WHAT WENT WRONG - V for Vendetta

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

This week, join Chris and Lizzie as they learn how the two Midwestern mavens of the Matrix (facing diminishing box office returns), an unassuming Aussie assistant director, and mogul of mayhem Joel Silver spin Alan Moore’s decidedly English anarchist manifesto (starring a bomb-happy, building-blasting, Guy Fawkes fanatic) into a post-9/11 American studio spectacle. Plus, Natalie Portman's shaved head, practical dominoes, and James Purefoy's desperate desire for eyes.*CORRECTIONS: Natalie Portman was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, not Best Actress, for her role in "Closer". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a politically charged, perhaps risky one to make, I would assume, but I think a very good one. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, as always, joined by Chris Winterbauer. Chris, how you doing? What do you got for us today? I'm doing fantastic. We are discussing a favorite of mine, actually, which is 2006's V for Vendetta, as Lizzie mentioned, a very politically charged film, although not charged enough in the eyes of some. And we will get to many of the interesting philosophical debates around the film and its intentions and the intentions of its creators and the original graphic novel behind it. But mostly Lizzie, this film set the world on fire due to Natalie Portman's. shaved head. I'm not sure if you remember that, but it was a... I do remember it. It was a very big deal. Gotta tell you, she looks great with a shaved head. I wish I looked like that with a shaved head. I would not have hair. She does. Still beautiful, even with the shaved head. And rocked it at can

back in 2005. So she was, she was sporting and in public. I have one quick question before we start, which is how old is she in this? Natalie Portman was born in 1981, so she would have been 24 or 25 when they were shooting V for Vendetta. So, Lizzie, had you seen V for V for Vendetta before, and what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast? Yes, I had seen it. I'm pretty sure I saw this in theaters when it came out, or if not, shortly thereafter, via a rental.

I remember thinking when it came out that I was like, that was fun, but that feels very overblown. I understand that they're trying to, you know, make a political message with this, but in all of my genius at however old I was 16 years old, I was like, this feels like a bit much. However, upon rewatching it in 2025, I was like, oh, oh, no, it's all happening. It feels more of its moment now, I think, than it did when it came out in 2005. And I really enjoyed it.

I enjoyed it both times. I think I enjoyed it more this time. Yeah, I also saw this movie in theaters. I was in Remain, a huge Wachowski sisters fan. The Matrix was for so many millennial folks defining. I realized I was living in the Matrix this whole time, which I still, I stand by that movie. I think it's arguably the most influential film of the 90s, and we'll talk more about that. By the way, I will not derail us farther on this, but the irony of the fact that something that the Wachowski sisters created spawned the Reddit threads of Red Pill.

Just my mind cannot wrap itself around that. Now, I'm sure like many people had been kind of let down by the Matrix sequels. I enjoyed reloaded. Revolutions was a bit of a bit of a soupy mess by the end. And so I was really excited for V for Vendata, even though the Wichowski's did not direct it, as we'll discuss. But I saw it in theaters, and I really loved it, even though I didn't understand so much about it. In particular, the anti-LGBQ sentiments of the government that the Wichowskis were clearly exploring, and especially the Valerie sequence that comes midway through the movie. Lizzie, I'm sure you remember this. This is the sequence in which Natalie Portman's character, Evie, is reading the letter from what

was revealed to be V's former cellmate or one sellover, who was a lesbian actress, and she's telling her life story, and she has a very beautiful explanation of kind of the last inch of her own integrity, which no one can take from her. So it's a movie that I've rewatched over the years, and it's just grown and grown on me. I think it's a little flawed. I think it's a little campy at times. Totally. There are some structural issues, but I find it kind of equally thrilling and emotional and brainy at the same time, and I think that's a really potent combination. And I just, I still, I cried when I rewatched at this. I just, I love so much about this movie, and I read the graphic novel that it's based on, and I now appreciate the criticism of the

film more, and yet I still love the movie. And we'll get to all of the decisions that were made to change it. And Lizzie, you mentioned how prescient it is. Decisions that the Wachewski's made, both made it more prescient, but also there are things from the graphic novel that were omitted that will get to that are also very prescient today. I have one bone to pick with this movie. Please. And I love her. Pick away.

I think she's a great actress most of the time. I know what you're going for. I know what she's getting at. Governor. Yeah. Natalie Portman's British accent is pretty rough in this. Which, you know what? By the time we were halfway through, I was like, nah, I don't care. But at the beginning, I was like, ooh. Oh. I think her performance is great.

Even Chris, master of accents, as you guys know. struggles a little bit with it. It was, we'll just get it out of the way now. It's bad. It offended UK critics much more than American critics. It did end up on a number of lists of worst accents, you know, of the year, even though her performance was praised. I think that is fair criticism. It's rough. Are you like a crazy person? Yeah. Everything sort of sounds like theirs. And it verged on like a Boston Mark Wahlberg accent at times. It was loose. I just, I blame it on George Lucas. She was coming off of Star Wars where she had been like pushed to no affect whatsoever. And so she was just exploring the

expressiveness of the human voice in this film. Of course. All right. A brief disclaimer, Lizzie. I will be quoting author Alan Moore a number of times in this episode. If you guys are unfamiliar with Alan Moore, he is prone to at times flowery, you could call it hyperbolic depending on your sensibilities offensive language at times maybe reflective of a different era, at others indicative of his more anarchic sensibilities. I will not be censoring his speech in any way. Okay. Just wanted to get that out of the way.

All right. The details. V for Vendetta is a 2006 dystopian thriller directed by James McTeague. It is based on the graphic novel by an uncredited, Alan Moore, and the credited David Lloyd, adapted for the screen by the Wichowski sisters.

It was produced by Joel Silver and Grant Hill. It stars Natalie Portman as E.V. Hampton. Stephen Ray as Chief Inspector Finch, Stephen Fry as Gordon Dietrich, John Hurt as Adam Suttler, and of course, Hugo Weaving as the eponymous V. It was distributed by Warner Brothers, and the IMDB logline reads,

In a future British dystopian society, a shadowy freedom fighter, known only by the alias of V, plots to overthrow the tyrannical government with the help of a young woman. Okay, I have one. One other bone to pick with this that I forgot to mention. All right.

We're just picking them bones. Please. I don't love that there are romantic implications. And I don't know if that's in the graphic novel or not. That's the one thing in this movie that doesn't really work for me is when it's, you know, she's sort of like kissing him at the end. And it's like, it's crossed the boundary from sort of either companion, you know, teacher, student to something that's trying to be kind of like they're in love. And I just don't buy it. it doesn't work for me.

So it's interesting you mention that because I definitely saw that as a complaint of fans of the graphic novel on some of the early message boards that I was looking at around the film. But then I read the graphic novel and interestingly enough,

Evie does kiss V kisses his mask in the back half of the graphic novel. But to your point, I think in the graphic novel it's played much more as a moment of gratitude following Vee freeing her mind after her imprisonment. And there really isn't a romantic valence.

And for me, I agree. One of the reasons it feels odd in the film is I always read V's character as gay. I don't know if that's right. I just, since in the film, it's minorities and the LGBTQ community that are being rounded up at Lark Hill. I just assume that because V's voiced by a white man, he must be a non-hetero white man. Again, I may be way off base. And listeners, if you disagree with us or if you have some insider information, Please shoot us a note.

What Went Wrong, Pod at Gmail.com. All right, sources for today's episode include but are not limited to, Magic Words, The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore by Lance Parkin, interviews with Alan Moore, David Lloyd, James McTeague, the Wachowski sisters, although those are really hard to come by. They're very private.

Coverage from the New York Times, vulture, various trades, and more. And I'd like to give a special shout-out to writer, academic, and critic, Elizabeth Sandifer, and her site, at Routatorumpress.com, her insights into Alan Moore, Viva Vendetta, Trans Representation, and more were really illuminating and helpful as I was putting together this episode. So, the question remains, Lizzie, how did two Midwestern Mavens of the Matrix facing diminishing box office returns,

an unassuming Aussie assistant director, and, as we've mentioned, Muggle of Mayhem, Joel Silver, spin Alan Moore's decidedly English anarchist manifesto starring a bomb-happy building blasting Guy Fox fanatic into a post-9-11 American studio spectacle. Yeah. Right? Yes. And it is very British still,

which I think also may have been why watching it at 16, I was like, I don't know what that building is. Well, Alan Moore would say it's not British at all, but we'll get into his criticisms. And what went wrong? Much as we will learn along the way. to getting this movie made. So, the story behind V's mask

begins a few thousand miles away from Hollywood Lizzie in the United Kingdom, where a man named Des Skin was struggling to achieve what nearly all our characters yearn for in this story, control. Des, known as the British Stan Lee, had left Marvel Comics in 1981

to produce his own comics magazine, Warrior. At this time, most, but not all, Marvel UK comics were just reprints of American material. And so Skin wanted to showcase British characters made by British creators. He wanted the creators to retain the rights to their work. Des's desire to create something independent

seems to have stemmed from a character that he was asked to make in 1979 for Marvel called Night Raven. Night Raven began as a violent, moody period piece. It was a descendant of the shadow and the spirit. These were 30s and 40s, Pulp Magazine and comic heroes with alter egos that fought crime and beat the, crap out of the bad guys and got knocked down a lot. And Night Raven was evocative of a V in a couple of ways.

Perhaps most obviously, he had an emblem on his chest that was a V encased in a circle. It was supposed to evoke the wings of a sparrow. Now, Stan Lee wasn't a fan, and he basically stripped everything that Deskin liked from this character in comic strip. He toned down the violence. He changed the art style. So Warrior Magazine is designed to fix these problems.

Artists should not be forced to self-censor and compromise. So Des invites David Lloyd, who had been the original artist on Night Raven, to make a new Night Raven-type series for Warrior Magazine. Uncompromising, morally ambiguous, anarchic, and David Lloyd knows exactly who he needs to bring in to write this comic. Alan Moore. Now, Lizzie, I'm sure you know Alan Moore's name from one comic, probably in particular. he's most famous for?

I don't. Okay, Watchman. Okay, okay. Duh. He's widely known as the mind behind Watchman. And I would argue, a deconstruction of superhero tropes, generally speaking. Okay. As Parkin writes in his book, many of his early series imposed realism on hokey characters

like Marvel Man, Swamp Thing, Batman and the Joker, reimagining their storybook worlds as unsentimental places of midlife crisis, economic reality, and brutal, often sexual violence. End quote. So Moore was always willing to color outside the lines when it came to comic books. He was born in November of 1953 into a working class family. He's a voracious reader, first books, then comic strips. He lost interest in school. He basically thinks school is just trying to indoctrinate me with punctuality and obedience, and I am not interested in that. He made his own fanzine. He got expelled for dealing LSD. He called himself the world's most inept LSD dealer,

which makes sense he got caught. He then drifted through low-wade's jobs until sometime around 1978 when he decided he was going to have a go at an artistic career. And so the next few years, he's writing, drawing, collecting unemployment. He gets married, he has his first daughter, Leah, by this point,

and he quickly realized he's a better writer than he is artist. And so he's going to focus more on writing and partner with artists. So the comic community quickly realized that Moore was very, very talented, and that he had a very different voice. So he started writing for Marvel, UK,

and then 2000 AD, which was a British sci-fi weekly comic magazine, and he honed his storytelling through these four to five-page stories that he was being offered. But he really wanted a dedicated strip. He wanted something of his own, a longer-form story that he could tell.

So Veefer Vendetta was not his first ongoing story, but it's arguably the story in which he began to reach the extraordinary highs, the potential that people saw in. him. And so Lloyd brings Moore in, and Moore's intrigued by Lloyd's pitch. And there was even a character that he'd worked on back in the 70s that kind of fit the mold for this story called the doll. And I'll read the description here. The doll was, quote, a freakish terrorist in white-faced makeup who waged a war upon a totalitarian state sometime in the late 1980s. He had created

it for a competition for D.C. Thompson. And, quote, D.C. Thompson decided a transsexual terrorist wasn't quite what they were looking for, end quote. So Moore has a good sense of humor with most of these things, and he knows that he's playing outside the sandbox that most people will accept. So he also drew from a character called Five, Trapped in an Abandon's Space Opera Project, and this idea was basically a mental patient of undefined but unusual abilities who had been kept in a particular room, Room 5. So you can start to see these characters coalescing into what V will be. He came up with a little bit of. with the name Vendetta and wanted to set the strip in the 1930s.

But David Lloyd said, no, no, no, no, no, pull it up to the 90s. We don't want to get boxed in. It's better to write into the future where we can make up the rules of our world. Smart. And we can avoid doing extensive research about the 1930s, which sounds like a slog. Lloyd pulled from a sample that he'd created, which featured an urban gorilla, G-U-E-R-I-L-L-A. Yeah, I figured that out. Well, it's comic.

You never know. That's true. fighting future fascists in the 1990s in a totalitarian state. And so Alan Moore loved this, anti-fascist comic. It uses science fiction to talk about threats to the present. And this is all under Thatcher's very conservative British government. The Iron Lady, yes. So it was David Lloyd who came up with V's iconic mask.

They were struggling to nail down the look of the character, and he pitched the guy Fox mask as a joke. So was that a common mask prior to this? I'm so glad you asked. And if there are any friends across the pond, listening, feel free to send us a note at What Went WrongPod at gmail.com with any corrections here, but I think I understand this, generally speaking. So the gunpowder plot was an attempt by a group of Catholics to assassinate King James in the name of opposing religious oppression. So this was

obviously post-Reformation. Protestantism is the name of the game in the United Kingdom and Catholics are feeling like they are being put down. The plot fails and a year later on November 5th, 1606, the state mandates a big celebration, bonfires church services to celebrate the survival of the king and the failure of the plot, and they burn effigies of Guy Fox. This then metastasizes over the years and morphs into a more secular celebration that by the 1980s is something not dissimilar, it seems like, from Halloween, right? Children get masks of Guy Fox, they're usually made out of paper, and he's become kind of a generic arch villain bogeyman. I don't get the sense that there's a strong political valence associated with the mask at the time that Moore and Lloyd are using it for

their graphic novel. Which is interesting, he'd kind of become a joke, even though Guy Fawkes was no joke. He was described by author Antonia Frazier as a man of action, capable of intelligent argument as well as physical endurance, somewhat to the surprise of his enemies. Could be a really good description for V, I would say. Now, Alan Moore thought this was a brilliant idea. It tied together the whole Britishness of the entire plot because this is a very British symbol. Quick aside, Guy Fawkes was not the leader of the gunpowder plot, Lizzie. This was an attempt to assassinate King James by blowing up the House of Lords on November 5th, 1605, but he was the one who was caught guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder red-handed. He was the only one caught red-handed, and so he became

synonymous with the plot, hence his face. Got it. So the least talented guy in the plot is... Well, sorry, that's terrible. Listen, Guy Fawkes, you did it. I'm just saying, if it's the one you caught, he's probably not the mastermind. Okay. But to be fair to Guy Fox, four of his co-conspirators were killed a few days after the plot was discovered in a shootout with the Sheriff of Worcester, and then eight were eventually hanged, drawn, and quartered in January of 1606. That included Fox. And there's one additional conspirator who I believe died of an illness in the intervening months between discovery and execution. The least talented terrorist, yes.

Moore and Lloyd wanted a strip that was as morally ambiguous and complex as it was starkly illustrated. And the illustration style is really cool on this, Lizzie. It's evocative of something like Sin City that would come a lot later. All high contrast black and white. The original had no color. And then the story is all shades of gray. Lizzie, in this morassive gray morality, Moore could play with a highly explosive political idea that he held close to his heart.

And one that honestly I didn't know a lot about as a political movement, until I was researching this episode, which is anarchy, specifically anarchism. So I'm going to play you a clip of more speaking on BBC 4's Comics Britannia series on anarchism, the rejection of formal coercive authority, as it's described back in 2007. Anarchy is, and always has been, a romance. It is clearly the best way and the only morally sensible. way to run the world.

That everybody should be the master of their own destiny. Everybody should be their own leader. This is something that I still believe. I think that even a cursory look around the world at the moment, particularly at the moment, would reveal that it is about 0.000-0-0-0-1% of the world's population.

that causes 99.99.99% of the world's problems. And that tiny percentage, it's not the Jewish banking conspiracy. It's not the asylum seekers. It's not the secret homosexual conspiracy running Hollywood. It's not even the Scientologists. It is leaders. I really like more. He's very charismatic.

He's very droll. Scientology is an interesting example in that, set up, though, I would argue, considering, you know, he says it's not even the Scientologist, it's the leaders, but within Scientology, I think you have a very particular example of what the problems of unregulated power can be. You raise an excellent point, which is, anarchism seeks the abolishment of hierarchy and power structures and specifically power hoarding. And that is very important to more, and I think important to the story. And I don't think is something that comes through.

in the film and is a big point of contention. And we'll talk about, I think, what the Wachowski's were specifically trying to do and how it differs from more. So interestingly, Lloyd, David Lloyd, the artist behind Veefer Vendetta, didn't believe that anarchism was possible. He feels, and has said, that there has never been an instance of human self-organizing in which people didn't turn to somebody else for instruction. So we always prop somebody up as a leader. So I believe that even though Moore holds it out as an ideal, Lloyd suggests, we don't exist in natural, cooperative, tribe-like states like that. We actually are our own worst enemies.

I think that's true. In the terms of electing leadership. So this tension between the two, I think, helped power the story and helped more challenge his own beliefs. As he later said, quote, I didn't want to just come into this as a self-confessed anarchist and say, right, here's this anarchist, he is the good guy. Here's all these bad fascists. They're the bad guys.

I mean, that's trivial and insulting to the reader. I wanted to present some of the fascists as being ordinary and in some instances even likable human beings." End quote. And so I do want to say, probably the biggest difference between the film and the graphic novel is the fact that the bad guys in the film are far more outlandishly portrayed

and I would argue kind of more one-note Nazi-esque characters than in the graphic novel, which is a much more complicated assortment of folks, as he said, doing terrible. things for at times understandable reasons. I'm assuming, Lizzie, you've never read the comic. No, I've not. Or the graphic novel before.

So let's briefly discuss some of the differences. Guys, if you want to read the graphic novel and avoid spoilers, scrub about a minute and a half, two minutes from now. But I think it's important to understand. So, comic is set in the late 1990s. Film takes place in the 2020s. The precipitating events of the story are not a synthesized pandemic as they are in the film. It's nuclear annihilation and thus nuclear winter in the comics.

in the graphic novel, I mean, very much a Cold War feel. Okay. Norsefire, the same political group in both, is clearly a white supremacist group, first and foremost, in the graphic novel. They rise from the vacuum of a gang-controlled society after the government has fallen. Homosexuals are mentioned as a targeted group,

and you still have the Valerie sequence right in the middle, but Norsefire's focus is just as much, if not more, on other racial groups. And so the purity propaganda is very much racial purity in the graphic novel. Okay. There are tons of subplots that get omitted from the film because it's a much more complicated story. Perhaps most important, Evie is 16 in the graphic novel. She is an orphan who is resorting to prostitution when we meet her at the beginning of the story.

So Lizzie, when she's going to meet Gordon Dietrich in the beginning of the film, on kind of a date, maybe a casting couch sort of situation, she assumes. In the comic, graphic novel, she's actually going to solicit a man for basically offering her services in an attempt to survive, and she inadvertently propositions a fingerman in the alley, they're going to murder her, and V saves her. So similar setup, she's much younger. She arcs from frightened child to V's ideological error. She literally takes up his mask at the end and becomes the next V. Like you mentioned, it's a much more pseudo-parent child, teacher, mentor-mente relationship than in the film.

I'm getting Leon the Professional vibes more versus what they show in the movie. Or at least the American cut of Leon the Professional. I have not seen the French cut, but I've heard. It's actually more erotic in that one, unfortunately. Okay, very important. The graphic novel features a mainframe computer called Fate, which the government uses

to hoover up all of the information that they're collecting through its surveillance state, and it's even so powerful it can predict short-term probabilistic events, like rainfall and traffic and civil unrest. It's very evocative of artificial intelligence or a large learning model. And so even though it was eliminated from the feature, when you reread the graphic novel,

it actually feels very prescient for today. Adam Susan, not Settler, is the supreme leader who basically controls fate, the computer, and he's basically in love with this computer. It's a very interesting relationship, anthropomorphized relationship. They composite a bunch of villains into one henchmen, creedy, you know, in the film. And then, again, perhaps most importantly, V does not seek to create something new or to revert power to the people. He literally seeks to destroy the existing

hierarchy and institutions to reduce everything to rubble so that somebody can then make something new after he's deceased. Okay. So he sees his role as destroyer to make room for creator. I think that comes through a bit in the end of the movie, the very, very end. Yeah, I do think the film, what they're saying is, I would argue the film calls for liberal revolution, and liberal revolution is reclaiming power from the government. Anarchist revolution is destruction of the state so that people can rebuild a flat organization. Got it. You know, on top of it. All right.

First chapter of V for Vendetta is published in March of 1982 in Warrior Magazine. And as early as 1984, Lloyd says that he and Moore were interested in potentially selling it as a movie or TV series, basically, for you. money. Lloyd says they went as far as sending out proposals, but they never solicited any interest, probably because this was very explosive anarchist anti-conservative material during Thatcher's, you know. Does not scream commercially profitable. It doesn't. It also looks very expensive. This is a vast world that they're exploring. So Moore says for his part that he was always dismissive of adaptations. He believes that he created it as a graphic novel. It should exist as a graphic novel. So Vee for Fendetta continues through February of 1985 as a serial, but Warrior Magazine collapsed and the story was left unfinished.

The Valerie chapter was actually the second to last chapter to be published. So then in the meantime, Moore has been working with D.C. on Swamp Thing and Superman. And in late 1986, we're going to meet one of our longtime friends of the pod. Moore and artist Dave Gibbons of Watchman, Dave Gibbons illustrated Watchman, met with DC president, Jeanette Kahn in London to discuss a potential watchman movie with an explosive American producer Joel Silver. Joel Silver.

We're going to make it an action film. So, fresh off 48 hours' commando and weird science and about to go into Predator, Silver asked Moore to write a watchman script for 20th Century Fox under Lawrence Gordon's Largo Entertainment. But more passed. He just said, I'm too busy. And he just clearly was not interested

in movies. Silver was undeterred. He optioned watchmen and the incomplete V for Vendetta. So even though he's bombastic, he's excessive in his taste, both on screen and off, silver's always had a very keen eye for, I think, smart action fair. He does. So he later said, when I bought it, no one knew what they had. They didn't know what they had. V was then only available in England. It hadn't come to America yet. So we acquired them both. And over the years, I was not able to hold on to Watchman, but I did hold on to V. And so basically it sounds like what happened was Silver ended up going to Warner Brothers, the Largo deal under 20th Century Fox, I think ended or fell apart.

He fell off the legal chain of title with Watchman, but he was able to bring V with him to Warner Brothers, probably because nobody else was as interested as he was. Watchman was the obvious movie to adapt. I think V was the more difficult one. Well, and Watchman was a much more independently successful graphic novel, right? It was. Yes. V was successful, but not nearly, as successful as Watchmen. I should also mention that Time Warner is the parent company of both Warner

Brothers and D.C. So keep that in mind as we move forward. So V for Vendetta is unfinished, and in early 1988, D.C. and Moore come to an agreement. Basically, they'll pay for him to finish V for Vendetta, and then when they stop publishing it, the rights will revert to him. So he will own it after they stop printing it, basically. Pretty good deal. So he and Lloyd complete the series and the first color issues hit U.S. shelves later that year, and it is worth mentioning, this is a moment when anti-homosexual discrimination was peaking in the United Kingdom. So this was largely as a result of the, or in response to, the AIDS crisis. And I do want to mention specifically Clause 28 or Section 28, which was passed in the spring of 1988 was an amendment that said, a local authority

shall not, A, intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with that intention, and B, promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. Wow. And this actually, it's interesting, Moore had, in some senses, predicted the future with the Valerie sequence. I assumed the Valerie sequence was written after Clause 28. He had written it almost four years before. And so, again, more ahead of the times in a dark sense. So they finished V for Vendetta in 89, and basically Moore's relationship with D.C. falls apart really quickly.

And it seems like what it boils down to is he realized that D.C. saying the rights would revert to him was bullshit. They would just print V for Vendetta and Watchmen in limited quantities forever to make sure that he would never get the rights back to either of these properties. As he said, you have managed to successfully swindle me, and so I will never work for you again. And he left D.C. Wow. So meanwhile, Joel Silver commissioned a draft. That was, according to David Lloyd, a disaster. Just how he likes him.

I couldn't find this draft, but Lizzie, you mentioned how British it is. Well, it seems like Joel Silver agreed, and this is Moore's description of the draft. Quote, they were going to change it to Paul Revere, and it wasn't going to happen in London because that's just going to confuse Americans who can't remember that there's more than one country in the world. Sure can't. So perhaps it's going to be set in New York and that political stuff about fascism that doesn't really play. So we'll have an American that's taking. taken over by the commies.

Next up was Roadhouse Scribe, Hillary Henkin. She moved to the action back to the United Kingdom, but it seems like she went a little over the top with some of the sci-fi satirical stuff. It's unclear if it's like a dark comedy anymore. I wasn't able to find a copy of this version, but I found some summaries that seem reliable. So like the Norse Fire Division headquarters,

the ear, the nose, et cetera, right, which are meant to denote listening, watching, are literally shaped like their names. The ear looks like an ear. The nose looks like a nose. Good. The fingermen are half-goat, half-human hybrids. What?

Don't know why. Where'd they come from? Unclear. Evie is tortured by the government, so V does not torture her in this version. He's also revealed to be her father, which is like a one-page, like, red herring they faint at in the graphic novel, but they just go for it here. They do age her up, and she's a TV employee, I believe, in this one, so that did survive. and V is more emotional and eccentric,

which is also something that I think survives to the Wichowski sisters' film. V is far more cold and ideologically driven in the graphic novel than in the final. Less driven by the Count of Monte Cristo? Yes. Yeah, he's far more eccentric. I like it in the film. He has shades of gray gardens in the movie.

I love it. Yeah, he's going crazy in the shadow gallery, as it's called. It was described as Le Miserab meets a clockwork orange in an L.A. Times article from 1919. And it's interesting is there is a spray-painted image of the little girl from Le Miserables on one of the walls during a riot towards the end of the graphic novel. They say they're seeking a strong director, maybe Terry Gilliam, perhaps Paul Verhoeven. Again, Alan Moore hated it. Quote, as I said at the time, if you wanted to do a film about goat policemen, then why the fuck didn't you just buy the option to Rupert Bear?

End quote. Goat policemen. So good. So the project fails to find a director. or it doesn't attract financing. Because Little did Silver or Alan Moore know, the minds that would bring V for Vendetta to the screen were also working in the comics, Lizzie,

just not at D.C., but at Marvel. So like Alan Moore, in the early 90s, the Wachowski sisters were learning that everything came down to control. The Chicago-born sisters had dropped out of college in the late 1980s, started a construction and house painting business, and then decided to take a crack at screenwriting after reading Roger Corman's How I Made a Hundred-Eyne. movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime.

Has there ever been someone on this podcast that didn't learn from Roger Corman? No, and it's the best. So they wrote comics for Marvel while working on their original scripts, most importantly for this moment, The Matrix, of course, and Assassins. Now, by 1994, they'd finished the scripts, landed an agent, signed a multi-script deal with Warner Brothers under the control of Lorenzo de Bonavut, at the time, and Joel Silver. Joel Silver was an early fan

of the Wichowski's writing and The Matrix. From the outside, this looked like a fairy tale. From the inside, not so much. Assassins, which I'm sure you haven't seen. Sure haven't. Was their first film to make it to the screen. It's not very good. I think it's pretty fun.

It stars Sylvester Stallone as the haunted number one assassin in the world, which has said multiple times. Like there's a ranking, and he is number one. All right. I'm warming. up to it. Yeah, it's kind of John Wick before John Wick, but before they figured out how to make it good at all. Antonio Benderas is his biggest fan and number one rival, and Julianne Moore is Seattle-based

computer hacker, Elektra, and she's Sylvester's next target. I'm not not in. And it's directed by Richard Donner. It's so out there. So basically, the finished movie doesn't really resemble the script that the Wachowski's had written. And they shared in a rare 1996 interview that they were deeply disappointed with this process. This is Lana. The film was not really based on the screenplay. The one thing that sort of bothered us is that people would blame us for the screenplay. And it's like Richard Donner is one of the few directors in Hollywood that can make whatever movie he wants exactly the way he wants it. No one will stop him, and that's essentially what happened. He brought in Brian Helgeland, who is maybe best known for LA Confidential. He hadn't

written that at the time, but now. And they totally rewrote the script. We tried to take our names off of it, but the WGA doesn't let you, so our names are forever there. And I verified that, so they did try to separate themselves from the project. For good reason, it did not perform very well, it was panned by critics, Stallone got a razzie, and the Wachowski's learned a valuable lesson. If they wanted to tell stories their way, if they wanted control, they had to direct. So they obviously wanted to direct The Matrix, but Warner Brothers wasn't going to let that happen, not with the budget that the Wachowski's were demanding

to make that film the right way. It was going to be a $70 million movie and first-time directors, it's a big ask. Now, Warner Brothers Lizzie did not make any money off of Assessons, but executive producer Dino DeLorentes did. He basically, I believe, optioned the script, flipped it to Warner Brothers for a bunch of money, pre-sold the foreign rights,

and, like, walked away with millions before everybody else lost money on it. That man made so much money. He's a mastermind. He's a mastermind of stankers, too, of, like, making money off of stankers. He is. Good for him. Oh, 100%. He had a soft spot for the Wichowski's, so they approached him about directing their next film.

But they were nervous because the movie was about lesbians. And Dino de Larentes is an old school patriarch. As Lana said in 1996, we were sort of beating around the bush trying to explain it. There's a woman, and then there's another woman. Dino stopped us and was like, in an Italian accent, this is the first woman, she is a lesbian? And we were like, yeah, this is a second woman, she is a lesbian? Yeah, she was.

Then he claps his hands together and says, done, we have a deal. And thus, 1996's Bound was born, which, guys, if you have not seen, I cannot recommend it enough. You can absolutely see how the Wachowski's are establishing their visual style. It stars a fantastic Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly. as two women who strike up a passionate love affair and plan on lifting $2 million in mob money off of Tilly's boyfriend, Joe Pantleiano, Joey Pants, who just showed up in The Last of Us.

Joey Pants, of course, also shows up in The Matrix as well. Exactly, as Cipher. Also, shout out to Jennifer Tilly for being one of the best friend of's ever on Beverly Hills Housewives. Absolutely. Maker a full cast member. Continue. It's a really, really tight, taught little erotic thriller

of the 90s. It's very underrated. So, sometime around this moment, the Wachowski sisters are under a writing contract for Warner Brothers. They're pushing to get a chance to direct the Matrix. Joel Silver hands them a graphic novel to take a crack at. Fee for Vendetta. So the Wichowski's give it a go. David Lloyd actually said of this version that it stuck very close to the source material. I did read some reviews that kind of panned it, but I haven't been able to get a copy of it.

Bound comes out in late 1996. It's not a commercial hit, but it is a critical hit. and it proved that the Wachowski's could direct. And it really does. It's stylish. It's noir. It's sexy. So six months later,

and what they had to do in those six months is a story for The Matrix, they got the Matrix greenlit. V for Vendetta is pushed to the side. Of course, Lizzie, the Matrix is a culture-shifting smash. Yes. Warner Brothers and Silver Pictures

quickly signed the Wichowski's to a much more lucrative, long-term deal. And in 1999, the L.A. Times speculated that V for V for Vendetta could be their next film. But of course, Warner Brothers said, absolutely not.

We need to make two more Matrix films as soon as possible and release them within six months of each other to capitalize on this money train before it leaves the station. So four years, two more films, over 300 shooting days, one short film anthology, one documentary, multiple comics, and a video game later. The Wachowski's were a tour millionaires, and they were... They need a nap.

They were exhausted. So in 2003, they're in post-production on the Matrix Revolutions, and I want to make clear they're exceedingly private people, and increasingly so across the production of the Matrix trilogy. According to some sources, they hadn't given an interview in four years. The official production notes on the original Matrix said that the two, quote, have been working together for more than 30 years. Little else is known about them, end quote.

And I think Warner Brothers liked that the mystery of the Witchhouskies helped fuel the fandom for the films, right? The films are loaded with Easter eggs and references to other films and martial arts and philosophy. It's very much a pastiche, and I think people liked observing and trying to figure out

what's going on with those Wachowski's. They're so mysterious. Now, there'd been a lot of tabloid rumors at the time, a relationship with a dominatrix, a very real divorce. There was a very public battle with actor Marcus Chong.

I'm not sure if you remember this. He plays Tank in the first film. Oh, I do vaguely remember this. He did not return for the second and third. So much had changed, since the Wachowski's first took a pass at V for Vendetta, but its salience had not in the light of post-9-11 policies like the Patriot Act and George Bush's invasion of Iraq eventually

and Afghanistan, the extraordinary powers granted to the presidency by Congress. All of a sudden, this comic book felt like it was coming full circle. So they gave a copy of V to their Matrix trilogy first assistant director, James McTeague. They said, James, do you think this would make a good movie? movie. He said, I'll think it could. I really like James McTee, and he's so unassuming, and he's so talented. And they say, well, we've actually written the script. And he says, oh, sounds great. And I'm sure he's just assuming, well, I've got my next, you know, first aid job. And they say, do you want to direct it? We'll produce it. Which I cannot describe the distance between assistant

directors and directors professionally well enough. There is such a wall put up in our industry between the different roles that you can have on a film set. And so even though back in the studio days, there are a lot of directors that came up as assistant directors, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kouasawa, Robert Aldrich, Guy Hamilton. In modern Hollywood, this is extremely rare. If you don't come in fully fledged as a director as an attour,

it's really hard to get the opportunity to move into that role. Which is strange. It doesn't make any sense. Because you would think that you would want your director to have learned all of the onset skills they would be getting as a first AD, but no, it's like they want. want you to come in fresh with your own bad ideas.

And it's not like it never happens, but all of the examples I could find were ADs of auteur directors who then had the power to say, now is your chance, not AD's selected by the studio. Yeah. Well, it's nice that they chose to lift him up. I don't know. I've never met the Witchowski sisters. I don't know very much about them.

Everything I've read suggests that the people, especially the crew that work with them, just really feel empowered and like they are true collaborators, and it's a real family experience, and they are brought from production to production. I was going to say, they seem to have a lot of repeat collaborators, which that has to be a sign that they are good to work with. James McTeague, being a prime example, V for Vendetta would be far from the last thing that they would make together.

In flexible roles, it's really interesting. They have a lot of quotes about how they feel that the role of the director is one of the most fluid roles on set. because anybody could make a decision that could be the right decision from the top. You know, there's something anarchic about the way that they like to make movies, too, I think. By this point, James McTeague, Australian-Born,

had been A-Ding major Hollywood productions for a decade. He is very experienced. He had not only done The Matrix Trilogy, he had managed to fit in one film out of another trilogy, Star Wars, Episode 2, attack of the longest Star Wars movie you're ever going to watch clones. I see, quite enjoy that one.

He was directing commercials at the time. He was looking for an entryway into feature films. As I mentioned, it's unlikely that a studio is going to see him that way, but the Wachowski's could. They could see what he could be, and they had the power to make it happen. So they go to Warner Brothers and Joel Silver, and I'm guessing they probably said, look, we're exhausted. We don't have it in us to direct a movie right now,

but we will produce, we will handle storyboarding, and we will write V for Vendetta, and we want James to direct it. And by this point, he'd worked with Silver and Warner Brothers on multiple films, so this is probably a very established relationship. Now, the Matrix and its sequels had printed money to diminishing returns. Revolutions did not do nearly as well as the first two,

but they'd made well over a billion dollars. This was still a movie about a masked vigilante who blows up buildings. And we are less than two years removed from 9-11. And at roughly this exact moment, moment, the United States was invading Iraq. And if 9-11 can kill glitter. Exactly. If it can take down a remarkable film like glitter.

So, Warner Brothers, to their credit, agrees to make the film. I think that's pretty bold for a studio at this time. I agree. That is a surprising choice to make. It's easy to put down studios as risk-averse and regurgitative. That's not a word. but always regurgitating material. We're watching the studio right now,

but I think this was a bold green light. The Wachowski's are handling the rewrite with McTeague's input, and they wanted to give it a little bit more American flavor, even though they want to keep it in the UK. As McTeague later said, quote, we decided to do a rewrite because the original script, meaning the Wichowski's first pass from the 90s, was very unwieldy and slavish to the graphic novel.

The graphic novel itself is quite long and complex, with lots of A, B, C, D, and F plots, very true. So we tried to harness that into a coherent film. So it seems like based on interviews with Mick T, he gave input on the rewrite and then the Wachowski's went and they rewrote the script. Now, they've spoken very little about the movie and the scripting process, but we can infer some big changes. So it's updated for a post-9-11 Bush-era audience.

The studio was very clear. This is not meant to be reflective of any particular administration. That being said, there are sequences that evoke Bush-era words. For example, during the Valerie sequence, I remember how the meaning of words began to change, how unfamiliar words like collateral and rendition became frightening. Lizzie, I'm not sure if you remember, but rendition was a big word at the time.

It referred to the CIA's transfer of foreign nationals, suspected of involvement in terrorism to detention and interrogation in countries where federal and international legal safeguards do not apply. It's very much what's happening at the beginning of Zero Dark 30, for example. It's moving to torture zones where you can do things without oversight from international guidelines. Guantanamo Bay.

Actually, no. I assumed that Guantanamo Bay would count in this definition. However, because the prisoners being flown to Gitmo were in direct American custody, were often public, and it didn't involve a third state. They were not considered instances of rendition. And to be clear, this is actually a program that started under President Clinton, but was obviously expanded under President Bush as we moved into. to the war on terror years.

We move from nuclear winter to the Norse fire engineering, then curing, quote, a bioweapon outbreak to seize power. This is obviously evocative or prescient of the pandemic that we'll eventually face. The pandemic was, of course, not a bioweapon and then cure and cover-up, but a pandemic nonetheless. The bigotry of the Norsefire focused more on anti-LGBQ discrimination than the racially driven white supremacy of the graphic novel. And again, I just want to highlight this is right at the moment

when George Bush, and I do think he kind of got backed into a corner by his more conservative party members, started making statements about marriage being strictly between a man and a woman. Quote, July 30th, 2003, George Bush, I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. He then went on to say, and Jesus, did he stick his foot in his mouth on this one? I am mindful that we're all sinners, and I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor's eye when they got a log in their own. What?

Of course, it makes them sound like he's just saying gay people are sinners, and therefore we shouldn't persecute them. I understand what he was trying to say. He just totally, completely botched. I'm not understanding the log to the fleck situation, but that's... It's a commonly used Christian phrase. It's from the book of Matthew. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? It's basically meant to call out the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of calling out the flaws in other people when you've not attended to your own.

Got it. Then, of course, they tried to strengthen DOMA the Defense of Marriage Act, which again was a act passed under President Clinton, which defined marriage in every federal law and program as only a legal union between one man and one woman, which cut legally married gay couples off from more than a thousand federal benefits and protections. And so, again, very, very evocative of Clause 28 from 1988, nearly 20 years prior in the United Kingdom. So obviously, Evie Hammond remains aged up.

She's a TV producer. Their relationship is shifted a little bit to maybe pseudo-romantic. And Natalie Portman explained it, I think, best. She says the relationship between V and Evie has a complication. Actually, she references the professional. She says complication like the relationship in that film. She's speaking of the professional. There's moments when it's father-daughter.

There's moments when it's like lovers. It has moments when it's mentor-student. And many times those all all at once. Adam Settler. He is not Hitlerian at all in the graphic novel. He is a man behind a computer. Very much in the movie is... John Hurt doing his best great dictator impression. I mean, even down to the color schemes of what he's wearing and everything. Yes, and Norsefire does have that kind of Nazi-esque style in the graphic novel,

but it is heightened to such a degree in the film. And I think this is intentional, you know, in one interview, Lana specifically references the way art and film was subsumed by the Nazi regime. Yeah. In pre-World War II for propaganda purposes. And then a really big change, Stephen Fry's Gordon Dietrich was not a closeted gay man in the graphic novel. Oh, okay. I really like that change.

I think that's a really, really wonderful sequence when she shows up at his house. I also just always love Stephen Fry. He's great. And it is when they do give a nod toward the racism of Norris Fire when he references owning the Quran and how that could result in his execution. It seems like the Lodestar they had, and Lana said this in a later. interview, how many perspectives do you take into account when you're deciding what is right for your society? And I think obviously she's suggesting that many minorities were being cut out at this point in time. And so she wanted to give voice to them. Yes. All right. Casting. So it seems like

Natalie Portman was basically the frontrunner from the beginning on this. It makes sense. James McTeague had worked with her on Star Wars episode two, but there were two other women he considered, neither of them are British. Scarlett Johansson. Okay. Who had just achieved acclaim for Lost in Translation, fantastic actress, and Bryce Dallas Howard, who had just done the village. She received a lot

of praise for the village, Lizzie, and I think she's very good in that film. I don't think she would have been exactly the right fit. All great actresses. But it was an actress that I mentioned, McTee had just worked with who had bagged the role. Natalie Portman was announced as Evie in January of 2005. She was

a month out from being nominated for Best actress for her role in closer. So I think they were thinking, she is a critical darling who has just starred in the biggest movie of 1999 and one of the biggest movies of 2002. Of those three, she is by far the biggest name. Oh, by a mile. I mean, obviously, I think Scarlett Johansson is now, but that's a much more recent development than people may remember. I don't think it's even close. Portman had been famous for 10 years because of the professional. Exactly. So, they were talking about. trying to figure out how to bring V to life.

And there were a number of options. They could go to the Darth Vader route, you know, one actor on set, use stunt performers, another actor lending his voice. But McTegan-Lewitchowski seemed to prefer one performer for all of it. So they actually did screen tests with actors in masks to see who could give life to the mask

while giving the vocal performance that they wanted. And it was English actor James Purfoy who won the role as V. Interesting. He's in Rome. Rome and Vanity Fair, yeah, with Reese Witherspoon. Yep. And a knight's tail, sharp sword with Sean Bean, Mansfield Park.

He's good. He's a very talented actor. He's great as Mark Anthony in HBO's Rome. Yes, he was wonderful. Which came out right around this. And he, I think, has a very good voice. He's got the right physicality. The Wichowski's and McTeague established he would never show his face.

It's a very handsome face. As McTeague later said, quote, you don't have any facial tics with the mask. so you kind of have to move the mask and bring the words with it. Which is true, you have to be way more expressive with your head than you normally do. Right. Purefoy seemed both excited and exasperated by the mask. I was unable to find the exact date of this quote, but the source that I found did say that it was given during production.

It's a great acting challenge. Wearing that thing, meaning the mask, takes a lot of takes. Spider-Man's mask comes off. Batman's mask. mask comes off. Even the elephant man had eyes. That's all I asked for. Just an eye. Every night I'm in that mask for another three hours when I go home. I have mirrors all over my apartment and I live in it until I go to bed. So my neighbors obviously think I'm mad. Even the elephant man had eyes. I think he's struggling with the mask. So despite being a first time director, I think McTeague's experience as an 80,

the backing of Warner Brothers and the association of the Wichowski's basically gave him pick of the litter with casting. So Stephen Ray as Finch, that was McTeague's first choice. Stephen Frye is Dietrich. That was McTeague's first choice. And in a fun reversal, John Hurt joined to play Adam Settler. And Lizzie, I'm not sure if you remember this. Hurt played Winston Smith, who was kind of the disaffected records clerk who begins a rebellion against the Big Brother regime in 1984. That's right. So he plays the opposite role in this film. And I think he has a lot of fun with it. He's so good. I love John Hurt. And then, Lizzie, shit hits the fan. For the first of four times in major ways.

On March 4, 2005, a press conference was held to announce the production. They're going into production within, I believe, two weeks of this press conference. And Joel Silver, for no reason, states that Moore, Alan Moore, the creator, was, quote, very excited about what Lana had to say and Lana sent the script, so we hope to see him sometime before we're in the UK. Uh-oh. I don't think you do hope to see him. Yeah, Lizzie, because unfortunately, this was news to Alan Moore. At the time of the press conference, Alan Moore was back at D.C.

He'd ended up working for a company called Windstorm Studios that was bought by D.C. And he ended up sticking around out of loyalty to his colleagues, even though he hated D.C. And the truth is, Moore just didn't care about adaptations of his comics. And the ones that had been made had just increasingly fucked things up. So 2001, Lizzie, are you familiar with From Hell, Johnny Depp, Jack the Ripper? That's based on an Alan Moore, grass. novel. Okay.

Which I think it was fine. It doesn't seem to have bothered more. Moore did not want his name on it. It was fine. I had it on DVD. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Again, it doesn't seem like there was a lot of controversy.

Moore just didn't want to be involved. 2003's adaptation of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Thanks to the question, just how bad could a comic book movie be? Oh, God, is this it? Oh, God, it's so bad. I really liked that movie. It's very fun. It's not great.

No. It was not even very face. faithful to the graphic novel. And so that was not Moore's problem with it. The problem was his name kind of got dragged through the mud because since the movie was such a loose adaptation, a screenwriter and producer Larry Cohen and Martin Poles sued 20th century Fox claiming that Fox had plagiarized a spec script of theirs from the 90s and then slapped the League of Extraordinary Gentleman title on it to do it as a smoke screen. They went further. They claimed that Alan Moore had been hired to create the comic as a cover story

for the subsequent plagiarism. Basically, they said, Alan Moore created the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Alan Moore established genius of comics, working in the UK, ripped off our crappy spec script from 1993 to make his comic. And he had to go in

and he was deposed for 10 hours to defend his position. He found the entire thing insulting a waste of time, and I'll read you his quote. disclaimer, some flowery language. If I had raped and murdered a school bus full of retarded children after selling them heroin,

I doubt that I would have been cross-examined for 10 hours, end quote. Wow. Alan. He was not happy. Coming in hot. His biggest problem, because this was settled out of court, it looked like an admission of guilt, and so he was not able to prove that he had not plagiarized anybody.

by virtue of association. All Alan Moore cares about is his integrity. That Valerie sequence, that last inch, your integrity that they cannot take away, that is all, you cannot buy that off of Alan Moore. He does not care about your money. He does not care about your prestige. All he cares about is that integrity. It is so obvious.

So he implements a policy. Any work that he controls, it's not going to be adapted. Any work that he doesn't control, he doesn't want a credit on. Any money they try to pay him, from adaptations, he sends it back, and they can pay it out to the other artists that had worked on the projects. He does not want a dime. And he had lost control of V for Vendetta many years prior, right? Yes. Okay. As long as D.C. continued to print Viva Vendetta, they controlled it. So, Joel Silver, to be fair, hadn't lied entirely. One of the Wachowski's, I believe Lana,

it may have been Lilley, called more and more politely told her he wasn't interested. He didn't want to talk about the film. He wasn't interested in the film. That was the end of it. Then Karen Berger of D.C. tried to send him an $8,000 option check for the film rights. And he said, I don't care about this. This was, I think, to re-up the film rights going into production. And he just said, remake it to David Lloyd. I don't want any of the money. So when Joel Silver said Moore was excited about the project, Moore was furious because he had literally said, I don't want anything to do with this. I don't want your money. I'm not involved, period. So it made him look to Inplicitous, in his opinion.

Now, the reason, according to Silver, that he thought Moore was excited, because of the lunch that he'd had with Moore back in 1986. Joel Silver says, quote, I had a nice little lunch with them. And Alan was odd, but he was enthusiastic and encouraging us to do this. I had foolishly thought that he would continue feeling that way today. 20 years later. It's been two decades. Maybe check with him.

I don't know. Who knows if this is really true or just Silver trying to backtrack. It's very funny. According to Silver, Silver claims he called Moore to apologize and that Moore basically hung up on him. More than told Warner Brothers that he wanted Silver to publicly retract his statement. And he told D.C. that he would sever ties with them again unless the apology was made on a platform as big as the press conference where Silver had made his remarks. So Warner Brothers and D.C. said fine, and they published a retraction on the DC website, which more viewed as way too small, and he, again, cut ties with D.C., following through on his threat.

He also then launches on a small, but not insignificant, defamation tour of how Warner Brothers is going to ruin V for Vendetta, just as they are launching into the production. Wow. Production for V for Vendetta began in March of 2005, and most of it took place not in the United Kingdom, but in Germany. So they started their shoot at Babelsberg Film Studio in Germany, just outside of Berlin and Potsdam. Now, Babelsberg is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world.

People have been making films there since 1912. Production designer Owen Patterson built 89 sets here in Babelsberg, like the interior of the Jordan Television Tower, Victoria Station, the various sections of the underground, and then on historic stage two, and this is where Fritz Lang shot one of the most timeless films of all time, Metropolis, in 1927, they built these Shadow Gallery, where he lives with all of the blacklisted art and music and books that Evie gets to experience when she joins him down there. They would obviously also shoot some exteriors in Germany, and eventually they would move back to

London to film the big set pieces that take place outside of Parliament, for example. But long before they get back to London, they have their next crisis. Roughly three weeks into production, James Purfoy drops out of the project. No reasons were initially given. James McTeague has said in the intervening years that it came down to the mask and Purfoy not being comfortable with it. Sounds like it. Purefoy said it wasn't the mask and that it was just, quote, creative differences.

Unclear what those are. The mask. Yeah, exactly. It was the mask. It wasn't the mask, but it was the mask. Losing an actor during production, as you know, Lizzie, can doom a film completely. But McTeague and the Wachowski's had two key advantages. First, V wasn't really the lead anymore.

No. Because Evie was. And you don't know who the fuck he is. You can put anybody in that thing. Because of his mask, they didn't have to reshoot pure voice footage. And in fact, a lot of the scenes in the film have stunt performers behind the mask, for example. So, by May of 2005, Riety reported that it would be the Matrix veteran Hugo Weaving. Love them.

Who would replace Purefoy? McTeague's countryman, he actually has UK citizenship through his parents, rose to international recognition with, I'm sure you've seen this movie, Lizzie. It's fantastic. Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Adventure road trip comedy, two Sydney drag performers, Hugo Weaving, and Guy Pearce. Except a gig in a remote desert resort, and they recruit their older trans friend Bernadette, Terence Stamp, to join them. they buy a battered bus, Priscilla, and they set off across the Outback.

It was mostly very praised for a positive portrayal of the LGBTQ community with some noted criticisms, specifically having cis men play drag performers and a trans woman. Right. It was Weaving's magnificently menacing performance as Agent Smith, Mr. Anderson, in 1999's The Matrix, and his stoic turn as Lord Elrond in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings that solidified him as one of the more versatile character actors working worldwide. Now, McTeague called weaving to pitch him the part, and weaving had two advantages.

One, he had done voiceover, specifically 1995's Babe. I'm not sure if you remember. Who is he in Babe? Is he a dog? Is he a sheep? He is Rex, one of the border collies in Babe. Now, Lizzie, he also had done a very specific type of acting back in theater school called Neutral Mask Work.

Did you ever do neutral mask work? We sure did do a little bit of this. I believe it's where, as the name suggests, you wear a very neutral mask on your face, and you are required to then sort of use the rest of your body as expression. Yeah, you have to lose the self through the face and figure out a different way to exist. Pioneered in the 50s and 60s,

I think it was part of the clowning movement as well. So weaving has six days to get to set, and he has four days to prep. So within 10 days of his call with James McTeague, he is in costume in front of the camera with Natalie Portman, Evie coming out of the torture, and realizing that V was the one behind it. How much footage did they get with James Purfoy? It doesn't seem like that much. I don't know that.

But the way McTeague describes it is that there was a lot of coverage of Evie that was shot, for example. There was a lot of coverage of, you know, other characters and... Well, if it wasn't working, they may have been avoiding him, too. Yeah, exactly. they shoot this scene as basically strangers, and I think it works. And I think that because of the second hand that weaving McTeague and the Wachowski sisters had, they'd worked together for the better part of a decade at this point. They were probably able to make up for any lost time very quickly.

Yeah. Now, Lizzie, this was all overshadowed by something far more shocking, taking place on set. Natalie Portman was going to actually shave her head. This was, I forgot how much people freaked out about this. This was big news, Chris. Such big news. Also, I got to tell you, I have must thank Nicole Kidman for my newly found wig spotting abilities because I immediately could tell that they had gone back and reshot certain things

because you can see the wig. It's pretty good, but you can tell when it's not her hair. Right, the alley sequence of the beginning. Yeah. So I believe that's because they shaved her head by the end of May. 2005 because she showed up to Cann to promote Attack of the Clones with a buzz cut. And that's when everything went viral, you know, at that moment. And so if, for example, Purefoy had already shot the Alley scene and they wanted to reshoot part of it with weaving,

they would need to reshoot her with a wig. They shot the scene of her getting her head shaved, which is also a big moment in the graphic novel. In one take with five cameras, that is not an actor. That is Portman's hairdresser who is shaving her head in the scene. Nice. And this is very sweet. several crew members volunteered to have their head shaved before the real take so they could light block and rehearse ahead of time.

Oh, wow. They had one shot at it, and that's the one shot that you see in the film, and it wasn't the only moment that they had one shot at capturing. The Dominoes, which are also a big part of the graphic novel. I wondered about that. I was like, my, this man has a lot of time on his hands. Well, he does. They were made by somebody else with a lot of time on their hands,

Robin Veers. He is a Dutch professional domino builder. His production company spent 200 hours of building time placing 22,000 dominoes in position. They closed the set as if they were doing a love scene because an earlier disturbance had toppled the dominoes during setup. Oh, God. They got everything into position when an assistant hairstylist dropped her comb while touching up V's wig at the head of the chain and narrowly missed the first piece domino. They then rolled cameras, and everything fell into place perfectly. And I believe that's the take that you see in the film. It's really cool.

Now, in June of 2005, one major sequence remained to be shot, and that was the film's climax, in which Evie carries out V's plot, blows up Parliament, and the common folk march on their government. As Jeff Boucher put it in the L.A. Times, that brought the cast and crew to the very heart of the British government between Trafalgar Square and Big Ben, the first week of June with tanks

and an ominous brigade of commandos armed to the teeth. And this was actually the first time that the British government allowed a film crew into this historic site, this close to Parliament, to film. Yeah, I guess that was really surprising that they looked like they really were on location for that. They were on location. Wow. Again, during the peak of the war on terror, blowing up parliament with people marching on the government, it required nine months of negotiations with 14 government departments and agencies. As James McTeague later explained, they shut down all of war. Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, roughly 500 people in masks descended for the shot, so that's

500 extras in full Guy Fawkes gear, as government snipers monitored from nearby rooftops, which all inspired a particularly funny conspiracy theory, that it was Tony Blair's son, 22-year-old Ewan Blair, who was responsible for getting the filmmakers access. So basically, Stephen Fry had given a quote where he asked an AD how they got permission to film in this location. And the AD pointed at Ewan Blair, who was working as a runner on the movie, and Fry said, oh, that's how we got permission. Daddy, Daddy, can you please let them have permission to film? This was obviously a joke, but it was quickly spreading as if it was serious,

and that Ewan Blair's nepotistic connections had been what allowed them to film there. And then Tony Blair drew real heat for allowing a film that seemingly championed terrorism to shoot its climax at such an important national site. Even the New York Times wrote, at roughly this moment, As persuasively as the filmmakers argue that their movie means to raise provocative questions rather than to lay down moral judgments, it is hard not to be unnerved at the mental image of one of the West's proudest democratic symbols splintering into millions and millions of tiny particles.

And this does play into a bit of a meta-narrative, which is the Wachowski's and Maktig, did want to illustrate the fact that they felt that the news media was complicit in helping the government sell its story of why they were invading Afghanistan and Iraq for example. So, production wrapped less than one month later, and real tragedy struck. On July 7, 2005, Islamic extremists Haseeb Hussein, Muhammad Sadiq Khan, Jermaine Lindsay, and Shazad Tanwir detonated four bombs in the heart of London, three on trains in the underground, and one on a double-decker bus.

52 people were killed, over 700 were injured, and a day later, police shot and killed an innocent Brazilian man, Jean-Charles de Menezes, when he was misidentified as one of the failed suicide bombers. This is obviously a terrible terrorist attack that occurred less than a month after filming the terrorist attack for the film in almost the same location where that had been shot. Wow. On August 18, 2005, Warner Brothers announced that the film would be pushed from November 5th to March 2006. They claimed that the delay was quote, strictly to accommodate the effects-heavy films post-production schedule. Oh, there's no way.

No. And if you look at the original release date alone, the 5th of November, this was a big move by Warner Brothers, and I'm sure one that they didn't take lightly. But I mean, the right move, for sure. Yeah. And there are some interesting quotes. Joel Silver was reaching out to reporters. There was a big effort to try to clarify the intent of the film at this moment, but not give it away.

Maybe that's sort of what I remembered from seeing this, was that. that first of all, being still so close to 9-11, and then also being close to the terrorist attacks in London as well. Like, it was genuinely, you know, I think, I don't know if this is the case. I think maybe for younger people who were not as sort of conscious as we were when all this was happening, it might unfortunately feel, you know, potentially a bit more rote today. And it didn't then. It felt very scary. So seeing this kind of building blow up, seeing like the sort of imagery,

you see in this movie, I remember feeling a little icky about it. I don't now, you know, kind of like knowing what's behind it and seeing it through fresh eyes. Yeah, for me, the distance between the United Kingdom and the United States and then also the distance candidly between the East Coast and the West Coast were enough that it didn't bother me at the time of the release, but I can completely understand why it may have bothered a lot of people at the time of the release. Press around the film was not great at this point in time. The LA Times even speculated that, quote, it's not unreasonable to wonder if this capes on cobblestone's movie

will end up in the same commercial litter box as the studio's Catwoman, a universally ridiculed masked mishap. God, how many litter box jokes were made about Catwoman? All of them. So, every single one. Now, James McTeague, I believe, did want the extra time in post.

It seems like he's made it clear in interviews that they were blowing past deadlines to try to finish the movie on time, which makes sense. They wrapped filming in June. There's a lot of special effects to get through. Yeah, that's very good. Very fast. Exactly. Now, all of V's dialogue was recaptured in the ADR booth. That's automated dialogue replacement. That means you rerecored your dialogue in post-production. So nothing that you hear from him is what was captured on set. And just to be clear, you would have to do that with an actor wearing a mask for the entire time. Like regardless of- They did mic them. Yeah, I'm sure you mic them, but you would still, I would imagine, almost certainly have to do all of it.

That was intentional from the beginning. They miced the interior of the mask. It just sounded very muffled, and so he honed in the performance in post. It is a magnificent vocal performance, in my opinion. He's great. There was an early fan, David Lloyd. The artist behind V was shown the film on November 5th, its original release date. And according to McTeague, the lights came up, and there was this voice from out of the darkness, which was David.

And he said, that's a fantastic representation of the work we did. Lloyd has said in interviews that he thinks the film, and the filmmakers did a fine job, but he does note the graphic novel is superior, and I don't necessarily disagree. Now, Lizzie, James McTeague has asserted that the studio only had one major note during post, and it was to remove one section of the film.

If you had to guess, which section would that be? Gotta be the Valerie section. That's exactly right. It is the Valerie sequence of the film. If you guys are unfamiliar, it is a sequence in which the story of a gay woman, an actress who was imprisoned and eventually murdered, by the government is told to Evie Hammond's character as she is imprisoned.

I want to be clear. I say got to be the Valerie sequence for two reasons. One is that I can see why, you know, that was a cultural live wire at that time. And I'm sure that the money people wanted that removed for that reason. The second reason is it is one of the only things in the movie that is somewhat self-contained that you would potentially be able to lift out without disturbing any other parts of it. Of course, if you were to lift it out, you would also sort of remove the beating heart of the movie itself. But I totally see... From a plot mechanic, you could remove it, yes.

To your point, Lizzie, it feels like in 2005, that would have been when Warner Brothers is seeing this rough cut. The Wichowski's and McTig were effectively able to sneak a queer short film into the middle of an action blockbuster. Yeah, and it's great. It's one of the best parts of the movie. I think it is probably the best overall, part of the movie. I personally love V's getting shot a hundred times and then killing everybody with

knives and saying behind the mask is more than a man. There's an idea and ideas are bulletproof. It's amazing and it also makes me cry. But the Valerie sequence is, like you said, it is the heart of the movie. It's where you get at its true thesis. Right. So the filmmakers, McTegan Wachowski, said, no, we're not cutting it. Again, to the studio's credit, McTeague says Warner Brothers backed off. It doesn't seem like it was a big fight. They had the note. They said no, and they moved on. Now, one crisis was averted, but the studio needed to keep the buzz alive. Lizzie, they needed the nerds. Austin's Butnumathon was a 24-hour movie marathon run every December from 1999 through 2016 at the Alamo Draft House by Harry Knowles, founder of A&Cool News, who we spoke about briefly in our

coverage of Lord of the Rings. The BNAT, Buttnamathon, was a way for studios to get advanced hype on internet message boards with the kind of cool gatekeepers of nerddom without having to put the movie in front of critics. So they basically went in and they said, you guys can watch this, there can be no leaks, and we want you to post about it afterwards. It's kind of the equivalent of like bringing in a bunch of TikTokers now, you know, and showing them the movie. So, ain't it cool news was also a bit of a friend to Warner Brothers. They had provided positive coverage of Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. And my guess is that the studio feels, even if the response is poor, they could claim that it's a test and that they're implementing fan feedback. Right.

So it could be kind of a win-win. Veefer Vendetta screened at the Butt Numbathon on December 11th, 2005. It was dedicated to the recently deceased Adrian Biddle, the legendary cinematographer who had lends the film. He, of course, had shot Aliens, the Princess Bride, Willow, Judge Dread, Event Horizon, the mummy, the world is not enough, Salma and Luis,

and so many, so many more. He had passed away a few days prior, and so unfortunately, he did not live to see the film's release. I hope he would have been proud because the nerds were in love. The V monologue, the Valerie sequence, the explosive finale, the internet was a buzz and Vendetta was a glow with the approval of the Illuminerdi, as I call them. Sorry, not sorry. But the buzz was to be short-lived. In January of 2006, Rolling Stone published an article titled, and I'm going to use this name because I think it's important to the story, but this is not her name.

The Mystery of Larry Wachowski. Written by Peter Wilkinson, the article, portrays Lana, the filmmaker, as a recluse who leads a double life in the Los Angeles BDSM clubs. It asserts that at these clubs, Lana allegedly met and fell in love with Karen Winslow, who at the time was working as a professional dominatrix

under the name Elsa Stricks. The article did not feature any direct quotes from Lana. It instead relied on court filings from her divorce, gossip following her feminine appearance, alongside Karen Winslow at Cannes in 2003, and specifically the testimony of Buck Angel, who is a trans adult actor and, crucially, Karen Winslow's X. So basically, according to the article,

Lana and Karen fell in love. What was once a professional relationship became personal, they struck up an affair. Each of them left their respective partners. Buck Angel felt betrayed and gave a lot of quotes to a lot of different places. Buck Angel asserted that Lana was beginning, hormone therapy and thus forcibly outed her publicly as a trans woman years before she would

come out on her own as a trans woman. So I would hope that Rolling Stone would not do this today, but just a reminder to listeners that in, what is this, 2004, 2005? This is January of 2006. January 2006. I mean, this is prime tabloid fodder, at that point, which is awful. I can't imagine having something that personal. Have someone else speak that for you. Speculation was rampant, you know, online, offline. Yeah, I remember this.

In the trades. Weirdly, the story was given some additional oxygen because there was a Senate committee hearing happening on January 19th, so I believe the same week that the story was released called decency in broadcasting, cable and other media. I don't want to get into too much detail, but basically the fact that,

founder of the Parents Television Council and the then chair of the National Association of Broadcasters were focused on trying to revive the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act. And there was a lot of hand-wringing over things that were seen as not family-friendly and that were perverse coming out of Hollywood. And it was described as the Hollywood problem. And a lot of, there were a number of stories that ran pairing the Lana Wachowski explosive revelations with the perverse Hollywood problem, which even if not explicit implies as if there is something wrong, you know what I mean, or perverse with Lana and that in some way ties to what these senators. From what I remember, it was explicit. Like, I don't think that people were... It may have been. I just was unable to find an example that did explicitly,

so I just want to be careful with how I word that. I was a, I am ashamed to admit, I was a regular reader of Perez Hilton and less hateful, I think, than Perez Hilton was delisted. And I do remember there being, I'm pretty sure, quite a bit of coverage of this on there. And I think it was coupled, you know, coupled with sort of this, what was considered at the time, salacious news was also the fact that it involved a BDSM professional. I think that also ended up making this even more sort of like, you know, hand-ringy. And it was presented as the answer to a question that had lingered since Keanu Reeves, since Neo met Trinity inside of what looked like a BDSM club in the beginning of the Matrix, right? There had been this question. And what's interesting is,

you know, the Wachowski's have long toyed with the idea of identity. They've long been interested in queer stories from bound forward. But they explicitly do not give interviews telling the audience what to think about their movies. And so I really think, Rolling Stone published this and people glommed onto it as if here it is. This is why, everything about the Witchhouskies is the way it is. And that's why it was considered a scoop. So obviously, this hurt Lana far more than it did the film. I cannot imagine what it must have been like. She was robbed with the chance to come out on her own terms. She wouldn't do so until 2012, roughly six years after this. V for Vendetta, open wide on March 17, 2006. Mere Days after

Alan Moore again was quoted in The York Times stating, I've read the screenplay. It's rubbish. not great hype, but critics generally disagreed with more. The press reports from a Berlin Film Festival premiere in February had been mixed to positive. Roger Ebert gave it four out of five stars. Variety didn't love it. The New York Times didn't love it. But generally speaking, American critics were pretty warm to the movie and Natalie Portman's accent, and European and British critics were a little harsher on the film, broadly speaking.

I mean, come on, guys, the accent. Americans are like, she sounds just like them. Conservative feathers were ruffled somewhat, and I will say so was the anarchist community. There were a couple of protests that were staged by, I would argue, true anarchists, political anarchists, feeling that the message of anarchy had been entirely stripped from the movie. And I do think that's true. I think he is trying to cause chaos to incite a liberal revolution, not an anarchist revolution, as we've discussed. Now, audiences were more receptive to V's message, Lizzie. It opened number one at the box office.

It grossed $135 million in its theatrical run against a $54 million budget. Okay. So broke even, maybe broke even, close to broke even. It was far below the Matrix trilogy. And I do think it was kind of the second lily pad in a trend that began with Matrix Revolutions toward eventually financially unsuccessful films like Speed Racer and then Jupiter ascending for the Wachowski sisters. But it was extremely successful on DVD. I believe it made well over $60 million on DVD in short order.

So I do think this movie made money. Yeah. Natalie Portman during one press conference expressed hope that Alan Moore would watch the film one day. To my knowledge, he is not. And he has said that he never will. Now, you mentioned this, Lizzie. One aspect of V in particular lives on. The guy Fox Mask.

The mask first became synonymous with Anonymous, the hacktivist group, that in 2008 took on the Church of Scientology, and I forgot about this, the church had basically pressured YouTube into pulling a video of Tom Cruise discussing Scientology practices, and I believe indoctrination from YouTube.

It was meant to be an internal video and somebody accidentally uploaded it to YouTube. Yeah, accidentally on purpose. Yeah, and so Anonymous was saying, hey, no, no, no, no, that's ours now. You can't take that down. That's public. And then, of course, the mask was adopted during a lot of the Occupy movements,

Occupy Wall Street, even the Arab Spring. And of course, as Alan Moore and others have pointed out, the irony is every mask bought is a dime or a dollar in Warner Brothers coffers at the end of the day and is ultimately more capitalist than it is anarchist. James McTeague went on to make a number of other films and projects with the Wachowski's, including Ninja Assassin and Sensate and more. And the Wichowski's have continued to explore identity in increasingly interesting ways with Cloud Atlas and whatnot. But for me, V for Vendetta remains my second or third favorite film for them. And even though its politics are more simplistic by a mile than what Alan Moore offered in his graphic novel, I think they're a great introduction into the idea of how we at times willingly will give up our civil liberties for the idea of control. And for that, I will always love this film.

And the fact that it brings a little bit of brain to a non-year-old. normally just brawny genre. I agree. And I also think it does a great job of showing how easily manipulated we are as a people when we are scared. And don't they say in the movie, people should not be afraid of their government, the government should be afraid of its people? That is arguably the most famous line from the film. Yeah. You know, I think I won't wax too political here, but I think that what we have seen as fallout, particularly from the pandemic, we have seen an awful lot of sort of predators

come out of the woodwork. And I think that's pretty much exactly what you see happen in V for Vendetta, is you look at, you know, a population that's very afraid, and that sort of opens the door for people to step up and say, I will fix it. I'm your savior. And I guess I think the movie left me with a feeling of just always be very careful of someone who offers to fix everything for you or offers to explain everything for you because nobody knows everything. And that's ultimately Moore's,

and I believe an anarchist criticism of the film, is the opposite of fascism is not liberalism. Fascism and liberalism are siblings or they exist on a continuum, and the risk of liberalism is that when you are afraid, fascism is what you tip toward, because there is an existing hierarchy to exploit.

Right. anarchism says without any hierarchy, I believe there's a line from the book. Yeah, here it is. Anarchy wears two faces, both creator and destroyer. Thus, destroyers topple empires make a canvas of clean rubble where creators can build another world. Rebel, once achieved, makes further ruins means irrelevant. So, Lizzie, thank you for going down the rabbit hole on V for Vendetta with me.

A movie just, I really, I really love. And I would like to ask you what went right? I mean, I have to give it to old Hugo. He's so good. He's so good. I just, you know, I think it's particularly difficult to give an engaging performance when you are not able to use your face in any way. It's also particularly difficult to give an engaging performance almost exclusively through ADR.

And he does it and does it beautifully. He's a wonderful actor. He's a wonderful voice actor. and he's someone who, you know, throughout his career has had no problem figuratively and literally disappearing into roles. And I just don't think that this would really work without somebody as strong as he is being the one behind the mask. I agree. I'm going to give mine to the Wachowski's, the Wichowski sisters who I think it's easy. I think there are some people who seem to forget the impact they've had on film and... It's enormous.

prefer. Yeah, they prefer to reference maybe a couple of later flops than they do the more seminal influential works that they've made. Again, I would argue The Matrix is the most influential film of the 90s. I think at worst it's top four, Jurassic Park, Toy Story, Titanic, The Matrix. I'd spend a long time trying to make up that list and those were the four I could really think of. I might swap Fight Club in for one of those, but sure. Well, I shouldn't have said I spent so long making that list because, yeah, you're right, I probably should have included Fight Club. But first rule of fight club, you don't talk about fight club. Yeah, I'm sorry. I think the Wachowski's are fantastic masters of pastiche, and I say that as a positive thing. And I think what I like most about them is that they are

fascinated by the idea and the limitations of identity. And we are so, as a society, focused on identity right now, I think across all spectrums. And I love that the Wachowski's are interested in the fluidity of identity. And I think Alan Moore is too in the graphic novel. And so I will give it to the Wachaski's. I hope we see more from them. I'm not sure if they have any more collaborations planned. Obviously, Lana made Matrix Resurrections by herself, but I've always enjoyed their films and the questions that they ask. And if you will allow me, Lizzie, I would like to end with an Alan Moore quote. This is from, I really do recommend if you guys haven't read V for Vendetta, please do read it. This is from the introduction.

to the graphic novel, which he wrote in 1988, so obviously at the release of the second half. My youngest daughter is seven, and the tabloid press are circulating the idea of concentration camps for persons with AIDS. The new riot police wear black visors, as do their horses, and their vans have rotating video cameras mounted on top.

The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality, even as an abstract concept, and one can only speculate, as to which minority will be the next legislated against. I'm thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon. Sometime over the next couple of years. It's cold and it's mean-spirited, and I don't like it here anymore. Good night, England, good night home service, and V for victory.

Hello, the Voice of Fate, and V for Vendetta. And that concludes our coverage of V for Vendetta. Great job, Chris. I'm glad you had me rewatch this one. Yeah. All right, guys. If you enjoy this podcast and you would like to help us spread the word, the word of what went wrong, there are four easy ways to do it.

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The Provost family, Zach Everton, Galen, David Friskalanti, vocal virtuosos all of you vibrating with vivacity. Adam Moffat, film it yourself, Chris Zaka, Kate Elrington. Your value is vast, your vow, inviolable. MXODIA C Grace B, Jen Mastro Marino, Christopher Elner, you are varnished with Verve, Blaise Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, rural juror, Lance Stater, Nate the Knife, Lena, Ramon Villanueva Jr., half-gray-hound, venturesome valorous and velocatis and wit,

Eleanor, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Richard Sanchez, Jake Killen, Andrew McFagel, You are vividly thoughtful, viscerally kind, vaults of virtue, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, J.J. Rapido. You are vibrato strong, vehemently voile, and verve incarnate. Jewish reissomant, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, just Sadie, Virtue Distilled. Brian Donahue, Adrian Peng, Korea, Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Sheibel, vaulted in grace, you are veritable legends, vital conduits, and vow-worthy companions. George Kay, Rosemary Southward, Tom, Kristen,

Jason Frankel, Virtually Unstoppable, Unstoppable, Vailance, Rich, and VAL. visibly brilliant. Suzanne Johnson, Soanchanani, Michael McGrath, Lon Relad, and Lydia House, your venerated minds, vast imaginations make you vanquishers of mediocrity and viscounts of value. Each of you, though your voices remain invisible, now varnish this venture with vastness and verity. You are not volume, you are voltage. A vital vein, neither vague nor vestigial. You are the voices behind the verse, the viscera behind this vessel. Our victories are yours, our vow is weekly. Thank you, V, for that inspiring shoutout.

Lizzie, what do we have for the people next week? That would be Dr. Strangelove or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. I'm very excited. And a really great film to follow up Viver Vendetta. It is. It's so good. If Alan Moore is concerned about the malice of a controlling few, boy, does Dr. Strangelubb explore their ineptitude in the most fun ways. Yes, it really does. I cannot wait. We'll see you next week.

See you guys. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at what went wrongpod.com. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer with additional editing from Karen Krupsov.