The Truman Show: Everything You Didn't Know

Jordan and Alex revisit Jim Carrey's inaugural dramatic role, released on the eve of the reality TV explosion. They'll discuss the gritty, violent first draft set in a faux-NYC (in which Truman abducts a stranger's baby!), the time Jim Carrey nearly died while filming the movie's climax, and why producers filmed at Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz's childhood home. Plus, they'll delve into the practical reality of living in a sunless dome, the psychiatric disorders named in the film's honor, and the truly sadistic reality TV shows that followed in its wake. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio.

(00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that gives you the secret history and little known facts
behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more, where
your trivia tangent tour guides. My name is Jordan Runtog
and I'm Alex Heigel, and today we're gonna talk about
The Truman Show. I saw it again recently and so
reminded how amazing it is. And initially I thought, there's

(00:31):
really no specific reason why we're talking about this movie today.
It came out, there's no big anniversary, no reboot or
sequel in the horizon. But then again, this is also
the perfect time to talk about it, because I'd say
it's one of the most terrifyingly prescient movies in the
last twenty five years. The Truman Show predicted the reality
TV craze, rampant product placement, the surreptitious invasion of personal

(00:52):
privacy and data mining, and also the forny issue of
whether to exist purely for yourself or for an audience?
Are you doing it for you? Were for the Graham.
So in an error when reality is becoming increasingly hard
to ascertain, there's really no better time to discuss the
Truman Show. Plus, it's just so damn good. It's so
clever and well crafted and creative. I was a screenwriting

(01:14):
major and this was really one of the movies that
maybe want to go with film school, these kind of
high concept plots. It's almost like a Kurt Vonnegut for
its story. What do you think about this movie? I
think it's great. We watched it at some point during
Lockdown and it is really good. I think it's kind
of falters around the end, but it is just such
a great concepts Foreshadows carries transition from maybe the air

(01:37):
apparent for Robin Williams like manic personality into like the
air apparent of Bill Murray's sad sack persona. And I
love it. I mean, Internal Sunshine one of my favorite movies.
Um and uh so this kind of gets it the same.
You know, he's such a I think he does get
short shrift as an actor, especially now that he's back
into doing that and sonic movies. But when he taps

(02:00):
into that well of sadness, it's so effective and this
movie is so good at that. And Philip Glass, I'm
a big Philip Glass, so that that song. Um, Truman
sleeps from this so good. I mean the movie it does.
It taps into this really human phenomenon who kind of
think of themselves as the hero of their own story,

(02:21):
and that can also be good, but can also be
egomaniacle as far as you know, empathy and things like that.
I feel like at one time we've all wondered if
we're Truman. Have you ever felt have you ever suspected
that you're in a in a fake world that's a
TV show centered around you? No, I think I constantly
assume that I'm on radio. I talked to myself constantly.

(02:44):
I think that's the reason why I've never been mugged,
because I just am always having animated because I'm also
tying so full hand gestures loud, not under my breath
like normal volume conversations with myself in public, always walking around. Um,
it's gotten worse with age, so no, I think I'm

(03:04):
permanently miked up. It's really the perfect training for being
a podcast. It's just talking with no audience. But unlike me,
we actually do have an audience right now, or at
least that is what our benevolent overlords at my heart
tell US, so we should just dive right in, from
the divisive US congressman who grew up in Truman's I. R.
L House, to the time Jim Carrey almost died on

(03:25):
set the gritty, violent first draft of this show, to
the practical reality of living in a sunless dome. Here's
our hashtag for the episode, and even the psychiatric disorder
named in the film's honor. Here is everything you didn't
know about The Truman Show. The Truman Show was conceived

(03:50):
by Andrew Nicol, a New Zealand born screenwriter who was
living in London and, befitting his amazingly paranoid premise, this
guy is, as you might imagine, somewhere anxious. His former
literary agent described him as quote the king of paranoia
and in a two thousand he was his agent and
that was his far agent I should say man nominally

(04:11):
on his side agents. So we don't know what happened there, uh.
In a interview with Vanity Fair, this agent recalls a
time when they were going out pitching the Truman Show
script at a major studio and a valet took their car. Again,
this is at a major studio. Andrew Nichol was very
reluctant to hand over his keys to this valet, saying, well,

(04:32):
he's wearing a valet uniform, but we don't know if
we actually bring the car back, do we? Again? The
valet at a major million dollars studio. So it makes
sense that this was the mind who created the Truman Show,
and he began with this notion that had been eating
away at him since childhood. What if everything that we
see around us is just a charade. I'm just I'm

(04:54):
picturing the scene in Annie Hall when the kid playing
young Woody Allen is depressed because the universe is gonna
end um day. Like, it just seems like I would
love to have known this guy as a kid. Uh
and Andrew Nicol later explained, I think everyone questions the
authenticity of their lives at certain points. It's like when
kids ask if they're adopted. And so he had this
germ of an idea of a counterfeit world, and then

(05:16):
he also had this concept of constant surveillance that he
added to the stressful stew and it all coalesced around
the idea of a television show. And this was the
early nineties, just prior to the advent of reality TV,
And he actually says that he finished the script just
weeks before MTVS Real World premiere. So yeah, this is
really something that was not as by any stretch of
the imagination as run of the mill as it is now. Yeah.

(05:39):
I mean, this whole thing is just going to make
me depressed because of how grossly apprecient it is. Um
Nicol's other films are also preoccupied with these themes of
technology and isolation. His first film was Gatica, which I
maintained as an underrated gym. Then he made Simone You
ever Simone Simone sim One zero? And remember that movie.

(06:00):
Al Pacino is a like a tech guy who creates
a virtual actress. Remember that sort of a little bit.
Did they just like a vodka brand do that too,
where they like digitally created a spokeswoman. Yeah, I think
that's been really common recently. There's been a lot of
like computer generated influencers who have gone out on Instagram
as like a social experiment. Um, and they made the

(06:23):
terminal Hanks reference ding Remember the terminal Alright? Moving on? Um, Yeah,
this early script, good Lord. The idea began as a
one page treatment called The Malcolm Show, in which he
then fleshed out into a full script. This early version
barely resembles the one that we know and love. It
was a sci fi thriller set in New York City,

(06:44):
which is nothing close to a utopia in real life
or in the script. Yeah, Truman was supposed to be younger,
barely out of high school, kind of swapping the midlife
crisis aspect of it for a teen crisis and a
burgeoning alcoholic. So that's fun. Uh, crimes are staged for
his benefit. This is getting grimmer and grimmer by the second.

(07:06):
There's a scene where a rape is staged for him
to witness, and he doesn't intervene, and after he leaves,
all the actors wonder why he didn't help, which I
guess is a riff on the Kitty Genovase thing. Maybe
maybe possibly, or I mean, I yeah, I have no
idea how this would possibly factor into his character development.
So maybe Nichols told to be if I at one

(07:26):
point that he was seeing a prostitute the character of Truman,
I should say, which sure. The scene in which he
confronts his wife after he starts to realize that his
life is a facad was a lot more dramatic and aggressive.
A big part of the plot hinged on Truman and
his wife needing to conceive a baby so that the
show could continue. Um, You'll remember is a sort of

(07:47):
tossed offline and the final version, but in the early
draft is a major goal of Christoff, the creator of
the show, who is Um the godlike, egomaniacal director played
by Ed Harris. You know, I like Ed Harris. I
like everything he's in. But that dude really goes for
the capital a acting pretty blue eyes though pretty like
a lady. So he finds as he passes through the

(08:09):
exit door in this fake world. In this draft, he
finds Christoph and the rest of the cast on a
rooftop and attempts to strangle Christoph, and the other rest
of the cast holds him back. Also to the b F,
I Nichols said, I followed him once when he went
through the sky. He went into his own souvenir store.
There were cardbird cutouts of himself. It got even more

(08:29):
warped in a strange way. He even jumped on a
studio tour tram with the guy driving and giving the
facts of his life that he didn't know. That's cool.
I like that layers upon layers. But even in this
early stage, this version sparked something of a bidding war
between the power players in Hollywood at the time. One
producer offered to give Nichols agent his own Rolls Royce

(08:50):
if they could land that studio. Scott Ruden, the noted
Hollywood producer, dubbed Hollywood's biggest asp by my former employer
or page six he won. God love him. Yeah. As
with the best art, the Truman Shows and amalgamation of
many different influences, some of them are obvious and some
are a little more unexpected. The basic story of a

(09:13):
man unknowingly being forced to live in an alternate reality
is the plot of sci fi novelist Philip K. Dick
book Time out of Joint. Do you ever read Philip K. Dick?
Not really know that man? Uh did a lot of speed?
Let me tell you that. Like he literally supposedly had
a bowl of uppers on his kitchen table at hand,

(09:35):
like Eminem's a state of mind exemplified by much of
Jim Carey's nineties output. Yeah, a lot of his stuff
is about slowly losing your mind and realizing you're the
world that you live in is not the world that
you think you do, and a lot of that is
because speed psychosis. Anyway, sidebar over, Sorry, moving on and
speaking of sci fi. As with all good sci fi

(09:57):
satires that make you feel a little uncomfortable, a little queasy,
the Truman Show bears traces of the granddaddy of the genre,
at the Twilight Zone. Nicols screenplay has been compared to
two episodes of the Twilight Zone. One of them is
a nineteen sixties season one episode called a World of Difference,
in which a businessman discovers that his office is actually
a film set and he's been unwittingly living in a

(10:20):
world where he's a movie star, and the whole episode
is his fight to get back home to his family,
who I don't think you're in on it. I haven't
actually seen this episode. The other episode of the Twilight Zone,
it's a later one from the eighties called Special Service,
features a man who discovers that his life is secretly
being videotaped and is a huge hit on a cable

(10:40):
TV network, and so that's interesting. Some other critics have
also noted the similarities between The Truman Show and in
short film by Paul Bartel called the Secret Cinema, and
for my money, this is way more sinister than The
Truman Show. The short follows a secretary whose life is
being filmed and shown to her friends and family and

(11:03):
private screenings. The whole, like smaller scale deception, is much
more personal and much scarier. To me. I really don't
like that. Um. Interestingly, Nicol screenwriter said that he never
heard of that film or the aforementioned Twilight Zone episodes
when he wrote The Truman Show. Um. He grew up

(11:23):
in New Zealand in the sixteaes and seventies, and I
have no idea if that stuff would have traveled over there.
So I buy it. I believe it. But this is
really interesting. The Truman Show director Peter Weir, who directed
Witness You note that's our first Harrison Ford mentioned this
time around. Uh. Director Peter Weird claimed that a crucial
influence on the character of Truman, spiritually if not visually,

(11:46):
was Michael Jackson, who was also an influence on Sonic
the Hedgehog. So Michael Jackson's influence truly knows no bounds. Uh.
Peter ware It was quoted as saying, you watched The
Truman Show, and I mean Jim Carrey did a fantastic job.
But Michael Jackson is Truman. He's who I based him on,
and he is the nearest thing to Truman, which makes
a lot of sense considering Michael Jackson basically spent his

(12:08):
whole life on camera with next to no privacy, which
you know in arguably contributed to his problems. That's another podcast. Yeah,
I just imagined reading that in the like the movie
Trailer Guy Voice, had Michael Jackson actually been cast in
this movie, Michael Jackson is Truman? Okay? Moving on, speaking

(12:35):
of who actually ended up playing this role, Jim Carrey.
Jim Carrey brought his own unique perspective to the role.
Is a newly minted a lister at the time, with
all of the horrifying intrusions that brings with it. His
drive was really wild. Did you ever see that interview
where he on Oprah where he pulled out the ten
million dollar check he wrote for himself. Yeah, oh wait,

(12:55):
tell that story. I didn't put it in here, and
I'm really glad you mentioned it before. He made it.
When he was in Canada, he wrote himself like a
ten million dollar check with no date on it, just
to himself, like Jim Carrey to Jim Carrey ten million
dollars And I don't know what he wrote in the
memo field, uh for the mask for Man in the Moon?

(13:18):
Um for Bruce Almighty? What d Jim Carrey movie could
we swap in there? Dumb and Dummer? Yeah, for dumb
and Dummer. He buried it with his dad, which is
like our second weird Canadian comedian with daddy issues after
Austin Powers and Mike Myers. Oh I didn't know that. Wow, Yeah,

(13:38):
what do you have a Man on the Moon story? Oh?
You were on set for it, right, Yeah. I had
a family member who worked at Universal at the time
that he was playing Andy Kaufman and Man in the Moon.
And there's that new documentary that came out on Netflix
a few years back about just how he went so
crazily method that he would just throw They weren't even tantrums.
He just would get like sort of is went on set,

(14:00):
especially he was drunk. Well, yeah, he was playing Andy
Kaufman's alter ego, Tony Clifton, the kind of like angry
lounge singer. And yeah, I was there one of the
days when my family member came home and was like
hell of a day at the studio. The security guards
at the gate, so there's this like a drunk guy
in the tucks braiding them and they were going to
call the cops on him, and we had to like,

(14:22):
you know, told him to call off the dogs and stuff.
And yeah, he was just like throwing chairs and stuff
around on the set. Yeah he he uh. He goes
hard like Ed Harris. I truly hate those Sonic movies,
but I am happy that he at least seems to
be working again, because do you remember his existential crisis
moment from a few years five years at this point,

(14:44):
do you remember that dimly this is actually like directly
related to Truman show. He showed up on some red
carpet and someone was like, you know one of these
chipper red carpet people was like, probably, okay, yeah, so
this is a new fact. Why was he a fashion
week Anyway, he was on the red carpet and someone
was like, hey, hey, Jim uh and he this went

(15:08):
viral because he was like, there is no me. There
are just things happening. Here's the thing, it's not our world.
We don't matter. There's the good news. And then the
rap caught up with him and asked him if this
is a tiff to around our international film festival. They're like,
what are you? What are you talking about? Could you elaborate?

(15:28):
I don't know, man, I think he was doing a
lot of psychedelics, but this quote is so fascinating At tiff,
the rap editor chief asked him what he meant by that.
He said, as an actor, you play characters, and if
you go deep enough into those characters, you realize your
own character is pretty thin to begin with. You suddenly
have this separation and go, who's Jim Carey? Oh? He

(15:50):
doesn't exist. Actually, there's just a relative manifestation of consciousness appearing.
And someone gave him a name, of religion, a nationality,
and he clustered those together into something that's supposed to
be a personality, and it doesn't actually exist. None of
that stuff, if you drill down, is real. Ah, he was.

(16:13):
You know, whether or not he's trolling with this is
I don't know, because he was well, he was promoting
a documentary that was made about this man of the
Moon crisis that he had, and so he was I
don't know, man, I hope he's okay, But anyway, that's
all germane to this. When he became extremely famous and
apparently lost part of his mind. Um, he made like

(16:35):
seven studio movies and three years, right, and they were
all hits. Ace Finscherer, Mask, Dumb and Dummer were in
one year. Um. Yeah, so he's suddenly an a lister.
He's been constantly hounded by the paparazzi. He talks about
when he and his then wife Holly Hunter went on
their honeymoon to Antigua only to find this private resort
just completely mobbed by cameraman. He would say in the

(16:58):
eighteen interview with Vanity Fair. Those were the kind of
things that happened periodically that made me realize, Okay, my
life will never be the same. It's almost as if
celebrities lose their civil rights when they become famous. Which, wow,
that hasn't aged. Well. There's great advantages. I've certainly been
shown incredible amounts of love. There are certain times when
there's just no sympathy for someone who has done well. Um.

(17:21):
It was, also, like he said, he related to the
world because it was first big, serious, dramatic turn, and
so in a very broad, perhaps overly literal sense, it
was his way of breaking out of the comedic dome
in which he found himself. But we might have gotten
a very different, perhaps more intense method turn on this.

(17:42):
Uh Gary Oldman, a friend of the program. Gary Oldman
Andrew Nicol was hoping to direct this, but Paramount wanted
to say he hadn't directed a film, so they were like,
we're not gonna give you ten millions of dollars to
make this, so they asked him to do a film test.
Um Scott calls in a favor. Scott Ruden calls in
a favor to Gary Oldman, who comes in into the
screen test as Truman. It it's it's horrifying first draft thing.

(18:07):
Truman starts to suspect when his world's fake, so he
grabs a baby from a complete stranger's baby carriage and
threatens to drop it, just dangles it unless the mother
admits that she knows his name. This woman understandably becomes
hysterical and Truman hands the baby back, to which she says,
thank you, Truman, which confirms his suspicions. So yeah, imagine

(18:30):
Gary Oldman in full on nineties method insanity dangling a baby.
H demanded you admit that you know his name, Yeah,
good lord, he's He was never seriously considered, but he
was very gracious about reading the script. He said, look,
nobody cares about me in this the stars the script God,

(18:51):
I look, God save Gary Oldman. But despite what I
can only imagine was a truly horrifying scene that he shot,
which unfortunately I haven't been able to find on any
kind of special features, screenwriter Andrew Nichol was passed over
for the director's chair. The original I think eighty million
dollar budget was just deemed too high for a first
timor especially one that they felt was just going to

(19:12):
make an art movie, and for that kind of money,
they wanted a blockbuster, so they went with a heavy hitter.
They went initially with Brian de Palma, which is kind
of a weird choice, but he also did scarface carry
the Untouchables emission impossible, so I guess it reflects the original, dark, gritty,

(19:33):
suspenseful version of The Truman Show. If this was the
movie that was going to be set in New York,
I guess I can kind of see it. But ultimately
Brian de Palma dropped out, probably due in part to
this change in direction. They wanted to make the movie
less dramatic a little more funny. Many other directors were
considered after Brian De Palma's departure, including Tim Burton, Sam Ramy,

(19:53):
Terry Gilliam, Barry Sonenfeld, and Steven Spielberg. And I guess
David Cronenberg apparently turned it down, which is interesting, and
to make Exist ends existence, oh yeah, starring Jude Law
and remember remember existence? Sorry, and the studio apparently turned

(20:14):
down Brian's singer uh. And this was all in favor
of Peter Weir and Peter were is really the man
responsible for lightning up the Truman Show, And he later said,
well admired Andrew Nickels screenplay. I felt it's dark tone
in New York setting undercut its credibility and there was
also a certain amount of logic to this too. First
of all, from production standpoint, he said, the building a

(20:35):
set of New York was way too expensive as well
as way too dark and gritty, so he changed it
to an idyllic town to make the movie feel less
sci fi. But also it makes sense from a story
perspective too, because he was thinking, why would millions of
people want to watch Truman seven if the show is
this grim and depressing setting and story, which is a

(20:55):
really good point and logic, as we'll find as a
really big watch word for Peter Were. For him, that
was a crucial element of making this high concept script work.
He would later explain, I wanted the logic of the
piece to be absolutely watertight. I wanted to have thought
of every question that an audience might ask, because I
knew that if we didn't answer them, even in small details,
then it would open up a crack in the piece

(21:17):
and they would say it couldn't happen. And it puts
some serious thought into the sort of logic of this world.
And he wrote a ten page history of the show
within a show, The Truman Show, which he says frequently
cleans up at the Emmy is a big Emmy winner.
And he also did a major history of this Kristoff character,
the great director in the sky who created The Truman Show,

(21:41):
and according to Peter Were's history, Kristof came from a
documentary film background and won an Oscar for a documentary
he'd made on the homeless population, in which he'd rigged
up cameras all around uh either crash pad or shelter.
I don't know which, and that's what kicked off Kristoff's
interest in capturing people at all times in sort of
this hyph for reality. And Kristoff's initial concept for The

(22:02):
Truman Show was just supposed to be a one year thing.
It was supposed to be filming a baby for the
first year of its life to help market baby products.
But once the show took off, they built it out.
They added out this father character who had a garage
with tools that they could sell. Again, it's all about
the product placement and the marketing money, and then that
evolved into a whole house, and then it eventually spiraled

(22:23):
into a whole town. And Kristoff started in on this
whole cradle to grave of man concept, which The Truman
Show ultimately became. So Peter Weare and screenwriter Andrew Nickel
worked together on this fresh approach from the movie, taking
it out of New York and into this cozy, utopian
dome studio. Jim Carey had commitments to film Liar Liar

(22:46):
and The Cable Guy before you could get to The
Truman Show, so Peter ware and Andrew Nichol had time
to tinker on the script before he was available and
they went through something like between twelve and sixteen drafts
I've seen before. Peter Weare was ready to shoot, and
he had a few meta concepts in mind that he
toyed with to add a whole other level of again

(23:07):
meta weirdness. He briefly toyed with the idea of playing
the role of Christoph himself with the director in the movie.
The director of the real film is going to play
it himself, but that felt by the wayside. My favorite
concept is one that he had for the theatrical release.
And you know how in the Truman Show there are
these interstitial moments of people in the real world, like
watching the show and talking about it. Peter were planned

(23:28):
for projectionists to stop the film at one point during
all the screenings and cut to video shot by cameras
installed in every theater, so that the audience could watch
themselves watching Truman before then cutting back to the movie,
just to add this whole immersive metal layer to it,
which is I admire the concept, but I mean the

(23:49):
execudiam Castle style of like how do you break down
the walls between audience and do you read about all
that stuff? Oh, he's the b movie guy. He was
if we're now that we're getting this high falutin bridging
the gaps meta stuff. William Castle was a B movie
horror guy in the fifties and sixties, and he actually
had a ton of this stuff that's so funny. They're
all called vision. There was like a preceptive vision and

(24:13):
was the thing he hip smell a vision. He had
a thing for the movie called The Tingler, which was
about this little like I don't know, it's like I
think it was like a little creepy monster. And then
they would stop the film in the middle of the
thing and be like, ladies and gentlemen, the Tinglers loose
in the theater, you know, do not panic like. And
then they had they had like joy buzzers wired into
the theater seats, so it would buzz everyone's seat at

(24:33):
the same time and people would just like scream and
flip out. I love it. It's like when all the
sound footage horror became a thing, and for all the
test screenings they would make people sign an NDA so
they could use those footage of like people freaking out
in the theater and then put that in the trailers
a rich text for analysis. As they told me in college.

(24:54):
I mentioned earlier that Jim Carey was sort of the
air apparent to the motor mouthed mania of Robin Williams,
And this is interesting because Robin Williams was originally considered
to play Truman, which makes a lot of sense because
Peter Weir had just done Dead Poets Society, which is
the old Captain, My Captain, twinkly eyed Williams drama inspires

(25:15):
a bunch of kids to major in English. I don't
remember what the point of that movie was. That was
his big breakthrough in the big dramatic role, so it
would have you know it kind of. It almost makes
a certain amount of sense that carry this was his
big breakthrough in the dramatic roles too. But we're fell
in love with Jim Carrey after seeing him in a
spenture Sorry, I gotta halfway. You gotta get this card

(25:45):
shopping executive. Yeah, bring me a spent I want to film.
Had this dense, multi layered film about the very nature
of identity and how media impacts that bring me the
guy who walked out of his ass. Uh. Yeah, we're

(26:09):
going to take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more. Too much information in just a moment.
Oh man, this is where this film starts to get
a little on the nose. Trueman is derived from the

(26:30):
Old English words for faithful and trustworthy. But yeah, true man.
Get it was Joe Sixpack taken. Chris Stop wants him
to be real and true. The only thing that's on
the show that's real, true man, Get it was Norm
l real guy taken. I wrote a bunch of this,
so I'm reading all of them, and Truman is also

(26:52):
a wink to Hollywood. The dome set is located just
north of the Hollywood Sign in Burbank, so beautiful downtown Burbank.
Listeners of a certain age will get that. Roman Martin
laughing joke. Paramount has studios in Burbank, so that's how
you get Truman Burbank. My last joke of these was

(27:12):
tim cell Town taken. Get it like Tinseltown anyway? Weird
weird saw echoes of Charlie Chaplin in um ace Ventura,
which okay, sure, Um and Carrie took that to heart,
bringing this kind of wide eyed amused Chaplains quality to
character of Truman. He said an interview with Entertainment Weekly,

(27:34):
the Truman Show was like a chaplain thing with funny
characters and whimsy and laughs, but with serious undertones and issues.
And uh, you know we mentioned earlier this was his
first sort of transition dramatic roles. Uh. He took a
pay cut to appear in it, taking a paltry twelve
million instead of his customary twenty million. And this is

(27:54):
my favorite part. Supposedly people on the set were banned
from uttering catch phrases from his past silly movies. So
I guess somebody stopped them. Anyone that somebody stopped them.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I desperately crave validation. Uh.

(28:14):
Jim Carrey apparently kind of. There was some friction with
him and Peter were during the shoot. Jim's contract at
the time, perhaps unsurprisingly is this massive star gave him
the power to renegotiate aspects of the script, to ask
for rewrites, and carry would later admit that he did
have a bit of a temper on the shoot. He said,
there were a couple of times in the film when
I got pretty angry, and Peter is just a gentle soul,

(28:38):
and I am most of the time unless I think
people are endangering people. Weird thing to add but Peter
would say, boy, there's a monster inside you that is
very powerful, and you have to be careful how you
lose it. This is getting weird, but they eventually became close,
especially after we're kind of put carry on a longer leash.
Let him improvise a little bit more. Um. The most

(29:00):
famous instance of said improvisation on this on this shoot
where the mirror scenes in which he uses soap to
draw space helmet around his reflection in the mirror proclaims
the planet true Mania. Sure. He claimed that this was
actually something he did at home, drawing soap masks on
his bathroom mirror and doing characters which I completely buy. Um.

(29:21):
Sometimes I would do a whole body suit or big
frilly dress with a wig and then put myself into it.
He would say, weird, dude, Jim Carrey, Yeah, God, more
dad's stuff. Uh. Carrie also drew on memories of his
father to create the character. He would later say that
the repeated catchphrase good morning and in case I don't
see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night was

(29:42):
the kind of thing his dad would say because he
was the type of guy who quote wanted people to
feel covered. Because he was Nadian and that's their deal.
Carry would later tell Vanity Fair, my father's demeanor was Truman.
He used to lean in when he would say hello,
how are you, He'd start laughing, even for you told
him how things were. He was just a very affable,

(30:03):
beautiful soul. I wanted it to be a tribute to him.
So there are little moments throughout the movie that are
so my dad that my family would say, oh, you
were doing dad, which is cute and Canadian comedians and
their dad's good Lord. Next we're going to find out
John Candy's entire career was an extended due to his father. Well,

(30:25):
this brings us to the character of Christophe Truman's lord
and protector. In many ways, he's Truman's foil because his
character when he's being interviewed on that chat show by
Harry Schuer I totally forgot Harry Shearer was in. Yeah,
it's noted that Kristof fiercely guards his privacy, which is
hilarious because he set up this man who's on public display.

(30:46):
Just thought that was interesting. Dennis Hopper was originally cast
in the role of Kristof, but apparently the crazy bastard
energy on the set between him and Jim Carey would
have been just too much because he departed in the
middle of production. But beyond the fact that he left
the movie, it gets a little fuzzy in terms of details.
Hopper later claimed that he was fired after two days

(31:06):
because We're and producer Scott Ruden had made a deal
if they didn't both approve of Hopper's performance, they would
replace him. I've seen other sources say that Hopper quit
much longer into the shoot. Interestingly, Dennis Hopper went on
to accept a supporting role in ed TV, which is
about a regular Joe Schmo starring in a basically a

(31:29):
reality show of his life. So I'm going to interpret
that as a giant middle finger to the Truman Show production,
like I'll make my own damn normal guy and a
reality show movie. God, can you imagine a meeting between
Jim Carey and Dennis Hopper. Not enough cocaine in the
world to do an imitation of those two men trailer together.
Good God. But he did ed TV and now over

(31:52):
to an arguably much better ed Ed Harris. He was
hired at the last minute, uh in an almost literal sense,
the last minute. He said he was hired on a
Thursday and had to report the work on a Tuesday,
and in between he had to fly to New York
for a prior commitment, so he had next to no
time to prepare, which is maybe why his initial thoughts
on how to play Kristof weren't so great. I guess

(32:13):
early in the production he planned to play Kristof as
a hunchback, which would provide a backstory for his over
zealous drive to give Truman a perfect life. He had
a bad childhood, so he wanted Truman to have everything perfect,
everything idolized. But I guess said Harris changed his mind
after trying on a prosthetic hump and realizing that it
looked not good. Um. So, interestingly, and perhaps appropriately, Jim

(32:38):
Carrey and Ed Harris never met on the set of
The Truman Show. I guess Hopper was supposed to shoot
all of his elements last, so carry was already gone
by Tom Ed Harris got there, which I feel like
serves the story that there was this disconnect between Truman
on Earth and the Great God Director in the sky.
But while we're on the topic of dark backstories, like

(32:58):
the dark backstory for Christoph, I want to talk about
Truman's best friend in the movie, the character known within
the show as Marlin. And something I never picked up
on until watching this movie recently was that the people
in Truman's world, his wife Meryl, his best friend Marlin,
they all have real world names. I just assumed that
they were people who were being themselves in Truman's dome world.

(33:20):
But we're aware of the premise. But that's not the case.
So the actors in this real life like you know,
oh no, I've gone cross side, you know, but you
and I have a podcast and are talking in now,
are an actor playing an actor, which is tough to
pull off a lot again, all this meta stuff, and
so all the actors in real life put a lot

(33:41):
of thought into their performances where they're playing an actor.
And so the real life actor Noah Emrick played an
actor named Louis Coltrane who was playing the role of Marlin,
Truman's best friend, and Emrick said that he came up
with his own backstory for the character. He'd been on
the show his entire life thanks to his pushy stage
mom who sold him into this on reality and sacrifice

(34:03):
his childhood for the sake of becoming a TV personality.
So adding to this emotional turmoil, this actor Louis Coltrane,
named for two jazz icons. He grew up on the show,
and he felt a genuine friendship with Truman, and he
felt really burdened by keeping this secret from this guy
who was authentically his best friend. And Emeric said, my

(34:24):
character is in a lot of pain. He feels really
guilty about deceiving Truman. He's had a serious drug addiction
for many years, been in and out of rehab. And
you don't really see any of this in the final film,
but there are a few deleted sequences where Louis openly
expresses remorse for what he's doing, and in one scene
that didn't make the final cut, during the big man
hunt for Truman throughout the town when Truman's making his escape,

(34:47):
Louis slash Marlin seized Truman making his escape and does
nothing because he wants him to get away. Interesting to
note that the Truman Show is studied in ethics classes,
especially media ethics, for all the terrible stuff that the
actors who are in Truman's world are forced to endure,
including Truman's wife Meryl, who has played within the movie

(35:08):
by the actress Hannah gil who has played in real
life by many even are kidding about the cross side thing. Yeah.
During the shoot, the cast members lived in the homes
found on location and we'll get to the location in
a minute. And Laura Linney bunked with Holland Taylor, who
played the character of actress playing Truman's mother or the

(35:29):
actual Truman's mother in the show. No, she is an
actress playing Truman's mother. Truman's mother, okay uh. She said
they spent the bulk of their time trying to work
out what she called the mental tight rope of playing
an actor who's maintaining a character and someone else's reality.
And she would describe it as not unlike playing a
character in a dream. It's like sleight of hand, but

(35:50):
slight of mind sounds like a seventies prog rock record.
Being in the Truman Show was a sleight of mind trick.
So she started out by developing the character of Hannah
g l who's this actress Laura Leney imagined, unlike being
this kind of fifties sunny housewife character on the show,
The actress Hannah was like this mogul, like a hard bitten, cutthroat.

(36:11):
Laura Leney would describe her as a rapidly ambitious, powerful woman.
While not on set. My idea was she had this
huge room with an enormous conference table, and she was
just making deals left, right and center, making an enormous
amount of money. So she imagines she got a salary
bump every time she slept with Truman, which, huh, or
got a products placement, Yeah, exactly, or got a successful

(36:33):
product placement on the show. I just think it's so
interesting that all these actors work so hard to create
this backstory for a character that almost never appears on
the film, Like, you don't see this Hannah Gilt character.
The only time that she breaks as somebody other than
Truman's wife, Meryl, is when Truman loses it at her

(36:54):
and she screams, you know, I can't work under these conditions.
That's it. So it's just so fascinating to me, the
whole iceberg underneath, that they've worked out who these people
are that we the audience seeing this film never get
to see. It's it's interesting. Yeah. Did you mention that
Emeric had pitched his character as alcoholic? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
And I think he mentioned that we'll talk about the

(37:16):
beer thing. But he says, like, that's why the whole
beer thing is so conflicting for him, because he his
character has been in and out of rehab, so having
to constantly hawk beer just these incredibly deep, like method
backstory things for anyway, Yeah, so the product placement. Laura
Lenny's character's character on the show is a pitch woman. Uh,

(37:38):
you know, she does these classic fourth wall breaks to
the camera showing the three and one kitchen knives and
the lawnmower, and even when he's in the middle of
his his you know world, who starts to break down,
he's having this identity crisis. She does the Cocoa Hot
chocolate brand, and she does those classic fan of white
showcasing the thing that you win prize and uh, Peter
Wear's wife gave her an old Sears Roebuck had aalog

(38:00):
from the forties and fifties, and so he was like here, like,
look how these models would pitch these products, and she's
so good at it, And Jim Carey agreed he would
complement the performance by saying she played it beautifully, like
some joyful animatron um. All Right, the actual name of
that town of truman World is Sea Haven Island. That's

(38:20):
the world within a world. The life size dome sound
stage that's Truman's universe, and so all the interior scenes
in that are brightly lit because they wanted to remind
viewers that in this world everything is for sale. Whole yeah, exactly, Yeah,
the whole thing is way too bright and way too colorful,
which is sort of the polar opposite of the initial

(38:40):
dank seventies taxi driver in New York City concept that
they were going with Craig Barron, who is the VFX supervisor,
and this said that they studied Norman Rockwell paintings, which
is really fascinating and this is such an easy thing
to see fifties postcards of Florida or California with these big,
idealized paintings of the ocean. So crafting this look, their

(39:02):
goal was to give the oppression that there was like
an art design or production manager team working on the show,
which I think they achieved. And so they were all
set to shoot it on a back lot, were had
a sound stage booked at Universal, but then his wife, Wendy,
who's the same woman who handed Laura Lenny those vintage
Sears catalogs. She told we're about the town of Seaside, Florida,

(39:23):
which is a master planned community located in the Florida Panhandle,
which sounds like a special layer of hell. Uh. We
had checked out a few Florida towns before this and
hadn't been impressed. But as soon as he set foot
in the town, he told his team, unpack our things,
We've found our town, and they opened up a production
office in town that very week. Many of the three

(39:45):
d extras used during the shoot, which was from December
to April, citizens of this town. And they still get residuals,
which I love. This guy was interviewed in Uh. He
said he still gets a bi monthly check for twenty
six dollars because tinsel town baby um and all of
them have uniformly nice things to say about Jim Carrey,

(40:05):
which is adorable. This one kid said that carry would
go and buy him ice cream and uh and do
the ace Ventura voice for him, which is funny considering
the prescribed other people doing that voice on set. The
craziest thing about Seaside, Florida Congressman Matt Gates grew up
there in one of those houses. No not one of

(40:27):
those houses in Truman's House. In the Truman House. He
was born in eighty two, so he would have been
a teen when this movie was shot and presumably living there.
There's a sign still in front of this house that
confirms that it is not only the Gates House but
also Truman's House. Uh. Not enough therapy in the world

(40:47):
to undo that. Not truly incredible Jordan's Jordan's subtitled this
next one Life in the Dome Colan The Gods must
be Crazy. I mentioned earlier about how logic was a
big buzzword for director Peter Weir, and he wanted to
make this world totally immersive and have everything planned out,
with all questions answers, so that the audience could just

(41:08):
get lost in it and just accept the fantasy, which
is a pretty tough fantasy to accept. And so I'd
like to do a lightning round of all sorts of
clever details that I'd never noticed about Truman's world, and
they all just make me appreciate this movie so much more.
The first one, you'll notice that in one early scene
there's a bottle of vitamin D on Truman's kitchen table.

(41:29):
Vitamin D is something that human beings get in large
part thanks to exposure to the sun. In this fake
Seahaven Island world, there's obviously no son, So that's why
Truman and presumably all the other actors pound vitamin D pills,
you know, so they won't come down with osteoporosis or
ricketts or you know, some kind of vitamin deficiency disease.
But especially important for Truman, because God forbid Truman die

(41:50):
and the show lose their star, and a small country's
worth of people be out of work. The radio, yes,
the radio station that Truman listens to on a way
to work, only plays classical music and other material that's
in the public domain, so that producers on this reality
show don't have to pay royalties or deal with the
business and legal hassles of getting copyrights clear to play

(42:13):
this stuff. Again, it's a TV show broadcast, you've got
to clear all the songs you play, so you only
play stuff that's in public domain. But Truman's not bored
by it for two reasons. One is because this is
the only kind of music that he knows. He's grown
up with classical music, and that's kind of old timey
public domain stuff. He doesn't know any better. And the
other reason is that there's only one radio station in town,

(42:35):
and that's because the rest of the frequencies are taken
up by short wave walkie talkies between the producers and
the cast so they can communicate, and you hear you
see moments of that throughout the movie. So there's literally
only enough bandwidth for one station. And you also notice
that there's only one TV station and it plays solely
old movies and I Love Lucy reruns, and Truman believes

(42:56):
he lives in rural Florida, so this all scans and
the Florida thing isn't typically stated, but when he talks
about Fiji being as far away as you can get
in the world before you start coming back, that indicates
I Peole got a globe that it's around Florida. That's interesting.
Is I Love Lucy's not in the public domain? Is
it was that because the studio owned it? No, In fact,
I think they actually owned it. I think they were

(43:16):
the first people to own their own Um. Yeah, they
famously became one of the first people to make you know,
reruns the thing. Uh they the studio was like, oh yeah, sure,
like you can have those like, you're gonna want to
watch this again, because the single handed the events is syndication.
That's why the one I always see is Night of
the Living Dead, one of the most influential horror movies
of all time, maybe the But George Romo never made

(43:41):
a dime on that original movie because the distributors forgot
to copyright it, so it's in the public domain. So
you see it in all of these You know, it's
a quick thing you can throw on in the background
of your film. Um, we mentioned the music. I just
want to point out Philip Glass has a cameo in
the film. He's in the studio and they're when they
panted the shot of musicians working on it, the Philip

(44:03):
Glasses in there, speaking of broadcasting. News was of course
heavily censored in Truman's world, and usually it extolled the
virtues of small town life compared to the dangerous, gross, overcrowded,
disease written troubled world outside of New York and Islands.
Yeah yeah, New York. Um, and you know you'll remember

(44:24):
that there's a newspaper headline that reads, see Haven voted
best place to live. You know, so the news is
usually used to kind of deter Truman from his his
wonder lost, his desire to escape the place where he's
been all of his life, and news is also used
to explain away troubling questions that crop up in his life,
like the sudden appearance of his father, which is dismissed

(44:45):
as part of a homeless problem as another headline that's
almost level in town is becoming a problem, which is
something you wouldn't necessarily expect in such an idyllic town.
But I guess they needed to explain away his dad reappearing.
But this is just a h this is speculation or
p Do you think it's how they just that was
like their clearing house for actors or explaining anything. They're
just like, there's a homeless guy wandering around. I don't know. Yeah,

(45:08):
I mean, well, I think we'll get to this later.
But I think there was a deleted scene where Truman
he like sees a jogger and two days before that
jogger was a guy in a wheelchair that like, Yeah,
I think there's definitely see moments of them like having
problems when they start to recycle extras because he starts
to notice um fun the note that the Seaside Times

(45:31):
newspaper if you pause it it just the right moment
is listed as volume twenty nine and Roman numerals number
ten thousand seven D sixty five, which means that if
you account that the daily issue, divide that by three
hundred sixty five, it's twenty nine and a half or
twenty nine and a half years. The exact age of Truman. Yes,

(45:51):
Truman is not did you do that younger than us?
Did you crunch those numbers? I didn't. I would I
would worry about you if you would talk. But yeah, this,
well somebody else did. Yeah, which is means that there's
someone else like me out there, which is even scary.
But yeah, the newspaper started when he was born, to
daily thing, So there you go. Uh, speaking of a newspaper.

(46:13):
The kiosk where he buys it is called Lancaster Square,
named for the actor Burt Lancaster. All of the places
in Sea Haven are named for one the Hollywood Icon
or another. There's Barrymore Road, and there's nods to orson Wells.
And then this even extends to the character names in
the cast. His best friends Marlin, Marlon Brando, his wife's
Meryl Meryl Streep, Lauren for Lauren Bacall. There's a Kirk

(46:36):
in there. It's all Hollywood, and it's interesting to see
how the show within the movie The Truman Show. In
the movie The Truman Show wrote in vacations for the characters,
and Marlon is a big one. There's a scene where
Truman talks about Marlon catching pneumonia as a kid and
missing a month of school. That was most certainly a vacation.

(46:57):
And there's also a time later in life and when
he talks about Marlon delivering chickens around the country for
long stretches in the summer, also most certainly a vacation.
So I thought that was interesting. But Truman, of course,
can never take a vacation. And uh, they do this
they I mean, the world building they put in this
is just so incredible. Even when he visits the travel agent,
the travel agent has posters of planes getting struck by lightning.

(47:23):
It could happen to you, it says, yeah. But a
little moment in the scene that that is just also
really fascinating. The travel agent she says she's I'm sorry
for being late, and she's wearing a makeup bib, which
is the bib that they put on actors in the
makeup chair to keep from getting um makeup on their wardrobe,
and she realized that she hasn't kind of hastily rips
it off. I always actually just like had lunch in

(47:43):
her office or something. I never never put that together
until researching this. Anyway, you mentioned earlier that there are
bits where actors are recycled. The bus driver becomes the
ferry driver later, and the jogger played a homeless man.
So just all these little touches. It is so fast hating.
You've mentioned that it can happen to you, the kind
of fear malgering that keeps him in the town. There's

(48:04):
a the bridge on the outskirts of time. There's a
sign that says you are now leaving Sea Haven, and
then in letters under it says, are you sure that's
a good idea? UM? And the motto in the in
the town center on the archway is unus pro omnibus
omnus pro uno, which is one for all and all
for one in Latin, as in this is all done

(48:25):
for the benefit of one man. The beers we mentioned
Marlin is usually carrying around a six pack. It is
always a brand of beer called Penn Pavel's, which is
a fictitious brand that is used frequently in film and TV.
You can see it in that seventies show Parks and Wreck,
The Walking Dead, Cougar Town, Harold and Kumar, Donnie Darko,
Modern Family, and Um. It is just part of The

(48:48):
Truman Show's extensive product placement campaign, which is uh interesting
because it's also the beer at the bar the Truman
Show bar Um and param On Exacts suggested that they
try and put real product placement in the movie, which
We're was like incredulous because he asked them if they've
even bothered to read the script because they missed the

(49:10):
point of the movie, which is unsurprising for Exacs. But
the beer thing is interesting because the other one that
I've seen all the time recently is Heisler, which is
a beer with the red label that you see in
New Girl, Brooklyn nine nine. And I was looking this
up and it's from a company called Studio Graphics, and
they actually gave an interview to thrill Us in and

(49:30):
they said that they were the first company to patent
a fake brand which is either for the beer or
for Morley cigarettes, which you will recognize as the cigarettes
from the X Files that the cigarette smoking man smokes.
So yeah, and now we'll be as as we frequently
do on the podcast, we begin to meditate on the
nature of time itself. Yes, there is the small matter

(49:53):
of time. There are some serious Truman Show nerves who
get into some serious Truman Show nursery here, and I'll
gloss over it quickly, but it is really interesting. In
the movie, an extra reads a newspaper dated Friday December
and that suggests a Sea Haven December. But in the
final scene of the movie, the security guards out there

(50:15):
in the real world who are discussing whether or not
anything else is on after Truman Show goes off the air,
there's a calendar behind them that appears to indicate that
it's May in the real world. So it's possible that
the Sea Haven world is five months behind the outside world.
And there are several theories as to why this is
possibly done. One is it so that Christophe could get

(50:35):
product placement deals set in time for the Christmas holidays,
which would then allow for sponsors to create real world
as seen on the Truman Show campaign. So Meryl gives
Truman a bunch of gifts at Christmas. There you go,
allows for right, Yeah, so many details. It's so good.
But speaking of time, as as we often do, it's interesting, well,

(51:00):
in relative terms, it is interesting to me to try
to figure out at exactly what point Truman figured out
the truth about his existence, or at least as near
to the truth as possible. And some of theorized that
it's the moment when Truman reunites with his father and
begins to sob, And according to this version of events,
he's crying not out of happiness for these reunited with

(51:21):
his long presumed dead dad, but because he realizes then
and there that everything is a lie. His friends, his wife,
his family, even his father, who had been this kind
of you know, canonized figure in his life that he
thought had died and he was a kid. Everybody's been
deceiving him, and that's why he starts to cry. And
you'll notice it all throughout the movie. Truman's wearing a

(51:41):
large black diamond ring which slipped off his father's hand
just before he drowned, which I guess we should have
mentioned this earlier. The thing that's really keeping Truman on
this island is that he's afraid of water because he
witnessed his dad drowning earlier on when he was a kid,
which was the perfect emotional scar worring to you know,
ensure that he would never dare leave you on an

(52:03):
island exactly. Yeah. Um. And so when his dad's about
the drown of ring slips off his finger, which Truman
wears throughout his life. He wore as a keepsake, but
producers wanted him to wear it because it contained a camera.
And after Truman reunites with his father, you'll notice that
he gives the ring back. Uh. And there are subtle

(52:25):
little hints that the production team is getting nervous that
Truman is piecing things together. And you can see Paul Giamatti,
who's one of the producers of The Truman Show. Uh,
he's reading classified ads in the l a times towards
the end of the movie because probably because he's worried
that his gigs about to end. Um. We mentioned earlier
speaking again more of this you know show within the

(52:48):
movie and all the production challenges around it. We mentioned
earlier that a major subplot in the original script of
The Truman Show of Real World Truman Show was Christoff's
insistence that Truman who's a baby, so that the show
could live on. It's like the Royal Family. You need,
you need an air, you need, you need an issue,
And it's a referenced in the final film obliquely, but

(53:10):
it was supposed to be a bigger part of the plot,
but it was left on the cutting room floor. And
there's a deleted scene that features a meeting with Kristof
and its production team and the principal cast, and this
is just after Truman loses it on his wife, Meryl
and she announces that she can't work under these conditions.
Kristof reveals that Meryl will not be renewing her contract
and she's being written off the show. But they're introducing

(53:32):
a new love interest shortly so that the first on
air conception can go ahead as scheduled and the show
can live on. And Kristof and the executives intend to
start a two channel broadcast format, with one channel dedicated
to Truman and the other channel dedicated to following his child.
And this prompts the guilt ridden Marlin, Truman's best friend,

(53:53):
to ask, so when Truman dies, we just go back
to the single channel format, right. He's kind of being sarcastic,
and Christoff doesn't reply and his silence is deafening. And
that's a deleted scene, but a very interesting deleted scene.
But yeah, they ended up cutting out the whole need
for a baby because I I my guess is that
it's just too creepy. Yeah, that's um. But speaking of

(54:21):
what happens when Truman dies, they almost don't have to
wait long for Truman to die thanks to his daring,
water logged escape on the high seas or the tempestuous
swimming pool whatever it is that actually doubles as the
sea for seah have an island. The boat the Truman
sales on at the end of the movie is named
the Santa Maria, which is the same name of one

(54:41):
of Christopher Columbus ships when he's sailing to find the
so called New World. So that's a nice little reference there.
Truman's on his way to find his own new world.
That's one of the more obvious signs. But there's one
that's a little more subtle, but I thought was interesting.
The sale of his boat is marked with the number
one hundred and thirty nine, and as with most details

(55:03):
in this movie, that's no accident. It's thought to be
a reference to Psalm one and thirty nine, which was
a Bible passage best known for its description of the
relationship between humankind and its creator. And the words are
for you created my inmost being. You knit me together
in my mother's womb. Your eyes saw my unformed body.

(55:24):
All the days ordained for me were written in your
book before one of them came to be. And this
is just before Truman communicates with Christoff, his creator in
a sense for the first time, the only time. Uh.
And just think of Kristoff's final words to Truman. I've
watched you your whole life. I saw you take your
first step, your first word, your first kiss. I know

(55:48):
you better than you know yourself. My relatives were Byzantine priests.
I feel like this is coming through now. Really. Yeah,
I worry. My great grandfather was a Bysantine priest. Yeah.
That's and wild man, I had no idea. Um, speaking
of Bible thumpers. Um. One thing the movie is actually
not about is abortion. I don't know how common that

(56:11):
is is a theory, but Nichols be if I interview,
I just love that he brings this up seemingly unprompted,
says my favorite piece of fan mail was a woman
who wrote to me and said, thank you because I
know that this is an anti abortion film and that
Truman is a fetus sailing to escape on a uterine see.
And his response was, that's beautiful and it's messed up

(56:35):
as you meditate on that. We'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages grab bag of
other things that this movie is ostensibly about, or the
themes of this movie. Antonio Graham She's concept of hegemony

(56:59):
in which film and television programs co opt our enchantment
or disenchantment with the media and sell it back to us.
That is a paper quoted from the Journal of Communication Inquiry.
Another one from the International Journal of psycho Analysis states
the progression of being an adolescent trapped in a familiar

(57:21):
and social world that eventually you escape and gain an
authentic identity as an adult or a true man. So
good job International Journal of Psychoanalysis for just hitting it
on the nose there. Um a Mormon writer compared Christoph
to Lucifer, and he also said the conversation between Truman

(57:41):
and Marlin at the Bridge can be compared to the
one between Moses and God. In the Book of Moses.
One C. S Lewis fan compared Kristof to screw Tape,
which is from the screw Tape Letters by C. S. Lewis.
That is, um, the book about the devil and God
writing letters back and forth to each other. Um. Thomas
Moore's fifteen sixteen book Utopia a social uh social political satire.

(58:06):
You're nodding at that. I did not have an idea
you know about this. I know about utopia because there
is a not the tyle on good Band. Um. There
was a utopian community that was actually is actually just
down the street from where I grew up, um. And
I think Laura Ingles Wilder grew up there, and my

(58:26):
sister ended up getting married there and DJ some weddings there,
So I know a little bit about the back weddings. Yeah,
the venue. Yeah, yeah, yeah that. As with most utopias,
it didn't last. Um. Well, and now I played baby
got back there. Speaking of the Christ. Yes, it wasn't

(58:48):
just Truman who nearly drowned doing a tempestuous storm at
the end of the movie. Jim Carrey very nearly died. Um.
He went into great detail about it during an interview
with Anity Fair for the film's twentie anniversary, and he said,
I was wearing wool clothing, a big wool sweater, wool
pants and shoes, and they had jet engines blowing on me,

(59:08):
and they had these giant wave machines that were creating
gale force waves. And I guess they had divers stationed
around in case he was ever in trouble. But when
he made the agreed upon sign of I'm in trouble,
which was a clenched fist, they assumed he was just acting,
to which I say, maybe get a better sign than
a clenched fist when you're trying to hold onto a
boat that's being tossed around like a cork on a

(59:30):
high seat. Um okay, anyway, Stunt stunt coordination things are
just baffling to me. They're like in scenes where people
are being strangled and like horror movies, they're like, oh,
just tap three times on me and that will be
my signal to stop choking you. And it's like, what
do you think people are cutting? When people are being
preventing from being strangled, they try and batter the person

(59:51):
who's doing the strangling, Like I think it would come
up with a better whatever Hollywood more like a Holly
weird Am I right, Well, you mentioned what Jim Carrey.
Jim Carrey getting angry on set because he was worried
about people's lives being in danger. Maybe it was this
because he talked a lot about it, and he has
more to say about it, and he still sounds pissed.

(01:00:12):
He said, I went under. I had no breath left,
and I was drowning. I was under the water, at
the bottom of the pool, and with the last breath,
with the last hint of consciousness, I just spun and
made a couple of gigantic strokes towards the back of
the storm and came up outside the storm, gasping for
air and exhausted. I almost died. That was the real deal, Jesus,

(01:00:32):
and from Jim Carrey almost drowning at the end of
the movie. This brings us too Titanic. Uh. The arc
of the universe bends towards the arc of your universe bends, Yes,
but here I don't know it is connected. Uh. Paramount
had originally scheduled The Truman Show for release in November,

(01:00:53):
but they held it back into the following summer, both
to allow for more time in post production because it
seems like the kind of movie that would need it
with all the weird lighting on Sea Haven, but also
so it wouldn't get eclipsed by Titanic at the Oscars,
which is interesting because Titanic itself had been pushed back
from the summer of December so that it wouldn't compete

(01:01:13):
with the Harrison Ford movie Large Plane. Did every single
movie is every single movie in the mid to late
nineties impacted by Titanic somehow? I guess it would the
biggest grossing movie at all time at that point. But
when producer Scott Reuten showed the Paramount CEO Cheryl Lansing
a rough cut of The Truman Show, he advised her
to have an ambulance waiting outside the screening room in

(01:01:35):
case she had a heart attack because over the fact
that they had blown the sixty million dollar budget on
what was basically an art film, and I guess the
first cut was not great. Lansing said she was not impressed.
She's quoted as saying it's not unusual to have a
bad first cut of a film. It wasn't usual to

(01:01:58):
have that bad of a first cut. But despite that,
bad rough cut. The Truman Show impressed audiences all over
the world was released on June. People love the innovative concept,
but Jim Carrey's performance also earned rave reviews from even
the toughest critics. Yes, I'm talking about the thumb tyrants themselves,
Cisco and Eiber. When they reviewed The Truman Show on

(01:02:20):
their show at the Movies, they not only gave the
film two thumbs up, but they also gave an on
air apology to Jim Carey for saying that he would
never have a career after they trashed ace Ventura Pet Detective,
the movie that got him the gig on The Truman Show. Um,
all right, well, so this movie comes out and actually
picks a lot of awards, uh nominations, doesn't win Best Director,

(01:02:44):
Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay all at the Academy Awards,
didn't win any of those. Did pick up Best Actors
for Jim Carrey and Ed Harris at the Golden Globes,
along with Best Original Score for My Boy Philip Glass.
Congratulation to him on that. Um. Let's take a look
at the box office to sixty four worldwide, pretty good. Honestly,

(01:03:07):
I'm shocked that didn't merit. The Truman Show to Electric
like sky Rod was like, boy, we gotta make some
hand of this. You know. We mentioned this earlier at
the top of the episode. The Truman Show was released
right on the cusp of reality TV that was kick
started by stuff like Big Brother and Survivor, and I

(01:03:29):
would argue, who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I think
that that kind of fell into the reality show umbrella
because people were just kind of watching the money and
watching people's lives be changed, or the hopes of people's
lives being changed by becoming a millionaire. I think it
was less about trivia. I think it was more about
watching people compete for this life changing thing. You know.
You know Jeopardy you win money, but you don't win

(01:03:50):
a life changing amount of money on in one episode,
but on this you could, so I would I have
a strong case we should do an episode on who
Wants to a Millionaire? I have a strong case that
that played a cruise a role in kick starting the
reality show craze that continues to this day. Um Anyway,
the Truman Show on some level obviously helped create a
market for this new type of television. It gave producers

(01:04:10):
a shorthand really um and perhaps the most extreme version
of reality TV following around the same time as The
Truman Show is a Japanese show called so Sunni DMPA
shown in and it actually premiered a few months before
The Truman Show was released, so it wasn't one influenced

(01:04:31):
by it, but it had seasons that went afterwards. Will
say it was influenced by it because the story is
too good, UM, and I just really wanted to share it.
A man won a lottery to receive a show biz
related job that's in quotes. This show biz related job
required him to live in an apartment for a year
with absolutely nothing and that includes no clothes. Everything that

(01:04:55):
he had he was required to win from mail in
sweepstakes contests, and the object was for him to earn
ten thousand dollars or a million yen in sweepstakes winnings,
which he did after three hundred and thirty five days.
Almost the full year he lived in front of the camera,
and the only possessions that he had he won via sweepstakes.

(01:05:17):
The only other thing that he had were stacks of
postcards and magazines required for entering these sweepstakes. He wasn't
given food. He survived on water, and he lost a
great deal of weight at first. Eventually he won sodas,
a bag of rice, and some dog food from sweepstakes,
and at what point he won a stuffed animal which
he began to speak to and referred to as his sense,

(01:05:38):
a kind of like Wilson in Castaway. The only clothes
he ever won were women's underwear, which were too small
for him to wear, so he remained naked, and due
to his nudity, there was an eggplant cartoon graphic that
covered his genitals whenever he was on camera, earning him
the nickname nasubi, which is the Japanese word for egg plant.

(01:05:58):
He won other prizes that he was unable to use,
things like movie tickets and a bicycle, which would have
required him to exit his apartment, and he was not
allowed to do that. When he was a television set,
it was useless because there was no cable or no
antenna hook up in his apartment. Why was there no
cable or no antenna hook up in this apartment? This

(01:06:19):
is where it starts to get really messed up. This starts, okay,
this is where it goes into another level. This man
believed that he was being recorded and the show was
going to be broadcast later once the footage had been
gathered and cut together, and presumably he would have some
kind of say over what was used now is presented. No,
unbeknownst to him, this experiment their words was being live

(01:06:43):
streamed the whole time, with footage compiled and re aired
at the end of each week, complete with frequent sound effects,
often added to highlight his sadness and frustration. So the
producers didn't give him cable because they didn't want him
to realize that he was already on air. And I
don't understand the legality around this, but it's just tremendous

(01:07:05):
and we're just getting started. Oh yes, this Kafka esque
old boy style nightmare just gets worse. This is directly
from the Wikipedia, because God knows how we'd improve on it. Quote.
Upon reaching his goal of earning ten dollars in the
sweep stakes, the man was clothed and blindfolded and taken

(01:07:25):
to a surprise location. He happily went along, believing he
was going to get a special prize for his year
of hard work. After they removed his blindfold, he found
himself in South Korea, where he was shown around town
and then taken to another apartment. He was once again
asked to take off his clothes and challenged to enter sweepstakes,

(01:07:47):
this time to win enough money to afford a flight home. Ah,
it gets worse. It gets worse when he quickly met
this goal all after several weeks, it was subsequently revised.
They moved the goalposts on him so that he now
had to afford a ticket in first class. When he won,

(01:08:10):
he was blindfolded again and taken to another apartment, where
he looked around side and took all of his clothes off,
at which point the walls of the apartment fell away
to reveal he was in a TV studio naked naked
live studio broadcast. He was confused by this because he

(01:08:32):
didn't know it hadn't been broadcast yet. This took He
didn't know it had been broadcast. It took fifteen months
of this man's life. His diaries on the experience became
a bestseller in Japan. The TV show broke all records,
seventeen million viewers every Sunday. He was traumatized by he
he said, he became uncomfortable and clothing for months afterwards,

(01:08:55):
for the first six months he had difficulty carrying on
conversations after it. And but and he was unable to
capitalize on this. I don't think he had much of
a career afterwards. Trying to break in Remember, he was
trying to break into Hollywood was the whole goal of
this nightmare. Um. And he tried to capitalize on this
during the early days of the COVID nineteen lockdown. But
he tried to pitch people like, hey, look what I

(01:09:17):
went through, you can do it too. I didn't read
all of that before I read it. How is that legal?
I don't know. Alright, folks speaking of mental illness, Yes, Uh,
the Truman Show's legacy lives on not only on traumatizing

(01:09:38):
television shows, but also in the mental health community. According
to a two thousand eight New York Times article, psychologists
and both America and the UK have recognized a delusion developing,
particularly in schizophrenic patients, which they've called the Truman syndrome
or Truman Show syndrome. Uh. And this is where patients
believe their lives are reality shows. And reportedly, many patients

(01:10:01):
specifically mentioned the film in therapy, almost as if his
existence justified their beliefs. One patient climbed the Statue of Liberty,
believing that his high school girlfriend would be at the top,
which would be the key to him being able to
leave the show world. Uh yeah. The story of one
of those suffering was documented in a two thousand thirteen
article in The New Yorker by Andrew Morants under the

(01:10:24):
somewhat glib title Unreality Star. And in the piece, there's
an Ohio college student and he's described as disassembling thermostats
around his parents house, looking for cameras, and even taking
classes designed to make him a better performer. Um. Thankfully,
the man was able to learn more about his condition
and get treatment, and apparently he's doing much better now.

(01:10:45):
This might be the darkest episode that we have done.
I mean, it's all fun and games when you talk
about the influences and everything, but the second this crosses
into the real world. Could God, I can't believe you.
They in like retrospect. It's kind of horrifying that this
movie came out and validated all of these people, like
a scanner Darkly or something. Do you remember that movie?

(01:11:08):
To me? Yeah, I think that's also Philip. That's also
Philip k. Dick. Actually, now that we mentioned it, and
it's just like, yeah, man, can you imagine having like
a nascent mental illness and seeing a big Hollywood blockbuster
that validates it. Sorry, outside of the Truman Show's legacy

(01:11:29):
is that it has given us a tremendous nightmare world
from which we would never escape, a cough gask hell
hole in which everyone must always be closing, always be contenting,
and uh, you know, everyone's start of their own horrible
little up show. God, this is depressing. Sorry, folks, come

(01:11:50):
back next time for more Disney hits of the nineties,
um and fun stuff. Yeah, I mean, the Truman Show
basically gave us a shorthand for the always on culture
where we don't know if we're living for ourselves or
living for an audience on social media or in some
cases actual cameras. Given the plethora of reality TV shows

(01:12:11):
out there, in alone on just cable, not counting streaming,
there were seven hundred and fifty different unscripted series, so
presumably that number as balloons, especially with streaming. UM. So
this is not an especially new observation. But in many ways,
we're all Truman, but also we're all in on it.

(01:12:35):
And screenwriter Andrew Nichol, who kicked all this off, later observed,
I have a very hazy crystal ball. I certainly didn't
foresee the onslaught of so called reality television. I doubt
the film had much to do with it. If it did,
I apologize. And Laura Lenny, who played Truman's wife, or
the actors playing Truman's wife, I'm not gonna get into

(01:12:56):
all that again. She's remarked on The Truman Show. She said,
The Truman Show is a very foreboding, dark movie, and
unfortunately our world has gone even way beyond that. Interestingly,
Jim Carrey doesn't see it that way. He says that
he sees The Truman Show as a hopeful movie. He said,
everybody at some point gets to the point where they
have to separate themselves from what people want for them

(01:13:17):
and what they want for themselves. And in order to
do that, you have to go into unknown territory. You
have to take a risk of losing everything. And you
mentioned this earlier about the potential of doing a sequel
for The Truman Show. Jim Carey was asking about that
during press for Sonic the Hedgehog. It's two ends of
his personality there um and his answer about this and

(01:13:39):
sort of about Truman's fate once he left the Dome
world was really interesting. I thought, he said, I think
Truman Show is something that exists on a micro level.
Now he says this in an interview with Collider. It
was kind of a story about that on a macro level.
But now everybody has a subscriber channel, everybody has their
own little Truman Show world. There's something to be had there.

(01:14:00):
Often asked about what I think would have happened to
Truman when he goes outside the wall. It took me
a while to realize that basically he was alone out
there too, because everybody went back inside. They all wanted
to be inside the dome. What do you think, Hi,
Should we crack up in a couple of pens pavel

(01:14:20):
beers and contemplate the meaning of our own fundamentally meaningless existence.
Thanks for listening, folks, This has been too much information.
I'm our cycle and I'm Jordan runtalg We'll catch you
next time for hopefully a brighter episode, See you under
the Dome. Too Much Information was a production of I

(01:14:44):
Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noeld Brown and
Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The
show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk
and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaumb and
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(01:15:05):
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