Glitter

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Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a classic all-time big-time flopper trademark, Lizzie Bassett, my co-host.

As always, I'm Chris Winterbauer.

Lizzie, how you doing tonight?

And let me tell you, I'm still mad at you for what you made me watch last night.

Are you really?

I'm not mad.

No, I'm not this night.

I'm not mad at it.

I'm not.

I'm being facetious.

I actually enjoyed this movie.

I had never seen it before.

Well, yeah.

What are we discussing today?

We are discussing the 2001 classic glitter.

And I have to ask, is this the biggest big-time flopper we've ever?

I think it might be for multiple reasons.

I don't know yet, but what I will say is it is not my least favorite movie that we've covered on this podcast.

But I don't think that is what a big-time flopper means to me, at least.

You are the owner.

You're the flopper queen, as we call you.

And this podcast, guys, is not about dunking on movies.

It is about exploring the behind the scenes, shenanigans, obstacles, terrorist attacks based on the timing of the release of this film that may have plagued a film's production and why we need to appreciate all of them as beautiful snowflakes that are unique.

And I just can't wait to hear about this one because Lizzie, I can only say it is Ray meets

Starsborn meets Crossroads.

And I'm so excited.

Well, okay, so obviously you had not seen Glitter before.

What was your experience of watching it this time?

I apologize to everyone involved in Glitter.

I did not see it in the highest quality.

I struggled to actually find this film.

We should say you literally can't pay for it, even if you would like to, but it's not available to stream anywhere.

And also, we should say this is Glitter starring, of course, Mariah Carey.

If anyone is not familiar with what this movie is, go on, Chris.

So my wife and I watched it last night.

We did unfortunately have to watch it on YouTube.

The only place to watch it.

And

I mean, I wrote down some thoughts.

I can pull them up.

When they uploaded to YouTube, they forgot the colors was what I thought for the first because all the flashbacks are so desaturated that they look basically black and white.

I wrote, Terrence Howard, he has murderer energy, and then he does murder someone by the end of the film.

I said, Padmalakshmi giving Minnie Driver a run for her money, strangling the cat.

She's very fun in this.

there are so many establishing shots that are just speed ramps of footage through new york city that it feels like the editor's like we got to finish the movie sooner we gotta and they just speed ramp all of these moments the co-lead max max beasley otherwise known as a poor man steven dorf who i thought was steven dorf for like at least a poor man

a portion of this movie doing the most uncanny mark wahlberg vocal impression i think i have ever heard he sounds i thought he might be a secret wahlberg that we didn't know about.

Or he's doing Christian Balin newsies.

Again, it is uncannily similar to that as well.

He's British.

Yeah, he is British.

That's why I thought he was doing Marky.

20 minutes in, I don't think we have seen a close-up of Mariah Carey, which was surprising.

And then I wrote, Mariah has such a good voice.

She does have such a good voice.

She sure does.

But yeah, just, I liked her friends.

They always just cut to them dancing.

They're great.

Terribly.

Marimba Seduction.

I actually kind of liked that scene.

I like when they make love for the first time and they go behind the glass to hide the nudity, but when he pulls her dress down, she's wearing giant white underwear.

Hey, shut up.

That's realistic.

I agree.

But it's just funny because it's not typical cinema as we've gotten used to.

Anyway, and then I wrote, Terrence Howard owns one shirt because he's in the same outfit the entire movie.

It's true.

It doesn't change.

Maybe no wardrobe change for him, I don't think.

No, I will say the movie held my attention.

It's It's definitely hokey.

I think it's a classic example of reality versus expectations.

So I think if this was marketed today as more of a lifetime movie, it would actually be perfectly successful.

But

in trying to be kind of a prestige musical, I know it's not a biopic, I guess I'm assuming technically, but as like a prestige pop vehicle, it falls a bit short of the lofty goals I'm sure they had set.

Well, let's get into it.

I will warn you, this is quite a bit darker than I expected us to be going in an episode on glitter, so just be prepared for that.

Let's just get the basic info out of the way first.

This is directed by Vondi Curtis-Hall.

The writers are Cheryl L.

West, who has a story by credit, and then Kate Lanier, who wrote the screenplay, stars Mariah Carey, Max Beasley, as we mentioned, Terrence Howard, DeBrat, Tia Tejada.

Eric Benet, and more.

Release date, we'll get into this, but it was September 21st of 2001.

The production companies were 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, and others.

And the IMDb log line is a young singer dates a disc jockey who helps her get into the music business, but their relationship become,

that's what it says, complicated as she ascends to superstard.

I'm not going to read that any differently.

That's what it says.

Do you still know anyone that works at IMDb?

We need to get this fixed.

No, I'm leaving that.

All right.

I would like to start with a quote from Mariah's memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey.

And it says, the saga of making glitter was a collision of bad luck, bad timing, and sabotage.

Oh, interesting.

So, not a lot of accountability in that sentence, but that's okay.

Just wait.

I actually think she does take a decent amount of accountability.

Whereas the photographer in glitter says, no, the glitter cannot overpower the artist.

And yet, it did.

It's a great line.

one of so funny one i remember from the movie

the other thing about glitter as i was watching and i said this to david while we were watching but if someone was like i will give you a million dollars right now if you can sing 10 seconds of one song from glitter I would not be a million dollars richer.

I just, there's not a single song in this that I can remember.

There are just, there are no earworms.

There's nothing memorable.

Yeah.

I will say one of my early thoughts was even though Mariah's got a fantastic voice,

I was reminded of Joker Foliadou, where I just, I didn't find the music memorable as I was, as we were watching this film.

It really, I just thought, at least the musical numbers will be fun and poppy and very mainstream.

Man,

just change the station, guys.

There's a couple of very good reasons for that, which we're going to get into.

And I did not know any of this.

So it was very interesting to really dive into this.

May I just say, I did like the piano songs she plays.

Yeah, I'm not saying I don't like the songs.

When I went back and listened to them, I actually do think they're good, but I literally cannot remember.

Like there's no earworms in this, basically.

I just can't remember any of them.

I agree.

And it's Mariah Carey.

She's never going to sound bad.

Like she does not sound bad.

So we're going to go on a surprisingly depressing journey today through the music industry, and we will find ourselves at the doorstep of one of the biggest flops of the 21st century, I think still.

And fair warning, Chris mentioned this, but the 9-11 terrorist attacks are involved in this episode more than you might expect.

Now, since Glitter revolves entirely around Mariah Carey, it's only fitting that we should start with Mariah.

So, Chris, do you know anything about her?

Nothing.

I mean, I've enjoyed some of her music.

Again, I think she has a generational voice in many ways.

Her All I Want for Christmas rendition is stunning and over the top, and I know virtually nothing about her.

Okay.

Well, before the Lameley, which is her fan base, as I've learned, I spent a lot of time on the Lamelies Reddit.

Thank you, Lamelie.

Before They Come After Me, this is not going to be a takedown of Mariah at all.

There is no denying her talent.

She's one of the best-selling artists of all time.

She has a five-octave vocal range.

Also, I would like to point out, I think she actually is a good actress.

If you've ever seen Precious or The Butler, she is very good.

In Precious in particular, she's very good.

This script is not good, but she's not bad at delivering it.

No, she's really not.

She's fine.

Yeah.

So at the time of Glitter's release, she had never had an album without a number one single, but that was about to change.

So let's get some background on Mariah.

She was born March 27th, 1969 in Huntington, New York, which is Long Island.

Her mother, Patricia, was a Juilliard-trained opera singer, turned vocal coach, I believe, who had given up her career to focus on her family.

Mariah was the youngest of three, and I believe she was quite a bit younger than her two older siblings.

Her father, Alfred, was an aeronautical engineer.

He was of Afro-Venezuelan descent, and Patricia was Irish and white.

The interracial marriage was something of a scandal at the time.

Patricia's family disowned her for marrying Alfred.

And here's a clip of Mariah Carey on the Oprah Winfrey show in 1999 talking about growing up in an interracial family.

For me, definitely, you know, growing up the way that I did,

I felt

you know, inside, and I never really expressed it to very many people, like I wasn't good enough, like I was, you know, I didn't look look like one particular group or another, I wasn't exactly the same.

Also, I had kind of also, you looked even different than your own brothers and sisters.

Yeah, I mean, we look related, definitely.

I mean, we all look, we all, you can tell we're brother and sister, but I mean, they didn't live with me very long when I was growing up, so it wasn't like I had, you know, people that we could completely relate to.

That's why I'm not sure if I can do it.

Well, this is an issue, and you are a role model, you do know that, for a lot of biracial children, girls, especially.

Later on, in this same Oprah Winfrey episode, Mariah's mother joined her and revealed that when Mariah was little, their neighbors had actually poisoned their dog and had even shot through the front window of their house at one point.

And that was in a nice neighborhood.

She said that's when they moved to like a more affluent area.

At three years old, her parents divorced and her mother got primary custody.

Now, Mariah described her relationship with her mother in her memoir as, quote, a prickly rope of pride, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration, and disappointment.

The jealousy in particular seems to have been a running theme.

Now, remember, her mother was a classically trained and very talented opera singer.

Obviously, Mariah inherited that talent and then some, I would say, but it seems pretty clear from an early age that she was special.

According to Carrie, one time after a sing-along together in the car, her mother turned to her and said, You should only hope that one day you become half the singer I am.

Wow.

I mean, I say that to my kids about podcasting, but

because then you won't pursue it as a profession and you'll do something practical.

Yeah, doctors.

Actually, no, not even doctors anymore.

No, that will be AI.

It'll all be AI.

Yeah.

Sort of related, but Mariah does not really celebrate birthdays in terms of numbers.

She celebrates more anniversaries and describes herself as eternally 12, I think, because it's safe to say based on her memoir, there was a substantial amount of trauma and neglect in her youth around that time, and particularly as she started to succeed professionally.

I'm not going to get into it too much here because it is a massive bummer, but it was allegedly particularly at the hands of her older sister.

Jeez.

She also suffered some really horrible discrimination at the hands of her peers when she was growing up.

And again, like she said, just felt like she never really fit in anywhere.

So she poured all of her attention into music from a very early age.

I don't think she ever had any other ambitions.

This was it.

As a teenager, she was literally traveling into Manhattan at night to record demos, turning back around, going to high school in the morning.

I can't even imagine.

As soon as she graduated high school, she moved to Manhattan to focus on her music career.

And at 18, she attended a music industry party where she handed one of her demo tapes to a music exec.

Now, he put the tape on in his limo as he was driving home and immediately turned the limo around when he heard her singing.

But Chris, she had already left the party and there was no phone number anywhere on the tape.

Which they kind of recreate when she intentionally does not give Dice her phone number.

And I said, Mariah, what are you doing?

This is absurd.

But I guess it was based on something in reality.

Why don't we see how this turned out?

So he did eventually track her down, beginning her career and bringing with him a whole host of problems.

The exec in question was then president of Sony Music, Tommy Mattola.

He was 20 years her senior.

And within five years, he would also, Chris, become her husband.

He was married at the time, by the way.

I believe they started dating pretty much immediately, even though he was married.

And again, she's 18.

But there were reports of seeing the two of them around town right away.

So she released her first self-titled album in June of 1990.

And he hired some of the best writers and producers to work with her on this album.

He put a lot of money into it, a lot of promotional money behind it.

But I want to point out, every single song from her demo, which she co-wrote with a guy named Ben Margulies, made it onto the album.

She became the first artist since the Jackson 5 to have the first four singles top the U.S.

charts.

And by the way, three out of four of those singles were from her demo tape.

So she can write too.

She can write too.

And I'm calling that out because a lot of times people talk about how Tommy Mattola made Mariah's career and that was a whole thing.

Did he help her?

Obviously, yes, of course.

But the fact that three out of four of those singles made it onto the demo tape tells me that there was no making happening here.

She had that innate ability to self-generate, much more so than maybe some of her contemporaries.

Yeah, and also like he was looking for someone to compete with Whitney Houston.

So this was a business opportunity for him.

By the time her second album came out, her partnership with Ben Margulis, who, again, she'd written the demo with, had dissolved due to a pretty nasty rights dispute.

I'm not going to to get into this the deal she signed with him initially was i think quite shady she was literally a child when she signed it and she signed away a percentage of her artist rights on future albums that he didn't even write on and didn't realize that she had done that and this is i think a running theme here of people taking advantage of her from a very early age

there was a lot of speculation that she was heavily produced and not actually capable of singing in that super high whistle register that you hear, maybe because she didn't embark on a tour to promote that album.

So she went on MTV Unplugged, and that shut people up pretty quickly because she sounds absolutely amazing live.

Yeah, if you've never seen the clips of her just going for it on her own live, and that, like you mentioned, that you're right, that whistle register, it's a weird, like husky falsetto is almost the way to describe it.

It's amazing.

And I don't know of any other artists right now that can quite do that.

David just popped in to say Ariana Grande, which yes, I think Ariana Grande was early in her career mentioned as sort of like a new Mariah Carey.

We get it, David.

You listen to Ariana Grande.

Very cool.

David loves Ariana Grande.

We all do.

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On June 5th, 1993, Carrie and Mattola married after years of dating.

She was 24 years old.

Now, Mattola is credited with pushing her to release a Christmas album, which, of course, you mentioned this.

It resulted in the annual holiday earworm, All I Want for Christmas is You.

And I have to imagine an absolute dump truck full of money for both of them.

Giant.

They literally just backed the truck up to the house.

They must every Christmas.

She was just pouring cash on Mariah Carrie's head.

However, their relationship, relationship, I think, obviously featured a pretty extreme power imbalance, and it sounds like Mattola took advantage of that to a really upsetting degree.

Mariah refers to his compound in Westchester, New York, as Sing Sing,

a fun double entendre, because both where she would sing and also, obviously, the name of one of our country's most infamous maximum security prisons.

Yeah, this is what Mattola was accused of.

The mansion featured armed guards, Gears.

Armed Irish guards.

I get it.

Which was triggering for her due to her Irish mother.

The mansion featured armed guards, who, according to Carrie, were all white, and an intercom system.

And Carrie recalls that Mattola would often monitor her through the cameras and talk to her throughout the house.

Sometimes when she would sneak out of her bedroom at night for some peace and quiet to grab a snack downstairs or work on music, all of a sudden she would hear the intercom crackle and what you doing coming out over the speakers.

I was about to make the joke of like the insecure nerd being like, What you doing?

What's going on?

Like, but that is it.

That's that's literally what he did to her throughout the house.

And she was not allowed to leave the house without his permission.

He allegedly paid employees to spy on her.

And once when their relationship was nearing its end, again, according to Mariah, he ran a butter knife down her face and throat in front of a bunch of his colleagues who just stood there and watched.

She said, quote, every move I made, everywhere I went, I was monitored minute by minute, day after day, year after year.

I was living my dream, but I couldn't leave my house.

Lonely and trapped, I was held captive in that relationship.

Captivity and control come in many forms, but the goal is always the same, to break down the captive's will, to kill any notion of self-worth, and erase the person's memory of their own soul.

Jeesh.

She also alleges there were elements of racism in the marriage.

She said he really never even acknowledged her biracial background at all.

Of course, he denies basically all of these allegations, obviously, but does say that it was absolutely wrong and inappropriate, that's a direct quote from him for him to have begun the relationship with her in the first place, and acknowledges being a little obsessive, which I think might be an understatement.

One man's a little obsessive is another man's, what you doing, buttercup, on the intercom in the middle of the night.

That's like, you're just trying to eat your weird midnight snack.

That's an absolute nightmare.

By the way, there is a pretty scathing Vanity Fair profile of Tommy Mattola from 1996 that backs up an awful lot of what Mariah is saying.

And that's from when they were married, including that two security guards were tasked with escorting her to and from the bathroom and standing outside the door.

Oh my God.

And naturally, in that interview, he did not make her available for comments.

So I am inclined to believe Mimi on this one.

I mean, you could tell the reporter was getting as close as they possibly could to saying this is really fucked up without saying it.

Things got so bad that she had to secretly rent an apartment in the city under a fake name so she could have some time to herself.

But in 1997, her guardian angel arrived in the form of Yankees superstar, Derek Jeter.

They met at a charity gala, bonded over having a similar background.

He also had an Irish mother and a black father.

They started a romantic relationship very quickly.

It didn't last very long.

I think she has acknowledged that it did begin while she was still with Tommy Mattola.

By spring of 97, she and Mattola were separated.

So I do think she separated from him very quickly thereafter.

And by 1998, they were getting a divorce.

During all of this, she's getting shit for bringing down Derek Jeter's batting average.

The tabloids are starting to have a field day.

Yeah.

So it was reported that even though she and Mattola were separating, Mariah and Sony would remain on good terms.

That was not the case.

You know, one thing I was surprised to learn when I started working in film a bit after film school is how small the industry is.

It feels enormous from the outside, just the sheer scope and scale of movies.

And you realize it's a pretty small network of people and it's an industry powered by relationships.

And so the positive benefit of that is one person looking kindly upon you or saying, I want to help you can be an enormous boon to your career.

And I've been really lucky that there have been a number of people who have helped me.

But the flip side is it only takes one person

in a position of power to poison the well,

you know, turn an entire corporation entity, you know, away from you or against you.

And so on the one hand, it would be easy to say, Mariah, get out of this relationship.

What are you doing?

But on the other hand, I can easily see how from her perspective,

everything

that she has worked so hard for professionally is tied to this person.

And if she loses one, she might lose the other.

Well, and he's also still the head of Sony, and she is still signed to Sony's Columbia Records.

Finally, free of Tommy's clutches, she told the Chicago Tribune in November of 1997 that she was ready to try acting.

And in fact, a project was being written for her by playwright Cheryl West.

And she even said, Chris, that she'd already written a soul ballad for it.

Hmm.

1997.

She told Movie Line that the movie was her idea, and she wrote the treatment.

Quote, it's a story I've wanted to tell for a long time.

We start with my character, Billie Frank, as a nine-year-old girl.

She's at a club watching her mother sing.

Billy is light-skinned, her mother's black, and her mother is clearly out of it, high or drunk.

We don't really know.

At a certain point, her mother loses it in the middle of the song.

She forgets her lines and she calls Billy to come up and sing.

The little girl saves her mother.

The crowd goes crazy because she's got this huge voice and she shouldn't be in a club anyway at two in in the morning.

Wait, am I giving away too much?

Yes, Mariah.

It's the all-opening sequence.

Madly scribbling down everything that's arriving.

Yeah, okay, sure.

And then Terrence Howard shows up.

Say what you will about Terrence Howard.

I know that he doesn't believe in science or math, but he can elevate garbage like nobody else.

He's a good actor.

He's particularly good at this, though.

I don't know if you ever watched Empire, but like

he's very good at it.

I'm gonna need that 100 grand.

He's great.

I like it.

He's great.

It should be mentioned.

I think we all can figure this out at this point, but glitter is just terrible as Star is born.

Like it's not her saying I had this idea.

This is as close as you can get to a star is born without having to pay someone rights.

Like this is not a novel concept.

Now she had been wanting to act for a while at this point.

By 1998, she had signed up for a James Bond spoof opposite Chris Tucker, who was a huge deal at the time that didn't ever come to fruition.

She also, I believe, had a cameo appearance in The Bachelor with Renee Zellwiger and Chris O'Donnell.

Around this time, Cheryl West had left the project and Kate Lanier had come on board to write the screenplay, which was initially titled All That Glitters.

And we should note if Whitney Houston is being used as like a lodestar, for example, and I don't know if she was for Mariah, but it sounds like she was for Tommy Mattola, who was grooming Mariah's career.

I mean, Whitney had just made the bodyguard in 92.

Yes.

Which was one of the most successful movies of the decade at that point.

I love the bodyguard.

It's fantastic.

And it was an enormous hit, an enormous hit.

And she was obviously already an established singer, but she successfully made that transition into film.

Oh, totally.

Now, Kate Lanier, the screenwriter, is a great choice for this.

She was coming off of Set It Off, starring Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett Smith, directed by F.

Gary Gray.

and What's Love Got to Do With It?

The Tina Turner biopic, which of course got Angela Bassett an Oscar nomination.

Yep.

Now, Mariah insists right off the bat, all that glitters is not autobiographical.

The relationship with her mom, not identical to her own, and she insists that dice,

her DJ love interest was unlike any man she'd ever dated.

But that didn't really matter because pretty much as soon as the movie was announced, the press started having a field day labeling it a vanity project, which

is not incorrect.

I don't know.

I mean, it's not her trying to tell her life story for sure.

I do remember, and I was young when this movie came out, but I remember people wanted to hate it 100%

for

a year at least before the movie came out.

It was Mariah, and I really think she had, now that I'm thinking back, it's such a shame.

I had no idea she was such a talented songwriter.

She had

gotten smeared with that reputation for just being, which, by the way, is so absurd because it's like, oh, she's just a good voice.

She's just got one of the greatest voices you've ever heard.

As if you could do anything close to that.

Right.

On top of that, she's not just that.

She was writing a lot of it.

She was doing a lot of the arrangements herself and everything, which is really impressive.

I think she was really presented as this empty vessel in such an unfair way.

And they said, oh, great.

You're going to put this pretty thing in a movie.

And who cares?

Now, All That Glitters was an ambitious project.

It was always intended to be be a dual chart-topping album and box office hit, which is a pretty rare combo when you think about it.

Not many have pulled that off.

Bodyguard, I believe, is a...

The Bodyguard was obviously one of Whitney Houston's biggest hits ever, and a Starsborn also.

Now, remember, she'd already been working on the songs.

Well, in 1998, Columbia Records, again, that's Sony, pushed her to release a compilation album instead, kicking Glitter down the road.

It also sounds like some of the songs that she'd been working on for All That Glitters wound up going on her 1999 Rainbow album instead, because again, glitter keeps getting pushed.

So that is why I think there's no really catchy songs on this, is that they all got put on the album before it.

So even though she divorced Tommy Mattola in 1998, she was still very much under his and Sony's control.

And let me tell you, he made good use of that.

She said that they even went so far as to pull her promo materials from record stores at one point.

And it sure seems like he was going out of his way to make make sure glitter was not going to happen.

Mariah would go on Charlie Rose later and say that she'd been trying to make a movie for three and a half years, but quote, fools wouldn't let me.

Tommy, Mariah was going to tank glitter all by herself.

You really did not need to help.

Oh, poor Mariah.

Poor Mariah.

So she's no longer romantically entangled with Mattola and glitter is really happening.

As we said, Vondi Curtis Hall, who you may recognize more as an actor, came on board to direct.

He's also a very accomplished TV director.

I'm not going to say anything else about Vondi because nothing that's about to happen is the fault of any of the cast or crew involved in this film.

Really quick, have you seen his first movie?

No.

It's called Gridlocked with Tim Roth and Tupac.

Ooh.

And it's actually...

It's very good.

He's a great director.

He is.

And it's like a very dark comedy.

And I saw it a long time ago and I saw his name and I didn't actually, I didn't put together that he had directed glitter.

Anyway, it's very good.

It's very funny.

Tupac died right before the movie came out.

Yeah.

And so I was just thinking about, oh my gosh, your first movie, your star dies before the movie comes out.

And then your second movie

is glitter.

Glitter.

Oh, no.

Just terrible luck.

But if you guys haven't seen Gridlocked, I recommend it.

All right.

Great.

I'll watch that.

For casting, obviously we have Max Beasley as Julian Dice, DJ Julian Dice.

And by the way, Chris, in case you couldn't tell from the 15 seconds they let him play drums in this, he is actually an extremely accomplished musician and drummer who has toured with Stevie Wonder and Robbie Williams.

That's why the Marimba scene works.

He's really good.

At first, I thought they were going to cut away and use a body tubble.

He actually played the marimba beautifully.

And I thought the seduction, I actually wanted that part of the scene to continue because I, at first, I thought this is ridiculous.

He's going to seduce her with a marimba.

And the way he played it was so beautiful, I bought it and I thought maybe she will want him, you know, after this moment.

And I wanted that scene to actually go on.

And then they went behind the glass and she had the granny panties on and it killed the mood.

DeBrat and Tia Tejada joined as Billy's best friends.

And we know thanks to a bankruptcy filing from DeBrat in 2018 that she and most other actors were paid SAG AFTRA scale for the movie.

So the $22 million budget most certainly was not going to them.

It's not a lot of money for what they're trying to do in this movie.

It's not, I don't think.

And also, she was a huge star at this point.

So Padma Lakshmi, you mentioned, is Billy's rival, Silk,

who would later go on to host top chef, of course.

And when asked about glitter many years later, she said, God, I cannot get away from this film.

But then she went on to give it a five out of 10 and said, it's not Citizen Kane, but it's not that bad.

I agree with her.

I agree.

I think she handles her role with aplom.

She's very funny.

Eric Benet joined for a small part of which he said he didn't have big screen aspirations, but it just felt right.

He also told Euroweb, and I quote, but I'm not trying to be no Tom Hanks right now.

And lastly, as you've mentioned, we've got Terrence Howard as villain, one-shirt villain Timothy Walker.

They call me OneShirt.

You owe me my $100,000.

That was just as an inciting incident or lock-in moment.

It didn't make any sense.

The arbitrary decision of, oh, you want to buy out my third background dancer from her contract?

Yeah.

$100,000.

Just, Terrence, you're not a serious person.

What are we doing?

It's amazing.

Also, why, anyway, the plot makes no sense.

Why would he give up Mariah Carey when he knows that his girlfriend, Silk, cannot sing?

Like, it doesn't, it makes zero sense for him to have made that trade.

Whatever.

It doesn't matter.

He's known for his vibes, not his brains.

I don't remember his character's name, but whatever it is.

It doesn't matter.

Principal photography for Glitter began on July 27th, 2000, and right off the bat, things did not go well.

Kate and Mariah were apparently rewriting large chunks of the script on set.

She also said that a lot of the story came from improvisation.

Generally not a good sign.

Not for a first-time actor.

No, unless it's like a Christopher Guest movie, this is not what you want to hear.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, this may have been due to pressure from the studio for it to appeal to everyone, which, of course, is a common theme on this podcast.

She later told USA Today, it started out as a concept with substance, but it ended up being geared to 10-year-olds.

It lost a lot of grit, it was gritless.

In fact, I got in over my head.

You can tell because

the first five to ten minutes, they're that's where I was referencing Ray, but they want to feel a little gritty.

Yeah, and then we're just in like go-go dancing and and DJs and it's weirdly like Disney-fied.

Yes.

You're the most beautiful musician I ever heard.

Among

the business.

Yeah.

And it's, and then by the end, and let's discuss the ending.

Spoiler alerts.

If you haven't seen Glitter, spoiler alert, spoiler alert, spoiler alert.

But Max Beasley gets shot by Terrence Howard at the end.

Oh, with 100 grand, you still owe me.

And like, you're not getting your 100 grand now.

You just murdered him.

And then when everyone's watching the television, they're like, well, at least Billy didn't see that.

And they all turn around.

She's standing right behind her.

They go, oh, God, Billy.

Oops.

Well, we should probably get you on stage.

Probably trot you out there for this big number.

She struggled also with cinematographer Jeffrey Simpson, insisting that he was purposely shooting her on her bad side.

For the record, there is zero evidence that this was the case.

Simpson is an extremely accomplished DP with no reason to do that.

He did center stage under the Tuscan sun.

She was very paranoid, I think, for reasons that we will come to understand.

She was also under a microscope from the press, even on set.

Take a look at this interview she did for E.T.

from set, addressing rumors that she'd been having an affair with Eric Binet.

She hadn't, and that Hallie Berry had come to the set to confront her.

She didn't.

We would have loved to have Hallie come to this set,

but she didn't.

That whole thing is a complete lie.

But why should this be anything different than everything else they make up?

Might as well just lie.

Got a little extra ink and a pad of paper.

Jot down a lie and publish it.

Hey,

yeah, not necessarily a high point of journalistic integrity.

No.

We are at this point in what the Daily Beast dubbed the tabloid era of terror, which is, of course, when we came of age as people who are in their mid-30s, it was particularly terrible to women.

They were just making, they were making stuff up.

I think it really peaked with the Britney shaved head

incident.

That was the apex or nadir, depending on how you look at it.

I think we're going to see some like early harbingers of that across this story.

They also asked her about her relationship with then-boyfriend Luis Miguel.

She said it's very hard to find time together and that of course they would break up in 2001 shortly before Glitter's release.

Some of her co-stars had their doubts about the film, including Tia Tejada, who later told Stuff magazine, it was when they brought mustard yellow men's football pants to me and said, you have to wear these and we're going to put a red lightning bolt on the butt.

They wanted me to wear a plastic dress that was shaped like a Christmas tree.

I was like, There is something really, really wrong here.

She was right.

Wasn't really the costumes, though.

It was a little thinger than that.

No, costumes were great, very colorful.

Although, were they set in the 80s?

It's very unclear.

Okay, really quick sidebar.

This movie takes place in 1984, 95, 97, 2000, all at the same time.

Also, her hat in the first act.

I don't hate anything as much as I hate her hat.

Italian cyclists.

Yes.

Her breaking away hat.

It's a me, a Mariah.

That is my favorite piece of costuming from this entire movie.

Mariah Carrie is very beautiful.

That hat is hilarious.

It's really stupid.

What's the brain?

I wrote down Vitalicio Segura's hat, and I just was staring at that text on her forehead.

It's great.

Amazing.

Well, for his part, Max Beasley later told The Guardian, that was a disaster.

But you know, when we made it, it was okay.

And there was some heavy-duty drama, really heavy drama.

And Mariah really showed her acting boots.

They just cut all that out, and I nearly cried when I saw it.

So

might be why it feels a little disjointed, among other reasons.

Now, as we said, Glitter was being produced by 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures, which is of course a division of what, Chris?

Sony.

Where her ex-husband very much still ran things.

She was reportedly quite paranoid about him messing with her, so she'd been recording the music for Glitter in secret.

However, Chris, I don't think you can call it paranoia when you are 100%

right.

The timeline is murky here, but sometime in 2000, Tommy Boy got wind of a track that Carrie had licensed for herself.

It was Firecracker by Yellow Magic Orchestra.

The bass line was going to be used in Glitter's lead single, Loverboy.

But he swooped in and he handed it over to J-Lo, who then turned it into I'm Real.

Oh my goodness.

The J-Lo crossover event I didn't expect in this episode.

J-Lo's going to stick around for a little bit here.

J-Lo's a bit of a villain in this episode.

Oh, no.

Oh, yes.

But then she gets Jeely, and the universe writes itself.

Maybe.

Now, I'm not sure whether this was legal or not since Mariah had licensed it, but it was most certainly quite shitty.

It ended up forcing Mariah's hand.

She had to remove it from her track because JLo's was hitting the market much sooner.

And based on at least one account, they had to work really fast finding a replacement because they were matching the music to film that was already shot.

Right.

Exactly.

That's what I was wondering.

They've shot the scene.

They have the BPM.

They have the tone.

Maybe they're seeing her mouth move.

I'm not sure.

They are for sure.

It's when she's performing.

It's the lead single, it shows up like throughout the movie.

So now we need to just replace the spine that it's built around at the last minute, and it has to match everything that already exists.

Yeah, not the best.

Yeah.

And I'm not going to play them here for rights issues.

It doesn't seem like anyone owns the rights to glitter.

Well,

that's true, but you can listen to both versions of the song.

The one they did eventually release with Firecracker as the baseline.

It is better, for sure.

He didn't stop there, though, Chris.

Producer Irv Gotti, who worked on J-Lo's album, confirmed years later that he was basically instructed to copy another track off of the glitter album called If We, which is a back-and-forth duet between Mariah and Ja Rule.

Now, you may not remember this.

I certainly didn't.

But I'm Real was actually two different songs on the same album, both called I'm Real.

The one that was an enormous success was I'm Real parentheses murder remix featuring Ja Rule,

which we now know is what was written in response to Mariah's existing track.

So that is the one, when you think of it, that's I'm Maria, the way you look, the way you talk.

I can't do Ja Rule.

So we know who was murdered now.

It was Mariah in this instance.

In this instance, it was Glitter.

Are you familiar with Mariah Carey's iconic response many years later when asked about Jennifer Lopez?

No.

I'm not going to play the clip because it's a German interview, and so they're actually translating in German over.

So without being able to see the video, it doesn't hit as hard.

But if anybody has ever seen the I don't know her meme, that is from Mariah.

She's being asked by this interviewer about Beyonce and she's very effusive.

And then they ask her about Jennifer Lopez and she goes, oh, I don't know her,

which is just one of the best burns possible.

Only replaced by Kiki Palmer's, I'm sorry, I don't know this man

more recently.

Yes, although that was genuine.

She most definitely knew who Jennifer Lopez was.

However, she used this to her advantage.

This is officially denied, but it sure sounds like she may have been able to leverage this ultra shitty move from Mattola as a way to get her out of her contract as Sony, even though she owed them one more album.

This is what makes me think that what he did might have been borderline illegal.

I don't know the inner workings of it, but pretty much immediately in April of 2001, she was signed to Virgin Records for $80 million

for four albums, according to the LA Times.

And her first album as part of this deal,

the soundtrack to glitter.

It's a good deal.

So she's finally free, but I also wonder if losing Tommy Mettola also came with losing a certain level of protection from the press, because from this point forward, they are just ruthless to to her.

She's, of course, under pressure to deliver a blockbuster album for her new label, Virgin, and up against the clock to create something for them with a whole new team.

I could be wrong, but I think that she let go of her manager at some point because a lot of these people were Tommy Mattola plants.

They were people who she'd come up with and who he had kind of assigned to her.

It wouldn't surprise me if she just went for a completely fresh start.

I think she did, but that's really hard when you've been relying on those people for, you know, a decade at this point.

And just new publicists, like you mentioned, who can you trust?

Who's going to actually keep the press from you?

Who's going to put you in front of the right people, the wrong people?

Yeah.

So the album was set to launch on August 21st, and the film had a release date of August 31st.

And she later told USA Today, I was with people who didn't really know me and I had no personal assistant.

I'd be doing interviews all day long, getting two hours of sleep a night if that.

I was burning the candle at both ends and in the middle, and it caught up with me.

And catch up with her, it did.

On July 17th, two days ahead of her dropping Loverboy, which again was the lead single for Glitter, the one that Jennifer Lopez stole the baseline of, Mariah went on the BET show 106 in Park.

She seemed frazzled and described her life as one day that's continuous.

It's been going on since November.

Two days later, to mark the premiere of Loverboy, Mariah Carey surprised Carson Daly with an unusual appearance on TRL.

In the clip that you're about to hear, she is pushing an ice cream truck onto the stage and she's wearing sort of a large t-shirt that says lover boy and very, very short shorts.

And she shortly thereafter takes off the t-shirt.

Take a listen.

Holy mackerel.

You like this.

Hey, can we get the AC crank down?

The AC, crank it down, get nice and close.

Wow.

What are you doing?

What did you bring?

You're my therapy session right now, Carson.

You see,

every now and then, somebody needs a little therapy.

Yes, I understand that.

And today is that moment for me.

What's wrong?

Well, you weren't playing.

Aren't you busy?

You just came by TRL to hang out?

I did not know about this.

We were just here.

What is this you brought?

Is this ice cream?

Is this ice cream?

It's an ice cream truck.

See, they had decorated this.

Wait, try to avoid shots because these shorts are really short.

They just don't move.

We're talking about the ice cream.

But we got to discuss this.

Okay.

Things are good from here.

I won't move.

But they, see, these ain't my, these are just some folks on the nice street.

But we like this.

Mariah, Carrie's lost her mind.

I don't know exactly what's going on here.

I was doing commercial break at the other video, and I hear her singing.

You bought ice cream.

Look at the ice cream truck.

She's improvising, so

maybe shouldn't have been doing that on set.

She is.

I think this moment is really interesting because this was sort of heralded by the press as like

an on-air breakdown.

Like that's, I think, what people have labeled this in years since, that this was a, she had a mental breakdown on TRL.

Watching it again, it's like, no,

I don't think that's accurate.

Also, you didn't hear this in what I just played you, but right before she comes on, guess what song Carson Daly had just finished introducing?

I'm Real.

Correct.

I'm Real by J-Lo.

Also, you can hear her saying in the clip, she's asking producers where she's supposed to stand.

I do not buy for one second that this was completely unplanned.

And she says it wasn't.

She said it basically was a stunt that went awry, which is what it looks like.

It seems, yeah, it seems like she's off script and she's attempting to figure out what she's supposed to do.

And

so she starts waving at the people outside.

She does, she seems a little, she seems very overwhelmed.

And she seems really frazzled.

But she's trying to maintain that I'm on television buoyant energy that she needs to.

Also, the lover boy shirt is just like a tie-dye cursive.

I know.

It's like an airbrush thing you get at the beach.

Carson Daly's involvement here is interesting.

I mean, if you watch the clip, he does look visibly confused.

I don't know and really couldn't find out because I don't think he's made a comment about this whether or not he has said that he knew about it beforehand.

She has said that he did know about this on some level beforehand.

I don't know if that's the case.

You know, there's a lot of people re-examining this clip and saying that that was a little shitty of him, the way that he played it off in the moment.

He did later make a comment referring to an interview that she had done earlier in the week, where he acknowledged that she looked like she was visibly being pulled in, you know, a million different directions by all the people who were surrounding her.

So I don't know what the deal is there in terms of how much Carson Daly knew or didn't know going into this moment.

I also like, I do wonder about them playing I'm Real right before she came out.

That just feels, it feels weird.

I mean, it was a big song, so who knows?

Yeah, it could just be random.

We never know.

It's easy to attribute malice or intent when so often it's just coincidence.

Yes, that's very true.

Either way, it did not help Glitter's press tour.

On July 25th, 2001, following a series of very strange press appearances, including a Q ⁇ A where her publicist literally yanked the microphone out of her hand, A cryptic audio message from Mariah appeared on her website where she whispered that she was going to be taking a break from music, but that nothing was wrong.

She said, quote, I just can't trust anybody anymore because I don't understand what's going on.

However, one day later, it was announced that she had checked into a hospital for extreme exhaustion.

Now, 17 years later, she came out and revealed that during this hospitalization, she was diagnosed with bipolar 2 disorder.

When she finally decided to speak openly about this, she told People Magazine, quote, for a long time I thought I had a severe sleep disorder, but it wasn't normal insomnia.

I wasn't lying awake counting sheep.

I was working and working.

I was irritable and in constant fear of letting people down.

It turns out that I was experiencing a form of mania.

Her appearance at the MTV 20th anniversary special was scrapped, as was the press junket for glitter.

So, Chris, on August 9th, After obviously a pretty rough few weeks and even rougher early feedback on the movie, the release date of the movie was pushed from August 31st to September 21st.

And Virgin Records also decided to postpone the album release a little, giving Mariah some time to recuperate.

And Chris, what date in the fall of 2001 did they choose as the new release date?

September 11th.

That is correct.

It had to be, because

nothing happens on Tuesdays.

Yep.

Glitter's album was now set to release on September 11th, 2001.

And release on 9-11, it did.

There is actual video footage from that day that pans up from a subway billboard to the two towers as they're about to fall.

It is literally the billboard for glitter and the camera pans up and it is the two towers.

The two towers above it.

It's horrible.

Another not so fun fact, that footage was discovered and uploaded by the director of the Loose Change documentary on YouTube.

Famously, one of the earliest internet offerings started to convince people 9-11 was an inside job and is perpetrated by Mariah Carey.

Surprisingly, that was not the angle that he took.

An amazing South Park episode about those conspiracy theories, but beyond that, I can't stand them and how they make, in a weird way, light of such a significant and unfortunate event.

And I was curious, so I was looking into this, and it's just, it's crazy how many movies we make that, especially at that time, that involved either bombs, planes, or New York slash the New York skyline that had to shift as a result of 9-11.

I mean, you had like collateral damage, big trouble, bad company, the sum of all fears.

I think Men in Black 2 had a big reshoot.

Lilo and Stitch, which obviously there's a live action version now, the entire third act, I believe, originally used a hijacked 747, and they redid it.

So instead, it's an alien spacecraft going through the mountains.

The Bourne identity, and then, you know, like even things like Zoolander, Changing Lanes, Stuart Little 2,

Spider-Man,

all had to have the Twin Towers digitally removed, either from the film or from marketing materials.

And also remember, like the Twin Towers are in Glitter.

Glitter is shot in New York.

It's thought to be one of the last films that shot in New York.

But on the bright side, Chris, Glitter may have actually saved at least one life.

A woman named Sarah Botkin was late to work that day because she decided to stop by the record store and buy the new CD from her favorite artist, Mariah Carey.

She worked on the 105th floor of the South Tower, and she should have been at her desk when the first plane hit, but instead she was downstairs, about to take the elevator up.

And 176 of her coworkers died that day.

Mariah showed up for a promotional screening of Glitter on September 20th.

It was her first public appearance since hospitalization.

Not really a fun night for anybody involved, but kudos to her.

She did show up.

Now, for what I think are obvious reasons, Glitter was a disaster on arrival.

Opening weekend, it earned a measly $2.4 million, and critics were absolutely shredding it from day one.

The tabloids didn't miss a beat and continued to kick her when she was down.

Chris, take a look at this tabloid cover posted by Reddit user Atomic Prince from September 5th, 2001, just four days after Glitter premiered.

Mariah Carey back in Mental Ward.

JLo drove me insane.

Above a very,

it looks like Photoshopped photo of Whitney Houston looking haggard.

And it says, Whitney wasting away, cocaine diet destroying her looks.

Oprah love crisis.

She's torn between two men.

And of course, Jean-Benet Ramsey's in the bottom corner because she was in the bottom corner of every one of these magazines for a decade.

What a nightmare.

This is just absolute nightmare fuel.

The next one says Mariah Carey Suicide Drama splits, she splits with Latin Lover.

And these magazines still exist.

You still see them in the checkout line.

You do, but they didn't hold the same

thrall over us that they did at this point.

They've been replaced by like TikTok, basically, at this point.

Yeah, that's true.

Loverboy, the lead single, peaked at number two on the Billboard Top 100, but it did not get much radio play or video traction on MTV.

The album only sold 116,000 copies in its first week, which is a third of what Rainbow had sold, and that was already a lower-performing album for her.

It became her first ever album without any number one hits.

Critic Stephen Thomas Erlwin called it, quote, the pop equivalent of Chernobyl.

It's a little harsh.

On a $22 million budget, Glitter the Film made $5.3 million at the box office.

I think it was more successful than Jealy.

Jealy, 7.2 against a $76 million budget.

You know what?

You deserved it, J-Lo.

You reap what you sow.

I'm going to be real.

You were murdered for a reason.

I am actually scared of J-Lo.

Please don't go after me.

Me too.

I'd love to work with you.

I actually think you're a good actress, too.

For years, Carrie referred to it as the G-word, and no one was allowed to talk about it because it had messed her up so much.

Though eventually, she did come to terms with it and was able to acknowledge it for the campy delight that I think we can all agree it is.

As for why it bombed at the box office, and I really love this quote, she told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live, quote, There was no script, darling, and it was released on 9-11.

It's a great quote.

And I will say, like, it's a joke, but the G-word was,

as bad as this was for Mariah,

which it sounds like a nightmare.

Yes, it does.

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck being set on fire at the box office and publicly two years later, I think did redirect some public attention and ire.

And the G-word became Geely, away from glitter after this.

That's true.

Another G movie.

I would argue glitter is more fun than Geely as well.

I thought I would much rather sit down and watch glitter.

It's that Jack Donaghy,

you have to go down through the crevasse.

I think glitter.

They go down.

They go.

You think we can't go lower?

They go find James Cameron's aliens in the bottom of the abyss.

They keep going.

Glitter was nominated, of course, for many, many Razzies, including Mariah Carey for Worst Actress of the Decade, Worst Picture, and for Worst Couple, Mariah Carey's Cleavage.

Okay, that's just wrong.

She has great cleavage.

That's stupid.

Factually incorrect.

Yeah.

As per IMDb, Carey was, quote, the single biggest individual vote-getter of the decade, 70 plus percent of all votes for worst actress of 2001.

Not fair.

She is not that bad in this.

It's weird.

The movie as a whole is

bad.

It is not good.

We don't want to put down movies, but this one just doesn't work.

But it's weird that you can look at it.

It's fun, though.

But that's the thing, because you can look at individual parts and

Mariah's fine.

Like the scenes are ridiculous most of the time.

But it's very watchable.

It bothers me a lot less than other bad movies, is my point.

It goes down easy.

I agree.

I wasn't bored, which really is the benchmark for me at this point.

Now, she is obviously going on to have an incredible career.

Glitter did not tank her.

The Lameley did not let Glitter fall by the wayside either, Chris.

In 2018, hashtag justiceforglitter began trending.

And in a fun twist of fate, her fan base managed to bump the album back up to number one on the iTunes chart, briefly overtaking the soundtrack to the film whose very story it had clearly ripped off, A Star is Born.

This is a tough one for this because I'm not sure much did go right, but what went right?

All right.

Well, we're here.

Lizzie, thank you for guiding us through the

no shininess present version of glitter, a darker, sadder story than I was expecting.

Me too.

So it's hard to say what went right.

I think Mariah Carey is what went right and what went wrong.

And I don't think she's bad in the movie.

I don't think she's great, but she's fine as an actress and she has an amazing voice.

And that combination should be enough.

But candidly, it's clear that either she didn't have the right people around her or she had too much power over the director and writer.

And I don't think anybody told her no or told her this isn't how you do a movie and we can't just improvise our way through it.

Or, you know.

That's the thing.

and she has said that she said basically like i didn't have anybody who was supporting me or guiding me which when you learn the context in terms of her leaving tommy mattola it makes a lot of sense but i do think that's where i would hope her director would have said something at some point and

that's hard though she's a superstar that's my point yes there's a power dynamic flaw there and even lawrence mark i saw his name he's the producer of the film i believe he'd already done jerry McGuire at this point.

He was a big producer.

And I just, I wonder if the problem was they were starting from a point where the material wasn't very good.

And they thought, is it worth expending the energy, taking the time to attempt to overrule her on certain things or teach her or guide her

when she may not have been in the mood to

be taught or guided.

And that's a little unfair.

I totally no, no, no.

I think she would agree with you based on what i've seen i mean that that's i think she's actually extremely self-aware particularly about this experience and you know she obviously had an undiagnosed disorder in terms of being bipolar and not realizing it she was being worked around the clock by people who did not know her and was just completely without a support system

On top of that, she's extremely nervous about this massive figure in her life coming back to mess with her, and he was messing with her.

And I think all of that, to your point, led to a situation where she both didn't have the support that she needed and was unable to receive help.

And so I think in a way, it's, it's, she's the only reason the movie got made.

And I don't think she's just this

struggling, drowning actress in the middle of a movie.

I don't think that at all.

But she, I think she's also in a weird way, the reason

the movie never really stood a chance either.

I think my what went right is that,

you said, she went all the way down into the crevasse for this one.

And I think that this experience may have freed her up to be less beholden to what people think of her.

And she's become pretty iconic in the years since for her very funny quips and comebacks from that I don't know her moment with J-Lo to one of my favorite moments ever where she's being asked on air about where her then ex-fiancé, who was like a swindler of some sort, I think, they're at.

Like, do you know where he is?

And she literally just goes, I don't know where the motherfucker is.

Yeah.

It's incredible.

Like very charmingly walking in on her son's live stream recently on Twitch.

Yes.

She's like, what's going on?

And she's great.

Such a mom.

So fun.

Yeah.

I just feel like she allowed herself to really be herself publicly after this.

I think she kind of just said, fuck it.

And

Yeah, it can't get any worse than glitter.

It didn't.

I mean, what they were doing to her in the press was so horrible.

And even though it sounds like it did take years for her to really get the help that she needed for bipolar disorder, she did get that help.

It sounds like she's much, much happier and much more in control of her own life.

She did come back with obviously many albums after this, but only three and a half years later with the emancipation of Mimi, which featured We Belong Together, one of her biggest hits ever of all time.

So she really just did not let this keep her down.

And I think that is admirable.

And you know what?

I was not a huge Mariah Carey fan before this, but I think I might be now.

And I loved glitter.

I like Mariah Carey now as well.

And I, I've always liked her music, but I didn't know anything about her.

I didn't either.

Thank you for, I mean, will I watch this movie again?

Probably not.

I, but I might.

And I think this would, I just don't really, let's be candid.

I don't really get high anymore, but I would love to watch this movie

very high.

If we're ever able to get someone to take care of our children at the same time.

Exactly.

This is what we turned.

This and Madam Webb as a.

Because the other comment I made to Lizzie is that I am convinced that Madam Webb and Glitter are actually happening contemporaneous to one another in the same cinematic universe.

Because Dakota Johnson, in a way, reminds me a little of Mariah Carey.

There's something in the talk show setting, there's just something about that energy, like, don't give a fuck energy.

Yeah.

And both of them survived a bomb at the box office in a big way.

Although, Dakota Johnson, much less scathed than poor Mariah, but yes.

I do think we, at least I hope, we look back at the early to mid-2000s and think,

man, we all were a little hyped up on our ability to just beat the shit out of people publicly.

It was horrible.

It was a pretty bad time.

All right, Chris.

Well, that wraps up Glitter.

We finally did it.

This has been one that you guys have asked for a long time.

It was part of a poll and did lose to Geely in a poll.

So Glitter Glitter also had that distinction.

Guys, thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of What Went Wrong.

We are weekly now.

And Lizzie, can you let the fine folks know what we are covering next week?

V for Vendetta.

That's right.

We're moving down the alphabet and we're doing all the V words.

A movie I really adore, a graphic novel that is

very,

very interesting.

And an instance, I would say, where although the creator of the original work and the creators of the film do not see eye to eye, I am thrilled that both versions exist.

And I can't wait to get into it next week.

Lizzie, where can folks go if they would like to support this podcast?

Well, obviously, there's word of mouth.

You can tell a friend, you can tell a family member, you can force someone to listen to an episode.

You can post about us on your socials.

You can follow us on Instagram or TikTok.

You can leave us a rating or review on whatever platform you're listening to us on.

You can also follow us on that platform as well.

It means you'll get a notification whenever new episodes come out.

But if you really want to go above and beyond, you can join our Patreon.

Patreon is a platform where audience members like you can connect with creators like us.

I hate that word, but it's true and you don't have to pay any money.

You can join for free and get updates on episodes, corrections, various musings from me.

For a dollar a month, you can vote on movies that we are going to cover in the future.

We have a very exciting Pirates poll that is going to be releasing very shortly after this episode.

For $5 a month, you can get an ad-free RSS feed and for $50 a month, you can have your name shouted out at the end of this episode.

Lizzie, are you going to give us some of that five-octave range that we all know you you have?

Are you going to make Terrence Howard come out?

Neither.

Can I just read them?

We'll just read them.

Cameron Smith, Ben Schindelman, Scary Carey, The Provost Family.

The O's sound like O's.

Zach Everton.

Galen.

David Friscolanti.

Adam Moffat.

Film it yourself.

Chris Zaka.

Kate Elrington.

M.

Zodia

C.

Grace B.

Jen Mastramarino Christopher Elner Blaise Ambrose Jerome Wilkinson Rao Jance Stater

Nate the Knife Lena Ramon Villanueva Jr.

Half Greyhound, Willa Dunn, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, don't forget about Dale, Richard Sanchez, Jake Killen, Andrew McFagelbagel, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton,

Ellen Singleton, J.J.

Rapido, Jewishri Samant, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Pangaria, Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, It's the Parents' Corner, Don Scheibel, George Kay, Rosemary Southward, Still the Parents' Corner, Tom Kristen, Jason Frankel, Soman Chainani, Michael McGrath, Lan Ralad, and Lydia Howes.

Thank you so, so much for making this podcast possible.

We hope to see you next week with V for Vendetta.

Bye.

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 was provided by Sarah Baum.