WHAT WENT WRONG - The Bonfire of the Vanities

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

Riddled with poor casting decisions, irresponsible portrayals, and uncomfortably bad accents, The Bonfire of the Vanities singed the careers of all involved. Joined by Luke Patrick and Sam Siegel, resident Hanks experts and hosts of the Hanksy Panksy podcast, Chris & Lizzie dig in on one of America's Dad's biggest let downs.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.

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast about what went wrong on Hollywood's various hits, misfires, and everything in between. I am Chris Winterbauer here as always with Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how you doing this week? Doing great. I took a 10-minute nap today. Wow. Life's really turning around. I had a 10-minute panic attack.

Anyway, this week we are very lucky to be joined by two friends from one of our favorite new podcast. Hanksie Panksy. We'll get into what it's about in a second. Welcome Sam Siegel and Luke Patrick to the show. Thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks for, thanks for having us. Thanks, y'all. Please really quickly tell us what Hanksie Panksy is about because when my wife told me about it, I didn't think it was real. Luke, do you want the honors or do you want me to take that? Yeah, I mean, we can we can chop it up. Basically, it's a very dumb idea for two very dumb idiots, which is me and Sam, where two best friends watch every single Tom Hanks movie ever made in chronological order. Yeah, that's the tall and short of it.

He hurts us. We, we, actually, we take it. Yeah, we take it. We don't even hurt him back. How many are there out of curiosity? I think last count was something in the order of 70s, so this is a multi-year project that we have assigned to ourselves. Okay. And as I've listened to the first 10 episodes or so, Hank's really started a lot of the first 10 episodes.

career on just stinker after stinker. It was a tough go, I think, for a while. Yeah, it was a big old pile of garbage. Oh, really? Yeah. That's so funny because I always think about, like, we were talking about this last night when we were watching the unbelievable treat that you have forced us to watch for today's episode. My boyfriend and our producer and I were talking about what his big break was, and I was like, bosom buddies, uh, big? Like, those are the only two things I can think of. So it's interesting to hear there's stuff before that. Yeah, there's a whole slew of it. And you're right on the money because we are post big for the meal that you guys are surfing up today. Like what we're, what we've just viewed is post his big breakout. There's no

excuse. No, it's insane. Okay. So, so you guys kind of sludged through, you know, the first eight stinkers and nine and you have splash in there and you have big. But as you mentioned, we're at a great point where our podcast get to intersect because there's a movie that I wanted to cover for a long time that is one of Tom Hanks's like kind of early career stinkers and that is the bonfire of the vanities. And so we are meeting. It is a meeting of the minds here. And I will give a quick intro to kind of the high level of the movie. And then I'd love if you guys would do like a little bit of your patented kind of three act breakdown of this movie. So the bonfire of the Vanities is a 1990 supposedly black comedy directed and produced by Brian De Palma,

starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cottrell, and Morgan Freeman, adapted for the screen by Michael Christopher from the best-selling novel of the same name by Tom Wolf, very famous writer. The movie was a complete and utter failure. No surprise. We just watched it. a humiliating outing for its rising stars and a financial blow to Warner Brothers, bringing in a mere $15.6 million against its $50 million plus budget. Oh. Yes, huge catastrophe. I highly recommend, if you enjoy this podcast, that you pick up a copy of Julie Solomon's

incredible book, The Devil's Candy, an anatomy of a Hollywood disaster. Julie Solomon was a writer for the Wall Street Journal, who Brian DePaulma gave complete access to follow the entire production of the film because she was a huge fan of the book and she wanted to write about the entire process of adapting a book and what was supposed to be a book about the adaptation of a prestige book into a prestige picture became a book

about this unmitigated disaster of this movie. Yeah. Well, to give you Luke Patrick's patented three-act structure of your money back guarantee, man, if you put on the spot here a little bit, I think this one's actually fairly easy to do. So the first act we were introduced to, and guys, I'm sorry, I hope you know character names because... Oh, we don't.

Oh, yeah, no. Okay, great. I'll fill the man. I got it. Thank you. Someone pull up the IMDB. So, Act 1, we're introduced to Tom Hanks. Sherman McCoy.

Sherman McCoy. Thank you. Sherman McCoy is a stock or options trader, one or the other. Anyway, high roller, it's the 80s. He's bringing in bags of money. Act 1, as we sort of established his character, he is kind of like a wolf of Wall Street figure. He's just generally breaking in bags of cash, comes from a prestige family,

is having an affair that his wife kind of finds out about in the beginning. So there's some tension, but then Act 1 kind of slides out in and then Act 2 when he and the mistress are stuck in the Bronx, and they accidentally hit a guy while they're supposedly being robbed. I'm sure we'll touch on that in a second. Yeah. There's some... Unclear what's happening.

Exactly. And so they hit a guy who then ends up in a coma. And so Act 2, you know, we're building tension as the local African-American community really rallies around this guy in the hospital. And then there's a attorney general, Mr. Weiss, who wants to go after whoever this was, because essentially there's a race component to this and they really want to bag one of these, these rich, white people to kind of help Mr. Weiss's campaign. So there's conflicting interests between the attorney general trying to bag him and Tom Hanks trying to subdue this entire experience plus his mistress is doing the same thing to a varying degrees culminating with him being arrested and then eventually tried. So at the end of Act 2, we're in the situation where Tom Hanks is about to be tried and

will most likely be found guilty. He'll go to jail. He's lost everything. His house, his wife, his job, all of his fancy socialite friends. He shoots a shotgun inside of his house several times. It's wild. And then an act. three, we essentially resolve this entire fucking movie by him playing. We'll get to that. In about two minutes. Yeah. And a real whiplash at the end when he plays a tape where he recorded his mistress

admitting that she was the one driving the car. He dodges all charges. Morgan Freeman talks at us for about two and a half minutes. And then roll fucking credits. The movie ends with him playing an inadmissible piece of evidence to the courtroom. And then Morgan Freeman just Fiat style is like, we're done. Yeah. This is over.

Also, I love how you're able to do the entire synopsis without ever mentioning the fact that Bruce Willis was in this movie playing the narrator and the character. Because he's so unnecessary to this movie. So as Luke mentioned, it's a rise, fall, rise again story. And it is bookended by Bruce Willis's supposedly literary. character, although imagining Bruce Willis as someone who's literate is... Yeah, that was a tough one. And if I may, Luke, you did forget

all the virulent racism. Well, we've got plenty of time to do on that, guys. I would say that's probably the next 40 minutes of this podcast. Very strange. Also, I want to point out that Bruce Willis's book somehow has catapulted him into superstar status, which I wasn't aware

it was a thing that happened to authors that write true crime books. It's like he is the Rolling Stones now. That's correct. Yeah. So it begs the question, why was this movie made? And it was really only made because Tom Wolfe's book, The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987, his first novel, was an unprecedented success.

And he was a very successful writer of a lot of nonfiction and experimental work, like the electric collate acid test, for example, the right stuff, radical chic and ma-mowing the fat catchers. That's not a real book. Yeah, that's nothing. And so he wrote this book that was called by many the quintessential book of the 80s. Published in 87, The Bonfire of the Vanities referred to this monk in Florence back in like the 15th century who said that we were getting too obsessed with the vanities of our lives, the excesses of our lives. So he and his followers went house to house, collected jewelry, books, articles of clothing.

They put them in a giant bonfire in the middle of the town and they lit it all on fire to show like we're purifying ourselves. So the book sold 725,000 hardcover copies. It made over $14 million. And the manuscript got sent around Hollywood in 1987 when they were releasing the book. But the general consensus was that the movie would be impossible to make because the book is entirely filled with unlikable characters. And there's no direct through line. So like in the book, everybody's an asshole. That's the whole point.

That is why the more racist elements may be like, kind of work in the book because Tom Wolfe's point in the book was that everybody's an opportunist. But then certain changes end up happening where that gets lost, like in the final story. And Luke, I don't know if you have any insight. You've read some of Tom Wolfe like into his writing style or anything like that, but is there anything about him that would make him particularly difficult to adapt in your mind? Yeah, actually, that's a really good question because it would, and I will preface this by saying that I have read electric clay acid test and it is a phenomenal book, but it has been a really long

time. And I would also put him in the same bucket as people like Ken Kese or Jack Kerouac where, um, or Salinger, where Catcher in the Rye was probably a great book when you were in high school. But if you reread it, it's probably just about an arrogant asshole white kid who tries to have sex with a prostitute. Um, yeah. So with that preface, um, his, his writing style is really stream of conscious and really tries to build. It's almost like you're inside of a painting, especially electric coolate acid test. It tries to build an experience for you. So through that book, you really get a sense for what it was like to be tripping your nut sack off,

driving around the South, or wherever you happen to be. I cannot imagine trying to translate that if that's what this novel is. And I really wanted to read it, but y'all, it's like 600-something pages. Oh, no. No one has time for that. Yeah, yeah. It's sitting next to Infinite Jest in my private books I will never read. Talk about vanities you can burn.

You're not going to ever do that. I do want to briefly, because we keep mentioning the sort of racism that pops up in this movie, and I know we're going to get to it a lot more, but just to kind of touch on it for a minute for people that haven't seen this movie, and I would recommend that you don't ever. The first thing that stands out is that as soon as what Luke was talking about where Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith, the mistress, end up in the Bronx, it is the most absurd and insane portrayal of the Bronx I've ever seen, where it's like they turn a corner and she's like, where are we? and he's like, oh, we're north of Manhattan.

And then there's like trash cans on fire and there's just people. No, there's cars on fire. It becomes like Mad Max beyond the Thunderdome all of a sudden. And there's just people attacking them for no reason. And it's the most absurd depiction of a normal night on a street in the Bronx that I have ever seen. Yeah. Yeah, Sam, what was your favorite moment of, as you mentioned, virulent racism as you were. It may have been kind of what Lizzie was talking about, where the Bronx was portrayed as

Fallujah, where every black man is either a criminal or a pimp, and every woman, a sex worker. And not the Bronx. And not the Bronx where my dad grew up and my grandparents lived. It was insane. Indeed. So, and we're going to get into all those choices as they were in just a moment. But we have to get to the man behind the movie, and that is this producer whose name is Peter Goober. I wish it was a different name, but that's his name.

He reads the book in August of 1987, and he instantly decides he has to make it. And he is not just some small-time producer. He had made Rain Man, Batman, Gorillas in the Mist, the Color Purple, Interspace, The Witches of Eastwick, Flashdance, Missing, Tangoid Cash, an American werewolf in London. He was a big time producer. That list is insane. And he made this movie. And he reads this book and he says, I can pull this off. Was he okay?

I know how to like, no, unclear. So he has an exclusive deal with Warner Brothers. He calls Lucy Fisher. So there's an executive at Warner Brothers who's in charge of the action films. And then there's Lucy Fisher who's in charge of the prestige films. So he calls her and he goes, I have your next prestige project. they shell out $750,000 for the rights of the project. And Lucy Fisher, by the way, if you've been following our podcast,

she cut her teeth running Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope back in the day before she went studio. So she is like, this movie is incredibly important to my career because it's going to be the most expensive prestige film that Warner Brothers has ever made. Our prestige department is going to be at the same caliber as the action department. And so she and Goober are working together to turn this thing into this enormous tentpole intellectual movie. They go and they hire Michael Christopher, who's a Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning writer to write the script. So far, so good. He'd written The Witches of Eastwick, and he was this like workhorse writer. And they pay him $600,000 to write the script.

So already one and a half million dollars basically in just to get a script for this movie. So then he turns in the first draft in October of 1988, and everyone's like, oh, my God, this is a giant trash fire of a script. Turns out it's really hard to condense a 650-page book into like a 98 to 120-page screenplay. This thing is a mini-series at best. It's so clear that points are being jumped over and missed, and I don't know why you would try to make this a movie. Exactly. And as I'm sure you guys have noticed, like, going through Hank's career, As we get later into the 80s, movie budgets start just skyrocketing for no real reason.

And so what happened was when Jaws went huge, Star Wars went huge, studios realized we could just do more front-end investment on these movies, and if we have a hit, they'll make like $500 million worldwide. But what that meant is all of a sudden directors realized if they had one failure, they'd be put in movie jail for like years at a time. So all of a sudden, nobody wants to take risks on projects. So Goober can't find a director that will take this movie because nobody wants to risk their career on it. This is a book that has no likable characters.

And so they tried like Mike Nichols, Norman Jewison, both of them said no. They wanted Martin Scorsese. He was like, I'm good. They tried James Brooks. They sent the script to Steven Spielberg and he was just like, I don't want anything to do with this movie. Like this is not me. And so finally in 1989, Goober proposes Brian DePalma, who's considered like one of the most. controversial directors in Hollywood at the time. And I'm curious, is anyone here a big De Palma fan?

Because you're a weirdo if you are, but that's great. And I'm just curious if you guys know his work at all or anything like that. So I feel like I've heard you mention him before on the podcast, but that's it. Yeah. So he was friends with Spielberg, friends with George Lucas, like he was kind of running in that crowd. But he was like the East Coast weird kid. And so he had made a series of kind of like hyper-violent hyper-sexualized movies like blowout with john travolta he did carry oh that's right and then it all yeah and it all culminated with the untouchables the kevin costner movie um about elliot ness and al capone so really quick background on de palma he's the third son of vivian and anthony de palma who's an orthopedic surgeon and this is a quote from his mom to give you a sense of like why de palma wanted to make movies that grabbed

people's attention. Quote, I had Bruce and Bruce was mine. Bruce was his oldest brother, the first child. I had Bart because one of the girls I would push carriages with had a child who'd inhaled a piece of carrot and died. So she had her first child because she loved him. The second child is an insurance policy. So that's why I had Bart. Brian was a mistake. Brian was a surprise. I didn't really want to have another baby. So Brian was like the third forgotten child of the family. Bruce was the perfect child, Bart was the artistic one, and then Brian was like always trying to get his parents attention and competing with them. To the point one time he was staying at home and his mom was convinced his dad was having an affair. So he started helping his mom trying to catch his dad have an

affair. And then one night he grabbed a rifle, dressed in all black, put on a ski mask, broke into his dad's office at the university who was working out, waited for him to come back with a suture nurse that he thought he was fucking. He was like 17 years old, confronted his dad with his gun and was like, Tell me what you're doing. Tell me what you're doing. Good God. By the way, you skipped over the one title in his catalog that I think most people might know, which is Scarface.

Yes. Oh, and he's done Scarface, which people hated at the time. Oh, okay. They, like, hated it. They were like, it's so violent. It's so over the top. It only became popular later. Well, I got to tell you, haven't seen this movie.

I agree with Brian's mom that he was a mistake. Oh, man. Well, we'll see if we can get you to love him by the end of it. He went to Columbia University. He was going to study physics. He falls in love with filmmaking. He makes a bunch of like no budget films. He transferred to Sarah Lawrence. And then he was on a studio movie called Get to New Year Rabbit where he was directing Orson Wells and it went really badly because directing Orson Wells can only go badly. He got fired from that. It was a Warner Brothers movie. And then, you know, he kind of leaned into the controversy. He told, Esquire. I want to be famous. I want to be controversial. As soon as I get this dignity from Scarface, I'm going to go out and make an X-rated suspense porn picture. I'm sick of being censored. So if they want an X, they'll get a real X. They want to see terror. They want to see suspense. They want to see sex. I'm the person for the job. He was very like, in your face, gonzo kind of style of filmmaking. So with the success of the untouchables, though, all of a sudden, like Hollywood liked him now. And so they brought him in for a meeting on Bonfire. And he

love the book, but he didn't love the script. So they bring him in for a meeting at Warner Brothers. He crushes the meeting. They call Steven Spielberg, who they're obsessed with and they're like, what do you think of De Palma? It turns out Spielberg and DePaulberg are best friends. So Spielberg gives him like a rave review and they bring De Palma onto the movie. They pay him 250 grand to refuse any other directing work while he helps with the script rewrite. So like De Palma's in. They've got the script. They're good to go and they start moving into casting. And this is where I'm really curious what you guys thought of the casting of this movie. In the book, Tom Hanks' character, Sherman McCoy, is supposed to be this super waspy guy.

Bruce Willis' character is supposed to be British. Melanie Griffith's character is supposed to be like a 25-year-old sex kitten. And Morgan Freeman's character is supposed to be white and Jewish. So I'm just curious how you felt about like how everything turned out at the end of the process in terms of how they cast this film. Hey, that's book wild. Yeah, I'm surprised that you're telling me Morgan Freeman's not white and Jewish. It comes as quite a surprise.

Yeah, that's some news. What's weird to me is that Tom Hanks has pulled off Wasp before in the similarly unwatchable volunteers. Yes. But this is a real different take on Wasp. I would say it's not a take on Wasp. Yeah, he actually doesn't really scream Waspy upper crust to me. And something that we both said watching it last night was just everyone is miscast in every single

part in a way that like I don't think I've seen. in other movies where it's not, it's not like one or two characters. It is every person. Oh, yeah. And when I saw the way that Tom Hanks was talking and the way that,

Melanie Griffith was kind of trying to interact with him, it reminded me of like what they actually managed to nail at the beginning of trading places with Dan Aykroyd and his, like, ridiculous super waspy fiancee. Yes. Like that is, I think, that got it actually. And kind of got it at the level of satire that this felt like it was going for, but that just doesn't match, A, the people they cast or be the actual seriousness of the

story that they're telling. Yeah, something Sam and I've talked about before as resident Hank's experts is that at this point in his career, he really wanted to break out into more dramatic films, but he was really, really known for being this high energy comedic value actor. And you can, you can totally see that with what you're saying. Like, he's operating at a different energy level that's just very high octane. It reminded me a lot of this other movie that we watched, which, for the love of God, do not see this movie. But every time we say goodbye was this like really dramatic post-war film that he was in. Same thing.

It's like everyone around him is so dramatic and he's operating at this like manic puppy-level energy. I'd like to throw out a proposal. Don't you guys think the movie would have been better if they just swapped Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks? Yes. Put him in the part where he's supposed to be, you know, a difficult to work with jerk that would allow someone to run someone. over. I'm not saying Bruce Willis would do that. Maybe he's a nice guy, but just saying what I feel. Man, ever since I met Sherman McCle, my writing jobs have been that much harder. So let's talk about why they made some of these casting decisions. So they're making this 30 plus million dollar

prestige film and it's all about these unlikable characters. In Hollywood, it's considered death to have unlikable characters in a movie. And so they decide, okay, well, we need to have likable actors play these unlikable characters to start to make them sympathetic. And so Peter Goober instantly is just like, Tom Hanks. He's, you can't hate Tom Hanks. I love Tom. He just like has such a hard on for Tom Hanks from the beginning. And without even telling the studio, he approaches Tom Hanks at the Governor's Ball

following the 1989 Academy Awards. This is actually before De Palma was on the movie. And he goes, hey, do you want to play Sherman McCoy from Bonfire of the Vanities? And Tom Hanks is like, isn't he like a waspy bond trader like asshole? And he's like, yes, you'd be perfect. Tom Hanks is like, I guess he, like you said, wanted to start playing serious roles. He wanted to be taken seriously as an actor. His biggest hits were big and splash, a movie where he plays a little boy that becomes a grownup

and a movie where he's fucking a mermaid. And so he, like, wanted to move into the prestige category. So even though it was a risk, he's like, okay, I'm definitely down to do this movie. Brian De Palma didn't really want him. He liked Steve Martin for the role. That's interesting. The studio said, quote, we're not casting a 60-year-old because his hair had gone white by that point. And then the studio wanted Tom Cruise to play Sherman McCoy.

Which also could have been interesting, basically just the same character from Rain Man at this point. But apparently Goober would not relent. He would literally call the studio heads and just chant Tom Hanks, Tom, Hanks, until they hung up the phone. on him over and over again. And finally, they agreed. Luke, we got to call this guy. You know, you got to get him on your show. This is what's funny.

He had seen all the same 13 Tom Hanks rolls that you did that. But his reaction was, this guy is dynamite. Like, I have to have it. Well, to be fair, bosom buddies, he was great in. Big, he's great in, Splash. He's great. Like, he is a movie star. I understand you guys have watched a bunch of clinkers,

but like he is extremely likable across all of them, unless I'm wrong. Oh, yeah, no, he's still my best friend. Right. He's just hurt me a number of times, like all best friends do. Sure. So then they start casting the role of Maria,

Maria Ruskin, played by Melanie Griffith in the film, who's his debutante, weird sex kitten baby voice. She's a southern young, like, gold-digging wife of a New York banker or something. something. I can't remember exactly what he did, but she's a very young wife married to an old man, but from the South, but living in New York. Yes. Real quick, Sam, as a fellow Southerner, and this is not the most problematic part of this movie, so forgive me for bringing it up at all. But Sam, how'd you feel about that girl's accent, man? Hey, man, it was real nasty. It just sort of travel around the South,

and it never real net one spot at all. Hell no, man, that was real bad. Wait, where in the South are you from? Arkansas. Oh, I'm from Virginia, a different part of the South. Okay. Well, then, hey, girl, what did you think of this accent? Well, I thought it was real bad. So it was actually so bad that her, almost her entire performance was re-looped in ADR. And it was still that bad? It was still that bad.

So either you couldn't understand her on set was so bad. Or the accent just like very so wildly that they looped almost every single one of her lines in post. So that's almost no actual dialogue from set that's been captured. So I had one because her audio, like the audio from everything she says sounds very straight. It's very

like subdued which would make sense if it's re-recorded that the way she's moving and acting is much more like high energy and then her voice is always like, oh, Sherman, that's it. Yeah, she sounds like she's doing a Jennifer Tilly impression. It's very weird. She's like a

prototype for the sexy baby in a bad way, I would say. Yes. She also was uncomfortable with some of the dialogue, so she would say it really quietly because she didn't want other crew members to have her hear it. So, like, when she has to say, like, hey, listen, eat my ass to, like, the guy that doesn't speak English, she, like, really didn't want to say that line. So they had to, like, loop it louder in post. I didn't want her to say it on here, but she did anyway.

That was not my least favorite Melanie Griffith line in this whole thing. The one that made my flesh want to crawl off my body was the, like, I've got a, what was it? I've got a thing for soft dicks or something. I was just like, oh my God. I don't ever want to hear that. A lot of real big lines in this movie. Melanie Griffith had kind of found fame late in her career for an actress.

De Palman actually discovered her for his movie Body Double, where she played a porn actress. She was one of the only actresses that was willing to take the role. She did a great job in it. He loved working with her, although she was like hopped up on all sorts of drugs, apparently. And then it was working girl that she did a couple years later that really blew her up. She's very cute in. She's great. The concerns from the studio were that she was difficult to work with.

She was the daughter of Tippy Headran. She's from a Hollywood family, and she's very anxious, and she had used substances to quell that. But she was now sober, which the good news was, you know, you were going to get a sober performance. The bad news was all the anxieties came back. The other concern that De Palma had was like she was playing this sex kitten, and she had just given birth. And she was going to have to be in a lot of skimpy outfits, et cetera. And he was a little bit concerned about what she would look like. on camera, and she was also older than the role was.

So De Palma told the studio to delay contract negotiations with Griffith, who'd been told that she had the part while he auditioned more people for the role of Maria. And the frontrunner quickly became Uma Thurman, who was only 19 at the time and had just made dangerous liaisons. And apparently was just a hair taller than Tom Hitz. I was going to say, yeah, she's like six foot six one. Yeah, so she came in and they did a test in the room with Tom Hanks where she comes in and she's like very quiet, blah, blah, blah. And then she was so sexy during the test scene.

It was like the jungle scene where they start making love that like Tom Hanks got flustered and walked out of the room. And like all the men in the room were like adjusting their case. The author describes it and it's very uncomfortable. You're making a very solid argument for soft dicks right now. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. Bring them back. And so De Palma actually really liked Thurman because he was like, this is a woman who, you know, Tom Hanks' character would risk throwing his life away.

I will also say about Uma Thurman. She has an edge to her that Melanie Griffith doesn't, where I might buy Uma Thurman being the mistress that kind of turns on a dime and is like, I'm not going to tell the police I hit this person. Yeah. Tom Hanks didn't want to work with her, though, because he viewed himself as a talented comedic performer and he liked Melanie Griffith as a comedic performer. and he didn't feel that Uma Thurman had the comedy chops to keep up with him as they did these scenes that involved her saying the wrong things or being an absurd character. So they do a screen test and from what I read, it sounds like Hanks tanks the screen test intentionally with Uma Thurman to make sure that Melanie Griffith gets the part.

So in the end, De Palma relents the studio closes with Griffith and De Palma just kind of starts preparing himself mentally for working with her. So like, Hanks wants to be a serious actor. That's why he wants this movie. Melanie Griffith wants to prove that she's still sexy. That's why she wants this movie. De Palma wants to prove that he can make a prestige picture. That's why.

So, like, everybody's doing this movie to try to, like, get to the next run. You know what I mean? In their career. And Bruce Willis is like, this is the movie that's going to get me away from, like, action star to serious actor. So the movie's cast. It's got a director. It's going great. They're in pre-production.

And then Sony Electronics buys Columbia pictures in this huge deal. that rocks Hollywood and forms Sony Pictures Entertainment, and they reach out to the biggest producer in Hollywood who just made Batman, and that's Peter Goober, the producer of Bonfire of the Vanities. And they pay $600 million to Warner Brothers to buy him out of his contract to come run Sony Pictures. So Warner Brothers no longer has a producer on their tent pole movie that's supposed to be released in Christmas of 1990, and instead of trying to find someone last minute and maybe pushing the date, They just say, fuck it. They promote De Palma to producer.

They give them a co-producer and they don't assign a producer to the movie. A producer's job really is making sure everything's happening on time and on budget. And you know what I'm saying? It's like they are the ones guiding the ship at the end of the day. Like the director's making all the creative decisions and they have lost their captain. And they are not replacing it. The studio is just like, they'll be fine. And it seems like that was probably a bit of a mistake.

I would say so. Based on what we're seeing at the end. But the biggest issue that they're running into is that because the movie is like shitting on all of these New York people, no one in New York wants to let them shoot at any of their locations. The American Museum of Natural History won't let them film there because the donors are people that Tom Wolfe took swipes at in the book. The rabbi at Temple and Manuel throws them out because they took swipes at the people that go to that temple. The movie's running into scheduling problems. Melanie Griffiths filming Pacific Heights.

She's not available until July 9th. Bruce Willis has to be off by the end of July to shoot Hudson Hawk. The start date is supposed to be April 13th, and they have to make a Christmas release date. So they're starting to film in April, and they have to deliver the film to theaters by December. And DePaul is like, can we push the release date? And they say, no, because they want the movie off the books before the end of the fiscal year. So Caruso makes this plan to make it work, like six days a week shooting for 67 days with night shoots for most of the shoot.

It is an immense amount of pressure on this movie. And Tom Hanks is feeling the pressure. And as you guys probably know, like Tom Hanks, he's not. not really a method actor, but he feels pressure to go method for this movie because Robert De Niro had just done Raging Bowl and he gained like 100 pounds for it. And he kind of lashed out at actors who believe they could just pretend. So Tom Hanks had his teeth capped for the movie to have straight waspy teeth, lightened his hair. He even considered getting a nose job to make his nose more wasp. Oh, Tom Hanks, no. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. He then went spent time at Yale and then he

hold up in Merrill Lynch, where they filmed all the bond scenes to get a sense of what it's like to be a bond trader. And with minutes of arriving at Merrill Lynch, the women of the office building jammed up the elevators because they were all trying to get to Tom Hanks's floor so they could go and see Tom Hanks. They had to send him home because the trading was getting shut down. I think the biggest issue that they ran into was that everybody on the project, since they needed it to be this prestige thing, was making like really big. choices. It's like really weird wide angle shots constantly and like everything feels very extreme and exaggerate and like all the performances are really big. Do this ever feel like a grounded or like

real world in any way to you guys as you were watching the film? It's like watching a period piece drama starring all Batman villains. Like it's one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. Kim Catrall is bizarre. I don't know. It was really strange. Yeah, that is so accurate. I love that Like, we were ragged on the accents earlier, but even the waspy people. Yes. Like, Sam, did it remind you of volunteers with Lawrence Burn the Thead is too much? The Lord's Born the Fed. They took this excessive approach to every element of the production, and for very human

reasons. There's a shot in the film of a Concord landing at Kennedy Airport, and it's like set against the setting sun with the Empire State Building. Eric Schwab is Brian De Palma's advanced man. He goes and scouts locations everywhere. He's a young guy, wants to be a director. De Palma tells him there's this line in the script, exterior Kennedy Airport Night,

the sky is the labyrinth of planes taking off and landing. And that's up to Schwab to shoot. And De Palma says, don't shoot it. We're never going to put a shot of a plane landing in my movie. It's too cliche. And Schwab says, what if I can make it the best plane landing shot in the history of cinema?

And so Schwab decides he's going to use a computer to calculate when the sun will be at the exact angle over this runway with a Concord flying in from Air France and the Empire State Building locked in and there would be like one two-minute window on July 12th of that year when he could film this shot and that shot costs $100,000 to capture and it's in the movie for four seconds and so like that's the level of excess that they were taking with this project. I mean it was a good shot I like seeing a Concord as much as the next fella. You know what's funny though?

Like isn't the whole point of the book sort of that exactly what you said at the top of this? People are so focused on themselves and these kind of material things that they lose sight of just being decent people. Yeah. So the movie ends up becoming the book. Like that's really what ends up happening. So De Palma becomes so concerned that the movie's just dialogue, people talking to each other. And he's a very visceral storyteller that he's coming up with ways to move the camera that are, I think, distracted. For example, the aerial shot of Tom Hanks, like, closing the deal on the bonds.

He's just like hovering above him. It's like God's eye. They felt like they needed to capture the kind of extreme language that Wolf uses in his books with a visual language that matched it. And so everything became excess. But then the movie became a parody of itself as they were shooting it. Now, we talked about the race stuff. And we mentioned that the judge character was originally white.

So two weeks before the production starts, Lucy Fisher, who's the, you know, executive Warner Brothers, reads the new draft and she realizes, oh, my God, we've got a race problem. In making the main characters more likable, Sherman McCoy and Peter Fallow, two white dudes, the movie no longer took equal shots at all of the other characters in the movie. The book's an equal opportunity offender towards every group. The movie garners sympathy for the two white characters, and then it criticizes all the black people and the Puerto Ricans and the Jewish people and the Jewish people and the, the rich women. And Fisher's biggest concern is that there is not a sympathetic black character in this movie because race relations, you know, are very important at this point in time. Right. So De Palma had originally rejected the idea of having Judge Kovitsky being a black character, but as he was watching the Oscars two weeks out from shooting, he saw driving Miss

Daisy sweep and saw this audience going crazy for Morgan Freeman and he realized maybe they'll be willing to root for Morgan Freeman in that speech more at the end of the movie if it's him as opposed to Alan Arkin like a Jewish man. Also you briefly said you know race relations being sort of top of mind at that time. This is two years post the Central Park Five. Is that accurate? I believe so. Yeah within it within two or three. There's a lot of bad visual callbacks I will say but to what the Central Park Five trial looked like and what the media and public reaction was around that. So the next day to Palma calls Fisher, he says, okay, let's recast the judge. So Alan Arkins out.

They pay him 120 grand anyway because he was guaranteed in his contract. And then Freeman comes in and his availability is so specific that the carefully arranged 67-day shooting schedule just explodes. They can't shoot the courtroom scenes in L.A. anymore. They have to shoot Freeman in New York and they have to find a courtroom in New York that will let them film in it overnight during the time that they have Freeman. this drives up costs $4 million across the project in the end.

This single decision is another $4 million bump because what ends up happening is they push and push and reroute so many scenes that they're paying for hundreds of extras. All those extras in the courtroom are on standby getting paid every single $30,000 a day on extras. Just pushing this scene, pushing this scene. They're looking for courtrooms all up and down the East Coast. It's a disaster. On April 9th, they're a week out from shooting. De Palma's going into rehearsal with his actors.

Things are going well, except with Bruce Willis. What De Palma quickly realizes is that Bruce Willis can't really act. Bruce Willis can play himself, Bruce Willis, the likable rogue, but he can't really play anything else. So a week out from production, they decide they have to entirely rewrite his character and all the narration, so the character is Bruce Wilson instead of the other way around. They're rewriting all of it, and production officially begins on a series. April 13th, which what day of the week do you think that is? Friday. Friday the 13th.

And it is officially the highest budgeted film ever shot in New York proper. It doesn't have a locked schedule. It doesn't have a locked script. And it lacks the ending location of the courtroom. Everyone's very nervous. The press is going crazy about this movie. Bruce Willis has brought on an enormous entourage to protect him from like his fans and the rest of the cast. And problems start immediately. The biggest issue that they run into is that Fernando Ferrer, who is the Bronx borough president, had just spent a long time fighting the image of the Bronx that Bonfire the Vanities the Books had created and now was like, fuck you guys for displaying my community this way in the movie. And so he petitioned the film and said, I want you to end the movie showing

new housing under construction, the Bronx Zoo, our new food market, and the following caption. The real story of the people of the Bronx can be found in their struggles and accomplishments as demonstrated in the last three years by the renovation of thousands of units of housing, new jobs, and the pride its neighborhoods are home to cultural institutions attracting more than two million visitors a year. And the studio says, we're not doing. And they reroute the request to the mayor's office. And the mayor is like, you can't do this. This is going to put millions of dollars in production money at risk for coming in here and told Fernando to back down. So that's how they ended up getting leverage to shoot the Bronx as if it was a war zone, as you guys have discussed. And

it was, it's really bad. And actually the Bronx residents were so mad that when they were filming those scenes, all the guys are pimps and the women are sex workers, locals were lined up at the fencing, blocking the set and they were throwing eggs and light bulbs into the set, trying to disrupt the filming to the point where the production hired a motorcycle gang to act as security guards to keep the locals away from the fence so they would stop egging these people. At what point have you hired Hells Angels and the local people are... It's become the Altamont Raceway incident at this point with the Rolling Stones. Yeah. At some point you know you've fucked up and I feel like it would have been way before that

shoot. Listen, if you're hiring the Hells Angels for anything, you need to take a step back and reevaluate. Yeah. Yeah. And so on top of that, there are some interesting cosmetic issues. Bruce Willis did not want people to know that he was balding. So as a result, Bruce would have his scalp painted every single day before shots so that the camera did not pick up that he was bald. The problem is that the lights would reflect off the paint.

Yeah. They were like, Bruce Willis is standing. We got to like create the same thing on you. But then Bruce Willis was like, I'm not balding. What are you talking about? out. And they were like, uh, okay, we don't really know what to do. So they would just let Bruce Willis paint his scalp. But the problem is his character wears glasses. So every time you took the glasses off, it would smear paint along the side of his face towards his eyes. And they would have to have

the hair and makeup come in and like clean him up and make him okay again because of the scalp paint. And it would get so hot that the scalp paint would trip. Oh my God. Bruce, just be bald. You're such a handsome bald man. It's fine. Yeah, I got to say as a fellow bald. Man, it's not worth it, Bruce. You got a, you got a ESOP, let nature take its course on that one. It's fine. The other physical issue that we run into is that Melanie Griffith, who was under a lot of pressure in the film and was really nervous about the way she looked, got breast implants, like

halfway through the shoot. And so showed up, like having lost a lot of weight from having her kid, she was very thin, and they shoot all the New York scenes. But then when they go and shoot on sound stages in L.A., three weeks later, she shows up with a cup size, three sizes larger than when she had started the project. It totally threw off potentially the continuity of scenes because she would enter a building with like a cup in the first scene and then she would be in a D cup all the sudden like in the following scene, you know, inside the building, which caused some issues.

I will say to Lucy Fisher's credit, she basically was like, good for her. They look great. Like I'm not concerned about it, the head of Warner Bros. It does feel like the least of your worries. Yeah. That seems okay and compared to everything else. Yeah, you got to pick your battles at this point. Yeah.

Yeah. So the movie quickly fell a week and then two weeks behind. They're losing locations left and right and they finally find their courthouse location, which as I mentioned adds like $4 million to the shoot. They ended up finding a big enough courtroom to shoot the scene. And when they get there, Morgan Freeman doesn't know his lines. Morgan Freeman had taken $650,000 to the, the movie, but he was not a huge fan of the project. And I'm going to play you a clip of Morgan Freeman

talking about the movie. Nobody starts out to make a bad movie. Nobody. But they happen. Too often. Sometimes even huge projects, like Bonfire of the Lannities, top book, number one actor on the planet at the time, everything going for it, that everybody think it was a slam dunk? He's shaking his head. He refuses to answer the question. There was a vibe that something wasn't happening or what? Yeah.

It's just how does that work? There's just the script or just the sense on the set? No, it's airline crashes. They say that this is mostly as a result of a

series of mishaps. So that was Morgan Freeman on Bonfire of the Vanities. Cool. Yeah. To add insult to injury, the press is just going crazy with this project. It's getting a lot of bad press along the lines of like,

is this going to be the biggest flop ever? Spike Lee and Tom Wolfe are at a Koro Foundation's commitment to leadership dinner, and they're both on stage. And Spike Lee gives away the ending. to the movie. Spike Lee had read a copy of the script. Tom Wolfe had not. Spike Lee turned to Tom Wolf and was like, what do you think about what they're doing with your movie? And Tom Wolfe gave his stock answer, which is, I hope it's great. It's got good people on it. But for a book, even if the movie's bad, more people will hear about it and maybe they'll read the book. It's like

a very PC answer. And then Spike Lee goes, what do you think about the ending where Henry Lamb, the comatose black person, wakes up and we realize he was scheming too. And he was faking it. He was faking it to get this whole thing going in the first place. So like all the black characters are schemers like in this movie, opportunist. Like what do you think about that? And there's press at this dinner. And so he gives away the ending to the movie, which is like a racially charged ending in public during production.

And it gets leaked. And it's on every page of every paper. And then a copy of the script got leaked as well. And they were like putting quotes from the dialogue of the script. script in newspaper releases, the studio had to get like a big apology from Spike Lee, who was actually very concerned that his career was going to be affected by it. But, you know, not what you want, your, you know, film getting its ending spoiled so quickly. So they go into posts, they start editing the movie. They, you know, loop all of Melanie Griffith's dialogue. And then they do

their test screening for the studio. And this is like the make or break moment. And the studio executives love it. They're like, it's a masterpiece. This movie's great. We're so excited. We just need to cut a little time out of it. You know, everyone's clapping each other on the back. De Palma's relieved. Like, we're going to be fine. You know, we're, they bring in the composer to get started. We're cruising. We're going to make our Christmas release date. Like, everybody's working over time. And guys, like, how delusional do you think they must have been to really be thinking, like, we're golden going into this final stretch? Chris, let me tell you about a magical little. thing called cocaine.

Yeah, exactly. It may be the 90s, but we still have a cocaine. Did they see the same movie, or was this a different cut of the movie? It was longer, but it was mostly the same movie. Including the same ending. Did they have to recut that ending, or was this basically the same? Ah, so they very quickly go into public test screenings, where they're going to screen it in San Diego and they get, you know, the feedback scores and cards and everything. And DePaul was traumatized

about public test screenings because a year before he had made a movie called Casualties of War, a very serious Vietnam War movie that was supposed to be. It was Sean Pan and Michael J. Fox and no one's seen it. And it test screened horribly. And the public just didn't get it. So he hated test screenings. They go into the test screening. Everybody's optimistic. And all the cards are like, the movie's kind of fun, but the ending is garter. bitch. Everyone hates the ending. Nobody understands it. They're like, why is Tom Hanks suddenly like a pirate fighting with a sword, like protecting Morgan Freeman from a crowd? Why are we in slow motion? Like, we don't understand what's happening here. They didn't like Morgan Freeman's speech. And all, they didn't

like any of the ending. And so all of a sudden, the studio was like, oh my God, we have to, we have to fix, you know, wait. And sorry, quick clarification. Was, did the ending contain the thing that Spike Lee had leaked? Or was that already out. Yes, it did. It did. It did. Yeah, they didn't like that Henry Lange. Actually, some people did like that Henry Lamb got away with it and then some people were like, that's very offensive. To De Palma's horror, there are two favorite scenes of the whole movie. Can you guys get, do you have any guesses as to what there are two favorite scenes of the whole movie? Sam, I'm going to lop it over to you because I believe you're probably on the same wavelength. You want to take a shot at that one? Luke, there are two favorite scenes and it's got to be

soft dick and shotguns. All right, we're doubling down. It was not soft dick or shotguns. It was Tom Hanks dragging his dog down the hallway. I did like that. That was people's number one favorite scene was of the whole movie, was just Tom Hanks dragging his dog. And then the other favorite scene was Beth, God, I'm going to forget her name, but the actress who photocopied her vagina.

That was their other favorite scene. Now, that scene was particularly traumatizing for her. and De Palma because they were secretly having an affair while the filming was happening. And so he had to direct her. She actually took her underwear off, threw it in Bruce Willis's face, and straight up went, you know, bush to copy. Oh my God. Photocopier. And the scene took nine hours to shoot.

No. And she felt, and she felt awful at the end of it. She felt really, really terrible at the end of it. and De Palma didn't feel good about it. Like, the whole thing felt weird, but audiences loved it. So I guess it, you know, paid off. They test screen the movie, and they cut the ending down.

They take out the Henry Lamb part first. And then they cut the sword fight. Finally, after the third and final test screening, they cut from the speech to Peter Fallow at his book. And it feels, like you said, like the movie just ends out of nowhere. Because they removed basically half of the third act due to the audience feedback. And that also allowed DePaul's. to keep other parts of the rest of the movie and get the movie to two hours and two minutes,

whatever it was. So they do a industry screening December 19th, and then they start getting reviews from the trades and De Palma's anxiety just spikes. Hollywood Reporter, it has enough incendiary cinematic devices to keep 50 toxic dumps in perpetual fiery rage. Bonfire will be quickly extinguished at the box office. You've got to be a genius to make a movie this bad. It was pretty brutal.

And so De Palma, seeing all of this on December 20, it says, I'm leaving Los Angeles. So one day before the movie premieres, Brian De Palma accepts an invitation from his new girlfriend, podcast favorite, Gail Ann Hurd, to go and spend the holidays in Aspen. So Brian DePalma leaves L.A. before the movie premieres. Everybody is waiting for the acts to fall. And the movie premieres on Friday, December 21st. It gets the full round of reviews, New York Times, gross and unfunny. LA Times, a disastrous misjudgment.

Chicago Tribune, a very ugly piece of work. The studio's like, maybe with Tom Hanks and Bruce Willie, we can get to $10 million for the opening weekend, maybe at least six or seven. In the end, it took in $3.1 million its opening weekend. On a $50 million budget, it came in second to kindergarten cop at $8 million. Oh, that one's good, though. And even though other films flopped that Christmas, Bonfire the Vanities, the movie that took the heat for all the reasons you guys said this was a movie that it seemed

like it was stomping on the Bronx in order to make its point it felt like it was a movie that failed to understand the irony of the original and in trying to make its lead characters sympathetic they made the movie really racist as a result because everybody else seems like an asshole and in just a hilarious unironic fashion peter guber the guy who put the project together the minute the movie came out did everything he could to distance himself from it he was like Well, you know, I was not involved in any creative decisions by the time that that thing got going. Classic doober. Yeah, in the end, the movie was voted Worst Film of the Year by American Film Magazine.

It was not nominated for any Academy Awards. It brought in $15 million at the box office against its $50 million budget. And a lot of people believe, unfortunately, that Melanie Griffith is the one who paid the price as an actor in the film for its. eventual demise. She is the one who worked the least coming off of the movie. As we know, Tom Hanks simply exploded after that and Bruce Willis, although he maybe took a slight dip, continued to get tons of work in the action space. Unexpectedly, Kim Cottrell became one of the most famous of the four of them when she landed her role in sex in the city at age 40. And Brian De Palma was very scarred and traumatized and as a result kind of ended up returning to making the

sort of Gonzo Fair that he'd done before, leaving the studio world behind. He went on to do Raising Kane with John Lithgow, which is just a Nutso movie, Carlito's Way. And then he kind of returned to studio stuff with Mission Impossible. And then just made a real string of stinkers with Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars, Femfital, the Black Dalia, redacted, Passion, and Domino most recently. So Brian DePaulma remains this incredibly polarizing director. Some people think he's a genius. Some people think he's a hack. But what's important, I think, to know about him is that he realized through this process and the process of making all of his films was that he could never compromise when he made his movies. So if you watch one of his movies, you're going to know it's

Brian De Palma, whether you like it or not. He finally said this thing that I'll conclude with in the book. When dealing with studio executives, he felt that he had to hold the line on matters he felt were important. They could give their advice about this actor or that sequence and you would seriously consider what they had to say, but their emotional investment in the film ended when they passed their suggestions on to the director. De Palma, on the other hand, would be thinking about this movie for the rest of his life. What I think is interesting with this film is that so many of the decisions actually weren't De Palmas to make. The studio selected Melanie Griffith. The studio selected Bruce Willis. Tom Hanks was on the movie before De Palma got there. They had a script

before he got there. They made him cut his ending. He didn't even write the original book. This is someone who's an intensely original person who made a movie where he was not allowed to be intensely original in any way, except for how he moved the camera and how he shot it. And I think that's why this movie looks so nuts when we watch it. It's like this was the one area where De Palma could go full flex and do all the crazy shit that he wasn't allowed to do with all of the other aspects of the production. I personally love a lot of De Palma's work. I thought this movie was a garbage fire. And one of the things that I really want to talk to you guys about is like, I thought Tom Hanks was so horribly cast in this movie. And I'm just curious how you guys felt having watched him and, you know, so many roles coming up to this.

I just thought like he was the absolute wrong choice. Oh, yeah. I think, I think this might be. And Luke, you might want to tell me if you agree, but this might be our worst Hanks yet. Yeah, I figure, well, we'll have to dive more into that because I really liked your point, Chris, about how when he was, cast. We have seen exactly as many movies as the people casting him at that scene by this point, minus the ones we've seen before this project. Yeah, if you gave me a lineup of the movies we've seen, I honestly might prefer this to something else, like say Bachelor Party, but it's a really,

it's a hard choice for sure. Actually, you know what? Fuck it. No, I would take Bachelor Party over this, a movie that has a coked up donkey and belly dancing, apropos of nothing, versus this. Yeah, 100%. Bachelor party at least, it's wretched. It's wretched. Don't watch it. But it at least achieves some of what it's trying to do. And I feel like Tom, at least in this, just couldn't get it in. It's a toughie. With that face and that amount of energy, it's hard to put them into this kind of a role. I am totally with you that if they just flipped Bruce Willie with the Hanks, you would have had a way better film. And we would have had a much more interesting watch since our whole thing is. movies that Hanks has been featured in, this would have been a fascinating adventure for us.

Oh, yeah. So all around, just a better choice. I have a question for you guys, because, like, do you think we all know Tom Hanks is a great actor? Miscast or not miscast is what he is providing in this movie by your expert opinions, good acting? I'm really curious what you think, Sam, because I have a suspicion that what we think of is Tom Hanks is a great actor, which he is a great actor. But thinking about the roles he's known for, like castaway or saving private Ryan, these are all movies where he gets to be really high energy as well. I don't know. I mean, has he done a really serious down?

Yes, he's done one. Which one is that? Road to Perdition. Which is one that I've seen, actually. I think he's excellent in it. I remember really liking it. I'm curious. Can I piggyback on your question, Lizzie, for these guys?

So do you think that Tom Hanks can play sex scenes? because I thought he was going to just, my biggest problem with him was that every time Melanie Griffith grabbed at him, it seemed like he became a giggly little boy where he was like, oh, what are you doing? No, like he didn't seem turned on. He seemed uncomfortable with the idea of sex. And his wife was on set a lot because Rita Wilson was in the beginning of the movie. So I'm just curious what you guys think about Tom Hanks as a sex icon. Well, you know, he actually doesn't have a sex sex in a lot of his earlier movies. And so he's good as like a romance, but not as like sex.

Yes. When he comes to doing the deed, you got to cut away. He can get you all the way up there, and then you need a second person to finish the job. Yeah. He's a great boyfriend. If we were to follow through with talking about like Kim Contrell's move to Sex in the City, if we were to have Tom Hanks follow that same trajectory, I don't think he would work as an Aden or Mr. Big. Like there's no, we can't get across the press.

a piss with what Tom Hanks is delivering. That's true. So as you guys know, we like to end our episodes with an upbeat section called What Went Right. And obviously Tom Hanks didn't go right in this movie. But in your mind, is there anything that went right? Is there anything that you can speak to where you think, you know what? In the disastrous set of decisions that were made in putting this together, this thing or element was great. Or at least what?

So I actually really liked the whole Don Giovanni bit. I actually liked that opera. And then I also thought that it worked pretty well as, as, Jesus, what is it? Like a mirror or a comparison allegory, whatever the fuck, for what was happening to Tom. And so I thought that worked, and I enjoyed that. And also the poet at the, at the event. Yeah, it was great.

Also, you're talking about the poet. That's one of the only parts in the entire movie that genuinely made me laugh. So, quick fact, Brian De Palma would love you. The studio wanted to cut Don Giovanni, and it was the last thing they shot. The studio was like, we're not paying for it. And Brian DePont was like, what if I can do it for just $75,000? And they said, if you go over, you have to cover the difference. And so Brian DePaul stuck up for that sequence because he thought it was so important to show

Tom Hanks' state of mind through that sequence, but it almost didn't make it into the movie. Yeah, it was genuinely good. And so I will take back when I said about Brian De Palma earlier. You don't think he was a mistake. Very good. Luke, how about you? Anything that went right? Yeah, I actually really liked the casting of, I'm going to exclusively refer to him as Donnie from Frazier as the Assistant Attorney General. Saul Rubinick? Saul Rubenick. Yeah, I actually really liked him, and I thought his character had some fun, like, the wire energy. Like, he's this young upstart who's trying to uphold something and also please the superiors.

And, but they don't dwell on it long enough to really have anything go well. So the, the thing that I liked about him was just that, uh, you know, his deliveries are great. And it's fun to see Donnie from Frazier doing some other stuff. He seemed like the only person who knew what movie he was in. Like, he was given. And also, uh, Kevin Dunn was had the right energy, uh, who played his attorney. He's from, um, VEP. and he played his lawyer at the end.

Those were the only two guys where I was like, oh, you guys understand the tone of the movie that is like supposed to happen right now. How about you, Lizzie? I got nothing. I guess maybe the scene where Tom Hanks is dragging his dog down the hallway because it does remind me of the first time I got a leash on my cat many years ago

and tried to get her to go outside and she just threw herself on the floor like a shrimp that I just then out of frustration slowly dragged across the car. bit towards the door. So it brought back memories. Fair enough. I'm going to actually go with another like what went wrong here. I know this is taboo. But shortly after this movie was released, Jeffrey Katzenberg penned an open letter to all of the executives around Hollywood and was like, we can't afford to keep making movies like this. And it is widely believed that this and a couple

of other prestige pictures that flopped in the early 90s are what led directly to the IP-only Hollywood approach that we have seen take hold over the last 20 years. And this idea of taking like brainy, artsy adults, you know, movies in the mid-50, 40 million dollar range was all of a sudden understood to be no longer viable. And really the last year that we had a lot of movies like this was 1999, but this kind of marked their steady decline. So actually what I'm say what went right though is that 20 years later now quibby is looking for a buyer and so they can suck it. I heard it are doing great. Yeah, they are. Well, guys, I'm very sorry that we all had to watch this movie. I really don't think anyone out there should watch it. Go read the book, The Devil's Candy,

it's highly worth it. And then go listen to Hanksie Panksy. And their back catalog is just an absolute treat. It's riddled with hot takes and conspiracies and a lot more talk about Tom Hanks' member than you ever thought you needed, but I can tell you that you do. Please check it out. Guys, anything else we can plug for you or you want to plug? I think that's it. Tell the people where to find you. Oh, you can get us on Twitter at Hanksie Panksy. We're on Facebook.

It's Hanksie Panksy Podcast. And then you can email us with your conspiracies at Hanksipanksypod at gmail.com. Yeah. Thanks again, guys, for being here. here. And as always, to our listeners, please give us a rating and review. Five stars, five stars. We had a couple of really good ones this week. As always, send us your recommendations. You can DM us through Instagram at What Went Wrong Pod. And then you can also email us at what went wrong pod at gmail.com. And also just remember to vote and get out there and, you know, vote, vote your heart out.

All right. That does it for our episode this week. We will see you guys next. week for some more disastrous fun. Bye. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonai Uos.