WHAT WENT WRONG - The Thing

Episode Date: January 26, 2021

Mid-shoot rewrites, microwaved bubble gum, and more KY Jelly than an Arizona State frat party. This week Chris & Lizzie hunker down with John Carpenter's cult classic The Thing, a film that survived production hell only to die in the wake of a more lovable Extra-Terrestrial.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.

What I have before me is really like some sort of pig slop. So if you guys hear a lot of like slurping and sort of soft mashing sounds, that's my dinner for the next three to four days. Well, I couldn't think of better sound effects to go along with the films covering today, which are two iterations of the thing. The primary one that we'll be talking about, of course, is the. 1982 classic, The Thing, released by Universal Pictures, directed by John Carpenter, written by Bill Lancaster, and starring Kurt Russell, Keith David, and Wilford Brimley, yes, of Quaker Oates. Diabetes.

Pardon? Wasn't either one that had, like, many campaigns about diabetes? Yeah, diabetes spokesperson. Along with a stellar ensemble, in general, the thing has, of course, become perhaps the primary a source cited by practical effects diehards in the age-old CGI versus analog debate. Lizzie, you I'm assuming I've seen this film before. Many times. Any thoughts upon a rewatch?

It's just so good. I actually really enjoyed watching these two back to back, and I know that we'll talk about that a little bit, but something this one does so well is just how contained it manages to keep it, which is something that you would think would be inherent in a story about people trapped in a research center in Antarctica. But the other one is not particularly contained at all. But this one just does such a good job of making the most of, you know, what, seven guys? That's it. Like, that's really all it is. And it's just, it's great. I love the soundtrack, that sort of heartbeat that runs throughout. It's awesome. One of my favorites.

It's a great film, and Lizzie's mentioning this other version, and so we're also going to talk towards the end of this episode about the 2011 prequel, which is also titled The Thing. Now, why'd they do that? We'll get into it a little bit, but directed by Mattis van Heijningen Jr. That can't be right. I'm going to call him Matt. He's Dutch.

And it was also released by Universal. The two films share more in common than just the title. from ruggedly handsome male leads or co-leads. I mean, Joel Edgerton is kind of beta Kurt Russell. Yeah, but he's barely, he's out of this for like at least a third of the movie. Yeah, for large chunks. But along with virtually identical plots, and they also share in common perhaps the forgotten fact that both films upon release

were panned by critics and audiences alike. Although John Carpenter's, the thing has over the years emerged as a cult classic and subsequently been re-evaluated as a horror masterpiece. So to those of you who haven't seen the film in a while or have not seen the film, John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing follows a group of scientists and Kurt Russell's McCready, a grizzled helicopter pilot, at an isolated outpost in Antarctica, who find themselves facing off with an alien creature

who is able to imitate each and every one of them perfectly. The men descend into a state of paranoid violence, unable to trust one another as they try to ensure that this creature can't make its way to more populated areas. I think it's worth pointing out also that this is Kurt Russell at peak hair and beard. Like, it doesn't get better than Kurt Russell's beard in this movie. Kurt Russell indeed grew that beard out over a year before filming. It's a fantastic beard on this project. So the thing's journey to the screen. Let's dive in. Clear.

It began in the mid-nidimmed. 1970s when producers David Foster, Stuart Cohen, and Lawrence Turner approached universal pictures about tackling a novella from the late 1930s called Who Goes There by John W. Campbell. It was a story that was brilliantly simple. A group of scientists in Antarctica find themselves trapped with an alien being that can assume the shape, memories, and personality of any living thing that it eats. They have to figure out how to destroy this thing while preventing it from leaving the continent and taking over the world. In the novella, this thing either exists in the form of the person or creature that it's imitating

or its true form, which is a four-legged and tentacled beast that is entirely blue with three red eyes. It kind of looks like a blue gorilla medusa with three red eyes. Okay, well, parts of that made it. The tentacles made it. Yeah, some of it. it was written during the golden age of science fiction. It's like Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft. They're all working at the same time.

And the trouble was how do you get a shape-shifting villain like this on screen? And so in 1951, Howard Hawks adapted it, written by actually by Charles Letterer, who if you haven't listened to our episode on Citizen Kane or watched Mank, go do it. He shows up as a side character. He's Marion Davies' nephew, who, actually reads the screen play and gives it to Marion Davies. So he was the person who actually adapted this for the screen. So the 1951 adaptation, because they couldn't figure out how to do the special effects for a

shapeshifting creature, opted for a Frankenstein-like version of the character, effectively a guy in a rubber suit. Right. And that one had a different name, right? It was called The Thing from Another World. And it also had a different ending. So the ending to that one ends with them successful. defeating the alien and they've saved humanity. And it should be noted that the ending to the

novella is much more ambiguous. They think they've defeated the creature only to look up and see birds flying overhead and they worry is the thing going to get off Antarctica in the form of a bird and go infect people. And so it's left a bit nihilistic. So it's the mid-1970s. Universal buys the rights to the book for these producers. Apparently there's very little interest around town in the project because nobody can figure out how they would do this from an effects perspective. And they buy the remake rights to the film that had been made. So Stuart Cohen, who by the way has an amazing blog where he just has his production notes from making the thing and it's available online.

Look it up. It's outstanding. So Stuart Cohen instantly wanted to bring in his USC classmate, John Carpenter, to direct the project. However, this was pre-Halloween and Universal Studios was going to allow a no-name director onto this project. So what had he done before Halloween? I know Halloween was like the big break, but he must have had...

He made a movie called Dark Star, which was like a very weird science fiction kind of comedy that was actually co-written by Dan O'Bannon, who wrote Alien. And it was made for like $60,000. It got decent reviews. He was doing no budget filmmaking, and we'll get into that. But pre-Hallowing, no one really knew who was. But meanwhile, there was another young director who had just exploded onto the scene after the success of the Texas chainsaw massacre Toby Hooper.

And so he was getting shown around Hollywood. Apparently William Friedkin was trying to like usher him in and be his big buddy at this time. So Universal had Toby Hooper under contract for his next film. This would eventually lead him to poltergeist actually down the line. But they handed him a copy of. the short story who goes there saying, hey, we've got these producers who want to make this project. They need a director. Toby Hooper reads it and unfortunately him and his writing partner Kim Henkel are like, we don't really like this. They don't really care about the theme of trust.

And most importantly, they worried about their ability to dramatize the mechanics of assimilation, basically being like, how do we show this creature? Yeah. Turning people into a creature. Now, it's important to note that Hooper and Henkel, despite not really liking the story, weren't going to pass up an opportunity to make a major motion picture with Universal. So with the studio's blessing and, of course, an impending WJA writer strike, there's always a strike that's like pushing these movies into production. Hooper and Henkel took a few components of the original story and they turned in a script that was basically apparently Moby Dick set in Antarctica with an Ahab-like captain character fighting an enormous and definitely not

shape-shifting alien creature. consensus amongst the studio executives and the producers was that the script was quote incomprehensible. Everyone agreed to part company, clearing the way for Hooper to make Funhouse, and then more importantly, Poultergeist as his follow-up to that film. So we might not have gotten Poultergeist,

had you not passed on this project and listened to our episode on Poultergeist that Lizzie led, if you haven't had a chance, it's great. So the team then met with another what went wrong alum, a director of this era, Lizzie, I'm going to guess he's the director you hate the most out of every director that we've covered on this podcast. A director I hate the most.

Oh, yeah. Was it Friedkin? No, I didn't hate him that much. Who maybe got someone killed? Oh, John Landis. They went to John Landis. What do you mean maybe got someone killed? You didn't react quickly.

So they go to John Landis, who would later direct Twilight Zone the movie. please listen to our episode on Twilight Zone the movie. He passed. The producing team then went out to a number of other writers and directors, none of whom seemed interested in the novella's central conceit. So you talk about how what's great about this project is that it's contained. Well, no one could figure out how to visualize that imitation process. So they all were like, well, we got to change it.

And it would always get bigger. It would not stay contained. So Universal's project, interest in the project wanes. there's little evidence that, you know, audiences are hungry for a monster movie at this point anyway, and then two really important things happen at the end of the 1970s. And of course, one is that in 1978, John Carpenter's Halloween is released. Yes. Made for a mere $325,000. This indie film cleared $60 million at the box office. It turned Jamie Lee Curtis into a star overnight. And then in 1979, Ridley Scott's alien burst onto the

scene, chewing its way to over $100 million at the box office and proving to studios that monster movies were back. So precedent established Universal's like, great, let's go. You can hire John Carpenter, who you wanted from the beginning for this project. So quick aside on John Carpenter, he's born in New York in 1938. His father was a music professor. John Carpenter's also a musician. He scored almost all of his own films, with the exception of the thing, which we'll talk about. he'd wanted to work in film from a very young age, and eventually he attended the USC School of Cinematic Arts in the late 60s. It seems like he dropped out at a certain point.

By the mid-1970s, he had a couple of low-budget features to his name. I mentioned Darkstar earlier, Assault on Precinct 13, which was like a thriller exploitation film, both of which Carpenter not only wrote and directed, but he also scored and edited. So he was kind of a do-it-all director of the 70s. He'd also written Eyes of Laura Mars, which was a studio thriller with Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones,

and he wrote and directed a TV movie called Someone's Watching Me. But of course he was looking for his studio movie. And so when he makes Halloween, all of a sudden, this is his opportunity. So he hit a hot streak. He doesn't immediately go to the thing. He then releases The Fog in 1980, which even though it got pretty bad reviews and Carpenter himself didn't really like the movie, it did great at the box office. It was $21 million against a million dollar budget.

Wow. And then he made one of my favorites, escaped from New York, in 1988, Snake Pliskin, both a critical and commercial success and the first of what would be many collaborations with budding superstar hottie, Kurt Russell. The hot, the superstar. So John Carpenter comes onto the thing and he's basically on fire. He has strung together three hits in a row, which is no small task. Very few directors have ever done that.

And he disguised that he's a little strung out and he doesn't really want to write the script for the thing. I also read another account that said that the studio wasn't going to let him write the script for the thing. Who knows? The point is, the producers have to find a writer now that can put together a blueprint quickly enough to slot into Carpenter's increasingly busy schedule. So after some swings and misses, including offering the project to famed sci-fi writer Richard Matheson, who has written a ton, he wrote I Am Legend. He wrote the one sequence of Twilight Zone the movie, what's the one where they're trapped in the little boys?

Anyway, he wrote that section of that, the short story that that was based on. So Stuart Cohen has this wild idea. He's like, what if we hire a writer who's never written science fiction before, who won't feel bound by the constraints of the genre? And he had a particular man in mind. Bill Lancaster, son of famed actor Bert Lancaster,

who had written the WGA Best Original Screenplay Award-winning movie The Bad News Bears in 1976. I did not know. That's who wrote this. So Cohen loved Bill Lancaster's script because it was an ensemble film that didn't worry about the backstory of the characters and kept all of the action to the baseball diamond. Hell yes. And so he thought, okay, great. I need a writer who's going to give me no backstory on these characters and can keep all the action to this immediate story.

So Lancaster reads the novella and he said his quote was like he thought it was a quote workable story. He wasn't super excited, but he then pitched this version to the producers that the producers were really excited about. And here's the quote from Cohen. He imagined descending levels of mistrust among the characters so profound that the line of reality became blurred, something, if he worked it correctly, so airtight that it no longer mattered whether there was a monster or not. The men became the biggest threat to themselves. Yeah. And it's the, that boom, there's the movie. Yeah. And that's the movie we end up. watching. So after a quick meeting with John Carpenter, Lancaster sequesters himself away for seven

weeks and he returns with 30 pages of screenplay, wanting to make sure that he's on the right track. According to Cohen, those 30 pages are almost the exact first 30 minutes of the thing. Like almost nothing changed. A lot of second act, third act suffers we worked later, but he was locked in from the get go. So it took him a while to deliver a first draft. It came in the fall of 1980, which meant it was too late for a 1981 summer release. So everyone loves it. The producers were so excited that they sent actors in parkas and snowshoes up the elevators at the universal lot to deliver the script to Universal Motion Picture President Ned Tannen

in a bucket of dry ice for formal approval. What? Yeah, they wanted to send it in a block of ice, but they're like, when it thaws, you won't be able to read the script because it'll be like so waterlogged. Also, those actors are the equivalent of the porn. actors that had to be in the hazmat suits delivering Emmys this year for the coronavirus Emmys. Those actors are the equivalent of sending a stripper and a cake to a bachelor party. Like it's not, yeah, it's sad.

It's not, it's rough. I'm sure they were like, what about a part in the movie? And they're like, okay, kid. Put on this parka. Yeah. So the studio loved the movie. They loved this idea of an all-male cast, the ambiguous ending, everything. They were like, great, we're good.

It seems like unanimous. The script is awesome. You know, kind of rare for the projects that we tend to cover. Yes. Well, it does make sense. The script of this movie is excellent. And I have to say, I wasn't super surprised when I saw that it was not written by John Carpenter. I love John Carpenter, but this is so good because it's very much not, it's not, it doesn't have quite as much like pazz as a John Carpenter script.

And that really helps. It's workmanlike is what I like to call. So they slotted it in for a summer 1982 release, and they worked on polishing the script, and they finally are getting ready to greenlight the film. And at the Greenlight meeting in the Universal Production president Ned Tannen's office, John Carpenter reveals to the group that he actually has another film set up with a different company. It's a $25 million special effects Western. I think it's called El Diablo.

He made it later. And it's scheduled for production at the same time as the thing now. And apparently it has momentum. And he was kind of like, it seems like, juggling both, hoping that they wouldn't conflict. And now they're going to conflict. And he's going to pick El Diablo over the thing. And he's like, I'll be happy to make the thing next. So everyone starts freaking out and scrambling.

And the studio won't push the release date. The lawyers and agents are running around trying to figure out what they're going to do. And the producers are told, go find a new director. And it's kind of last minute. Now, in the end, it turns out that Carpenter's Western was not nearly as far along as he thought it was. And they were like, oh, no, go make your other movie. Yeah. We need more time to get this money together.

But for a moment, the producers strongly considered hiring Sam Peckinpaw on to direct The Thing. Ah, who is who was the first choice for deliverance? Exactly. And who'd done the Wild Bunch and had done a lot of rated R. Gore stuff. So could have been an interesting version of this film. I never saw. Anyway, Carpenter comes back to the project, a little sheepishly, I think, and Universal sets the film's budget at $10 million with $200,000 earmarked for creature effects.

And this made it the most, yeah, not enough, yet the most expensive monster movie Universal had ever made. That's a little misleading. They'd kind of stop making them back in the 30s and 40s. So, you know, it was like the time value of money. Anyway, I'm going to skip over the casting process because I want to get to the effects. Just know that Kurt Russell was the last role to be cast in the film, despite his friendship with John Carpenter.

He'd even helped Carpenter develop his ideas for the film. Carpenter had originally reached out to Nick Nolte, Christopher Walken, and Jeff Bridges for the role. Jeff Bridges is the only one that I feel like could have swapped in there. They were either all unavailable or declined. The producers also considered Ed Harris, Chris Christofferson, eh. Fred Ward, who is tremors.

He's great. and Scott Glenn, among others. But in the end, Carpenter went with Russell, and they had actually already started filming when he was brought on for the project, which means he was already growing his beard personally before he was cast in the movie, which I do think is interesting.

Thank God. So, of course, the thing is most famous for its practical effects. The monster that terrorizes the men throughout the film is grotesque and tactile. It's truly something one of a kind. Like, I remember growing up, my uncle would tell me about the movie the thing. It's like you just got to see it to see, but what is it? You got to see it. And interestingly, in the script, there's basically no description of the monster. He left it

in the shadows. It was ill-defined. It was something that lurked around corners, but never stepped into the light. And so Carpenter didn't know what the monster should look like, but he knew what it shouldn't look like. And here's John Carpenter on what he wanted to avoid. What I didn't want to end up with in this movie was a guy in a suit. See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and monster movies and it was always a guy in a suit or sometimes it was a kind of bad puppet like it conquered the world comes to mind right now Roger Corman's movie this kind of vegetable monster kind of going like this woodenly and my fear was they'll laugh at us you know they'll laugh at they'll be a

joke I mean even as great as the movie was an alien was a terrific movie it's still in the very end up stood this big guy in a suit you know I don't want I want to do a suit. You know, I want something that's alive. And he's right. Even in Alien, it's a little underwhelming in the third act when he finds, he stands up and you're like, oh, not as good as the chess buster, even though it's amazing.

So enter Rob Boutin. Rob Boutin is my favorite person after researching this podcast episode. Robert Boutin was a 21-year-old, Wunderkind effects designer who'd come up all. understand Winston. At age 14, he pestered visual effects artist Rick Baker by mailing him his original drawings and illustrations, and Rick Baker was so impressed. Rick Baker, who ended up doing the very famous werewolf transformation in an American werewolf in London. Oh, wow. This guy's like the real deal. He was so impressed that he hired 14-year-old Rob Boutin to come in and be his apprentice based on illustrations that he'd mailed to him cold. So Rob Boutin

was already developing a name for himself. He had designed many, if not all, of the canteena aliens in Star Wars. He had actually, he was, if you go back and watch, he's the tallest alien in the band. He's like a big guy and he liked morking himself into movies. And he had actually met John Carpenter.

After seeing Halloween, he was so obsessed with Halloween that he, and this was just, this guy, he just, he loves his work and he is just such a little kid. about it. So he sees Halloween and he knew the cinematographer from Halloween Dean Cundee from a Roger Corman movie that he'd done. So he goes to Dean and he goes, you got to introduce me to John Carpenter.

You got to introduce me to John Carpenter. He's 19 years old. Dean Cunney's like, fine, come to this meeting I have with John Carpenter. We're shooting the fog. Rob Boatine bursts into the room. John Carpenter's like, who is this? And Rob Boatine's just like, huge fan. Love Halloween. What's, you're doing the fog? Is there a role? Can I play? something, I'll do makeup, like I'll do anything. And John Carpenter kind of looks at him and he goes, you want to play like a dead pirate tomorrow? And Robin's like, sure, let's do it. And so the next day he comes set and he's one of the like kind of background villains in the fog, actually. And that's how he met John Carpenter. And he just had this like infectious personality. And so it's then in

1981 when he does, he kind of breaks out on his own and he does the effects for the howling. And he does, this is actually six months before Rick Baker does an American werewolf in London, and Boutin gets this incredible response to the howling. No one has ever seen werewolf transformation effects like this. He's 20 years old when that movie is released. I mean, he's just absolutely a prodigy. And so Carpenter calls him up after seeing the howling, and he says, listen, we're making the thing. You need to design the monster.

He sends him the script. Boutin reads the script. There's no description in the script of what the monster is. Carpenter has not told him what the monster should be because Carpenter doesn't know what it should be. And here's John Carpenter on what Boutin brought him for the meeting. He came in with a wild concept, which is that the thing can look like anything. It doesn't look like one monster. It looks like anything.

And out of this changing. shape, this imitation, comes all the creatures throughout the universe that the thing has ever imitated, and it uses these various forms. And Rob was very daring in his approach. I must say, even sometimes I was doubtful as to whether he'd pull it off. So Botein comes in with this idea where it's not just like there's one base, you know, image and then he could be a dog or a person. He's like, no, he can be literally anything in the universe that it's ever come in contact with. Right. any life form. Any life form that we might know of or not know of.

And his whole pitch is, let's pull the monster out of the shadows, put it in the light, show the audience something that they've never seen before. And Carpenter, whose whole fear is if we put this, if we make this monster. And make it look like shit.

Yeah. People are going to laugh at us. He loves this idea, but he's like, I have no idea what this will look like. So he tells Boutin, go downstairs. We have a storyboard artist,

Mike Plug, who was actually a very famous comic artists that Rob Boatine was a huge fan of. So it was basically like, go work with this guy who you already love, and draw out what you're thinking. And Boatine goes down and two weeks later, he comes up to Carpenter's office with a stack of drawings that are basically monsters for every single scene of the film. And the drawings are remarkable. And many of them look like shot for shot takes of the finished movie, including Norris's

head ripping itself off and falling off the table, like growing spider head, growing spider, like the, you know, cabbage exploding face of the dog at the beginning of the movie. Like all this, he's just created. It's just out of, it's like this nightmarish imagination. And Carpenter looks at them and he just goes, do you know how to do any of this? And Boutin laughs and says, no, but I'll figure it out. Wow. And Boutin got hired.

He has the job. He's 22 years old. That's insane. Because this is like, the one thing that I'll say about this is, it is still mind blowing that it's 1982 and it's 100% practical because yes you can tell that it's practical like you can tell that a lot of this stuff is is puppets but it looks so good and it's so there's just so many moments that still brings so much like joy to watch like what chris is talking about with the head detaching and the spider legs springing out of it as it skitters across the floor it's just it's so

good that's botan's dedication and we're going to get to the consequences of that so filming begins in late August of 1981 in Juneau, Alaska. That's where they shoot like the opening helicopter shots. That's what we thought. Yeah. The alien spacecraft. They then moved to the universal lot to shoot the interiors. The problem was

it's like September, August, in Los Angeles, and it's 100 degrees. Yeah, you're going to roast. So the set wasn't refrigerated, so they literally brought in as many portable air conditioning units as possible, and then they added humidifiers to create the fogged breath of the characters. The problem

was you had then an incredibly cold and incredibly humid set. Yeah, that's awful. With like constant temperature changes for all of the characters and crew, they would be inside near freezing and then they would step out to 100 degrees during lunch and breaks. So basically, flu and cold outbreaks were running rampant through the casting crew through all of the filming. And it was under these conditions that Rob Boutin has to create all of these special effects. So at its peak, Boutin commanded a team of things.

35 artists and technicians. They had hundreds of gallons of K-Y jelly around the set that were used, and they were using dozens of non-traditional substances to create the unique look of the viscera-laden monster, including mayonnaise, creamed corn, and microwaved bubble gum. They were just throwing everything at the wall to try to get this to look right and to look unique. So, Boutin's work required extensive rigging and prep, using mechanical and pneumatic systems to move the monster, right? Because this wasn't somebody in a suit. They had to make casts of actors'

likenesses. And they had, and like, Boutin was a fiend for detail. He knew that the movie was going to live or die on the effects and needed them to be perfect. In fact, the character Norris, who's the one who ends up on the table getting defibrillated, the actor that plays him remarks that they made a double of his chest for that scene. And then they had an artist painstakingly plug every, match every single chest tear. And he said, I've been looking at my own chest with this chest here for 30 years, and I couldn't tell the difference between me and what was sitting on that table. And Botin's need for perfection and budget limitations meant that many of these effects had to be pulled off in one take, something that rarely if ever happened. So for example,

when Norris's stomach opens up and eats the doctor's arms, they had to create a replica chest that matches Norris's exactly. It was then rigged to open and then bite the doctor's arms. Norris's real head was attached to the dummy body on the table. His actual torso was supported by a harness built inside the table. The production team then hired a double amputee body double to reach into the exposed rib cage, making dummy arms out of gelatin and wax that could be chomped by the pneumatic jaws worked into the monster. Oh my God. Then goo would spit out of the exposed ma toward the ceiling.

And then that when the doctor character pulls away with his stumps, that's a double amputee wearing a prosthetic mask of that. actor's exact likeness that Boutin crafted to look exactly like that actor. So like the amount of detail and sophistication going into these shots and there you could have Boteen could have said like hey let's just shoot that shot from the backside right so we don't have to create a mask for that double amputee. No it's like let's show everything. Let's make it as good as possible. And then of course at the end of that sequence, goo and tentacles start spewing out of the exposed stomach towards the ceiling. So on that day everything's going pretty well.

until they're going to shoot the shot where the goose spews out of the stomach, which is all rigged up with like an air pressure system. And as Boutin Lager described it, they rolled the camera, the stomach opens, and all of a sudden a quote, Las Vegas Bellagio-style fountain of crap came streaming out of the torso, covering everyone in the room, completely not working. It just looked like a jet stream coming out of the stomach. It took six hours to reset the models,

and they left Norris hanging in the harness inside the table the entire time because it would have taken too long to get them out. So every time they do this, they have to reset all of that goop and that blood and that everything that they're doing and they have to clean everything. I mean, it just they do it and carbon would be like, oh, fuck. You know, we got to do it again and it would take hours. And not only that, but Boutin's use of novel materials and techniques

had some unexpected results as well. I'd like to play you a clip. This is the voice of Rob Boutin. I think you'll get a sense of what kind of a character he is. It's a little bit of a longer clip, but I promise you that it's worth it. This is the moment where Norris's head pulls itself off its own body,

falls off the operating table while the room goes up in flames. You know, obviously for this shot, we couldn't use Charlie Hallahan, right? So he actually made like a perfect replica of this guy's head. And fully you know, animated it, you know, with mechanical effects and whatnot, you know.

And in it had a hydraulic ram that would actually stretch the neck out and sever the rubber at exactly a perfect point. And again, this was only like, you could only do it in one take. All right. And when it stretches open and the skin rips, what I wanted to see inside was something that was very reminiscent of like what's in a comic book whenever you see goose stretching and whatever, it's like this really stringy stuff. So we really didn't know how to do it. how to make that stuff. So what we did was we just started, you know, melting plastic and getting bubble gum, you know, and making this crazy concoction that I'm sure was like so toxic, you know, it couldn't be good for you, right? And what we did is we, right before the shot,

you know, we had, you know, the whole replica of Hallahan's body. And we actually had this, this goo that we would pile in there really quick. And the whole time, it's giving off fumes like paint thinner and lacquer thinner and all this kind of stuff. And, and, and, and And again, we have effects guys buried in the little table underneath to operate the stuff. And then all these guys that have rehearsed the motion of the neck coming off and everything without doing the split. Camera set up, right? And everybody's going like, what's that smell? And I'm going, oh, it's the stuff inside the neck.

You know, just some nutty concoction we made that'll stretch, you know, bubble gum and whatnot, plastic melted down. They're going like, it doesn't smell too good, you know. So I go, well, we better hurry up and shoot it, right? So the camera set, everything's ready, and then Carpenter goes, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. Shouldn't there be fire, you know, like underneath the lens here? So finally, you know, the effects guy gets a fire, puts it underneath the lens out of sight. And, you know, John says, okay, everybody's set, ready to go? You know, I go, ready.

John says, roll camera. Right, so they roll camera. All right, and he goes, all right, light the fire bar. Guy turns on the gas, you know, stuff's coming out. The guy's up there with, you know, like a lighter, you know, and he's, and finally, it ignites, right? And the whole effect, the whole Hallahan, you know, replica body explodes, right? The whole room goes into this huge fireball with the whole crew sitting in. And when the fire clears, everybody's sitting there like in a cartoon, you know, with their face is black.

And I'm staring down at the body, and I'm in shock because since it's a one-take deal only, I look down at it and I go, oh my God, it's on fire. And then John says, don't just stand there, put it out, you idiot. You know, like that. And then, you know, I was just so shocked that months of work, preparing for this moment was just blown to bits in just a second. We had to set up, take a whole other day to get back to this point and finally just accomplished the one shot where the head stretches and the neck savers.

Jesus, they're lucky to all be alive. Yeah, so a slightly long clip. But yeah, just remarkable, they had so many issues like this on set. Boutin was actually spread so thin because he insisted on personally handling all the effects for the film that a certain point, he was actually forced to bring in his old mentor, Stan Winston, who did all the effects for Star Wars, to complete the dog thing that marks the end of the first act of the film. Winston didn't have time to create a mechanical robotic prop, so instead they made the hairless dog thing a hand puppet with an operator positioned inside of it.

You can kind of tell. Yeah, it doesn't look quite as good as some of the other effects. I think it was a bit fast. I still think they did a really good job. Yeah. It was made of foam latex, very complicated. And one of the designers, Lance Anderson, puppeteered it from inside the actual dog. He was inside of it with a helmet on because they were squibs as bullets were hitting the

outside of it. And they needed to make sure that if one of the squibs backfired, it could hit him and pierce his head. So anyway, Stan Winston actually refused credit for the film saying all the credit should go to Boutin, and he received a thank you in the credits for his work. But it shows kind of the respect that Boutin had amongst his peers. Boutin's dedication to the film was unmatched. The cast and crew of the film were really in awe of his work. He created dozens of grotesque but beautiful pieces, and he in fact nearly worked himself to death.

Here's just a brief clip of Boutin talking about his work schedule on the thing. So what I did was I was so, you know, wanting this step to come out so great. I actually lived at Universal for a year and five weeks without taking a day off. I worked, you know, seven days a week, never took a day off, you know. And I was there night and day. Night and day, I'd sleep on the sets. You know, a carpenter would come in. Where's Rob?

You think, oh, you know, he's in the locker room, you know, for, or he's in the lab, you know, and then he'd wake me up, hey, you know, we've got to shoot this thing or whatever. And I ended up, you know, working so hard that I ended up in the hospital at the end of the show. John looked at me and he said, you don't look well. Somebody take this guy to the hospital, right? You know, but since then, you know, I've wised up and, you know, it's, I don't do that anymore. So, so Robitine indeed, literally lived at

Universal for a year and five weeks and he found himself in the hospital at the end of production with double pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer. He wasn't the only one struggling to get the results he wanted though. There was a unique situation that happened with the thing where John Carpenter

found himself with a gap in filming. So they'd shot the exteriors in Alaska for just the establishing shots of the ice field in August. They then went in production in L.A. in the fall. And then they had six weeks until they could shoot the exteriors of the actual station in British Columbia. Because what they'd done is they actually built all those sets in Stewart, British Columbia over the summer. And then they let it snow on the sets in December.

And they returned once it was snowed in to film those scenes. in the snow, which is just such a cool production plan when you think about it. Yeah, it looks great. So they had a six-week gap in production. And so Carpenter had his editor put together an assembly cut of the film. He watched it and he hated it. He thought it was long, it was dull, it lacked tension. The humor fell flat. The special effects moments were too spread out, and certain special effects sequences didn't work at all, including a painstakingly created stop motion sequence at the end of the film involving the final Blair thing, the like really big version of it made by stop motion master randah william cook who would later do the stop motion effects

in lord of the rings for example so carpenter instead later opted to use like a full-sized puppeteered version of the blair thing which costs an extra 150,000 dollars to make and it required 50 people to operate oh my god if you want to see cook's team's work on this stop motion which is really remarkable you can check it out in the making of the thing documentary on youtube so carpenter gets into the editing room during this break and he takes an axe to the movie. He cuts out anything that doesn't directly serve the movie. Any character backstories are gone. There was initially this whole death scene with this character Bennings, who ends up being the one who they burn in the snow with his hands. That was gone. He comes back with this leaner cut that, quote,

still lacks drive. So he calls the production designer, John Lloyd, and the producers into his office, and he sits them down and he basically says, I've written, I've rewritten the script. And we're going to shoot new pages that no one's ever seen. And we are going to have to rejigger the entire schedule in British Columbia to make this work. And we have two goals. One is we need to clarify the mechanics of the alien, which were still not clear enough in his mind. And two is Kurt Russell is going to be our leading man.

And so in the original... Both great calls. Yeah, in the original screenplay, it was truly an ensemble and it was only at the end kind of default that McCready, you know, emerges as the protagonist, and it was, the audience didn't have anyone to latch on to as a result. So Carpenter adds the following scenes. These were not in the original movie, and they were added after the fact. The entire Blair at the, at the computer sequence, explaining the way that the assimilation functions, all done later. All of this animation was added after the fact and animated by Carpenter's USC classmate John Walsh, specifically designed

to look like a simplistic video game. So audiences would understand it. So that's why they did that. McCready finding the half-burned Long Johns added after the fact, Fuchs telling McCready that there's something wrong with Blair inside the ski dozer later, also added to give McCready more information than the other men, them burning Bennings in the snow with McCready manning the flamethrower. And then McCready speech to the men that they have to stop this thing or it will take over the world.

Wow. This is a lot of importance. teams. I should give John Carpenter more credit. I know. McCready recording his note about how it tears through your clothes and how about nobody trusts anybody anymore. And of course, Fuchs running out into the snow with the flare and the subsequent discovery of his burned body with the question of, like, did he kill himself so he wouldn't become one of those things? Yeah. So Carpenter's written all of these new scenes and it throws the production schedule for their shoot in Stuart British Columbia into disarray. They cut a bunch of planned transition scenes, keeping only what was absolutely

necessary, but producer Stuart Cohen had another concern. What was the ensemble cast going to think about the rewrites that boosted Kurt Russell to leading status? On top of the fact that Kurt Russell had also been paid significantly more than everybody else involved in the movie. So initially they were planning on basically giving everyone $50,000. Kurt Russell ended up getting paid $400,000 because of his status as a much more established leading actor. So a rift had already formed between Carpenter and his cast, and then further on set, they were really frustrated by Carpenter being so focused on the special effects over their performances. So it didn't help that their journey to set was also going to be unusually treacherous as they attempted to get to the set that was built in British Columbia, built on a knoll between some mountains.

It was only accessible via a one lane mining road covered in snow. The cast was driven up there at one in the morning via a bus, only to have the bus nearly slide off the side of the mountain with them on board. So literally the bus lost its traction and almost plunged 500 feet off the side of the mountain with the entire cast inside of it. It was so cold while filming in British Columbia

that the camera lenses often shattered. They couldn't bring the camera lenses inside between takes because the added heat would cause the lenses to fog and they wouldn't be able to film with them. They actually did blow up the set so that's real. They got one take at it.

They captured it with seven cameras. They had camera assistant. run out, hit roll on the cameras, and then run away from the set before it was blown up with remote charges. They then used the blown up set as the Norwegian camp that they go to. They do look awfully similar. And the snow was so heavy some days that filming was nearly impossible. In the end, the thing came in with a final budget of basically $15 million, almost $5 million more than Universal's original budget. Most of that was, the $1.5 million that ended up going to effects.

So originally $200,000, then 10% of the budget at $1.5 million. Well, there was no way. No. And in the end, John Carpenter had to personally appeal the studio for the final $150K to finish the Blair thing, as I mentioned, at the end of the film. Post-production was a bitch. And before I get to just the most important point, which is the ending, I'd quickly like to mention the film's score because it's often talked about.

as Ennio. Marconi, right? Ennio Marconi. Yes, Marconi is credited as the composer of the film. Okay, kind of. Carpenter asked him to score the film and sent him the score that he'd done for Escape from New York as reference.

Marconi then created like an hour of electronic synth work and sent it to Carpenter who temped 20 minutes of it into the film, then did the rest of the score himself. Wow. Morconi actually never scored to picture for this project. And it was like a very unusual working situation. And Marconi later asked him, like, why did you ask me to do this if you just wanted your own score to be the score for this project?

It's kind of unclear. But in the end, it's kind of like a more. It's a good score, though. Yeah, it's like a pizzazzy version of a carpenter score is the way that I would like describe it. I just want to know who came up with that sort of heartbeat sound because that's the most recognizable part of this. I think that was more cony. I think that's, that's my guess as well, because it's a lot simpler than anything John Carpenter did, and it's so good. Yeah.

For anybody that hasn't seen it, there's sort of a through line that actually also appears in the remake as well, because it is such an iconic moment. But when at the beginning and later, when there are these sort of sparse moments, there's a, the soundtrack is literally, it just sounds like a heartbeat. That's all it is. Just kind of bum bum, bum, bum, bum. And it's great. And it's great. cones thing over it. So they kind of, they get through post and they, and they go into test screenings. And in May of 1982, the whole team's coming off of a high because they'd secured an R rating,

which was actually great news because it was such a graphic movie that they were really worried that they were going to get an X rating and have to recut the movie to get an R rating, which can be just a disaster process having to like go back and forth with the MPAA. Okay. Right. So they get to this preview, which some of the crew, and, you know, like Rob Boutin was in the audience, for example. And the preview starts well.

And then people start walking out during the first autopsy scene with the creature. In fact, a couple people threw up during that sequence. The audience was virtually silent, except for the applause that would follow kind of each special effects sequence. Apparently, Rob Boutin was the only happy member of the thing production team coming out of this preview. The movie ends. It gets light applause. everyone gets up and leaves. The vibe in the lobby is that people are uncomfortable

with what they've just watched. And the response from the test cards is consistent. Praise for the effects. The movie overall gets a fair rating. A lot of people complained that it was too gory. But the biggest complaint at the end was that the movie was ambiguous. People wanted to know.

Did the men win? Did the alien win? No, that's the best part is that you don't know. Who is infected at the end? Do they live, et cetera? Apparently, John Carpenter said he knew he was trouble when at the end of the movie during a question and answer for a test audience, the girl asked him, well, who's infected? And he goes, well, you're supposed to use your imagination.

And a woman in the audience just audibly goes, oh, God, I hate that. And that's when John Carpenter knew he was fucked with the ending of this movie. Sir, the American audience is not that smart. So the studio first asked John Carpenter, are you willing to cut down some of the gore. And Carpenter says, no. He says, the only way that the monster works is if it's gory. And to their credit, universal, it doesn't seem like they pushed that. So they said, okay, could we bring in Verna Fields, editor of Jaws and American Graffiti, and we're not going to make you redo a different ending, but could we see if she can try recutting the ending a little bit to make it seem more like it's clear that McCready's human, right, at the end? Like, could we try that? Carpenter says,

Okay. So they bring in Verna Fields. And according to Stuart Cohen, the producer, they didn't feel like it was a huge imposition. They felt like she's a great, respected editor. Like, yeah, she was a huge deal. Let's bring her in. She did some work, but apparently it didn't change much. So they conceived a new ending in which Childs walks away from the camp, leaving McCready alone to ponder his fate. and it's like implied that that maybe that would the audience would think then he's definitely human so they actually cut this and I don't think they had to shoot additional footage for it I think they had enough footage to get this more or less with what they had they tested it and it tested like three percentage points higher than the original ending so the studio says we're going to go with that and the producers and carpenter are tired from this process agree they then sleep on it

And then over the weekend, basically the producers and Carpenter all have a change of heart. They call the studio. It's 10 hours before the print's supposed to go out for release. Oh, my God. And they say, we have to go with the original ending. And the studio actually okayed it. And they went with the original ending for the release of the film, which, at the time, Blade Runner was being made at the exact same time.

And famously, Ridley Scott did not get his original ending for that one. So I will give universal credit. So the ending is obviously famous for its ambiguity, as I've mentioned. And for what it's worth, screenwriter Bill Lancaster said that it was always his intention for both men at the end of the film to be human. And that it was supposed to be two men sharing one last drink at the bottom of the world before freezing to death. He felt it was poetic.

Now, it's unclear if this was John Carpenter's intention. that's just what Bill Lancaster said. For anyone that hasn't seen it quickly, it's very ambiguous. The way that it's left is that Childs, played by Keith David, I think, has sort of been missing for most of the last, like, act of the movie, really.

And he kind of reappears right when you think that Kurt Russell is the only human left. So the question then remains, is it possible that Keith David is the thing? And Kurt Russell is just like, I'm going to sit here with you and find out. basically, and that's it. And also, we haven't seen McCready for like a minute in between the explosion of the thing.

So it's like, is McCready the thing too? There's just. I never even considered that. I always assumed that he was human. There's all sorts of online internet theories about like, you can't see the fog of his breath. I think a lot of those are just production issues that have nothing to do with any intention. In the end, though, the thing was definitely. on arrival and it had nothing to do with the ending.

It's because it was released on June 25th, 1982, which was two weeks after E.T. the extraterrestrial was released. Also by Universal. Yeah, they could have thought that through. Well, they did and they just thought wrong. So the intent was for the two to serve as counter programming to one another. E.T. was for families. The thing was for adults.

Instead, the world simply hated the thing and loved E.T. It should also be noted that Blade Runner was also released on June 25th. Blade Runner also didn't do very well, similar to the thing. So the reviews for the thing come in, and they are brutal. Here are some favorite selections. Quote, is this the most hated movie of all time? The quintessential moron movie of the 80s. Instant junk.

A wretched excess. Cold and sterile. Boring. What? What? What? What? What?

effects, bereft, despairing, and nihilistic, lacking in feeling and meaning, lacked pacing, and was devoid of warmth or humanity, sacrificed everything at the altar of gore. You get the point. Wow, those critics are stupid. It earned 19.6 million against its $15 million budget. ET made $800 million. It should be noted that the cast was also split. So Stuart Cohen remarked that it cast and crew screening. A lot of the cast approached him after the screening and they felt that the work that they had done was being overshadowed by the effects work and that John Carpenter had sacrificed the character building they'd done throughout the movie in order to showcase Roboteen's admittedly spectacular. But at the end, pretty shockingly over the top for the time

period special effects work. One actor, in fact, said that he found it offensive after he'd seen it. And Kurt Russell actually didn't initially have a positive reaction to the film and felt that it was too high on the ick factor. Although later, he's reevaluated it. And if you wanted to listen to just a blast, watch the thing with the John Carpenter plus Kurt Russell commentary on it. It is just so fun, so fun. So of course, in the intervening 40 years, the thing, has been re-evaluated as a masterpiece of horror and science fiction. There's been much analysis and hand-wringing over why it didn't connect with audiences nearly 40 years ago. What is known, however, is that the film's failure had an immediate

impact on the rising star of John Carpenter. So due to the thing's lack of box office mojo, Carpenter was fired from the adaptation of Stephen King's Firestarter that he'd been attached to. Universal opted to buy him out of the multi-picture directing deal they'd signed with him, just a couple years prior. He later realized that perhaps his focus on the film's effects had been the very thing that had derailed him. Hollywood shunned him because he'd created something too gory. He continued to work, sliding back toward more independent work

and smaller studio fair. His next movie, Christine, another Stephen King adaptation, was well received, but Carpenter later said he only made the movie because it was the only thing offered to him at the time. And indeed, if you look at his career, he weirdly seems like he's on this upramp, and then he kind of plateaus slash has a downward trajectory after the 80s. Rob Boutin lent his considerable effects talents to blockbusters over the following decade

and a half, including the Witches of Eastwick, Robocop, Total Recall, and Fight Club, as well as seven. He worked with David Fincher a couple of times. Interesting. Yep. He did the sloth character in seven. And then he was the special effects makeup supervisor in Fight Club. So he seems to have stopped working around the year 2000, though.

It really appears that he's fallen by the wayside, never mentioned in the same sentence as the Stan Winstons and Tom Savini's of the world. And I think it's a real shame because I think he was a prodigious talent who is an Academy Award winner for his work on legend, the really, really weird fantasy movie by Ridley Scott. And he's created some of the most iconic images of, you know, the movies from the last 40 years, including Arnold Schwarzenegger's exploding face

and all of the weird like quato effects in Total Recall. He did the Robocop costume and Robocop. And obviously he created the thing. It just seems like based on the timing of his decline, he's a very private person. He hasn't really done any interviews. It seems that perhaps the industry's transition from practical effects to the world of CGI

kind of marked his exit from the industry, which brings us briefly to the 2011 prequel of the thing, The Thing, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton. Call it something else. Yeah, I know. They thought about it and decided against it. The film follows the events at the Norwegian outposts that lead up to the original film's beginning.

There is some interesting backstory on this project, but guys, it's just not nearly the same caliber of film, and so instead, I want to use it as a bit of a coda to this episode. So the movie was conceived by producers Mark Abraham and Eric Newman. They'd been looking through the Universal Studios Library for new properties. to reboot, which is hilarious because that's the exact same thing that the producers with The Thing had been doing when they made it. They come across the thing, and rather than a remake, they decide that Universal should allow them to make a prequel, they said that doing a remake would be like painting a mustache on

the Mona Lisa. They bring in the man I will call Matt. That's not his full name, the Dutch commercial director. He'd been set to helm the Donna the Dead sequel that Abraham and Newman were producing until it had been unceremoniously canceled by the studio. this was to be his first feature. They also brought Ronald D. Moore of Battlescar Galactica to write, but in the end, Eric Heiserer, who wrote Arrival,

did a page one rewrite of the script, and Scott Frank, who wrote the Queen's Gambit and Minority Report, lent some help, although he was uncredited. In setting out to make the project, the production team decided to shoot the film anamorphic, like the original, on 35-millimeter film, like the original. They were going to match all of the locations to the original. They were going to make it so the ending of this.

film could lead directly into the beginning of the first one, it really felt like we're going to do this homage to the first film. And perhaps most importantly, in this spirit, they hired Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr., who created amalgamated dynamics, and these were the two gentlemen who had come up under Stan Winston and broke off to do their own work, including the practical effects for Alien 3. So, Lizzie, you just watched the 2011 version of the thing. How much of the final film looked like practical effects to you. I'm going to go with almost none. Precisely.

So, unfortunately, despite scripting and even filming for practical effects, in the end, nearly everything was replaced with CGI. Yeah. Some of which works. I have to say, I know how poorly received this movie was. I remember being underwhelmed by it in the theaters, but it's not as bad as I thought. To be fair, if you watch the VFX breakdowns online,

and there are some posted by amalgamated dynamics and also image engine which did the CGI. You can see that they did plan to use some CGI from the get-go. Like there was some CGI planned from the start. Well, I mean, Jurassic Park uses CGI. Exactly. That's, yeah. However, the goal was a balanced approach.

A lot of practical, some CGI. Unfortunately, test screenings of the film left audiences bored with the slow pace, which apparently just matched the original film, underwhelmed by the practical effects, which matched the original film. According to one source, quote, the film looked like an 80s horror film, which was the point, but current audiences

didn't seem to be down with that, at least in the test ones. So universal concern that this isn't going to appeal to a modern audience pushes the release date on the schedule from April 2011 to October 2011 and they line up reshoots. They basically reshot a bunch of stuff to increase the pace of the film. So like now it's like the monster gets out, I think at around 20 minutes in. Originally it wasn't until 30 minutes in. They rushed. They cut. a lot of character stuff. They replaced all of the practical effects, although not the designs. If you go and see, all the practical effects look identical to the CGI.

They literally CGIed on top of the footage of the practical. Why would you do that? I think they just thought it looked more like a modern film. And then they refilms the ending of the movie. In the original ending of the film, Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character, Kate, makes her way onto the alien ship and discovers that actually the aliens, that piloted that ship aren't things.

They were a different species that had discovered the thing, been killed by it, and tried to like kind of suicide bomb crashed the ship onto Earth to kill the thing. That was all scrapped. And in lieu,

we get this like weird glowing Tetris orb engine and the kind of bad CGI monster at the end of the film, which is the... That was the worst of the CGI. For sure. And it seems like

the problem was they'd spend a lot of money on practical effects. and then they had to spend all that money again on CGI effects. So I think like if they'd been budgeting for one or the other, it would have looked a lot better. Instead, they had to spend the money twice, and they probably couldn't afford to spend all the money that they needed

to make one version work. So in the end, everyone seems to have been disappointed by the results. The film was released to tepid reviews, as Lizzie mentioned, and a cold box office, although I would argue it's not nearly as bad as a lot of people say. It's not at all. A fine movie. Yeah. It's not nearly as good as the original, but I still think it's like an entertaining.

I thought it was totally fine. I enjoy it. Yeah. It lost money at the box office gross $31 million against its $40 million budget. Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr., who please do go online, watch their work on the film. It's pretty remarkable, the things that they designed that were not in the end used. They were either incredibly diplomatic at the film's premiere or perhaps more likely they simply hadn't been made aware of how much their work had been replaced with CGI when they were interviewed on the red carpet at the premiere just before the film's release. Here are the two of them. Oh, no.

How are you guys working the practical effects with the digital? Absolutely. I mean, I wish it was totally our idea and our answer, but it's not. A lot of fans have turned to us saying, I hope you guys don't go digital. It's not up to us. I mean, the best we can do is provide a huge load of really effective, realistic,

animatronic and makeup effects, which we did. And there's some great stuff in the movie. And then the digital aspect is really a little bit of tweaking and adding pieces here and taking certain characters in different directions. I don't think it's overdone. You know, I have very specific taste about practical versus digital, but I think there's a great mix. Aw.

So unfortunately, they hadn't seen it. I think they hadn't seen it. And I think that that was probably a brutal screening for them to have to. That would be awful. Attend and see that their work had been used in a very different. different way. And in fact, they made, they kickstarted their own film called Harbinger Down. You can go watch it like on Amazon as a kind of response to this. So they wanted to make like a creature feature that was entirely practical effects. There are a lot of simplistic takes

online asserting that the reason that the thing from 2011 failed as a result of its reliance on CGI over practical effects, all the while ignoring the fact that the thing of 1982 failed also when it was released. In the end, I personally love. Carpenter's version for a whole host of reasons that are absent from the 2011 released, practical versus CGI, not being one of those major reasons necessarily. In fact, I think it's safe to say it's the sheer inventiveness of the effects in the 1982 version that give the movie its staying power. We know that CGI, when used imaginatively, is as powerful a tool as has ever been used in film.

So perhaps the bigger issue with the 2011 version is that we were too savvy to what the thing was. and the new iterations of it that we were given simply didn't spark our imagination in the same way that the first film did. Here is Rob Boutin looking back on his work in the first film briefly. The interesting thing about the thing, right, and the fact that it was actually done a long time ago, you know, people actually think that, you know, the imaging and the special effects and the creature work would ever hold up to this day, even in the light of the fact that, you know, there are computer graphics and things now. And I think part of the reason for that is that it's, you know, you just can't beat wild imagination, you know. And no matter how you do it, as long as it's executed very well, you know, you just can't pierce through the magic.

So I think Boutin's exactly right. I think it doesn't really matter how you decide to execute something. It's a matter of what you're trying to execute and just getting that to look as realistic. as possible, be it CGI or practical. And of course, the thing never really dies. In 2018, a box of manuscripts written by Joseph Campbell was unearthed at Harvard University. Amidst these pages was a longer version of the original novella who goes there titled Frozen Hell.

This expanded story was published in 2019, posthumously, and in 2020, Blumhouse announced a planned adaptation of the book with Universal. We'll see if it's also called The Thing. And that concludes our deep dive into the things. So Lizzie, you can pick the first one or the new one, what went right. Kurt Russell's beard, although somebody needs to get him a thicker coat. No. Well, yes, it's great.

But I will say watching them back to back, the thing that works, as we said earlier, so well about the first one is how simple the plot actually is. and I think they get away from that in the second one to the detriment of the movie a little bit. So I think I would just say what went right, I'll go with the first one and I'll just say what went right is that with the exception of the really incredible creatures, they just kept it really simple. And I think that's such a good lesson. It's so tempting when thinking up something that you want to write to just keep adding all these embellishments and as an actor, you want the backstory for your character, you want the motivation. And then it's like at the end of the day, they didn't need that.

It's not that it isn't there in the performances, but you want this snapshot of this event. And that's what you get. And I just think it's so good. Yeah. So script, I would say. Yeah. I'll just go with Rob Boutin, hiring him. I think you have no movie without him.

And his inventiveness is remarkable. and obviously John Carpenter and this Bill Lancaster and everyone brought the movie to life, but no one could figure out how to adapt this because they couldn't figure out the monster. And Rob Boatine figured out the monster somehow. And then he figured out a way to make it work when he couldn't use computers to help him in any way, which is just amazing. So Rob Boatine, go check out his work. You guys can watch the 1988 documentary, The Making of the Thing on YouTube.

It's great. Check out Stuart Cohen's blog or John Carpenter. Kurt Russell's hilarious commentary on the film, highly worth it. Also, you know what? Go watch the 2011 one after you've watched this one. It is kind of fun to watch them back to back. There are some little things that are like callbacks to the original one. Like you see where the creation of the kind of two-faced, burned monster is that they found

and the original the thing comes from. And I thought that was pretty cool. So you know what? It deserves a little more credit. Go back and watch it. All right, guys, that does it for this week. As always, send us your recommendations. Leave us a rating and review.

And until next time, there it is. What we were waiting for. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthano UOS.