lost $265 million. It's a lot of dollars. And they were being investigated by the IRS. Over the next couple of years, there are more losses, layoffs,

all sorts of attempts to attract investors. They sold the TV rights to their film library, and by the end of 1992, they made a deal with the French bank Credit Leonese, which also happened to own MGM. They'd taken them over in a restructure. And as part of the deal, MGM would get distribution rights to Caroleco's films for the next five years as soon as its deal with TriStar expired beginning in 1994, which would be, of course right before Cuthroat Island in 1995. Okay, now Lizzie, I know what you're thinking. When are we going to keep talking about Rennie Harlan's hurricane movie, Gale Force? Yes, can't wait. It got canceled. So. Okay. Harlan stayed in the Caroleco family. He made Clifhanger, which you mentioned with Sylvester Stallone. We are absolutely going to cover it. Also, they did a remake, reboot, requal that theoretically coming out this year, although that's been tied up in weird financial headaches.

But that movie had production shutdowns. It went millions of dollars over budget. And yet, not a bad word from Harlan. As he told Variety in 1992, Mario and I don't talk money. We've had no problems with it, and I love working with him. He doesn't interfere. So Harlan likes that Mario, does not seem to creatively interfere with him.

Now, this lack of interference, Lizzie, allowed Harlan to carry out one of the craziest stunts ever put on film. Do you remember the stunt where stuntman Simon Crane's zip lines between two planes? Do you remember that scene? Yes, of course. I vaguely remember this movie, but that I will never forget. They really did that. So Simon Crane... Yeah, clearly. He was on Golden Eye. We discussed him on that film, and we discussed the bungee jump sequence. He nearly died, and it cost a million dollars to do this, and it still holds the record,

the Guinness World Record for most expensive... Yeah, exactly. Most expensive film stunt performed in the air. It was peak 90s action movie shit. Yeah. And Lizzie, there was one person who wanted it on peak 90s action movie shit. Any guesses? Actor or director? Actor. Who was on the outside looking in and wanted in. She's the star of this movie. Oh, Gina Davis. Gina Davis. All right. She was having arguably a more meteoric rise than Rennie Harlan even. But before we get there, a quick backstory. And you can go more into it. when we do, Thelma and Louise. So she was born Virginia Elizabeth. She grew up in Massachusetts. Her mom grew all of their food in a one acre garden. That's awesome. She bathed one time a week. Oh. She and her brother fought over who we'd use the bathwater first. She later said,

my parents probably would have been Amish had they heard of being Amish. Their lives would have changed not a bit. What were they? Just seems like Frontiers, man. Okay. Homesteaders. Yeah. She also said that when she was three years old, she told her parents, I am going to be an actor. She studied acting at Boston University. I know, my alma mater. But she didn't graduate, unlike Lizzie. She moved to New York and wanted to become a model.

She was working as a salesperson at Anne Taylor, my mom's old favorite place to shop on her character. Of course. And sat in the window display with a couple of mannequins as a joke. She would sit very still. She didn't blink. She tried not to move her chest when she breathed. But every once in a while, she would move robotically.

And people started gathering outside the window to try to figure out if she was real. They were like, she has to be real. She has arm hair. So she shaved her arm hair. And they said, she has to be real. She doesn't have a plug. So she attached a cord to her leg, so it looked like she was plugged into the wall. Now, she did work as a model, but a lot of the jobs used her as a body double for somebody else's face or just a hand bottle.

This wasn't a runaway success modeling career. She auditions for a movie and she books it. Do you know what her first movie role was Lizzie? No, I don't. Tutsi. Oh, that's right. Yes, I forgot about that. I love Tutsi.

Although I know that there are some problems, but... We'll cover it. Now, when she was on Tootsie, she didn't know that you were only supposed to come to set on just the days that you were filming. So Gina Davis came to set every single day. Oh. And Dustin Hoffman took her under his wing, brought her along to watch dailies, and then she took off.

So, Lizzie, let's talk about her run from 1986 to 1992. The Fly, 1986, Jeff Goldblum, Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice, 1988, and the accidental tourist that same year. And yes, people are going to scoge. Scream to the heavens that I didn't mention, Earth Girls Are Easy, and Transylvania 6,5,000, which are both cult films, also with Jeff Goldblum, and of course they were a couple in the late 80s. The point is, she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Muriel Pritchett and the accidental tourist, less than five years into her acting career at this point in time. And then she co-stars in two more back-to-back hits in the early 90s. Lizzie, do you know which two movies these are, female-driven films?

Well, one is certainly Thelma and Louise. Yes. I don't know the other one. Sports movie. Oh, a league of their own. That's right. So it's the early 90s. She's in her mid-30s and she's looking to do something different. As she later wrote in her memoir,

I had wanted to be in an action movie for a long time. I love nothing more than going to a theater to see one on its opening Friday night. One of my goals is still to be a kick-ass villain in a Marvel movie or in a Wonder Woman movie. The baseball of a league of their own had convinced me that my body was no longer my enemy. So she spoke about how she felt that her height was almost something that she she had to apologize for earlier in her career. And she would lie about her height when she was going out for modeling jobs, for example. Of course, because she's six feet tall, right?

Yes, she's very tall. Yeah. So she wanted to do more physical roles. She liked firing a gun in Thelma and Louise, for example. And so her agents say, well, if you want to do action, you should probably meet Rennie Harlan. So they meet. We'll talk about this more in Thelma and Louise, but it is interesting because I feel like if you look at her earlier roles, just the way that she's moving in those.

Thelma and Louise and a league of their own, but I think particularly Thelma and Louise, there's a big departure in terms of how she holds herself and also how she's being shown on camera, too. You can tell she's very tall in both of those movies. Yeah, they cast her opposite some tall man. I mean, she and Alec Baldwin, I think are close to the same height in Beetlejuice. And then Jeff Goldblum is obviously taller. Tse 4. And we'll get to her co-star here. Frank Langella, 6'4, Gina Davis, 6'4. Matthew Modine, 6'4. Matthew Modine, 6'4. Wow. I didn't realize he's Wow. Okay.

Me neither. So this meeting, she goes to meet Rani Harlan, and it goes well. It goes really well. So as she later said, the meeting went on for much longer than it probably needed to. It's tough to meet men anyway, but when you meet a Nordic god, well, you fall in love. So Davis and Harlan soon start dating. I believe basically Davis, Goldblum, Harlan, and Dern all like swap basically because Goldblum started dating Dern and then Harlan married Dern. And they're all giant people.

The good news is they all seem to like each other still, too. They do all seem to like each other. Yeah, well. Maybe not after this, but. We'll talk about, I don't know how things ended between Davis and Rennie Harlan, but yes. Davis and Goldblum, at least, are on good terms. It seems so. So a couple months later, she's on the verge of landing her dream action role.

In May of 1993, Variety Report's, Davis I's pirate role, but not cutthroat island. The movie was called Mistress of the Sea. It was based on a 1964 novel about the adventures of Anne Bonnie, 17th, Buccaneer. It was a Paul Verhoeven move, Lizzie. But by July, Verhoven walked away. There were reports that Harlan might replace Verhoven, but eventually both he and Davis left the project. By August, they were both attached to another pirate movie at Carolco called Cutthroat Island. According to Davis's memoir, it went down like this. Quote, quote,

at the same time that Verhoven was trying to put his project together, Rennie was also preparing to make a pirate movie called Cutthroat Island starring Michael Douglas. told Rennie he wanted a woman with a name to play the female pirate captain, and Rennie implored me to come on board as it were. I was still floating around Verhoven's project, but at dinner with Rennie and his producer, Mario Casar, Mario begged me to join Cutthroat and offered me a lot of money, which is how Mario Casar had gotten the script in the first place. So let's talk about where the script came from, Lizzie, and how it nearly became a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. So back in the early 90s, screenwriters Michael Frost Beckner and James Gorman had a year-long deal with

Disney and they had to write a handful of scripts and one of them was about pirates. So Bechner went and studied pirates at the Huntington Library. Shoutout, Huntington Library, Great Botanical Gardens too. And then he got to work. He wanted to give it the runaway train energy of a buddy comedy movie, gives the script to his writing partner, Gorman, he doesn't love it, too much sword fighting. So Bechner throws it out and they start over. They watch every pirate movie they can find. They're drinking rum while they're doing it. Basically, they wanted to take all the cliches from pirate movies and make them fresh. Like, What if the sword fighting was in a burning warehouse instead of on a ship? And here's how the script, at least in this first draft, more or less went.

Second draft, I guess. We open on Cutthroat Island in the aftermath of a huge battle. There's a cave on the island, and we've got three men that have hidden the treasure. A Spaniard, a British privateer, and a pirate. There's a double cross. These three divide up the map to the treasure between them. We jump forward in time. A pirate's telling the story at a bar to our protagonist, Shaw,

the Matthew Modin character in the eventual film, Shaw imprisons the man and steals the money. He thinks the story was fake, but just in case decides to look into it, the Spaniards become a governor, the British guy's a doctor, and a man named the Scar is hunting them for the map pieces. Most importantly, tell me if this reminds you

of a character from Pirates of the Caribbean. Shaw can't swim, rig a boat, sail a ship, doesn't drink and can't shoot straight. Yeah, Jack Sparrow. Yeah. He's basically a stand-in for a contemporary person trapped in the pirate world. He teams up with the British doctor's daughter

Morgan, who doesn't know that her dad had been a brigadier, and across the movie, she arcs into the role of a pirate. Okay, so this is big-time Pirates of the Caribbean. A few other important details. Cutthroat Island was extremely difficult to get to. It had a volcano. The treasure map was not printed on a scalp. The missing piece was part of a lullaby that Morgan's father had sung to her as a child.

It's a lot less disgusting, but I've preferred that. Also kind of reminds me of the story of the boy that comes with Orlando Bloom. at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean. The tone was darker, and it was, according to a number of people, a lot closer to Pirates of the Caribbean. Also, Shaw was the main character. Morgan, the female role, was second build.

Several producers at Disney were on board, and they took it to Michael Eisner. And they said, we can do a Pirates of the Caribbean movie based on the ride using this script. And he said, no, we are not going to mix our rides with movies. And then they did that for about 15 years. straight a few years after this.

Anyway, back to Caroleco. According to the LA Times, Bechner's agents let Caroleco see the script before mailing it out to the studios and Mario Casar immediately forked over $2 million for it with no competitors. Oh my God.

And then nothing happened. Beckner reportedly met with Caroleco to discuss potential script changes, but they never reached a consensus so the focus became, we need to find a director who can find the right direction for this movie. There were reports that they were

considering Kevin Reynolds, who had just done Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and swore he would never work with Kevin Costner again. And then he would go and make water roll with Kevin Costner immediately afterward. And then he really swore he would never work with Kevin Costner again? That's right. He said, Kevin Costner should direct his movie so he can always work with his favorite actor, Kevin Costner. And then Kevin Costner said, you got it, buddy. And then he said, I will go build a ranch and shoot Horizon for the rest of my life on it. Yeah. The project never got off the ground, in part, Lizzie, because Caroleco was on the brink of bankruptcy.

But also, because Hollywood was very wary of the pirate genre. We talked about this on Pirates of the Caribbean and in our pirates primer. But it had been a long time since the golden age of pirates in Hollywood, the 30s and 40s. The 1962 adaptation of Mutiny on the Bounty was a troubled production that did not make its money back. Robert Shaw's Swashbuckler, nearly released in 1976 under the title, The Blarney Cock flopped. Same with Yellowbeard. And Rowan Plansky's pirates had made just $6 million against a $40 million budget.

Even Hook, I didn't know this. Hook was actually considered by the studio a bit of a failure. They say it fell short of their expectations, even though it made $300 million worldwide. It was very expensive. It was, and they were expecting a bigger hit out of Spielberg. So in 1993, the tides seem to be turning. Mistress of the Sea was in works at Columbia, as we discussed. There was another pirate film, female pirate film, called Anne of the Spanish Main,

with Timothy Dalton and Mercedes Rule attached over at Miramax. Love Timothy Dalton. Yes. Timothy Dalton, as Shaw, would have been, he is so dashingly dastardly. Yeah. There's something very sinister about Timothy Dalton, and I feel like that would have been good. I agree, and no disrespect to Matthew Modin, who I think is a wonderful actor. He is.

Timothy Dalton is very funny. Yeah. Very funny. He's funny, but he can also be scary. And I think that that's missing a little bit from this with Shaw. I agree. That was his bond. The Living Daylights.

He was a dark bond before we had a dark bond, you know. I know. He's my favorite Heathcliff. That's true. He's a good Heathcliff. Very good. So, Casar needs a big star to sell Cutthroat Island to foreign distributors. So enter Michael Douglas, basic instinct.

Douglas is interested. He's done something like this before. Watch movie, Lizzie. Romancing the Stone. Romancing the Stone. Exactly right. The Michael Douglas is so sexy he turns women into horny psychopaths.

Genre was starting to drive him insane. He said he wanted a positive change away from the dark films he'd been doing. Also, it didn't hurt that he was offered basically $12 or $13 million to do the movie. Yeah. So meanwhile, Davis and Harlan signed on for a lot less, but still hefty price tags.

So 3.5 to $5.5 million for Davis, five and a half for Harlan. I think this makes a lot of sense because at this point in time, she's second build to Michael Douglas. I was going to ask. Okay. So Shaw is still the main character. She is not the lead.

Shaw is the lead. Got it. So at this point, according to Davis, she said that she signed on to the project reluctantly because, quote, almost all the daring do was carried out by the men in the story. In fact, at one point, she was tied up in the hold for 30 pages. Interestingly, Kira Knightley also complained that she didn't get to do a sword fight

in the first Pirates of the Caribbean, and then, of course, she got to do it later on. But again, it's just interesting that it feels very Pirates of the Caribbean-E in many ways. The Verhoven Project's shaky. She's getting a big pay bump. Rennie Harlan's begging her. So she says yes to the movie and yes to Rennie Harlan. They get married in an elaborate three-day ceremony, line dancing, elephant rides, hot air balloons,

and a special song written by a Finnish composer called The Gina and Reni Waltz, which was almost drowned out by the press helicopters hovering overhead. Okay. Wow. Elephant rides. Yeah. I don't want to do that at a wedding. And line dancing.

Okay. I don't know. Now there's one problem, Lizzie. Michael Douglas is not happy with the script. He's pushing for rewrites, which pushes the shoot date from January of 1994 to June of 1994. Coralco brings in two more writers, Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon. These guys are Oscar nominated.

They had adapted Stand By Me. Oh, wow. They also wrote Star Man, for example. Now, we couldn't find a direct quote from Douglas on this, but he reportedly wanted Evans and Gideon to ramp up his role and tone down the violence. I think he wanted something a little closer to Indiana Jones and how playful the tone would be.

Or romancing the stone. That's a similar tone there. Exactly. This is consistent with what Rennie Harlan at the time said he wanted to do with his career. Quote, my goal now is to make an event movie that will take me away from violence and toward broad-based family movies.

It's just more interesting for a director to create a whole world for the characters instead of people just shooting each other. And then he said, hold my beer, here's some guns. By January of 94, he told, journalists, the movie would be PG-13. He said the shoot would take 85 days. They were considering locations in the Caribbean, Thailand, and Europe, and that they had tested computer-generated shots

to recreate the 17th century pirate ships. Meanwhile, Michael Douglas was rounding out his From Hell Sex trilogy with disclosure, so the start date moves again to September. In the interim, Gina Davis and Rennie Harlan push for another round of rewrites on the script. Nobody's happy with the script. Enter Susan Shilliday. the scribe behind Legends of the Fall. Maybe they're hoping for a more sensitive female perspective on the characters. She did not receive credit on this movie.

I cannot speak to the work. We obviously have not read this draft. Apparently her draft was not well received in particular by Michael Douglas. Mid-July of 1994, Michael Douglas abandons ship. So they're conflicting accounts as to why he dropped out. Davis has said, and Douglas said at the time,

that he didn't have the time coming off of disclosure, to learn the sword fighting and the stunt work that he would need to do going into Cutthroat Island. He might have also just been tired. I mean, and it sounds like he wasn't super stoked on this, but he's coming off of a kind of crazy run at this point. Yeah. In 1996, he told the New York Times,

they had a hard time searching for who Shaw was. I just was not comfortable with the part. The combination of not seeing it on the page and not knowing where it would go, I was feeling uncomfortable, and I wanted out. That's apparent in the end result, I would say. The same article quotes an anonymous executive source, who said, quote, it was becoming Rennie's film for Gina.

Michael got upset when he realized that was happening, but I don't fault him, it was an impossible situation. In fact, when she learned that Douglas was out, Gina Davis says that she and Harlan, quote, cried for joy jumping up and down in excitement, end quote. But Lizzie, that's not because she wanted this to be her movie. It's because she didn't want to do the movie at all. And they thought it was done.

They thought the movie was going to die when Michael Douglas walked off. Quote, you see, Rennie knew that Caroleco was going belly up before Cutthroat Island even went into production. Now without Michael, the reason to make the movie had gone away, which was actually a very good thing for both of us. So her agent calls Mario Casar and says, hey, Michael's out, I don't think this is happening. Gina's out. And Katzara says, absolutely not. She has to do this movie no matter what. What did I offer her? Five million? Make it eight. Yikes. It wasn't just the money, according to Davis, she had a legal obligation to continue that Michael Douglas didn't. Multiple sources confirm he was never officially attached. She was.

Yeah. I mean, even though she was kind of in some ways at the apex of her career here, he still was a substantially bigger star. She couldn't believe it. She said, the ludicrous thing was that the only reason I was there was because of Michael. I never wanted to carry the movie. Even Rennie Harlan later said, We begged to be let go. We begged that we didn't have to make this movie. Gina was scared mindless about headlining this film.

We felt that a pirate movie with a female lead was suicidal, but we were contractually obligated. And they were at the mercy Lizzie of a delusional captain. So why did Mario Casar want to make Cutthroat Island? Well, Lizzie, it was the last movie that Carolco had left. So in the spring, just before Douglas left the project, they cut ties with their only other movie heading into production. Crusade starring Arnold Schwarzenegger with Paul Verhoeven directing. It was this massive, gritty reimagining of the Crusades never got made.

The story goes, Caroleco asked Verhoven to promise the budget wouldn't get any bigger. They'd already spent $13 million in pre-production. The overall budget had ballooned from $60 or $70 million to $120 million. which would have made it one of the most expensive movies of all time. If you remember, Lizzie, I believe Jurassic Park was 60. Yeah. In 1993. Verhoven said he couldn't promise that the budget wouldn't go up.

So Qasar cut ties. He relinquished the rights to crusade to Schwarzenegger in exchange for not having to pay the actor's $15 million salary, which he was on the hook for. Thank God Arnold took that IOU instead. Yeah. Coroco couldn't afford to make both movies. In reality, they couldn't afford to make any movies.

at this point. But I think they figured if we made one, and if it was a hit, maybe we could survive. Plus, Khazar had already pre-sold the foreign rights to cutthroat for somewhere in the $50 to $60 million range. So he technically had half the budget, you know, or a little more, already lined up. And if he made the movie, he got a $1 million fee, which probably didn't hurt. So Crusades dead. Coral Coast taking on water. Douglas is out, but Mario Casar says,

we are going down with the ship. And I will bring you, Gina Davis, and Rennie Harlan with me if I have to. Cutterd Island is getting made no matter what. So let's go find a new leading

or second build man in this case. Enter the poor Matthew Modi. Oh. You know what I mean? It's like, he's not poor witness to any of this. He doesn't know what's going on.

No, he's nowhere near as established a star, if at all. I mean, what had he been in prior to this? I think Pacific Heights was probably the most recent big thing that he had done with Michael Keaton, but that was a few years prior. Let's get to Matthew Modin in one second. Are there any folks who you would imagine may have been considered who were popular around this time?

Just think big names. I mean, I'm sure you can guess a number of them. 1994? Yeah. I don't know. Tom Cruise. Yeah. Alec Baldwin.

He was not on the list that we found. It's entirely possible, though, because they'd work together before. Maybe they didn't want to deal with him. That might be why he was. I am gone. I don't know. Tell me the rest. Liam Neeson, Kiannu Reeves, Daniel Day Lewis, Michael Keaton,

Ray Fines, Gabriel Byrne, Charlie Sheen, and Kurt Russell. I was going to say Kurt Russell. Kurt Russell to me makes a lot of sense. Yes. He was just off of Tombstone. I think he was also dead off of that movie. He's also tired.

Yeah. But he has that sort of devil-may-care, like I don't give a fuck attitude that would have played very well, I think, with this. And he's also played an incompetent action hero to great effect in big trouble in Little China. That's honestly his thing. Yeah.

He's like, I'm not very good at this, but I do that really well. Yeah. So Kassar finally books Matthew Moding. He's 15 years younger than Michael Douglas at this point. He's a well-respected actor, but he's not nearly as famous as Michael Douglas. No, he's so cute. His strong pedigree, right? He had starred in Birdie back in 1984, which won the grand jury prize at Cannes.

Full Metal Jacket. Of course, Private Joker and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. But around town, I did not know this, Lizzie. He was kind of known as the guy who had turned down the role of Maverick in Top Gun. I do vaguely remember this. Yeah. He actually didn't agree with the movie's pro-military message. And that's why he turned it down.

What you got to say? Go Matthew. Yeah. Mad props for standing up for what you believe in. Yeah, because in case anybody doesn't know, Top Gun, the franchise as a whole is literally like a recruitment tactic. Yeah, for the Navy. Always has been.

From the get. Yep. Coralco booked him for less than a million dollars. Finally, they'd be saving some money, which they then promptly set fire to in pre-production. By this point, locations had been secured. They were going to shoot in Malta and then in Thailand. Rennie Harlan tried to stress his intentions to the crew with a staff memo.

I would like to read you an excerpt dated July 25, 1994. No sequence of setting that you've seen in movies before is good enough. Any idea previously used has to be reinvented now and then cranked up 10 times. I don't want big. I want huge. I don't want surprising. I want stunning. I don't want fast.

I want explosive. I don't want accidents. I want disasters. I don't want dirt. I want filth. I don't want a storm. I want a hurricane. I don't want hills.

I want mountains. I don't want groups. I want crowds. I don't want accidents. I want disasters. It's my favorite tagline. Could have been the tagline for this movie. I don't think he should have ended with I don't want groups, I want crowds.

That actually seems like the most reasonable ask on this entire list. It also reminds me of what is this a school for ants? It needs to be at least three times this big. But I think what he really wanted was a better script. He later said, quote, there was no real script for it. Sometimes you have the right star and the right director and the money and you just want to go ahead, even if you don't have a good script. That's what happened with Cutthru Island.

I get it. I completely get it. I mean, it's so hard to pull all of this stuff. together, and when you have the momentum, I can imagine... And to get a green light, it's nearly impossible. Yeah. Like, it would be really, really hard to pull the plug on something when you have the money. Like, when the money is there, you probably think, well, we can fix this, you know, as we go.

I think there are very few filmmakers who have the wherewithal, the discipline, the courage to turn down an opportunity like this, you know, and you could probably count them on one or two hands. I wouldn't. I'd be like, I would have made cutthroat island 100%. And it would have been way worse. Absolutely. Way worse. The dialogue, to be fair to me, I think the dialogue might have been a hair better and everything else would have been a thousand times worse, a thousand times worse. Mine would have been worse for sure. Way worse. No, you would have a couple good zangers. You would add some good singers. I know you, Lizzie. You would add some good singers. Thanks, Chris. But no coherent plot. No, no. And the explosions just wouldn't have been as good. Let's just be honest.

For sure. Now, the real tragedy was that Rennie Hart, had a script that he wanted to make with Gina Davis. It was called The Long Kiss Goodnight. Oh, yes. Written by Shane Black. He found it and he set it up at New Line after he agreed to do Cutthroat. So he had to do Cutthroat first before they could go do The Long Kiss Good Night. So the script for Cutthroat gets reworked again, this time by writer Robert King.

Did this damage The Long Kiss Good Night? We just talked about this very briefly on 10 Things I Hate About You, where people thought, which makes sense because Shane Black, Gina Davis, thought this was going to be. be a huge hit, and then it's kind of a dud, although it's a good movie. Yeah, we'll talk about it at the end. This movie had a long shadow on the people who worked on it, unfairly so. That sucks, because it's not bad. No. So writer Robert King, he came in to do more rewrites. He's most known now he works with his wife on The Good Wife and the Good Fight, for example, both shows I really enjoyed. Yeah. Harlan was not satisfied, but Caroleco couldn't afford more rewrites. They are out of

money. So Harlan brought on Mark Norman, who was actually a writer from the OG Mission Impossible TV series, amongst many other credits, and paid him out of his own pocket to continue working on the script. He's paying presumably hundreds of thousands of dollars to get this script into better shape. And shooting gets delayed again to Halloween. October 31st, 1994 is the start date, which just isn't ignominious start date. Yeah. So meanwhile, the crew is hard at work at Malta. Also, nothing goes well in Malta. Anytime we've come. Nothing goes. Cocaine mannequins. Oliver Reed died in Malta on Gladiator. Literally anytime Malta has come up and it comes up somewhat frequently, it does not go well in Malta. Yeah. Well, Oliver Reed will also be here in Malta and we're going to talk about him in just a moment because he was almost on this movie.

Oh no. This does not need Oliver Reed in it. No. I want to stress the scope of what like a crew pulled off on this movie because their work is underappreciated. They built two ships with a total of 80 working cannons. Yeah, you can tell. It looks great. At a cost of more than a million dollars per ship, they built replicas of those ship in Jakarta, Indonesia. They sailed them to Thailand for filming there. In the end, there would be more than 2,000 costumes,

over 300 firearms, 600 swords, 250 daggers, and 60 to 70 custom-made axes, candidly, until Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. I don't think that anyone had made this level of arsenal an outfit for a movie. in quite some time. It looks great. That's right. The costumes, they're so layered.

Everything's very rich. All of the weaponry. It looks lived in, too. It looks dirty. I thought that was, they're like, let's get funky. It's great. They made facades for a thousand feet of buildings. Harlan arrives in Malta in August of 1994.

He comes face to face with the sets and the costumes for the first time. We don't know why, but he was apparently not thrilled with the sets. So they tore them down and rebuilt them. And there were some other unanticipated costs. So, for example, there was a European law that prevented the production from shipping out the horses by boat. So they had to be flown out, which was double the initial plan. I don't know. I don't know.

What plane are you putting horses on? Like a military. C-130. Yeah. A military transport plane would be my guess. Oh, God. I don't want to be on that plane. Horses are so beautiful.

I mean, a hollowed out 747 is also enormous. It could have been that, too. Sure. Horses from a distance, A-plus, horses on a plane. I don't want to be on that plane. Horses on a plane, sequel to snakes on a plane. There were rumors that Rennie Harlan spent $15,000 to get his dog through customs, which, you know, at the end of the day, whatever, that's his money. Yeah, I'm sure.

But also that he shipped over his security team from Cliffhanger, his Mercedes-Benz, and dozens of cases of V8 vegetable juice, which apparently he and Gina Davis both really liked, which, I mean, look, hey, you don't want to get scurvy, so there's that. I mean, Elizabeth Taylor's shipping her chili from Ohio or whatever it was. No, Hollywood. It was Chasin's chili. Yeah, so, I don't know. That's true. Stunt men come in from Poland, carpenters from Italy and England, but not everybody stuck around. So producer David Nichols by this point had already quit.

He was replaced by Joel Michaels. Art director, Wolf, I think it's Kroger. It might be Kroger. From the 13th Warrior, Lizzie, was either fired or quit due to scheduling issues in this instance. Camera operator, Nicola Pecorini, who's a prolific camera operator, Steadicam-Ops, second unit cinematographer, was fired for reportedly not getting along with Harlan. more than 20 crew members walked out in solidarity. According to the New York Times, he later said that he had been complaining about ill-treatment of the crew

on difficult scenes that were never used, and the production problems were only beginning. They had to rent a bunch of the lighting equipment and camera equipment from Italy. The American crew apparently didn't know how to use them. Oh, God. Meanwhile, Mark Norman, the writer that Rennie Harlan had brought on and paid out of his own pocket,

is doing last-minute rewrites, handing off new scenes on the day that they were being shot, and Lizzie, actor Oliver Reed, is showing everybody his penis. Yeah, I wish I could say I'm surprised. I'm not. Do you know which character he was supposed to play originally? I'm guessing it's the uncle, not Frank Langella, but the other one, Mordecai. That's right, Mortichae.

Yeah, he was replaced because he was getting drunk, getting into fights, and taking off his pants. Yeah, that's called the Oliver Reed special. That's what you get when you hire Oliver Reed. And according to one source, he dropped Trow in front of both Rennie Harlan and Gina Davis, in attempt to basically say, you can't tell me what to do. My God. Matthew Modin later said

that Oliver Reed thought he was a spy, meaning Matthew Modin, and punched him when he was drunk. Some of the stunt guys told Modin that Reed had a tattoo on his penis, so Modin asked to see it while they were at a restaurant in Malta,

and Oliver Reed just pulled his penis out, and there it was. That one's on you, Matthew Modine. If you ask to see Oliver Reed's penis, you're going to see it for sure. Yeah. There's a pretty gross story that Vic Armstrong,

incredible stunt coordinator, who worked on this movie told, Basically, it seems like the straw that boked the camel's back was that Reed was just suggesting very grotesque things into the script, including when Gina Davis comes to him in the whorehouse, he was basically suggesting that he should be masturbating at the beginning of the scene and should reach climax during the scene. And I'm going to leave it there because it gets pretty gnarly.

And Rennie basically said, I've got to get rid of him. We cannot have this in the movie. Because if you think about he's trying to make something PG-13, Oliver Reed is never going to allow that to happen. and he's going to make an unsafe, you know, working environment, and he's wildly inappropriate. Also, like, you don't need Oliver Reed. He's a major liability. It's not like he's an enormous name. He is a known quantity at this point. Like, yeah, he's great in Gladiator. He's great in Oliver Twist. But please remember, in Oliver Twist, he plays a murderous, drunken psychopath and is extremely convincing.

Yeah. So Oliver Reed walks the plank. He's gone. Bye. But that was far from the only gross thing to happen during production. They were shooting, obviously, on two massive water tanks at Malta Film Studios. for a lot of this. And at one point, the sewage system failed and contaminated the water tanks, but they kept shooting so people got sick. Oh, God. And another point, cinematographer Oliver Wood fell off a crane and into one of the tanks. He was a very successful cinematographer. Was it a poop tank? It was apparently not the poop tank. Oh, well, at least there's that. Yeah, he would go on to do the Boren trilogy. He actually broke his leg and had to be replaced by Peter

Levy, who had done Predator 2 with Harlan. So they lost their DP and had to replace him midway through the shoot. And this is an extremely physical shoot. Modin and Davis did a lot of training. They're climbing ropes, learning to ride horses. And according to Davis, she did six months of fencing lessons. You can tell. And of course, Vic Armstrong is heading all of this. I mean, you can really tell. And that early on in the movie, the sequence where she ends up, I can't remember exactly what's happening. She's like on a cart and she jumps off the cart into a structure, runs through the structure, and then busts out the window on the other side into the cart again. I rolled that back and watched it twice because that is Gina Davis. If you watch, you see her face coming out the window,

rolling down the roof, her giant, like spider leg body onto the cart. That's her. So there's a little movie magic there, Lizzie, that we will talk about towards the end of this episode. But to your point, yes, quote, the director happened to me my husband and he was like, of course she can do it. And that somehow gave me the confidence. She did a lot of her stunts. During rehearsals, she's struggling to nail her horseback riding scenes. Her stunt double was a man named Angel Gomez Fernandez. And she says that he told her, what if you just act like you know how to ride? And suddenly, she looked like she knew how to ride, even though, as she put it, quote, it was always the horse who was fully in charge. Yeah. So she just had to kind of take a leap of face with a lot of these things.

Yeah. So here's how it was supposed to work with the horse back riding. Harlan would say rolling and then action over the walkie-taki. She'd then kick the horse with her heels and the horse would run. But the horse started learning the commands. So the horse would start running when the walkie-taki went off and Harlan said rolling. Oh, God. So they had to start whispering their commands. And another time, Gina Davis got thrown from her horse. when it veered to the left unexpectedly, she was not hurt, but one of her silicon bra inserts, she called them silicon breast enhancements,

not an implant, to be clear, shot out from her shirt and disappeared into the sand. And I'm guessing this was molded to her body in some way because the second AD, Howell Caldwell, had to launch a super secret search party to find it without telling anybody exactly what it was. He was very discreet and very much gentleman, which I'm sure Gina Davis appreciated.

I'm sure it was custom, because you need the costumes to be fitted around that and stuff. Oh, yeah. Now, Matthew Modin had his fair share of injuries in Near Misses, one of which you can see on film when you watch this movie. So, one day, they're filming with the water cannons. The spray launches a board with a nail sticking out of it through the air. Modin turns at the last minute and it slices along the back of his head. So he gets stitches. Jesus. Then on the day he gets his stitches out, they're filming the escape from the brothel. Yeah. Remember, they jump from the second story onto a bunch of barrels that then explode as they're running away from it. Sure. How could I forget? If you watch that scene, Lizzie, it's 42 minutes and 48 seconds into this movie. If anybody wants to see it, one of the barrels gets launched directly at the back of Matthew Modin's head and hits him exactly where the stitches had just gotten taken out.

Oh, my God. You can actually see Stan Shaw, who plays Mr. Glasspool, who's running right next to him, reach over and touch Matthew Modin, you know, as if to say, hey, are you okay in this shot? It's in the movie. Apparently, as soon as he got out of the frame, he threw his sword down and screamed, I don't want to play anymore. I want to go home. End quote. Oh, no.

There was another close call in one of the ships caught fire. Shooting was paused for three days, but the most dangerous stunt was filmed in Thailand. Lizzie, is there one scene or stunt that you would imagine would it be particularly daunting to do, perhaps involving a cliff on this film? Oh, yeah. It's when they're dangling off the cliff on the ropes because they've just come up from the cave full of the treasure. And Morgan jumps off. the cliff and he catches her by the hand. Yes, and then they release themselves just in time for the tide to hit the rocks at the bottom.

So according to Davis, they did their close-ups first on land as they're hanging there talking to each other. Then they get put in harnesses and dangled over the actual 300-foot cliff for the wide shot. That is really Matthew Modding and Gina Davis. No. I'm not doing it. No, sir.

No, sir. They have the cameras above and the harnesses are held by. wires, not the ropes themselves. So the ropes are props effectively, right? Yeah, yeah. She said they're instructed to, quote, sit into the harnesses, putting their weight directly on the wires, not on the fake ropes that they were holding.

And Gina Davis starts to freak out. Yeah. She says that she started to cling desperately to the rope, which made me feel like my arms were the only thing keeping me from falling to my death, which meant that her dialogue did not match the close-ups. So then, after they shot that, they had to redo the close-ups on the land to recreate the fear that they had felt when they were hanging off the side of the cliff. Now, Lizzie, they did that jump and catch for real.

What? So that fall and grabbed, they are on wires over that cliff, and stuntman Claudio Pacifico did the cliff jump and was caught by the other stuntman. That is crazy. Wow. Yeah, I'm good. I'm so glad that people are able to do this. It couldn't be me.

Would never be me. But it looks really good. Wouldn't be me. Now, a big element of this story from the trades at the time was what was Reni Harlan and Gina Davis this is a working relationship like on this movie? Of course. Was he making this movie for her? Was she getting preferential treatment?

And I think we can unravel some of these suppositions, although it's still somewhat murky. So on the one hand, producer Joel Michael said, naturally anyone with good sense would have been concerned about a situation where the director was married to the star of the film. That's a pretty strong union to be dealing with, but I can't compliment Reni and Gina enough

over how professional they were. The name of Gina Davis's memoir, Dying of Politeness, she has always said that politeness was the thing that got in her way, in many situations, and she was always afraid of, you know, bringing shame upon her parents or embarrassing them in some way. So I tend to believe that she was probably extremely professional.

On the other hand, though, Matthew Modine felt that Harlan gave Davis a lot more attention than him, and that perhaps he was too focused on the explosions. Quote, it's the first movie I've worked on where the director never really spoke to me. It was frustrating, and Renny spent a lot of his time just trying to find new ways to blow things up. He likes to blow things up. That tracks with what I watched. And in a press interview for the movie, Davis letter said,

Rennie was always fixing Matthew's hair and saying, you know, can you open your shirt a little more? Maybe we should have some oil on his chest, things like that. And I was like, hey, what happened to me? I'm married to the director. The sense I get is that Rennie Harlan was probably not very engaged with the actors and was more engaged with the stunts and the explosions. Yeah.

So shooting raps in March of 1995, here's the thing, Lizzie. According to Harlan, they were only 10 days over schedule. Two weeks over schedule? That's not so bad. He told the LA Times, the last number I knew the budget to be was about $85 to $90 million or a little less. I do not know what the final was with all the final was

with all the insurance and completion bond costs. That's not that crazy for what that looks like. This movie went over budget, but it's all on screen. Yes. And Rennie Harlan claims, and Davis backs this up, that he cut between $15 and $20 million in expenses and set pieces by reworking the script again with his own money while they were on set. I believe it. And also, like, the ships, the stuff that they're filming on water, the ship's exploding.

I mean, 100% this looks like almost $100 million. The point is it doesn't seem like it went disastrously over schedule or over budget. No. Matthew Modin did tell a funny story about finding an entire room filled with unopened crates of V8 juice towards the end of the production. But that wouldn't be more than a few thousand dollars. Based on the final result, I'm actually guessing that the dailies were reassuring. Yeah, I think so.

I think so much of this looks really good. I agree. And like, really the only failing is that the story is not super strong and some of the lines aren't that great. But, like, otherwise, it's pretty fun. Yeah. The stunts look great. The explosions look great.

The scope is there. The actors are very charming. They hold the rap party in Thailand on April Fool's Day. Now, we don't have a ton of information about post-production on Cutthroat Island, but here's what we know. There were four credited editors if you look on IMDB. I think two of those are assistant editors. They're listed as editors, but Derek Brecken and Florent Retz were both doing a lot of assistant editing work around the time.

So I think we can set aside. There were not four active editors on this movie. There was veteran editor Ralphie Winters. I mean, Winters is. is a huge name. Ben Hur, Gaslight, Quovadis, Pink Panther. This was his last credit, actually. He was in his 80s. He'd won two Oscars, been nominated for four more. My guess, I am just guessing, is that he was brought in later in the process to help with the cut. Because I think Frank J. Yoriyosti, who we've discussed on this podcast before, was probably the lead editor. He cut Cliffhanger for Harlan.

He'd also done diehard, tombstone, basic instinct, total recall, roadhouse. There's also Burt Lovett. He's uncredited, and he had done Predator Two for Harlan. I'm guessing, again, he was brought in later in the process to maybe help after they felt like the cut maybe wasn't quite working. Yeah, totally. It could be any mix of that. Any one of them could have been. Yeah. My suggestion, though, is that, you know, don't look at this and say, oh my God, there were five editors. There was one main editor. Sure. You know, I think it's miscredited on IMTV. The music, though, which I think is a high point, was written by composer John Debney. Now, he

He was nearing 40. He's a prolific television composer. In the late 80s, he'd started composing for indie films and theme park attractions, including the Phantom Manor, Disneyland attraction. He scored his first live-action studio feature in 1993, my wife's secret favorite movie, Hocus Pocus. Oh, a classic. Of course.

A classic. Wildly inappropriate movie for children. Just Sarah Jessica Parker's boobs alone. Yeah, they are at her eyeballs. And just constantly calling the boy a virgin, the whole movie. I love it. Debne said he was very surprised that Harlan reached out and that he had heard his music. But I actually read online that he was not the first choice.

He was actually replacing composer David Arnold, who Lizzie would do Independence Day and had just done Stargate for Roland Demric. Now, I couldn't figure out exactly why Arnold left the project, but I did read that Debney very intentionally was harkening back to, you know, Golden Age composers and folks who had done a lot of pirate movies like Miklosurosurja. He had done Spellbound, a double life. He did Ben Hur, for example. I mean, listen, you again, go watch this and Pirates of the Caribbean back to back. The music and this feels very close to what Zimmer will do or Claus Badel in Pirates, yeah. Big time. A couple of the references, Eric Wolfgang, Corn Gold.

He did Captain Blood, the Seahawk, the Seawolf, Max Steiner, of course, the father of film music. And then Alfred Newman, Lizzie, who we can never get away from. No. He did the Black Swan. The Newman's are everywhere. So Demney didn't give an exact timeline, but he said that the score needed to be done quickly, which would be consistent with potentially replacing somebody else. else. So at this point, MGM is handling Krollco's distribution. This is the last movie that they're

going to be doing together. So let's go out with a bang. Let's release the movie in June of 1995. Let's take advantage of summertime. We get ahead of the 4th of July weekend. Apparently, Rennie Harlan says this is unrealistic. The movie's not, I mean, they wrapped on April 1st. They would have to be done with the movie by June. That's just two months. No, that's insane. He says to MGM, we can't do this. And they say, well, really because Mario Casar is saying that we totally should do a summer release. Because things that Caroleco have gotten worse, Lizzie, there's a lot of bad press about their financial situation.

They've been laying off staff. They're considering selling the rights to all their movies and scripts, and everybody has been blaming it on Cutthroat Island. Eventually, the release gets pushed to late July and then again to the end of December, which raises a lot of eyebrows because the holiday release date... That's a Bone Garden, yeah. It's also loaded with prestige fair. This is a summer action movie, not...

not some sort of Oscar. I should specify, it is a bone garden for this kind of movie. It's a strange place to drop it. Exactly. Trailers had actually already gone out announcing the summer release date. Oh. But there was another pirate-esque film that would be opening in July. Lizzie, what big-time flopper that we have covered that was shot on the ocean came out in 1995 in the summer.

Waterworld. Waterworld! But well, it's water. Released on July 28th of 1995, I would have assumed that it would suck some of the negative attention away from cutthroat island. No, it's a harbinger of doom for Cut Throat Island. You're smarter than I am, Lizzie. People just kept comparing them and equating them. They are both water-based movies with massive budgets and production problems that the media loves to write about.

They're both better than they deserve the legacy of. I would actually argue that this is maybe, in a lot of ways, more impressive than Waterworld. I think this is better than Waterworld. Especially when you think about the fact that Waterworld costs almost 70% more than this movie. Yeah. Waterworld was the way. bigger mess. It went way further over budget. It's not as good. It cost 175 million on the low end, is what I've read. Jesus Christ. Reviews were mixed and it did flop, although again, to your point,

Lizzie, not nearly as hard as people like to remember. It brought in $264 million worldwide against its $175 million budget. Let's just say $250 million budget, including marketing. So it probably lost $100 to $125 million, somewhere in that range. Which it made back with its theme park show. And on home video. It did really well on home video. So listen to our episode for more on Waterworld. The point is it casts a shadow over Cutthroat Island, and the situation is already very dark.

In November of 1995, just one month before Cutth Road Island is to be released, Caroleco files for bankruptcy protection. Mario Casar resigns. They're talking about selling the film library to 20th century Fox, and Cutthroat Island is an orphan dead in the water. Earlier in the year, MGM had said that they planned to spend at least 30, million dollars promoting the film, which would already be pretty low based on a hundred million dollar movie.

Yeah. By fall, that number had dropped to $18 million. I would have to guess that it fell even lower. Gina Davis says that one day before the film was released, the LA Times ran a huge article about how expensive it was, including a claim that they'd had the shoelaces made by hand. And Gina Davis points out, there were no shoelaces. They were all wearing boots. Yeah.

But it didn't matter. Cutthroat Island was released on December 22nd, 1995. It was a bloodbath. The high seas of the box office, Lizzie, were patrolled by far more powerful ships. Ships like The Toy Story, the Jumanji, the Father of the Bride Part 2, the Heat, the Golden Eye, and many, many more. Oh, no. Cutthroat Island earned just under $11 million domestically. Is that total?

I could not find a reliable foreign number. I saw $6 million international, so 17 total, but I could not verify that $6 million number, so I'm just sticking with the domestic of $11 million. Holy shit. That's bad. It was pulled from theaters after two weeks. Matthew Modin specifically requested that the trades not be delivered to his hotel room in L.A. where he was doing press. But when he woke up the day the movie was released,

there they were piled up outside his door, and he made the mistake of reading them. Oh, no, don't look, buddy. Critics were generally unimpressed, but the headlines really focused on Gina Davis playing a pirate. A lady pirate of the Caribbean. Extravagant Demolition with woman as top pirate. The New York Times said,

It's not possible to believe that Miss Davis is the highly respected captain of a pirate ship and it's not even fun to try. What? I'm sorry, that's stupid. Like, one of the elements of this movie that actually, I think, works very well is Gina Davis as a pirate captain of this ship. First of all, we know there were female pirates.

We know that there were several of them that were very successful. And I actually think she does a pretty good job and is pretty believable as not only is she physically imposing, but in terms of the way that she sort of manned the ship and captains the crew. So that's bullshit. New York Times again. Just dropping the ball.

They're stupid and wrong every time. Again, caveat, moonshot. The consensus seemed to be that Davis and Moting lacked chemistry. Yeah, that's true. I don't know if that's true or if it's the fact that the script was clunky, which they also called out the dialogue. They said that the movie didn't know who its audience was. I think that's fair. I think Pirates of the Caribbean tonally lands in a slightly more successful place,

And which, of course, that's ironic considering the movie had spent $3 million on its script, you know, at this point, if not more. Roger Ebert's review was actually much more positive. He gave it three stars out of four. And yet, it was actually maybe the harshest. I'd like to read this quote. I saw it because that that was my job. And having seen it, I grant its skill and award it three stars on that basis. But unless you're really into pirate movies, it's not a necessary film. Sorry. Basically, a lot of folks recognize the technical achievements of the film, but they viewed it as excessive. Gina Davis said that basically in the LA Times review, Kenneth Turin wrote, full-sized ships, impressive waves, thousands of costumes, accurate down to the shoelaces, anything and everything, an unreasonable amount of money could buy, has been press-ganged into service here.

Gina Davis later said he got the shoelace line from the LA Times article that had run the day before. So again, it's just how this narrative snowballs. Matthew Modian later said, I didn't want to kill myself, but I wanted to hang myself in the bathroom so that when the cleaning lady came in to do the room, she'd find me and say, oh, my God, and call. because I wanted people to know that that's how much it hurt, that I did the very best that I could on the film,

as did everybody that was working on the film. So Gina Davis and Rennie Harlan jumped straight into Lizzie The Long Kiss Good Night, a bit of a proto-atomic blonde slash born identity slash Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Very fun movie. I like it. Yeah, it's good. It actually did do better than Cutthroat Island, but it got pretty mixed reviews,

and it did not break even at the box office. And it didn't help that writer Shane Black mused after the fact that, quote, it might have made more money if it had been about a man. But of course, that quote was pulled out of context. His full quote explains that he originally wrote it about a man, then realized it only worked with a female lead. He thought it was better with a female lead. I think what he's suggesting is in light of some of the failures of female-driven action films, Tank Girl, Cutthroat Island. Right. That it's not a problem of the actual film. It's a problem of the environment and the audience, yeah. The Long Kiss Good Night did go on.

to find a substantial cult audience, and that movie, I think, has found its place in the world. But Carolco sold its film library in early 1996 to Canal Plus for $58 million, and by mid-1996, Cutthroat Island was deemed a record-setting flop. Assuming a budget of $100 million and a marketing spend of $18, it lost at least $100 million. The Guinness Book of World Records has claimed, as of April of 2012,

that it was the biggest box office flop of all time, pegging the net loss at $105 million. That was passed by John Carter. and other films. I don't think that's exactly fair. Mario Casar pre-sold the foreign rights for a reported $50 to $60 million. In theory, cutting the loss in half.

Now, did those folks lose their money? Yes. Yeah, 100%. But, you know, you could cook the numbers slightly differently. The point is, unlike Waterworld showgirls, other flops of the time, Cutthruid Island didn't find a second life

on home video. I don't know if it was just the movie. I don't know if it's the fact that Caroleco shut down before it was released. I have a theory about that. What's your theory? your theory? My theory is that it's actually a little too good to land in the same place as Waterworld and Showgirls. Yeah. It's not the car crash. No. Like Showgirls and Waterworld, I think, are on a similar

level. Showgirls in particular is so crazy. Showgirls is insane. That it holds a certain cachet because of how nuts it is. And to a certain extent, Waterworld does too just because of how just how dumb. Just feel it's fun to watch Kevin Costor just like suffer through the whole thing. And his little vagina gills on his neck. There's a lot. Those two totally make sense as cult classics. This one is like... It's competent.

Pretty decent. And that I think is why it falls through the cracks. Yeah, it reminds me of that Verhoeven quote where he says he'd rather make the worst movie or the best movie as opposed to a middle of the road movie. And he famously went and collected his razis for showgirls. Yeah. Cuthard Island, which Lizzie was translated

to throat surgery island in Finnish. Okay. would eventually find its fans. As Gina Davis later said, what made up for all the bad reviews was that Quentin Tarantino really liked the movie. When I met him years later,

he told me he'd watched one of the action scenes involving a carriage over and over again to figure out where the stunt was because it looked as if I had done this impossible stunt myself. Yes, it does. And this is the stunt that you mentioned, Lizzie.

So, let's talk about it briefly. All right. If it fooled Quentin Tarantino, I feel a little bit better. It fooled everyone. So Corridor crew cracked it. So it's two shes. shots, the shot of her coming out of the window, her face is obscured by the glass and her hair as she

quickly rolls. And that is done by a stunt performer. Okay. And the minute the stunt performer lands in the seat, it morph cuts. Oh. You can actually see the slight interpolation between the frames. It morph cuts to Gina Davis sitting up in the carriage going forward. Yeah, because she whips her hair up. She whips her hair up. Yes. It's so hard to detect. It's so well done. I had to watch this, you know, corridor crew video and watched them go frame by frame and watch them point it out. You guys can see it online. But it's an amazing stunt. And she did so many of her stunts on the film.

That's awesome. Yeah, well, that looks great. Matthew Modin later said that the Duffer brothers told him they thought it was one of the best pirate movies ever made. I agree. And as you mentioned, Pirates of the Caribbean pulls from this film quite liberally. Now, Rennie Harlan and Gina Davis divorced in 1998, reportedly because Harlan had slept with Davis' assistant and fathered her child. Oh, dear. We'll leave that one there.

He has worked prolifically ever since, although often at the fringes of Hollywood, and he's never really ventured into that family-friendly arena he described before embarking on Cutthroat Island. Gina Davis's career, on the other hand, slowed down dramatically. So from 1997, the year after the Long Kiss Good Night, 2008, she only acted in two feature films, Stuart Little and Stuart Little, too. She had a short-lived TV show, the Gina Davis Show, and she later told Volcher she was getting offers, quote, but for nothing meaty or interesting, like in my 30s. She was frustrated that Thelma and Luis and a league of their own hadn't sparked a run of

female buddy comedies. Yeah. She said instead, it was, quote, more psycho bitch roles. Candidly, the roles opposite Michael Douglas at the time. Yeah. She said that she started watching children's shows with her daughter after her daughter was born, and she was stunned at how few female characters there were. I didn't know this.

It took like 20 years for Sesame Street to introduce a single female character. Did you know that? Well, with the puppets. Chris, puppets are famously not women. Yeah, I know, but like, you could, and if you breed them enough times, you should get a female puppet eventually. Yeah, it's like in Jurassic Park, but the opposite. That's right. If all the puppets are male at some point, they'll produce a female puppet.

That's exactly right. So, she decided to do something about it. So in 2004, Gina Davis founded the Gina Davis Institute on Gender and Media. Yes. She spent years gathering data on female representation in TV and film. She took her findings and continued to take her findings to executives across. across Hollywood with one goal to create more roles for women on screen. In 2015, she founded the Bentonville Film Festival, which I've never been to you, but I've heard great things about. Is that in Bentonville, Arkansas? That's right. Nice.

Focuses on films featuring underrepresented cast crew and stories. And she has said that despite how it turned out, Cutthroat Island was tremendous fun. And I can say, having gone through her filmography, although I cannot speak about how she feels about the roles, Gina Davis has worked far more in her 60s than she did in her 40s. And I wish her all the mediest and best roles going forward. I love Gina Davis. And that concludes our coverage of Cutthroat Island. I hope I have dispelled the shroud of fog around this not so flopper. Yeah, it was a huge flopper, but the movie's pretty good. So Lizzie, I have to ask you, what went right? The stunts, the special effects in this are absolutely incredible.

But I would like to give what went right to the costume department and the production design team. Because truly, this movie is the tapestry is rich. I mean, everything looks lived in. Everything is beautiful. There are so many layers. You can really see the money on screen. I love the way they dress Gina Davis. She looks hot, but it's very practical. It seems like she could move in the stuff that she's wearing. I don't feel like she's overly sexualized in this movie in terms of the clothes they have on her at all. So huge shout out to those departments. This movie looks beautiful. I agree. That was maybe going to be mine. And I want to shout out Gina Davis. And Rennie Harlan, I think the movie's well directed too. But I would like to give my what went right to John. Debney. I listened to his music after the fact, and I was listening to it in comparison with some of the other references that he made. I think his score is so good in this movie. I actually think it's under in the mix. I think the music's a little low. I think that with the Claus Biddell or, you know, Han Zimmer, depending on how you want to interpret it, score in Pirates of the Caribbean, they actually Mickey Mouse

the music a little more to great effect. And I wish they had done that a little more in this movie. I think it could have helped with the tone. And I think his music's great. It is. And again, like, there is a blueprint here for Pirates of the Caribbean that they ripped hands. And the music is a big part of that because it feels like an updated version of the swashbuckling music from the sort of epics of the 50s and 60s. And I think that they end up building on that in Pirates of the Caribbean in a way that, of course, is very memorable. But yeah, the music and this is great. All right, Lizzie. Thank you for going on that journey over the seven seas of Hollywood with me. If folks are enjoying this podcast, how can they support it to get more throat slit on Cutthroat Island? Well, you can leave us a rating or review. You can tell a friend or family member that you like what went wrong and maybe they will too. Send them a specific episode for a movie that they know. People seem to like that as an entry point. You can now on both Apple and Spotify become a subscriber and with that you will get at least one bonus episode every month. Usually it's more. You can take it up a notch and you can join Patreon. You will get all the bonus episodes there. Also for $5 a month in addition to that, you get an ad-free feed. And then if you you would like to take it up one more cutthroat notch for $50 a month, you can get a swash-buckling shout out just like one of these. There once was a ship we all did know in the name of the ship

was the Carol Co. Her captain paid a premium. I take the money and run. Run boys abandon ship. The IRS is here to audit. Michael Douglas got too sure, but Gina's still on board. Harlan, he wanted more exploding barrels and guns and swords. Matthew Modding did his best, and Gina lost a brust. They say they sank the carolco, but we all know that story ain't so. The man who did's named Mario, so leave my Gina alone. The wind's picking up, boys, let's do the roll call. Make sure we got all our full stop supporters on board.

Adrian Pang Correa, Alex Barrett, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Shindleman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C, Grace B, Chris Leal, Covediner, Datum 3, David Friskalante, Darren and Dale Conkling, MZodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G, film it yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids, The cast and crew of Winner Trip to Browntown Half Greyhound I have the biggest man crush on Chris Winterbauer James McAvoy, Jason Frankel J.J. Rapido, John D. Wiltshire, Jory Hill Piper, Jose Emelano Sato de Giorgio.

Karina Canaba, Kate Ellrington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Ogeslager McCoy, Lena L.J, Lousy Susan, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate Ashley, Nate the Knife, Rosemary Southward, Rural Jarre, Sadie, Just Sadie, and the Provost family, where the O's sound like O's.

Oh, Cutthroat Island is pretty entertaining. The stunts and the sets and the ships are amazing. Pour one out for the lost soul sailing on their way to Cutthroat Isle. All right, thank you very much. Thank you. Chris, it's my episode, but what are we heading into next week? It's not pirates. It's kings. It's three kings. It's the movie, the Apocryphal film, in which David O'Russel may or may not have been punched in the face. I am so excited that we're going to be talking about three kings. I really like this movie. It's a great movie. I am very excited to talk about it. I watched Gunga Dean when we were going to cover Temple of Dune and I thought, wow, it was three kings. And so let's get our butts to the Gulf War and be soldiers of fortune. Let's do it. I look forward to it, Lizzie. Can't wait. It's David O. Russell, so certainly a lot's going wrong. I mean, I just have to imagine. and Spike Jones just having a real tough time.

Yeah, for sure. All right. We'll see you next week. Bye. Bye. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krupsa.