WHAT WENT WRONG - Waterworld

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

Near decapitation, sunken sets, and an incredibly expensive divorce... 1994 was not Kevin Costner’s year. This week Chris & Lizzie discuss the notorious box office bomb that wasn’t: Waterworld. Join them as they dive into the story behind a film that lost audiences before it even hit theaters.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of What Went Wrong. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here virtually with your other host, Chris Winderbauer. Chris, how's it going? It's going well, Lizzie. Glad to be recording the podcast on another lovely Friday night in my 97-degree apartment. It's so hot. It's horrible. It's bad. So last week I'm well aware of the fact that I promised you all this week's episode would be about the Wizard of Oz. I have to throw myself on the altar of shame here and just to... tell you that I did not get my shit together in time for it to be an episode on the Wizard of Oz.

It will be coming next week. And based on what I have learned so far, I'm pretty excited for it. So instead of The Wizard of Oz, this week, we are covering another W movie. Chris, what is it? It's actually a double W movie. It is. Waterworld, a film that has lived in infamy since its release in 1995, the movie that spawned a Universal Studios ride and endless, puns involving water and fiascos. So, Lizzie, I believe you saw the movie for the first time last night. Please share your thoughts.

Yes. I have seen the Universal Studios show previously, which is 10 out of 10, fantastic. Lots of explosions and jet skis. Highly recommend. The movie, however, like, I knew it was going to be bad. The whole thing about Waterworld is like, oh, it's terrible. I didn't understand what I was getting myself into. And my biggest question is, why is Kevin Costner's character just such a bag of dicks to all the women in the movie for the whole movie?

He's like a domestic abuser. And then at the very end, he's like, I guess I like kids and women. And they're like, thank you, Kevin. And that's it. And then he saves the day after blowing up a poor old man in an oil slick. And I think that's the plot. well we certainly come out this from different perspectives i i love this movie as a child oh my god i it has not aged as well as i hoped it would uh in terms of its misogyny and portray the portrayal of

women in particular it's insane i'm excited to talk about it uh we are going to get into the behind-the-scenes aspects uh but a brief overview before we get started water world of course is a movie that took Steven Spielberg's advice to never shoot on the water, drowned it in a puddle, and decided to shoot exclusively on the water. This is a movie that briefly owned the ignoble title of being the most expensive movie ever made and won that, be it causation or correlation, marked a downturn in the career of one of Hollywood's biggest stars, Kevin Costner. It was so infamous that it was actually referenced in the 1996 movie The Cable Guy when Jim Carrey is attempting to drown Matthew Broderick in the flood late in the film, I'm going to play you a brief clip from

that movie to show how it had permeated the zeitgeist. So obviously people are having fun at the movie's expense in Hollywood and elsewhere. For those of you that don't know, Waterworld is of course a 1995 post-apocalyptic action film directed by Kevin Reynolds, starring Kevin Costner. It also starred Gene Triplehorn, Dennis Hopper, and a nine-year-old Tina Majorino. The movie is set 500 years in the future and imagines the world where sea levels have risen 25,000 feet and Earth is entirely underwater. Yeah, ahead of its time for the sort of global warming apocalypse angle.

Yes, very much so. The remaining humans live on ramshackle flotillas called atolls, and there are rumors of a mythical dry land somewhere in this endless ocean. Kevin Costner plays The Mariner, that's his only name, a drifter with gills who can breathe underwater as he attempts to protect Enola, a young girl with a back tattoo that might have the key to save humanity. And her protector, Helen, wait, let me get to it. They're pursued and threatened by the smokers, a band of gas-guzzling pirates,

led by Dennis Hoppers the Deacon, explosions ensue. Okay, so as we were, David and I watched this last night. As we were watching it, David was at the top, he was like, wait, wait, wait, do you know the twist? And I was like, no, like, how is there going to be a twist in this movie? I assumed it would be something like, oh, the dry land is underwater. It's like a city below the seas and that's the twist. Atlantis, something like that. No, it's that he has gills and is some kind of disgusting web-footed fish.

creature and I lost my mind. Like, I can't... Not a twist. Happens in the first 10 minutes of the movie. Yeah, David, you did not prepare me for that appropriately. She like pulls back his ear and you see his gross little like skin flap kind of breathing. And David was like, that's it. That's the twist.

That's the twist. What? He's been dead the whole time. Oh my God. Okay. I am so excited because that is going to be a big part of our conversation. So the final price tag for Waterworld was 175 million dollars. At the time that it came out in 1995, that made it the highest budgeted film ever.

It would soon, of course, be surpassed by James Cameron's Titanic. It was released to middling reviews and a similarly anemic box office response, and it serves as one of the greatest examples we have of a toxic buzz poisoning a film before it could even reach its audience. The question remains, however, is Waterworld as big a failure as history would have us believe? Let's dive in. So Waterworld's journey began in 1986 when aspiring writer-director Peter Rader was brought in for a meeting at New Horizon. Now, New Horizon is the production company of Roger Corman. You know, Roger Corman is the B-movie Schlockmaster.

Who James Cameron worked for. Exactly. So Rader met with a young executive Brad Kravoy, who would later go on to produce Dumb and Dumber. And Brad Kervoy told Rader, I've got an infusion of South African money. It sounded very sketchy. And I need to do a Mad Max rip-off. If Raider can write the script, Krovoi says, I'll let you to direct it.

And he's never directed anything. Exactly what this is. And that's fully a Mad Max rip-off. So Raider didn't love the idea of just doing another Mad Max for regurgitation until he was sailing. Apparently he was into sailing at the time. And he said, but what if the entire world was covered in water?

And he pitched this idea to Krovoi who laughed him out of the room, saying that a movie like that would cost at least. five million dollars to make and cormon's projects were often budgeted around three or five hundred thousand dollars he was making tiny budget stuff so crevoy laughed him out of the room and raider decided to write the film on his own he wrote the script and shelved it for a couple of years uh then in nineteen eighty nine raider sold the script to producer lawrence gordon of largoe entertainment he then wrote six or seven drafts over the following two years while they attempted to attach a director they'd attach to director they'd approach someone

Raider would write a new draft and it would fall through. It kept happening and he was pretty disillusioned and it seemed like the project was going nowhere. Until in 1991, a miracle happens. Kevin Costner randomly gets wind of the water world script through Lawrence Gordon's brother, Chuck Gordon. So Chuck Gordon had produced Field of Dreams and worked with Kevin Costner repeatedly and he slipped Costner the script. and it's hard to overstate Costner's star power at this moment. It's worth doing a brief detour into his career. Kevin Costner came from humble beginnings.

He was born in Compton, California. His mother was a welfare worker, and his dad was an electrician. He attended Cal State Fullerton, and he studied business administration, it's my understanding, and he really only discovered his passion for acting and dance in the final year of undergrad. He then got married to Cindy Silva. He took a job at an advertising agency and started taking action. acting classes five nights a week and just auditioning and hustling. He thought he'd gotten his big

break when he was cast in The Big Chill directed by Lawrence Kasden. The only issue is he was set to portray Alex, the friend whose suicide brings the group together. In the initial script, he had scenes that were filmed as flashbacks. They're all cut. That ended up being played and they got cut from the film. So you see Kevin Costner's boots in the movie, but you never see Kevin Costner. However, Lawrence Kasden really liked working with him and promised Costner that he would get him a role in one of his next movies. And that was 1985's Silverado, which was a Western, and it was a big hit, and Kevin Costner kind of was established as a good supporting player in Hollywood. So he kind of worked steadily throughout the 1980s, and then it was his turn as Elliot Ness in 1987's The Untouchables

that blew him up internationally as a leading man. Over the next five years, he had, had one of the craziest runs of hits of any actor I've ever seen. He starred in Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Robin Hood, JFK, and the Bodyguard. Wow. In this span, he won two Academy Awards for what for Dances with Wolves, best director, and best pricksurer, because he starred in, produced, and directed Dances with Wolves. And also, anybody who's listened to our Titanic episode may remember that they actually use dances with wolves as sort of a litmus test of the the only three-hour-long movie that could be financially successful. Exactly.

He was also nominated for Best Actor in Dances with Wolves. He lost to Jeremy Irons. He not only was a critical success, the combined box office receipts of just the bodyguard, Robin Hood, and Dances with Wolves was $1.2 billion. So each of those movies made $400 million at the box office. So he comes out of the late 80s into the early 90s as this unprecedented triple threat.

He's an actor, a director, and a producer. and he's Oscar winning in two out of three of those categories. At the same time as Kevin Costner is circling this script, Kevin Reynolds, a director, has reached out to the Gordon Company to see if they're looking for a director on Waterworld, independent of Kevin Costner. And it seems like this is the universe bringing all the right elements together because Kevin Reynolds gave Kevin Costner his first starring role in Kevin Reynolds' debut film, Fandango from 1985.

So Costner and Reynolds became friends after Fandango, and Costner hired Reynolds to direct segments of dances with wolves. So in Dances with Wolves, when Costner couldn't direct himself or he needed somebody to direct a second unit, Kevin Reynolds was on set doing that work. So it seems like, oh my God, it's great. We've got the director and the actor. The only problem is they're not talking to each other anymore because they had just shot Robin Hood Prince of Thieves where Kevin Reynolds got so pissed off during the editing process

that he quit the movie and refused to attend the premiere. So it seems like the Lawrence's have this perfect combo of star and director. They just have to get them to talk to each other. Chuck Gordon convinces the Kevin's to meet in Lake Tahoe, where Costner's filming the bodyguard and bury the hatchet. They did whatever men do to resolve their differences. I don't know if it was a hatchet fight. Sure.

And agreed to share a sleeping bag and agreed to start fresh with Waterworld. So Raiders long adrift spec script had a director and a bona fide movie star. So Costner and company take the script to Universal. So Universal is uncomfortable greenlighting a movie at this price, but they don't want to lose the project to another studio, so they kind of split the baby. Basically, externally, Universal Greenlights the project at $65 million, hoping to find the ways to keep the price tag around that budget during prep. But internally, they've basically greenlit it for $100 million. And then internally, internally, meaning Costner and the Lawrence's, they know the thing's going to actually probably cost

$135 million. So already there's disconnects between public perception, universal, and the producers. Not a good place to start. So really quickly, to wrap things up on the writing side, unfortunately for the writer, Peter Rader, all of this good news meant that he was no longer going to be involved with the project. The Kevin's and the producers decided that they wanted to bring in new writers, and it became a revolving door of kind of Hollywood script doctors that would tackle.

rewrites. Oh, always a good sign. Always a good sign. So David Tui, who he was famous at the time for writing the fugitive, was brought in to do the initial rewrites. They brought in a number of other writers, and as we'll get to later, ultimately a young Joss Whedon was the onset script doctor for this movie. What? Yeah, polishing scenes as they went. So it was during this scripting phase that the old rifts between the Kevins began to resurface, each of them wanting to take the story in different directions. Costner wanted to focus on the character of the mariner, this brutal, loner who brooded and brooded and hated everyone. And Reynolds wanted to hone the narrative.

He wanted this to be like a swashbuckling Errol Morris adventure films. Ultimately, however, Costner had the power. Costner retained creative control over the story, which led to, in Costner's words, Reynolds being passive aggressive, sitting back and ignoring orders from the studio as they came in saying, well, it's on Costner. So already things aren't going great.

In 1993, Waterworld goes into prep. Uh, apparently Kevin Costner calls Steven Spielberg ahead of production for any advice, given the troubles that Spielberg had had while shooting Jaws almost 20 years prior. Yeah. Spielberg responded, quote, do not shoot on the water. You're going to need a couple of shots on the water, so use the second unit for that. Do all of your coverage in a tank or on a stage, end quote. I think most of us would agree that when it comes to filmmaking, when Stephen Spielberg tells you to do something, you should probably do it.

However, Kevin Reynolds had a specific, gritty vision for the film that he believed could only be achieved by shooting on open water and Kevin Costner supported this decision and its budget ramifications. That $65 million budget that Universal was hoping to cling to went out the window and they revised their internal estimates to $100 million, which still was probably unrealistic. It's also worth noting that in 1993, Universal released Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park. which with a box office hall of a billion dollars became the most successful highest grossing film of all time. Once again, when Steven Spielberg tells you to do something, you do it. And it's so good and it holds up unbelievably well. We won't talk about it, but truly it does. Truly a remarkable movie. So, production designer Dennis Gassner scouted locations in Australia, New Zealand, Malta,

and the Bahamas before deciding on, and I apologize for the butcher. of this pronunciation. Kauaihe Harbor, Hawaii on the big island. They picked Hawaii because flights were short and frequent from L.A. The island had reliable fax phone lines, and everything was done by facts in the early 90s. Gassner failed to learn the translation of Kauaihe, which means warring waters. Uh-oh. And is one of the windiest places in the Pacific.

Oh, no. So the production was a shot in the arm to a reeling local economy in Hawaii. A sugar mill had closed in recent years. They hired over 300 extras and an equal number of crew members. So that's close to 1,000 people that they hired to work on this production, similar to Apocalypse Now. Local contractors, knowing that they were the only games in town, gouged the production on everything that they could,

from steel supplies to porta-potties, charging them double, triple, quadruple, what it would cost on mainland United States. Computers and generators would regularly, quote, go missing from the production and often needed to be replaced. The crew swelled to over 500 strong as they struggled to finish the complex and expensive construction that the project required. Now, Lizzie, when you watched this movie, did you not think to yourself, holy shit,

did they build all of this stuff? Yes, I did. In fact, I said multiple times to David, that looks like a somewhat functioning catamaran. Did they really build that thing? They did. They actually built two of them. So Costner's trimaran, which is a catamaran with a third pontoon, was fully functional and 60 feet long. It could reach a speed of 30 knots.

Two of them were made for $500,000 a piece. Oh, my God. One that was used for the speeding part and another one that was used to show the sales going up and down. So the atoll that Tina Magerino, and Gene Triple Horan are on at the beginning of the film was built from over a thousand tons of steel and it was built in eight separable sections. The original budget for it being $1.5 million,

the final price tag for it came in at just over $5 million. Wow. So that a toll that they built, they actually constructed that entire thing and then they pushed it out a quarter of a mile into the ocean to go record at it. That's insane because the set piece that Chris is talking about right now, the vast majority of the action with this thing actually happens inside of it.

So why would you not just build a set and have... Because when they built it close to shore, if they shot up towards one of the ledges, you could see the Hawaiian mountains on the outside. Shoot the other way! So they had to get far enough away from shore. Well, then they'd have to rotate the set. So cost overruns are plaguing pre-production, and the studio actually considered cutting bait with the project.

This would be early 1994. However, the actor's pay or play deals had kicked in. So this basically meant, regardless of whether or not we go forward, you have to pay us a large percentage of our fee. And so the producers were already on the hook for well over $20 million at this point in time. And a single camera has not rolled yet. So in May of 1994, the cast shows up. As we mentioned, nine-year-old, adorable Tina Majorino. She was cast as Enola.

She beat out Anna Pac-Wan for the part. Anna Pac-Packwin had just won an Oscar for her work in the first. piano. Gene Triplehorn was cast as Helen, Inola's Protector, and Dennis Hopper, I think my favorite performance in the whole movie, was Pegas the Deacon, like the insane cartoonish villain. On June 27th, 1994, production began on Waterworld, and they have a scheduled shoot of 96 days, including several weeks of additional effects and tank work filming in Los Angeles. There's no way. Exactly. And it should be noted that the film's first assistant director, Alan Curtis, who, if you remember from earlier episodes, the first assistant director is responsible for setting and maintaining the schedule,

told Universal that a 96-day shoot was impossible. He requested 135 shooting days, and they functionally told him to go fuck himself. So, of course, Alan Curtis was on the money, as first ADs often are, and that 96-day schedule goes out the window pretty much immediately. As I mentioned, they've established the set a quarter mile offshore to allow nearly 360 degree filming. That means that each day, 425 members of the cast and crew need to be shuttled across the water that distance, often resulting in them barely getting a shot off before lunch. Once they did start shooting, shots were often ruined by passing boats, mountains in the distance, and pods of humpback whales that would be breaching near their production,

interrupting continuity. And that's when they were able to shoot. High speed wins, like hurricane speed wins, whipped the set daily. Sometimes preventing them from being able to line up a single shot because the set would move too much relative to one another. So Hurricane Warning shut down the production three times that I read about. And one that hit sank the 1,000 ton a toll set,

requiring them to shut down production and salvage it, from the bottom of the bay. Oh my God. They had to like pull the thing up from underwater, went down like the Titanic. Even when the seas were calm, the unpredictable drift of the camera and picture boats

meant that each scene had to be shot multiple times to make sure that the filming angles would match in the editing room. They might line up a close-up on Kevin Costner, by the time they roll, he's 13 feet in a different direction than he was supposed to be. There's no, you can't lock anything down. They could try tying the boats together,

but then you'd see the ropes in front. I'm sorry. This is actually. insane. So you're saying that they are not, even though they've built this gigantic floating set, they are not even shooting on that floating set. They are shooting from boats. Both. They are. Sometimes they shoot from the set and sometimes they're shooting from outside the set on boats. And when it's just the trimoran, sometimes the camera's on the trimoran and sometimes it's on a separate boat that's separate from the tram. And sometimes it's on a helicopter that's circling that's trying to keep the

shot in frame. So they've got every possible permutation of it. Passing clouds, disrupted continuity. they would have to wait for storms to roll by, shutting down production for multiple days. The attack on the atoll early in the film was scheduled to take a week and it took a month to film. To make matters even worse, injuries and sea sickness ran rampant through the cast and crew. The medics on set were treating an average of 40 to 50 people per day for injuries and seasickness. Yeah, for the only experience I have being on a boat for a long period of time is that prior to COVID, IMD used to have the IMD boat at Comic-Con every year, which is a big yacht. That's like a minimal amount of movement.

However, being on that thing for 12 hours a day, and I'd like to point out looking at screens when you're on a boat and you can see the sort of water level in the background change, I legitimately almost threw up, like, at least three times a day. Director Kevin Reynolds had a history of seasickness. Oh, good. And he was just struggling to keep his lunch down as he was trying to direct this movie. And this isn't even the worst of it. Kevin Costner's stunt double, Laird Hamilton, who we should mention, is a very famous American

Big Wave surfer, commuted to and from the Big Island from his home in Maui, 40 miles across open ocean on a jet ski every morning and every night. And one, which is pretty boss. This guy's great. One day, the production freaked out because Laird didn't show up to work. Sure, that's bad. That's a long jet ski commute. That's a long jet skate commute over open ocean.

So they call his wife on Maui and she goes, oh no, Laird left for work early this morning. Turns out, halfway between Maui and Hawaii, Laird's jet ski ran out of gas. Oh my God. They had to send out a Coast Guard rescue helicopter that took the crew most of the day to find him. In a far less comedic incident,

stunt coordinator Norman Howell one day rose too quickly during a deep sea dive when they were getting some underwater footage and suffered the bends. a near fatal embolism. He had to be flown to a hospital on Honolulu on Kevin Costner's private jet, apparently, where he recovered in a decompression chamber for days, canceling any stunt work for that period of time.

And it wasn't just the stunt guys that were getting hurt throughout this process. Tina Mancherino and Gene Triplehorn were aboard the trimaran when the weather picked up, winds snapped the sail and the boat began to sing. Oh my God. They were knocked off the boat and it ran them over. They had to then wait as the boat. boat sank around them for 30 minutes until a rescue crew could get close enough to pull them out of the wreckage. Tina Marjorino further earned the nickname Jellyfish Candy from Kevin Costner

after being transported to shore on three separate occasions to be treated for jellyfish stings. This is a nine-year-old girl. Gene Triplehorn is quoted saying, I was just feeling a little like Patty Hurst. I was completely brainwashed by my captors and I was just outlawed. there trying to get through it. Not an easy production for the supporting cast and crew. And Kevin Costner himself was not immune. One scene from the film required him to be strapped high on the tri-maran's mast while a helicopter filmed him from roughly the same height. Is this where he's trying to cut the line because Jack Black's helicopter is wrapping the wire around? That's exactly the scene. So let's listen to this clip from a 1995 news segment.

discussing this stunt in the film. This stunning shot of Costner as the mariner sailing the seas in a world without land turned out to be the most dangerous scene in water world for him to shoot. When the sun set 40 knot winds whipped up the sea, Costner was literally stuck to the top of the mast, 50 feet above the water for over an hour. The helicopter, you know, was about 15 feet from me and of course the mast is going like that and when I say it was the blades going around. So, you know, there was times when I thought what the hell am I?

mind doing you know and then they go can we do it again I go you got to be out of your mind but the point was I couldn't get down so might as well do it again but the winds are blowing a helicopters the blades of the helicopter 15 feet from you what is going through your mind are you thinking the kids why am I here is this worth it what was what were you think you have you have a lot of those thoughts and then you also said don't forget look romantic and strong you got all this thing you say by the way you're terrified don't forget it get that chin out Kev, you know, and you go, yeah, yeah. You know, so, you know, that's a lot of acting, just faking it, right?

Oh. He's up there. Apparently, the only thing going through his mind is the notorious Twilight Zone movie helicopter stunt that killed Vic Morrow and two children. So Costner was attempting to scream at the helicopter, back the fuck up. But the rotor was so loud that they couldn't hear him. Then they got the shot, and that's when the winds came in. And the winds were so strong that everybody had to go below deck and leave Costner

up there for an hour until the winds died down enough that they could safely go up and get him. So he was strapped to the top of this boat, 50 feet in the air, while like 40 mile an hour winds pelted him from every direction. Oh no, poor Kevin Costner. As everyone was down below. It sounds absolutely miserable. So throughout production, Kevin Costner continues to revise the script because he's unhappy with the story and specifically he's unhappy with his character. And so, Lizzie, I think initially this story was written with his character being more of a classic Western gunslinger type. Man rolls into town. A task needs to be done. He's a mercenary at first and he discovers his morality. I think perhaps what Costner wanted was something more complex.

But as a result, as you mentioned, he kind of just comes off as a gruff asshole for most of the movie. and then he just has this sudden about face later in the story. And there was definitely a tension, and this is what Costner's fighting, between the action set pieces of the movie, or do we need more character development? So Costner brings on the young, fresh-faced Joss Whedon to come to set in Hawaii and write scenes for him. So Joss Whedon had just script doctored Speed, also starring Dennis Hopper.

I was going to ask if Speed is before this or after, because this... It is right before. Okay, because Dennis Hopper's performance in Waterworld is legitimately just the off-brand version of his performance. Exactly. I think he's aware of that. According to Joss Whedon, he's become Kevin Costner's personal scribe.

His only real job is to transcribe Kevin Costner's ideas into new pages, putting as little of his own ideas and alterations in as possible. He reportedly called it seven weeks in hell. Great. Tensions are running understandably high on set. And from what I can research, the finger pointing escalated quickly. By August, the art department was taking the brunt of the blame for most of these delays and overages. Peter Chesney, a designer responsible for much of the atolls build, and Kate Steinberg, who was the head of special effects on set, were both forced off the film in August.

I think the hope being from the producers in Costner that if they could shake up those departments, perhaps they could jiggle things loose and start moving faster. That didn't happen. By Labor Day, so they should be almost two-thirds of the way through this shoot, they're not even halfway done. And the first assistant director, Alan Curtis, who had told them from the beginning that they needed 135 days to shoot, quits the film. This is a huge red flag for the studio. The first assistant director is the bad guy, is the commander. He is the person in charge making sure things are happening day to day. He walks off.

At this moment, the budget has swollen to $135 million. The production was supposed to end before hurricane season in October, and it's clear they're not going to make that window. It was under these conditions that an envoy of executives visited the set. Never a good sign. Yeah. Universal President Casey Silver, Costner's agent, and MCA, President Sid Scheinberg, flew to Hawaii to assess things themselves. They had one directive, get costs under control. Their solution, cut scenes. specifically big action scenes.

Kevin Costner said, no, I'm not going to do that. And they said, you have to, or we're going to take the money away. So I got to give him a lot of credit. Back against the wall, Kevin Costner put his money where his mouth was. He said, keep us funded through the rest of the shoot, and I will forfeit my back end to keep us going. He was going to get 15% of gross receipts on this project. In the end, that would have been between $13 and $16 million,

that he gave up to keep up to keep. the movie going. He's been strapped to a mass, 50 feet above the water, almost killed by a helicopter. He's been on set for over 100 days. The guy believes in this movie, and he's going to finish it. Yeah, I don't get the impression that he's an asshole in reality. No, he is an utter profession from what I can gather. Maybe a bit of a tyrant on set because he takes all of this very seriously, but as we're about to discover, 1994 is an incredibly difficult year for Kevin Costner, and this movie is not entirely why. Okay.

They head into October. At this point in time, rumors begin circulating that Kevin Costner's marriage to his wife of 16 years, Cindy Silva, is in jeopardy, specifically due to an affair that he was having with a Hawaiian hula dancer

slash hotel employee at the resort that Costner was staying at. Tabloids picked up the story, and along with photos of the woman in question, they forced Costner to go public with the truth. He and his wife were in the process of divorcing. So while he's in the middle of the toughest shoot he's ever done, he comes forward and says, yes, we are getting a divorce.

But the reality is, his wife had served him with divorce papers on his third day on set in Hawaii back in the late spring. He's now gone through this whole project in the middle of a divorce, and now he's getting slammed with tabloids spreading. What I truly believe from my research are lies about an affair with this woman at the hotel. It seems like she was just a married mother who was harassed by a hungry press, eager to throw a dart at Costner's kind of good boy reputation. So Costner eventually had to ban the presence of tabloid magazines on set because the cast and crew had them around constantly. He reportedly said, I don't ask for a lot on the set.

Be quiet and don't read my tabloid headlines to me. Apparently Dennis Hopper, with his weird sense of humor, tried to show Costner one of the articles at one point, and Costner just stood up and walked away from him and refused to talk to him. You know Dennis Hopper is just the ultimate button pusher. Like I'm sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, in the end, Costner's divorce doesn't leave the papers right away because not only is it salacious and who it follows, but it's actually financially significant. It was at the time the third most expensive divorce ever. Oh, Jesus. With an 80 million settlement. So Costner's losing $80 million in the process of making this movie that might lose a lot of money. He did something bad then. I don't know if you get $80 million without it. You know, he might

have done something bad. I don't think that the thing that the tabloids were reporting on is true. Now, unfortunately, Kevin Costner's divorce would prove to only be the beginning of his financial woes. See, in 1994, the Kevin Costner hot streak was finally cooling down. While he was in prep and production, on Waterworld, four projects that he was involved in flopped. That would be China Moon, which he produced, Wyatt Earp, which he starred in and produced, the war, which he started in alongside Elijah Wood, and most notably Rapunui, which Kevin Reynolds directed, nobody saw, made $300,000 against a $20 million budget. Rapa hooey? Exactly. It followed the ethnic troubles of the Rappanui tribe on Easter Island.

Don't use me saying Rapa. You're going to hell. So suddenly, four months into production, the Kevin's need Waterworld to be a hit. Costner is vulnerable financially and critically for the first time in five years. Kevin Reynolds, as a director, is now going from flop to potentially flop, and they need this movie to work. The tensions are high. Fortunately, it seems like Kevin Costner's divorce has actually brought the Kevin's closer together for the last bit of production. So Kevin Reynolds went through a divorce in 85 and Costner could confide in him. And so it seems like that helped them a little bit.

So the original plan was to wrap filming by December of 1994. However, the delays had them stuck in Hawaii through the end of December. In January, they relocates at Los Angeles for the final stretch of shooting on the movie. The underwater city sequences where Kostner takes Gene Triplehorn in like a weird like CO2 death trap bubbles down to the bottom of the ocean were shot in tanks at Huntington Beach. Scenes of the deacon's tanker were filmed on a field in the city of commerce that was a 114 foot replica of the Exxon Valdez that was made by the production design team. The bungee jump stunt that the mariner does at the end of the film. The most insane thing I've ever seen. I screamed. Yeah, so this involves there's a girl in the water, three jet skis trying to get to her,

and they're going to do so by running into each other. And Kevin Costor bungee jumps from a hot air balloon effectively to pull her out of the water. That was shot above a blacktop parking lot, so they were shooting it above asphalt. In the city of commerce, a stuntman was supposed to do the shot, but Costner, knowing that it would take more takes with a stuntman to ensure that his face was hidden, said that he would do it himself because he, quote, wanted the movie to be over sooner. Oh, my God. So he risked panicking his head on the asphalt just so he could end the movie faster.

Or his life. It seems like he would have been fine just dying in a bunch of jump accident at this point in time. In an ironic twisted fate, the last day of shooting is Valentine's Day, 1995. So, Kosteris, no wife. Oh, no. He needs a hit. The filming wraps on Valentine's Day. it's another bungee jump take in front of a blue screen.

He throws his back out on the last one. Director Kevin Reynolds asks if he can do another take and Kevin Costner says, we're done and just walks off the set. A planned 96-day shoot had run 157 days. Kevin Costner had worked every single one of them six-day weeks for eight months. The guy is a machine. He never stopped. four failed movies, injury, cast and crew leaving the movie, he stuck through all of it.

And unfortunately, post-production was not going to go any easier. The film demanded some elaborate planned visual effects, including computer-generated ocean scenes, a giant sea creature that randomly appears for like six frames. Didn't need it. Kevin Costner being composited into an underwater city. And there were also some unplanned visual effect requirements. Now, Lizzie, you mentioned Kevin Costner's gills. Yes.

Is there any body part that you could think of that people might think the gills look like? I mean, it looks like a vagina. So upon seeing Kevin Costner's gills, specifically during an underwater scene where they're open, one universal executive exclaimed, The damn things look like a vagina. Yes, they did. columnist Liz Smith got a hold of this story, and producer Chuck Gordon had to call her and deny that Costner had anything resembling female sex organs on his neck, desperately trying to prevent her from running a story that said such. He later said, quote, talking to Liz Smith about vaginas, that was probably the hardest conversation I had on Waterworld, which, considering everything they went to, says something about his perhaps puritanical upbringing.

So the effects team solved the genital problem by digitally transferring Costner's gills from an above-water scene where they looked less vaginal to the underwater shots, which added a lot of expense. This was 1995 VFX for not cheap or easy to do. In the throes of post-production, the Kevin's were once again not getting along. Kevin Reynolds's first cut of the film was two hours and 40 minutes. This wasn't some overstuffed indulgent director's cut. He had simply included all of the portions of the movie that were written into the script. It was simply too long. Yeah.

Now his contract dictated that he turned in a two hour and 15 minute cut. Reynolds wanted to focus on the action sequences in the story and ask for reshoots in Hawaii to help fill in logic gaps where sequences would need to be cut. Now, Kossner didn't want to do reshoots in Hawaii, and he wanted to focus. on the Mariners' character. Guess which one got their way? Kevin Costner, Academy Award winner movie star, and producer Chuck Gordon took control of the editing bay, and Kevin Reynolds quit the movie. It should be noted that nearly the exact same thing happened on Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. Reynolds said of Costner at the time, quote, in the future, Costner should only appear in pictures he directs himself. That way, he can always be working with his favorite actor

and his favorite director, end quote. Sick burn. It should also be noted that Universal had little incentive to do reshoots as well. This would have added expense to an already expensive film and pushed their July 4th release date, which would have cost them dollars at the box office. So the buzz around the movie has reached levels of toxicity rarely seen in Hollywood. The budget had reportedly passed $150 million at this point in time.

The trades are a light. with clever monikers for the picture, including fish tar, a riff of Ishtar, and Kevin's Gate, a riff of Heaven's Gate. To be fair, Kevin's Gate was actually coined during the difficult production of Dances with Wolves, but it came back for this movie. So, you might be wondering how details like these got leaked. Well, in this instance, there were a lot of leaks on the movie, but my favorite was Dennis Hopper, who did his best to make sure. everyone knew how expensive this movie was. Let's listen to this clip of Dennis Hopper on the Dick Cabot show in December of 1994.

Is the most expensive movie in the history of this planet? How much is it up to now? Well, I don't really have that, that I'm not, they don't really tell me. Are you free to reveal it if you do? Well, not really, but being me, I'll go for it, yeah. It was budgeted $100 million. Oh, well. And I think it's.

somewhere between 140 and 160. That's what I've heard, so I don't really, but I really don't have the knowledge. Do you, as a film star and an illustrious, important figure in the business, when you hear money talked about like that, ever have that cliched thought, and they don't have enough money to keep the kids' mission open in Harlem,

and they don't have enough money to keep this and that going? You know what I think really shows you that I'm really an actor? I think, how come I'm not getting more money? money. That's what I think. That's his honest statement. I mean, I have to tell you the truth. I just wonder why they don't pay me more money to be in this movie.

So not only does Hopper reveal. Dennis Hopper was a party. He was a part. He was like, no, but I'm going to tell you anyway. Not only does he reveal this amount, but this is a moment. If you remember, this was talked about on Heaven's Gate and it was also talked about on Titanic. The question of should this much money be spent on a movie becomes a moral question.

becomes a moral question. And I think it's stupid for a number of reasons. At this same point in time, obscene amounts of money are being spent on innumerable activities that are less valuable in terms of their cultural, you know, prevalence than movies. But in this particular instance, it is only leading, adding up to this toxic buzz that's building around the movie. So what do people know about this movie? They know it's a disaster.

They know it's a disaster. They know people have been getting hurt on it. they know a lot of the casting crew of quit. They know that Kevin Costner cheated on his wife with a hula dancer. They know that it costs more money than all of these things that they can possibly think of and the hubris of the men involved that wanted to make it. Everyone's attitude is basically fucked this movie before anybody has seen a frame of it. So on May 9, 1994, the producer's rough cut is screened for a test audience in Sacramento.

The only thing the audience has been told is that they are, quote, seeing a new action movie with a major Hollywood star. Just before the lights went down, it was revealed to be Waterworld. One distraught audience member shouted out, fuck this, I want my money back, even though he wasn't paying for the test screening. So the audience felt duped.

The test print received negative reviews. Attendees complained about the pacing, the computer generated shark footage, saying that much of the movie looked fake. And meanwhile, composer Mark Isham, who'd scored point break, Everyone's Through It, and Quiz Show turned in demos for roughly 25% of the film. Aisham had been hired by Reynolds.

They'd worked together before. And at this point, Reynolds is off the movie. Yeah. Isham has taken an introspective and restrained approach that he felt matched the setting of the film. Costner says it sounds too ethnic and bleak and fires him. Oh, no. Mark Isham offered to redo the score. But Universal and Costner decided to move on because they were in a crunch and they felt

they couldn't trust him with the project. Costner and Universal then hired James Newton Howard, giving him exactly six weeks from the point that he was hired to record and deliver the final score. Well, damn, he did a pretty good job. He did a pretty good job. He was able to cobble together the blockbuster feel that Costner wanted, and he was given a little help with synth samples

from his new friend and emerging composer Hans Zimmer. That adds up. Yeah. There are very humble. Hans Dimery moments. There are very Hansimri moments. So the final production cost on Waterworld came in at $175 million, which was $75 million over the $100 million initial Greenlight budget. It was also almost $60 million more expensive than the film that had just become the most expensive movie of all time. True lies. James Cameron just continued making the most expensive movie ever, literally. Yeah, the problem is they're good, though. I know, they are.

It was Terminator 2 and then he did True Lies and then he did Titanic and then he did Avatar. And in each instance, he made the most expensive movie. Universal spent another $60 million on print and advertising. The total bill was $235 million. Waterworld premiered on July 28, 1995. It brought in $21.5 million its first weekend, which secured it number one at the box office, but was far below the $40 to $50 million you would have wanted it to make to potentially recoup its budget. Its final box office tally was $100 million in the United States, but $164 million internationally,

with a total worldwide box office gross of $264 million, with a budget of $235. So at first blush, it's tempting to say, as many people do, that Waterworld was an historic flop. However. It made its money back. Almost. I did some research, because remember, the studio is only getting half of those box office receipts. The theaters get the rest. So that 264 is less than 150 in what the studio is saying.

But I did some research into the film's financials and found out that this is actually a misnomer. Waterworld was not a flop, even though people liked to say it was. Waterworld's box office gross of $264 million resulted in roughly $15 million going back to the studio. Now, $115 million against the budget of $235. That's a huge loss. Well, it would be if you didn't include aftermarket revenues for VHS rentals, sales, and television licensing. So in 2013, deadline estimated that Waterworld had brought in an additional $190 million from aftermarket channels, bringing the project out of the red and making it profitable

to the tune of roughly $10 million. My favorite aspect of this episode so far is that Waterworld didn't lose money. It actually made money. $10 million. That's a miracle. It is a miracle. But it's one that we need to mention. This movie is still plagued by the negative.

press that generated during its production. And I think it's largely unjustified. Here is Kevin Costner on the effect of negative press leading up to the film's release. I myself don't like being told what to think, and I think most people are really like that. They don't like people telling you what to think. And as it turns out, that information hasn't been good. And so that makes you even more angry that perhaps there might be some people that won't ever get to see this movie based on what some idiot said.

So it's a little bit of a pity party, but I will say that what this reminded me of is the rotten tomatoes effect of present day, where we all do it, myself included, we create thresholds under which we are unwilling to give movies a chance. We use the tomato meter as a barometer to make decisions as to what we should watch. and as a result, creators become beholden to that metric. To the point now where Certified Fresh is put on movie posters. Oh, yeah. It's shocking. This is not a shot at critics. I think film criticism is incredibly important.

I love good film criticism. A.O. Scott, have his book. I haven't read it. It's on my shelf. But I do think that this was an example of, now, Lizzie, I know you didn't like the movie, but I would argue that it's a perfectly serviceable mid-90s action. It is dated in a lot of the ways that a lot of mid-90s action movies are, but it fits in perfectly with the milieu of the day.

And it absolutely suffered from the narratives that were spawned from its production, when the reality is it made money. It spawned the Waterworld, a live, sea world, spectacular ride event at Universal Studios, which opened in 1995 and is still running today. And they expanded to both Japan in 2001 and Singapore in 2010. All three remain extremely popular to this date. The pre-release hysteria about this movie was so pervasive that the movie was deemed to flop before it didn't even flop. Costner continued to churn out films at a prolific rate.

However, he, after this project, lost his luster critically and commercially. Sometimes the narrative around a movie gets so destructive that it prevents us from being able to look at the movie in the right way. Sometimes I think we look at a tomato meter and it colors the way that we watch the movie we're going into. If it's been rated very positively, we think we're dumb and we're missing something if we don't like it. If it's rated very negatively, we think we're dumb and that we're seeing something that's not there when we like it. I think this was an early iteration of that to a certain extent. And I liked what Kevin Costner had to say about, don't tell me what to think. I want to find what I like and think it myself.

Kevin Costner, say what you will about him, works harder than anybody we have covered in this podcast so far. Maybe James Cameron is up there also. But Kevin Costner, as I mentioned, went 157 days on this movie, strapped to boats, getting divorced, getting whipped by the wind, six days a week. His first date he quit. His director quit. The studio said he had to cut the movie down. He lost $80 million in a divorce settlement. Four movies flopped.

Everybody said he had vaginas on his neck. They shot on his movie. And still, he went out and he did the press tours. He stood up for his project. He owned it. He owns it to this day. He says, I think it's. It's a good movie.

It's a fun movie. It's got a lot of problems. I'm proud of it. I'm glad we did it. So that concludes my history of the flop that wasn't Waterworld, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. Oh, happy birthday, Waterworld. So, Lizzie, I'm really excited about this part of the podcast, considering how much you hit it the movie. What went right in your mind?

I might just go ahead and go with Dennis Hoppers. fake eyeball that they try and sew on to him in that one scene. It's one of the most... There's a scene which, by the way, I don't think they actually show Dennis Hopper losing the eye. It's another thing where all of a sudden it like jumps to the next scene and all of a sudden he's missing an eye and he asks one of his minions to like fix it for him and they sew this awful like Hieronymus Bosch painting demon eye onto his head. And I loved it.

I guess I'll go with my bright spot is Dennis Hopper's fake eye. Yeah. And Peter Raider's original script, there was a lot more of that weird sense of humor. And a lot of that was ex-ized. There should have been more of it. Yeah. It was a much goofier story. Yeah.

My what went right for this film was I thought the art department absolutely crushed it. The construction, the scale, the scope, you can feel it. There is hardly it feels like. any CGI. You really notice the CGI because it's mid-90s when it does happen, like that sea monster. But that giant Exxon Valdez set, the Atoll, the Trimaran, it feels like it's functional. It feels like everything works on the boat as it's happening. It didn't feel like they were cheating the project. Totally. And my other one right is Kevin Costner did most of his own stunts on this movie. And I think you can tell in the final film because it looks like Kevin Costner swinging around the mast and, you know,

jumping from side to side, so I will give his committed performance on that front, kudos. Well, guys, that concludes our episode of Waterworld, one of the most infamous production nightmares in movie history. We hope that it will help you appreciate this film a little bit more, whether you like it or not. As always, please send us recommendations through our Instagram handle at What Went Wrong Pod or What Went Wrong Pod at Gmail.com. Yeah, we've gotten a bunch of interesting recommendations and we are listening. We are taking them to heart. And when we actually manage our time appropriately, we are covering them. Thank you, everybody for listening. We will talk to you next week. Bye. Bye. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Yethonouos.