WHAT WENT WRONG - Twister

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

On-set jet engines, temporary blindness, and hepatitis shots - three signs you might be in the “suck zone”! This week Chris & Lizzie get carried away by Jan de Bont’s Twister and learn how he threw everything including the kitchen sink (literally) at Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton to get this movie made.*CORRECTIONS:*According to screenwriter Terry Rossio, De Bont was actively considering Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton for the lead roles in his ill-fated Godzilla film (which pre-dated Twister).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.

Dumb, dumb, do you. Action, accent, accent, accent. Welcome. Welcome, welcome. Welcome, welcome. Welcome back to season four of your favorite podcasts that happens to be about movies. What Went Wrong? Lizzie, I feel like it's been forever.

How are you? I feel like no time's past at all, and we've just been doing this in our sleep. I'm doing great, Chris. How are you doing? You know, I'm doing well. I feel like time has. passed because David and I both turned 34 since we last saw you and I got more gray hair and David got less hair and we're both not feeling great about it. But we are feeling great about this

season of what went wrong. We're so excited to be back with you guys. We have been working hard on getting a Patreon going by signing up now. You can take part in a poll where you get to choose what episode we cover from a list of audience suggested episodes. And that's the not all. You will also get immediate access to our very first ripped from the headlines bonus episode where we discussed the goings-on with Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, and if you subscribe to our The Space Jazz is Strong with this one tier, you will get early access to our first video episode covering a movie that we will be keeping secret until we release it on our main feed. We have also been working hard on getting a whole slate of films this season.

many of which interconnect in really fun and interesting ways. So we're very excited to dive into that with you guys. Lizzie, do we have any other announcements before we get to this week's movie? No, Chris. Let's get to this big time flopper. We've got a big time flopper for you guys today. That's right. We are discussing a mid-90s favorite, the classic woman versus man versus nature versus monogamy. Versus cows?

versus cows flick twister. I've never seen this. Oh, okay, because I was going to say, Lizzie, I'm sure you saw this as a child. No. Hold up upon rewatch, but this is your first time seeing it. So, Lizzie, how was your first time watching Twister?

Well, it was like being inside of a Twister. It was, I loved it. It's very fun. It makes almost no sense on any level, both from like a personal human connection level, and also, I think, the science. I don't know, but at the same time, I was most invested in the journey of Bill Paxton's long-suffering,

soon to be not new wife. Yes, Jamie Gertz's, Melissa, the poor woman is... Insane! Yes, it's horribly mistreated. I assure you we will get to all of that in great detail. But for those of you who have not seen the movie, and I highly recommend you watch it. Here's the IMDB logline.

Bill and Joe Harding, advanced storm chasers on the brink of divorce, must join together to create an advanced weather alert system by putting themselves in the crosshairs of extremely violent tornadoes. So, you know, that's right. It's a movie that's operating at a couple different levels. The characters are about as emotionally unhealthy

as a Midwest town after an F5 passes through. And yes, that was a tornado joke. And no, it wasn't funny. And there will be more throughout this episode. So a few details before we get into the What Went Wrong. Twister was directed by What Went Wrong alum, Jan de Bont. Yon! Lizzie, where was Yon previously seen in our catalog of films?

Previously seen as the DP who got his scalp ripped off in Roar. That's right. It required 220 stitches. Check out our episode on Roar for more on that fun time. The movie was written by novelist and shockingly tall human Michael Crichton and his then-wife, the actress Anne Marie Martin. It was produced by Crichton, Kathleen Kennedy, who now runs Star Wars for Disney, Ian Bryce, who went on to produce the Transformers franchise most recently. and it was executive produced by Stephen Spielberg. It featured a truly incredible ensemble cast, Academy Award winner, Helen Hunt,

the only man to be killed by an alien, a Terminator, and a predator, Bill Paxton, Jamie Gertz as his long-suffering fiancé, Melissa, Carrie Elwis as their villainous, unclear, like a competing storm-chaser. Yeah, fellow storm. Rich man, evil rich man. Storm Chaser.

Yes. And then rounding out their team, you have young Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, Todd Field, who's going to be... Yes. That's a young Todd Field who just directed Tar with Cape Wynchette. That's right. And Jeremy Davies or Opum from Saving Private Ryan, if you don't remember him. And Lost.

Oh, right, and Lost. And Solaris and many other films. Yeah, this has every 90s man in it. It does. If you were a man in the 90s, you're in Twister. And also the grandma from True Blood. That's right. So Twister was released on May 10th, 1996.

It was the first movie to be released on DVD in the United States. What? That's true. And a sequel is in development with a 2024 release planned. No. And yes, it is called Twisters. With a Z, I hope. With a Z.

No, with an S, although there are at least, I think, six tornadoes in this movie already. No, there's more than that. I was going to say, how can you do a sequel? Well, one splits into like three at a certain point. There's approximately 85 tornadoes in this movie, and that's not how I thought tornadoes worked. I'm not sure, but only three people died. It also takes place in a span of 24 hours, and there are 42 tornadoes in that period. That's what I mean.

So speaking of Lizzie raised the many possible historical inaccuracies of this movie, movie, so I decided that we should just get them out of the way now so we can enjoy talking about it. So back in 1996, Entertainment Weekly, in a pithy little article, interviewed Harold Brooks, who was a meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, which we open with in this movie in Norman, Oklahoma. They asked him about the various seemingly implausible events of the film. So Lizzie, we're going to do five true or false questions. Yes, I love a game.

and see how many of these you can get right. One, you can drive a truck next to an F4 or F5 tornado. No, no. That's correct. That is false. Driving a truck in a straight line is very difficult with 70 mile per hour winds. An F5 tornado has wind speeds starting at 261 miles per hour. They would not be able to drive next to it comfortably as they did. This is the thing that David and I were yelling at the screen at while we were watching this,

is that every time there is like minimal wind around Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, and then houses are being ripped out of the ground. And somehow they're fine. They have like a light Beyonce blow dryer wind in their face, and that's it. It wasn't a blow dryer. We will get to that. Okay. Two, a cow flying through a tornado may reasonably be expected to moo.

I think it would be dead. Actually, Harold said true. He said cows and other animals are often lifted and alive while in the air during a tornado and sometimes survive. Three, a tornado can lift a house, a la the one that blows in front of Bill and Joe at the end of the film. Ah, ooh, this is tough because I feel like when I've seen swaths the tornado damage, it doesn't. I'm going to say no. That's actually true. An F-5 tornado can lift and reposition a house in a day.

different area. Four, is Pepsi the most popular drink in Wakita? If you'll notice, they use Pepsi cans at the end of the film to make all of the, it's a Pepsi sponsored movie. Yeah. Sure, true. False. Coca-Cola outsells Pepsi 8 to 1 in Wikita, according to store owners.

I don't even know where Wakita is. Okay. And number five, the thing that seemed to bother most people about this movie, even when I saw it as a kid, Joe's dad would have been fine if you'd just gone to the bottom of the cellar with her and her mom. Yes, this is my first reaction. 100%. Let go of the handle.

True. Don't Hodor. True. Harold says Joe's dad should have gone to the bottom and he would have survived with his daughter. Yes. But then we wouldn't have a movie. So let's get into it. When Twister was announced, it had all of the elements needed for a box office hit.

It had a hot new director. Jan DeBant was coming off of directing speed. A smoking young cast. Bill Paxton always had it, and Helen Hunt was very popular on Matt About You. A shockingly successful writer, Michael Crichton, had just introduced Jurassic Park to the world, and the blessing of the greatest director in the world, Stephen Spielberg. Now, little did the cast and crew know. They were about to enter the eye of the storm.

Pund number two. I think you mean the suck zone, according to Phillipsy more often from the movie. He's having so much fun in this movie. And it's wildly inappropriate. Yeah. Okay. Now, this is a very interesting movie for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which, because it was originally supposed to be directed by Stephen Spielberg.

This has happened a couple of times with Spielberg. This is a, that's a poltergeist situation too, right? Where he still remains relatively involved? Yes. And we'll get it. It has an interesting turn at the end of the film as well. I won't go into Spielberg's origin stories here. For more on that, check out our episode on Jaws or go watch the Fableman's.

Stephen Spielberg was arguably at the height of his powers by the mid-90s. I just want to drop a couple of facts that are wild. In 1993, he'd released Jurassic Park, which grossed nearly a billion dollars to become, at the time, the highest grossing film ever, outpacing Spielberg's previous record holding, E.T. the extraterrestrial. That same year, so 1993, same year as Jurassic Park, Spielberg also released Schindler's List. The two films took home 10 Academy Awards between them,

including Best Director. However, Spielberg reportedly fell into a depression after Schindler's List, remarking later that he had wondered at the time if it would be his last film. Let's keep in mind that not only had he just created an incredibly personal and harrowing movie about the Holocaust, but he was at the end of a 12-year run, starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark that spanned, 10 movies, most of them huge blockbusters, and he was exhausted.

Yeah. So he was also at a crossroads with his company. He had Amblin Entertainment, which has its home at Universal Studios. He just launched DreamWorks in 1994, and he'd also begun making some of his films with Warner Brothers. So basically, Warner Brothers, Universal, and DreamWorks all want some of the Spielberg magic. And Twister was set up as an Amblin Entertainment project, so he, Spielberg and his company basically said, all right, you guys can split it between the two of you.

So what's interesting is this movie has two studios attached to it splitting the financing. And so basically, Warner Brothers got the North American rights to the movie and Universal got the international rights to the movie. And then Spielberg said, all right, great, I'm going to be the executive producer. Let's find another director for the movie. So really quickly, a couple of things on the script, because I think that of everything in this movie, the wildest mess part of this movie is the screenplay. Yes, the wildest mess is the relationships in this. I mean, there's, you know, also the fact that they drive through a house and things of that nature.

That I can deal with. I cannot deal with the fact. Can you? What if there are people in the house? It's fine. The way that Bill Paxton's character treats his fiancé in this movie. Yeah, it's insane. It's actually abusive.

It's like gaslighting. He's putting her in danger. I don't know why her character even exists. No, also then he's shocked when she says, I'm going to go home. And she doesn't even dump him hard. She's like, it's fine. And he's like, wait, I thought we're getting married. It doesn't.

Michael Crichton was working through some things with one of his ex-wives. Clearly. What's interesting, I couldn't figure out exactly how the script originated. After the movie was released, Crichton and Spielberg were sued by not one but two writers, claiming that they had stolen their screenplays about tornado chasers. Both, one case was dismissed, the other was settled out of court. But what's clear is Crichton wrote it for Spielberg in Amblin, and the screenplay sold for a then record $2 million.

I mean, it makes sense, Michael Crichton. Like, if you got Michael Crichton, you got Steven Spielberg interested. Like, there's no question that would sell for a ton. And I want to be clear, Michael Crichton was in a conference. screenwriter and film director by this time. Most people don't know this, but he had written and directed The Great Train Robbery, starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland, and he had, which had been based on his novel. And he had also written Jurassic Park originally as a screenplay before it became a novel, and then again, he turned it into a screenplay for Stephen Spielberg.

Which you can tell. His books are very cinematic. Like, there's no question that he's thinking about it when he's writing. Absolutely. So they have the studios. They have the script. They have the producer. Now this project just needs a director. So according to Entertainment Weekly, the main four directors who were being considered at the time.

I bet you could guess two of them, Lizzie. We've covered one on this podcast, huge director in the 80s and 90s, and he has a movie that's out right now. James Cameron. James Cameron is one. Two, Tim Burton. Which would have been different.

Three, Robert Zemeckis, who feels like a very natural fit for this movie. He's done a lot of spectacle stuff. And four, John Batam, who had directed Saturday Night Fever and War Games, whose material I was not as familiar with. Apparently, they were all in talks to direct the film. And, of course, not included in that original set of directors. Yon DeBond. Is the eventual director, exactly, Yon DeBant.

And that's because Yon DeBant was six months deep in pre-production on the Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie. Uh-oh. Yep. And we will be doing an episode on that movie down the line, so I'm not going to waste any time on it here. But basically, Yon DeBant is a bit of a risk-taker, as we learned on Roar.

Yeah, by the fact that he allowed his scalp to be ripped off by a line. Exactly. So let's do a quick history on Yon DeBant before we get into this. I will keep it short. He was born in the Netherlands in 1943. So during World War II, he was one of 17 children. That's a lot. I hope his, I hope that was half siblings for the sake of his mother.

But he showed a lot of promise in the world of film while he studied at the Amsterdam Film Academy, and he developed a bit of a reputation, a risque reputation, after he served as a cinematographer for the 1971 Dutch film Blue Movie, which was nearly banned in the Netherlands for showing sex scenes that included a shot of a fully erect penis. So transgressive, roll breaker. He then went on to shoot Turkish delight for what went wrong alum director, Paul Verhoven.

Check out our episode on Showgirls. And also starring Rutger Hauer, check out our episode on Blade Runner. Roar was DeBond's first American job as a cinematographer. Although it did come out after private parts, which was a movie he actually shot after Roar. It's just Roar took so long to finish. Well, Roar took 500 years and 2 million lions.

Yes, they were still burning through lions. So then throughout the 1980s, DeBont becomes this sought-after action DP. So first of all, he follows Roar with Coogho, which I do think is an interesting choice. He goes from killer lions to killer dogs. He then shoots Tom Cruise's All the Right Moves, Die Hard, Black Rain for Ridley Scott, The Hunt for Red October, lethal weapon three, and basic instinct.

Damn. So he goes on a run. And what's clear from his filmography is that he is fearless, for better or worse, and he had become a premier action cinematographer by the time the early 90s roll around, and all of the sudden,

his career changes with speed. So speed was set up at Paramount, which was, it just basically said, what about that movie, runaway train, except it's on a bus. That's literally what the screenwriter said. That's great.

It's all you need. It's all you need. So much. Speed is great. And we're going to do a speed and a speed and a speed two, like combo episode. Now, John McTiernan, the director of Diehardt,

was offered speed. He passed. But he said, why don't you hire the DP who shot Diehardt, Yon DeBont, to direct speed? So this sliding door's passing of the torch moment.

happens and a cinematographer gets the chance to direct, which it does happen in Hollywood, but it's not an easy transition for cinematographers to make. And so that was a cool move by John McTiernan to help his collaborator out. Interestingly enough, Lissy, can you guess the director that DeBant beat out to get speed? Action director shot a car chase movie that came out this last year. A car chase movie from this last year? Ambulance? I'm totally blanking on who did it. Oh, oh, shoot. Is Roland Emrick?

Michael Bay. Oh, my God. Cut that out. I got that wrong. I should know who directed the ambulance. Yep, you should. If you just said explosions, I would have known. Explosions.

Explosions and inappropriate usage of Megan Fox's teenage body. Yeah, exactly. So, again, that's all we're going to say about speed because we are going to do more episodes on the speeds. But the one point I want to raise here is that important to twister, DeBant brought on young Wunderkind writer, Joss Whedon, to rewrite speed for him. I did not know that.

Yeah, Whedon came in and basically rewrote all of the dialogue for that movie. And that's where DeBant formed a relationship with Weeden. That'll come into play down the line. Also, sorry, had to say it. Really quick, fun fact. Stephen Baldwin was offered the lead role in Speed and he turned it down. Thank God. Thank God.

Okay. Speed is released on June 10th, 1994. It is a huge hit. It's a great movie. It grossed $350 million on a $35 million budget. Hell yeah. It was a huge critical success as well. It catapulted Keanu Reeves,

Sandra Bullock, and Yondubon into the top tier of Hollywood elites. And if you haven't seen speed, do yourself a favor, go see speed. So, DeBont curries his new status as a hitmaker into Not Twister, as I said, but instead, Godzilla. So unfortunately, DeBant sent them a script that in 1995, not inflation adjusted, according to the studio, would cost $200 million, which I think inflation adjusted is like $330 million. It would have been the most expensive movie of all time. by like over $60 million, basically. So the studio said no,

and DeBont walked from the project, and then DeBant got brought in to shoot Twister, because they were like, this movie takes place entirely in cars. Let's hire the guy that just shot a movie that takes place entirely on a bus. That does make sense. It makes perfect sense.

So then, director in hand, they have to set out and cast this movie. And what's clear is that the initial leads were not going to be Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. And I think that, you know, Lizzie, you'd probably agree. Candidly, it's a big budget movie. Initially, it was slated to be $30 to $35 million, and it needed stars.

And at the time, Helen Hunt was a TV actress and Bill Paxton was more of a character actor. Sure, although you say it was a big budget movie, I have to say from the first shot of that satellite floating in space, it doesn't look like any of the month. went to the VFX. Did they spend it all on the shot of the shining at the drive-thru? Because...

Very mean to the artists at ILM who worked very hard on this movie. I know. They did a great job with what they had, I'm sure. But there's a lot of shots that look pretty rough. I think a lot of the movie looks great. I think a lot of it, they were trying to pioneer new things that hadn't been fully developed yet. I mean, you can tell it's entirely

that they're not, they're doing a lot of stuff not practically at all, which I know was kind of, and this is something discussed in Jurassic Park, but that that was new. To do everything on the scale that they're doing completely, CGI was extremely new, like as of 1992. We'll get to what the budget ended up being later. However, there was a very popular actor,

he's still a very popular actor, who was initially cast to play Bill Harding, and the minute I heard his name, I was like, oh, that makes perfect sense. Lizzie, do you have any guesses? You gotta give me a hint. I'm really doing badly on the games today, and I thought I would do better. America's dad. Tom Hanks?

Tom Hanks. So Tom Hanks was originally cast and apparently made it as far as being fitted for wardrobe. So he had committed to the projects. What? Yes. He was committed to play Bill Harding. I can't believe Tom Hanks said yes. It was a big budget action film, you know? I guess that's true.

It's like a science-based action story. It is, you know, listen, I'm not saying I didn't enjoy this movie. I loved this movie. It just makes zero sense. Apparently also what they were saying to the actors, and this was true, was this script is a starting point. We're bringing in more writers to work on it, and we will get to that in a moment. So they probably said, hey, Tom, just you, tornadoes, it's going to be awesome.

I do want to watch that. Yeah. Now, Tom Hanks dropped out not to be. in another movie, but instead to do his directorial debut. That thing you do. Which is great. I love that movie. I love that movie.

I'm so glad he did it. But on the way out, again, not unlike how Jan DeBant got his first job, he recommended his Apollo 13 co-star Bill Paxton for the role. Who is so great. Yeah, who's great. I mean, he was such a lovely actor and it was so tragic that we lost him back in 2017. Yeah. And this is one of, you know, a handful of movies where he's the real male lead.

And he does a great job. Now, apparently, and this is much less rigorously confirmed, other actors considered for the role. And by the way, this could mean just that the producers sent a list to the studio. This doesn't mean that they necessarily met with these actors. So take it with a grain of salt. But the list included Michael Keaton, Kurt Russell, Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, John Travolta, Richard Gere, John Cusack, Nicholas Cage. Yes.

Which would have been fun. Bruce Willis, who I actually think Bruce Willis temperamentally, like 90s, Bruce Willis would have been kind of suited for this too. No, the two in this list that I want to see are Nick Cage and Kurt Russell fighting tornadoes. Kurt Russell would be great. 100%. Also, Val Kilmer, who actually at the time of this movie was shooting Island of Dr. Moreau, I believe. Also was like extremely hot.

Yes, very attractive. To be clear, again, this does not mean. that these people auditioned or even met about the projects. It just means they were considered. One last fun fact about Bill Paxton. At the age of eight, he was in the crowd in Dallas when President Kennedy was assassinated, which I thought was totally crazy. So before going to Helen Hunt, Yondobont and the company offered the role of Dr. Harding to a Jurassic Park alum. Laura Dern. Laura Dern, who actually, I think, you know, relationship with Stephen's

Spielberg. She played a similar role. It makes a lot of sense. And she turned it down. I'm guessing it's very similar to what she just did. And so Helen Hunt was brought in to lunch with Spielberg and Jan de Bonn. And apparently in an interview with Vulture, she said that the minute she heard about the project, she said she had no interest in it, but they brought her into Ambulin. They did a fancy lunch. And before they even showed her the script, she just says like, I'll do it. It sounds great. I'll do it. She was very impressed with everything that they were doing. She's great. And so at the time, she was on the very popular TV show, Matt About You, with Paul Reiser,

and this is an opportunity to be in a huge movie. Now, this was much to the chagrin of John Wu, who was making Broken Arrow, and she was originally cast in that movie and left it a very wise career move. Although I do love Broken Arrow, this Twister is much better. Yeah, Twisters played on TBS and TNT all day for our entire. childhoods. I somehow avoided it, but Helen Hunt, I knew who she was just from Twister previews on those. Yep. So the cast was obviously an ensemble effort, and I think one of the advantages of casting Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton is that the team feels a little more vibrant. It feels like they're

more part of the team, if that makes sense. So as we mentioned, Carrie Elwis, Jamie Gertz, Lois Smith, that's Aunt Meg, as you mentioned, Alan Ruck, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeremy Davies, Todd Field, Zach Grenier from The Good Fight, if you watch, is Carrie Elvis's driver. Jake Busey has, like, one shot in the movie, Joey Slotnick. And I think Patrick Fisler isn't also like one shot towards the end of the film. He's like one of Carrie Alwis's guys as well. So it's got a great cast. I think it works really well as like a team effort.

And according to the cast, they all became very close during the shooting of this movie because it was very difficult and traumatic for all of them. them and Helen Hunt said she remained friends with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joey Slotnick, and a number of other actors for many years after the movie. And a fun story I loved was that Philip Seymour Hoffman, who apparently only took the movie so it would, so it could give him enough money to move out of L.A. and go back to New York, he would every time he saw Helen Hunt would just go, sequel! And he would just try to get excited about doing a sequel to Twister.

Yeah, you can tell he's in his own movie and he's having so much fun. He's just loving it. The suck zone. Carrie Elwis also is like just hamming it up and it's great. Just mustache twirling. I love him. He's great. Now, according to a 2020 interview with Yon DeBant in Vulture magazine,

the green light for the movie came only after they, Lizzie, proved that the visual effects could be accomplished. So it was convincing in 1995. They shot a number of test scenes, including the opening at the farm with Joe's family going into the shelter, a version of that. That was one of the best parts. I mean, like, minus the fact that it made no sense and he could have just let go of the door handle,

that was one of the scariest and most effective parts of the movie. Right. And they also did a- Because they don't show the tornado. Exactly. They also did a shot from inside the car, showing the storm in the distance, and a tire coming right at the camera

and hitting the window and bouncing off. There was actually a bit of a hullabaloo because that shot was put in the trailer, although it actually never ended up in the movie. and people were upset. People hate that. They get mad. As I mentioned, the effects were executed by Industrial Light and Magic, or ILM.

They were revolutionary for a number of reasons at the time. And according to DeBont, the footage stunned the studios and gave them the green light. And apparently that's what was most important. Lizzie's giving me a face. I just don't. Like, maybe it's because, spoiler alert, I've spent a lot of time researching Jurassic Park. But, like, this doesn't, this just doesn't look anything like that. And also, ILM is responsible for, you know, we've talked about them a lot.

They're the water tube creature thing in the abyss. They're T2 in Terminator 2, Judgment Day. Like, there's a quality to the movement of stuff that they do usually that I just didn't, it just felt like it was not here on this. But whatever. You know, we'll get into a few of the details about why this movie, was so revolutionary from a VFX perspective and why what they're doing is in many ways a lot more challenging specifically than what they did on the Abyss and what they did on Jurassic Park.

I mean, look, what they did on the Abyss and T2, they're recreating something that is not found in nature. So already they have an advantage with both of those things. Like, I get that this is way harder. There are also a few other specifics we'll get into a little bit later in this process. But we can't get around the fact that right away DeBont brings in his old friend in collect collaborator, Joss Whedon, to rewrite the script. Apparently at a rate of I heard $100,000 a week, but that was unconfirmed. They're not paying screenwriters like that these days. In 1995. Exactly. Now, unfortunately, during pre-production, Weeden came down with bronchitis and had to step away from the project briefly. So they then brought in Academy Award winner Steve Zalian,

who had written Schindler's list to work on revisions until he had to leave to get. married, at which point Whedon came back in, working all the way into the first two weeks of shootings. However, Zalian has since said about his work on the project, for three weeks, I wrote scenes and faxed them to Oklahoma, where the film was being shot. Unbeknownst to me, until much later, every page I sent was completely ignored because the director was perfectly happy with the script he already had. The production was not. Anyway, the point is, there isn't a word I wrote for Twister that actually made it into the film. So they were literally just running $100,000 a week through a shredder at this point.

I mean, that adds up because when you said the person that wrote Schindler's list, it's like, well, that does not match the energy or dialogue of what's happening in this. Yeah. And so then the final writer, they brought in another writer, a fourth writer, or I guess fifth, if you include Michael Cretton's partner. They brought in Jeff Nathanson, who was actually a writer on Matt about you, I believe, at the time, and was also working, it seems like as a studio script doctor. Later, he would go on to write Catch Me If You Can, the Terminal,

the fourth Indiana Jones. Basically, they brought him in to write the car dialogue. So he summed it up as they said they didn't realize the movie would take place in cars so much. So I had to write dialogue like, look out, here it comes, and get out of the way. Oh, my God. I hope he wrote it looks like we're going in

when Bill Paxton decides to blow through the second story of a house. I think that's kind of the stuff that he was doing. So the issue with the script, according to DeBond, was that the original script was actually a romantic comedy of sorts. So apparently Michael Crichton and his wife had based it on his girl Friday. I don't really. They wanted it to be like a bickering couple kind of movie. Yeah, that's all it is.

That still comes through. It does. Helen Hunt's annoying because she's a risk taker and she loves her job. This other lady's annoying because she loves her job. but it has no risks and she's on a phone all the time. Like, it's there. You could see Carrie Grant just giving her some shit. Yeah.

So apparently DeBant was like, this is really boring. And the studio was like, no, we need all this character stuff. And the way that the script was structured is that it would be like a dialogue scene and then they'd go chase a tornado. And then they'd stop chasing the tornado, have a dialogue scene, chase a tornado. And so DeBont just said, fine. Put all the dialogue in the action scenes when they're chasing the tornadoes. I was going to say, this sounds to me like,

there were fewer tornadoes, and Jan DeBantz said more tornadoes. Yeah, he turned the entire movie into a single chase scene more or less. Yes. And the problem is, when you shove all of your dialogue into your action scenes, that means that you're performing dialogue and stunts at the same time. Yeah, it's wild. It's really, really hard to shoot choreographed action with VFX and practical effects when you're also trying to get the right emotional beats and performances from your actors.

There's a reason it's like, you know, emotional beat. Then John Wick shoots 37 people and then do another emotional beat. So one last note I found on the writing process that I did find interesting because we've commented on the way in which Jamie Gertz's character, Melissa, Bill Harding's fiancé, is absolutely abused in this movie. Apparently, originally there was going to be this like catty back and forth dialogue between her character. and Helen Hunt's character. That was the one nice thing was that that wasn't there. And, you know, who made sure that wasn't there was Helen Hunt and Jamie Gertz. They got together and they just said, quote, this would neither be fun to play nor watch,

and they got it removed from the script. Yeah, that was the only saving grace. Because I felt like it was going to come at some point. There's a scene in the diner when they're together and it's like it feels like it's building towards it. And then Helen Hunt just pays for her coffee and is super classy and walked out. was like, this, okay, this is good. That came from Helen Hunt.

Really good instinct, because it just, it was unnecessary and it would have made you dislike her character for no reason. So the movie was supposed to be shot in California for the exteriors and then in the United Kingdom, I believe at EMI Elstreet Studios where they shot the Shining and Star Wars for the interior, for all of the soundstage work. However, DeBond insisted on authenticity. He said this would be the last great action film not filmed on a soundstage. And he convinced the studio to let them shoot in Oklahoma.

Oh, no. So they actually shot this on location in Oklahoma. They also shot in Iowa. However, there was one problem. That meant they were literally in Tornado Alley, and they were constantly on the lookout for actual tornadoes. Oh, no. At least four tornadoes hit the state during the movie's production,

though none of them shut the production down. However, what did cause a shutdown was the tragic 1995 Oklahoma City bombings. Oh, okay. God. So in April, on April 19th, 1995, white supremacists and domestic terrorists, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols detonated a truck bomb in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The bomb killed 168 people, injured 680 others. It destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a 16-block radius. The cast and crew of Twister, who were in pre-production at the time, paused production and relocated to aid in recovery efforts,

which I thought was very good of them. Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001, and Terry Nichols, his accomplice, is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole. I just wanted to acknowledge that before we moved on. As I mentioned, production began in May of 1995, and it became quickly apparent that there was a bit of a disconnect

between Yandabant and his cast and crew. Now, this is total speculation but my guess is that once you've been scalped by a lion, you're a little more tolerant of tough working conditions than your average crew member or cast member in Hollywood. We've covered directors like this in the past, William Friedkin on The Exorcist. Yeah, Jimmy C.

Jimmy C. Anytime there's water. Well, as I like to call him, Jimmy C in the concrete boots back in the abyss. However, in order to understand And much of what went wrong in this production, it's important to go through the way in which the production approached creating the wind and the tornadoes for the film. So, Lizzie, let's talk about the VFX and what's practical and what's not practical because I was very surprised by some of these things. So obviously, the tornadoes in the distance are computer generated.

Yes. Now, the really challenging thing about animating tornadoes is their interaction with the physical world around them. Sure. Right. So I think that's where some of the shots look really good and some of the shots look not so good. And specifically, the difficult thing is how to destroy things in a way that feels real, right? And so the issue is in Jurassic Park, for example, or in the abyss, you're creating things that stay intact, right? And in Twister, they're creating things that are constantly dispersing themselves or dispersing things around them. And at the time, they didn't have what are called physics simulations in the computer programs that they ran.

So they had to hand animate the way that things would interact with the environment. And this gets really, really difficult and really painstaking. They were able to do some of this with what are called particle simulators. And so, for example, there's a part in the film where like a barn is disintegrated. And the way that they achieved that is they had a modeler place 3,000 individuals. individual planks in 3D space, and then they used a particle system to, like, spin it out of control. But again, that's a very painstaking process. Yeah, it looked very good.

So anything, any elements that needed to move in specific ways, like the cow flying by the car, or the house that rolls in front of them at the end. That also looks pretty good. That shot still looks awesome. And those all had to be hand animated. And the thing that gets really hard here is that they did not have the time or the money to animate everything that kind of needed to be animated. So to get a sense of the time spent on these shots. So that house shot, it's like maybe the best shot in the movie.

It looks great. I want to give credit to the YouTube channel Corridor Crew who had a breakdown on this shot. So apparently VFX artist Stu Mashowitz spent six months just working on the four shots, that comprise that sequence. There's an initial wide shot of the house rolling, a medium of the car hitting the house, a close-up, and then a medium of it exiting. All of these had to be animated by hand

by Stu Mashowitz and the camera's inside a moving car shaking and they don't have a way to track the camera digitally. So that means they have to frame by frame, make sure that they're moving the house, not just in a way that feels natural, but relative to the perspective of a camera that's shaking and traveling 60 miles an hour. Nowadays, you have software

that can automatically track that for you. And that's a reason why at this time, these shots that were either handheld or moving like that that involved VFX were extremely revolutionary, because prior to this, they were either locked off or they were on a track. Exactly.

So Jurassic Park, a lot of it's done on dollies or it's locked off, and then specifically... No. There's some handheld shots. There's some handheld, but a lot of it, I'm just saying, is done. This movie, there are no shots that are locked. It's entirely handheld. Like, that's what was crazy.

And they're in cars. And in the abyss, it is all, almost entirely locked off. Yeah. The other issue was render time. So when you animate something, you then have to render it, meaning the computer has to generate the final image, right, that then goes out onto the film reel. And it would take 12 hours. hours per frame to render.

So, like, for example, the close-up of the car as it's about to hit the house is 12 frames long. That took 144 hours or six days to render. Oh, my God. And the studio has a release date of May 2006, 1996, that they've already set and they have to hit. So there's no sliding this schedule. This is always a mistake when they rush the VFX.

Anytime we have talked about this, it always ends up going badly. Yep, exactly. Now, an interesting confluence happens here that leads to a lot of the pain on this set. So they can't animate everything. And they also can't use stunt doubles very much because Jan Duvant put all the dialogue into the action scenes. So you can't use a stunt double while Bill Paxton is saying an important line to Helen Hunt in the car. So, Hunt and Paxton had to do most of their stunts on this movie, while Yon DeBant and his team literally through everything and the kitchen sink at them. So, for example, they're filming the hailstorm scene where they're driving through the hailstorm, and Bill Paxton is literally getting pelted with giant chunks of ice and is clearly in pain.

they had an ice vehicle that would drive in front of the main actors vehicle, and they had these machines that would hurl chunks of ice that had been mixed with milk, so they looked whiter, at the actors. But the ice pieces were not uniform, so they were supposed to be the size, you know, a little smaller than golf balls. But some of them were the size of baseballs, because apparently the machine just couldn't make them exactly the right size. Oh, my God.

You know what? let's hear Yondobot just describes it perfectly. This is from an interview that he did with Vulture magazine on the 25th anniversary of Twister. And I just love the way he describes these things. Quote, I wanted the actress to do their own stunts. For instance, there's a scene in the car near the end where Helen and Bill get into a hailstorm. And you have to understand that the hailstorm is a real hailstorm. We had two gigantic trucks with huge wind machines spitting out ice cubes at the actors. So it's real hail. And it can hurt. if you're in a moving truck. So I tell Bill, listen, those machines cannot spit out everything

the size of hail. Some pieces are bigger. And of course some pieces were bigger. And they hit him in the head. He was supposed to duck more often, but he didn't. Oh my God. Yon, you should know about not ducking. It's the reason half your scalp is missing from a lion. So as you'll notice, DeBont kind of consistently puts the blame on Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt for people. being like clumsy in this movie. And he has a tendency to do that. Now, Lizzie, you mentioned that it looks extremely windy around the actors, but it looks like maybe they're just getting a Beyonce blowout. Yeah. Okay. That actually was not the case. So in order to create the onset wind conditions, DeBant wasn't satisfied with your usual giant fan that might give you a Beyonce blowout.

No, instead, he brought two 707 jet engines and he mounted them on the back of the back. of semi-trucks, and they would go full blast while they threw debris in front of them, blowing them towards the actors. What? Yep. You didn't need to do that. Jet engines. Put a fan closer to them, and you would have gotten the same thing.

Well, they wanted to do, like, these wide shots, right, where everyone's, like, running and getting, like, knocked over, and that's because they had two giant 707s. They looked pretty good. Now, the actors were given earplugs, but because they're on camera, they can't wear eye protection. So the big issue is that the actor's eyes would dry out instantly. So they had PAs with vizine that would run in between every take and just like spray it into the actor's eyes. That makes sense because I was wondering,

there's some shots towards the end, like when Helen Hunt is peering around that corner of the house and they show a wide shot of it and her eyes are just like, ding, ding, ding, think, think, think. Nope, they're just struggling. Now, that also might have been for another reason that we'll get to in one second, which is even worse.

Now, Hale was honestly the least of their concerns when they got to the third act set piece. So those tractor trailer combines that began falling on the road in front of the car, they couldn't animate those because they were having to animate too many elements. This is the problem, is that you can tell the stuff that's real

because it looks amazing. Yes. So they had real tractor combines being flown over the road by helicopters that would then be released in the path of the car. Now, again, again, no one can say, it better than Yon de Bont, so I got to quote the guy again. Quote, they really fall from the sky, and it is not like a little fall. No, it's a real combine, multiple ones. And then they fall to the left

and to the right, and you have to drive around it. It looks dangerous from the ground, but in reality, it was always safe to do it. Using longer lenses, you can make that distance seem even shorter, so it looks like it's really close to the car. Generally, it was always like 20 feet or 30 feet from the car. That is not far. It's a little close maybe, but it's just that spectacular to watch in real life. Oh my God. 20 or 30 feet is nothing. I know. And then they have to get around it. And they're going, you know, pretty fast at that point. No wonder they looked so scared. They did. They thought it was great acting. Well, they were driving. They were driving in a lot of these scenes, the actual actors. Oh my God. Helen Hunt more or less said the same when she was interviewed in 2021. She said, quote,

I think the reason it holds up is that a lot of it wasn't visual effects. They were actually just throwing shit out us constantly. So, again, another injury here. When performing the final major car stunt, they're driving through the corn, they set the truck on cruise control, and then they have to somehow get their doors open, even though the corn would definitely keep the doors closed. No, no, no. It was an infallible plan. Right.

So they're shoving the doors open. When a large piece of corn hits the door, Helen Hunt slips, and the door slams into her head, giving her a concussion. And the car was actually moving when they did that. Yes. Yeah. Oh, my God. So then the door was propped open so they could perform the stunt more safely.

And DeBant said of the incident, quote, I love Helen to death, but you know, she can also be a little bit clumsy. Sir. Sir. How dare you? To her credit, Helen Hunt was extremely affectionate when speaking of DeBont to Vulture. and when the interviewer brought up that clumsy quote, she declined to comment very gracefully. And so she is a classy, classy individual.

Wow, I would have been like, I'll show you clumsy, take a gander at speed to cruise control. Some clumsy storytelling. Now, a couple of other, one more tiny one before we get to a big one. The scene early on in the film where Bill and Joe hide in that ditch from the first big tornado. Sure, sure. Apparently, that ditch was really unsanitary, and all the mud and shit that was getting thrown at them got in their eyes. And they had to get hepatitis shots after the fact because they were exposed to all sorts of gnarly bacteria down there. No, I'm good.

Yep. Now, again, ironically, one of the biggest issues that DeBond struggled with was the fact that despite traveling to Tornado Alley to shoot the film, they had perfectly sunny skies for the entire production. Now, the issue this causes is an unexpected one, and that's that in post-production they're going to add tornadoes to the sky. But they need the sky that they photographed to be as dark as possible so that when they add those tornadoes, they look natural. And then if they just simply brought the exposure of the entire scene down, you wouldn't be able to see the actors,

because the actors would be too dark. Right. The solution, bring in four 16,000-watt lights, They're called 16Ks. Traditional light bulbs are 2 to 100 watts for reference. Mount them on the back of a pair of trucks and shine them directly into the front cab of the cars that Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were riding in. And what this allowed them to do was bring down the exposure of the camera. And then Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were still lit while the bright blue sky behind them actually looked dark. But the problem is they have to act staring directly into the force of a thousand suns.

So let's get a Bill Paxton quote in here. Here is him talking to Entertainment Weekly back in 1996. Quote, those lights, they were like sunballs. They had to pump light into the cab to get the exposure down to make the sky behind us look dark and stormy because it was too bright outside. And those things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I got back to my room and I couldn't see.

End quote. And neither could Helen Hunt. The film's two stars were literally temporarily blinded by the light. They had to wear those, if you've seen old folks wearing those kind of wrap-around sunglasses. No, Chris, I think you mean notoriously clumsy, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. Not blind. Not blind. Exactly.

They had to wear those big glasses around for a few days. They were unable to shoot. But there was no long-term damage somehow. Says Jan DeBant. Well, you know, I will say. DeBond never lost the faith of the cast. To either Devon or the cast credit, Paxton and Hunt stuck through the entire production.

Both of them were very complimentary after the fact and expressed enthusiasm for a sequel, as apparently did Philip Seymour Hoffman. However, Yon DeBant did literally lose his crew. His cinematographer for the movie was Don Burgess. And Don Burgess and him clearly just butted heads from the get-go. Burgess had just shot,

Forrest Gump with Robert Zemeckis. And according to Burgess, as reported by Entertainment Weekly, DeBond didn't know what he wanted until he saw it. He would shoot one direction with all the equipment right behind the view of the camera. Then he'd want to shoot in the other direction right away, and we'd have to move and he needed to get angry that we took too long, and it was always everybody's fault, never his. And so this all came to a head when DeBont apparently shoved a camera assistant

into the mud when the assistant walked into the frame of a complicated shot. He then called Burgess and his team incompetent. Burgess and his crew of I read 20 in one source and 40 in another camera people, then walked off set in the middle of the day and quit on the spot. That takes a lot. I mean, the abuse that these poor crew members tend to be used to, especially when working with big directors and sort of autos, like they stick it out for them to leave.

that had to be pretty bad. It was pretty bad, I think. Things were so tense that the crew considered getting shirts printed la la Blade Runner, go check out our T-shirt wore and Blade Runner,

that the shirts apparently were going to read fucking hell shit, which was apparently the most common three-word phrase that DeBont used throughout the duration of filming. The cast was apparently shocked

to see their cinematographer walking off the set, and the studio had to come in, they had to calm everybody down, They shut production down for a week, kept everybody in Wakita and Oklahoma, and they found a replacement camera team. DeBant disputes the specifics of the shoving incident,

chalking it up to a miscommunication. He said they had to use hand signals to communicate, given the wind machines. I don't know. I'm just saying what I heard from Entertainment Weekly and Don Burgess. Don't shove people in the mud. Nothing is worth that. A week later, Jack N. Green stepped in as the new director,

director of photography, and he was an experienced cinematographer as well. He had just won an Academy Award in 1992 for his work on Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. Actually, excuse me, he had been nominated for an Academy Award in 1992 for his work on Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. Okay, Chris, you're fired. I am fired. I have been nominated for a Razzie. The things between DeBant and Green seem to have gone well until there were two days left in production, and they were shooting the scenes in Aunt Meg's house after the tornado had ripped through. Now, this house was actually a set, and it was a hydraulic collapsible set. Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's, you know, you've been to Universal Studios, the rides, and you can see a building come down, and then it all rebuilds itself.

So apparently the house was rigged to collapse. Jack was inside the structure. Somebody inadvertently triggered it. He was struck in the head by a collapsing ceiling, and injured his back requiring him to be hospitalized. So they lost their second cinematographer. So Yandabant did a Yon DeBant, and he stepped in and acted as his own cinematographer for the final two days of the shoot. What he secretly wanted the whole time. And then you cut back and he is pressing the trigger button to take out his own cinematographer

back then. So ultimately, production did go over schedule, but only by about three weeks from what I could see. And apparently they actually had to get Paul Reiser's permission because that was going to push the shooting of Matt about you two and a half weeks. But Paul Reiser, Classy fella. Sit down. No, no, no, no.

He just said yes. I like Paul Reiser. He's a good actor. He is a good actor. DeBant shot with multiple cameras throughout the film and he ended up shooting 1.3 million feet of film. This was between three and four times more than the usual amount used on a feature film. Oh, that's a lot.

It is. The movie became much more expensive as a result of his shooting style. The team headed into post-production, and they handed over 300 digital sky replacement shots to ILM compared to the 150 that they had planned for, and they still had the same release date. So ILM started racking up a lot of overtime, and not just for the tornadoes. There was an early scene where Philip Seymour Hopman's character leaned back in his chair, and unbeknownst to everyone until pretty late in the game, you could fully see his genitals peeking out of his shorts.

And they caught this just before the film was released and they had to digitally paint them out. But legend has it that the VHS screeners that were sent out ahead of the release include what I like to call the full Seymour, as you know, it's known in the industry. Now, another issue that costs them a bunch of money in post, is that they could not make Joe's backstory make sense. No one understood why she was

obsessed with tornadoes. And that's because they did not have the original scene, the opening scene that's now in the movie, where her dad gets sucked away by a tornado. Instead, they had shot a nightmare sequence that they used kind of as a flashback throughout the film, but apparently it just wasn't working. So in March and April of 1996, mere weeks before the movie's going to release, which is partially why I think they don't show the tornado in that opening scene. Lizzie, I don't think they had time to do the VFX. I'm glad. They shot that opening scene to clarify her fascination with the storms.

And I think this is also why Bill Paxton's big speech at the midpoint about her needing to move on from her dad's death, it plays over the radio instead of over Bill Paxton's face. I was wondering about that. Yeah, they cut away from him, and it's played on every other character reacting, which makes me think it was ADR. Yeah, 100%. And then it's never discussed really at all. The only time it's referenced by anybody on camera in the main part,

and it's not a direct reference is someone says, it's when the fiancé asks if any of them have seen an F5, and they say only one of us. But they don't even really indicate that it's Helen Hunt. And I was confused for a second. So that makes me think that maybe wasn't even that. and they added it later. It's unclear.

There were a couple of character things that I couldn't quite figure out, to be honest. Also, fun fact, I believe that's Alexa Vega from Spy Kids that plays Young Joe at the beginning of the movie. I thought she looked familiar. Yeah, in a blonde wig. So Twister was initially budgeted around

$30 or $35 million. By the time they got to shooting, it had gone up to $70 million just because of the scope. However, after reshoots and added VFX costs, reports are that the final price tag landed around $90 million. Damn.

Wait, Chris, do you know how many VFX shots were in this? I heard that there were over 300 digital sky replacement shots. I would not be surprised if that was like, you know, the majority of the shots. Maybe 3 to 500 would be my guess. I'm not sure. But that's a lot for the time.

That's a lot. That's a ton. I think Jurassic Park is something in the 50s. Yes, which is the other issue. they're doing it in a much tighter timeline and doing more shots than Jurassic Park did. And it might have only been, you know, again, it might have only been 300. That's the number that I was able to find. That's a lot for 1995, 1996.

Yeah. Again, another really weird consequence of this movie. Apparently, it's the reason Sammy Hagar left Van Halen in the 90s. What? Yeah, they were hired to do an original song for the film. It's called Humans Being. And they had just wrapped their 1995 tour, and they were all really angry at each other, and Hagar didn't want to do it, and he kind of screwed over Eddie Van Halen and Alex Van Halen.

And so they basically kicked him out of the band as a result of this song. And ironically, that is also what led to Armageddon having that Aerosmith song, is that Michael Bay, who's, like, really paranoid about Yon DeBon, since he took speed from him, heard that Yon DeBant got Van Halen for two. Twister, and he was making Armageddon. He's like, why don't I have a rock song? And so Jerry Bruchheimer was like, fine. And he got him, Aerosmith for Armageddon.

Fun fact about that song from Armageddon, that's one of my earliest memories of being very embarrassed was being in the Borders, books, and music. And I went to go listen because for all you kids, you don't remember this. They had listening stations to listen to the CDs. And I went to listen because I loved that song, and I listened to it. And I was singing along out loud. Oh, very loud. And I remember my dad coming up and being like, hey, don't, hey, don't, don't do it out loud.

Hey, shh. You're being dumb. You're being a dumb kid. Yeah. I thought it was cute. How old were you? How old it was when that movie came out. Yeah, you're probably under 10.

Oh, for sure. I was like 8. That's cute. If you were 13, it wouldn't have been cute. I was a big 8-year-old, though, so maybe not. Maybe not. All right. A couple of last things.

things. A lot of people have noticed over the years that there are a lot of animal noises mixed into the sounds of the tornadoes. You'll notice jungle cats. Totally. It sounds like a leopard going like, ah, in the middle of. I was like, what is that? So this was done intentionally by the supervising sound editor, Stephen Flick and his team. It included the roars of, as I mentioned, jungle cats, as well as a camel's moan slowed down a great deal. And fun fact, Steve Flick was one of my professors in grad school. He's a wonderful man. Nice.

He showed us clips of Twister on our first day at film school. That's pretty fun. All right, let's get to the release. And we have a fun one for you, Lizzie. Twister was released on May 10th of 1996, and the tagline for the film was The Dark Side of Nature. But they almost went with a very different option. Any guesses, Lizzie?

I have no idea. They almost went with, quote, it sucks. That's great. As a reference to the suck zone. That's great. It's super meta. Why didn't they do that? Well, they realized it would give critics an easy way to poke fun at the movie and they thought

people wouldn't take it seriously. And so they ditched it. I disagree. I do think it would have been very funny. So not only did the movie have a hard release date, they actually pulled the release date in by two weeks because they were afraid of lining up the same weekend as Paramount's Mission Impossible. So they actually had to finish two years.

weeks earlier than they thought. And when they finally... Is that when the first Mission Impossible came out? That is. How long has Tom Cruise been doing this? For longer than even since the first mission... Well, for Mission Impossible? 30 years. Almost 30 years. Yeah. Now.

Wow. Tommy works hard. Oh, man. No one works harder. It's amazing what, you know, Zanada do can do for you or whatever. Scientology God he worships. Zinu. Z new, that's right. Okay, so let's get to napkin math with Chris Winterbauer. In its first weekend, Twister, which didn't have a huge start at its poster, the poster was just the tornado, and it said Twister.

It's all you need, baby. It earned $41.1 million. It was number one at the box office, passed the bird cage as the year's biggest opening weekend. It was the sixth largest opening weekend of all time behind the Lion King, Jurassic Park. Batman, Batman Returns in Batman Forever. So if you complain a lot about having superhero movies now, I guess it was the same back then.

And more importantly, this movie had legs, which means that the next weekend, it only had a 10% drop in revenue, which was a record. And so it earned $38.5 million in its second weekend. Films usually drop 25 to 50% at least in their second weekend. What was it up against? The first one.

In its second weekend, it wasn't up against much, but then it went up against Mission Impossible, The Rock, the Lost World Jurassic Park, and Dragonheart. So it was a big blockbuster summer, and yet, after 12 weeks in the box office, it had earned $231.3 million domestically, and it was the 12th highest grossing domestic film of all time. It then earned $500 million worldwide, and it was the second highest grossing film of 1996 behind-only Independence Day. Oh, one of my other favorites. It's great.

At the time, it was the 10th highest grossing film in history. Whoa. It also signaled to studios that you could release a movie in May and get summer box office numbers. So up until this point, we had a lot of June release. Star Wars, Blade Runner, etc. Nobody was comfortable releasing in May, and Twister changed that. A little bit of history. It also marked the beginning of a spate of disaster films in Hollywood,

which had always been popular, but we're making a comeback. The incredible Dante's Peak, volcano, Titanic, Deep Impact, Armageddon, the Corps, the Day After Tomorrow, to name a few. Critically, the movie was praised for its visuals and panned for its story. Yeah. It was nominated for two. Academy Awards, best visual effects and best sound, but lost them to Independence Day and the English patient, respectively.

Yeah, there's a lot of war in that. Yeah. It also won a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Written Film grossing over $100 million, which I do think it deserved. And it also, I don't think this is fair, Jamie Gertz was nominated for worst supporting actress. Not her fault? It's not her fault at all. She was given absolutely nothing to do.

This movie was also extremely successful in the home video space. It was the first DVD released in North America. The town of Wakita, where they actually filmed, maintains a Twister museum to this day. It also led to a ride at Universal Studios, Florida, called Twister, Elypsis, Ride It Out. Okay. That is what they do in this movie. They just decide they're just going to sit and wait through the tornado, which is, not really what you're supposed to do.

Helen Hunt went on to win an Academy Award for her work in as good as it gets. So this movie seems to have helped her. She has fond memories of it. As recently as two years ago, she said she held a screening of the movie in her yard just for fun. And so it seems like she has a good relationship with it. Now, Bill Paxton, as we know, settled into a polygamous lifestyle via HBO's Big Love. He also was a big favorite in the storm chasing community. He narrated Stormchacer Sean Casey's 2011 documentary Tornado Alley.

And a lot of the storm chasers that grew up in the 90s actually credit this movie with being what attracted them to the hobby and the profession. Oh, that's cool. So after he died in February of 2017, hundreds of storm chasers and storm spotters used their markers on what's called the spotter network to spell out Bill Paxton's initials across the states of Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Which I thought was very sweet. Obviously, Steven Spielberg went on to continue to be Steven Spielberg. Yes. Well, we do have to call out another loss too soon that we've been discussing in this as well,

which, of course, is Philip Seymour Hoffman. And it is a treat to see him having fun in a role and having so much fun. Just I feel like he got no direction in the best way. Yes. Which leaves our director, Yon. DeBant. So since making Twister, DeBant has only directed three films, none of which were particularly well-received. DeBant's first opportunity to direct was very much a sliding doors moment. Had John McTiernan decided to direct speed, DeBant may have remained a cinematographer. And so his career was

similarly derailed by fate. While in post-production on Twister, DeBont already had his next movie set up with Amblin. Any guesses, Lizzie? No, I'm out of guesses this episode. My brain is not working. What was it? It's a Tom Cruise movie from the early 2000s. Oh, Jerry McGuire? That's from the 90s. Oh my God. See, this is, don't let me guess. I don't know. Minority report. Minority report. Which scene in Spielberg directed. Jan DeBont had been developing the script with Michael Tolkien and David Self. And while he was in post-production on Twister, Spielberg approached DeBont and said that Tom Cruz was interested in making that movie, but only available for a limited window.

DeBant, knowing he wouldn't be ready to shoot when Cruz was ready, accepted Spielberg's offer to switch movies. Whoa. Spielberg had been planning on directing. Lois Smith across both. Yes, she grows the plants in Minority Report. Spielberg, though, had been planning on directing a very different movie than Minority Report, and the movie that DeBont took on that Spielberg got off his plate, The Haunting.

Oh, oh. Which we're going to have an episode on. So we'll get back to Yon DeBant later this season. Stephen. You... Stephen Spielberg is a sneaky switcheroo. A sneaky switcheroo. Took Minority Report, hand it off the haunting.

Yeah, that's not a good deal. But anyway, more on that another day. For today, it's time for us to get to what went right. So, Lizzie, you just saw Twister for the first time. Yeah. In your mind, what went right with this movie? I really enjoyed getting to watch Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bill Paxton on screen, having a good time and just, you know, sort of in their heyday to a certain degree. It was fun.

It was fun to see two people that we lost way too early in a fun context. So I would say that. And I'll also say what went right that I've learned over the course of this episode, which was Helen. Hunt's decision to not have the women fight and that sequence with the with the coffee where she just buys her coffee and walks out it did make an impression and I like the idea that they were the ones that made that happen I agree my what went right was is Helen Hunt I think she's great in this movie and she is very dynamic she's very captivating they in a way it's feels a little progressive. Now, it's very not progressive in a lot of ways that Bill Paxton is

treating his fiancee, but she's actually, I feel like in the romantic dynamic, she's doing, she gets to play the kind of I'm Over It, aloof character that typically has been given to men throughout, you know, Hollywood history. And she handles it wonderfully. And I think she shoulders this movie and proves she can carry a big movie. And I just, I think she's a wonderful actress. And I really liked watching her in this. I thought she was really, good. Yeah, I agree. She pulls off like a really dumb situation in terms of their relationship and she makes

it believable, which is really hard. Absolutely. Well, guys, that wraps up our coverage of 1996's Twister. As we mentioned, we will be covering a number of films that intersect with this film down the line, but

we've gotten some new reviews lately. And guys, we need to talk about these. Because Some of them are great, but most of them we're frustrated by. The quality is not there. We need you guys to step up your game. I don't agree.

I had some favorites that I definitely wanted to shout out. One of them is from my, well, I'll just, I'll let the review read itself. I would love and listen to what went wrong, even if I didn't assistant coach Lizzie's middle school cub volleyball team. But seriously, folks, I'm no film nerd. And this podcast is hilarious, well written, well researched, engaging. very entertaining. Thanks for all your hard work. Congrats on an amazing show. Can't wait for season three. P.S. In middle school, Lizzie dressed up as bubble gum on the bottom of a

shoe, and I knew she was destined for greatness. That's right. That is from Gray M. I don't know if you want your full name, shout it out, but you know who you are. You were an amazing assistant volleyball coach, and it was nice to hear from you. Very good. From J. Ram, love it. Don't need to have seen the movie to enjoy the episode. I'm way behind, so I hope they still berate the viewers. We do, Jay, and your review lacked in substance. So just wanted you to know that. This one, you know, one of them hurt my feelings a little bit. Love the content, but Chris needs to work more. That's from KMB352. You know, I assure you, no one feels that way more strongly than I do. I was going to say, sir, do you think Chris is actively avoiding work? Yeah, no, no, no. I don't need to review

myself on this podcast. This reviewer did call me out and said that my understanding of set is iffy at best. I would disagree. I think it's subpar. But if this individual who is a first AD is interested in educating us, we are always open to improving the quality of the content that we give our listeners. So to CanB352 in all earnestness, yes, you did hurt my feelings, but I'm willing to look past that if you would like to have a conversation with us about your experience as a first AD. Please send us an email to what went wrong at what went wrong pod at gmail.com. God, Chris, you can't even get the name of our email, right?

Chris, you're fired. Well, you know, I don't work very much. You're hired. Yeah, exactly. You're replacing me. But anyway, guys, keep the reviews coming. We really appreciate it. We now have a Patreon going.

check it out if that's of interest to you. Of course, no pressure whatsoever. All we ask is that if you have not yet subscribed to our podcast, please do so. If you're enjoying it, recommend it to a friend, family member, stranger, Uber driver, whoever. We very much appreciate you taking the time to hang out with us. Yes, and keep sending us suggestions. I love getting them. I love talking to you all on Instagram. It's usually me or David. talking to you. It's sometimes Chris, but not very often. All right, guys. Tune in next week for a special below the line release and in two weeks for our next regularly scheduled episode. Bye. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, video content, and more. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonon, with cover art from

Thaunni U.S.