Scream: 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 (00:10):
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 TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your two disturbingly obsessed divas of
data dissemination. I'm Alex Heigel.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
And I'm Jordan Ron Talk. Hello, Heigel.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I was just about to say, like, do you want
did you want me to do?

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Like what's your favorite podcast? That's good, that's real good.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
It's not, it's not. It's not one of my disagree
he's I mean no, because, as we'll cover later, that
man is weird. Yeah, and I don't think I have
the depth of grossness in my soul to adequately capture him.
Maybe I do, Maybe I do. Let's not sell myself short.
Once again, we put the proverbial car before the horse,

(00:55):
because Jordan, late though we may be, we are finishing
out Spooky Month at TMI. It's kind of an educase,
right because we can get it in under like Day
of the.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Dead, yeah, or like Daylight Savings time, and everything gets
darker and sad. Sure, spooky, it's a different kind of spooky.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, that's an inside spooky.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
That's a heart spooky, it's a spooky mind.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, we're finishing out Spooky Month at TMI with an
all time classic that revitalized the slasher genre and its
director's semi morribond career launched a thousand at least probably
a million at this point film school lectures on metatextualism
and coined an annoying new voice for people to imitate.
Present Company included that's right, we were talking about nineteen ninety.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
Six is scream God. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
I was first made away of this film by the
trailers and like movie standees everywhere, like this is one
of the first movies that I distinctly remember being in
theaters and being like, what's that? And then it wasn't
until because this movie came out December of ninety six,
it wasn't until ninety seven that I saw hordes of
ghost faces of all sizes and shapes trick or treating.

(02:07):
So this was just like one of those movies that
I was like, I think too scared for maybe a
little bit.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Really.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah, I didn't really get into like properly watching whrror
until like middle school, or at least like seeking it out,
which otherwise foisted on me in a few different opportunities,
as I think we covered extensively here the kid down
the street with the Michael Myers obsession and my dad
showing me Alien.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Yeah, that'll do it, brother.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah. So yeah, I think I got to this at
like eleven or twelve, and it got me, got me
real good.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
As it should have.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
I mean it is rooted in like the who Done It?
You know, so as that wonderful row of like hitchcocky
in or almost noir like subterfuge and suspicion of everyone.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
I think that's why I like it. It feels less
horror to me and more in like the Hitchcock realm.
Like Psycho doesn't feel like horrid to me either. Yeah,
and that's probably why exactly because I don't do Gore
and I don't do like monsters and things like that.
But yeah, this I really.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Except for when I made you watch The Thing and
you were like that dog just exploded.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Oh I love the Thing though. That was another one.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
It's another one.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
It's a suspicion of everyone. Yeah, yeah, so good people,
Good that you love the s tier of horror films
at least.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Assessing Scream looking at it through like twenty twenty four
eyes is frankly difficult because Meta is now just one
of the giant tech companies that's slowly poisoning all of
our brands. And also, like the Kevin Williamson and I
will lump Joss Whedon into him, the Kevin Williamson Joss
Whedon like school of dialogue became such a defacto tone

(03:47):
for cinema, and it got extra legs out of it
because Joss Whedon did The Avengers. So not only did
we have like a solid ten year span where Dawson's
Creek and Scream or like Kevin Williamson's dialogue was everywhere,
it was this sort of met textual hyper quippi, you know,

(04:07):
teens who have every single pop culture reference of a
much older man at their fingertips. And then in twenty twelve,
Just Whedon did The Avengers, so all of a sudden,
everybody had to be like all.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
The superheroes had to talk about other superheroes.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah, or just being like not fourth wall breaking, or
at least like winking at the fourth wall, like you know,
the classic joke on film Twitter is like when someone
like rolls their eyes and goes, He's right behind me,
isn't he? And then like you know, like like that,
so the movie had a long tail.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
Oh my question for you, how much do youah that
Tarantino had to do with that kind of medica? I mean,
I guess that's they weren't really discussing movies. They were
more discussing pop cultural points.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
I mean, inasmuch as Quentin Tarantino had an influence on
everything from the mid nineties to the mid two thousands,
you know, and still but like yeah, I mean, I'm
sure anyone who is a struggling filmmaker in the early
nineties saw Reservoir Dogs and then pulp fiction and was like,
oh and especially for this movie, I think because as

(05:12):
we're getting into later, Quentin Tarantina was like mier Max's
golden boy and literally the only person that the Weinsteins
would not work with. So I'm sure some of the
notes were like dial this into the Quentin territory, Quentin territory.
But so yeah, it's really hard to remember what had
bomb this was into the horror psyche, not financially, but

(05:33):
just like it just rewrote I mean, not only did
it rewrite the rules as it openly discussed them. But look,
you know the rules. Yeah it but it also just
like revolutionized that. I can't think of another horror film
that changed the way people like discussed the grammar of
horror as a genre, because every other one had just

(05:54):
been kind of an iteration on a mold. And A
great read for this is also the book Men, Women
and Chainsaws, which is incredible, an all time title, and
it is like an actual scholarly work done by I
think a woman at you See Berkeley, Carol J. Clover. Yeah,
this was written in nineteen ninety two and it's the

(06:15):
book that coined the term final.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
Girl for starters, oh seriously.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, and sort of laid down a lot of the
rules that people are talking about with this, like Slasher's
never use a gun. Slasher's always used not like it's
always like a phallic extension or was one of her
big things. So there's a lot of like that book has.
It's dense because it's like you see Berkeley, I don't
know if it's I think it was printed through Princeton,
but it's like postgrad level of writing. So it's dense,

(06:43):
but it does like lay out a lot of the
track work for this movie's exploration. Anyway, I've talked about
for long enough? Do you what do you think about
Scream Jordan?

Speaker 3 (06:51):
It's so good. It's just so good. I don't have
anything smart to say about it. I mean just the
opening alone.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Oh yeah, yeah, is his Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
I would cement it in, you know, in the pantheon
of incredible scary movies.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
I am mad that I didn't get to see this
in theaters because I cannot imagine what it would have
been like in a pre internet, pre phone, pre spoiler era.
When you walk in there and you see one of
America's sweethearts, Drew Barrymore, who is then summarily terrified and
grossly murdered.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
Just what do you want? I want to see what
your insides look like? God, this is what this movie
did for phones, what Psycho did for showers. I have
to say I heard the phone to this day.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
I mean, I'll put the I'll put the I'll put
a note in that I had at the end, but
the use of color I d jumped up three hundred
after this movie was filmed. It did this movie? Is?

Speaker 3 (07:42):
Is this what inspired you to like bone up on
scary movie trivia in case you got a phone call
and somebody was like, you know, riddle me.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
This, or else your girlfriend died. Well I didn't have
a girlfriend, so there's no worrying about that. But that's good.
Or else your fretless bass happened, neck chat. I don't
know you at age fifteen. Yeah, no, I would have.
I would have lost a valuable time obsessing over Bay
Area punk, Scott punk if you will. Yeah, I don't know.

(08:13):
It's what would it have been like to see in
real time? We cannot We literally can't know.

Speaker 3 (08:19):
Yeah, I know. Did you ever notice? In the opening?
And maybe this is just me reading too much into it.
The music is like a weird mix of the psycho
theme and the et theme, and it has like the
the like staccato string hits, but also there's like a
little dude in the background.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
It's really interesting. I mean, as as we'll get to.
The composer had like never seen a horror movie, so
he was unbound by the various conventions of unshackled by
the conventions of the genre.

Speaker 3 (08:48):
I love a misanthropic. This entire movie is I mean,
there are so many great one liners. She used to
sit next to me in English class. Not anymore.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, it walks such a great line of it's the
it's in the Heather's mold, but it's not. It doesn't
push it quite so far, and it really does walk
that wonderful line of like these are all quasi unlikable
characters to various degrees, excepting maybe sweet Jamie Kennedy and
you know Nev campbell Is is like whiny but understandably.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
So I'm sorry if my traumatized life is an inconvenience
to you in your perfect existence. Yes, I'm the one
who's been self absorbed with all this post traumatic stress.
This it's so funny. I mean it almost seems like
it like prefigures the like over use of like oh
I'm so traumatized, Like yeah, it's funny. How early that seems.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, yeah, And like I like, like I was saying,
it's like it does walk this line of having everyone
be like in these quasi unlikable archetypes of like you know,
the hot slut, the dirt bag boyfriend, and yet they're
still so magnetic by part of it's just being young
and hot. But it's like I don't find it that though,

(10:01):
no walk that back, cut that out. I don't want
people coming to me for Nev Campbell. She's as sweet,
although I am pissed at her about the reboots, which
we will get to. Okay, well, Jordan, from the roots
of this film, from the pen of a failed actor
and a Barbara Walter special, to the violence that the
Weinsteins inflicted on the production process, to the absolute revolution

(10:22):
it's spurred in its genre. Here is everything you didn't
know about Scream. The story of Screen begins with a
man named Kevin Williamson, the aforementioned failed actor. After graduating
from college in North Carolina, Like so many idealistic dumbasses
before him, a young Williamson moved to New York to

(10:44):
pursue an acting career. This didn't go very well on
either coast. He got a small part in the soap
opera Another World in nineteen ninety, then moved to la
in nineteen ninety one, picked up small roles in things
like in Living Color music videos and films like nineteen
ninety four is Dirty Money and the previous Year's Hot Ticket,
a film which concerns two kidnapped strippers who must perform

(11:07):
erotic routines for their captors after their plane crashes near
a mountain hideaway.

Speaker 3 (11:11):
That concerns me too.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
It was well hitting this all time low and taking
screenwriting classes at UCLA.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
Can't confirm taking screenwriting classes is an all time low.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
That Williamson had his first success in Hollywood. He'd written
a script called Killing Missus Tingle, which was later retitled
Teaching Missus Tingle, that was picked up in nineteen ninety
five and then sat in development hell until after the
successive Scream. Missus Tingle was based on a teacher of
Williamson's in high school who repeatedly told him he had
no hope of ever becoming a writer. Once she interrupted

(11:42):
him while he was reading a short story aloud to
the class, saying, you have a voice that shouldn't be
heard and that's disgusting and sit down.

Speaker 3 (11:53):
Did I ever tell you about my last day in
screenwriting school? No, it's literally the last time I set
foot in the screenwriting apartment floor of NYU for what
they called was a crypt panel where you had your
final project, your thesis project evaluated. And I had a
habit of being overly wordy as it were, which I've
then parlayed into speaking about Bewitched in the Brady Bunch

(12:16):
for hours at a clip on podcasts, so it ended
up working out for me. But so there's dialogue in scripts,
and then there's what's called across the page, which is
like description and of scenes and stuff like that. And
one of the educators on my panel just took my
script and like closed their eyes and flipped through it
and then just opened that a page at random and

(12:37):
put their finger down and hit a big old block
of text and read it out in this like flowery
voice and was like, now, that's beautiful, but that has
absolutely no business in a screenplay. Have you ever just
considered becoming a novelist? And that was my exit interview
from U Screenwriting was, let me just do a thing
that we didn't just spend the last four years too

(12:58):
China do and you kind of just came to it naturally.
And I haven't completed a screenplay since. Actually that's not
trure I have.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
I mean, you wouldn't make an excellent novelist.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
He's dead now, though I won that one. I didn't
do it.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yes I did, ultimately, and not really the point here,
but Williams had made a deal with one of Hollywood's
literal devils to get this beloved script off the ground.
He was a hot name in horror after Scream and Mirror.
Max was then attempting its unteenth at bat at the
Halloween franchise, casting about for a writer for what would
eventually become Halloween H two oh. Williamson told Ain't It

(13:35):
Cool News in nineteen ninety seven Love citing them that
he wrote a treatment for H two oh as a
favor to Bob Weinstein. It was a little trade off.
He'd let me direct Killing Missus Tingle if I wrote
the Halloween treatment. My first script was at another studio,
and I told Bob, if you can get that movie
for me to direct, I'll bear your children phrasing Yeah

(13:56):
that am Kevin. That didn't age well.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
No. As part of this deal, the film was eventually
released as Teaching Missus Tingle for two reasons. One, the
column by massacre happened in April nineteen ninety nine, and
anything conflating killing in the schools became an instant no go.
And two, there was the nineteen seventy eight thriller by
author Lois Duncan that had a suspiciously similar plot called
killing Mister Griffin, and Duncan's camp prompt legal action when

(14:20):
they were made aware. Williamson told the Happy Horror Time
podcast in twenty twenty three, they stopped everything in its tracks,
and they went through the book, and they went through
the script. Williamson maintained that his script was based on
his aforementioned evil teacher and a real, incredibly mundane incident
from his high school years where he and some pals
were cut drinking in an attic above the school gym

(14:42):
like idiots. No, no, not on the premises, literally in
the attic. Yeah, the school. What kind of gym as
an addic? I've never I now, I'm like thinking, fact,
they could buy high school gym of an attic? And
if so, what kind of horrifying things are out there?
What was in there?

Speaker 2 (15:01):
What did I miss out on?

Speaker 3 (15:02):
Yeah? I mean kind of anyway, this would have scotched
their entire graduation. So he and his palace contemplated driving
to the teacher's house presumably the teacher that caught them
and quote bagging her and saying like, please please don't
do this to us. You're gonna ruin it. We're not
going to be able to graduate. Please don't do that now,

(15:23):
he says, bagging her. I mean I assume it means
like like literally in a sad head. Yeah all right.
I no word on whether or not he actually did that,
but you're right, teaching missus Tingle isn't very good. I
remember really liking it when while I was watching with
my older cousins, like soon after it came out.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Fine, Katie Holmes, you think she's good and things.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
It's good than that.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
She's she's a sweet lady.

Speaker 3 (15:51):
I look her as like a slightly evil student. She
kind of plays that that role in in Wonder Boys
with Michael Douglas.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
Oh you would like wonder Boy.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
I love wonder Boys. Yeah, it's about a stressed out writer.
We can't finish anything.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I mean I think Helen
Mirren was like someone was like, why did you do
that movie? And she gave the classic like Michael Kaine
answered and she said something because they gave me a
big check pay for my mother's hospice. Yeah, So I
don't know. It's it's it's fine, it's quirky. He's not
a director, and has he done anything since he's about

(16:26):
to do the next one.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
There's going to be a teaching missus Tingleer.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
Oh sorry, there's gonna be a seven cream for seven.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
A seven cream for the new reboots.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
They've just been calling them. They're they're ostensibly they're Scream five,
six and seven, but they've been working the Roman numerals
into the title or like typographically, so it didn't it's not.
For a while everyone was hoping it was going to
be five cream and then scrimmix because of the Roman.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
Like the you know, it's the cream, the cream, it's
it's the vit from the makers of the Vivich comes. Yeah,
that's dumb. I hate that.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, it is.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
It is. It's like too fast to scream.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
Well, you know the funny thing about it?

Speaker 3 (17:11):
Have you?

Speaker 2 (17:11):
I told you what the funny thing about the Fast
the Furious franchises, it was something like copyrights, right, Roger
Corman owes the title fast and Fast and Furious or did,
and so subsequently every time they had a new Fast
and Furious movie, rather than paying him again, they just
iterated a new form of it, and it's too fast,
too furious, fast five fast X the Fast and the

(17:34):
Furious or no Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift.

Speaker 3 (17:37):
Well, I thought Tokyo Drift was flying fast and furious
Tokyo Drift.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
I think, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
They skirted it with drifting, so the oldest trick in
the book.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
They drifted right past.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
A one hundred year old Roger Coran on his death
bed earlier this year, still cursing the producers fast the
Furious franchise.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Roger, One last question? Do you want to let them
have it? No rose food?

Speaker 3 (18:06):
This is an episode for the nerds. This is our
usually we're in for the music nerds. This is for
the film nerds. This is gonna good way.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Where do I get into focus? Pulling you people? Have
no idea? What's in store for you?

Speaker 3 (18:16):
Dutch angles, zipzabs hop. We're having gone to film school.
I know surprisingly little about like the technical terms for
any of like the film composition.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
I think zipzabzop is a drama game. Yeah yeah, yes,
and a right go ahead?

Speaker 3 (18:37):
Oh it's me still who's literally whose lines it? Anyway?
Though we'd sold his first script teaching Missus Tingle, Williamson
told The Hollywood Reporter that quote, I was still struggling
a lot and eating my oodles of noodles. He was
house sitting in Palm Springs when he watched the March ninth,
nineteen ninety four episode of Turning Point focusing on Daniel Rolling,

(19:01):
known as the Gainesville Ripper, who murdered five college students
in Florida over four days in August nineteen ninety Williamson
told CNN in nineteen ninety eight, during the commercial break,
I heard a noise and I had to go search
the house. And I went into the living room and
the window was open. And I've been in the house
for two days. I'd never noticed a window open. So
I got really scared. So I went to the kitchen,

(19:22):
got a butcher knife, got the mobile phone. I called
a buddy of mine. That buddy, David Blanchard, was in
Hot ticket with Williamson and told CNN Kevin was looking
under the beds. He was going out to the garage
and looking in the garage and I'm like, don't go outside.
If you go outside, You're gonna go outside and the
killer will sneak in the door while you're outside. And
Williamson was like, what do you mean, what do you
mean the killer. It's like Seinfeld meets serial killers. Yeah,

(19:46):
the Paris conversation drifted to the iconic slasher stars of
their youth, but Williamson told CNN, I went to bed
that night so spooked. I was having nightmares, and I
woke up at like three or four in the morning,
and I started writing the opening scene to scream.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
Dude, how funny does this movie? If you just read
it in the side Feld voice, I'm sorry if my
dramatic life is an inconvenience for you. So you have
a few animacy issues. So there was all of your
mothers on timely that.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
Jerry, Jerry, It's all a movie. It's all one great
big movie. Only you can't pick your genre. No, that
was I could have done a better Cramer.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
I don't care. I'm not a Sidefeld guy. But it
is funny.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
But you do play the bass.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
That would have been a great soundtrack addition to this,
Like they fade out the nick cave and it's just
like the obnoxious keyboard synth slab bass.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
Forgot how good the soundtrack is this?

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, horror movies weren't a big slump back then. Kevin
Williamson told The Ringer, they have an amazing oral history
of this as does Hollywood Reporter that will be sighting
the slasher films of the late seventies and eighties had
sort of petered out. No one was really making great
horror films. Well, the second part of that sentence, he
is stupid. Williamson was correct that most of the major

(21:00):
slasher franchises were in Faulo periods at this point. I mean, dude,
Candyman came out like, uh, it's one of the that's
another str horror movie, you dumb idiot. You couldn't touch
Candy Man. Kevin Williamson, you hack, you put I hate that.
I hate that, And no good horror movies.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
That come out. You have no good horror movie ideas.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
Uh. He was right about the first part, though. Michael
Myers had been off screen since nineteen eighty nine after
the wildly mismanaged fifth installment in his franchise, Jason Vorhes
was literally dragged to hell by Freddy Krueger in nineteen
ninety two. Is Jason Goes to Hell the Final Friday?
Did you know that, Jordan?

Speaker 3 (21:39):
No? I did not.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah. At one point Newline had the rights to Jason,
Evil Dead and Freddy, and they were planning for Jason
versus Freddy versus Ash three way crossover, and it fell apart,
and then all we eventually got out of it was
Freddy Versus Jason, which is a fun movie. But prior
to that, Freddy's Last Bow had been in the year prior,

(22:01):
in ninet ninety one in Freddy's Dead The Final Nightmare.
The nineteen ninety the third movie in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
would set a record as the lowest grossing film in
the franchise until the next one in nineteen ninety five.
The point is that while there were a lot of
excellent films being made around this time, like the aforementioned
in nineteen ninety twos Candy Man, it was easy to
feel like the slasher genre had quick voice led out.

(22:25):
So Williams had set to writing the kind of horror
slasher that he'd want to see. I thought, if a
killer was actually using the cliche of a horror film,
perhaps that would spin them around, he told Entertainment Weekly.
I thought, if you could just expose the rules and
play with them, then the audience doesn't know what they're
going to get. Suddenly they're on edge. I started playing
with the tropes Williamson didn't even have a full length
feature in mind when he started writing in the middle

(22:45):
of the night. What people don't know is that the
opening I wrote it as a one act play. That's
great Comic book dot Com in twenty twenty one. It
was just a young character on the phone talking to us,
but it could be a killer outside that morphed into
the opening scene into Williamson worked quickly and banged out
the rest of the script in three days, ultimately titling
it hilariously What would follow Scary movie every time?

Speaker 3 (23:08):
About my friends when I play no I just saw recently.
My friend is an incredible actor. She's and she leans
more towards like the horror movie genre kind of things.
I mean, she's kind of your classic scream queen basically.
And she was followed home to her apartment one night,
and this guy attacked her in the lobby of her
her apartment and like fractured her skull. It really beat

(23:31):
her badly, and apparently this guy had been like stalking
her for weeks and she had no idea and it
was really really really horrific. I mean, she had she
had to move and kept changing places where she was
living for you know, every couple of weeks because she
was just so you know, just just traumatized by it
all and it took a year to physically recover and

(23:52):
she didn't work in that time. And one of the
first things she auditioned for was as a victim and
an SVU type show, and during the audition the casting
director said, I'm sorry, I think we're gonna go a
different direction. Your screams don't sound lived in. It was
the phrase. And so she wrote this incredible one act

(24:12):
play called pretty Good Not Bad that just It went
to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh at the end of
the summer, which is just her at this audition. It's
just a monologue talking to you know, an unseen casting
director having given that that note, and it is it
is unbelievable. Ellen toldend, does her name, look her up,

(24:33):
check her out, let's cast her. If you're in a
position to say, she is absolutely amazing. It's an incredible
piece of work. I don't know when and where it's
being performed next, but it was really really stunning.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
That's crazy.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
Yeah, it was pretty It was really crazy.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
I can't imagine doing that.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
Yeah, no, I know. It was a really unbelievable way
to process something that I mean is not terribly dissimilar
to what we're discussing that went on in Scream, but
she made something incredible out of it. Super proud of
her anyway, Well, now we're gonna talk about the Weinstein's
after that. Jesus, I was hoping to be something a

(25:07):
little brighter. Christ Williamson sent a specscript around and it
pretty quickly attracted attention. A Dimension Films executive told the
Hollywood Reporter that he was given the script by a
Mirramax executive and was immediately hooked. Bob Weinstein told me
that I've ever read a script that blew me away.
Let him know immediately. So I called him at home
and said, I just read a script, and if you

(25:28):
don't want to make this, I don't know what you're
looking for. Producer Kathy Conrad added, we got into the
game on it fairly early, and we were used as
a stalking horse for several of the other places that
bid on, and afterwards we won and got the script.
What is a stalking horse?

Speaker 2 (25:42):
I actually love that and also this woman, keep her
in mind, Kathy Conrad is incredible. Stalking horse is used
in either politics or bankruptcy or criminal investigation.

Speaker 3 (25:54):
What a trifecta? What a riddled rich term.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
It's basically the idea of testing a concept on behalf
of a third party. For example, in politics, it's used
when like a sham candidate is put forward to hide
another more serious candidate.

Speaker 3 (26:13):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Yeah, yeah, So I think the idea is that people
were waiting to see or hear what Dimension would bid
on it in order to calculate their own bids.

Speaker 3 (26:23):
Greatly, okay, Williamson recalled to the Ringer In twenty twenty one.
There were a lot of different companies bidding for it.
The price started going up. It being the script, the
price started going up. Oliver Stone's production company had a
discretionary fund and they were bidding on it. I got
nervous because the price went up to a degree where
one of the studios was like, Wow, we don't pay
this kind of money for a horror movie. We're out,

(26:45):
And I went, okay, well this is over. Williamson ultimately
wound up going with Dimension, who bought the script for
four hundred thousand dollars in the summer of nineteen ninety five.
Medium Level. There was also a Vanity Fair article in
two thousand and four that suggested Drew Bahrem read the
script and once she signed on Merrimax, Green led.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
It, Yeah, that article is really interesting. It's all about
the Weinsteins and but it has a ton about screaming
it and as we'll get to the frankly unconscionable I
mean at a long list of their unconscionable acts, but
the horrible way they treated Wes Craven so Dimension funnily
enough immediately pitched it to its eventual director, Wes Craven,
who turned it down. The studio then went to their

(27:23):
roster of directors connected to Dimension, like Robert Rodriguez and
Quentin Tarantino, before also talking to the likes of Sam Raimi,
Danny Boyle, who would have just been coming off Trainspotting
I believe, and George Rameiro.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Tarantino would have been interesting.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, I think he would have been doing at this point.
It would have been mired in either one of his
unrealized projects between pulp fiction and Jackie Brown or just
Jackie Brown. And you know, he's a he's a I
don't think he would have wanted to do something.

Speaker 3 (27:51):
Oliver Stone doing that.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Would have been incredible because he would just he was
just off natural ble one killers.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Uh okay with you. I thought he was just.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
That's the thing about Hollywood, is they just they just
immediately go like, oh, that guy did something similar, Let's
have him do it again.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
I thought he was just off of doors, off the doors.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
That would have been hilarious. But the film seemed tailor
made for Craven, who had taken a stab at reinventing
the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise with nineteen ninety four.
Is a New Nightmare. This was the first time he'd
come back to the franchise since nineteen eighty seven.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
Is it too late to hold for applause?

Speaker 2 (28:25):
No?

Speaker 3 (28:26):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
Craven signed a very naive early contract that essentially gave
away his rights for the Nightmare and Elm Street franchise
after the first one, so New Nightmare could seem as
a much more humorless dry run for Scream's entire self
aware meta approach to the genre. This is going to
get a little weird. Craven, Freddie, actor Robert England, and
the original film star Heather Langencamp all star as themselves

(28:54):
in a world which the Nightmare and Elm Street franchise
is a real film franchise. We are all playing themselves
in a world like our own, until the lines between
fiction and reality are blurred because Heather begins to be
stalked by a new indifferent guy who also just looks

(29:14):
exactly like Freddy Krueger. It doesn't really quite come off.
It's very interesting and creative and like a bold effort,
but it gets a little mired. There's a scene in
which it literally grinds to the halt in Wes Craven's
office so that he himself can deliver a speech about
maybe the stories that we tell are actually legends, and
maybe those legends are based in real things that can

(29:39):
surface again once we give them enough power. It's a
bold swing and it was become a real called hit,
but I don't think it did it particularly well in
the time.

Speaker 3 (29:49):
It sounds like the horror equivalent of It's Gary Shanling show.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, I mean it really does prefigure like I mean,
I don't want to say like Eric Andre that's like
actually just it's deranged absurdism, but like it really for
nineteen ninety four, like taking your established franchise and taking
that big of an intellectual philosophical swing at it is
really it was really something, and it really just gets
at the heart of Wes Craven. He is one of

(30:13):
the most conflicting personalities who has contributed indelibly to the genre.
You cannot find a bad word about Wes Craven. He was,
by all accounts an incredibly gentle kind, intellectual guy. He
studied English and psychology and undergrad and then got a
master's in philosophy and writing from Johns Hopkins, and he

(30:34):
was teaching full time in New York when he bought
a used sixteen millimeters camera and started making short films
From there. He basically leveled up through the film industry
from sound editing and then under pseudonyms, he started working
in porn. He supposedly worked on Deep Throat under a pseudonym,
and it was actually through the porn industry that he
met Future Friday the Thirteenth creator producer Sean Cunningham, and

(30:57):
he raised enough cash for his first feature, nineteen seventy
two's Last House on the Left. Last House on the
Left is one of those appalling grindhouse classics that Rob
Zombie saw and made it. Half of his artistic vision,
the other half being Texas Chainsaw. It is so gross
and so mean. It's ostensibly a homage to Ingmar Bergmann's

(31:18):
nineteen fifty nine Oscar winning film The Virgin Spring, Dragged
through many layers of dirt. It's shot in seven days.
It's like a it's like ostensibly it's I guess, putting
it as bluntly as possible as a rape revenge film.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
Yeah, I'm on the Wikipedia page, and there's a Wikipedia
page for rape and revenge film as a genre, which
I am not familiar with.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, yeah, straw Dogs I think is probably in there maybe.
But Last House the Left was shot in a week,
and Craven deliberately pushed the boundaries of what he could
get away with with violence on screen. And he did
this as a way of reconciling what he felt was
the unrealistic depiction of violence on screen. Henceforth or hence heretofore.

(32:03):
He did this purposely as a way of reconciling what
he felt was the unrealistic depiction of film violence and
the photos and film footage of the very real carnage
of the Vietnam War that were trickling in Last House
on the Left became a touchstone of the exploitation and
grindhouse genre and attracted all kinds of protests, censorship, and coverage,
and expanded beyond the limited rum regional releases that Craven

(32:26):
had envisioned for. And it also has one of the
most famous horror taglines of all time. To avoid fainting,
keep repeating, it's only a movie, It's only a movie.
It's only a movie. Done in like fading down descending script.
Classic was reused for like four other films in the decade,
but despite Last House in the Left's success, it grossed
three million on a ninety thousand dollars budget, Craven had

(32:48):
trouble getting his other non horror films made and he
did not want to be pigeonholed as a horror guy.
He told Newsday in nineteen ninety four that he had
written a comedy about the beauty pageants circuit and an
ambitious biopic of Kerrent Anthony Herbert, the Inspector General of
the Army who is demoded for refusing to cover up
American atrocities in Vietnam, but under financial duress and also

(33:11):
informed by a friend of how cheap it was to
film in the Nevada Desert. Craven wrote and directed another
cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes in nineteen seventy seven,
about an inbred cannibal family of feral killers hiding out
in the irradiated Nevada Desert and preying on tourists. Though
ostensibly just another revenge film, Craven viewed The Hills Have
Eyes as a treatise on how, for quote unquote, normal

(33:31):
people can be pushed into savage violence. By the end
of the film, the mild mannered tourist is indistinguishable from
the villain whose head he's crushing in with a rock
while screaming. It's a hefty film. The remake is actually
far crazier. It's a great remake as far as these
things go. But it has a lot going on, not
just as like post nuclear kind of stuff, because the

(33:53):
implication is that, like, aside from inbreeding, these people were
messed up by the bomb test deserts of America. So,
as he'd feared, Craven became trapped in the in genre.
Fair He made two more horror films before nineteen eighty
two's disastrous Swamp Thing adaptation, which is just a real
piece of and you have to understand how much I

(34:14):
love swamp Thing as a character. God that movie sucks anyway.
His next film was A Night Merre at Elm Street
in nineteen eighty four, another film that literally turned the
horror genre on its head. Ress Craven was a big reader.
He read like newspapers voraciously and this was based Did
you ever hear about what this was based on?

Speaker 3 (34:33):
No?

Speaker 2 (34:34):
So, Wes had read several newspaper articles in the La
Times about long refugees who had fled to the United
States because of war and genocide in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
They were having these horrible nightmares and were literally refusing
to sleep, and some of these men ended up dying
in their sleep soon after. And this was actually called

(34:56):
Asian death syndrome and affected people from ages nineteen to
fifty seven. Wes later said that there were all of
these articles and the paper never really dragged them together.
And then do you know what else? He was inspired by?

Speaker 3 (35:11):
No gem We've found no the Gary Wrights, see we.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
Can make it Oooh yes, yes, indeed, yeah, So that's
just nuts man. And so he had this idea of
a slasher who pursued people in their dreams, and his
next few years continued to expand the horror genre that
he was now at least semi comfortably resigned to. Nineteen
eighty six Is Deadly Friend was an adaptation of a

(35:37):
sci fi novel about a teenage computer prodigy who implants
a processor chip into the brain of a comatose neighbor,
with the titular deadly results. Nineteen eighty eight Is the
Serpent in the Rainbow, starring Bill Pullman, is an incredibly
fascinating film. I really love this film. He goes back
to the roots of the zombie genre and is based
on a real life account of an ethnobotanist was in

(36:00):
Haiti studying the botanical roots of zombies and voodoo and
the idea that you can combine certain plant elements and
vegetable elements into powders and like blow it in somebody's
face and put them into this state of living death
where they would act under your control and do your bidding.

(36:20):
And before, like I mentioned in the last episode, before
Georgiamhera came along with the Knight of the Living Dead,
positing the zombies were actually going to rise from the
dead The first time that Americans had really heard about
this was in I Walked with a Zombie in the forties,
which is actually about Haitian voodoo. So he goes and
adapts this novel and filmed it in Haiti after the
overthrow of the Duvaliers, and they literally had to flee

(36:44):
because they were like, it's not safe for you here anymore.
And so the film is just, I mean, it is
insane because it has a very relatively faithful depiction of
the Tantan mccoot, who were the paramilitary secret police that
were basically the death squads of the Devalier's Papa Doc
and Baby Doc. And this was not that covered in

(37:06):
Western media, and certainly not that I mean it was covered.
This was certainly covered in Western media, but not in
like mainstream genre fair filmmaking, and certainly not on location
in Haiti. Then nineteen eighty nine Shocker comes along. It's good.
It's a fine movie. It's a fine horror movie starring
Mitch Peleggy. Mitch Peleggi. Mitch Peleggy is he's an X

(37:28):
Files guy. He's best known as one of their FBI
handlers and X Files anyway, that presupposes what if a
serial killer became electric after he was executd anyway, bomb water,
bubbles grave, and ever smoked weed. So it's oh yeah,

(37:49):
but yeah, it's a first bom ripe idea.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
I didn't realize, I mean, that's a totally derail you,
but that the concept of zombies and popular culture is
relatively new as opposed to like mummies and yeah things
like that.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not that big of a nerd
to have read into where Romero was purposely diverting from
the established canon of like, I wa, I mean that
movie is really groundbreaking. It's first of all, I think
it's like the first time zombie appears as a in
a Hollywood title. But I don't know when he was

(38:22):
writing or directing Not a Living Dead how much he
was purposely like I'm going to take this away from that.
But yeah, I mean it's really interesting. You know, Haitian
culture is extremely fascinating, and also the way that the
US decimated that country. It's also the first successful slaver
vault on countrywide level. So yeah, read about Haiti cool culture. Anyway.

(38:47):
Craven came Roaring Back in nineteen ninety one with The
People Under the Stairs, which is an absolutely bad film.
I'm going to describe it to you now. It stars
twin peaks Everett McGill and Wendy Robie big Ed and
Nadine as a pair of inbred husband and wife costs
playing slum lords who have this enormous house that they

(39:07):
have accrued all of their ill gotten wealth into, but
they have also secretly been capturing children and mutilating them
and stashing them in the basement when they failed to
live up to their insane conservative religious standards. The two
were very pointedly a character of Nancy and Ronald Reagan,
which is oh deeply wild, and at one point Everett

(39:30):
McGill shows up in a gimp suit wielding a shotgun
with zero explanation. He just comes out in a gimbsuit.
But so they're not they're not even the antagonists, or
they are not the anti heroes of the film. The
protagonist in this movie are all black. There's like an
elementary middle school age kid who is the star of it.
And what happens is is that he basically the accompanies

(39:52):
two older guys on a break in and they're trying
to rob them and uncovers this whole macabre world that's
going on in there, and it just deliberately is like
just a deliberate, pointed barb into the ratio dynamics of
the US at the time, because not only do you
have this idea that's playing on white fears of you know,

(40:13):
black crime and home invasion seeping into the rich suburbs
and et cetera, but the whole film becomes about how
these people are the actual true disgusting monsters. It grows
thirty one million on a six million dollar budget and
is just now a legitimate classic of the genre. But
then Craven went into this whole ambitious reboot New Nightmare
in nineteen eighty four, and then he did Vampire in Brooklyn.

(40:37):
Do you ever see Vampire in Brooklyn? Jordan? No, not
a great movie.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
Was that what started Eddie Murphy's downturn.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Or that Boomerang? I think? But well Boomerang came first.
But yeah, this is the film.

Speaker 3 (40:50):
That life This isn't a holy Man holy Man.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
No, this is holy Man was later. This is the
film that prompted Dennis Dennis at faced, little Guy Oh Miller,
now the Blonde One, Tommy Boy Spade, not Dennis Spade,
Dennis Spade, David Quaid, David Quaid, Dennis Spade, Dennis Spade.

(41:14):
This is the film Vampire Brooklyn. Sorry, Vampire Brooklyn is
the film just having a stroke.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
It's like a laser with a mirror.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
It's just watching it go back and forth. This is
the film that prompt is Dennis Spade on his Hollywood
Minute and.

Speaker 4 (41:35):
David No, no, I didn't got me doing it. This
is David film Bade, Dennis Quay, the film that prompted Burns.
This is a film that prompted.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
Dave son of a Whore.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
This is the film that prompt This is the film
that prompted David Spade in SNL's Hollywood Minute to show
sure of Eddie Murphy in Vampire and Brooklyn and say,
look kids, a falling star. That then spurred Eddie Murphy
to never return to said L until the twenty oughts. Anyway,

(42:14):
that brings us to pitching scream.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
The anecdote was totally worthy. Julie Pleck, Wes Craven's assistant
at the time, told the Ringer Vampire and Brooklyn came
out and it was kind of a disaster, and that
made him sad. Oh, so he wasn't in any hurry
to jump back into it into his own genre. Producer
Mary Anne Madelena said that Craven told her that he
quote wanted to get out of the horror ghetto, but

(42:41):
quote a couple months later he read it again maading
the script for Scream, and they had attached Drew Barrymore,
and he just felt like, well why not. He really
enjoyed that work and he knew he was good at it,
so he never thought twice about it once he accepted
the job. Writer Kevin Williamson went over to Craven's house
to go over the script and told the ringer, I
get lost driving up into the Hollywood Hills and I'm

(43:03):
already late. And then I show up and he has
all these pages of notes on my script. I just
see them sitting there on the table, and I'm like,
oh no, this is gonna be horrible. He's gonna want
to change everything. I've heard these horror stories. I know
what happens now, this is the moment I get kicked
to the curb. I always lived in fear of that.
And then it turned out he was like, well, most

(43:24):
of these are typos. There were a bunch of typos.
He goes, we should just fix everything. Don't you think
has he said he used to be a teacher.

Speaker 2 (43:32):
That's an English teacher, don't you think? Yeah? All the feedback,
I mean, god, I just you know, he's like not
I think. I mean. John Harper is my all time
favorite horror director. But the depth of Wes's like generosity
to younger people is really something that truly touched me
in this episode, even just the way that he gave

(43:52):
feedback to actors and talk to.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
People, which we'll talk about Jamie Kennedy thing this goal. Yeah,
the only time I'll ever say that Jamie Caning was cool.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
He empowered Jamie Kennedy to make Miami's Most Wanted anyway, Sorry,
keep going.

Speaker 3 (44:05):
The Weinsteins were both predictably bullish. You say about the
tone of the film. Bob Weinstein told Vanity Fair, I
didn't want it to be a parody. He met with
the writer Kevin Williamson and said, Kevin, I want to
make sure I bought the script. I think I bought.
Is it a funny movie with scares or is it
a scary movie with humor? Very good point Williamson responded,
it's a scary movie with humor, to which Bob responded, good,

(44:28):
that's the way I saw it, but you've got the
wrong title. He'll remember that the title was originally scary movie,
which is a little on the nose and also hilarious
given the scary movie that we know about today. According
to Bob Weinstein, it was actually his brother, the actual
living monster, Harvey Weinstein, who came up with the new
title from a Michael Jackson song out that year. Kind

(44:50):
of surprised that MJ's team didn't sue.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
Was the Michael Jackson Janet Jackson song that was like
one of the most expensive music videos of all the
time because they were I think it's still all this
crazy early CGI with it. Song sucks, but still yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:05):
Yeah, song sucked. Then I'm surprised that one of the
Jackson's didn't sue.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
Oh my god, other things on his mind too soon
as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages.

Speaker 3 (45:31):
Once the movie moved into official production, though, Drew Barrymore
changed her mind and told Williamson that she only wanted
to be in the opening scene. This actually delighted Williamson, though,
because he'd been influenced by Psycho, in which Janet Lee,
introduced as the obstensible star of the film, is killed
off early on spoiler.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Give her a thirty year old movie, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:51):
Psycho, sixty five year old movie.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Well yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
Producer Mary and Madelena suggested that Barrymore wanted to leave
the production altogether, but was afraid of running a foul
of the Weinstein's Ooh, yeah, I told you my my
Weinstein story. Right, well, let me rephrase that. Yeah, buddy,
I knew something. It was like a friend of a
friend who worked at the Weinstein office, and apparently there
was like an edict that you couldn't have like bowls

(46:17):
of candy on your desk because Harvey just had no
self control, as we've since discovered, and would just just
eat it all, to the point where he would just
like regularly vomit in his office from eating too much candy.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
Oh do that's foul? Ugh God, there is no way
in which that gloop. There's no way in which that
man will get worse.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
With the lead role of Sidney Prescott vacated, production began
casting about for a new cast.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
I wrote that. Well.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
Yes, Vanessa Shaw of hocus Pocus and Reese Witherspoon were
looked at, but Witherspoon, who was to be fair at nineteen,
looked much younger than the rest of the cast. Well,
Kevin Williamson's first choice of Molly Ringwald turned it down
because she said she was too old to play a
high schooler. How old would she have been. She would
have been like twenty, she would have been like pushing thirty.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Yeah, I like so with the rest of them, probably,
but uh, you know, like there's that whole Hollywood grace period,
I guess before now when everybody just looks like an
airbrushed in Instagram model. But you know, you used to
get away with casting twenty five year olds as teens.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
Oh yeah, well, I mean in Greece, wore don't we
talking about how like Stuckard Channing was pushing. I want
to say she was pushing like forty yeah, yeah, something like.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
I mean the film the medium of film was more
forgiving back then, you know, like actually literally than digital.
So but I just I mean, that seems like the
kind of thing Molly Ringwold would do because she is
self aware and like by all accounts a relatively lovely person.

Speaker 3 (47:47):
Yeah, oh wait, I take that back, Stuckard Channing was
like thirty four, okay, so younger than we are now
a really bad news huggle.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
We can't start in Greece anymore.

Speaker 3 (47:58):
We've aged out of height, aged out of high school roles.
When I was in high school, I was cast as
all the I used to get stopped and shown hall
passes by the underclassmen. In high school, I was always
I always had roles in drama because I was always
cast as the adult. I remember we did I Love
Lucy and I was Fred, which was a bummer. It

(48:21):
was Vince Fontaine and Greece. Speaking of Greece, any anytime
they needed a lecherous older man, or like grumpy or stooped,
I was always cast I just get grumpy. Yeah, well
you were like King Lear, weren't you.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
Oh stop bringing that up, all right?

Speaker 3 (48:34):
Were so? Okay? Who else would I looked at? For
Sydney Prescott. The final choices came down to Alicia Witt
then of the sitcom Sybil. I Love Alicia Witch. She
was in mister Holland's Opus. She was the clarinet player
that he's trying to teach how to play the Redhead.
She was dating or married to Ben Folds for a while.
She's great. Okay, she's from near my hometown. She's from Worcester, Massachusetts.

(48:58):
I think both of her parents died in a carbon
monoxide leak not too long ago. Google that. Google that.
Check me see if I have my my local hometown.
Girl makes good loar.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
That makes good lore.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
When her parents died, oh, Brittany Murphy, oh, also is considered.
Who do we ever forget how she died? Because then
her like husband died similarly.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
Yeah, Jesus christ dude, Well yeah, her parents were found
frozen to death.

Speaker 3 (49:24):
Oh that was it.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
Yeah, because they were like hoarders and refused to let
anyone into the into their home for repairs or anything.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
And it was in Worcester. More importantly, it was in
driving distance in my father's house. It was in It
was in worcesters near the Polar Beverage factory. My favorite Seltzer.
Jesus christy. Yeah, that's a bummer. But she's great. And
ned Campbell was the third that made the final cut,
and Nev Campbell as herself.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
I'm not sure if there was a starring nev Campbell
as herself. She was a professional ballerina before this Campbell.
If Campbell, I think Alicia Whitt was too check me
on that. Stop bringing up Alicia Witt, Jamie. Can we
pull up Alicia WIT's dead parents?

Speaker 3 (50:10):
Man?

Speaker 2 (50:10):
What happened to? Was there a thing with Brittany Murphy?

Speaker 3 (50:13):
I forget Uh, there was a theory that there was
like some kind of weird mold in the house or something.
That is, they both died of like weird respiratory things
within like a couple months of each other.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Yeah, because her husband was found dead in their home later. Yeah,
you're right about that, Dan.

Speaker 3 (50:29):
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that there hasn't been like
a one of those like TMZ ABC News specials.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
I think everyone just loved her too much and it
was so sad Brittany Murphy. Yeah, I know, yeah really was.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
Today's the eighteenth anniversary of Back to Black coming up.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
Just bringing in tragic young women.

Speaker 3 (50:50):
Huh. Yeah. Keiths breast Specialty.

Speaker 2 (50:53):
Campbell, who is a beautiful, chestnut mare of a woman,
started in the Craft within May of ninety six, and
he is now obviously indelibly linked with the Scream franchise
and the character of Sidney Prescott, but after the casting
Kerfluffel in the recent reboots, I sort of hate her.
To briefly sum that up, they relaunched, they relaunched Scream

(51:16):
in twenty one, and she has a cameo where David
Arquette like calls her character and is like, don't come
back to Woodsboro. There's another ghost Face and she was like, Okay,
I won't. That's it. And she didn't come back for
six because even though Courtney Cox and David Arquette came

(51:39):
back for five, Courtney Cox was also in six, but
Nev Campbell kept holding out. She was like quoting too
high a price, and the lead actress, Melissa Barrera, who
is in The Heights, basically got a little too real
about Israeli and Palestine and production canned her and brought

(52:00):
back Nev Campbell, and Nev Campbell has not addressed that.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
Oh man, dude, I just got it. I finally just
got it. Ghost Face Killer. It's a Scream reference.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
No, no, I.

Speaker 3 (52:16):
Actually don't think it is. Wu Tang predated Scream. See
you were correct, Yeah, yeah, because they did well.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
It's funny because Wu Tang did a whole thing.

Speaker 3 (52:24):
You know.

Speaker 2 (52:24):
They were so into the grindhouse stuff, like not just
the The Shaw Brothers seventy stuff, but also horror movie
and there's a there's a a Wu Tang side project
called Grave Diggas. It's like horror rap. So anyway, think
of that what you will. Uh Yeah, so that sucks
and five Cream is good. Scream six Cream I didn't

(52:49):
like as much, and I will just not be seeing
the seventh one anyway. Matthew Lillard auditioned for the male lead,
eventually played by Skeet Ulrich, whose actual name is Brian
ray Trout, but he went with Skeet Ulrich so low
and I had this conversation last night. Ulrick was his
stepfather's name, who actually raised him. And there's actually a
horrific trauma at the base of this joke because Ulrick's

(53:11):
birth father actually kidnapped him and his brother in like
a deranged custody move and just traveled around with them
for like three years across three different states before finally
giving up the ghost and returning them to their mother
and stepfather. And Skeat is a derivation of Skeeter, which
was just a Little league baseball name from his coach.

(53:34):
But yes, it's very stupid as far as a screen name.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
Wow wow wow wow.

Speaker 2 (53:39):
Yeah. We'll also get to the We'll get to another
traumatic childhood incident for young Skeet later. Anyway, Matthew Lillard
auditioned for the lead and was told you're not the
right guy to make out with Nev Campbell the entire time.
Why don't you come back in for the best friend? Ulrick,
who was then quoted next in Entertainment Weekly's Oral History, said,
with possible malice, I'll have a with Matt about that.

(54:01):
I think you should let that go by now. This
is all made funnier by the fact that Lillard and
Campbell started dating during the production of Scream and stayed
together for two years. Also hilarious. In a twenty two
interview with Vulture, Matthew Lillard said of the movie, it's
not a perfect movie. I think the opening sequence is incredible,
and the middle of the movie sort of gets bogged down.

(54:23):
Then the end sequence, the last twenty minutes is incredible.

Speaker 3 (54:26):
Apparently, Matthew Lillard was accompanying his girlfriend to auditions somewhere
else in the building, and the casting director for Scream
saw him and encouraged him audition another one of those
I mean salt grain No, I just I guess it's
worse if you if someone looked at him and was like.

Speaker 2 (54:43):
You'd be a good second banana as a deraanded serial killer.
Production was iing Vince Vaughn for the role that went
to Alrich.

Speaker 5 (54:55):
I guess because singers swingers come out too, But like,
I don't know where that would have been in the
production release cycle of of Scream, So I don't know.

Speaker 3 (55:08):
Alrighty Brunette was soulful ozz.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
Yeah, that's how they went with Ulrich. Or we have
Johnny Depp at home.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
He does. He is good in that though, and he's
going as good as it gets too as the troubled
like guy that you want to believe is good but
you know that there's something bad.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
He's great in this movie. He is obviously a QTE
and it just becomes so menacing. Yeah. And he'd started
with Nef Campbell in the Craft, so that contributed to
their chemistry. He, however, did not realize that the film
had any comedic overtones. He went deep into his role,
researching famous teen killers like Leopold and Loeb and the
Menendez Brothers, and therefore, on the first day of shooting,

(55:45):
he was somewhat taken aback by Jamie Kennedy and Matthew
Lillard's let's say, broad performances.

Speaker 3 (55:53):
That makes it work so well?

Speaker 2 (55:54):
Yeah, he told it Entertainment Weekly. I remember thinking, what
are they doing? Don't they know? This isn't funny, This
isn't supposed to be funny. And man, I was wrong.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
I was on skeetz Wikipedia page. Apparently he enjoys woodworking
and gardening. Sweet boy lovely.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
I know, I regret. I regret taking that stray. Yeah,
taking a potshot at Skeet.

Speaker 3 (56:17):
To be fair, even Matthew Lillard admits that the pair
his on Jamie Kennedy's maniacal performance at the film's end
is one hundred percent scenery chewing, as you describe. And
I second, he told Vulture, we were crazy. If I
ever saw somebody do that on a set, I'd be like, dude,
bring it down fifty eight percent. Lillard has one of
the film's most hilarious ad libs when Alrich throws a

(56:38):
cordless pone at him, which wasn't in the script. Lillard
genuinely reacts you mean with the phone, Dick.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
My hehole performance is incredible. I mean everyone cited this.
My Mom's gonna be so mad at me. But he's
like covered in blood, like drooling. It's really nuts.

Speaker 3 (56:56):
All our colleges that Wes Craven told him to throw
the phone at Matthew just to see what he would do,
blaming the director. One of the other oldest traits of
the book.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
I do like his funny like Wes craved like thoughtfully
puts like the frame of his eyeglass in his mouth,
and he's like, Matthew, throw the phone at him. Let's
see what happens.

Speaker 3 (57:15):
Let's see what happens again, A very professorial yeah thing
to say.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
The precise stature of Lillard and Rick's character's relationship was
almost immediately questioned, especially by queer fans of the movie,
but it took a little while for the principles involved
to admit the seemingly obvious subtexts. And this movie was
influenced by the Leopold Loeb case, and of course, anyone
who has seen Alfred Hitchcock's movie Rope, which is a
take on that case, will recognize the mid century closeted

(57:42):
overtones of that relationship. Leopold and Loeb never caught to
it themselves, but it was a widely speculated situation in
which one of them was like kind of the alpha
and the other one was in love with him and
just kind of went along with it. But while Kevin
Williamson came out to his friends and family in nineteen
ninety two, he gave an interview with ps dot Com
into twenty twenty two, and he told them that he

(58:03):
was very hesitant to present the gay side of me
in my work at the time, resulting in the queerness
of characters Billy and Stu being quote a little codd
and maybe accidental. Looking back, he told the site, now
maybe I'd be braver, Maybe I wouldn't be that shy
little gay writer who felt like he couldn't get away
with it. Williamson then elaborated on the queer readings that

(58:24):
are inherent into the coore genre. It's always the survival
tales that connect us. I think that's one of the
reasons Final Girls are so important to us as a
gay audience. Prior to Scream, he said, he related to
Jamie Lee Curtis and Halloween because I know what It's like,
I think gay kids everywhere understand that survival element that
we have to sort of create in ourselves, and then
when we're watching the final girl have to prove herself

(58:44):
and rise to the challenge and save her life. I
think that's something gay kids everywhere can relate to. Lillard,
with much less subtlety, addressed the rumors at Seattle Comic
Con in twenty twenty three. Stu and Billy were definitely
gay and like Ski Orick is like, uh what. But
then Lillard continues and he says, I said it to
the twentieth anniversary with Kevin. Somebody asked, are they gay?

(59:07):
I was like, they're definitely gay, right Kevin? And Kevin
was like probably. So there's all that.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
Matthew Lillard doesn't strike me as terribly intelligent.

Speaker 2 (59:17):
He's I have such a soft spot for him though,
because of this and Thirteen Ghosts.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
Which she's all that too.

Speaker 2 (59:24):
M I was listening to comedy around the comedies around
this time, but also SLC Punk, which is like such
a fantastic under the radar movie that was so huge
for me and my high school buddies.

Speaker 3 (59:36):
Just could we do the movie? No? It was a
really good shaggy Courtney Cox was off of the part
of these scheming journalists. Gail Weathers by think of Carl Weathers.
Gail Weathers by one of the film's producers in her
manager's office, and she jumped at the chance to play
a character that was a little against type. She was
well into her friend's role at this time, she told

(59:57):
the Hollywood Reporter, But I had to convince Wez, so
I wrote him a letter and assured him that being
a bitch wouldn't be a stretch at all, leaving that
one there anything to say about that. Okay, Brookshields and
Janine Garofflo were also considered, who both would have been good.
The other principal female lead, Rose McGowan, had to audition
for the film twice when her agent demanded two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars instead of the offered fifty thousand.

(01:00:21):
That's insanely low.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
Well, and it's up too. I mean this has been
cast as like her being difficult, and she's even an
interview seid, like my agent was too aggressive and like
fed it up. But everyone else was offered one hundred
k and she was offered fifty, So there was already
some disparity there. I also think Rose McGowan has been
was like one of Harvey's victims, so that's like, oh, oh,
she was one of the I mean she launched me. Yeah,

(01:00:44):
she was behind it a lot of me too stuff,
but like, I don't know that it was. Oh so
she said he actually didn't assault her until nineteen ninety seven,
which cool that it wasn't in this movie.

Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
Well for this movie, making matters a little sadder. She
ended up just backtracking and taking the fifty grand. Yeah,
which makes me sad because she's my favorite character in
this movie.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
Yeah, she's a treat.

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
She deliberately dyed her hair blonde to contrast with Nev Campbell's.
She said, I hated that color she was talking to
e W, but it was perfect for the film. Her
character's death scene, which is kind of the moment when
I check out of the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:01:28):
We go back to the stuff you're saying about her
wardrobe and yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:32):
So I guess the wardrobe department wanted her to be
like more of a tomboy and gave her all these
like overalls and things that she was like, no, I'm
not going to do that, And she apparently got into
a cab and went out shopping and came back with
the stuff that we see her in, which we're all
very like extremely nineties hot slut.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Sure, I probably can't keep saying that. No, okay, cool,
you know more about the rules of horror than I do.
That is that a is that an archetype? Thirty rock reftords.
At one point, someone walks into Jack's office and Liz goes, now,
who's this hot slut? Anyway? Yeah, and then she also
like one of the other things she talked about is

(01:02:13):
that like the set decorator had given her like Indigo
Girls posters and stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:02:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Yeah, she went and like ripped them down. She was like,
that is not what this character would listen to. I
love that. There's definitely well there's I think there's some.
But she was just like she was like really took
ownership of like the character as it appears in the film.
It was not how it was written or intended by production.
Bless Indeed. I love a spunky, spitfire. Yeah, sharp tongued.

(01:02:39):
Everything I just said sounds bad, Yeah, it does. It's
got to be a better way. It's gotta be a
better way to say, fix it. And post brassy.

Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
Maybe call her brassy woman just just takes no guff yeah, yeah, witty, hilarious,
no guff yeah, sticks up her sauce. What oh the
garage scene. Oh yeah, the garage scene. Thank you. Her
character's death scene was a big piece of the set's climax,
but it occasionally veered into chaos. Well, Pelton goes face

(01:03:11):
with beer bottles, but she didn't have to do. She
reached the door and couldn't turned the doorknob and made
it out, but she stopped wet back, picked up beer
bottles on the ground that she dropped and threw them
at the killer, which I mean, again is what I
love about her. She was not gonna just run from him.
She was going to attack him. She was just fighter.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
But it's oh oh, that was her fatal flaw. And
also not wearing a bra, would you sub you? She
accidentally It sounds so creepy. It was northern California in
an unheated garage, but it is like, obviously the thing
that everyone notices about that scene.

Speaker 3 (01:03:43):
She accidentally hit a camera with a beer bottle and
shattered a lens, which I can't imagine was cheap.

Speaker 2 (01:03:49):
Yeah right, they were shooting an anamorphic too, oh, which
we'll get to.

Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Yeah. Rose McGowan was so small that she actually had
to be nailed to the garage door by her shirt
because she kept slipping through the doggie door.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
That she was wedged in.

Speaker 3 (01:04:04):
It's a dumb death, it is.

Speaker 2 (01:04:07):
It is funny because when she was talking to e
W she was like, I've gotten into my house when
being locked out multiple times that way.

Speaker 3 (01:04:15):
I actually my aunt's elderly neighbor was killed by a
garage door that malfunctioned and closed on him.

Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
Jesus did it just like drop heavily?

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
I don't. I don't know. It's very final destination. Okay, yeah,
I don't. I don't know if he was just old
and like the Austin power is seen when the thing
is slowly moving towards the guard, it just screams for
like ninety seconds.

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Oh sure, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:04:40):
I shouldn't joke about that. But I didn't know him,
so he's an abstraction to me. Good this really, this
episode's bringing out my worst good. Oh where am i? Oh?
The role of Randy, the guy who knows all the
rules about surviving horror films Seth Green, Jason Lee, and

(01:05:03):
Breck and Meyer all auditioned for the role. All of them.
They would have been gone, Well, Jason Lee is a
little too alpha, but Seth Y and Breck Andmeira they work.

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):
They have beta energy.

Speaker 3 (01:05:12):
Yeah right, I'm not wrong, right, Yeah, you're right. As
I ask for your approval as to whether or not
someone is a beta, as my voice gets higher and higher,
my voice cracks. Oh. Jamie Kennedy ultimately won the role
and has a really sweet story about Wes Craven shooting

(01:05:34):
that scene. Oh you should take this. I know I
love how much you love this.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
Oh yeah, this is one of the aforementioned Durable West
creator and anecdotes. Kennedy was talking to Entertainment Weekly. They
did a big oral history and a bunch of interviews casts.
We're gonna be citing them along, but he was saying
Craven liked his first take. He was like, I think
that's good. But Kennedy was like, I can do better.
So he did a second and then a third, and
then he said afterward, Wes said cut print great and

(01:06:00):
said how do you feel? And I said I feel good.
He said, well, I want to tell you I'm probably
going to use the third take. Never be scared to
ask for another take. Always trust your instincts. That was
a big lesson for me, not to be scared. That
scene really helped me for my whole career, which is
sweet like that. But again, Miami's Most Wanted Will he

(01:06:21):
helped me when I was making Miami's Most Wanted. And
the masked son of Mask?

Speaker 3 (01:06:27):
Was he the son of Masque?

Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
He was in some dog Mask sequel.

Speaker 3 (01:06:34):
Well, you'll be pleased to know that Matthew Lillard and
Nev Campbell weren't the only couple that came out of Scream.
David Arquette cast says the good natured, if ineffectual Deputy
Dewey met Courtney Cox at the first read. The Dewey
was written as more of a dumb jock. Arquette decided
to play the character. It was a frustrated John Wayne
want to be whose authority is constantly being undercut. David

(01:06:55):
Arquette was said to be very excited to act with
Courtney Cox. She was less enthused. Initially we all got
cast Wes had had us out at his house our
Kat's talking to the ringer. I saw Courtney and was like, hey,
I'm playing Dewey and she's like yeah, I heard about
you or something like that. She gave me some real attitude.
I love him in this movie. I normally hate David Arquette,

(01:07:15):
but he's so good in this movie. Like I love
how when when the ghost Face calls Sydney at their
house and he's like long off the phone, but then
he like grabs the phone. It's like hello, yeah, yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
A great it's it's a great role for him, and
it is so I mean, he comes back in the
fifth one and has this unbelievably heartbreaking scene where he's
like it's actually short, but he like wordlessly wakes up
in his trailer and like goes and pours himself his

(01:07:50):
morning coffee and whiskey and then like sits down and
watches Gail on her new anchor show, like on the
National News, and he's like does a lot of great
wordless acting in that scene. And it's just so fraught because, like,
you know, they got together on this movie and had
a child and divorced. So he plays that whole dynamic

(01:08:12):
like there's so much real life history in there, and
he's talked about how they co parent their kids, so
they have like a good friendship and relationship as parents.
But like man, he brings a ton of pathos to
that fifth movie. It's like, honestly, one of my favorite
things about it their dimension where they like, you know,
he says like at one point, he says, like I
left in the middle of the night, like a coward,

(01:08:32):
something like that, and she says, You're many things, but
you are not a coward. And it's like one of
the sweetest moments I've seen in a horror movie.

Speaker 3 (01:08:41):
Did he bring any of that to Eight Legged Freaks.

Speaker 2 (01:08:44):
Or as many wrestling movies?

Speaker 3 (01:08:48):
Now?

Speaker 2 (01:08:48):
The Archets are just so sad, man, I mean, they
had their Alexis had such a sad life and death.

Speaker 3 (01:08:55):
And anyway, I don't know much about Roseann Arquet, No
one does.

Speaker 2 (01:09:01):
They are related, right, No, I think Patricia's widely considered
the best one.

Speaker 3 (01:09:06):
She's got an Academy Award for what Boyhood? Yeah, all right, So,
the as.

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
We mentioned, the pair got together over the course filming.
Jamie Kennedy told Entertainment Weekly we had a table read
and their characters just had a lot of interaction. I said, Jesus,
that's really good chemistry. Afterwards, we were going home to
the airport. We all shared a limo and I was
literally like, Okay, that wasn't acting. They were just getting
along so well in the limousine. I was like, I'll
just sit on this side of the partition. It was

(01:09:33):
actually very beautiful. It was very nice to see people
fall in love. Cox and Arquette got married in nineteen
ninety nine and have a daughter together, Although I as mentioned,
they ultimately split in twenty thirteen. He's talked openly about
how her one million dollar per episode's success on Friends
affected their relationship. Random Casting notes Leev Schreiber got twenty
thousand dollars for a role given to him by Bob

(01:09:54):
Weinstein in an unrelated meeting.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
So.

Speaker 2 (01:09:59):
Bully for him. One of the franchise's best jokes is
that the wrongfully arrested character Schreiber plays is named Cotton Weary,
and then he later parlays his notoriety into a news
show called one hundred percent Cotton God. Yeah, I waited
for that one to hit. Henry Wrinkler is the school principal.
Westbraven also stuck Suck in Linda Blair as a reporter

(01:10:20):
he'd worked with her on the TV movie Stranger in
My House in nineteen seventy eight. He also makes a
cameo himself, dresses in Freddy Krueger's outfit as the high
school janitor, staring right at the camera I believe. And
he also cast a guy in the original Nightmare on
Elmstreet who played a cop as the Woodsboro Sheriff, which
I just love. So now onto the voice of the

(01:10:41):
film's Killer Killers spoiler the movie is almost thirty years old,
Roger L. Jackson. Sensibly the characters throughout this entire franchise
have used the same model of voice modulator to disguise
their voices, but it's always been Roger L. Jackson in
every single Scream. He was also the voice of Mojo

(01:11:01):
Jojo on Powerpuff Girls, which is funny Ojo Jojo. The
role that led Jackson to Scream was actually Tim Burton's
Mars Attacks, which he provided the voice of the alien
translator device, So I guess something about that guy's voice
just screams mechanically modulated. He auditioned for Scream with Drew

(01:11:22):
Barrymore because she wanted a real actor to play against,
not some pa blankly reading lines, He told the ringer
I was working as a voice actor living in San
Francisco and went in for the audition with a lot
of other people. The audition script was the first scene
from the film The Opener. I heard some of the
other people in the waiting room saying, my agent says,
they're looking for new Freddy Krueger because this was Dimension
and Wes Craven. But in reading over the scene, I thought,

(01:11:44):
this is not Freddy Krueger. This is subtle, he would
continue device. I knew it had to be a sexy
voice and something interesting enough to keep the girl on
the phone, even though she clearly.

Speaker 3 (01:11:53):
Wants to hang up. He sounds interesting. There's this texture
and erotic color to his voice. It's like a cat
that seems sweet and playful, and then all of a sudden,
the Paul comes down onto the mouse's tail. I wanted
the voice to change color as ghost Face goes in
for the kill, sort of like a cat does. Okay,
he thought.

Speaker 2 (01:12:13):
A lot about it.

Speaker 3 (01:12:15):
Yeah, yeah, and it gets even more troubling. Jackson was
kept isolated from the cast, but he always did his
scenes live, which meant that the actors literally knew someone
was watching them as they talked, but they didn't know
who or presumably where. Jackson said that Craven gave him
some room to adapt the lines, something that he remembers

(01:12:35):
with alarming relish. He would say, he'd let me improvise
so I could be really creative. I remember I said
something not in the script, like have you ever felt
a knife cut through human flesh and scraped the bone underneath?
I read that like the guy from Airplane. You ever
been in a Turkish bath? Johnny? Have you ever felt

(01:12:55):
a knife cut through human flesh and scrape the bone
underneath Johnny? Like Gladiator movies? Yeah. Another one I was
proud of was when I told nev that I would
cut out her eyelids so she couldn't blink while I stabbed.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
Her to death.

Speaker 3 (01:13:08):
Wow. Okay uh. Later, Jackson tells the vice interviewer, if
I ever kill someone, I just want to kill them
as me, not ghost face. Let's let's pick that apart.
I just want to be seen as as the killer
inside me.

Speaker 2 (01:13:26):
Now. He was prompted this. They were like, do you
ever call anyone up and randomly with the like prank
call people with a ghost face voice? He was like no,
and then he said that creepy thing. I mean, I
guess he's doing a bit, but like, I don't know. Man,
he's like, just look at not the judge of book

(01:13:46):
byites cover.

Speaker 3 (01:13:47):
But you know, let's see, I was not what I
expected this man to look like. Wow, okay, yeah, yeah yeah. Well.

Speaker 2 (01:13:59):
Production for production for Scream was largely set the quaint
little wine country town of Santa Rosa. Our former coworker
Ben Trivett, who does listened to this podcast, also lives there.
It's a harrow fifty miles from San Francisco. The town
was not unacquainted with Hollywood movies like Peggy Sue Got
Married and Inventing the Abbots were shot at its high school,
while the city itself has served as a backdrop for

(01:14:19):
everything from Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt to Stop
or my moum will Shoot Hitchcook Love Northern California. Yeah,
wonder why it's gorgeous?

Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
I mean I didn't mean it like that.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
No, Birds is uh, Birds's Bodega Bay and budget and
you know, obviously offerdigo of San Francisco, so oh it's cool.
Scream production wanted to use Santa Ros's High School as well,
and claimed that they got a verbal agreement from the
principal which they based their shooting schedule around, but they
never actually made it there. First, the city claimed that
the crew hadn't fired the proper paperwork, and even after

(01:14:52):
that had been resolved, the school reneged on its supposed offer,
saying it conflicted with final exams. In the film's DVD commentary,
Wes Craven says, there was actually Rose McGown and Nev
Campbell's dialogue about twenty minutes in that caused the district
to bulk And.

Speaker 3 (01:15:06):
What was that? Was? I just all about life.

Speaker 2 (01:15:08):
It's like their interest scene where they're bantering back and
forth about good.

Speaker 3 (01:15:11):
Stand next to me in English class? Well, she did
not in the.

Speaker 2 (01:15:13):
Mood yeah, I guts and stuff. The movie was really
how do you gut someone? The movie was relocated to
the Sonoma Community Center and entire scenes, huge swaths of
the movie, because this was set in high school, were
rewritten to accommodate the switch. As we get to later,
Craven was already at odds with the Weinstein's about budget
and production matters, so the extra expenses were deeply unappreciated.

(01:15:38):
On the DVD commentary, he estimates that the move cost
production about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, so in
the end credits of the film you can see a
very pointed message no thanks whatsoever to the Santa Rosa
City School District governing board. Supposedly, Craven took this grudge
further off screen and started a never confirmed publicly boycott

(01:16:00):
of Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. I was a producer
named Daniel Ferrins who is actually a graduate of Santa
Rosa High told Horror dot Com in twenty eleven, Santa
Rosa is very high in the Hollywood Blacklist of places
not to take your productions, But Hollywood Reporter journalist Dana
Harris contradicted that to the Sonoma County Independent in nineteen
ninety nine, saying the idea of there being a blacklist

(01:16:23):
against a particular county is ridiculous. It's a complex industry
and annoying things happen all the time. When a community
does something unfriendly. There may be some gossip or something
for the short term, and it might stop some people
from filming there. But believe me, there isn't some master
puppeteer distributing blacklists and dictating where people can go to
make their films, which I say not true, and if true,

(01:16:43):
a bummer.

Speaker 3 (01:16:45):
Anyway. Because of the relative isolation of northern California from Hollywood,
the cast bonded easily during the shoot. They had fond
memories of staying at the Double Tree Hotel, mostly because
they had fresh baked cookies daily. This whole anecdote's very
meee code. Every day they give you a fresh cookie,
Jamie Kennedy said, And I know it sounds stupid, but

(01:17:05):
it was just so good. Every day. I felt like
I had a little treat. If I did a good scene,
I'd eat my cookie. Presumably if he did a bad scene,
he would also eat his cookie. Cookies were eating. Shooting
mostly at night. The cast blacked out their windows because
they'd come back at six am and quote unwined, which
you speculate mostly meant drinking. David Arquette had a bar

(01:17:28):
installed in his room, which I'm very impressed by. The
setup included black lights and lava lamps. He seems like
he just bought out the entire contents of a spencer gifts.

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
No, he said, I didn't put this in, but he
said he went to every local headshop. Nah to a
mass this collection nev Campbell. Remember, David is nuts, so
he bought every toy possible that you can buy in
Santa Rosa and they were all hanging from his ceiling.
I think it was called David's Bar, David's Club or something.
The cast and crew also had lots of parking lot

(01:17:59):
party and even bonfire at one point. Skeet Ulrich told Vulture,
we did feel like a group of outcasts that came together,
you know, six am, getting off work and we're rolling
into the hotel half caked and sticky syrup and blood
as people are rolling out to go to their wine
tours and Napa Valley. We must have looked like the
most insane group of people in this hotel complex. It's

(01:18:19):
not every film that you get to do that. Less
and less now as we get distracted by so many things.
It was really an incredible time. He made this very
interesting comment that like pre smartphones and pre eternal Internet,
like people bonded on film shoots so much more because
you were there was downtime where you would hang out
and you didn't just he said. He said, nowadays everybody

(01:18:41):
just everyone just disappears into their phone. That's sad.

Speaker 3 (01:18:46):
Yeah, it reminds me of the story of the Robie
Williams Crinkly eyed school movie The Cider House Dead Poets Society.
There is, writes to me, the story from the Dead
Poets Society where all the boys were getting up to
high jinks in the hotel.

Speaker 2 (01:19:00):
Yeah, that's what everyone says. One of the other things
quotes about this was like people talk about, like I
hate shooting in La because in La you just everyone
goes back to the formats, But shooting on location, you're
usually all in one hotel or together, he said. They also,
the thing that comes up constantly is it's like summer camp.

Speaker 3 (01:19:19):
They can stand by me. They said that too. They
would do like theater, games and the rooms and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:19:23):
I mean same with Karate Kid, all the all the gang,
all the bullies were like ripping dirt bikes around like
a ripro in time.

Speaker 1 (01:19:33):
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more. Too much information and just a moment.

Speaker 2 (01:19:56):
I wanted to do a roundup of quotes about how
nice Wes Craven was, but they're there are too many,
and we would be here for days. Jamie Kenned who
described him as a tenured Berkeley professor, But he had
a sense of humor about what he was doing. He
once told Courtney Cox, who asked him for direction, Courtney,
what do you think that I've been there? I don't
know what it feels like to be chased by a knife.

(01:20:17):
Apparently he was a bird watcher as well. Kevin Williamson
said he would sit in his chair, he would be
doing a crossword puzzle and reading about birds, and then
he would just go action and become somebody else. Virtually
every actor has multiple quotes about how safe and comfortable
he made them feel in the set shooting this harrowing stuff.
Arquette it did have one hilarious quote in the Hollywood
Reporter Oral History. When you do a take and it

(01:20:39):
wasn't what Wes wanted, he'd say, well, David, that's terrible.
That was absolutely unusable. He laughs. But he says he
had a way of giving direction to an actor that
doesn't make them feel like they failed, and it almost
lifts their spirit up so that in the next take
you can do it again and have more fun with it,
faster better and more blood. He'd say it like that.

Speaker 3 (01:21:00):
Speaking of harrowing the film's opening scene, My God, Kevin
Williamson described the house as out in the middle of nowhere.
What was interesting is that there were just two houses
in these huge fields, and our base camp was at
the other house where they shot Kujo. That's so great,
Drew Barrymore said. The scene took five days of night
shoots to capture. We started on a Monday night and

(01:21:22):
we ended on a Friday night at like five in
the morning. So Saturday morning, okay, is a feeding and
gremlin after me tonight, I've gun cross that it was
more or less shot in sequence. And when Barrymore and
Craven sat down and plotted out, they came up with
an interesting strategy to coax real tears out of Barrymore.

(01:21:42):
She told ew we couldn't have been more on the
same page. I was like, I never want faked tears.
I will come up with a mechanism that will actually
make me cry. I will run around until I'm hyperventilating.
He and I had this secret story. We would just
talk about it every time because it made me cry
every time I thought about it. That worked for tears.
It didn't work for hyperventilating. I would still have to

(01:22:02):
run around a lot. Craven narrowed down this allegedly secret
story for the DVD commentary. He said, the night before
we started shooting the scene, she told me a horrible
story about a newspaper article of a dog being burned
by its owner set on fire. And he started crying
as she was telling this to me. So every time
I needed to get her over that edge into complete tears,
I would just say, Drew, I'm lighting the lighter God,

(01:22:25):
and then she would burst into tears.

Speaker 2 (01:22:28):
It was like the most Drew Berry Moore. Yeah, yes
it is.

Speaker 3 (01:22:32):
For the scene. Roger L. Jackson, the voice of ghost Face,
explained that he was outside one of the windows, crouching
in the shadows and taking shelter into a canopy because
it was raining outside. I was watching Drew through the
window while I was on the cell phone, and I
was completely miked up. It was a live conversation. My
view is what the killer would have seen. It was
genius and pretty horrifying.

Speaker 2 (01:22:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:22:59):
Craven is apparently in the killer's custum at one point,
specifically when Barrymore throws the phone at him? Is that
his territorial forest?

Speaker 2 (01:23:06):
Think about phone throws in this movie. Man. The other
thing that's funny is he talked about how they like
the whole running bit in these movies is whoever is
in the assumes the ghost face Mantle becomes like an
immediate klutz and it's like tripping and falling all the time.
And they said that that was like so precisely choreographed
because they had to walk this fine line of like,

(01:23:27):
he's obviously a guy with a knife trying to kill
teenage girls, but also it is funny when you throw
a lamp or something at him and he does a pratfall.
There's also an incredible deep cut pause for applause Halloween reference.
In that opening scene, the character's father tells her mother
to drive down to the Mackenzies, which is what Jamie

(01:23:49):
Lee Curtis tells the kids that she's babysitting in the
original film. She doesn't tell them drive, she says, go
down to the Mackenzie's. But man, that is a deep cut.
I got a deep cut too.

Speaker 3 (01:24:00):
Ready. When Henry Winkler opens his closet in his office
to try on the screen mask, before the ghost face mask,
before he gets killed. You see his black leather fawnsie
jacket from Happy Days Hang in the closet. Well, it's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:24:14):
Despite the good vibes on the set, this being a
Weinstein production, they were predictably being giant soles. This was
largely a Bob move, So we don't have as much
horrific sexual violence, but we just have the ordinary cruelty
of men with money towards artists. Bob hated the early
rushes that he was seeing and started calling supervising producer

(01:24:35):
Kathy Conrad, who, as I mentioned earlier, I love nitpicking
details like barrymore sweater grossly saying things like shouldn't it
be racier? And her Wig. Much of the cast and
crew also recall an incident where Bob called Kathy Conrad
and asked for Wes Craven, literally interrupting a shot. As
she told Vanity Fair, Bob told him he thought Wes

(01:24:56):
could do better. Wes said to me, what kind of
a studio head calls a filmmaker in the middle of
shooting and kicks him in the balls and expects him
to work the rest of the day and do good
work and researching this. It was so much meaner than that,
The film's editor Patrick Lucier told the Ringer. Wes was
very despondent a few days in when he was just like, Oh,
the studio called up. They're very upset. They don't think

(01:25:19):
it's going to be good, he said. They told him
he was a TV journeyman and a hack. Executive producer
Mary and Matdelena told THHR Bob actually said the shooting
was workmanlike at best.

Speaker 3 (01:25:31):
Wow, wasn't it kind of a legend at this point?

Speaker 2 (01:25:34):
Like yes, he was, dude.

Speaker 3 (01:25:36):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:37):
Twenty minutes after that phone call, Bob called again, complaining
about the killer's mask. Conrad called him on it, this
time saying, you're the president of the studio. We sent
you sketches of the mask. Then a few hours later
she got another phone call. Bob wants Wes to continue filming,
shooting each scene with four different masks until he can

(01:25:58):
decide which one he wants.

Speaker 3 (01:26:00):
That's the most studio executive thing, most like higher level
boss like thing i've ever heard monsters. More work for
you until I make a decision that I could make
right now but won't. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:11):
Dimension Studios head Carrie grinnat yes said his name, and
not a typo of carry. Grant did in fact come
out there and held a midnight meeting in Craven's hotel room.
This is where Mike I just loved this woman. Thinking
that they were about to fire Craven, Kathy Conrad unloaded
on the head of the studio. Who the first do

(01:26:32):
you think you're talking to? You hired a guy who
created the genre, basically, and you're telling him how to
make the movie. This guy's made thirty some odd movies.
This is the most insulting thing I've ever seen in
my entire life. Love it. Essentially, they reached a bargain
where production would cut together just the opening scene and
send it to New York for the Weinsteins. When this happened,
Conrad monitored the situation in real time on a call

(01:26:55):
with an assistant to the Weinsteins. The footage is in
the office. The footage is on its way down to
the screening room. The footage has reached the projection booth.
The footage is being threaded. Bob is on his way down.
Harvey is now with Bob. They're both seated. The lights
have gone out. They're starting, I'll call you back anyway.
Bob called her ten minutes later. It was over the moon.

(01:27:15):
I think he said. Harvey was levitating for the theater,
which may have been to drugs.

Speaker 3 (01:27:21):
May have been the Flay show he received during the screening.
But I guess to his credit that too far for you?
How was that too far for you?

Speaker 2 (01:27:32):
I mean, you know, it's gross when other people would
be Bob is just a person, but it's gross with
the knowledge that that probably happened at some point or
Bob knew about it and was like, yeah, okay. So
Bob called Conrad back ten minutes later, just over the moon.
He apologized, and he said production told them you can
do whatever you want. There's a quote that was like

(01:27:54):
the only person that could do what they wanted at
Merrimx was Quentin Tarantino because of pulp fiction. But it
is really gross how everyone at that studio was just like,
these men are unabashed monsters, Like who's that Broadway producer
who like Scott Scot a.

Speaker 3 (01:28:08):
Friend who were for Scott Rudin And then yeah, it
was known at the time.

Speaker 2 (01:28:11):
These are terrible, terrible human beings like and then and
then and then it was just an open secret that
one of them was a horrifying sexual predator. What a
nightmare industry movie magic.

Speaker 3 (01:28:24):
It is weird, and I don't know how much of
this I'll keep, but like, yeah, I mean I had
a really good friend who who worked for him and
was like, yeah, when that ex was a came It
wasn't like all of a sudden like wait, you two
you too know this on It was like yeah, everybody knew.
It was just it was even thirty Rocks.

Speaker 2 (01:28:39):
Yeah, it was another thirty Rock joke where Jenna Moroney
says something like she says something you remain the person
who you were in certain situations. In many ways, I'm
still trapped under passed out Harvey Weinstein at a Meer
Max Christmas party. Oh god, that was a line in
network television. Everyone was just like, who, well, it's funny,
creepy Harvey, It's funny.

Speaker 3 (01:28:58):
It is the whole like notion of open secrets, you know.
I mean, I remember hearing stuff about the Louis c
k thing for years, and you know, and now there's
this one comedian who's become a very big deal with
a a show that's like basically like a like a
one man show kind of deal that's supposed to be
you know, first person. And I'm hearing from all kinds

(01:29:20):
of multiple sources that he made it all up. It's
presented as like a first person like an authentic thing,
and it's a very deeply emotional forum. And it's of
course widely believe that it's been completely made up. And
he's won like all these awards for it and stuff,
and now he's getting cast in like extremely high profile. Like, Yeah,

(01:29:42):
it's weird. It's weird when there's just like too much
money riding on stuff for people to speak out. It's
bizarre sad anyway, speaking of masks, ooh right.

Speaker 2 (01:29:57):
And the ones we wear.

Speaker 3 (01:29:58):
Yes, yes, the ghost face mask truly horrifying, like really
deeply unsettling.

Speaker 2 (01:30:04):
Yeah, it was great. Like I said, I remember seeing
it just on the streets of New Cumberland, Pennsylvania and
just being like, ah.

Speaker 3 (01:30:12):
I think that's what's so Like if you see it
in New York, it's kind of not that scary, but
seeing it in like the suburbs, there is a creepiness
to it. I can't explain why.

Speaker 2 (01:30:21):
I mean, it gets at the clown thing yess like
deranged in the sort of clown way. And obviously everyone's
seen the Edward Moons painting at some point in their life.
But you know, it just kind of goes back to
the Michael Myers thing, which is like, what is the
scariest thing in the world A white man, you know,
just a white face that signals danger for a whole

(01:30:41):
gender and several races.

Speaker 3 (01:30:44):
You know, I read somewhere on some listical thing and
I couldn't like totally source it, but they wanted his
like cape drapy thing to be white, but it looked
a little too clanny, Yeah, so they changed that. The
mask is not explicitly described in the script, and much
like the iconically terrible William Shatner mask that they gave

(01:31:07):
Michael Myers, this was just a standard Halloween mask that,
as you mentioned, was inspired by Edward Munch's painting The
Scream and a whole lineage of cartoonishly distorted faces that
took its cues from it cover of King Crimsons in
the Court of the Crimson King and Pink Floyd's The
Wall for Starters. The ghost Face mask was designed in

(01:31:30):
nineteen ninety one as part of the Fun World company's
Fantastic Faces product line and was found by Kevin Williamson
and executive producer Mary and Madelena while location scouting.

Speaker 2 (01:31:42):
Just in a room, just in a kid's room. They said,
we took.

Speaker 3 (01:31:45):
That to production and said, riff on this, make something
like this, And they must have done twenty different designs.
But while fun World legally owned the design, it was
a team effort from a group of talented artists. Lauren
Griffins was a special effects makeup artist working in Los
Angeles Tony Gardner's Altyrian Studios and recall the fangoria, the
Halloween tradition amongst the special effects community, which was to

(01:32:06):
throw a party to show off their stuff. I love that.
That's really cute, Griffith said. My costume idea was an
advanced take on the classic Halloween costume of a bed
sheet with eyeholes for a ghost, which integrated a formed
buckram ghost face mask with a long jaw. Buckram is
a kind of stiff fabric. Tony Gardner told the magazine
that during the slow period for movie work, the company

(01:32:27):
decided to make a collection of Halloween masks and self
market them, buying an ad in the back of Fangoria magazine.

Speaker 2 (01:32:35):
It is really amazing, like this article, like you can
go in line because Fangoria has these tremendous arcads that
were literally just all in fiocabinets in like New York,
in one office, so they have so much of it,
all of it digitized. That's but you can go back
and see like these one ads and it is just
a ghost face mask. It's like literally the goddamn ghost

(01:32:55):
face mask. And this is why this next wort pisses
me off.

Speaker 3 (01:32:58):
Oh here you you do this them.

Speaker 2 (01:33:02):
So in nineteen ninety one, Gitterns and this fellow artist
at this company, Altierian Jim Usterman, drove cross country to
the annual Halloween Trade Show in Chicago, which is the
largest event of its kind in the US, to promote
their line of masks. Within months of that show, this
company called fun World had a brand new in house designer.

(01:33:24):
Her name is Brigitte Slairton Leeden. Slairton Leiden, her name
is Brigitte Slairton Leiden, and they just told her to
copy the Altyrian designs. She explicitly told Fangoria I was
given a picture of something similar to what the finished
masks would eventually look like, and was asked if I

(01:33:45):
thought these could be made as masks and do some
drawings with a similar look and feel. So I did
a bunch of sketches of different faces with that same
white melty face with simplistic black facial feature shapes, and
in a surprise to no one familiar with Corporate America,
fun World's line of Fantastic faces, which included six masks,

(01:34:06):
are all riffs on that original kind of design that
was done by Aultrian. A year or two later, Gieterns
told Fangoria, I was in a drug store and I
saw fun World's mass produced knockoff versions of my whaler mask.
Clearly it appeared to be a direct rendering of my
original creation. I was a bit amused, but didn't pursue

(01:34:27):
looking into it any further, as I had left that
part of my life behind and was on too a
new one.

Speaker 3 (01:34:32):
Years after that, one of the masks was found and
picked for the movie, though Dementia Studios wanted to own
the rights for their own design for merchandising purposes, which
was smart and Special Facts House kN BFx was churning
out designs left and right that weren't quite what they
wanted Wes Craven stuck to his guns, and eventually they
had to reach out the Fun World to license the
rights for the mask. But the drama over credit for

(01:34:54):
the masks design, though literally, played out in the pages
of Fangoria magazine. Fangoria issue number one eighty nine from
January two thousand interviewed the original fund World designer, writing
the mask was actually designed by fun World employee Brigitte
Swedish chef Sounds, prior to the movie's conception. Brigitte stated

(01:35:16):
the idea was something I worked on with Alan Geller,
the vice president of the company. Of the entire assortment,
that face was the strongest one. A reader wrote in
to bring up the original designers, and from then on,
fun World literally wrote sleeve and Linder out of the
story of the mask design. She no longer is mentioned
on the site, and fun World now credits VP Alan
Geller as the creator of the design.

Speaker 2 (01:35:37):
So to recap, yeah, she claimed credit in Fangoria, and
a reader in Fangoria wrote in to correct the record
and fun World Reddit someone at that company read it
and when she's a loose cannon, we are taking her
out of this narrative and they don't, so now it's
just credit to the VP.

Speaker 3 (01:35:58):
That's sad.

Speaker 2 (01:35:59):
And then and all these original artists are cut out.
This is the most popular Halloween costume in the US
period for like decades, I'm sure, and all of these
artists have been cut out of these massive profits. The
owner of Vultarian Studios, Tony Gardner, said that when he
first saw the movie, he was genuinely flattered that they
had used our mass design. I really enjoyed the movie

(01:36:21):
and thought it was a great compliment that the Whaler
was up there on the big screen and such a
great film. I was a bit naive at the time
and assumed that since it had been years since we
created the mask, there would be no way to fight
for it. I also assumed that the movie was a
one time deal and the ship had already sailed. But
here's the thing. Fun World didn't register that or the
phrase ghostface as a trademark until nineteen ninety six, so

(01:36:44):
they had stolen these designs, failed to copyright them, and
then filed the paperwork just as the movie was being made.
Before these original artists had any notion that this was
going to become one of the biggest horror movies of
all time, and hilariously enough, the top banner of on
World's website currently reads over fifty years of seasonal product fun,

(01:37:05):
honesty and integrity.

Speaker 3 (01:37:06):
Wow eh, this has been the Heigel's moral stand of
this episode.

Speaker 2 (01:37:14):
Yeah, gob on my soapbox. I take my seasonal ephemera
very seriously, all right?

Speaker 3 (01:37:21):
Yes, you do you love spooky season? Also?

Speaker 2 (01:37:24):
Yes, and and the sanctity of it as a pagan
Celtic right.

Speaker 3 (01:37:27):
I don't think you get this up in arms about
like nutcrackers or like oflf on the shelf.

Speaker 2 (01:37:32):
No, absolutely, yeah, but I will paint Celtic roots in
blood in the Fun World offices.

Speaker 3 (01:37:40):
I continue going ham on Easter just because of the
pagan Yeah. Yeah, still Halloween though, Yeah, oh of course. Yeah.
Your birthdays, everybody, Higel's birthdays coming up?

Speaker 6 (01:37:52):
Shut up?

Speaker 2 (01:37:53):
That means Jordan's birthdays coming up? No, my birthday is
until Christmas. Yeah, well your birthday is next week or two.

Speaker 3 (01:38:01):
Shut up.

Speaker 2 (01:38:01):
I'm just trying to deflect. Also read.

Speaker 3 (01:38:06):
The film's third act takes place entirely in an essentially
abandoned house in Tomalas in Morin County. Population as of
the twenty twenty Census one hundred and eighty seven. That's
up there with the Buffalo Bill House right. The house
they found had been built by a couple in nineteen
ninety on thirty acres of land, and when they died

(01:38:26):
within a month of each other, their children wanted nothing
to do with it. That house was like five years
old when they filmed that. That's terrifying. Production designer they died,
They died real quick.

Speaker 2 (01:38:37):
Yeah, they built their dream house and then Super died
In America.

Speaker 3 (01:38:43):
Production designer Bruce Miller explained, it just doesn't make sense
that in a normal American home, murders could be happening
in the upstairs bedrooms and people watching television downstairs would
know about it. So the house had to be big
enough and the rooms had to be separated by enough
distance to convince the audience that these things could really
be happening without the other people knowing about it. This
particular house was perfect for that because it was very

(01:39:05):
convoluted and kind of Victorian on the inside. It's like
the Manson murders. There was one guy in the property
who was in the little guest cottage just just away
from the main house, and he lived and everyone's like,
you didn't you didn't hear that. You didn't hear the
screaming on the lawn and and the guns, and you
hear any of that? And he said no, And then
they checked like the stereo. He was like, listen, I

(01:39:26):
think he was listening to the doors. Actually they checked
his like stereo levels. And yeah, there's all sorts of
stories about whether or not he actually heard nothing or
if he just hid under his bed.

Speaker 2 (01:39:38):
For those of you who are keeping track at home,
that is our Manson family tie in. Jordan has yet
to work in the Beatles or the Beach Boys. Yeah
that's true. Huh, I'll figure out something. I haven't done
a Manson tian in a while. It's true, it's true.

Speaker 3 (01:39:52):
So this house production got it cheap and it was
Craven said that the art department went in there and
did an enormous number on the house. We put all
sorts of beams and stained glass windows, darkened all the colors,
brought out all the set dressings. It was done in
a sort of farmhouse style and we changed it into
a gothic farmhouse. Production also made a bunch of fake
barn fronts to hide the trailers. I like that these

(01:40:15):
were obviously all taken out after production the house was sold.
The house was sold in twenty fourteen for whoa two
point eight million dollars, although I guess it's outside of
San Francisco and Zillo now estimates its value at three
point five million, and you believe it currently is a
wedding venue and event rental property called spring Hill Estate

(01:40:36):
and does offer Scream tours for two hundred bucks a pop.

Speaker 2 (01:40:39):
So they don't call it the Scream House like they
they It's called spring Hill State and I think they
do just like weddings there, but there is also like
a subcontracted company that does Scream tours there. And I
think when they launched the movie, Airbnb did some kind
of a like when they rebooted the movie, Airbnb did
some kind of a tie in. I was like, come
stay Stew's house from Scream. I don't have dollars two

(01:41:01):
hundred dollars to drive into the middle of nowhere and
like trapes around a house. I'm sorry that surprises me.
I spend that money on boutique guitar pedals. Jordan Streyman,
give me some free sh ah. Anyway, that final forty
two minute sequence. Like fully a third of the film
takes place in that house. It was hell to shoot.

(01:41:23):
They did it over the course of three weeks, and
to start with, the place was because of the remote location.
It made lighting it with a traditional overhead rig called
a condor impossible. A condor is one of those things
that it's one of those things that it has like
a base and that it has the extending legs out
to stabilize it, and then you mount different isolated arrangements

(01:41:44):
of lights on it. And the ground was simply too
steep and weird to do that. So they essentially had
to mount a lot of the lighting that was used
for the exteriors and to get the kind of atmosphere
stuff for interiors on the side of the garage. And
this was costly, took time, It was less than perfect
because it showed up in some shots, and so this
is sad. Cinematographer Mark Irwin had worked with Craven on

(01:42:08):
four films before, and he had vociferously opposed the location
from the start, but this is where it gets weird.
He also pushed to shoot Scream with an anamorphic lens.
Anamorphic lenses as I mentioned earlier our favorite of John
John carpetel anamorphic lenses are a favorite of John Carpenter.

(01:42:29):
It basically distorts the image into a wider frame, and
Carpenter and a lot of the Western guys that were
inspired by love it because it gives you this beautiful, large, scenic,
widescreen image to work with. But because it is actually
distorting the image that's printed on the film, you get
things like lens flares, and you get a little distortion

(01:42:51):
at the ends of the sides of the screens, and
some of that in the hands of a really talented
cinematographer like Dean Kundy on those Carpenter films, looks really
really beautiful, like you can make lens flair and do
weird things with the distortion inherent in the format. But
this guy, Mark Orwin and Wes Craven hadn't shot an
anamorphic before. It was just something that was like, I'm

(01:43:12):
gonna shoot this one an anamorphic. So this created a
problem with what they call focus pulling. And feel free
to skip ahead fifteen or thirty seconds if you are
not interested in the most granular bit of filmmaking I
have ever talked about. On this show, focus pulling is
a specific part of camera operation, which doesn't mean keeping

(01:43:34):
the entire shot in focus. It means keeping a specific
focal point on an actor or in a location consistent
as those things move within the frame. So, for example,
a puller might hone in on an actor's eye during
a shot, and bad focus pulling is when they would

(01:43:54):
not track that as the actor moves, and then you
end up with a focus point that goes from their
eye to their ear or to a point in the background.
That is focus pulling. And so with about three weeks
to go, editor Patrick Lucier voiced concerns with the particular
focus puller on Mark Irwin's team that he said had

(01:44:15):
been quote.

Speaker 3 (01:44:16):
Accumulating for three films.

Speaker 2 (01:44:18):
So I remember these guys had worked Craven's team had
worked together for a while, and they took the cinematographer
into one of the rooms and was like, look, man,
all this stuff is unusable because with bad focus pulling,
that eliminates the consistency of footage that you need to
edit a film together. Right, You can't edit shots together

(01:44:39):
that have different focal points ostensibly within the same scene.
This all track My explaining this well, yeah, okay, cool.
And so one of the most famous examples of this
that I think I haven't delved into whether or not
it was the specific focus pooler or just the cinematographer
who did this, But there's a really famous one in
Requiem for a Dream is during the unbroken shot of

(01:45:02):
Ellen Burston's like horrifyingly sad monologue, and there's a second
where the focus pool changes, and it was because the
guy working it had started crying and his tears fogged
up the lens so that he couldn't see what was
the lost focus for a second. Anyway, So that's your

(01:45:25):
that's Hegel's nitty gritty digression.

Speaker 3 (01:45:29):
I'm wearing nasal strips right now because, as you can hear,
I have a cold. But if I wasn't, you would
have heard me snoring. Okay, cool, I'm saw. I'm kidding.
You know, I love all this technical stuff that I
don't have a magic. I love how much you love
movie magic. No, I did, and that was very well
told and very fast. I'm kidding.

Speaker 2 (01:45:48):
You should keep the story bitten, though it's funny.

Speaker 3 (01:45:52):
Keep it all in I always do. I never edit
you for time. Well, I edit you for a fence
and humor. Anyway, After screening some of the final footage,
Irwin said Craven after conferring with editor Patrick Lucier, Lucier
informed Erwin that all the filmed footage was unusable and

(01:46:14):
that thirty five days of scenes needed to be reshot.
He must have wanted to walk into the ocean. That
is so bad and it all began with a scream,
A wonderful making of book. Irwin alleged that he was
being scapegoated for the film running behind scheduled due to
an agreement Craven had at the studio that he would
forfeit his salary after a certain amount of delay. Producer

(01:46:37):
Kathy Conrad denies that she will defend Red Craven to
the death, but either way. Erwin was replaced on the
spot after the screening by Peter Deming for the final
three weeks of shooting thirty five days over Oh my god. Anyway,
This is all contributed to what is now referred to
as quote the longest night in horror history, scene one

(01:46:58):
hundred and eighteen, which had over twenty parts. Hi, I
goel tell us about seeing one eighteen. This seems like
something that is more you well.

Speaker 2 (01:47:06):
Cast and crew printed up T shirts that read I
survived seeing one eighteen after they wrapped. So there's about
That's about the scope of it. To keep blood consistent
from shot to shot, they were not allowed to wash
their costumes, so Nev Campbell said, I would take it
off in the morning and then in the evening when
I went back to work, because the continuity of the

(01:47:27):
blood had to be the same. They would just wet it.
They would just dampen the whole thing. I wanted to
burn that costume at the end of the movie. The
call sheets for these for all these days of shooting
had a much more prosaic name for the scene, People Live,
People Die. The final confrontation between Campbell, Lillard, and Ulrich

(01:47:49):
took five days on its own. One particular moment made
production literally question Wes Craven's sanity. Mary and Matdeleena said,
we thought Wes went nuts because we didn't know the
sofa had feathers in it, and we thought Wes was
crazy to carry on with everyone covered in blood, which
is really corn syrup as the feathers fall over them.

(01:48:10):
Skeet Olrick told Vulture, We've got Nev pinned in the
corner of the kitchen. I'm trying to hit that little
heartfelt moment of my character having lost his mom and
Sydney disappears and we can't find her, and I run
into the living room with my knife and cut the
couch open. I had so many damn feathers stuck to
all that blood around the neck. We do the first
take and all I can hear is Wes laughing. I
look down and it looks like I have a duck

(01:48:31):
on my hand. Also, that finale had a very real
scare for skeet Ulric.

Speaker 3 (01:48:37):
His dad came out.

Speaker 2 (01:48:42):
Here is this on the coll sheetr McDonald.

Speaker 3 (01:48:50):
Where he was talking with like Bob Einsteiner or if
he's talking with somebody who's like, yeah, I used to
walk into uh, Dean Martin Street.

Speaker 7 (01:49:01):
Dean Martin at Hamburger hamlet you know everything. That's what
I meant. That's where I saw him.

Speaker 6 (01:49:06):
Was it was it Hamberd, Yeah, that's where I also,
we must have talked about it.

Speaker 3 (01:49:09):
I don't know, well, you know it was me at
Hamberg and I.

Speaker 6 (01:49:11):
Walked in there and he had lost his son and
he was my He was one of the guys that
just did it like that was the guy. I looked
at it and he was sitting there and he was
having a martini, and I just walked over and I
was twenty two, twenty three, and I just kind of
stood there. I didn't want to bother him because I
or maybe I was twenty four and he was just

(01:49:34):
sitting there and he looked up and it was it
was nice, and I just went, I found your.

Speaker 7 (01:49:38):
Son, that' said Bob Sage's better a guest.

Speaker 2 (01:49:54):
Something should do an edit where they find an old
picture of Skilk's biological dad and just like put him
in as a force ghost in the background like the
blue Anakin Skywalker. I'm proud of you some Oh, anyway,
making more fun of Sketric's childhood drama, the guy had

(01:50:15):
open heart surgery when he was a kid. Oh, and
he was left with a scarred area where the skin
was thinner, and there was a bunch like stainless steel
wire because they had to reconstruct like part of his heart.
So there's stainless steel wire like under this, under this
scarred area, this thinner skin that was very sensitive to
the touch. And turns out havev Campbell hit him in

(01:50:38):
that exact spot with an umbrella when she jumps out
of the closet at him, and so his reaction to
that pain is very real.

Speaker 3 (01:50:47):
Cambell recalled the difficulty of maintaining an intense level of
terror for that long. How long were they shooting this
five days? God? But that was helped along by Wes Craven,
and the scene was skeeton. Matt went up against the
counter and there to kill me. I'm about to get
my strength. Wes came up and he just whispered in
my ear. He said, imagine you've got a thousand bullets

(01:51:08):
ricocheting through your body, and he walked away. Your fear
might have been helped by how intense Alrick and Lillard were.
Lillard told Vulture, we were amped, were fully torn. Bro,
he really is that way. Wow. There was no doubt
that we were on a fever pitch for the five
days we shot the last killing sequence, we were screaming,

(01:51:30):
don't see what he did there. We were in between,
we were in between takes, trying to maintain that energy.
Aulrick added, Courtney came to the set getting ready to
shoot it, and Matt and I are like caged animals
in that zone. Just pacing the set. Courtney comes in
and we make eye contact, and Wes was like, Okay,
all right, all right, she's freaked out and we're not
even filming yet. And I distinctly remember Wes being like,

(01:51:53):
all right, guys, just calm down for a second.

Speaker 2 (01:51:57):
Just like Faroly covered in blood. I can see how
Crinny Cox looks at and makes eye contact with one
of them was like, what the fuck did I sign
up for again?

Speaker 3 (01:52:06):
These fifty gallons of fake blood on this movie? It
almost sounds low and I.

Speaker 2 (01:52:11):
Say that, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:52:14):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:52:14):
Random note about composer Marco Beltrami from his CHR part.
He said Wes was looking for a composer for the movie,
and I send over a demo tape. I had not
seen any horror movies up to that point. I had
never been affair and of the genre. When I went
into meet with Wes, I remember him saying, it's funny
all the demo tapes we get, everyone sounds like John Williams.
You're the first one that sounds like your original Bell

(01:52:36):
Trommy took the opening scene home and scored it over
the weekend to secure the gig. Speaking of music, you
gotta talk about my beloved Nick Cave, whose song Red
Right Hand off his nineteen ninety four album with the
Bad Seeds Let Love In, was used in the film
alongside a host of other tunes, but it edged them
all out and became the franchise's de facto theme song. Unsurprisingly,
this story starts out with a long time Wes Craven collaborator,

(01:52:58):
Grammy and Peabody Award winning music supervisor Ed Gerard. Gerard
told Bloody Disgusting dot Com that he'd actually pitched a
different Nickcave song, lover Man also Let Off Let Love
In for Vampire in Brooklyn, albeit unsuccessfully. However, Scream's eventual editor,
Patrick Lucier liked the album so much that he asked
Gerard if he could keep it. Gerard wasn't even hired

(01:53:19):
on Scream until about halfway through, and he came in
and pitched Red Right Hand, which is the sort of
narrative ramble of a song about this mysterious badass with
the titular limb, which is a reference to John Milton's
Paradise Lost, and Gerard actually gives Lucier all the credit
for the song's effective use in the film. Lucier explains
how the song was present basically from his very first edits.

(01:53:41):
He said the two sequences where it appears the instrumental
early on and the lyric into the chorus for the
town shutting down, were cut in during the initial edit
on both scenes. Never once was any other music present
for either scene, and neither of those scenes were shown
to Wes without that song present. It was serendipitous timing
because Cave had released Murder Ballads, which contains his chart

(01:54:01):
topping Kylie Minogue duet where the Wild Roses Grow, in
February of nineteen ninety six, so his team was looking
for any opportunity to prolong the exposure. When it came
time to use the song again and Scream two, music
supervisor Ed Gerard met with Cave. He looks at me
and goes, were you the one that put that song
in there? And I said yeah. He said, you know,
I sat with my kids and we watched Scream, and

(01:54:23):
they were impressed that my song was in that movie.
They loved that movie. However, Cave felt about its continued
use in Scream, he just stopped being opposed to its
licensing in general, as it is also the theme song
for the prestige crime. I've never watched it. Peaky Blinders.
Then later Nickckave's son would take a dangerous dose of
acid and fall.

Speaker 3 (01:54:43):
Off a cliff. Oh is that? How was that went down?
That happened in twenty fourteen. I didn't know the acid part.

Speaker 2 (01:54:49):
Oh yeah, he was super tripping, very sad, very sad.

Speaker 3 (01:54:54):
Production predictably had the battle the MPAA over certain gory
aspects of the film. Apparently it got sent back nine
times as NC seventeen for the NPA allowed it to
go out with an R. Weirdly, one of the biggest
points of contention was the line movies don't create psychos,
Movies make psychos more creative. Kevin Williamson told The Hollywood

(01:55:17):
Reporter that was the line I had written on a
note card and taped to my wall, and the whole
movie was written towards that line. It came out of
me watching Bob Dole, who at that time is screaming
about the violence and cinema, and he was going after
Quentin Tarantino for that whitty Harrelson Juliet Lewis movie Natural
Born Killers editor Patrick Lucier said it's certainly the line
of dialogue the NPA went after and wanted to remove

(01:55:37):
from the film. It was like, you can't speak that
kind of truth, that particular line of dialogue. They wanted
to censor, but they don't word it that way. They
just say, look at these areas, this is a problem,
this and this and this and this. The film was
still titled Scary Movie until late in production when the
Wine Scenes insisted on rechristening it to scream which prompted

(01:55:58):
a quickly settled lawsuit Sony Pictures claiming it infringed on
the copyright of their nineteen ninety five movie Screamer. Most
people actually hated the title, though a few did begrudgingly
admit that it tied in with the Edward Munch painting
the Mask resembled quite well. One maybe problem was that
Bob Weinstein insisted on releasing the film on December twentieth,

(01:56:19):
nineteen ninety six, two days before my ninth birthday. Bob
was outam and about it, and he'd done his tracking.
Producer Kathy Conrad told Vanity Fair that guy knew everything
about every movie. He looked at all the competition. He
did analyze those numbers. His office was like the new
York Stock Exchange. He said, everyone's going to see all
these other things, but there's this group of people who

(01:56:40):
are being ignored. They're going to go see this movie, Scream,
because it's the only one counterprogramming a horror movie. No
one was thinking like that at Christmas. Bob just decided
he was going to do it differently. One other brilliant
part of the marketing was that the studio highly promoted
Drew Barrymore as the star, priming audiences for the bait
and switch when she was killed ten minutes in. Scream

(01:57:01):
opened against Beavis and Butt Heead Do America, which did
twenty million on its first weekend, while Scream did a
mere six point three million. But the film had a
slow burn, becoming more and more popular in nineteen ninety seven,
eventually picking up one hundred and three million domestically against
his fifteen million dollar budget, and it was something of
a win for Bob Weinstein. Dimension, with five films and

(01:57:23):
release that year, were responsible for about thirty seven percent
of the studio's total grosses, whereas Harvey had put out
thirty two pictures through Mirrimax. Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:57:34):
Yeah, it kind of made Bob, which is interesting because
there was this whole like Harvey was obviously hot for
pulp fiction, but like this one was such a big
win for dimension within the mier Max umbrella that it
I mean, I hope he dies still, but you know.
Critics were mostly positive about the film's striking tone and

(01:57:54):
takes in the horror genre. Roger Ebert and Janet Maslin
both raised the point though that the film's gore might
have diffused its satirical points. Ebert merely posed this as
an open ended musing in an otherwise positive review, though
Maslin wrote with scream Craven wants things both ways, capitalizing
on lurid material while undermining it with mocking humor. Not
even horror fans who can answer all this film's knowing

(01:58:17):
trivia questions may be fully comfortable with such an exploitative mix.
This is really interesting because the Substance is a wonderful
horror movie that just came out this year that is
like truly a mind boggling film. It is extraordinarily beautiful,
beautifully shot. Demi Moore puts in like maybe a career
best performance, but it is so intensely stylized and so

(01:58:41):
sledgehammering with its themes that I have been having hot
conversations with people about this movie about whether or not
it crosses the pose law territory. Pose law is the
Internet adage that you cannot successfully produce a parody or
a satire of political or religious extremism without simply making

(01:59:02):
a copy of that thing.

Speaker 3 (01:59:04):
Explain.

Speaker 2 (01:59:04):
So, the idea being that certain forms of political and
religious extremism are so caricatured. It's like, how do you
parody Donald Trump? He's already like a singular force of
comedic idiocy, right, So the idea of pose law is that, like,
when you are trying taking aim at something that is
so extreme and doing your parody in an extreme way,

(01:59:25):
you have just produced the thing that you are parroting. Okay,
does that make sense?

Speaker 3 (01:59:29):
Yeah? So, I mean it's like, well, one of the.

Speaker 2 (01:59:32):
Debates one of the things that it was most frequently
brought up with this on like film Twitter is Starship Troopers,
where every six months someone brings up the fact that
there are people out there who just fully read Starship
Troopers as like a rock and movie about guns and
bugs and like, yeah, America, despite the fact that it
was made by a Dutch guy who has very clear
memories of the Nazis and purposely dressed all of these

(01:59:56):
square jawed, hot American people in SSUNI forms, and that
just goes right over a lot of people's heads. And
my thing with the substance is that, like, this movie
takes such aim, broad aim at how women are treated
in Hollywood, women's body standards, all this really pointed stuff,

(02:00:18):
but it does it in a way that is so
leering and on the nose that it I feel like
there are people out there who would just straightforwardly read
it as like a great morality tale about what happens
to women if they're too obsessed with their appearance, you know.
So I don't know, I've been I've been reading a
lot about it, and many people are just saying, like,

(02:00:40):
you are literally missing the point that is it is
what it is, you know, it's that blunt in these
points that it's making and these things that it's tackling,
because it's forcing you to confront them in not even
a particularly subtle way. So I just think it's a
really interesting conversation about how you can pare it these
In this case, what Maslyn and Eber brought up of,
like when you're parodying something, and when you're satiring something

(02:01:03):
like you know, if you look too hard at the monster,
you've become monsters also, or whatever the Nietzsche quote is,
but you know, you know saying.

Speaker 3 (02:01:10):
Look too far into the abyss. The aby stare too
far into the abyss the abyss stairs.

Speaker 2 (02:01:14):
Yeah, just like, how do you parody something that is
so like how would you make a parody of Last
House on the Left, How would you make a parody
of like Devil's Rejects of like these really extreme examples
of gore and stuff. It's it's without just making another
gorror film, you know.

Speaker 3 (02:01:30):
I mean Sean of the Dead's a good example. I
think of that too.

Speaker 2 (02:01:33):
Yes, Sean the Dead is amazing for that. Yeah, I
don't know, man, maybe the British are just more onto
it than us. Anyway, it would be its own episode
to discuss the impact that Scream had for starters. It
launched Kevin Williamson in an enormous way. He was essentially
worried that the film was going to flop, so he
told the ringer, I said yes to a lot of

(02:01:53):
stuff before Scream even came out. Dawson's creek was happening.
I know what you did last summer was happening, and
they sent me this script for the faculty, like on
the set of Scream. So right away you have one
of the biggest teen dramas of the nineties, and then
just two more of the biggest teen horror movies of
the nineties and late two.

Speaker 3 (02:02:11):
Thousands created Dawson's Creek and Vampire Diaries. I didn't know that. Wow.

Speaker 2 (02:02:16):
Yeah, so like the shadow of that Kevin Williamson's particular
style of dialogue, as I mentioned along with Joss Whedon
because Buffy the Vampire Slayer was also huge at this
time and lauded as an example of how you can
make compelling genre fair focused on teens. Those two men
in their dialogue of like pop culture heavy, quasi meta

(02:02:37):
reference y quippie dialogue is just something we are we
still feel in Hollywood. And more importantly, though it launched
Wes Craven back to the top of the Elder Statesman
horror director pile, Scream did make an impact in negative
ways too, though. In the two thousand and six murder
of Cassie, Joe Stoddard, the perpetrator dressed as ghost Face

(02:03:00):
and following the Columbine High School masacre. In nineteen ninety nine,
the United States Senate Commerce Committee reviewed the marketing of
films to youths, with Screams Opening shown as an example
of negative media that could possibly have been viewed by children. Kehole,
I cannot stress how much this film has also been
analyzed with people with more prosgraduate degrees and impressive bylines

(02:03:22):
than the two of us. So I'm going to avoid
all that. It's out there, you can read it. It's
tremendously ripe text. And then, obviously, the success of the
original launched three more direct sequels and two recent reboots,
with a third on the way. But the og is
still the highest grossing and still the best. And also
we don't even have time to get into all of that.
I would like to pull focus there back on to

(02:03:44):
Wes Craven, whose twenty fifteen death was a huge loss
to both the horror community and seemingly anyone he ever
worked with except the Santa Rosa School District. There's two
great quotes that his editor, Patrick Lucier, gave to Hollywood reporters.
Is very serious and very touching. Wes made very unique
films that had a lot of integrity. He understood that

(02:04:06):
these were primal stories that were important to tell, that
you were offering people something scary yet letting them survive
the experience. There's something about surviving on screen whoares that
makes the hordes of your own life or the charals
and tribulations feel less So for those couple hours you
get to escape that. And the second great quote that
he gave was Wes's memorial service, was that the Director's

(02:04:29):
Guild of America and there's all these different people who'd
worked with him over the years and family. There were
all these directors who showed up for it. Michael Apdad
who used to be the head of the Director's Guild,
Christopher Nolan, John Landis, and Toby Hooper and all these
different people spoke. But one of the best speeches was
one of Wes's friends from the Audubon Society who played
bird Calls. Wes would have loved it. Whoh John Lennis killed.

Speaker 3 (02:04:54):
A couple kids.

Speaker 2 (02:04:58):
And Rick Morrill. Folks, thank you for listening. This has
been two terrors much stab formation, close out, Spooky Mom.
I hope you had a great Halloween everyone. I'm Alex
Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtalg.

Speaker 3 (02:05:12):
We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a
production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 2 (02:05:21):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.

Speaker 3 (02:05:24):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (02:05:28):
The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run
Talk and Alex.

Speaker 3 (02:05:31):
Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and 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
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