WHAT WENT WRONG - Doctor Dolittle

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

Of the 1,500 animals that worked on 1967’s Doctor Dolittle, not one threw more shit at the fan than lead human actor Rex Harrison. We apologize for the laughter in advance.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More tragically, a giraffe, they had to shut down production. Oh, no. When a giraffe stepped on its own penis. What? A giraffe. I don't know, apparently a giraffe. Why would that shut down the production just step off of it? It stepped on its own penis and it hurt itself so bad.

It was so insane. Hello and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here with your other host, Chris Winterbauer. Chris, how is it going? Lizzie, it's going great. It's almost September. I have no idea what's happened over the last six months. My life is a watercolor painting underneath a blow dryer and all the colors are running in every direction.

That sounds good. So, yeah, feeling good. But I'm very excited to talk about a very bad movie today. And that would be 1967's Dr. Doolittle. Lizzie, had you ever seen Dr. Doolittle before? No, I think I meant to ask my dad. I think he loves this movie, and I have a lot of questions about how and why after having watched it. Fair.

Yeah. I saw this movie when I was, I think, eight or nine years old at a movie theater. My grandparents took me to see it, and they were big Rex Harrison fans. And this, I need to talk to them about that after researching this movie. And so I had like vaguely fond memories of the movie, but really, watching it, uh, eviscerated all of those. So, uh, you mentioned you did not enjoy this film. And one of the things that I'm sure turned you off the most was it's two and a half hour running time. Two and a half hours long. And also didn't know it was a musical. And I'm going to go ahead and

put musical in quotes, in air quotes. Yes. Because I don't really think we can call it that. I think you could call it toxical. Sounds like a poisonous popsicle. But here we go. Dr. Doolittle is a 20th century Fox production. It was released in 1967. As you mentioned, it is a quote musical. And also I'll put quotes around comedy directed by Richard Fleischer. It was written by Leslie Brickis with music by Lionel Newman, starring Rex Harrison, Anthony Newley, Samantha Eggers, and Richard Attenborough as the circus leader, if you recognized him.

No, I didn't even know. I saw his name at the beginning and I was like, oh, where's the old? old man from Jurassic Park going to be, and then I totally forgot about him. He plays the guy that runs the circus that, like early in the movie. Anyway, it's based on the novel series of the same name by Hugh Lofting, who was a British writer. It was shot using the deluxe color film technology, not technicolor. This was single strip, not three strip color film. And we will briefly touch at the end on Eddie Murphy and Robert Downey Jr.'s

respective reboots of this property, but our focus is on this original adaptation from 1967. So the story, Lizzie, I'm not going to let you explain the story because trying to explain the story of this movie is a nightmare. I mean, please go for it. If you're able, I couldn't even do it. Oh, I can sum this up real fast. So there's a doctor who realizes that if he can learn how to talk to animals, he can be the greatest animal doctor in the world. And so he does that. There's like a two-headed alpaca situation. There's potentially racially. insensitive stereotype of an Irish man who brings a child to this doctor. They get shipwrecked with this lady who just cooks for them on a floating island. Yeah, see, nothing happens. It roughly

combined the plotting of the three original Doolittle books. This was a series of books, as Lizzie mentioned. Dr. John Little, played by Rex Harrison, is a British veterinary doctor who doesn't care for humans and only cares for animals. His name is Little? Oh, no, no, no. Sorry, Dr. John Doolittle. It's not to be a weird twist. The movie's ostensibly about his quest to find a supposed great pink snail. So if Wizard of Oz is the greatest example of a studio wielding power over its actors in an abusive way, Dr. Doolittle is its antidote. This production was plagued by many things, but Rex Harrison, the lead actor, was certainly the scourge of production.

Today's episode will be a journey into the lengths that Harrison went to, be they intentional or not, to externalize his inner turmoil onto those around him in some of the most absurd ways possible. Great. Quick note, I pulled much of this episode's information from two really good books. Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution, Five Movies, and the Birth of a New Hollywood, and Roadshow, The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s by Matthew Kennedy. Let's dive in. So, as I mentioned, Dr. Doolittle was created by Hugh Lofting, a British author in 1920.

He made a series of these books for, kids. It followed the character and a bunch of movie studios wanted to buy the rights, including Disney and Fox. He turned them all down. He died in 1947. The rights went to his widow, Josephine, and may be interested in a little cash. Josephine's not holding on to him quite as hard as Hugh did. So she options them to a producer, Helen Winston in 1960. Remember that name. She woke him back. So in 1963, Arthur P. Jacobs, who was like a public relations guy that decided to become a movie producer, decides that he wants to produce an adaptation of Dr. Doolittle. And he's heard that the rights are available because Winston's adaptation has fallen through.

So being a PR guy, he meets with Loftings Attorney and has this great pitch. He's going to turn it into a musical comedy. And it's going to star Rex Harrison, who not that many people knew, but he was on the London stage play version of My Fair Lady at the time with Julie Andrews. Wait, had he done the movie of My Fair Lady yet? filming it when this got pitched. Oh. And so it's like Rex Harrison and the songs and lyrics are going to be written by

Alan J. Lerner, who wrote all the songs to My Fair Lady. So that's going to be like the ultimate duo to make this movie. And My Fair Lady is... What happened? Well, you'll see. So My Fair Lady is in production at this point at Warner Brothers. The 55-year-old Rex Harrison was a bit of an odd choice for the role. He was more of a serious actor.

He was born in Lancashire, England. he attended college in Liverpool, and he came up through work on the stage. His career was interrupted by World War II. He flew in the Royal Air Force, and he found fame later in life, basically. So it wasn't until 1963's Cleopatra, where he played Julius Caesar

and the forthcoming My Fair Lady adaptation that he would find worldwide recognition. And if you don't know Rex Harrison by name, you do know him by voice. Harrison's speech pattern is famously the inspiration for Stewie on Seth McFarland's family guy. Here's a brief clip of McFarlane explaining the story that led to this influence. Yeah, there's a great, there's a great, I read the biography of Alan J. Lerner, who is the lyricist.

Mm-hmm. I know what I'm talking about. And there was, I guess he and, he and Rex Harrison were strolling through Hyde Park one day during the development of that show. And they were both talking about the trouble they were having. with their wives and Rex who obviously was later turned out to be gay said I say Alan wouldn't it be marvelous if we turned out to be homosexuals and you got the sense in reading that I'm like god this this is this is one guy

kind of putting the bone out there and the other guy probably going yeah that'd be That'd be pretty funny, Rex. This is my hotel. I'm going to take off. Wait, I had no idea Rex Harrison was gay. I knew he had six wives. It should be noted. I could not find confirmation of rumors that do exist that Rex Harrison was either gay or bisexual.

He never came out as gay, for example. Independent of that, Harrison and Lerner were considered this winning combo. And so on Christmas Day, 1963, Jacobs, the producer, who is taking on this project, signs an option for the do little film rights. The following month, Alan Lerner signs onto the project to write the lyrics, and he's been hired to write the screenplay, even though he hasn't written a screenplay before. And in March, they get 20th century Fox back into the deal, they sign on to this tribute the project, Rex Harrison, Inks' deal, everything's good to go. Quick note on things at Fox really quickly. So six months,

prior in June of 1963, the studio had released Cleopatra, which was a giant cluster fuck of a movie. We'll get back to that on a different episode. It nearly bankrupt the studio. In 1962, they lost $39 million, which is an insane amount of money for that point in time. So the Daryl Zanick, the head of the studio, feeling like there's no one in the world he can trust to run production, hires his 28-year-old son, Dick Zanick, to be the head of production. feeling he's the only producer he can trust. Now, to be fair, Dick had shown promise. He produced his own first film at the age of 24,

but there's all this criticism around the appointment, like is this nepotism, basically. So Dick Zanick's taking over the studio at 28, and even though he's well respected personally and professionally, and he'd go on to have a big producing career, I just want us to all keep in mind that there's a 28-year-old man at the head of a studio that nearly went out of existence the year before,

and he's being put there by his father, who's telling him, like, don't fuck. it up. The pressure is intense on this young man. So Dick Zannock really believes in the Doolittle property. He really believes in kids movies at this point in time. And so he makes a press announcement right when they make this deal that Fox is going to release the film, the Dr. Doolittle adaptation on Christmas Day in 1966. So three years later, make an announcement, three years from now, count it. We're going to give you Dr. Doolittle as, quote, a gift to the world. Everyone's so excited. Like Rex Harrison's in. Everyone's in.

Alan Lerner, not a fast writer. So the long and short of it is, he kept pushing back the deadlines and never turned in a single outline or treatment, let alone a script. He claimed to be busy working on a different stage adaptation. Then he disappeared to Rome when Jacobs tried to, like, confront him at his New York apartment until basically in May of 1965, over a year later, the studio's like, you have to give us something now or you're getting no money for this. He sends word through his agents that's like, we're so sorry, Mr. Lerner won't be able to start working on Dr. Doolittle until October of 1965, but he would still like to do the movie. So the studio fires him. They're like, we don't care how good you are with my fair lady. Like, you're off the project. And also,

it should be noted that during this period, Lerner somehow managed to renegotiate his fee up from $100,000 to $350,000 without ever turning in a single word of script. This man's incredible. He is remarkable. So the delay on scripting had three major consequences. First, they've attached a director to the project. Now, Lizzie, this director has a direct relation to the last episode that we did. It is Vincenti Minelli, Liza Minnelli's father and Judy Garland's ex-husband at the time. So he was brought on... Isn't it just Vincent Minnelli?

Yeah, but it's spelled Vincenti, so I like to say it like that. So, Vincenti. So Vincent has been brought onto the movie, but he has to drop it because the delay is interfering with his ability to take other work. So they lose their director. Second, the Christmas 1966 release date is like, just done. It's not going to happen. And then third, all of the sudden, Rex Harrison is an international movie star. So on December 25th, 1964, the film adaptation of My Fair Lady was a roaring success, released to $72.7 million at the box office against its $17 million budget. Huge Warner Brothers hit. It was three hours long.

Did you know that? It's so long. Yeah, I do, because I've seen it. It's great. It's great. It's great. So Rex Harrison is now a worldwide movie star. He's opened opposite Audrey Hepburn, and he won an Academy Award for his performance.

I didn't know that. One best actor. So at first blush, this is great for Fox. They're like, our actor under contract for this movie has won an Oscar and is like one of the most successful actors in the world. All they need is a new lyricist and a new director, like a new screenwriter. The problem is that Rex Harris Harris, is a dick, and he realizes that he holds the project's life in his hands. So suddenly, he's the most powerful person attached to this thing. If he walks away, the movie falls apart. So Fox and Jacobs,

the producer, decide that they're going to hire Leslie Brickis, who's a British lyricist who would later go on to write songs for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And that's kind of what he would be mostly known for. They then go out to director Richard Fleischer, who had just directed 20,000 leagues under the sea, which had won Best Visual Effects the year before. Jacobs flew with Brickus and Fleischer to meet Harrison at his villa in Portofino, Italy, and he basically gave the writer and director a simple directive. Don't fuck this up. Get Rex Harrison to like you so I can hire you onto this movie. Because if Rex Harrison said no, they wouldn't be able to bring them onto the movie. Harrison shows up to lunch with Jacobs, Fleischer, and Brickis an hour and a half late.

restaurant right below his villa that they flew to Italy to see him at. Easy power play move to start things up. Not only did he show up an hour and a half late, he decides to bring his wife, Rachel Roberts, who's shit-faced. It's worth just diving in, as you mentioned. Harrison has this troubled history with women. He was married six times. In 1942, he divorced his first wife.

He married Lily Palmer, an actress. While he was married to Palmer, he had an affair with the actress Carol Landis, who committed suicide in 1948 after spending the night with Harrison. Oh, no. He then waited several hours before calling a doctor or the police, causing a, quote, scandal that ended his contract with Fox, but there were no legal repercussions. And no foul play was ever found.

But. Okay. So then Harrison divorced Palmer in 1957. He married actress Kay Kendall. She then died of leukemia in 1959. and then he married Rachel Roberts, his fourth wife in 1962. So he's with Rachel Roberts now. Two of his past wives have died, one under very suspicious circumstances.

Cool. Rachel Roberts is an actress, and she suffers from suicidal depression and violent mood swings. Keep these women away from Rex Harrison. I know. And these violent mood swings are made worse by her blackout drinking, something that the director, writer, and producer team who've come to Italy would come to understand by the end of this lunch when, quote, Roberts blacked out, barking like a dog in a supposedly impromptu audition to provide the animal voiceover for the movie. Oh, no.

So, like, just not a great situation. Rex Harrison, take her home. Take her upstairs. He just, like, kept her around. He thought she was entertaining. So Fleischer, who's an experienced director at this point, decides to gamble his relationship with Rex Harrison on a joke. So Harrison sits at the table. Fleischer doesn't say anything for a minute. takes a long look at him and then totally deadpan just says to rex harrison movie star i'm sorry i just

don't think you're right for the part and then gets up and walks away from the table and everyone just goes dead silent and jacob's is like this guy just fucked up this whole thing in the first sentence and then all of a sudden harrison smiles and starts laughing and then says perhaps you're right and flisher had won him over okay now unfortunately uh for leslie bricciss rickis rex harrison had been really looking forward to working with his friend, Alan J. Lerner again. And so he decided that he was going to make Leslie Brickus' life hell for as long as he was writing on the movie. He would rip apart Leslie's lyrics whenever he read them. He decided that he wouldn't agree or disagree to Leslie's participation in the film until he finished his next scheduled shoot the honeypot. And so that left

Leslie in limbo. He didn't know if he was going to be the credited writer on the movie or not. But luckily, Leslie was a pro. He got to work anyway. By July of that year, this is like two months after he was He'd already delivered a rough draft, multiple songs, and he'd pulled out a lot of the books, racism. That was a big step. Apparently, Hugh Lofting's widow said she loved the script, and she thought it was a complete surprise that captured the spirit of Doctor of Doolittle. So great work, Leslie, on that front. And if you do notice, like, the natives in the movie less offensive than you would have thought.

Yeah, I will say, shockingly less racist than I expected. As soon as they crash landed onto an island, I was just like, oh, no, this is going to be bad. And it actually wasn't that bad. So that I'll give that to talk to a little. They speak nine languages. They read all the books. You know, it's good. Unfortunately, Rex Harrison had a lot more demands.

Jacobs and Fleischer had convinced the immensely popular Sammy Davis Jr. To play the leader of the C-Star Tribe, Bumpo, who was going to have a much bigger role in the movie. But Harrison said, no. He said, I don't want to work with a song and dance man. And he said that it had to be Sidney Poitier or he would leave the project. Sir, it's a musical. Indeed. What is wrong with a song and dancing? Yeah, exactly. So Jacobs and Fleischer are like, okay, we have to get Sidney Poitier and we have to fire Sammy Davis Jr. So they fly to New York. They meet with Poitier. They offer him $250,000, creative input on the project, and he agrees to take the role. They haven't told him that Sammy Davis Jr. was ever attached. There's no mention of Sammy Davis Jr. They then go to the majestic theater where they're scheduled to see Sammy Davis Jr. perform in a show. called Golden Boy that night, and they're supposed to have dinner with him afterwards, where they're

planning to break the news to him, but Sammy Davis Jr. doesn't know anything. So apparently during the show, Sammy Davis Jr., like ad-libed a line about Rex Harrison as like an homage to the producers in the audience because he's so excited about the project. And then these two guys go into his dressing room, and Sammy Davis Jr. is like dancing about. He's like talking all of his ideas for the movies he's about to get fired from. And they're just sitting there like, we're so we're such assholes. And then to make it so much worse. Who's the worst person that could walk into the room right then?

Sidney Pottae, who was just independently friends with Sammy Davis Jr., decides, I'm going to stop by my buddy Sammy Davis Jr.'s dressing room after your show just to say hi, walks through the door, and these guys are like, oh my God, I hope Sidney Potier doesn't say anything about the role.

And Sammy Davis Jr. brought up the movie, and Sidney Bonte, who's such a pro, says nothing. And then he just, like, walks out of the room, they take Sammy Davis Jr. to dinner, and they fire him. And he was very upset. he did threaten to sue. He said he was going to go to the NAACP.

It should be noted, though, that Davis did get a couple last jabs at the production. In 1967, the studio actually asked him to record all of the songs to the movie and release it on an album to promote the movie because his voice was so much better than Rex Harrison's. And when he performed it on TV, I think he gave it a little bit of his own flavor as a little fuck you to Rex Harrison. So here's Sammy Davis Jr. In the film, Dr. Doolittle, for those of you who do not, believes in the philosophy that man should be able to communicate with animals. And Leslie Brickers has written one song for Rex Harrison, which he says, which Rex is only Rex Harrison can.

If we could talk to the animals, imagine chatting with a chimp in chimpanzee. Well, I figured if I sang it like that, I wouldn't get back in my neighborhood again. So we did a different version and it goes like this. Look out. Ha, ha, ha. If I could talk to the animals, I just imagine it chatting with a chimpanzee. Wow. Okay, how much more fun is this version of the song?

So much more fun. I want to see the movie where Sammy Davis Jr. is double too little, because that is 100 million times better than Rex Harrison. So much better. He's so dynamic and like his voice is good. I love it. So finishing up the casting side of things, so Julie Andrews and Barbara Streisand were both offered the role of.

Oh my God. If that had been Barbara Strickson. She comes back later in the best way. You're going to love it. So Julia Anders and Varva Strasen are both offered the role of Emma Fairfax, who's like the cookwoman on the ship. No reason to be there outside of the fact that they figured they needed a woman somewhere in the movie. Also, not in the original book was written as like a composite character for the movie.

Clearly. They proved to be too expensive for the production to afford. And so they went on to the young Maggie Smith, who was co-starring with. Rex Harrison on the Honey Pot, but negotiations with her broke down. So the role eventually went to the 26-year-old Samantha Egger, who had just been nominated for a supporting actress Oscar in her performance in The Collector. I don't know much about Samantha Eggers.

She seemed fine, and she kind of came and went. Now, unfortunately, as they're getting the movie ready, Harrison is just getting into like a shittier and shittier mood from afar that's just like spiraling everything. And the reason is that like the things on this movie, the honeypot, that he was all excited to do, are not going well. The studio mandated that they rewrite the script, and Harrison doesn't like the rewrites because he doesn't have as many lines in the rewrites.

The production faced delays when the first cinematographer was fired, and the second one died suddenly. Like, everyone just dies during these movies back in the 60s. And then also Harrison's wife, Rachel Roberts, had spiraled into an alcohol and barbiturate-fueled depression after Maggie Smith had won the role

that she'd auditioned for in the project. So she thought since Rex was the lead, they would give her, you know, maybe a shot at the other role. Maggie Smith was younger than her, I think. It was just really bad. So when Harrison could turn his attention to do little, he basically took out all of his like negative destructive emotions on that project because he couldn't do it on the honeypot.

So Harrison also demanded that he be allowed to perform all of his songs live on set rather than do a pre-record and lip sync, which was industry standard at the time. And he's not even a good singer. So, Harrison's reason was that he not so secretly hated Brickus's lyrics, and I think he basically wanted to be able to change them as he saw fit during production, whereas if they pre-recorded them, they'd be locked in. I think it's important to note here as well that Rex Harrison doesn't really sing. No.

In this movie. And honestly, when I thought about it, not really in My Fair Lady either, he does this just like very rhythmic talking thing that's all the way through. and then sometimes you'll sort of sing a note, but then it's back to this and here we are again. And he starts to sing. That was too much singing. It makes me nervous.

That was like more singing than Rex Harrison by a lot. It's really just so bad. Apparently they called it talking on pitch. And it was like, it was like, it was his strategy to get through the day. And like that's what he did constantly. And it became like a method for actors who couldn't sing. Like, he popularized it. He was like the first one. It's like if Hamilton were just really bad, that's what it felt like. It's really bad. It's bad spoken word with the British guy. Not only that,

it's like an ego thing. So Samantha Eggers's voice was dubbed, for example, by a singer. Oh, because I was going to say she sounded great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he could have been dubbed, but he didn't want them. He didn't want to be dubbed. Cool. So in the meantime, Brickus has turned in a full draft of the script. That's on October 22nd, 1965. And it's important to note, this is just a few months after Foxes, the sound of music exploded onto the scene. It made almost $300 million at the box office, rave reviews. Yeah, it's better than My Fair Lady. Oh, it's amazing. It's like, I think it's the best musical of all time, maybe. Dick Zannick is now all of a sudden, he's 31 and he's like, boy, genius, head of Fox, right? Because, like, he released the sound of music. And all of the sudden,

sudden every studio in Hollywood is like all we want is a fucking three hour road show musical like they had such hard ons for musical they all start going into production so jacobs and zanick read bricus's script and they send it back to him and all they say is it needs to be bigger and it needs to be longer because we yeah so a script that could barely justify a one hour running time all of a sudden they're like we need this to be at least two and a half hours long so we can justify an intermission and a roadshow-style release. Oh, my God. All of a sudden, it's like the kitchen sink is getting thrown at Dr. Doolittle.

Not everybody at Fox agrees with this approach. Daryl Zanick, Dick's father, who still owns the studio, had been sent the script as well. And here's what he wrote to his son. Tell me if you think these concerns proved Prussian. Quote, since this is the most expensive project on our entire program, we have got to be positive that the final script will be a masterpiece, which it is not.

The production would be a hell of a mess. They would be able to maybe do half of the planned animal scenes. If they overshot it at all, meaning if they went over budget, the movie wouldn't be able to return a profit. Apparently, these two had a hyper-competitive father-son relationship. So Dick responded very defensively and was like, I'm very confident that we can pull this movie off. And we need to go forward with the bigger is better approach. Unfortunately, I think Daryl, the dad would prove to be. 100% right.

Right. Of course, Rex Harrison is not going to just go along with the most recent version of the script that they've sent him because he was in a bad mood when he got it. So he reads the script and he sends a letter, he sends a telegram that says, quote, the script was clearly not written for me, which is literally impossible. He's been sending notes to the writer for the last eight months, forcing him to do whole versions of the script with his notes in it. He says, it's not for me. I'm not going to do Pratt Falls. I will not be sung to. It was written for a short fat man.

I don't know how you know that. And he suggests they hire Kerry Grant. And then... Honestly, great. Get him in there. Yeah, exactly. Jacobs and Zannick are shocked and they're like, Rex, we'll get back to you.

They circle up and they kind of decide, you know what? This Rex Harrison guy is just too much. We can't deal with him anymore. We got to just move on. And so Rex Harrison clearly was doing this for leverage and he's overplayed his hand. Now, Lizzie, what star who had just blown up with the sound of music might be a good fit as Dr. Doolittle?

Christopher Plummer? Christopher Plummer. Most handsome man of the 60s? Most handsome man. It's so handsome. He was. Still is. Captain von Trapp.

Yes. Christopher Plummer, indeed. So tired of Harrison's shit, the Xanax and Jacobs decide to replace Rex Harrison, with Christopher Plummer. Would have been better. Also, wait, Christopher Plummer can sing, right? He's singing in the Sound of Music. He can sing.

Oh, get him in there. Hire him. Win, win, win. So the studio buys out his contract on a Broadway play for $90,000. They agree to pay him $250,000 for the role. And then Rex Harrison hears that they're replacing him and is like, oh, my God, I fuck this up because the Honeybought movie's not going well. So he actually needs to get paid.

for this movie. So on December 30th, only three weeks after he said he was leaving the project, his agents send word that he is, quote, fully committed to do little, and he claims, and he claims to have been unaware of the demands forwarded by his agents. He says they were operating without his consent for all of this time. throws them under the bus. And Zannick wrote back respectively, quote, you are always our number one choice, and we're very sorry things didn't work out.

And then they fired him. So for a brief moment, this movie, like, has a chance. Unfortunately, over the next two weeks, Harrison and his team, like, fucking grovel like no one's groveled before. And one of the things that they do, which I'm sure is true, but it's just so fucking shady, is Rex Harrison uses the recent suicide attempt of his wife, Rachel Roberts, as the excuse for why he's been so difficult to deal with. So she'd attempted to overdose on pills while they were shooting the honeypot, and he's like, that's why. So, poor lady. Fox, knowing that because they have a contract with Rex, they don't want to get into legal action with him. So they bring him back onto the project.

They fire Christopher Plummer, who's basically like, that's fine because he just got paid $90,000 not to be in a play. And he also, like, didn't have to be in this movie. So they bring Harrison back. But meanwhile, back on the Fox lot, various accountants have looked at the expanded script, the bigger is better scripts. And they've realized that the movie's not going to cost $6 million, which was the original budget. It's actually going to cost $14.4 million. and Dick Zanick's like, oh, no, this is a lot more than I thought it was going to be. So even though he was riding high on the sound of music, he's like, let's just cut $2 million

out of the budget. So they start trying to find things to cut out of the budget. And some things are easy. Like Rex Harrison was demanding they continued to bring in new lyricists to write alternate versions of Brickas's songs. And they were just like, we're going to put the kibosh on that. And then they realized that the thing that would save the most money is if they cut the character Bumpo, who Sidney Poitier was playing, who they'd owe $400,000 for the role.

Now, there were two big problems with this plan. Number one was that nobody told Brickas that Bumpo was potentially being cut. So during every rewrite, he just made the character a bigger and bigger part of the story because they were like, we're paying Sidney Bwatea a lot of money. Let's give them a lot of scenes. And then they're like, they're like, no, Brickis, you got to lose all those scenes. Like, not going to work. And then on top of that, they're terrified of the PR backlash. of firing America's only black Oscar-winning actor from the production. And this is like, like a big movie this next year is going to be in the heat of the night. Like, this is a big moment for race relations in America.

So they're like, oh, my God, we have to do this and it's going to be awful. And in an insanely lucky break, though, it turns out that Poitier hadn't actually signed his contract yet because his agent was still negotiating a couple of points. So basically, the agent comes to them and they're like, can we just change these two things? And the studio's like, that's just way too much. much. And they told, and they told them to fuck off. And then contract negotiations broke down and Sidney Poitiers walked away from the movie. It was like, could he have like one extra chair? Only green Eminem? Yeah, exactly. Get out of my office. And meanwhile, they're like, whew, we dodged that

bullet. So then when Poitier leaves, Harrison again threatens to quit because he's like, the only actor on this project besides me was Sydney Poitia. And they're just like, Harrison, Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. And Harrison was like, fine. And so you actually shut up that.

So summer production starts and they've basically shaved $2 million from the budget. And then all of a sudden that $2 million just gets eaten right back up because, of course, actors, animals, everything. Animals. It's a nightmare. The first thing I said as soon as this movie started, I just said, oh, no, look at all these animals on this 1960s. set. Yeah. It's like, it's just like there's like 50 animals in one room within the first two scenes of the movie. Yeah. So, here's some various examples. It costs over $100,000 to teach a chimpanzee how to cook bacon in a frying fan.

Didn't need that. Not only that. You didn't, you didn't have to teach one chip. You had to teach the two understudy chimps to know in case the first chip. You don't need it. In case the first chip shit himself. So then they had to pay Brickus another $100,000 because they just kept making them work on the script because Rex Harrison, they basically were like, we're not going to use these changes, but like we're going to pay you to be Rex Harrison's little typewriter boy. No, this poor man. It turns out so like Anthony Newley, who gets brought on to play Matthew Mug, who's like the offensively Irish character, he gets brought on to the project. he gets brought on to the project and apparently he's really good friends with Brickus so like they have a good back and forth

and then Harrison becomes paranoid that Briggas and newly are conspiring to reduce Harrison's role and expand Matthew Muggs role and Harrison turns out raging anti-Semite and newly is Jewish and so Harrison to his face would call him a cockney Jew or that Jew comic and then Oh my God. Oh yeah and then behind his back

he would say like a lot worse things than that and that's just the start of some the racism we'll get to. Speaking of animals, the production heads to the quaint town of Castle Come, England, which had just literally won the award for the quaintest town in England right before they started shooting. Unfortunately, filming was delayed production class balloon due to the fact that no one at Fox realized that all of the animals that had been trained in California would have to be

quarantined as soon as they reached England. So they show up in England and they're like, sir, you can't bring the animals off the plane. And they're like, oh, fuck. And so they, and it's not like a week. It's like months of quarantine. So they have to conscript an entirely new set of animals in England. They had to find them in England. And these are British.

These are not Hollywood animals. These are now British animals. These are wild British animals that have to be trained. And so they ship all the exotic animals back to Los Angeles and hold them until they can shoot with them in the studio and they get all these new animals. So in terms of total numbers, how many animals, how many animals, animals total do you think worked on this movie? So many. Um, total numbers. Okay, I'm going to say like, I'll say like, like 200. 200 to 1500 animals were brought on to work on Dr. Doolittle. So yes. Uh,

until like counting all the flies or something how to get there. No, no, the flies are a separate issue. Um, so, uh, that was because they had so many birds. And then they had like, like, for every main character, they had all the understudies too. So it wasn't like one sheep. It was five sheep. And it wasn't one chimp. It was five chumps. And it was just like, so everything multiplied.

And then so like these animals are fighting. They're humping. They're pooping on each other. They're like lunging. They're screaming. The script called for a goat to climb up the neck of a giraffe for lions to play patty cake. Excuse me? Yeah.

They needed understudies for quote, Chi Chi Chi the Chimp, Jip the dog, Polynesia the Parrot, Sheila the Fox, Toggles the Spectacle Horse, and Sophie the Seal. Gub-Gub the piglet was replaced every two weeks because piglets outgrow their cute phase too fast, and so they just kept having to bring in new piglets. There was a group of cats that refused to follow Anthony Newley down the street, even after they covered him in fish guts, which was trying to attract the cats behind him. A goat ate Fleischer's script, and it kicked down the walls of one of the sets.

Yeah, don't mess around with goats. They'll kick you in the head. Mary the Rhino came down with a viral infection, and the only way they could inject her with penicillin was by putting the injection in an elephant gun and firing it into her, which is the most insane thing I've ever heard. That can't be right.

There's no way that that is the standard procedure. No, it's not. No way. Oh my God. They had to fly a new rhino in from Mbasa to Hollywood because Mary then took two weeks to recover. Harrison was... You shot her!

With an elephant gun! Harrison was bitten by a chimp, a Pomeranian, a duck, and a parrot. Hell yeah. One scene required ducks in a pond, and they grabbed the ducks and threw them in the pond, but they forgot the fact that the ducks had just molted right beforehand,

so they didn't have waterfuth feathers, and all the ducks sank instantly. And they'd like dive into the pond and pull the ducks out so they wouldn't drown. When a squirrel wouldn't sit still, they filled a fountain pen with gin, and fed it to the creature drop by drop to get it drunk enough to stay quiet for a shot. Rex Harrison wrote in his journal that, quote,

they got a few seconds of film showing the squirrel nodding and swaying before it passed out cold. Oh my God. Two urban legends, I couldn't confirm, but we're in these books, was a parrot apparently learned how to mimic the first assistant director's voice yelling cut to the confusion of the crew. Oh, my God. And more tragically, a giraffe to shut down production. Oh no.

When a giraffe stepped on its own penis. What? A giraffe. I don't know, apparently a giraffe. Why would that shut down the production? Just step off of it. It stepped on its own penis and it hurt itself so bad. So it was so insane.

That was the same giraffe that was on the cover of Life magazine. Really? Yeah. Rex Harrison was like on its back on the cover of Life magazine. And apparently the choreographer on the movie was like going back and forth between a different production. And he shows up the other production and they're like, oh, you're early. And they're like, yeah, we had to shut down for three days. And they're like, why?

And he goes, the giraffe stepped on its own cock. And he's like, what is happening? Oh, no. I hope it's okay. It lived. It was fine. So once again, the animals were only the start of it. No one checked the weather report.

Turns out it rains in this town all day, every day. So for two months. It's a town in England. For two months, they only shot for five days without rain interruptions. Tensions with the residents ran high. The production insisted that they had to remove all the antennas from the roofs of the houses, so it looked period appropriate. And all the tenants were like, we want to watch television.

It got really dicey. One local attempted to blow up part of the set after the team damned a local river for a shot. It's like early in the movie, they're going across a bridge in the town, and it's like to damn it to make it look deep. Anyway, production falls further and further behind. and Jacobs is feeling the pressure, the producer. The weather turns the fields into mud. Multiple animals are getting pneumonia.

They can't shoot with any of like the lions and stuff because they're back in Hollywood. And so basically he makes the call. We're going to leave England now and we're going to rebuild every set on a soundstage in L.A. and reshoot almost all of this back in Los Angeles. So like outside of some of those exterior shots, all of that was painstakingly recreated in Los Angeles,

doubling the production costs. And as he's preparing to leave for Los Angeles, Jacob suffers a heart attack. So the producer, he was overweight, smoked a lot. Has a heart attack, the production has to tudge on. They go back to L.A. It's just a struggle. They have to build the sets on a slant,

and they have to be able to push the floors up so that they can more easily wipe the poop and pee off of it as like the animals are constantly shitting themselves. That, speaking of flies, they were just everywhere constantly. All of the fabrics have to be plastic or painted so they wouldn't get stained. You'd think the lion costume in the Wizard of Oz was bad. Like literally everything had to be hosed down, drained, and dried, and smelled awful on the set.

Everything needed duplicates, even the walls, because if an animal kicked a hole in one, they had to fly in a new one, like instantly. They had to start inoculating the actors because the animal trainers kept coming down with hepatitis after being bitten by the animals. Oh, my God. And of course, the last issue is noise. The animals are so loud all the time. Like, none of the dialogue was usable.

So all of the re-recording costs are going up, you know, for later in post. Also, because all of the animal scenes, they're inside. Like, it's very minimal outdoor scenes. And it's not, it's like the animal's in frame. And there's like 50 backup birds to the side that are all like, like screaming at everyone. So then they shoot in L.A. The team then heads to St. Lucia in the Caribbean.

to shoot the Africa sequences or like the Sea Star Island sequences in October. The deal is like Harrison's going to live on a yacht with Rachel Roberts. Anthony Newley is going to bring his kids and wife and it's going to be like a great tropical vacation until he gets a telegram

from the unit production manager and here's what it says. Quote, recommend newly not bring children. Stop. Insect, terrible from very wet summer. Stop. Everyone covered in welts and soar. Stop. Two people. Bad infections from bites. Stop. Six people.

disintery, stop, please send bug spray, stop. And that's what he sent from St. Lucia. Oh, my God. So filming starts up. It's shut down every other day by tropical storms. There's fleas everywhere. The actors are getting bit constantly. But of course, Rex Harrison and Rachel Roberts are like the two nightmares on set more

than anything else. This is what Samantha Eggers said of her co-store. I quote, often had a wonderful time with Rex. I mean, yes, he was unkind and vitriolic and very mean-spirited. But he was also very funny, until, of course, he turned on me too. So during one shoot day where Fleischer was filming Anthony Newley and Harrison was not needed on set, Harrison piloted his boat into the middle of the scene and refused to move it for two hours, ruining the shot and preventing filming presumably due to another contract dispute.

So he was willing to just like shut down production when he wasn't the center of attention. Things only got worse when his wife showed up. So Rachel Roberts shows up and she's openly racist towards Jeffrey. Holder who played William Shakespeare the 10th. And he's a Trinidad born actor. He's also a writer and director, very accomplished. He was awesome. The second he showed up, he was one of the best part of the movie.

Yeah. So she's like openly racist toward him. She's like, what's it like hanging out with this type of person? What's it like being on this side of the set? What's it like being on this part of the boat? It was just unbelievable the stuff she would say. Now, beyond that, because of the position of Roberts and Harrison's yacht out in the middle of the bay that they're shooting on, they would get in the,

these huge late-night drunk screaming matches that would just carry across the water and everyone could hear them everywhere. One night the seal takers thought that their seals were in distress, but it was just Roberts screaming off the bow of her boat. One day, Rachel Roberts fakes a suicide attempt by leaving her shoes on the deck of a boat, wrapping her clothes around a log, screaming, throwing it into the bay, and hiding below decks. On another day, she gets drunk and makes a wild swim for the seal tank screaming that she's going to free them. They had to stop her from doing so. Even like the seemingly simple shots of the fucking giant snail just sitting in the shallow

end of the water was complicated by the fact that the St. Lucian, like native people, would run up and start throwing rocks at it at random times because recently a lot of their children had been made ill by something caused by eating freshwater snails. so they would run out and they thought the production has made this like effigy to a demon in front of them and like throw rocks at it and on top of it it looked terrible. So they get through that. They go back to Los Angeles. It's like supposed to be like a few more weeks of shooting and that lasts four more months.

The budget's climbing and climbing until it hits $18 million. It's like literally three times what it was supposed to initially cost. Jacobs and Zannick are freaking out and they're like just killing the messengers. Like if anyone gives them bad news, they're getting fired from the project. The editor comes to them and she's like, hey, I think we should revise the schedule. And they're like, you're fired, leave. Like, we can't, we can't deal with you right now. And somehow, Rachel Roberts and Rex Harrison are still together.

And they've rented a house in Beverly Hills and their problems are now all of a sudden dangerously public because they're in L.A. So one night, Harrison and his wife terrified a room full of Hollywood establishment, including Billy Wilder and Jimmy Stewart and their wives, when at a party in the L.A. restaurant, the Bistro, he began singing. a song about his penis to the tune of I've grown accustomed to her face while his wife, Rachel Roberts, who was not wearing underwear, did handstands. What?

I don't know. Honestly, I would really love to go back in time to like between the 40s and 60s in Hollywood. It was insane. A disaster. So production wraps in April 1967. It lasted 10 months. Fleischer and Jacobs began the arduous process of trying to sell a movie that they really know probably isn't worth seeing. So Doolittle's final cost was $18 million and they would then spend

$11 million marketing it. To make matters even worse, Warner Brothers releases Camelot, which is like a three-hour musical Roadshow movie. It's the first one post sound of music and it tanked. And all of a sudden the industry is like, wait, maybe people actually aren't interested in musicals. And it was the fact that the sound of music was just great and like a really compelling story that made. it's so successful. There are literally 13 different musicals at this scale in production around Hollywood. Everyone's like, oh my God, like we are all fucked right now. Zannick at the time said, you look back now and ask, how could you be so stupid? Dr. Doolittle was conceived in a period of euphoria. We were all writing a musical wave that we didn't realize was going to come crashing down

on the beach all at once. Well, the key part of this, though, is that they're called musicals. and generally they tend to need to have some sort of songs and music that is memorable and catchy, none of which this had. So, like, you can't just put music in a movie and call it a musical. That's not how it works. Indeed. Helen Winston, that producer from the top of our story, files a lawsuit for $4.5 million against the studio saying that they had ripped off her original screenplay. Turns out that idea for the animal strike was from the screenplay that she had had committed. commissioned. Brickus read that screenplay, assumed that the Animal Strike was from the books

and had included it, but it actually wasn't from the books. So Helen Winston owned it, and they then had to pay her off. It wasn't for the full four and a half, but they sell it for a lot of money. And meanwhile, these guys are like, we've got a fucking turret on our hands, and they're just like, we don't care. We're going to sell this thing so hard. The Media Blitz included half a million copies of a soundtrack being issued in stores four months before the film's release, including a cover of Talk to Animals recorded by Bobby Darren, Tony Bennett, and Dizzy Gillespie. What? Sammy Davis Jr., as I mentioned, was hired to re-record an album featured in the film. Bobby Darren did another version called Bobby Darren sings Dr. Doolittle that was released simultaneously.

Like, the marketing machine on this thing was nuts. They bought out the cover of Life magazine. They partnered with 50 companies to create 300 unique items to sell in stores that would be associated with the film. They had 35,000 stand-up cutouts of Harrison as Doolittle made and placed in stores around the country. The merchandising created for the movie was valued at north of $200 million. Well, this explains why my dad loved this, because at 1967, he would have been eight years old. So an eight-year-old saying this everywhere. Yeah, you would watch it.

So Mark Harris, the author of one of those books I mentioned, says Dick Zannick and his lieutenants told themselves that it wouldn't matter, that if they just announced loudly and frequently enough, how wonderful their quote, get Christmas gift to the world was, nobody would look too closely once they unwrapped the box. That shows you their strategy. So the reviews of Doolittle were as expected, rough. Here's what I would call the most positive review from Variety. They wrote, quote,

the overall entertainment value of Dr. Doolittle is hard to pinpoint. Is it a good motion picture? The answer varies according to what the individual expects for his money, which I think is just like such a great, great backhand compliment. Dr. Doolittle opened opposite the Jungle Book, which had been out for a couple months, but was still killing it at the box office. The movie gets released. It does terribly.

After they factor in their marketing and everything, the studio basically lost $11 million. Zanick and Fleischer, that's the head of the studio and the director, rebounded almost instantly because they went on to make Planet of the Apes almost immediately afterwards. And so Zanick did just fine Rex Harrison's film career tank with this movie. He acted in literally seven more movies from 1968 to 1982. every single one failed critically and commercially. There wasn't a single good one in there.

He retired in 1982 from film and he just did stage work. He was knighted in 1989. He and Rachel Roberts finally split in 1971. She acted in a few more things. And then in 1980, she actually made a final attempt to reconcile with Harrison and tried to win him back. And when she failed, she killed herself in 1980. So she had a very tragic life.

Rex Harrison died of pancreatic cancer in 1990 at the age of 82. You. Dr. Doolittle has been remade twice since the 1998 Eddie Murphy one, which I would argue was like a moderate success. It was a fine movie. I was going to say that one's fine. Had a great Elias song on the soundtrack. And then most recently, 2019's Doolittle starring Bobby Downey Duce's Robert Downey Jr. doing what is maybe a Welsh accent. And I'm sure in a few years we'll be ready to do an episode on that one. My question is like why is this an enduring story? The books sound like they're kind of trash. The idea is like not particularly inventive. It's just a doctor that talks to animals. I think it's the cue value, like the cue value. It's like people just

know the name. And so they're like, oh yeah, do little. I know what that is. And so all the executives are like, yeah, let's remake it. It's like Santa Claus. Everyone knows what it is. So however challenging this movie was going to be made by the nature of its animals and locations, etc. or however bad it was because of its script. The fact is Rex Harrison just made everything exponentially worse. I really tried to find something redeeming here. Like, was there a childhood trauma, you know, anything? And really what I could come down to is like Rex Harrison was a bully,

an egomaniac, and he was an asshole. I mean, I think it's worth noting that like his performance in My Fair Lady works because he's playing an egomaniacal asshole. Like that is that character, someone who's so full of themselves and so sure of their own capabilities that they're willing. to literally ruin a woman's life for an experiment. That's the character. So A plus, he did great at that, but anything else is a little tough.

I agree. However much I dug, I couldn't find anything that would exonerate the man. So what went right? I have two what went right. One is snarky, and the other one's not. My snarky one is I am not a big musical fan, and I'm okay with this ending musicals for a little while. in Hollywood and moving on to some other types of movies.

So that's my first take. The second is, I do think some of the effects were good. And obviously, we're watching now in high definition. This was played back in the day. You know, it was being projected. It was harder to see those types of details. That's it. Thank you so much for listening to our coverage of 1967's Dr. Doolittle.

Friendly reminder for your own health and safety. Do not watch 1967's Dr. Doolittle. Feel free to dive into either of the other ones. As always, shoot us an email at what went wrong pod at gmail.com or through Instagram at What Went Wrong Pod with recommendations of films that you would like us to cover in the future. Yeah. We will talk to you soon. Get out of here and don't step on your own penis.

If you do, you're very lucky. Congratulations. You either have very short legs or very... David Tudy. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthano Youos.