WHAT WENT WRONG - The Silence of the Lambs

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

Directed by... Gene Hackman and starring... Sean Connery? This week Lizzie & Chris put the lotion in the basket and learn how real-life stalkers, moth-wranglers and concerned daughters gave us one of the greatest thrillers of all time!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.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Welcome back to season two of what went wrong. That's right. We greenlit ourselves. And here we are, back at it again. Chris, it's been a couple weeks.

What have you been up to? Nothing. No. Let's see. We left the state at the right moment. California went to shit. coronavirus has ravaged us like a grizzly bear going through a family campground. Yeah, real bad.

And now we've returned to California just in time for all the ICU beds to disappear. So feeling great about our timing and decision-making process. And the fact that we just bought a house here, it's like really feeling good about being locked down long-term in California. Great. Anyway. I feel very. lucky. I've been, I got the chance to see a little bit of my family. It's been a good two weeks.

Our cat put on 15 pounds staying with our in-laws. That's the truth. Carmine. My in-laws were like, she just keeps screaming. So we just kept feeding her. And I was like, no, that's not how you deal with this. You got to just let her scream. Speaking of screaming cats, my dad sent me an audio recording. My father, who had two cats, then inherited his mother's two cats when she passed away earlier this year. He now has four cats. He sent me a recording of what feeding time is like at his house. David, roll the clip. It is, I just sent him back a jiff of Grey Gardens. I was like, Dad, this is bad. And I didn't actually hear it. So I'm just going to assume that it's awful. Guys, thanks so much for circling back for season two. We didn't have a ton of money on the advertising

budgets. We're glad that you caught wind. We have a lot of fun films for you this year. And actually, a lot more good movies. Because we've gone. through a lot of the bad ones. I think if you're watching along as we go, we're going to hit some more fan favorites. Thanks for coming back. So today we are talking about a particular fan favorite. It is a favorite of both me and Chris. It's a movie that met with resistance shockingly at almost every stage of pre-production. It lost its director and star, required a moth wrangler, my favorite credit we've come across so far. It had no budget for an awards campaign and yet against all odds. It went on to become a classic with an enduring legacy,

some of which has been met with valid criticism from the LGBTQ plus community for years and that means, of course, we are talking about the silence of the lands. A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some father beans and a nice kianti. So this movie for anyone that's not familiar

was released February 14th, Valentine's Day, 1991. It was directed by Jonathan. and Demi with a screenplay by Ted Talley. It is based on the novel The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, which was a massive success when it was released, and we'll get to that in a little bit. It stars Jody Foster as FBI agent, FBI agent in training, I should say, Clarice Starling. Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Scott Glenn as FBI agent in charge. That's a pretty good impression. I'm impressed. I'm going to roll out a lot of Jody Foster in this one. She's my favorite. That's good. Scott Glenn as FBI agent.

agent in charge of the behavioral science unit and Ted Levine as serial killer, Jame Gumm, aka Buffalo Bill. I've never understood why his name is Jane and not Jamie or James. That has yet to be revealed to me. The film follows agent in training, Corrice Starling as she's sent to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a cannibalistic serial killer and brilliant psychiatrist who's imprisoned at a maximum security mental institution.

Fun fact, it's down the street from my grandma's house in Baltimore. Yeah. Yeah. To see if he can provide the FBI with any information about the prolific serial killer they're currently hunting, which is Buffalo Bill. Now, Chris, we've both seen this movie a million times, but what was your reaction on this watch? It just, you know, it holds up. It's excellent. A lot of the cinematography is very unique. Yep, we'll get to that as well. eyelines in the movie, which is basically how close to camera the characters are looking oftentimes. It almost in this movie feels like they're breaking the fourth wall and staring into the camera.

And they do that obviously for specific reasons. And Lizzie will talk to that. And then of course, every time I watch it, I'm always struck by how little of Hannibal Lecter there actually is. Yes, we will get to that as well. There's almost none. Yes. I mean, his and his scenes are some of the most memorable, but he's also. just, and then last thing, Scott Glenn was...

He's great. Just a real sexy man, like back in the day. Anyway, just throwing it out there. I've always liked Scott Glenn. He's great. Yeah, he's awesome in this. You know, this movie, it has everything that I love. I love Jody Foster.

I honestly grew up believing that she was from West Virginia or whatever because of her accent in this. She's not. She's from Los Angeles, I think. I love serial killers, not in like a fun way, but I'm very interested in them. obviously Anthony Hopkins, and then, of course, I do enjoy Chris Isaac as a SWAT team agent in his cameo in this. Fun fact, do you know one of the other movies he has a prominent cameo in? I don't. It's that thing you do. He's Uncle Bob or whatever that records them. Yeah. Love Chris Isaac.

Interesting. Okay, something I did not realize, and maybe you did know this, Chris, but the Silence of the Lambs is actually the second movie in what we'll call the Hannibal Lecter cinematic universe. The first one was Manhunter by Michael Man. There you go, 1986 Manhunter. Written and directed by Michael Mann and starred William Peterson. Now, it is called Manhunter. However, it is actually based on the book Red Dragon, which we see get remade again in 2002. Yes.

And that was a straight up remake, which I didn't know. I confess because I've seen Silence of the Lamb so many times, I actually chose to watch Manhunter instead before this, which I think was pretty valuable. it's a little weird. So, Cooree Starling does not appear in this film, but Hannibal Ector does, and is played by Brian Cox, of all people. I love Brian. My wife was never supposed to have a daughter.

That's him in the ring, if you didn't know. Oh, my great accent. Oh, my God, I forgot. He's in the ring. He's in the ring. Man, he did some, like, clinkers before, and he's so good, but like, I don't know. The ring was great. The ring's not a clinker.

I mean, okay, you're right. It's not a clinker. Whoa! We're going to have a separate conversation about the ring. I think I have problems with it because it really scared the crap out of me at the point where I couldn't sleep for seven days and I'm still mad at it. So one thing that's weird is that though Brian Cox's name in this movie is Hannibal Lecter, it is spelled differently. It's actually spelled differently in multiple different places. It's always including a K in this one.

Sometimes it's L-E-C-K-T-E-R, sometimes L-E-C-K-T-O-R. Sometimes there's no C. Anyway, it's weird. I'm not sure what the deal is with that, although there are some issues with the actual name Hannibal Lecter that we will get to as well. The movie also features the appearance of Francis Dollar Hyde or The Tooth Fairy, who was then later played by Ray Fines in Red Dragon. Despite frankly being like mostly okay, I was expecting this to be kind of bad. Yeah, it's not bad. Arguably, honestly, I would say better than Red Dragon. Yeah, I think it's second to Silence of the Lambs in the Hannibal Lecter universe.

I would agree with that. Outside of the show, the show's good. I need to watch a show. I love Mads Mikkelson. The reason I'm bringing up Manhunter is that despite being, as we said, mostly okay, it was a massive failure, both critically and at the box office. This is a segment from the New York Times Review on August 15th and 1986. Quote, the main trouble is Mr. Mann's taste for overkill. Attention keeps being diverted away from the story to the odd camera angles, the fancy lighting, the crashing music, and you realize you're being had. It's like catching a glimpse of the gimmicks in the magician's bag. I agree with that. Very Michael manny. It's very over the top. And for those of you who don't know, Michael Mann directed heat, then Miami Vice, collateral. He's known as a very stylish

somewhat outlandish, action-oriented director. Yeah. And that is all very much here, although there are some weird, like, jump cut edits in this. I don't know what the deal was. It looks like it was a little rushed. Where Silence of the Lambs, I think we can all agree, is relatively timeless with potentially one exception. Man Hunter

is like one of the most 80s movies I've ever watched. I'll be honest, like collateral feels like an 80s movie and it was from like 2003. That's true. It's Michael Mann. Brian Cox really only gets like two scenes in this and he is fine. He's not anything particularly remarkable. To be

honest, the part just isn't that fun in this movie. And we see it again with Anthony Hopkins and Red Dragon. It's just not that much fun. I almost would have liked to have gotten to see him develop the character a little bit more, just having seen him in succession. and how scary he can be. But alas, that will not happen.

So Manhunter was produced by Warner Brothers and Dino DeLerentis, an insanely prolific Italian producer, who in addition to producing the film, also managed to get a hold of the rights to the name Hannibal Lecter. And we will come back to that. I believe it's the film rights to the name. So Thomas Harris follows up the novel Red Dragon with 1988's The Silence of the Lambs. Remember, Manhunter came out in 1986.

The book is a huge success critically and commercially. Roll doll loved the book. Roll doll? Yes. Super creepy. Yeah. Super creepy dude. We'll cover that in a separate episode.

His short stories are creepy too. Real weird out. David Foster Wallace also included it on his top ten books of all time, actually along with Red Dragon, interestingly. Harris had the right to sell a one picture license. However, despite the novel's success, absolutely nobody wanted to touch it thanks to Manhunter. I do want to call out that the main source that I'm using today, is a really excellent oral history of the Silence of the Lamps for the 25th anniversary.

That was released by Deadline, among some other articles and interviews as well. So thank you, deadline. That was great. Now, Bob Bookman was the paradigm agent who had brokered Harris's deals previously, and he actually personally called up an exec at Paramount after he found out that they had given the book particularly negative coverage. And for anybody that doesn't know, coverage just means that these agents tend to have people read a script or read a book and then they will summarize it and they'll also give their feedback whether or not it's worth the agency or production company pursuing that project. So Silence of the

lambs got very negative coverage and it was getting negative coverage across the board. So Bookman calls up his guy at Paramount and he's like, I urge you please just have somebody else read it. Like have one more person do coverage of this. So the guy says fine. He had somebody else read it. He calls Bookman back. He's like, you know what? It's got really positive coverage. They really liked it. There's no way in hell we're buying this. They have just like they couldn't, they wouldn't do it. Bookman said, quote, nobody wanted it. It was a combination of the serial killer aspect of it and the failure of Manhunter. It reminded me of how the science fiction genre was dead as a doornail until George Lucas made

Star Wars. Now, at this point, they're thinking that this possible franchise and this sort of like massive bestseller book universe is totally dead. But then out pops. Gene Hackman. Did you see this one coming, Chris? Nope. Didn't see him coming. All right. So Gene Hackman had read the book and he loved it. He was also looking for something to direct at the time. Now, he got his friend Arthur Crimm at Orion Pictures to go 50-50 with him on buying the book rights. Can you guess who Gene Hackman wanted to play in addition to directing the movie? Clarice Starling. Nailed it. No, he wanted to play Hannibal Lecter, which like, I mean, I love Gene Hackman. It could have been interesting. No, I think he could have played the Scott Glenn role. Okay. But I don't think he could play. I don't personally see it.

He's a great actor. I agree with that. They hire Ted Talley as the screenwriter to adapt the novel, who had just written White Palace starring Susan Sarandon in a couple of TV movies at this point, and he goes ahead and starts working on the script. Now, from the way Talley tells it, it does seem like Hackman may have had one foot out the door

from the second that he purchased the book rights. He said that their only meetings were basically Talley pitching Hackman his ideas and then just Gene Hackman just being like, uh, cool, write it. Go write it. And Talley was like, okay? Sounds good. And then Hackman kind of immediately starts to reduce his involvement in the project. Even though he initially was so excited about playing Lecter, he started to realize that starring in that role and directing might be a little too much. And maybe he should take on the role of Jack Crawford instead, which. is, as Chris pointed out, a better fit. He also apparently told Talley that, quote, maybe Bobby will play Lecter, but Talley was too scared to ask which Bobby that might be, so they don't know.

So I'm guessing Bobby D.Bobby De Niro. Unclear, because there's a couple of bobbies that will come up when they do start cast. Can you imagine Robert Redford as Hannibal Lecter? I just, honestly, he could have eaten the whole world, and we'd all just be charmed. True. So now Talley is a third of the way

through the draft and he finds out that, A, Orion Pictures apparently hasn't a hundred percent secured the rights and Gene Hackman completely dropped out of the project. What happened, so he says, is that his daughter read the book, called up Gene and said, Daddy, it's too violent and there's no way you're making this movie. And Gene Hackman must really love his daughter because he said, you got it. I suspect it was more buyer's remorse and he was looking for a reason to back out. Fortunately for all of us, even though this was probably the worst three days of Ted Talley's life. Orion Pictures does manage to buy Gene Hackman out of the project and they spend around a million dollars for the book rights. So it's done.

They have it. The script is already well on its way to being done. They do not have a director. Now, they just made two movies with a young director named Jonathan Demi. That was something wild and married to the mob, both of which were relative successes. Demi had gotten his start in a familiar place that we've seen at least two directors in the show come out of Roger Corman's studio. And Demi had another movie in mind that he really wanted to make. It was a thriller starring Danny Glover, and he'd even gone so far as to find the right script for it. When he brought the script to execs at Orion, they told him, we really like this.

If this is the project that you want to do, we are behind you, we will do this. But before you sign up, please read The Silence of the Lambs and see if you'd be more interested in this. So Demi reads the book, and he's like, done. I'm doing this. This other project can wait. There's just one problem. They still don't have the rights to the name Hannibal Lecter.

So they're literally sitting around trying to figure out any other name they could possibly call this character that doesn't sound absurd. So you've got like, you know, Lanable Hector, Manable Specter. And Anthony Hopkins as brilliant psychologist and cannibal, Tim. I still watch it. So Tim was a first draft idea. No, they realize that they don't have a movie if they don't have that name. Because it's not like it's an unknown property. It's a very successful series of books at this point.

So they get Bookman to call up Dino De Laurentis and they are able to strike a deal. Dino loves money and he's very good at making it. So he says, go ahead. And it apparently also meant that he raked in the cash for the sequels using Hannibal's name as well. Now, as he's writing script, Talley has one person in mind for Clarice, and that is Jody Foster, who had just won an Oscar for the accused. There's just one problem. Jonathan Demi also had one person in mind for Clarice. And it was Michelle Pfeiffer. Interesting. Yeah. So she just worked with him on married to the mob. I think she was kind of top of mind for him. He was really on board. Like,

he actually went so far as to offer her the part. Oh, really? Yeah. She turns it down again, like Hackman because she felt that it was too violent, which is interesting. She's definitely done some violent movies, but whatever. Yeah. Scarface. That's exactly what I said. Like, you did Scarface, but you won't do Silence of the Lambs? Well, but maybe to be fair, she didn't like. Scarface was not well received. That's true. And it was criticized for its violence. So maybe she felt that she didn't want to do that again. That is very true. I like Michelle Pfeiffer a lot, but I don't think she would have been anywhere near as good in this part. So this kind of blew my mind, but Jody Foster sort of had to campaign for this part.

She had read the book and she loved it and she actually called up Ted Talley while he was writing the script to fight for it. Now, she had good reason to be interested because in addition to it being an excellent book, she'd had personal experience with not one but two very scary stalkers and she had worked directly with the FBI both times.

Now, one of them is very famous. That is John Hinkley Jr., who actually made an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in, in order to impress Jody Foster. That was the motivation behind this. So she had direct experience in terms of working with the Bureau and was very interested in diving deeper and portraying them in a pretty positive light.

And by the way, the FBI did cooperate in making Silence of the Lambs by sending Jody to actual training at Quantico and had her meet with John Douglas, who is the basis for Mind Hunter as well as Jack Crawford. The reason they were so willing to pitch in was that they hoped her starring as Clarice Starling would make more women want to join the Bureau. Despite other names like Laura Dern being in the mix,

Jody's campaign worked, and once Michelle Pfeiffer passed, Jody accepted the role. So next to cast, obviously, is Hannibal Lecter. Names that were thrown around include Robert De Niro and Robert Duval. So there are two Bodies there. Two Bodies, yeah. Unclear.

Both Bobby D. both Bobby D. Now, Demi said everybody wanted to play that part from Dustin Hoffman to Morgan Freeman. Can you imagine Dustin Hoffman? No. And I don't want to. I love Dustin Hoffman, but not for that role. So bad. Morgan Freeman, I thought was kind of interesting, actually. Yeah. He can be imposing. Right. That one I could see a little bit more realistically. But eventually, there were two names for Lecter that felt right for Demi. One being Anthony. Hopkins, taking second place to the more commercially viable name. Chris, who do you think was their top choice for Dr. Hannibal Lecter, someone who in the early 90s was considered commercially viable and close to the same age as Anthony Hopkins? Okay, commercially viable in the early 90s, close to the same. Marlon Brando was box office poison at this point, right? Okay, yeah, so it can't be

him. Um, God, commercially viable? Okay, hold on. Sean Connery? Yes. No! Oh my God! I can't believe I guessed that. Oh, no.

Oh, my God. Floresh! Floresh! I was laughing so hard, picturing Sean Connery in this part. And I ate his liver with some kianti and faber beans. So bad. Do you hear the lamb screaming, Clarice?

he's just like yelling in his jail cell they offered him the part like Sean Connery yes they offered it to him over Anthony Hopkins he called them back and called it repugnant and said that he would never be a part of it he hated it he was like I hate this I'm not going anywhere near it thank God

because that would have been awful yeah so bullet seriously this movie but also rest in peace Sean Conner Sorry, he did just pass away. That is true. RIP.I.

And by the way, Sean Connery, great in James Bond and other films. Not good for this, though. No, no, no, no, no. So Demi opts for his at that point second choice, which is Anthony Hopkins. Now, Hopkins was a very prolific actor at this point, although mostly known for theater work. But he'd been in tons of TV miniseries and a lot of BBC stuff. He had starred as the Doctor and the Elephant Man, which is actually what convinced Demi that he wanted to work with him. because he played the doctor so convincingly.

Fun fact, Hopkins based his performance as Lecter, at least in part, on Hal, the computer in 2001, a space odyssey. Interesting. You can kind of hear it in the voice. I like that. Now, Demi gets to work, and he brings with him another guy he came up the ranks working with at Roger Corman, and that is Tak Fujimoto. He's a cinematographer.

He's amazing. Also, M. Knight-Shammelon cinematographer of choice until his retirement, as well as being the DP on Ferris Bueller's Day Off, pretty in pink. I mean, he's amazing. Chris mentioned this at the top. The movie does have a very unique shooting style. And you see a ton of close-ups, which was very intentional. That's something that Jonathan Demi and Tokfugimodo really wanted to work on. And Chris also mentioned the eyeline. This is something that I didn't pick up the significance of until starting to dig into this. But the way that it's shot, you're seeing the movie from Clarice's perspective.

Yeah, you almost never look her in the eyes. You don't ever look her in the eyes. But you're always looking at the other characters as if they're looking at you. And it's every time she enters a room, you get all these men looking at her. The cameras actually put at her height also if you watch carefully. And so they're like looking down at her often. And it's very effective. Yeah, it's really good.

That's why you're seeing people like Hannibal Lecter talk straight into the camera. It's because you are supposed to be Clarice in the movie essentially as you're watching it. I want to play a little clip of Jody Foster talking about that shooting style. A lot of the scenes actually in Silence of the Lambs are done to the camera, which is this sort of odd technique that Jonathan and Demi came up with this sort of Hitchcockian technique. And most of the time that when he's delivering his lines, he's not looking at me, he's looking directly at the camera. And I'm somewhere behind there where he can't see me.

She's talking, he in that case, is Anthony Hopkins. So the reason she's talking about doing those scenes is that while shooting went pretty smoothly, there was one kind of weird dynamic on set, and that is that Jody Foster never spoke to Anthony Hopkins during the shoot. So let's hear her tell us why. On Silence of the Lambs, is it true that did you never speak to Anthony Hopkins? No, never spoke to him. He was scary. The first day, we had a reading, we had like a little read-through, and I got there early, and then I went to the bathroom, and I came back, everybody was sitting down. We did the through of the film.

And by the end of it, I never wanted to talk to him again. I was... And so then we did the whole movie. He was always behind the glass partitions, or he was in his cell. And because the scenes were so long, they'd kind of lock him in at the beginning of the day. And he'd go there, and then the next day,

he'd be on the other side, and I'd be on this side. And we got to the end of the movie, and it really had never had a conversation. But are you never passed backstage in a corridor? No, I avoided him. As much of that. I really avoided him. And then I was eating a tuna fish sandwich.

It was the last day, and he came up to me, and he said, I guess he was sidled up to me. And I said, I don't know. I sort of had a tear in my eyes. I was like, I was really scared of you. And he said, I was scared of you. I think he's funny because why would anyone be scared of me? I don't know. I love that.

Oh, that's great. He's terrifying. Except, like, as a person, he seems very fun. He seems wonderful. And if you guys want a fun like Instagram follow, Anthony Hopkins is a blast. Anthony Hopkins Instagram is an absolute treasure. So a couple other things that could have gone very wrong, but thankfully didn't during the shooting process. First is the ending of the movie as initially written and almost as shot.

The end of the movie showed Hannibal and Dr. Chilton, who is the sort of warden of the mental institution who's awful. I'm having an old friend for dinner. Well, yeah, so the original ending showed Hannibal and Dr. Chilton in Chilton's home with a bodyguard dead on the floor and Hannibal peeling an orange with a pairing knife that he's about to use to carve up Chilton who's strapped to the board the way that they had Hannibal done earlier. Demi throughout the movie was extremely careful to remove any unnecessary violence. You'll notice this happens a bunch of times. Like someone will talk about a really horrifying crime and hand Clarice a picture. They don't show you the picture. they show her reaction.

Even Hannibal's escape is all shown in the aftermath. We see the guard as he's been, you know, after he's been killed, all that is, there's very little that's explicit. Yeah. Demi in particular felt that this ending was too much and that it would kind of ruin the movie at the very end. Ted Talley was a little miffed, but he was like fine. And he said, okay, then they go to a tropical location. And Jonathan Demi was like, you want me to.

pay to fly all of us to a tropical location for this last thing. Ted Telly is like, yes, if you want to change the ending of my movie, that is what I want you to do. You did it. What's funny is it works on a few levels because what I like about the movie, it's very restrained the whole movie. And there's this feeling that both Clarice and Hannibal are more restrained and sophisticated, or at least he respects that of her than those around her.

there's a like grotesque nature to the everyday people, right? And that he's above. And then I love at the end that he disappears into the crowd. And it's anyway, at the ending I find really fun in a way that doesn't, it's a wink, but it doesn't betray the tone of the rest of the movie. Exactly. I think they really nailed it. And one thing that I loved is that Demi did go to Harris to say like, hey, we're changing

the end. like, are you okay with this, basically? And Harris was like, it's fine, do whatever you want with the movie. The one thing I'll say is that I don't think Hannibal Lecter would sweat. And if you watch, he's not. He's like cool as a cucumber. And he looks like he's just in his element. He's got his wig on and he looks very natural. And then Chilton, on the other hand, looks very out of sorts. It's just like coming off the plane and whatnot. It's great. And of course, the line that Chris mentioned, that's very famous is that you hear Anthony Hopkins on the phone to Clarice say, I'm having an old friend for dinner as he watches Chilton walk away. So that's so much better, I think, than what it could

have been. Also, Buffalo Bill's dance was not in the script. That was a big surprise for the screenwriter who did not know that was coming. And then he saw it and he was like, oh, my God, all right. Also, I did see one report saying that it was initially choreographed to Bob Seeger's her strut. Okay. But Ted Levine chose goodbye horses instead. Again, better choice. Weird. call. A couple more things from the set and post-production. There was an extremely fun credit on this movie I mentioned at the top, which is moth wrangler. Evidently, this was one of the hardest jobs on set. So the character that Ted Levine plays, Buffalo Bill, Jane Gum has an obsession with these, they're called Death's Head Moths. And he has them all over his house and he like,

you see one get pulled out of someone's mouth. Now, according to a 1991 interview with the New York Raymond A. Mendez, our moth expert, who by the way, was very experienced, had to track down the very rare Death's Head Moth that appears in the movie, but there was one problem. There was really only one colony of these moths that was available. A, it was in England, and B, they had a cold. They were all sick. Oh, poor guys. So the moths were too sick and they could not travel. So the moths that you see in the movie, in the end, are actually not Death's Head Moths. was wondering because they don't look like the same moths if you're watching closely. They're not. They're not. On a big screen. Uh, they actually had to dress up tomato hornworm moths. So essentially this man was in charge of moth costumes.

And tomato hornworm moths are very large moths that are you can find in California as well as other places in the United States. And even in Washington, you can find them. And they're huge. So they can be like the size of your hand. I hate that. They get big enough. So, last thing about the actual production process, there was a whole sequence that didn't make it into the movie as well, like an eight to 12 minute sequence. Now, Demi had turned in a locked cut. This was done. And this sequence was in the movie. And he held a screening for friends and industry folks, one of whom was famed screenwriter, who we have talked about before, William Goldman. After screening the movie, they assumed that it was done because the screening had been a huge success. But Goldman called up Demi and told him to remove a huge. chunk of the third act. There was this big sequence where the attorney general, by the way, played by Roger Corman, shows up after Lecter has escaped and tells Clarice and Jack that they're off the case, you know, they're fired or whatever. And she's like, you can't stop me. I will fight for this girl. I'm going anyway. And then Goldman just calls up Jonathan Demi, cool as a cucumber

and is like, just my two cents, but lose that whole thing. You don't need it. Demi kind of laughed it off. He was like, that's my big, that's my big moment, my big emotional moment. But he was, he went back to the edit and he had them lifted out just to watch the movie again. And he was like, oh, William Goldman is 100% right. Yeah. And by the way, William Goldman wrote The Princess Bride. He's an incredible writer, novelist and screenwriter. And so that section in the screenplay would typically be called like the all is lost moment, right? In a typical procedural serial killer story, investigative story, at the end of the second act, the character gets kicked off the case. It happens in any cop movie you've ever seen. By removing it, what's cool is that instead, the kind of

all is lost emotional moment that the audience latches on to is Clarice talking about the lambs being slaughtered with Hannibal Lecter in his cell. And that becomes her emotionally vulnerable low point in the story. And the movie feels less like a police procedural. than it does a movie about Clarice Starling having this journey through this terrifying world of men, you know, across as she tries to track down Buffalo Bill. Yeah, it's interesting. The portrayal of women in this movie is actually great. And I think relatively revolutionary for when it came out.

I think it was absolutely the right call to pull that out. And the other thing that kept coming up as I was reading was that Jonathan Demi said that Jody Foster was kind of the one that pointed out to him, like, this isn't a procedural. This is a movie about a woman who is trying to save another woman. That's it. And like, that should be the focus. And that is the focus. And it's very successful. And because of that, it allows the move, the points of the movie that you really remember are the dialogue scenes between her and Lecter where very little like evidence is discovered or exchanged, right? It's not the typical, I find this piece of evidence, which leads me to this location, which leads me to this character. And that's a red her.

You know, those beats are secondary. So it comes time to release the movie, and they initially had intended to release it in 1990, but Orion Pictures was headed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They were completely broke. It turns out in 1989 had been an unbelievably bad year for them. They released Great Balls of Fire, She Devil, Speed Zone, Valmont, an adaptation of Les Liaison Dangerous, which was competing with dangerous liaisons. liaisons. Yeah. And they also lost their co-founder who left to join TriStar Pictures.

I was just saying, I haven't seen any of those movies, I don't think. The only one that got some better critical success, I think, was great balls of fire, but that did not do well. So they also had dances with wolves, which they were releasing in December, and they had spent so much money on. In order to not compete with themselves, Silence of the Lambs essentially just gets bumped. They're like, you know what? I'm sorry, this is not an award season contender, we're going to bump it to February. And the idea there was just like,

we're going to dump this for the cash. We can get from the tickets, and that's it. And for those of you who don't know, February, January, February, they call dump you area. And it's when studios drop movies. Now, if you're like just a horror film or a middle of the road rom-com or something,

you get released in February or March, like, hey, but if this is a quote, prestige picture, you know, that is a signal to audiences and critics alike that the studio does not have faith in the movie to do well financially or in the awards circuit. Yeah. In this case, it was definitely an award circuit play that they just wanted to get it out of the way. Now, it seemed like Silence of the Lambs' chances that the Oscars had completely gone bust

since it was releasing so early in the year and obviously then didn't qualify for the 1991 Oscars. They'd expected that it would. on top of that, they give it basically no marketing budget. Because they probably spent all the money on Dances with Wolves. They did. They spent so much money on Dances with Wolves. Now, all of this, even though when the film does come out on February 14th, which, by the way, Valentine's Day was Jonathan Demi's idea, it is a massive box office success.

It pulls in $272 million worldwide on a $19 million budget. And it was rated R, which is also unheard. heard of for a rated R film. It does crazy, crazy well. That still is not enough to save Orion from its financial woes. So the Silence of the Lambs team is like, you know what? People are loving this. I know it's weird, but we're not going to give up on the awards campaign.

And then they had very little money left for any kind of campaign push. So they did something kind of unusual for the time. They made videotaped VHS screeners of the movie and sent them out to all the voters in the Academy. This is something that we think of as completely standard now. We all get screeners every year. It was not done. Oh, really? Not the same way. No. That was pretty much all they could afford to do. They didn't run ads. They did nothing. They didn't host any screenings or dinners. They sent out videotapes. That was it. Wow. And I probably people were like, hey, what a refreshing grassroots approach? You know what I mean? To this whole process as opposed to nowadays when it's like, I don't want your

screeners. Right. No, yeah. They were. like, yeah, I'll watch this again. You know, this, I enjoyed this when it was out. By the way, this was a year that saw huge awards campaigns for Thelma and Louise, JFK, Bugsy and Prince of Tides. So at this point, you know, the whole team behind Silence of the Lambs is like, whatever, let's just submit to every single category we want, who cares, including putting Anthony Hopkins not in the best supporting actor category, but in the best actor category, despite the fact that he is only on camera for somewhere around 16 to 17 minutes. Yep. When I rewatched it for this episode, I was like, I think it must have been supporting actor.

And then I looked it up, best actor. Yep. Now, against pretty much all odds, the movie went on to win five Oscars, the big five, by the way, which were Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, best actress, and yes, best actor for Anthony Hopkins less than 20 minutes on screen. It was only the third movie ever to win all five after it happened one night and one flew over the cuckoo's nest. Now, this thing about an actor being on screen for a small amount of time and still winning is not unheard of. Anne Hathaway, I think, had around 15 minutes in Les Miserables. Viola Davis did not win for doubt, but she was on screen for nine minutes and was nominated. And boy, do you remember those nine minutes. So, despite sweeping the end of the end of the end of

Academy Awards and being a massive critical and commercial success, Thomas Harris, the author, who was famously disappointed with Manhunter, had vowed that he would not watch another adaptation of his books because he wanted to keep his characters his own. And he held on to this promise and refused to watch Silence of the Lambs. Until somewhat recently, he actually did watch it. It came on TV a couple years ago. And he sat down and watched the whole thing and said that it was a wonderful movie. But yeah, he wouldn't watch it when it came out. Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, Thomas. So we would be remiss if we did not talk about how one aspect of the movie has aged. And that is Buffalo Bill and the possibly inherent transphobia that many feel is part of that character. Now, there was some initial outcry that the character was homophobic when the movie was released and even a decent amount of protesters outside theaters and premieres and the Oscars, which has since with more time been. more accurately focused on the representation of a possibly trans individual versus just homophobia.

Now, remembering this is 1991, so it is the height of the AIDS crisis when fear and revulsion of the gay community was at an all time, just truly vicious high, people were mad that this was the representation of, you know, somebody who was other on screen, despite the fact that he was, you know, loosely based on sort of a conglomerate of serial killers. There were very specific choices made about Buffalo Bill that did play into stereotypes. You know, he's got the little poodle. He's got a very sort of effeminate way about him.

He's, there's sewing machines everywhere and he's. Yeah, he was kind of like John Wayne Gacey Jr. meets Ted Bundy in some ways. Like, and he like captured women in the same way that Ted Bundy did with like the pretending he was injured and needing help into the car. And then January and Casey Jr., famously killed a lot of boys and sexually abused them before. But then they added... Well, the big one is Ed Gein.

And Ed Gein, right, exactly. And then they added the excessive, yeah, like you said, feminization, making him, like, it was weird. It's like, is he a cross-dress or is he trans? Like that. And it actually is something that is very briefly mentioned if you watch it. Hannibal Lecter says in it like he's not he's not trans essentially he like wants to be it's a very weird wishy-washy like you don't really know what you're looking at and and also like that is a blink and you miss it conversation now demi's initial response was that Buffalo Bill was not a gay

character or a trans character for that matter he was just someone who hated himself so much that he wanted to become the farthest thing from himself which was a woman now I am no by no means an LGBTQ scholar. I don't feel qualified to talk about this. I do think we need to mention it. But in retrospect, even that description that Jonathan Demi gave alone, like, that's problematic. I can see it. Like what he just described is that sort of, you know, Bill is driven by a desire to change.

And it's that desire and the goal of changing into a woman that makes him an evil, you know, brutal serial killer. So I do understand the criticism of this. And I also believed Demi that he really didn't think that this was... Yeah, I don't think anyone in 1991 had this top of mind. No. I think it's hard, though, and it's complicated because the question becomes, what aspect of the identity is driving what aspect of the identity?

Right. And we can't say, we know. And I, anyway, I understand completely why people would be upset over this. and I think we've moved away from this type of serial killer as a culture in film, which is a great thing. But I also think that you could have, there's maybe a way to do the character where it doesn't feel like one drives the other. Right. Right.

Where like Lizzie's saying, his desire to kill is less rooted in a trans, like, dissociative sort of issue that he's dealing with. Right. I mean, we have almost no other information. about him in the movie aside from this, which is interesting. Like there's that this is the motivation. That's all there is. To his credit, after some time, Demi listened to the criticism. In 2014, he said, quote,

Jane Gum isn't gay and this is my directorial failing and making the silence of the lambs that I didn't find ways to emphasize the fact that he wasn't gay. He said, Juan Botas, who was one of the inspirations for Philadelphia, said, you can't imagine what it's like to be a 12-year-old gay kid and you go to the movies all the time and whenever you see a gay character they're either a ridiculous comic relief caricature

or a demented killer. It's very hard growing up gay and being exposed to all these stereotypes. And Demi said that registered with me in a big way. And Demi would go on to direct his next feature, which is Philadelphia, two years later. While he claimed there was no link to the backlash in seeking out the project of Philadelphia and making it,

he did comment when Philadelphia was met with some criticism again by those who had not forgotten about Silence of the Lambs, saying, quote, I expected it, actually hoped for it. It's the job of militants to demand more of anything. If these people were satisfied, change would be hard to get through. Every one of them is right. There could have been more of this or more of that, but now maybe another film will take it further,

which I think is one of the most graceful ways to handle that. So, of course, a lot did go right on this movie. Lizzie, having watched it now for the umpteenth time and having researched it, in your mind, what went right? I have to go with the cinematography. It's something that I never appreciated watching this growing up and watching it as an adult. It is so impressively done right down to that night vision sequence at the end. Like, you really are, you are Clarice Starling along for the ride, and it's done so effective.

and it shows, like you said, everything down to her height and how small she is in that room. It really does show it well. And I think there's so many ways that they portray the difficulties that she sees as a woman entering the bureau that it's like you're not hit over the head with it. It's just kind of there. And it's there in like every scene that she has to deal with. And it's just done so well. it's very surprising to me that this is written and directed by

by men because it is so good there's that one scene where the cop where Jack Crawford says like let's talk about this privately like you know we don't even talk about this in front of a lady or whatever yeah yeah and afterwards he's like oh that really got to you didn't it that I like kicked you out and she's like yeah it did

because like these cops look at you for how to behave like this is you are the standard and it kind of like hits home for him And it's just like, it's so good. They really do a great job. It's great. I'm going to just go with a really obvious one, which is casting Anthony Hopkins, this Hannibal Lecter.

So I did a little look at his filmography before this movie. And it's true, actually. He was not, he is the Anthony Hopkins we know because of Silence of the Lance. Yeah, this is the turning point. Yeah, I always assumed he was a known quantity on the level of a Gene Hackman before this film. that certainly wasn't the case. And wow, he just knocks it out of the park. And he was great.

If you guys haven't seen the original Elephant Man directed by David Lynch, it's excellent. And if you have not seen Magic starring Anthony Hopkins, where he plays a ventriloquist who starts believing that his doll is alive, which is really good and creepy movie from the 60s. But he was great. And it became such a ubiquitous performance. I remember when Billy Crystal, they rolled him out at the Oscars in the full office. Hannibal Lecter suit with the mascot and everything. It was really fun. So yeah, Anthony Hopkins. Incredible. Excellent. A role that would define his second half of his career.

Truly. Well, thanks so much, Lizzie, for walking us through an excellent film. We hope to continue with this stretch of great films for the beginning of season two. As always, if you have any recommendation, please send them our way. We are trying to get through them one by one. And rating and review, season two means we need to drive these ratings even higher. So five stars if you're enjoying the podcast, don't review if you're not enjoying. No, do. We love the one star reviews. No, we do. But if you are going to give us a shitty review, we just ask that you just really give us a shitty review and write what you actually don't like about the podcast because then we can make the podcast better or we can read it and make fun of you on the actual podcast. So, thank you again. That does also involve actually listening

to the podcast before you give it a shitty review. That's my one request there as well. We're not bitter. All right, guys. Bye. Thank you. See you next week. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing music by David Bowman with cover art from you, Fonogne UOS.