New Theme! Movie Busts: Waterworld Fire - Episode 55

In this episode, Ed is going back to his childhood from the 90's to talk about one of his favorite movies: Kevin Reynolds' and Kevin Costner's epic fill Waterworld.

Waterworld came out in 1995 and was touted as the most expensive movie ever made in human history. With an eye watering price tag of $175 million, the many creators of the movie as well as the executives who fronted the bill tried to make a cookie cutter no-fail format that can only result in huge success. Can you see where this train of thought can lead? Sounds a lot like "there is no way that this plan can fail!"

Well, here we are. A movie written by a Harvard graduate, directed by one of the most popular directors of the day, Kevin Reynolds who directed Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starred Kevin Costner as the lead and Dennis Hopper as the villain. The movie was filmed in the middle of the ocean with nothing but practical special effects and very little CGI. When it was all said and done the budget and filming times ballooned, but there was no way it could fail right? For the 90s this movie was going to be a huge hit. 

And then it released and absolutely BOMBED and it bombed hard! 

Take a listen and Ed will go over the cautionary tale yet again, that just because you think you have a fool proof plan, doesn't mean it's going to work out. Just because you follow a "formula of success" doesn't mean you'll have success. Throwing money at something doesn't guarantee that nature will obey your wishes. 

For more details and notes about the episode, check out the website. You'll find the back catalog of over 50 episodes. 

You might also want to check out Episode 46 - The Byford Dolphin Incident  for when you get to the part about one of the stuntmen who nearly died from the bends in one scene. You'll thank Ed later for it. 

Hey before you go! 

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top. 

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Hey everybody, this is Ed.

SPEAKER_02 0:01

This is Deja. And this is Kara.

SPEAKER_04 0:03

And this is your day's dumpster fire.

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Where we don't celebrate humanity's successes, but its most fantastic failures.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Like, and three, two, one, go.

SPEAKER_04 0:33

Yeah. Well, and it's just like, and in the audience, like you guys will never you'll maybe I'll leave it in one time so you can hear just how awkward that silence is. Because I but I always shore it up. But one of these days I need to actually go and fix it because it's it's just funny. We just look like three idiots just staring at a computer screen waiting for something to happen.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

It is kind of great. We look intelligent.

SPEAKER_03 0:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

All right. What do we got today?

SPEAKER_04 0:58

All right. So today, well, today's is is a palette cleanser. Um uh for those of you who've been listening for a while now, we just got done with a three-parter on the very famous Donner Party incident of 1855.

SPEAKER_02 1:17

1846.

SPEAKER_04 1:19

That that's is that the year? Yeah. Got it. So uh yes, that is a now that I realize I just mentioned this episode is a palate cleanser. Probably literally based off of what those folks had to eat in the Donnie, the Donner Party incident. So uh where that one was a pretty serious, pretty bleak, uh, here we're going in a very different direction. The uh the question that I have for you, and and in kind of given light of recent events in our lives, uh have you ever poured your heart and soul into something and only to find out that it is something that is viewed as a failure, but yet in the grand scheme of things, it really wasn't.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Ed, I don't know if we like need to drop anything. Like let's just say, yeah. Yeah, I've definitely felt like that once or twice before.

SPEAKER_04 2:28

Uh yeah, I think I think a lot, especially adults, have had that moment where they're gonna be like, this is gonna be my defining contribution to society, and then you pour everything you got into it, and then like it's a very lukewarm response, or it's kind of criticized. And you know, even our students out there probably experience that where like, dude, I'm gonna essays aren't my thing, but I'm gonna write this essay and I'm gonna dazzle this teacher, and I'm I'm I have to get an A on it. Like, there's no way it can't be an A. And then they get like a solid D minus back. Cool.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

That was my entire high school experience.

SPEAKER_04 3:09

Uh yes. Just kidding. I also had that one English teacher that she would absolutely refuse to give anything above a C.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

That's so annoying.

SPEAKER_04 3:18

It didn't matter how amazing it was. Yeah, it's just thankfully I learned that she's not the end-all be-y'all decider of what's good or not in terms of writing. So uh maybe that worked out well. But in in this case, for this show, uh I I'm kind of putting together a um, I don't know, like a like a little sub-genre or hopefully a recurring theme where we look at the blockbuster bus or movies that had a lot of time, money, effort, skill, resources dumped into it, and it absolutely dies in the movie theater for one reason or another. I think you could actually make a podcast just on movies that failed hard.

SPEAKER_02 4:10

I think there is one. It's called How Did This Get Made.

SPEAKER_04 4:14

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

And the guys who done Unspoled do that too. That's the uh the film podcast I listen to a lot.

SPEAKER_04 4:21

Got it. We'll have to we'll have to check that out.

SPEAKER_02 4:23

Yeah, you'll have to check it out. It's it's pretty good.

SPEAKER_04 4:25

So yeah, the the this is uh hopefully gonna be like a recurring theme where you know we have episodes where it is like literal fires where cities burn down, or you know, and I think we have a few other ideas, like maybe uh one of them was like a a government law or ordinance that goes into effect that doesn't work out well, like prohibition. Um, so yeah, it's gonna be a recurring thing where we're gonna kind of look at movies that just crashed and burned. And I think for me personally, the movie that stood out to me in my lifetime was the proverbial Kevin Costner uh great movie of Waterworld. So as I was researching Waterworld, because when I was a kid, I actually liked the movie. I thought it wasn't half bad. Granted, this was like 12, 13-year-old Ed. This is back when even like when Hulk Hogan was in a movie, it was amazing. Uh, when you when you get older and you look back at it and you're like, I actually liked Hulk Hogan in a movie. Uh boy. Um, so yeah, we're gonna be kind of diving into the movie Waterworld, and one of the things I kind of want to bring up a little bit is because I don't think people fully understand just how difficult movies are to make. Uh, especially when you look at the role of a director, uh, directors they're pretty much the the god of the success of that movie. And if a director fails, like in one thing, the whole movie can flop. So, what I did is a quick little uh Google search in terms of what directors are responsible for or what they need to have an advanced knowledge in. And of course, Google just spits out like this gigantic list. And some of the things that stood out to me is like filmography. They have to know the history of making movies, i.e., film school. Uh, technical skills involving everything from special effects, set design, uh costumes, makeup. They even have to be familiar with like CGI. Uh, they may not know how to actually create stuff, but they need to understand how it fits in and not be super awkward. They need lots and lots of writing skills. I feel like these people are doing more writing than anything. And that also includes uh script creation. Uh, they have to know a lot about photography, both still and motion photography or video. Uh, they have to have the whole lighting thing down pat, which that's a science in its own right. Uh, there's also the leadership skills because they have literally thousands of people working for them. Uh, they have to know how to multitask. Because one thing that that I always found baffling is that when a director is making a movie, they're not filming it in order that you see the scenes laid out in the movie. Uh so for example, if you look at um uh what is it, the Bohemian Rhapsody movie by Frieda Mercury, uh the main actor who played Frederick Mercury, he actually filmed the live aid performance that we see at the end, but that was like the first thing that they filmed in the movie. So it's like they never ever record these movies in any order that would make sense to us, but make sense to them. So that also involves like the logistics and whatnot. Uh, they have to know a lot about marketing, they have to live and breathe budgeting, and then more importantly, they have to be able to live and breathe fundraising. So those are just a few things that directors have to take into consideration, and then it gets even more complicated when there's like three directors all working on the same project, and especially when some of those directors are actually actors, that really opens the door for a lot of arguing and whatnot. So that like when I was researching Waterworld, that was kind of some of the things that I when I was looking it up, that's kind of what I discovered. There's also the budgeting aspect of it, which you know, these things, these these movies, especially when they're intended to be like a huge summer flick or something like that, you know, we we may look at hundreds or thousands of dollars as being like costly uh for these giant movies. It is like literally millions of dollars a day to make. Like they are just burning through cash like crazy. And then they also have these vice presidents and executives coming in and they just nose their way into every little aspect. And yeah, it the the the budget to entertainment factor is very uh closely scrutinized. And if money does become a problem, then they have to figure out how are they going to to get that. So while we're on the topic of Waterworld, which had at the time that it was made in 1995, it was the most expensive movie ever made. And then shortly after that, Titanic came out. And now you look at budgets today, and they just dwarf the movies from the 90s in terms of cost. Like today, uh uh, a blockbuster movie, just the advertising alone is more money than what would be spent to make a movie back in 1995, which to me is is hilarious. But um, I'll have these charts here that we'll put in the show notes or on our website, the daystemsterfire.com, where you kind of see, you know, like okay, we take like Star Wars 2015, a production budget of$533 million and worldwide gross over$2 billion.

SPEAKER_02 10:39

That is a it's insane, isn't it?

SPEAKER_04 10:42

That is just a wild amount of money. Pirates of the Caribbean on Stranger Tides, which I didn't even think that was that fantastic of a movie, but that came in about$380 million and it grossed over a billion dollars worldwide.

SPEAKER_02 10:58

Avatar was up there for a long time.

SPEAKER_04 11:00

Uh yeah, yeah. Avatar was up there. What was it? Oh, yeah. Uh well, Avatar Way of the Water, 400 million to make, and it came in at 2.3 billion dollars, and that's worldwide, even domestically, it brought in almost 700 million.

SPEAKER_02 11:16

Yeah, that's a big one.

SPEAKER_04 11:18

So yeah, it's just it's just crazy to see the amount of money that these that these movies are are dealing with, and then conversely, it seems like for every one movie that is a huge blockbuster hit that brings in a ton of money, you have like 10 or 15 of them in between that are just absolute disasters. So, like uh the marbles, hundred dollars, hundred million, hundred dollars, a hundred million dollars to make, uh, and then I'm sorry, no, it took three hundred million dollars to make, it brought in approximately a hundred million dollars. So, yeah, Marvel took a loss of two hundred million dollars just on that, and when you factor in, like a lot of these movies are using the same production company, like they're still using 21st Century Fox or you know, uh Paramount or Warner Brothers or whatever. If you have a couple of movies in a row that tank like that, it can bankrupt a whole production company overnight. Jungle Cruise, that one cost 264 million. It only brought in 114 million, therefore, it was a loss of 150 million. Uh, solo or Star Wars story, that took 375 million. It only brought in 252 million, therefore they took a loss of 122 million dollars. This just adds up really fast. So we'll have those charts in the show notes. Uh, you can kind of peruse it because they're kind of uh it's kind of eye-opening, and it really begs the question of like, okay, well, what does a movie need to have to be successful? Like, what is the what is the recipe? What are what is the secret sauce? Because you get people like James Cameron or Steven Spielberg, it seems like they they can't produce a bad movie or a movie that isn't going to gross a lot of money. So I think every director out there is trying to figure out like what in the world do you have to have, you know, X percentage of what needs to go into what to make a movie successful. And back in 1995, that was the that the hunt was on. The hunt was on to try to find that recipe. And for a while there, from the mid-1980s up to the mid-1990s, there was quite a few movies that were uh hugely successful that we never would think to this day would be successful. Probably one of the most famous ones from the 80s was Mad Max. Uh, Mad Max has made hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, and the budget for that was 15 million. And boy, does that budget shine through when you watch that movie. There's that one cutscene where that motorcyclist guy gets run over by a semi, but if you look at the semi, it's just a piece of plywood that is attached to like a pickup truck, and it's in the shape of a semi-truck. Like you can you can clearly tell that this is like a North Korean semi, and that it is lacking anything that would actually make it a semi, and it's just a prop. So yeah, looking at the Mad Max movies from back then compared to today, it's like, wow, how how were these successful back then?

SPEAKER_02 14:54

And just for reference to 1995, that year had some some big movies come out. We've got seven, uh, Braveheart, Casino.

SPEAKER_04 15:03

Geez, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 15:04

12 Monkeys, Jumanji, Toy Story, Dangerous Minds. I came out. So 1995 was oh Apollo 13. 1995 was a big year for a lot of movies that we still talk about today.

SPEAKER_04 15:21

Yeah. So when you look at Waterworld Time for movies. Well, yeah, great time for movies, probably a bad time to release like Waterworld. I think they if they held it out for maybe another year or two, it probably would have been a lot better. But even still, if they waited until 1996, they would have to deal with Independence Day.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

Oh, yeah. And that's another that's like a head-to-head apocalyptic type of thing.

SPEAKER_04 15:47

Yeah. When we're looking at Waterworld here, uh think of George Miller's uh Mad Max movies, but the exact opposite. Uh George Miller, he grew up in like the middle of nowhere, Australia, and he he based his movies off of kind of like the desolate wasteland of Australia where it's just dirt, dead grass. It's just a very bleak place, and that's the reason why he he kind of set the stage for the whole Mad Max series. Even um uh the Furiosa movie that came out is even more uh based on that. Uh in 1990 or 97, in 1979, Mad Max struck a chord among its audience due to its post-apocalyptic future where humanity and civilization has completely fallen apart, and the once uh vitriol, fertile earth was wrecked by war, pollution, and all that stuff. And while the movie was beyond cheesy, uh the special effects were special, I I I guess you can say. Um the audience loved it. And the subsequent Mad Max movies were made, and they still are uh very popular even to this day. Let's fast forward to 1985. Uh, a very young uh screenwriter, you know, just fresh out of Harvard. So that podunk little school. I mean, nothing nothing major comes out of Harvard.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Nothing special. Yeah, no, it's just it's like nothing special at all. It's just Harvard, just run down and you know old.

SPEAKER_04 17:31

Yeah, it's a very old school, yeah. It's kind of ghetto. They'll take anybody.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

She ghetto.

SPEAKER_04 17:37

But yeah, no, there's young uh screenwriter came out, uh Peter Rader. Uh I keep wanting to say radar. It's not, it's R-A-D-E-R, but I apologize, Peter, if I call your last name Radar. It's actually Rader. He watched a Mad Max movies and he was enthralled by it. And he he came up with an idea that was so amazing that there's no way it could not sell in theaters. So Raider had a vision where it would be possible to take like the Mad Max world, and you can always tell a Mad Max movie because of the outfits. The costumes are just so over the top. They're just finding like for body armor, they're literally finding anything that you would never want to use as body armor, as body armor, like wearing cast iron pans or football apparel, or you know, just whatever you could find in a trash heap as a form of protection, which now to look at it, the uh Fallout series is big on that.

SPEAKER_02 18:44

Yeah, they somehow made it look really cool. Yes. I gotta give them credit for that.

SPEAKER_04 18:48

Yeah, the the outfits in all the Mad Max movies are amazing.

SPEAKER_02 18:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:54

And I think a lot of it too is that he lets the actors, George Miller lets the actors kind of like they have a say, pick and choose what they want to wear to a certain degree.

SPEAKER_02 19:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:05

So Raider was like, okay, I see the Mad Max movies, I want to take it up a notch, and I still want to have like these over-the-top characters, over-the-top costumes. Um, I want to be able to use the latest and greatest of the uh uh pyrotechnics and all the the stuff that George Miller didn't have back in 1979 to create a movie where instead of everybody's living on a waste land, everybody's living on a waste ocean. In 1985, we were politically or geopolitically across the world. Uh, there was all this talk about like global warming was starting to come out. There's like the Kyoto Convention, uh, the idea that, hey, we need to start making cars more efficient, fuel efficient, less car emissions, and all that kind of stuff, because they were worried that the polar ice caps would make. Melt. And basically, what radar did was like instead of using the wasteland of uh Australia, it's more like the ice caps melted, and suddenly the entire world is underwater. All of Earth is just a giant ocean. In reality, if the polar ice caps melt, the ocean will rise. And I can't remember the exact figure, but it's like inches, not thousands of feet. There's not that much water in the ice caps. But hey, we don't we don't need to focus on that. But even still, uh, the oceans going up even a few inches would be devastating in a lot of respects. Not to mention the weather would be absolutely crazy just because of all the stored energy in oceans and all that heat and and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, the weather would go crazy. But we're not going to worry about that. Well, actually, we will worry about some hurricanes here in a little bit. Great. Basically, he had this idea of a Mad Max movie on the ocean, and for the most part, the premise behind this movie isn't all that bad. Right? You have an anti-hero, he's like a loner guy who travels the world in some weird catamaran thing. I think in the movie they called it a trimaran. So it's like imagine like two canoes held together with some poles and whatnot, and a trimaran is like three canoes, and then you have like these sails on it that I guess they can go super fast. I don't know much about them, but they're very distinct looking. I guess the key component is them that is one person can operate it. So yeah, you have a loner character, he's like an anti-hero, he doesn't like people, he kind of makes bad decisions, and uh he's living on this weird trimarin kind of going from one floating settlement to the next. So he's kind of like uh Link in Zelda, where uh if you ever played uh Wind Waker, like the whole world is covered in an ocean, and then you have to hop on your little boat, and then the map is a grid, and in the middle of each grid, there's like an island in there. Uh that it's kind of like that in a way, where you go from one floating settlement to the next, and there's very few resources out there, there's no land, no, like there's no dirt. In fact, if you have dirt, that makes you very wealthy in in this water world world. Okay. Yeah. And what he does is uh they call him the mariner, and what he does is uh he trades like scraps, like what you would find in a landfill, and he he trades it, uh, but he also has access to dirt. That's because there's a special characteristic about him. He can he has like this jar of dirt, and then like even a pinch of it can sell for a lot of value because, well, it's all under the ocean by thousands of feet. Well, it turns out that we discover that the mariner is like a mutant of sorts. Uh he's part of the next breed of humans that have been for generations living on this ocean. He actually developed gills behind his ears, and as a result, he can breathe underwater.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 23:25

Yeah, and it's it's kind of a cool idea, I guess, if maybe not maybe some lazy writing. But what he does is he can swim to the bottom of the ocean. Okay, and he scoops up dirt from you know, way down. It is seriously, I think it's like six, seven thousand feet underwater. He scoops up all this dirt, puts it in a jar, goes up to his little trimer end, dries it out, and then he goes into these settlements and he trades it for a ton of food or whatever he wants. It's kind of a it's kind of an interesting idea, definitely different, whereas like Mad Max, it's almost like water is the currency.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

Yeah, it's just the opposite.

SPEAKER_04 24:08

Yeah, that's yeah, yeah, like uh Fury Road, right? Uh in Morton Joe, he he basically controls his people with the presence of of water. So yeah, not not a half-bad gig, I guess. One thing leads to another, and the mariner finds himself arrested for being a mutant. Yeah, he's he's found as a mutant, one of these floating city thingies, and uh he comes across a hot mom with a young sassy daughter. Nice, yeah. There's got to be a hot mom. Always. And what's weird about this daughter of this hot mom is that this girl has like a weird tattoo on her back. And it's a very cryptic tattoo, but it basically is interpreted as it's a map. And if you can decode this map that somehow ended up on this girl's back, it will take you to where there is land. And this whole movie is all about this mariner guy who somehow gets stuck with this hot mom and sassy daughter, and suddenly the villain of the story is this uh oil-guzzling warlord by the name of Deacon. And again, he looks just like somebody that you would see from a Mad Max movie, just wearing all sorts of weird stuff. He has an eye patch and all that kind of stuff. And his personality is a little over the top. He was actually my favorite character in the movie, and he lives on this.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

I low key thought you were gonna say he has an iPad. He has an iPad. It's like, yeah. I kind of pictured uh one of the middle schoolers walking around with his iPad all the time. That's kind of what I pictured in my head for a second.

SPEAKER_04 25:49

That is exactly what he does. Yes. It is very much an iPad. Um but yeah, he lives on his giant oil tanker, which is conveniently named the Exxon Valdez. Nice D's, yeah. I thought when I was a kid, I had no idea why it was that like but significance of it, and then as I got older, like, oh, that's kind of clever. Um, but yeah, he's taking his giant oil tanker, and so he has like unlimited oil, and he's like fortified this weird tanker thingy, and then he's got a whole horde of bad guys that follow him around on jet skis, and he's like a gang leader of sorts, kind of like Toe Cutter from uh Mad Max or Immorton Joe from Fury Road. Got it, and these people that are on jet skis are kind of like the biker gang. Deacon's goal in life is to find this mysterious girl with this mysterious tattoo to try to find this mysterious land, and it then it turns into this cat and mouse game where Deacon is trying to get the girl, but then Mariner is trying to protect the girl because he has a change of heart or whatever. He really doesn't want, he doesn't really even care about these two people. But typical movie fashion, he eventually falls for them and is like, okay, I gotta protect him. Long story short, Deacon is destroyed. Um, and basically, uh, the Mariner, Hot Mom, and Sassy Daughter, uh, they get in like a I think it's like a hot air balloon or something like that, and then eventually they find land. And what is interesting, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it was a hot air balloon or a plane.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

I thought the same? Yes, anyone, hot air balloon.

SPEAKER_04 27:34

No, I now that I look back at it, I think it's a plane, and the character that has the plane is actually Jack Black.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

That's funny. Oh my gosh, why didn't this movie do well? This I hope it was a hot air balloon. I hope you're incorrect in it actually was a hot balloon.

SPEAKER_04 27:51

I know I never I I'm thinking about it. It was definitely an airplane. Yes, it has Jack Black in a very young Jack Black, and he plays the same part in there as he does in all of his movies. And um long story short, they find land. And what's interesting in the director's cut of the movie, they find like this island and they walk around on it, and they see uh stuff on there that you would find on top of Mount Everest. Like they find pictures up there, they see a plaque uh commemorating Hillary and him making it up in the 1900s as like the first guy to climb up top. So basically, the island that they found is basically the tip of Mount Everest.

SPEAKER_02 28:35

Got it.

SPEAKER_04 28:36

To kind of give you an idea of how tall or how much ocean you're dealing with, which that's clever.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

That one's not that one's pretty good.

SPEAKER_04 28:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 28:44

I like that one.

SPEAKER_04 28:45

So yeah, there's it it all things considered, it's not that bad of a movie. It's I do too. Kind of good in a lot of respects. The plot is kind of interesting, if not linear. Uh the dialogue I thought was really good because they they it it doesn't take itself too seriously. Like instead of having cans of spam because they couldn't get spam, like they couldn't get approval from spam uh to have this as a prop, they changed it to Smeat.

SPEAKER_02 29:12

Sick.

SPEAKER_04 29:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

I love that. That's disgusting.

SPEAKER_02 29:17

I have found a new hated award. We're gonna have to find this movie and watch it as adults. I've got a list.

SPEAKER_04 29:23

Like the movie won awards, like it won uh best costume design in the Saturn Awards, and it won a few others too. But yeah, the big thing a lot of people really give the movie credit is special effects because there was no CGI and it was filmed in an ocean, not on a stage. So, like it gets a lot of credit for that. The writing for it was for the most part decent given how many people worked on it. Uh, there were 36 various writers that worked on it.

SPEAKER_02 29:55

Wow, that's a lot of people.

SPEAKER_04 29:58

Uh, most of whom quit or got fired.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

Oh, that's a good amount.

SPEAKER_04 30:02

There was, and I'm gonna go into a little bit more detail on it, but it it the writing part of it, like they didn't even have the finished script when they started filming. They had no idea how the movie was gonna end, and it got so bad that they brought in a very young Joss Whedon to like, hey, can you finalize this? Can you fix this? Yeah, can you like yeah, polish this turd? And then he eventually quit.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

Oh no, push this turd.

SPEAKER_04 30:34

Oh no, so so yeah, and and the special effects were very impressive. Um, a lot of people got injured making this movie, uh, but yeah, there was little to no CGI. Granted, 1995, CGI was pretty uh janky, all things considered.

SPEAKER_02 30:53

Yeah, yeah. It was just a baby.

SPEAKER_04 30:56

Yes, you you gotta start somewhere. Actually, she was a fairy, like Toy Story. The reason why uh they made the toys or the characters' toys is because they didn't know how to make human skin look right CGI-wise. So they just like, okay, we can make everything plastic.

SPEAKER_02 31:14

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 31:14

That was the idea behind it.

SPEAKER_02 31:16

It was really smart, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:18

No, but there's like the there was that short where they had the baby at the beginning of it, and it looked really weird, super creepy.

SPEAKER_02 31:26

It looks a little janky, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:29

But because they didn't know at that time that when you look at human skin, you're actually seeing light bouncing from a few layers down. Skin is actually kind of translucent in a way, so like when you look at somebody, you're seeing like the first two or three layers, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Like water, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:47

So once they figure out how to put that in CGI, then they can make skin look a lot more natural. But that has nothing to do with the movie.

SPEAKER_02 31:54

True.

SPEAKER_04 31:55

The the special effects was kind of like think of it as like a Marvel movie today, but all practical, which to me is cooler, yes, yeah. There's something about a actual gasoline explosion versus a CGI one, like you can tell the difference.

SPEAKER_02 32:13

Yep, you totally can.

SPEAKER_04 32:14

It's it, and I think what it is is that when they have that gasoline explosion, the giant fireballs, even though you really can't like directly see it, but you're producing a lot of heat, and that heat kind of, in my opinion, kind of messes with the atmosphere a little bit and it gives it a very different effect than say like a uh CGI um fireball. Like it's it's it's fine, it works great, but you can tell.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

Yeah, for sure. I agree.

SPEAKER_04 32:43

So for a movie where gasoline and oil is is almost as prevalent as any character would be, because you got land, and then that's like the that's like the gold, and then you also have like oil and gasoline, which is kind of like if you have access to gasoline, you have power. That is the well, it's kind of like that today, just in general. Like if you own all the gas, if you own all the oil mines or the oil wells, you're a very powerful person. So it's almost like they were trying to make a statement back then, and not just thinly veiled behind the Exxon Valdez. Um, so the special uh the special effects coordinator, his name was Martin Bresson. Um, and he worked on movies such as The Abyss, uh Volcano, and then the near and dear classic Escape from LA.

SPEAKER_02 33:36

I just watched that movie for the first time, like three or four months ago.

SPEAKER_04 33:41

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 33:41

It's oh it was great.

SPEAKER_04 33:44

It's a cult classic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:46

Yeah, I liked it. You'll have to remind me and all.

SPEAKER_04 33:49

Yeah, didn't it have like a young Kurt Russell in it?

SPEAKER_02 33:52

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 33:52

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

Sure did. Yeah, you gotta watch it, definitely.

SPEAKER_04 33:57

What is the premise? Like, California breaks away, and then everybody is trying to get out of Los Angeles or get out of California.

SPEAKER_01 34:04

Yeah, yeah, something like that. So it's very prophetic. Okay, going with that California breaking away from the United States.

SPEAKER_04 34:12

Yes, and and you've got like Kurt Russell, who is a very conservative uh like his mindset is the exact opposite of everybody that would be living in California, so I he kind of like hates everything. He's trying to get out of there, right? Um, yeah, it's one of those things I mean. And it's like that today. If you're in LA and you're stuck in that traffic, you're you're never getting out.

SPEAKER_02 34:35

It's not that bad.

SPEAKER_04 34:38

Karen I go back and forth all the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:41

I don't know, it's pretty bad. But you know what? I will say, I will say I have driven in New York. New York is really, really bad. I've driven in um Seattle, and Seattle's awful. Yeah, it's really awful, and Portland's really bad too. Portland makes me want to throw up because it's so like uh windy. Yeah, because you're going through the mountains.

SPEAKER_04 35:03

Well, in New York is is a hot mess because that city was built and designed for hor well that and it was built under the premise of like horse and buggy and wagons, not giant trucks and all that kind of stuff. So um, so yeah, like 1996, Waterworld was nominated for best visual effects at BAFTA, which you know that was pretty good. Um, even the most ardent haters of the movie, they had to concede that there was some actually good parts to it to the point where yeah, it did win some awards. Um, the concept of the movie wasn't too awful, this is my opinion. Even though our modern world was uh submerged um thousands of feet underwater, which would mean that the polar ice caps, yeah, I guess they melted, but it wouldn't add miles uh height. Like the the actual polar ice caps themselves would have to be so tall that they would have to be in space in order for that to produce enough water to like submerge everything. Uh, but that's kind of not the point. It's just how do you create a world where it is a wasteland, but not blatantly plagiarize the Mad Max movies? But there is a there is a vibe of believability to it in in Waterworld. Like, how would I dress, how would I behave if I was in this world where there was no land? And um, I and I think they get that right. So yeah, it's cool. Like it's it's why why is this movie even on the show? Like, why how is this a uh how is this a uh dumpster fire? Um oh I forgot it won an Academy Award for sound mixing. This is winning sci-fi awards, it's winning academy awards, like it's doing doing pretty good. So, like, how how was Waterworld a dumpster fire exactly? Well, what made the movie a dumpster fire is not what you would think. Yes, it did poorly at the box office, but what's strange is the reason why it did poorly. And we're gonna kind of break down like the the major stuff in there, but there was one component, and it's not what you think. There was one piece that ruined it for everybody that worked on the movie. The biggest, well, first let's take a look at the uh the major players. So the biggest player on the movie was Kevin Costner, and Costner took this project on as like a passion project. He actually has a thing for post-apocalyptic movies. Uh, a few years after he made this, he did The Postman, which is a very famous sci-fi book, and it tanked as well. But again, I read the book, I like the movie, it is what it is. Like Kevin Costner really wanted to try to make a post-apocalyptic movie uh do well. For those of you who may not know Kevin Costner, he uh up to this point, uh, he starred in a few movies like The Intouchables. There was Field of Dreams, uh, he was the main character in JFK. Uh he starred next to uh Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. Oh, and he also in 1990 he directed a tiny little movie called Dances with Wolves.

SPEAKER_01 38:35

Isn't he in Yellowstone as well?

SPEAKER_04 38:37

Yes, yes. But I I I I only brought up like movies that he had been in up to Waterworld because he's been a prolific actor even afterwards. But yeah, Dances with Wolves actually won him an Academy Award for Best Actor and Director. Like, not bad. So already we're starting this Waterworld movie off. Like the main character is Kevin Costner, who is like one of the hottest actors of the time period. So, needless to say, by 1985, Kevin Costner was, you know, one of the one of the most highly sought-after demanded actors of the day, and he was paid accordingly because it seemed like everything he touched would turn to gold. Oh, he also starred in um uh Robin Hood, not Men and Tights, but Prince of Thieves with uh Morgan Freeman. Because of the success of that and whatnot, it's just like, okay, cool. Like, Waterworld. This is gonna be an interesting idea. Has Kevin Costner in it, and not like some known name or like Mel Gibson in Mad Max, um, because that was his first movie. So again, we're trying to find that equation of what makes a movie super successful. We are checking the box of you gotta have an A list actor. So uh the other major player in the making of this movie is director Kevin Reynolds, uh born in San Antonio. Antonio raised as an Air Force brat. Reynolds would actually become a lawyer. He gave up his law degree. So like he was a successful lawyer. And he's like, screw it. I'm going to go pursue a career in filmmaking. I don't know what made him do that. That is quite a change in professions. But then again, I was also in mechanical engineering and I became an English teacher. So I guess I could kind of see where where he was coming from there. So yeah, he got himself into USC, which I guess USC is a uh it's an okay school, right?

SPEAKER_02 40:33

Just a small little school that does some film stuff. It's fine. She I. Yeah. She's fine. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 40:41

Isn't like in all seriousness, isn't like USC like one of the most premier film schools in America?

SPEAKER_02 40:47

It's a very good school. That is the school you want to go to if you want to be in film.

SPEAKER_04 40:52

Yes. Or law.

SPEAKER_02 40:53

Or anything else.

SPEAKER_04 40:54

Yeah, or microbiology.

SPEAKER_02 40:56

Literally anything.

SPEAKER_04 40:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:58

It's a really good school.

SPEAKER_04 40:59

And didn't their football team get busted for doing bribes or something like that in the play for two years?

SPEAKER_02 41:06

Late 90s, early 2000s.

SPEAKER_04 41:08

Got it. Is that part? But just goes to show you, man. Don't cheat. So yeah, he went to USC at film school. And some of the other movies that he directed uh prior to Waterworld was like Fandango, uh, The Beast of War, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and then Rapa Nui, and then of course Waterworld. So uh Robin Hood was kind of a bigger movie, but all his other projects were kind of smaller, almost like an independent film type of thing, uh, which was probably one of the reasons why he was selected for Waterworld because it was originally intended to be a uh independent film. So yeah, the movie that put Reynolds on the map as like a big budget director was Robin Hood. Uh, as it too also starred Kevin Costner, and uh they were like bros. And both the Kevins were like inseparable at that time. That was like, hey, whatever the Kevins take on, dude, you're gonna make a grip of money off of it.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

It's like Adam Sandler and like Rob Schneider and all those guys.

SPEAKER_04 42:18

Yes. Uh Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 42:22

Uh, those are two that they always were for a long time they would they would follow each other. We have the Kevins now, so we have a we have a pretty well-known director and we have a very famous A-list actor. Um, the movie also had uh Peter Rader and David Truhe as writers. I know those are kind of like not as common names, but as a budding writer myself, when I look at a movie, that's like the first thing I look at in terms of the quality of the movie is who are the writers? Uh, because that determines a lot. If the writers suck, there's no way you can make the movie good. Hence, like the writer's guild strikes and stuff like that can really bring the industry down. They got Dennis Hopper, who is a veteran actor from the 70s and 80s. He played Deacon uh as a villain. Uh, he did a great job. So Waterworld was checking a lot of boxes needed to be that absolute legendary box office hit. Uh, good writers, good director, decent cast. And Waterworld was written and intended to be a smaller independent film. But when the Kevins got their hands on the storyline, they decided to try to make it into a major motion picture. And the original budget was supposed to be$30 million. And once the Kevins got a hold of it, boom, they got an extra$70 million, and it was now a$100 million movie. At that time, that is that's a big budget for a movie. Case in point, Independence Day uh came out in 1996. Uh, that was a$75 million movie. So already we are looking at like checking that other box, you know, good actor, good director, good writers, and now we're gonna throw a ton of money into it, right? What could possibly go wrong with all this? And after all these delays and issues and whatnot, um, when the movie was released, the bill would come out to be a hundred and seventy five million, or by today's standards, that would be about two hundred and ten million dollars.

SPEAKER_02 44:34

That's pretty pricey for the expensive.

SPEAKER_04 44:38

Yes, and for me, this movie's 30 years old. Yeah, like when I did the conversions, like, dude, I think Carrie, you were what three?

SPEAKER_02 44:50

Yeah, I was being bored. Just barely turning three. And Deja, you were like three, four months, maybe a baby, a child, yeah, a babe.

SPEAKER_04 45:03

Yeah, just a babe. One of you was just out of diapers, and the other one was living in diapers, literally pooping in diapers.

SPEAKER_01 45:11

Correct.

SPEAKER_04 45:12

Explain meanwhile, I think I was in the third or fourth grade. And yes, I I I I was not wearing diapers at that time.

SPEAKER_01 45:22

I was like, but you didn't say if you were wearing diapers or not. So nothing about the diapers.

SPEAKER_04 45:27

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe pull-ups here and there, but oh god, just on bad days.

SPEAKER_02 45:32

We'll talk about that later.

SPEAKER_04 45:34

I'm a big kid now, right? So according to an article from the Wall Street Journal, that the year Waterworld came out, and if we factor in the advertising and the cost of releasing the movie on that's right, cassette tape. Oh yeah. Dude, like we we we got we we're teaching students that don't even know DVDs, let alone VHS, yeah, or VHS.

SPEAKER_01 46:00

Like it's crazy. I watched I I literally watched my students try to touch screen operate a walkman. Oh no, wow. Like, I'm not even joking. I uh he was like, How do you turn it up? I was like, There's this thing on the side, you scroll it. Yeah, it's like a little wheel. You have to scroll it, yeah. Yeah, and and there's no touch screen. Like everything you have to push a button or scroll something. And you have to put something inside of this, which is a disc. You can't just play anything when there's nothing inside. You have to have a disc. And for whatever reason, you can't jump. Yes, don't jump. Don't run.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

You cannot don't even think because it will stop. Yes, it'll jump, it'll stop.

SPEAKER_04 46:56

But also, do not uh there was the uh there was a CD player walk that we all had when I was in junior high and high school where you would hold the CD player like a book on your side, and you that arm never moved. So when you would walk, you know how your arms kind of swim when you walk? The C D player arm would never move, otherwise it would skip.

SPEAKER_01 47:20

That's how, yeah, yeah. I remember being on the bus and like we would go over the like speed bumps, and my walkman would skip, and I'm like, oh crap. I'd have to like open it and like check the diz, like you know, huff on the front and wipe off my my fog to make sure it's clean and put it back in. But man, start it up, go back to the song I was on.

SPEAKER_04 47:43

Those things are incredible though. I had one that honestly, I I I I missed those days, and I had a special one that my mom got me for text return season where it would record ahead like 20 seconds, it would record so as as so like you could like jostle the Walkman or the uh CD player and it wouldn't skip because it recorded ahead like 20 seconds.

SPEAKER_02 48:10

That's kind of cool.

SPEAKER_04 48:11

Uh and and now that is now everything is just digital, it's yeah, hilarious. Uh, probably the cringe.

SPEAKER_01 48:19

I had a CD player that could hold six discs. Hey.

SPEAKER_04 48:22

Oh, nice. Yep, that's that's a little after my time. You're out there. I don't like to hold two the worst just saying the worst case of technology use amongst awkward people is when I was in junior high. The school got like the teachers got computers put in their classroom that they could use for their grading, and they didn't, none of the teachers knew how to use it. And I was in there trying to show them how to use their their new fancy computers. I'm like, okay, take the mouse and put it over this icon and then double-click it. And I kid you not, there was at least three or four teachers, grown adults, that physically picked up their mouse and they put it on the screen, and they was started clicking.

SPEAKER_01 49:10

Oh no, like, oh no, not the screen.

SPEAKER_04 49:14

And yes, I remember me and my my friend at that time, we just looked at each other and were like, this is gonna be a long afternoon of trying to let alone have them open up the software and try to put in their grades and and all that crap.

SPEAKER_02 49:29

Oh man. Anyway, back to Waterworld.

SPEAKER_04 49:31

Yes, yeah, enough for the cringy technology. Um, it was originally intended to be an independent film, but obviously we just found out that it ballooned to like$210 million by today's standards. And at that time that the movie was made, and if we factor in the cassette tapes, the ancillary costs, the advertising, the whole works, it Waterworld would need to gross uh more than the top two highest earning movies this summer prior. So there was Speed, which was$121 million, and The Mask, which was$119 million. So it would that movie, Waterworld would have to outperform those two movies from the year prior combined in order to turn a profit. Like that's a gamble. That is yeah, that's also high stakes, doubling two of the highest grossing movies the year prior. Okay. Both Kevins had visions of making Waterworld the largest movie ever produced, and in a way, they accomplished that until Titanic came out in December of 1997. Both men really wanted to create a rich and detailed world that wouldn't scream cheap or corners were being cut. I think it was this vision that caused the original film timeline to go from three months to seven months. So three months to do all the principal photography, and then it ballooned to seven months. And we'll get into like what happened there. What the Kevins wanted to do was introduce scope and breadth and portray a world truly covered in water. They didn't think the movie would look authentic enough inside like a studio in like a giant water tank. I get that. I can I can see why they would want that.

SPEAKER_01 51:22

I see that.

SPEAKER_04 51:23

And after all, the Mad Max movies, they were pretty much filmed outside. Like they were just filmed in the middle of nowhere in Australia. According to Raider, who stated in Yahoo News, Spielberg was unequivocal. Do not shoot on water. So this is coming from Spielberg when he gets down one of this project. He's like, you're going to need a couple of shots on water. So use a second unit for that. Do all of your coverage in a tank or on a stage. Don't do that. And and Spielberg would be the guy to listen to because he had a nightmare of a time trying to film Jaws back in 1974. So Jaws was all filmed in live water, and it yeah, the complexities of it and the fact that you are having to rely on weather behaving was an absolute nightmare. I don't know if you've heard of Steven Spielberg, uh, but even back then he was pretty on top of it.

SPEAKER_01 52:24

Didn't Steven didn't Steven Spielberg um also wasn't he a part of directing the Twilight Zone movie?

SPEAKER_04 52:32

That I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_01 52:34

Twilight Zone, the movie. Kara? That was a catastrophe in itself. I was just talking to Kara about that one. I think he might have I don't know if he was, but I think he was I'm checking right now. A part of it at least.

SPEAKER_04 52:47

Yeah, I'm not sure because I don't think I saw that.

SPEAKER_01 52:50

I feel like I feel like he was a part of something because he also said I can't I don't remember. I'll have to look into it and let you know, but I feel like he was a part of it.

SPEAKER_02 53:02

He let us know. So Twilight Zone, the movie, had four different movies in it, and each of those four movies had their own director. One was Joe Dante, John Landis, George Miller, which I'm very familiar with, and Steven Spielberg.

SPEAKER_04 53:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 53:18

There's one that was like an absolute catastrophe with like a plane crash. I'll have to figure out who what what it is in legend later.

SPEAKER_04 53:27

Yeah, because that could be another episode right there.

SPEAKER_01 53:29

Oh, 100%.

SPEAKER_04 53:31

But yeah, no, uh Spielberg, he's like, guys, I I I tried doing this filming on live water thing in 1974 with Jaws, and it was it was just too much of a hot mess for him. Uh, Spielberg argued that trying to build sets in the middle of the ocean is way too unpredictable. And when the weather does change, it's usually like a hurricane, or at a bare minimum, it's gonna be something catastrophic. During the initial filming stage of Waterworld,$22 million was spent on building. Remember, the original budget for this movie was gonna be$30 million. So$22 million was spent on building a floating atoll in the Kawai Kai Kawa yeah. It's a harbor in Hawaii. Say it uh Kala. Say it again say it as best.

SPEAKER_01 54:29

Let me let me look at the notes because I'm gonna be able to help you with this one at least. This is the one time I can help you with pronunciation. Don't ask ever again, ever again, ever again.

SPEAKER_04 54:39

Yeah, I think it's Kawaii. Kawaii.

SPEAKER_00 54:42

Kawaii Kawaii Kawaii He. It would be Kawaii He. Kawaii.

SPEAKER_04 54:47

Okay. Sorry. Kawaii He.

SPEAKER_00 54:49

Kawaii.

SPEAKER_04 54:50

Um so yeah, uh, they built a$22 million floating atoll. So when you watch the movie, there's like this weird like city thing floating in the middle of the ocean. Um that was all practical. That was all done as though it was an actual thing. I just realized that made no sense. It was built in in a way that it it was like, hey, we don't want to film like parts of this. We want to be able to film the entire thing like as a legit floating city. The thing weighed over a thousand tons. And Lockheed Martin was contracted to build the eight base floats. So this is the company that makes airplanes, like military airplanes. Yeah, they came in and they built the uh eight base floats and counterweights to give the quarter mile wide city. So this thing was a quarter mile wide, um, and it floated on these I they said floats. I'm assuming they were like these giant like pontoons. And yeah, the whole thing weighed over a thousand tons. The set was incredibly ambitious, and it was absolutely stunning. Like everybody who's ever seen it uh is like, wow, this is actually an engineering feat unto itself. Well, in the first days of filming outside the coast of Hawaii, once out to sea, like so they got this thing out there, a hurricane hit and sank most of it.

SPEAKER_01 56:24

That sucks. Yes. That's that is exactly what needed to happen. Set piece just this goes bloop. Goodness. Right down the drain.

SPEAKER_04 56:37

Yes, yeah, you're literally flushing money down the drain. I could only imagine if they had email back then. I could just see Steven Spielberg just sending the Kevins an email being like nothing in the body of the email. It would just be in in like the uh um the subject line? Yeah, the subject line, it just says, I told you so.

SPEAKER_02 57:00

Or L O L. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:03

Yep. Or bloop. WTF. So WTF, bro.

SPEAKER_04 57:11

So remind you now, remember this was supposed to be a$30 million movie, and yeah,$22 million was set or building was was spent just building one thing. Uh so yes, this hurricane hit and sank the entire thing, so it had to be drudged up, and then they had to spend tens of millions of dollars rebuilding it. It cost tens of millions of dollars to make it. Ouch. This wasn't the only set that got damaged um by go figure unpredictable oceanic behaviors. Another set called the bartering outpost sank completely. So this first set, the biggest one, I think like half of it sank, and it was just like at the bottom of the harbor. But this bartering outpost completely underwater. Yes, it was a smaller set, but they yeah, they they they had to just rebuild that thing from the ground up. So yeah, it was a bit cheaper, but was still in the range of like close to$10 million. Just to just to and I think that bartering outpost was only in the movie for a few minutes. Sick.

SPEAKER_01 58:31

Oh my god. That's wrong.

SPEAKER_04 58:35

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 58:36

That's wrong. That's foul.

SPEAKER_04 58:37

Now the original movie was like three hours long, and so they chopped out a lot of it. But when if you I get uh from understanding, if you get the director's cut, they they there's a lot more in there about like that bartering outpost and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 58:54

So I just picture what it's like for the um like the set crew and the special effects crew that spent so much time putting that together and engineering it and building it and making it look beautiful and like paint and building and just all the things that it takes to just just to make it, not even the money, and it goes underwater.

SPEAKER_04 59:19

Yeah. Oh which really goes to show you like if this was the real life, the real world, a city like this could never even exist.

SPEAKER_03 59:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 59:28

It would just sink. But wait, it gets better. Of course. So the weather issues continue to plug the cast and crew of the movie every day. It this was just the behavior of the ocean. It was every day they had to battle it. And the initial recording time was gonna be 96 days, and the this 96 days for the crew was considered the worst 96 days of their lives. When filming in the middle of the ocean, other problems began to arise because, like, very rarely was it ever beautiful. And then the days that it was, um, they had to be out in the middle of the ocean trying to film all this stuff. And Reynolds was big on getting multiple different shots at the same time. This was kind of his his spiel. It's like, okay, we're gonna do this explosion, and I want like five different camera angles, and then he would go back through the editing phase and pick the one that he thought was best. So every action scene, every explosion, every gunshot, every action scene had multiple different cameras out there. And what sucked was that it took forever to get these cameramen out there and these like 200-pound cameras on these little floating dinghies out in the ocean. And there was all these boats that they had to kind of keep an eye on because they didn't want a boat to be accidentally in the field of view of another camera. So they had to like strategically place these little dinghies all over the place. And the intensity of the practical effects made it so that the cast would have to go in for costumeslash makeup changes, which would take hours because those folks that would do the costumes and makeup, they were on a boat, they were in a much bigger boat miles away because you can't have that you can't have that accidentally pop up in a movie, and there was no cool way to get rid of it. So the actors would have to hop into a little dinghy, and then they would have to spend like an hour or so getting out to the costume makeup ships, and meanwhile, the cameramen were just floating out in the ocean surrounding the set and whatnot. And then the currents would kind of push them all over the place. So where Reynolds wanted to get like five different angles of the same shot. Now, like by the time these actors came out, like hours and hours and hours later, everything would change. Like the angle of the sun would change, the lighting would change, the batteries on the cameras would die. Uh, because they'd just been sitting there waiting this entire time. The crew or the cast would come back out, and then the little dinghies for the cameramen were all over the place. So then they had to like go back and reposition everybody all over again. And by the time they got all the cameramen positioned, then the cast had to go back to the ships to change their costumes because now was a different time of day and their costumes wouldn't look right on the camera or their makeup wouldn't look right on the camera. So then they would have to do it all over again. And there were many, many, many times where they couldn't film a single thing because they had to constantly be changing costumes, constantly changing makeup, and then when they get the crew back out there or the cast back out there, then they would have to go back and spend hours repositioning all the boats.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:05

And then that's that's a nightmare.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:11

And you have to have some really skilled cameramen too, because if you think about it, they're on a boat in the middle of the ocean. What do boats do in the middle of the ocean? They bob and they move on a job and they you're not gonna get a still shot, so you have to move with the ocean somehow, or there's I'm sure there's techniques to do it, but you have to have a really good cameraman to get that body strength you need for that.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:35

And it was exceptionally hot, and then we also get to factor in because it's the ocean, and you're mentioning it, they're bobbing up and down, yeah. Like ocean sickness would kick in, which would pose another batch of problems. And the one thing to remember about these cameramen is that film that they use, that cellulite, is really expensive and it is heat sensitive, so it could go bad pretty quickly. Much of the crew, including the cast and stunt men and women, suffered extreme bouts of seasickness, uh, while the ocean didn't care about how much vomit was being expelled on a daily basis. Uh, there was a slight issue of accessing the bathrooms. There were no bathrooms on site.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:20

Awesome. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:23

I guess you could say most of the men didn't care because they would just pee off the side of a boat. Um the women a little bit more complicated. And I think even some of the women were like, screw this, I'm tired of spending an hour on a jet ski going all the way back to a ship to pee and then come all the way back out. So some women even figured out how to pee off the side of the boats themselves.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:50

Holy a skill. Yes, a skill and dedication and persistence, yes, respect.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:57

And also, too, like there was no privacy. So yeah, it was uh it was an interesting time for sure. Uh most of the the cast and crew consisted of men, so that was fine peeing off the side. After all, you know, men kind of have the hardware for it, but there were a few women on there, including the main actress, and uh there were like stunt actresses and stuff like that, and they kind of lacked the hardware to pee off the side of a boat. Then there is the part uh involving the expulsion of solid waste from both men and women, and uh that that became a little more complicated. The nearest bathroom was thousands of yards away, and it could take hours for a boat to arrive and escort the people, doing pee-pee dances and poo-poo dances. It could take hours, and they could be in the fetal position just waiting to explode or suffering from the meat sweats the entire time, as men always seem to get. And uh, yeah, they could be out there for hours waiting, otherwise, they had to act in that condition. It wasn't just nature throwing hurricanes and storms at the movie makers. Uh, there was all sorts of other nature things, um, puke and pee and poo and all that fun stuff. On one such day, uh word got out that there was, I think there was an earthquake and a tsunami was coming. The entire production shut down. They're like, okay, we obviously can't have the entire cast and crew get washed away in a tsunami. That's not how tsunamis work. If you're in the middle of the ocean, a tsunami will pass by and you wouldn't even notice it. They you don't see the big wave or anything until it hits uh the reef barriers of land because all that water hits it and then it goes up and over. So they didn't really know that, and so they kind of freaked out, and they're like, Okay, pack up, we're shutting down for the day, and they wanted to wait out this tsunami that never came. Whole day wasted, gets better. Uh, on top of the basic needs of human beings in nature saying, Hold my beer and watch this exploding bladder. Uh, the filming process was absolutely grueling for most. A 10-minute scene could take over a month to film. The constant shooting and reshooting and subsequent resetting associated with reshooting uh caused the cast and crew to become increasingly exhausted. To save as much time as possible, many of the cast and crew uh would just stay the night on the makeup and costume boats. So I think these were like maybe hundred-foot-long boats, ships, I guess. Uh they're really designed to house maybe a handful of people. Now there was like dozens of people. And these guys, the the crew and the cast were so fed up with like all the time delays, they're like, you know what, screw it. I'll just stay on the boat. Like, I'll just spend the night here because we gotta get this done. Mind you, these boats didn't have any air conditioning or anything. It's getting down in the 50s at night, getting in 100 degrees during the day. It it kind of sucks. While these boats were bigger, it's not the same as sleeping in in a hotel. One person though didn't worry about that though. Um, turns out Kevin Costner, uh, part of his agreement to join this project was that he wanted a beachfront villa in Hawaii at a cheap little price tag of 14 million dollars. And at the end of each day, he had a special boat come out, pick him up from the set, and then take him to the villa where he had food catered and running water and all that stuff. And he did that every single day.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:55

Commitment again. The optics at the laziest and most pautiest.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:02

Yes. Yeah, that's probably not the optically the most positive thing that you could do in that situation. So even though this is like an ultra diva move, from what I understand though, Costner was punctual. It wasn't like he came strolling on to set like halfway through. He was like one of the first people there all the time. So I gotta give him some credit for that. And he was also one of the writers for the movie, which introduced problems of its own that we'll get into. And he was an executive producer, so he needed to stay somewhere landlocked with communication means so that he could do those two functions, like be the uh, you know, be one of the directors and producers. So he needed a he did actually need a uh a location where he could make phone calls and do stuff. And he would. He would work on the movie to like the wee hours of the morning. Ultra diva move, but I'm just like, couldn't a hotel do the same thing at not 14 million dollars for the whole thing? It gets better. As filming progressed, injuries started to climb. Uh, this was tied to long days of shooting and the constant resetting of everything due to camera boat shifting, sun-changing positions in the sky, makeup redoes, um, the crews needing to do inconvenient things like pee. On one such occasion, one of Costro's stunt doubles was filming a scene underwater under a great depth. Like, I don't know what I can't remember what scene it was, but like he was pretty deep underwater, and then he came up too quickly. This resulted in the stunt double getting a severe case of the bend, which nearly killed him. If you want more details on how that whole decompression thing works and what it does to the body, uh check out episode 46, the Bifer Dolphin Incident. We'll have links in the show notes for you. But yeah, basically, uh, real quick, you go underwater, your blood starts absorbing nitrogen gas from your lungs to kind of like balance out the pressure. And then if you come up too quickly, all that gas in your blood escapes. Like it wants to get out of your bloodstream, and that causes immense pain, confusion, uh, death in some cases. It's a pretty serious thing for a diver to get through. And in some cases, it can get so bad that you essentially explode. So check out episode 46 if you want more uh more details on that. So, some stunt men got stung by jellyfish, another was almost eaten by a shark. So go figure you try to film a scene where they have to use pig's blood to make it look like you're bleeding. Uh, apparently sharks like that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:45

So Oh, yeah. That is the craziest thing I have ever heard.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:50

That's I feel like that was just a brain fart, you know, type of thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:56

We just gotta get this movie done. We have all this other stuff going on. Just just throw the blood on him, we'll figure it out.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:03

Yeah. Meanwhile, you it's not that big of a deal.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:05

It's fine.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:05

And meanwhile, you know there's an intern, like he's still going for his college degree, and he's like, guys, um that may attract sharks. It's like, shut up, you give me my coffee. But the pig's blood will attract. I don't care. I don't you don't know what you're talking about, okay? We're not gonna attract sharks. Just go away five minutes later. Like, oh, look, we're filming Jaws 2 now. Quickly get this footage. We're gonna need it for the next movie. These people are just getting eaten alive. Thankfully, nobody did actually get eaten, but yeah. Um, one of those things where nobody thought about that prior. Okay. There were numerous cases of people falling from too high of heights, injuring themselves, or getting burned from the pyrotechnics because the the structures were kind of small and the explosions were in very close proximity. Whereas on land, you can film a guy with like an explosion 200 yards behind him, and then all you have to do is just zoom in on that dude with the explosion going off behind him, and it looks like he's only like 20 feet away. You can't do that in the middle of the ocean. Doesn't work like that. Yeah, people were getting burned and and all that kind of stuff. Um, another one of Costler's stunt doubles would take a jet ski to and from the film site, because I guess he he lived in Hawaii, so he would just go to and from. One dial, one day while heading out to film, uh the jet ski broke down, and the stunt man just floated in the middle of the ocean until enough concern arose on set for a search party to be mobilized, which that took time. They had to shut down everything, they had to pay a ton of money for the search and rescue people. Hours later, the stuntman was found just drifting idly in the middle of the ocean. He was probably like reading a book or something, and the stuntman was rescued. Needless to say, the makeup folks did they didn't have to do much to make him look sunburnt. So that saves some time.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:05

Yeah, that's a plus.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:08

Silver linings, I guess. Costner nearly died a few times while filming a shot during a storm. Costner was strapped to his trimarin when it capsized, and Costner nearly drowned. So he was on the top mast, the whole thing capsized, and he was like bolted into this thing while it was upside down in the middle of the ocean. Terrifying. That's rough. That's that is scary. There was another scene where he would jump out of a hot air balloon, and uh so he would like jump out of this hot air balloon, fall, like obviously he had a rope around him, but it wasn't a bungee rope, it was just a cable rope.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:48

Oh no.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:49

And they yeah, they got that mixed up because it was supposed you're supposed to fall and then kind of slowly come to a stop, grab the person and then come back up. Uh no, he had a rope tied around his waist and he fell like 50 feet and this snapped him right at the bottom. God gosh. Yes, uh that that messed up his back, and I think even to this day he has some issues with that. The problem was that Reynolds, he's like, dude, our camera boatmen they didn't get the angle right because they're just floating in the middle of the ocean. So he's like, All right, Kevin. Bro, right? So he's like, I didn't get the angle. Kevin, I need you to go back up and do it again. And Costner was like, no, nope, we're leaving it as is. I am not doing that again. Because like he still had to film the rest of the movie with a dang near broken back. So the safety concerns got to the point where a substantial amount of money and time needed to be invested to stem the growing list of people getting hurt or nearly dying. So, like, that now, like every see every movie is gonna have a budget of like X amount of dollars we got to put in for safety. Here it was becoming a sizable proportion or percentage of the making of the movie. Is that like 10%, 5%? No, now we're getting into like 20, 30 percent. Okay, now we're gonna get into the script issues, as well as Costner kind of dealing with some personal family stuff. Um, at the start of the filming in June of 1944, the script wasn't finished yet. Now, this isn't necessarily uncommon. Uh, this happens a lot. Like they get a movie going and they still need to hash out parts of the script. In terms of Waterworld, it caused a lot of onset drama, confusion, hurt feelers, uh, all of which would manifest itself in one way or another. Probably the most famous aspect or an example of not having it completed or changing the script on set was Star Wars Empire Strikes Back. Towards the end of the movie, Luke gets his hand cut off. And in the actual filming of that scene, Vader tells Luke, I killed your father. But then when James Earl Jones did the voiceover afterwards, Lucas told uh James Earl Jones, like, Oh, by the way, we're changing the script, and I need you to say, Luke, I am your father. So that the response was genuine from Mark Hamill. But even Mark Hamill, when he saw this in the movie theater, he's like, Oh, I had that's a shocker to me.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:29

That was actually done on purpose.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:32

That was done on purpose because the guy who played Vader, not James Dole Jones, but the guy in the suit. Yeah, he was notorious for leaking information to other people because he was just so excited about it.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:43

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:44

So they they did it on purpose. They told the guy, just say this, and you know, and that's that's gonna be the line or whatever. Yep.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:52

And um and then Jones voiced it over.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:55

Yeah, and then James Earl Jones voiced what the actual script was supposed to say.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:59

Yeah. So it it's yeah, the there's there's reasons to change it on the fly like that. Uh, in the case of Waterworld, it was like, uh, we still need to write 75% of the script. So it's not a matter of just changing a line or two. It's like we need all the lines, please. The like the strategy that was used in um Empire Strikes Back was not implemented in Waterworld. To be honest, nobody knew what the strategy was at the time of filming. At the end of the day, uh, at the end of each day, Reynolds, Costner, Raider, and some of the other contributors, uh, they literally got together and they worked out what was going to happen the next day. So they were literally planning out day after day after day at the end of each prior day. That includes action scenes, that included materials, stunts. So, like you would have people showing up to film a scene, and they had no idea what the scene was even going to be until they got there.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:02

Talk about winging it.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:04

Uh, yes. And I think that kind of worked for the movie a little bit because there's parts of it where yeah, they they just don't take themselves seriously. And I think that's just a lot of ad-libbing going on, which works. I mean, if you got a if you got a cast with good chemistry, that can work out fairly well. And I think they kind of got lucky there, but yeah, they were just literally flying in the seat of their pants, which again, we're dealing with the most expensive movie ever made in history up to this point. You kind of want things a little more thought out. That's my assumption.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:37

Just a little bit, at least a plot line, you know, a climax, yeah. Descending action conclusion.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:44

Yeah, like this is this is where we're headed to guys. So just keep that in the back of your mind.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:50

Instead of like, um, I don't even know what we're having for lunch tomorrow, let alone what we're gonna film. Um, eventually some of the wardrobe and makeup. Artists got tired of the constant delays and being forced to change out characters' clothing in uh makeup multiple times a day. So, and living on a freaking boat in the middle of the ocean for 96 days, so they just kind of gave up eventually. As I mentioned before, Joss Whedon was called in. So the guy who wrote uh I think he wrote what Age of Ultron and then he did uh Firefly. That was a that was one of his major projects. So yeah, the guy Joss Whedon definitely has some experience, but at this time he was very young and starting out. Uh, they brought him in to try to make sense of things and try to finish the project off. However, even he wasn't able to fix the issue, and he's like, I'm out. This is this is going nowhere. Like I'm having to fight everybody every day just to figure out what's going on. Uh, on top of that, during the filming of this movie, Costner was getting a divorce from his wife, Cindy Silva. Um, there was rumors that while Costner was just roughing it in his uh beachfront villa in Hawaii, there was rumors that he was having an affair with another woman. So I don't know if that's true or not, but hey, somebody's got to keep that bed warm for him when he gets back. Uh that, yeah, that that who knows what was going on there, but again, that's a bad look. And uh the whole divorce cost Costner uh$80 million or$168 million by today's standards. Wow, that's expensive. That's tricky to try to film. Like, here you are, a major contributor to the biggest movie ever at that time, as well as like you're the executive producer, you're a director, you're the main actor. Oh, and my wife was trying to like take everything from me. Like, that's not gonna put you in the proper frame of mind. That's not gonna put you in the problem-solving mode necessary to succeed in this case. Eventually, Costner and Reynolds, um, the two bros, they had a pretty bad falling out uh due to all the fighting and differences of opinions and the direction of the movie. Um, what seemed like an unshakable bond between Costner and Reynolds eroded, and Reynolds left the project about three-quarters of the way through the movie. Uh, Reynolds is still kind of giving credit for that movie. Like, if you look at the uh the credits, it says directed by Kevin Reynolds, but yeah, he's like, I'm done. And it was reported that Reynolds said um a little later on that Costner should only act in the movies he directs. That way he can work with his favorite actor and his favorite director.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:46

Oh man, right? And the kiss wow.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:52

And uh I guess I guess they're amicable today, but they they still kind of have a a mutual frustration with each other. Like they have worked on some projects, but yeah. And then you got uh Alan Curtis, he was the assistant director. So the assistant director is uh responsible for like being the eyes and ears and the communication between the director and the cast, so he's like the go-between. Um, and also the assistant director would be responsible for filming smaller scenes, B scenes, all that kind of stuff. He got tired of mom Kevin and dad Kevin fighting all the time, and so he's just like, uh, yeah, here's my folder, I'm out. So now we are down two directors. Uh as the delays kept mounting, so did the price tag. Due to all the shooting, reshooting, rebuilding, and then reshooting, and then costume makeup changes, followed by more reshooting and shooting that needed to be scrapped, uh, for whatever reason, etc. The filming time for this movie went from 96 days to a staggering 157 days. That's a long time to be living on a boat in the middle of the ocean.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:09

Oh, that's miserable.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:11

And then Costor still had that beatfront beat that beachfront villa that they were still making like daily payments on. Oh so that's wild. Um, oh, and that trimarin that that they use as for like one of the main props of the movie. That thing I I think I read somewhere it was like$15 million and it was custom built. And it was eventually used as like a uh a competition trimerin for like sailing competitions and whatnot. So it got good use, but boy, was that an expensive piece of equipment.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:50

Man.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:51

With all the delays um and the long list of issues mentioned above came the price tag. Initially, the movie was set to cost$65 million, and then about halfway through, it inflated to$135 million. At this point already, we're encroaching on being the most expensive movie ever made, uh slash you know, crazy records and and whatnot. When it was all said and done, Costner now, Costner's now solo uh project cost upwards of$175 million. Now, in all fairness, uh I kind of want to look at both sides here. Costner did put up$38 million of his own money to finish the project. Because again, this is gonna be his baby, this is gonna be his legacy. He was going to like this movie was gonna be hugely successful, and you know, because you know, what could possibly go wrong? I I do have to give it, I have to give Kevin Costner a little bit of credit. He really was committed to this movie if nobody knew what was gonna happen. Albeit his ego uh might have uh might have been bolstered with the Academy Award for directing Dances with Wolves. Um, it's it wasn't like this guy was completely out of touch with reality, but it was also like, bro, Dances with Wolves is a vastly different movie than Waterworld in every aspect.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:16

It's a little a little different.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:18

Okay, to put things in perspective, Independence Day, which came up the next year, was a total production cost of$75 million and only took 72 days to film, and it brought in$817 million worldwide. That's a pretty good turnaround. This means up to this point, Waterworld is uh now by far the most expensive movie ever made until Titanic came out. The box office bomb. Waterworld was released to theaters uh July 28th, 1995, to a sorry United States or a local weekend sales of 21.6 million.

unknown 1:26:59

Oof.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:00

Uh Independence Day opened to 50 million dollars. So like Independence Day cost half as much and doubled the amount of money on opening day.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:14

Yes. Uh, all in all, the domestic box office brought in$88 million. Um, domestically, Independence Day raked in over$306 million. Uh worldwide, Waterworld fared way, way better. Like it was a popular movie uh more outside of America, and it brought in$264 million. So that's not that's not too bad. Remember the movie cost$175 million, so technically speaking, Waterworld does eventually turn a profit, but boy, it was rough while it was in theaters. Independence Day when it came out and it's worldwide uh gross income was over 500 million, so it seemed like Dang. Yeah, Independence Day was half the cost, half the time to make to put together, and it doubled in revenue in all metrics than Waterworld. Yeah, and it I mean it had Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, and that was pretty much it. And yeah, Will Smith was a very popular actor back then, but I think Kevin Costner was considered more of like, oh yeah, whatever movie this guy touches, it's gonna be amazing. Whereas like Will Smith was still kind of proving himself in the uh movie scene. Now, when we look at how much Waterworld cost to put together as well as market, the total bill was 235 million. So we factor in the advertising, the cassettes, and all that stuff. Um, it came in at 235 million. That's over 60 million dollars in advertising. So remember, 175 to manufacturer, 235 when you factor in all the uh promotional stuff.$60 million. That's more than what most movies cost to produce at that time, period. Like$60 million, you can make a, you know, a relatively mid-budget movie off of that. And that was just in advertising. In the end, Waterworld did turn a profit with the addition of international sales and the sales associated with VHS cassette tapes. It seemed like Blockbuster. Many people don't remember this, but there was a time where you would go rent movies in cassette form and bring them home, and then you would have to like rewind them before you returned them and all that crap.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:35

Um, Blockbuster was the best Friday night ever.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:39

For me, it was Hollywood video that that we had one close to our house.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:43

I did both of those, but yeah, every Friday night.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:46

So yeah, it seemed like Blockbuster helped pull Waterworld out of this disaster and also had a pretty successful television release. Um that's in large part thanks to the women. There was supposed to be a nude scene in there with the main uh female actor, and she's like, No, but we need a nude scene. No, we don't. Um can we, what can we give you to do a nude scene? No, I'm good. Okay. Alright, well, we're acting the nude scene. And uh and I think because of that, that helped the movie do better on television because you don't have to edit that out and stuff like that. And props to the to the female actors, like, no, I'm not doing it. Like, I'm glad that she put her foot down and stood up to these guys. I also got to give the guys a little bit of credit too, that they didn't push it too hard because they kind of propositioned it, like, hey, nude scene, we'll pay you extra money or whatever, but they didn't like ruin her career because she didn't want to do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:54

So I but the fact that you have to say good on the men for not ruining her life, that could have sucks.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:01

Yes. That that's that's that that's what I was thinking too.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:05

I was like, we shouldn't have to say that's like how far we have to set that bar down. Like, yes, good on you guys for not being complete douchebags. But also, I I look at this this industry and how women are treated in the movie making industry is absolutely deplorable.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:26

That that's the only reason it's better now, but it used to be so bad, yeah. Even now it's a little bad, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:35

Yeah, it was it's a rough industry, yeah. And that and that's the reason why, like, when Kevin Reynolds brought that up and they tried to proposition her and she said no, and she was pretty firm on that, they they backed down. And given how that industry treated women at that time, I kind of have to be like, okay, cool guys, you didn't make this too bad, you didn't coerce her and stuff like that. So, which is good to see in that industry. That boy, there that casting couch, man, the history of the casting couch could tell uh through the decades is it is scary. That's why, like, I really wish Marilyn Monroe was still alive today, because that how she was treated even as a teenager was horrendous. And the stuff she had to do with these talent recruiters and these directors and whatnot, yeah, it is so shameful. Um, I really wish she stuck around long enough to write like a book on the I think she could have blown the lid wide open on Hollywood in terms of how they treated women for all that time. But, anyways, the dumpster fire. Uh Blockbuster helped pull this movie out, and because of the uh decision not to have a full nude scene, that helped it do better on television, so the syndication profits help. And the media had an absolute field day from the minute the cameras started to roll. And now we are getting into what I think is the root cause of this dumpster fire. Waterworld was a movie that was very closely tracked by tabloids and news agencies across the world. And when you think about the big names that were in this movie, that immediately brings the attention with them. And as these big names were in there, they had news agencies and reporters coming out left and right, paparazzi. Uh, you had people that were kind of like living, they had their own boats out in the middle of the ocean, and they were using that to kind of spy on the set. Whereas before they wouldn't really have given it any time. So, like, if you had a cast member stubb a toe, that would be reported all over the nation. And the dumpster fire is that the movie tanked in large part because the news media they would not let up during the filming of it. So it kind of had a bad reputation even before it released, if that makes sense. Yeah, there's a phenomenon out there uh where you can have say somebody gets mugged in a subway. Okay, the news wants to report on that. So a reporter comes out, they get all the details, and then they publish it in newspaper or the news or whatever. All the other news agencies want a piece of that, but they can't just come in and report on the same exact event. They have to come in and they have to, otherwise, that'd be plagiarism. They have to go in and they have to kind of retell the story, but they've got to make a change to it so that it doesn't look like they're just plagiarizing.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:52

And so what happens is that you can have one bad event, so like one sore pinky toe from being stubbed on a ship somewhere could explode across the nation and the world.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:06

Or on your couch.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:07

Or on your couch, yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:08

It was awful, yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:10

It that because of that one incident, the this could explode to 50,000 crew members all stubbing their toes at exactly the same time of day on the same couch, all while filming the same movie. So basically, each news agency they needed to report on the same event a little differently, but to the viewer, to the listener, it sounds like, oh my God, people are dying left and right in this movie. Or they're that it's just like everybody's getting injured, or it's like it just blows up because they have to report it slightly differently. Things can really blow out of proportion. And due to the negative media coverage during the filming of this movie, the initial reviews that came pouring in added more feel to the dumpster fire. Uh the Hollywood reporter wrote that uh wrote, not surprisingly, World War Waterworld is a monumental example of how script troubles, creative differences, power struggles, and bad luck can swamp a potentially worthwhile project. One reviewer I saw on Reddit was like, Waterworld should be what in the world. Uh Roger Ebert, of all people, was a little bit nicer. Um, normally he's like brutally like transparent on his opinions and movies. He wrote that I'll remember some of the sites in Walderworld for a long time because again, the visuals are very impressive. But I wouldn't, I won't necessarily want to see them again. But he did kind of give the movie praise for its production value, special effects, action scenes, and all that. So, like, cool. It was a little over the top, but it worked out. Um, it was evident that Mad Max was such an inspiration for Waterworld that it was viewed as almost a direct ripoff. That's so that was some of the uh reviews came in like, really, this is this is so much like Mad Max. Like, does George Murray even know? Did you at least get some permission from him to rip it off so much? Uh Chris Nashawadi wrote uh in Esquire a somewhat positive take on the film. He wrote, in the end, Waterworld would mark the beginning of a rough stretch of Costner's charmed career. Uh one that hit its um that hit its nadir. Nadir? Nadir? I've never heard of that word. Anyways, one that hit its nadir uh with yet another post-apoc apocalyptic message movie, 1997's The Postman. Um, that was the other one that that tanked, starring Kevin Costner, and he was like producer and all that stuff. But contrary to popular opinion, Waterworld wasn't a disaster, it's always been painted as in the press. Yes, the critics dogpiled on it, and the audiences in America mostly stayed away, but the movie ended up making back its production costs uh once internal receipts, home video sales, and TV licensing were factored in. It wasn't exactly Titanic, but it wasn't FishTar and Kevin's Gate either. So the whole FishTar and the Kevin's Gate thing is kind of like a uh a spin on uh a Heaven's Gate movie that was so bad that it actually bankrupted the uh uh the movie production industry that put it together. Awesome. Yeah, and and Fishtar is kind of uh is along the lines. It was a movie that just it was so bad that it like cost entire companies to fold up. So in the end, Waterworld was a dumpster fire, but not in a traditional sense. Yes, some really stupid decisions were made, and there was a bunch of chicanery going on uh behind the the uh camera, but how much of that stuff like takes place on any other large budget? I mean, look at Titanic. Dude, there was hundreds of people that got injured making that movie. There there was reporting on it, but not that much. Uh, at what point does the news media ruin things before those things are even given a fair chance? Waterworld seems like a perfect combination of strong creative personalities, meets Murphy's law that gets chewed up and spit out by negative re or negative news coverage, which is something that irks me. Because how does the news media inform us of anything by just tearing everything to the ground? And like, how is that beneficial just by ripping everything to pieces before anybody even has a chance to draw their own conclusion? But that's uh that there is a different dumpster fire. For another day. So that is the uh train wreck that is Waterworld. There's a lot going on there. Yes. There's a lot of stuff, a lot of just a lot of Murphy's Law coming together at once. Yeah. And I don't know. To me, it's just like I kind of want to do more of these because I kind of want to see these guys, like Kevin Costner and all these people put their heart and souls into this project. And then once it came out, absolute failure. But then over time, it was like, uh, was it really that bad? Like, could we really count this as a failure? But it will always kind of be heralded as a failure just because the news media had to get in there and report on every little thing that went down. And so to me, that that's the real dumpster fire. Is it's not a matter of did they fail or is it successful. It's like who really gets to say that something is good or bad. And nowadays it just seems like it's just media that ruins it for everybody. So yeah, Waterworld. Excellent. Jeez. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:13

That's all she wrote. Goodness. That's uh that's I really I'm gonna try to find it. I'm gonna try to find it and see if we can we'll watch it tomorrow.

SPEAKER_04 1:41:22

Yeah, yeah, if you can on the projector. Yeah, no, I uh I grew up watching that and I have fond memories of watching it. Now, obviously, if I look back at it today, I'm probably like, oh my god, what am I watching? But I remembering it being an okay movie until I looked at all the stuff that went on behind the scenes and the craziness and the amount of money that was spent and and all that stuff. It's just like, oh, yeah. Because they tried to make they tried to make that equation, right? They had this equation: lots of money, A-less actors, famous directors, lots of good writers, and that should make a perfect movie. And boy, did it not do that. It did not.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:01

It did not, it did not. Wasn't it? No, my mom loves that movie.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:07

But she she loves that movie, but whenever it came on TV, I just remember I couldn't take it seriously. And I don't know if that's because I was young or if it's just that silly to me.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:17

Because I haven't watched it in years, because I had no like intention to, but yeah, it's one of those movies where it like there's a lot of scenes and a lot of parts of the script where you could tell they don't take themselves seriously. There's a lot of funny scenes in it.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:33

Sometimes that's okay. Sometimes that really works for a movie. Yeah. And then sometimes it really doesn't. And I don't think it did for this one. I don't I don't think it did for this one.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:43

But I don't know. I uh to me I liked it. I like the I like some of the funnier stuff in there. Uh where like the villain is serious, but then there's also parts where he's not so serious, and he's just so blatantly over the top that it's kind of comical. Um but yeah, go watch it and and let me know. So hopefully this is a little bit of a palette cleanser compared to uh eating people. That was kind of the direction I wanted to go in.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:10

That was crazy.

unknown 1:43:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:13

That was uh yeah, it was so much fun to research, though.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:16

Oh yeah, I'm sure. But um, yeah, I know we got some projects coming around the corner here. Yep, kind of going in all sorts of different directions. Of course, Kara and Deja won't tell me. Um, well, actually, I know I know what you got coming up, Kara, but I have no idea what Deja's working on.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:32

Yeah, it's Deja's turn to do a secret project. Yes, after the school year. We have some things in the pipeline for you. Um, I'm not sure about Deja, but mine's definitely not as dark and creepy as my last one. So we're gonna do a few palette cleansers after the three-parter, and then um maybe I'll find another disturbing dark one to do. I don't know. We'll find out, or maybe Deja will find one.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:58

I think the one that I'm gonna do that, and I'll I'll only tell you this Ed. I think the one that I'm gonna do, it isn't super dark and deep. I f I think you will find it very fascinating, and I think it'll be right up your alley, which is different for me, but I've been indulging so much of it, and it's very I think you're gonna like it, but I don't think you've ever heard of it, and that's why I want to keep it to myself because I don't want you to go and do your thing that you do. I am that kind of person because I genuinely think I found something.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:40

I am that kid, like right before Christmas, I would sneak out to the Christmas tree and I would try to like peek in the presents and see what wasn't under the tree for me.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:49

Yeah, definitely you were shaking them.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:51

I know you were oh no, I had like Xacto knives and I would kind of make little incisions and then I would use flashlights to light the underneath the paper. I had all sorts of tricks.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:00

Didn't even realize you were doing surgery.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:02

Yeah, and then Christmas Day I had to act surprise.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:06

That's hilarious. Yeah, no, I think you're gonna like it. It's up your alley. Yeah. Okay. It's gonna be good. Excellent. Cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:13

Well, with that being said, remember go check out our Instagram at thedaystumpster fire. Check out our website, thedaystumpsterfire.com. Um, we have a bunch of extra stuff on there. I just revamped it, put my art up on there, so you can go check it out. All that good stuff. And then uh remember, I'm gonna go with Ed's advice to all of you is to um steal somebody's phone illegally and then break into it. And then press press a bunch of buttons you get in and then subscribe to the podcast at least six different times.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:45

Um do that but legally. Yeah, no, no, for realsies though, do it legally if they give you permission, please.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:52

I was thinking about uh going into the Apple store and you know how they have all those laptops and iPhones. I was thinking about going in there and changing the Safari. Like when you open up Safari, it has that that home website. I was thinking about changing it to our website, right? So like every single person that goes in there will boom sees our website.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:11

You should just make the back screen on all of them, just the wallpaper, yes, our our yeah, our Spotify like screenshot or something like that, yeah, or a QR code. Right, yeah, QR code, 100%. It's a good idea. But yes, we'll do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:27

Um send it to everybody you know, leave a review because I would like some feedback from some people on some things. Definitely. So if you have some time, leave a review wherever you listen to the pod, that'd be good, or hit us up on Instagram and all that good stuff. But um, I think that's all of the housekeeping. So I'm gonna end it there.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:48

Yeah, awesome stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:50

See you later, guys. Cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:52

All righty keep it a hot mess. I finally beat you this time.