Shakespeare In Love

Hello, listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong.

This is, of course, a film history podcast that covers everything that goes wrong and happens behind the scenes on both your favorite movies and also maybe your not favorite movies, which as we'll learn, this one today qualifies as a not favorite for me.

But we have a special guest with us today.

Chris is not here.

He is taking care of a million babies.

Really, it's two.

He has a brand new baby and a toddler as well.

So we're giving Chris a little break.

But fortunately, we have a special treat, which is a special guest, and that is our returning guest host, Naomi Lind.

You may remember her from the previous episode that she did on 50 Shades of Gray, which was great.

If you haven't listened to that, go back and listen to it again.

She's an amazing writer, actress, researcher, dog mom,

one of my best friends.

And I'm very happy to have her here, even though it's to talk about a movie that I'm not happy I had to watch, which is Shakespeare and Love.

So, welcome, Naomi.

Thanks, Lizzie.

I'm back.

So excited to be here.

I liked 50 Shades of Gray a lot more than this one.

Oh boy, Lizzie.

Well, I can't wait to tell you what I think about this movie.

Okay, great.

So 25 years ago, an Elizabethan-era rom-com full of whimsy and mistaken identities does the impossible, winning best picture at the Oscars over the greatest war film of all time.

Subsequently changing the future of Oscar campaigning.

Shakespeare in love.

So Lizzie, you've given us your unfiltered opinion on this film.

I have more.

Don't worry.

Can't wait.

Here's my first question.

Did they have psychiatry a la Sigmund Freud 400 years before Freud?

They sure didn't.

Because there's one thing that this film is not, and that's historically accurate.

I was wondering.

Great.

But, and part of that, I mean, part of that is just because not much was known about Shakespeare between,

you know, the time that he wrote wrote Romeo and Juliet.

But they knew about the times.

Yeah, but they added in some, you know, modern references for the people.

So they took a lot of, a lot of liberties.

I mean, like Queen Elizabeth didn't show up to plays with the peasants.

No way.

Are you kidding?

Here is my hot take on this movie, and then I will stop.

And I want to hear what you have to say about it.

But I think

if this movie had not been positioned as like a

prestige, you know, Oscar-winning drama, it would be totally fine.

It's a dumb rom-com.

Like, this is basically William Shakespeare presents love actually.

That's that's essentially what this is.

And that's fine.

Like, if they had just let it be that, I wouldn't necessarily watch it, but it's one of those movies where it's like, if you put it on in the background or you're watching on an airplane, okay.

But the fact that they positioned this and then managed to get it that many Oscars, I hate it.

I just absolutely hate it.

and naomi what do you think

well izzy with that i'm uh i'm embarrassed to say that shakespearean love is in my top four on letterbox no naomi

i'll tell you why so

back in so it came out in 1998 um and it was along with elizabeth and my mom bless her didn't have a ton of boundaries over what films I watched.

And she took me to see Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love in theaters.

And the year before was Titanic, which I was obsessed with.

And

these are like the three films that made me want to become an actor.

Oh.

And so I loved them so much.

I'm so glad that my mom, you know, wanted me to, I think, like, if I was going to be interested in the arts, that I might as well see quality films.

And she's been like very influential.

So yeah, yeah, that was my experience with it.

So, it's just like holds a very special place in my heart, but I under, I completely understand

why

you have the reaction that you did to it.

Sorry, Nay.

I'm glad you liked it.

I'm glad you liked it because then I don't want this just to be a total dump fest on Shakespeare and love.

Yeah, no, I think it's, I think it's a, I think it's really fun.

It's, I've probably watched it like 15 times.

It's one of my comfort.

movies.

I know it's one of, I know, it's one of my comfort movies.

But I also,

until I started researching the film, I didn't know about the Oscars controversy.

I had no idea.

I watched the ceremony.

I was so excited because I'd seen like three out of the five films that were nominated.

And I was like super excited for Cape Blanche Twin Best Actress.

And she should have.

She should have.

And yeah it was just i was just excited that films that i saw were nominated and it was just such an exciting award ceremony to me as a 10 year old but had absolutely no idea about the controversy until i started researching this film i know we're going to get into it um but i i think i've realized the root of my hatred which is that i love Elizabeth and had was like very obsessed with that movie at the time, even though I saw both.

And I was enraged that Kate Blanchett did not win.

And I still am to this day, because Elizabeth is an amazing movie.

And by the way, it stars about half the cast of this movie.

And I was way better in that one.

So, all right, Naomi, tell us, how did this happen?

All right.

So, I'm going to just start off with the sources that I used today because they are incredible.

So, I used Hit, Flops, and Other Illusions by Ed Swick, Oscar Wars by Michael Shulman, and Down and Dirty Pictures, Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film by Peter Biskind.

So we'll get our basic info out of the way as we do on what went wrong.

The IMDb log line is,

the world's greatest ever playwright, William Shakespeare, is young, out of ideas, and short of cash, but meets his ideal woman and is inspired to write one of his most famous plays.

Shakespeare in Love was directed by John Madden with screenplay by Mark Norman and Tom Stoppard.

It was produced by Miramax and Bedford Falls Productions and starring Joseph Fiennes as Will Shakespeare, Wyneth Paltrow as his muse Viola DeLesseps, Dame Judy Dench as Queen Elizabeth I, Jeffrey Rush and Colin Firth.

It was released by Miramax in the United States on December 11th, 1998.

Lizzie, just like our 17-year-old friendship, The origin of Shakespeare and Love begins at Boston University.

What?

It's the late 80s and Zachary Norman is sitting in his Elizabethan theater class when he gets a pretty rad idea.

He calls his dad Mark Norman, a screenwriter in LA, and pitches him an idea for a screenplay about Shakespeare as a young writer coming up in the theater.

Mark Norman is like, what the fuck am I paying thousands of dollars in tuition for?

Kidding.

Yeah.

He's like, as all of our dads work at Boston University.

He exclaims, that's fucking brilliant.

And he struggles at first to find a way into the story.

Shakespeare is an intimidating figure to tackle.

But as he begins his own research on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan era, he is struck by the similarities to present-day Hollywood.

There were money-hungry producers wanting a hit for the masses, rival theaters behaving like warring studios, egotistical actors, and struggling writers trying to get by on their work.

In some ways, William Shakespeare wasn't all that different from himself and other writers he knew.

That is really interesting.

You made a good point earlier, which is that this was always going to be incredibly hard just because so little is known about Shakespeare himself.

But I did find the sort of like machinations of the business side of theater in this to be interesting.

Yeah, I think it's fun.

And it also, I think, makes it more approachable in general, because it gives it just a little more of a contemporary spin.

So cut to a couple years later in 1991 when Ed Swick walks into Norman's office.

We'll be talking about Ed Swick through this episode, episode, so let's just get his intro out of the way.

Ed Zwick is a writer, director, and producer.

He got a start in TV after graduating from the American Film Institute, but rose to prominence after directing the critically acclaimed Civil War drama Glory in 1989.

Oh, yeah, of course.

Which starred Matthew Broderick and a young Denzel Washington, which was an insanely tough production.

We should definitely cover it.

And he was also a co-creator on the popular TV show 30 Something, whose production offices were down the hall from Mark Norman.

So Zwick and Norman begin shooting the shit and talking shop about projects they were working on.

And it's then that Norman tells Zwick about his idea for a screenplay about a young William Shakespeare struggling to write Romeo and Juliet while holding a mirror up to Hollywood's nature.

Whoa, Shakespeare joke.

I promise that's my last one.

Also, doesn't he mean his kid's idea?

He's stolen this from his kids.

So Zwick has always been a big fan of the theater and Shakespeare, and he loves the idea and the two of them just kind of like nerd out on the pitch.

And by the end of the conversation, Zwick encourages Norman to write the screenplay for him to direct.

Zwick pitches the project to Tom Pollack at Universal, who happened to be his first attorney after graduating from film school, and Universal commissions the project.

In addition to their directing and screenwriting roles, Zwick and Norman are also signed on as co-producers.

Norman writes a draft of the screenplay, and while the general structure and story worked, Zwick wasn't totally satisfied with it.

If you're going to make a movie about Shakespeare, the dialogue needs to match his unparalleled wit and Norman's script just wasn't at that level.

When I read it, the dialogue is clunky.

There's a copy of it on his website actually.

Oh wow.

I just don't think that an American writer could have fully written that script honestly.

It's pretty hard and also, well, I'll save it until we get to Tom Stoppard, but if you're going to have somebody do this, that's probably who you want.

Exactly.

And Zwick, theater nerd that he is, knows there's only one person for the job and convinces Tom Pollock to fly him out to London to see about a guy.

And that guy is renowned playwright Tom Stoppard.

Yeah.

So why Stoppard?

He had written the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, which is based on Shakespeare's Hamlet.

And he understood the era, the world, the language, and most importantly, the humor.

Well, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is also a very interesting and I think important reason why he's perfect for this, because it's not just based on Hamlet.

It is an expansion of the world of Hamlet through two sort of minor characters from that play.

So he's kind of, he did in that almost exactly what they want to do in this movie.

Yep.

So the meeting goes better than Zwick could have imagined.

After Zwick's very long-winded pitch, they spend the afternoon bonding over literature, career missteps, and talking about their families.

But by the end, Stopper doesn't give him any indication whether or not he would do the rewrite, and Zwick flies back to LA without an answer.

And Stoppard does eventually say yes, but he names his price, allegedly only agreeing to take the job if Universal paid him a million dollars for the rewrite.

Hell yeah.

Hell yeah.

In 1991.

This is 1992.

Oh no, that's so much money.

He's in insanely high demand for a rewrite.

Even someone of Stoppard's caliber.

So surprise, Universal says no.

That is, until the it girl actress of the early 90s expresses interest in the project.

Lizzie, I think you know who this is.

I do know who this is.

It's Julia Roberts.

Julia Roberts.

What a weird fit for this.

It feels like stunt casting to me, but I'll give more of an opinion on that later.

Okay.

At this point in 1992, 23-year-old Julia Roberts was already a two-time Oscar nominee.

She also won the Golden Globe both for Steel Magnolias and Pretty Woman.

Oh, okay.

She was nominated for best supporting for Steel Magnolias and for Best Actress for Pretty Woman.

Okey-dokey.

And after Pretty Woman became the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time, she was just box office gold.

So when Universal hears from Julia's team that she was interested in doing a period piece, They agree to pay Stopper that million dollars for the rewrite.

Wow.

Okay.

So he does the rewrite, which takes all of 10 weeks.

And when

here's my question.

How hard did Tom Stoppard actually work on this?

That's a great question, Lucy.

I mean, I feel like not that hard.

He did a pretty like significant rewrite on it, though.

I mean, like, he added, he added like the Christopher Marlowe storyline.

It, it really changed.

It changed a lot.

Which, by the way, I will say, the like two times that Rupert Everett was on screen, I was like, thank God, because he was just a breath of fresh air compared to everybody else.

I don't know what it was about him.

I mean, I know he's a wonderful Shakespearean actor, but he was really great.

Well, he thought that he did a bad job in the film.

I read somewhere that he like couldn't watch his performance in it.

I thought he was great.

Yeah, really good.

Yeah.

I secretly also really like Ben Affleck.

Anyway, continue.

Oh,

we're going to get to that, honey.

So when Zwick is given the script, he can't put it down.

It was just the film he waited his whole life to direct.

And more importantly, Julia Roberts loves the script and agrees to do the film.

They begin pre-production at Pinewood Studios in London, making costumes, building sets to replicate Elizabethan London, and most notably the Globe Theater, where most of Shakespeare's plays were performed.

There was just one very major missing piece.

They needed to cast their Shakespeare.

So Zwick and Julia fly together from LA to London for Julia to read with actors auditioning for Shakespeare.

And this is a long-ass flight.

It's around 13 hours.

And Roberts and Zwick are seated next to each other in first class.

So they inevitably get to talking about the script, mutual friends, and then the conversation shifts to Julia having a heart-to-heart about falling in love, often with her co-stars.

Oh.

And she intimates that love is the driving force behind some of her best work, which literally sounds like a scene from Notting Hill.

Also, as soon as you said that, I was like, if I were Julia Roberts, I would not want to be seated next to the director for a 13-hour flight where you're just trying to relax.

It's like having your co-worker next to you, but I'm going to reverse that and say, if I'm Ed's Wick, I do not want to be next to Julia Roberts telling me she needs to fall in love with her co-star.

Yep.

So, you know, this all leads to a very important topic on her mind.

Who should star opposite her as Shakespeare?

And she knows exactly who she wants.

Because she's auditioning boyfriends.

Okay, good for her.

So to quote Julia, I'm going to give you some hints here.

Okay.

He's brilliant.

He's handsome and intense and so funny.

Did you see his performance in A Room with a View?

He's done Shakespeare too.

Don't you think he'd be perfect?

A Room with a View.

Shoot, I've seen that.

Is it Daniel Day-Lewis?

Sure is.

Oh, yeah.

Uh-huh.

Oh, he is hot.

Yeah, he's, I mean, he would also would have been such a great, I think such a great choice.

He would have been good.

I, to be honest with you, I think Joseph Fynes is one of the weakest parts of this.

Like he's, he's,

listen, he's great as a total creep in a handmaid's tale, but I don't know.

He's fine.

But Daniel Day-Lewis probably would have been better.

Yeah.

But also, I think like Joe Fines is like, has that like boyish quality that I thought really worked for it.

But he's very pretty.

Yeah, he's he's a babe.

So Zwick had already met with Daniel in London the month before about doing the film, but he turned it down because he was already scheduled to do In the Name of the Father with his best friend, Jim Sheridan, who had directed him in My Left Foot.

But Julia doesn't take no for an answer and says, I can get him to do it.

And as soon as

he's notoriously not the easiest to deal with.

But she's Julia Roberts.

She can get any man she wants, right?

So as soon as they land, she has her assistant send Daniel Day-Lewis a large bouquet of roses with a card that says, be my Romeo.

Then that night during a dinner.

I don't think this is his style.

It's really not.

If we know anything about Daniel Day-Lewis now in hindsight, it's that this was not going to work.

Oh, I know.

But that night during a dinner with Zwick and Tom Stoppard, Roberts gets a call and ducks out quickly after the meal, making an excuse that she forgot she had plans with an old friend.

The next morning, they were supposed to start a full day of readings that the actors Wick had lined up for Shakespeare.

Zwick waits downstairs for Julia and she doesn't show.

He waits for an hour while actors begin showing up for their appointments, and then he gets a call from Julia asking him to come upstairs because she has some news.

Okay.

Zwick goes up to her room and finds a very giddy Julia Roberts.

She tells him that he should cancel the readings today because Daniel said yes.

Yep, that old friend that Julia ran off with was Daniel Day-Lewis, who had come to meet her in her hotel room the night before.

Wow.

Okay.

Zwick was suspicious, but he wasn't really in a position to say no to Julia.

So the team had to tell the actors waiting downstairs that Julia wasn't feeling well and they needed to cancel for the day.

A few hours later, Zwick gets another call.

This time, it's Daniel Day-Lewis asking him to meet a nearby pub where he tells him, like, you know, I can't do your movie, right and Zwick is just like yep I know

oh no

he was just being polite and couldn't tell her no yeah

oh no but also like no one knows what that conversation was in the hotel room no one knows what happened in the hotel room

but the next morning Julia shows up for their rescheduled readings and looks miserable like she hadn't slept the night before which is not exactly the vibe you want going into a day of chemistry reads

but Zwick is still optimistic.

He thought that the other actors would turn her mood around once she saw how great they were.

And he was especially excited for her to read with one actor in particular, a young pre-Schindler's List, Rafe Fiennes.

Yeah, I was wondering if he was considered for this.

Yeah, and he was first on deck.

They begin the reading, and Julia is totally unengaged, despite Rafe's attempts to connect with her in the scenes.

And according to Zwick, she barely acknowledges him.

Wow.

Yeah.

This is also also like the most beautiful Ray Fiennes ever is, and he's so beautiful.

It's before he got all creepy.

I know and I love creepy Ray Fiennes too.

He's great.

I do too.

He's excellent.

I love creepy Joseph Fiennes, but he's like so, so stunning.

Was this, this would have been after the English patient?

This is before the English patient.

This is before he had barely done any film at this point.

He was just, he was like a mainstay on London stages at this point.

Got it.

And then this would be immediately prior to Schindler's list.

So he's about to break out big.

Okay.

Yeah.

This is like the year before Schindler's list.

Yep.

And so he clearly could tell it didn't go great.

And he just books it out of the room after they finish.

And after Wraith leaves, Zwick asks Julie what she thinks.

And she just says, he isn't funny.

Wow.

And this more or less continues with every actor they see that day and throughout the rest of the week.

So any idea who some of the actors were?

They're all British, mostly.

Mostly.

Okay.

I don't know.

Did Colin Firth manage to get in there?

Yep.

Okay.

We got Rafe Fines, we got Colin Firth.

We got Daniel Day-Lewis.

Did Rhysi Fons get in there?

No, but that would have been a good one.

I don't know.

Who else?

Sean Bean.

Oh.

Russell Crowe.

Russell Crowe.

Cast him.

Cast him.

Jeremy Northam, Rupert Graves,

and Julia's future Notting Hill co-star, Hugh Grant.

Hugh Grant, of course, of course.

Uh-huh.

All of them would have been good.

I think all of them would have been great.

Julia found issues with all of them.

It didn't matter how talented or handsome they were, they weren't Daniel Day-Lewis.

Wow.

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Out of all these actors, there was one that she was willing to do a full screen test with at Pinewood, an actor named Paul McGann.

Julia comes out in full costume with hair and makeup and looks exquisite.

But when they begin the test, she falls flat.

It was clear she hadn't done the necessary prep for the role, specifically on the dialect.

Zwick tries to be encouraging.

He could tell she was losing her usual confidence and seemed uncomfortable, but it doesn't make a difference.

I understand how looking at this on paper, and maybe for listeners right now, too, you're thinking, like, oh my God, Julia Roberts is so annoying.

But

she

was at such a crazy point in her career at this point, and she's so young.

To have this much power at 23 and to be working this hard, I can totally see just fucking this up.

And like, it's not, it's not intentional it's not even really your fault like you just don't know exactly what you're doing and also like what to do with the kind of power and clout that you've gained at that point exactly and with something like an english dialect too i think a lot of actors think that it's going to be an easy thing to do and then once you start doing it and it's not second nature it's just like the first thing that kind of like dampens your performance

And like you said, like she had so much writing on this and was so young.

And I, I mean, I definitely feel for her.

If I felt like I was bombing and I was in her position, that would be so terrifying, especially because the paparazzi was like already on top of her with all of her romances.

Julia flies back to LA the next day and subsequently leaves the project six weeks before shooting was set to begin.

Whoa.

So with Julia out, Universal cancels the project with around $6 million in the hole.

Oh, no.

And Zwick is devastated as he watches the set get taken apart at Pinewood.

Wow.

Yeah.

So do we think the world missed out on a Julia Roberts Shakespeare in love?

No, I don't think that's a good fit at all.

And I like Julia Roberts.

I think she's a good actress.

Yeah, I think it just would have been a different film.

I think it felt like stunt casting.

It feels very much like Demi Moore and the Scarlet Letter.

And it's not that I don't buy Julia Roberts in a period piece.

I don't buy her in this type of period piece.

I agree, especially because she tends to play women who have a lot of agency

and who are very strong-willed, which

during this time period and in this story would not have made a ton of sense.

I think she just would have read Too Contemporary, too.

Yeah, for sure.

She also looks very, she's beautiful, but she doesn't look right for this, really.

Yeah, I don't think so at all.

So, next,

along comes Hollywood's and what went wrong's most notorious recurring villain, Harvey Weinstein.

We knew he was coming.

Yep.

Now it's two or three years later in late 1994, early 95, and Zwick's doing all right.

He's just been nominated for Golden Globe for directing Legends of the Fall starring Brad Pitt, when he gets a late night call from Harvey Weinstein asking him to come meet him in Tribeca that night.

Zwick couldn't say no to a meeting with Weinstein, even if it was after 11 p.m.

Miramax is on a major upper trajectory after selling to Disney, and Weinstein is the undisputed kingmaker of independent film after pulp fiction becomes the first indie to break 100 million at the box office.

So Harvey had just seen a screener of Legends of the Fall and begins showering Zwick with praise, calling him a genius, telling him he'll make whatever he wanted and so on.

So Zwick shoots a shot and tells him about Shakespeare and love, which Weinstein is interested in, so he sends him the script.

And Harvey loves it and immediately gets on the phone with Universal the next day about buying the rights, but he backs down when he is told about the $6 million in sunk costs and the $9 million price tag that Universal has put on it in turnaround.

Wow.

For any new listeners out there, turnaround basically just means that a studio has decided,

we don't know what the hell we're doing with this project anymore.

And so they try to recoup some of the money that they've put into it in development by making it up for grabs for another studio that might want to then pay to pick it up.

Yeah.

Even though Weinstein turns it down, his interest gives Zwick newfound hope about the project.

And over the next year or so, he begins shopping the script to other studios with various pairings of actors attached, like Winona Ryder and Kenneth Branagh, Stephen Delaney and Emily Watson, Jude Law, and some ladies Wick can't remember, who I think would have been a good choice.

Yes, totally.

But no one bites.

Then in 1996, Zwick reads in the trades that Miramax has bought Shakespeare and Love from Universal.

Miramax and Weinstein have only continued to grow in power since Zwick's late night meeting two years before.

Weinstein was award-hungry and like Zwick, never forgot about Shakespeare and Love.

This time, he had some leverage with Universal because he had an option on something, or rather someone, they wanted.

And a little what went wrong trivia from a previous episode.

I think you know who this is.

Oh, shoot.

I think it was an episode I did too, and I can't remember what this is.

It was actually Chris's episode.

Okay, I don't listen to Chris.

What was it?

Just kidding.

I do, but I can't remember.

Peter Jackson.

That's right.

Okay, it's Lord of the Rings.

Got it.

Universal wanted him for the King Kong remake.

So, as you probably recall, Weinstein says, I'll give you Peter Jackson if you give me Shakespeare and Love.

That's right.

But Universal doesn't just hand the script over.

They agree to sell Shakespeare and Love to Mirror Max, but there is a caveat.

I'm not an expert in turnaround purchases, but typically the purchaser pays 10% down, which for Shakespeare and Love was $900,000.

But instead, Universal was asking Miramax to hand over $2.25 million instead.

Wow.

Yeah.

The reasoning is unclear, but it's likely that they didn't want to sell a potential Oscar contender to Miramax.

Yeah.

Weinstein is like, I can get them to come down.

I'm Harvey Weinstein.

Rah, rah, rah.

And proceeds to belittle the shit out of Casey Silver, one of the studio heads at Universal, who then goes, fuck you guy.

The price is now $4.5 million.

And there was one more thing they're adding to the deal.

Miramax has to agree not to cast, quote, a big star like a Julia Roberts in the film.

What?

I can't imagine him agreeing to that.

He says he isn't deterred by the casting stipulation, but I think he says a lot of things.

Yeah.

But he does agree to the $4.5 million deal,

which was the most he had ever paid for a script at the time.

And sorry, that's $4.5 and a half million down or that's the total purchase price?

No, that's four and a half million down.

Oh dear.

Okay.

So it's a lot higher than that.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

9 million altogether.

Oh, okay.

So he stuck with it.

All right.

After the sale is announced, Zwick's agent contacts Weinstein to see what Zwick's role will be, considering he had been championing the project for years and was the contractual producer, but there was no role.

Zwick is completely shut out of the film with Miramax's reasoning being that he had been paid in the original deal with Universal and they were not required to keep him on the project.

Weinstein didn't want Zwick to direct the film or be attached in any way.

That sucks.

Yep.

Zwick lawyers up immediately with Burt Fields, a well-respected and feared Hollywood attorney.

He famously represented Jeffrey Katzenberg in his lawsuit against Disney.

Fields sends Weinstein a legal letter and Weinstein goes full Lord of the Rings orc.

Weinstein calls Zwick around midnight or one one in the morning and starts the call off with, you think you can sue me, you prick, and escalates from the usual, you don't know who you're dealing with, you'll never work again type of threats to mocking Zwick for being sensitive when Zwick tells him that it wasn't a good time as he was visiting his dying father and ends the call with, I'll kill your whole family, you little fuck.

What?

What?

Harvey Weinstein, ladies and gentlemen.

Wow.

These late-night calls continue, and Zwick just begins recording them and sending them to his attorneys.

Contrary to what Weinstein probably assumed, Zwick doesn't back down and his attorney threatens to enjoin the production.

Right.

Enjoin here, meaning that they would prevent the production from moving forward.

After the production is threatened, Weinstein immediately calls Zwick, asking to meet.

No.

Zwick and his attorneys show up to meet Weinstein at his room in the Peninsula Hotel.

And Weinstein's like, you guys want some massages?

No.

No.

Just kidding.

Sorry.

I had to.

Weinstein grovels and is extremely apologetic.

He even tears up at one point saying,

I can't help it.

I do bad things.

Oh my God.

He's such a toad.

He's just the absolute.

Yeah, and not just like, oh, it gives me, it just gives me the chills.

Weinstein goes on to tell Zwick that he'll make anything he wants and even offers him the film adaptation of Chicago on the spot.

But there's only one film Zwick asks for, which is Shakespeare and Love.

Weinstein immediately backtracks.

He makes an excuse about the schedules conflicting with Zwick's upcoming film The Siege and that his deal with Universal stipulates that the film has to be made that year, which is most likely a lie.

Zwick settles for a producer's credit by way of his company Bedford Falls, and in the terms of the deal, he was supposed to be included in all press releases and every major interview about the making of the film in addition to being sent dailies from set.

Well, considering I didn't even know that he was involved in this, I'm guessing they didn't honor that one.

Surprise, surprise.

No, they did not.

Yeah.

And then rounding up the producing team, along with Zwick and Mark Norman, who miraculously hung on to his producer's credit, is Donna Gelati, David Parfit, and one more person, Harvey Weinstein.

The toad himself.

Yeah.

In a move.

Rarely done before, a studio executive has made himself a producer on his own film.

Harvey didn't just want another best picture award from Miramax.

He wanted one for himself.

My question is: like, why

this movie?

Like, why do you look at this movie and say, this is the one that I can get to all the Oscars?

Is it just because it's Shakespeare?

It's the script.

I think all of it just keeps coming back to the screen.

It was a really good script.

Yeah, the screen.

Like, that is like the general thing.

I think that's kind of, I would say that's pretty undisputed, that the screenplay is just so strong.

And it's also a film about the creation of art, which I think is going to appeal to a lot of people.

So since we have established that, alas, poor Zwick was never going to direct this film, Miramax needs a new director.

They settle on English director John Madden, who had just done Mrs.

Brown with Judy Dench, which Miramax distributed, and he also had a background as a theater director.

And Madden had a really clear take on the screenplay and making Shakespeare accessible and more approachable was his number one priority.

He also wanted to elevate the romance in the film even more, putting Tom Stopper back to work on revisions.

Miramax had one actor in mind to play Viola from the get, and that actor, of course, is Gwyneth Paltrow.

Before she was the conscious, uncoupling queen of wellness and purveyor of vagina candles, Gwyneth Paltrow was basically the face of Miramax in the mid to late 90s, having starred in films like Sliding Doors, The Pall Bearer, and most notably, in the title role of Emma.

Yes, which is really good and she is great in.

But being Miramax's Miramax's go-to leading lady came at a cost.

Before production on Emma began, a 22-year-old Paltrow was summoned to Weinstein's suite at the Peninsula Hotel on the premise of a work meeting.

Oh, no.

Where he proceeded to put his hands on her and tried to get her to go into his bedroom for massages.

She turned down his advances and managed to leave without further escalation.

As we know, Paltrow was not the first nor the last woman to walk into that room and find themselves in the same situation.

She relayed the experience to Brad Pitt, her boyfriend at the time, and when Pitt saw Weinstein at an event, he cornered and threatened him, saying something along the lines of, if you ever make her feel uncomfortable again, I'll kill you.

Good for Brad Pitt.

Yeah.

Oh man, poor Gwyneth.

I mean, poor everybody.

Poor everybody.

And according to Paltrow, Weinstein was never inappropriate with her again after that, but that didn't stop him from screaming at her over the phone for telling Brad Pitt about what happened between them.

Wow.

She was convinced he was going to fire her, so she did what other survivors have done.

She kept quiet and moved things back to a professional relationship.

Their working relationship remained fraught.

Weinstein was a notoriously difficult boss, but to Paltrow's credit, she wasn't afraid of standing up to him and holding her ground after this.

Steering us back to casting, Gwyneth initially turns down Shakespearean love without reading a script.

She had just gone through a bad breakup with Brad Pitt and didn't want to be so far from home during the shoot.

With Gwyneth out, for now, Miramax has another young actress in mind who is the star of an earlier Miramax film and had quickly catapulted to leading lady status in 1997.

Kate Winslet.

Kate Winslet.

She had just come off Titanic and John Madden meets with her and it goes well.

She really responds to the script and understands the character.

So he thinks it's a sure thing, but she would have been good.

Yeah, she would have, I think she would have been great.

But she calls him.

a week later to say that she can't do the film.

He tries persuading her with doing a reading of the script with friends of hers, but she still declines because being in the spotlight had quickly taken its toll on her and she was too overwhelmed with the fame and attention that came after Titanic to do another high-profile project.

Honestly smart.

She then went to do this film called Hideous Kinky, which is this like Small Independent, which is another film my mom took me to see in theaters that I also loved.

Wow.

Was it appropriate?

Almost definitely not.

The project then comes back to Gwyneth Faltrow, who finally gives the script a read.

And like everyone before her, she is totally enchanted with it and knows she needs to do it.

One of her agents tried to talk her out of it, saying, it's more of a guy's role, and I hope that she fired them.

What?

What does that mean?

Now that they have their viola, once again, they need to find their Shakespeare.

Gwyneth Faltrow tests with several actors in the UK, but one stands out above the rest, and it was a relative newcomer, Joseph Fiennes.

Fiennes had actually botched his first audition because he was so nervous, but John Madden had a feeling and brought him back to read again.

While Joe Fienes hadn't done much film, he was a classically trained actor and had worked on the West End in London and at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford upon Avon.

And Joe was the obvious choice to them.

Also, at this point, had a very famous brother.

And also had a very famous brother named Ray Fiennes.

Not saying he didn't deserve this.

Joseph Fiennes is very good in his own right, but I'm just saying might have helped a little bit that his brother was Academy Award nominee Ray Fiennes.

Yep, definitely couldn't have hurt.

But Weinstein wanted another actor for the role.

I'll give you a hint, Lizzie.

Okay.

He's American, had recently been in another Mirror Max film.

Staying Gwyneth Paltrow.

Benjamin Affleck.

Yep, Ben Affleck had just done Goodwill Hunting and happened to be Gwyneth Paltrow's new boyfriend.

So remember when I said Gwyneth wasn't afraid of standing up to Weinstein?

Despite her relationship with Affleck, she is completely against the idea of casting him as Will and fights for Joe Fienn and convinces Weinstein that they need to cast an English actor in the role.

Weinstein does get Affleck in the film, though, which apparently took some convincing.

And according to Down and Dirty Pictures, his buddy Matt Damon told him not to do it because it would be a step backward to do a small supporting role in his girlfriend's movie.

Wow, Matt.

But Weinstein persuades him, much like Shakespeare does Ned Allen, by telling him that by taking a supporting role, it shows everyone that he can be a character actor too.

And in a barely there English accent, Aflex says, I'll do it.

You know what?

I didn't even care that he didn't have a British accent.

I thought he was pretty fun in this.

I agree.

I liked it.

He comes in as a total, you know, dickhead, over-the-top actor.

I thought he was good.

I thought he, you know, he looks very handsome.

He's barely in it, but like, he's good.

He does a good job in this.

He's also like, he's kind of like in a different different film than everybody else, but it weirdly works.

I was fine with it.

I kind of wanted to watch his movie, to be honest.

So Affleck wasn't the only person who needed convincing.

Colin Firth initially turns down the offer to play Lord Wessex.

And he had established himself as a leading man in the UK.

So when he told Madden no, Madden just took his answer at face value and moved on to other actors.

But Colin Firth was playing coy and kind of expected Madden

to chase after him.

And he just like wanted to be wooed and was a little surprised when Madden didn't do that.

But luckily, they come back to him and he accepts the offer for the role, which I'm so glad that he does.

He's great.

I love Colin Firth so much.

And also controversial opinion, but I think Colin Firth's character kind of deserves an apology in this movie.

Oh, does he does he that?

I mean, listen, is he an asshole?

Yes, but at the same time, he's just playing by the rules, you know, that somebody else set up.

And also William william shakespeare is cheating on his wife the entire time and is kind of the biggest asshole in the whole movie i'm just saying i'm just saying he's a nice man with a tobacco plantation like

he's given the time period i think he could be so much worse that's all i have to say lizzie's coming in with the hot tanks i'm sorry i the whole time i was like you know what

This guy, man.

The rest of the cast is rounded out with English actors, including Judy Dench, Rupert Everett, Imelda Staunton, Tom Wilkinson, who I love in this film.

I love

in this film, and Jeffrey Rush.

And okay, Jeffrey Rush is Australian, and I didn't know that, and I bet you didn't either.

I did know that, actually.

Okay, well, there we go.

Principal Photography begins at Shepperton Studios on March 2nd, 1998.

The $24 $24 million production is overseen by producers Donna Gelati and David Parfit.

Weinstein doesn't do anything more than show up to set for a half day at a time.

He just says hi to the stars.

Yeah, he's just like, oh, that set looks good.

And that's it.

Bye.

Thankfully, the shoot goes well.

Aside from Gwyneth Paltrow and Dame Judy's dress is giving them trouble.

So Gwyneth's dress at the end of the film was so heavy that it gave her bruises.

Just because of the corset, like holding it up, or yeah, it's like the corset, and also, I think just like the

weight of it on the shoulders.

And I will say these, the costumes are beautiful.

Gorgeous.

But I can imagine that they would be really, really hard to wear.

Yeah.

And she's also just like cinched for the gods, you know.

A little bird.

Yeah.

And one of Judy's epic gowns was so large and restrictive that she couldn't sit down in it.

I think she's like joked in a talk show that she was like you could die in that thing and still be standing up

great just prop her up And she also had to wear platform heels to give her more stature.

She's tiny.

She's tiny.

And John Madden nicknamed her Tudor Spice.

Joe Fein said, quote, we were having so much fun that I worried the film couldn't possibly be any good.

One person who was also worried the film wouldn't be any good was John Madden.

He would wake up in the middle of the night stressing about Gwynneth Poucher on a mustache, thinking it would never work.

He also...

He's not totally wrong on that because boy, does she not look like a man at any point in this movie?

He also didn't want anyone to watch the dailies, or as they say in the UK, the rushes.

There were so many moving parts and storylines that he worried the scenes wouldn't have fared well on their own out of context, and Madden wasn't sure if any of it would work altogether.

Production wraps in June of 1998.

Judy Dench buys herself a very large rap gift, the Rose Theater Set.

She bought it in hopes that she could reconstruct it for young actors to use as they learn about Shakespeare.

What?

But I don't think that it ever came to fruition.

Where'd she put it?

I have no idea.

I wish I knew.

It's not small.

It's not small, and it's also like held up by scaffolding.

It's not like a secure structure on its side.

I love the idea of this just like in the backyard at Judy Dench's house.

Same.

Oh, bless her.

Once John Madden sees the first cut of the film, he breathed a very big sigh of relief.

They had pulled it off.

When Weinstein sees the cut, he loses his shit.

And over one thing in particular: Ed Zwick's production company, Bedford Falls, being included in the title sequence, and demands it be removed because Zwick, quote, didn't do anything on the film.

Oh my god.

The reason that Zwick didn't do anything on the film is that Weinstein wouldn't allow him to and had reneged on all terms of their deal after Zwick had offered Glyneth Poucho a role in the siege before production began.

Okay, but I also want to say, even if Ed Zwick hadn't done jack shit on this actual part of the production, he did the vast majority of the development on this movie and seems to have done all of the things that actually made it good.

So that's insane.

Yep.

So before production began, Weinstein just cut him out of all of the press releases, refused to send him dailies or have any decision-making power as a producer.

But Weinstein's attorneys tell him, like, hey, remember that time you tried to sue you with the most powerful lawyer in town?

So Zwick's credit remains.

Good.

But not sure if you noticed this, Weinstein is nothing if not a vindictive son of a bitch and has Zwick's Bedford Falls title appear in the opening credits just as Jeffrey Rush steps in a pile of shit.

Wow.

He's just like

the thing that's so frustrating about Harvey Weinstein is that everyone knew that he was a grotesque, just piece of garbage.

Like, even if this is all the stuff that he was doing, the fact that he's calling directors in the middle of the night and saying, I'll kill your entire family, like

everyone, everyone knew, and everyone was just continuing to allow this guy to do this shit.

And clearly, it also wasn't a surprise that he was doing this stuff to women either in the background.

But it's just, it is stunning that this person was able to continue in the way that he was for as long as he did.

Yeah, truly.

The film screens for a test audience in New York and gets a fair rating of 80 from the audience, which Madden and most of the producers were happy with.

But Harvey was not.

He needed a best picture nominee and the film wasn't there yet.

The audience feedback regarded three primary issues with the film.

One, to quote the line from Hamlet, they thought this is too long, so they cut it.

Agree, it's still too long in the final version.

Two, they didn't understand why Viola had to marry Wessex and couldn't just run off with Will, which ties into the key issue they had, the ending.

In the original ending, Viola and Will just have a rushed farewell before she sets sail with Wessex and credits start rolling.

Since Miramax relied so heavily on testing, it was back to set they go.

Wow.

Unlike other directors that had been under the same predicament with post-Miramax test free shoots, John Madden didn't put up a fight and was very accommodating to Weinstein's demands.

Fixing the issue over marrying Wessex was easy.

They added lines with ADR about the DeLesseps family's title being taken away if Viola doesn't consent to marry him and that Shakespeare's life would be in danger.

And the rest of the scenes had to be reshot.

Paltrow and Fienes had already moved on to other projects.

Joseph Fienes was clean-shaven and had to have a beard glued back on for the reshoots.

While it was in an earlier part of the film, Madden reshot the scene between Will and Viola as Thomas Kent punting on the Thames to deepen their connection more.

Unsurprisingly, the end was the hardest thing to nail.

Stoppard writes different versions of the shipwreck that we see in the end with Viola coming out onto shore, like the beginning of 12th Night.

In one iteration, he wanted the camera to pan up to reveal a modern-day Manhattan, which was a no.

Okay.

Yeah, no.

Still not that idea.

They shoot Viola coming up to two men on the beach and asking, what country, friends, is this?

Which is the first line Viola speaks in 12th Night.

But this was too much of a deep cut.

So instead of reshooting that scene again, they remove the two men from the beach and post.

And what we get is what we see in the final version of the film.

If anybody doesn't know, there's obviously a bunch of like Shakespeare Easter eggs across the whole movie.

And one of the biggest ones is that, yes, this is him writing Romeo and Juliet, but by the end, so much of what you've seen is also what goes into 12th Night, which is the fact that her name is Viola.

Viola in 12th Night ends up

cross-dressing as a man for the majority of the play.

And then, yes, you see it all come together at the end.

And of course, Queen Elizabeth asks for a comedy, and that's what he gets in the next one.

But also in reality, Shakespeare wrote a lot of other plays between Rome and Juliet and 12th Night.

We don't care about reality, Naomi.

Doesn't matter to me.

But Weinstein still isn't satisfied with this ending.

He is in full Harvey Scissorhands mode, which is a nickname that followed him all through the 90s and beyond.

Stoppard puts his foot down at first and stands behind the new ending, but Weinstein complains that it, quote, isn't a rom-com ending.

I like the way it ends.

I do too.

He was the only person that wanted a traditionally happy ending with Will and Viola ending up together.

Will is married anyway.

Continue.

It's like one of the historical things they like hold on to.

It's like, that could never happen.

Right.

He is married to a woman named Anne Hathaway, which they mention so briefly, David didn't even notice until they get to the point where they say he's married.

And he was like, he's married.

He's like, yeah, they did mention that in the scene where he was getting psychotherapy in 1592 or whatever, but continue.

So one of his suggestions, quoting from Michael Shulman's Oscar Wars, was, quote, Viola falls into Shakespeare's arms saying, all the world's stage, to which he replies, and all the men and women are merely players.

It's just so fucking dumb.

It sounds fake.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The answer is no.

The answer is hard no.

And they are about five weeks from their premiere date and still don't have an ending to the film.

Wow.

Okay.

Luckily, Stoppard finally gives in and writes one last scene.

Will and Viola making their final heartfelt goodbye, where she gives him an idea for a new play, which he then writes, immortalizing her forever.

With this new ending, Miramax does another test screening at the end of November ahead of its December 3rd premiere, and the film is welcomed to a high score of 90 and rows of sobbing women.

All right, nailed it.

But oh ho ho, Lizzie.

Harvey Scissor hand still has some adjustments.

Oh my God.

He wants Colin Firth cut out of every frame of the underwater shipwreck scene because it was confusing.

So they undergo further edits and finish just days before the premiere with a publicist saying it was literally presented wet.

Wow.

Well, it worked out for them in a way it didn't work out for cats.

So that's, you know, at least they have that going for them.

At least they got the Oscars.

It's better than cats.

Shakespeare and Love premieres on December 3rd, 1998 in New York City and is released in the U.S.

on December 11th, 1998.

The film opens to positive reviews and earns $224,012 on its opening weekend.

But before you comment on how low the box office is, they only released it to eight theaters at first before expanding.

So this boded well for its box office.

And then the end total ends up being around 289 million between international and domestic.

And what was the total budget?

Like 25 million?

24 million.

Okay, so great.

So they made plenty of money.

Yeah.

After the Academy screening in Los Angeles, Weinstein is still worried about his Oscar chances after what he thought was a lukewarm response.

But someone else in the audience thought the opposite.

Terry Press, Press, the head of marketing at DreamWorks, was gearing up for her own Oscar campaign for Saving Private Ryan and turns to her husband after the screening and says, Houston, we have a problem.

Why, though?

Saving Private Ryan is one of the best movies ever made.

It is beautiful.

Like, how did this happen?

I mean, think of some, think about it.

Like, why do you think she was so concerned about Shakespeare and Love?

I think you nailed it, which is that this is a movie about the way that art is made, which you are 100% 100% correct.

That, you know, listen, actors, filmmakers notoriously can be a bit navel-gazy.

And I think that that's exactly what this movie provides.

Yeah.

And the largest block of the academy are actors.

Yep.

So it's an actress's film.

And she saw the response as being like a really warm reception.

So remember when I said that Weinstein was Oscar hungry?

This is not the first time Miramax had a film up against Steven Spielberg masterpiece.

Weinstein tried going toe-to-toe with Schindler's list with Jane Campion's The Piano in 93.

Ah, which is so good, but Schindler's list is, I mean, they're both amazing.

They're both great, but near pointless endeavor to go up against Schindler's list.

You can't.

Yeah.

You can't.

But this time, his film was the most nominated film of the year.

Shakespeare and Love received 13 nominations and Saving Private Ryan had 11.

And being the most nominated film is great marketing for any campaign, but this wasn't just any campaign.

Miramax's campaign strategies had always been unconventional.

Before they sold to Disney, they had limited resources while campaigning for My Left Foot, so they got creative and a little political.

Weinstein had Daniel Day-Lewis, whose character in the film had cerebral palsy, fly to Washington and go before Congress members to advocate for passing the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Wow.

A week later, Daniel Day-Lewis was nominated for best actor, which he would later win, and the ADA bill passed as well later that year.

Coincidence?

Maybe.

Wow.

Interesting.

This time around in 1999, Miramax had more clout, more money, and they also happened to be the most nominated distributor that year.

They also had Life is Beautiful that also got seven nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor and Best Director.

Prior to 1999, studios would have a marketing executive or publicist oversee their awards campaign, and they would, you know, have some ads printed in the trades, schedule the stars and creative team to do some press.

And in the 90s, they began sending VHS screeners to academy members.

On average, and remember these numbers, campaign spending before this was around $250,000 for independents and $2 million for major studios.

Okay.

Miramax just goes full tilt.

In addition to buying an absurd amount of ad space in the trades, one of the first things Weinstein does is hire an, quote, army of consultants.

These consultants were all seasoned publicists, but the majority of these publicists were retired or semi-retired and also happened to be members of the Academy.

Okay.

Their job wasn't really to generate publicity, even though it's certainly part of it.

Their task was to appeal to and schmooze with the older voting bloc in the academy.

Miramax was all hands on deck, dividing up the Academy member list between consultants, executives, and producers based on who they knew.

They also had interns and lower-rank staff at Miramax regularly call Academy members to follow up on the screeners they had sent, which is a direct violation of the Academy's rule against phone baking, which Miramax, of course, denies.

One of the consultants planned a Welcome to America dinner party for John Madden and invited several Academy members, which violated another Academy rule.

Yeah, you can't do this.

And when they were found out, they found a way around the violation by inviting a few, quote, civilians, including Walter Cronkite and his wife.

Yeah, this is not playing fair.

Meanwhile, Terry Press over at DreamWorks was pulling teeth to get Spielberg to go out and promote Satan Private Ryan.

Like, period.

Spielberg was never big on campaigning.

He trusted the process and respected the Academy to do its thing.

Oops, big mistake.

Big mistake.

But he really just believed that his film spoke for itself.

I think he had like a very like Pollyannish view of the academy.

Well, to be fair to Steven Spielberg, he made an absolutely incredible movie with some of the best performances, you know, across the board.

But when you've got Harvey Weinstein paying off publicists in the background, yeah.

Yeah.

On a call with New York Times journalist Lynn Hirschberg, press learns that Weinstein had called Hirschberg trying to convince her to write that, quote, Saving Private Ryan peaked after the first 25 minutes and then became a run-of-the-mill World War II drama.

Weinstein and his gang of consultants have been trash talking Saving Private Ryan all around town.

I'm so mad.

I'm so mad.

Uh-huh.

It's like it's not, it's one of the best movies ever made, period.

It is certainly one of the best war movies ever made.

It's an unbelievable accomplishment.

Those first 25 minutes are an unbelievable accomplishment.

And then it

continues to be amazing.

It made Vin Diesel made me cry in Saving Private Ryan.

How do you do that?

This, of course, is negative campaigning, which is another direct violation of Academy rules.

Like you, Lizzie, Terry Press is furious.

Get him, Terry.

She goes back to Spielberg with this news, but he tells her, quote, no matter what, I do not want you getting in the mud with with Harvey Weinstein.

Well, he's right about that.

Yep.

Like the soldiers in Saving Private Ryan, Press goes to war.

DreamWorks throws an additional one to two million dollars into their campaign, buys more ad space, and re-releases the film in a thousand theaters, because the film would come out in the summer.

And they're competing with the film that came out in December, right before the awards.

And Press goes one step further and goes to the press about Miramax's negative campaigning.

Good.

Weinstein, of course, denies it all, saying, quote, that's bullshit.

I love that movie.

And that

and quote, I always think that Terry Press is behind everything.

These people, they have to win everything.

Me, I'm happy to be in the race.

I'm that scrappy player who got invited into the game and was happy to shake things up.

The point of it is, when I lose, I'm not a sore loser.

I've spent my entire life coming up from nowhere, winning, losing, whatever.

We never malign somebody else's movie.

I hate him.

Ooh, I hate him so much.

Lies

and deceit.

The lying toad of Toad Hall.

This is not, yeah, no.

Miramax also fires back in the press that DreamWorks was playing the victim card and doing their own smear campaign by badmouthing Miramax's campaign strategies in the press.

Oh my God.

In short, everyone's mad, except for the Academy.

They choose not to intervene intervene in any of this because the rivalry is great for ratings, or so we can assume.

They know, they know exactly what's happening.

They know exactly what Harvey Weinstein was doing, and they're letting him do it.

When it comes time for the ceremony, the rivaling teams make their respective plans.

Should they win Best Picture?

And the Shakespeare and Love Squad chooses Donna Gelati, who agrees to pass the mic to Parfit and the original producers Ed Swick and Mark Norman to say a few words in that order.

And did you watch the Academy Awards in this year in 1999?

I probably did, but I don't remember.

Yeah, it was thrilling.

Remember like Roberto Bernino like running over the.

Oh, yes, I do, of course.

Of course, I remember this.

I remember Gwyneth Paltrow's pink dress now that you mentioned this.

Which has its own Wikipedia page, by the way.

As it should.

As it should.

It's iconic.

Throughout the ceremony, each film picks up awards as they go.

Saving Private Ryan unsurprisingly wins awards for best cinematography, editing, and sound, among others.

Gwyneth Paltrow wins best actress, beating out frontrunner Kate Blanchett.

Judy Dunge wins best supporting actress for her eight minutes of screen time.

That might be the dumbest one, to be totally honest.

And I just want to call this out because I looked up who won what for this year in the Oscars when I was watching.

She beat.

Brenda Blethen in a movie called Little Voice, which I'm aware that most people probably have never seen, but is so good.

You should go out and watch it.

And Brenda Blethen is fucking phenomenal in this movie.

She is terrifying.

She's this like overbearing,

very emotionally abusive mother to this really like sort of meek young woman who is Little Voice.

And this, you know, Little Voice's skill, as you learn over the course of the movie, is that she's unbelievably good at impressions of famous singers.

Michael Caine is in it as like a sleazy club owner.

He's amazing.

Ewan McGregor is in it.

It's really good.

Go out and watch it.

It's absolute bullshit that Judy Dench beat Brenda Blethen for this.

Yeah.

And Lizzie, you showed me that movie.

I watched that with you for the first time.

It's so good.

Oh, God, it's excellent.

Makes me want to give it a rewatch.

And also, Brenda is just, I think, like one of the most under-appreciated actors.

She's the best.

She's so good.

And then Stoppard and Norman win Best Original Screenplay.

But after Steven Spielberg wins Best Director and his old friend Harrison Ford walks out to present Best Picture, Team Shakespeare thinks, well, there goes the Oscar.

And Team Ryan starts buttoning their suit jackets for their inevitable ascent to the stage.

When Harrison Ford opens the envelope, his face drops as he says, Shakespeare in love.

Backstage, a publicist at DreamWorks says to Miramax's main publicist, never speak to me again.

Terry Press is standing in the mezzanine with flames on the side of her face.

And Steven Spielberg stays motionless in his seat while the Shakespeare producing team comes on stage to accept the award.

It's awful.

Yeah.

Like, I also just can't even imagine what went into making Saving Private Ryan and how fucking hard that had to be, like physically, really hard.

And to have these people walk up and win for Shakespeare in love, I would be crushed.

Yep.

And furious.

As planned, Donna Gelati starts them off with a speech, then David Parfit.

And as Ed Swick moves toward the mic to finally have his moment,

Donna invites Weinstein to say a word.

Weinstein and his brother Bob had called Donna before the ceremony asking for a favor, that he passed the mic to Harvey to wrap things up if they win.

Donna knows better not to comply with a request from Weinstein and was in an impossible position, either gives Wick his due or piss off the biggest bully in Hollywood.

Weinstein shoulders Zwick out of the way as he steps up to the mic to make his first ever Oscars speech.

When they get off the stage, the mood isn't exactly celebratory.

I don't think anyone's really happy that they won.

Members of the Miramax team noticed that people weren't too enthused by their win and realized that they were being pinned as the bad guys that stole Spielberg's Oscar.

Well, yeah, because you did.

You did.

But also, a lot of people on the Miramax team were not told about the negative campaigning.

And Weinstein told them that it never happened.

So they just thought that DreamWorks was like badmouthing them around town.

Some of them were just totally in the dark.

The The next day, the general opinion is that Miramax bought the award through its exorbitantly expensive campaign and negative campaigning.

The marketing team starts counting up all of the ads they put in the trades.

MirrorMax's total was 118 pages of ads, and DreamWorks was 165 pages.

So DreamWorks actually put out more ads.

Sure, but they weren't doing the stuff in the background that you're like legally not allowed to do.

Yep.

The page count was a win for Mirror Max, but it didn't change the fact that Shakespeare and Love's Wynn crowned them as the big baddies of Hollywood.

Not that they weren't that already with Weinstein, but there's no exact amount confirmed on what they spent, but Miramax reportedly spent between $5 million to $15 million on its campaign for a $24 million film.

Yeah, I believe it.

And remember the number that I said before of like the average number for, and it was like $250,000.

Wow.

Unreal.

The next year, everyone began taking a page on Amir Max's handbook and Harvey's unconventional methods became the norm to this day, which is spending significantly more money on ads, hiring Oscar campaign strategy teams to schmooze with voters and doing press appearance after press appearance after press appearance.

And it's become an industry in and of itself.

Yeah.

Which is really disappointing.

Like it's so often we see movies and actors that don't necessarily deserve it coming away with the prize.

And once you understand what's happening behind the scenes, it makes so much more sense.

But it sucks.

Yeah.

And I was before this episode, I like I said, I didn't know about this whole campaign before.

And I had never seen Saving Private Ryan because I don't really, I don't really like war films.

Did you watch it?

And I watched it in preparation.

I watched it last year because I knew I would be doing this eventually.

And I was like convinced.

I'd be like, you know what?

I think I'll I'll still be playing Shakespeare Love.

Oh, no, you won't.

And then I watched, and I watched Saving Private Ryan, and it's, it's incredible.

I completely, it deserved, it deserved to win Best Picture.

It was the best film of that year.

It's astounding that it didn't win.

And it makes me want to cry just thinking about Saving Private Ryan.

Like it really is a movie that will absolutely stand the test of time.

And like I said, like, listen, at face value, Shakespeare and Love, there is a lot to enjoy about this movie.

I totally, I totally understand why you loved it.

I understand why it appeals so broadly to actors.

I get all of it, but like,

it's not an Oscar contender.

That's the craziest thing to me.

Let it be something that is fun and fluffy because that's what it was.

Do not put it up there next to Saving Private Ryan.

And by the way, I'm not saying that fun movies can't win Oscars.

They totally can, but like, there's not a lot of substance to this movie.

It's really pretty lightweight.

It just shouldn't have been there.

Like, and that does leave such a bad taste in my mouth.

Also,

how did she get that wig?

How do they explain how she could possibly have had a wig that was built like that in the 16th century?

It doesn't nail me.

This movie makes no sense.

This really

went

no no sense.

It's pretty crazy.

I didn't realize they had lip gloss in 1596,

but you know, whatever.

I have one question for you.

Why was this R?

Is it just the boobs?

Because this.

It's the boobs.

Yeah.

It's pretty minimal, though.

Like, I was actually very surprised that this was R.

Yeah, it was enough that it's going to get the R rating.

It's so mild.

I guess it's just the nips because you can, you just see nips a couple times, but very tastefully done.

Yeah, I think it was tastefully done, but it was, yeah, I think, I think that was the reason because I don't think that they ever like say like fucking it or anything.

I don't remember.

There's almost nothing.

Yeah.

And they show sex like, I don't know, twice, but it's either very comical where the people are fully clothed and it's like barely even anything, or it's, you know, the very, like,

very peachy 13, or it's like the, you know, sort of love scenes between her and Joseph finds in which they're not clearly having sex.

You can just see her boobs and they're kind of kissing.

So anyway, I was surprised that this was R.

Also his dirty ass fingernails.

If you're going to make nothing else historically accurate, why do you have to make William Shakespeare's hands filthy as he was?

That was his choice.

That was an actor choice.

He wanted to see

his hands covered in ink for the whole film.

I hate Joseph Fiennes for that.

I hate it.

Because all I could think about was he's touching Gwyneth Paltrow.

He's touching her in sexual ways.

Please wash your hands.

I know you can't, really, but like, it's disgusting.

And also also the teeth.

Jeffrey Rush's teeth.

Jeffrey Rush's teeth and Judy Dench's teeth, which I thought was pretty cool that they gave Elizabeth the teeth that she probably really had in terms of the one historically accurate thing they had.

But those are the only two that they gave bad teeth.

Everybody else has like beautiful veneers.

Yeah, well, that's because Jweth Paltrow was brushing with that little stick.

Yes, I loved her little stick toothbrush.

My brother had one of those.

I don't know why, but he used it.

So Shakespeare in love was the major heartbreak of Edswick's career.

His contributions never got the acknowledgement they deserved, aside from one instance at the Golden Globes when Tom Stoppard accepted the award for best screenplay and started off saying, sorry, Harvey, I'd first like to thank Ed Swick.

Hell yeah.

Thank you, Tom.

And it's not, it wasn't recorded.

It was like one of the awards.

We don't have like a speech.

recording on YouTube or anything.

I think that it was one of the awards they wouldn't put on TV.

Wow.

But that was the one like public acknowledgement that he gotten.

After her win, Gwynneth Paltrow continued to do more films of Theramax in the years that followed, but her career struggled to reach the acclaim she had with Shakespeare and Love.

She found herself doing projects for either love or money, but rarely both.

In 2017, she went on the record with Megan Tuey and Jodi Cantor of the New York Times with her account of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein and was instrumental in getting other women to come forward at the start of the Me Too movement.

Yeah, say what you will about Goopy Paltrow, but she stepped up first.

Yeah, I think she gets such a bad rap.

And like, there's some, you know, there's some things that she said that's like, okay, Gwyneth, really, but I know.

You know what?

I love her.

I love her.

She's one of, I love being like one of my favorite celebrities.

I just, I love that.

Me too.

That trial where she was being tried for knocking over that man on the ski slopes, some of the best TV I've ever seen.

Iconic.

Absolutely iconic.

I understand that, you know, she does some questionable things with, with Goop and that people are, you know, people are, she's easy to hate.

I get it.

But I will go on the record saying I love Gwyneth Paltrow.

I don't care.

I know she's a Nepo baby, but I actually do think she's a good actress.

And

I think what she did in terms of the Me Too movement and Harvey Weinstein is extremely admirable.

Yep.

I 100% agree.

And she hasn't played a lead role in about 14 years.

And this is just entirely by design.

It seems like she is just loving life as a business mogul at Goop and

using her Oscar as a doorstop, which she does in her Vogue 73 Questions video.

Of course she does.

Which again is iconic.

Like Zwick, Joseph Fiennes also fell out of favor with Weinstein.

After Shakespeare in Love, he had a five-picture deal with Miramax, but that fell apart during a meeting with Weinstein at, you guessed it, the Peninsula Hotel.

Fiennes has gone on the record confirming the incident, but he's never specified exactly what Weinstein said, but there were some terms that Fiennes didn't agree with, namely the amount of control Weinstein would have over his career.

And Weinstein began threatening and intimidating him.

And he saw who he really was and walked away from the deal and Hollywood in general.

Wow, good for him.

Good for him.

And he just, he went back to London to do theater and smaller independent projects, but came back with Handmaid's Tale.

Which he's great in.

It's so hard to watch Shakespeare in love now, knowing.

I know, because he's so good at being such a creep.

Lastly, Weinstein was exposed for the monster that he is after over 100 women came forward with allegations of sexual assault and harassment.

He is currently serving a 16-year prison sentence on three counts of rape and has been banned from the Academy and the Producers Guild of America.

Long may he rot.

And that concludes Shakespearean love.

Great job, Naomi.

I did not know so much of that.

And I'm glad to have done this with somebody who loves the movie because I feel like if I had tried to do this, I would have just been dunking on Shakespearean love the whole time.

And you know what?

That's not as much fun.

So this was great.

I feel like I feel like I didn't lift it up enough.

You know, you lifted it up, I think, as high as it can go.

So

good, great job.

I should have given it to Norman.

Thank you.

And this leads us to our what went right.

I mean, I'm going to give it to the unsung hero, which is Ed Zwick.

It seems like he was the champion of this movie from really the beginning.

Obviously, Mark Norman, you know, stealing it from his kid.

That's pretty cool too.

But,

no, just kidding.

But it seems like Edswick is the reason why this movie eventually made it to the screen.

And it is absolutely horrible

what happened to him.

So I stand with Tom Stoppard when I say thank you, Edzwick.

Round of applause for Edswick.

My what went right

is,

and sorry to Edzwick, is going to be John Madden.

Because

without, I think if it had been Zwick directing,

he would have fought back against Weinstein about the reshoots.

I think he would have fought back so much that it, that ending wouldn't have actually happened.

And I think the ending is what makes the film work as well as it does.

And I think the ending is also why the film got nominated.

I think it really does work.

And

I don't think that that would have happened with Ed Zwick just because of his relationship with Weinstein.

And And John Madden was also the one that was able to like really move the film into like being even more of a romance.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Naomi.

That was really, really wonderful.

I appreciate you coming in as an absolutely excellent pinch hitter, especially on this one.

And also, I just wanted to let you listeners know that we are very excited to announce that we are partnering with some brands that we really trust and believe in to help sponsor the podcast.

So you're going to start hearing some ads that are coming from me and Chris talking about these products.

And we will also be able to offer you all some special discount codes in those ads.

So, if you're so inclined, we would really appreciate it if you would use those codes, give some of these products a try.

It does help us a ton.

It helps us support this show, and hopefully, it gets you all some good deals as well.

So, keep an ear out for that, and we really, really appreciate you.

Also, if you would like to support us, you can, of course, tell a friend, leave a rating or review.

You can join our Patreon as well.

There are multiple tiers, but as always, I have to shout out our full-stop supporters for their undying Edswick level of devotion to this show.

And Naomi, should I do it in my best, worst British accent?

Please.

All right, here I go.

Why is it so hard?

I'm about to Julia Roberts this.

Channel Ben Affleck.

Channel Ben.

Okay, okay.

Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Jake Killen, Kang, Andrew McFagel-Bagel, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, Jewishri Samant, Lachlan Morrow, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Peng Correa, Chris Leal, Ramon Villenueva Jr.

Kathleen Olson, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheibel, George, Rosemary Southwood, Tom Kristen, Soman Cainani, and Michael McGrath.

Thank you so much.

I feel like I got there sort of by the end.

The beginning I was struggling with the Shrek that was left over from.

It was a little too good, Lizzy.

I think it was too good.

I'm sorry.

Naomi, is there anything that you would like to plug before we sign off?

I mean, I have a short film I produced called Eprinephrine that's going to be making its rounds to the festivals, hopefully.

Check it out if it comes to a festival near you.

And

you can watch me in Only Murders in the Building, season three.

Yes.

Yes.

If you want to see me as a Mary Pickford silent film ghost story.

That's right.

You absolutely can.

And also keep an ear out for Naomi's name in the What Went Wrong credits because she does step in and help us from time to time.

And she does an absolutely amazing job with research, as you can probably tell from this episode.

So thank you again.

Thanks for having me.

We will see you all next time for a two-parter on Tombstone.

So, get ready for that.

I'm your Huckleberry.

I think that's the right line.

Bye.

Bye-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 and music by David Bowman.

This episode was written and presented by Naomi Lind.