Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

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All right, guys, back to today's episode.

Hello, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make a good one, let alone a pretty great one based on an amusement park ride.

I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with my co-host, Chris Winterbauer.

And Chris, what swashbuckling, rafter-stomping, semi-early aughts classic do you have for us today?

That's right.

Our buckles are getting swashed with 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean or Caribbean.

The Curse of the Black Pearl.

The Curse of the Black Pearl.

A late addition to the title, as we'll learn.

Now, Lizzie, I'm assuming you had seen Pirates of the Caribbean along with everybody else back in the summer of 2003.

You betcha, Chris.

That would be because I was exclusively in love with Orlando Bloom.

So of course I showed up for The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Well, what did you think when you first saw it, and how did you feel upon re-watching it and knowing now that Orlando Bloom is newly single, having just split up with Katy Perry?

David, watch out.

No, I had a similar feeling that I had upon watching it at 13 years old, or however old I was, which is that Orlando Bloom is the worst part of this movie.

We're not trying to be mean.

He has to play the most boring character in this movie.

He does.

I actually think he does a fine job, but he is the least interesting part of this movie.

And you know what?

Credit to my 13-year-old self.

Even then, I was like, he's hot, but I'm not that interested.

I still loved him.

Yeah, man, I loved this movie when it came out.

I saw it an absolutely bajillion times, you know, when I was eighth grade, ninth grade.

I loved it then.

And to be totally honest with you, I loved it now.

Upon re-watching it, it's great.

It's really, really fun.

I know it's long.

There's one particular sequence where I was like, all right, we can wrap this up.

I understand that you're impressed by the fact that they can hop in and out of the moonlight in their skeleton suits, but this doesn't need to be 45 minutes long.

But otherwise, it's fantastic.

It is really, really fun.

It's still a surprise that this movie is good based on the IP.

And yeah, I really enjoyed it.

But actually, you know what?

I should take back my statement that Orlando Bloom is the least interesting part of this movie.

The one thing that changed for me between first watch and this watch was that I was no longer so enamored of Captain Jack Sparrow.

Maybe that's because it has now been just done to death and it was something that felt sort of fresh when the movie came out.

But I just thought he was a little boring, a bit rote, and I was kind of itching for him to get off the screen and for everybody else to get on there upon this watch, which was very different than what I remembered.

Chris, what about you?

I remember going to the theaters and thinking, there's no way this is going to be as good as I had already heard from some people, this movie's amazing.

And I thought, that's ridiculous.

This is a Disney Pirates movie.

And I loved it.

I saw it in theaters multiple times.

The sight gag of Johnny Depp, Captain Jack Sparrow, riding his sinking ship into the harbor remains one of my favorite sight gags of that era.

It's great.

I put it on, and I want to qualify this, I put it on shortly after getting back from the theater seeing 28 Years Later.

And I didn't have a great experience re-watching it.

I thought it felt a little slow.

It didn't feel dynamic.

I agree, Captain Jack Sparrow felt a little trite to me upon re-watching it.

And then I realized that's completely unfair because I had just had this amazing experience seeing 28 Years Later in a theater with a bunch of people around me.

And it was so fun and I really loved it.

And it's so modern.

And then I came home and I watched a movie that's clearly designed to be enjoyed with other people by myself.

Yeah.

And so I took a couple days and then I re-watched it and I tried to get in the right mindset for it and I enjoyed it a lot more.

It doesn't quite hold up in the way that I remember it, but I appreciated so much about this movie from some of the performances.

And I agree, I think Johnny Depp's performance, it feels overdone because we're watching what precipitated a whole run of performances, but as we'll discuss, it was very unique for the time.

100%.

I do also think something I didn't recognize because I was too young is how much of a pastiche this movie is and how much it borrows from so many other movies.

We just talked about this in last week's episode of Braveheart.

This movie came up, but one thing that really struck me this time is how massively this borrows from the plot of The Last of the Mohicans.

I don't know if you noticed that, but big time, particularly with the relationship between Commander Norrington and Elizabeth Swan, it's almost identical to the relationship between Madeline Stowe and the English commander in The Last Mohicans, whose name is Escaping Me, who's wonderful, but literally, like plot beat for plot beat, extraordinarily similar, except, well, I won't say what I was going to say because it's a big spoiler for Last Mohicans, but let's just say their engagement ends.

Definitely a dynamic we've seen before, right?

The well-suited betrothed.

We have, but it really is very specific to this, in addition to a a couple of other things that also mimicked it.

I would bet you they pulled from that.

Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me.

This is very much a kitchen sink movie.

And in that kitchen sink, we have some really, really fun things like Depp's performance.

I think Kira Knightley's performance is really dynamic.

Obviously, Jeffree Rush just having a great time.

Always loved Jeffree Rush.

Yep.

Great visual effects, great practical effects.

It's incredibly long.

As you mentioned, Lizzie, the story's convoluted and paper thin at the same time, but that's fine because it just whips you along.

I don't care.

And the fact that there is a story at all is a testament to the writers who put pen to page and brought this vaguely told, as you mentioned, Lizzie, Disney ride to life.

Now, before we begin, I want to shout out some sources for today's episode.

If you guys are interested, there is a lot on this movie out there.

We're going to give you all the best parts, I hope, in about an hour and a half, but there's a lot more.

So, Bring Me That Horizon, The Making of Pirates of the Caribbean by Michael Singer.

Disney War, yes, one of our favorite books, Comes Back by James B.

Stewart.

Johnny Depp, the illustrated biography by Nick Johnstone.

Johnny Depp does the stick figure drawings.

Oh, I'm just kidding.

That would be a great book.

I know.

An epic at sea, the making of the pirates of the Caribbean, and various interviews, articles, etc.

One more piece of housekeeping.

We are not going to be covering the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial in this episode because it takes place.

years and years and years after this film was made and released.

We will get to it when we get to Aquaman Aquaman or Aquaman 2, or perhaps the third Fantastic Beast film, or if we get to the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean, or if they make a sixth one and we get there.

So keep an ear out, but just know, we're not going to be talking about that today.

Now, as always, the details.

The Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl, is the first in a series of five Pirates of the Caribbean movies, directed by Gore Verbinski.

Story by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie, and Jay Wolpert.

Screenplay by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, most notably, although many more.

And of course, starring Johnny Depp as Captain Jacksburg.

Orlando Bloom as the stiff as a board Will Turner.

Kira Knightley as the plucky Elizabeth Swan.

Jeffrey Rush as the scenery chewing Captain Barbosa.

And I will mention her now because she'll come up later, Zoe Seldana in an early role as Anna Maria.

I also want to shout out Mackenzie Crook as one of Barbosa's henchmen with the fake eye.

He's always really, really fun and he's excellent in this.

He's so good.

And the slapstick energy between him and his partner in crime or would-be crime, Lee Erenberg, they make for such a fun comedic duo in this movie.

They're wonderful.

It was distributed by Walt Disney Pictures by way of their Buena Vista Pictures distribution arm.

The INDB logline reads.

Blacksmith Will Turner teams up with eccentric pirate captain Jack Sparrow to save Elizabeth Swan, the governor's daughter, and his love from Jack's former pirate allies who are now undead.

That is a complicated setup.

It's like two protagonists, a weird backstory and antagonist, but basically the whole movie is just a chase sequence.

Yes.

So the question remains, Lizzie, how did a studio on the losing end of the live-action box office battle, an eccentric actor, to say the least, known more for mechanical hands than peg legs, and a newly minted master of horror come together to breathe life into the waterlogged pirate genre.

And what went wrong?

Quite a bit.

Now, we did put out a primer, primer, primer, primer on pirates.

If you guys are interested, if you would like to learn more about the backstory of pirates, how they were eventually mutated into the form that we began to experience on screen, and the golden age of pirates, the 30s to the 50s, please give that a listen.

But we're going to begin with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney.

Lizzie, had you ever or have you ever been on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride?

I don't think so because I have never been to Disneyland.

I've only been to Disney World.

I don't know if they have one there.

They do.

Okay, well, I don't think I went on it.

I think I went on Splash Mountain about 500 times.

Got it.

Well, I have been on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride once.

I believe it was back in 1996, but the ride is much, much older than that.

Walt Disney himself came up with the idea for a pirate-themed attraction back in the late 1950s, But his original idea was not a ride at all.

Instead, he wanted to make the extremely exciting pirate-themed walkthrough wax museum.

Not quite as fun, but he put his team to work.

Imagineer Mark Davis was one of the first to get to work on the concept art for the new pirates attraction.

Fun fact, Mark Davis got his start at Disney as an apprentice animator for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

By this point, pirates were a familiar concept for Disney.

In fact, their first live-action feature was Treasure Island, which was released in 1950 and is an adaptation of the classic novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Then in 1953, Lizzie, they had an animated film which features a notorious pirate, Peter Pan.

Peter Pan, with Captain Hook.

A couple years after that, when Disneyland first opened in Anaheim, California, it featured a replica of Hook's ship, the Jolly Roger.

But Walt Disney was also playing with the idea of creating a New Orleans French district, and the history of the French quarter is actually strongly associated with pirates.

But Mark Davis said that he had a hard time getting Walt to actually look at his early designs of the Pirates Walking Museum.

And that's because Walt was extremely busy prepping for the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York, where Disney was debuting a bunch of new attractions.

One of them was called Great Moments with Mr.

Lincoln, which featured him getting assassinated.

I'm just kidding.

Which featured a life-size President Lincoln who could talk, gesture, stand up, and sit down.

It showcased Disney's latest robotics technology called audio animatronics.

I don't want that.

I don't want the animatronic President Lincoln just standing up and sitting down in front of me.

I want to see it, but I want to see Cole Escola as Mary Todd Lincoln next to him doing an interactive ride.

Equally important to our story, if not more important, was what would become arguably the most famous boat ride in the world, It's a Small World.

It's a Small World was very innovative.

So It's a Small World used a water trough system that created currents to move a whopping 3,000 passengers through the ride per hour.

And you know what's great about getting 3,000 passengers through your ride per hour?

Money.

A lot of money.

Money!

Cha-ching!

A walk-through museum would turn over maybe 500 guests per hour.

And it would create a more fractured experience of the story.

The guests could pick what they're looking at and walk through at their own pace.

They might miss things.

So after the fair, Walt scraps the wax museum and he decides to make a boat ride, which makes perfect sense for pirates, to move passengers through separate scenes of full audio-animatronic pirates.

It's also around this time that Disney decides that this pirate attraction should be in a bigger area.

And so Mark Davis needed to make a whole lot more pirates, and he came up with the idea of adding skeleton pirates, simply because he needed to fill more space.

I also want to note a couple other Disney legends that worked on the ride.

Xavier Attencio, who wrote the script, so all of the dialogue and the scenes, and then composer George Burns, who created the very famous song, Yo-Ho, a Pirate's Life for Me, which was created for the ride.

I did not know that.

I assumed it was created by actual pirates.

No,

the pirates were busy dealing with scurvy.

They couldn't write it.

So on March 18th, 1967, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride finally opened to the public at Disneyland.

Three and a half months later, Walt Disney passed away of lung cancer.

This was actually the last Disneyland attraction that he oversaw before he died.

Let's walk through a quick summary of how this ride progresses.

You can watch it online, or you can go to Disneyland too.

So, passengers board their boats in Lafitte Landing.

They drift through a Louisiana bayou at night.

Just before the first drop, they pass under a talking skull that says, It be too late to alter course, matey.

They then drop into dark caverns, go past scenes of skeleton pirates, including one pirate drinking wine, which just passes through his open chest.

Cool.

Also, Also a moment in the film.

Another sitting on top of a massive pile of gold treasure drift past a pirate ship firing its cannons at a fort across the water and a village.

And this is where things get interesting, where more pirates are threatening to drown the mayor if he doesn't reveal where the treasure is.

And then things really take a turn where the pirates begin auctioning off women to be their brides.

The women are all tied together.

There's some light fat shaming of one woman, and the men are all shouting, we wants the redhead at one another.

Okay,

yeah, I don't think I was on this ride.

Then, pirates chasing women around the village, except the larger woman who is apparently chasing the pirates, and one pirate holding the petticoat of a woman who is hiding in a barrel nearby.

And meanwhile, a trio of pirates float by singing, Yo-Ho, A Pirate's Life for Me.

And then there's more pirates singing Completely Drunk, celebrating as they burn down the village.

And then finally, you go past some pirates locked in jail cells trying to bribe a dog holding a set of keys in its mouth.

Also in the the movie.

The ride was a hit, a huge hit.

Such a hit that four years later, when Disney opened the Magic Kingdom in Florida, guests were extremely disappointed that there was no pirates ride here.

It turns out before he passed away, Walt Disney had said, we shouldn't do this in Florida because it's so close to the Caribbean, nobody's going to be interested in it.

He was wrong.

The guests complained to guest relations.

They said, we want our pirates up the Caribbean in Florida.

So Disney fast tracks a Florida version of the ride.

It opens two years later.

A decade later in 1983, Pirates was an original ride at the opening of Tokyo Disneyland, and they got a very weird idea of what American culture is like.

And then it opened in Disneyland, Paris, which, by the way, was originally called Euro Disney, which is a much better name.

I remember that.

Apparently, they changed it from Euro Disney because it would be like calling it Dollar Disney in America.

And European Disney.

That doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, no.

Although Disney is the East India trading company of the world now, Europeans were confused by the name.

So no, it's Disneyland, Paris.

And that opened in 1992.

So speaking of the 90s, meanwhile, back in Burbank, Disney Studios is in the midst of what is commonly referred to as Lizzie.

The Disney Renaissance.

The Disney Renaissance.

There had been a dark period after Walt died.

The company had struggled to find its footing, but things turned around in the mid-80s when new leadership came over from Paramount Pictures by way of Michael Eisner.

So he became the CEO and chairman of the Walt Disney Company, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the hero of our Shrek story, became the chairman of Walt Disney Studios.

And it's under their leadership that they start pumping out what are referred to as kind of the modern classics of Disney, starting with The Little Mermaid in 1989.

Love the Little Mermaid.

It's great.

And in 92, they're gearing up to release Aladdin.

And Aladdin, like so many animated films, has four credited screenwriters, but we're going to focus on two of them, Ted Elliott.

and Terry Rossio.

So Aladdin was their second produced film after 1989's Little Monsters.

And Aladdin was going to be a big hit.

And so they had a fresh idea for their next project, a gothic swashbuckler about cursed pirates.

And Lizzie, this seems like a no-brainer.

A hugely successful, internationally recognized ride adapted by two of the screenwriters behind what would become a $500 million Oscar-winning animated hit film.

Yeah.

I mean, this just seems like greenlighting.

We'll just print the money.

But according to Elliot, we pitched it at Disney as a tie-in to Pirates of the Caribbean.

And at the time, Disney said, no, I don't think so.

Rossio expanded upon this and later said that Disney essentially said, quote, do a film based on the ride?

That's insane.

End quote.

It may have been an insane idea, but it was not, as it would turn out, an original idea, because a year earlier, somebody else had come up with a very similar version of that exact same idea.

19-year-old Stuart Beatty was an Australian exchange student at Oregon State University.

When he was there, he wrote two spec scripts, both of which would be made into feature films, one which was made into a movie released in 2004.

It was inspired by Beatty's first experience catching a cab by himself when he started thinking, man, I could be some homicidal maniac sitting back here, and here we are talking like best mates, and you've got your back to me.

Any movie about a cab driver and a psychopathic assassin he drives around all night?

No, this baby is private my brain.

What is it?

Collateral.

Collateral, I knew it.

Tom Cruise.

Jamie Fox.

That was on the tip of her tongue, guys.

It wasn't anywhere near it.

Now, the idea for his second screenplay came to him while playing Catch.

Quote, I was Tilson of FreeSpeed with a friend of mine in Oregon, and we were like, let's make a movie.

Great.

What hasn't been done in a while?

Pirates.

Oh, great.

That hasn't been done in ages.

And so he decided to write a pirates movie.

But pirates were out of style for a reason.

As As we discussed in the primer, the golden age of pirates was the 30s to the 50s.

By the 80s, they're considered outdated.

These movies are also very expensive and difficult to shoot.

Right, there's water.

There's water, there's guns, it's a period piece, blah, blah, blah.

There's kind of a second wave of twists on the pirate genre.

You've got things like Hook and Muppet's Treasure Island.

There's some straight to video and TV movies, but the general consensus is audiences don't want these movies.

And in 1995, that was proven with Cutthroat Island, which we will certainly cover at some point.

We will definitely cover.

Rennie Harlan directed Gina Davis starring film that was so miserably received that Carol Co-Pictures effectively went out of business.

And so the pirate genre was considered completely toxic, but Stuart Beatty didn't know that because he wasn't in Hollywood at the time.

So he decides to incorporate elements of the Disney ride and he titles his script Quest of the Caribbean.

Hmm.

Eh, not the best name.

That's okay.

Over the next several years, he shops it around Hollywood.

Everybody says, kid, this is going to to cost $100 million.

Nobody wants to make it.

And it's around this time, Lizzie, that people started to finally complain about that Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

Is it all the raping and pillaging?

Well, what was passed as quaint and family-friendly in the late 60s was beginning to be seen as a bit misogynistic in the late 90s.

And so Disney came up with a really sophisticated solve.

They put food in the women's hands so they could say that the pirates were chasing them for the food.

Not for their bodies.

Great.

Yeah.

Okay.

They're just hungry pirates.

They're just hungry.

Yes.

Just put food.

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Around this time, Disney starts to break into the business of turning unexpected IP into feature films, namely their rides.

So they released their first movie based on a ride.

Have you seen Tower of Terror starring Steve Gutenberg and a 15-year-old Kirsten Dunce?

I have not.

Nor have I.

It seems like Disney wasn't particularly proud of Tower of Terror because it is not available on Disney Plus.

And I believe the only place you can find it online is a ripped copy on YouTube, not on like the sweatbox, that amazing documentary about the Emperor's New Groove that we talked about.

So not a great start.

We are not condoning watching these ripped things on YouTube.

But should you want to, go ahead to YouTube.

The reviews were mixed.

Three years later, they released a movie I did see in theaters, Mission to Mars.

Yes, I saw that one as well.

Mission to Mars was technically their first theatrical feature based on a ride, and it owns the ignominious distinction of being the second best Mars movie released that year behind the absolutely bananas Red Planet, which is a movie.

Yeah, that movie's best known for, I believe, Tom Sizemore and Val Kilmer wanting to murder each other during the production.

Now, Mission to Mars was actually shut down as a ride in 1993, but it was given a $100 million budget.

Brian DePalma directed it.

It starred Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, and Don Cheadle, but it was a big-time flopper.

$110 million,

not well-received critically.

But Disney says, you know what?

We're going to take another swing at the live action genre, not with Pirates Lizzie, with the Country Bears.

I don't know if you remember this one.

It's based on the Disney attraction, the Country Bear Jamboree, about a singing family of bears.

Nope, I missed this one as well.

Well, yeah, it didn't do great, as we'll get to.

So, Disney vice president of production Brigham Taylor had pitched the country bears after visiting the ride with his family.

They then greenlit another ride-based movie, The Haunted Mansion, and this is when Taylor toyed with the idea of making a cheap direct-to-video version of Pirates of the Caribbean.

And so, this starts to get developed internally at Disney.

Here's what's strange.

Of all of the rides that you just mentioned, the one that makes the most sense as a narrative live-action movie is is Pirates of the Caribbean, not the bear jamboree.

Yeah, I don't understand the logic here.

Certainly, with Tower of Terror and the Country Bears, they would be much cheaper.

Sure.

Mission to Mars, I can't explain.

I'm wondering.

That makes no sense.

Yeah, I don't fully understand it.

I think science fiction was popular at the time.

If you look around the time of Mission to Mars, you have things like The Matrix, obviously, Minority Report would be shortly after.

I think that the combination of it's prohibitively expensive and this genre is considered too risky are what's holding Pirates of the Caribbean back.

But Taylor gets a draft penned by Jay Wolpert, who I think is kind of an in-house writer at this point.

And he had also written The Count of Monte Cristo for Touchstone Pictures, which was owned by Disney.

Starring JC.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Jesus Christ Jim Caviesel.

So the new co-chair of Disney Studios, a man named Dick Cook, decided that it was time to get a producer on this project.

So Pirates of the Caribbean is going to happen.

We need a producer.

And Lizzie, if you want a big budget, band of miscreants, unwieldy vessels, a loose relationship to historical accuracy, and the exploitation of female characters carrying food,

you need Jerry Bruckheimer.

Call him up.

He's available.

And yeah, I did just reference Con Air, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and Coyote Ugly in that order.

So you guys can check that out.

Wow.

Pearl Harbor, by the way, written by last week's screenwriter, Randall Wallace.

Yes.

Again, the truth is one thing, and then there's Randall Wallace's truth.

Now, Dick Cook gives Bruckheimer an amazing pitch.

He says, you won't be excited, but take a look.

That's it.

Cook was right.

Bruckheimer was not excited.

He read the script.

He said, the script was basically a by the numbers pirate movie that I didn't think anybody was interested in seeing.

And that's when Stuart Beatty comes back into the picture.

So as Stuart Beatty later put it, that's when they remembered that crazy Australian guy who kept saying for all these years to do it.

And by that time, I had sold the script collateral.

And so they were like, okay, well, DreamWorks trusts him.

Maybe we can trust him too.

And so they brought me in and they're like, what do you think?

And I said, well, you know what?

I think I've been saying this for 10 years.

Let me do a draft.

Let me show you what this can be.

And six weeks later, I had to give them a first draft and they green lit it.

So the movie was green lit off of Stuart Beattie's draft.

But after a couple of drafts, Disney said, We need a pro.

We need two pros.

We need the guys who had just co-written Shrek, Ted Elliott, and Terry Rossio.

Absolute money machines.

Oh my God, money machines.

And I do want to point out, at this point, Disney has poached three writers from DreamWorks purchased or DreamWorks distributed pictures.

And Disney did not like DreamWorks, as we discussed.

No.

Or DreamWorks did not like Disney and vice versa.

Now, Elliott had actually written a pirate movie, which was Disney's 2002 released Treasure Planet.

I don't think Treasure Planet had come out at this point, but the movie's a lot of fun.

I will say, though, it was a commercial flop.

So I wonder if Treasure Planet had been released earlier, if it would have negatively impacted the development of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Yeah, that's very close to the actual release of this.

It is, yeah.

So it's by the time Treasure Planet came out, this was well into development and maybe even pre-production.

Now, as Beatty put it, the big joke was like Disney kept saying they didn't want ghost pirates.

Even though there were skeletons in the ride, Disney said, it's like, you can't do a hat on a hat, right?

You can't do pirates and ghosts.

And they said, we're going to put a pirate hat on top of the hat.

And so then Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio come in and they go, ghost pirates.

And Disney goes, yes, great, great, great.

Let's do it.

Yes.

Everybody's on cocaine now.

Yeah.

And Beatty makes the joke.

And Beatty's very polite in his interviews, but my sister made the point that I think he felt like he got a little bit screwed and squeezed.

Like he had been the one beating this drum for 10 years.

Totally.

And then he was whisked away pretty quickly.

Although, to be fair, we now know that Elliott and Rosso pitched pitched it even earlier.

Well, and so the other big joke was that Rossio and Elliott had pitched the supernatural element, Cursed Pirates, 10 years earlier, and Disney hadn't gone for it then.

So, again, there's only so many things you can do with pirates.

So, Bruckheimer has said that it was that supernatural bit that gave the movie the quote little edge that made me think this was something really special.

I think that's true.

He knew he'd have to convince Dick Cook, who wanted a PG movie, that they could do this as PG-13.

Up until this point, Disney had only ever released PG movies.

I think in part because PG-13 wasn't invented until the 1980s.

And then once it was invented, PG-13 and R were reserved for Disney's distribution label, Touchstone Pictures.

So Tombstone was touchstone, for example.

I will say this is pretty squarely PG-13.

That is one thing that struck me about this time as I was like, oh, they're, yeah, they're murdering people left and right.

They're slitting throats.

Honestly, it's kind of great gateway horror, I think.

It is, yeah.

So as Bruckheimer told Cook, I don't think your audiences want to see a PG movie of this, but I promise you it won't be an R.

And we pitched him the story and he said, go make it.

To be fair, it doesn't sound like the ride where the pirates are trying to either rape or eat the women's food was PG either.

So source material.

No, it was until the 90s, right?

Tastes changed.

You're right.

That was fine.

That would have been G in 1965.

I agree.

Now, Bruckheimer immediately reached out to his first choice for Captain Jack Sparrow.

Lizzie, any guesses as to who his first choice was?

Can I get a hint?

It's a trick question.

Is it Johnny Depp?

It's Johnny Depp.

Okay.

It was his first choice.

In fact, Terry Rossio said later that they were specifically writing the script to woo Johnny Depp to the film.

That makes sense.

I mean, it feels like it's written for him, to be honest.

Now, there are other names that have been leaked by other sources, and it's possible that executives at Disney, for example, were considering other people.

It's also entirely possible that Bruckheimer was in the instance that Johnny Depp would be unavailable or that he would turn down the film.

I think it would be stupid not to have other people in mind.

Of course.

So I'll read you these names.

I think a couple actually make a lot of sense.

Michael Keaton.

Sure.

Christopher Walkin.

I think he's just too old, but he actually would have been great when he was younger.

Yeah, maybe.

Jim Carey.

Yeah, sure.

He makes the most sense to me.

And Matthew McConaughey.

It also makes sense.

It's a more laid-back Jack Sparrow, but yeah, it works.

Yeah.

Back when Australian Stuart Beattie was writing his version of the script, he had envisioned an Australian pirate.

Lizzie, any Jacks from Australia that you can think?

Ah, ooh, mm.

The greatest showman himself, Hugh Jackman.

Hugh Jackman.

Okay, he would have been great.

He would have been great.

He was famous in Australia, and his breakout role had come in in 2000 with Wolverine and X-Men,

but Disney didn't think he was big enough yet.

Depp had obviously been huge for over a decade.

Also, he maybe wasn't big enough in terms of career.

I think he was arguably too big physically.

It may have not been as fun.

He would have been towering over everybody, which I think doesn't quite work with Jack Sparrow.

He's definitely that tall.

It's funny, if you go back and look at him as Wolverine in the first X-Men.

Well, he just looks like a normal large man there.

He hasn't gotten into the...

Yeah, he was pretty pretty thin relative to how he is now.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's a big boy.

I mean, he looks great.

He's got 70,000 abs.

This is a double recording day for us.

Hugh Jackman, big boy.

Now, Bruckheimer really wanted a, quote, edgy actor to pair with this edgy new story idea.

He wanted to set Pirates apart from the softer ride-based movies like The Country Bears, which was going to be released that summer.

So he wanted Pirates to be a movie that adults and teenagers would enjoy.

And Depp's the perfect fit.

Like he's got this resume of roles in offbeat and pretty adult movies.

There's Crybaby, Edward Scissorhands, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Chacola, and his last movie before Pirates, 2001's Blow.

Oh, yeah.

He arguably plays a bit of a pirate as a drug trafficker.

True.

So fun fact, around the same time that he was in Talks for Pirates, he also signed on to play the creator of Peter Pan in Finding Neverland.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So we get a bit of a double pirate thing here.

So Bruckheimer claims that he flew to France, where he met with Depp, and they had lunch for five hours, drank several bottles of wine.

I bet they did.

And at the end of the lunch, Depp said, I'll do it.

But other sources suggest that Depp didn't fully commit until after a director signed on.

And I tend to think that both of these things could be true.

He probably said, I'll do it.

And then they sent him a contract and he said, yeah, he's seven bottles of wine deep.

And he's like, I don't remember this lunch.

Exactly.

So Disney wants Depp for his pirate-like persona, but Depp is a little hesitant to work for Disney because Disney represents everything that he isn't.

Sure.

So, Disney is interested, but not necessarily committed.

And Bruckheimer goes off to find a director who can handle a big budget, high-risk production of a new version of a dead genre that straddles horror and family fun.

It's a narrow target.

Enter Gore Verbinski.

So, Gore was born Gregor Verbinski in Tennessee, but grew up in La Jolla.

Before becoming a director, he was a punk rock guitarist.

Oh, cool.

He then transitioned to directing music videos before taking on a project for Budweiser that would change the course of his career.

Lizzie, I would like to play you the very famous Budweiser commercial.

Is it the frogs?

I love the frogs.

Let me see it.

That's it.

That's the whole commercial.

It's just a bunch of frogs saying Budweiser.

It's amazing.

I don't know why it makes me want a Budweiser.

Jesse said that the commercial actually sucks.

Jesse, it was 1995.

None of us knew what was good then.

Listen, does it make any sense?

No.

Does it make me want to go down to the bayou, buy some frogs, and have a bud?

Yeah, it does.

It does.

I want to drink a Budweiser with some frogs.

It totally works.

I know it's not good, but I want to.

It also featured frogs made by Stan Winston Studio.

Oh.

The ad was a massive success.

It turned into a five-year-long ad campaign, and Verbinski transitions into directing feature films.

Now, he was attached to a different movie first, Conair.

Okay.

One of my secret favorites.

A classic, I gotta bring my daughter Miss Bunny.

Such a weird movie.

I love it so much.

That's how he met Jerry Bruckheimer in the first place.

That job ended up going to director Simon West, so Verbinski moves on to his debut feature, Mouse Hunt, which I saw in theaters, released in 1997, which the BBC described as a, quote, anarchic comedy.

And it makes a lot of sense that he would eventually direct Pirates.

This is another kind of paper-thin slapstick ride of a movie.

It stars Nathan Lane and Lee Evans, and it is literally about two men trying to hunt down a mouse in their house.

He was then attached to direct Disney's Mission to Mars,

but he left due to, quote, creative differences, probably not wanting to go to Mars and learn that aliens had created the world.

He was also temporarily attached to direct Catch Me If You Can,

which of course Spielberg would end up directing.

Great movie.

So his second feature was 2001's The Mexican, starring the Americans, Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt.

The title refers to a pistol.

The movie was not very well reviewed, and while it wasn't a total flop financially, it underperformed drastically compared to what people thought it should do, given the star power of Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts.

Who I imagine were quite expensive.

So Verbinski's next project would eventually revive his reputation, and that's, of course, the seminal horror adaptation, The Ring.

which started the J horror craze in the United States.

It's an adaptation of the Japanese horror film Ringu.

And I think it is a great example of a remake that's close to the quality of the original.

I think Ringu and The Ring are both fantastic movies.

Also interesting that he went back to people who were not big names for The Ring, and it's very effective.

Right.

Naomi Watts and Brian Cox, obviously, and Martin Henderson of the fantastic motorcycle movie Torque.

So Bruckheimer, even though The Ring had not been released yet at this point, knew that Verbinski would be a good fit.

In fact, a perfect fit.

He had a wide breadth of experience that included practical effects, the Buddha

commercial, VFX, so both practical and VFX for mouse hunt, slapstick comedy, action, and horror.

VFX for the ring.

Exactly.

He's a perfect combination of skills for Pirates of the Caribbean.

Verbinski said, what everybody else was saying, I thought the pirate genre was extinct, but he was intrigued.

He really liked a couple of aspects of this project.

One, Johnny Depp.

I think it's a great opportunity to work with one of the biggest stars.

Two, it's Jerry Bruckheimer.

He's going to have a lot of money.

And three, he liked that it was a really big risk.

Verbinski has a lot of quotes that he basically is like, this is either going to make my career or end it.

I think that he had this adrenaline junkie quality to him.

I mean, it's a big project take on.

It's exciting.

So this is when Johnny Depp officially comes on to the project.

Johnny Depp likes that this project could be risky because that is the opposite of Disney.

So Verbinski goes to meet him in London and Depp, again, ever the troublemaker, apparently asks him, what can we do that will really freak the studio out?

But Verbinski, instead of trying to push him away from that, encourages him.

He says, pirates are gross and disgusting.

And Depp says, yeah, that's great.

I could play the whole part without a nose.

End quote.

So apparently the idea was that Jack Sparrow's nose had been cut off during a sword fight and then it had been sewn back on, turned blue.

And then his only real fear is apparently getting common cold or pepper in his nose because that would make him sneeze and that would really hurt.

Verbinsky knew they would never do this, but Johnny Depp apparently said, You know, hey, I really want to do this.

And Verbinski said, See how liberating this is?

This could be the end of our careers, but let's have fun.

End quote.

So, in June of 2002, Johnny Depp officially signed on to either make something that would end their careers or propel them into superstardom.

Now, Lacey, there's one little issue at this point, and that is Michael Eisner is going to shut this movie down.

From the get-go, he had major doubts about reviving the pirate genre, about using expensive CGI to make the pirates undead.

According to Disney War, quote, Eisner had groaned when Cook presented him with the notion of a $120 million period costume drama on the high seas, a recipe for disaster.

Every recent pirate movie had failed.

Why would this be any different?

Eisner rejected the idea out of hand.

Meanwhile, the producers were doing their best to keep the budget down.

So they were developing the story and they come up with this idea that they want sword-fighting skeletons.

And I definitely think this is both part of the ride and also an homage to Jason and the Argonauts, right?

Yes.

So the idea becomes, okay, we still want to see the actors' faces, so let's do it like Ladyhawk, pirates by day, skeletons by night.

But the producers are saying, no way, there's a lot of night scenes.

CGI is expensive.

We can't have them as skeletons for every night.

So Terry Rossio, and maybe Ted Elliott, but I only saw Terry's name here, comes up with an idea.

What if the pirates are skeletons at night, but only when the moon comes out?

Can we get away with that?

They loved it.

Yes, when the budget gets tight, we just put a cloud in front of the moon.

And that's what we did.

What a smart idea.

Very smart.

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Now there were forces beyond their control that were making matters worse.

In July of 2002, Lizzie, the Country Bears was finally released.

Was it now?

It was.

It cost $35 million to make, and it would gross $18 million.

The San Francisco Chronicle called it nearly unbearable, to which I say, still bearable.

Huh.

Only nearly.

They could have leaned all the way into that pun.

Bruckheimer and Verbinski, I think, know that the only way to keep this thing going is if they force it to keep going.

They just have to keep going until somebody actually pulls the plug.

So they continue casting.

Next up, the role of Captain Barbossa.

Now, according to some secondary sources, but we could not get a primary source on this, Robert De Niro was offered the role first.

Okay, I could see it.

But he turned it down because he didn't think the movie would do well at the box office.

So the part went to Australian actor Jeffrey Rush, who had recently been nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Marquis du Sade in Quills with Kate Winslet back in 2001.

One of these secondary sources implied that De Niro took his role in the movie Stardust, in which he plays a bit of a pirate because he had passed on this role and felt like

damn it, I missed the money train.

I need to get on the next one.

And Stardust didn't do as well.

Although I really liked that movie.

Now, Rush really believed in this project, and he was working with a young actor named Orlando Bloom on a movie called Ned Kelly.

When Disney reached out to Bloom.

Don't worry, I watched that too.

Oh, you did.

About the role of Will Turner.

And of course, Bruckheimer had cast Bloom in Blackhawk Down and claims that he had talked to him about playing Will Turner way back then.

But Bloom said he wasn't interested.

Who wants to do a movie about a Disney pirate ride?

You know, pirates haven't worked.

But Rush encouraged him to take the opportunity seriously.

And then when Bloom learned that he'd be opposite Johnny Depp, I think that definitely didn't hurt.

He must have been a pretty hot ticket at that point because he was coming off of the Lord of the Rings.

That's exactly right.

So Bruckheimer has said he felt that they were lucky to to get him because this was within a year of Bloom exploding off of Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring.

Oh, yeah.

Which had become an enormous international success.

Yeah.

And he was like the person that came out of this that teenage girls everywhere were absolutely in love with.

Absolutely.

They should have been in love with Vigo, but they were in love with Orlando.

I actually feel like the boys were in love with Vigo and the girls were in love with Orlando.

Why can't we have both?

We can have both.

Other actors consider Jude Law makes a lot of sense sure heath ledger oh yeah i think could have been a good jack sparrow definitely definitely could have been a good jack sparrow would have been younger ewan mcgregor okay also wonderful toby maguire

i mean spider-man i could see it i don't know if he does accents but sure and christian bale oh yeah absolutely Or is Jack Sparrow?

Christian Bale is so good.

Christian Bale could do anything.

Also, a very young Tom Hiddleston.

Great.

Who says that that he bombed the audition because he was completely hungover?

Yeah, he would have been great too.

Any of those would have been good.

Somebody else who thought they bombed their audition?

Kira Knightley.

She says that it went horrifically.

She was only 17.

Yeah, she's so young.

She does not look 17.

She is also 17 in love, actually, which is really weird.

She's got to be 16 and bend it like Beckham, which blew my mind.

I think she is.

The next day after her audition, she gets a call and she says she goes to LA to meet Gore Verbinski and then New York to meet Jerry Bruckheimer.

Knightley said of the meeting, quote, I'd only packed a small bag when I went over to make it because I was convinced they were going to fire me.

And I actually went for that audition and I was angry at my agent for sending me to it because I was doing exams at school.

I thought, there's no way I'm going to get this.

This isn't going to happen.

And obviously, because I was so pissed off when I turned up, they were like, wow, she's got real attitude.

And that's why it worked.

She's great.

I really like her in this.

I don't think I appreciated her when I was younger watching this, but I think she really holds it down.

She does.

She's also said that she was very upset that she didn't get to do a sword fight in the first film.

Every time she tries to grab a sword, it eludes her.

For example, she grabs the two off the mantle, and so she insisted in the follow-up films that she be able to sword fight, and she was allowed to sword fight, and she's very proud of her sword fighting.

Nice.

Even though she'd had Bennett like Beckham, she'd also had a minor part in Star Wars as one of Queen Amadala's body doubles.

Verbinski said she was basically an unknown to him, but he decided to roll the dice.

And he said that once they started filming, he was blown away by her, which doesn't surprise me.

I think she matches Depp, in my opinion, for spunken attitude.

100%.

And for her to be that young is really wild.

I mean, the second she shows up, she feels like an enduring movie star, to be honest, more than Orlando Bloom does, which is

also hard to do because he was also a big deal at that point.

I agree.

One more note on casting, just because it's a great quote.

Brian Cox, who had, of course, been in the ring, my wife was never meant to have a child with Corfropinski, was one of several actors considered for Governor Weatherby Swan, which is a role that would go to Jonathan Price.

Yes.

And he wrote in his memoir that he turned his nose up at the part.

Quote, and I wish I could get Brian Cox to read this because it would be so funny.

It would have been a money spinner, but of all the parts in that film, it was the most thankless.

True.

Yes.

Plus, I would have ended up doing it for film after film, meaning the sequels, and missed out on all the other nice things I've done.

Another thing, he could have stopped.

He could have stopped.

He never does.

He could have stopped.

He never does.

And bless him.

Another thing with Pirates of the Caribbean is that it's very much the Johnny Jepp as Jack Sparrow show.

And Depp, personable though, I'm sure he is, is so overblown.

So overrated.

I mean, Edward, scissor hands.

Let's face it.

If you come on with hands like that and a pale, scarred face makeup, you don't have to do anything.

And he didn't.

And subsequently, he's done even less.

But people love him, or they did love him.

They don't love him so much these days, of course.

Oh, keep going.

Keep going, bro.

If Johnny Depp went for Jack Sparrow now, they'd give it to Brandon Gleason.

And just Brandon Gleason catching strays there at the end.

I don't even know if it's a compliment or an insult.

No one knows.

He would have been fun.

God bless.

Good lord.

Frank, he would have been like, Go, marry him.

Don't marry him.

Do you think I cared, you damn children?

I don't care.

So funny.

Yeah.

By the way, Jonathan Price is great.

It is a thankless role, and he brings a lot of sort of sweetness to it, I think.

He does.

So let's get back to the budget.

Bruckheimer is not going to let Eisner kill this movie.

Literally, he just called him again and again and again and again until Eisner finally agreed to meet him.

Eisner comes into the meeting fully intending to kill the movie.

But Bruckheimer was prepared.

He has storyboards and drawings of all the major scenes and he just walks Eisner through the whole movie.

And Eisner says,

I love it, but why does it have to cost so much?

And Bruckheimer counters, your competition is spending $150 million a film.

This may have been a bit of an exaggeration in looking at the movies that he's referencing, but it's definitely directionally correct.

You had Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, even Austin Powers.

Meanwhile, Sony has Spider-Man, Men in Black, 20th Century Fox has Star Wars and X-Men, and Disney has the Country Bears.

So Eisner gives in.

But, and this is important to remember, because the Country Bears was fresh in his mind, he tells Bruckheimer, let's move this away from the park.

So the top-down message is loud and clear.

Pirates needs to actually be different from the ride-based movies that came before it.

And it would be, largely because Johnny Depp was determined to make sure that Pirates was more a Johnny Depp movie than it was a Disney movie.

So Johnny Depp insisted that the first read-through not be held at Disney, where it traditionally would take place probably at a reasonable hour in a producer's office.

Instead, it was held in a windowless nightclub called the Viper Room in West Hollywood at 8.30 a.m.

It reeked of cigarettes and alcohol.

And I just would have loved to bend on the wall as the like nice Disney executives come into the Viper Room with Johnny Depp to read the script.

It was certainly a strange location for a read-through.

It was also where River Phoenix overdosed and passed away.

And Johnny Depp was a co-owner of the Viper Room, and I believe had been present at River Phoenix's passing.

That's right.

It was a strange Hollywood landmark, and certainly a strange place for a read-through of this movie.

But one of the things that really helps Pirates of the Caribbean is that Disney embraced the idea of difficult locations.

So as art director Derek R.

Hill remembers, when I first got the call, I wondered, are we going real or are we going Disneyland?

And it turned out they were going real.

One of the reasons this movie looks so good is they shot on location in the Caribbean, specifically the island of St.

Vincent and the Grenadines.

It looks great.

So this is where they shot Port Royal and Rumrunner's Isle.

But the local airport could only handle small planes.

So when they were building out the sets, they decided to charter a 747 to fly the crew to St.

Lucia and then ferry them over to St.

Vincent.

The team came in with a a crew of 400 people and then they hired several hundred more locals from St.

Vincent and the surrounding islands.

And because they needed period-specific props and set pieces, they had to research and manufacture pretty much everything back in the United States and then bring it to the island.

Now back in LA, they built Fort Charles at an abandoned oceanarium called Marine Land of the Pacific in Palos Verdes.

They also built and shot several interior studios in Los Angeles, including the massive treasure cave that we see.

Took five months to build that and three weeks to fill it with fake treasure, including nearly a million gold coins minted just for the movie.

It looks so good.

It does.

And you know what else looks great?

The ships.

Yes.

They built the HMS Dauntless and two versions of the Black Pearl.

The Black Pearl.

The HMS Dauntless and one version of the Black Pearl last time were mounted on barges so they could be towed around.

Then the second version of the Black Pearl was built on a gimbal for studio work.

If you guys are unfamiliar, gimbal work means the set itself is mounted on a gimbal.

A gimbal is a pivoted support that permits the rotation of an object about an axis.

So it makes it so you can, for example, simulate that the ship is rocking and have everybody in the set move according to that movement in sync with one another.

As opposed to doing the old Star Trek move of grabbing the desk and leaning to one side.

Exactly.

Also, the Interceptor, the fastest ship, besides the Black Pearl, was a real functioning ship.

They refurbished an old ship called Lady Washington, then sailed it from Port Townsend, Washington, shout out, to Long Beach, and then from Long Beach to St.

Vincent.

I believe that is a 4,500-mile journey.

Wow, yeah.

Yeah.

They also built miniature versions.

Of course, we love a good miniature.

Put them in pools with wave simulators for some of the storms and battle scenes.

I think what was most shocking was that Johnny Depp showed up looking like the most bohemian pirate that anybody had ever seen in their entire lives.

Now, he had dropped the no-nos idea, but he turned up for hair and makeup wearing gold-capped teeth, eyeliner, and a braided goatee.

Great.

All his ideas.

Okay.

Disney executives who had hired Johnny Depp because they felt he was a very attractive young man,

you know, male actor, felt like perhaps they were hiding the selling point of this movie behind a fake tan eyeliner gold cap teeth and generally speaking a keith richards costume as we will discuss was very much intentional yeah he's just cosplaying as keith richards so a meeting is held and a compromise is reached johnny johnny you get to keep the goatee in the eyeliner but you only get three gold teeth how many did he have but when shooting began he just kept shoving them back in so they started shooting and he just he just put the teeth back in When he opened his mouth, he made wild facial expressions, staggered around the set, gestured dramatically with his hands.

So why had Depp decided to play Jack Sparrow like that?

He said that he sorted the character out while he was in a sauna.

Quote, he kind of came to life while I was reading the script in extreme heat, bordering on 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

The heat was very important to me, the idea of sweltering heat and a guy who's been on the ocean for 10 years.

I thought that Jack would have perpetual sea legs from being on the water too much.

So land becomes really odd and uncomfortable.

I think that's a pretty cool interpretation.

Yeah.

Not out of the realm of possibility that he would have been drunk a lot of the time, too.

I don't think they didn't have a lot of water, probably.

So you're probably drinking some low-alcohol content beverages quite a bit.

And that's just Johnny Depp, not even Jack Sparrow.

That's right.

That's not even Pirates.

He also wanted Jack to appeal to kids and adults.

So he channeled Pepe Le Pew, which I definitely think you feel.

Yeah.

And as we mentioned, rock legend Keith Richards.

Keith Richards even said later that Johnny Depp sent him a message to cover his behind, basically saying, just a heads up, man, I'm doing this, and it's you.

Disney was very concerned.

The executives are seeing the dailies and they are pulling their hair out.

Quote, what's he doing with his hand?

Is he brilliant or is he crazy?

Is he a complete homosexual?

End quote.

Yeah, their biggest concern.

Is he gay?

I remember the discourse around this movie and it was, is Johnny Deff gay?

Is he playing this character gay?

That was such a topic of conversation at the time.

Which is when you rewatch it so stupid because first of of all, who cares, obviously?

But second of all, he's clearly not over the course of the movie.

He's expressing interest in multiple women.

I wondered if they put that in where he gets slapped four times by women to be like, this guy fucks.

He is straight.

This guy, this guy lays pipe.

But also, he's going after 17-year-old Kira Knightley when they're on the island dancing around with rum as well.

Although, I will say that's one sequence where I was like,

this could have really been creepy.

And somehow they managed to pull it off without it being creepy, which I think is a testament to his performance in that because he does play it as sort of like, it's less weird uncle and more like fun, drunk substitute teacher, if those are archetypes that we're going after.

Here's what I mean.

That's not right.

Obviously,

trying to sleep with a 17-year-old on an island by today's standards would be a heinous thing.

Oh, listen, don't do that.

But

16th century...

She's halfway through her life at 17 is my point.

Oh, my God.

She's nearly dead.

I think the quote that actually makes the most sense is from Michael Eisner.

We've hired the sexiest actor and he looks like this.

Question mark.

So Eisner's concern is that the movie's not going to work if they can't capitalize on Johnny Depp's palpable, natural, heterosexual sex appeal.

I would argue, Mr.

Eisner, the reason he's so appealing across the board, especially at this time, is actually that his sex appeal is almost pansexual.

It appeals in almost an androgynous way across all groups.

100%.

He's very androgynous.

And he's also had a career of playing parts where he's not, you know, stereotypically attractive or handsome and has come across as attractive because of his on-screen persona.

I agree.

Eisner, though, reminded everybody that King David, which was Paramount's 1985 biblical epic about David, had failed and it had failed for one specific reason.

Richard Gere had worn a skirt and an earring.

Who knows if that's true?

That's why it failed.

Yeah.

Depp, though, held strong.

He said that there were a few people who were supportive of him, in particular, Gore Vrbinski, who always had his back.

And he said, look, you hired me to do a job.

You have to trust me.

You have to trust me or you have to replace me.

And I think that was the right position.

The haggling went on for six weeks.

Behind the scenes, Dick Cook is trying to reassure Eisner.

He's promising him we can use camera angles to minimize his wild appearance and performance, which is ridiculous.

Most of his performance has to be be captured in medium shots or wide to capture the fun gesticulating that he's doing.

Bruckheimer says, in the end, they cut together some of the footage, they put it to music, they showed it to the executives, and according to Bruckheimer, everything changed when they saw how the character fit into the larger world.

Yeah, it works.

Makes perfect sense.

The budget was ballooning towards $150 million.

And I think that might have been stressing people out.

As Rubinski later said, the production had a, quote, spirit of madness to it.

To start, everybody's really nervous about the story because it is so convoluted.

Like, there's a treasure, they stole the treasure, they're trying to return it.

And the treasure has to hit a certain depth in the water, and there is a sonic boom that goes off.

I'm heard.

When that happens,

the charts come up.

There's a bootstrap in the build.

She's the daughter, but she's going to say his name.

Yeah.

And I know that in the end, it doesn't end up mattering, but I could understand being extremely anxious about it during the production.

Oh, it doesn't make any sense.

And that's fine.

Yeah.

Now, Elliot and Rossio are on set for the entire shoot.

And so they are adding to the script as they go, writing in ideas from Verbinski and the cast.

And of course, Verbinski is learning quickly that working on water is impossibly difficult.

A couple of examples he gives you, feeding the crew.

You start shooting, lunchtime.

Oh my God, you're four miles out and you have to allow the ship with all the food to now approach.

And it couldn't be close to you at the beginning of the day, because if you shot in that direction, you would see the ship in the background and of course nothing stays where you put it so you start shooting one thing and the boats start floating away from one another or the boats start floating in the wrong direction or the current changes or the wind changes and as rubinski says the result of this is a drastic increase in visual effect shots so in the end quote this movie has 700 visual effect shots but there are probably 150 you notice 500 effect shots are just getting rid of city lights or hotels in the background that makes sense there's an oil tanker driving through the background, and it's going to cost an hour of shooting to wait for it to clear frame.

You roll and paint it out later on the computer.

Yeah.

It was the only way to keep things on schedule.

Makes perfect sense.

Now, there are a lot of very, very fun.

practical stunts and sword fighting scenes in this movie list.

You mentioned stomping on the rafters, the very fun introductory sword fight between Will Turner and Jack Sparrow inside the Blacksmith's Forge.

Now, the stunt coordinator on this movie was George Marshall Rouge, who'd worked on the Lord of the Rings films.

And the swordmaster is a gentleman we've discussed before, Bob Anderson, who of course had helped choreograph the Princess Bride.

Yes, that's right.

Which had some of the best sword fighting, as we learned.

It did.

He had worked on some classic pirate films in the 50s, including The Master of Ballantre, which starred Errol Flynn.

And in recent years, he'd done Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, helping with lightsabers, Bond movies, Zorro movies, The Princess Bride, as we mentioned, and fun fact, he he was a consultant for the fencing scene in the famous Lindsey Lohan twin film, The Parrot Trap.

Oh, wow.

His greatest credit.

Now, Depp has said that the stunt work was, quote, way more intense than anything he'd done before.

And he'd had scissors for hands.

So that's saying something.

Yeah, but he didn't do much with it, Brian Cox's point.

He basically just sat there and looked sad.

And it works.

It's great.

He also had the added task of incorporating Jack Sparrow's signature movements into the choreography, which I think he does really well.

He seems like he's drunkenly swaying even as he's fighting Orlando Bloom.

Yeah.

So the sword fights involving the pirates as skeletons were very challenging for the actors and cameramen.

They would shoot these scenes live and then do reference passes where the humans in the story were basically fighting air.

This is the exact approach, Lizzie, that we discussed in 1999's The Mummy.

This technique had, of course, been mastered by VFX artist extraordinaire Ray Harryhausen decades earlier on, for example, Jason and the Argonauts.

So this is a technique that had been around for quite some time.

I do want to mention, with all this going on, some of the cast felt that they were falling through the cracks, or, to put it more bluntly, being treated as second-class citizens because they didn't have the clout of the bigger players involved in this project.

So, Zoe Zeldana, who played Ana Maria, has described the shoot as, quote, an experience not worth repeating.

She has said flat out it's something she wouldn't do again.

She said that the shoot was a big machine that was too out of control and suffered from poor management.

She also said, quote, those weren't the right people for me.

I'm not talking about the cast.

The cast was great.

I'm talking about the political stuff that went on behind closed doors.

It was a lot of above the line versus below the line, extras versus actors, producers versus PAs.

It was very elitist.

I almost quit the business.

I was 23 years old and I was like, fuck this.

I am never putting myself in this situation again.

People disrespecting me because they look at my number on a call sheet and they think I'm not important.

Fuck you.

Wow.

Good for her.

It was so bad that she says that years later, Jerry Bruckheimer actually apologized to her.

Wow.

I get the sense that everybody was so stressed.

Stressed, yeah.

And everybody was probably trying so hard to manage upward that they may have been taking it out downward at the same time.

Yeah, I believe it.

That's shitty.

You shouldn't do it.

Doesn't matter.

But she also would have been probably coming off of center stage at this point.

Is that right?

Which was a much, much smaller, I would imagine, very intimate production where she was a way bigger part.

Oh, this was by far the biggest thing she had done at this point.

And she's obviously, what, I don't know, 11th build, 12th build on this movie, maybe.

Although now she's one of the biggest stars in it, but yeah.

Yeah.

Now, Johnny Depp says that he had a much more positive experience, but He did mention that nobody told him he'd actually be steering a ship until they actually started rolling.

So Depp is at one point steering the interceptor, I believe.

He also didn't walk away completely unscathed.

Depp injured his knee when the ropes attaching the interceptor and the dauntless broke.

This was an intentional stunt.

The ropes were supposed to break, but, quote, suddenly the belaying pin snapped and just went straight into my knee at full speed.

And what felt like taking a ball peen hammer to the kneecap, and it's the first thing in my life that's ever taken me off my feet, end quote.

Wow.

At some point, the the sinking ship that Sparrow rides into Port Royal at the beginning of the movie did fully capsize, but it does not sound like Depp was on it.

Verbinski later said that this was constant throughout the movie.

People saying, Everything's fine, or this is safe, and it was definitely not safe, or was not fine, and everything that could sink would sink at some point.

Verbinski was struggling.

There was at least one meeting between Verbinski, Bruckheimer, Dick Cook, and Brigham Taylor, along with Nina Jacobson, who was a co-chair at Disney with Dick Cook, that literally spiraled into a shouting match.

It was so bad that Jerry Bruckheimer, who famously had worked with Michael Bay on a number of movies until this point, told Verbinski that it was the worst meeting he had ever been a part of.

Wow.

Yeah.

Michael Bay, who when Ben Affleck asked him why NASA would not...

Just shut the fuck up.

Just shut the fuck up, Ben.

Yes, if you've never heard the DVD commentary of Armageddon, it is unbelievable.

It's Ben Affleck walking you shot by shot through what a disaster it was to make Armageddon.

We will certainly cover that movie, but one of the funniest parts is when Ben Affleck kept asking Michael Bay,

why,

why do these NASA scientists, why do they not have the information?

And every man, Bruce Willis, is the one showing up being like, you don't know how to drill?

Let me show you how to drill.

And he kept asking Michael Bay, and Michael Bay just went, just shut, just, just, just shut, just, shut the fuck up, just shut the fuck up.

Just do it.

You know what?

You know what?

Shut up, Ben.

Shut the fuck up.

Shut the fuck up.

So funny.

It's amazing.

All right.

It's no surprise.

Verbinsky, quote, quit or came close to quitting at least four times.

And there was talk on the set that Disney would fire him.

This is according to James B.

Stewart's Disney War.

So some compromises had to be made.

Vrbinski fought to keep the ship-to-ship battle between the Black Pearl and the Interceptor.

It's great.

Fantastic.

But he did have to lose interior shots of pirates rowing the longboats.

Gore, you didn't need them.

Yeah, you did not.

Some sources claim Vrbinski had to forfeit several lines and even entire scenes that referenced the ride, specifically because Eisner wanted to distance the movie from the ride.

I would say the movie references the ride plenty now that I've read through the ride and seen the film.

So, Lizzie, Principal Photography wrapped in March of 2003 with a July release date.

What

700 VFX shots.

Wait, really?

Yes.

Verbinsky and his team pulled 18-hour days to edit the movie.

All the while, Eisner is freaking out about how long this movie is.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

This wrapped in March and it released in July of the same year, not one year apart.

The same year.

I literally don't know how that's possible.

That's a cat's timeline.

Let's talk about it.

So, Verbinski and the editorial team are working 18-hour days to try to get the edit done.

Eisner's breathing down their necks because this movie cannot be over three hours long.

It ends up being two and a half hours basically.

Meanwhile, during production, Industrial Light and Magic is holding bi-weekly video conferences with Verbinski and updating shots as they go.

So to be clear, VFX has been running in parallel to the production of the film.

Wow.

Okay.

So they're executing shots while you're shooting the film.

You would have to.

I mean, there's no other way to do this.

Yes.

This is obviously the only way to get it done.

Even so, it's considered a big rush job for Industrial Light and Magic.

They use a bigger team than usual.

They pull 200 artists onto this.

And apparently, they used the same animation and modeling software they had just used on Aang Li's Hulk.

Looks a lot better in this.

I think Colk looks good.

One creative method they used to achieve the look of decaying skin was taking photos of turkey jerky, scanning them in, and then grafting that texture on top of the skeletons.

Ugh.

It was especially challenging to create the close-up shots of the pirates transforming into their undead forms.

Each character had so much detail with all their trinkets and accessories that needed needed to be retained.

The same goes for the movements of the skeleton pirates.

Ilem worked from motion capture references of the real actors to be sure that each skeleton moved like its pirate counterpart.

It really looks pretty good.

That is insane.

It does.

And I believe that pirates honestly may have been not this one, but the sequel with Bill Nye in his octopus human form is arguably like the pinnacle of VFX.

Some of those shots look seamless.

I cannot believe how good they look.

So these movies are very much pioneering into new technological fronts on the VFX side.

But it's the music that ended up being a real squeeze.

So, to score the film, Verbinski first brought in Alan Silvestri, who had done the Mexican and Mouse Hunt.

But before they even recorded anything, Silvestri had been asked to leave.

It was not anything super dramatic.

Basically, Silvestri quickly realized that it's not just a Gore Verbinski film, it's a Jerry Bruckheimer film too.

And he would have to serve two masters.

And if they were going to finish this on time, it was going to be better and arguably it would only be doable if they brought in somebody that Bruckheimer had worked with before.

Otherwise, it would take too long to familiarize Silvestri with Bruckheimer and vice versa.

So again, Silvestri said, no harm, no foul.

And he said that, quote, Jerry Bruckheimer couldn't have been more respectful, end quote.

Okay.

Composers are often, because they're the last on, given the boot and treated unfairly.

It doesn't sound like this was necessarily one of those instances.

So Verbinski and Bruckheimer go to frequent Bruckheimer collaborator, Hans Zimmer.

The only problem, the story goes, is that Hans Zimmer is on The Last Samurai, and he's contractually obligated to not do any other movies until that movie is finished.

But Pirates of the Caribbean is on an extremely tight timetable.

Right.

So they hire Hans Zimmer's production company, Media Ventures, which was a big house of composers that Hans was the head of, and they would do commercials and video games and movies.

Klaus Bedelt was one of the composers in-house at Hans Zimmer's production company, and they technically hired Klaus to score the movie.

But again, the story goes, and my understanding is that that didn't stop Zimmer from feeding some core themes to Klaus as he was scoring this.

And then Klaus would then go and flesh them out and get them orchestrated and recorded for the film.

Now, Klaus has said that he only had four weeks to score this movie.

So I think that that this was more Klaus and Hans riffing on an existing style that they knew that Bruckheimer and Verbinski would like, and not so much a case of plagiarism or anything like that.

That being said, I think the Pirates of the Caribbean main theme, He's a Pirate, sounds quite a bit similar to a couple of other famous Hans Zimmer themes.

Yeah, there's a portion of, I believe, the song is He's a Pirate on the soundtrack that has the sort of classic theme in it, and it is almost identical to certain tracks on the Gladiator soundtrack.

Now, I have to give Reddit some credit for unearthing this connection.

I was unaware of the fact that Hans Zimmer had scored a little action film from the mid-90s called Drop Zone, which is a, I think, pretty blatant point-break ripoff starring Wesley Snipes.

And portions of the score are very reminiscent of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Or should I say, Pirates of the Caribbean can be a little reminiscent of Drop Zone.

Anyway, the point is, it evokes many Hans Zimmer moments.

Listen, Hans does what he does.

I don't blame them, and I do think the overall score is wonderful.

No, if they had 48 hours to make this, I bet I would pull that out of Gladiator 2 and be like, change this note, switch it around a little bit, swirl it in a bowl, and here it is, and it's great.

Exactly.

If you guys would like to learn more about the Pirates of the Caribbean score, I highly recommend a video on YouTube called The Insane Story of Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack by Charles Cornell.

Not only will he talk to you in a little more detail about some of the behind-the-scenes machinations, machinations, he also does a really great explanation of the actual music behind the score itself.

And he explains, you know, how it's similar to these other movies and why it's similar musically, and why it's just such a great piece of music to begin with.

So, again, check out Charles Cornell's video, The Insane Story of the Pirates of the Caribbean's soundtrack on YouTube.

So, the premiere is around the corner, and Michael Eisner, I believe, has to be just downing Tums and Pepsid AC because he is so stressed about releasing this movie.

So, Disney had taken the the actors' measurements for a line of pirates' dolls, the quotas dolls, I believe it's action figures, but they had pulled out of that deal in part because they thought the movie was too convoluted to be a hit.

So, they were just worried that nobody's going to understand this.

He was also worried that teenagers would associate the movie with the ride and think that it was for kids.

And so, this is when Michael Eisner comes up with a late-in-the-game idea.

He wants to change the title.

It had been called Pirates of the Caribbean until this point, but he said he wanted a title that would lend itself better to sequels like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Sounds like everybody else was against the name change, even other Disney executives.

Everybody's like, Michael, no.

And he says, Yes, we need a subtitle.

And they're like, okay, what?

And I don't know who came up with it, but the idea is brought forth: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which makes no sense because the Black Pearl isn't curse, nor is the curse about the Black Pearl.

It's the Aztec gold that is the curse.

That's right.

But I don't think they want to say, and the curse of the Aztec gold.

So lean in, brothers.

If you're going to put it in the movie, put it on the poster.

I think it's fine.

But when they did put it on the poster, they made sure to put it in very small font.

So it was like, hi, sir, you're happy, but you know, we don't really want to distract from it.

So Pirates of the Caribbean premiered at Disneyland on June 28th, 2003, to somewhat mixed reviews.

The Hollywood Reporter said, since the Walt Disney Company film based on one of its theme park attractions was the unbearable, not nearly unbearable, unbearable, The Country Bears, Pirates of the Caribbean is surprisingly not bad.

So not a ringing endorsement.

The New York Times, though, said, this movie is better than it deserves to be given its origins, a ride at Disneyland and Disney World.

I would agree.

But they were not very nice to Kira Knightley.

Quote, Miss Knightley is strident and confident in her movement, an ability that makes her all the sexier and alluring, which is fortunate given that her acting skills aren't quite as devastating as her looks.

About a 17-year-old New York Times.

I don't agree.

I actually think she's pretty fun in this.

I don't agree either.

Listen, she does a lot of jaw acting.

I don't care.

She let her do it.

It's fine.

She's also said that she completely lost her privacy at this point in time.

She was stalked by men.

And then she was basically told that she had asked for it by being on screen and dressing in whatever people had put her in.

This was a gnarly time on that front.

If you remember Natalie Portman and literally receiving mail from men saying, I can't wait for you to turn 18 and for you to do your first nude scene when she was 15, 16 years old.

Of course, the performance that drew the most attention was Lizzie.

Captain Jack Sparrow.

Captain Jack Sparrow.

Not Orlando Bloom.

No, literally forgot Orlando Bloom was in this.

Robert Ebert said that Depp, quote, seems to be channeling a squashbuckling drag queen, but somehow he pulls it off.

I agree.

And the audiences loved him.

It grossed roughly roughly $653 million worldwide, over 300 in the United States, and close to 350 internationally.

And this movie, Lizzie, had incredible legs.

So we often talk about the first box office weekend, but the big thing to know about Pirates of the Caribbean is that it stayed big at the box office.

So for 12 weeks, it was one of the top five highest-grossing films at the box office.

And domestically, it had what's called a 6X multiplier.

And that means that its total box office run in the US was six times what its opening weekend had been.

That's incredible.

A lot of films have like a 2x multiplier.

This movie had a 6x multiplier.

And apparently it's because there were a lot of teenage boys and girls who were re-watching it over and over again.

It's fun.

The Academy Awards agreed that there was something to this Jack Sparrow guy because Johnny Depp was nominated for an Oscar.

Okay, that is a pirate bridge too far.

You know, I looked up who else was nominated that year, and I actually think Johnny Depp brings a lot of spunk to a pretty dour round of nominees.

Sean Penn and Mystic River, Ben Kingsley, House of Sand and Fog, Jude Law, Cold Mountain, Bill Murray, Lost in Translation, all great performances, but all just very downer.

So I don't know.

I think it's nice to have an upbeat performance in there.

The movie was nominated for a total of five Oscars.

Best actor in a leading role, best makeup, best sound mixing, best sound editing, and best visual effects.

Now, of course, Lizzie, Pirates got not one, not two, not three, but four sequels.

Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man's Chest, at World's End.

That's the last one I saw.

Yeah, me too.

On Stranger Tides, and Dead Men Tell No Tales, but they do make more movies.

Rubinski left after the third film to expand into animation with Rango and then returned to Disney IP with the misbegotten Lone Ranger.

And then he followed that up with a bit of a flop, A Cure for Wellness.

He has not directed a film since, but I did see that he has a movie in post-production that I believe is called Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.

Interesting.

The franchise came to dominate the careers of, I believe, Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp in particular.

Knightly expanded beyond the films, I think, more successfully.

For sure, yes.

In the fall of 2017, Disney confirmed that a sixth installment was in early development for the Pirates franchise.

But that November, a lawsuit was filed against Disney by writers Arthur Lee Alfred II and Ezekiel Martinez Jr., claiming that Disney had plagiarized or lifted elements from their 2000 spec script that they say they had shared with Brigham Taylor before the original Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl, was in development.

Drafts are written, the lawsuit progresses, it's dismissed, the dismissal is reversed, and it all builds to 2022, where Disney settles the plagiarism lawsuit, and the terms are undisclosed.

So we don't know if there was any merit to this suit or not, or if Disney just wanted to put it to bed.

During this process, Johnny Depp was dropped from Pirates of the Caribbean by Disney.

They did not pick up his option for a sixth movie.

Now, he tried to present it in the Depp Heard trial that this was because of an op-ed that Amber Heard had published alleging domestic abuse.

A Disney executive testified that this wasn't the case, that they had no idea that this op-ed was going to be published or even existed when he was dropped from the movie.

And

my understanding, and candidly, what I would believe, is that he was let go because he was unreliable as a professional presence on set.

And I'm guessing at nearly 60 years old, they were probably wanting to refresh the franchise and go in a different direction.

Everything was obviously delayed with COVID, and then with the writer's strike, there were at least two versions of the scripts that Disney was developing in parallel.

Jerry Brockheimer has said that one of them would leave the door open for legacy characters, one of them would not.

As of the time of this recording, there is no green light for another Pirates of the Caribbean film, but I would not be surprised if we got a new one by the end of this decade.

They have to reboot it with younger people.

That's what they do.

They need a new crop.

I agree.

They need a new crop of pirates.

What's interesting is that even though Pirates of the Caribbean was a massive success and its sequels brought in billions, it It did very little to revive the pirate genre as a whole.

There were other pirate films released after this, but none of them had the staying power of Pirates of the Caribbean.

And the only example I can think of that's really broken through recently is Our Flag Means Death, the HBO television series.

And even that's very small, but very funny.

I think the reason is that the appeal of this is not actually the pirates.

There we go.

I agree.

I think it's a roller coaster ride.

The supernatural elements are, I think, what makes this.

Also, just honestly, the actors they cast.

You know, I didn't love it upon rewatch, but it was sort of very novel at the time.

I do think Johnny Depp's performance as Jack Sparrow is a big reason that this worked, in addition to everyone else, who I do, I think the whole cast is really great in this.

Well, speaking of what's great, that concludes our coverage of Pirates of the Caribbean.

So Lizzie, I have to ask you, what went right?

Well, I think a lot went right.

It's a long side.

Well, there's a lot to choose from.

I'm going to give it to the writers on this one.

I think what Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio did here in terms of being able to extract any story, let alone a fun one, is really pretty impressive.

And it holds up, you know, 20 plus years later after release.

It is still fun.

And I think that that's a real credit to the screenplay and credit to them and to Stuart Beatty, all of whom had pitched this idea and pitched the supernatural element, which I do think is kind of the key to this really working and being something special.

I agree.

I'm going to give mine to Gore Verbinski.

And I think he reminds me a lot of Robert Zemeckis in some ways, kind of a jack of all trades, but also interested in pushing the medium forward technologically, it seems like, or at least he was for a period.

And I've really liked a number of Gore Verbinski's films.

I think The Ring is really fantastic.

I think

I really like Pirates of the Caribbean.

I liked Rango.

And so I'm really curious to see what he does next.

But more broadly speaking, I'm sure all these people are great at their jobs, but I can't imagine the stress of working on water, trying to explain Johnny Depp's behavior and performance to Disney executives, including Michael Eisner, with a producer the size of Jerry Bruckheimer over your shoulder as you are attempting to bring this movie to life in a genre that has left the scattered corpses of all of the directors and actors who have attempted it in its wake over the past 15 or 20 years.

So I got to give mine to Gore Verbinski.

What a risky move and knocked it out of the park.

I agree.

Great job, Gore.

Great job.

All right, guys, that concludes our coverage of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Lizzie, can you let the folks know what we have coming up next?

We have the natural follow-up to Pirates of the Caribbean, Chris, and that is...

Bob Fossey's all that jazz.

But we have a very, very special guest for this episode who we are very excited about.

We are joined by Demi Adajuibe.

He was wonderful.

It was a super fun episode to capture with him.

So please come back and listen to that.

It is a wild film and a wild ride.

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Don't worry, you can join for free.

We post information, corrections, sometimes musings, mostly by myself, about various films.

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Arrh!

Gather around ye scurvy dogs, for it'd be time to read the roll call of the Dread Crew Patreon.

In the voice of the only one, Captain Barbosa himself.

Now brace yourselves, middies, Darby names here to chill the bones and twist the tongue.

Slip knots nine, you won't be slipping these knots when I get you on my ship.

Kay Kanaba, Nathan Sentineau, and Daniel Edwin Davies.

You'll find yourself in Davey Jones's locker.

James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, and Ben Scheindelman.

Scary Carrie, aye, we don't say that name twice, lest the mirrors crack.

The Provost family, that's Provost, like the wail of a banshee in the fog.

Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kids.

Don't be breaking glass on my ship.

David Friscolante, Adam Moffat, film it yourself, yes.

Chris Saka, Kate Ellrington, M.X.

Odia, C.

Grace B, Jen Mostra Marino.

I heard tale of the sea shanties she sings that drive men mad with longing.

Christopher Elner, Blaise Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, the Rural Jur.

Say it three times fast just to prove that you're literate.

Lance Stater, Nathan Knife, that's not a nickname, that's just what he's got in his pocket.

Lena, Ramon Villanueva Jr., Half Greyhound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling.

Are they twins or simply cursed reflections?

Jake Killen, it's in the name.

Stay on his good side if he has one.

Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter.

I've heard her song in the dark of the night, but don't be fooled or she'll lure you into shallow waters and ground your ship.

Ellen Singleton, don't let the name fool you.

She's never alone.

She's got an army with her.

JJ Rapido, too fast for the eye, Jewish Risamant, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, just Sadie, just like Barbossa.

This accent's all over the place.

Brian Donahue, Donahue, Adrian Peng Corea, Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, that's David's mom.

Steve Winterbauer, my father.

Don Scheibel, George Kay, Rosemary Southward.

Tom Kristen, Jason Frankel, Soman Chinani, just the man I've been looking for to put the tales of Captain Barbosa down, put pen to paper.

Michael McGrath, Lon Ralad, and Lydia Howes.

Now belay your grumbling and clap for the finest crew that ever haunted a Patreon before.

Ye are.

All right.

Thanks, Jeffrey Rush, for that incredible series of shout-outs.

Guys, we will see you in a week for all that jazz.

Very excited to talk about it.

And until then,

bon bayage.

Bye.

Go Go to patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer with additional editing from Karen Krupsoff.