The African Queen (1951)

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She wakes up and somebody's written cock and balls on her mirror.

And she's like vomiting into a bucket.

John Houston and Humphrey Bogart are like 50 plus-year-old men at this point, you know, acting like teen boys.

And action.

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 colonial romance set against Africa's luscious backdrop, staring a couple of Huaidis.

As always, I am one of your hosts, Chris Winterbauer, joined, as always, by my co-host, Lizzie Bassett.

Lizzie, what do you have in store for us today?

Well, my first question, Chris, is how do you think we would fare on a river steamboat in

the turn of the century Belgian Congo?

Well, I can tell you, Lizzie, I just would have ignited that gelatin explosive right away and ended things immediately.

I think that would be the only reasonable solution.

Yeah, exactly.

Quick murder sui.

That's fine.

Great.

That's fine.

So, you know, we have a movie where they chose not to do a murder sui, and that is The African Queen.

Yeah.

Chris, had you seen this movie before?

I had never seen the African Queen before.

This was my first time seeing it.

Well, what'd you think?

I really liked it overall.

And I really loved the first half.

And I really loved the ending.

I thought the ending was really fun and spoilers, I love the German ship captain marrying them, you know, shortly before the Dex Machina of the African queen rising for one last hurrah.

Did you recognize him, by the way?

The German ship captain?

I did, but I couldn't place him.

He's the Russian ambassador in Doctor Strangelove.

Okay, very good.

Yeah.

So

First of all, the cinematography in this movie is incredible.

The colors are gorgeous.

I think it's the three-strip technicolor process, which is really cool and technical to look into if you guys are interested.

It actually uses three strips of black and white film with filters to create the color and the fact that you get such luscious colors.

And it's not really that like cotton candy early technicolor look.

Very painterly.

And in fact, the early scenes where Mr.

Alnut is eating with Hepburn and her brother in the house feel like an influence on especially the French plantation sequence in Apocalypse Now, the way that it's lit and shot.

I think Hepburn and Bogart have really fun chemistry, and I think the movie really motors as she subverts his expectations throughout the first half of the film.

As the conflict moves from internal to external after they make love,

I was less invested in the movie.

I agree.

And it seemed like just a series of increasingly annoying pestilence and rapids.

And by the time we hit the gnats and the third rapids, et cetera, I was ready for them to get to the Louisa.

But I really enjoyed it.

Hepburn has a steeliness that's very fun.

Bogart is a really wonderful leading man, and he's a unique looking person.

And I liked the fact that both are older in this film, which I think is very interesting for a love story as well.

I think Hepburn's in her 40s and Bogart's probably in his 50s by this point.

So I really enjoyed it overall.

It's just special shout out to the cinematography.

And also, I want to say to hair and makeup and costume and wardrobe, they look dirty this whole movie.

I love that.

Well, they are.

I know, but I love that.

One of my.

I don't know if that was a choice.

Regardless, it works because one of my frustrations on some recent shows, and I'll shout out The Last of Us as one example, is they look so clean all the time.

Where are you getting your baths going?

So I liked that they were just dirty, dirty people on the river throughout this movie.

They sure were.

So I enjoyed it.

What did you think?

I also really enjoyed it.

So I had actually seen this movie several times when I was little.

And it's funny because I, what I remembered of it, I thought they were like at odds for almost the whole movie.

Like that's what I remembered.

Same as you.

That's the part that really stuck out in my head.

And much to my surprise, that's not the case.

They're, they're not even like really that much at odds at the beginning.

It's just, you know, he's drunk and she's got a bit of a stick up her butt, but then not really, because like she turns out to be a thrill seeker who just wants to murder a bunch of Germans at the beginning of World War I.

She's a, she's a terrorist.

But you know what?

She's a very charming one.

So I agree.

I think it really works.

I really, really enjoyed it.

It's kind of a crazy movie.

It's, it doesn't really make a lot of sense.

It's, I don't think it would get green lit today, as we're going to learn.

They had a bit of a hard time getting it greenlit back then for a lot of reasons.

I just, I love Catherine Hepburn.

I love her so much.

I'm a huge fan of the Philadelphia story.

I love this.

I love that she just continued to get better and better.

I love that she really didn't give a crap about what anybody thought ever, period.

And she also seems to have maybe had the best time out of anybody in this, despite some pretty crazy obstacles that we are going to get into.

So let's talk about the African Queen because this, this, Chris, we're going back to our roots here.

This production was a disaster.

Well, this is very much, it's of the milieu of Apocalypse Now, which we've covered, Fitzcoraldo, which we just covered, Sorcerer is on our list.

These are

man versus nature,

both in the film and in the making of the film.

Yes.

These are our bread and butter.

Yeah.

All right.

The main sources for today include an open book by John Houston, The Making of the African Queen, or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall, and Houston and Almost Lost My Mind by Catherine Hepburn, By Myself and Then Some by Lauren Bacall, and Bogart in Search of My Father by Stephen Bogart.

So basic info, as always, The African Queen is directed by John Houston.

It was written by James Agee, as well as John Houston, as well as John Collier and Peter Virtel, who are uncredited, but we will still talk about.

It is based on a novel by C.S.

Forrester.

It stars Catherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, and it was produced by Sam Spiegel, who we're going to talk about quite a bit during this episode.

The IMDB logline, as always, is in World War I, East Africa, a gin-swelling Canadian, note Canadian, riverboat captain is persuaded by a straight-laced English missionary to undertake a trip up a treacherous river and use his boat to attack a German gunship.

I don't even know why they bothered with the Canadian and English there, because neither of them are doing either of those accents.

Everyone's just roughly...

she's mid-Atlantic and he's

kind of

Humphrey Bogart.

Humphrey Bogart, yeah, exactly.

Chris, this movie came out in 1951.

But to understand why major movie stars Humphrey Bogart and Catherine Hepburn agreed to go into the jungle on a riverboat, I want to take us back to 1947.

May 19th, 1947, to be exact, where a crowd gathered at a rally in Los Angeles for presidential hopeful Henry A.

Wallace, who was a leader in the Progressive Party at the time.

Now, this being Hollywood, there were some movie stars in attendance, including Charlie Chaplin, but everyone was wondering if one star in particular was going to make an appearance.

And she did.

Catherine Hepburn walked out on the stage in a bright red dress, and here is what she had to say:

America became great,

not because of the Salem witch hunt, but in spite of them.

them.

We are still great

because the American people have always accepted the challenge of new ideas from the day that freedom was born in 1776 to this very moment.

The American people eagerly grasped at fresh concepts when they created this nation.

The men and women who rode covered wagons across the plains followed the road of vigor and youth to new freedom and a fuller life.

The path of middle-aged thinking not only sets back the clock, it leads only to the grave.

And today,

we won't turn the clock back and we won't stand still.

We'll move forward,

progressively forward.

First of all, Catherine Hepburn for president.

Second of all, what witch hunts do you think she is referring to?

She referenced Salem directly in that.

I imagine, based on the timing, that this is the second Red Scare, the advent of McCarthyism, the House on American Activities Committee, and Hollywood blacklisting, as it were.

That is correct.

Are you able to give our audience just a very brief explanation of what HUAC or the House on-American Activities Committee was doing in the 40s in Hollywood.

They were attempting to root out anybody who had any perceived or actual associations with big quotes communism.

Right.

And there were many people who had been affiliated with or communist party members years and years and years earlier, or just gone to a party where that idea was discussed or gone to a meeting.

Yeah, exactly.

Especially like in the I believe in like the 20s and 30s, and especially writers in Hollywood in particular were being kind of hunted down.

And I think this, it touches on this long-held perception that Hollywood has this outsized power to influence American culture, and therefore it needs to be monitored and reined in in specific ways so that it is not infiltrated by perverse or un-American ideas, as some people might say.

And we discussed.

Yeah, exactly.

And we discussed something similar with in the early 2000s, the Senate was very concerned about this depraved sexuality that Hollywood was pushing on the rest of the United States or violence in movies at the end of the 80s or in the early 90s.

And so the communism was the name of the game back in the 1940s.

And I think that kind of died out by the mid-50s, if my history is correct.

Yes, I believe that is right.

By the way, you mentioned a lot of screenwriters getting blacklisted.

One of the most famous was Dalton Trumbo, and he actually may have written the speech that you just heard Catherine Hepburn read.

Wow.

Yeah, so that's a pretty big move.

And she would later claim the dress was bright pink.

It's not.

It's bright red.

I think she's making a very pointed statement.

It's a pretty amazing speech.

It's worth listening to the whole thing.

Now, Hepburn was already considered unconventional with her trouser pants wearing and also the fact that she openly lived with and had long-term unmarried relationships with both male and female partners, of course, most famously with Spencer Tracy.

She was labeled a communist sympathizer pretty much immediately, and her career took a massive hit.

Now, just a few months later, Humphrey Bogart and John Houston would suffer a very similar backlash for participating in, and actually in Houston's case, founding, something called the Committee for the First Amendment, which was a group of Hollywood stars who banded together to protest the HUAC hearings.

and subsequent punishment of the Hollywood 10, which that's the group of film industry personnel, including Dalton Trumbo, who refused to testify and they kind of got hit the hardest.

Committee for the First Amendment was a bit of a fail for reasons that I'm not going to have time to get into here, but it is interesting.

Bogart would reverse course pretty quickly under pressure, most likely from Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, and say that he didn't realize that certain members of the Hollywood 10 were actual communists, which they were, although in theory that should be allowed under the First Amendment, which was kind of the whole idea.

John Houston was like, yeah, I knew some of them were communists.

I've even been to a communist party meeting.

So he was less sort of backtracking.

But Bogart even went so far as to write an article in Photoplay magazine titled, I'm no communist.

So he was having a hard time with it.

And really quickly, the First Amendment does not just cover free speech.

It covers the freedom of association.

That's what's important about you are free to associate with communism or whatever party you would like to.

That's right.

You may be wondering why I'm telling you this, but it's because at the tail end of the 40s, all three, Humphrey Bogart, John Houston, and Catherine Hepburn, were searching for a way to revitalize their careers.

But because of the hit that they had taken due to the Red Scare, it would have to be outside of the studio system, far away from the prying eyes of Hollywood, and completely on their own terms.

So that brings us to the African Queen.

Let's go to Africa.

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So the African Queen was a novel first published in 1935 by British author C.S.

Forrester.

And Chris, he's had a lot of his work adapted for TV and film.

Do you know his most famous character?

It is Horatio Hornblower,

which your face still looks confused, maybe because I watched a lot of BBC growing up, but that was a big BBC miniseries starring Yoan Griffith.

That was his big break.

I've never seen it.

Oh, it's good.

It's good.

Just like Horatio Hornblower, a lot of Forrester's work follows war heroes, captains, et cetera, which may have been motivated by his own inability to serve in World War I due to a heart condition.

And even though The African Queen is basically a romance novel at its core, I think it's really about two people who decide to sort of do the quote-unquote right thing against all odds, driven by this sort of sudden surge of patriotism, and they happen to fall in love along the way.

So sometime in the early 40s, Columbia bought the rights to The African Queen and wanted to make it starring Charles Lawton, aka Quasimodo, if you're not familiar, and his wife, Elsa Lanchester.

So the character of Charlie in the African Queen in the book is British and has a cockney accent.

You may notice he sure doesn't in the movie.

But this never materialized.

And in 1946, Warner Brothers bought the rights from Columbia.

Now, they considered what went wrong alums Betty Davis and Olivia de Havilland.

Both would have been fun.

Betty Davis in particular.

Get those torpedoes ready.

Terrifying.

And David Niven and Paul Henried for Charlie.

Except Warner Brothers didn't get anywhere either because no one seemed to think it was a good idea to make this movie.

Chris, why do you think people were not hot for the African Queen?

Just the difficulty in shooting it?

I mean, no.

No, okay.

I don't know.

It's just, I mean, I'll save it.

It's about a couple of unmarried old people getting it on in a grimy old riverboat.

Nobody wants to see that.

Okay.

No, that I didn't think of that.

but that is kind of it's interesting in that she is unusual it is unusual not that i mean i know like his character makes a little more sense i feel like or may have been more common the older bachelor at the time yeah but sure they let her cut he's gross sure

poor bogart her character is so interesting because she's i love how they set her up as religious and

not prim, but a bit at the beginning.

And then they just subvert that constantly with the way that she behaves throughout the entire film in such a fun way.

And that is very interesting to be in your mid-40s.

There was something about the film that reminded me a little bit of the sound of music in some ways in how the characters are set up at the beginning.

But yes, the age that is unique.

It would be unique today.

I mean, yeah,

I agree.

Her character is very interesting.

I kind of read it as she had been stuck with her bit of a fuddy-duddy brother her entire life.

Who's not given a name beyond brother, I believe.

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

By the way, he never even went to Africa.

We don't really have time to get into this, but he was shot entirely in London.

So when they're editing together that church sequence, he is not there.

If you watch, he's never in shots with any of the locals.

He's never in the reverses facing out towards.

Yeah.

Wow.

Okay.

According to Humphrey Bogart's biography, Tough Without a Gun, an RKO script reader said the main characters were, quote, physically unattractive and the story itself, quote, distasteful and not a little disgusting.

Rude.

Very.

So the project sat around for a few more years until 1949, when a British screenwriter named John Collier, who had been hired to rewrite the screenplay for Warner Brothers, tried to buy the rights to the project because he actually wanted to make it for himself, but that didn't really happen either.

And by 1950, the rights were sold to an independent film company called Horizon Pictures.

Now, Horizon Pictures was co-founded by producer Sam Spiegel, who you may see credited as S.P.

Eagle, which is his attempt at sort of distancing himself from that original name.

Yeah.

Right.

And writer-director John Houston.

Now, you might remember we talked a little bit about Houston in our episode on Chinatown, in which he plays Uber villain Noah Cross, and he is very scary.

I don't know that I want to be on an African steamboat with him.

And you'll see why over the course of this.

So he was born to Hollywood actor Walter Houston before continuing the Hollywood dynasty with his own children, Angelica and, of course, course, Danny Houston, and then future generations, including Jack Houston, who I love, Boardwalk Empire.

The best.

He's great.

So John Houston lived a lot of lives before becoming a director.

He was a writer, painter, amateur boxer, and even honorary member of the Mexican Cavalry.

Why not?

Okay.

He began making a name for himself as a writer first and also as a hard-drinking, hard-partying man-about-town.

He had multiple drunk driving incidents, one of which resulted in his passenger getting injured when he hit a parked car.

Another time, he was driving on Sunset Boulevard, supposedly sober, when he struck and killed a dancer named Tosca Rulean.

He was absolved of any wrongdoing by a grand jury because she was not in a crosswalk.

She was jaywalking.

Despite all of this, in 1941, he broke out big with his directorial debut.

Do you know what this was, Chris?

I don't.

It's the Maltese Falcon.

That was his first film?

Wow.

That's the, I think that's probably the earliest Bogart film that I saw as a kid.

Because for me, it was like, it's the Maltese Falcon, Casablanca.

What's the William Wyler movie he did?

Dead end.

But anyway.

I love Humphrey Bogart.

He's great.

The African Queen's very late in his career.

It's one of the last.

The Kane Mutiny was the last one that I really remember that he did.

So he was in a lot of stuff in the 30s.

And then Casablanca is 1942.

So very shortly after the Maltese Falcon.

Yeah.

So it's been a decade for Bogart from his kind of highs of the early 40s.

For sure.

And as we know, his career took a hit in the mid to late 40s because of his brief association with trying to defend people who were under attack by Huak.

So Houston struck gold again in 1948 with the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which starred Bogart and Houston's own father, who won an Oscar for it, along with two Oscars for John and writing and directing.

But in 1947, as we mentioned, he had spoken up about his distaste for Huak.

And in 1949, his film We Were Strangers about a pair of Cuban revolutionaries, bold move, John, got him even deeper onto the Red Scare shit list.

He directed The Asphalt Jungle in 1950 and then The Red Badge of Courage in 1951, which was a total of it.

We have to cover that movie.

That movie is insane.

I like touched on it briefly in the research for Ben-Hur because it bled so much money.

It was unbelievable.

It cost a metric shit ton of money and it ended up being cut down from over two hours to about 69 minutes.

So it was a disaster.

Against Houston's wishes.

Yes, yes.

He was very much running away from that production as well.

Yeah.

And sometime around 1949 or 1950, he told his producing partner Sam Spiegel that the next movie he wanted to make was The African Queen.

So they approached Warner Brothers for the rights, but Warner Brothers wanted $50,000 and they did not have that.

Yeah.

So Spiegel got creative with the financing and he turned to an unlikely lender, which was Sound Services Inc., a company that provided studios with sound equipment.

And he told them he would pay back the loan in full and he would use all of their equipment on set, on location, and give them credit in the title.

So they agreed.

That's cool.

It is cool.

It was a good idea.

Although he's pretty fast and loose with money, as we're going to learn.

Sure.

Yeah.

We'll see how quickly that loan got paid off and see how cool it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They pulled together the rest of the funding from Romulus Films, who would handle distribution.

They handled European distribution, I think, alongside United Artists.

Now, Houston already had a writer in mind for the script.

It was a poet, novelist, and journalist named James Agey.

He had actually reviewed a documentary that John Houston had directed years earlier, and they struck up a friendship from there.

And he told Houston recently that he really wanted to write a screenplay.

So Houston was like, bing, bang, boom, come on down to Santa Barbara, I'll fly you out, put you in a fancy resort, the San Isidro Ranch, by the way, if you're curious, only $3,000 a night.

I would like to stay there.

Oh my God.

Houston decided this trip could serve two purposes, write the screenplay with his buddy and get in shape.

Why not?

According to Houston's autobiography, Open Book, quote, I thought this an opportunity to live the good life and get into shape, so I proposed to Jim that we follow a stiff regimen of work and exercise.

We decided to play one or two sets of tennis each morning before breakfast and at least two sets each afternoon after work.

We swam a couple times times a day, avoided nighttime activities and cocktail parties, and so far as I knew, Jim, like me, hit the sack before 10 p.m.

Here's the thing, Chris, old Jimmy was not going to bed at 10 p.m.

He was writing well into the night and drinking and smoking.

And also, I'm not sure that those multiple tennis matches were a great idea because he had a heart condition and he had a heart attack.

Oh, no.

When Houston came to visit him immediately afterwards, AG felt like he'd let his friend down.

He was apologizing, but Houston is like, don't sweat it.

We've written almost the whole thing.

I know we don't have an ending yet, but you can just come meet me in Africa when we're better and we'll cook something up.

James A.G.

never went to Africa.

He remained pretty sick and he would unfortunately die of another heart attack a few years later.

Oh, no.

Now, Houston had always known that he would change the ending from the book.

The novel actually ends with Charlie and Rosie getting pardoned and agreeing to marry when they reach the coast.

The last couple of lines are very open-ended, sort of about how their relationship is going to go.

And it, it literally says it's not, whether they lived happily or ever after is not easily decided.

So that's where the book is.

But C.S.

Forrester apparently also wasn't super happy with the ending.

So to quote Houston, he quote, wrote a rather slapdash ending, planning to redo it, and then flew to England with Sam.

Hey, that's the Marvel way.

That's true.

Very famously.

They kind of flesh out the third act and they shoot the movie, they test it, and then they say, We got six weeks of reshoots.

Let's figure out how this thing should actually end.

I'm paraphrasing, but that is more or less an approach that they take in the Marvel cinematic universe.

Interesting.

Well, Houston did realize he would need a little extra help with the last chunk of the script, so he asked Peter Viertel, who he had worked with on We Were Strangers, to come finish it up with him in Africa.

Now, Virtel would go on to write a quote-unquote novel called White Hunter Black Heart, and I'm putting novel in air quotes because it was a very thinly veiled retelling of his time on the set of The African Queen.

Got it.

I will give you a little taste of where we're headed.

This is from White Hunter Black Heart.

Quote,

When I think back now, I realize that the only thing John Wilson, aka John Houston, and I actually ever had in common was the fact that at one time or another, each of us ran over someone with an automobile.

Oh, wow.

The victim of his accident died.

Mine lived on to sue the insurance company for a good many years.

It is true that Wilson was always a violent man, given to violent actions.

Some of my friends called him a spoiler and ascribed his wild, troubled life directly to his personal mania for destruction and disaster.

But these generalizations always seemed inaccurate to me, for although he certainly contributed to the trouble that always sprang up around him, I cannot believe that he caused it all.

At least he went with Wilson and he wasn't like, my friend John San Antonio.

Schman Schmeerston.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Yeah, no, that's obviously.

We're in Bob Fossey, all that jazz territory here.

No, it's not about me.

Well, fun fact, Clint Eastwood made this book into a movie where he played the John Houston character.

So meanwhile, Sam Spiegel was busy securing the stars for the movie, and Catherine Hepburn was interested pretty much immediately.

I don't really think they considered anybody else for this.

Yeah.

No, she was probably best known at this point for playing Tracy Lorde in the Philadelphia story.

Have you ever seen that?

I love that movie.

And she kind of had been, I okay, tell me if I'm got, if I've got this right, because I don't know a ton about this era of Hollywood, but my understanding is that she'd kind of had a long-running creative partnership with Spencer Tracy.

She did at this point, yes.

At this point.

And I thought they were romantically involved behind the scenes.

Yes, they were.

And then, but there was a bit of a question maybe of could she pop on her own?

Like, could she do it?

That's right.

Okay.

That's kind of what, because it feels like she kind of almost reinvented herself three times, like two or three times across her career.

Yeah, it's pretty incredible how she did that.

It's very incredible.

It's really smart.

The Philadelphia story, which we may cover at some point, that was another example of her kind of taking control of her career.

Yeah, didn't she like buy that script from RKO?

Yes, she did.

I think she actually owned the rights and then like sold it back to them or something.

She was savvy.

She's very smart.

Yeah.

But as we said at the top, her career had taken a hit thanks to HUAC.

And this movie probably looked like a really good option for rehabilitation, given that her entire character arc is basically lame spinster missionary, suddenly decides to avenge her brother's death in an act of patriotism by blowing up a German boat.

That's it.

That's her whole life.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

It's like, it's a radicalization plot, basically.

Yeah, it's pretty wild.

So she was in, and she wanted to know who would play Mr.

Alnut.

And Spiegel came to visit her.

They discussed names.

And he's like, what about Humphrey Bogart?

And she's like, great idea.

And he's like, yeah, and also, what if we change the character to Canadian?

Now, why the super specific suggestion that just occurred to him on the spot?

Probably because he'd already done the exact same thing to Humphrey Bogart, who was already on board.

So they had their leads.

Now, Hepburn's first impression of Houston was not great.

Pretty much immediately, she got the sense that he didn't have a very good handle on the project.

And when he came to meet her, she understandably wanted to talk about the script, but he kept kind of avoiding her questions.

According to her book, The Making of the African Queen, she wondered, quote, how much of it does he write himself?

I don't even know know if he's read the book.

For sure, he seems to be stumbling around.

He was chronically late, something that really pissed her off, and something about him just didn't feel right.

Quote, he makes me uneasy.

I feel all hands and feet, and I simply can't imagine being directed by him.

She basically decided, though, what the hell, I would like a free trip to Africa, and this might be my only shot.

And then she wondered if perhaps that might also be Houston's motivation.

She was on to something, as we're going to learn.

Adam Sandler has said he made that movie blended, I think, because he wanted to go to Africa with his family.

Well, he wasn't the first.

She was understandably concerned about their lodgings and where they'd be filming, but he blew her off.

She said he, quote, made me feel kind of a nuisance and a dumbbell.

Was I?

No, you definitely were not.

As we will learn, those were very valid concerns.

I think it's the there's

They are such extremes in that she obviously not only wants to understand the entirety of the material that she's doing, but there's, she wants to understand every aspect of this production because it's going to impact her and the way that she performs and how she can get ready.

She's hyper-prepared.

Here is Houston.

He's like, we don't have an ending.

We're going to fly by the seat of our pants.

Does it really matter where we are?

Don't worry about it, honey.

Like, and

that is hard to put those working styles together.

That's exactly right.

That is very hard.

So, with pre-production in full swing, John Houston set off to the Belgian Congo to scout some locations.

Now, Now, I do want to point out I am saying Belgian Congo because that's what the area was known as at the time.

It was still under colonial control.

I'm going to be using names for towns and cities that have since been changed since the Democratic Republic of the Congo gained independence, but I'm going to use the names as they were in 1950 and 51.

Now, Chris, John Houston may indeed have had an ulterior motive for this movie and scouting trip.

He really, really, really wanted to kill an elephant.

In fact, according to Sam Spiegel, when he got on the plane to Africa, he literally forgot to bring the script.

But he did remember his elephant gun.

Oh, you bet your ass he did, probably more than one of them.

So he had his crew scouting deep in the jungle, and at one point they were in a village called Pontherville, where they met with a local leader.

They hung out with him for a while, and they assumed they were going to stay in his nice house, but they were wrong.

They got escorted to their sleeping quarters, which was just a former single-cell prison that was about a 30-minute hike through the jungle with nothing to sleep on but an old car seat.

One crew member got so badly bitten by swarms of bugs that he wound up in a hospital in Nairobi for months afterwards.

Oh my god.

And there's another fun anecdote Houston had about this scouting mission.

That time that he maybe accidentally ate a person.

So let's talk about it.

There's another fun anecdote Houston had about this scouting mission.

That time that he maybe accidentally ate a person.

So let's talk about it.

They were setting up the area that would serve as the main camp for production along the Rookie River.

And it was going to have bungalows, a commissary, even a bar.

But none of that was set up yet, so they contracted a local hunter to bring back meat for their meals.

And here's what Houston had to say from his autobiography.

Game was scarce, and I wondered how in the hell he could manage to shoot enough meat for the pot, which kept going constantly.

The pot consisted of an indiscriminate sort of stew comprised of monkey, forest pig, deer, and you name it.

Eventually, someone did.

One afternoon, a group of soldiers marched into camp and arrested our black hunter.

We weren't told why.

They refused to tell us, but finally King Paul confided to me that villagers had been disappearing mysteriously.

It seems that when the hunter couldn't find game for the pot, he got the meat in the simplest way possible.

I must say I couldn't tell the difference in the taste.

The hunter was executed a few days later.

I was thankful that the long pig was served before the main group arrived.

Only a few of us were privileged to dine so exclusively.

John, what?

So John Houston ate humans.

A person.

Right.

Yeah.

And he seems happy about it.

Well, I feel like he got to check it off his bucket list and he didn't have anybody to blame him.

He's like, what could a man do?

I was fed this.

What?

That is wild.

That, I mean,

also just terrible that this person

murder other villagers to feed them.

Yeah, he's not concerned about that.

He's happy that the rest of the crew didn't get to taste it.

Well, at least there's that.

Sure.

At least he didn't feed Catherine Hepburn a human.

Yes, I guess that's right.

Could be worse, Catherine.

Yeah, but off to a great start.

There's literally people being murdered.

Yeah.

It reminds me of William Seabrook, who ate human flesh before he had gone.

There was

at this, this was earlier.

Seabrook was in the 20s, but there was kind of this, it's like a version of extreme tourism now or something, this fascination with finding the most extreme possible thing.

And people have been talking about, oh, cannibalist tribes and, you know, Papua New Guinea or whatever.

And, and I don't know why.

Maybe it's like a tie-in to colonialism or something, but I, it ties into the big game element.

There's this exotic, it's like Hemingway-esque.

You know what I mean?

The need to do something so extreme.

And I don't know.

It doesn't appeal to me personally, but I think it was decent.

It seems like it was kind of common throughout the mid-20th century amidst certain men in particular.

Definitely.

Also, I want to point out this is John Houston's account.

We don't know if that's true.

I don't know that he has a reason to lie about that, but who knows?

Yeah.

Meanwhile, the the cast was getting ready to join Houston in Africa, but there were already some bad omens.

So, Lauren McCall, Humphrey Bogart's then 27-year-old wife, he was 52, was already anxious about leaving behind their toddler son.

And when she finished the first leg of the journey from LA to New York and got off the plane, she learned that as her son was waving goodbye to them from the ground at the airport in his nanny's arms, the nanny had had a stroke and died.

What?

Oh no.

I shouldn't laugh.

It's horrible.

Oh, it's horrible.

So, Chris, you have children.

What would you do if

you got that phone call upon the plane landing?

You have to return.

I wouldn't be able to leave.

Not if you're Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

I mean, it was a different time.

Absolutely.

Very different standards of parenting at that time than today.

And maybe we're too far in the other direction, but still, that's wild.

This is something that sadly would end up hurting their son for a long time.

I think that they did not return for him.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, Catherine Hepburn, who was the daughter of a urologist, was perennially concerned about where the bathroom was.

She had to pee a lot on the long flights and at one point, I think, accidentally stepped in the toilet and ended up getting her entire bunk wet.

Oh, no.

But much to their surprise, after their harrowing journeys, when they landed in Stanleyville, in the Belgian Congo, John Houston was nowhere to be found.

Instead, it was screenwriter Peter Virtell who met them and had to explain that Houston had left just one hour earlier via private plane, leaving them all to just waste time in Stanleyville.

Catherine Hepburn was pissed.

She didn't know anybody.

She didn't really know the Bogarts very well.

And as they waited around in Stanleyville, a message came through from the camp in Beyondo.

Houston wanted an elephant permit, which would have cost around $300 or about $4,000 today.

Like a hunting permit?

A hunting permit.

Yep.

And it was being included as a necessary expense for the film's budget.

Hepburn's rage increased, especially because they had all been promised appropriate clothes for the jungle, but those never materialized.

She was actually better off than anybody else because of the clothes she just normally wore.

At one point, Humphrey Bogart had to borrow a pair of her pants.

At least she wore trousers.

Thank goodness she was progressive.

She was very prepared.

Now, unbelievably, Houston kept them waiting around in Stanleyville long enough for Hepburn, Bogart, and McCall to almost die in a boating accident.

They hired a guy to take them via motorboat to some fishing village because they were bored, and the overheated boat literally exploded, causing severe injury to the guy that they had hired.

Humphrey Bogart had to put the fire out with sand and a blanket.

The number of times I've left this production by now, I think we're hitting four times.

Minimum.

Yeah.

Well, just you wait.

Finally, after a few days, the main cast learned they'd be making the trip out to the main camp.

And Chris, it's a really easy short trip.

It's just an eight-hour train ride, which was so hot that the roofs of the train cars kept lighting on fire, and then a 40-mile car ride followed by a river raft great easy so when they said that lizzie had to return to work at amazon and drive an hour across la she said over my dead body because that was too far that's true i don't know if she would have made this one no i'm not getting in an eight hour train while it's lighting itself on fire i'm not doing it but they did in may of 1951 along the rookie river in beyondo a remote town in the belgian congo filming began and chris this would not be a what went wrong episode without some torrential downpours, so here they are.

Great.

As soon as they got to camp, it started pouring rain.

Obviously, that's a problem since they can't film, but it was doubly bad since it turned everything, including the floors of the bungalows, into mud.

Even when it wasn't raining, it was so humid that nothing would dry.

Catherine Hepburn said she spilled water on the mud floor of her bungalow on the first night and it literally never dried.

One benefit of this time they had was that they were all stuck inside together, so Houston had to finally listen to Kate's questions about the script, And it sounded like they kind of started to get along, or at least she gave up and figured she might as well just listen to him tell stories for hours.

But producer Sam Spiegel was not having fun.

According to Hepburn, quote, Sam Spiegel, who bore the financial responsibility, was going mad trying to figure out whether or not he'd been misinformed about which was the rainy season.

He had us housed at Claridge's.

He had furnished us each with a Rolls-Royce and a driver.

He had sent us caviar and champagne.

Now, he was probably panicking because nobody really knew where Sam's money had come from.

In fact, some of the financing for the lead actors had fallen apart right before they got to Africa, which resulted in Hepburn and Bogart deferring their salaries.

According to Bogart's son, he actually put some of his own money into the movie.

John Houston hadn't been paid since January.

Catherine Hepburn almost didn't show up because of the money, but Spiegel reassured her with this telegram.

I have just returned from Africa where John remained with entire technical staff busily building boats for African Queen.

In shock that lawyers still haggling over wording of guarantee between London and Los Angeles, as delays in guarantees, purely obstinacy of lawyers, will be settled long before you arrive.

Please cable me, Claridge's.

Also, I have found 10,000 pounds of gold here in Africa.

Come get it, Catherine Hepburn.

It's here for you.

Come here, Catherine.

No, funny that he mentioned cabling him at Claridge's, which is a very expensive hotel in London, because he was not even staying there.

No.

Send telegram to my lawyer, S.P.

Eagle.

It is not me, not the same person.

Yeah.

As you clearly figured out, he was a bit of a con artist.

In his early career, he left behind a string of women, at least one kid, and an awful lot of fraud.

He even did time for it in England and in the U.S.

He traveled with fake passports and reportedly re-entered the U.S.

illegally at one point by literally swimming the Rio Grande.

Through all of this, he presented as extremely wealthy and was known for very lavish New Year's Eve parties, but the thing is, he was not actually rich until much later in his career.

He was known to bully and blackmail his colleagues.

His quote-unquote friend Billy Wilder, according to a biography of Spiegel, once said he was, quote, a modern Robin Hood, a man who steals from the rich and steals from the poor.

There it is.

Equal opportunity.

Even his business partner, John Houston, was known to laugh at him because no one took him seriously, which begs the question, why were they business partners?

This is something people wondered about publicly as well.

As Lauren Bacall put it, Houston was a genius, Spiegel was not.

Meanwhile, back at camp, there was a bigger problem, or should I say, Chris, a bugger problem.

Nice.

Thank you all.

Yeah, they were all immediately attacked by black wasps.

And because everything was made of palm leaves and raffia, it all started decaying, which attracted a truly disgusting creature called the soldier ant or army ant.

Now, Chris, I want you to look at this little guy.

Well, well we talked about bugs in our bugs primer and bugs are great lizzy we rely on bugs it's their planet not ours but i want you to look at this bug and see if you would like to spend quality time with it it's got a big old head it's got a big old head big old chompers on that guy yeah no i did when i was like in Dallas one time visiting my mom's family i accidentally stepped in an anthill of fire ants didn't notice for five minutes.

They were all at my calf and got bit all over, pussed, everything.

Yeah, no, I would not like to spend time with these guys.

Yeah.

They can have it.

They can have the camp.

I'm leaving.

Well, that's about right.

So they actually had to dig trenches around the camp and fill them with kerosene to try and keep the ants out, but that didn't work.

The ants made one attack on the camp and they lit the kerosene trenches to try to burn them out.

Also didn't work.

Another night, Hepburn and Bacall had just gone back to their respective tents when Hepburn said, quote, all of a sudden, I felt some itching on my ankles.

I reached down and scratched.

I went on talking, reached down again, and happened to look at the mud floor.

I was standing in a procession of ants about six inches wide and an inch and a half deep.

Yes.

So they were climbing through her, basically, to get across the camp, and they had climbed completely up to her neck by the time she was able to get out of there.

She was covered in bites.

It's part of the reason she has all of the, or not the reason, but the reason you can't see them is because she's covered in high neck dresses for almost the whole movie.

Well, at least the leeches were fake, right, Chris?

No?

Yeah, some of them were real.

So Houston actually wanted to use real leeches on Humphrey Bogart, who was like, go fuck yourself.

She's not doing it.

Gummy worms, sound fine.

What are we doing?

He's like, absolutely not.

So they did use fake leeches on Humphrey Bogart, but the ones that you see in close-up shots are real leeches attached to the leech wrangler's body, which by the way, new job our children may have to have due to AI, leech wrangler.

I don't think AI can do that.

That's true.

Even sand fleas got in on the action.

During a break, Humphrey Bogart discovered a painful swelling in his foot.

There was a, I think it's a Chigo flea.

Apologize if I'm mispronouncing that.

It had burrowed into his toe, and you actually can't yank these out with tweezers because it leaves the head embedded and that can cause blood poisoning.

Oh, so hence the line in the film about the leech.

He says that line in the film.

Don't yank it off.

It'll leave the head in, which will poison the blood.

And that's why they used the salt.

Yeah.

Well, honestly, the leech might be better than this thing because the way that they got this thing off was a crew member had to press the lit tip of a cigarette into Bogart's toe to get it to let go.

You have to do that with ticks too, sometimes.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can burn them off.

Somehow, after all of this, though, Catherine Hepburn's biggest concern was still the bathroom.

She was horrified to discover that she was to be sharing what she described as a Siamese twin outhouse with Humphrey Bogart.

It was basically a rattan and palm hut with a very thin divider and two holes, so you could hear everything.

The Megan Trainer, as it were.

Didn't she have the like back-to-back toilets with her husband?

Yeah.

I'm just like, what is that joke?

Yeah, you're correct.

Yep.

She said, no, thanks, and ended up using part of a boiler as a chamber pot that she kept in her bungalow and would just dump in the jungle every day.

Yeah.

Works.

It works.

So the African queen used in the movie was an actual old riverboat from 1912 that the art director found and had fixed up by local carpenters.

Also, those the models of them when they're going through the rapids, I love them so much.

I was wondering if what size, it's like one-fifth or something size models.

Oh, I think they're tiny.

They were made by local monks and nuns, actually.

I thought they looked good.

There were two

three limitations of technology, despite how good the cinematography is in this movie.

And I think it looks amazing.

And the only three that jumped out at me were the scale models, some of the matte work that they do.

You can see the outlines.

And then the gnats when they do the transparency of the gnats on top.

Those were the only three things that I thought didn't really hold up.

I thought the rest of the film looked outstanding.

Well, it's probably because they're actually doing everything else in the rest of the film, and it does look great.

Yeah.

So the idea was to use the actual boat to pull four rafts.

Raft number one would be a replica of the African Queen.

It would basically be a stage.

So, it's not the full boat, it's parts of it that they can use to shoot because the real thing was so small.

Shoot coverage, like in different directions, yeah.

Right, raft two would be equipment, lights, and props.

Raft three would be a generator, and raft four was to be Catherine Hepburn's private dressing room, port-a-potty, and full-length mirror.

But unfortunately for old Kate, the boat could only pull three rafts, so hers had to go.

That is the most expendable of the ones you've described.

Yeah, you don't get a bathroom.

One thing she wouldn't let go of, though, was the full-length mirror.

And apparently, they tried carrying it in their car down to the boat every day with half of it hanging out the door.

It broke, and everyone thought that she would leave it behind, but not our girl.

She just used shards of it to do her makeup.

On a moving boat.

On a moving boat, yeah.

It had like a whole chunk missing.

And apparently, Humphrey Bogart also used the mirror shards.

Some other mishaps, a boiler almost collapsed on Hepburn and Bogart when the ship ship accidentally ran aground into some trees.

The poor AD Guy Hamilton had to grab it to stop it from smushing them and he got burned.

At one point at their third location on the river.

Was that Guy Hamilton, future Bond director, Guy Hamilton?

I think, yes.

Yeah, so Guy Hamilton, future, I think he directed at least four James Bond.

He would go on to direct at least four James Bond films and he was briefly attached to direct Superman, the movie.

But he could not because he didn't want to give up his tax status in the UK.

Well, good thing he got to keep his hands.

Barely.

At one point at their third location on the river, Houston's boat suddenly lifted up out of the water.

Any guesses, Chris, as to what was happening?

Hippopotamus?

That is right.

They were on top of a hippo's back.

God, hippos are so scary.

They're really fast.

And also, all the crocodiles you see in the movie are real, and they were just waiting for the hippo to chuck them in the water, but it just kind of put them back down.

Also, the African queen itself sank twice.

At least one of these occasions, they'd asked some locals to watch the boat when they had to leave it tied up somewhere.

And according to Bacall, they did watch it sink.

Right.

They're like, we did it.

If the extent of the direction is watch the boat, they are going to watch the boat.

I also do love those crocodiles jumping off shore.

And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

As they're like running to eat the crew.

It's so funny.

They're like, yeah, yeah, let's go, let's go, let's go.

Rushing into the water.

Crocodiles.

They're so big.

Good lord, they're big.

It took two days to pull the African queen up out of the river, patch it up, and dry it out.

The generator raft was also way too loud, so it actually had to be a few bends away down the river, and they didn't have enough cable.

So they had to order more, which was giving Sam Spiegel an absolute conniption fit.

But according to Hepburn, John Houston didn't really care because it gave him a bigger excuse to use his hunting license.

Keep in mind, during all of this, John Houston's wife was pregnant with Angelica Houston the whole time and actually gave birth while he was on set.

And meanwhile, he's like tromping through the jungle trying to find an elephant.

Generators remain the bane of the sound department's existence, shooting on location.

So it like fight, like if you're shooting on location, at least in my experience, getting the damn generator far enough away from the set so that it is not disrupting the sound capture is so difficult and so annoying.

And I cannot imagine trying to do it on a river of yeah, this just looks like a complete disaster.

Yeah.

Now, as we just mentioned, John Houston, very into big game hunting, or as poor burned-up assistant director Guy Hamilton put it, quote, John wanted to shoot an elephant.

That was really what the picture was about as far as he was concerned.

In fact, he would frequently switch locations on a moment's notice in order to be closer to his favorite hunting spots.

And even though Hepburn was vocally opposed to elephant murders, she decided to go with him on one of his hunts.

So Sam Spiegel was freaking out because she might get hurt.

Turns out that was a pretty valid concern.

On this particular trip, John Houston accidentally walked himself and Catherine Hepburn right into the middle of a herd of elephants, which is really, really dangerous.

They smelled them.

They started panicking, stomping all over the place.

It was so scary that their hunting guide actually ran away, leaving them there in the middle of the herd.

And apparently John Houston looked over at Catherine Hepburn, expecting her to be like freaking out and running away.

And she was just completely still with her tiny little rifle, just holding it ready to go.

Fortunately, the herd dispersed and they survived, but really they just got lucky.

Even more fortunately, he never got his elephant.

Good.

I thought you were going to say he pulled a Dick Cheney and accidentally shot her in the face.

She got Dick.

No, she was okay.

Now, as you might be able to guess by the color of the river water, almost everyone on set got violently ill with dysentery.

I feel like dysentery is what we're always waiting for for on-location shoots.

It's like the Oregon Trail.

Star Wars and Tunisia.

I think Lawrence of Arabia had some of that as well.

Also a Sam Spiegel production, by the way.

And we'll definitely cover that at some point.

Speaking of Spiegel, he had arranged for everyone to live on board a riverboat when the shoot moved to Uganda, but had somehow neglected to arrange for working water filters.

So some of the British crew also got malaria.

At one point, everyone was so sick they had to suspend shooting for three days.

Catherine Hepburn would sometimes have to run off and barf in between takes, but she refused to stop working.

And the cinematographer was actually worried that she was going to look green in the opening scene in the church because they were shooting in Technicolor.

And if you watch that, she looks ill.

She does look pretty ashen in the beginning of this movie.

She actually lost 20 pounds over the course of this movie and she was skinny to begin with.

You can really tell with her cheekbones,

they look extreme.

Yes.

Well, but Chris, there were two people who remained untouched by the tummy bugs, and those were Humphrey Bogart and John Houston.

Any idea why?

Alcohol.

That's right.

Just

draining that liquor.

Mainlining it, just killing all the bugs all the way down.

That is literally what they did.

They had decided to avoid the local food and especially the water.

So they just ate cans of beans and drank hard liquor.

Can you imagine the farts?

Whoa.

Oh, my God.

Well, ferment, like one of the reasons to drink fermented drinks is that it has, you can have, like, I believe this is right, like a lower bacterial.

You're not as likely to get sick from it.

And the similar when you move to like coffee and tea by boiling it, you also are less likely to get sick from it as opposed to just drinking regular water.

To be clear, Catherine Hepburn was boiling it and it was not working.

According to Hepburn, quote, those two undisciplined weaklings had so lined their insides with alcohol that no bug could live in that atmosphere.

I love just these like Africans by

we're ready to go.

And they dive into Humphrey Bogart's gut and they're just like, sweet Jesus, let me out of here.

They just die immediately.

No, she was mostly pretty pissed at their drunken antics.

According to Entertainment Weekly, she at one point said Houston was, quote, as funny as a baby's open grave, which, what a line.

Whoa.

Houston claims, quote, both Bogey and I teased Katie unmercifully at the beginning.

She thought we were rascals, scamps, rogues.

We did everything we could to support this belief.

We pretended to get roaring drunk.

Pretended, John.

We even wrote dirty words and soap in her mirror, but eventually she saw through our antics and learned to trust us as friends.

I love how like she wakes up and somebody's written cock and balls on her mirror.

And she's like vomiting into a bucket.

John Houston and Humphrey Bunger are like 50 plus year old men at this point, you know, acting like teen boys.

And also, I'm sorry, you pretended to get roaring drunk.

Y'all were hammered.

That's the only way these bugs weren't getting in there.

But she gave in at some point and even she started drinking champagne instead of the water.

She also did end up liking John Houston.

She really liked the direction he gave her to sort of channel Eleanor Roosevelt in her performance, which I think you can see come through.

Yeah.

I mean, he's a, he's obviously crazy talented because he seems to have done no prep.

And

one eye on the production, one eye on his elephant gun as he's like scanning the horizon at all moments.

And yet he still directs in an incredible movie.

It's insane.

That's amazing.

He directed a lot of incredible movies.

Yes.

Yeah.

She also became very close friends with Humphrey Bogart, by the way, and Lauren Bacall in particular, Bogart's wife.

I'm not going to talk about her a lot in this episode, but Lauren Bacall, other than leaving her toddler behind, she seems really pretty amazing.

She took care of a lot of the cast and crew on this.

When they all got really sick, a lot of the like finding and preparing of food fell to her.

And I think she seems like a genuinely kind person.

Now, even though John Houston may have been hammered off his ass and wandering around trying to kill elephants, he was pissed that no one had drinkable water and he went went pretty nuts on Sam Spiegel for not getting it there in time for the cast and crew.

So, Chris, picture this.

You're pooping your brains out in the jungle.

You run to the outhouse.

You look up and the ceiling starts moving.

More bugs?

Nope.

It was a black mamba.

This happened to one boom operator who ran out of the bathroom screaming because there was a black mamba just hanging out.

in the pot.

This also happened to Catherine Hepburn when she ran into the bathroom to barf.

Lauren McCall apparently used a termite mound as her personal bathroom after this.

Now, obviously, on a set like this, you would rely heavily on locals to support day-to-day needs as porters, guides, and also as extras, which we see in the movie.

But one day, when they were expecting to shoot a bunch of locals as the villagers in the first few scenes, Houston was really confused when none of them showed up.

It turned out a rumor had gone around that Houston and his cast and crew were cannibals, that they were eating people.

Which, to be fair, where did that come from?

Had they heard about John Houston's first scouting trip?

Because you were eating people, John.

Anyway, he had to convince the chief that they had no intention of eating anyone on purpose, I suppose.

And after a few brave scouts checked out the camp, the extras finally came back and they filmed.

Now, this is the one thing I will say about the African Queen.

I, because I didn't remember it super well.

I thought based on the opening scenes that we were going to get maybe a little bit more dynamic between the colonial people and the natives of the area.

And you basically get none.

They're really just used as backdrop.

The movie is literally just the two are two leads for 90% of it.

Yeah.

It's very different than Fitzcorraldo, for example, which the tension is largely between Brian Sweeney, Fitzgerald, Fitzcorraldo, and the locals that he is conscripting into his ridiculous dream of moving his boat over this hill.

So very, very different, despite the similarities of the location yeah i think it suffers a little bit from that the african queen does that it doesn't it uses africa and also the people of the congo as a backdrop essentially and that's the one thing that i think does not hold up particularly well about this movie yeah i wonder if there was a even just from a narrative perspective it feels like there could have been ways to integrate the conflicts of the time just to make the the narrative a little more dynamic and i obviously like the perspective would probably probably wouldn't have held up.

But

I was expecting it, like you said, I thought it was going to come back in some way and intersect in some way.

And it never really does.

You have the conscripted villagers firing at them with the rifles

midway through as they're going around the German fort.

And that's really it.

That's it.

And you have the village at the beginning.

And, you know, it's shot beautifully, but yeah, you don't really see any interactions, which is interesting because clearly Catherine Hepburn's character and Rosie and her brother had been living with that village for, at that point, years.

And it's interesting.

One other thing that I think is interesting is that their mission becomes almost a very nationalist mission, right?

This idea that we need to go against the Kaiser, these Germans.

And it's interesting because from, I know Hepron's avenging her brother and maybe she's avenging the villagers, but they're kind of doing it in the name of king and country, weirdly, even though he's Canadian.

And so that doesn't quite make sense to me.

Maybe one of our audience members can explain it better.

And the other thing I wondered was if they specifically didn't make them American because they didn't want to create, following the Huak stuff, to create two American radical characters.

Maybe.

And anyway, despite how much the movie...

really rides on their dynamic and their dynamic is wonderful, it does feel like they're superimposed as opposed to integrated into an environment.

Very much.

Well, by the end of the shoot, the exhausted casting crew were counting the days until they could leave.

And officially, I believe the filming was scheduled for somewhere around seven weeks.

It was wrapping in late July of 1951.

But Houston's creative detours, aka his random hunting schedules, had put the schedule in quite a bit of jeopardy.

And Sam Spiegel was really wanting to ship everybody home because he did not want people to get sick.

This is already a nightmare.

But with just a couple days left on the schedule, Houston's like, I need three more days.

Humphrey bogart absolutely flips out he also blamed katherine hepburn because he felt like she just wanted to stay in the jungle too because she actually was really enjoying it humphrey bogart hated it absolutely hated it but houston managed to rally the troops people agreed that they would stay but sam spiegel was like absolutely not you can have one more day and you can have a skeleton crew to film whatever you need so it was literally Humphrey Bogart, John Houston, Catherine Hepburn, and one cameraman.

There was no sound department.

They didn't even get to keep the makeup team.

Hepburn did her own makeup and applied Bogart's hairpiece herself.

I thought it looked a little fluffier in certain scenes.

So they moved on to London after this to capture any scenes involving the cast, particularly submerged in water, because you absolutely could not get in the actual river they were shooting on.

Like they have kind of the love,

the prelude to the love scene where they bathe in the river.

Right.

Or one of my favorites is when they're repairing the propeller.

Yes, the underwater.

It shows up next to him.

The mermaid scene.

The mermaid scene.

Yeah, in the very clear blue water that looks nothing like what that river looks like because it's not that river.

That river actually contained parasitic flatworms, among also crocodiles, hippos, everything else that we've mentioned.

So you cannot get in that water.

So a special gigantic tank was built to shoot the underwater scenes, but it actually burst just before they got there.

It did a ton of damage, but fortunately, nobody was there, so no people got hurt.

Now, over the course of the shoot, Houston's relationship with Sam Spiegel had only gotten worse.

Spiegel reportedly told Peter Viertel that, quote, he seems to hate me for some reason.

That reason could be that you never paid him.

Spiegel was taking full advantage of the fact that the whole team had been sequestered in Africa.

And at one point, when $50,000 arrived from some financial backers with $43,000 supposed to go to Houston, Spiegel just turned around and used it to pay his taxes.

You know who he reminds me of?

Who is the gentleman who created Fire Festival?

Billy McFarland and Ja Rule.

Don't you erase Ja Rule from this story?

The whole robbing Peter to PayPal approach of financing projects is

the fake it till you make it.

I mean, it's really prevalent in the podcast industry.

There was a, if you guys are interested in looking up, Cast Media, this company imploded a few years ago, and it was an example of that where, you know, money had been promised to podcasters by way of ads, and then the ads didn't materialize.

And all of a sudden, you know, the company ended up going bankrupt.

And there's so so much of that where any media company is the cash flow, if the yeah, if there's any hiccup in the cash flow, things go south really quickly.

Yes.

So he was certainly correct.

Houston did not like him.

And Houston went out of his way to embarrass Spiegel in front of the casting crew and really anyone else.

At one point, Houston had been making a speech at lunch and noticed that Spiegel had already started eating.

And he said, quote, I'll wait until my partner is finished going down on the asparagus and then proceed.

Spiegel was a portly man, so this was

particularly rude.

He also brought up Spiegel's jail time in front of Spiegel and was generally a pretty big dick to him.

But again, Spiegel literally was not paying him.

The jail time seems like fair game.

Relevant.

Yeah, potentially relevant.

Fair game.

Yeah, I don't love going after people for their weight, but

the jail time, by all means, swing away.

John, swing away.

Now, for his part, Spiegel was furious that Houston seemed to have treated the shoot as his own personal hunting trip and paid basically no mind to the schedule or budget.

Potentially also a fair criticism.

And their relationship had deteriorated to the point where Houston did not want to make another film with Sam Spiegel.

But the African Queen's bad luck didn't even stop here after it was done being edited.

The reels of film had gone through a crazy storm in transit across the Atlantic, and customs held them up when they reached Boston.

But on December 19th, 1951, they arrived in Hollywood just in time to premiere on the 26th, right before the deadline for Oscar's season.

Now, despite initial concern from some distributors that Hepburn looked too old and Bogart looked too much like an actual drunken river rat, the African Queen did gangbusters at the box office, Chris.

Wow.

It only cost Horizon about $730,000 and Romulus about £250,000,

and it grossed $4.3 million

in 1951.

Yeah, good for them.

I don't know what that would be today, but I would imagine it'd be like $40 something million.

It would be more like $141 million today.

That seems too big.

Hold on.

Hold on.

Let me do this.

Okay, $53 million.

Okay, so I guess $41.

Fine.

So that's, I wasn't too far off.

Okay, fine.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yes, close.

About $53 million.

$1

million.

Listen,

I looked at the internet.

I did see there was a great meme I sent, Jesse.

It was like a guy, it's like 1927.

I'm standing at a lamppost.

I'm flipping a quarter.

I see a young lass.

I smile at her.

I accidentally drop the quarter.

It falls into the sewer grate.

I have just lost a trillion dollars.

So it is hard to know.

Well, as the trillions of dollars seemed to be rolling in, they somehow escaped the pockets of Humphrey Bogart, Catherine Hepburn, and John Houston.

Uh-oh.

Humphrey Bogart called in lawyers to investigate.

Real ones.

Real ones.

Not Sam Spiegel-style lawyers.

No, real ones.

That turned up quite a few discrepancies in Horizon's bookkeeping.

And from what we know about Sam Spiegel, this is not shocking.

Bogart ended up convincing Houston to meet with his counsel as well, Morgan Marie, who would eventually become Houston's business partner.

And here's what Houston said.

Murray filled me in on a few of the deals Sam had made and advised me to disassociate myself from Horizon and its shenanigans without delay.

It was the best intentioned, worst advice I ever accepted.

I got out of my contract with Horizon, no more partnership, no more share of the possible profits.

The African Queen was one of the most successful pictures I ever made, and Sam got all the money.

My leaving Horizon is one of the what-ifs of my career.

What if I had waited?

How much would I have made?

Actually, I know, a more than comfortable sum.

It would have changed my life.

The African Queen was dogged for years and years by messy litigation.

tons of lawsuits.

For her part, Catherine Hepburn didn't seem too surprised that the money money never materialized, and she was just happy about the experience that she'd had.

They may not have gotten their money, but they did get the career revitalization that they had been looking for.

In 1952, the movie was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Actress in a Leading Role for Catherine Hepburn, Best Director for John Houston, Best Writing for a screenplay, and Best Actor in a Leading Role for Humphrey Bogart.

Now, despite having openly talked a bunch of shit about how he thought the Oscars were an absolute load of crap, Bogart this time quietly campaigned for the African Queen, and much to his, and everyone's surprise, he beat Marlon Brando in a streetcar named Desire to win, I believe, his only Academy Award.

I think it is his only Oscar.

And I mean, Brando's great in that movie, but I'm kind of glad Bogart got it.

I think Bogart's great in this movie.

And it was like this, I feel like this was also a transition film for him.

Like

he was so stylized in some of his earlier movies as,

the private eye and the gumshoe detective, and in Casablanca.

He's very charming in this.

But I guess my point is, it showed an ability to translate to a slightly new era of film, I feel.

Like, it showed that he still had another act in him.

And I know it didn't last long.

Didn't he die in 57?

Yeah, he was not very old when he died.

Catherine Hepburn, though, continued to work for a long, long time.

On Broadway with Christopher Reeve in the 70s.

But anyway, I like that Bogart got this later win.

And as somebody who also, I have teased people I know or that care a lot about the Oscars that, you know, oh, it's an industry award.

It's the equivalent of the Dundee's.

But if I were to get nominated, would I campaign for it?

Of course.

Yes.

I would be thrilled.

So both things can be true.

Just in honor to be nominated.

Yes.

Now, I mentioned that Sam Spiegel would not actually be rich until later on in his career, and he sure would at that point.

He would go on to make on the waterfront, Lawrence of Arabia and the bridge over the river Kwai in the next decade alone.

He raked in the money.

So John Houston's decision to part ways with him, while probably smart from a personal perspective, financially was not.

Yeah.

And that wraps up our coverage of the African Queen.

Thank you, Lizzie.

That was a real what went wrong classic, like a real throwback to our just, we're on location, the draft's stepping on its own dick, and we're trying to make it through this movie.

There's bugs everywhere.

Here's what I'll say: if this had been a studio movie, like a classic Hollywood studio system movie, it would not have been on location.

Well, let's just say it was for one second.

Like

David Oselznick, right?

He would have, he would have gone to Africa or sent someone to Africa, found a sickly elephant, tied it up in a clearing, and said, Oh, John, look,

there's this terrifying wild elephant in this clearing on day one.

So John would just get it out of his system.

And I am not condone.

I think poaching is awful.

I'm a vegetarian, but I'm just saying the studio system knew how to handle, I think, some of these.

Yeah, there was no one handling John Houston.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Just the idea of him being like,

you all hold that thought.

We'll be back to shooting this afternoon and just literally marching off the set into the jungle with his gun, which he would do.

He would just leave the set with the gun and be like, see ya.

You could make a really funny, like, the studio style show about this movie.

Like, I do think I've always wondered why we haven't had a Hail Caesar style TV series yet.

And maybe it's just too expensive because to do a period piece sort of thing like that.

But that would be really fun.

Well, what went right, Chris?

I will give my what went right.

It's really, I'm torn, but I want to give it to

I'm going to give mine to Hepburn.

I'm going to steal her.

Good.

She clearly knows how to work with a lot of people.

And that's a really impressive quality, I think.

And I am not condoning anything that John Houston and Humphrey Bogart did in their sophomoric attempt to rib her, as they would, you know, as they would say.

But the fact that she took that in high spirits, it seems like, and and with grace, and then was able to channel it into, I'm not going to let you off the hook, John, you know, and also see the good in what he had to offer.

And it seems like he did offer some good direction and that did help her give the performance that she was after.

I think it just shows it's a real

strength.

to be flexible to other people's working styles.

And that's just very impressive under any circumstance.

And her performance is wonderful.

I think she and Bogar are both outstanding in this movie and so i'm just really impressed i think she was a lot easier to work with than humphrey bogart i would i would guess because she's just really prepared and she probably knew that script inside and out she just seems like the best she seems great and i that she has a lot more nerve and a lot more just conviction than

many people throughout the history of hollywood and she could apply it both morally and politically as you expressed at the beginning of this episode but she also could apply it when she was on a production as well.

And that's impressive.

Well, since you stole, I think, the most obvious what went right of the whole movie, I'm going to give it to the location.

We don't talk about that all that often, but I think that the choice that they made to film this on location, whether that was motivated by John Houston really wanting to kill an elephant or what, it was such a great choice.

Obviously, it was a total mess to film this and very uncomfortable, but it looks fantastic.

They look sick.

They look hot.

It's beautiful.

It just, I really think it paid off so much.

The cinematography is wonderful.

John Houston really used that environment to his advantage.

And I think he loved it there.

And I think that that comes across.

So I will give it to the absolutely beautiful filming locations.

And they shot.

in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo for most of this movie.

They also shot some in Uganda, and it's just gorgeous.

So that's my what went right for the African queen.

If you guys are interested in a little bit more discussion on kind of

the ugly or inherent colonialist

approach of location filmmaking in international locations in general, that is something we talk about a lot more in Fitzcaraldo because Fitzcaraldo, like I said, employed literally thousands of native peoples and the ethics of Herzog's approach are murky at best.

And that's a very so.

We talk about that a lot more if you guys are interested in our Fitzcaraldo episode.

If you guys want to listen to that, great.

A good companion piece to this one, which we admittedly focused almost exclusively on the American and European cast.

Well, as you mentioned, it's mostly just these two characters throughout most of the film.

Yeah.

Next, coming up next, Lizzie.

It's a catfight.

It's a one-on-one basketball game with Benjamin Bratt.

We are talking about the Halley Berry would-be

star vehicle, just one of the best,

most fun

misfires of the mid-ots.

Just an amazing comic book misfire of a movie.

Catwoman, The Last Attempt at a Solo Catwoman.

I know we got a kind of version of it in Dark Knight Rises, but yeah.

I can't wait.

It is going to be, it is going to be a lot of fun.

And we have a special guest.

We do have a a special guest.

Yeah.

Guys, if you are enjoying this podcast, there are five easy ways to support us.

Number one,

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I've been talking to Jesse about it.

What the heck?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's going to be exciting.

Deep Impact and Armageddon, two movies that beg the question,

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And for $50, you can get an African queen-style Canadian English shout-out just like one of these.

Here goes the old girl.

Angeline Renee Cook, Polly Ho-Yin, Evan Downey, Jose Salto, Amy Elgeschlager-McCoy,

Nathan Senteno, Jory Hillpiper, I'm just getting a really bad British accent.

Slip Knots 9.

Kay Canaba.

James McAvoy.

Cameron Smith.

God, I can't do accents.

Suzanne Johnson.

Ben Schindelman.

Scary Carey.

The Provost Family.

The O's sound like O's.

Now I'm getting Australian.

Didn't know this would be so hard.

Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kids.

David Friscolanti.

What is Mid-Atlantic, and how does one do it?

Adam Moffat.

Film it yourself.

Chris Zaka, Kate Elrington, M.

Zodia,

C.

Grace B.

Jen Mastromarino.

I'm going Maggie Smith.

D.

B.

Smith.

Blaise Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, Rearl G.

There we go.

Lance Stader, Nate the Knife, Lenna, Half Greyhound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Jake Killen, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, J.J.

Rapido,

Sadie, just Sadie, old girl, Brian Donahue, Adrian Peng Correa, Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheibel, Rosemary Southward,

Tom Christen, Jason Frankel, Sermon Cainani, Michael McGrath, Lan Rillard, Lydia Howes.

May we all float down the river together.

All right.

Thanks so much, Chris.

And we will be back next week for Catwoman.

Meow.

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.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.

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