Armageddon: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows
and more. We are your two hurdling asteroids of hurdling
facteroidst whatever. There's no bad ideas in brainstorming C Plus.

(00:29):
I'm Alex Hagel and I'm Jordan Roun Talk and Jordan.
Today we're talking about one of the biggest, dumbest, most
ass kick in his dude's rock movies of an action
nineties peak.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
I'm a byon Era.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
I'm stunned into inarticulateness by this movie's the purity of
its vision.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
We're talking about Armageddon, which turns twenty five this June.
Wow ah, the grim passage of time. It is the
movie that taught us all that oil rig workers can
with the right mind. Ontage makes successful astronauts, that there's
no problem that Uncle Sam can't blow up real good,
and that the leathery glam muppets from Aerosmith still had

(01:10):
hits in them.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
It's like the Mister Show sketch blowing up the Moon.
Well yeah, wait, play golf on it, bounce an egg
on it? What else could you do with it?

Speaker 2 (01:20):
I don't really remember this movie that much as a kid.
Having said all that, I remember this in term that
I remember that damn song more than the movie. But
for me, my preferred Michael Bay Jerry Bruckheimer joint is
The Rock and then Conair. I love con Air so deeply.
That's my preferred large plane movie. But you know, man,

(01:42):
Armageddon is the highest non transformers grossing film in the
bay ouvre.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
It is in the Criterion collection.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
We will discuss.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Rotten Tomatoes Criterion collection.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Even Michael Bay is baffled by that that might be
the lowest rated movie in the Criterion collection.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
I think it has to. That's an incredible, dubious honor.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah, but uh, you know, as I quote the Android
from Alien so much on this podcast, I admire its purity.
It's pre oversaturation era Ben Affleck, It's Bruce Willis, It's
got a ragtag group of character actors. It's got a
training montage, It's got a sweet bespoke vehicle jumping a canyon.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Uh, what what more you want?

Speaker 2 (02:29):
It's one of the all time dudes rock movies.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
I gotta say, I've never heard that term dude's rock before,
at least in the relation to movies. Tell me, tell
me more about that.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Oh well, it goes hand in hand with dad movies.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
It's typically like dad movies are like Apollo thirteen, though
there's like a historical element, So you take it dadly.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
I mean, you take a dad movie and you dial
up the stupidity and.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
You have more explosions less Tom Hanks.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah, and occasionally I think it crosses into like combat sports,
like I would describe Karate Kid or Rocky or blood
Sport as a dude rock movie. Rocky's better than that. Well,
no it's not. I mean, but because dude's rock is
not of its value negative, it's just it's it's it's
value neutral. It's like it can apply to anything, like
I would describe forty seven ronin like a cure Kurosavo

(03:15):
movies as dudes rock movies. You know, like Good, Bad
and Ugly is a dude's rock movie. It's just a movie.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
Dude's rock. Is that like a celebration of dudes as
a dude's rock? Okay, I just want to make sure.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Yeah, of caricatured but not necessarily negative masculine values.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Okay, it's a very articulate answer to inarticulate question.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Well, it's important that they're not misogynist. You know, I
would not describe Transformers as a dude's rock movie because
it's it's got leering, grotesque misogyny in it and uh
also racist.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah, loves his daughter very much, loves his daughter.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Be afflic ben Affleck. You know, there's there's this, there
is a sweetness to their romance even though it's very stupid.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
And animal crackers. Yeah, so I can't eat animal crackers
to this day actually because of that.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Because of this movie.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
It just I always think of it. Yeah, that's funny.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
Well okay, sorry, this concludes my thesis on dudes rock movies.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
Well, thank you, I mean I asked you, so I
appreciate that. But yeah, I mean, when I was a
little boy, I loved two things A tremendous amount out
of space and live Tyler. My beloved that thing you
do cemented her in my heart as my dream girl
for a time, so I was very much primed for Armageddon.
This was the era when I was also graduating from
PG to PG thirteen movies, and as everyone knows, PG

(04:36):
thirteen movies hit different when you're actually in the age
in the thirteen year old range. So this was very
special to me, although I have to agree with you.
Independence Day sort of got to me first, and we
are a big Sean Connery household, so The Rock is
probably my favorite Michael Bay movie.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
But losers go home and whine about their best winners
go home and the prom queen.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
You know, of all our years of friendship, I've never
heard you do a Sean Connery. That was pretty stunning.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Oh no, I did the Finding Forester one. My name
is William Forrester. I'm that one up there.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
That's very good. Wow. And I've been watching The Succession
lately and listening to Brian Cox to his equally gravelly
Scottish accent. I'm never going to do Succession. I know.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
I used to work for the Murdochs. I'm not watching.
I'm not watching a thorough humanization of their inter family squabbles.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
I you know, I delayed a long time for a
similar reason. But but yeah, you know, I'm thoroughly charmed
by Michael Bay's skill for blowing stuff up in New
and exciting ways. There was a great quote from a
making of featurette for Michael Bay on the set of Armageddon.
This movie makes the rock His previous action thriller looked
like My Dinner with Entre.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
He is a quote machine.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Man. It's an alreadier reference than I would have expected
from Michael Bay to be honest with you, But yeah,
I you know, I know how much you hate. I
don't want to miss a thing. I actually have a
soft spot for it. But I have a good reason.
It was the final slow dance number at my high
school dances. And you know, as every self conscious guy knows,
slow dances are the safe dances because all you have

(06:12):
to do is hold on to your date for dear
life and just sort of sway from side to side
a rhythmically until it's over the sound of those strings. Man,
I mean, to this day, it's so potent. It still
makes my blood pressure spike because I always associate it
with the sense of, Okay, this is the last dance,
This is your last chance to make your move that
you've been avoiding all night. So I still have good

(06:34):
memories question mark of that song, memories, potent memories of
that song. I say, I want to sign a value
judgment like dudes rock no value judgment. I gotta say.
We were talking about Bruce Willis shooting at Ben Affleck
in this movie. Way wrong. Answer became a minor catch
phrase among my social circle at this age, which is

(06:56):
probably preferable to Austin Power's references. Yeah, yeah, that's a
little lessonnoying well. From Michael Bay's visceral hatred of Ben
Affleck's natural teeth to the allegation couldn't say the fifth
episode we referenced ben afflex teeth in relation to arm
Again them Finally, I'm glad we finally put this anecdote

(07:17):
in its proper home.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
To the allegation that the film was directly stolen out
of a lunch room conversation about the similarly asteroid themed
film Deep Impact, to that damn Aerosmith song Here's everything
you didn't know about Armageddon. There's really no way to

(07:39):
talk about arm Again without talking about Deep Impact. You know,
we had this whole thing in the mid nineties or
where we talked about and it happens probably still, but
it's how we talk about like, you know, we had
con Air and then the isn't there a Stephen Sigall
movie is conn Air Air Force one? And like a
Steven Sagall movie on a plane?

Speaker 1 (07:55):
Right? And then we had Dante's peak.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
Called Volcano No backdrafts the firefighting one though two volcano
ones around the same time.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Oh yeah, what was the other one? Well, we talk
about when we talk about armageddon.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yes, so, but there is this thing of like, okay,
you know, multiple projects get green light, and two films
that are suspiciously similar come out around the exact same time,
and usually the bigger, dumber, sexier one wins, which is
what happened with asteroid movies.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
I mean, I've never seen and really have never given
a second thought to Deep Impact is do you know
anything more? Have you seen it? Is it any good? Nope? Okay,
no idea.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
And I feel bad that I feel bad because I'm
contributing to this whole epidemic, but no, I know nothing
about it.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Now we will, though.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
According to a May nineteen ninety eight issue of star Log,
producers David Brown and Richard Zanek came up with the
concept for Deep Impact sometime in the late nineteen seventies
when they were contemplating a way to update the nineteen
fifty one film When Worlds Collide by Paramount.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
That's such an incredible title for a movie. Hit each other.
It's a static X. Now, this is what it's like
when world's good. H You ready to go? So I
just told you how much I like don't want to
miss a thing. You think I know that? I think
I know a static X song.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
Well, that movie was itself based on the nineteen thirty
three science fiction novel of the same name, concerning the
coming destruction of Earth by a rogue star and humanity's
efforts to build a space arc to transport a group
of men and women to a planet orbiting the star.
Screenplays were created and drafted, but the project landed in

(09:34):
development hell for years and stuck there.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
Do you remember this really short lived show in the
mid nineties called Earth two No Oh. It was this
really high budget, really high concept show about similar to that.
Maybe people try to build a space arc I think
it starts with the blast off of the space arc
and they I can't remember if they're just going through
space orf they actually land on a new world. I

(09:58):
think they land in a new planet. It was strange.
It only lasted a season but I think Steven Spielberg,
or at least Ambulan Entertainment his production company, had something
to do with it. It was really good, and that
is relevant because.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
I have a joke to make. That was the producer's
note for the Passion of the Christ. They were like,
can we change it to the lift off of the
Space Arc. I think that's just sexier that way. By
the mid nineties, Steven Spielberg, fresh off Jurassic Park, was
tapped though by coincidence, to work on Deep Impact, though
he had been actually working on a different film about

(10:35):
an asteroid colliding with Earth. This really gives rise to
the universal or the collective unconscious thing with just a
bunch of different people.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
Being like asteroids man.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
His project was based on a book by sci fi
legend Arthur C.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
Clark oh Wow, who.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
Most notable in the mainstream for two thousand and one
of Space Odyssey, but often thought of as one of
the Big three or four of mid century sci fi,
with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heiland in Alibert.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
A sequel that was like twenty ten A Space Like
Adventure or a space.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Hog twenty ten. In the meantime, A space Hog adventure
written by Arthur C. Clark. I said this had to
be a non degreation one.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
Here we are.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
Spielberg had already optioned the rights for Clark's novel, which
was in nineteen ninety three called The Hammer of God,
which is Metal, and he had planned to produce and
direct this film for his DreamWorks studio, which at this
point was still kind of new, But then he decided
to simply merge these projects with Xanak and Brown. So
you have two roads joining in a wood of asteroid

(11:46):
movies and this is this is a Bruce.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
Joel Rubin favorite Dolly painting to Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote Deep Impact, told Creative Screenwriting
magazine Steve Even Spielberg called me and said he would
like me to write a movie that was inspired by
When Worlds Collide. Stephen and I spent time at his
office and his home talking about what we wanted about
who these characters should be. But we knew we couldn't
make a movie about two planets on a collision course
with the Earth and trying to save humanity by flying

(12:17):
one hundred movie to the rogue planet to start a
new world. Even in the nineteen fifties. That felt kind
of bogus. Sure, so we began to figure out a
more realistic scenario. I began months of research into what
might really cause an extinction level event and was led
to the comet that killed the dinosaurs. Why couldn't that
happen to us?

Speaker 1 (12:37):
I thought, that's long Like, yeah, I was really researching this,
and I found us a little known incident from the past.
It's like, oh, the one that everyone knows, And so
Deep Impact was born.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Steve Spielberg had still planned to direct this film himself,
but then he got overworked with amishtad amistad? Is it amishtad?
Like Rumspringer, I'm like Sean Connery sane, I'm a stadd
I'm that one up there. Touchstone Pictures had also just

(13:10):
announced Armageddon, set to be released in summer of ninety eight. So,
faced with this dilemma and not wanting to look like
Johnny Come Lately to the whole asteroid craze. Imagine if
this is like the fifties and we got a bunch
of novelty themed asteroid songs like Spice Girls doing like
do the Asteroid. So the team behind Deep Impact decided

(13:34):
to hire Mimi later to direct the film, and Spielberg
was going to executive produce. And then Rubin has this
accusation that comes out in a book called Tales from
the Script.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
That's great.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, it is fifty Hollywood screenwriters share their stories, and
this is aggregated everywhere when people talk about Deep Impact
versus Armageddon. So I actually paid for the kindle copy
this book, and it's sure enough. It is in there.
It is in there is a real quote. It's not
made up.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
This guy wrote Jacob's Ladder, he wrote Ghost.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
Sleeping with the Enemy. He's he's not a nobody, and
his quote in that book is as Thus, I was
working on Deep Impact and I had lunch with the
president of Disney, someone who had produced another movie I
had worked on. We're having lunch in the Disney commissary
and he starts asking me about Deep Impact. I just
started freely and openly talking about it. I had no

(14:28):
idea he was planning Armageddon. He was taking notes on everything.
I was saying, that's a red flag.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
I wasn't really literally giving him my script, but I
was talking to him enough about it that he could
pick up the genre, the tone, the character driven aspect
of it. That was really clever. I thought he was
figuring out how to do a movie in juxtaposition to
the movie that I was in the process of writing.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
Wrong.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
He was getting all of my ideas. It was really
fascinating that there was a kind of subterfuge that was
happening with his head of a major studio. When I
found out that Disney was doing Armageddon, I went, wow,
that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
Wow, the barely restrained pass of a cresh and then
this rite is tremendous.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
I didn't know this, but Armageddon has what was rumored
to be nine credited screenwriters. That's what Ebert wrote in
his in his contemporaneous review.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
But it doesn't have that many. I imagine in the
context of nine screenwriters, this is what you caught.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yes, exactly. So the credited people on it, the WGA
people on it are Jonathan Hensley, who did work on
conn Air in nineteen ninety seven, JJ Abrams, Enemy of
the Pod, jj Abrams.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
Little Nepo Baby Stoppers opening for Taylor Swift. Do you
know that JJ Abrams also worked on Casper. I forget
if it was like as a script doctor. If he
was credited but yeah, he has some kind of Spielberg connection.
I think Spielberg is supposed to be his mentor, right,
I gotta find out exactly how he is. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
His mom was a Pea Boy Peabody winning TV producer.
His dad worked at CBS, and they moved out to
LA after being in New York. His sister is a screenwriter.
Yeah anyway. Tony Gilroy, who is one of the credited writers,
told Rotten Tomatoes in two thousand and seven, there were

(16:23):
so many people working on that Armageddon. I don't know
what number writer I was. I worked on it for
a couple months. I did exactly what I wanted to do.
I got in, I did what I had to do,
made some people happy.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
I got out. Shane Selerno is another credited writer. Yeah, right,
I was in the show. Shane Selerno.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
Another credited writer is the guy who he wrote that
he like, self funded and self produced that Salinger documentary
from a couple of years back. Oh and a guy
one of the guys who wrote Outbreak, Robert Roy Coole,
is also credited with a story by But that's just
the tip of the Armageddon. Iceberg steroid incredible visuals you're

(17:03):
coming up with here for your Analogis I really really
admire that?

Speaker 1 (17:07):
But yes, you are correct. There is a New York
Times magazine feature in August nineteen ninety eight the detailed
the Armageddon scripts, reported eight writers' strong development process. So
let me read from that. After Jonathan Hensley conceived a
story he described as Dirty Does and Goes to Outer Space,
sold the pitch the Disney, and delivered to producer Jerry
Bruckheimer a script that mapped out the film's essential structure.

(17:29):
He eventually left to work on another project, which was
to be his directorial debut. And I'd also be remiss
not to mention the involvement of all time action producer
Gail Anne Hurd, who produced a number of immortal action
bangers like Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Tremors, and The Walking Dead.
James Cammeron's ex wife, Oh, I forgot about that. I

(17:50):
knew they were codvolved. Yes, okay. At that point in
the spring of nineteen ninety seven, the film Armageddon was
already set for production and slatted for a Lie nineteen
ninety eight release. The director and star war in place.
Additional casting had already begun and then a parade of
additional writers had at the script. Tony Gilroy did extensive

(18:10):
work on the opening fifteen pages, with contributions from Paulitanzio
and Jeffrey Abrams, who I think is j J. Abrams
then concentrated on the backstories of the individual driller spacemen
reflected in a montage summoning them to the NASA headquarters,
and continued to do scene work throughout. Anne Bitterman focused
on Ben Affleck and Live Tyler's romance, as well as

(18:31):
the father daughter conflict between Liv Tyler and Bruce Willis,
and Shane Salerno fleshed out several action sequences, while Scott
Rosenberg contributed Steve Buscemi's sarcasm and Ben Affleck's horny animal
crackers bit. I love that we know the name of
the person who came up with the animal crackers walking
along Lived Tyler's Torso that is tremendous. I'm so glad.

(18:54):
I want to send him a fan letter or a
box of dogs, one or the other. Oh, and he
also the rendition of the crew singing John Denver's leaving
on a jet plane right before they left. That is okay,
so my favorite and least favorite bit of this movie
that came from the same mind that Scance. Robert Town,
who is an incredibly legendary screenwriter, wrote Chinatown Shampoo. The

(19:17):
last detail this is.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
The craziest one to me. They got the guy who
wrote Chinatown to come and punch up the Big Rock
Hit Earth.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
Movie from the same spirits that brought you Large Plane,
Large Boat, Large Rock Hit Earth. It's either Large Rock
Hit Earth or US blow up Large Rock.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
Those are the two working titles.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
I'm pitching. Yes. Robert Town also one of Hollywood's most
famous script doctors. He wrote some of the more serious
scenes in this movie, the ones that really underpinned the
world's imminent doom, and during production, Jonathan hens Lay, the
guy who basically conceived of the story, continue to function
in kind of an editorial capacity, patching together various pages

(20:05):
contributed by all the other writers. But this turned out
to be too many writers again, eight writers, some would
say nine. In June nineteen ninety eight, a Writer's Guild
of America arbitration committee decided the only five of these,
including JJ Abrams, could actually attach their name to the
movie and the credits.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
That's insane, and that's how you note really is getting
nuts when the WGA gets involved anyway, So yeah, draw
your own conclusions about how that story evolved.

Speaker 1 (20:33):
From all of that, the blame is spread.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah, there's also this hilarious I mean, the DVD commentary
for this has become like a totem for people online
because of how hilarious it is. It is between Michael
Bay and Ben Affleck. So we're going to draw a
lot from that. Just when we keep saying from the
DVD commentary, it's well worth your time. And this hilarious
quote about the rewrite process comes from Michael Bay himself.

(20:56):
This writer begged me to rewrite the script. He rewrote
fifty three pages in two days. And when I read
the script, it was pure sh that's like Karawakian figures.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
I was gonna say that.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Quote reminds me of like a Drill tweet, Like this
whole thing smacks of gender. I say, as I flipped
the picnic table over and turned the fourth of July
into the fourth of.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
Michael Bay.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
As Drill tweets, he does not name the writer. I
assume I pray it's JJ. It kind of has to be, like,
I don't think there's anyone who's like, who's like that young,
that Michael Bay would be like your script sucks, bro,
and adding more fuel to the Armageddon versus Deep Impact fire.
Apparently this is from moviefone, and a source told moviefhone

(21:47):
in twenty eighteen that Bay and this guy snuck into
the Paramount Studios while the Deep Impact was being edited
and stole dailies from the editing bay to compare it
to Armageddon. And then after Deep Impact came out first,
Disney Studio's chairman Joe Roth came and through the Armageddon

(22:08):
production an additional three million to punch up the visual effects.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
So all of.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
Which is to say, in the feud between the two movies,
Armageddon knew what it was doing. Yeah, but ethically it
took the lower road. Yes, that's true. They were Deep
Impact went high, Mageddon went low in so many ways.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Yes, there's a tremendous GQ oral history of Michael Bay's
career that opens with the line. In nineteen ninety eight,
a National magazine asked in an article, is Michael Bay
the devil friend of the pod? Ben Affleck is quoted
in this oral history of saying quote, I think Michael
is actually an auteur in the true sense of the word.

(22:50):
Every movie he makes reflects his personal creative vision. You
may like it, you may not, but those movies are
him without compromise. It's a very generos read. Yeah, Michael
Bay himself said, for the same oral history, I took
a geology course with this teutonic expert at Wesleyan. He said,
way tectonic. Teutonic would be German. I took a geology

(23:12):
course with this tectonic expert at Wesleyan. Just Michael Bay
at Wesleyan. Yeah, that's confusing, he said. Calamities happen. It's
the plumbers who will fix the world. So armageddon, that's
what it is. It's everyday Joe's saving the world. Now,
let's take a little look at Michael Benjamin Bay at
a glance. Born in nineteen sixty five, He got a

(23:35):
start in the film industry interning with George Lucas when
he was just fifteen years old, and then he moved
on to work at Propaganda Films doing not that's the
name of a company. It so he wasn't making like,
you know, Triumph of the Will uh commercial later Yeah, yeah,
oh yeah. He would do commercials and music videos for
stuff like Coca Cola and add for the Red Cross

(23:56):
and the Gott Milk campaign, which won a Cleio. He
also did music videos for meatloafs I'd do anything for love,
and also I touched myself by the Vinyls and a
Vanilla Ice song.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
Did you know that I didn't know about the Divinyls.
I knew about Meatloaf because that's the most Michael Bayan
vision of like a music video. But Divinyls is hilarious.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yes, yes, But his music video work drew the eyes
of producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, who selected him
to direct his first feature length film, Bad Boys, which
grows to one hundred and forty one million on nineteen
million dollar budget and began the Bruckheimer Bay Imperial phase
of the nineties. They follow that up with The Rock, which,

(24:39):
as we mentioned earlier, is he gloriously absurd Sean Connery
Nicholas Cage film where they have to break into Alcatraz
to stop a terrorist general played by Ed Harris from
launching chemical weapons at San Francisco. I forget why, but
I'm sure he had an okay reason, because he's he's
at Harris. Yeah, I feel like it's very rare that
he's like a bad guy.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Well, it's because, if I remember correctly, it has some
convoluted thing about like the treatment of veterans after serving,
because he and his crew were like like black ops
guys or something, and they were like disavowed by the government.
And so Ed Harris is going to poison all of
San Francisco to prove a.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
Point bad point good movie. And then came Armageddon. One
of Michael Bay's opening lines in the DVD commentary that
I think his actual opening line in the DVD commentary
is why is Armageddon in the Criterion collection. I think
that's the first thing he says. But one of the
things he says after that is making films is like

(25:37):
a war, which props not coincidentally, James Cameron has an
identical quote, and there's certainly an interesting dynamic at play
with the cast. Michael basseble for the film For Starters,
Bruce Willis was essentially forced into making this movie as
part of a deal with then Disney chairman Joe roth All,

(25:58):
as part of a bit of industry dram that went
back to a movie called Broadway Brawler. Did you know
about any of this? I knew about none of this.
No Ice so crazy? Broadway Brawler. It was a twenty
eight million dollar rom com billed as similar to Jerry Maguire,
but against the backdrop of hockey. Bruce Willis was to
play the title character, Broadway Brawler, who was a washed
up hockey player, and of February nineteen ninety seven, Bruce Willis,

(26:21):
who was also producing this movie, shut down the production
in Delaware, firing the director Lee Grant, who had won
an Oscar for acting in Shampoo, her producer husband Joe Fury,
who reportedly is the guy who brought Bruce Willis aboard
in the first place, fired cinematographer William Fraker, and wardrobe
engineer Kara Otits twenty days into production, basically fired the

(26:44):
entire production team. Willis then called his old Moonlighting director
Jennis Dugan to take over as director. An La Times
article from June nineteen ninety seven contained all of that
juicy gossip, which Bruce Willis denied through his publicist. William Fraker.
The cinematographer later said director Lee Grant was doing a
great job, but Bruce was telling other actors how to act.
It was a great script and Lee's vision was a

(27:05):
love story about two people with the background of hockey,
but Bruce just took over. Several other sources confirmed to
the La Times that you know, Bruce was basically being
a diva and demanding more screen time.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Yeah, talking about Brusk is complicated because of the whole
recent news that he is retiring because of aphasia, But
there is an incredible amount of ink spilled, not least
of which from Kevin Smith very famously about his some
of his habits on film sets that do not make
him seem like the biggest team player when he was

(27:39):
at the height of his fame. Anyway, the end result
of all this drama is that there was the company
Synergy that was bankrolling this film. Canned the whole thing
with the help of Joe Roth, who was then chairman
of Disney, which owned Synergy, but at this point production
had already cost Synergy seventeen million dollars, which didn't even

(28:02):
include Willis's fee, which is around seven and a half
million plus perks. So the solution that they decided was
Disney was going to pay off the seventeen million dollars
that Synergy had already spent, and then they forced asked
whatever asked with a heavy implication. They asked Bruce Willis

(28:23):
to star in three Disney movies for a heavily discounted
rate instead of potentially opening him up for a lawsuit
for breach of contract. And he wisely took this option,
and it ended up working out great for him because
the films that he made were Armageddon and then The
Sixth CeNSE and then The Kid, which I didn't know

(28:44):
anything about but was apparently a big hit for Disney.
But yeah, two of the highest grossing movies of the
era were made as a result of him being a
tremendous jerk on a movie that never got made. Those
three movies grossed one point three billion dollars worldwide, and
poor Lee Grant went to TV directing and made for
TV movies and back to acting, and she has never

(29:07):
gotten to make this project. She gave a heartbreaking quote
to Variety in nineteen ninety seven talking about it. She said,
this was our project. We worked on this two years
and got Bruce interested. I've had joy every day making
this movie. It was so strange. One day, you're doing
great in the next minute when some kind of whim
can destroy it. It was like a tornado. But on
the other hand, that's life and you go on and

(29:29):
do other stuff. I tried to do my best, my
best shot, and I loss. If you lose, you lose.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
Hoo fah. And she was also blacklisted for twelve years
in the fifties as part of the Red Scare.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah, so that's super super depressing. Really kind of tainted
a lot of this for me anyway. So Willis this
is the first movie he's making as a result of
this deal, and perhaps as a result of that, he
did not come on to set super willing to play ball.
He came in about thirty day the shoot. And also
Michael Bay was supposedly eyeing Sean Connery as more to star,

(30:06):
but then he talked to some actual oil guys and
I think it was decided that Connery was a little
too old to convincingly.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
Play the part.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
And then Disney naturally came in and was like, uh no,
we got Bruce Willis for you. And then this got
even messier somehow. This is a hilariously dated sentiment. While
doing a Q and A on the Ain't It Cool?
News Forum in two thousand and seven, promoting Diehard four,
Willis said of Armageddon, a screaming director does not make

(30:37):
for a pleasant set experience, adding of Bay, few people
will work with him now, and I know I will
never work with him again. In twenty twenty two, at
a screening of his most recent film, Ambulance, Michael Bay
said of Willis, Bruce came in a month after we
were shooting, and he was tough. What I realized psychology wise,
with actors, it's always psychology. He wanted to feel like

(30:59):
top dog because everyone was there for a month, everyone
was sort of friends. Then Bruce comes in and he
wanted to kind of assert himself. The same year, he
said an Entertainment Weekly interview, Bruce was tough at the
beginning of Armageddon, and there was a point when producer
Jerry Bruckheimer said to me, you've got to show him
some scenes. So I did, and Bruce goes, Wow, you
should have shown me that earlier. And ever since then

(31:20):
we got along. Wow you don't suck.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Yeah, right, God, I don't think I realized that Bruce
Willis was that prickly difficult, he said, Yeah, I didn't realize.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, Kevin Smith has a whole thing. I'm working on
the cop cop Out, cop something some movie with him
where he just like shut down production and went back
to his trailer to like grilled chicken.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, and it makes me think of Bruce Willis's uh
I say, misbegotten, but I guess he did quite well
musical career Bruno his musical alter ego Bruno in the
late eighties. And there's this incredible music video where he's
like being backed by the Temptations, and I just I
forget what the song is, but like respect, oh is

(32:02):
there respect? And just like all the Temptations are like
backing him and doing the Temptations moves, but they're all
like you can kind of tell the rolling their eyes
in the music video, Like I'm surprised that they didn't
reshoot that because it's very obvious how much they just
are not feeling back.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
In Bruce Willis, Well, you know those moonlighting checks paid
for a lot of stuff. Yes, as you meditate on that,
we'll be right back with more too much information after
these messages.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Well, on the upside, Bruce Willis brought a lot to
the movie, including this line that he improvised, which is
I think kind of you know, it's the trailer line
the United States government just asked us to save the world.
Anybody want to say no, come on that rules. That's
a good line. It's good I know. Also, I didn't
realize this all. Speaking of improv all the actors made

(33:05):
their own choices for what their characters wanted from the
government when they were negotiating with them about going up
to actually do this basically suicide mission. One guy wants
his fifty six parking tickets in seven states wiped off
his record. Another guy has two what he refers to
as women friends that he'd like to see made American citizens.
No questions asked, My favorite, Bruce Willis says, yeah, Max

(33:29):
would like you to bring back eight track tapes. I'm
not sure how that's gonna work. But someone else wants
a full week Emperor's package at Caesar's Palace. And Harry Stamper,
which is Bruce Willis's character, makes what definitely would have
been my request. Who killed JFK.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
Huko JK? And and none of the guys want to
pay taxes again? Yeah, ever, that's that would be me,
doesn't that.

Speaker 1 (33:53):
Nicholas Cage make a similar joke at the end of
the Rock when he's going through some kind of like
microfilm and he's like, honey, do you want to know
who who killed JFK? I mean probably maybe it must
be like one of Michael Bay's practizations, which is a
kinship I feel with him. Oh yeah, Michael Clark Duncan's
character wants to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom at the
White House for a summer. So yeah, good stuff. What

(34:16):
would you ask for if the government was going to
send you on a suicide mission that you more than
likely wouldn't come back from, but they would offer you
anything aside from no Texas Walt Disney's Frozen Head, I'd
put it in like in some kind of plastic thing
and make it into a bowling ball.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, that'd be a good use for it. Yeah, I
just want to kick it around, play a game of
kickball with it.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
I also love, speaking of just Bruce Willis behaving badly.
At one point during the production, then Disney chairman Michael Eisner,
I guess, made a surprise appearance on the Space Shuttle
set the jokingly tell Bruce Willis that he'd been fired
and replaced with Kevin Cooster, which I love. Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Having Willis's character die spoiler alert, I guess was considered
something of a risk because he was the biggest star
that the movie had. But apparently while he was still
in negotiations, that was something he told Bruckheimer he would
only do the movie if his character would die. And
for the scene in which he says goodbye to live
Tyler over the monitors, he was looking at pictures of
his own daughters to muster up the emotions for the scene.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
That's nice. Do you think he insisted on dying because
he was like, oh, I didn't want to do this
movie in the first place. I'll be damned if there's
a sequel. Yeah, maybe maybe. When the thunderbirds fly over
the flight, you know, like blue Angels type group of
formation flyers in the final scenes during Harry's funeral, they're
flying in the what's known as the Missing Man formation,

(35:47):
and it's basically the aerial equivalent of the riderless horse
for state funerals, you know, the processions that you see
in DC, like with Kennedy and Martin, Luther King and
RFK and so forth. The formation has flown with four
jets and then one of the jets pulls straight up
while the rest of the formation flies in their original positions.
And to have this done at your funeral is an
extraordinary honor. And the Thunderbirds later flew this maneuver in

(36:10):
air shows out of respect for US military personnel lost
in the Iraq War and that war in Afghanistan. My
stepbrother is in the Air Force, so I feel like
I gotta shout out the airman.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Another guy who Michael Bay was not super chill to
Ben Affleck making his move up from the relatively smaller
world of Days and Confused and Chasing Amy and yes,
Goodwill Hunting to his first big boy pants action blockbuster.
Funnily enough, Skeet Ulrich said in twenty nineteen at a

(36:44):
comic con that he turned down Armageddon for as good
as it gets.

Speaker 1 (36:50):
That's insane. The partner as good as it gets is
like it's not even like a supporting roles. This tiny
role he's probably got like ten minutes of screen time.
I call b on that.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
Affleck told GQ, I imagined Michael would be emblematic of
everything big and Hollywood. I had come off Chasing Amy
and Goodwill Hunting, so I really had no idea what
big Hollywood movies were like, he was right. The producer
and former VP of Bay Films, Jennifer Klein told the
magazine Ben Affleck was new on the scene. We put
him through the Bruckheimer Bay machine, like you're no longer

(37:25):
chasing Amy. You're going to have to go to the gym,
get a tan, get a haircut. And Affleck told Entertainment
Weekly in twenty twenty two that May had quote a
vision of a glistening male torso in the oil and
he was like, that's going to go in the trailer
and sell tickets, and he was right. We've talked about
this enough. Let's get to the real meat of this episode.

(37:46):
Ben Affleck's tiny baby teeth. The most famous bit of
behind the scenes trivia around Armageddon centers around Michael Bay's
hatred of Ben Affleck's teeth. Pretty early on in the
DVD commentary, Bay just goes, yeah, we paid twenty thousand
dollars for pearly white teeth. He says, I always liked
low shots that kind of come up right under your

(38:08):
chin and make you a little bit heroic, and Ben
had kind of had these baby teeth. So I told
Jerry Bruckheimer God, he's got these baby teeth. Jerry, I
don't know what to do, which sounds like a Seinfeld line.
He continued, Jerry used a very famous star in a
plane movie that he replaced teeth with. So he said,

(38:29):
we did it to him, why not do it to Ben?
So my dentist had Ben sitting a dentist's chair for
a week, eight hours a day.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Jesus, I didn't know that was what it took. Dude,
Porcelain veneers Man.

Speaker 2 (38:40):
Now, the fine folks at the Ringer on their feature
on just this commentary track did a little creative extrapolation
and concluded that before nineteen ninety eight, Jerry Bruckheimer had
produced two films that Bay could be referring to as
plane movies, Top Gun and con Air. In those films,
the very famous star Bay could have been referring to

(39:00):
are Tom Cruise and Nicholas Cage, respectively. They then compare
a pick of Cruise in The Outsiders and Cruise in
Top Gun to conclude that, yes, Michael Bay was following
in Jerry Bruckheimer's footsteps in forcing one of his leading
men to undergo cosmetic dental surgery for a film. It's
actually kind of shocking. You look at Cruises Outsider's teeth
and Cruise his top gun teeth now from.

Speaker 1 (39:22):
Outside or was it Outsiders? I think it was Outsiders
where he he had had a tooth capped, and I
think he took the cap off for that role, the
one the picture that's always online that you see, like
the before and after of him when he's got a
real snaggle too. I think that was the deal, like
he'd had something capped. Didn't Nicholas Cage do something crazy
to his teeth for a role like a vampire movie? Possibly?

Speaker 2 (39:44):
I mean he's done too at this point. He did
Vampire's Kiss and Renfield just came out this week or
this month. Renfield, I ken't confuse pronouncing Renfield and Seinfeld,
so I've been calling I've been calling it Seinfield and Renfeld.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
Oh we shave his teeth, yeah, to transform into Rakla
for Reinfeld. Yeah, what a weirdo.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
The teeth thing is something that haunted Affleck. Kate Beckonsale
recalled on the set of Pearl Harbor. She mentioned to
him that Michael Bay had crudely told her that she
needed to lose weight, and Affleck commiserated by telling her
the teeth story, and Kate Becketzale told Women's Health I
was like, well, at least I get to hang on

(40:26):
to my actual teeth and then adding insult to injury.
On the commentary track, May said that while shooting Steve
Bussemi told him that he was going to get some
work done on his teeth, and by responded, you have
a million dollar smile and you shouldn't change a thing.
Go on, but Affleck those teeth, Ben Choppers, that wasn't.

Speaker 1 (40:50):
All he hated about that, Affleck. There's a great story
from the pre production of Armageddon. We touched on this
in our recent Goodwill Hunting episode. After Ben left the
first meeting with Michael Bay and Jayry Bruckheimer, Michael Bay
turned to Jerry Bruckheimer and said, Jerry, he's a geek
like which against sounds like a Seinfeld thing. Michael Bay
remembered thinking, Okay, he's this kind of pale Boston guy.

(41:11):
We can work him out, give him a tan, do
everything to make him a star. But this wasn't enough
to fool his co star, slash movie love interest liv Tyler,
who described him as quote this nerdy, smart guy. He's
obsessed with the New York Times crossword puzzle. He reads
a lot. He's really interested in knowing more about the world.
So all this to say, everyone on the set of
Armageddon thought that pen Affleck was a nerd, a pasty.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
Nerd with baby teeth from Boston. Poor guy aflex DVD
track is a joy. He has so much I wouldn't
even call it thinly veiled contempt for this movie. He
treats his commentary track like an episode of Mystery Science
Theater three thousand. He occasionally just makes fun of things

(41:55):
that happen on screen. Every time Billy Bob Thornton is
on screen, Ben starts doing a sling blade accents, like
he literally starts going like wandering around NASA, and he's like,
I'm gonna get me some of them French trad potatoes.
For the scene in which the oil oil drillers are
like sliding around in the oil, Ben Affleck starts making

(42:18):
like cartoon noises like whoop, and then you hear Bruce
Willis go, yeah, one of the guys almost died shooting
this because they filmed he, Bay and Willis all filmed
there separately, and then they cut them together.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
So they weren't doing it, and then greatest performance.

Speaker 2 (42:35):
And then Affleck tells this perfect anecdote about the film.
I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil
drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts
to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut
the fuck up. So that was the end of that talk.
And also, per Affleck, the entire love story dimension to

(42:55):
the script was added during the whole rewrite development process
because of your loved large boat movie. Yes, Titanic had
just been a huge hit, and so the Army Geddon
team figured they needed a romance plot line to kind
of surf off that rose Jack energy sweep in the nation. Originally,
the film was supposed to focus more on the relationship
between Willis and Billy Bob Thornton's characters, and Willis makes

(43:17):
a maybe joke on the commentary that they continually reminded
Affleck of this fact that his part could be cut
out completely if they needed to do so. Speaking of
that of the love scene that they had earlier that
we were talking about, Affleck and lived Tyler were friends
before filming Maybe from Boston.

Speaker 1 (43:35):
Because of the Aerosmith thing.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
I don't know, maybe so their love scenes were extra awkward.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
Tyler told cinema dot Com.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
It was really a nice treat to have Ben play
that part because I did know him before this movie.
He did treat me like a little sister. He was like,
cover yourself up, girl. It was really fun. He's my friend.
It was nice because we'd know each other's families and
boyfriends and girlfriends, which made it all cool. The bad
part is we were supposed to do these kissing scenes
and we would just giggling like crazy. Tyler turned down

(44:02):
the role multiple times before accepting. Our second Scream reference
of the day is that nev Campbell revealed in twenty
eighteen on Watch What Happens Live that she passed on
liv Tyler's role, which means, in an alternate universe, there
is a world in which one of the killers from
Scream plays the love interest of one of his attempted
victims in the movie Armagedin.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
But who's the killer from Scream? Sket a right right, yeah,
it says yeah. Also considered for the part of Grace
Stamper or Robin Wright, Denise Richards, and Miili Jovivic.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Those are all fine. Robin Wright would be good. Denise
Richards is a blank slate, so maybe not.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
Was she on a Bond movie?

Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah, Christmas Jones right, the nuclear scientist. Christmas only comes
once a year. Cruel. Yeah, that's also Coruel. It was terrible.
That's like one of the worst Bond movies. Millie Jovivisch
would have been good. She would have been coming off
Fifth Element. The film was supposed to end on the
tarmac once the survivors get back, but Affleck and Bay

(45:04):
decided that they needed to end with the character's weddings,
and it was Ben Affleck's idea to shoot a bunch
of wedding footage with like a super eight camera and
have it play over the end credits. And that was
his super eight camera that they used, which is just adorable.

Speaker 1 (45:16):
He must be a Wonder Years fan too. Ah. I
see this is the hidden depth of Ben Affleck, the
profound sadness of Ben Affleck, the melancholy of Ben Affleck.
That's really interesting that we love Ben att TMI, I
did we do? I also love the bit where he
starts singing leaving on a jet plane to live Tyler's
character before he boards the spaceship and then the rest

(45:37):
of the crew joins in, which apparently was a big risk.
Michael Bay shot the scene two ways with the song
and without the song because they weren't sure how it
would play on camera. Bruce Willis said he was sure
it was gonna get cut because apparently no one could
sing on the set and they were all singing in
a different keys. But it's like so bad that it
almost like it almost works. It almost sounds like they're

(45:59):
doing some like complex harmony. It kind of has to
be like.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
A rip of the Righteous Brothers thing from top gun right,
Like there's no way that's just a coincidence that's true.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
But yeah, Bruce Willis said the DVD commentary, it took
quite a bit of work to fix that scene with
everyone's singing amusingly in con air. Steve Buscemi referred to
the irony about quote a bunch of idiots singing a
song made popular by a band that died in a
plane crack define irony. He's referring to them singing Sweet
Home Alabama, which is recorded by Leonard Skinner. He is

(46:31):
seen in Armageddon singing Leaving on a jet Plane, which
was sung by John Denver, who also died in a
plane crash, probably during the production of the movie. I
think it was in nineteen ninety seven.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
They make so many jokes and or not jokes, but
references in conair to Steve Bussemi's being like a cannibal
and like a serial murderer, and then he's just like
becomes the most likable person in that movie, such as
the power of Steve.

Speaker 1 (46:55):
I think at Armageddon too, speaking of like meta movie
moments they talk about, they make a pulp fiction reference,
which is funny because Bruce Willis and by right, we're
both in pulp fiction.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:09):
Unified theory of Bouscemi. But back to the impossible, impossibly
deep sadness of Ben Affleck. He ran into some problems
to the very first night of shooting when they were
in South Dakota's bad Lands, which was standing in for
the Astroid. Michael Bay told Collider at A Q and A,
they're walking out of a plane crash and wind machines
are giving one hundred mile an hour wins, and all

(47:31):
of a sudden, I see Ben Affleck trying to hit
his face shield. They had real mass hallocks on their helmets.
I'm like, cut, cut, what's going on, Ben? What are
you doing? So we had the run literally like a
football field towards him, and he was trying to find
a rock to bust his mask because you could breathe
because the air thing was shut off, so they tried
to suffocate Ben Affleck the first day out of this.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Said just smashed.

Speaker 1 (47:56):
Rock. I can't breathe or he just wanted to feel something.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Yeah, incredible.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
Hilariously, Ben Affleck told Entertainment Weekly, it's funny because amer
Gunn is the one movie of mine that my kids
have watched and will kind of admit to liking, even
though they relentlessly mock it and me, what are you
driving a tank on the moon? But they had fun,
you know what I mean. They won't even watch The Town,
So there you have it. Can't even got respect from

(48:23):
his own kids. It's so funny to me.

Speaker 2 (48:24):
He picks out The Town as one of his movies
that he's most proud of, the Jeremy Renner bank robbing movie.
It does have funny one of my favorite line readings
of all time in all cinema in that movie, which
is where Jeremy Renner is making his last stand and
they're like, you're cornered. The police are like, come out
with your hands up, and he just goes yo, perfect

(48:46):
Boston honk. Anyway, as with any ensemble cast, there are
some fun bits in here about the rest of the folks.
The leg brace that Billy Bob Thornton's character wears.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
Was his own idea. For some reason.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
His manager got him the role, and explained in an
interview to People TV that his manager just happened to
be in a plane ride with Jerry Bruckheimer and told
him he should cast quote some really good like actors actors.
I'm just imagining leaning over and squeezing his shoulder like
really tightly. Thornton later told Indy Wier that while I
don't really do blockbusters, I thought on the level that

(49:20):
Armaged was supposed to work. I always thought it did,
and I enjoyed my time on that movie. And he's
not immune to the film's charms, he added, every time
when Bruce Willis is buying the farm on the Rock,
I tear up relatable Owen Wilson. The first day Owen
Wilson came to the set an hour hour and.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
A half late.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
Bey told GQ. We put PA's out on the Warner
Brothers lot. I said, call me when you find him.
I put my arm around Owen, who's a great guy.
I said, Owen, you know what, I worked with Sean
Connery and I gotta tell you he was never late,
and Owen was never late again. Per the commentary track,
it was Steve Buscemi's idea to make his character Rock

(50:00):
a genius who knew there was no way the mission
would be a success. So he played the part as
a person who knew he was on a suicide mission,
who knew the entire race was about to become extinct,
and who quote wasn't going to get his panties in
a bunch about it. Much of his dialogue was apparently
deemed too funny and cut sadly, and his character's line,
you know, we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel,

(50:22):
one nuclear weapon, and a thing that has two hundred
and seventy thousand moving parts built by the lowest bidder,
was a variation on something said by astronaut Alan Shephard.
According to the Oxford Reference Dictionary in nineteen sixty one,
his quote was it's a very sobering feeling to be
up in space and realize that one safety factor was
determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Yeah, he's the first American in space, so he had
lots of sweat. I feel bad for Steve Buscemi and Armageddon.
He reportedly was getting really tired of playing sleazy characters
and was hoping that this role would break him out
of that because as written, the character was kind of heroic,
but as soon as they cast him, they started to
rewrite the character to make him a bit more of

(51:05):
a sleeze because they got Steve Buchemi for it.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
Michael Bay told Collider that his casting director found Michael
Clark Duncan at a gym, and then proceeds to get
sentimental about how much Clark improved as an actor while
working on the film. He said, what I loved about
Michael Clark Duncan was the charm and just being real.
He was a lovable guy. I like working with real
people and turning them into actors. But he had this
voice and was like a bad B or C actor.

(51:31):
He's talking about filming Armageddon. It was first take, second take,
and I'm like, oh my god, we're in trouble. I'm like, Mike,
I want you to just be you, pretend it's just
you talking. He became the most studied actor in terms
of he came literally the furthest because he watched Bruce,
he watched everyone. Everyone sort of took him under his wing.
Then the next movie he did Green Mile, he was

(51:52):
up for an Oscar and then, in a great bit
of oral history editing a few graphs later, Michael Clarke
Duncan says to GQ about my Bay, he's like one
of those chihuahuas that's always barking.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
I think Michael Bay's memories of this have been colored
by the fact that Michael Clark Duncan died in twenty twelve.
And he's got a little rose colored glass. It's a
gimlet eye. Is that the expression? Yes? Because the story
I heard was that Michael Bay was threatening to replace
Michael Clark Duncan because you hear really having a lot
of problems with his performance early on, and they pulled
him aside and said, you know, we're gonna have to

(52:26):
replace you if you can't match that energy that you
had in the audition. And so they basically just scared
him into into getting it right.

Speaker 2 (52:34):
And then one of my last favorite quotes from at
GQ thing Billy Bob Thornton. I was sitting at the
table read through with Owen Wilson and Bussemi, and we
were all sitting there kind of nervously, and Steve looks
at me and goes, what the are we doing here?

Speaker 1 (52:50):
Yeah. Later, when asked why he did this film, Steve
Buscemi replied, I wanted a bigger house. Well, speaking of money,
and lots of it, Armageddon not cheap to make. Michael
Bay told GQ on Armageddon each day was a big
expensive day. We're talking two hundred and fifty thousand dollars

(53:11):
a day and it was one hundred and twenty seven
day shoot.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
I was just say, between that and all the stuff
that they were working around like at NASA, and I guess,
if you want to do it on a technicality in
terms of like the equipment that they were shooting around,
this might be the most expensive movie ever made.

Speaker 1 (53:28):
There was I was able to track down, and I
think I put it in here. Yes, the cas and
crew worked around nineteen billion dollars worth of equipment, so yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
Yeah, easily like far and away the most expensive movie,
if we're counting that as a technicality.

Speaker 1 (53:43):
Wild the film's director of photography, John Schwartzmann, told Live
Design Online in nineteen ninety eight that quote we used
to say, the only easy day on Armageddon was yesterday.
Ben I Fleck told Entertainment Weekly around the same time,
we could have made like I think four hundred chasing
Amy's for what we made arm Again for. And this

(54:04):
just something that he mocks. On the film's commentary track,
he points out a shot and says, this is where
you just have a random helicopter in the background for
no real reason, just because you're a big movie and
you're expensive and you can you have no idea how
much of a headache having a helicopter in the background
causes us safety This and money that only so many
hours they can fly. They're on walkies, wins blasting everywhere.

(54:25):
Ben Affleck hated this. I love how much Ben Affleck
hated this.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
Yeah, it's kind of adorable, honestly, but my god, did
they spend money on this movie. They shot over a
million feet of film, and Kodak sent them a gift
basket with six bottles of Corbell's champagne.

Speaker 1 (54:46):
Bottles, not six cases, various.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
Other line items on the budget in addition to ben
Afflex twenty thousand dollars teeth another twenty thousand for Frankie,
the dog that attacks Godzilla toys. He belonged to Brendan Kelly,
an actor who in the Rock no idea if it
was his particular set of skills that cost so much,
but he was so good at it they had to
hide all the toys from him on set before they
started filming, otherwise he would just.

Speaker 1 (55:10):
Go to town on them.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
The space suits, which on the DVD commentary Bay calls
the biggest nightmare of the entire shoots, costs a collective
one point five million. They were designed in France by
someone who just worked with Luke Bisson on Fifth Element,
and Bay did not enjoy the experience. He's still apoplectic
about it on the commentary track. But the guy who

(55:31):
designed them, Chris Hillman, came out of it great. He
made props and costumes for not only this, but stuff
like Stargate and ad Astra, among many others, and NASA
later actually hired him to help redesign a space suit
for smaller torsos as well as a helmet adapter. So yeah,
that's great. Good for Chris.

Speaker 1 (55:52):
But Michael Bay didn't give him an easy time. He
was mad because he went to check in on the
costumes just three weeks before shooting began, and he said
the suits looked like quote an Adida's jogging suit on
a rack. His breaking point came when he found someone
spray painting a generic club from a garden store and
sewing rubber onto the knuckles to make it look a
little more space. Yeah. But I did watch one of

(56:16):
the making of featurettes and Ben Affleck says something about
how like they were supposedly one of the first, if
not the first production to actually get proper NASA space
suits in addition to like because there are some scenes
when they're wearing ones that look like the ones that
you see like normal as I think he's talking about
the landing suits that are designed.

Speaker 2 (56:34):
Yeah, because they have the they have the orange ones. Yeah,
we'll talk in a second about this. The access that
they had for this film, which is just bananas. The
Armadillo vehicle was built specifically for the film, As perhaps predictably,
NASA does not actually have a giant tank with gatling
guns on it that cost one million dollars. Good bargain though,

(56:55):
Base as in the commentary that it never once broke
down and they took.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
It past three thousand miles without Katie. The oil changed
three thousand miles.

Speaker 2 (57:03):
Has what it has a Chevy three fifty I guess
driving it around the bad Lands had a Chevy three
fifty seven engine inside apparently, and the only person they
let drive.

Speaker 1 (57:13):
It was Affleck, which is hilarious to me.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
The miniature for it alone that Bay keeps in his
office costs one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And while
we're on the topic of the Armadillo, Mattel had a
toy line that they had already planned attached to Armaged
and they told Bay during production that toy trucks with
guns on them sell more because of America, and that
is why there is a giant Gatling gun on a

(57:38):
space rover. That Gatling gun, incidentally, or the Gatling guns.

Speaker 1 (57:43):
I don't know if they got.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
Multiple ones, or if they just moved it from truck
to truck, but that was an actual gun from World
War Two and it was accompanied by its own full
time police officer to guard it. Wherever it went, So
these are just all items on the guns handler was
an ite him on the line budget the gun's pa, Yeah,

(58:04):
can we get someone out to the guns trailer? The
gun won't leave its trailer. An oil driller contacted by
Mel magazine to fact check the film did say that
the gun was absurd, but he added there is a
time when you might need a gun during drilling. That's
when you're working in northern Canada when there are bears.

(58:24):
Those guys, that's a great feature that Mel did. They
fact checked armagin with a gang of oil drig drillers,
and then they said much of the movie, unsurprisingly is horse,
particularly willis chasing Affleck around with a shotgun on an
oil rig. But they do agree with the aspect that
oil rig workers are a little rough around the edges generally.
One of the guys is quoted is saying, nowadays, with

(58:45):
drug testing and laws, it's a little bit harder, but
back in the day you wouldn't go to work unless
you were high.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
Did they also fact check the space stuff too, or
has that already been done by Like? No, No, the
Mel thing was just for the oil rig drillers.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
The space stuff, we'll get to the bomb that they
take on. The mission cost seventy five thousand dollars to
design and construct.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
That sounds low considering everything.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
Else it actually does. Yeah, the film's lighting cost was
over a million dollars, and this was partially because they
moved the entire lighting rig to not just Kennedy Space Center,
but also the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the
oil rig off the Gulf of Mexico where they shot. Yeah,
there's the great The interview with the cinematographer that we

(59:33):
quoted earlier is great, but he talks about they just
the lighting for this was so essential. It's part of
why the film looks the way it does that they
just whole hog moved their entire lighting rig around wherever
they shot at. Maybe the most expensive part of this
was that the main drill site was shot at Stage
two in Disney, which is larger than a football field
and is one of the largest sound stages in Hollywood.
But Michael Bay said it wasn't big enough, so they

(59:55):
dug the floor down another forty feet, bringing the entire
height of this to ninety feet at a cost of
two million dollars. The destruction of Shanghai was originally intended
to be shot using miniatures, and actually rather artily for
a Michael Bay film, was storyboarded as just being seen
through the eyes of a father and a son on
a fishing boat. What ended up happening was that they

(01:00:18):
rented the largest sound stage in Hollywood, which belonged to
Sony Stage thirty. They built a ninety foot pier and
filled the indoor lake for this, and then they blew.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
It all up.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
That did not I was not able to find a
cost attached to the hat. I assumed it was prohibitive.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
Oh lord, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll
be right back with more. Too much information in just
a moment. Funny enough.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
One through item in Michael Bay's career is that, despite
being seemingly very unpleasant, he has this ability to just
charm the pants off people. The oil rig scenes were
filmed on an actual working four hundred million dollars drilling rig,
and Michael Bay claims on the commentary that the reason
that they were allowed to film there was because he
told them the movie was about oil drillers saving the world,

(01:01:22):
which makes sense. Lighting technician Andy Ryan told in that
Live Design Online article that They trucked all of their
gear from LA to Galveston, Texas, put it on a barge,
and then boted it one hundred and eighty miles to
the oil rig. Our guys used the crane on the
oil rig to lift the containers off and line them up.
The riggers rigged the rig for us, so to speak.

(01:01:44):
We took a two hour helicopter ride to get out there,
and within two hours we were shooting piece of Cake.
Another amazing Michael Bay quote from the collider Q and
A is about securing a B two stealth bomber for Armageddon.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
On that day.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
On the shoot, they had this line of death where
they had two military people with M sixteen's bruce and
the actors are there. They have a sign that says,
you cross this line, lethal force will be used. By lunchtime,
I was sitting in that mother fire. You just gotta
be good with the gift of gab.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
And yeah, as I said earlier, as a result of this,
the cast and crew worked around nineteen billion dollars worth
of equipment.

Speaker 2 (01:02:24):
It's funny for somebody who's so linked with this American jingoism,
Brah Brah military science, junk stuff and all of his movies.
Michael Bay is a weird dick about the actual aesthetics
of space exploration. A great quote from the commentary, I
was very unimpressed when I went to NASA. He also

(01:02:46):
described meeting with people who had stayed in the Mirror
space station, although they were not allowed to call that
space station in the film Mirror, but he said that
it is filled with junk, mold is growing on the walls,
and it smells like leaky sewage.

Speaker 1 (01:02:59):
I think it was that they weren't allowed to call
it that. I think it was that they didn't want
to because, oh, in case something and yeah, you know,
it was kind of a space jalope that they're worried
it was gonna like crash or dicinegrate before the film
was released, and then they would have this awful joke
in the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
So the mission control that is in NASA is it's
just a company that sells herbal products and supplements in Houston.
He says, the old mission control is the most unsexy
thing you've ever seen. If you saw the real NASA,
you wouldn't trust it as far as you could throw it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
Right away with words. Michael Bay has a cameo as
a scientist at NASA HQ, or at least his NASA HQ,
And this goes back to his earliest entertainment ambitions. He
wanted to be an actor. Years before he perfected the
art of blowing stuff up on screen, he had started
an amateur production of Pirates of Penzance and has told
the GQ his own mother remembered the performance by saying,

(01:04:00):
I never laughed so hard in my life.

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
He also wanted to be a magician. I found so much. Yeah,
he talks about doing a close quarters magic like sleight
of hand stuff. Despite this, his contempt, his seething contempt,
perhaps just under his hatred of ben Affleck's teeth, was
his distaste for NASA, the aesthetics of NASA. But my god,

(01:04:26):
they they got so much access to stuff for this
and the director of photography, John Schwartzman, told American Cinematographer
that he chocked all of this up to Jerry Bruckheimer's
cozy relationship with the Air Force thanks to Top Gun.
You may remember from our Top Gun episode that you
got a fast plane. You may remember from our Top
Gun episode that that movie drove air.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
Force applications that year.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
So the Air Force had a cozy relationship with Jerry Brockheimer,
and that apparently extended to NASA. Schwartzman said, when we
were making Army Gedin, Mimi later was making Deep Impact.
We were literally making it at the same time, two
movies about asteroids, but they did not have the access
that we had. I have to believe that was Jerry's
relationship with the government and the military. We had nothing

(01:05:13):
but green lights everywhere we went. It was incredible. I
spent a week living on an offshore oil rig for
that opening sequence in the movie, the whole crew was
flown out to an oil rig.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
There's not an.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
Insurance company or lawyer in the world that would let
that happen nowadays. He also tells another thing that would
absolutely not happen nowadays, particularly after nine to eleven, and
then also particularly after January sixth, We did things like
go to Washington, d C. On a Sunday with a
crew of five people and Dolly tracks and cameras in
a van. We literally bribed the Capitol police with hats
from the rock that Michael signed to let us lay

(01:05:45):
track inside the Capitol grounds to get shot of the
Capitol building.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
That's a pretty chintzy bribe. Yeah. Half the hats signed
by like Sean Connery or Nick Cage or something. But
I'm not a halftime by Nike Michael Bay.

Speaker 2 (01:05:58):
I would send me a rock hat signed by It'd
be better if it was a hat of the rock
from his WWF days signed by Michael Bay.

Speaker 1 (01:06:10):
That's been a high concept merch I can get behind.
Director of photography John Schwartzman continued. We shot at what's
called the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, where the astronauts trained for
missions in the world's largest swimming pool. They actually allowed
Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis to put on real space
suits with real astronauts and go into the tank. Willison

(01:06:31):
Affleck were the first two non astronauts to don spacesuits
and perform tasks underwater, accompanied by five trained spacemen and
other than the pool. The craziest bit of access that
the production had was not only that they were allowed
to shoot on a space shuttle and shoot on the
gantry where the space shuttles take off, but NASA also
let them film a space shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral

(01:06:53):
and Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis when they were filming
on the gantry, both tried to press their luck with
NASA security and step into the Space Shuttle before NASA
text immediately warned them off. Director of Photography John Schwartzman said,
it was very complicated. We had to place the cameras
before they start to fuel the main rocket. That's usually
forty eight hours before. We had to deal with getting

(01:07:15):
the NASA computers to turn our cameras on and off.
There's a two mile fenced off area. Once they start
to fuel the rocket. You can't go in, I imagine for
security purposes, like that scene in Contact.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
Yeah, they talk about Babe. Babe predictably does have a
bit of a heart on for the level of control
that NASA UH has over this. He says, like if
someone drops a pen under the Space Shuttle before it launches,
they have to scrap the entire thing and start all
over again, which is something that he surely envies.

Speaker 1 (01:07:45):
So they had to get everything right long before the launch.
The director photography said, once they start to fuel the rocket,
you can't go in, you can't change the camera exposure.
You're done. You just crossed your fingers and hope you
did it right. But he added that NASA was very
impressed with one apt aspect of their production. At the time,
NASA had been shooting launches with sixteen millimeter film, and

(01:08:05):
so when they saw the thirty five millimeter panamision cameras,
they just completely lost their minds. And that's also like
working with rigging gaffer Jeff Soderberg so much that they
kept them on as a consultant at the agency to
work with other film productions who wanted to shoot at
NASA facilities. Yeah, it's really crazy how much NASA big
up to Michael Bay. The Kennedy Space Center built a

(01:08:27):
movie theater from the ground up to house the premiere
of the film in nineteen ninety eight. But despite a
close contact with NASA, Armageddon is woefully unrealistic. It's long
been an urban legend that NASA actually shows this movie
of its trainees and makes them spot all one hundred
and sixty eight inaccuracies just to test them, But this

(01:08:49):
apparently is just a rumor that likely started in the
feedback section of a two thousand and seven edition of
The New Scientist magazine, which reads, why does NASA show
the movie? Armageddon's part of its management training programs. In reality,
the screenings are just a game for NASA space geeks
who can find the highest number of impossible things. In
the movie, the record feedback is told stands at one

(01:09:11):
hundred and sixty eight. So that bit of truth has
been repeated and distorted in a classic case of internet telephone.
But the reality is we have no idea that this
has actually become a hollow tradition in NASA training. It'd
be funny if it was. Yeah, I like that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:28):
Meanwhile, in two thousand and eight, a PhD student from
Australia won an international prize for paper she wrote outlining
her plan to prevent an asteroid from colliding with the Earth.
This was reported in a couple of different UK papers. The
Space Generation Advisory Councils Move an Asteroid two thousand and
eight competition. Good Lord was based on a Pofice, which

(01:09:52):
is a minor planet expected to pass close to Earth.
In twenty twenty nine, Mary Desauza, from the University of
Queensland's School of Engineering proposed covering the minor planet in
a milar sheet and using solar radiation to push it
off its path. This is as a few outlets have
pointed out alarmingly close to the plan of action proposed

(01:10:12):
by scientists in arm Again, we want to land a craft,
deploy solar sales. You'll have a great big canopy. Solar
winds will be caught by these milar sales, and Billy
Bob Thornton's character replies, come on, guys, we've got to
come up with something realistic here. It would take an
entire podcast to point out what's wrong with the film specifically,
but we could just start with broadly the entire premise.

(01:10:36):
The rock is just too damn big. Scottish astrophysicist doctor
Alistair Bruce told I News in twenty seventeen, that's why
it's fun to talk about, because it's such a Hollywood thing.
They went big and then they went way too big
the Chile Cheliabinsk. The Cheliabinsk asteroid was about sixty feet across.
That's the one that exploded above Russia a couple of

(01:10:56):
years ago. He continued. I think they say it's once
every few decades that the Earth will be hit by
something that big. By way of it, for instance, he
says the largest rock that ever hit the Earth was
the one that killed the dinosaurs. At six miles wide.
The one in the film is described as the size
of Texas, considerably larger than six miles.

Speaker 1 (01:11:16):
According to a Making of feature hosted by Leonard Nimoy,
So I trust it asteroids that would cause a crater
that would say, wipeout Manhattan come every fifty thousand years,
which that's pretty frequent.

Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
So at that size, it is insane to think that
the bomb they used would have done anything. And in fact,
four physics students came at this from a mathematical angle
in twenty eleven, and they determined that the film's bomb
would have had needed to be roughly a billion times
stronger than the largest nuke ever detonated on Earth, the

(01:11:53):
Soviet Union's Big Ivan. It was a big borous.

Speaker 1 (01:12:03):
But Michael Bay was not bothered by this. He's quoted
as saying, now, I know there's no fire in space,
but it's a movie, and most people don't know that
no sound either in space. His contempt for everyone and
everything except for himself and his movies is incredible. Fire.

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
And there is one bit of NASA related procedure that
the film did get right. Steve Beseemi's character Rockhound goes
a little Baddie on the way up and his crew
mates ti him up with duct tape. Incredibly, it came
out ten years later that this is an actual nassive procedure.

(01:12:39):
The issue came up in the press in twenty eleven
when an astronaut, lamed Lisa Noak, who's part of the
Discovery's crew in two thousand and six, drove from Houston
to Orlando to kidnap a woman who, along with Noak,
was part of I am not making this up an
astronaut love triangle.

Speaker 1 (01:12:55):
Yeah, she drove all night wearing diapers. Ben Affleck Benff
ben Folds referenced it in a song Didn't which song
called Cologne Off of Way to Normal. In two thousand and.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
Eight, Well Noak was arrested and charged with attempted kidnapping
Burger with assault and battery, and as part of the
press coverage, the Associated Press asked NASA what would happen
if an astronaut similarly lost it in space, and NASA
sent them a copy of their policy, which the AP
paraphrased as the astronauts crewmates should bind his wrists and

(01:13:29):
ankles with duct tape, tie him down with a bungee
core log tie and inject him with tranquilizers if necessary.

Speaker 1 (01:13:36):
I can't believe they let that out. I can't believe
they let that out.

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):
Well. Popular Science took a slightly deeper dive into the details,
noting that the flight surgeon, who is part of mission
control on Earth, should be notified before the tranquilizers valium
are given, but still after the duct tape in bungee
cords have been applied.

Speaker 1 (01:13:57):
The order of operations is a bunch of cord alert flight.

Speaker 2 (01:14:02):
Doctor and then shoot him up with valume and Bay
and company might have been vindicated last September when it
was reported that NASA was embarking on a mission suspiciously
similar to the plot of the film. The agency dubbed
the experiment the Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART for short.

(01:14:22):
Robert Brown, head of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratories Space Exploration Center, told CNN, for the first time ever,
we will measurably change the orbit of a celestial body
in the universe. They did this by sending a small,
unmanned spacecraft and ramming it into the rock, which was
a five hundred and twenty five foot wide asteroid named

(01:14:43):
Dimorphos at thirteen, four hundred and twenty one miles per hour.
The craft was one hundred times smaller than the asteroid,
so it wasn't quite as dramatic as the film, but
NASA was only seeking to change the asteroid's speed as
it orbited a much larger asteroi by around one percent.
Nancy Chabbitt, planetary scientist and Dark Coordination lead, told CNN.

(01:15:06):
Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into
a great pyramid or something like that. It's really about
asteroid deflection, not disruption.

Speaker 1 (01:15:15):
Yeah. I think overall, deep Impact is credited with having
more scientific accuracy.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
A movie neither of us have seen or know anything about.
So jokes on them.

Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
Good autumn.

Speaker 2 (01:15:27):
According to Bruckheimer and Bay, and they've said this in
separate interviews.

Speaker 1 (01:15:30):
They've related this anecdote.

Speaker 2 (01:15:32):
Michael Bay called up Jerry Bruckheimer one day and said, Jerry, Hey,
everything he says to Jerry Brockheimer, Yeah, could sound like
a side quote. Jerry Hey, I just read Godzilla was
competing with us. I said, Jerry, Godzilla, they have a
whole album. We don't have shit. And there was this
long pause, like, let me call you back. Three days later,

(01:15:53):
we had Aerosmith sitting in his edit room. Songwriter extraordinaire
Diane Warren, who's written nine number ones and his one
tony short of an Egot, was known to Bruckheimer because
she had written how Do I Live for con Air,
an incredible and perfect film.

Speaker 1 (01:16:09):
No idea that was filmed.

Speaker 2 (01:16:11):
Great song how well, also a staple of slow Dances
of My Youth, so that song. Warren actually offered it
to Leanne Rhymes, who was a teenager at the time,
but Bruckheimer and his team thought Rhymes was too young,
and they had Trisha Yearwood record her version for the film.
In an incredible bit of passive aggression country passive aggression,

(01:16:33):
Rhymes recorded her own version and both of them came
out on the same day. Your Woods peaked at twenty three.
Leanne Rhymes went to number two. Yeah, that's the one
I know.

Speaker 1 (01:16:44):
Diane Warren told ABC that she came up with the
title I Don't want to miss a Thing long before
she wrote the music. It was actually while watching a
nineteen ninety seven Barbara Walters interview with James Rowland and
Barbara Streisan. It was an interview he gave about how
he misses her when she sleeps, you know, like he
can't wait to see her, and I wrote down the title.
I didn't write the song, but I just thought I
don't want to miss a Thing. That's a pretty cool title,

(01:17:06):
you know. She later told Rolling Stone, I was shown
the end of the movie, so I went back and
wrote the song. And never in a million years thought
Aerosmith would do it. I kind of thought a female
vocalist would end up doing it and more. Incredited Disney
Music executive Kathy Nelson was for suggesting Aerosmith is the
right vehicle for Don't Want to Miss a Thing, supposedly
because of the band's string of recent ish nineties hits

(01:17:28):
like Crazy and Janey's Got a Gun, the fact that
Stephen Tyler's daughter is the star of the movie, that
that had to have been a bigger role than I
feel like people are making it out to be.

Speaker 2 (01:17:37):
I can't remember where I put this in, but did
you I have read that you two was originally floated
to do this song, which is probably the only thing
worse that I can imagine Aerosmith.

Speaker 1 (01:17:47):
I mean, especially because I'm from Boston. I should say this,
but I Aerosmith are one of my least favorite classic bands.
Awful ban him think yeow, terrible and what Sweet of
which's okay though that's song kind of God because it
has harmonies. That's why you like it? Yeah? Yeah, and
a good bass part. Yeah, dude, the bass.

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):
Parts are like shockingly underrated. Back in the saddle, although
that's a six, that's a Fender six string of the
Fender six.

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
I don't even know the name of the bassis for Aerosmith.
Isn't that bad Brad Whitford or is that the rhythm
guitarist rhythm guitarist Tom Hamilton, Tom Hamilton's Tom Halson, Uh God,
I hate this man.

Speaker 2 (01:18:30):
Warren wasn't involved in the song's production at all, she
told shortlist dot Com, and so she was bowled over
when she heard the finish version. The only thing I'd
heard was teaching the song to Stephen at the Sunset
Marquee at the villa. There's a piano there where he
was staying, and I was just sitting at the piano
hearing him sing that. I mean, I still get chills
when I think of it, because it was so amazing
to hear the song come alive. Like that, and then

(01:18:51):
when I heard the record, it was like, Oh, this
is the best thing I've ever heard. That is the
best thing I've ever heard of any of my songs
in my life. Diane Warren is hilarious. Her interviews are amazing,
but she is wrong. The band was in the middle
of yet another career resurgence. This band has had more
second chances of life than Motley Crue or Robert Downey Junior,

(01:19:13):
roj Simpson who, yeah, the band's drummer, Joey Kramer, who's
written a few songs for them and is credited with
coming up with their name and his trump guy. I
think that's why they fired him at one point, didn't they.
There was like a big kerfluffle with them recently. I
don't remember that for a band that's considered like this
huge classic rock juggernaut, they are messy bitches, like they

(01:19:36):
remember when they split up and there was the Joe
Perry Project and then I think they fired joe Joey
Kramer recently.

Speaker 1 (01:19:44):
Perry still playing like casinos around New England. Good for him,
he's a good guitarist. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:19:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:19:50):
My girlfriend went to high school with Steven Tyler's daughter
and they had like a like a talent show night
or whatever, and they did great gig the sky and
she came out and did the Claire Oh she did
that part. Yeah, yeah, she did. Like the vocal part.
It's crazy apparently like whipped. Yeah. So she's she's better

(01:20:12):
than her dad. His the most annoying voice in the world. Sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
Uh, Joey Kramer told Louder Sound in twenty twenty one.
I kind of knew it was a hit, but I
didn't really like the song. I didn't think that the
song was us when I first heard it. It was
just a demo with piano and singing. It was kind
of difficult to imagine what kind of touch Aerosmith could
put on it and make it our own. Aerosmith guitarist
Joe Perry wrote in his twenty fourteen memoir Rocks My

(01:20:41):
Life in and Out of Aerosmith. Maybe it didn't have
the masculine edge of our other ballads, but it was
a beautiful song.

Speaker 1 (01:20:48):
I do love that song. I'm sorry, I don't care
what you say. Also their first US number one, baby
I Can't I Can't do it like you garbage.

Speaker 2 (01:20:57):
You have a terrible song. It's so Leaden. It's so
thumping and overwrought and like and.

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
His voice, I can find the beat when I have
to dance to it. That man should not be singing ballads.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:21:10):
He does not have what you would describe as a
sensitive voice.

Speaker 1 (01:21:14):
I like when he starts going into like the high notes,
it almost sounds like an electric guitar to me.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
I mean, you know, the best thing they ever did
was dream On, and that's the best thing.

Speaker 1 (01:21:23):
He ever hated that song. I hate that song really yeah,
I hate it, hate it wow. I hate the stupid
harpsichord intro. I hate the fake Robert Plant chorus. I hate,
I hate ever. I hate that song so much. And
yet you like Oh Boy because I have a bad

(01:21:43):
taste in news.

Speaker 2 (01:21:46):
It's because you like Treacle I do. I do both
both musical and literal and literally.

Speaker 1 (01:21:55):
Wow. Yeah okay uh.

Speaker 2 (01:21:58):
As part of the process to convince the band, they
brought them down to view rough footage from the film.
Stephen Tyler later told MTV News that my daughter at
the end, I don't want to give it away, but
she starts crying and she yells, Daddy. The tears started
running down, and I said I'll do the song. I'll
do the song fair.

Speaker 1 (01:22:15):
I mean, maybe hearing his daughter referenced dad's, you know,
was kind of the deciding factor. Yeah, yeah, because I
mean everyone, I'm sure a lot of people know about
Live and Steven Tyler's kind of difficult early years. Liv
spent most of her early life believing that Todd Rudgren
was her dad. Who among us This mother model b B.

(01:22:37):
Buele named her Live Rundren. That's the name on her
birth certificate, which was signed by Todd Rudgren. She'd been
living with Todd for many years, I think from like
nineteen seventy seventy seven or something, most of the seventies,
but at some point during the time together she had
a brief she got with she got with Stephen Tyler
for what's been described as a brief relationship, which I

(01:22:58):
can't tell if that's a euphem asm or not. But
the official story was that Stephen was deep in his
drug addiction and fuel told young Live that Todd was
her dad just to sort of protect her. But I
can't tell if this was something that Todd Runggren was
in on. I do know he signed the birth certificate.
I don't know if she just had an affair and
didn't tell him, pretended the baby was his or not,

(01:23:20):
but at any event, I guess. Live reportedly figured out
her true paternity around age ten when she met Steven
Tyler's daughter Mia and noticed that they looked basically like twins,
and if you google him, they do. And she asked
her mom about it, and her mom told her the
truth about her who her real father was, and Live
changed her name in nineteen ninety one at the age
of fourteen. And that's so when she kind of, you know,

(01:23:42):
officially came out as Steven Tyler's daughter. She told Wonderland magazine,
Todd Rungren was my father. Todd basically decided when I
was born that I needed a father, so we signed
my birth certificate. He knew that there was a chance
I might not be his, but there's a lot of
puzzling ellipses in here. He sort of stopped calling him dad.
But you know, when he you know, dot dot dot,

(01:24:05):
he's the most. I mean, I'm so grateful to him.
I have so much love for him. You know, when
he holds me, it feels like daddy. And he's very
protective and strong, that's sweet and something I never would
imagine about Todd Runggren, the I don't want to work,
I just want to bang on my drum all day
guy and to People Magazine Live described Todd Runggren as

(01:24:25):
quote her spiritual father. But to me, this whole backstory
adds an extra poignancy to this song, which is maybe
one of the reasons why I like it, as in,
you know, an absentee father who got his life back
on track, wanting to be there with his daughter and
not want to miss anything. You know, they think that
there's something sweet about that there. Plus it works so
perfectly in the movie. Leave's character has kind of had

(01:24:47):
a tricky relationship with her dad, and then her real
life dad is singing to her in the soundtrack. It's
great to get all the drama behind it. Is that
anything to you? No? Okay, but it's the.

Speaker 2 (01:25:04):
I mean canceled but Kevin Spacey inside the actress studio
when he's doing the Pacino impression.

Speaker 1 (01:25:10):
Oh funny. No, No, it doesn't do anything for me.
That's so weird. I did I send that to because
I was just watching.

Speaker 2 (01:25:20):
No, it's one of my favorites before.

Speaker 1 (01:25:22):
I can't say I've watched it a bun talk.

Speaker 2 (01:25:26):
Well, I'd love to tell you that, but I don't
work on tuesdays.

Speaker 1 (01:25:28):
Yeah, it's really good.

Speaker 2 (01:25:31):
Yeah, it's great. I think the yeah, the the John
giel Good one. Just run through the whole thing right now.
Oh well studied, studied for years.

Speaker 1 (01:25:40):
And years, you know, uh so good walking. Yeah, but
everyone has a walk in.

Speaker 2 (01:25:45):
It's really the it's it's some of the it's the Yeah,
it's the it's it's the gold Carson. Yeah, I'm just
thinking of yeah, that's that. I don't work on tuesdays one.

Speaker 1 (01:25:54):
Oh wait, an, I'm thinking of Jack Lemon. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:57):
Yeah, and he does uh, he does Clint, he does
Eastwood too, where he's like, well, le's say get it
done by six sake, get out early and hit the links.
I love that Aerosmith hands fans are correct in their
hatred for this song because apparently all the other treacly
crap that they had pop songwriters come in and write
with them, like Desmond Child, that's all just fine, but

(01:26:20):
this one is a bridge too far. But Diane Warren
is amazing. She's a real eccentric. Someone has in an
interview talked about her carrying her like pet bird around
with her and talking to it like out on the street.
She told Sterrygum in an interview, I wrote, I don't
want to miss a thing for Armageddon, And then years
later the director of the Sweetest Thing wanted to see

(01:26:41):
me because they'd spend all this money shooting a scene
where they used I don't want to miss a thing.
He was scared because it was a scene where Soma
Blair was giving a blowjob to somebody and the guy
had to bring on and it gets caught in her throat.
So she dated a song to sing and they used
I don't want to miss a thing. It ended up
being a big sing along. I guess they thought I
wasn't gonna say okay. Of course I think it's okay.

(01:27:02):
I wish I was in the group singing along to it.
One last quote from her, she gave a shortlist. It's
funny because even though I wrote I don't want to
miss a thing, I can't relate to it. It's always
funny to me because I wouldn't want someone to listen
to me breathe all night. I could stay awake just
to hear you breathing. I don't want to do that.
If someone listens to me breathe all night, I'm like,
get the fuck out of here.

Speaker 1 (01:27:20):
What's wrong with you? Oh? What a treasure?

Speaker 2 (01:27:24):
Oh? And for some reason, on this song's Wikipedia page,
it mentions that heavyweight boxer Tyson Fury has sung it
live after beating opponents on two separate occasions in twenty
fifteen and twenty nineteen, one of whom was a former
world heavyweight champion, Vladimir Klitschko, who is now I believe,
fighting in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 (01:27:43):
So there's that. Is there any lyrical reference that like
would make it make sense for a post fight victory song?
You know, I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (01:27:55):
Maybe he just really likes the song, Tyson Fury, I
don't love to miss a thing. Yeah, there's footage of
it online.

Speaker 1 (01:28:05):
That's okay.

Speaker 2 (01:28:10):
There was a minor kerfuffle around this movie in twenty
thirteen when a journalist from the Miami Herald made it
seem like Bay was apologizing for Armageddon, saying, I will
apologize for Armageddon. It tremendous. I didn't write that to
be so funny, but it is. I will apologize for
Armageddon because we had to do the whole movie in
sixteen weeks. It was a massive undertaking that was not

(01:28:33):
fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third
act if I could, but the studio literally took the
movie away from us.

Speaker 1 (01:28:38):
It was terrible.

Speaker 2 (01:28:40):
My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I
had to be in charge of that. I called James
Cameron and asked, what do you do when you're doing
all the effects yourself? But the movie did fine. There's
two things about that that I didn't write in here
that I want to relate. One is that that journalist
actually sent the tape around of the interview because they
were so annoyed that they made it seem like they
were being misquoted. And two, James Cameron's advice to Michael

(01:29:02):
Bay was have two meetings, one from twelve to one
pm and the other from seven to eight pm. I guess,
so you could plan the day and then have a
debriefing on what went wrong. But Bay was sufficiently incensed
by this to take to his own websites blog and
call this article out, writing, I'm not the slightest going
to apologize for the third movie in my career. What
I clearly said to the reporter is I wish I

(01:29:23):
had more time to edit the film, specifically the third act.
He asked me, in effect, what you would change if
you could in your movies, if you could go back?

Speaker 1 (01:29:30):
God, he talks weird.

Speaker 2 (01:29:31):
He asked me, in effect, what would you change if
you could in your movies, if you could go back?
I said, I wish we had a few more weeks
in the edit room on arm again. Yes, I'm proud
of the movie enough set. Bay would later elaborate in
an interview to Moviefone that his visual effects guy had
quote something that happened in his family, which I guess
is marginally more sensitive to this man than saying nervous breakdown.

(01:29:52):
But the studio moved the release date up, and so
Bay continued, I'm a young filmmaker. This is my third movie,
and I'm like, oh my god, I've got this massive
movie on my hand. I had so little time to
actually cut the movie. We were literally in and out
with sixteen weeks, which is an extraordinarily short time to
cut and finish a movie of that size. So if
I could, I would have wanted to go back to
that seventy eighty minute mark where I thought the effects

(01:30:14):
just sucked, but that's life.

Speaker 1 (01:30:16):
But he needn't have worried, at least from a financial perspective.
Armageddon was released on July first, nineteen ninety eight, and
took first place at the box office with an opening
weekend gross of thirty six million, and it hit fifty
four point two million in its first five days, ultimately
grossing five hundred and fifty three point seven million worldwide.
It was the highest grossing film of nineteen ninety eight worldwide,

(01:30:39):
and the second highest grossing film of that year in
the United States, finishing just behind Saving Private Ryan. Interesting
quote from Michael Bay courtesy of his grandfather, who once
told him, you can make money if you sell stuff
to Middle America.

Speaker 2 (01:30:52):
I have to wonder if Bay doing Pearl Harbor after
this was his attempted a few to Saving Private Ryan
for beating Armageddon.

Speaker 1 (01:31:00):
Right. Good thought. Yes, so it did well at the
box office. But critics, however, that was a whole different story.
Roger Ebert famously hated it, writing quote, the movie is
an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense,
and the human desire to be entertained. That's an Alzheimer. Yes.
He especially hated the film's fast paced and quick style editing.

(01:31:24):
The average cut apparentty in this movie lasts just one
point five seconds. That's yeah, right, that's really nuts, and
this led Roger Ebert to call Armageddon quote the first
one hundred and fifty minute trailer. He would go on
to name it the worst film of nineteen ninety eight,
with its biggest competition being Spice World, and included it
on his all time Most Hated Films list. Michael Bay

(01:31:47):
also remembers in the commentary that he watched the film
at a screening with La Times critic Kenneth Turned in
the audience, who famously also hated Titanic. Michael Bay said,
he looked like he had a scowl on his face,
and I'm telling you, the audience cheered twelve times. I
don't think he liked that. He counted, of course, he counted.

Speaker 2 (01:32:11):
Ultimately, the film was nominated for Best Original Song, Best Sound,
Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects at the Oscars,
and it lost.

Speaker 1 (01:32:20):
Meanwhile, at the Razzies that year, it.

Speaker 2 (01:32:22):
Was nominated for Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Actor, Worst
Supporting Actress, Worst Screenplay, Worst screen Couple, and Worst Original Song.
It won a Worst Actor for Bruce Willis, who had
a banner year at the Razzies.

Speaker 1 (01:32:33):
He was also nominated for Mercury Rising and The Siege
and It's the Touchdown at the top of the episode.
Despite only having a thirty eight percent on the Rotten Tomatoes,
Armageddon was included in the Criterion Collections list of DVD
releases for the essay paired with the release, which is
something that Criterion always does. The company chose film scholar
Janine Bassinger, who taught Michael Bay in college, presumably to

(01:32:58):
explain herself. The commentary opens with Michael Bay himself saying,
why is the Criterion edition of Armageddon?

Speaker 2 (01:33:05):
Armageddon, despite this checkered legacy, was a launchpad for basically
everyone involved. As we mentioned, Willis's next picture as part
of his deal with Disney was The Sixth Sense, easily
one of his best roles of all time. Michael Clark
Duncan went on to do The Green Mile and pick
up an Oscar nomination. Liv Tyler went on to the
Lord of the Rings. Ohen Wilson went on to Shanghai, Noon,

(01:33:28):
the World, Tenebaumbs and Zoolander. Billy Bob Thornton went onto
Monsters Ball and Bad Santa Bouscemi, then did Monsters, Inc.
And Ghost World, So it's just all stuff that these
people are forever remembered by. Happened in the couple of
years after Armageddon. Affleck did Shakespeare in Love and then
stuff like Dogma, Boiler Room, and Reindeer Games. But then

(01:33:48):
pretty much right after that he enters his benefit phase
and we get Gee Lee and.

Speaker 1 (01:33:54):
The rest Jersey Girl, what's that jersey Oh, Jersey Girl?

Speaker 2 (01:33:59):
Yeah, yeah yeah, And then also Pearl Harbor, which is
bays next film and a pretty big flop, and then
Bay didn't really recover from this for like ten years.
He went from the sort of flop of Pearl Harbor
to the flop of the Island, and then in Transformers

(01:34:19):
in twenty two thousand and seven, that's when he really,
you know, comes back roaring. I got a little high
falutin with this with this outro, you know, thinking about
this movie in its place in the zeitgeist in the
pre nine to eleven American Empire, the waning days of
the Clintonian American Empire, I'm reminded of that Hunter S.

(01:34:41):
Thompson line about looking out with the right kind of
eyes and seeing where the Last Wave crested and broke.
You know, this film and Independence Day are really kind
of some of the last movies of that spirit of
like big raw, raw American jingoist exceptionalism, us blow and
stuff up real good to save the day, and Bee

(01:35:03):
for one, seems to agree. Last year, he was talking
to Entertainment Weekly and he said, a lot of European
press have started to look at my movies and they say,
you're a very patriotic director, and do you feel that
the American dream is disappearing? And I'm like, that's a
very astute observation, and yes I do. He continued, I
think we were all crying on Armageddon when they literally

(01:35:24):
shut down prepping the shuttle for an hour so we
could go on to the gantry. And it's like, this
is just awesome that we could do this, because it's
just the brain power and the total American can do spirit.
And I think we've lost that can do spirit. So
while Bey's brand of big and loud might be a
dizzying and dated reminder of the pre nine to eleven

(01:35:45):
American maximalism, we'll always have that on screen asteroid the
size of Texas, folks, this has been too Much Information.
I'm Alex Hagel and I'm Jordan Runta.

Speaker 1 (01:35:57):
We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a
production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown
and Jordan Runtogg. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.
The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtgg
and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and

(01:36:19):
the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard,
please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts
on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Armageddon: Everything You Didn't Know