WHAT WENT WRONG - The Island of Dr. Moreau (Re-release)

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Huge egos, hurricanes, and black magic are but a few of the destructive forces that waylaid this notorious production. This week Chris & Lizzie look into why a director shouldn’t sneak back onto set once they’ve been fired, Marlon Brando’s firm stance against ever reading scripts, and Val Kilmer’s method approach to playing an *sshole.CORRECTIONS:*This episode was originally pulled following allegations of sexual assault against director Richard Stanley.*Chris uses the word "Aboriginals" to describe Indigenous Australians, an outdated and derogatory term.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next?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, dear listeners. For many moons, we've received messages about our elusive island of Dr. Moreau episode. Where is it? Why did it disappear? Well, since it's spooky season, and Halloween is right around the corner, we thought we pulled out of the vault for you, just like Disney. But unlike Disney, we actually had a good reason for pulling it in the first place, so I do want to give you a little bit of context. Shortly after we released this episode, allegations of very serious domestic violence were made against Richard Stanley, who directed this movie. We don't address those allegations in this episode because we didn't know about them. Domestic violence is not something we take lightly or something we would ignore in our coverage of a filmmaker. So please listen with care. And without further ado, enjoy what went wrong on the island of Dr. Moreau.

That has to be the theme song. Thanks for listening, Mom and Dad. This is the brand new show. How do we describe it? I don't know, but I just want to point out that you're automatically talking like you're on NPR. I can't talk any other way. Hello, and thank you for listening to What Went Wrong, the world's premier podcast, exploring what went wrong on your favorite and least favorite movies.

The point of this podcast is not to drag any movie or person, but instead to explore why it's a miracle that anything ever made ever turns out even halfway decent. This week, we're going to talk about a. film that probably few of you have seen. You should all go rent it. The Island of Dr. Moreau. The 1996 version, directed by John Frankenheimer, originally directed by Richard Stanley, who was unceremoniously fired midway through the production.

I would like to open talking about the movie before even talking about what it's about with a quote from Richard Stanley talking to vice. This was a few years ago. He said, I was surprised under the circumstances. that they were even able to cut together a series of sequences, let alone finish the film. It was totally chaotic. I remember David Thulest saying one day that he was going to cut off one half of his mustache to see if anyone would notice.

Not a single line of my script wound up in the film, which in some ways I am grateful for. Yeah. Having recently watched this, if I were Richard Stanley, I would be thrilled that no part of me had entered this film. It's a very infamous movie. Richard Stanley quit filmmaking afterwards. the director, and we'll get into that. But the island of Dr. Moreau, as I'm sure many of you know,

is based on an H.G. Wells novel from 1896. It's about Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat who's left on the island of Dr. Moreau, a mad scientist, who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. So literally sewing people and animals together. They made two film adaptations before this one, 1933, the Island of Lost Souls, and 1977, the Island of Dr. Moreau with Bert Lancaster. We're not talking about those movies.

And I have to say, I did read the book in college, and I remember it being really good. It's a short read. It's a fun read. And then I watched this movie, and I was like, did I remember the book completely wrong? Because I don't remember any of this plot from it. And I think the answer is, no, they just completely changed the plot for the movie. is that correct? It seems like it.

There were five writers on this movie. So before we jump into how this project came about and what went wrong, Lizzie just watched it on Friday. How did you feel watching this movie? It's interesting because, so first of all, it's not not fun to watch. It is very fun to watch. I also love Val Kilmer, so I was excited about this. but we were watching it and the first like, I don't know, 15 minutes are like pretty promising. And I was thinking, you know, what is Chris talking about? This is not that crazy. This is just sort of an updated version of the island of Dr. Moreau.

Like Val Kilmer's tan. I'm on board. I'm enjoying it. And then it just takes like the sharpest left I've ever seen. and I don't even really know how to explain it because it makes zero sense. They reveal everything so quickly. I feel so bad for David Dullis and Faruja Bok, who are clearly trying and it's just not going well. Yeah. It was a $40 million movie that made $49 million at the box office. That was $40 million?

$40 million movie. How? We'll get into that. Made $49 million. at the box office, which might sound like it made money, but that actually means it lost money, especially when you consider what they spent on advertising, but we'll get into that. Basically, this project started with a director named Richard Stanley. And some people might know Richard Stanley.

You're going to hear about him soon because he has a new movie coming out called Color Out of Space with Nicholas Cage. That's supposed to be awesome, and it's his return to filmmaking after 23 years in the wild. It looks good. It looks very good. Richard Stanley was a South African film director, and in the early 80s he was working on short films. He was an anthropology major, really smart, really interesting guy. He won the International IAC International Student Film Trophy Award in 1984, so he's obviously a very talented guy, moves to London.

In the late 80s, he's working in the music video world. He has some success there with some bands, and in 1990 he made his first feature film, which was this post-apocalyptic sci-fi film called Hardware that a lot of people compare to Terminator in some ways. Interesting. Yeah. Really weird sci-fi punk post-apocalyptic movie. It eventually got picked up by the Weinstein Company. It was made for about a million dollars.

Really inventive, cult success, made $5.7 million in the United States. I don't have the international numbers. So it did really well for a tiny little film. And he's obviously talented. And then in 1992, he made this movie called Dust Devil, which was like a... a South African mystical serial killer movie. And that's where we start to have some issues with Richard Stanley. He turned in a 120-minute cut of the movie.

Financier made him whittle it down to 110. They then test-screened it. It didn't test screen well. So he had to cut it down to 95 minutes. They tested again. The audience was confused. So rather than add back in time, they cut more plot points to get it down to 87 minutes. And the movie got a one-week release in the UK.

and was dumped to home video. Stanley purchased back the prints of the movie and released a final cut later, but he didn't get paid the second half of his directing fee for the movie. He shows back up in London after making this in the early 90s, and he's broke. He has no money. In fact, he says he's $40,000 in debt at this point.

So this guy's like a talented young director, and ever since he was five years old, he's wanted to make the movie The Island of Dr. Moreau. It was on his father. shelf when he was five years old. He's been obsessed with it since he was a little kid, written at the height of the British Empire, spurred by Darwin's theories. He loves this idea of Moreau as a metaphor for God, blah, blah, blah. He has a weird connection to the book as well because Richard Stanley's great-grandpa was an African explorer, British explorer of Africa,

Henry Morton Stanley, who Joseph Conrad claims was the inspiration for Colonel Kurtz. in Heart of Darkness. Really? Yeah. And so when H.G. Wells, after he, so Wells and Conrad were friends, Conrad releases Heart of Darkness a year after, uh, island of Dr. Moreau. And H.G. Wells accuses Conrad of plagiarism, saying that Colonel Kurtz is the same character as Dr. Morel.

Sure, except that he's not sewing animals together. I mean, like, I get it, but at the same time, those are, I don't know. I think they're different. Who knows? Yeah. I think they're different. Conrad's defense was, no, he's actually based on Sir Henry Morton Stanley. And so Richard Stanley has this weird connection.

And also, Richard Stanley shares an agent with the estate of HG Wells. Seems like this movie's going to be great. No, so everything's like lining up. So he's incredibly creative. He hires Graham Humphreys, who's a concept artist, to make these 12 incredibly beautiful paintings of what his version of the island of Dr. Moreau is going to look like. and they are awesome. They're like cosmic horror meets weird Darwinism meets like Christ figure.

Moreau himself is like this jacked long-haired Jesus guy. Like very different than what you end up with in the movie. Maybe we should take a moment right now to actually explain just briefly so people can understand who you do end up with in the movie. You end up with 300-pound version of Marlon Brando. It's very weird. Okay, so we'll get back to that. I just want to make sure you have.

These images were like he's a doctor, he's in a doctor's uniform with like scrubs. That changes. He looks buff. The images are really, really incredible. So he has come up with this concept art and he starts cold calling people from South London. Using the last quarters that he has, he's literally calling the heads of studios in Los Angeles, which you couldn't do today, but he's pulling it off back then. And finally, he gets a hold of this.

gentleman Edward Pressman of the Edward R. Pressman Corporation. Okay. And Ed Pressman is interested in making the movie with Richard Stanley attached to direct. Great. Stanley has a script. And Pressman, to his credit, has produced like an occlective group of movies. He did Badlands with Terrence Malick. He did Conan the Barbarian.

Oh, nice. He did Das Boot. Well, these are my dad's favorite movies. Exactly. He's like a dad's producer. And he did Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Cattel, which is a really weird movie. Maybe my mom's favorite movie. I think because they show Harvey Kytel full frontal nude.

Also in the piano. Yeah, true. Sorry, Mom. A lot of his wiener out there. So Richard Zanley doesn't own the rights, so he needs a company like Pressman's company to pick up the rights. And Pressman turns around, he takes it to a producer, Mike DeLuca. And DeLuca is still active today. He has his own company.

But at the time, DeLuco was in charge of production at New Line Cinema. And New Line Cinema, if you guys remember back in the 90s, it was the, that intro logo that's the film strip with one side of the perforation that's at an angle. And they couldn't really figure out how they were going to approach the movie. Ed Pressman wanted to Americanize the script. Richard Stanley was opposed. He wanted it to feel British. So as a compromise, they brought on this writer Michael Hur.

And he had written this book, The Dispatchers, which is considered, like, the most incredible Vietnam War book at the time. And they brought him in to tweet. the Montgomery character who Val Kilmer plays. When you watched the movie, Lizzie, did you feel that Val Kilmer had a Vietnam War vibe? No. I felt like Val Kilmer was just playing a weirder version of his character

from real genius, but on an island. Exactly. I think this might have gotten lost by the final draft. But Stanley was thrilled because he was like, we've got Michael Hur coming in to give it this Vietnam War acid trip, like Apocalypse Now. I would like to say they nailed the acid trip. Yeah, exactly.

version of it. So they then had basically this identity crisis at the company where DeLuca is bringing in David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, at this time to start working on potential projects with them while Richard Stanley's coming in kind of more on the old slate of stuff that they were doing. But they're like, you know what? This is going to be a $5 to $10 million small budget elevated science fiction horror film. And that's perfect.

Like Richard Stanley had done a. a $1 million movie. He'd done like a $3 million movie. This felt like the natural evolution for him to get to the $10 million, $5 to $10 million movie. So they bring on Tim Zinaman to be the line producer. We're going to have some great quotes from him later. And for some reason, because Edward Pressman has access to Marlon Brando, they'd just

done a movie with him. By this time, Brando had developed a reputation for hating Hollywood. He hated acting. He hit it himself. He hit it everyone, it seems like. Cool. And so, yeah, exactly. So Rob Shea was like, why do we want Marlon Brando on this movie?

And Deluca and Pressman were like, because it's Marlon Brando. And even Richard Stanley was like, I didn't imagine like an overweight version, but it's Marlon Brando. But then before he knows it, Richard Stanley reads in the Hollywood trades that Brando is in and Roman Polanski is directing the movie. What? Yeah. So he didn't realize that he had apparently been fired without even understanding that he was fired. So he calls New Line Cinema and he says, the, I have to be able to at least get a meeting with Brando.

If I can convince him, because there are logic was Brando won't work with you. He doesn't know who you are. He'll work with Polansky. So Stanley convinces New Lion Cinema to let him meet with Brando. And Brando's not happy about this. And so New Line Cinema is like, great, we'll let him meet with him. Brando will hate him. And then we'll be done.

And we'll move on. So what they didn't think of was that Richard Stanley knows warlocks. What? So Richard Stanley reaches out to a friend of his from London, Dr. Skip James Featherstone. Okay, so that's a warlock. Who's a warlock?

Great. To perform an occult ritual at the same time as Stanley's meeting with Brando to try to tip the scales in his favor. Now, to be fair, Stanley comes across as an extremely intelligent person in the documentary that we watched for this. And his mother was an anthropologist

best known for her book, Myths and Legends of South Africa, and she took him around the continent throughout his life to visit with witch doctors, et cetera. So he might know things that we don't know. Sure. And I'm not a big believer on witchcraft, but who knows? So one night Richard gets into limo with a new line executive, Ruth Vitale, and they drive up to Marlon Brando's house, while at the opposite end of the world, the skip Featherstone is performing a cult ritual like at the same time to make sure things happen. Okay. And so Stanley and Ruth showed at Brando's a say,

and the first thing that Brando does is he takes a laser pointer and he starts guiding his attack dogs around them with a laser pointer as they're walking into the house. So he's like, look, don't attack anywhere I point it as he's like pointing it near them as they're walking in. Good. They come in and it's a little balmy in the house, so they request air conditioning.

And Brando turns up the AC, and then Ruth Vitale kind of jokingly comments, if you keep turning it up, I'm going to fall asleep. And so Branden just keeps turning the AC up. And then after about 15 minutes, Ruth Vitale falls asleep. And Stanley's convinced that's what the ritual is doing from across the world to make I go to sleep. And so Stanley plays the one card that he has. He knows that Marlon Brando is still obsessed with the Colonel Kurt's character that he played in Apocalypse now.

So he brings up his ancestor. So he brings up the fact that I'm actually the great grandson of the guy that inspired that character, Joseph Conrad. And they become fast friends instantly over that connection. And in fact, Marlon Brando wants to play the Moreau character now as a way to continue playing the Colonel Kurt's character that he'd fall in love with and been obsessed with. Which, as we know, went so well on Apocalypse Now and everyone thoroughly enjoyed working with him there, right? Everyone went insane on Apocalypse Now.

Literally everyone went insane. So suddenly Stanley's back in. He's like won his way back into the production. and Skip Featherstone has every credit. And so things are rolling now. Bruce Willis is cast as the lead, which ended up being David Dullis. He likes the script. He wants to do something different.

He's hot off a diehard. Let's do it. That's interesting. He would have been actually interesting in that part. Yeah. I think it would have been great. To clarify also for people watching that haven't seen it, the David Dullis character is basically, he's the shipwrecked sailor who shows up,

who's kind of the, he's like your window into the story. He's in every man. He just spends the whole movie wandering around the island. Yes, he does. Wondering what's happening like us. Then Richard Stanley runs into James Woods, noted asshole in a restaurant, gives him the script and says,

would you like to play Montgomery, who's written as this like Vietnam War vet, like acid-trote character and James Woods is in. And boom, they have their cast. It is Bruce. Willis, it is Marlon Brando, and it's James Woods. That's pretty good. It's great.

And I think the budget had gone up a little bit at this point. They start location scouting. They find this island location at the northeast corner of Australia in this place called Cairns. They find this ridge there, and they can match it to an island that they find, like, in the Bikini Atoll area with, like, aerial shots. Everything's going well. Of course, Stanley doesn't look at the rainfall maps for Cairns at this point. time, which we'll get to in a second.

But so everything's coming together. They've got Bruce Willis, they've got James Woods, they've got Marlon Brando, and then they bring in Stan Winston's company to do all of the creature effects. Okay. And Stan Winston's company did Star Wars, for example. Like, they are the premiere, them and like Henson, you know what I mean, for physical makeup. And they start doing these incredible concept art for all of the beast people.

And if you've seen the movie, they look pretty good. Like, that's one thing that when we were watching this, even though it is a hot dumpster fire towards the end of it, the characters, or sorry, the creatures look incredible. Like the way that the faces move, the way that the people are able to move in the suits, it is impressive. The physical effects are still, I think, great. They're really good. And they're really creative. And they do a really cool job of, like, each character is a little bit the animal plus themselves. Yeah.

They made it, yeah. They did a good job. It's really good. And so I think that this is like where Richard Stanley was obviously comfortable, right? Was all the, if you watch his movie hardware, he does a lot of practical effects, physical effects. But even with like someone like Brando, Willis Woods, this is a director that nobody knows in the United States. This is a director who as enthusiastic he is about working with these, you know, different crew members on the art side of things is very green when he's coming into this project. Well, that's what I was going to ask is, because I have.

not seen hardware. Had he ever dealt with actors of this sort of caliber before? No. Not even close. And so this was a big step up. And what's interesting is it's kind of like a sports team where the coach seems to have authority, but the players are the actual commodity. And so they outrank him completely at this point. Exactly.

And so basically, Stanley is relying on the fact that Brando likes him because that is his one Trump card. is that he, and he says a couple of times in this documentary, I always knew I could go back to Brando for back. And so Brando was like his one safety blanket, which is, and to his credit, it sounds like Brando really did like him. Now, meanwhile, they're doing all the creature design. It's all super creative and really interesting, but it's very Richard Stanley. And so New Line's starting to freak out about some of the creature designs. For example, they have written in a Panther woman into the script who, Ferris the Balkans up playing. And there was supposed to be a love scene initially where we realize that she's the panther woman when the main character who was supposed to be played by Bruce Willis is

What? It's suckling on her nipple and then he just moves down and there's another nipple and he moves down and there's another nipple after that and then you realize- Oh no, I wish that was in. Me too. And then you realize that her pubes have grown up her chest into fur on her chest. Yeah, so she was like, pubes to chest hair. And when Richard Stanley describes it, it actually sounds very romantic and, like, very lovely. But they ended up cutting it.

He does a good job. So back in L.A., Richard has moved to L.A. He's living in these apartments, and he doesn't drive because he grew up in London. And South Africa, and he could use public transportation. So he has no way of getting anywhere. So meetings would happen without him because he didn't know how to get to them. Richard, there are buses. Yeah.

And to see how. bad it got. He started getting paranoid that he was being kept out of meetings intentionally. And so to see how bad it got, we have a great clip here of Tim Zineman talking about a phone call that he got from Richard one night

at 2 a.m. And this is from Lost Soul. This is from Lost Soul, the doomed journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau. Okay. About two in the morning of that same day I got a call from Richard saying it's an emergency. I

have to move. I can't stay in that place one minute longer. And I said, where are you? And he said, I'm in Hollywood. I've walked from Burbank to Hollywood. And I don't know where to go or what to do. And I said, oh, where are you in Hollywood? And he says, I don't know. So I think that was when I said to myself, oh, oh. Oh, buddy. Yeah, it was bad. Tim's Mr. Cinnamon seems like a very, very nice professional guy. I just like the way he said, oh, oh. Yeah, he's a couple of those in this. Apparently, as a joke, Zinemann said when he was going through the budget with his staff,

they got to the line for the director's fee. And he jokingly said, we should put in another $1.5 million as contingency here for when they have to fire him and bring in another director. Oh, no. Which I don't think was, he wasn't saying it in a mean-spirited way. It was more just, this is not going great. And also for those that don't live in Los Angeles, Burbank to Hollywood, is not a short jaunt.

No, this would be like a multi-hour. He left at 10 to get there at two. There are mountains in the way. Correct. So to Ziniman's credit, he suggests they get Stanley to Australia as soon as possible to basically just give him as much prep as he can have. So they fly Stanley to Australia to Cairns. There's no TV, no phones.

And they're like, he's just going to live on set. And we're just going to spend as much time getting him ready. So he is 150% prepared once we start. start shooting. Meanwhile, Bruce and to me more decide to get divorced. Yeah. And it's not going well. And for various legal reasons, Bruce decides he can't leave the country for the next six

months. Yeah, she just wrote a memoir, I believe, where she talks about this a little bit. Yeah. We won't get into it, but sounds like it wasn't fun. A lot of personal tragedy led to the downfall of this movie. So Bruce into me divorce, and then Richard Stanley finds his new, lead, but he, in retrospect, is not thrilled about it. We have a very short quote here from Richard Stanley about who comes next in this progression. I then made another strategic error.

I met Val Kilmer. So... Wait, hold on. Val Kilmer was taking over for Bruce Willis? In the lead. So Bruce Willis was going to play Montgomery? No. Oh. Val Kilmer was taking over to play the lead role. So he was taking over to play the shipwrecked sailor. Pendrick, correct. Okay. Yep. Who he doesn't end up playing in the final film.

No, all right. So Val Kilmer is a huge star right now. Batman Forever just premiered. He is Ghost in the Darkness. Yeah. So sexy in that movie. Listen, he's very tan. He's great.

He's great. He's huge. He will come out shortly after this, I think. Like, Val Kilmer is, and he's incredibly charismatic. Like, he's a huge international star. Yeah, he's very fun to watch. So they send Stanley to fly to Tokyo. to meet with Val.

Meanwhile, because Val's in, the budget balloons to $40 million. Partially because now Val's fee is going to be a lot higher. And then Marlon Brando's fee is going to be a lot higher. And now this is going to be like a big international tent pole, science fiction film. So Richard Stanley just went from moving from a million dollar movie to $3 million movie to $5 to $10 million movie to moving from $3 million to $40 million movie. And he meets with Val Kilmer in Tokyo. and Val Kilmer says, listen, I'll do this movie,

but I need 40% fewer shooting days. What? He just said, I'm a busy guy. I'm Batman. And I need 40% fewer shooting. Yeah, George Clooney was right around the corner. And so New Line then turns to Richard Stanley and says, if Val drops out, we're pulling the plug on the movie.

So Stanley's like, I can't shoot the movie with a main character where I can shoot him half as much as I thought I could. Yeah. So he turns around and he says, Val, what if you play Montgomery? Oh, buy James Woods. And he fires James Woods to move Val Kilmer into the role of Montgomery. Just kicks him over. I've never felt bad for James Woods until right now.

James Wood did nothing wrong. But now they don't have a lead. They've got Val Kilmer, Marlon Brando, no lead. So in comes Rob Morrow. I love Rob Morrow. Of Quiz Show and Northern Exposure, who's great, who seems like a lovely gentleman in this movie. Rob Morrow makes it to Australia, and he ended up lasting four days.

So we'll get to that in a second. I was going to say, I don't remember him from this. Is he in a monkey suit that I didn't know about? They did shoot scenes with him, but he did not end up making it into the final film. So we now have Rob Morrow, Val Kilmer, and Marlon Brando as the three leads. Still great cast for this movie. That's a hot 90s cast. I've never heard one.

So in Australia, they start casting the beast people. They're doing all of this plaster and makeup. I mean, they're doing full body casts of every single extra. They are casting people of, like, extreme body types for all of these things. Yeah. So, you know, very tall people, very fat people. And most importantly, they have found the shortest man on earth. Nelson de la Rosa from Dominican Republic.

They saw him on a talent show there. This guy is great. I have to say, true star, star, the movie, heart of the film. Nelson, Delaroza. guy, he's amazing. Well, Marlon Brando felt much the same way. So they go to Dominican Republic, they bodycast him. This guy's like a huge celebrity there. And then they hire this animal behaviorist, Peter Elliott, who worked on gorillas in the mist. And they did like a multi-month training period with Peter Elliott and all of the beast

people on the island on how to move and sound like animals. Which I will say again, it pays off. It's great. The movements of the people that are the actual beast creatures. The beast creatures do an incredible job. And we have a quote here where Peter Elliott talks about doing that and then he makes some noises with like a tube. It's just him making these noises just to show you how good he is at animal noises. Okay. I'd start by getting to them to look at footage and rehearsing them as the real animal.

On all fours, like the pigs being real pigs, the fact that they're rutting and the sounds they make and getting to know as much as possible. about the real animal. And we'd have stuff like... What? Yeah. It's pretty amazing. He's remarkably talented. So they had this...

They've got Stan Winston's company doing the effects. They have Peter Elliott training these people on how to do it. And it seems like Richard Stanley works really well with all of these people. Right. He's been very good at communicating his vision. to them and he works with them really well, kind of all of the outcasts of the production. You know what I mean? And also people that don't have big name clout behind them.

Exactly. Like not the studio, et cetera. He's getting along really well with all of the kind of below the line people. And by the way, below the line just means not director, not producer, not like a list talent on the movie. So he's even working really well by including the Aboriginal community in the production. he's brought in a couple of people to be actors on the crew, and he wants to be respectful and make sure that they're not feeling like

they're just infringing on their land to shoot this. And it's clear he's getting overwhelmed with the above-the-line stuff. He's rented a house in Cairns. He's locked himself in the house. They can't get him to come to meetings. They can't get him to location scout. They fly in his sketch artist, Graham Humphreys, to do storyboards.

And effectively, the way they start communicating is Richard Stanley, rather than communicating with the crew, just starts communicating with the sketch artist who's making storyboards, he Xeroxes this is a storyboards, and he sends him out to people and he's like, this is what I want. Richard, you've got to go to some meetings. Yeah, which is what

the production designer, who seems very cool, Graham Walker is his name, and he says, like, you know, Richard said, can't they just come to my house? And Graham's like, no, mate, like, you got to go to the studio. And it's just not going well. But it's still like every,

it's not going great, but it's still plugging along, all of the sudden, pretty much right before they're supposed to start shooting, Marlon Brando's daughter, Cheyenne Brando, commits suicide. And he had a sad life. And this was shortly after his son, her half-brother, murdered the father of her child in Marlon Brando's home. Yeah. It was very dark.

She was very troubled, it seems like, and had a very, painful existence. She was a model who had been raised in Trinidad, I believe, or Haiti, and then had moved to L.A. So Brando's on another movie in Ireland called Divine Rapture. He's supposed to go right to Australia to shoot Moreau after they scrap Divine Rapture. It gets canceled. It never got released. He goes, he disappears. I didn't realize that this was shot right after his daughter died. Immediately. So he just disappears. He's off the map. No one can get a hold of him. He's not coming for the first day of the shoot. Understandably.

And so they decide to shoot some boat scenes and beach scenes and hope that Brando shows by the time they wrap those. Have they cast the lead at this point? This is Rob Morrow as the lead. So Rob's on set. So Stanley at this point is feeling like he's got no support because Brando was his only backup. And so he also worries that Skips, Warlock mend has undone. Skip, this is... Call up Skip. This is nuts.

Skip had a laboratory where he experimented with radioactive materials in his home, and he built the walls of his laboratory too thin, and he accidentally became irradiated, and his bones started to crumble, his hip dislocated, and then in the hospital he caught a flesh-eating parasite. And so Stanley's convinced that all of his fixes have become undone. His PA gets bit by a poisonous spider that was hiding under a lampshade, and it was incurable and melted the flesh of her hand.

He then called his mother, and immediately before he called, she said the house had been struck by lightning and three fireballs had rolled in. And then she said that the neighbor in Ireland just saw a hyena cross the road. And Stanley at that moment realized that the wallpaper of the room in his home was hyena print.

And the hyena is the villain from the film. This is like the omen. This is like everything leading up to the Antichrist that's about to pop out. So everything's going wrong for Richard Stanley at this point. Including Val Kilmer hates this movie. And apparently one time Richard went to give Mr. Kilmer direction. And Mr. Kilmer said, Richard, actors stand in front of the camera. Directors stand behind the camera.

Go stand behind the camera. Whoa. So things are not going well. And reports started getting back to New Line at this point that Val's unhappy, and he's the big star. He's the reason the movie is going to make any money. To his credit, like, the only reason that movie made money was because of him, his name, and Marlon Brando's name. There were reports that Val Kilmer is sitting down and won't get up. That's the full quote.

And there are reports that Richard Stanley has climbed into a tree and won't come down. No. And so we're three, four days into production. Things are not going well. And then the production gets hit by a hurricane. And the rain keeps coming. And it keeps coming. And five hours into the hurricane, the set is swept out into the Pacific Ocean, the dock set that they were using.

So the only weather cover sets that they have are the ones of Moreau's Laboratory, which and Marlon Brando's MIA. So they can't shoot those scenes. So they can't shoot the stuff that they have the set for and they can't shoot the stuff. that they have the actors for. And so meanwhile, Rob Morrow is freaking out. Understandably. Completely understandably.

And so we have this great, he's very understated now when he talks about it, but I'll let him explain what he did at this point. In those four days, I started sending SOSs to my lawyer saying this is looking weird.

You know, there's bad stuff going on here. There's bad vibes between people. He was calling me from Brisbane, and then all of a sudden he almost broke down. He said, this is totally insane. I cannot, cannot continue. You, I don't know what to do. I want to get back to my family in the United States. I can't stand this.

It's complete insanity. Would you please, please, please let me out of this? So that's the lawyer. That's Rob Shea of New Line Cinema. He was the head of New Line Cinema at the time. And Rob Sheade, to his credit, let him out of his contract. And Rob Morrow left. So Richard's having like a breakdown.

Apparently someone ran into him on the beach and he just was muttering to himself, I must be seen every day attempting to film something. And he was having a tough time. And Val Kilmer and Tim Zinem, the line producer run into each other at a restaurant during the downtime. And Val kind of says, this isn't working. Something needs to change. And Zinneman agrees with him. So Tim's in him and calls Mike DeLuca at 4 a.m.

Tells him everything that's been happening and DeLuca is like screaming at him. Like, what the fuck do you think I should do about it? And then Tim says, you know, you need to watch the footage. Yeah. And then you need to fire Richard Stanley. Yeah. And so Edward Pressman is the one that has to let Richard go. He brought him onto the project.

And apparently the way they went about it, everyone agrees was bad. They called his agent. and then his agent fired Richard. And then his agent also fired Richard. Oh, no. And so Richard couldn't even get a hold of his agent after he'd been fired from the project because the agent also fired Richard. And Edward Pressman in particular, this was the guy who Richard had first brought the script to,

who I think really believed in him and the project at the scale that it was originally conceived. And it's easy to see like an indie film and think, oh, look at the cool stuff they can do with no money. Imagine what they could do with money. Yeah, the assumption is always. if you can work on a small budget, you can work on a big budget. But I don't, I don't, I don't opposite might be true. I agree. I think it's like you could take a Stevens billboard, a James Cameron, and give them nothing and they could make something interesting. Right. But if you've only worked

with nothing, it's really hard to all of a sudden jump up into having a lot. It's also the level of pressure that's there. I mean, the more money that's spent on this, the more your ass is on the line for, for, you know, how much this is cost. So $6 million to $40 million, that's a big. jump of how much is riding on what you're doing? It's a huge jump. And I think Richard Stanley was just in a position where there was no way that he could really succeed at this point. And everything was working against him.

Right. His warlock is radiated. I know. Radiation poisoning to your witch is like the worst thing that could happen. Oh my God. That guy's not still alive, is he? I maybe. I don't know.

It's possible. I might need to call him. Yeah. So to their credit, a lot of people wanted to stick by Richard Stanley. So Farooza Balc, who plays the Panther Woman on the project. And Moreau's daughter. And, yeah, she's Maro's daughter. She wanted to stick it out with him.

So much so that she was threatening to cut her own heart out with a sushi knife. Yeah, Farooza. And so she runs out of the restaurant she's in. She jumps in her limo and she tells her driver to take her to Sydney. And I guess she didn't understand that Sydney was on the opposite side of the consonant. And so the limo driver drove her 2,500 kilometers. Oh my God. Sydney. And when she's interviewed about it, she's like, yeah, maybe that happened.

Like, I don't know. Yeah, it did, Faruja. Come on. Yeah. And so Stanley has a complete mental breakdown. He's been living with this project for years. He's wanted to make it since he was a child. He goes back to his house and he apparently just starts shredding documents. He just like, it starts shredding all the documents he can find. He's like, fuck you guys. You can't make this movie. Frouza is really to shut down.

this production, but not everybody's going to stand by Richard Stanley. New Line goes to Stanley and they're like, listen, we'll pay you your full fee if you just leave the product, if you leave the country right now. This is such a nightmare. So then there are these two PA guys, Lewis and Ollie, who are literally a comedy routine. These two Australian guys and they're amazing. And they're supposed to take Richard to the airport and make sure he gets on the plane. And Ollie's like, so, you know, we're taking to the airport and we let him out.

And I'm not going to like welcome to the guy. and then the next morning I get a call, where the hell is Richard Stanley? And apparently he never got on the plane. Yeah. So, so Richard St. Everyone at the production is terrified

that he's going to blow it up. Oh, no. Apparently he and some Aboriginal friends had placed ritualistic rocks in a circle around the production trying to curse it. That may have worked. All of the extras are in limbo.

There's no director. They don't, they have sunk millions and millions of dollars into the movie now. There's a star, too. There's, we have no Marlon Brando. Rob Morrow's out. Right.

Like, we have, Val Kilmer there, Stan Winston's whole company's hanging out. Everyone's just chilling. Here's an interesting comparison. So Rob Morrow was allowed to leave the movie. Fruza Ball called her agent and said she wanted to leave, not because she didn't like the movie because the director that she had signed on with had left. And she wanted to support him.

And the agent told her that if she left the project, they would sue her, garnish her wages, tarnish her name, destroy her reputation, and she would never work again. and that they wouldn't represent her. That's a bit of a difference between how they treated the man who tried to leave the project. Yeah. He gets a hold of the studio head

and he's out. He cries because he misses his family. And she calls, and by the way, he should be able to leave. 100%. And she should too. Yes. I mean, especially if the person

that you signed on to do the movie with who you believed in is gone. And all of a sudden, they're like, you better stay put or your career is over. So they are trying to find a director desperately because they've sunk enough money to the movie

that they need to finish it. and they go out to a bunch of directors and they all prep because here's the offer. You get one week of prep for an FX, a visual effects heavy movie with Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando who are considered two of the most difficult actors in Hollywood today. And so then they finally go out to John Frankenheimer. And if you don't know who John Frankenheimer is, he's a very well-respected director. And he's taken over broken productions before. So he finished this movie called On the, it's called The Train, which was shooting in France,

Arthur Penn was directing, he gets fired. Frankenheimer comes in, saves the movie, does really well. But his demands were a little extreme. The title was changed to John Frankenheimer's The Train. The French co-director was never allowed to be on the film set. He had to be given total final cut of the film, and he had to receive a Ferrari. And that was for his demands, and they were met. He was old school.

He hates the Australian crew, and he tells everybody about it constantly. And then the Australian crew makes sure. shirts with a line from the movie and it's uh you don't have to obey these bastards they're not gods and it's about frankenheimer so even his first AD describes him as a bit of a tyrant and like he likes him um forusibalg hates him uh because he does all of the things that i think a sensitive actor would hate name calling he's screaming at her you know uh he asks the to show the opposite you know the difference between him and uh richard stanley he turns to the aboriginal actor and him to smash the didgeridoo that he has over another character's head and a disreidu is a sacred

part of their community and they actually is just like I'm not going to do that man. Oh my god. It's just not going to happen. So they're getting everything going. They have like a week to get prepped and then Brando doesn't show up on the day he's supposed to return to set. And then a week passes and he finally does show up and everyone can tell that this is the one person that John Frangenheimer is nervous about meeting and working with.

And so at 3 p.m. on the first day, he shows up for his first shot, which is the reveal shot of Marlon Brando in the movie. And Lizzie, how would you describe Marlon Brando's reveal in the movie? If I'm remembering correctly, it's when he shows up on his like Pop Mobile thing outside. The Palinquin. He looks like if you took a beekeeper's outfit and then also, put panty hose over your head and then covered yourself in chalk white paint. It's like, I think I audibly gasped when he showed up because it is, it's just so clear that no one told him no, like to anything that he's wearing. So that's like the running theme with Brando in this movie.

He shows up, he's covered in white paint. Yeah. He's wearing a giant hat. Yeah. He's got aviator sunglasses on. He's complaining about the heat. That's his character trait. He's wearing a catering tent.

He's wearing a diaper effectively, too. That's what it looks like he's got on. It's like this weird cheesecloth diaper thing that they show later. And these were all his ideas that he had pitched to Frankenheimer. Yeah, that's clear because later on in the movie, they're kind of like wiping the white stuff off of his face. And all of a sudden, in a way that you can tell he has added to make it make sense, he just goes, this is my medication to.

I'm allergic to the sun. Anyway. He said she's allergic to the sun. So he also, he refused to learn Ron Hutchinson's lines and he would improvise his dialogue. Also very clear from the fact that he is waiting in between sentences to know what he's supposed to say next. Well, he also wore a radio receiver in his ear and he was read his lines from his assistant, which apparently he'd done on a lot of the movies that he'd been in his later years. And boy, can you tell.

So apparently on the first day, he said that the scene would be better. if there were peacock feathers behind his head. He's not wrong. And all of a sudden, the art director just takes off. All of set shows shuts down. And then the art director returns like an hour and a half later with peacock feathers. And he's like, how the hell did you get peacock feathers? And he goes, I was driving past a farm earlier in the shoot.

And I saw a peacock. Apparently he drove to the farm, chased the peacock down, tackled it, pulled the feathers out of its butt, and stuck him behind Marlon Brando's head. because he knew they wouldn't shoot unless they did that. And basically, like, the way Brenda would work is he would create insane demands, and then it was only after they met all of them that he would agree to shoot anything. So he would show up for a 9 a.m. shoot. He would stay in his trailer until lunch, with Frank Hennhammer going in to talk to him.

The executives would pace nervously outside. He would then come out at lunch. Then he'd say, like, we're going to shoot this, and then he'd just make up things that he wants to add to the scene. Including one instance, he said that he should have an ice bucket on his head because he was so hot. Yeah, I remember this. And he's sitting in a chair

and Faruza Balca's loading ice into the ice bucket hat. Yes, she is. That was his idea. And he keeps going so much better. He also at one point recommended he said, Frankenheimer learned that he was fucking in with him

when he recommended that he's character to be wearing a hat the entire movie and at the end of the movie they take the hat off and reveal that he's actually a dolphin. And it was pretty insane. Ron Hutchison also from the Guardian piece, a couple great quotes from him. Brando was only answering the door when the pizza man came. This was the best news that the pizza makers of Cairns, the small town had ever had,

because Brando was consuming industrial quantities of pizza while room-hating on what the hell he was going to do when he had to face the cameras. I think there might have been existential terror there. Apparently when Frankenheimer offered him the writing gig, he said, take a look at these tapes before you actually commit. They showed Brando sitting in a hammock with literally the small. smallest person who's ever been measured by scientists, the actor Nelson de la Rosa, who was just under 28 inches tall. Brando had just had him on his chest and was singing, Fraga went according to him for 90 minutes. Then John said, this is all I've been able to persuade Brando to do.

And it's not in the movie. Yeah. So no one, though, can get Brando in a nutshell better than Fruza Balch. And she does a great impression of him in this quote where she went to Brando as a young actress talking to this incredible titan of acting about how their characters father and daughter should relate this one day i said can we talk and he said what what is it dear and i said i don't know just um in terms of our characters and how they relate i i'd love to have some time to do that and he said no this is all insane i'm getting paid you're getting paid you're getting paid None of the scripts make any sense. So why worry?

You know, just relax. Do what you're doing. You're beautiful. Don't worry about it. And I said, but I mean, how the characters relate. Isn't there? So Marlon Brando never read the script, which is very obvious when you watch the movie. I have to say, though, that kind of makes me like Marlon Brando.

Yeah, no, he's just like, this is a paycheck. It doesn't matter. You're beautiful. You're going to be fine. And I think that's fine. It goes to show like what it sits a, you, when you're making a movie, you don't know if people have read the script. You don't know if people are just there because they need a gig to tide them over. It's, and it's with Marlon Brando, you can assume it's one way or the other.

And really, he clearly, I think probably, I can't surmise. Who knows? His daughter committed suicide. He's dealt with so much. Also, the person he had a connection to and the reason that he was excited about this is now off the project. And he clearly hates Frankenheimer. And Frankenheimer hates him. because Brando hates people who put him on a pedestal,

which is very clear. Like the people who think he's this god of acting, he hates acting. So he's fucking with him. Yeah. Brando falls in love with Nelson Delarosa, the shortest man on earth, and he insists that Marco Hofshneider's lines,

who was Maling, his like main son initially, all of the important parts then go to Nelson Delorosa. So Marco Hoshinider lost his part to the shortest man on Earth. And Marco was like, and apparently it goes to Delaroza's head. And one day, Marco gets into an elevator with Del Marosa and he's like, hey, Nelson, how was your day? And Del Arosa looks out up at him and he goes, fuck you! And he punches him in the nuts. And Marco was like, I can't even fight back because he's the smallest man on Earth.

So Brando goes to the costume designer and he says he wants every scene. Deloosa should wear the same costume that Brando's wearing in Minnie. It's amazing. And then Brando says he wants to do a scene where he's playing a great. grand piano and where Nelson de la Rosa is playing a tiny grand piano on top of the grand piano. And that was all Brando. And here's the best part of the movie. So it's a circular dolly shot, tracking shot around a grand piano where Marlon Brando is clearly

just swaying side to side moving his hands, not matching the music at all with Nelson Delarosa on a miniature grand piano that's on top of the grand piano, also doing the same thing. And the prop master built that miniature grand piano. On set. It looks incredible. So like kudos to the production design team. And the production designer said that's his favorite scene in the entire movie.

It's the best one. When we got there, I was like, this is great. If this can be the next 40 minutes, I am. This is just like a two-hander between a 300-pound Marlon Brando and the shortest man in the world. It's so good. It's like the most extreme version of that movie, Twins with Schwarzenegger and Dana-Divito. Yeah, it's just, it's great. And so Brando apparently turned to Frankenheimer.

someone in the production, he said, no one is going to care about this movie except for this young man. He was, like, convinced that, like, Delorosa was the only reason people would ever watch the movie. And... He is a great part of it. So, apparently on set, like,

between Brando and Val Kilmer, nothing's going the way they want it to be going, but the way that Val is doing it is much more destructive. So apparently, Val Kilmer was reading lines off-screen with an actor, took his lit cigarette and started burning the focus polar sideburns off during a take. Frankenheimer is quoted to have said, if I was directing a film called The Life of Val Kilmer,

I wouldn't have that prick in it. And Frankenheimer's like getting super depressed. His hero, Marlon Brando, has turned out to be a nightmare, hates him. Everyone hates each other. Everyone's losing their minds. They do a night shoot one night. It's like middle of the night. they're waiting for everyone.

This is where they have to shoot 12 hours overnight. They're waiting on, they're waiting, they're waiting, they're waiting. They finally get to the first 80. By the way, all these extras have to go to three to three to five hours of makeup before they show up on set. And then sit around. And then they're sitting around in the heat of Australia. They finally find the first AD and they're like, what the hell is happening? And the first AD admits that Marlon Brando won't come out of his trailer until Val Kilmer comes out of his trailer.

And Val Kilmer won't come out of his trailer until Marlon Brando comes out of his trailer. Wait, quick question. Have they cast the lead yet at this point? Yes, they have David Dulles. Yeah, so they don't go into detail about that, but he was a British actor. He was seemingly up and coming. He's great. Yeah, he had done that movie. I'm going to forget, hunger or something like that, that had gotten some critical acclaim in the UK, and then he got this.

And yeah, he does a great job. So when John arrives, also, they up the extras from 10 to 100. They advertised for hippies and ferrilles and amputees. And so basically the extra base camp becomes this like center of debauchery. All these people are being paid really well. They're getting paid studio money and predioms. And like all of the different hotel rooms are becoming party rooms. Everyone's just getting fucked up and like having sex with each other.

And it's like becoming the island of Dr. Moreau in these like where the extras hang out basically with all their costumes. And one of these extras, Lewis of Lewis and Ollie. goes back to his roommate, Dana, who talks about he was working on this fruit farm not too far away, and he met this guy out there high out of his mind raving about how Val Kilmer ruined his life. And it turns out Richard Stanley had never left the country. He was living on the Mary River with a paraplegic farmer, just a little ways away. And he one night saw this light down in the forest down river and meets some people camping there. One of them is this guy, Lewis's roommate.

And so Lewis and Ollie are like, oh, fuck, we got to go find Richie Stanley. So they go out, they find Richard Stanley, and they get him to come back, and Stanley decides he wants to go to set. So they give him one of the extra costumes. Oh, no. And he decides that he's going to return to set as one of the dog people. So he's created a full arc from, like, creator figure of Moreau to dog person extra on his own movie. Oh, my God. And they sneak him to set in a van, and they would bring him the script with daily changes every day.

And Stanley would, like, smoke blunt and, like, read how they'd. bastardizes his script every day. He borrows the dogman outfit, which he still has in interviews. He has the dog mask that he wore to set. He shows up, and the first AD, this is my favorite story that made me like the first 80. So it's incredibly hot. There's like 100 extras. And the first AD is trying to give people breaks as much as possible so they can take their masks off.

Because it's so hot. And every time they would take a break, he would notice that there was this one guy who wouldn't take the mask off. But the guy was really good. He was like doing a really good job. Like he seemed to know the story. And so he goes up to the guy and he's like, hey, I really like what you're doing. Like, I really appreciate it. Because the first AD's job is actually to direct extras on the set.

So, like, the director does not direct background. The first AD does. So he'll give feedback. So he's like, this guy's going to die. I got to go talk to him. And then he says, the guy says, oh, yes, well, thank you. And he has a completely different accent than everybody else that's an extra on the movie because they'd hired all local. And he says, it was in that moment that he started to get an inkling that maybe Richard

Stanley had not gone away from set, but he didn't say anything. Rumors started spreading around set that like maybe Richard Stanley was there, maybe he wasn't. And apparently one day, Richard Stanley is the extra that's sitting next to the gasoline tanks when they're going to blow the set up. And they give him the torch as like one of the torch bearers and all of the extras tense up because they're like, is Richard Stanley going to blow us all up right now? Oh my God.

And he decided not to. So in the end, they finished the movie somehow. Frankenheimer comes out with something. It's got a beginning and the middle and an end. Frankenheimer kind of had a bad string of movies after that until he did some stuff in the early 2000s before he passed away. Val Kilmer had a bit of a decline after that. Like Brando's health deteriorated further.

How close to the last movie was this from Marlon Brando? It's close, right? Five or six years. Okay. I think he did the score. in like the early 2000s was this last one. So the movie made

49 million on a $40 million budget. So it probably lost at least $15 to $20 million overall. But they didn't lose as much money as they would have lost if they had just canceled the production, as Rob Shea says. And it really kind of turned into a nightmare for everybody involved.

And I think that there are some key bad decisions that were made earlier that just led to this failure. And Richard Stanley just disappears. The head of New Orleans, line cinema is like, Rob Shea is like, I've always wondered what happened to Richard Stanley. Like nobody hears from, he doesn't make another movie. He just completely disappears. And then he actually finally showed up again with this new movie, Color Out of Space, which is like a cosmic

horror film with Nicholas Cage. And it's an indie film. And it's supposed to be great. And it's based on an HP Lovecraft story, I believe. And it's one that he wrote in the 90s. He wrote this movie at the same time that they're making this. But it seems like they did it at the right budget level for him too. So it was like sub 10 million. And it looks great and like he kicked ass. So Richard Stanley disappears. His agent stops returning his calls. Hollywood treats him like he doesn't exist.

And the movie flops and everybody moves on. And I think that the tough thing is there were a lot of people involved in the movie who were incredibly passionate about it. And it was ruined by a number of people who didn't care about it at all. And it just goes to show you that like unlike other businesses and industries where the destructiveness of one person can be limited and mitigated in movies, it, really only takes one or two people not caring or one person being overwhelmed for something to fall through. And unlike a tech project where you can switch out the project manager, Richard Stanley was the only person that was so passionate about it that he was going to make the weird. Now, who knows if his version would have been good or bad, but I think it certainly, you would have

been able to tell that he cared about it. And I think the biggest thing when you watch it now is you can tell that some departments do care about their, when you watch the movie, I actually think it's shot pretty well. The makeup and effects are amazing. Also, Berger Bach and David Dulles are great. They're really trying. All of the extras, by the way. Like, Ron Perlman plays like the priest, like goat man.

He's the seer of the law. He's great. And then it sucks because you can tell Marlon Brando not caring is actually leads to some kind of interesting moments in the movie. Yes, because it's still Marlon Brando and he's still so fascinating to watch that even when he is in a tent, in white face, being. fed lines through a radio. He is still Marlon Brando.

Val Kilmer not caring really hurts it for me. Because he is so good when he does care, like in Ghost in the Darkness. And he, and all of these other, and like kiss, kiss, bang, bang of more recent years. Like, he's absolutely awesome. But he clearly is just checked out for whatever reason in this movie. And to reiterate, he did apparently apologize to Richard Stanley after the fact. Although apparently Richard was like, it's a little late for that map. Yeah.

Yeah. So that is the story of the ill-fated island of Dr. Moreau. There were rumors two years ago that they were going to reboot it with Richard Stanley directing it. That's not. I think that that disappeared. I don't think he wanted to do it. And I think that Spectrovision, which is Elijah Woods's company. Which is doing Colorado Space.

And they're also doing two other cosmic horror films. Nice. And I think Stanley might be involved in those. But I also think it shows that when you, direct something, you're so emotionally and personally tied to it that when it doesn't go great, or in this instance, when it goes horribly, it kind of destroys you. And I can completely understand why he just couldn't bring himself to make another movie. Yeah.

Period. Because he had just invested everything into trying to get this going. So what we like to do at the end of all of these episodes is a short section. on what we've learned and best practices for the future. So, Lizzie, hearing about the ill-fated island of Dr. Romero, what have you learned? I've learned, I guess, don't rely entirely on a warlock who may or may not irradiate himself to death. So know your witches. Know your witches.

Gosh, yeah. I think for me, the big learning experience is more money does not necessarily mean a better or easier production. I would argue more money, more problems is probably the way to think about it. More brando, more problems. Exactly. Very, very true. That's all we've learned. Yeah.

Those are our main learning. What are we doing, David? What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by the best. Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing in music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthana Youos.