WHAT WENT WRONG - War of the Worlds (2005)

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

This week, Chris & Lizzie try to unearth the truth behind 2005's War of the Worlds - was it an unmitigated, Cruisian PR disaster? Or was Tom Cruise's bizarre press tour merely a scapegoat? Plus, how Steven Spielberg and company put together a $135M sci-fi epic on a 10 month turn-around, how a couple of B-movie mockbusters beat it to the box office, and yet another concept album throwing a wrench in the works. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of 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 a good one. Hello. Chris, I think you're lagging a little bit. I'm having trouble hearing you. What about now? Is that better?

Yeah, that's fine. Okay. Here we go. Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another... Q! David! Come on. Can you get him inside, please? I'll go grab them.

Jesus, dude, turn your input down. Uh, shit, sorry. Cremel's calling me. Give me one second. All good. Hey, yeah, we're about to record. No, we're recording. What is going on?

Slow down. What are you talking about? Chris, if you need to go, it's totally fine. Yeah, yeah, no. Okay. All doors immediately. All doors and windows and turn off AC heaters. Stay inside until further.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Monitor local media for real time. We have to go. Where's Bob? No, wait, where are we going? I don't know, we just need to go. No. Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to 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 movie that asks the question, what if the aliens just poop themselves to death? I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett. Here, as always, with Chris Winterbauer and Chris, what do you have for us today? How did you do the Tom Cruise scream? I feel like this is when we got into Peak, Tom Cruise scream mode. It was like, it was this into Mission Impossible 3, which I love both of his performances and both of these movies.

I do also love that you believe that the orange goo that comes out of the ship at the end is their collective diarrhea. You can't tell me that's not diarrhea. You can't tell me. Oh, no, we have the runs! Ah! Then they all just die. The end of this movie is literally just the aliens get Montezuma's revenge on Earth.

They get Hondo Virus. Turns out the tripods are giant cruise ships. They get Hondo Virus and they die. Okay. That is not a joke that could be a very serious pandemic that we all need to deal with. We are talking about the 2005 science fiction disaster film, War of the Worlds, directed by Steven Spielberg starring Tom Cruise. Some good running, some great running in this movie.

This feels like the beginnings of Tom Cruise running as well. Yeah, I mean, he'd run before this for sure. I mean, he's run since all the right moves. Yeah, but he's really enjoying it in this one, you know? Well, it's the chest out, you know. It's the bounce. Yeah. It's the lightness of the feet.

He's a great on-screen runner. You can't argue with it. Lizzie, had you seen the 2005 Stevens Spielberg War of the Worlds before? And what were your thoughts upon watching it or rewatching it for the podcast? My answer is, I don't know. I thought I had not seen this. But then upon watching it for the podcast, there were certain scenes where I was like, this feels weirdly familiar.

Maybe I did see this. But regardless, this was my first time really, I would say, taking action, having an actionable viewing of War of the Worlds. And you know what? I had in my head that this movie must be really bad. Because I think I remembered a lot of perhaps what we're going to talk about, the press surrounding this movie that maybe was less related to the actual reviews of it than I realized and more related to other things.

And so in my brain, I was like, oh, this is going to be a mess. And then it started. And I was like, this is pretty good. And, you know, I think the practical effects are excellent. The practical sets are excellent. The main problem, which is not really their fault, is that the technology for CGI was not where it needed to be for them to rely on it as much as they do in this movie, I think.

Some of it looks fine. some of it doesn't hold up quite as well. But I think the performances across the board are really excellent, particularly Dakota Fanning, who is acting circles around absolutely everyone else. I have one bone to pick with this movie, though. They set up both a Chekhov's gun and a Chekhov's crane operator, and they never deliver on the crane operator. I'm so glad you bring this up.

I have a big theory about this. Okay, great. I can't wait to get to it because I literally was like, well, that's going to come back. And then it never does, ever. Yeah. If anyone's not familiar with the term Chekhov's gun, what we were referring to is the thought that if you introduce a gun at the beginning of a play in the case of the original terminology

and the first act, that it inevitably will appear by the end as part of the climax. It will go off by the end. Yes, it will go off by the end. So you introduce something. The anticipation is that it will or must come back. And this never comes back, ever. The gun does come back, actually. But come on, he's a crane operator.

Some other thoughts that I had. Why does Tom Cruise keep smiling at the aliens? That's a big question I had for the whole first act of this movie. Also, he's maybe the worst on-screen father ever. Every other scene, he's just leaving his children behind in the midst of a disaster and then seems to remember vaguely that they're there, at which point he, you know, jauntily bounces back to them on his feet. Why are the aliens so bad at zapping Tom Cruise?

They seem to be able to get everyone else around him. He's ziggin and zagging? He's ziggin and zagan. He's very fast. Okay, he's very fast. That's fine. All right, I'll accept that. Does anyone want to be in Tim Robbins' basement? Yeah, absolutely not. The answer, that is no. Absolutely not. No.

And then, uh, not my blood, not my blood. One of my favorite lines. And then the last thing I'll say is, in movies like this, I do find myself wondering, what is the point at which I would just lay down and die? Because certainly it is before the end of this movie. I am going to self-immolate along with what I thought that brother had done. Well, it's interesting because in the original book, in the H.G. Wells book, at the end of the book, effectively that's what the hero, the narrator does. You know, he's a writer. It takes place obviously in the south of London. He basically decides, I'm just going to go and let the aliens kill me, but they've poop themselves to death when he arrives, as you say. And so... That's literally what they're doing. You can tell me that's not what they're doing. No, I do agree with you. But it's interesting that you mention that because that is basically the end of the book.

And I think if I can jump in, for me, like, I really like this movie, but I agree it's got some jumbled elements, perhaps, and it feels like the end. The end. They don't set up the end super well, which I know we will get to. The last thing I just want to say very quickly is that the reason I'm saying that, maybe this is what you're getting to, but like this movie is harrowing in terms of it does not let up. It's gnarly. It's gnarly, and it does such a good job of building the 10.

across so many of these sequences that I literally just thought to myself, I think I'd be okay being dead. Like, I think I would just be like, ah, just to lay down. So, yeah, I think it really for about, especially for the first 90 minutes, I would say. It's a two hour and 15 minute movie. And the first 90 minutes is what you would call a divorce dad road trip, like a weekend with divorce dad movie mixed with an alien disaster movie, which is like, dad is wholly incapable of keeping milk in the fridge, let alone.

keeping us safe from the aliens. I really like that. And we'll talk about some of the specific choices they make with Cruz's character, where he's at in his career when this movie's made. And then you get the obligatory, you know, we're hiding out in the basement with the weird prepper guy, you know, sort of sequence with Harlan Ogilvy played by Tim Robbins, where it doesn't feel like the movie's on a sure footing.

And then in the end, it kind of feels like the movie that Spielberg and Cruz and company wanted to make, which I do think they do for most of it, which is a movie that adheres to the thought that the truth is we would run, right? like we would not be brave. We would like try to protect our families and we would run. And it kind of from a cinematic perspective, it's exploring almost a cowardly response. Again, a very normal response,

but a cinematically cowardly response to an alien invasion. And I really like that. But it almost doesn't feel like they have the courage of their convictions at the very end. Because the very end almost feels like what Cruz's character, Ray Ferry, would experience had he died and he had like, you know,

was having a vision from heaven because it's such a picturesque perfect ending. And it almost feels like Spielberg can't commit to, the darkness of what they've set out to, and he has to go back towards the Spielbergian sort of Schmaltz at the very end of the movie. But I really love so many elements of this movie, as you mentioned, Lizzie, the set pieces are great. Really good. The scene where the car gets jacked from them is an awesome scene. And when he loses the gun and you realize, oh, my God, that's a blessing because he would have gotten himself killed because he does not know what he's doing.

The ferry sequence is great. I love, I'm forgetting the actress's name, who's in Abbott Elementary, who is like trying to get on the ferry with him, and she loses her grip on him. and, you know, he leaves her behind. Like, I think it does a really good job of subverting a lot of disaster movie tropes in a big way, again, until kind of the very end of the movie, which is fine. Yeah, and I also think, so for anyone is not familiar, the very end of this movie, basically you learn that the aliens were all killed by an amoeba. Like, they die by diarrhea on their spaceships.

Which, again, that's how the book ends. That's how every adaptation of this has ended, yeah. Right. But I think the reason that this one feels unusual, natural is that they shift to that so abruptly, and they don't even show it happening. Someone just says, oh, the machines were behaving erratically, and then they fell over. It's like you don't even really see that. So it feels like a very sharp left turn at the end versus getting used to it, getting to witness it more in real time along with Ray. You don't really get to do that. It just feels

very tacked on. Yeah. But let's get into it. Just a couple of other thoughts that I had. I really think that this is like Spielberg doing a love letter to a lot of other movies as well. One of my favorite parts is when he steps out of Harlan Ogilvy's basement and it's the clear Wizard of Oz stepping into Technicolor moment and everything's red from the kind of like weird root like plant that the Martians are seeding our planet with. There are so many loving homages to the 1953 film. Those are also present in some of his earlier work. I would argue there's a shot that we'll get to from the 53 film that he basically recreates an ET in a specific way. But I really think what's interesting about this movie, as you mentioned, Lizzie, is that you remember the bad press around this movie.

Yes. It's like the story I think a lot of people remember about War of the Worlds, or the story at least that I've been told and have internalized, is that this movie was at some level of failure, and at some level it was because of erratic, perhaps, behavior from Tom Cruise on the press tour of this movie, as well as just generally speaking, public behavior. Is this the couch jump?

We will get to the Oprah Winfrey Couch Jump, which happened on the press tour, for this movie. This is a very specific moment in time. This is when some specific internet outlets were birthed. YouTube came online right about this time. And what I want this episode to be about is almost a debunking episode about what is the truth behind War of the Worlds, going all the way back to the first known adaptation, the first notable adaptation done by Orson Welles. So let's get into it, Lizzie. First, the details. War of the Worlds is a 2005 science fiction disaster film directed by Stephen Spielberg. The screenplay is credited to Josh Friedman and David Kepb, based on the novel by

H.G. Wells. It was produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Colin Wilson, and it was brought to life by a bevy of stalwart Spielberg collaborators. I'm sure you saw the names in the credits Lizzie. The music, John Williams, cinematography, Janus Kaminsky, editing, Michael Kahn, costume design, Joanna Johnston, production design, Rick Carter. These are people who have worked with Spielberg for a decade or more. It stars Tom Cruise as Longshoreman Ray Ferrier, Dakota Fanning as his daughter, Rachel, Justin Chatwin as his surly son, Robbie, Miranda Otto as his barely there ex-wife, Marianne, and Tim Robbins as Harlan Ogleby. As always, the IMDV, we'll get to, hold on, I have a theory on Tim Robbins. The IMDV logline reads, an alien invasion threatens the future of humanity. The catastrophic nightmare

is depicted through the eyes of one American family fighting for survival, which I feel like reads more like a logline for signs. Yes. Well, there's a lot of similarities. Well, I shouldn't say that. There are circumstantial similarities, and yet signs handles it very differently. Very differently.

I find my propose an alternative. An alien invasion threatens the future of humanity. Tom Cruise runs. Mm-hmm. That's your movie. So today, Lizzie, as I mentioned, we're going to talk about aliens, of course. We're going to talk about belief,

and we're going to try to get to the truth with all of this. Yes. What is the real story of War of the Worlds? We have to go back in time to a Sunday, which everybody knows is the scariest day, as my wife calls it, the Sunday scariest, as you're staring down the barrel of a Monday. In fact, it was a Sunday, the night before the scariest night of the year, Halloween, and it was a very scary year, 1938. A lot of the world was staring down the barrel of fascism, as we've discussed many a time.

Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. Japan continued its military offensive into China. Nationalist forces under Franco were making gains against the Republic in Spain. But in America, we were like, we got a couple of oceans here, separating us from the rest of the world. We're going to the movies. We're listening to the radio. And the Mercury Theater had a recurring spot on CBS opposite famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his puppet Charlie McCarthy. Although it was actually called the Charlie McCarthy showed, so was Edgar the puppet or was Charlie the puppet?

It's an open-ended question. Anyway, who Lizzie was an innovative up-and-comer in his early 20s working with the Mercury Theater, founder of the Mercury Theater at the time? That would be Orson Wells. Orson Wells. And he decided to put a Welshian war on the radio. H.G. Wells' is The War of the Worlds. Different spelling. No relation. The science fiction novel chronicled a Martian invasion.

of Earth, and it was 40 years old. It had been published back in 1898. But Orson had a fresh angle, Lizzie. What was his idea? His idea was to dramatize it as though it were a real radio broadcast. Now, to be clear, he was not intending, I don't believe, to trick people into thinking it was genuinely real. He wanted to use the format of news broadcast to tell the story. I listened to it in preparation for this episode, and it's really fun. Yeah. But to be clear, it's really only the first half. It's just until the intermission. Right. And then after the intermission, you go into a more predictable, like traditional radio play with a narrator and other actors.

So he asks Howard Koch to write the script, yes, of Casablanca, which we discussed. Okay. In the form of a news broadcast. And after three days, Koch tells Wells' producer, John Hausman, this is hopeless. Houseman tries to reach Wells. He can't. So he goes back to Koch and says, Wells wants you to stick with it. Keep going.

So he worked for a few more days. Some actors pitch in. And then Wells adds some changes that bypassed the CBS legal department. because they had already done the legal review. And on Sunday, October 30th, 1938, the broadcast of Orson Wells' adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds was beamed to the nation.

Now, the story that you and I, and I believe many of our audience have heard, is that nearly everyone believed that this was real. They missed the opening disclaimer and the intermission. Mass hysteria ensued. People fainted, fled, died by suicide. Or did they?

Now, Lizzie, have you listened to the broadest, It's great. It's really fun. It's electric. I do think they do a great job of making it feel real by doing those. And now returning to the live band musical interludes, right? And it feels as if it's just percolating slowly and then all of a sudden it explodes. So the first half, as I mentioned, plays in near real time as Martian cylinders land in New Jersey, heat rays from tripods, lay waste to nearly 7,000 soldiers. And the war, of course, isn't much of a war at all. In the book, you know, as much of war as there would be between men and ants, or as Harlan Ogilvie says in the movie, Men and Maggates.

But far fewer people were listening than we've been led to believe. And even the people who did tune in, and even the people who did initially think it was real news, didn't seem to panic. Some of those who were initially duped quickly realized they were listening to fiction. How, Lizzie? How could they know? Because they were familiar with Orson Wells, or I don't know. No, they just looked outside.

Oh, yeah. I don't see any trapods out there. Or they changed the station and they realized that other news stations were not reporting on this. Yes. Or they checked the broadcast schedule in the newspaper and the description said, A dramatization of Orson. So, yeah. What I had heard was that there was another program on a different channel that aired directly before this

and that that was a big deal and that that was the reason that many people had missed the disclaimer that aired at the top of this. so that there was some initial confusion from people who tuned in, but that it was not to the extent that we are led to believe. No. And there was also, again, at the intermission, you would hear another disclaimer. Right. This is an adaptation.

A lot of people just enjoyed the show. According to one source of the 1770 people who wrote to the main CBS station about the broadcast, 1,086 were complementary, and roughly 40% of the letters sent to the FCC were supportive of the broadcast. But on Halloween, 1938, the next night, War of the Worlds dominated the new. news, thanks to the newspapers. Headlines claim thousands terrorized, listeners in panic, people pray for safety. One source claims that the newspapers were intentionally sensationalizing the news in order to put

radio in a bad light. Would this have happened if it were in a newspaper? No. Get rid of your radio. Read more newspapers. That's not to say that nobody panicked. Yeah. Radio stations and newspapers did get calls from people trying to figure out the truth.

Is this real? Is it not real? And there were a couple of unfortunate coincidences that made the broadcast more believable. My personal favorite, in the town of Concrete Washington, great name, home to 1,000 people at the time, they lost power during the broadcast. No, that's bad. Oh, no. There were also alleged eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the rockets from Mars, which, you know,

it's like my daughter who just makes up stories about everything. Sure. Last night, I'll share this briefly. We do this walk every night before bed. try to get some energy out of my son. And Nora just insists on touching this fuzzy cactus. And I'm like, you're going to get pricked. You're going to get, sure enough.

She comes back. She's like, ah, she got all these little cactus spines in hand. And I was like, do you touch the cactus? She goes, no, it was the grass. And I go, no, those are cactus spines. She goes, a spider threw them at me. I'm like, what? And so I start pulling the cactus finds out of her hand.

I go, what did we learn? And she goes, don't touch the cactus. Amazing. Little turd. Anyway, the point is, the FCC launched an investigation, But there was no punishment. There was no formal action. They made an informal agreement.

We're going to avoid the fake news format going forward. And then 2016 called and said, hold my beer. So Orson Wells moves on to Hollywood. But the question is, what if War of the Worlds had beaten him there? Would the radio broadcast be remembered or taken seriously at all had it hit the silver screen first? And it's kind of interesting that it didn't. I think we sometimes like to think of the IP invasion of Hollywood as a modern phenomenon. We talk about this all the time, Lizzie.

We tell people, like, there's a rich, history of IP being used in Hollywood. We just discussed a movie, adaptation of a book, Edna Farber's Giant. And you mentioned she was adapted how many times in the 30s, for example? Although you said every one of her books, basically. Ten out of 12, I believe, of her books were adapted. And if you look at silent film, that's almost all existing IP. That's exactly right. So studios have been chasing material for over a century back in the 20s, Broadway plays, Pulp Fiction, Religious Literature, Shakespeare, and science fiction was ripe for the picking. So Paramount reportedly bought the rights to the novel in 1925, basically 13 years before Orson's broadcast.

And there was precedent. You know, think of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, for example. Or even something like, you know, Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So there are plans for Cecil B. D. Emile to direct. Roy Pomeroy drafts an outline, but it doesn't go anywhere. I don't know why, but the movie just never took off. And at some point in the early 30s, Alfred Hitchcock expressed interest in the the property. This is before he had come to the United States and started working a lot

in the United States with David O'Sullsnik. That one doesn't go anywhere. And that actually makes a lot of sense. This is a British property. The book is originally sent near around Surrey in southern England. Next up, Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein, pioneered the theory of montage. And he directed big movies, Battleship Potemkin, right? I think 1925. That was his second film. That's an enormous film for the time. By the way, if you've never seen a photo of Sergei Eisenstein, I was reminded that he is 100% the inspiration for the crazy haircut of the main character in David Lynch's Eraserhead. Lizzie look him up really quickly. Okay.

Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. It looks like he was like that joke of Sean Pan has been electrocuted every day since 1975. That's about Sergei Eisenstein. Yeah. So another screenplay gets written, but that doesn't go anywhere. And after the 1938 broadcast, Paramount decides we can't make this movie right now. Lizzie, why could you not make War of America?

the worlds in 1939. Because you are seemingly inevitably headed towards World War II. World War II starts. World War II is happening. We're not in it. It's happening. We're not participating. And in fact, there's a lot of resistance to participate in their government organizations

and Senate committee is designed to prevent propaganda from making it feel like the United States should join the war. So this would be a very dicey movie to make at the time. So let's fast forward to 1951. America, thanks in no small part to the Nazi scientists brought to the U.S. in Operation Paperclip, is experiencing a scientific boom. And Hollywood is entering the golden age of science fiction in Hollywood. To be clear, in literature, it predates this by two decades.

But in Hollywood, the public is captivated by the idea of space travel and the atomic bomb. And in 1951, we get some really important releases. So the thing from another world, RKO, and the Day the Earth stood still. Yes. 20th century fox. Michael Rennie was ill, the day the earth stood still. I was just listening to Rocky Horror. Of course, that is from Science Fiction Double Feature off of that movie's soundtrack,

which lists almost all of the sci-fi classics from this era. Yep. Things come full circle at Paramount when they assign George Powell, prolific science fiction producer of the 50s, to make War of the Worlds. Now, he had been DeMille's protege, and the resulting film was released in the United States in late August of 1953. Paul produced, Barry Lyndon wrote the screenplay, and Byron Haskin directed. Lizzie, have you ever seen the 1953 The War of the World's Adaptation with Gene Barry and Anne Robinson?

I have not, no. It's very fun. It's very hokey from the time. It actually has really fun special effects. There are a couple of key changes from the book. They move it to California, just outside of Los Angeles, and then eventually in Los Angeles. The main character is a scientist, not a writer as he is in H.G. Wells' version. They give him a love interest, played by Anne Robinson, who's, I believe, effectively a nurse, instead of a wife that he's trying to get back to because they wanted to give it like an active love,

you know, sort of element. But in a lot of ways, it's much more accurate than the Spielberg version. Like the aliens are closer, although smaller, to the way that they're described in the Wells version. Although they do make a couple of important changes, they give the aliens the three fingers. They have tentacles in the Wells version. You can see the influence on ET from the 1953 version, for example. And it was, you know, kind of innovative. It won a special effects Oscar, you know, and it was nominated for sound and editing.

It's a real, like, staple of this era. This podcast is sponsored by Built. Guys, Lizzie and I don't always agree on everything. For example, she loves a good Sally Bowles-style pixie-cut, and I say, godspeed. But we do agree that housing is expensive. Rent, mortgage, it doesn't matter which one you're paying. It stings every month, but Built can make it feel a little bit better. Let me explain.

Built started out rewarding members on their rent, and now as of 2026, built members can also earn points on mortgage payments wherever they live. Every housing payment earns you points you can use toward flights with top travel partners like United and Hyatt, Lyftrides, Amazon.com purchases, and so much more. Personally, I redeem my points for Amazon.com, which I use to order Blu-rays of the movies that we watch on this podcast. But here's what I think the most underrated part is. Built members also get access to a neighborhood concierge.

It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and find new local spots, all while being rewarded at more than 45,000 merchant partners. It's like having a personal assistant baked into where. wherever you live. It's simple. Being a renter and now owning a home is better with Built. Join the membership for where you live at joinbilt.com slash wrong. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com slash wrong. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. So the era of science fiction as, you know, kind of the Hollywood B-movie crop, staple crop ends arguably in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick's 2001 of Space Odyssey, which really

take sci-fi to the next level. Right. And movies like War of the Worlds, which I think scratched an itch for large-scale destruction and effects, morph more into the disaster genre, which we've talked about. And you get movies like earthquake and airport and Airport 77 and the swarm. Poseidon, Tower of Terror. Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno. Yeah, sorry, not Tower of Terror.

Tower of Terror. Tower of Terror. Tower of Terror. Poseidon, Big boat. Haunt of Iris on the seas. But of course, we have aliens, right, returning in the late 70s.

Could you name a couple of movies, Lizzie, from around that time that involve aliens? Alien. Perfect. Alien. Alien. Alien. Shortly thereafter, the thing.

Close encounters of the third kind. E.T. Exactly. Even Star Wars, to a certain extent, you know, it features many aliens. You mentioned John Carpenter remade thing from another world. Yeah.

The thing. Now, there were always rumblings of War of the Worlds. Like, let's remake War of the Worlds. This is a book that people know. It's been around for nearly a century at this point. The movie has not been remade since 1953. I think people forget, you know, a lot of movies that are frequently remade, there tends to be about a 15 year cadence. Yes. It's about 15 years. It's born. It might be like 20-ish years. Yeah, 15 to 20 years go by and the studio perks up, right? And they say, all right, we got to do it. Now, in the early 90s, Stephen Spiel, buys one of the last surviving War of the World's radio scripts. I can find no evidence of this, but I am convinced that the discovery of E.T. by Elliott, along with the alien design, was directly influenced by the 1953 adaptation. But what we do know, Lizzie, is that Steven Spielberg loves aliens. Me too. I got to tell you, aliens are right up there with vampires for me. I will watch almost anything with aliens in it. I love them. I mean, War of the Worlds, they are alien vampires.

Yeah. In the Wells version and in the Spielberg version, they suck. I drink your milkshake. I know. They literally drink the human milkshakes and then spray them everywhere. They do. Can I shout out one alien movie, very briefly? If no one has seen this, it was a small movie.

I can't remember how many years ago it came out, but it's called The Vast of Night. Yeah. And it's excellent. One of my favorite alien movies. So if you're an alien fan. The Vast of Night is very Spielbergian in many ways. It is. Yes, very much.

In a close encounters kind of way. In a close encounters kind of way. It's really, really good. There is a particularly incredible oner in that. movie that deserves more attention than I feel like it got. So watch The Vast of Night. I think it got some good attention. It's a great indie film. I believe his second film is coming out soon. I will double check that and we can promote it. Great. Now, Spielberg also made his first alien movie at a young age. She was 17. It was called Firelight and it depicted an alien attack on Earth.

He was massively inspired by some golden age of sci-fi movies. The Day the Earth stood still the War of the World's Earth versus the Flying Saucers from 1956. But his love for aliens, Lizzie, goes beyond the movies because young Stevie Spielberg wanted to believe. He had a deep, rooted belief that we had been visited this century. Quote, I was a real UFO devotee in the 1970s and really into the UFO phenomenon from reading. For me, it was science, end quote. Was it Chariot of the Gods? I don't know if it was Chariot of the Gods. And here's why. I think it had more to do with perhaps the books of Jacques Valet. Have you read any, like, passport to Magonia for for example, from 1969.

I haven't read them. Because, you know, in Close Encounters, the character played by Francois Rufauts, the French scientist at the beginning of the movie, who shows up. Yes. Yeah. So, he's inspired by Jacques Valet. Got it. Okay.

And to be clear, Jacques Valet, not just a euphologist, although I think a lot of people know him from that. That's how I knew him. But also, internet pioneer, astronomer, computer scientists, venture capitalists, out of the Bay Area. The point is, what's interesting about him in particular is he actually does something that I think you mentioned signs, but that Eminet Shambi Shambi Shambi. Tomlon really taps into in signs, which I love. I do too.

Passport to Magonia, it explores the potential links between UFOs, cults, religions, demons, angels, ghosts, cryptids. You know, what if all of these are manifestations of the same sort of thing being perceived in different ways? And what I think is so interesting about that is when everybody complains about signs and the fact that these aliens have landed on Earth and they're, you know, sensitive to water, it's like, because they're actually demons and that ain't aliens. it's demons and angels

because, you know, it's all about religion. And so they're sensitive to water because they're a little fiery demons. So it's holy water. It's holy water. Yeah, exactly. Because he's a priest because it's Mel Gibson. Well, look, I think it's one of the few paranormal type things that I will even allow myself to entertain. Yeah, I like it's fun.

And at this point, it feels less like entertaining, considering the government is like, yeah, there's aliens. And there's like, there's definitely something going on. My wife's reading Annie Jacobson's Area 51 right now. Oh. A lot of the stuff about that is it's really, you know, dead. Russian spy planes and whatnot. But I like the idea that there's stuff that we don't understand out there. Definitely. And that the explanation is not just some religious, you know, allegory. Right. And I also, you know, you're talking about sort of like archetypes, cryptids, all these

things. I think that's why ancient aliens is so fun and why the world of worlds is so fun is because these things, they're not new. They actually are like more ancient than we are. And that exerts this kind of control over humanity that's almost a relief in some ways. Because it's like, Oh, this was all set up before we even got here. Yeah, exactly. And it's funny because Spielberg in this movie makes a specific choice to imply some sort of ancient aliens connection by having these machines have been buried underground for so long. Right. Which is not part of the H.G. Wells book.

Let's get back to the 90s. Spielberg buys the script and says, oh, man, this would make an amazing movie. And I think in part, it's not that he's, maybe he'd forgotten that this movie existed. I really think it's the timing, right? He's just made Jurassic Park. He has just brought dinosaurs to life. He also just made Schindler's list. You know, maybe he's ready to make a war movie.

He will go on to make Saving Private Ryan very shortly after this. The technology's ready, but Roland Emmerich beats him to the punch, Lizzie, with what movie that we're going to cover later this summer? We will not go quietly into that good night. We will not vanish without a fight Independence Day. One of the best speeches of presidents ever given. That's my president. That's my president.

Bill Pullman, Independence Day. Truly, I would nominate him in a heartbeat. So Spielberg moves on. But as H.G. Wells puts it in his boat. intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded this intellectual property with envious size. So around the same time that Spielberg's toying with the idea, of course, a lot of other people are thinking about War of the Worlds. Screenwriter Peter Briggs turned it into a spec screenplay. Now, he's probably best known now for adapting Hellboy with Germal Del Toro.

But back in the early 90s, he was very known for aliens and predators. Specifically, he wrote an early draft of Alien versus Predator based on the Dark Horse comic that sold the 20th Century Fox. Now, that movie would languish in development hell for years, and it would not get turned into a film until, you know, I think early to mid-2000s. But Briggs, who must have been a glutton per punishment, decides that he's going to do a spec adaptation of War of the Worlds that is faithful to the period. Cool.

1898. And he even incorporates research material he pulled from the University of Indianapolis that Wells had cut before publishing it. For example, Wells' hero was supposed to die in a blaze of glory after using explosives to take out one of the tripods in the original version. Okay. which happens in this movie. But then he changed it. So spec scripts are almost never made, as you know, Lizzie.

They're often used as calling cards or samples. And in fact, Briggs would use this as a sample. But Briggs's agent sent it to Paramount, who owns the rights, the cinematic rights, for War of the Worlds. And according to Briggs, they flipped out for it. Why? Because Kenneth Brana had just approached Paramount about adapting War of the Worlds also.

So Paramount says, oh, great, perfect timing. Here's a script. And they sent Briggs' screen. script, Kenneth Rana. And Rana, who was also working with actor Brian Blessed, loved it. They say, this is great. Let's go make it. And then they hit a snag. And it's the same damn snag we hit on the Iron Giant, which is that this damn movie had been turned into a concept album in the 70s, and the rights got all screwed up. So back in the late 70s, musician Jeff Wayne decided to do something unusual. He turned War of the Worlds into a concept album.

Took a few months, but he was able to lock down the rights. In fact, quote, except for the book and movie rights, the latter of which are owned by Paramount, I own everything else, including, as best as we could determine, merchandising. Oh, dear. So Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds, that's the full title, was released in 1978. And Lizzie, it's narrated by Richard Burton. Hell yeah. It's really fun.

I listen to the whole thing. The music's awesome. The narration, Richard Burton's voice is great. Yeah, he does have a great voice. Honestly, it's kind of a blast. I'm not a big fan of concept albums generally. They're just not my style, but I... Well, it's got to be better than space, jazz.

No, it's just, yes. No, this is... It's really fun. Here's the thing. War of the Worlds was public domain in the United States, but not in the UK. And European copyright law had just changed. The book was originally set to become public domain 50 years after the author's death. Wells died in 46, so that means it would become public domain in Europe in 19.

1996, perfect timing. But then that period got expanded to 75 years. So the merchandising rights get stuck with Jeff Wayne for another 25 years. So according to Briggs, they get Jeff Wayne into a room to try to make a deal. They're saying, Jeff, we want to make this movie. He says, I will sell you these rights on one condition. You make this movie a musical. The project died.

No, I wish they'd said yes. Now, Briggs claims that in 1998, an executive at Cruz-Wagner Productions, which is Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's production company, which they formed in 1992, reached out about the script. Now, I don't think this necessarily means Tom Cruise was asking about it. This is just an executive at his company. Sure. Their job is to find material that would be suitable for Tom to star in or to produce. And I think War of the Worlds makes a lot of sense for this type of stuff that he's doing. So War of the Worlds was perfect, except Jeff Wayne.

And they say, yeah, you know, we can't do anything with this. But Jeff Wayne may have inadvertently protected the property because Hallmark was also interested in turning the War of the Worlds into a probably not super high budget mini series. What? But they couldn't get past Jeff Wayne. So that version also died. Do the aliens come home for Christmas and realize that their true love has been in the bar all along? Yeah, they realized it was the guy that they went to high school with who's like, where's flannels?

And he's pretty hot. Yeah. It was only a matter of time before Hollywood's biggest star made a movie with its biggest director. Now, that was not War the Worlds. Lizzie, when did Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg finally hook up? That would be Minority Report. That's right. One of the greatest science fiction films, in my opinion, ever made.

That's great. An enormous commercial and critical success that Jan DeBont will, always say should have been his movie. I believe the story is that Yon DeBant was originally supposed to direct that, and Spielberg was going to direct The Haunting. And then they, feel was like, what if we flipped? Stole minority report. Well, Jan, that's your fault. So for Spielberg, I'm guessing it was a welcome turn after the somewhat muted reception of 2001's AI artificial intelligence. And I'm guessing these two men probably bonded over the fact that both of them didn't have a great time working with Stanley Kubrick in their respective endeavors

with eyes wide shut and AI artificial intelligence. Yeah. Now, for Cruz, it was perhaps also a nice distraction from his divorce from Nicole Kidman, although I think based on the timing, that divorce happened basically concurrent to or maybe even after the filming of Minority Report, which had a lengthy post-production process. But the point is, these two knew they wanted to run it back. I mean, Minority Report was a total success. It was a huge success. Very good. According to Cruz, Spielberg pitched three ideas, and the third idea was The War of the Worlds. Now, Cruz loved science fiction films. He hadn't starred in a lot of them, but he loved them.

And I want to read you a quote, Lizzie, and I want you to put yourself in the mindset of, I just listened to that amazing primer on Scientology that what went wrong released on Friday, which we recorded 10 minutes ago. Yeah. So here's the quote. You look at science fiction and the role that science fiction has actually played in our culture because they were dreaming and pushing for the space race. It was the science fiction writers during that poll fiction era that were writing about space

and then creating that, trying to get them to not think about blowing each other up, end quote. So he's talking about our supreme leader. Maybe. It's possible that there is an allusion here to the founder of Scientology Elron Hubbard, who, when he published Dianetics, positioned it as an alternative to nuclear proliferation and escalation. Right. And if you guys don't know, Elron Hubbard, was a prolific pulp science fiction writer, in fact, the most prolific author of all time,

according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Now, Cruz and Spielberg already had another project in development together, Lizzie. It was called Ghost Soldiers, and it's kind of a perfect synthesis of both of their sensibilities, at least as an audience would see them. It's the story of a group of Ranger volunteers who in January of 1945 set out to rescue over 500 POWs in a Japanese camp in the Philippines. It's basically saving Private Ryan meets Mission Impossible. It makes a lot of sense.

and writer Josh Friedman had, as of January 2002, already written the first draft. A little bit on Friedman. He'd studied film at USC in the 90s. He got an agent, dropped out, sold a spec script called Dead Drop, that eventually became the 1996 movie Chain Reaction, which I've never seen, starring Keone Reeves, Morgan Freeman, and Rachel Weiss. I will watch it for her. The IMDB Logline reads,

two researchers in a green alternative energy project are put on the run when they are framed for murder and treason. And there are actually kind of a few of these weird sort of like alternative energy thrillers from the time. I've also reminded, do you ever see the Val Kilmer movie, The Saint? Yes. Where he plays like the master thief who's attempting to steal the cold fusion technology or whatever. Yeah. Anyway, the point is the story goes, nine other writers worked on this script and all that was left was a single line of Morgan Freeman's dialogue.

Would you like to hear the one line that was left of Josh Friedman's doing? Yes. Okay, here we go. I'm your friend. That's it. I'm your friend? I'm your friend Eddie Yikes

That was the only line left But it didn't matter The project changed his life He was hired to adapt Ghost Soldiers I think this was actually before Spielberg and Cruz were attached But Ghost Soldiers died in development There may have been too much competition

You had the Great Raid at Miramax You gotta change that title It's also possible that You know, Spielberg He'd been involved in Band of Brothers Which had come out around this time And maybe he was thinking I gotta move on from World War II

He also I believe was developing Munich which was going to follow the murder of the Israeli Olympians at the 1972 Munich Olympics. So he may just have wanted to move away from this arena. Again, it didn't matter for Josh Friedman because the point is Spielberg says, hey, why don't you tackle War of the Worlds? But he doesn't want to do it as a period adaptation. So Lizzie, what happened at the beginning of the 2000s that seemingly changed the course of everything in the United States

and has continued to define us and certainly changed a lot of movies in Hollywood? September 11th. Exactly. So Spielberg said, Quote, these films came out in response to our fears about the Soviet Union and a possible nuclear war. He's talking about the original War of the Worlds. Now, in the shadow of 9-11, it felt that War of the Worlds had a special significance. I think I made this picture because I thought this story's time had come again.

So he tells Friedman, I want you to do a post-9-11 take on War of the Worlds. And Friedman goes off and writes it, cross 2002 and 2003. Hands in the script. Silence. Paramount decides they don't want to pay him any more steps. They don't greenlight the movie. He says he left and went on to other projects. Now, I don't think that's because Paramount didn't want to make this movie.

I get the sense that it's because Spielberg and Cruz wanted to bring on a different writer. And let's talk about the first writer that they considered. It's possible they considered him before Friedman. It's possible this came after. We could not nail down the timeline. But we do know that it is the director who also loves aliens, Lizzie. He loves aliens. He loves mystery boxes.

He loves aliases. It is J.J. Abrams. J.J. Abrams. Aliens and aliases. And Super 8 is obviously a very Spielbergian alien movie that he would later make. So sometime in 2003 he gets a call. Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, and Paula Wagner want to meet you. And he says, is this a prank?

And they say, no, come in. And they bring him in and they say, do you want to write war of the world? And he says, I can't because I am stuck making this show called Lost. And I have no idea what's happening. We don't have a script. And he was so busy on Lost. that he had to say no to War of the Worlds. He said he felt like he had committed career suicide.

Here I was doing this pilot that I didn't have a script for, when instead I could have been working with Spielberg and Cruz. Little did he know, loss would become not only the most expensive pilot of all time, but one of the most successful shows at the time. Abrams is out. Spielberg needs a sure thing. He needs the man who'd help to make the dinosaurs walk the earth. Jurassic Park.

David can come here. Yeah, that's the song. Yeah. So Josh Friedman and David Kep are around the same age, but they were at very different points in their career. Lizzie, you mentioned. Jurassic Park, since 93, let me just read you some of the films that David Kep wrote between 1993 and 2003.

Jurassic Park, Carlito's Way, that was the same year. The paper, Mission Impossible, The Lost World, stir of echoes, panic room, Spider-Man. Yeah, just some small movies. Just a few little indie flicks. So some sources say that Spielberg discarded Friedman's script, but we'll get into that in a little bit. So in January of 2004, Spielberg, Cruz, and Kep meet to talk about the story.

And they establish a couple of things. Number one, Cruz's character, he's just going to be a dad with a blue collar job. We're going to show him being really good at that job. But it's not going to come back later. Great. Okay. Can I give you my theory? Yes.

I think that originally, in the third act, there had to have been something. He was going to operate one of the tripods. Yes. Of course. It's exactly set up for that. That is why he is doing it. He was going to operate it to dump their diarrhea. Yeah.

Or whatever. He was going to hit the diarrhea dump button. But it was clearly set up for that. It has to be. And then they just clearly abandoned. They decided we're not going to do that. And I'm glad they actually didn't do that because that would have been too heroic for the character. Yeah.

But also then you didn't need the extended sequence of him dropping that. It's so weird and funny because they make a point of showing how good and like adept he is at operating the controls of this crane. There's no way it wasn't supposed to come back. Here's my theory. They cut it from the climax, and they said, should we cut it from the beginning? And they said, this guy's kind of such a shitty dad for a lot of this movie. He should be good at something. He should be good at something in the beginning.

And they kept it. Or Tom Cruise had been like, I just learned how to operate a crane for the last six months. Like, I'm going to do it in this movie. That's true. Either way, it's fine. They also agree about what they don't want in the movie. They said no destruction of famous landmarks, no shots of world capitals, no scientists or government officials as main characters. I think that's really cool.

This is going to be an anti-aliant invasion movie. They take all the tropes that we normally see and they say, we don't want to see them. It's going to be big but intimate with a very specific point of view. If Ray doesn't see it, we don't see it. And I think that's really effective. They feel like ants. They really feel like ants.

Like even if there is a plan to deal with the aliens, we have no idea what it is. And of course, Lizzie, by the nature of the source material, the aliens are going to be mean. And as we discussed in Temple of Doom, Spielberg always seems to be suffering a little, bit of cognitive dissonance when he's dealing with material that is darker than his normal sensibility. And he has a quote here that I think is interesting. He says, my true nature makes me

want to make E.T. in close encounters. But the audience in me wants to make war of the worlds. For the sheer excitement, nothing comes close to warfare between the human race and an extraterrestrial one. It's bigger than life. And it's interesting that, like, I think there's the movies that he feels are maybe more in his wheelhouse, which could be an E.T., for example, as opposed to the movies that he really remembers fondly from his childhood that really like made him want to go make movies, for example, which maybe had a bit more of an edge to them. But what's interesting too about it, Lizzie, is that do you know that E.T. started as a much darker movie? I vaguely remember us talking about this. You talked about this on Poltergeist a little bit. And we will talk about this when we cover E.T.

But it originally was supposed to be a dark sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind called Night Skies. Right. And then it, of course, became something very different. So Kep starts working on the script, and Spielberg's very secretive about it. He would only hand out sections, and according to Kep, quote, like only five people read the whole script. He would only give people portions of the script. And then, after 50 years of rumblings, false starts, and roadblocks, the War of the World gets an adrenaline shot right in the ass. Cruz and Spielberg are at this time two of the busiest men in Hollywood,

and they've got a couple of big movies lined up. Tom Cruise has Mission Impossible 3, or MI3, and Spielberg has what will become Munich. So after Abrams turns down, War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise calls him up. He starts inviting him to concerts and get-togethers. Abrams starts returning the favor. Abram says, it's like we were dating. I ended up inviting him to my birthday party.

Tom shows up, and he is the nicest guy in the history of all time to my friends, especially my most cynical friends. Everyone sees it and gets it. He's a sweetheart. He's real. It was the most normal fun time, end quote. Lizzie, your face was like, what's he doing? What's he doing?

What's he doing? I don't know. My first thought was like, is he recruiting him? Oh. To Scientology? That was my first thought, but no. I don't feel like Tom Cruise has to do that. He's up to something else.

He is up to something else. Abrams agent calls him after Cruz and Abrams have been dating for a while and he says, Are you aware of the conversations? And he says, we're not dating, what conversations? And he says, no, no, no. This conversation is that Tom wants you to direct Mission Impossible 3. Which would be a huge move for J.J. Abrams. We are now in the summer of 2004.

So David Fincher had been attached to that film briefly, then Joe Carnahan, and now Cruz wants to bring on Abrams. The movie's been delayed, and Paramount's like, We Need Our Next Mission Impossible. Spielberg has decided to postpone Munich to take another crack at the script, and so all of a sudden they have a very brief window, where Cruise is available before Mission Impossible 3 because Abrams is working on loss and needs to get up to speed, and Spielberg's waiting for the script on Munich. And so they decide, what if we just make this really tiny indie film called War of the Worlds during this break? This $130 million indie film. So in August of 2004, Variety Reports, following 48 hours of frenzied negotiations, War of the World, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg, has been set on a crash pre-production schedule. $130 million budget.

They have just 10 weeks of prep, less than half of what they would normally get for a movie this size. That's crazy. Lizzie, they need to hit a November 2004 start date for filming. It's August of 2004, and they're going to hit a June of 2005 release. That's some Twilight and New Moon timeline there. That's 10 months. That's crazy. Kathleen Kennedy later said Spielberg turned to her and said,

Don't freak out when you look at the script. Just recognize that there are three people in the movie. That's the heart of the film. And every now and then there are a thousand people running in the background, end quote. Yeah. So on the one hand, I think. Spielberg is sensitive to this in a sense because he said, you know, this wasn't a cram course for War of the World. He said, this was my longest schedule in about 12 years. We took our time.

I think he means production schedule, like shooting schedule. This is a crazy tight delivery in terms of prep and post-production because he also said, I've never prepped a movie this quickly. Yeah, it's crazy. I think he wants to make it clear. I'm not phoning it in. You can see it in the movie. He's obviously not phoning it in. This is a crazy tight timeline. So how does he pull it off? Well, obviously, he's not going to do it alone. He brings in, as we mentioned, a lot of the people he's worked with before, composer John Williams, his cinematographer, Janice Kaminsky, editor Michael Khan, costume designer Joanna Johnston, production designer Rick Carter. As you mentioned, Lizzie, the sets in this movie, the builds. Really great.

Amazing. The airplane crash, when it crashes into the suburban neighborhood, that one's particularly incredible. Yeah. It's fun, too, because it's also just what JJ Abrams does on Lost and the pilot. Also, stunt coordinator Vic Armstrong, we should mention who we just talked about on Temple of Doom. And of course, Industrial Light and Magic. So they basically rolled off the Star Wars prequels onto War of the Worlds. And one of the first calls that Spielberg made was to Dennis Murren, VFX supervisor, who we've talked about on a number of episodes. But one of the next calls

was to a man named Dan Gregoire. Spielberg had met Gregor at Skywalker Ranch sometime in 2003, where he was doing something that had been done for a couple years, but was still pretty new in Hollywood. Pre-visualization. Hmm. So Lizzie, we've talked about pre-vising before, basically creating a digital pre-visualization, think a very rudimentary animated version of what a sequence will look like in a movie. He was doing this with George Lucas on Revenge of the Sith, and he was doing it digitally in many instances on a laptop, and it would take a matter of hours, not days, to render this thing out. And so this process allowed Lucas to basically look over his shoulder and direct the scene right there. And so for War of the Worlds, one of the ways they were

able to kind of move quickly is Gregor would take photos throughout location scouting. He'd recreate at the locations on his laptop, and then Spielberg could, quote, fly the set, meaning, you know, he could explore the set and nail his angles before they ever got to set. And Lizzie, we talked about how meticulous Spielberg is with storyboarding. This is obviously taking that to the next level. Right. It's essentially 3D storyboarding. Exactly. And, you know, he would then send these to ILM. I'llm could get a head start on mapping out their effects. But I also want to be clear, this was not, I don't think this was entirely new to Spielberg. I have seen the previsis for, do you remember in a minority report when the spiders are going through the apartment to find him in a

the bathtub and it's that amazing crane shot going over all the rooms. I'm 99% sure they pre-vised that entire sequence because that's used with a motorized crane that they're doing that with. So I believe he's used this technology before, but never to this extent. And did you say that Dennis Murren was the one at ILM who was heading this up? No, this was Dan Gregorah, who's then sending things to Dennis Moran at ILM. I could be wrong. I'm pretty sure Dennis Muran was also heading up the team behind the T2 in Terminator, which makes a lot of sense given the tentacled creature that appears later. Oh, yeah.

I mean, Dennis, he's a veteran. He's done everything. So they're also setting up crews to work simultaneously on the East and West Coast. So basically, they're going to shoot East Coast first for location work,

and then they'll come back to L.A. after winter break to shoot, you know, stage work and anything remaining. And Spielberg has to consistently resist the huge temptation to go bigger, right? And this may have in part been why they omitted potentially

a we could not verify scene in which he operates one of the tripods, Tom Cruise. Yeah. I'm just, it has to be that. It has to be. But one example, the big hillside battle, Lizzie, right? Where Justin Chatwin runs off, you're not my real dad.

He goes up the side of the hill. And Tom Cruise is trying to pull him back. And we're seeing the tanks, you know, along the top of the hill. Yeah. He had actually prevised going over the hill and seeing the full extent of like the, the, quote, war of the world. Right. But we never do in the final film because he had to commit to the personal point of view of the family, which I actually think is a really effective story choice.

Yeah. It's like, I like that Cruz never sees over that. He doesn't go over the hill. You know, it's consistent with his character. Also, 10 months, Stephen, 10 months. So let's talk about casting briefly. So Cruz is obviously in from the start. But we should note that audiences were just starting to get a taste in a sense of the non-heroic cruise.

So, like, if you go back to Cruz's origins and especially you look at some of his roles in the 90s, he played some really complex characters in a really interesting way. You think of something like Rain Man in the late 80s or even Jerry McGuire in the 90s, pretty flawed individuals. And then in the early 2000s, as we discussed in our primer a little bit, you see him move a little bit. You see him move a little bit more into more of the Mission Impossible world of, you know, something like The Last Samurai, for example. Yeah, safer roles for sure. Somewhat.

Or, you know, more popcorn. But he had just done Michael Mann's collateral, which came out in August of 2004, where he's not only an antagonist, he's the Silver Fox antagonist, which is a totally no look for Cruz. He's good in it. He's very good. So I wonder if Cruz at the time was wanting to explore darker roles. Because if you look at something like Collateral and War of the Worlds, these are two movies where he's playing far more dark or flawed characters

and some of the other movies around it. Yes, but they're not... Like, you're talking about the early exploration of his parts and you're thinking of things like Rain Man or interview with the vampire where he's really pushing himself and trying to do things that are very different from Tom Cruise. I would argue with both collateral and War of the Worlds. He is fully in the lane that he will, I think, remain in

where he's kind of always Tom Cruise. But, yes, he is definitely... He's mean Tom Cruise in this. one. He's angry Tom Cruise. He's angry Tom Cruise. So around the same time, Trey's report that Dakota Fanning, 10 years old, has been cast as his daughter. And for Dakota, Tom Cruise, Shmomom Cruz. She'd acted across Sean Penn and I Am Sam, Denzel Washington and Man on Fire, Britney Murphy and Uptown Girl, Mike Myers in the Cat in the Hat, and Kevin Bacon and Charlie Staren in something called Trapped that I didn't even know was a movie. The point is, even when the movies weren't great,

Although Man on Fire is, in my opinion. Banning was always praised as a natural. And as you mentioned, she's a scene stealer in this movie. Yeah. He basically, I'm sure Spielberg gave her the tape of Willie Scott and said, Scream that much, but make it more watchable for Lizzie. Yeah. Thank you.

So the main two roles are set. Now, I read, you know, the remaining cast wasn't set until a month out from shooting. I don't think that's that unusual. That's not that unusual in my experience. Not from what we've seen. No. Early October, Tim Robbins is in talks to join the cast. You could argue he'd peaked in the 90s, the player, Shawshank Redemption, and a lot more.

But he's making a comeback. Lizzie, he just won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Do you remember which movie? Was it Mystic River? That's right. And they said, play the same character in this movie. Oh, no. Except this time, it's aliens.

That's right. So, he'd also worked with Tom Cruise, Top Gun. And he'd never worked with Steven Spielberg, which is kind of crazy to me. I would imagine he would have totally crossed past with him, but he hadn't. So this was the first time. You know, I actually, while I find the basement, sequence with Tim Robbins to be strange on many levels. It feels out of left field. I always love Tim Robbins. It just feels like a bit of a non sequitur in this movie. Yeah. It feels like a little bit

of a weird distraction. He's just not set up. You know what I mean? He just kind of comes out of nowhere. No. But I will say, I do like them opposite each other because of the size difference because there are a couple of moments where they are physically at odds. And it's like, it's very clear in that moment that, like, I'm sorry, Tom Cruise, you are not overpowering Tim Robbins. Human giant Tim Robbins. He's huge. And, like, that is interesting to watch because in those moments, it's like the character of Ray, clearly recognizing, I cannot physically overpower this person, so I'm going to have to figure

something else out. And he does, and he bludges him with a shovel. Yeah. He's also not, like, wispy thin the way he was in the 90s, too. No, he's big. Tim Robbins is thickened out by this point in his career. So he's an imposing person. But Robbins was an early choice.

along with Australian actress Miranda Otto. This is what I was going to say at the beginning is that Miranda Otto's entire role in this movie is just to look hot pregnant for Tom Cruise to be like, it's a good look on you. And she's like, really? And he's like, yeah. Well, let's talk about it.

What was she most famous for right at this moment, Lizzie? Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings. Not a man. Die. Now's cool. So she happens to be on a quick trip to L.A.

And her agent calls and says Steven Spielberg wants to meet you. Again, she thinks this. This is a joke. She's also pregnant. So she meets Spielberg and she says, Oh, she's actually pregnant. So she says, I had to say to him,

I don't know if I can do this because I'm pregnant. And Spielberg says, no, that's great. Because there's barely any relationship here to begin with. And it gives it something if you're pregnant. And so they wrote it into the movie. They just wrote her pregnancy into the movie. It's just that it's such a weird line. But yes.

I know. But I think what they were trying to do again is like he's kind of such a derpy, deadbeat dad for a lot of this movie. Which, again, I really like that I think they wanted to say he's not resentful of his ex-wife. that way. Like, he's fallen short as a father, but I like that they said, they don't need to be fighting or have baggage. You know what I mean on that front? Yeah, she seems to get along with him decently well. Yeah, and like, he's moved on. And I like the new husband is just like,

I'll be outside because you guys have to do your thing. I liked that element of it. It felt like actually a realistic mature portrayal of divorce as opposed to what you normally get in the movies. And also when the brother is like, you just chose Boston because you're just trying to dump us on moms so you can leave and spend for yourself. And Tom Cruise is basically like, correct. Yeah. It's like, yeah, you really don't want to be with these kids. That's true. Also, fun thing, Lizzie, you haven't seen the 53 version, but her parents who are just at the very end of the film, that's Gene Barry and Anne Robinson, who are the two leads from the 53 version. Oh, cool. I thought that was really nice. Last but not least, Justin Chatwin as Robbie. So Spielberg said he looked

for a long time to find somebody who threw a baseball as poorly as Tom Cruise. I'm just kidding. Justin throws it way better. Wow. Michael Kahn, give him an Oscar for the way he edits around Tom Cruise's throwing motion in this movie. It's tough. It's like in the natural Robert Redford's son at the end of the movie and you're like, so he's not a natural. But that's okay. Anywho, Justin Chowen, it's interesting. They say they searched far and wide, which I'm sure they did, but we couldn't find any other names that they considered. And Chowman also had a Spielberg connection by way of Dreamworks. So his big debut was in the 2005 film, The Chum Scrubber, which was an independent film. directed by Ari Posen, which featured Jamie Bell as the lead,

Lou Taylor Pucci, and Rory Colkin, all of whom also could have been great in this role. So I wonder if somebody just gave Spielberg the DVD of the Chumnskrubber. It was like, pick one. Yeah. Who knows. Also, I always confuse that one with Thumb Sucker, which also stars Lou Taylor Poochie. But that's the Mike Mills one.

Yes. I like both movies. I prefer Thumb Sucker. I like Thumb Sucker quite a bit. Yeah, it's good. Anyway, Chum Shrubber was distributed by GoFish Pictures. art house distribution arm of DreamWorks. Also, I believe it was produced by your favorite guy, Lawrence Bender. Oh, quick note on DreamWorks. Company founded in 1994, we've talked about at Spielberg,

Katzenberg, Geffen, SKG. Not a financial runaway success. Geffen later admitted they came close to bankruptcy twice. They planned to build a back lot in 2000. That fell apart. They took huge losses on Sinbad Legend of the Seven Seas. Oh yeah. $125 million loss. Shrek 2 underperformed on DVD, Cat in the Hat bombed. I just want to make the point. While Spielberg is prepping for War of the World's, DreamWorks animation was spun off into a separate company. And for much of 2005, DreamWorks was negotiating a deal with NBC Universal, parent company of Universal Pictures, to buy DreamWorks. And if you remember, Lizzie, Universal was the home of Amblin, Stephen Spielberg's production

company, and where Stephen has made, you know, many of his biggest hits, obviously, going back to Jaws. More on that in a bit. So they have a 72-day shoot across Connecticut, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and California. For the crashed plane, they pay $60,000 for, decommission Boeing 747, much like it lost. They spend $200,000 to transport it from Victorville, California to Universal Studios. If you're using a helicopter and a series of lorries escorted by the police, and you can still see it on the tour at Universal. Have you seen it,

Lizzie? Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's fun. One of my favorite things is if I have a general on Universal and I like walk the back lot and see the tour and I'm like, I wonder what they think I do. And then I'm like, nothing, you're going to a general. Anyway, they had one plane, but they had 60 different versions of Ray's leather jacket, and although we couldn't find in an exact number, they had a lot of extras, who may have been preoccupied by the notion that just maybe they'd get to be acting across Tom Cruise,

the biggest movie star in the world. And it was not easy work. They are screaming and running from imaginary tripods. It is cold, it is icy. They are soaking these environments with water because it's supposed to always look rainy. And there's a bit of an apocryphal story that may confirm our instincts

about Steven Spielberg's sensibilities. quote, Stephen Spielberg personally instructed extras to look more frightened, explaining that they should turn around and think, oh, fuck, to which someone said, Mr. Spielberg isn't this movie rated PG-13, to which he reportedly said, PG-13 movie R-rated director. Okay. If that's true, that's the funniest line I have ever heard. Cool dad. This is something like that. Dakota Fanning turned 11 on set. Tom Cruise reportedly gave her a cell phone as a birthday present, which I can just say as a parent is a terrible birthday gift.

Do you not get my kid a phone. Ask her parents first. Now, the bigger concern was not the cell phones that Tom Cruise brought to set. What do you think he may have brought to set, Lizzie, that may have caused a stir? I don't know. Scientology. Ah, okay. Specifically, a Scientology tent. So if you guys missed our primer on Scientology and its history, Tom Cruise joined the practice, the faith, the religion in the 1980s.

He was introduced to it by his first wife. Mimi Rogers, kind of distanced himself from the religion, relatively speaking, during the 90s while he was married to Nicole Kidman. They divorced in 2001. He was brought back into the fold. You mentioned he received a very prestigious medal from them that was videotaped and later released in 2008. He was very much the, obviously, the face of Scientology at this point. The Scientology tent was there just in case, according to Cruz, anybody wanted to read some religious material or get an assist. Now, in Scientology, an assist is sometimes described as spiritual first aid. They're performed at disaster sites to, quote, help the individual overcome the effects of

loss, shock, and trauma and speed recovery by addressing the spiritual and emotional factors related to illness and injury. Oh my God, I can't imagine the conversations on the production team when they found out that Tom Cruise wanted to bring a Scientology tent. You got to let him do it, but... Yeah, a less generous interpretation of what an assist is is you're proselytizing to people when they're most vulnerable. Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed, praying on the week. Like when they've been standing in the cold all day, hoping for a chance to work with their favorite actor. Maybe you go to the tent, hoping you can talk to Tom Cruise. We don't know that.

I'm just suggesting it. When he was asked about the tent before the film's release, Tom Cruise said, I also had a cappuccino tent on set, and I made sure the crews were well fed too. If somebody wanted an assist from a Scientology volunteer, it was there for them. People are curious about it. They're always asking me about it. They want to know what Scientology is.

Now, to be fair, I have no doubt that he was very generous with the crew in the cast. Yeah, that's a unknown thing about him. Every story I've heard is very consistent that he is very generous with the people that he works with, to the point, you know, learns everybody's names. He's very formal, very polite with everybody. He seems very dedicated to his work and the people he works with. But, either toward the end or just after filming, he invited 20 film execs to a four-hour tour of three Scientology facilities in L.A. I don't know who went. I don't believe Steven Spielberg did. There's no way. While Cruz was trying to turn L. Ron Hubbard's vision into a reality,

ILM is doing the same for Steven Spielberg. And from start to finish, they have seven months to complete all of the special effects for this movie. That's insane. They're working in parallel with production. So Gregor is on set with a backpack with his pre-vis gear. Spielberg's team make sure that they shoot the effect-heavy sequences first, which on the one hand is great for ILM, but that's really hard for production when you only have 10 weeks of prep, right? So it's like you have to balance the needs of posts and the needs of the production team.

Well, it's hard on the actors, too, to have to jump directly into that. It's hard on everybody. It's just so hard. So he would shoot and edit, then deliver the shots to ILM. they'd send them back to review and approve during production. Now, again, he's done stuff like this before. If you remember, Lizzie, he's approving Jurassic Park visual effects shots while he's on the set of Schindler's list in Poland.

So the entire film from prep to delivery had to be finished in 10 months. The DGA standard for a director's cut, Lizzie, do you know how many weeks it is? Is it nine weeks? It's 10 weeks for a movie of this scale. For a smaller budget movie, it's six to eight weeks. They had 12 weeks for all of post-production. Edit, sound, score, effects, color mix delivery.

This is bananas. Was this like an exercise in Can We Do It? Well, Spielberg and ILM were moving fast. The problem is, Lizzie, two independent studios across town were moving even faster. Because I buried the lead. There was not one War of the World's film released in 2005. There were not two War of the World's films released in 2005. There were three War of the World's films released in 2005.

So if Scientology can feel a big thing. fit like a Pentecostal knockoff ginned up by a prolifically pulp or hacky pulp writer. Perhaps it's only fitting that Tom Cruise's A movie would be effectively ripped off by a pair of savvy B movie distributors. While they're making War of the Worlds, Penn Dragon Pictures was making the classic War of the Worlds, described as the most accurate of the three adaptations occurring. It's directed by Seattle filmmaker Timothy Fines, whose previous project was called Bug Wars. Hell yeah.

I have not seen it, which Forbes called a lesbian exploitation sci-fi turkey that got shown in one theater in 1997. Now, I did read on one Reddit thread that Heinz had actually gotten a modern adaptation of War of the World's Greenlit, but it was canceled due to 9-11. But I also read that Heinz may have made all of this up because like El Ron Hubbard, he was a bit of a fabulous. And at one point, he claimed to have raised $40 million from early Microsoft employees to make his version, which just doesn't pass the sniff test. No. Now, Hines may have been a bit full of it, but UAV, an obscure distributor of DVDs, had turned the business bullshit into an art form. The plan, Lizzie, shipped 60,000 copies of Hines's War of the Worlds in mid-June,

just as Paramount was launching into their heavy marketing for Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and then hoped that people would say, this one looks good enough at the video store. How were they getting away? Was the thinking just that they were not going to sell any merch, so it wouldn't matter? Yeah, it's just the DVD. Oh, because it's public domain. Okay. According to Forbes, this was nothing new for UAV.

They said the company, quote, trolls backlogs for old or independently produced movies that ride the coattails of big studio releases, sharing a star or a theme. Then it sells those movies to retailers to push alongside the Hollywood material. For example, 20th Century Fox released the DVD for Master and Commander, starring Russell Crow, UAV licensed and redistributed Prisoners of the Sun, a 1990 film in which Crow had a small, all role, but they made sure to put his face on the box of the VHS. Got it. Okay. So they're just little parasites.

They were also known for distributing animated movies that essentially ripped off Disney movies. So not the Lion King, but Kimba the Lion Prince. Yes. Not Hercules, but the amazing feats of young Hercules. Schmercules. Hercule's. Now, DreamWorks and Katsenberg had long been accused of stealing from Pixar and Disney,

think ants in a bug's life, the Emperor's New Groove and the Roald. to El Dorado, finding Nemo and a shark's tail, but UAV took it to another level, or maybe down a few levels of the bridge of total freedom. And this strategy was about to spread like a virus through aliens poorly equipped for our environment and caused diarrhea. In the late 90s, indie film studio, The Asylum, was established to make and distribute horror films on DVD as quickly as possible. They would acquire horror films and distribute them. But they were being crowded out by companies like Lionsgate, which were offering better terms to low-budget filmmakers. So, they started making their own movies. And the typical shoot was nine days.

Now, in the spring of 2005, they were taking their time with a special project, their own adaptation of the War of the World. Instead of nine days, Lizzie, 18 days? They had 14 days. Whoa, big money. Stephen Spielberg was making a movie faster than he ever had. Director David Latt was getting more time than he'd ever experienced. He even had two days of pickups. It was luxurious. Now, Latt said the movie was originally called Invasion, and the idea was just to write a sci-fi epic

and kind of pull from every kind of invasion movie, including War of the Worlds. But oddly, he had the same instincts as Spielberg. And my understanding is they decided to basically, oh, they're doing War of the Worlds. We should do War of the Worlds. Before his War of the Worlds was released, and before the Spielberg one was released,

here's what Latt said. You could go any way with this material. You can make a quarter of a billion dollar epic adventure film, which is what I think DreamWorks is going to bring to the table. Or you could follow Wells's journey, which is a more personal reflection and drama in a lot of ways. If we had more of a big budget, I may have gone bigger, which may have ruined the film in a lot of ways. What's so interesting is he actually has the same instinct with the material that Spielberg did. And to be clear, Latt wasn't just doing this as a cash grab. He was like Tom Cruise in

Scientology. He really believed in this movie. Quote, I'm so proud of this movie. I really wish I could enter it into festivals. It's coming out next month, though, and it'll be out on the shelves before any of the next big festivals run. We are doing a theatrical screening, and I can't wait to see it on the big screen. I watched this movie last night. It's available on YouTube for shot in 14 days and for what they're trying to do. Like, are the effects terrible? Yes. Like, are they laughable sometimes? Yes. The main cast is not bad. It is totally entertaining. Like, this movie, I had a totally fun time watching for what it was. You know what I'm saying? Like, as like a sci-fi channel original movie, basically, is like what this is kind of comparable to. It's fun.

And Lizzie, it's got Spielbergian DNA because the lead is C. Thomas Howell, who debuted in E.T. is one of Elliot's older brother, Michael's friends. Yeah. I'm sure this was very annoying for Spielberg and Paramount. They had not just one but two, like, knockoffs coming to the floor right as they're releasing their movie. But it's not illegal. As you mentioned, Wells' novel was public domain in the United States. So the studios lawyers warned UAV. They said, look, if you distribute it in Europe or in Asia, we will sue you because we maintain our copyright there. Right.

But UAV said, look, our movies don't and can't compete with studio movies. And Paramount basically agreed. But they were still upset. They were worried that it was going to confuse people into buying the wrong DVD. Which it did, right? Yes. But, Lizzie, Paramount had a bigger concern. Scientology.

Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is jumping couches for Scientology. So in 2005, Tom Cruise had started to become a lot more open about his affiliation with Scientology and his belief in Scientology. He was really becoming a vocal advocate for Scientology. Because why? Well, he fired someone. That's right.

In 2004, Tom Cruise parted ways with his longtime publicist Pat Kingsley. And who did he replace her with, Lizzie? His sister, Leanne DeVette. Now, my understanding, I was reading. this interview with Amy Nicholson is that this was a bit more of a mutual parting of ways in that Cruz wanted to be more open about his Scientology beliefs. Well, and she's like, I'm not doing it. And Kingsley said, yeah, like, I don't know how to manage that.

I don't think you should do that as my guess. You know, that was her approach. And so they parted ways, whereas Leanne DeVette was a Scientologist. And so in hiring her, Cruz was fully embracing that aspect of his life. So they start the press tour. And in April of 2005, while Cruz and Spielberg were in Germany promoting the movie, a reporter asked Cruz why he set up the, the Scientology tent on set.

To be clear, this is an interview with Cruz and Spielberg. So they're both sitting there. I'd like to read an excerpt from the magazine. I don't know. The name of the magazine is, I believe, there's Spiegel. And so this is not the interviewer's name. I'm just going to say Spiegel as the magazine's name. So here's a question.

We visited one of your locations near Los Angeles, and we were amazed to find a fully staffed tent of the Scientology organization right next to the food tents for the journalists and extras. Cruz, what were you amazed about? Spiegel. Why do you go so extremely public about? about your personal convictions. Crews, I believe in freedom of speech.

I felt honored to have volunteer Scientology ministers on set. They were helping the crew. When I'm working on a movie, I do anything I can to help the people I'm spending time with. I believe in communication. Spiegel, the tent of a sect at someone's working place still seems somewhat strange to us. Mr. Spielberg, did that tent strike you as unusual?

Spielberg, I'm sure, dying inside. I saw it as an information tent. No one was compelled to frequent it, but it was available for anybody who had an open mind and was curious about someone else's belief system. He's very good in an interview. Cruz. The volunteer Scientology ministers were there

to help the sick and injured. People on the set appreciated that. I have absolutely nothing against talking about by beliefs, but I do so much more. We live in a world where people are on drugs forever, where even children get drugged, where crimes against humanity are so extreme that most people turn away in horror and dismay.

Those are the things that I care about. I don't care what someone believes. I don't care what nationality they are, but if someone wants to get off drugs, I can help them. If someone wants to learn how to read, I can help them. Context again, Cruz at one point claims that Scientology did cure his dyslexia. If someone doesn't want to be a criminal anymore, I can give them tools that can better their life. You have no idea how many people want to know what Scientology is. Spiegel, do you see it as your job to recruit new followers for Scientology? Cruz,

I am a helper. For instance, I myself have helped hundreds of people get off drugs. In Scientology, we have the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. I'll stop there. So, look, aside from the claims, the problem is the conversation ends up becoming entirely about Scientology. It's not about the movie, which is what they're there theoretically to promote. Right, because unlike Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, it turns out, is actually really bad at interviews. When he is let off the leash. When he's off the leash, yes. He is really bad at it. Like, he doesn't understand how to evade.

At least at this moment in time, there's like a particular run right here where he keeps kind of getting himself in trouble, and I don't doubt that he believes the things he says, and that's part of the problem here. Yeah. Again, I'm just putting it in the context of promoting the movie. What's going wrong? You know what I mean? With promoting the movie.

What's going wrong is that he doubles down, and he's immediately on the defense in a very offensive way. Yeah. He's very aggressive. He's very intense. So it comes across poorly. And also, like, this reporter has a very valid point. Like, having a religious presence, you know, on a working set is not a good.

good look. My personal opinion is it's wildly inappropriate that no one, I would never want to have any sort of religious sect on any, in my workplace wherever I go. Again, there could be exceptions. You could work for a religious institution, obviously, or something like that. That's very different. Sure. Or if you need a consultant or advisor because of the nature of the film that you're making, fine, but that's a very different situation. So a month later on May 23rd, Tom Cruise appears on what television show, Lizzie? Oprah. Oprah. Now again, he's supposed to be promoting War of the Worlds, And again, I do think Amy Nicholson makes a really good point. In this interview she did with Brooke Gladstone when she was writing her book on Tom Cruise,

Oprah is the one who keeps pushing him to talk about Katie Holmes. Of course. And he goes for the bait. And she does basically encourage him to get on the couch and, like, show her how much he loves Katie Holmes. It's interesting. I don't know if I agree with that and actually watching the clip because she seems physically... You should watch it again. I have.

She seems uncomfortable with how much he is kind of in her physical space. I, okay. I feel like there's a little bit of like she knows this is good TV. What's going on here? She does, but I think you can tell she is genuinely uncomfortable at the intensity that he's showing and also the way that he is approaching her. Well, the timing was not great, regardless of who wanted it, in terms of promoting War of the World. This is the same month the Huffington Post and the Press Hilton site launched. It's one week after YouTube posted its first video.

And so these things are going viral. And then a week later, Lizzie, and we talked about this on the big flop, on June 1st, 2005. on Access Hollywood. He criticized Brooke Shields for using antidepressants. Then five days after that, the LA Times ran an article called Control Switch on

with a big photo of Cruz's face. And it's making this point that Cruz had, quote, returned to normal after the string of unusual behavior, including couch jumping, but that the new normal was kind of different

because it included this openness about Scientology that was here to stay. And all of this is a distraction in the studio's eyes, right, from War of the World. And there's more distraction.

Like Penn Dragon films is the classic War of the World. world's being released on DVD. And so people are thinking probably, oh, wait, is this the real War of the Worlds or is that the Real War of the Worlds? It's interesting. It's not dissimilar from 1938. Is this real? Is this fake? As, you know, we think about Orson Wells. And then Scientology continues to come up. June 24th, Tom Cruise is on the Today Show. With five days out from the film's release, Lizzie, what does he do here? You're being glib, Matt. You're being glib. He's criticizing psychiatry and he uses the word glib quite a bit. Which, to be fair, is Matt Lauer

glib and also a predator? Yes. Yes. Turns out, you're being glib, Matt. Why don't we talk about that button in your office that locks the door? Yeah, if only he'd gone there. So, again, the criticism of psychiatry is not just a Cruzian belief. That is very much a Scientological belief that he is promoting. It's a core part of the religion. Paramount does not seem like he can keep Scientology out of the promotional tour for War of the World. They did keep Josh Friedman out of it, the original screenwriter. So he had not been given credit on any of the marketing materials, but he actually sought WG arbitration to maintain his credit on the film, and he got it. So my understanding is that

KEP and the studio pushed for sole credit for Kep, but Friedman, he clearly contributed enough that the WGA awarded him partial credit. Yeah. The marketing's done. His name's not on it, but maybe it didn't matter, because Lizzie, the reviews actually weren't great. Roger Ebert gave War the World's two stars. He called it big and clunky. He said it lacked the zest and joyous energy we expect from Spielberg. And he said it kind of was like, it was almost Spielberg imitating himself. He called out the tentacle scene in the basement as basically the same as the raptor scene in the kitchen, but just not as good. He does use the mirror, kind of much in the same way. And he really hated the tripods.

The New York Times was more positive. They reminded us that, quote, Cruz remains adept at playing either with or against type, depending on how you look at it, a jerk brought low by circumstances beyond his control, which is praise in the most damning way. Generally speaking, the set pieces and effects were praised, but there was a warmth and humanity missing from the movie, is what the critics seemed to kind of generally say. But the audiences didn't seem to care about Cruz's antics or the absence of that amblin heart. So War the Worlds opened huge, Lizzie. Sixty five million dollars, the opening

weekend, it opened on June 29th. It broke Cruz and Paramount's respective single-day box office record held by Mission Impossible 2. It was Spielberg's fastest film to hit $100 million, beating out the Lost World, Jurassic Park. Wow. But perhaps no one was more excited than the folks at Asylum. On June 28th, 2005, one day before Paramount's towering tripod hit theaters, they released H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds on DVD. And as the story goes, Blockbuster ordered 100,000 copies from them. God damn it. Now, the one version I heard was that it was by accident. They thought they were ordering the Paramount one. I don't think that's true. We could not find a primary source on this. We believe it's because Blockbuster knew this strategy worked and people

would rent the mockbuster and not go to the theater. I buy that. I don't think that somebody, like, like, they would have to go through multiple checks and balances before making an order like that. There's no way everybody signed off on that. So War of the World's Broke Rectuals. It's made $600 million worldwide. Wow. Some people say that it bolstered Steven Spielberg's career after the dip of the terminal. Yeah, this was a wildly profitable movie. That's crazy.

That's not what I thought at all. I think there's this perception around it. Let's get into this a little bit. So it brought in like almost three times what collateral did. And Collateral was also a successful movie for Tom Cruise. But it seems like War the Worlds was like the beginning of the end for nearly everybody involved. So Lizzie, Spielberg and Cruz never worked together again. Well, you only bring a Scientology tent to Steven Spielberg set one.

So Spielberg pivoted immediately to Munich, which underperformed and was controversial. Tom Cruise did partner up with J.J. Abrams to crank out Mission Impossible 3, which became the lowest grossing film in that franchise. Yeah. The NBC Universal deal for DreamWorks fell apart after GE lowered their offer. So Viacom enters bidding late in the game. This is Sumner Redstone. And all of a sudden, Spielberg and Geffen find their company in the hands of the Viacom chairman, who was not a friendly face in the way that Universal was. that relationship would not last. That's a story for another day. And the fever pitch around Tom Cruise and

Scientology reaches its height in November of 2005 with the release of Have You Seen the Traped in the episode of South Park. It literally shows the secret Zeno story like verbatim of Scientology with a disclaimer that says this is what Scientologists actually believe and it makes jokes about Tom Cruise being trapped in a closet. A few months later, Cruz's 14 year relationship with Paramount came to an end. Sumner Redstone blamed Cruz's public behavior. He said, quote, It's got nothing to do with his acting ability. He's a terrific actor, but we don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide

and costs the company revenue should be on the lot. Wow. Now, the asylum pivoted and launched an entirely new strategy based on the success of H.G.E.S. The World is the World. Their next movie, King of the Lost World, released one day before Peter Jackson's King Kong. Wow.

And their latest movie, Master of the Universe, releases on the day of this recording two weeks prior to Travis Knight's Masters of the Universe. Wow. But, Lizzie, I want to take us back for one second. to 1898, when two U.S. newspapers published unauthorized serializations of H.G. Wells's the war of the world. One moved to the action to New York, the other moved it to Boston. And H.G. Wells was pissed because that wasn't true to his story. And it brings us back to this idea

of truth and the real versions of things and what people believe. I think one of the reasons that were collectively, generally, since it's a very small religion, very allergic to Scientology, as you mentioned in our Primer, is that it's very new. And it doesn't feel real as a result, right? It doesn't have the weight of the older religions that preceded. And you mentioned Mormonism. I think that's one of the criticisms of Mormonism very much. It's like, come on, you found these gold bars in New York in the 19th century. This doesn't make any sense. It's not consistent with the way that we viewed religion. And I think that follows a lot of the new movements and groups and cults that we discussed in our Primer episode. What's funny is that they're actually both very consistent with the way that, you know, quote unquote,

biblical texts are at times revealed to prophets. It's just that they didn't, I think they failed to capture the correct way to update it for modern times. Yeah, or maybe their timing's wrong by a couple thousand years. But it brings us around to kind of like these stories and what we're told and what we choose to believe. And what I had always heard is that Tom Cruise's adherence to Scientology and his outlandish behavior on some of these talk shows and whatnot and the expression of his beliefs is what led to this dissolution of his Paramount agreement, that this is what they terminated his deal with Cruz Wagner Productions. I don't think that's true now. So in 2005, Paramount released some major flops, Lizzie, The Weatherman, Aon Flux, Get Richard Iatryans,

Sahara, Bad News Bears, Elizabethtown. And they had one big hit, War of the Worlds, which by one measure was responsible for nearly 40% of their theatrical revenue from that year. So one measure of their theatrical revenue was $1.5 billion, were the world's $600 million. In 2006, much of the same story was true. Mission Impossible 3, yes, lowest grossing of the franchise, their biggest hit as a studio for that year. So what really happened between Tom Cruise and Paramount? It wasn't Scientology, it was business. So per the financial times, the cost of Cruz Wagner's overall deal was minimal. Five to million dollars a year. In fact, Cruz didn't take an upfront fee for acting or producing in movies, which would be $35 million or so per movie if he was both acting and producing. What he did get was

22% of the gross revenue on theatrical and TV licensing, and more important, 12% of the DVD receipts. And that was the sticking point. So the way this works, Lizzie, I did not know this. Most writers, stars, directors don't get a direct portion of DVD revenue. They get a portion of a royalty. So when that DVD revenue comes into the studio, 80% goes to the studio's home entertainment subsidiary, and then 20% is set aside as like a royalty pool that the other people then participate in. So that 20% is treated as gross. So if you were to get 12% on DVD receipts normally, it would be 12% of 20%, which would be 2.4%. Cruz was getting 12% of 100% accounting. He was getting actual 12%.

or, you know, 60% of that 20%, basically. He made over $70 million with that deal on the first Mission Impossible, and he made like $30 million plus on the second Mission Impossible DVD sales alone. The problem was that the third Mission Impossible didn't make enough money at the box office to justify that deal. To make up for the fact that Cruz would control so much of the DVD receipts. So they said, drop your DVD fee, or we're going to cancel your overall deal at the studio. Cruz wouldn't back down from his numbers.

So they said, great, we're not going to re-up. And then Paramount blamed his public antics as being the reason for why they let him go. Interesting. I mean, there is some truth, though. This did massively damage Tom Cruise's reputation in a way that didn't seem possible prior to this time. And, like, if you look at where his career goes after War of the Worlds, it takes a pretty big dip until about 2011. And 2011, it starts to come back with Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, and then it's a slow grind back up to, you know, edge of tomorrow, things like that. But in some ways, it kind of never

recovered. You know, obviously he's one of the biggest stars in the world. I'm not talking about financially speaking. But in terms of people thinking of Tom Cruise as, like, one of the greatest actors, that's changed. I think we think of Tom Cruise as Tom Cruise, and people have decided that they're willing to accept that, especially as he's hurling himself off of cliffs on motorcycles and things. But this took away a lot of the mystique, and it's almost like he had to become okay with just saying, I am who I am, this is me, you don't get anybody else. And I'm going to play it very safe. Obviously, I'm still hurling myself out of helicopters, but safe in terms of, you know, the types of roles that he's taking from here on out. And we really don't see the nuance or the challenges that he gave

himself earlier in his career. Yeah, I think it's so interesting that it's hard for me to tell if the tail's wagging the dog, you know what I mean, on this sort of thing? Because I wonder, I'm not endorsing Tom Cruise's proselytizing, but I wonder if we would have the same perception of him. Had the studio, had Sumner Redstone not said, this guy is committing creative suicide by behaving in the way he's behaving. Yes, because of the way that this stuff played on, you mentioned Perez Hilton, but like this was. Oh, no, I know. But I'm saying it continued to be a story because they dropped him. because they dropped him. It was all of a sudden what before,

there was always a question, right? Where it was like, well, does it matter because he seems untouchable, right? He's like a movie star. He will always make them money. So as a result, I feel like there was always the opportunity for this thing to go away in theory.

But then when Paramount said, again, publicly, they're saying, you're so weird, we're going to drop you. All of a sudden, it was like, oh, my God, yes, he must be, he is crazy, right? Like, I feel like it was the confirmation that everybody was kind of waiting for at the time.

And yeah, I think people, I mean, yes, I completely agree with you. His reputation took a huge hit after this movie. He was persona non grata for years. I mean, it was really Tropic Thunder that started to bring him back in 2008. And he did also, am I correct in thinking he did rehire Pat Kingsley? Isn't that right? No, he hired somebody else. He fired his sister.

And he did not rehire Pat Kingsley. I can't remember the gentleman's name, but he did bring on. It was kind of a disaster, is my understanding, with Leandevitt. And he brought in somebody else after that. Yeah. I mean, it's very interesting because the first. fact is everybody was aware that he was a part of this prior to this moment. And then you have in this moment, Tom Cruise reaching this level of success where he is comfortable enough to go, this is me.

Like, this is what I believe. This is what I'm really like. And the whole world went, Hugh. Yeah, what's funny is, again, it is unusual. And I do find it off putting in the interviews. Like, there's an intensity and a conviction that is very, like, it's just very odd to me. But what's weird is, like, the couch jumping thing, for example, I think people would now almost find it endearing. You know what I'm saying? Like, we're almost through the looking glass in a sense compared to that moment. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know.

But I think it's hard to rankle it with, like, what we now also know about allegedly what went on in terms of his relationships with both Nicole Kidman, but particularly Katie Holmes. What I kept thinking when I was watching Going Clear was, damn, he's so charming because I forget, I forget all of that. this shit about Tom Cruise. And that's what made him successful. It's not that the information wasn't available. It's that it was so easy to forget it or brush it aside because he is so charming and charismatic when he understands how to turn that on. But when that laser is pointed in the wrong direction and he is actually allowed to sort of expose this element of himself, it is so

disconcerting. And look, I think he's an amazing actor. He's an incredible movie star. I love watching Tom Cruise. And then I watch Going Clear and I'm like, I am so uncomfortable. I'm so uncomfortable. Yeah, it's such an interesting moment. And it's interesting that we all forgave him, you know, and welcomed him back. Well, Lizzie, I got to ask you, what went right on this one of the Three War of the World that was released in 2005? I'm going to give it to Dakota Fanning. Sure. Because I think her performance grounds this movie in a way that you really, really need. she's so good at projecting genuine fear in a way that's really endearing and feels very human. It feels like the way that a child would react in these situations.

She's not overdoing it. I think she is so impressive in this movie, especially given the scale of it and who she's working with. So I will absolutely give it to Dakota Fanning. I think she holds it down. Great choice. I want to give mine to the department heads that have been with Spielberg for so long. You know, in making this movie in 10 months, yes, Spielberg had to make decisions very quickly. But it's John Williams, Janus Kaminsky, Michael Kahn, Joanna Johnston, Rick Carter, Vic Armstrong, Dennis Mirren.

Who pulled that off? Oh, my God. They pulled these guys and gals and everything in between are amazing. Yeah. And kudos. This movie does not look rushed. No. At all.

And so just incredible work. All right, Lizzie. If folks are interested in supporting this podcast and they want to visit our tent, so to speak. How can they do that? Well, you can tell a friend or family member, hey, do you like Scientology? Well, forget about that and come on over here and listen to what went wrong instead. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcaster you're listening to this on. You can now subscribe in both Apple and Spotify, and there you will get one, at least one bonus episode every month.

You can also go a step further and join our Patreon, where for $5 a month you get those bonus episodes, you also get an ad-free feed, as well as a really lovely fan community. We love engaging with everybody over there. And then if you want to go clear, if you want to go to the operating Thaytan level full stop, you can, for $50, get a shout out just like one of these. It was late November of 2004. I was an extra on the set of War of the Worlds when something happened that defied all-earthly explanation. I haven't talked about it since, but friends, this is a true story. It was the end of the day

We were almost wrapped A beam of light shone down And suddenly Martian tripods Attacked Beow-beo Beow-Poo-Poo-Poo-Poo-Boo-Boo-Bit We were all running and screaming

Steven Spielberg shot it Don't stop filming And at that moment And the Martians pooped their pants. The Martians could not believe that it could end like this. So Tsunasianogy 10thi, went for an assist.

Help me. Help you. And Tom said, I've conquered dyslexia, drug abuse, and I've saved Hollywood. Surely I can cure the Martians of this. But no matter what he tried, the Martians died and died. And before you get all high and mighty, hear me tell. Every other major religion tried and failed as well And now let us remember those who fell before the aliens pooped themselves

Adrian Pankoria, Angeline Renee Cook, Beatrix Earhart Ben Shindleman, Blaise Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C, Grace B, Chris Leal, Daniel P, David Friskalante, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Schibel, M Zodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G, film it yourself, Frankenstein, Gael and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids, the cast and crew of Win a Trip to Browntown, Half Greyhound, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, John D. Wilcher, Jory Hilpiper, Jose Emilano Salto del Giorgio,

Karina Canaba, Kate Elrington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Olgeshager McCoy, Lena L.J, Lousy Susan, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Mary Postus Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate Ashley, Nate the Knife, Rosemary Southward, rural juror, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott Oshita, Soman Chaynani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, and the Provost family, the O's sound like O's. And as we stare down, Disclosure Day, listen closely to what I say.

If someone says they have answers, they don't, not even me. Lizzie, next week... I'm so excited. Can you tell us? We are going into the legend of Beowulf with the 13th Warrior. We've talked about this kind of since the beginning of the podcast. It's been a long time coming.

We actually didn't think there was enough. And then... Oh, there's a lot. There's a lot. Turns out there's 13 Warriors too much. Yeah. So we're going to dive into that next week. It's a VHS that for some reason I owned and watched all the time.

I loved this movie. Yeah. So when Rotten Tomatoes... was first made, I was shook to my core to see that this was not fresh. I was stunned. I'm so excited. Guys, go watch the 13th Warrior. Go read the book or isn't Eaters of the Dead? I think it's the Crichton book. It's based on it's a longer title than that. Yeah. All right, Lizzie, I'm very excited. Thank you guys for listening. Until next week. All right. Bye. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer,

post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer. and edited by Karen Krebsaw.