Lawrence of Arabia

Summary

WHAT WENT WRONG – Lawrence of Arabia (April 6, 2026) Sad Boom Media | Hosts: Lizzie Bassett & Chris Winterbauer

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EPISODE OVERVIEW

A deep dive into the legendarily epic, chaotic, and influential production of "Lawrence of Arabia." Hosts Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer uncover the astonishing obstacles behind David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece, from the historical realities of T.E. Lawrence and ethical questions of casting, to sweltering desert shoots, budget overruns, behind-the-scenes drama, and why actually finishing a script before shooting would have helped. Along the way, they celebrate the film’s extraordinary artistry—cinematography, performances, and iconic music—while interrogating its controversies and what makes it endure.

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KEY DISCUSSION POINTS & INSIGHTS

Why Lawrence of Arabia Is Legendary

• Both hosts express a profound admiration for the film, emphasizing its sweeping scale and modern cinematic style, especially given its era. (03:23–05:01)
  • Chris notes the “camera movement, technical elements, Maurice Jarre’s score, and Omar Sharif’s performance” as timeless.
  • “It feels extremely modern in many ways. Although dated in a couple of important ones.” (03:23 – Chris)
• The film’s approach to its protagonist is highlighted as unusually complex for its time, showing both myth and moral ambiguity. (06:33)
  • “It chooses a bit of a warts and all approach to this person… this is not the way we typically consume our heroes.” (06:33 – Lizzie)

The Real T.E. Lawrence: Fact vs. Film Myth

• Lawrence’s background, spy craft, intellect, and complicated personal life undergird the movie’s drama. (12:31–21:00)
  • Born illegitimate into nobility, extremely intelligent, an archaeologist and fluent in Arabic.
• Lawrence was a “spy before he was Lawrence of Arabia,” working under archeologist cover to scope Ottoman lands for British intelligence. (13:00)
• Guerrilla tactics: Lawrence “popularized or modernized” guerrilla warfare, blowing up tracks not trains to maximize disruption. (16:28–16:56)
  • “His greatest strength is his endurance and his masochistic ability to withstand pain.” (15:06 – Chris)
• His complicated relationship with fame, rejection of knighthood, and nuanced sexuality—likely asexual or homoromantic—are discussed, with an emphasis on avoiding reductive readings. (20:21–26:16)
  • “Lawrence was almost certainly asexual. The only sexual experience he seems to have had was not consensual.” (90:44 – Lizzie)

How The Film Got Made: Development Hell & Casting Drama

• Sam Spiegel’s stormy career as producer, connections to John Huston/On the Waterfront, and survival through legal woes. (27:54–29:59)
• David Lean’s journey—from Quaker childhood to acclaimed editor and director—learning the craft bottom-up, building a career on character studies within epic frames. (29:44–31:32)
  • “He was directing epic character studies.” (05:28 – Chris)
• The struggle to adapt "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and impress Lawrence’s brother, who required script approval and denial of ‘romanticizing’ conditions like adding a love interest. (33:37–34:13)
  • “Good luck, buddy.” (34:13 – Chris, about script approval)
• Initial casting: Marlon Brando (!) and Albert Finney were both contenders for Lawrence. Brando declined and Finney refused a long-term contract. (38:33–41:39)
  • “I’ll be damned if I’ll spend two years of my life out in the desert on some fucking camel.” (40:00 – Brando, reported by Lizzie)
• Peter O’Toole, a virtual unknown but with classical chops, ultimately landed the part despite producer doubts—underpaid, underprepared, but fated for stardom. (41:51–44:52)
  • “David Lean was like, this is it, this is our Lawrence. So, Sam, suck it up, get it together.” (43:57 – Lizzie)
• Omar Sharif’s casting paved the way for more authentic representation, profoundly elevating the film (57:46–60:11):
  • “As soon as Omar Sharif enters, you are on location, you are in this world, you are dropped in.” (07:03 – Lizzie)

On-Set Chaos: Location Woes, Technological Feats, Bleeding Butts, and Drunken Camels

• Shooting began in the Jordanian desert—far from civilization, with extreme heat, logistical nightmares, and no finished script. (53:11–56:45)
  • “It was actually so hot that sometimes the thermometers couldn’t read the temperature.” (56:06 – Lizzie)
• Legendary cinematography: Moving gigantic 70mm cameras (larger than IMAX cams!) through sand, rigging makeshift lifts, and obsessing over continuity (down to removing paper cups from endless dunes). (11:27–55:27)
  • “These [cameras] are like the size of camels, basically.” (11:27 – Chris)
  • “You need Legolas walking on the snow.” (56:04 – Chris)
• Peter O’Toole invents the “rubber saddle” to cope with camel rides, becomes “father of rubber” to Bedouin extras. (63:31–63:38)
  • “I found after a while my bottom was bleeding from bouncing up and down on this snorting great dragon.” (63:31 – O’Toole, quoted by Lizzie)
• Genuine sense of camaraderie (and wild living) between O’Toole and Sharif—drinking, gambling, enduring pain together. (64:53–64:54)
  • “We weren’t sober, but neither were we unconscious. We were fully aware of the pain and agony of watching all of our pennies go down the Suwannee.” (64:53 – O’Toole)
• Jaw-dropping stunts and set pieces: Filming the siege on Aqaba and train derailments with real camels, horses, explosives, and only one shot to get it right. (68:50–73:05)
  • “The train conductor had to start up the train, get it going, and literally jump out of the train. Before it exploded.” (73:05 – Lizzie)
  • Sharif and O’Toole’s gallows humor: “Peter, I’ve been working out the odds… I’m going to tie myself to the camel.” “Well, I’m going to get drunk.” (69:32–71:11 – O’Toole recounting to TCM)

Cultural, Ethical, and Political Questions

• Ongoing critique of casting practices: The whitewashing and brownface/browngaze issues of the time, especially Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal, foregrounded against Sharif’s authenticity. (07:07–09:10)
  • “It is distracting to have a white British man with blue eyes in the role of Prince Faisal.” (07:25 – Lizzie)
  • Conversation extends to industry-wide denial of opportunity to actors of color (09:10–10:22)
• Historic distortion: The real Lawrence knew more about imperial intentions than the script suggests; the film oversimplifies some politics to streamline its protagonist’s inner conflict. (89:01–89:50)
• On-screen homoerotic and homoromantic subtext discussed, contrasting tabloid simplifications with the actual subtlety of Sharif and O’Toole’s bond. (90:44–92:40)
  • “It is a romantic relationship. It is homoromantic, but it’s not presented as sexual.” (91:57 – Chris)
• Impact of restoration, cuts, and the controversy over how much was shown or cut, particularly in scenes implying sexual assault during Turkish captivity. (87:44–89:01)

Post-Production & Music: Legends at Work (Post, Score)

• Editor Ann Coates (“one of the greats”) delivered modern, audacious edits—most famously the match-blow-to-sunrise smash cut. (78:06–79:26)
  • “It so wonderfully transports you to a time and place and it feels so magical that there’s really nothing like it.” (79:26 – Chris)
• Maurice Jarre’s iconic, sweeping score became another pillar of the film’s lasting legacy, even though he had just six weeks to write it. (82:38–86:19)
  • “I was only sleeping about two or three hours a night. I don't want to have this kind of experience too often.” (85:02 – Jarre, quoted by Lizzie)
  • “Weirdly worked in their favor. … it just allows the desert to be quiet in a lot of scenes.” (85:37–86:07 – Chris)

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MEMORABLE QUOTES & MOMENTS

• “It feels like it could have been shot today. And so some of the shots of the desert really are unparalleled. It's like shooting medium format film as a movie, which is incredible.” (03:23 – Chris)
• “I am not condoning this at all… He doesn’t look right. He doesn’t carry himself the same way. As soon as Omar Sharif enters, you are… dropped in.” (07:03 – Lizzie)
• On O’Toole’s wild ride: “He had a transistor radio plugged into my ears and I had a cigarette going, and I had a little bottle of something in the saddlebag. I was quite comfy.” (64:15 – O’Toole, via Lizzie)
• AQABA sequence: “Peter, I've been working out the odds… I'm going to tie myself to the camel … Well, I'm going to get drunk. … Oh, I'm gonna get drunk too.” (69:32–71:11 – O’Toole and Sharif, to TCM)
• On what went right: “Kudos to Omar Sharif for, like, he took a small part and then he turned it into a huge part… You can just tell he's a star the minute he shows up.” (93:23–94:02 – Chris)
• On David Lean: “I have to give it to David Lean. I just think… every shot is like a painting.” (94:02–95:00 – Lizzie)

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IMPORTANT SEGMENTS & TIMESTAMPS

• 03:23: Chris’s overview of why Lawrence of Arabia endures—cinematography, score, performances
• 07:03: Lizzie on the tension between authenticity and brownface in the cast
• 13:00–18:00: Deep background on the real T.E. Lawrence, guerrilla tactics, and role as a spy
• 20:21–26:16: Exploration of Lawrence’s sexuality and modern interpretations
• 38:33–44:52: Casting nightmare—Brando, Finney, O’Toole
• 53:11–56:45: Desert shooting begins: logistics, heat, missing script, technical marvels
• 57:46–60:11: Omar Sharif’s casting and why it changed the film
• 68:50–73:05: The shooting of AQABA charge and train stunts, tales from O’Toole and Sharif
• 78:06–79:26: Ann Coates’ editing magic (the legendary “match-to-sunrise” cut)
• 82:38–86:19: Maurice Jarre’s score—creative obstacles, enduring impact
• 87:44–92:40: Censorship, restoration, and how the film handled sexuality and trauma

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CONCLUSION: WHAT WENT WRONG … AND WHAT WENT RIGHT

Despite script chaos, brutal conditions, budget woes, and complicated politics, “Lawrence of Arabia” emerged as one of cinema’s defining achievements. The hosts credit:

• David Lean’s uncompromising vision and painterly rigor
• Omar Sharif’s and O’Toole’s transcendent performances
• The physical and creative risks taken for authenticity, even when grueling or dangerous
• The unsung heroes—Ann Coates (editor), Freddie Young (cinematography), Maurice Jarre (music)—whose artistry achieved the film’s modern magic.

“Lawrence of Arabia won seven out of its 10 Oscar nominations and remains, I think it’s safe to say, one of the greatest films of all time.” (92:41 – Lizzie)

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For further exploration, the hosts recommend seeking out Behind the Bastards’ T.E. Lawrence series and revisiting David Lean’s early works to better understand his growth as a filmmaker of epic character studies.

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(For those interested: Next week’s episode teases “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” and promises equally wild behind-the-scenes tales.)

Transcript

[Lizzie Bassett]

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[Chris Winterbauer]

And action. 525,600 minutes. That's how long Lawrence of Arabia is. Hello, I am Chris Winterbauer here with my co host Lizzie Bassett to discuss the movie that said Seven Samurai. Hold my beer. I have to cross the desert of Nefud as Lizzie. I will just lambast you relentlessly because you got mad at me in jest over how long Seven Samurai was and promptly threw Lawrence of Arabia on the schedule. I know, I thought this is a three hour movie. No sir, this is a four hour movie. And I loved every minute of it. As always. I am Chris Winterbauer joined by Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing today? Let's get into it.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I am so excited. I too love every minute of this movie and I can't wait to talk about it with you because boy is it interesting. From the real life subject matter, the man himself all the way through the making of it. As you can probably imagine, given the fact that they're in the desert, it's insane. Like when you watch this movie, you're like, okay, so I know that CGI doesn't exist, so they're just doing all of this. So I can't wait to talk about it because it is truly an incredible undertaking. Chris, had you seen Lawrence of Arabia before and what was your experience upon watching it again for the podcast?

[Chris Winterbauer]

I've seen Lawrence of Arabia before. I think I'd seen it twice, once when I was young and did not have an appreciation for it at all. And then I did see it again in film school. Honestly still didn't have that strong an appreciation for it. So I didn't remember it super well. We rewatched it and it is remarkable for a number of reasons. It feels extremely modern in many ways. Although dated in a couple of important ones. The cinematography is amidst the best you'll ever see. One of the reasons for that is it's shot on, I believe, either 65 millimeter or 70 millimeter film. And as a result, when you do that transfer, the amount of detail and the tonal range of that film is so impressive that aside from the lighting techniques, it feels like it could have been shot today. And so some of the shots of the desert really are unparalleled. It's like shooting medium format film as a movie, which is incredible. I think it is so unique in the way that it approaches its hero, who is a very interesting person that I'm sure we'll talk about T.E. lawrence. And it is such an interesting non traditional hero in so many ways and the way in which o' Toole brings that to life. And I'm excited about that. I generally really like Peter o' Toole's performance, although I do think it can veer on somewhat melodramatic in certain moments, which I know is very much of the time. But I will say that upon rewatching it, aside from all of the technical elements, the movement of the camera, which is incredible, and David Lean does that throughout his earlier filmography. The two things that really felt truly timeless to me, three things. Maurice Jaars score.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I mean, it's amazing. And you can feel the way it influenced John Williams, for example.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, wait till you hear about the score because your mind's gonna be blown.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And then Omar Sharif's performance.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And Claude Rains. Yes, those two in particular. I also think Jack Hawkins is really good as General Allenby, but in particular Claude Rains and Omar Sharif. I thought, wow, these guys are so subtle, they are so modern, they feel so timeless. So more than anyone else, those two performances jumped out at me and I loved it. And I went back and I watched Summertime, which I'd never seen with Katharine Hepburn, that he directed a couple movies before this. And then I watched Bridge on the River Kwai, and that's the three movie run. And then obviously did Dr. Zhivago. I didn't have time to rewatch that. But what's so cool, I think, if you watch those two into Lawrence of Arabia, is you can feel David Lean coming into his own as a director with the way he moves the camera and, you know, he moves from a traditional film ratio in Summertime, which is a lovely little movie, and into CinemaScope and then into 70 millimeter. And it really just feels like he's expanding his palette with every instance. But the last thing I'll say is, like, I know he's known for directing epics, but what he's really doing is he is directing epic character studies. And you can see that with Hepburn in Summertime, you can see that with Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai, Colonel Nicholson, and then you can very much see that with Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. So I love it. I think it's a lovely movie. I'm sure we'll talk about some of the dated elements and things that obviously wouldn't be done today, like brownface, for example, but I'll save those for when we get to that in the production.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Beautifully said, Chris. I couldn't say it better myself. You're hitting the nail on the head. It is remarkable because, yes, in some ways it is simplifying T.E. lawrence a little bit, or at least uncomplicating him, but in many other ways, it chooses a bit of a warts and all approach to this person. And I think that that is unusual, A, for the time, B, as we're going to learn because of how T.E. lawrence had been positioned historically at that point, and C, just because, you know, this is not the. That we typically like to consume our heroes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Exactly.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And they really don't shy away from it. I think Peter o' Toole's performance in this is wonderful. But I am with you. The person that stands out the most to me in this is Omar Sharif, for many reasons. We will talk quite a bit about him in this episode. But I do just want to call out at the top, it was not unusual at this time at all to have white British actors with blue eyes playing Arab characters. Which with a couple of notable exceptions, is what you see across most of this movie. You know, Alec Guinness is the big call out here. And as well, there's you know, Jose Ferrer is in this. Anthony Quinn, who is Mexican, American and wearing a massive prosthetic nose. But the thing that struck me the most about watching this is that a. I am not condoning this at all. I think Alec Guinness actually does. Gives a relatively lovely performance. He's an amazing actor, and I think he does the best he possibly could with this. But I gotta tell you, the second he is on screen opposite Omar Sharif, it just highlights every single reason why, you know, obviously, racism aside, you shouldn't do this, because it is distracting to have a white British man with blue eyes in the role of Prince Faisal. He doesn't look right. He doesn't carry himself the same way. As soon as Omar Sharif enters, you are on location, you are in this world, you are dropped in. And the second these other guys show up, it takes me out of it a little bit every single time. So we're going to talk about how Sharif got cast. Spoiler alert. He was not the original person cast for this role. The thing about this movie is, like, yes, it's doing this. It is doing brownface. That's something that was extremely common at the time. But what it also does is it highlights the importance of actually casting four people's real ethnicities. And why, from an artistic perspective, that is important.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, no, exactly. The way I was thinking about it, as I was trying to process it, is there are two vectors, along which it's obviously wrong to do blackface in particular, but obviously brownface and Hollywood would do red face, et cetera.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Everything. Every kind of face.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. The most obvious vector is the one you mentioned, which is that it can veer into horrible stereotype and demeaning performances along that vector. This movie actually, I think, does a decent job in that Guinness is giving a dignified performance. I actually looked up photos of Prince Faisal. Guinness is actually on just a photographic basis. Right. He's kind of a dead ringer for Prince Faisal. But I agree with you. He simply does not bring the knowledge of culture, et cetera. Right. That Omar Sharif brings when he shows up. And so obviously, like that hamstrings the movie in certain ways, despite Guinness performance. And then, as you mentioned, Lizzie, what's more actually important is the denial of work to people who should be getting these roles. And then you have the perfect example of that in this movie, which is Omar Sharif goes on to become an enormous movie star.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Which he should be. And he would maybe, would maybe would not be had he not gotten a role like this.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He definitely would not have been in Hollywood.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Exactly. So, like, Guinness didn't need this role. Like, could there have been someone in the Prince Faisal role that not only could have been artistically even a little bit better, and that is no shade against Guinness performance, but you nailed it. I couldn't explain it better than you.

[Lizzie Bassett]

There's just a. Yeah, it's just not right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And then it's the economic opportunity that's being denied somebody else. We don't need to beat a dead horse. But this is why it's so important to give these opportunities to the folks who should, you know, be getting the opportunity to represent the culture that's being represented on screen.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes. That is really the only shortcoming of this movie. And it's something that was very much of its time. I'm so glad you mentioned Claude Rains. We're not really gonna get into him in this episode. Cause not a ton went wrong with him.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He's so good in this movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He's wonderful. He's so sort of slimy and inscrutable and just can kind. He just. He goes whatever way the wind blows. And his performance is so small and detailed. I really love him in this.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Me, too.

[Lizzie Bassett]

All right, let's get into it. Lawrence of Arabia is, of course, directed by Sir David Lean, with a screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson. Cinematography by Freddie Young, who I want to call out because there is a lot to cover here. We're not going to have time to get into too much. But Freddie Young's cinematography in this is unbelievable. And he was not even the first, second, or like, third choice for cinematographer. And he is just. It's stunning.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Can I emphasize right here when you see Christopher Nolan shooting with Imax cameras, these 70 millimeter cameras, I believe, are bigger than those. These things are like the size of camels, basically. And he is doing dolly shots in the middle of the desert with these things. It's crazy.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's insane. It is edited by Ann Coates, who we will talk about a little bit. And it stars Peter o', Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, and of course, Omar Sharif. And you'll notice not a single lady. We'll talk about that as well.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Don't think Lawrence was interested.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He was not. The budget was around $15 million today worth around 160 million. So. Yeah, this is a WAPA.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

The IMDb logline, as always, is the story of T.E. lawrence. The English officer who successfully united, led the diverse, often warring Arab tribes during World War I in order to fight the Turks say successfully is debatable, depending on how you interpret it. So let's actually talk about the real T.E. lawrence, because I think it's important. I'm kind of obsessed with him after this.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So, Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in 1888 in Wales into a pretty unusual family. I don't know if you know this, Chris, but he was the son of nobility, a baronet, but his father had actually cast aside tradition and his marriage in order to be with his mistress. He was like, you keep the money, ma'. Am. I just can't do this. I'm going to be with the woman that I love. And they remained legally married, which meant that he never legally married Thomas Edward Lawrence's mother. So Thomas and all of his four brothers were illegitimate, even though his parents did remain together for the rest of their lives. And Lawrence was an adopted name that they used as sort of a cover. I believe it was a family name on his mother's side. Now, he was very, very smart. He was obsessed with medieval military history. In fact, his thesis at Oxford involved a walking tour through Syria, where he walked a thousand miles by himself to study Crusaders castles. And after graduating, he decided he wanted to be an archaeologist. So he headed back to Syria. And while he was digging up Hittite settlements, World War I, of course, was brewing. Now, Germany was determined to get the Ottoman Empire on their side, and a key piece of that strategy was the Baghdad Railway, which was planned to run from Istanbul to Baghdad. To be clear, this is not the railway that he ends up blowing up. British Intelligence obviously wanted to know what's going on in this area, so they recruited some intelligence officers. One of them was, of course, T.E. lawrence, and he was perfect because he had the COVID of being an archaeologist in the area. He has a legit reason for being there. HE SPEAKS ARABIC, he's familiar with the landscape. So before Lawrence was Lawrence of Arabia, he was a spy. And that is important to remember. In August of 1914, Britain declared war on Germany and many were obviously drafted into combat, but not Lawrence. Do you know why, Chris?

[Chris Winterbauer]

I know he was very short.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's it. He was five foot five.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Because I knew o' Toole was much taller than Lawrence actually was.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, he's six two. Yes. So that is one of the biggest complaints about Peter Otul's casting, is that he does not actually look outside of the shots of him in the traditional garb, where he actually does look quite a bit like T.E. lawrence in the face. Physically, he does not.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

However, as soon as the Ottoman Empire officially Entered on the side of Germany. The Brits were like, height be damned. Get this little guy on our side because again, he's fluent in Arabic. I don't know how many of those are floating around.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, he was brilliant. I've always wondered if someone like Indiana Jones was slightly modeled as like an Americanized, you know what I mean, version.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Sure.

[Chris Winterbauer]

G.E. lawrence or something. Because here's this guy, he's an archaeologist. He's effectively an ultra marathoner.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

His greatest strength is his endurance and his masochistic ability to withstand pain. I mean, the guy's just such a fascinating person.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He really was. And so England started to get nervous that the Ottomans might be able to take control of the Suez Canal. They at this point began backing an Arab uprising against the Ottomans. And they sent Lawrence to basically be their like, envoy to Prince Faisal. And in exchange for support, the Brits were of course promising an independent Arab state after the war. Now, as we learn in the movie, they never really had any intention of making it a truly independent state. How much Lawrence knew about England's intentions is somewhat up for debate. Although I will say he almost certainly knew Sykes Picol agreement pretty early on. Of course, in the movie, he finds this out much later. And that is the kind of initial agreement planning out how the Ottoman controlled portions of Arabia would be divided between France and England after the war. So a little bit more on that later, but keep that in mind. Now, this is all a massive oversimplification, but he did indeed help bring previously warned tribes together to blow up the Hejaz railway, take Aqaba and eventually Damascus. And just an example of how smart he is. To your point, Chris, do you know why he blew up the tracks and not the trains?

[Chris Winterbauer]

So that the tribes could pillage the trains in order to stay motivated?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Nope.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Okay, then he's smarter than me.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Clearly his argument was we shouldn't destroy their fleet of trains, we should just destroy the tracks, because the tracks can be repaired and that will keep them running out to all the different areas that we're attacking. It will cause their forces to dissipate and it will scatter them.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Right. It's very smart.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes. So his whole idea was for the Bedouin army that he had assembled to make these disparate attacks so the Turks felt like they were fighting all over instead of just fighting on one front. And of course it worked.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's Guerrilla Warfare 101, right?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. You could argue he kind of in some ways came up with it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Well, certainly at a time when like trench Warfare. Right. Seems to be the norm across Western Europe. Here's this guy who's doing guerrilla tactics in the Middle East.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. I shouldn't say he invented it. He popularized it or modernized it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Right. Turned it into a real fun time.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. As you see in this movie.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He's loving it.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He did not. So he did try, and arguably mostly fail to help gain the Arab independence that he and England had been promising. And then, of course, the war ended. I made a point of mentioning he's a spy, and that is very important because he kind of lied to everybody. So it's a little tough to know what was going on and what his motivations were. During the war, though, he had met an American war photographer named Lowell Thomas. Now, in the movie, they've changed the name to Jackson Bentley, but that's who this is. He had followed Lawrence around, taking some of the most famous photos that we still have of him today. And when the war ended, Thomas was trying to figure out how to make a living. So he decided to tour around New York and London with what was basically a PowerPoint presentation on steroids, the T.E.

[Chris Winterbauer]

lawrence Traveling Roadshow, which did not actually involve T.E.

[Lizzie Bassett]

lawrence. It was just a live show set around the photos that he had taken of him in Arabia that told Lawrence's story, or at least Thomas's version of it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I bet you it was pretty exciting.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, people loved it. Apparently. It was pretty like, cheese tastic. It had, like, a dance of the seven veils. And it did also paint Lawrence as a morally pure, brave, and utterly uncomplicated war hero, which makes sense. That's what people wanted. You know, they're exiting World War I, which, unlike World War II, arguably didn't really have as clear motivations for a lot of people.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So, yeah, World War I shouldn't have happened. I think we all kind of generally feel about that. Yeah. Franz Ferdinand, Why'd you die?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, that wasn't his fault.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You could have held on.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Lean left. So this show was an enormous hit. It gave people what they wanted. They wanted to see a war hero. Here they had it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So much so that a feature film adaptation of his life felt pretty much inevitable. But there's just one little problem. The actual Lawrence wanted nothing to do with this. He was pretty embarrassed by it, especially by the way that it was painting him. And he had used his newfound fame to his advantage initially when negotiating some terms on Faisal's behalf, I believe. But Lawrence was mostly pretty depressed, and this oversimplification of what he had tried and again, kind of failed to do, was really not helping him. And the only thing worse than a film adaptation of his life, Chris, would be a film adaptation made by an emeticum. And his biggest fear about this was that it would insert a love interest. So he kicked that can down the road. But in 1934, he had a change of heart and he did enter into negotiations for a film about his life with producer Alexander Korda. But he had two conditions. One, it had to be historically accurate. Any guesses what the second condition might have been?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Is it no love interest?

[Lizzie Bassett]

More specifically, it's no women.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I ask you one question about him? Because I've heard this, but I don't know if it's true.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Did he turn down a knighthood?

[Lizzie Bassett]

It is true. He did refuse a knighthood in person from King George V. Wow. And that had to do both with, I think, him being frustrated with the way that he was used during the war, but more so the that the British government had not lived up to the promises that they had made during the war. So the no women thing brings us to a question that I think we were all asking after watching Peter o' Toole's let's say, flamboyant performance in Lawrence of Arabia, which is, where exactly did Thomas Edward Lawrence land on the Kinsey scale? And the answer is, as with all things about this man, very complicated.

[Chris Winterbauer]

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[Lizzie Bassett]

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[Lizzie Bassett]

It had long been an assumption that T.E. lawrence was gay, and I think that was probably a pretty common assumption at the time that the movie was made. Right now I want to call this out. You may see people calling him a pedophile because of an Extremely close and, yes, potentially romantic relationship he had with an Arab teen when he was working as a young archaeologist. This is before anything that we see in the movie. Very sadly. This boy who was known as Da Um passed away from typhus when World War I broke out. I think he was only 18 or 19 years old. It's, I think, pretty safe to assume that this relationship was romantic on some level, given that Lawrence seemed to have dedicated his book about his time in Arabia, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to Daum with the following. I loved you so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky and stars to earn you freedom, that seven pillared worthy house that your eyes might be shining for me when we came. So as far as I can tell, he's basically saying I backed the Arab uprising and tried to win their independence because I loved you. And I'm sorry that I couldn't get it for you while you were alive,

[Chris Winterbauer]

but how old would Dom have been during their relationship?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Like 16?

[Chris Winterbauer]

I mean, it depends. Yes, but it depends on. I don't know what the age of consent was. I'm not condoning it. I'm just saying it's a little. Potentially more complicated than it seems. Certainly more complicated than calling him a pedophile, I think.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I agree. I don't think that that is a fair representation of him at all, based on what I've read. And it's also quite possible this relationship was never sexual, because, Chris, you may know this.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Well, I've heard people say that they believe he was asexual and homoromantic.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's correct. And from what I understand, that is probably the most accurate representation of him based on his own writings, outside of a sexual assault that may have occurred while he was imprisoned by the Turks, which we sort of see hinted at in the movie.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Hinted pretty strongly, I would say. Yes, for the time, at least.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. He never wrote about engaging in any kind of sexual acts and in fact wrote explicitly about having no interest in it whatsoever. One of the people he was writing to frequently was E.M. forster, who was a known gay man. He was not uncomfortable with Forrester's sexuality at all. There's kind of no reason to think that he wouldn't have discussed his own. So I think this reading is accurate. But more on the film's take on his sexuality a little bit later. So shortly after his change of heart on the biopic about his life, Lawrence had another heart change. He got cold feet and he tried to pull out of the negotiations, but then he died? Yeah, in 1935. As you see in the beginning of the film, he died following a motorcycle accident in which he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles. Lots of theories. People thought he was assassinated. People thought perhaps he had died by suicide. You know, perhaps he wasn't dead at all and he's living on an island with Tupac. As with everything else in his life, we're never really going to know what he was thinking. If you want to learn more about T.E. lawrence himself and his part in the development of the modern political climate in the Middle East, I highly recommend listening to the four part series on behind the Bastards about him. It's wonderful. All right, let's rewind the clock back a couple years to 1926. Remember Lawrence's book Seven Pillars of Wisdom? It was not widely released commercially until after his death, but in 1926 there was a very limited release, a subscriber's release, if you will, of the autobiographical book. And one copy landed in the hands of someone we talked about in our African Queen episode, and that is producer Sam Spiegel.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I had forgotten.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He's a crazy person.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And then I remembered your African Queen stories and I just thought, oh, my God, Sam Spiegel of the Desert with David Lean. And also Spiegel did Bridge on the River Kwai, which was also a crazy location shoot.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Anyway, yes, he is a very interesting man. He's an insane person. For more background on Sam Spiegel, go listen to the African Queen episode. Here's a little refresher of really all you need to know for today. He was born around the turn of the century in the Polish region of the Austro Hungarian Empire. Very fascinating early life. He narrowly escaped a pogrom, eventually made his way to Hollywood, then got sent right back to Europe to function as a translator for the German and French versions of Universal films being produced there. 1933. He flees Berlin because it's not a good time to be a Jew in Berlin. And he made his way to London. He kind of conned a millionaire into backing a film that ended up just disintegrating into a series of bounce checks. He actually served prison time for that. And then he smuggled himself back into Hollywood, and by 1948, as we discussed, he had teamed up with John Huston for the African Queen, though of course their professional and personal relationship would sour very much and disintegrate after that film, much to John Huston's chagrin because of what happens next. And then Spiegel goes on to make on the Waterfront. In 1954. In 1957, he produced the Bridge on the River Kwai with director David Lean. And since this is the first time we've also covered David Leaning, here's a little bit of background that you need on him. He was born a Quaker. I did not know this. In 1908, in a suburb of South London. Now, due to his parents Quaker faith, he was not allowed to attend the cinema as a child. But he did it anyway. He was obsessed with the movies and at 19 years old, joined the Gaumont Film Studios. As a dog's body, do you know what that is?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Like a film courier or something? Like a messenger.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's just like the worst position you could possibly have at the studio. It's like anything nobody else wants to do. The dog's body will do.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You're a pa, Just the lowest of

[Lizzie Bassett]

the PA I know, but you don't have to call a PA a dog's body.

[Chris Winterbauer]

British people, well, they wear a dog costume too.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Okay.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's a.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's kind of a thing. So then he landed a job in the cutting room, eventually working his way up to the position of editor. And by the end of the 1930s, he was the highest paid working film editor in British cinema.

[Chris Winterbauer]

This makes sense.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes, it does. But in 1942, playwright Noel Coward brought Lean on to co direct in which We Serve. This was Lean's debut, and it went so well that Coward then hired him to direct his next three films. The last of which, Brief Encounter, earned Lean the first ever Oscar nomination for a British director in 1945.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Noah Coward, who had also been a spy.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Everyone was a spy.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. Along with Roald Dahl. We'll discuss next week on Willy Wonka.

[Lizzie Bassett]

You know what we should actually do is we should write musical about the interactions between Roald Dahl, Noel Coward, Ian Fleming and David Ogilvy. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

There's gonna be a lot of women. I'll just let you know now. And they're gonna be having a lot of sex with these men. Because that's all they were doing.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, that's all they said they were doing.

[Chris Winterbauer]

The women confirmed it. Okay. There's a lot of letters about this.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So next he directed Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, which starred a young Alec Guinness as Fagan. And in 1955, he directed Summertime, which you referenced. It starred Katharine Hepburn. And this was notable because A, it was in color.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yep.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And B, it shot on location in Italy.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, Shot in Venice.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, in Venice. His first time really getting to do this. And he loved it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's beautiful.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's much more sweeping in scope, even though obviously smaller than where he will end up. But it's where you begin to see his style really materialize. And then, as we said, in 1957, he directed the Bridge on the River Kwai, which of course also starred Alec Guinness and which was shot on location in Sri Lanka. And it was a massive commercial success. It became the highest grossing film of 1957 in the U.S. and Canada. It was also a critical success. So obviously Lean and Spiegel are eager to get another project together. That one went pretty well, even though, you know, there was some crazy stuff in the shooting. But end result a. Yeah, we're gonna cover it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's amazing. It has maybe one of the greatest, most tense third acts ever, ever put on film. It's amazing.

[Lizzie Bassett]

By the way, Spiegel had literally bought himself a yacht and a Park Avenue penthouse thanks to Bridge on the River Kwai. So they first turned to the idea of a biopic about Mahatma Gandhi, and they eventually dropped this because they thought it would be presumptuous to try to cram his life into one movie. Nobody tell Richard Attenborough. I was gonna say Richard Attenborough said, hold my beer.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yep.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And according to Lean, Spiegel also, quote, didn't think a picture about an Indian would be box office. That's probably because Spiegel had his heart set on one man, and maybe always had since he received that manuscript back in 1926. And that was, of course, T.E. lawrence Spiegel said, quote, he was a man of highly controversial character who actually became a legend in his own lifetime. The hardest problem in the conception of our film was to transpose his self contradictions, not to resolve them using a script basically compounded from Lawrence's own Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A book of such fascinating detail, you could make a dozen pictures. It's an embarrassment of riches lacking that blue thread of continuity every picture must have.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And a lot of cul de sacs on, like describing camels.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, he spent a lot of time on them.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He's a detailed writer.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. So Spiegel made Lean a very important promise for this. They would not start shooting without a finished script.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Foreshadowing.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. Around 1958 or 1959, Spiegel and Lean cleared the first major hurdle. They secured the film rights to Lawrence's 1926 edition of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. And that was not an easy task. The rights sat with Lawrence's brother, A.W. lawrence. Te, of course, was long dead at this point and aw. Put up a pretty serious fight and sat through many meetings with Lean and Spiegel. But he finally gave in on two conditions. One, he would have total script approval, and two, he had the right to veto title use if he didn't like what he saw. To which I say, good luck, buddy.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, I was going to say, Sam Spiegel's like, come at me in court, bro. You know?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. And the push that finally got him over the edge was actually a script analysis by Michael Wilson. Now, Wilson was one of many screenwriters who was blacklisted in 1951 when he refused to testify before Hugh Ack, the House on American Activities Committee, of course, led by Joseph McCarthy, right before his blacklisting actually took effect. He won an Oscar with his collaborator Harry Brown for A Place in the Sun. He then spent eight years in France. He's working on productions outside the studio system, including 1954's Salt of the Earth. And most crucially, after Lean hated the initial screenplay for the Bridge on the River Kwai by Carl Forman, Foreman suggested bringing in his friend Michael Wilson. But you might notice when the film won the Oscar for Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards, the award went to neither Foreman nor Wilson. It went to Pierre Boulle, who had written the book on which it was based.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Why, Chris Foreman was also blacklisted, wasn't he?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Correct. Both writers were blacklisted.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He wrote High Noon.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Which was viewed by many as almost anti American in its sensibilities. And John Wayne hated that movie. And he made Rio Bravo as a response to it. And I believe it's rumored that John Wayne was in part responsible for Carl Forman's blacklisting. In particular, I can't speak to Michael Wilson because John Wayne was very tied into Hugh.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, John Wayne, we're coming for you. Just you wait.

[Chris Winterbauer]

We're coming for you.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, so because Wilson could not actually receive an Oscar for the work that he had done on that film, Lean offered him kind of a consolation prize. And it was writing the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia. Now, it's interesting that Lawrence's brother responded positively to Wilson's treatment, because it doesn't seem like Wilson liked T.E. lawrence all that much. Here's what he had to say in a document dated September 20, 1959, called Elements and Facets of the Theme. In trying to serve two masters, Lawrence betrayed them both. Part of Lawrence's tragedy was his intellectualism. With his inheritance of Western culture, he could never really hope to submerge himself in an alien culture. Did he not serve to introduce into the Arab world the very evils from which he had fled. He was a man who, fleeing blindly from a deadly disease to a healthy land, himself afflicts it with the plague.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's a great analysis, but I wonder if Lawrence recognized that ultimately, perhaps in himself a little bit. And I wonder if his brother saw it too. And I wonder if the honesty of that treatment. What would be most offensive to Lawrence would be a hagiography right at this point in time. His brother would know that. And what's so interesting is I think that Bridge on the River Kwai is oddly such a great warm up to establishing this character, because Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, is very much the man who tries to serve two masters and fails them both in Bridge on the River Kwai in that he wants to both maintain his Britishness and then build this bridge, and yet he is doing it for the Japanese at the same time. And you know what I'm saying? In the end, he says, what have I done? Is his last line before he dies. Much like T.E. lawrence. There's such an interesting thematic through line here. And that analysis is pitch perfect.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I agree. I think as we're gonna get into, obviously some things change. There's another screenwriter who is brought on who we'll talk about as well. I'm a bit sorry that we don't totally get to see Wilson's take on this, because I think he nails it. And I think he also was more interested in this sort of political climate around Lawrence as well than this movie is.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I think it's still there on the margins.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It is. It is.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You get like 75%, maybe 50 to 75% of it. Right. Because you're seeing and you're wondering, is Lawrence just deluding himself? How can he not see that Claude Rains is going to backstab these people? You know what I mean? Immediately.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, the reality is he does know. Which we will get into.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Exactly. So I think the movie, it splits the baby a little bit, but I still think it does a pretty good job.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, it does, but. AW Lawrence apparently agreed with this and granted them the film rights for 22,500 pounds, or about $335,000 today. And just six days after Wilson had turned in his first draft, Columbia Pictures held a press conference at Claridge's in London announcing the next Sam Spiegel, David Lean production. You've all been waiting for it. It's going to be the Seven Pillars of Wisdom and it's going to star. Ooh, Any guesses?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Not Peter o'. Toole. He wasn't known.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's not Peter o'. Toole. In fact, it's someone who was in a movie that I already mentioned that Sam Spie produced. Someone who's come up on the podcast multiple times, most recently in the American History X episode.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He came up and. No, but it's not Humphrey Bogart. That doesn't make any sense. Who came up? Tell me. Tell me.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's me, T.E. lawrence.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Really?

[Monday.com and Aura Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Marlon Brando. I mean, look, one of the greatest actors of his generation playing a Brit.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He doesn't look right at all.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He doesn't look right. He's got the. What Atul does bring. I would argue it's actually less that it's flamboyant and it's more that it's Faye. His performance, Right there's actually a David Bowie esque quality. It's almost androgynous. It's a little otherworldly. He seems untouched by the things around him, which makes it such a wonderful reveal when it's shown that this guy's ultimately an endurance athlete.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

The ruggedness of Brando is so wrong for that.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, it's not even the ruggedness. Also, Brando's like young Brando, which this would have been. He's, like, pretty beefy and hot, which definitely is not right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. He would have had to probably lose a good amount of weight. I mean, o' Toole is, like, rail thin in this movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. Peter o' Toole has literally said in interviews, like, I can't gain weight. I'm just real thin.

[Chris Winterbauer]

We're like, good for you. Good for you, Peter.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Good for you. Good for you. Shut up, Peter. So I don't know how attached Brando really was. Certainly not attached enough to announce it, because he dropped out shortly thereafter to make Mutiny on the Bounty.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Who? Another one we gotta cover.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I know. Reportedly telling Spiegel, quote, I'll be damned if I'll spend two years of my life out in the desert on some fucking camel. Which, I mean, he nailed it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Way to know yourself.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. So Spiegel turned to his second choice, a then relatively unknown British theater actor, Albert Finney.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Oh. Oh, really?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes. Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

What did Albert Finney look like? Young.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I'm gonna hold that thought.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Okay.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Because In August of 1960, David Lean spent four days and a rumored £100,000 shooting screen tests with Finney. And I would like to show you Albert Finney as Lawrence of Arabia. Can you see this?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Oh, yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I mean, he looks like he's in Star Wars.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He's very surly.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes, he's very surly. Same problem I have. He doesn't quite like. In terms of the face, Peter o' Toole actually looks quite a bit like TD Lawrence.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I think so too. I've seen some photos of T.D.

[Lizzie Bassett]

lawrence because he's kind of delicate, even though he's tall. Albert Finney is not.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You know who they needed? They needed Spike Jonze.

[Lizzie Bassett]

You know what I mean?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Like a smaller, thinner, honestly, Edward Norton. You know what I mean? Like early 90s Edward Norton. He's too tall. But yeah, no, Finney. I love Albert Finney. He's great. It's actually. This is closer to what I would imagine from Brando, weirdly, despite how different their physicality is.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, I agree.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Interesting.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So this was a massive undertaking, as you just saw from the photos that I showed you. There were sets, costumes, there are other actors. They really thought that they had their Lawrence. And Sam Spiegel agreed. He offered Finney the role on one condition. He had to sign a five year contract with Spiegel. And this was a no go for Albert Finney.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, come on, Sam.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I know who said, quote, I hate being committed to a girl or a film producer or to being a certain kind of big screen image. And David Lean even was like, yeah, this was a terrible deal.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's a David O. Selznick deal. That's not a good deal.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, he'll show up later too. So David Lean took matters into his own hands and he started his own search for Lawrence. And he found him while watching a movie called the Day They Robbed the Bank of England. He said, on screen, I saw this chap playing a sort of silly assed Englishman with a raincoat casting for Trout. And this was of course, Peter o'. Toole. Now, o' Toole was of Scottish and Irish descent, but he had grown up in Leeds. He studied at rada, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, which, if you don't know, is like the drama school. He was 28 years old when Lean saw him and had just finished a first season at the Royal Shakespeare Company. So massively classically trained actors, actor. He also came with a strong recommendation from Katherine Hepburn, but he had a bit of a reputation that preceded him and it wasn't good. He was known as a hard partying, unreliable heavy drinker. And Sam Spiegel was super duper not a fan. Here's why. When they had been auditioning actors many years earlier for Suddenly Last Summer, Peter o' Toola, come In and he had read for a role. Now, during the screen test in which he was apparently playing a brain surgeon, he turned to camera, spiked the lens and said, quote, it's all right, Mrs. Spiegel, but your son will never play the violin again.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's very funny.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's funny. Sam Spiegel really didn't like it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I was, you know when you mentioned he was a hard partier, big time. What is he? He was 30 years old when he shot this movie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, about.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, he at times looks a lot older.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, it'll age ya.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I think generally he has bags under his eyes that make him look a little older and he's a gaunt, but he looks a little weathered. So I'd forgotten that at the beginning credits, which I love that opening shot with the motorcycle off frame and they do the title card that way when it says Introducing Peter o'. Toole. I thought I had totally forgotten that.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Because he looks older.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, because he looks older, but he was actually a little younger. Anyway, it's just an interesting, interesting time indeed.

[Lizzie Bassett]

David Lean was like, this is it, this is our Lawrence. So, Sam, suck it up, get it together. And also, TikTok, we gotta get this show on the road. Can we please, please just cast this drunken crazy person? And Sam Spiegel's like, fine, but he asked Anthony Nutting, a former British diplomat who was serving as an advisor on the film, to have just a little sit down chat with old Petey. And Nutting told o', Toole, quote, if you don't stay sober, you're going to leave Jordan on your ass. You're the only actor we've got and if you get bundled home, then there's no film. That's the end of the film and that's probably the end of you. And I have to imagine Peter o' Toole said cheers. But he agreed to do it. In November of 1960, he was offered the part for a fee of £12,500, which is nothing.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Well, I'm guessing this movie took a long time to shoot too, so.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, it straight up took two years. Marlon Brando was correct.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, he was probably making like £2 an hour.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was also nothing compared to what some other people were being paid on this. Jose Ferrer, who played the Turkish bay, which as you remember is a very

[Chris Winterbauer]

small role, almost a cameo.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Basically it is a cameo. He was paid double and I'm guessing

[Chris Winterbauer]

Guinness and even like Quinn and stuff. And Jack Hawkins was one of the biggest British actors of the 50s. I'm sure, he got a lot.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Everybody was paid more than Peter o' Toole and Omar Sharif. Everyone. Everyone was paid, like, their salaries put together, basically.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Right.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So o' Toole was also required to learn how to ride a camel before showing up to set, and he only had a couple weeks to do it. Now, speaking of extremely not Arab people playing Arab people, Sir Laurence Olivier was originally cast as Prince Faisal, but he dropped out. I would say, thank God. I find his Othello particularly difficult to watch. And this led to Alec Guinness getting the role instead. Now, Guinness, as we've mentioned, frequent David Lean collaborator at this point. He'd been in Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and, of course, the Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he won a bafta, Golden Globe and Oscar. But here's the thing. He and David Lean really hated each other on that movie.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's. Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Hated each other.

[Chris Winterbauer]

There's a great shot where he's on the bridge and he's pouring his heart out. It's like at the end of the movie to General Saito behind him or Commander Saito or whatever his name is, and the camera's just pushing it on his back. And it's incredibly modern. Right. Nowadays, you wouldn't blink an eye. And my understanding, the story I've always heard is that Alex Guinness was like, why is the camera not on my face? Because this is my big moment. And, yeah, I don't think they liked each other a ton.

[Lizzie Bassett]

They did not see eye to eye on this. To your point, I think David Lean had a much more modern interpretation of how to tell stories and how to develop character.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And move the camera.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, and move the camera. And Alec Guinness really wanted to bring more character. He wanted to bring more depth, more humanity. And David Lean was like, like, nope, pull it back more. More boring and dull, please, Alec. You're not doing it right. At one point, they didn't speak for 48 hours. And Guinness later wrote that Lean quote surrounds himself with sycophants and has no sense of humor. Probably true, but I think David Lean did know what he was doing. But Guinness agreed to give it one more go. And he did sign on to Lawrence of Arabia. Fun fact about Alec Guinness, I don't know if you know this. He had actually played T.E. lawrence in a theater production of the play Ross by Terr Ratigan, which was also about T.E. lawrence. Ross was an alias that he used later in his life. And at one point, this was an early rival production to Lawrence of Arabia, but Sam Spiegel had threatened legal action against them. If they pursued a feature film so they were not able to get financing. This. I mean, this actually doesn't seem that shady to me, considering Spiegel had the film rights to Seven Pillars.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I actually think young Alec Guinness would have been an exceptional film. T.E. lawrence.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I agree.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He was just too old at this point.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. So Anthony Quinn, as we mentioned, was brought in to play Auda, who I believe was a real person. And of course, Anthony Quinn, he is Mexican American. He is not of Middle Eastern descent. That is a wild prosthetic nose on him. He was one of the biggest movie stars in this movie at the time. And he was kind of brought in as like the big American movie star. Also, remember that yacht that Spiegel bought? Well, he put it to good use. For a year leading up to production, while casting was happening, Lean, Spiegel and Wilson lived on the yacht, floating around Europe and working on the script. Now, do I want to be on a yacht for a year? Yeah, maybe. Do I want to be on a yacht for a year with my co workers? No, rude. I don't think you want to be on a yacht with me either one.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I would say one of your co workers is your husband.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That one I'd be on a yacht with.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So you're picking out one person you don't want to be on a yacht with.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No, I meant more my phone, like my office. Coworkers. You don't count. You're my friend. So this is your job.

[Chris Winterbauer]

What co workers are we talking about? It's okay, I understand.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's true. So Nutting, the guy whose job was partially to yell at Peter o', Toole, was also negotiating film locations. And he managed to convince King Hussein of Jordan that the movie would have help boost tourism if he let them shoot there. And David Lien was thrilled because he always wanted to shoot on location. And this happened mostly in and around Jordan. Sam Spiegel encouraged him to consider the cost saving benefits of Southern California. But the reality is he was very concerned about being able to even get into the country if they filmed in Jordan. Because he was Jewish. And he was correct. There was a very good chance at this point, due to the political climate in the region, that he would not even be allowed in in. But Nutting was like, no problemo. I'll just get you a visa that lists your religion as Anglican and bing bang boom, you're in. And Spiegel was pissed. He was like, no, I'm not Anglican. I'm not ashamed of my religion. To which Nutting apparently replied Sam, just shut up. Here's your bloody visa, which does suck. But as the start date drew nearer, David Lean and Sam Spiegel came to an unfortunate realization as they floated around on their yacht. They really hated Michael Wilson's script. According to Lean, it was too American. To which I say, what does that mean, brother?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Based, probably lines like that.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Based on where they land. I wonder if they felt like it had maybe, I don't know, humanized him too much or, like, veered in a cowboy direction.

[Chris Winterbauer]

What I'm imagining, I'm imagining George W. Bush as Lawrence of Arabia. We're gonna go in there, we're gonna teach them about democracy, make sure they don't get them nuclear weapons, and it's gonna be great. Mission accomplished. As you see Lawrence just walking with

[Lizzie Bassett]

a banner that says Mission accomplished behind him. Yeah, great.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And then Omar Sharif throws a shoe at his head.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Great.

[Chris Winterbauer]

All right.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So they unceremoniously fired Michael Wilson. And in his place, they hired Robert Bolt, who was a playwright who had just premiered A Man for All Seasons. He would go on to, of course, write the screenplay for this. So he started rewriting Wilson's script. And he was a staunch anti imperialist and pacifist who viewed military leaders like Lawrence as just not great guys all around. In fact, he described Lawrence as a romantic fascist and also rewrote the character to be a lot more flamboyant than Wilson had. Now, they would come around to a slightly more sympathetic portrait of Lawrence by the end of production. But this is where Bolt kind of started. Sounds great. But there was one major problem, which is that Robert Bolt was taking his sweet ass time with a script that needed to shoot in like a month. And so Sam Spiegel realized he's gonna have to break the promise that he made to David Lean and break probably the top what went wrong rule of all time. They would start shooting without a script.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's the number one rule. It's the number one rule we've come across. Gonna do it next week with Willy Wonka.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Can't wait.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You just can't do it. But they do it.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's Tobias Funke. It's never worked for anyone else, but maybe with us.

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[Lizzie Bassett]

So they were supposed to start filming in Jordan in February, but it actually started three months later in May. And they still didn't have a final shooting script.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Now, and I'm sure it's getting hotter and hotter.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh my God, it is so hot. David Lean's plan was to shoot mostly in chronological order, partially to give Peter o' Toole's performance a sense of discovery so he could, you know, discover the character. But I also suspect it was to buy some time because they didn't have a finished script. So for the first month of shooting, there were only three actors on Peter o'. Toole. Zaya Moyadine, who plays Tafas, Lawrence's guide at the beginning of the movie, and Maurice Ronet, a French actor who was playing Sheriff Ali. Now, here's the thing. When you look at a picture of Maurice Ronet, he doesn't look all that different from Peter o'.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Toole.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He had a little bit darker hair, but he had green eyes and is clearly a friend. French white guy. And even with this small cast, shooting was off to a rocky start. The first thing they filmed was the first time we ever see Lawrence traversing the desert. It's that crazy beautiful shot of the dunes and the tiny little camels coming over the ridge. And to capture this, two 65 millimeter Panavision cameras had been dragged up an almost 90 degree, 500 foot slope on a makeshift ski lift just to get the shot right. But seconds before they started rolling, the first AD screamed halt. There was a paper cup visible somewhere in the desert in frame, Game of Thrones style. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Can I just mention.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So this movie, which has been restored. Right. Liz, you were like, I bought the Blu K. Shut up.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I bought the Blu Ray. It's incredible.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It is. No, it's incredible. It looks amazing. But what's so remarkable is we're watching it on a 4K television right through Blu Ray. And Lawrence is about 12 pixels tall, right? In this screen. You can barely see him. Imagine you are looking through an optical viewfinder. It's a mirror system through a lens. And telling your director, I think we can see Lawrence. Right? Because Lean has to decide, is he gonna bring his actor like, a hundred yards closer? You know what I'm saying? For these shots, there's no. You can't punch in digitally. There's no way to verify this?

[Lizzie Bassett]

No. They're doing a lot of guesswork in this.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's crazy. It looks so good. It blows me away.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So they just went out and removed the cup. No big deal. Right. Chris, can you think of any problems with what might happen if you need to go out into this shot and remove the cup?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Footprints in the sand.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Bingo. Footprints in the sand. So they had to have people go out there with little wool booties on. And these were.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I believe these are like snowshoes or something, you know, to, like, get down there.

[Lizzie Bassett]

They had 300 Bedouins wearing sandals who had to go out in the desert with palm fronds and wearing, like, wool sandals and sweep away any footprints. Anytime anybody went out there, you need

[Chris Winterbauer]

Legolas walking on the snow. Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, they didn't have him. And thus began one of the biggest pains in the ass of the entire production. So cast and crew also had to wear goggles because of the sand. Unless you're on camera, then you're out of luck. Or unless you're David Lean, who said the goggles disturbed his train of thought. He will come to regret that. Umbrellas had to be brought in to cover the cameras between takes so that they wouldn't melt the film because it was like 120 degrees. It was actually so high that sometimes the thermometers couldn't read the temperature. And they had to cool down the thermometers.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And the camera is a metal box with a magnifying glass on the front. Like it's an e. It's an oven in an oven. It's crazy.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. And this particular location, Jebel Tubek. I might be mispronouncing that. I'm sorry. Was 150 miles away from the nearest well and had not been inhabited since the 7th century A.D. when a bunch of monks abandoned their monastery there. And speaking of things not going quite right, Lean was less and less pleased with Maurice. His performance wasn't right, neither was his accent. Both of those things could maybe be Fixed, but his green eyes could not. And they really bothered David Leen. It was at this point that a novel concept popped into David Lean's head. What if we cast someone who's actually Middle Eastern?

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's kind of the equivalent of location shooting for David, you know what I mean? In a sense, it's the next evolution he needs to make as a director, candidly.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So they shit can Maurice Rene and they start hunting through headshots of basically every Egyptian actor available. And when David Lean saw Omar Sharif, he said, if he speaks English, bring him here.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I mean, he's amazing. His eyes.

[Lizzie Bassett]

He's gorgeous.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He's got these huge eyes and then these incredible eyebrows.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I know.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And so he's so expressive.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes. And very, like, sweet eyes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. But also scary. But brutal and scary. But he's pitch perfectly cast in having the opposite seeming moral arc of Lawrence.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And I love it.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I know.

[Chris Winterbauer]

So, like, we meet him from our Western perspective, murdering a man for drinking from his well. And by the end of the film, Lawrence is the warped moral monster and Shareef is the one who we know understands the world for the way that it is. And it's so good, it's amazing.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So Omar Sharif was born Michael Dimitri Shalhoub in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1932 to Syrian and Lebanese parents. And by the time he was cast, he was already a very established star in Egypt. He'd been acting professionally since he was 22. He was married to one of Egypt's biggest movie stars, Fatim Hamama. And it was around the time that he married her that he had changed his name to Omar Sharif and converted to Islam. And he didn't just speak English, Chris. He spoke Arabic, English, French, Italian and Spanish. How? I'll tell you how. His mother. Here's what he told the Guardian about his childhood. Quote, I was a fat little boy when I was 10 years old. My mother, who didn't speak any English at all, said, I know the only thing is to put him in an English boarding school. The food will be be so horrible that he'll lose the weight. That's how I became an actor. There was also a theater at the English school I went to. So I lost my weight, I became thin, I learned to become an actor, and I learned English very well. All this was because my mother didn't like looking at her fat son. He's very funny, by the way.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's a very Dahlian prelude to next week's episode, too.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes. So David Lean's pitch to Shareef was not amazing. It Was basically, hey, can you come and do a screen test for a pretty small part in this movie? Movie? It's not really written yet. Also, you're gonna have to travel to Jordan for it. Now, normally, Omar would have said no, but it was David Lean, and that name alone convinced him. Now, Sharif later said to the Guardian, when he took me from Egypt, he didn't know me. He just said, I want an Arab person to play this Lawrence of Arabia thing. I want a real Arab who speaks English. All this happened because I had been to an English school in Cairo. So he called me and I went to the desert. And he loved me. He actually liked me very much. I was one of the only actors he actually liked in all his life. He hated them.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You can feel it, Shareef. That becomes the central relationship of the movie. Yes. I mean, it's so interesting that you say the script was not finished because that's the only relationship that actually.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, they wrote a lot more in for him.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I was gonna say that tethers us in the back half of the movie. And you mentioned again, Kim, Cassie and Arab actor. One of the things that works so well about Bridge on the River Kwai is obviously General Saito, and the other Japanese characters are actually played by Japanese and Asian actors. And then you compare it to something like Breakfast at Tiffany's.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Which comes out a couple years later. And obviously, like, that movie is a little hard to watch. Very hard to watch now for Mickey Rooney's performance. So.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, In June of 1961, he officially replaced Maurice Ronet. He was only paid £8,000 and was required to have a mole removed off his face by a plastic surgeon before arriving on set. He was also given barely a week to learn how to ride a camel for his iconic entrance. Let's talk about this entrance briefly. It is one of the greatest entrances in film history where he appears out of a mirage. It is so good. He had to enter from over a quarter mile away. According to Omar Sharif, it may have been more like two miles away.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I believe that.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I do, too. He said two to three miles. It was hot as shit because Lene needed a very high sun for the shot. Now, you may notice what looks like camel tracks kind of extending from the well towards where Shareef is. That's actually spray paint on the ground. It was both to sort of guide your eye in that direction, indicate that it's a. You know, a.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Traveled like a game trail or something. Yeah, that's kind of what I thought. Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It was also to help him know where to go. Cause he's coming from, you know, one to two miles away right now. To obscure Shareef, before his entrance crew had to drive trucks in circles in front of him to kick up the sand. So it looks like he's entering from a sandstorm. It's amazing. And they used a very special lens that David Lean commissioned for this shot. Specifically, I believe it was a 482mm lens. I've also seen 450mm. I'm inclined to believe the more specific number. You pointed this out earlier. But almost impossible to see what you're looking at in the viewfinder with this thing especially. Cause he is so far away.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Here's the thing, too. On a 450mm lens, if you touch the camera while it's rolling, oh, you're

[Lizzie Bassett]

gonna completely fuck up the shot.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It will vibrate so hard that it'll look like he is jumping from the top of the frame to the bottom of the frame. And the camera's running film through it so it is actually vibrating when you are using it. So, like, again, I just don't know how they technologically did this. It's incredible.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's amazing.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And they have to commission that lens because again, it's a 70 millimeter piece of film which is larger than 35 millimeter by like at least 2, maybe 4x. And so they have to make a lens that can create an image circle big enough to cover that. You know what I mean?

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's incredible. Huge shout out to Freddie Young on this. The cinematography in this movie is like, it's unmatched. But let's go back to the camels, Chris. They hurt everybody's butts. Peter o' Toole said, quote, I found after a while my bottom was bleeding from bouncing up and down on this snorting great dragon. So he made a little trip to Beirut on one of their days off, and he bought some pink sponge rubber that he shoved into the saddle to try and make it more comfortable. And it turns out everyone else thought this was a really good idea, including the Bedouin extras who kept asking him to go out and get more of the sponge rubber so they could jam it into their saddles as well. They ended up calling him the father of rubber in Arabic. They really appreciated it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You see the miscommunication on set when they're saying, if you need a rubber, go to David o'. Toole.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Peter o'. Toole. Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Peter o'. Toole. Excuse me.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And it's a good thing that o' Toole figured out how to get comfortable on those camels, because he was on them a lot. He told NPR's Fresh Air. Quote, I had a stuntman doing all those shots that are miles and miles away. And David Lean said, look through the lens, Peter. Look at the stuntman. So I did. And he said, you see? No poetry. So I found myself being the poet, and I was the one bouncing up and down miles and miles away. But it was all right. I had a transistor radio plugged into my ears and I had a cigarette going, and I had a little bottle of something in the saddlebag. I was quite comfy. So that is him in those shots that are like two miles away. It's Peter o' Toole just bouncing around

[Chris Winterbauer]

on the camel, drunk, with a cigarette in 120 degree weather.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes. Having a ball. So they spent nine months in the desert in Jordan, according to O', Toole, living in tents. They would shoot for 10 to 12 days straight, and then they would have a few days off, which naturally, Peter o' Toole and Omar Sharif spent in Jerusalem or Beirut, spending literally all of their money at the poker table. They did this multiple times. They lost everything that they made on this movie, like, over and over again. This is my favorite quote from him on this. He said, we weren't sober, but neither were we unconscious. We were fully aware of the pain and agony of watching all of our pennies go down the Suwannee.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Sounds like a great time.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's the thing. In case you can't tell, Omar Sharif and Peter o' Toole became very good friends during the filming of Lawrence of Arabia. As we've discussed, David Lean, not much of a director for actors. He doesn't really care about them that much. He's not particularly encouraging. So they really leaned on each other and I think, you know, very much loved each other by the end of the this. And this shoot was a slog. According to Sam Spiegel, they were trying to capture at most one minute of footage a day. In September of 1961, Robert Bolt, who was still not done with the script, was arrested in London. He had been demonstrating on a campaign for nuclear disarmament when he was arrested. And basically the authorities are like, hey, if you just publicly apologize and take everything back that you said, we'll let you go. But he refused. And so he remained in prison. And it turns out that legally at that time, anything he wrote while imprisoned would have become government property, which meant he could not work on Lawrence of Arabia as long as he remained behind bars. So September 28, production, now in its 117th day, was shut down, and Sam Spiegel paid a little visit to Bolt in prison. This is what Bolt had to say, say, quote, and then all hell broke loose. Sam Spiegel just went absolutely mad. So have these people got to lose their jobs and lose thousands of dollars just so that you can go to heaven when you die? Was his line, which is an amazing argument. So after a fortnight, I bound myself over and came out. I felt that although there were very good reasons why I should, I knew that ultimately I should not have come out. And it was simply because Sam had built up the pressure to such an extent that I couldn't hold out. So Bolt apologized, walked back his statements and was released. However, he quickly realized that he had been pretty heavily manipulated. It turns out production had been shut down anyway because they were running out of scenes to shoot in the desert. And Spiegel knew that they hadn't planned to resume shooting until December and they had budgeted accordingly. Bolt called it, quote, the most shameful moment of my life, and never forgave or spoke to Spiegel again after the film was completed. I suspect what happened here is that Spiegel didn't want the bad press of him being in prison and probably also was in a hurry to get the script done. But still, this is so shitty. On December 18, 1961, filming picked back up in Sevilla, Spain. This is where they shot all the scenes that are supposed to be Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus. Anything that had, like, modern architecture, that's Sevilla. So David Lean was not happy to be leaving the desert and effectively recreating these locations versus finding more authentic ones ones. But he did not have a choice. It was way cheaper to film in Spain, plus a lot more comfortable for cast and crew. And Sam Spiegel had frozen assets there that he could only spend in Spain, so hooray. But it was not easy. They had to ferry all the camels over from Jordan to the new location. And next they moved to Almeria, Spain, which is where they filmed the two most incredible set pieces in the movie. Lawrence's attacks on the Hejaz railway and the siege on Aqaba. And by the way, this movie basically transformed Almeria. It was just a tiny fishing village, and afterwards, it actually became a pretty major filming location. Cool. In fact, location scout and property master Eddie Fowley, who was like David Lean's right hand man, loved it so much that he opened his own hotel there, which became the stomping grounds for many movie Stars. And you can still stay there today. It looks beautiful. So let's talk about Aqaba first, because this sequence is mind blowing. It is not historically accurate. I know I gave Braveheart a lot of shit for the battle of the bridge. Not having a bridge. This is a similar situation. But I don't care. I don't care. It looks amazing. So the entire set was built on a beach called Playa del Algarobico. And when I say built, I mean they built all of those tiny little structures. Most of them were just facades and they could only be shot from the land side. If you're wondering how they safely shot this absolutely bonkers sequence, I would like to turn to a scene from Yellowstone to best explain their play.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Rip, have you figured out how to do this without all this getting trampled? Best we came up with, sir, is like it.

[Lizzie Bassett]

There you go. That's essentially the plan.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I feel like that's also how they shoot Yellowstone.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It is, yes. It was a mile and a half long charge down a hill of shale. There were 100 camels at the front with Omar and Peter leading the charge. And behind them, 500 stallions. Now, they'd done a rehearsal the day before. It went okay, but everybody was aware of the fact that, like this was a rehearsal. It doesn't have the same energy. They would stop and start. They're all really scared about how it's gonna go on the day. And here is Peter o' Toole on Turner Classic Movies explaining how they actually did it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

We were all very nervous and I went into this little tent where we were to start the charge. And Omar was sitting in a chair and he had his black keffir on, but he didn't have the little thing around it. And he had his worry beads and he looked like a nun with a mustache. I said, what do you. What are you doing, Omar? He said, peter, I've been working out the odds. Odd.

[Lizzie Bassett]

What odds?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Whether the Campbell will fall over or I will fall off the camel.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Huh.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And what do you decided? That there's more chance of me falling off the camel than there is of the camel falling over. I said, I see. And what do you intend to do? He said, I'm going to tie myself to the camel. And I said, well, I'm going to get drunk. And Omar said, oh, I'm gonna get drunk too.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I love that, Peter. I've been working out the odds.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I just. I love the sardonic sense of humor of these people.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, it's great. He seems like so much Fun.

[Chris Winterbauer]

They just seem like they were having such a good time together. And despite. Despite it being disastrously unsafe.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Insane. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Peter o' Toole later laughed at a critic who mentioned his quote, look of messianic zeal in this sequence because he was really just terrified and hammer drunk. And if you watch the clip again, knowing that, it's like. Yeah. And by the way, by the time the camels hit the water, Peter o' Toole had a broken thumb. He did not know how it had happened. And Omar Sharif was still tied to his camel, so that part of his plan had worked. But unfortunately, he was tied to it upside down because the ropes had slipped and he was just dangling under its belly in the ocean.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I mean, horribly unsafe, but also incredible.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I know, but it's amazing. Yeah. So when it came to the train derailment sequences, the first thing Lean noticed was that the desert didn't look right. The sand was the wrong color and there were little shrubs all over it. So they hired hundreds of locals to come pick out the shrubs, and poor Eddie Fowley had to import massive amounts of yellow sand to try and match the color of the desert. Desert.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And we should mention they probably destroyed a local ecosystem in dune, for sure. You cannot remove those plants. Deserts have incredibly delicate ecosystems.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, absolutely. They're like, dump more yellow sand, Eddie.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, exactly. The lizards are like, for the love of God, stop, Please stop.

[Lizzie Bassett]

The production team built a mile of train tracks and they trucked in two early 20th century German and Belgian trains in order to get the scene where the train completely explodes and derails. They knew there was one way to do it, and that was to completely explode and derail a train. So that is what they did.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's crazy.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yep.

[Chris Winterbauer]

At first I thought, oh, maybe this must be miniature.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No.

[Chris Winterbauer]

But then it's a full sized train. It's clearly not. Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Sam Spiegel not happy about this, because you only get one shot to get this right, and it's very expensive. They did do a lot of planning to try and ensure that it happened the way that they wanted. They actually placed greased metal plates underneath the sand where they were trying to encourage the train to derail so it would sort of shoot down that direction, which worked. And they figured it would take 10 pounds of gunpowder to cut through the rails, another 10 pounds to push the train car off the tracks. So they set that up, and when it came time to get the shot, the train conductor had to start up the train, get it going, and literally jump out of the train. Before it exploded, I mean.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And David Lean blew up the goddamn bridge at the end of Bridge on the River Kwai.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Sure did. He loves to blow up a bridge or a railroad trestle. Now, in the other train scene with all the horses, they were supposed to obviously catch the horses after they get loose. But if you watched the movie like I did and thought, how the fuck did they catch the rest of those horses? The answer is they did not. Most of them ran off into the Spanish Desert and were never seen again. Bye.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Wow.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yep, one shot at that one, too, because you lost all your horses. But it quickly became clear to everyone that Spain could not provide a vast, bleak enough desert for the Turkish massacre scene. So they moved production to Morocco. And Morocco was a nightmare. King Hassan II had pledged a lot of help to the crew, and it did provide a ton of camels and the actual Royal Moroccan army to serve as extras in this sequence. But every day brought a new problem. There weren't enough camels. The water supply was contaminated with salt. The troops wanted more money, or, as we'll learn, earn any money. It was hot as balls and in fact, the troops just wanted to get paid, period. But somehow their wages had vanished into a bank account in Paris, by some reports. Not sure whose. They got so pissed that at one point, they started firing live rounds over the heads of David Lean, the cast and the crew. Okay, not great. Not great. They also realized the camel riders in Morocco didn't look anything like the riders in Jordan. So they had to have all of the saddles remade and teach all the extras how to ride camels. Everyone was pissed. Everyone also got sick. Malaria, enteritis, just random rashes. Morocco was not fun. Plus, it was taking David Lean forever to capture the shots. He was apparently averaging 24 seconds of usable footage a day here.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And when you're making a movie that's ultimately going to be close to four hours, I mean, it's hundreds of shooting days. It's just. It's crazy. I mean, every frame is a painting. It's beautiful. You can't argue with the results. But I cannot imagine how frustrating that process would be.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Insane. Sam Spiegel apparently flew in to give everyone a pep talk that basically amounted to, you're doing great, sweetie, but can you please, for the love of God, go faster?

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's the same as Kurosawa, you know what I mean? All these guys, like, they're getting the notes and they're like, please hurry up. Please hurry up.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Looks so good. Good job, good job. Make it faster. Also, I didn't even get to this, but Sam Spiegel apparently would like fake heart attacks throughout this production when things weren't going the way he wanted them to. And at one point was actually flown across the desk, strapped to a gurney by the Red Cross. He was fine. Anyway.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's like Jodie Foster faking appendicitis. Tony Collette, Toni Collette. That's what it was on your movie. Fights. Sorry, I got confused. Yeah, yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And finally, after 313 days of shooting, production wrapped.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's crazy.

[Lizzie Bassett]

The shoot had lasted almost as long as the actual Arab revolt itself.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I mean, what was the Shining? 185 days.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And that's always got nothing on David Lean.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

And they weren't in the desert. Although it seems like Peter o' Toole and Omar Sharif had a better time than anybody on the Shining did. So back in London, as post production was about to commence, David Lean, who didn't wear his goggles, actually had to have an operation on his eyeball because he had sand embedded behind his eyelid. David, turns out you need your eyes. You're a director.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Post production began in September of 1962. And remember that day, because Sam Spiegel had already planned to premiere the film at the Royal Film Performance, which was attended by the Queen and was scheduled for December 10th of 1962.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Well, good thing your director's an editor.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, he also had an absolute legend to lean on by his side, and that was Ann Coates. She had been working as an editor for about 10 years. At this point, though, she actually started off as a nurse at a plastic surgery hospital. And she was looking for work when she ran into a friend who was working on Albert Finney screen test. Lean hired her to cut the early screen test and was so impressed with her work, he hired her to cut the entire movie. She would go on to edit everything from Murder on the Orient Express, Elephant Man, Lady Jane. What about Bob? Erin Brockovich. Unfaithful. And her final credit was actually 50 shades of gray.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Interesting.

[Lizzie Bassett]

She had a lot of range. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I mean, we should mention this movie has one of the most famous cuts in the history of film, Chris.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That is thanks to Anne Coates. Can you explain what you're talking about?

[Chris Winterbauer]

There's a moment. Well, can I briefly mention, also, the only great part of Prometheus is Michael Fassbender's obsession with Peter Otoole's character in Lawrence of Arabia. And the trick is Mutt minding that it hurts. But there's a moment where Peter o' Toole has lit a match and they're discussing his mission, which is going to be insane. And it does a close up where it's almost a two shot of the profile of Peter o' Toole's face and the match. And it's perfectly positioned in the frame so that the match is about a third of the way up the frame. And he blows it out really quickly. And you smash cut on that action to a landscape shot, a telephoto landscape shot of the desert with a blood red sky as the sun is just breaking the horizon. And it's one of the most breathtaking modern feeling match cuts. Yes, I would say like, almost like a stream of consciousness match cut because there's no actual action being matched. Right. There's no geography being matched. And yet it is so. It so wonderfully transports you to a time and place and it feels so magical that there's really nothing like it. It's amazing. It takes your breath away even watching it today.

[Lizzie Bassett]

You have Ann Coates to thank for that. That was her idea. She introduced David Lean to the idea of smash combination. And this particular edit was, I believe, her doing. It's amazing.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

She and David lean worked from 9am to midnight, seven days a week, in order to edit the 31 miles of footage. They ran into quite a few problems. Some of the negatives had been damaged by fingerprints. They actually fingerprinted the entire crew to try and figure out who had done this. It turned out it was someone from the lab. There was a bunch of stuff, the sand that they had brought in to like post sync the edit got dumped outside in England where it got rained on, turned into a pile of, of mud. And according to Coates, the original cut was of course compromised by the speed at which they were forced to do it. She said, we cut it very, very fast for a 3 hour, 40 minute version to open for the Queen. We could have done it with another couple months to get it really trimmed down, maybe by 10 minutes. I love that.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I was going to say.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, yeah. You can't cut much out of this.

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[Lizzie Bassett]

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[Lizzie Bassett]

Now you talked about the score, and I am so excited to tell you about this. Chris Lean wanted to use the same composer he had used from the Bridge on the River Kwai, but Spiegel had another person in mind. And the biggest problem was that neither of these guys, they felt, were capable of pulling off the Arabian themes. They were both British, so they're like, okay, the Brits will split the British themes and we'll hire Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian for the Arabian themes. But the two Brits screened the film and they thought it was hot trash, so they declined to be involved, leaving Lean with Khachaturian on the Arabian themes, Benjamin Britton on the British themes, and a young French composer named Maurice Jarre, who would be coordinating the efforts between the two. But Maurice started writing a little bit of music under everyone's noses, just in case he might get the chance to contribute. Lucky for him, Khachaturian could not get permission to leave the ussr and Britain said he needed at least a year to score something of this scope. So Jar thought, surely now it's my turn. And Spiegel said, nope, I am hiring Richard Rodgers instead.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Oh wow.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes. Of Rogers and Hammerstein.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Wow.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Well. And the Sound of Didn't he do

[Lizzie Bassett]

the Sound of Music well, they wrote the Sound of Music. Yes. I mean, that's.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, yeah. But I'm saying, like, the music feel. I know. I know he's not right. I'm just trying to think of examples that are not Oklahoma. To try to justify this.

[Lizzie Bassett]

The King and I.

[Chris Winterbauer]

The King and I. There we go. Thank you.

[Lizzie Bassett]

But Richard Rogers turned in some theme options, and David Lean was like, what? What? What is this? What is this trash you're serving up to me? And then as they were going over what he had turned in, one of the pianists who was in the room playing the music pointed out, this is actually an old military march. I know this one. It's not even an original piece of music. And David Lean was pissed. So finally he turned to good old Maurice Jarre, who had been sitting in the corner the whole time and said, what do you have? And he walked over to the piano and played what would become the main theme of Lawrence of Arabia. And David Lean was thrilled. He insisted that Jarre get the job immediately. Jarre was thrilled, I would assume, until he found out that he had six weeks to score the entire film. And he did it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's crazy.

[Lizzie Bassett]

In a 1984 interview, Jarre said of the experience, quote, I don't want to bore you with the story, but I barely survived this experience from the physical point of view, having to do everything in six weeks. I was only sleeping about two or three hours a night. I don't want to have this kind of experience too often.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Here's what I'll say. Having just watched Bridge on the River Kwai and this movie back to back, there are two ways in which this movie feels more timeless to me than Bridge on the River Kwai overall. One is obviously the filming technology. They use 70 millimeter film. And the other is Maurice Jar's score.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It's so good.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I mean. I mean, Bridge on the River Quiet is an amazing movie. And they use a military theme as score in that movie as well, like a whistled theme by the British soldiers. It's very effective, but it feels dated in a way that this movie does not. And the other thing that helps, I believe, because he only had six weeks, they probably underscored it a little bit for the time. And that is so effective because it just allows the desert to be quiet in a lot of scenes. And the dialogue scenes can just play as dialogue scenes.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Omar Sharif's entrance. There's almost no music underneath the first few minutes before that, and then it's perfect.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. So I think it weirdly worked in Their favor. I feel terribly for Maurice Jar, but, wow, what a score.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. And of course, he would go on to score Dr. Zhivago, which is, like, one of the most beautiful film scores of all time and many, many more. But this was his big break.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And A Passage to India. I think he did David Lean's last film as well.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes, he did. So this would Indeed premiere on December 10, 1962, in front of Queen Lizzie herself. Six days later, it had its New York premiere, where it received a standing ovation. But David Lean received a warning from. I promised he would come back. David O. Selznick. Oh, Selznick told him, quote, they will do to you what they tried to do to me on Gone with the Wind. They will try to make you cut it. Don't let them. I refuse to let them cut Gone with the Wind, which they said was going to be hopeless if it wasn't cut because of the length. They could only get two shows a day. Day. It's made more money than any film ever made. Don't let them touch Lawrence. Selznick was right on the money. Cinema owners began complaining about the length immediately, saying it would only allow for one screening a day. They can't make their money back. So In January of 1963, Spiegel ordered an additional cut of around 17 to 21 minutes off of the movie. According to a 1989 LA Times article, the most controversial of the truncated scenes suggesting Lawrence is homosexual and sadomastochistic tendencies gained mythic proportion after it was trimmed. The restored and very subtle scene proves an industry truism. Where there's smoke, there's often just smoke.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Is the suggested scene when he's being tortured by the Turks?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And for our audience, if you're unfamiliar, if you haven't watched the movie in a while, he's strapped down, his shirt's been removed, and he's being whipped. And he seems to be able to handle it better than at first they're expecting. But then the guard smiles at him and he looks back and he sees the Turkish general or commander, right. With his shirt open, watching from the next room. And there's a suggestion that it's sexual. It's sexual. And I think, based on what I know of T.E. lawrence, it's suggested to me that maybe he's gonna be raped.

[Lizzie Bassett]

100%.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. And that's how I read it.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, he writes very specifically in his own works that he was.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. And so I feel like they're trying to suggest that when they can't this is obviously before Deliverance, right? No one's done, and so they can't put it on screen. But I feel like that's what they're suggesting.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It is. Yes.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. But it's very subtle. It's not like a protracted scene.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's the thing. It did not need to be cut at all. And in fact. And it's an important scene because it kind of helps with the motivation that he goes into the next Turkish massacre with. Without it, it's a bit weird.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I think it's too subtle, actually. That's why the last third of the movie feels a little rickety to me in terms of tracking where he is emotionally. But, you know, again, that may just be me.

[Lizzie Bassett]

So in 1971, an even shorter version was released theatrically, and it seemed that all hope for David Lean's original vision had been lost. But in 1986, a film restorer named Robert Harris pitched Columbia on a restoration. Now, he couldn't get it done due to contractual issues, but Lawrence superfans Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg could. They rescued the project. And in 1989, a fully restored version premiered in Los Angeles, New York and dc. Dc. Now, one person who was not in love with Lawrence of Arabia was A.W. lawrence. It turns out he actually hadn't seen the final shooting script that Bolt had been writing until July of 1962, which was way too late to address anything. And he really, really didn't like it. He felt it had been turned into an anti war movie, which was not what he had agreed to, nor was it what he had intended. And he fiercely denied that there was any way his brother had taken part in the Turkish massacre, even though it seems like he almost certainly did. But there is one historical distortion that many say does harm the movie a little bit, and I am inclined to agree. In the film, it's implied that Lawrence doesn't know about the Sykes Picolt agreement until it's effectively too late. And he's already made all these promises to Prince Faisal. In reality, he almost certainly knew about it long before any of this happened. At the very least, he knew that England was not being genuine in terms of the Arab independence that they were offering. And he probably always knew that he's a spy. Like, he is very aware. Also, the Sykes P Cold Agreement, I believe, was basically public. By many accounts. This tormented him deeply, and he may have actually given Feisal a heads up about it early on, which is also interesting, because that would have been some kind of treason, I would think, on the Part of the British Mm. It's one of the few instances in which Lean and Bolt seem to want to uncomplicate T.E. lawrence. And speaking of another instance of this, as promised, I want to come back to the homoerotic undertones of this movie. When asked by the Washington Post in 1989 if the film is, quote, pervasively homoerotic, David Lean said, yes, of course it is. Throughout. I'll never forget standing there in the desert once with some of these tough Arab buggers. Some of the toughest we have. And I suddenly thought, he's making eyes at me. And he was. So it does pervade it, the whole story. And certainly Lawrence was very, if not entirely, homosexual. We thought we were being very daring at the time. Lawrence and Omar Lawrence and the Arab boys. Now, this in and of itself is another oversimplification and sensationalization of T.E. lawrence. I want to say again, Lawrence was almost certainly asexual. The only sexual experience he seems to have had was not consensual. It took place when he was imprisoned by the term. I'm not knocking David Lean here. He made a really phenomenal movie. Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I think, if anything, he's actually kind of misstating what they did, in my opinion, because I actually feel like, what's so wonderful about his relationship with Omar

[Lizzie Bassett]

Sharif, It's a romantic relationship.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's romantic, but it is in, like, a camaraderie sense. Right. In that they are like. It is a romantic brotherly love, and their estimation of each other grows and their affection grows across the movie. And it is homoromantic, but it's not presented as sexual. And that's really important distinction. And I'm glad they don't tip it in that direction, you know what I mean, in the movie, because that's not honest to the character. Yeah. It just feels like a quote that's not actually representative, in my opinion, of the final film.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I agree. I actually really like the on screen relationship between Lawrence and Ali in this movie and between. You know, I think Omar Sharif and Peter o' Toole definitely leaned into it in a way that I'm not sure everybody would at the time. Time. And it is a very romantic relationship.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Totally.

[Lizzie Bassett]

In the end, Lawrence of Arabia won seven out of its 10 Oscar nominations and remains, I think it's safe to say, one of the greatest films of all time. That ends our coverage of Lawrence of Arabia. There's so much more that we could have gotten into. I don't have time, but I really loved this movie. I Loved diving into it. And I want to learn more about T.E. lawrence. He's extremely fascinating. Chris, what went right?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Well, thank you, Lizzie, for driving us through the desert on this one. It's an amazing story. It's an amazing movie. David Lean's an incredible director, so I. And I actually don't really know his filmography. I've seen Great Expectations, I think was the one that I've watched that he did, but I don't know his filmography pre Summertime very well.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, I want to watch some of the earlier. The Noel Coward stuff I would like to see.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, exactly. I've seen, you know, Summertime Through a Past to India, I think I've seen, including Ryan Stoddard. But anyway, I want to give mine to just the two actors that I thought transcended all of this, and that is Omar Sharif and Claude Rains and mostly Omar Sharif because he's the bigger character in this. He's great, and you can just tell he's a star the minute he shows up. And what a performance. And good job on the production for realizing that you're going a different direction. But just kudos to Omar Shrif for, like, he took a small part and then he turned it into a huge part. And that's really cool.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. And became arguably one of the first Middle Eastern Hollywood movie stars ever. And he was wonderful. I have to give it to David Lean. I just think, you know, the dedication to detail. You said every shot is like a painting. It really is. And he was willing to go live in the desert for. He was there for. For like, three years, because he was there a year before everybody else was. It's just so beautiful. And I very much admire his. Even though he didn't, as Omar Sharif said, he did not like actors. I very much admire his willingness to explore unlikable characters in the way that he does without trying to stand off some of their rougher edges for the most part. I love this movie. I'm so glad I owned it on Blu Ray. We must get some kind of projector so that we can watch this on a big screen, because it is phenomenal. Well, that wraps up our coverage of

[Chris Winterbauer]

Larry of Arabia or in Friends, Lawrence of Alabia as the name.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh, God.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Phoebe's sister of the movie she's in.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Chris, if people would like to support this podcast, how can they do that?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Cross the desert of Nefud and tell a family member or friend what went wrong? Pretty good. Give it a listen. Number two, leave a rating and review on whatever podcast you're listening on Number three. Subscribe on that podcaster so that you're getting our episodes every Monday and occasionally Friday. Number four, you can now get bonus episodes through Apple or Spotify. Sign up for our $5 special features program and you will get at least one bonus episode every month. These tend to be reviews of new releases. We just did Project Hail Mary. We've got a bunch of fun stuff coming out for you guys over the next few months with the summer release Number five. If you would like even more from us, you can join our patreon head to www.patreon.com whatwentwrongpodcast and for $5 you get the bonus episodes. You get an ad free RSS feed, you get newsletters, extra credit posts, musings from us. And for $50 you can get a Peter O' Toolian shout out just like one of these.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Adrian Peng Correa Angeline Renee Cor Cook Beatrix Earhart Ben Schindelman Blaze Ambrose Brian Donahue oh my God, I do not sound like Peter o'. Toole. Brittany Morris Brooke Cameron Smith C Grace B. Chris Leal Chris Zacher David Friscolanti Darren and Dale Conkling Don Scheibel M. Zodia 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. How far away from received pronunciation is this? Probably pretty far. Grace Potter, Half Greyhound James McAvoy Jason Frankel JJ Rapido Jory Hillpiper Jose Emiliano Salto Del Giorgio Karina Canaba Kate Elrington, Kathleen olson, Amy Elgerslager McCoy Lazy Freddy Lena LJ Lydia Howes Mark Bertha Mariposas Humans Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath Nate the Knife Rosemary Southwood Roger. That's the only one that sounds all right with this terrible accent. Sadie. Just Sadie Scott Oshita Soman Chainani Steve Winterbaugh, Suzanne Johnson the Provost Family. The O's still sound just like Os and there is no spoon. Thank you all so much and I'm very sorry for this. I'm sorry for that offensive British accent.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Well, I mean, there were no women for you to play in this shout out, so we had to go with that. Well, Lizzy, why don't you tell us what we have coming next week? A Journey into Pure imagination.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's right. We have, I believe, an oft requested film coming up. We have Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and we have a very special guest expert joining us on this episode. So come back in a week for that.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yes and learn how shooting in a studio can be just as unsafe as shooting in the desert. We're very excited. Thank you guys so much for listening. Until next week, this has been what Went Wrong.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Bye Bye. To support what Went Wrong and gain access to both bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad free RSS feed. You can also visit our website what Went Wrongpod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer, post production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura woods and edited by H. Con Sam.