Cutthroat Island

Summary

WHAT WENT WRONG – "Cutthroat Island"

Podcast: WHAT WENT WRONG
Hosts: Lizzie Bassett & Chris Winterbauer
Release Date: August 10, 2026
Movie Discussed: Cutthroat Island (1995)
Main Theme: An audacious, disastrous high-seas adventure, Cutthroat Island has long lived in infamy as one of Hollywood’s worst box office flops. But was it truly the ship-sinking catastrophe it’s remembered as—or is there more to the story?

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Episode Overview

The hosts, Lizzie and Chris, deep-dive into the troubled production, release, and legacy of Cutthroat Island, a 1995 swashbuckling pirate film directed by Renny Harlin and starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine. The episode challenges the myth of the film's uniquely disastrous production, uncovering what really happened with Hollywood’s infamous flop, and uncovering the film’s overlooked merits and misunderstood history.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. First Impressions & The Movie’s Reputation

• Lizzie confesses she had never seen Cutthroat Island (04:01), assuming “it was just going to be terrible… an unmitigated disaster." She is surprised:
  • “It’s really, really fun, and I really enjoyed both Geena Davis and Matthew Modine… Frank Langella eating every piece of scenery—thoroughly enjoyed that.”
  • She notes the film’s influence: “There is so much Pirates of the Caribbean DNA in this movie.” (05:55)
• Chris notes: “I think this movie has a lot of highs. Great… practical effects, stunt work, explosions, some fun cinematography…” (06:43)

2. The Myth vs. Reality

• The hosts set out to dispel the popular narrative: “The story that I’d always heard about this movie… was that it was an unmitigated disaster, a runaway production, and… it sank Carolco, the company behind it. And as we’ll learn: this movie did not slit the throat of Carolco.” (07:55)

3. The Key Players – Producer, Director, and Star

Mario Kassar & Carolco (Production Company)

• Wealthy, aggressive producer behind Rambo, Total Recall, etc.—always spent big to draw talent. (10:17)
• Financial practices relied on foreign pre-sales and “Carolco premiums”—giant paydays for stars and directors.
• “It’s easier to raise $100 million than $5 million… people's ego gets higher…” (23:03)

Renny Harlin (Director)

• Young, wild Finn—known for hits and flops.
• Hollywood doors flung open after Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and Die Hard 2.
• Hired by Carolco for $3M(!) to direct a canceled hurricane movie (Gale Force), then Cliffhanger—and then Cutthroat Island.
• Visual style: “No sequence or setting that you’ve seen in movies before is good enough...I want huge...I want disasters...I want crowds!” (Renny’s epic pre-production memo, 53:12)

Geena Davis (Star)

• Oscar-winning, tall, athletic, beloved for Thelma & Louise and A League of Their Own
• “She wanted to do more physical roles… one of my goals is to be a kick-ass villain in a Marvel movie...” (32:02)
• Cast for Cutthroat Island only after a prior pirate project fell apart.

4. Development Hell: Script Problems and Casting Chaos

• Original script: Written as a buddy comedy, Disney considered it for a Pirates of the Caribbean movie (37:15)
• Studios wary after decades of pirate fiascoes (Mutiny on the Bounty, Hook).
• Michael Douglas originally cast but left over creative differences and concerns about the script (44:14).
• Geena Davis (reluctantly) left as lead after Douglas’ exit; the production attempted to cancel, but Carolco refused.

5. Financial Shipwreck: Why Was Cutthroat Island Doomed?

• Carolco was already collapsing: loss of $265 million in '91, IRS investigations, asset fire-sales.
• Cutthroat Island was greenlit as a gamble to save the company. Mario Kassar had already pre-sold $50–60 million in foreign rights (47:14).
• After losing “Crusade” (a Paul Verhoeven/Schwarzenegger epic), all hope was placed on Cutthroat Island…even when Geena and Renny wanted out.
• The supporting cast saw last-minute changes, with Matthew Modine filling Douglas’ role for a fraction of the price (50:56).

6. Production Chaos

• Preparation was massive:
  • Two full-size ships with 80 working cannons each, costumes and weapons by the truckload (56:35)
• Endless setbacks:
  • Firing and quitting of key crew, unions issues, filming in Malta & Thailand, contaminated water tanks, a major DP injury, and Oliver Reed’s notorious, destructive behavior (59:41).
  • Quote: “Oliver Reed, getting drunk, getting into fights, and taking off his pants… that’s called the Oliver Reed special.” (59:59)

7. Epic Real-World Stunts

• Dangerous, practical effects:
  • Shipwrecks, real explosions, cliffs, and physical horror.
  • Geena Davis and Modine were put in harnesses over actual 300-foot cliffs for the iconic “cliff jump” (65:56).
  • Signature action moments involved clever editing—Corridor Crew later showed how one carriage stunt cut mid-action from stuntwoman to Geena seamlessly (83:11).

8. Post-Production & Release

• Editing army: four editors, including legends like Ralph E. Winters and Frank J. Urioste (70:33)
• Music by John Debney, channeling the swashbuckling scores of Golden Age Hollywood—direct inspiration for Pirates of the Caribbean (72:22, 73:12).
• Release date chaos: intended for July 1995, then delayed—ultimately dumped at Christmas amid the likes of Toy Story and Jumanji (73:54).
  • “That’s a bone garden… a strange place to drop it.” (74:24)

9. Critical and Box Office Failure

• Opened December 22, 1995.
• Made just $11 million domestic, possibly $17M worldwide against a ~$100M budget (77:15).
• Ripped apart in the press, especially for “a woman pirate captain” (78:04)—a criticism the hosts vocally reject.
• Guinness listed it as the biggest box-office bomb ever until John Carter surpassed it.

10. Legacy and Re-evaluation

• Did not have a second life like Waterworld or Showgirls.
  • “My theory is that it’s actually a little too good to land in the same place as Waterworld and Showgirls... it falls through the cracks.” – Lizzie (81:49)
• Geena Davis: “What made up for all the bad reviews was that Quentin Tarantino really liked the movie…”
• The film’s practical effects, set design, and score are now more appreciated, and it directly inspired Pirates of the Caribbean.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• "There is so much Pirates of the Caribbean DNA in this movie." – Lizzie (05:55)
• “It was not the tale that we have been told, or at least the tale that I have heard and internalized myself.” – Chris (03:03)
• "I don't want big—I want huge. I don't want surprising—I want stunning. I don't want fast—I want explosive. I don't want accidents—I want disasters." – Renny Harlan’s production memo (53:12)
• "I begged to be let go. Gina was scared mindless about headlining this film.” – Renny Harlan, quoted by Chris (46:02)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• First impressions & reputation: 04:01–06:28
• Carolco + big budget breakdown: 10:17–17:35
• Renny Harlan primer: 13:30–18:41
• Geena Davis origin story: 29:25–33:25
• Script, original casting, Disney’s near-miss: 36:45–38:09
• Michael Douglas backs out: 44:14–46:02
• Production troubles, Oliver Reed saga: 59:41–61:27
• Epic stunts and setpieces: 65:06–66:54, 83:11
• Post-production & music: 70:33–73:12
• Release & flop legacy: 73:54–75:56, 77:15–78:40
• Re-evaluation & legacy: 81:46–83:56
• What went right: 86:24–87:56

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What Went Right?

• Lizzie: The “tapestry is rich” — production design and costumes are standout, making the world feel lived-in, beautiful, practical, and not overly sexualized.
• Chris: Geena Davis’s performance and John Debney’s evocative, swashbuckling score—laying groundwork for Pirates of the Caribbean.

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Final Thoughts

Despite its reputation, Cutthroat Island offers impressive spectacle, practical action, and a pioneering female lead—unfairly pilloried by Hollywood’s shifting fortunes and creative indecision. The hosts encourage listeners to revisit the film with fresh eyes, appreciating its pyrotechnics, stunt work, and style, and to re-examine what truly “sank” Carolco.

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Next Episode Preview:
Three Kings – The wild, tumultuous making of the 1999 Gulf War satire.
[End Episode]

Transcript

[Lizzie Bassett]

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[Chris Winterbauer]

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[Lizzie Bassett]

Hello, and welcome back to what Went Wrong? Your favorite podcast, Full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a very expensive one that sank to the bottom of the ocean. All so. Pirates of the Caribbean, Could Drunken Jack Sparrow run away with the booty? I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here, as always, with Chris Winterbauer. And, Chris, what do you have for us today?

[Chris Winterbauer]

I'm glad you didn't say run away with Keira Knightley's booty. I don't know why that's what I thought you were going to say.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I would never. I would die.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You would never. And I should walk the plank for even suggesting it. Yep, we have Cutthroat Island, a film that has been recommended, suggested, implored by our audience to be covered many a time. And finally, I decided, you know what? It's time for me to leap off of an exploding barrel, Renny Harlin style, and cover this movie. And this is a really fun story. It is one that is going to take us to, I mean, the edges of the earth as far as Hollywood financing is concerned. And I hope we can dispel the many rumors around this movie, because it is not the tale that we have been told, or at least the tale that I have heard and internalized myself. And I will first express what that is. So, Lizzy, before we dive into myth versus reality, fact versus fiction, what was mere stories of piracy on the high seas with Cutthroat island and what actually happened, I have to ask you, what were your thoughts upon watching or rewatching it for the podcast?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, I'd never seen this movie before I knew that it. Well, let's say I thought I knew that it was an unmitigated disaster. And all I'd ever heard was, you know, this is in the top 10 movies usually that pop up when you look for, like, biggest box office disasters, biggest money losers. And so I thought, okay, well, this is just gonna be terrible. Yeah, like, this movie's gonna be really bad. I'm gonna have to just soldier through. And that was not the case at all. You know, is it the best script in the world? No, no, no, not at all. However, it's really, really fun, and I really enjoyed both Geena Davis and Matthew Modine. Although he's strange in this world, he's much more suited to a Stranger Things universe than he is To a. Whatever this is. 18th century pirate universe. 18th, 17th.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I'll double check it right now.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Who knows? You know what? It doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah. I thought all of the explosions were incredible. And, boy, were there a lot of explosions.

[Chris Winterbauer]

17th century, 17th.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Okay, there you go. I thought it might be early, you know, maybe one too many explosions. Except that they were really fun to watch. Every time they exploded something, which is, I would say about every five minutes, something explodes in this movie. Something large and expensive. Geena Davis, I thought, was really great, particularly with the stunt work that it looks like she is doing. I don't know if we're gonna get into that, but there's a couple of action sequences in this where they're not cutting away. So I assume it is her doing a lot of this. And I thought that was really impressive. And I've always really liked Geena Davis also. She and Matthew Modine are just super hot, so that helps and is fun to watch. Frank Langella eaten every piece of scenery. Thoroughly enjoyed that. I loved King Charles. I hope that monkey was paid appropriately. He was a star. And. Yeah, I just. I don't know that this deserves to be besmirched the way that it has been for all time. But the thing that I could not get out of my head when watching this is how much Pirates of the Caribbean DNA is in this movie. It's crazy.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. They just said, let's just do it better. Yes, let's do this.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Literally, they just said, what if we had a slightly better script? Not even that much better. What if we had a slightly better script and we add ghosts and that's it?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. Better dialogue.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. Funnier dialogue. Yeah, sure, there's some better actors, but it's okay. It's better. It's better. But it was so very clear that this movie set the stage for Pirates of the Caribbean in a big, big way that I didn't understand before watching this. So I'll hold the rest of my thoughts there. But, yeah, I really enjoyed this. This does not deserve the legacy that it has acquired.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I agree.

[Lizzie Bassett]

One complaint. Okay. The number of times they punched Gina Davis in the face, it was one too many.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Oh, no. I'm 100% fine with that.

[Lizzie Bassett]

You're fine with that?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. If this is gonna be a female pirate, like a woman pirate in this

[Lizzie Bassett]

world, it is equal opportunity face punching. They will tell you that.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Let's just lean into it. She gets punched in the face, she gets thrown off a cliff. You know, I mean, that's what would happen Supposedly to a pirate or Anne. Bonnie. I thought I had seen this at some point. I've seen scenes of this for sure, at some point. I don't know if I'd ever watched the whole thing through and I had the same experience. I think this movie has a lot of highs. Great, as you mentioned, practical effects, stunt work, explosions, some fun. Cinematography, some great aerial cinematography. Great horseback riding scenes. Especially earlier when she's running the horse across the submerged sand spit at the beginning. It's very fantastic. Production design, great costumes. I agree. I think the story is fine. I think the dialogue. I don't think that the.

[Lizzie Bassett]

There's not much story.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. I don't think that the. With the exception of Frank Langella, I don't think that the actors feel well suited to the dialogue and vice versa. And so the dialogue feels a little caught in between. Are we modernizing it? Are we not modernizing it? So that, I think is a little tough. But as you mentioned, when we're in the more physical scenes, I think both Geena Davis and Matthew Modine really shine in this movie. They're, as you mentioned, both very attractive, tall, strong people. And we'll talk about some more tall people. Many tall people. And very tall people in this episode.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. Wasn't Frank Langella huge?

[Chris Winterbauer]

He's also tall. But the story that I'd always heard about this movie and the reason I wanted to cover it, is that, like you said, I heard that this was an unmitigated disaster. It was a runaway production. And because this movie, which was such an Icarus esque endeavor by Harlan and Davis, who were married when they made this movie that sank Corolko, the company behind it. And it was their folly. And as we'll learn, this movie did not slit the throat of Korolko. In fact, it may have merely been a scapegoat to cover up the inevitable scuttling of a shockingly leaky ship, as it were. Okay, but first, Lizzy, let's get into the details. So Cutthroat island is a 1995 swashbuckler directed by Renny Harlan. We have not covered Renny Harlan yet. I'm very excited to talk about him a little bit today. Written by Robert King and Mark Norman from a story by Michael Frost, Beckner, James Gorman, Bruce A. Evans and Reynold Gideon, and executive produced, most importantly, by Mario Casar. It stars, as you mentioned, Geena Davis as Captain Morgan Adams, Matthew Modine as William Shaw, Frank Langella as Dog Brown.

[Lizzie Bassett]

The stupidest name ever, they say.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Doc Brown. But dog.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And they spell it D, A, W, G. Yeah, they do.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Maury Chaykin as John Reed, Patrick Malahide as Ainsley, Stan Shaw as M. Glasspool and many, many more. It was released in the United States on December 22, 1995, distributed by MGM, but produced by Korolko. And as always, the IMDb logline reads. A female pirate and her companion race against their rivals to find a hidden island that contains fabulous treasure.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Cutthroat Island.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's it.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I wanted to shout out one additional actor who I actually thought was great in this and reminded me tonally very much of, I think, where they land in Pirates of the Caribbean, which was Angus Wright as Captain Tr. The Captain. The British guy. Yeah. Who at the end.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Who changes sides at the end.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, I thought he was really great.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I agree.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Very fun to watch.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, he understood the assignment.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He did, for sure. Not everyone did.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops by James Robert Parrish. Very fun book. We've pulled from it before. Box Office Hollywood Story in A Century of Flops by Tim Robbie and Dying of A Memoir by Geena Davis.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Geena.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Now, Lizzie, we're going to cover more Geena Davis shortly. We are, but we're going to take a departure from her and we're going to head back to the year of 1990 as the Colonial Brits cursed the Pirates of the Caribbean in the Pirates of the Caribbean later. Well, Hollywood studios were cursing the name of one man, Mario Casar. Now, he was the producer behind some of the biggest action comedies of the 80s and early 90s. I'm sure you heard of First Blood, Rambo 2, Rambo 3, total recall, a couple of bangers in there and then just a couple that made a lot of money. Yeah, he seemed to have a treasure map to box office success. Each of these movies made over $125 million worldwide. Total recall pulled in over a quarter of a billion dollars. And Rambo II did a cool 300 million. Cassar was rolling in it. And like any good pirate, he had a ship. You could find him at Cannes throwing parties on his 203 foot yacht or back in LA driving around Bel Air in a stretch limo, license plate Corolco. Now, Corelco had only been around for 15 years or so, but by the early 90s, they were known for cutting big checks to attract bigger names to their movies. Like the $16 million they paid Sylvester Stallone to do Rambo 3, which was more than the entire Budget of First blood or the 10 million they gave Arnold Schwarzenegger to do Total Recall?

[Lizzie Bassett]

I mean it paid off.

[Chris Winterbauer]

They gave Micha ten and a half million dollars for Basic Instinct with another four and a half guaranteed for Basic Instinct.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I mean, yeah, I guess. Listen, that's not Michael Douglas finest erotic thriller role. That obviously goes to Fatal Attraction.

[Chris Winterbauer]

But fine, yeah, it is part of the triumvirate of Michael Douglas is so sexy he literally drives women insane trilogy. Wait, what's the third disclosure?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh yes, of course. Yeah. A fun genre. That doesn't make sense.

[Chris Winterbauer]

A fun genre. When we determined that women were the problem in sexual harassment cases in the

[Lizzie Bassett]

workplace and not Michael Douglas.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Exactly. These were record setting salaries. Mario Casara called them the Carolco Premium. And it wasn't just for actors. Basic Instinct scribe Joel esterhaus was paid $3 million for that. Script producer Irwin Winkler made out with a cool 1 million. But most important to our story, Kuroco also wanted big time directors Lissy reliable captains to steer their ships into the terrifying waters of physical production. Like James Cameron, your personal favorite, who sailed off to direct Terminator 2. Now in pre production for 5 to 6 million dollars.

[Lizzie Bassett]

My favorite. I love T2 Judgment Day.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's great. Paul Verhoeven's attorney told the LA Times at the time that they had asked for, quote, a staggeringly large amount of money on Total Recall. And Mario just said yes. This was great. Great for talent. No, better a time to be a gun for hire on the high seas of Hollywood. But it was driving up prices for the Hollywood studios. And Kassar wasn't just doing this with the established stars. He was paying above market for up and coming talent too. Like one Renny Harlan. Lizzie, how familiar are you with the man known as Renny Harlan?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Not, I mean, cliffhanger.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Cliffhanger, great example. You've probably seen Deep Blue Sea.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Or at least the scene where Sam Jackson gets eaten by a shark.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh no, I've seen it. I've seen it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's great. We need to cover it. So he's come up a lot on the show and I would describe him as a man of extremes. He is famous for some massive hits. Cliffhanger is a great example. But some massive flops. Cutthroat island would be a great example, but back in 1990, he's 31 years old and he is on his way up. And Lizzy, I cannot paint you a good enough picture so I need to show you one. I would like to show you Renny Harlan at The premiere of Wild at Heart.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, he has Laura Dern on his arm, which is gonna help anybody in the. I'm guessing this is late 80s. This is amazing. So he. I mean, yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Please describe him.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I don't know if it gets better than this. Circa 1990, if that's where we are.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's 1990.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, 1990. He is a very attractive blonde man. He has long, luscious, unbrushed Fabio esque locks falling around his shoulders. He is wearing really a fabulous black leather jacket, motorcycle jacket, some just great JFK junior baggy trouser pants, obviously a black T shirt. He's got a scruffy beard. And then of course, he has Laura Dern on his arm who has maybe the most insane shoulder pads I've ever seen in this picture. She's got like a David Byrne suit on with a miniskirt, but it feels very serious. So anyway, it's the most 90s picture I've ever seen. I love it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Also, I would point out Laura Dern looks short in this photo with Renny Harlan. Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And she's probably wearing heels. And she's quite tall.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And she's quite tall. Renny Harlan's six four.

[Lizzie Bassett]

All right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Big, big Nordic man.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Just an important question. Is that an earring? No. I can't believe he doesn't have an earring.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Well, maybe we can't see the piercings he has. I don't know.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He has to have at least one.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So he'd started out as a commercial director. He made the leap to the feature film Born American which was made in Finland and it was supposed to star Chuck Norris, who backed out when financing got shaky and was replaced by his son Mike Norris. And the IMTV logline reads, a trio of vacationing American students cross the border from Finland to the USSR during the Cold War and are soon imprisoned after a skirmish with Soviet soldiers.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Hell yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It did surprisingly well in the United States. And Renny Harland roundhouse kicked the front door of Hollywood down. He comes to the US and he gets hired to direct two low budget horror films. On the one you have a movie called Prison. I've never seen this movie. Here's the IMDb logline. The spirit of a long dead prisoner returns for revenge, haunting the prison's new governor. Now it's produced by Erwin Jablons, who. He did Halloween, which we discussed.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Brother of Frank Jablanz, right?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yes, that's right. And it starred Viggo Mortensen.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Viggo, yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It did not make an impact at the box office. But on the other hand, he also directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, the Dream Master, which we just talked about on Tank Girl. It was made for six or seven million dollars, but it made nearly $50 million at the box office. It became the highest grossing nightmare film yet. And then in 1990, two more movies and two more extremes. On the one hand, he has the Adventures of Ford Fairlane starring Andrew Dice Clay. Again, I have never seen this movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Never heard of it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

IMDb logline reads, A vulgar private detective is hired to find a missing groupie and is drawn into a mystery involving a series of murders tied to the music industry. It did not recoup its budget.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

On the other hand, you have Die

[Lizzie Bassett]

Hard 2 Die Harder, great title.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Which is on the poster. It's not technically the title.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's technically the Tagline.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That made $117 million at the domestic box office alone, well over 200 worldwide. Now, the trend I started to notice, and this isn't necessarily a strike against Harlan, but if I were going to offer him a job, I might say, this guy does really well when he steps into a franchise and perhaps not as well. Or his movies don't tend to do as well when they're originals.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So far that seems to continue too. Right. He's got the beginning in 2004, I think that did decently well, didn't it? I didn't love it, but it's a mixed bag.

[Chris Winterbauer]

But let's continue forward. So I would simply suggest a studio might lord this over a young director. Right. The young director might come in to negotiate and say, look, I have these two big hits. And the studio might say, well, that was really Bruce Willis and that was really Freddy Krueger, not Korolco. They decided to pay Harlan $3 million to direct a hurricane movie called Gale Force, which I want to see. Renny Harlan's twisters so bad. And suddenly everyone in Hollywood, Lizzie could feel the winds of change. Sorry, not sorry. If Renny Harlan was getting $3 million, then more established directors wanted four, five, six million dollars. Harlan told the LA Times, it changed everything. People started questioning their fees. I'm very happy about it. Directors are the ones behind the movies. They are as important as the stars. I like that he took this as a compliment or as a positive spin. Because an offensive way to take it would be everyone saying, if Randy Harlan's getting $3 million, why am I not getting more?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Everyone's going, who?

[Chris Winterbauer]

I'm glad that he took it. Proletariat Sort of solidarity, workman style like approach to this. The question remains, how could Koroko afford to, quote, pay a lot more money? Where is this treasure coming from, Lizzie? And to answer that question, we need to rewind a few years. So Koroko was founded in 1976 by two men, Mario Casar and Andy Vina, who we discussed on a couple of other episodes because he later formed Synergy and did Tombstone, for example. Now they had met in 1975 at the Cannes Film Festival. We discussed Vina before, but back in the mid-70s he was a 30 something Hungarian businessman based out of Hong Kong. He'd fled Canada from Hungary, reunited with his parents in California, he went to UCLA. And at this point in the mid-70s, he owns a wig manufacturing company, two movie theaters, and just launched a foreign film sales business called Pan Asia Films. Just a real smorgasbord of business interests.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, that makes me sweat just thinking about that.

[Chris Winterbauer]

We have one podcast, I can't, I can barely doubt right now. So Kassar, on the other hand, was in his mid-20s, a little bit younger. He was born in Beirut in Lebanon. He had family ties to the film business through distribution. His dad worked in film distribution. He got his start selling the rights to European movies to Asia and the Middle east for commission. Then he would start buying the rights himself using a loan from his godfather, who was a banker. And again, to be clear, at this point in time, really up until 1975, Lebanon was known as the Switzerland of the Middle East. It had an amazingly robust financial sector. So it makes a lot of sense that it would be a portal or a passageway through which both film financing and distribution could run. Now Korolco was the name of a defunct company from Panama. We could not figure out what they originally did. But Casar and Vina buy that name and they form their own company and start buying up the rights to European movies and selling them in Asia. And there are some funny quotes with them about the movies that they would buy and sell. And you know, basically they buy them for a dollar, sell them for a hundred, you know, over in Asia, just based on somebody's name. So by the early 80s they're back in LA. They have a small office in Melrose, two desks facing each other. Vina's wife and Kassar's girlfriend are their secretaries and they start prov producing their own movies. And key to their strategy is foreign pre sales to independent distributors abroad. Basically, here's the package. We've got the script, the stars, the director. Here's the budget. Here's the price you pay for your region. The right to distribute in advance. And then we use that money to fund the budget. So if you don't have studio financing or you're not going to do a negative pickup, or you can't do equity financing, you pre sell the rights abroad and then you can fund the film that way. They're an independent operation, but in the US they have a partnership with TriStar Pictures. Now, Lizzy, any good pirate knows that you need a name that will travel and a way to protect your loot. And they had both. So to sell their movies abroad, they needed big name talent. Arnold, Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro. And to protect their treasure, they need tax shelters.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Don't we all? Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So in the mid-1980s, a tax attorney named Peter Hoffman became the president of Korolco. And according to the LA Times, he used his, quote, arcane tax skills to take advantage of a 28 year old clause in the US tax code that enables American corporations operating overseas to shelter much of their foreign income through subsidiaries set up in places like the Netherlands, for example. Side note, director Yui Boll from Germany has been in the news with his terrible movie that I'm not even going to name right now.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, the Armie Hammer thing.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. People have often wondered, how did he continue to make movies for so long even though they all lose money? Apparently it is. He took advantage of this tax loophole in Germany that sounds not dissimilar from this for 20 years. And it allowed him to get, you know, 50% on the dollar back of everything. All right, sidebar. Done. A few years after Hoffman became president, Andy Vina left the company. We couldn't find a direct quote confirming this, but some sources claim that he was more cautious than Casar and he was worried about the sustainability of their business model. But at this point, Lizzie, the business model seemed to be working. So you mentioned Terminator 2. Amazing movie. It grossed $517 million. It was the highest grossing film of 1991, the third highest grossing movie of all time, behind just Star wars and E.T. the Extraterrestrial. Basic Instinct made more than $320 million. But these movies were not cheap. T2 was 100 million. Basic Instinct was 50 million. But there was a method to the madness. As he later said, Kassar, it's easier to raise $100 million than $5 million. When you say, oh, I need 2 or 3 million, people say, why don't you fund it yourself? But if you say, I need 100 million because it's got this or that in it. They get excited. It's more attractive. Their ego gets higher. The small amount of money worries people.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I feel like Basic Instinct is a clue because that movie does not need to cost $50 million. Like when you you're talking about Terminator T2. Sure that I understand why that cost what it cost. Basic Instinct is basic, as it were. Other than the people in it and what you paid the people, which is a massive inflation. That movie does not need to cost 50 million at that point at all.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I bet you Basic Instinct has if you just run the quick napkin math numbers. I was gonna say 20 to 25 million and above the line costs alone between Verhoeven, Esterhaus, Douglas and Stone. Yeah, and the lion's share being Douglas in that instance. It's a massively inflated above the line situation.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Huge. I mean that thing probably could have been made for under 30 million. No problem them. Does anyone else feel like August is the Sunday of summer? It's the perfect time to hit reset before the autumn rush. And for me, that always starts with my wardrobe. And Quint proves you don't need a crowded closet to look incredible, you just need the right pieces. And when you're on the hunt for those pieces, I always tell people you have to check Quint's first because everything at Quint is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. So you're paying for quality, not brand markup. I have a cream colored cashmere quarter zip that I wear constantly and can't wait to start wearing even more in the fall. I also wear my little gold hoop earrings from Quint's every single day I sleep in them. And now that it's summer, my daughter has been wearing the cutest little toddler tankini and sun shirt from Quint's at least once a week. And it's not just clothes by the way. We also have unbelievably soft duvet covers from Quince that make me feel like I'm sleeping in a luxury resort and not my dirty little house. Upgrade your everyday Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quint.com WentWrong get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com WentWrong this podcast is supported by article.

[Chris Winterbauer]

The easiest ad reads to do on this show are the ones for the brands that we were already using before they became sponsors and for me, that is Article Now. When we lost our house, we had to replace a lot of our furniture and we needed a dining room table, a kitchen table for my kids to sit at for them to destroy slowly over time. So we needed something durable but also something that looked good. And we went to Article and then when they reached out to sponsor the podcast, we said, well, we could use a couch for our kids to destroy. That also looks good and fits inside of our relatively small living room, which is why we went with the Seni Corner sectional and it's holding up great. As parents of young kids, Article is the perfect fit. Their products are stylish, they last forever, and they're affordable. Plus it ships fast. None of this like 10 week wait time while they get it out of the warehouse. It comes mostly assembled and it is secure and safe. Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com wrong and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com wrong for $50 off your purchase of $100 or more. If I've learned anything watching Sergio Leone's dollars trilogy, it's that the best movies bring the style and the substance. Which is why we are so excited to announce our exclusive what Went Brahmi Giveaway. Our listeners get the chance to win a custom what Went Wrong and Brahmi Mashup tote filled with everything you'll need to cook a great meal while looking good. Maybe not as good as Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef, but definitely as good as Eli Wallach. Sorry Eli, each tote is filled with Brahmi's Protein Pasta, made from only two Old World ingredients, Italian Wheat and Lupini Super Beans. No fillers or protein isolates or weird processed pea proteins. Just simple ingredients, timelessly crafted, naturally packed with protein and fiber. You'll get Cubetti, our favorite shape, and one of Brahmi's other awesome styles like Fusilli Radiatori, Curly Mac or the OG Penne. Plus a Brahmi hat, koozie and bandana with a few more surprises. So for a chance to win some what Went Wrong swag and some epic pasta dinners, head to whatwentprammy.com Brami pasta perfetta. Well, the Carolco premium is catching up to them, so in 91 they lost $265 million.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's a lot of dollars.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And they were being investigated by the irs. Over the next couple of years there are more losses, layoffs, all sorts of attempts to attract investors. They sold the TV rights to their film library. And by the end of 1992, they made a deal with the French bank Credit Lyonnaise, which also happened to own mg. They'd taken them over in a restructure. And as part of the deal, MGM would get distribution rights to Korolko's films for the next five years as soon as its deal with Tristar expired, beginning in 1994. Which would be, of course, right before Cutthroat island in 1995. Okay, now, Lizzie, I know what you're thinking. When are we gonna keep talking about Renny Harlan's hurricane movie? Gale Force? Yes.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Can't wait.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It got canceled. So Harlan stayed in the Karolko family. He made Cliffhanger, which you mentioned, with Sylvester Stallone. We are absolutely gonna cover it. Also, they did a remake, reboot, Requel, that theoretically coming out this year, although that's been tied up in weird financial headaches. But that movie had production shutdowns. It went millions of dollars over budget. And yet not a bad word from Harlan. As he told Variety in 1992, Mario and I don't talk money. We've had no problems with it. And I love working with him. He doesn't interfere. So Harlan likes that Mario does not seem to creatively interfere with him. Now, this lack of interference, Lizzie, allowed Harlan to carry out one of the craziest stunts ever put on film. Do you remember the stunt where stuntman Simon Crane zip lines between two planes? Do you remember that scene?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes, of course, I vaguely remember this movie. But that I will never forget.

[Chris Winterbauer]

They really did that. So Simon Crane, yeah, clearly he was on goldeneye. We discussed him on that film and we discussed the bungee jump sequence. He nearly died. And it cost a million dollars to do this. And it still holds the record, the Guinness World Record for most expensive film stunt. Yeah, exactly. Most expensive film stunt performed in the air. It was peak 90s action movie shit. And Lizzie, there was one who wanted in on peak 90s action movie shit. Any guesses?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Actor or director?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Actor. Who was on the outside looking in and wanted in. She's the star of this movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, Geena Davis. Geena Davis.

[Chris Winterbauer]

All right. She was having arguably a more meteoric rise than Renny Harlan, even. But before we get there, let's just do a quick backstory and you can go more into it when we do Thelma and Louise. So she was born Virginia Elizabeth. She grew up in Massachusetts. Her mom grew all of their food in a one acre garden.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's awesome.

[Chris Winterbauer]

She bathed one time a week.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh.

[Chris Winterbauer]

She and her brother fought over who would use the bathwater first. She later said, my parents probably would have been Amish had they heard of being Amish. Their lives would have changed. Not a bit.

[Lizzie Bassett]

What were they?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Just seems like frontiers man.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Okay.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Basically homesteaders.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

She also said that when she was three years old, she told her parents, I am going to be an actor. She studied acting at Boston University.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I know my alma mater.

[Chris Winterbauer]

But she didn't graduate. Unlike Lizzie, she moved to New York and wanted to become a model. She was working as a salesperson at Ann Taylor, my mom's old favorite place to shop, on her finger, of course, and sat in the window display with a couple of mannequins. As a joke, she would sit very still. She didn't blink. She tried not to move her chest when she breathed, but every once in a while, she would move robotically. And people started gathering outside the window to try to figure out if she was real. They were like, she has to be real. She has arm hair. So she shaved her arm hair. And they said, she has to be real. She doesn't have a plug. So she attached a cord to her leg so it looked like she was plugged into the wal. Now, she did work as a model, but a lot of the jobs used her as a body double for somebody else's face or just a hand model. This wasn't a runaway success modeling career. She auditions for a movie and she books it. Do you know what her first movie role was, Lizzie?

[Lizzie Bassett]

No, I don't.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Tootsie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, that's right. Yes, I forgot about that. I love Tootsie, although I know that there are some problems, but we'll cover it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Now, when she was on Tootsie, she didn't know that you were only supposed to come to set on just the days that you were filming. So Geena Davis came to set every single day, and Dustin Hoffman took her under his wing, brought her along to watch dailies, and then she took off. So, Lizzie, let's talk about her run from 1986 to 1992. The Fly, 1986, Jeff Goldblum, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, 1988, and the Accidental Tourist that same year. And yes, people are going to scream to the heavens that I didn't mention Earth Girls are easy and Transylvania 6 5000, which are both cult films also with Jeff Goldblum. And of course, they were a couple in the late 80s. The point is, she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Muriel Pritchett in the Accidental Tourist, less than five years into her acting career at this point in time.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Crazy.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And then she co stars in two more back to back hits in the early 90s. Lizzie, do you know which two movies these are? Female driven films.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, one is certainly Thelma and Louise.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yes.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I don't know the other one.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Sports movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, A League of Their Own.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's right. So it's the early 90s, she's in her mid-30s and she's looking to do something different. As she later wrote in her memoir, I had wanted to be in an action movie for a long time. I love nothing more than going to a theater to see one on its opening Friday night. One of my goals is still to be a kick ass villain in a Marvel movie or in a Wonder Woman movie. The baseball of A League of Their Own had convinced me that my body was no longer my enemy. So she spoke about how she felt that her height was almost something that she had to apologize for earlier in her career. And she would lie about her height when she was going out for modeling job, for example, of course.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Because she's six feet tall, right?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yes, she's very tall.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So she wanted to do more physical roles. She liked firing a gun in Thelma and Louise, for example. And so her agents say, well, if you want to do action, you should probably meet Renny Harlan. So they meet.

[Lizzie Bassett]

We'll talk about this more in Thelma and Louise. But it is interesting because I feel like if you look at her earlier roles, just the way that she's moving in those Thelma and Louise and A League of Their Own. But I think particularly Thelma and Louise, there's a big departure in terms of how she holds herself and also how she's being shown on Came. You can tell she's very tall in both of those movies.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, they cast her opposite some tall men. I mean, she and Alec Baldwin, I think are close to the same height in Beetlejuice. And then Jeff Goldblum's obviously taller and he's six' four as well. And we'll get to her co star here. Frank Langella, six' four. Geena Davis, six feet. Matthew Modine, six' four.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Matthew Modine, six' four. Wow. I didn't realize he's that tall.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Okay, me neither. So this meeting, she goes to meet Renny Harlan and it goes well. It goes really well. So as she later said, the meeting went on for much longer than it probably needed to. It's tough to meet men anyway. But when you meet a Nordic God, well, well, you fall in love. So Davis and Harlan soon start dating, I believe basically Davis, Goldblum, Harlan and Dern all like swap, basically because Goldblum started dating Dern and then Harlan married Davis. And they're all giant, giant people.

[Lizzie Bassett]

The good news is they all seem to like each other still too.

[Chris Winterbauer]

They do all seem to like each other. Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, maybe not after this, but we'll

[Chris Winterbauer]

talk about, I don't know how things ended between Davis and Renny Harlan, but

[Lizzie Bassett]

yes, Davis and Goldblum at least are

[Chris Winterbauer]

on good terms, it seems. So. So a couple months later, she's on the verge of landing her dream action role. In May of 1993, Variety reports Davis I's pirate role, but not Cutthroat Island. The movie was called Mistress of the Sea. It was based on a 1964 novel about the adventures of Anne Bonny, 17th century buccaneer. It was a Paul Verhoeven movie, Lizzie. But by July, Verhoeven walked away. There were reports that Harlan might replace Verhoeven, but eventually both he and Davis left the project. By August, they were both attached to another pirate movie at Carolco called Cutthroat Island. According to Davis memoir, it went down like this. At the same time that Verhoeven was trying to put his project together, Rennie was also preparing to make a pirate movie called Cutthroat island, starring Michael Douglas. Michael told Rennie he wanted a woman with a name to play the female pirate captain and Rennie implored me to come on board, as it were. I was still floating around Verho. But at dinner with Rennie and his producer, Mario Casar, Mario begged me to join Cutthroat and offered me a lot of money, which is how Mario Cassar had gotten the script in the first place. So let's talk about where the script came from, Lizzie, and how it nearly became a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. So back in the early 90s, screenwriters Michael Frost, Beckner and James Gorman had a year long deal with Disney and they had to write a handful of scripts and one of them was about pirates. So Beckner went and studied pirates at the Huntington Library. Shout out, Huntington Library, Great Botanical Gardens too. And then he got to work. He wanted to give it the runaway train energy of a buddy comedy movie. Gives the script to his writing partner Gorman. He doesn't love it, too much sword fighting. So Beckner throws it out and they start over. They watch every pirate movie they can find. They're drinking rum while they're doing it. Basically they Wanted to take all the cliches from pirate movies and make them fresh. Like what if the sword fighting was in a burning warehouse instead of on a ship? And here's how the script, at least in this first draft, more or less went second draft. Together we open on Cutthroat island in the aftermath of a huge battle. There's a cave on the island and we've got three men that have hidden the treasure. A Spaniard, a British privateer and a pirate. There's a double cross. These three divide up the map to the treasure between them. We jump forward in time. A pirate's telling the story at a bar to our protagonist Shaw, the Matthew Moden character in the eventual film, Shaw imprisons the man and steals the money. He thinks the story was fake, but just in case decides to look into it. It the Spaniards become a governor, the British guy's a doctor, and a man named the Scar is hunting them for the map pieces. Most importantly, tell me if this reminds you of a character from Pirates of the Caribbean. Shaw can't swim, rig a boat, sail a ship, doesn't drink and can't shoot straight.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. Jack Sparrow.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. He's basically a stand in for a contemporary person trapped in the pirate world. He teams up with the British doctor's daughter Morgan, who doesn't know that her dad had been a brigadier. And across the movie she arcs into the role of a pirate.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Okay, so this is big time Pirates of the Caribbean.

[Chris Winterbauer]

A few other important details. Cutthroat island was extremely difficult to get to. It had a volcano. The treasure map was not printed on a scalp. The missing piece was part of a lullaby that Morgan's father had sung to her as a child.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's a lot less disgusting.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Might have preferred that also kind of reminds me of the story of the boy that comes with Orlando Bloom. At the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean, the tone was darker and it was, according to a number of people, a lot closer to Pirates of the Caribbean. Also, Shaw was the main character. Morgan, the female role, was second billed. Several producers at Disney were on board and they took it to Michael Eisner and they said, we can do a Pirates of the Caribbean movie based on the ride using this script. And he said, no, we are not going to mix our rides with movies. And then they did that for about 15 years straight. A few years after that, this. Anyway, back to Korolko. According to the LA Times, Beckner's agents let Corelko see the script before mailing it out to the studios. And Mario Casar immediately forked over $2 million for it with no competitors.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, my God.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And then nothing happened. Beckner reportedly met with Korolco to discuss potential script changes, but they never reached a consensus. So the focus became, we need to find a director who can find the right direction for this. There were reports that they were considering Kevin Reynolds, who had just done Prince of Thieves and swore he would never work with Kevin Costner again. And then he would go and make Waterworld with Kevin Costner immediately afterwards.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And then he really swore he would never work with Kevin Costner again.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's right. He said Kevin Costner should direct his movie so he can always work with his favorite actor, Kevin Costner.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And then Kevin Costner said, you got it, buddy.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And then he said, I will go build a ranch and shoot Horizon for the rest of my life on it.

[Sponsor/Guest Voice]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

The project never got off the ground in part Lizzie, because Kuroko was on the brink of bankruptcy, but also because Hollywood was very wary of the pirate genre. We talked about this on Pirates of the Caribbean and in our pirates primer. But it had been a long time since the golden age of pirates in Hollywood, the 30s and 40s. The 1962 adaptation of Mutiny on the Bounty was a troubled production big time. Did not make its money back. Robert Shaw's swashbuckler nearly released in 1976 under the title title the Blarney Cock flopped. Same with Yellowbeard. And Rowan Polanski's Pirates had made just $6 million against a $40 million budget. Even Hook, I didn't know this Hook was actually considered by the studio. A bit of a failure. They say it fell short of their expectations even though it made $300 million worldwide.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It was very expensive.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It was. And they were expecting a bigger hit out of Spielberg. So in 1993, the tides seem to be turning. Mistress of the Sea was in works at Columbia. As we discussed. There was another pirate film, female pirate film, called Anne of the Spanish Maine with Timothy Dalton and Mercedes Ruhl attached over at Miramax.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Love, Timothy Dalton.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yes. Timothy Dalton, as Shaw would have been. He is so dashingly dastardly.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. There's something very sinister about Timothy Dalton and I feel like that would have been good.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I agree. And no disrespect to Matthew Modine, who I think is a wonderful actor.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He is.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Timothy Dalton is very funny. Yeah, very funny.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He's funny, but he can also be scary. And I think that he's missing a little bit from this with Shaw.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I agree. That was his Bond. The Living Daylights. He was a dark bond before we had a dark bond, you know.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No, he's my favorite Heathcliff.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's true. He's a good Heathcliff.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Very good.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So Kassar needs a big star to sell Cutthroat island to foreign distributors. So enter Michael Douglas. Basic Instinct. Douglas is interested. He's done something like this before. Which movie? Lizzie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Romancing the Stone.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Romancing the Stone, exactly right. The Michael Douglas is so sexy, he turns women into horny psychopaths. Genre was starting to drive him insane. He said he wanted a positive change away from the dark films he'd been doing. Also, it didn't hurt that he was offered basically 12 or 13 million dollars to do the movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So meanwhile, Davis and Harlan signed on for a lot less, but still hefty price tags. So 3.5 to 5.5 million for David, five and a half for Harlan. I think this makes a lot of sense because at this point in time, she's second billed to Michael Douglas.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I was gonna ask. Okay, so Shaw is still the main character.

[Chris Winterbauer]

She is not the lead. Shaw is the lead.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Got it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So at this point, according to Davis, she said that she signed onto the project reluctantly because, quote, almost all the daring do was carried out by the men in the story. In fact, at one point she was tied up in the hold for 30 pages. Interestingly, Keira Knightley also complained that she didn't get to do a sword fight in the first Pirates of the Caribbean. And then of course, she got to do it later on. But again, it's just interesting that it feels very Pirates of the Caribbean Y. In many ways, the Verhoeven project's shaky. She's getting a big pay bump. Renny Harlan's begging her. So she says yes to the movie and yes to Renny Harlan. They get married in an elaborate three day ceremony, line dancing, elephant rides, hot air balloons, and a special song written by a Finnish composer called the Gina and Rennie Waltz, which was almost drowned out by the press helicopters hovering overhead.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Okay, wow. Elephant ride. Yeah, yeah. I don't wanna do that at a wedding.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And line dancing.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Okay.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I don't know. Now there's one problem, Lizzie. Michael Douglas is not happy with the script. He's pushing for rewrites, which pushes the shoot date from January of 1994 to June of 1994. Koroko brings in two more writers, Bruce A. Evans and Reynold Gideon. These guys are Oscar nominated. They had adapted Stand By Me.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, wow.

[Chris Winterbauer]

They also wrote Starman, for example. Now we couldn't find a direct quote from Douglas on this, but he reportedly wanted Evans and Gideon to ramp up his role and to down the violence. I think he wanted something a little closer to Indiana Jones and how playful the tone would be.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Or Romancing the Stone. That's a similar tone there.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Exactly. This is consistent with what Renny Harlan at the time said he wanted to do with his career. Quote, my goal now is to make an event movie that will take me away from violence and toward broad based family movies. It's just more interesting for a director to create a whole world for the characters instead of people just shooting each other. And then he said, hold my beer, here's some guns.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

By January of 94, he told journalists the movie would be PG 13. He said the sh would take 85 days. They were considering locations in the Caribbean, Thailand and Europe and that they had tested computer generated shots to recreate the 17th century pirate ships. Meanwhile, Michael Douglas was rounding out his From Hell Sex trilogy with Disclosure. So the start date, start date moves again to September. In the interim, Geena Davis and Renny Harlan push for another round of rewrites on the script. Nobody's happy with the script. Enter Susan Shilladay, the scribe behind Legends of the Four Fall. Maybe they're hoping for a more sensitive female perspective on the characters. She did not receive credit on this movie. I cannot speak to the work. We obviously have not read this draft. Apparently her draft was not well received in particular by Michael Douglas. Mid July of 1994, Michael Douglas abandons ship. So there are conflicting accounts as to why he dropped out. Davis has said, and Douglas said at the time, that he didn't have the time coming off of Disclosure to learn the sword fighting and the stunt work that he would need to do going into to Cutthroat Island.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He might have also just been tired. I mean, and it sounds like he wasn't super stoked on this, but he's coming off of a kind of crazy run at this point.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. In 1996 he told the New York Times they had a hard time searching for who Shaw was. I just was not comfortable with the part. The combination of not seeing it on the page and not knowing where it would go, I was feeling uncomfortable and I wanted out.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's apparent in the end result. I would say.

[Chris Winterbauer]

The same article quotes an anonymous executive source who said, quote, it was becoming Rennie's film for G. Michael got upset when he realized that was happening, but I don't fault him. It was an impossible situation. In fact, when she learned that Douglas was out. Geena Davis says that she and Harlan, quote, cried for joy, jumping up and down in excitement, end quote. But Lizzie, that's not because she wanted this to be her movie. It's because she didn't want to do the movie at all.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And they thought it was done.

[Chris Winterbauer]

They thought the movie was going to die when Michael Douglas walked on off, quote. You see, Rennie knew that Ko was going belly up before Cutthroat island even went into production. Now, without Michael, the reason to make the movie had gone away, which was actually a very good thing for both of us. So her agent calls Mario, Kara and says, hey, Michael's out. I don't think this is happening. Gina's out. And Kara says, absolutely not. She has to do this movie no matter what. What did I offer her? 5 million? Make it 8.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yikes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It wasn't just the money. According to Davis, she had a legal obligation to continue that. Michael Douglas didn't. Multiple sources confirm he was never officially attached. She was.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. I mean, even though she was kind of, in some ways at the apex of her career here, he still was a substantially bigger star.

[Chris Winterbauer]

She couldn't believe. Believe it. She said the ludicrous thing was that the only reason I was there was because of Michael. I never wanted to carry the movie. Even Rennie Harlan later said, we begged to be let go. We begged that we didn't have to make this movie. Gina was scared mindless about headlining this film. We felt that a pirate movie with a female lead was suicidal, but we were contractually obligated and they were at the mercy, Lizzy, of a delusional captain. So why did Mario Cassara want to make Cutthroat Island? Well, Lizzy, it was the last movie that Korolco had left. So in the spring, just before Douglas left the project, they cut ties with their only other movie heading into production, Crusade, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Paul Verhoeven directing. It was this massive gritty reimagining of the Crusades. Never got made. The story goes, Korolko asked Verhoeven to promise the budget wouldn't get any bigger. They had already spent $13 million in pre production. The overall budget had ballooned from 60 or 70 million to $120 million, which would have made it one of the most expensive movies of all time. If you remember Lizzie, I believe Jurassic park was 60.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

In 1993, Verhoeven said he couldn't promise that the budget wouldn't go up. So Cassar cut Ties. He relinquished the rights to Crusade to Schwarzenegger in exchange for not having to pay the actual actor's $15 million salary, which he was on the hook for. Thank God Arnold took that IOU instead. Yeah, Koroko couldn't afford to make both movies. In reality, they couldn't afford to make any movies at this point, but I think they figured if we made one and if it was a hit, maybe we could survive. Plus, Cassar had already pre sold the foreign rights to Cutthroat for somewhere in the 50 to 60 million dollars range, so he technically had half the budget, you know, or a little more already lined up. And if he made the movie, he got a $1 million fee, which probably didn't hurt.

[Lizzie Bassett]

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[Chris Winterbauer]

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[Chris Winterbauer]

So Crusade's dead, Krolko's taking on water, Douglas is out, but Mario Kassara says we are going down with the ship and I will bring you Geena Davis and Renny Harlan with me if I have to Cutthroat island is getting made no matter what. So let's go find a new leading or second billed man in this case. Enter the poor Matthew Modi. Aw, you know what I mean? It's like he has not bore witness to any of this. He doesn't know what's going on. No.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He's nowhere near as established a star, if at all. I mean, what had he been in prior to this?

[Chris Winterbauer]

I think Pacific Heights was probably the most recent big thing that he had done with Michael Keaton, but that was a few years prior. Let's get to Matthew Modin in one second. Are there any folks who you would imagine may have been considered who were popular around this time? Just think big names. I mean, you can. I'm sure you can guess a number of them.

[Lizzie Bassett]

1994. Yeah, I don't know. Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He was not on the list that we found. It's entirely possible though, because they'd worked together before.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Maybe they didn't want to deal with him. That might be why he wasn't on the list.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I am gone.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I don't know. Tell me the rest.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Liam Neeson, Keanu Reeves, Daniel Day Lewis, Michael Keaton, Ralph Fiennes, Gabriel Byrne, Charlie Sheen and Kurt Russell.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I was going to say Kurt Russell.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Kurt Russell to me makes a lot of sense.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He was just off of Tombstone. I think he was also dead off of that movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He's also tired, but he has that sort of devil may care, like, I don't give a fuck attitude. That would have played very well, I think, with this.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And he's also played an incompetent action hero to great effect in Big Trouble, in Little China.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's honestly his thing.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. He's like, I'm not very good at this, but I do that really well.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So Kassar finally books Matthew Moding. He's 15 years younger than Michael Douglas at time the same. He's a well respected actor. But he's not nearly as famous as Michael Douglas.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No, he's so cute.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He has strong pedigree. Right. He had starred in birdie back in 1984, which won the Grand Jury prize at Cannes.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Full Metal Jacket, of course.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Private Joker in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. But around town, I did not know this Lizzie. He was kind of known as the guy who had turned down the role of Maverick in Top Gun.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I do vaguely remember this. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He actually didn't agree with the movie's pro military message and that's why he turned it down. What you Gotta say.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, Matthew. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Mad props for standing up for what you believe in.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. Because in case anybody doesn't know, Top Gun, the franchise as a whole is literally like a recruiting.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's like a recruitment vehicle.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. For the Navy. Always has been.

[Chris Winterbauer]

From the git.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yep.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Coroco booked him for less than a million dollars. Finally, they'd be saving some money, which they then promptly set fire to in pre production. By this point, locations had been secured. They were going to shoot in Malta and then in Tyler. Renny Harlan tried to stress his intentions to the crew with a staff memo. I would like to read you an excerpt dated July 25, 1994. No sequence of setting that you've seen in movies before is good enough. Any idea previously used has to be reinvented now and then cranked up 10 times. I don't want big. I want huge. I don't want surprising. I want stunning. I don't want fast. I want explosive. I don't want accidents. I want disasters. I don't want dirt. I want filth. I don't want a storm. I want a hurricane. I don't want hills. I want mountains. I don't want groups. I want crowds.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I don't want accidents. I want disasters is my favorite tagline.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Could have been the tagline for this movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I don't think he should have ended with, I don't want groups, I want crowds. That actually seems like the most reasonable ask on this entire list. It also reminds me of what is this, a school for ants? It needs to be at least three times this big. But I think what he really wants was a better script. He later said, quote, there was no real script for it. Sometimes you have the right star and the right director and the money, and you just want to go ahead even if you don't have a good script. That's what happened with Cutthroat Island.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I get it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I completely get it.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's hard to pull all of this stuff together. And when you have the momentum, I can imagine.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And to get a green light. Yeah, it's nearly impossible. Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Like, it would be really, really hard to pull the plug on something when you have the money. Like, when the money is there, you probably think, well, we can fix, you know, as we go.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I think there are very few filmmakers who have the wherewithal, the discipline, the courage to turn down an opportunity like this, you know, and you could probably count them on one or two hands.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I wouldn't. I'd be.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I would have made cutthroat island. 100%. 100%.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And it would have been way worse

[Chris Winterbauer]

than what came out as the dialogue. To be fair to me, I think the dialogue might have been a hair better. And everything else would have been a thousand times worse. A thousand times worse.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Mine would have been worse for sure. Way worse.

[Chris Winterbauer]

No, you would have thought you would have. Couple good zingers. You would add some good zingers. I know you, Lizzie. You would add some good zingers.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Thanks, Chris. But no coherent plot.

[Chris Winterbauer]

No, no. And the explosions just wouldn't have been as good. Let's just be honest.

[Lizzie Bassett]

For sure.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Now, the real tragedy was that Renny Harlan had a script that he wanted to make with Geena Davis. It was called the Long Kiss Goodnight.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Written by Shane Black. He found it and he set it up at New Line after he agreed to do Cutthroat. So he had to do Cutthroat first before they could go do the Long Kiss. Good. So the script for Cutthroat gets reworked again, this time by writer Robert King.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Did this damage the Long Kiss Goodnight? Cause we just talked about this very briefly on 10 Things I Hate about yout, where people thought. Which makes sense. Cause Shane Black, Geena Davis thought this was gonna be a huge hit. And then it's kind of a dud. Although it's a good movie.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. We'll talk about it at the end. This movie had a long shadow on the people who worked on it. Unfairly.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So that sucks. Cause it's not bad.

[Sponsor/Guest Voice]

No.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So writer Robert King, he came in to do more rewrites. He's most known now, he works with his wife on the Good Wife and the Good Fight, for example. Both shows I really, really enjoyed.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Harlan was not satisfied. But Kuroko couldn't afford more rewrites. They are out of money. So Harlan brought on Mark Norman, who was actually a writer from the OG Mission Impossible TV series, amongst many other credits, and paid him out of his own pocket to continue working on the script. He's paying, presumably, hundreds of thousands of dollars to get this script into bed. And shooting gets delayed again to Halloween. October 31, 1994 is the start date, which just is a great ignominious good omen. Start date. Yeah. So meanwhile, the crew is hard at work at Malta.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Also. Nothing goes well in Malta. Anytime we've got.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Nothing goes. Cocaine mannequins. Oliver Reed died in Malta on Gladiator. Gladiator.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Literally, anytime Malta has come up, and it comes up somewhat frequently, it does not go well in Malta.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, well, Oliver Reed will also be here in Malta and we're gonna talk about him in just a moment because he was almost on this movie. Oh, no.

[Lizzie Bassett]

This does not need Oliver Reed in it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

No. I want to stress the scope of what the crew pulled off on this movie because their work is underappreciated. They built two ships with a total of 80 working cannons.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, you can tell it looks great.

[Chris Winterbauer]

At a cost of more than a million dollars per ship. They built replicas of those ship in Jakarta, Indonesia. They sailed them to Thailand for filming there. In the end, there would be more than 2,000 costumes, over 300 firearms, 600 swords, 250 daggers, and 60 to 70 custom made axes. Candidly, until Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, I don't think that anyone had made this level of arsenal an outfit for a movie in quite some time.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It looks great.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's right.

[Lizzie Bassett]

The cost, they're so layered. Everything's very rich.

[Chris Winterbauer]

All of the weaponry, it looks lived in too. It looks dirty. I thought that was. They're like, let's get funky. It's great. They made facades for 1,000ft of buildings. Harlan arrives in Malta in August of 1994. He comes face to face with the sets and the costumes for the first time. We don't know why, but he was apparently not thrilled with the sets. So they tore them down and rebuilt them. And there were some other unanticipated costs. So, for example, there was European law that prevented the production from shipping out the horses by bomb boat. So they had to be flown out, which was double the initial plan. I don't know. I don't know.

[Lizzie Bassett]

What plane are you putting horses on? Like a military C130?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, a military transport plane would be my guess.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, God, I don't want to be on that plane. Horses are so beautiful.

[Chris Winterbauer]

But I mean, a hollowed out 747 is also enormous. It could have been that, too. Sure.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Horses from a distance. A Horses on a Plane. I don't want to be on that plane.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Horses on a Plane, Sequel to Snakes on a Plane. There were rumors that renny Harlan spent $15,000 to get his dog through customs, which, you know, at the end of the day, whatever, that's his money.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, sure.

[Chris Winterbauer]

But also that he shipped over his security team from Cliffhanger, his Mercedes Benz and dozens of cases of V8 vegetable juice, which apparently he and Gina Davis both really liked, which, I mean, look, hey, you don't want to get scurvy. So there's that.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I mean, Elizabeth Taylor's shipping her chili from Ohio or whatever it was. No, Hollywood. It was Chasen's chili. Yeah, so I don't know. That's true.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Stuntmen come in from Poland, carpenters from Italy and England, but not everybody stuck around. So producer David Nichols by this point had already quit. He was replaced by Joel Michaels, art director. Wolf, I think it's Kroger. It might be krager from the 13th Warrior. Lizzie was either fired or quit due to scheduling issues. In this instance, camera operator Nicola Pecorini, who's a prolific camera operator, Steadicam op, second unit cinematographer, was fired for reportedly not getting along with Harley. More than 20 crew members walked out in solidarity. According to the New York Times. He later said he had been complaining about ill treatment of the crew on difficult scenes that were never used. And the production problems were only beginning. They had to rent a bunch of the lighting equipment and camera equipment from Italy. The American crew apparently didn't know how to use them.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, God.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Meanwhile, Mark Norman, the writer that Renny Harlan had brought on and paid out of his own pocket, is doing last minute rewrites, handing off new scenes on the day that they were being shot. And Lizzie actor Oliver Reed is showing everybody his penis.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, I wish I could say I'm surprised. I'm not.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Do you know which character he was supposed to play originally?

[Lizzie Bassett]

I'm guessing it's the uncle. Not Frank Langella, but the other one. Mordecai.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's right, Mordecai. Yeah. He was replaced because he was getting drunk, getting into fights and taking off his pants.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, that's called the Oliver Reed special. That's what you get when you hire Oliver Reed.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And according to one source, he dropped trou in front of both Renny Harlan and Geena dav. An attempt to basically say, you can't tell me what to do. Matthew Modine later said that Oliver Reed thought he was a spy, meaning Matthew Modine and punched him when he was drunk. Some of the stunt guys told Modine that Reid had a tattoo on his penis. So Modine asked to see it while they were at a restaurant in Malta. And Oliver Reed just pulled his penis out. And there it was.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That one's on you, Matthew Modine. If you ask to see Oliver Reed's penis, you're gonna see it for sure.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, there's a pretty gross story that Vic Armstrong, incredible stunt coordinator who worked on this movie. Tony. Basically it seems like the straw that broke the camel's back was that Reid was just suggesting very grotesque things into this Script, including when Geena Davis comes to him in the whorehouse. He was basically suggesting that he should be masturbating at the beginning of the scene and should reach climax during the scene. And I'm gonna leave it there because it's just pretty gnarly.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I'm good.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And Rennie basically said, I've got to get rid of him. We cannot have this in the movie. Because if you think. Think about he's trying to make something PG13. Oliver Reed is never gonna allow that to happen. And he's gonna make an unsafe working environment. And he's wildly inappropriate.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Also, you don't need Oliver Reed. He's a major liability. It's not like he's an enormous name. He is a known quantity at this point. Yeah, he's great in Gladiator. He's great in Oliver Twist. But please remember, in Oliver Twist, he plays a murderous, drunken psychopath and is extremely convincing.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. So Oliver Reed walks the plank. He's gone.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Bye.

[Chris Winterbauer]

But that was far from the only gross thing to happen during production. They were shooting, obviously, on two massive water tanks at Malta Film Studios for a lot of this. And at one point, the sewage system failed and contaminated the water tanks. But they kept shooting, so people got sick.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, God.

[Chris Winterbauer]

At another point, cinematographer Oliver Wood fell off a crane and into one of the tanks. He was a very successful cinematographer.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Was it a poop tank at this point?

[Chris Winterbauer]

It was apparently not the poop tank.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, well, at least there's that.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. He would go on to do the Bourne trilogy. He actually broke his leg and had to be replaced by Peter Levy, who had done Predator 2 with Harlan. So they lost their DP and had to replace him midway through the shoot. And this is an extremely physical shoot. Modine and Davis did a lot of training. They're climbing ropes, learning to ride horses. And according to Davis, she did six months of fencing lessons.

[Lizzie Bassett]

You can tell.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And of course, Pick Armstrong is heading all of this.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I mean, you can really tell. And that early on in the movie, the sequence where she ends up. I can't remember exactly what's happening. She's, like, on a cart and she jumps off the cart into a structure, runs through the structure, and then busts out the window on the other side into the cart again. I rolled that back and watched it twice because that is Geena Davis. If you watch, you see her face coming out the window, rolling down the roof, her giant, like, spider leg body onto the cart. That's her.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So there's a little movie magic there, Lizzie. That we will talk about towards the end of this episode. But to your point. Yes, quote, the director happened to be my husband and he was like, of course she can do it. And that somehow gave me the confidence. She did a lot of her stunts during rehearsals. She's struggling to nail her horseback riding scenes. Her stunt double was a man named Angel Gomez Fernandez. And she says that he told her, what if you just act like you know how to ride? And suddenly she looked like she knew how to ride, even though, as she put it, quote, it was always the horse who was fully in charge.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So she just had to kind of take a leap of faith with a lot of these things.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So here's how it was supposed to work with the horseback riding. Harlan would say, rolling. And then action over the walkie talkie. She'd then kick the horse with her heels and the horse would run. But the horse started learning the commands. So the horse would start running when the walkie talkie went off. And Harlan said, rolling. So they had to start whispering their command. And another time, Geena Davis got thrown from her horse when it veered to the left unexpectedly. She was not hurt, but one of her silicon bra inserts, she called them silicon breast enhancements, not an implant to be clear, shot out from her shirt and disappeared into the sand. And I'm guessing this was molded to her body in some way because the second A.D. howell Caldwell had to launch a super secret search party to find it without telling anybody exactly what it was. He was very discreet and very much gentleman, which I'm sure Geena Davis was.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I'm sure it was custom. Cause you need the costumes to be fitted around that and stuff. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Oh, yeah. Now, Matthew Modine had his fair share of injuries and near misses, one of which you can see on film when you watch this movie. So one day they're filming with the water cannons. The spray launches a board with a nail sticking out of it through the air. Modin turns at the last minute and it slices along the back of his head. So he gets stitches.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Jesus.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Then on the day he gets his stitches out, they're filming the escape from the brothel. Remember, they jump from the second story onto a bunch of barrels that then explode as they're running away.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Sure, how could I forget?

[Chris Winterbauer]

If you watch that scene, Lizzie, it's 42 minutes and 48 seconds into this movie, if anybody wants to see it. One of the barrels gets launched directly at the back of Matthew Modine's head and hits him exactly where the stitches had just gotten taken. Out.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh my God.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You can actually see Stan shaw, who plays Mr. Glasspool, who's running right next to him, reach over and touch Matthew Modine, you know, as if to say, hey, are you okay in this shot? It's in the movie. Apparently as soon as he got out of the frame, he threw his sword down and screamed, I don't want to play anymore. I want to go home. End quote. Oh.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, no.

[Chris Winterbauer]

There was another close call when one of the ships caught fire. Shooting was paused for three days, but the most dangerous stunt was filmed in Thailand. Lizzie, is there one scene or stunt that you would imagine would be particularly daunting to do, perhaps involving a cliff on this film?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, yeah. It's when they're dangling off the cliff on the ropes because they've just come up from the cave full of the

[Chris Winterbauer]

treasure and Morgan jumps off the cliff and he catches her by the hand.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes. And then they release themselves just in time for the tide to hit the rocks at the bottom.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So according to Davis, they did their close ups first on land as they're hanging there talking to each other. Then they get put in harnesses and dangled over the actual 300 foot cliff for the wide shot. That is really Matthew Moding and Geena Davis.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No, I'm not doing it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

No, no, sir. They have the cameras above and the harnesses are held by wires, not the ropes themselves. So the ropes are props of effectively.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Right? Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

She said they're instructed to, quote, sit into the harnesses, putting their weight directly on the wires, not on the fake ropes that they were holding. And Geena Davis starts to freak out.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

She says that she started to cling desperately to the rope, which made me feel like my arms were the only thing keeping me from falling to my death. Which meant that her dialogue did not match the close ups. So then after they shot that, they had to redo the close ups on the land to recreate the fear that they had felt when they were hanging off the side the of now, Lizzie, they did that jump and catch for real.

[Lizzie Bassett]

What?

[Chris Winterbauer]

So that fall and grab, they are on wires over that cliff. And stuntman Claudio Pacifico did the cliff jump and was caught by the other stuntman. That is crazy.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Wow. Yeah, I'm good. I'm so glad that people are able to do this. It couldn't be me. Would never be me. But it looks really good.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Wouldn't be me. Now, a big element of the story from the trades at the time was what was Renny Harlan and Geena Davis working relationship? Like on this mov, of course. Was he making this movie for her? Was she getting preferential treatment? And I think we can unravel some of these suppositions, although it's still somewhat murky. So on the one hand, producer Joel Michael said, naturally, anyone with good sense would have been concerned about a situation where the director was married to the star of the film. That's a pretty strong union to be dealing with. But I can't compliment Rennie and Geena enough over how professional they were. The name of Geena Davis's memoir, Dying of Politeness. She has always said that politeness was the thing that got in her way in many situations. And she was always afraid of, you know, bringing shame upon her parents or embarrass them in some way. So I tend to believe that she was probably extremely professional. On the other hand, though, Matthew Modine felt that Harlan gave Davis a lot more attention than him and that perhaps he was too focused on the explosions. Quote, it's the first movie I've worked on where the director never really spoke to me. It was frustrating. And Rennie spent a lot of his time just trying to find new ways to blow things up. He likes to blow things up.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That tracks with what I watched.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And in a press interview for the movie, Davis Letter said Rennie was always fixing Matthew's hair and saying, you know, can you open your shirt a little, little more? Maybe we should have some oil on his chest, Things like that. And I was like, hey, what happened to me? I'm married to the director. The sense I get is that Renny Harlan was probably not very engaged with the actors and was more engaged with the stunts and the explosions.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So shooting wraps in March of 1995. Here's the thing, Lizzie. According to Harlan, they were only 10

[Lizzie Bassett]

days over schedule, two weeks over schedule. That's not so bad.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He told the LA Times. The last number I knew the budget to be was about 85 to $90 million, or a little, little less. I do not know what the final was with all the insurance and completion bond costs.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's not that crazy for what that looks like.

[Chris Winterbauer]

This movie went over budget, but it's all on screen. And Renny Harlan claims, and Davis backs this up, that he cut between 15 and 20 million dollars in expenses and set pieces by reworking the script again with his own money while they were on set.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I believe it. And also, like, the ships, the stuff that they're filming on water, the ships exploding. I mean, 100%, this looks like almost a hundred million.

[Chris Winterbauer]

The point is, it doesn't seem like it went disastrously over schedule or over budget.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Matthew Modine did tell a funny story about finding an entire room filled with unopened crates of V8 juice towards the end of the production. But that wouldn't be more than a few thousand dollars based on the final result. I'm actually guessing that the dailies were reassuring.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, I think so. I think so much of this looks really good. Really. The only failing is that the story's not super strong and some of the lines aren't that great, but otherwise it's pretty fun.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, but the stunts look great. The explosions, the scope is there.

[Lizzie Bassett]

The actors are very charming.

[Chris Winterbauer]

They hold the wrap party in Thailand on April Fool's Day. Now, we don't have a ton of information about post production on Cutthroat island, but here's what we know. There were four credited editors. If you look on IMDb, I think two of those are assistant editors. They're listed as editors. But Derek Brecken and Florent Retz were both doing a lot of assistant editing work around the time. So I think we can set aside there were not four active editors on this movie. There was veteran editor Ralphie Winter. I mean, Winters is a huge name. Ben Hur, Gaslight, Quo Vadis, Pink Panther. This was his last credit, actually. He was in his 80s. He'd won two Oscars, been nominated for four more. My guess, I am just guessing, is that he was brought in later in the process to help with the cut. Because I think Frank J. Uriosti, who we've discussed on this podcast before, was probably the lead editor. He cut Cliffhanger for Harlan. He'd also done Die Hard, Tombstone, Basic Instinct, Total Recall wrote, there's also Burt Lovett. He's uncredited, and he had done Predator 2 for Harlan. I'm guessing again, he was brought in later in the process to maybe help after they felt like the cut maybe wasn't quite working.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, totally. It could have been any mix of that. Any one that could have been. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

My suggestion, though, is that, you know, don't look at this and say, oh, my God, there were five editors. There was one main editor. You know, I think it's miscredited on IMT.

[Lizzie Bassett]

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[Chris Winterbauer]

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[Lizzie Bassett]

Here's a show we recommend.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Hey, what's up you guys?

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's Giro Rafuolo, your host of the Comment section podcast.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Each week I am joined by a

[Lizzie Bassett]

special guest to dive deep into all things comedy, pop culture takes and the highs and lows of the Internet.

[Chris Winterbauer]

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[Lizzie Bassett]

and Every Wednesday on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Chris Winterbauer]

Acast.com. The music though, which I think is a high point, was written by composer John Debney. Now he was nearing 40, he's a prolific television composer. In the late 80s, he'd started composing for indie films and theme park attractions, including the Phantom Manor Disneyland attraction. He scored his first live action studio feature in 1993, My Wife's Secret. Favorite movie? Hocus Pocus.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, a classique. Of course, a classique.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Wildly inappropriate movie for children.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Just Sarah Jessica Parker's boobs alone. Yeah, they are at her eyeballs and

[Chris Winterbauer]

just constantly calling the boy a virgin. The whole movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I love it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Debny said he was very surprised that Harlan reached out and that he had heard his music. But I actually read online that he was not the first choice. He was actually replacing composer David Arnold, who, Lizzie would do Independence Day and had just done Stargate for Roland Emmerich. Now, I couldn't figure out exactly why Arnold left the project, but I did read that Debny very intentionally was hearkening back to, you know, golden age composers and folks who had done a lot of pirate movies like Miklos Roja. He had done a Double Life. He did Ben Hur, for example.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I mean, listen, you again, go watch this and Pirates of the Caribbean. Back to back.

[Chris Winterbauer]

The music in this feels very close to what Zimmer will do big time in pirates.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, big time.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Couple of the references, Eric, Wolfgang Korngold, he did Captain Blood, the Seahawk, the Seawolf, Max Steiner, of course, the father of film music. And then Alfred Newman, Lizzie, who we can never get away from. No, he did the Black Swan.

[Lizzie Bassett]

The Newmans are everywhere.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So Demni didn't give an exact timeline, but he said that the score needed to be done quickly, which would be consistent with potentially replacing somebody else. So at this point, MGM is handling Koroko's distribution. This is the last movie that they're going to be doing together. So let's go out with a bang. Let's release the movie in June of 1995. Let's take advantage of summertime. Get ahead of the Fourth of July weekend. Apparently Renny Harlan says this is unrealistic. The movie's not. I mean, they wrapped on April 1st. They would have to be done with the movie by June. That's just two months.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No, that's insane.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He says to mgm, we can't do this. And they say, well, really? Because Mario Cassar is saying that we totally should do a summer release because things at Kuroko have gotten worse. Lizzie. There's a lot of bad press about their financial situation. They've been laying off staff. They're considering selling the rights to all their movies and scripts. And everybody has been blaming it on Cutthroat Island. Eventually the release gets pushed to late July and then again to the end of December, which raises a lot of eyebrows because the holiday release date.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's a bone garden. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's also loaded with prestige fare. This is a summer action movie, not some sort of Oscar.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I should specify it is a bone garden for this kind of movie. It's a strange place to drop it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Exactly. Trailers had actually already gone out announcing the summer release date. Oh, but there was another pirate esque film that would be opening in July. Lizzie. What big time flopper that we have covered that was shot on the ocean came out in 1995 in the summer.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Waterworld.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Waterworld. But, well, there's water. Released on July 28th of 1995. I would have assumed that it would suck some of the negative attention away from Cutthroat Island.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No, it's a harbinger of doom for Cutthroat Island.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You're smarter than I am, Lizzy. People just kept comparing them and equating them. They are both water based movies with massive budgets and production problems that the media loves to write about.

[Lizzie Bassett]

They're both better than they deserve. The legacy of totally. I would actually argue that this is maybe in a lot of ways more impressive than Waterworld. I think this is better than Waterworld.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Especially when you think about the fact that Waterworld costs almost 70% more than this movie. Yeah, Waterworld was the way bigger mess. It went way further over budget.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's not as good.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It cost 175 million on the low end is what I've read.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Jesus Christ.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Reviews were mixed and it did flop. Although again, to your point, Lizzie, not nearly as hard as people like to remember, it brought in 264 million doll dollars worldwide against its $175 million budget. Let's just say $250 million budget, including marketing. So it probably lost 100 to $125 million somewhere in that range, which it

[Lizzie Bassett]

made back with its theme park show.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And on home video. It did really well on home video. So listen to our episode for more on Waterworld. The point is, it casts a shadow over Cutthroat island, and the situation is already very dark. In November of 1995, just one month before Cutthroat island is super be released, Ko files for bankruptcy protection, Mario Casar resigns. They're talking about selling the film library to 20th Century Fox. And Cutthroat island is an orphan dead in the water. Earlier in the year, MGM had said that they planned to spend at least $30 million promoting the film, which would already be pretty low based on $100 million movie. By fall, that number had dropped to $18 million. I would have to guess that it fell even lower. Geena Davis says that one day before the film was released, the LA Times ran a huge article about how exp a claim that they'd had the shoelaces made by hand. And Geena Davis points out there were no shoelaces. They were all wearing boots. Yeah, but it didn't matter. Cutthroat island was released on December 22, 1995. It was a bloodbath. The high seas of the box office, Lizzie, were patrolled by far more powerful ships. Ships like the Toy Story, the Jumanji, the Father of the Bride, Part two, the Heat, the goldeneye, and many, many more. Oh, no. Cutthroat island earned just under $11 million demand domestically.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Is that total?

[Chris Winterbauer]

I could not find a reliable foreign number. I saw $6 million international, so 17 total. But I could not verify that $6 million number. So I'm just sticking with the domestic of $11 million.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Holy shit, that's bad.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It was pulled from theaters after two weeks. Matthew Modine specifically requested that the trades not be delivered to his hotel room in la, where he was doing press. But when he woke up the day the movie was released, there they were, piled up outside his door. And he made the the mistake of reading them.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, no. Don't look, buddy.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Critics were generally unimpressed, but the headlines really focused on Geena Davis playing a pirate. A lady pirate of the Caribbean. Extravagant demolition with woman as top pirate. The New York Times said it's not possible to believe that Ms. Davis is the highly respected captain of a pirate ship, and it's not even fun to try.

[Lizzie Bassett]

What? I'm sorry, that's stupid. Like, one of the elements of this movie that actually I think works very well is Geena Davis as a pirate captain of this ship. First of all, we know there were female pirates. We know that there were several that were very successful. And I actually think she does a pretty good job and is pretty believable as not only is she physically imposing, but in terms of the way that she sort of mans the ship and captains the crew. So that's bullshit.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's New York Times again, just dropping the ball.

[Lizzie Bassett]

They're stupid and wrong every time.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Again, caveat. Moonshot. The consensus seemed to be that Davis and Modeen lacked chemistry.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, that's true.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I don't know if that's true or if it's the fact that the script was clunky, which they also called out the dialogue. They said that the movie didn't know who its audience was. I. That's fair. I think Pirates of the Caribbean tonally lands in a slightly more successful place, and which, of course, that's ironic considering the movie had spent $3 million on its script. You know, at this point, if not more. Roger Ebert's review was actually much more positive. He gave it three stars out of four, and yet it was actually maybe the harshest. I'd like to read this quote. I saw it because that was my job, and having seen it, I grant its skill and award it three stars on that basis. But unless you're really into play pirate movies, it's not a necessary film. Sorry. Basically, a lot of folks recognized the technical achievements of the film, but they viewed it as excessive. Geena Davis said that basically in the LA Times review, Kenneth Turan wrote, full size ships, impressive waves, thousands of costumes, accurate down to the shoelaces. Anything and everything an unreasonable amount of money could buy has been press ganged into service here. Geena Davis later said he got the shoelace line from the LA Times article that had run the day before. So again, it's just how this narrative story. Matthew Modine later said, I didn't want to kill myself, but I wanted to hang myself in the bathroom so that when the cleaning lady came in to do the room, she'd find me and say, oh my God. And call. Because I wanted people to know that that's how much it hurt. That I did the very best that I could on the film, as did everybody that was working on the film. So Geena Davis and Renny Harlan jumped straight into Lizzie the Long Kiss Goodnight. A bit of a proto Atomic Blonde born identity slash Mr. And Mrs. Smith. Very fun movie. I like like it.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, it's good.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It actually did do better than Cutthroat island, but it got pretty mixed reviews and it did not break even at the box office. And it didn't help that writer Shane Black mused after the fact that quote it might have made more money if it had been about a man. But of course that quote was pulled out of context. His full quote explains that he originally wrote it about a man, then realized it only worked with a female lead. He thought it was better with a female lead. I think what he's suggesting, in light of some of the failures of female driven action films. Tank Girl, Cutthroat Island.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Right. That it's not a problem of the actual film, it's a problem of the audience environment and the audience. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

The Long Kiss Goodnight did go on to find a substantial cult audience and that movie, I think has found its place in the world. But Korolco sold its film Library in early 1996 to Canal plus for $58 million. And by mid 1996, Cutthroat island was deemed a record setting flop. Assuming a budget of $100 million and a marketing spend of 18, it lost at least $100 million. The Guinness Book of World Records has claimed as of April of 2012 that it was the biggest box office flop of all time, pegging the net loss at 105 million that was passed by John Carter and other films. I don't think that's exactly fair. Mario Casar Pre sold the foreign rights for a reported 50 to 60 million dollars in theory, cutting the loss in half. Now, did those folks lose their money?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, 100%. But cooked the numbers slightly differently. The point is, unlike Waterworld, Showgirls, other flops of the time, Cutthroat island didn't find a second life on home video. I don't know if it was just the movie. I don't know if it's the fact that Corelco shut down before it was released.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I have a theory.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And it was orphaned. What's your theory? Tell me your theory.

[Lizzie Bassett]

My theory is that it's actually a little too good to land in the same place as Waterworld and Showgirls.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, it's not the car crash.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No, like Showgirls in Waterworld I think are on a similar level. Showgirls in particular is so crazy. Showgirls is Insane that it holds a certain cachet because of how nuts it is. And to a certain extent, Waterworld does, too. Just because of how.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Just because. It's fun to watch Kevin Costner just, like, suffer through the whole thing and

[Lizzie Bassett]

his little vagina gills on his neck. There's a lot. Those two totally make sense as cult classics. This one is, like, pretty decent. And that, I think, is why it falls through the cracks.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. It reminds me of that Verhoeven quote where he says he'd rather make the worst movie or the best movie as opposed to a middle of the road movie. And he famously went and collected his razzies for Showgirls.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Cutthroat island, which Lizzie was translated to throat surgery island in Finnish.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Okay.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Would eventually find its fans. As Geena Davis later said, what made up for all the bad reviews was that Quentin Tarantino really liked the movie. When I met him years later, he told me he'd watched one of the action scenes involving a carriage over and over again to fig where the stunt was, because it looked as if I had done this impossible stunt myself.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes, it does.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And this is the stunt that you mentioned, Lizzie. So let's talk about it briefly.

[Lizzie Bassett]

All right. If it fooled Quentin Tarantino, I feel a little bit better.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It fooled everyone. So Corridor Crew cracked it. So it's two shots. The shot of her coming out of the window. Her face is obscured by the glass, and her hair as she quickly rolls. And that is done by a stunt performer.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Okay.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And the minute the stunt performer leaves, lands in the seat. It morph, cuts. Oh. You can actually see the slight interpolation between the frames. It morph cuts to Geena Davis sitting up in the carriage going forward.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. Cause she whips her hair up when

[Chris Winterbauer]

she whips her hair up. Yes. It's so hard to detect. It's so well done. I had to watch this Corridor Crew video and watch them go frame by frame and watch them point it out. You guys can see it online. But it's an amazing stunt. And she did so many of her stunts on the film. I would take away from those.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That looks great.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Matthew Modine later said that the Duffer Brothers told him they thought it was one of the best pirate movies ever made.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I agree.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And as you mentioned, Pirates of the Caribbean pulls from this film quite liberally. Now, Rennie Harlan and Geena Davis divorced in 1998, reportedly because Harlan had slept with Davis assistant and fathered her child.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, dear.

[Chris Winterbauer]

We'll leave that one there. He has worked prolifically ever since. Although often at the fringes of Hollywood. And he's never really ventured into that family friendly arena he described before embarking on Cosmic Throat Island. Geena Davis career, on the other hand, slowed down dramatically. So from 1997, the year after the Long Kiss Goodnight 2008, she only acted in two feature films, Stuart Little and Stuart Little 2. She had a short lived TV show, the Geena Davis show. And she later told Vulture she was getting offers, quote, but for nothing meaty or interesting, like in my 30s. She was frustrated that Thelma and Louise in A League of Their Own hadn't sparked a run of female buddy comedies. Yeah, she said instead it was, quote, more Psycho Buddha roles. Candidly, the roles opposite Michael Douglas at the time.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

She said that she started watching children's shows with her daughter after her daughter was born and she was stunned at how few female characters there were. I didn't know this. It took like 20 years for sesame street to introduce a single female character. Did you know that? Well, with the puppets.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, Chris, puppets are famously not women.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, I know, but like you could.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I'm kidding.

[Chris Winterbauer]

If you breed them enough times, you should get a female puppet.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's like in Jurassic park, but the opposite.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's right.

[Lizzie Bassett]

If all the puppets are male, at

[Chris Winterbauer]

some point they'll produce a female puppet. That's exactly right. So she decided to do something about it. So in 2004, Geena Davis founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

She spent years gathering data on female representation in TV and film. She took her findings and continues to take her findings to executives across Hollywood with one goal, to create more roles for women on screen. In 2015, she founded the Bentonville Foundation Film Festival, which I've never been to, but I've heard great things about.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Is that in Bentonville, Arkansas?

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's right.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Nice.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Focuses on films featuring underrepresented cast, crew and stories. And she has said that despite how it turned out, Cutthroat island was tremendous fun. And I can say, having gone through her filmography, although I cannot speak about how she feels about the roles, Geena Davis has worked far more in her 60s than she did in her 40s. And I wish her all the meatiest and best roles going forward.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Geena Davis.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And that concludes our coverage of Cutthroat Island. I hope I have dispelled the shroud of fog around this not so flopper. Yeah, it was a huge flopper, but the movie's pretty good. So, Lizzie, I have to ask you,

[Lizzie Bassett]

what went right, the stunts, the Special effects in this are absolutely incredible. But I would like to give what went right to the costume department and the production design team because truly this movie is. The tapestry is rich. I mean, everything looks lived in. Everything is beautiful. There are so many layers. You can really see the money on screen. I love the way they dress Geena Davis. She looks hot, but it's very practical. It seems like she could move in the stuff that she's wearing. I don't feel like she's overly sexualized in this movie in terms of the clothes they have on her at all. So huge shout out to those departments. This movie looks beautiful.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I agree. That was maybe gonna be mine. And I wanna shout out Geena Davis.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And Renny Harlan. I think the movie's well directed too. But I would like to give my what went right to John Debny. I listened to his music after the fact, and I was listening to it in comparison with some of the other references that he made. I think his score is so good in this movie. I actually think it's under in the mix. I think the music's a little low. I think that with the Klaus Bedeld or Hans Zimmer, depending on how you want to interpret it, score in Pirates of the Caribbean, they actually Mickey Mouse the music a little more to great effect. And I wish they had done that a little more in this movie. I think it could have helped with the tone. And I think his music's great.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It is. And again, there is a blueprint here for Pirates of the Caribbean that they ripped handily. And the music is a big part of that because it feels like an updated version of the swashbuckling music from the sort of, you know, epics of the 50s and 60s. And I think that they end up building on that in Pirates of the Caribbean in a way that, of course, is very memorable. But, yeah, the music in this is great.

[Chris Winterbauer]

All right, Lizzy, thank you for going on that journey over the seven seas of Hollywood with me. If folks are enjoying this podcast, how can they support it to get more throats slit on Cutthroat Island?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, you can leave us a rating or review. You can tell a friend or family member that you like what went wrong and maybe they will too send them a specific episode for a movie that they know. People seem to like that as an entry point. You can now, on both Apple and Spotify, become a subscriber. And with that, you will get at least one bonus episode every month. Usually it's more. You can take it up a notch and you can join Patreon. You will get all the bonus episodes there also for $5 a month. In addition to that, you get an ad free feed. And then if you would like to take it up one more cutthroat notch, for $50 a month, you can get a swashbuckling shout out just like one of these.

[Chris Winterbauer]

There once was a ship we all didn't know and the name of the ship was the Carol Company her captain paid a premium I take the money and run, Run, boys. Abandon ship. The IRS is here to audit Michael Douglas got you, sure. But Gina's still on board. Rennie Harlan, he wanted more exploding barrels and guns and soldiers Matthew Moding did his best and Gina lost a breast they say they sank the Carol Co but we all know that story ain't so the man who did's named Mario so leave my Gina alone the wind's picking up, boys. Let's do the roll call. Make sure we got all our Full Stop supporters on board. Adrian Pang Korea. Alex Barrett, Angeline. Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittney Morris, Brooke. Cameron Smith C. Grace B. Chris Leal, Covadiner Dayton 3. David Friscalanti, Darren and Dale Conkling Mzodia. Evan Downey, Felicia G. Film it Yourself Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel. The Broken Glass Kids. The cast and crew of Win a Trip to Browntown. Half Greyhound. I have the biggest man crush on Chris Winterbauer, James McAfee, Jason Frankel, J.J. rapido, John D. Wiltshire, Jory Hill Piper, Jose Emiliano Salto Di Giorgio, Karina Canaba, Kate Ellerington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Olger, Schlager McCoy, Lena, L.J. lousy Susan, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate Ashley, Nate the Knife, Rosemary Southward Rural Juror Sadie, Jess, Sadie and the Provost family. Where the O's sound like O's. Oh, Cutthroat island is pretty entertaining. The stunts and the sets and the ships are amazing. Pour one out for the Lost Soul sailing on their way to Cutthroat Isle.

[Lizzie Bassett]

All right, thank you very much. Thank you, Chris. It's my episode, but what are we heading into next week?

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's not pirate. It's Kings. It's Three Kings. It's the movie. The apocryphal film in which David O. Russell may or may not have been punched in the face. I am so excited that we're gonna be talking about Three Kings. I really like this movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's a great movie.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I am very excited to talk about it. I watched Gunga Dean when we were gonna cover Temple of Dune, and I thought, wow, it was three kings before there were three kings. And so let's get our butts to the Gulf War and be soldiers of fortune.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Let's do it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I look forward to it, Lizzy.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Can't wait. It's David. Oh, Russell. So certainly a lot's going wrong.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I mean, I just have to imagine Spike Jones just having a real tough

[Lizzie Bassett]

time the whole time. All right, we'll see you next week. Bye.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Bye.

[Lizzie Bassett]

What went wrong is a sad boom.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Post production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krups.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It.