Catwoman (with Ryan Bailey)

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to 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 one of the greatest cinematic furballs ever put to celluloid a movie that begs the question: if Hallie Berry can't pull off a Karen haircut, who can?

As always, I am Chris Winnerbauer, joined by my co-host, Lizzie Bassett, joined by a very special guest.

Lizzie, would you do the honors?

I certainly will.

Our special guest may be able to tell you, though, that it's not a Karen haircut as much as it is a John and Kate plus eight Kate Gosselin haircut, and that's because we have with us today Ryan Bailey of So Bad It's Good with Ryan Bailey.

He is, listen, he's a reality expert.

He covers, you know, reality TV shows on his show, but he does it with such vigor and detail.

And as I learned when I joined him for an episode of his show recently, he's also an enormous movie buff.

So kind of the perfect guest for this movie, which I would argue is so bad it's good.

And he's sitting here in a Stanley Kubrick hat.

So what else could we possibly want from him?

Ryan, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you guys.

I mean, this is like a make-a-wish foundation for me to be able to talk not about real housewives for a second is truly amazing.

I am a fan of your show.

I am so thrilled to be here.

Even if it is for Catwoman, I am so, so dang thrilled.

So thank you for having me.

And Kate Gosselin, thank you for that reference because as soon as you said Karen haircut, I was like Kate Goslin.

Watching the movie.

I was like Kate Goslin.

It's crazy.

I have to say, honestly I'm such a big fan of your show and it blows my mind that you can sustain those episodes when you do them by yourself you can sustain a conversation with yourself about the real housewives for two hours and it's amazing it's engaging all the way through you have like such a breadth of knowledge about these tb monsters who we all love so much and I just really it's very impressive.

If you have not listened to Ryan's show, you absolutely must.

If you watch any of these shows, it is truly a must listen.

I don't watch any of these shows, by the way.

And I listened because Lizzie was on your show.

Oh, I'm so sorry, Chris.

No, it's wonderful.

Yes.

It's weird.

It's like how I listen to some sports podcasts and I don't actually watch the sporting events.

And this is now going to be my relationship with you, Ryan.

I don't know the material, but I just like the sound of your voice and you're very engaging as you discuss it.

Well, any reality television really goes to what went wrong because every reality television show, you're wondering how this got made and what's the reality behind the reality.

Like it's not now, there's everything that happened behind the scenes, and you have to pay attention to a 360 focus of not only the show, but all the podcasts about the show and the Reddit threads about the show.

And you have to do like deep research, like you guys are doing, just to make sense of what you're seeing on screen, which most of the time you cannot make heads or tails of if you're just a casual viewer these days.

It's true.

Well, you certainly can't make heads or tails of this movie, I would say.

Heads or cattails.

So,

Lizzie, Ryan, in any particular order, had you seen Catwoman before?

And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

Guess first.

Ryan, please.

So, yes, I did watch this originally.

And just a little backstory about me.

One of my, I guess, I don't want to say sexual awakening in a creepy way, but Michelle Pfeiffer will always be my cat woman.

Of course.

And as a kid, I just thought it was just, I got into such a Michelle Pfeiffer kick from Catwoman that as a kid, I was watching movies like Russia House with like her and Sean Connery just to watch more Michelle Pfeiffer movies, like Frankie and Johnny with Al Pacino.

I became obsessed with Michelle Pfeiffer.

And so, yes, I saw this and I was so disappointed because, on top of that, I'm a huge geek.

I'm a huge Batman fan.

This doesn't even go into the world of Batman at all.

So,

I watched this.

I watched it once and I never watched it again until you guys asked me to watch it.

And I revisited it and it was more enjoyable in an LOL sort of a way.

And I was able to divorce myself from those original hurt feelings of how do you ruin this kind of property.

So I was able to divorce that.

And it was actually a more fun watch.

And especially looking at the directorial style.

But yeah, that was, that was it.

But Michelle Pfeiffer, I always speak your name.

And I don't think it's too late to put Michelle Pfeiffer into James Gunn's universe in some way at this point.

Oh, yeah, that would be great.

Well, okay, so I have to say thank you because I think you just clarified for me a lot about this.

So I actually, I had not seen this before.

And all I remembered about when it came out was that, you know, it was a disaster and everybody hated it.

And I watched it last night.

I loved it.

This movie is insane.

It's insane.

When Calli Berry catches that ball of catnip and starts rubbing it all over her face and purring and meowing, I was like, what won best picture this year?

Million dollar baby?

Get it out of there.

It should have been this.

So I was sitting there and I think David even said, he he was like, why do people hate this?

Like it's, it's crazy.

But what you just said makes so much sense is that you're totally right.

It pays zero attention whatsoever to the actual franchise or character of Catwoman in a way that's truly bonkers.

You've got Frances Conroy as a crazy cat lady who somehow owns a magical Egyptian cat and then she becomes an actual cat woman.

Great, great.

Great movie, A plus.

But yeah, I get it now.

I understand why you would be upset if you were coming from, you know, a love of the original franchise and particularly Michelle Pfeiffer's performance, which is like, am I incorrect in calling that also a bit of a campy performance, but sort of in a different way?

Yeah, it was very much in the style of what Burton had established, a very heightened style for Batman and Batman Returns.

And as we'll discuss, it actually is because of certain departures that Burton and his writer took from the source material, in particular with Batman Returns, that we end up going down this very,

very distinct, divorced from the comics path that we end up with.

There's a real weird domino effect that happens because of those films.

And as you mentioned, Ryan, we will get to this.

Pfeiffer was very much the high point of Batman Returns.

And so

it's a missed opportunity that there was never a solo movie with her.

I completely agree.

Get her in the gun universe.

It It would be fantastic.

And I know they flirted with it for a while with Michelle Pfeiffer, which I'm sure you'll talk about.

Yes.

But also, I'm also kind of thankful in some ways that she was not to this point brought in because you could see a world in which the Flash movie, which came out a couple of years ago, which used Michael Keaton again to not great effect, I'm shocked that they didn't shoehorn him in because we even had a CGI Nicholas Cage as Superman in that movie, right?

Right.

So I'm shocked.

It's a different aborted Tim Burton rendition of Superman.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And so for me, this movie very much, I think, Lizzie, you would agree, is like the cinematic forerunner to Madame Webb in many ways.

Catwoman walked so Madame Webb could run.

It's true.

Yeah.

Or vice versa.

And so, yeah, I think that this, to me, there's like this kind of D-grade superhero movie subgenre.

And I mean that with affection, but Madame Webb, Morbius, Craven the Hunter, perhaps the mid-ots Fantastic Fours.

They're certainly above the 2015 Fantastic Four.

Just on Craven the Hunter, have you guys seen the clips going around online of how they reanimated the actress's mouth for some of the lines that they had to retake?

Yes.

I watched the whole VFX breakdown of it.

It was amazing.

They just took like a still image of the actress.

It was completely still.

And they just replaced her mouth like the talking gerbils in those old Quiznos subs commercials.

Quiznos hamsters or annoying orange.

It literally literally looks like the earliest YouTube videos.

I don't know if you've seen this, Ryan.

Anyway.

But in some ways, the directing style of this or just the CGI that was used in 2003 reminds me of even what you're talking about right now.

It's like, it feels like this is not even fully fleshed out CGI at times.

It looks crazy.

Yeah.

I have one complaint about this movie about Catwoman, which is that

it's shocking.

One, I have one.

They make Callie Berry look terrible.

She looks.

They do.

They make her look.

And how do you do that?

She's like the most beautiful person I've ever seen.

I have seen her in person.

She is stunning, like truly the most beautiful person I've ever seen in my life.

Yeah.

Who did this?

Well, let's find out.

So this movie, which imagines a world in which felines are the Illuminati, I half expected Ophelia to show her the Zapruder film and there's a cat with a rifle on the grassy knoll and cats are behind everything.

But that's the great opening title sequence.

It's almost like Dick Adventure 7, where we're seeing famous cats through history and the evolution of cats and their magical powers.

Those acts neider openings of Watchmen.

You're forgetting X-Men Origins Wolverine where they also fight their way through history.

Every war.

So I do though think there's actually a lot to admire in this film.

I think the execution is extremely bungled and all over the place, but we'll learn why.

And when you have as many writers as they did, that's typically a good indicator of why the tone and the story got a little confused.

But first, let's go through some of the details before we get into how Hallie Berry survived one of the, I would say, most precipitous falls in the history of Hollywood stars back in 2004.

So, Catwoman is a 2004 American superhero film directed by Pitoff, single-name director, like Mick G, for example.

Perfect.

The screenplay is credited to John Rogers, John Broncado, and Michael Ferris.

Story by Teresa Rebeck.

Oh, Broncado and Ferris.

Now,

many, many, many, many, many, many, many more writers wrote on this.

We will get to them.

Teresa Rebeck is a playwright, a very good playwright.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I do want to mention the vibey tunes put to screen on this, just because we won't talk about it too much at the end.

Sorry, that's my other complaint.

Well, it's the house MD opening music that they just use the whole time.

It's not good.

It's Klaus Spaudelt, who co-composed Kind we don't know exactly on Pirates of the Caribbean.

So it stars Hallie Berry as Patience Phillips and her alter ego, Catwoman.

Sharon Stone as Laurel Hedaire.

Alex Borstein as the obligatory funny friend, Sally.

The, and my researcher put these notes in, the ridiculously hot, although I would have to agree, Benjamin Bratt as Tom Lone.

Yes.

Lambert Wilson as George Hedair.

Francis Conroy as Ophelia.

And I do want to mention Byron Mann as Wesley.

He is one of the henchmen.

And I've loved him since I saw, I remember he's the dastardly CDO manager, Wing Chow, in The Big Short, if you guys remember.

And I really like him.

I think he's great and he's fun in this too.

Well, did you notice who the other henchman is, by the way?

No.

I recognize, yeah, what's the actor's name?

So we looked this up because we were like, where are we seeing this guy?

It's Michael Massey, who's in The Crow.

Oh, that's right.

From The Crow.

Yeah, he's actually the one who, not to be a bummer, but I believe fired the shot that killed Brendan Lee.

Got it.

Yeah.

I always think it's so interesting when you have a look of a henchman.

Yes.

He does.

He's got that very sharp face.

You know, it's like you can really work.

You can work in Hollywood.

Yeah.

You know who has the look of a henchman, who aged into the look of a henchman?

We just discussed him, I believe, is Crispin Glover.

Oh, who is beautiful, but has the definitely has the look of a henchman as well.

Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, oral histories of Catwoman from Inverse and Entertainment Weekly, a making of Catwoman, DVD featurette, Dan Waters' interview for Bloody Disgusting, and many, many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved with the film.

As always, the IMDb log line reads: A shy woman, endowed with the speed, reflexes, and senses of a cat, walks a thin line between criminal and hero, even as a detective doggedly pursues her, fascinated by both of her personas.

Emphasis by me.

It's always hard to figure out where to start with some of these episodes, but with Catwoman, I think we got to start with the end because we know where this is going.

We can't bury the lead.

We tried to bury Hallie Berry back in 2004, 2005, but she wasn't having it.

In 2005, she accepted the Razzie Award for Worst Actress for her performance in Catwoman, which also took home worst picture, worst screenplay, and worst director.

I will note, producer, director, screenwriter did not show up to the Razzies.

Hallie Berry did.

She showed up with her Oscar.

Yeah.

And she carried it onto the stage, which she had won three years earlier for Monster's Ball.

And let's listen to a brief clip of her performance as she took home the Razzie.

Oh my God.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you so much.

I never in my life thought I would be of you.

My nigga rapping!

I mean, it's not like I ever aspired to be.

But thank you.

So I'm not going to play the entire speech, even though it's amazing because it goes on way too long.

And she calls out Warner Brothers in the speech.

She like told me that she's like, oh, she does.

Oh, yeah.

Like, I read through that.

I didn't get to see it, which was just delightful to watch that right now.

But she calls out Warner Brothers and like, thank you, Warner Brothers, for putting me in the worst movie ever, which I thought was amazing.

There's a few other people she thanked.

So yes, she said, thank you to Warner Brothers for putting her in a piece of shit, god-awful movie.

That was the exact quote.

She then said, it's hard being on top.

It's much better being on the bottom.

She then thanked the writers, all 20 of them.

She then thanked her co-stars, specifically calling out Alex Borstein for lying to my face and telling me I was doing a great job.

She then thanked her director, Pitoff, the one-name French guy, and went on to say, I didn't know what the hell he was saying.

I'm sure it showed in my performance, but it was truly a joy and a pleasure.

You can watch the full speech online.

It is very tongue-in-cheek.

She's obviously being extremely sarcastic.

She plugs her acting coach.

She tells everybody to buy her acting coach's book because it could change their life.

She thanks her manager.

She says, Maybe you should read the script next time before you just cash my check.

It's a really, really, really fun performance.

And it really begs a question: which is how did an actor as dynamic, funny, talented as Hallie Berry go from being the first and to this day only black woman to take home the best actress Oscar to winning a Razzie?

Wow, breaking glass ceilings across the book.

Can you win an Oscar for a Razzie speech?

Because that was really,

it was gripping.

But I mean, I mean, obviously it comes down to money, right?

Like she got one of the highest salaries at the time for Catwoman.

So, right, doesn't, and that's how we wind up here because Monster's Ball, she got that Oscar, which is such cachet in Hollywood.

So you can actually do like the James Bond film.

You can start making real money because you know she got probably a day player rate on Monster's Ball.

And so this is her cashing in just like every other male star out there does this, you know, do one for them, one for me.

And it's just that Catwoman was such a phenomenal flop that we still talk about it to this day.

But this is par for course for action stars in Hollywood a lot of the times.

And also, as we'll get to.

There may not have been much of a script for her to read when she attached to this movie.

That makes sense because Halle Berry is a very smart person and she knows good material.

This movie's nuts.

I don't think there's any way Halle Berry read this particular script and said yes.

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Well, let's talk about how we got from the origins of Catwoman to the version that we see here.

So before Halle Berry was Catwoman, there was the Catwoman.

But before she was the Catwoman, she was just the cat.

And she lived in the shadows between black and white, good and bad, Razzie and Oscar.

She was created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, who also created Ryan.

The Joker, Batman, so many amazing characters.

That's right.

As Kane said, We knew we needed a female nemesis to give the strip sex appeal.

So Bill and I decided to create a somewhat friendly foe who committed crimes, but was also a romantic interest in Batman's rather sterile life.

She was a kind of female Batman, except that she was a villainess and Batman was a hero.

We figured that there would be this cat and mouse, cat and bat byplay between them.

He would try and reform her and bring her over to the side of law and order, but she was never a murderer of entirely evil like the Joker.

So I like this.

It's this temptress sort of quality to her that ideally brings out a new dimension to the kind of bland Batman of that era.

So she makes her first appearance in 1940, Batman number one, the DC comic.

It's the first issue of Batman's series of solo comics.

And I'd just like to read you her introduction because it's so fun.

So Batman and Robin are on a yacht.

They meet an elderly woman with gray hair, glasses, a sprained ankle wrapped in a bandage.

But under the bandage, she's hiding a necklace that she stole from a real elderly woman.

Batman and Robin notice that she has nice legs and she can run upstairs like a young person with perfectly unsprained ankles.

So Robin tackles her and Batman wipes off her makeup while saying, quiet or papa spank.

She then tries to convince Batman to go into business with her, but he insists they're on opposite sides of the law.

He lets her get away, talks about her beautiful eyes, and then reminds himself, you have a girlfriend.

They have a love-hate relationship throughout the entire series.

They both let each other get away over and over again.

And by the second issue, Batman starts to refer to her as the Catwoman.

And by the third issue, she has the cat mask, no holes for eyes.

They just look like, it looks like a real cat's head.

So I think an important thing that may have made a big impact on you, Ryan, with Michelle Pfeiffer's version of Catwoman was that whip.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look, I got, I got him.

I'm like, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

As he's like breathlessly sitting there thinking about it.

Yeah.

Patent leather and whip.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it was seven years before she got the whip.

And her original whip is not a bull whip like Michelle Pfeiffer has in Batman Returns.

It was actually called the Cat O Nine Tails Whip, which is described as nine pieces of knotted cord fastened to a handle and used to flog the bear back.

It was actually created as a form of corporal punishment in the British Royal Navy and was used into the late 19th century.

So 10 years in, we learn her origin story.

It's the 1950 issue of Batman number 62.

The wall of a condemned building comes crashing into the street.

Bricks fly everywhere.

Catwoman saves Batman, but in the process, takes a couple bricks to the head.

When she comes to, she doesn't recognize Batman or Robin, and she tells them her name is not Patience, but Selena Kyle.

She's a flight attendant for Speed Airlines, and the last thing she remembers is falling out of the plane as it crashed, hitting her head on a branch and blacking out.

By now, her cat mask had eye holes.

It looked more like a cat version of Batman's mask.

She had a cape.

She didn't wear the jumpsuit yet.

She wore a dress.

And the color of her costume changed a lot.

And there was actually a stretch where she was blonde.

Okay, let's talk about the moral panic of the 1950s really quickly around these comics.

Lizzie, we discussed this a little bit on Wonder Woman.

There's this psychiatrist named Frederick Wortham, who I have read as the asshole who tried to cancel comics in the 1950s.

And he read so much Freudian sexuality into these comic books.

So here's what he wrote about Catwoman in his famous book, Seduction of the Innocent.

A typical female, and imagine this in an older German voice.

A typical female character is the Catwoman who is vicious and uses a whip.

The atmosphere is homosexual and anti-feminine.

If the girl is good-looking, she is undoubtedly the villainess.

If she is after Bruce Wayne, she will have no chance against Dick.

Now, Dick is actually Robin.

His nickname was Dick.

I believe what he's suggesting is no one could like Catwoman and therefore Batman and Robin are gay, to which Ryan would say, we're all after Catwoman and her whip at this point.

What are you talking about?

Why can't we yes and both of those?

Exactly.

I think there's a threesome that's about to go down between these.

Let me know when you get to the problem.

Yeah.

In 1954, the comics industry adopts this new guide or code for creating, quote, moral comics.

It's voluntary, not mandatory.

You just didn't receive a certain seal of approval if you didn't follow the code.

So DC decides Catwoman, she's a little morally ambiguous.

She doesn't fit into this world.

So her last appearance is in 1954.

She abandons Batman and Robin on on an island to be hunted by jungle cats, but she leaves them with an out because she does not take Batman's utility belt.

She then flies into the sunset on her plane, which is shaped like a panther and has retractable arms.

Wow.

And Batman tells Robin, that was no accident.

Murder isn't in Catwoman's heart.

Sentiment is her weakness, and that's why we'll catch her the next time.

But there wouldn't be a next time for 12 years.

So let's jump to the world of television.

Are either of you familiar with Catwoman and her early appearance on television in the late 1960s?

Well, yeah, was this Julie Newmar and Urtha Kitt on the Batman television show?

Very good.

Ryan, I am so impressed.

Clearly, we've hit a niche of interest with you on this episode.

Yes, so Batman, the 1966, 67, 68 series starring Adam West, featured Catwoman, first played for two seasons by actress Julie Newmar.

But in the third season, Newmar was off making a movie, so the role goes to Eartha Kitt.

Now, Urtha Kitt is very famous at this point, especially especially for her music.

She'd been nominated for an Emmy.

She had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

You guys, if you don't somehow recognize her name, you would recognize her version of Santa Baby, for example, or Cecibon.

Oh, love Urtha Kit.

Big fan.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I'm saying the audience.

No, I know you do.

And also, she steals the movie in The Emperor's New Groove, which we've covered as well.

So.

The fact that she was going to play Catwoman opposite a white Batman was still a pretty big deal.

So this was just eight months after Loving the Virginia, and it's roughly a year before Star Trek's monumental first interracial kiss.

Captain Kirk, Lieutenant Uhura.

So as Kit's daughter later said, this was 1967.

There were no women of color at that time wearing skin-tight bodysuits playing opposite a white male lead with sexual tension between them.

She was one of the first really beautiful black women who were allowed to be sexy without being stereotyped.

I do think she helped Blaze the Trail.

Now, there were some people who said that the show intentionally erased or cut out some of the sexual tension between Catwoman and Batman when Kit took on the role.

But Kit herself has said that she had a great time.

She said the character was a lot of fun.

She said that she was a starving cat at the time, and this was one of the greatest bones that was ever thrown to her.

People still remember my name because of Catwoman.

And Newmar herself said that Urtha Kit did it better.

She's really fun.

Yeah.

She's a really, really fun cat woman.

She's super fun.

And especially for that version of the show, which was so campy in a way better way than Joel Schumacher's version ever could be.

It was so fun to watch Adam West play off of Earth a Kid.

It was like a tennis match.

Yes.

And

she's such a trailblazer in her real life, but she also is so willing to go against conventional wisdom or to take the not safe path in the way that I think Catwoman would.

Like one of the things that we came across in our research in January of of 1968, she was invited to a White House luncheon where she criticized the Vietnam War.

Go Urtha.

And the papers claimed she made Lady Bird Johnson cry.

Both of them say that wasn't true.

But she was blacklisted in Hollywood and the CIA compiled a dossier on her.

And then she made a comeback in the late 70s after a journalist at the New York Times exposed that CIA dossier.

So she was, again, I think like Catwoman, she was very comfortable operating in,

it's not moral gray zones, because I think she had the moral high ground in this instance, but outside the bounds of what was conventionally accepted as good behavior for a woman at the time, for example.

So, there was actually a third actress who also played Catwoman at this time, and this is Lee Merriweather.

She was a former Miss America.

She was the first Catwoman in a movie.

One other thing worth noting: all these actresses were in their 30s and 40s when they took the role.

So, Catwoman,

always

a slightly older actress.

So,

let's jump forward.

The TV show was canceled in 1968.

And while Catwoman cropped up in a couple animated series, her popularity kind of fizzled in the 70s and 80s until the comic book boom of the early 1990s in Hollywood.

So any guesses?

Do you guys remember which movie?

1989 movie came out that really spurred, I think, the boom of comic book.

Batman?

Batman.

Tim Burton's Batman.

That's right.

June 19th, 1989.

Come on.

There we go.

There we go.

So Tim Burton's Batman was an unexpected, huge success, massive success.

On top of that, Marvel is desperate for cash.

So they are just fire sailing properties.

They are just,

you want a Fantastic Four?

Take a Fantastic Four.

You want one of these?

Take one.

You want a Blade?

Take a Blade.

There's a big announcement.

All of these Marvel properties are being developed.

There's a big, big gold rush on comics.

It's James Cameron's going to do Spider-Man.

Wesley Snipes is going to be in the Black Panther.

LL Cool J is doing Blade.

Oliver Stone's doing Electra.

There's going to be...

This press announcement keeps popping up in all of our episodes.

None of these movies, none of these movies get made.

None of these movies get made.

Wes Craven's doing Doctor Strange.

None of these movies get made.

None of these movies get made.

All right.

But another Batman movie did get made, and that's Batman Returns, which was released in 1992, directed by Tim Burton and written by Dan Waters.

So Michael Keaton came back as Batman.

He's the best.

And Michelle Pfeiffer made her debut as Catwoman and awoke something in many a youngster.

And I'm just guessing of all generations across America, all generations, sexes, etc.

Michelle Pfeiffer, Ryan, had joined the project last minute.

Who did she replace?

She's blanking out from Blade Runner.

And no, no, wait.

I'm thinking of the Batman, the original movie when Kim Bassinger was played.

Anyways, who did she replace?

Annette Benning.

Annet Benning.

Ah,

Annette Benning.

Interesting.

She'd gotten knocked up by Warren Beatty a few months before filming began.

He was like, no swinging whips.

You get back here.

Now, there were a lot of doubts about Pfeiffer's ability to take on the role, but they were quickly proven wrong.

Not only could she literally actually decapitate mannequins with her whip, and if you guys have not seen it, go to YouTube and watch Michelle Pfeiffer behind the scene footage, I believe three or four mannequins in a row,

actually gets them with a 10-foot whip, and the whole crew just erupts in shock and applause because she's so good at it it wasn't just the crew early test screenings proved people loved her she's so good in this movie amazing they loved her so much that a couple weeks before the movie came out the studio decided to add that last shot of her looking up at the bat signal to assure the audience that catwoman was still alive That's what's what's so frustrating about the Batman franchise at that point as a fan is that you actually set up the return of somebody and then you go in a completely different direction after Michael Keaton doesn't want to go go into the next one and Tim Burton doesn't want to go into the next one and Joel Schumacher gets involved.

You're like, you've already started something, this weird, wacky, wild world that is campy, not campy like the 66 Batman TV show, but you have all of this promise.

You know, you just wonder if like that was today.

This movie did really decent at the box office and they decided to completely switch course at that point.

But let's talk about why, because it did do decent at the box office, but not in a way that gave the studio confidence.

So it had a record-breaking opening weekend, $46 million.

It was released in June, again, summer tentpole, but it fell off a lot more quickly than the studio was anticipating.

So week over week, that percentage drop in box office gross was extremely steep, especially compared to the first Batman.

It just didn't have legs.

And the issue was that a lot of audiences found it really dark.

I mean, it is a dark movie.

I mean, it's a great movie.

The penguin has bile coming out of his mouth.

Like, even as a kid, you're like, this, and the sexualization.

And they were trying to sell happy meal toys based on the penguin.

I have all those happy meal toys.

Like, I remember that.

It was such a weird partnership trying to sell action figures based on a Danny DeVito's penguin.

You know, like, I want to play with the chubby penguin man.

It was a big promotional tie-in with McDonald's, and they were not loving it.

It was a big, big problem.

Thank you.

Jesse wrote it.

I didn't.

It upset McDonald's.

They were very, very frustrated.

And there were some Batman fans that were frustrated too by the creative liberties that Waters and Burton had taken with the franchise.

So Batman killed people, post-comics code mid-50s, he did not kill.

Catwoman's character and backstory, this timid secretary, she was resurrected and transformed by mystical alley cats after getting pushed out of a window.

Which is very similar to the Catwoman movie, pushed out of a water pipe, like by Max Shrek and Batman Returns.

And we have the makeup, you know, it's very similar in story.

It is.

And so again, that's why Waters and Burton were the first to take these steps away from the source material.

I think it works really well in the tone of the world that they set up.

But the point is, you know, Penguin, much darker than the version that folks were used to from the comics.

Max Shrek was an entirely new character invented for the movie.

But again, Catwoman was the silver lining.

Not only did audiences love her, but critics loved her too.

The New York Times wrote, Selena metamorphoses thrillingly into Catwoman in a sequence that ranks with the most captivating moments Miss Fiverr has spent on screen.

Fully inhabiting this vixenish character, she turns Catwoman into a fierce, seductive embodiment of her earlier dissatisfaction.

End quote.

General consensus, she stole the show, and one producer knew that she should have her own Catwoman movie.

Enter Denise De Novi.

Okay,

so the studio doesn't invite Burton and Waters back to make a third Batman movie.

So this, Ryan, is where we divert from what should have been the good universe, right?

Yeah.

So Waters has joked that Warner Brothers divorced Burton and gave him Catwoman in the settlement.

Summer of 1993, Batman Forever is in pre-production with Joel Schumacher.

We'll get to that movie later.

And the Treys report that Burton and Waters are working on Catwoman, but it's really complicated because they had very different versions of the movie in mind.

So Waters has said that Burton wanted to make a, quote, $18 million black and white movie like the original Cat People of Selena just low-key living in a small town.

End quote.

I'm in.

Please make that.

I mean, make that now.

Yeah.

What's interesting is it's basically what he ended up doing with Ed Wood, which he was developing at that time and had been put into turnaround.

So it's clear that he had an aesthetic on mind and he he was looking for the right vehicle for it.

So at the same time, Waters wanted to write this huge bombastic cat woman going to another city story.

I had her move to a Los Angeles version of Gotham City, and it's run by these three asshole superheroes.

It was the boys before the boys.

Also sounds great.

It's kind of more like an early draft of V for Vendetta, I remember.

Basically, like she has no memory of her life as catwoman.

She's moved to this neo-vegas hellhole.

People drive golf carts instead of cars.

It's very Burton-esque.

And then once she embraces Catwoman, there is the cult of good, which is the bad superheroes.

And so she infects the entire female population with the idea of Catwoman.

They all rebel and they come out in Catwoman costumes in the streets.

It becomes this like giant revolution movie.

She becomes a leader, a leader of women as they lead a revolution of Catwoman.

So it kind of takes the idea in the final film of Catwomen women throughout history and makes it a revolution inside of this weird way.

He's like a version of Joaquin Phoenix's Joker at the end of the movie where everybody's inspired by his anarchy.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, this script did not go over well.

Waters has said that Tim Burton got, quote, exhausted reading my script.

But in other interviews, it seems like he basically thinks Burton wasn't really interested in this movie.

He wasn't really giving him notes, but he also didn't ask the studio to replace Waters.

It seems like he was maybe treading water, literally.

And so it's worth noting that in early 1994, there are reports that Burton just doesn't know what he wants to make next.

He's considering Catwoman.

There's also Follow the House of Usher.

There's Ed Wood.

There's potentially Superman at some point.

He'll go on to do Mars attacks.

So again, I think he's a little bit torn because perhaps he'd been anticipating doing a third Batman, and now that's not the next thing on the road, Matt.

So Waters writes for two years.

And in July of 95, he submits his script to the the studio on the same day that Batman Forever was released.

And the studio went totally silent.

And Waters later told a reporter, there's a crazy thing in Hollywood where everybody's afraid to give bad news.

It's like ghosting a girlfriend or a boyfriend.

Your agent doesn't want to give bad news.

The studio doesn't want to give bad news.

The studio never really fired him.

They just said, we'll do a notes session.

And then it never got scheduled.

And then all of a sudden, Tim Burton was directing a a different movie.

And then his agent said, Let's talk about your next project.

And he said, Well, I'm still writing Catwoman.

And they said, No, no, no, no, no, they paid you off.

We're done.

And so that's how he found out Catwoman was dead.

And Daniel Waters, by the way, he also wrote like Heathers, right?

Ooh, I believe, which it would make a lot of sense just in the dialogue and Batman Returns being kind of so acerbic in wit.

Yes.

Oh, man.

I love Heathers.

I mean, it's amazing.

He wrote Heathers.

He did write Hudson Hawk as well.

And he wrote Demolition Man.

That was the big one where,

because that also feels extremely campy and fun if you guys haven't seen it.

And what's interesting is the world of Demolition Man to me feels similar to the world of the Catwoman script that is described that he wrote as well.

Is that Catwoman script floating around out there?

I had never.

Yes, it is.

And there are long, I have a multi-page here description of the entire, like I could, you know, read, it's just too long to read, but it's, it's pretty,

pretty intense and in-depth.

And it seems like it would have been a very expensive movie to make because not only do you have to build these amazing, enormous, Burton-esque sets, but then you have to fill them with an entire army of Catwoman in the third act of the film.

Catwoman, of course, has nine lives.

She lost one, but the studio wasn't ready to give up on the project.

So even though Waters was off, Denise Denovi was fielding additional takes.

So a few years ago, writer John August, who you guys know, he wrote Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, so many things, host of the Script Notes podcast, which is fantastic.

If you guys haven't listened, check it out.

He participated in the hashtag share your rejections trend on Twitter, and he claimed that he had pitched Catwoman to Warner Brothers in 98.

I'd like to read his tweet.

Catwoman at Warner's in 98, sequel with Michelle Pfeiffer returning, producer excited, after pitch, exec insisted it needed to be Sarah Michelle Geller and involve hair washing scene, then showed me Matrix trailer.

End quote.

That sounds like the greatest meeting of all time.

I would love to have been in on that meeting.

You go in and there's Michelle is thrilled.

She is coming back.

She's on her whip game.

And then he pitches and they go, and by the way, we're thinking, we're going to age it down.

We're thinking Sarah Michelle Geller.

And he's, what?

And they go, have you seen this trailer for The Matrix?

And then he's put it on.

I was washing my hair today.

I had a great idea.

The hair washing.

What do they mean?

Well, you know what's funny?

They eventually got that scene in The Grudge.

Oh.

Oh, that's true.

And I wonder if that executive was involved.

We'll never know.

What if there's a grudge in the back of your head?

But you got to think, this is how Hollywood thinks in a lot of ways, because you imagine even with this Halle Berry cat woman, it's like, what if they were playing one-on-one basketball?

And that's where we saw a lot of her cat woman powers was on the court.

And also her butt.

Well, we'll get to that scene.

What if we show singles of her ass bouncing?

What if they did it in front of kids, like a lot of kids?

These poor kids in this playground that they're on consistently.

We'll get it there.

So John August did not win this job.

So Zenobi brought in new writers, Teresa Rebeck and Kate Condell.

So Lizzie, you mentioned Teresa Rebecca.

She had co-written Harriet the Spy, a lot of TV, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, LA Law, a movie called Gossip starring James Marston, Lena Hedy, and Norman Reedas.

And Condell co-wrote the second legally blonde movie.

Now they're writing this in 2000.

So this is just before we get the kind of reignition of superhero excitement with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, which is going to come out in 2002.

According to Entertainment Weekly, they wrote a low-budget origin story with feminist grit, contrasting the sheen of mainstream superhero films driven by men.

This is definitely directionally correct in that the movies that preceded Catwoman most immediately that were based on DC and Marvel Comics were male-driven.

X-Men in 2000, Blade in 1998, Batman and Robin in 97, technically Steel with Shaquille O'Neal in 97 as well.

But I think the more important element to understand is that Catwoman's being developed at a time when everybody seems to be keeping their powder dry when it comes to comic book adaptations.

And it's a bit of a dead moment between the year 2000 and 2002/2003.

Here's a synopsis from Mike Thompson, published in the American film magazine Cashières du Cinemart.

And I would like to read this one because it's pretty interesting.

We open with Patience, age 12, in a tree with her cat, Spooky.

Patience's mother, Constance, is getting ready to confront her boss, Simon Greenaway, about royalties she feels she's owed due to a computer chip she created, but that he is taking credit for.

So it's kind of the terminator too.

Constance heads off to her meeting but never returns.

We learn that she apparently committed suicide by breathing in carbon monoxide.

Fast forward 12 years, Patience has grown up in working, where else?

A pet grooming store.

Her life outside work is a mess.

She never goes out.

She has no self-confidence.

And while she's sure her mother was killed, she can't convince anyone.

Simon Greenaway, however, has used the computer chip Patience's mother created to build an industrial empire.

As you already guessed, the story goes that Patience sets out to prove that her mother really created the chip.

She's killed, resurrected by cats, and a scene similar to the resurrection from Batman Returns and turns into Catwoman.

From there, the story plays out like you would expect.

An action sequence here, some witty banter there.

The truth is revealed.

The bad guys are punished.

So,

computer chips instead of the beauty industry, kind of, and a revenge story, more or less.

Which, by the way, I like the beauty industry stuff they do in this one.

Also, Chris, I just want to say you forgot Teresa Ribeck's one of her probably most important and iconic credits, which is Smash.

I don't know if you ever watched Smash.

Oh, I never watched Smash.

Brian, did you?

Yes, and it was on Broadway for a second as well.

So, I mean, that's huge.

We need a Catwoman musical eventually.

That's right.

Oh, yes, we do.

We need a making of Catwoman musical, and that would be great.

Chris, did they ever say anything about why take, I mean, no offense to patience, but why take it completely out of Gotham?

Why take it out of Selena Kyle?

Yeah.

Because you would think you would want to be able to tie in that universe at some point.

You nailed it, Ryan.

This is exactly where I'm going to get to it.

Do you have a guess, Lizzie, as to why?

I have a guess that it has to do something with the rights.

And I don't know if I'm wrong, but it's because this was not available on HBO Max.

I had to rent it on Amazon.

And this this is in theory, and it has the Warner Brothers logo at the top.

So that tells me something went awry somewhere in the rights because it should, in theory, be on HBO if it is a Warner property.

Yes.

So we weren't able to fully untangle the rights issue, but it is a rights issue.

So due to the stipulations in the contracts of folks involved in Batman returns, I believe, and it may be specifically Michelle Pfeiffer's contract.

They could not use the name Selena Kyle unless they hired Pfeiffer.

That is what writer John Rogers said about the movie, and he would be the next writer hired.

They have said they could not afford Pfeiffer.

I also read she was not interested, but then I also read she was interested and felt slighted that they hadn't approached her.

So

unclear what's the actual answer as to why not Pfeiffer, whether they feel she had aged out of the role in terms of pop culture relevance and they wanted a the Michelle Geller tips it to me that they're looking to try to capitalize on a younger, newer, fresher face and that they were in the way that Sharon Stone's character is kind of edged out in this movie, they were doing that to Pfeiffer.

That's my guess.

But the base issue is they are not able to use Selena Kyle's name due to the rights and contracts.

But the rights issue must have worked itself out at some point because by the time you have Anna Hathaway playing Catwoman in Nolan's universe, she is Selena Kyle again.

Yeah.

And again, I could not get an exact answer on this, but my general understanding is that because Nolan's Batman actually exists inside the Batman DC universe, they are allowed to use the name Selena Kyle, although I believe they don't use the name, they don't actually refer to her as Catwoman in that film.

Whereas Catwoman with Hallie Berry technically does not exist inside the Batman universe.

They specifically never mention Batman.

So they bring in another writer, John Rogers.

Now, Rogers has written several episodes of The Cosby Show.

Oh, perfect.

Oh, he's back then.

A natural fit.

Yeah.

Catwoman's in big Cosby sweaters in his draft.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you remember American Outlaws?

Yeah.

I don't know if you guys saw that.

Yeah, it's Colin Farrell and Allie Larder.

And then he also wrote one of the greatest disaster movies of all time, The Core, which is a movie about taking the subway to the center of the earth.

And it is amazing.

I've done it.

It's really good.

It's Hillary Swank.

And it's just, it's so, it makes Armageddon look like a PhD in physics in terms of scientific accuracy.

I'll wait for the criterion.

Yeah, it probably is coming.

So he would eventually write an early draft of Transformers, but right now he's kind of the perfect size for Catwoman.

So Denovi calls him up.

She says, we've been working on this Catwoman movie for 10 years.

We got a draft that nobody likes.

You want to come in and work on it?

He says, okay.

So he comes in because they have an actress who's very interested in playing Catwoman.

It's not Halle Berry, but it's someone who was pretty big in the late 90s and early 2000s.

And that's Ashley Judd.

Oh.

Yeah.

So you can see a photo of this script online where the cover literally reads, Ashley Judd as Catwoman.

So this is a couple years after Double Jeopardy, which I really liked.

Really love that.

Yeah.

Where the Heart Is with Natalie Portman, 2000.

There were reportedly months of meetings.

And by early April of 2001, Trades report, Ashley Judd,

Catwoman.

Been waiting for that one.

So Rogers claims it was his version of the script that got the movie Greenlit.

And according to some sources, he submits his first draft in July of 2001.

There's at least one additional draft in March of 2002.

So let's talk about what he did with this draft.

So his first pitch is this cannot be a heightened reality like the Schumacher Batman's.

It has to be a grounded crime story.

So he says his script was very dark and violent.

It's going to be a return to this sort of genre-y, grounded vengeance story.

And then we did none of that.

So he said, initially, the axis of the story was the domestic labor of housewives.

Then we turned it into a bioweapon thing.

Then I made patients a vet so it would make sense.

She's working with animals.

There was originally a whole historical sequence where you see the Egyptian cat goddess Bast bring the first cat woman back to life.

And then you see the catwoman of history and all this other cool stuff.

That became a speech by Francis Conroy.

And he hated this process and ended up hating the script.

So he said that in the draft before mine, they had insisted on a scene where Catwoman, in the middle of a chase sequence, through the city, smashes through the window of a department store, and here's a mother talking about how a dress fits on her daughter.

And Catwoman stops and does a speech about body image before she then continues the pursuit as the police thunder up the stairs.

There was a lot of okay, so they just wrote Barbie, yeah, there was a lot of we have to write speeches, and then America Ferrara had a monologue.

Yes, we have to write speeches to justify why she does this.

And I'm like, Indiana Jones doesn't do that, James Bond doesn't do that.

So, as Rogers worked on the script, Denovi went looking for a director, and

I don't know what she saw here, but she saw something.

I saw something.

It was the 2001 film VDOC, which is a French film.

It is very notable for being the first feature-length, full-length feature film shot entirely on high-definition digital video.

It's actually in the Guinness Book of World Records for that point.

So I don't mean to take away from VDOC, but if you watch the trailer, it looks a lot like Catwoman.

It's just Gerard Depardieu in 19th century France Catwoman.

It's very digital, very stylized.

So like 90s music video, just frenetically cut, frenetically paced.

Also, I'm sorry, I cannot stand Gerard Dippardieux.

Oh, I mean, there's a lot to not stand, yeah.

It was the directorial debut of Pitoff, French director.

His real name is Jean-Christophe Comer.

And in the late 80s, he had, of course, founded a digital post-production studio in France.

So, like so many directors of the 90s and early 2000s, he came up in VFX.

I mean, David Fincher is a great example of this.

Came up in VFX at ILM, goes on to do music videos, controversial commercials, becomes one of the greatest directors of all time.

So I do think that this was a pipeline that studios were looking at.

And there was a director who was very well known, who he worked with, which is Jean-Pierre Gennot, who had done, I mean, you guys have seen Alien Resurrection, City of the Lost Children, so many wonderful films.

Well, also, like, it totally makes sense to want to hire somebody from a VFX background for a movie like this that's going to be extremely VFX heavy, especially if you're concerned about money.

You would think that this person should have a pretty decent sense of what these things are going to cost.

Yeah.

And these films that he had worked on as a visual effects, I mean, even back to Delicatessen and like, I think 91 or City of Lost Children, these are all visually stunning films.

They are.

So if you're taking a big swing and you do not have to pay a big price for a first or second time director, you think maybe this is legitimately a home run or a very unique idea.

Like maybe I'm finding the next Tim Burton.

And there's a Burton Burton quality to Jean-Pierre Genot's work.

But they're not even thinking about the language barrier, which even Ali Berry makes fun of in the Razzie, where he was not able to communicate his vision with the crew.

But like on paper, you could see this is a big swing potentially.

And if you watch those films, they each have a unique look.

I agree.

I also wonder if they took this to a number of bigger American directors who said, you know, we're not interested, candidly, or they did.

I wonder if he was their first choice.

I don't know.

We did not find any information that said that they had approached other directors, but I completely agree that you probably think maybe we can get him at a price.

Maybe he does something really cool.

And we've broken in this new awesome director.

And now we have him at our studio.

And he will be, we will put this franchise on his back.

And so Denovi and the team at Warner Brothers, they all watched the movie.

And they said it was really impressive that, you know, he's a visionary and they wanted a different look for Catwoman.

so specifically Denobi said I didn't want it to look like just any other mainstream popcorn summer movie I wanted it to have a beauty and a style and sort of transcend the genre a little bit and have it be more stylish and sophisticated than the average movie and she wanted a director who took the character as seriously as I did and she hoped that because Pitoff was French and not American he would have a distance from Catwoman and how she existed in pop culture and he could just treat her as a mythical, like kind of a mythical creature, a folkloric hero, and give her the gravitas that she may be missing in the United States.

Well, he did some of those things.

Well, let's see.

Yeah.

So, April 2002, he's attached to direct his second ever movie.

It's going to be a big Hollywood tentpole film.

And to prepare for the film, he doesn't turn to the comic books, but instead he watches cat documentaries.

Great.

Yeah.

My first research was not much about comic books, but more about how to play with a woman's body and give her cat-like movements, to which I say phrasing, sir.

It's a language barrier, Chris.

We covered this, yeah.

Yeah.

I worked with a dancer to find the right fighting style.

One of my inspirations at the time was Capoeira.

Later, I worked with a storyboard artist and an illustrator who came, of course, from the comic book world.

It was a mix of everything.

So he has a vision, and they hire two additional writers, because why not?

John Broncado and Michael Ferris.

And they had co-written the game.

the David Fincher film, which actually makes no sense, and I love it.

It's really fun, great tone.

They also co-wrote The Net.

They would write Terminator 3 eventually.

They're hired for Catwoman and they get one rule from Warner Brothers right away.

You cannot mention Batman.

Nope.

You can't say it.

No, don't say his name.

Don't even think about it.

Shut your mouth.

They really wanted to keep these properties separate from one another.

And I don't think it's surprising because development on each of these characters, Catwoman, Batman, Superman, was not going particularly well.

There was the rejected Joss Whedon Batman reboot, and then expectations for the Nolan one, I think, were pretty low, even when the movie was released.

And then there were multiple aborted Superman attempts from the Tim Burton version with Nicholas Cage through the Kevin Smith era, and then Mick G, another single name director, Brett Ratner.

And the idea of launching a shared cinematic universe hadn't been introduced yet.

So they very much wanted to keep these streams separate.

Although, there is a photo of Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman on the floor as Patience is looking at all the old pictures in Ophelia's house of all of the ancient Catwomen, so they do cheekily reference that maybe it is the same universe as Burton's Batman Returns.

So, this is where we start to see the form of what film will come.

So, Patience Phillips works for a cosmetics company.

The company is about to release a toxic product.

She's murdered.

She's reborn as Catwoman via, and the description says, Mystic Feline Gang.

Chris, it's cats.

It's literally Andrew Lloyd Weber's cats.

Those are jellical cats that appear.

They burp in her mouth and then she becomes, well, it was the jellical ball.

By the way, this has to be, this is like when Toby Maguire's Spider-Man came out and I tried to be bit by a lot of spiders.

Exactly.

I can only imagine if this had been a bigger hit, people would just be like, cats, breathe on me.

I want to get powers.

Well, it reminds me of that episode of South Park where they all get obsessed with cheesing, which is when the cat peas in your face because it gets you high.

And if you've never seen it, it's very funny.

They're calling it cheesing because it's fun to do.

So, and they call it Mary Jane pissing your face fun time.

So she falls in love with police officer Tom Lone and then fights Laurel, the narcissistic supermodel spouse of her company's CEO.

There is a little nod to the comics.

I don't know if it's intentional or not.

The final fight takes place on a yacht, not at the top of a building, which is where she'd met Batman in the original comics.

Laurel's wearing a latex mask that melts melts when she gets too close to fire.

The writers also played up the comedy.

And this is where we get a lot of the cat-like behavior infecting a human.

I am obsessed with cream, cat nip, I'm going to eat all the tuna.

And then also just weird wordplay, like I'm a cat now, so I must be into cat burglary, even though that's not really what cats do, but okay.

So one thing I really like about their script, in the end, Catwoman rounds up all the local shelter cats to fight a river of plague rats that has broken out of the lab and is running amok in the city.

So basically all the rats get infected with what the cosmetics company has been making and they're like

charging the city and Catwoman has to rally the army of cats to destroy all the rats.

And that is cool.

That's amazing.

Well, so we so I mean, but even just from a producer standpoint, I'm like, that's going to cost a lot of money.

We're going to need to.

Yes, that got cut.

I mean, we had the penguins and Batman Returns like fighting against Batman, but now, I mean, it sounds amazing.

I would love to see it.

But even thinking about the CGI usage in what actually this movie turned out to be, imagine how janky that would look in terms of the CGI cats we saw.

Again, it would have looked like cats, which I'm not saying is necessarily a bad thing.

Digital fur technology.

Shout out Taylor Swift.

Most of the cats in this movie are real, believe it or not.

I do believe it.

Very, very few CGI cats.

There's one that crawls up on her chest and breaks in her mouth.

There is.

And he goes,

There is one angle to this story.

Hallie Berry's not attached yet, but when she did get attached, there was one angle that she always knew was going to be a problem.

And she felt that the cosmetics company angle was soft relative to what people expected from the genre at the time.

So she basically said, all other superheroes save the world.

They don't just save women from cracked faces.

I always knew that was a soft superhero plight, but at that time in my career, I didn't have the agency I have today or belief that I could challenge it.

So I went along with it.

So I think there's a lot of just going along with it and hoping it'll turn out.

No, I think that's really an interesting point.

But at the same time, if you look historically about Catwoman in the story, it's never been about world saving, or even if at most, it's saving Gotham in regards to teaming up with Batman and the rest of the other superheroes.

So that's a tall order, but we're not dealing with Marvel's The Avengers.

Catwoman's usually always been a solo performer that started off like doing bank heists.

So I totally understand that point, which I think is interesting, but also to the point about the makeup of it all, didn't you at times feel like you're like, oh man, this is almost like a prequel to the substance or this could have been a prequel to the substance.

It could have been.

That's what I wanted it to be.

Totally.

That's the thing is I kind of liked it.

Like I liked what they were starting to go into.

This could have been a body horror film.

Why don't we see more of the effects of what this makeup is doing to the women?

And I almost thought, like, and I forgot the first time I watched it, I was like, does it come out that Sharon Stone's like 150-year-old woman and she's been using this makeup?

I wish.

I thought it was going to be a bit of the portrait of Dorian Gray, but they didn't really go there in the end.

If they had, it would have been really fun.

And also, whatever, if something will make me look like Sharon Stone, I don't care what it's going to do to my insides.

She looks absolutely insane.

Well, but then they also kind of ruin it by doing so much digital airbrushing on her, which she's beautiful.

They don't need it.

And also, it undercuts her character, which is her character's supposed to look a little bit older to contrast with Hallie Berry and the supermodels that her husband is being horrible to at the opera.

So I do think this is really an important point, which is they're trying to figure out a way to make a character who was always meant to operate in smaller stakes situations into something that feels global in the way that the other superhero movies that are coming out at this time do.

And that's a really hard needle to thread, and they clearly don't end up pulling it off.

And part of the issue is regime change.

So there's a big shakeup at Warner Brothers toward the end of 2002.

Basically, there's a big corporate restructuring.

Lorenzo de Bonaventura, who had been the head of the studio and who had shepherded in, you know, The Matrix and Harry Potter, he resigns, goes his own way, sets up shop at Paramount.

Alan Horn is then moved into Bonaventura's old position, and Jeff Robanoff gets bumped up to the head of production.

So all of a sudden, Jeff Robinoff is overseeing the development of all these properties, including Catwoman.

At first, he's working with Broncado and Ferris to rewrite their script.

He brings them into his office.

He puts up a bunch of note cards, move this scene here, get rid of the rats, et cetera, et cetera.

And then Broncado and Ferris are let go.

And there's a lot of turmoil at the studio.

The Batman vs.

Superman that's been developed is canceled.

Nolan's Batman gets brought in.

And at this point, more or less, Ashley Judd, who had been attached to both Catwoman and a Broadway production, chooses the Broadway production, which ironically or poetically is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Petoff directed that as well, by the way.

Yes, he did.

He did.

So by February of 2003, Variety reports Ashley Judd's no longer in Catwoman.

And Genovi says at this point, this just evolves into a much bigger movie.

So the low-budget origin story has become a big superhero movie.

So they try to go for a big star.

And the first person they go for is Nicole Kidman.

Oh.

Who been in Batman?

Dr.

Chase Meridian, come on, bingo, criminal psychologist, working Gotham City, romantically entangled with Bruce Wayne.

Yeah, Batman Forever, 95.

She'd obviously blown up since then.

I think she had just filmed Cold Mountain.

She'd been nominated for an Oscar for the Hours in 2002 and Mulan Rouge in 2001.

She passes.

Too bad.

I love, I love a quasi-evil Nicole Kidman more than anything else.

If you've never seen Malice, one of my favorites.

Oh, my God.

And that's early.

One of Alec Baldwin's, Alec Baldwin, even an amazing performance in that film.

Yeah, fantastic.

And Bill Pullman.

Can't forget.

So they offer the role to Hallie Berry.

Now, you made the point, Ryan.

Her salary was reported as between $12 and $14 million.

Good.

Huge money.

Get that money.

Huge money.

Pitoff said that he was fighting to bring Hallie on board to cast a black woman as cat woman, which was a tradition.

And he says that he saw Hallie Berry for the role, that she fit it better in his mind than someone like Michelle Pfeiffer, for example.

I'm guessing the studio was very happy to offer her the role.

She was a huge name.

So you mentioned this, Storm and X-Men.

She had done the Bonkers Swordfish with Hugh Jackman and John Travolta in 2001.

She won her Oscar for Monsters Ball that year.

And she was, of course, a Bond girl in Die Another Day 2002.

So she's got the acting chops and the prestige, and she has the big budget blockbuster franchises.

And for the time, just to give like some context, you know, this is such a huge salary, especially for a woman, because at the time, you had Toby McGuire, Spider-Man 2, making around 17 million, which obviously is higher.

But then after that, Hugh Jackman for X2 only made $5 to $7 million.

Ben Affleck for Daredevil made $12.5.

And Christian Bale, which Batman Begins, was in its infancy of being talked about, he eventually went on to make $9 million.

Jennifer Gardner, $3 to $4 million for Electra.

So this really was like kind of breaking the glass ceiling for women in superhero films salaries.

Yeah, and the whole movie would rest on her because there were no other superheroes, notable villains in this world.

There was no other touch point to the comics, right, in this world at all.

So March of 2003, she signs on to Catwoman.

She said that she was in talks as far back as when she was working on Die Another Day.

That entirely makes sense.

The trade reporting is always very delayed compared to when these decisions are made.

She says she was wildly excited, but she also said the pitch wasn't really a story.

It was just the idea of reinventing Catwoman.

The studio was a big part of that.

The idea was not to do what's been done over and over, but to bring something different.

So Broncado and Ferris were rehired.

Then they got fired again.

John Rogers had also been fired.

He says that this relationship just deteriorated very quickly.

He would just go into meetings.

He He would argue with them about notes.

He didn't understand that they didn't like that.

And then, after about two years of turning in drafts and trying to do notes for people who didn't know what they wanted, I got a draft done that Hallie and the director liked.

Then I had a conversation with the execs and they said, John, we believe we've reached the end of our creative journey with you and we're going to find some other writers to work with the director.

And he said, oh, that's great.

That was a good conversation.

And my manager said, you just got fired.

Oh, that's great.

He was then blackballed from Warner Brothers for a year.

So Broncotta said there was just exhaustion.

You got punch drunk.

We'd come up with ideas.

They'd say, no, we tried that.

In draft seven and 11, it was a strange, out-of-control machine.

So they bring on Ed Solomon to rewrite the whole thing.

Of course, he'd written Men in Black, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Pitoff works with Solomon for two months.

He does early production design work.

They take it into the studio.

The studio says, nope.

So Pitoff fires his production designer, Jean Robas, who had been working with him on all of these movies until now.

Robas is responsible for a lot of the look, right, that the studio has hired Pitoff to bring to the movie.

Oh, no.

They then return to a previous draft of the script.

It's a complete 180.

And meanwhile, Hallie Berry is crawling around her house like a cat.

Working with an acting teacher.

She said the team gifted her a cat.

His name was Plato.

I watched, studied, and learned how cats think.

I didn't have the responsibility of children or family.

I was just just a woman alone with a lot of idle time to focus on this.

I was full-on cat all the time.

I'd crawl around my house trying to jump on my counters thinking, if I were a cat, how would I get up there?

I was in it 24-7.

And she also studied Capoera per Pitoff's suggestion.

Now, at this point, she'd been fitted for her costume.

Let's talk about the costume.

It's terrible.

John Rogers would later describe her as he said she looked like a Quebecois stripper.

Yeah.

To which the Quebecois strippers say, excuse me, sir.

He actually claims that the costume was one reason he turned down the studio's offer to do press for the movie.

Who knows?

But let's talk about the thinking behind the costume.

Pitoff said they wanted to stray from the traditional Catwoman costume and go for something, quote, more feral.

His intention was to reveal the costume in the movie, not before, but because they were going to shoot Halli Berry in the suit on location outdoors, right, where Paparazzi could see her.

They knew this wasn't feasible.

They had to get ahead of it.

So in late September of 2003, they released a photo of Hallie Berry in the suit and people didn't love it.

Lizzie or Ryan, would you like to take a crack at describing the suit from Catwoman?

Ryan, please.

Imagine a naked body and then sneezing a couple pieces of leather on it.

No, I mean, it's just like it's all cut up at the legs.

It looks like, you know, ripped jeans, but just ripped everywhere.

The belly is completely out.

I mean, she would be horrible during the wintertime.

You would freeze to death, but it's just a lot of leather pieces wrapping around her body.

But it's just, it really is to showcase a body and skin more than any sort of costume.

Yes.

And also, Halle Berry has one of the best bodies on the planet.

This thing does not do anything for her.

It's like it's the super low-rise, low-slung, you know, jeans of the early aughts, which looked good on absolutely no one.

And to your point, they're ripped like a cat has clawed the leather pants.

But you can also see, especially in the movie, when they do the close-up again on her, but we get get it, Pitoff, you were very interested.

But you can see that like there's a sheer fabric behind all of the tears that like kind of wrinkles as she moves.

So you can tell that it's not her skin.

It just, it looks terrible.

And the bra also, it's just, I don't know.

But when they over-sexualize like this,

it takes away all the sexuality.

Like, you know, when you're overly, like, when you're overly showing us, it kind of robs us of that experience completely if that's what you're going for in the first place.

And it's not flattering.

Just like the cut of how they did this is the least flattering thing you could have put on Halle Berry.

And the fact that, I mean, this is also why the Kate Gosselin haircut, you know, so they can have the like little cat mask and still be able to showcase her hair.

Exactly.

Really, that's the only reason I could come up with why they would do the haircut is it simplifies the cat mask, to which I say, ponytail out the back or whatever.

It'll be fine.

Bloggers were not having it.

They said it looks like the most ridiculously awful lame-ass attempt at a catwoman costume in history, like something out of some bargain basement member ribber magazine.

Wait, was this the first time bloggers were negative about a movie?

Something?

So this was like very early social media.

And this was right when Ain't It Cool News taken off after Lord of the Rings.

Oh, Harry Knowles is Perez Hilton should have been popping up.

Yeah.

That's right.

So as Pitov said, it was the start of social media and people started to say, we don't like the costume.

I think the fans didn't like the way they'd been approached.

I think he means the costume had been approached.

Warner Brothers was saying, take it or leave it.

I think meaning, Pitov, this is the direction.

You're either in or you're out.

I was very disappointed by the way they acted.

Warners was like, no worries, they will calm down.

We don't give a shit.

But you have to give a shit, man, is what he says.

Yeah.

Warner Brothers,

man, they decided to get aggressive.

They said, you know what?

They don't like the costume.

We'll give it to them early.

And they pulled in the release date from 2005 to 2004.

So the idea was Catwoman would come out first, then Nolan's Batman would be released in 2005, and then Singer's Superman Returns would come out in 2006.

So not only do they have a costume that nobody likes, a script that nobody likes, they have to release the movie earlier than planned.

So they go into production.

Most of the movie shot in Vancouver, September 2003 to February 2004.

It's raining all the time.

They're working 15-hour days, but apparently, the shoot itself was pretty positive.

Alex Borstein said Holly Berry was amazing to work with.

So Berry said it was a great shoot.

She said she had the time of her life.

She worked her ass off to embody a cat in so many ways, psychologically and physically.

There was a choreographer on set to help her move like a cat.

And as we said, there were a lot of real cats in the movie, which were trained by Boone's Animals for Hollywood.

Shout out.

So there were bright spots, but of course, the problems were they were rewriting the script on set.

So they had writers on set and the writing process just never ended.

They just kept adding pages and revising things.

Whew, and they improvised as well.

Sharon Stone said she came up with Laurel's line, and then I turned 40, and they threw me away.

But I want to know, I have a couple favorite lines in this movie, including, I'm going to be late for my job, which no one has ever said.

You say, I'm going to be late for work, which is one of my favorite.

Also, when he says,

I want you kids to be the good guys, now let's go outside and shoot some.

And you think he's going to say bad guys, but then he says, Hoops.

You're missing the best line in the whole thing, which is said by someone off camera.

And it's when Benjamin Bratt is investigating the break-in at the jewelry store, I believe.

And you hear someone off-camera say, Hey, what should we call her?

Cat chick?

And someone else goes, No, no, no, cat broad.

Yeah.

So Warner Brothers is not thrilled with the dailies.

They think Pitoff is bringing too much of a European sensibility to the movie, to which I say, none of you have been to Europe.

Yeah.

Pitoff himself didn't confirm this, but he basically said he just felt like all he was trying to do was appease the people above him, that his job was just not to get fired at this point.

Well, he's in a bad position.

He's in a terror.

They're all in terrible positions.

Ryan, as you said, like, he's not an established director at this point in America, or it really sounds like particularly overseas either.

They probably got him for, you know, cheap.

So he's trying to keep a job.

Yeah, I mean, you're selling IP more than any sort of cohesive story.

So it's selling Collie Berry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, they don't do a great job, unfortunately, but that is, it's just her on the poster.

And there are all these just change, everybody just changes their mind constantly.

So the Ferris wheel scene, which became known as the fucking Ferris wheel, which it involves a flying camera, a techno crane, second unit photography.

He does a pre-vis, like a preview shoot of the entire scene, shows up the set the morning he's going to do the scene, and he gets a message from the studio.

They say, We hate the pre-vis, do something different.

And it just turns into a nightmare.

It's supposed to just be like a normal dialogue scene, right?

Where it's like we get a view as they're at the top of the Ferris wheel, but then they have to rush a stunt in and special effects.

It was bad.

And then the weather turned bad, so they had to break down and rebuild the Ferris wheel on a set in front of a green screen.

And then the movie's special special effects really started to pile up.

And it seems like maybe Pitov, because he had such little control over so many things, started to really focus on VFX specifically.

Which makes sense.

And the production designer said, you know, Pitoff was very nice, but he was more interested in the visual effects than the story of the movie.

And so they bring on the team that just did the Matrix and Matrix Reloaded, which was in-house at Warner Brothers, ESC.

And they were really pushing the envelope on what was possible with DigiDoubles or digital body double replacements.

This technology had been around for a while and it had been used recently on Spider-Man with Spider-Man in his suit, for example, or even on Blade 2 to allow Blade to do things that a human stunt performer couldn't do.

ESC took things to the next level in The Matrix Reloaded with the fight scene between Neo and 100 Agent Smiths on the rooftop, which, although now it sits very much, I think, in the Uncanny Valley, was a big breakthrough in terms of what could be accomplished with digital body doubles and so this is a technology that was going to be used very heavily in catwoman and i'm sure you guys recognize it catwoman will be in a fight it'll either be hallie berry or a stunt performer and all of the sudden the body is taken over by a digital body double replacement and the physics that once applied to the actor no longer seem to apply to the body double yeah yeah her body's like rubber she becomes flubber basically but in some ways like with the movement of Catwoman and those, when she's like up on the second floor and bouncing around, I was like, okay, I see something here.

There's an idea here where we haven't seen Catwoman move this sort of way.

It's just that it's not cohesive and it's still so sloppy.

And then when it goes to like the other CGI with like cats and things like that, it's so wacky and tacky at times.

I personally think the VFX is actually.

very well done for the time, but it's in service of so many clashing stylistic choices around it, from the way that the scenes are lit to the way that the camera is moved to the costumes, et cetera, that they just have no chance of succeeding.

But the VFX artists, like a couple of them on the shoot, have said the problem was the technology just wasn't there yet.

You could take a still shot of the digital double doing something in the scene and it looked photoreal, but the minute you put the motion in, it just fell into the uncanny valley.

Yeah.

I think this really comes through, but Pitoff said that he was inspired by a couple of really highbrow sources, in particular, Lara Croft Tomb Raider and Video Games.

Of course, Lara Croft is a video game.

Yeah, and don't you dare besmirch Lara Croft Tomb Raider, which, by the way, I love those movies as well.

That makes a lot of sense in terms of the way that she's moving, particularly the way she's like bouncing off the walls.

It is very, very Lara Croft.

And her outfit is a little Lara Croft as well.

In the, you know, midsection revealed.

Lara Crofts is jungle appropriate, Chris.

She is, she's raiding tombs.

That's true.

So the release has pulled in, so post-production is jammed.

Klaus Bodel, I'm sure, had two days to come up with his vibey elevator music that's filling out most of this movie.

Sounds like it.

So just like when we were discussing Hulk, the special effects were so jammed that they weren't ready for the film's teaser trailer.

So the studio is having to sell the movie without the best possible footage.

And they've already spurred on ire from the fans with the release of the costume, for example.

And then the story's just not working.

So they put the movie together, and because they'd rewritten it so much during the shoot, it just didn't make sense.

The pieces didn't fit together.

They were re-editing it, they were inverting scenes, moving things around.

They did a 10-day reshoot one month before the movie was released.

Oh, wow.

One month, 10-day reshoot, including a new ending.

Can you guys guess how the movie was originally supposed to end?

Did Catwoman die?

Nope.

She and Tom happily lived happily ever after.

Instead, they went with the ending where she leaves Tom in the cafe.

The movie hasn't even been released, and people are already distancing themselves from it.

Dan Waters, from the beginning of our story, gets an opportunity to arbitrate for credit.

But after reading the most recent draft, he says, oh, thank you.

I don't need to arbitrate.

It's all yours.

I'll let you and Peacock have this one.

No.

Yeah.

So the budget had ballooned to almost $100 million, or maybe even more.

That's reported.

Oh, my God.

Catwoman opened wide on July 23rd, 2004.

Its IMAX release was canceled because of delays in the movie's visual effects.

So it was not able to be remastered in time for an IMAX release.

And it ended up bringing in a worldwide total of $82.4 million

against its production budget of, again, $100 million.

Not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

But that's worldwide, though.

That's world.

Well, that's every dollar.

That's pretty bad.

That is them pulling money from the couch cushions after every screening.

Yes, that is pretty bad.

Is it G Lee bad?

No.

Is it Fantastic Four bad?

No.

It's pretty bad.

And the critics were really harsh on the movie because they had a pun to play with.

Catwoman achieves something I would not have thought possible.

It made me think fondly on Garfield.

The script should have been tossed out with the kitty litter.

Pitoff goes crazy with fragmentary editing and slanted camera angles, and the story goes down and comes back up like a hairball.

Roger Ebert put it on his most hated list and wrote: The director, whose name is Pitoff, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project.

Wow.

I miss you, Roger.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there were a lot of reviews that called out Barry.

They said that she overacted.

They said she didn't have the appeal of Earth a Kit or Julie Newmar, or that she wasn't much more than eye candy, but there were some that kind of defended her and said that the movie had let her down.

Yes.

Also, like, I'm sorry, those reviews piss me off because she is,

yes, this movie is an absolute disaster.

She is going 110% into this.

She is doing exactly what they asked her her to.

She is doing it with, you know, a plum, and she's, she's in.

And if she wasn't in, this would be such a slog to watch.

I mean, these actors are doing all of the heavy lifting in this movie.

And you can tell the confusion of even how to play the scene at times on their faces, but they are committing.

And even Alex Borstein having to put so much like, you know, exposition and stuff in her storyline and having to make it work why she's on the phone, why she's using the phone at a nurse's station in a hospital, like all of these things.

And she just makes it seem like it's normal.

So the actors are doing their jobs, they're just working off a very shoddy script.

So,

as Rolling Stone wrote, it's not hard to see why Hallie Berry would want to put on a cat suit and become the first woman of color to play the lead in a blockbuster.

After all, Berry is the first African-American woman to win the best actress Oscar for Monster's Ball, which she remains.

Sadly, Cat Woman, allegedly a tale of female empowerment, declaws her ambitions.

And to me, that feels like the most fair review of all of them.

Yes.

Barry felt like she took the brunt of the criticism.

I agree.

For years, this has always been referred to, when I've discussed it and heard about it, as Hallie Berry's Catwoman.

And that's so interesting to me because of everyone involved, she had the least control over the story.

She did have control over her performance, et cetera.

But as she mentions, she did not feel that she had the power to ask for really a very small, minor tweak that she refers to, right?

I feel like maybe the stakes are a little too small with the cosmetic industry.

That's not an unreasonable note.

She didn't feel like she had the power to do it.

She may not have had the power to do it at the time.

And yet, we all think, that's Callie Berry's movie.

She put that thing on the screen.

Well, and I just want to call out like the coverage at the time of this, you know, I was in high school.

I was reading all of, you know, delisted, Perez Hilton, everything.

And all of the blame was laid at Hallie Berry's feet that this, like, what an idiot, you know, for doing this.

And when you actually think about how literally any movie is made,

this is not Hallie Berry's cat woman.

Like that was an insane way to frame this.

And it's very, you know, disappointing that that is how they would treat her.

But the claws are out.

When you have somebody that won an Oscar and then you, you know, or you're already considering, oh, maybe this is potentially a cash grab.

Like, I'm thinking of like, also, like Arnold Schwarzenegger's last action hero back in the day and when that completely tanked and all of the coverage around that is, you know, once you accept that sort of paycheck and the movie turns out to be that, you are the face of that, you know, you are the face to blame because there is not a name director.

You know, this isn't David Fincher's catwoman.

This isn't Tarantino's catwoman.

This is Hallie Berry.

So that privilege.

His name's even smaller on the marquee because there's only one of them.

Yeah.

But it's frustrating because she's amazing.

She is amazing.

And it's also like, I don't think it's an accident that she's a woman of color either who is, you know, taking a risk here and trying to headline a superhero movie.

And I am sure there was some glee in being able to say, like, you know, what a failure about her in that context as well.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

But I do want to make sure we don't lose Ryan's point, which is an important one.

And that is that at the end of the day, day, Halle Berry did take the money and it was definitely a bit of a Faustian bargain, right?

You're going to get $12 to $14 million, so you're going to get an unheard of paycheck.

But the flip side is, or the cost, is there is not a script and we don't know if it's going to be any good.

And it ended up not.

But what is obviously not fair is

one person in a multi-hundred, if not thousand-plus person production bearing the entire weight publicly of its failure.

So just last year, she said, I felt like it was Halle Berry's failure, but I didn't make it alone.

All these years, I've absolutely carried it.

At the same time, she said, I loved it.

It got panned.

The critics said it sucked balls, and balls aren't that bad.

What I'm happy about is that the children have found it now on the internet and they love it.

So it's vindicating because now they're saying it's cool and what the heck was everybody's problem with it.

I agree.

I have a friend Kaya that swears by this movie that we actually got into a fight years ago about this because I was like, this is awful.

And she's like, I love that.

This is a comfort movie.

I love it.

I watch it all the time.

I'm with her.

I enjoy watching it.

I do think it's terrible, but I like it.

And it's fun.

And it's everybody's fault involved in this movie.

Largely Petoff.

He did not create a cohesive story, period.

Like that's, and Denise Denovi, the producer.

Those two, if anything, should carry most of the burden because my problem with this movie is not really any of the actors or any one scene.

It's, I have no idea what's going on, like from moment to moment, because you have not guided me through.

I don't need to.

No, I'm just saying.

But even the visual style in terms of like the basketball scene, like you almost get seasick watching the cuts or something, and you realize we think that may have been an on-set scripting development.

We couldn't figure out which draft that was.

And we were like, maybe they were just like, we should show her powers some way very cool with the basketball.

Or even Hallie running away from the henchmen.

You're like, this guy, they're just filming a close-up of this guy going like this.

And then they insert the visualization.

I was like, there's no vision here except for just jerky movement.

The thing I wanted to end with on this episode to me is

success in Hollywood is terrifying for anybody that's experienced it from what I've read.

And because as you get higher and higher, the fall is steeper and steeper.

And as you mentioned, Ryan, the claws are out.

People,

man, it's in America, we like an underdog story, but we really like to tear down our heroes, but then we also like a comeback story.

We do have that.

And so I think this is a great example of, God forbid, you ever have success and then bomb.

But if you do, follow the Halle Berry playbook because she twisted her body in midair.

She turned into the skid.

She landed on her feet.

She said,

I will accept that Razzie happily.

This is my movie.

I took that $12 million.

I will take that Razzie and I am moving on.

And her career rebounded.

And I think she was

not unscathed, but she landed on her feet more or less because I think she leaned into it.

And that's, that took a lot of courage.

And that's very bold and admirable.

Yes.

And there's, in my opinion, there's nothing worse than trying to cast the blame elsewhere when something something has gone awry.

Yes.

The smartest thing she did was just saying, this is my movie and I like it and I don't care.

And like, yeah, you think it's bad, whatever.

I, you know, I thought it was fun.

I'm not going to stand here and say that I knew this was a bad movie because like, that's not true.

You know, we, we just did an episode with Paul Scheer and he was like, oh, I love him.

Nobody thinks they're making a bad movie.

I mean, this, this is what I love about your podcast is that you point out that everybody goes in wanting to make something good most of the time.

And the fact that anything gets made at all is so awe-inspiring because of how much you have to go through to get anything made in Hollywood.

So the fact that this actually, you know, went to completion is a feat in and of itself.

And, you know, your podcast reminds me to have empathy for projects instead of just outward hate because there is so much that goes into every little piece of this.

that you're, you know, by the end of an episode, I'll be like, I'm shocked they even got to the first day of filming.

I'm literally shocked.

Oh, I am too.

I'm always shocked that

they ever made it past the scripting stage.

It's ridiculous how hard it is and how many hoops you jump through and people you're trying to please and agendas you're trying to fit within.

It's a miracle.

So along the lines of miracles, Ryan, we always end our show with a little segment called What Went Right, where we have to pick one thing from the movie.

It could be a particular cast member, crew member.

element of the story, theme, whatever you'd like that went right in a movie where kind of most everything went wrong in this instance.

Oh my gosh, do you have an hour for me to sit and really ponder this?

But yeah, Lizzie, you go first.

You go first.

You're going to steal the only one.

Well, I'm going to steal the only one.

Yeah.

Do you?

Go for it.

All right.

Well, I'm going to steal this out from under you, Ryan, probably, but I think the only obvious what went right here for me is Hallie Berry.

I think, yes, this movie's nuts.

It's technically very, very bad on every level, from, you know, creative to special effects to everything.

But she is all in and she's fun to watch.

And it doesn't matter what she's doing.

I like watching her.

I like watching her sachet away at the end of it.

I just think she's great.

And I love, love, love the way that she handled the aftermath of this.

I love that she owned it.

And I just, I like her in general.

I'm, I'm a big Halle Berry fan, both as an actress and as a person.

And I think that, A, this was actually a pretty brave decision to try and take on this character in this franchise.

And B, it was an even braver decision when it completely tanked for her to not throw it under the bus.

So for me, it is, it's Halle Berry all the way.

Ryan?

What went right for me is Benjamin Bratt.

Wow.

No,

no, what went right for me, obviously.

Honestly, though, close second.

No, he, by the way, it was, he was great arm candy, but Halle Berry, obviously.

But I think what went right was that in this going so wrong, there actually is some sort of blueprint, not just for audiences, but potentially for Warner Brothers to course correct and to go into the direction where we had Batman Begins, which is really in a very serious,

allegedly real world.

And I think that course correction potentially couldn't have happened without Catwoman being as bad as it performed at the box office.

That's no shade to Halle Berry at all, but I think it potentially gave them a roadmap.

Now, obviously, they, you know, they still make mistakes because it's a studio, but I thought it was very interesting then to get the Nolan version from that point on.

It's a great point.

So you stole Halle Berry.

So I will give mine to

Sharon Stone, who I think is fine in this movie.

Look, she's not given a lot to do, to be fair.

She's given absolutely zero, but she looks great doing it.

And I love Sharon Stone.

She looks great with a a short haircut.

She looks so, she looks, she's a good actress and she's an, she's an incredible visual presence on screen.

She just dominates every shot that she's in.

So tall, like a spider.

I love her.

Yeah.

And I was thinking about, so this is where the Real Touchwives would come in.

I love villainess roles so much.

It's one thing I really do like about Disney movies.

I was thinking about so many of my favorite characters from Earth a Kit in the Emperor's New Groove to Ursula to even Maleficent back in the day.

And I just just feel like we're missing that a little bit with some of the more macho superhero movies.

And Julia Louis Dreyfus was really good in Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolts, for example.

Yeah, she was great.

I love that scenery chewing actress.

And I thought, it's too bad we didn't get Denise Richards in one of these D-level superhero movies as the villainess because I think she would have been so fun and she was misused for a lot of her career.

But I will give mine to Sharon Stone and more broadly, let's just give some more bad guy roles to some of these actresses because they're great.

And I mean, Bane's amazing, don't get me wrong, but Marion Cotiard could have been given,

yeah.

I was born in the pop costume.

Tom Hardy is almost never intelligible, is what I've learned.

I watched the Revenant, and I was like, I need subtitles.

I like his Muskrat hat, but I have no idea.

Benicio del Toro and usual suspects paved the way.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

Yes, I agree, Chris.

More villainesses, more villainesses over 40.

Like, let's, yeah, this should be the pipeline.

I don't need them to turn into moms.

That's right.

Exactly.

It should be the opposite.

It should be the opposite.

They should kill their kids.

They should die alone.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

And by the way, these actors, I mean, like, think about it, Denise Richards would knock the hell out of a villain monograph.

Oh, she'd be so good.

Yeah.

And to your point about housewives.

If you're looking for villains that are like Bravo is littered with them.

They're all villains on these shows.

And like, so you will be able to show like delicious dialogue and people with, you know, just horrible intentions on Bravo every night of the week.

But yeah, I mean, it would be so amazing.

And I just watched Thunderbolts the other night.

And, you know, at least they gave Julia Louis Dreyfus dialogue to work with, even though she could make anything comic.

She's so good.

They gave her dialogue where they didn't give Sharon Stone any runway except for just like a long look at the camera that we knew she was a villainess.

Yeah, I agree.

Well, that concludes the story of

Catwoman.

And Ryan, I was so pleasantly surprised today because I knew you'd be a great guest and you have a wonderful voice and your podcast is fantastic.

And I don't even like reality TV very much.

And it's that captivating.

You guys should go listen to So Bad It's Good with Ryan Bailey right now.

But you're also such a wonderfully knowledgeable person when it comes to not only movies, but comics as well.

I know you don't have time, but I would happily listen if you were to expand your ouvoir into other areas as well.

A Renaissance man over there.

That's true.

I have been looking forward to this since I got the email.

And I just don't want to disappoint your audience.

So thank you, you guys.

I over talked.

But my God, this is, I always try to explain to my audience that I cover mainly pop culture and reality TV, but my first love was movies from a kid.

And I used to, I grew up in Kansas and this is like pre-internet and you would have to just devour anything that you could find.

And, you know, I would go to like the mall and my mom would let me pick one magazine and I would pick variety.

And this is in Kansas.

There'd be a a weekly variety.

And I remember as a kid, it would say Boffo box office in Gotham.

And I was like, are they talking about Batman's Gotham?

Not realizing that New York City was Gotham in variety.

But I have been such a huge movie geek.

And so kudos to you guys, because I knew your podcast.

I listened to your podcast and you always, you've reignited my love of film.

So thank you guys.

This is a joy.

And if anybody ever cancels, I am in like flames.

You guys are amazing.

Absolutely.

You're the best.

And, you know, Chris said it, but truly, go listen to So Bad, It's Good with Ryan Bailey.

I really, really love it.

Even if you don't like Housewives, your breadth of knowledge and like the way that you're able to break down these people and the characters and everything, it is just so engaging.

It's so wonderful.

I really love it.

This is when I wake up from the dream.

I'm going to put that on my LinkedIn.

Thank you.

With a cat burping in your mouth.

No, but I mean, like, honestly, the way that you talk about, you know, movies and TV is just, it's so fascinating.

And particularly hearing you talk about comics, I do, I feel like, is there a spinoff?

I think there could be a spin-off.

I just, I'm just so happy to have met both of you guys.

And Lizzie was on my show.

If you want to start with Lizzie's episode, she was amazing because it turns out, Chris, Lizzie does watch the trash that I watch.

Yes, I do.

And not just these amazing films.

Oh, no, I'm aware.

She texts me about it all the time.

She's, she's, why are you not watching this?

David and I are watching this.

Why are you not?

And I was like, I don't have time.

I don't know.

I don't have time.

Chris, we have a new season of Salt Lake City, Real Housing of Salt Lake City coming up in two weeks.

That would be the one I would start with because I love that.

It's a perfect one to start with.

But he has to start at the beginning, doesn't he?

I mean, to quote John Oliver, don't try to jump in at season five.

No, no, I always like watching Housewives sometimes late in the game because then you can go back and watch the earlier seasons and it's like watching a prequel and you're like, oh, all of this

happens.

Wow.

You can watch it any way you want.

But he would miss Jen Shaw committing crimes on camera, which really is just a treasure.

And I do not look down on it at all.

I think some people look down their nose at reality, to which I say sports is just reality television.

And I love sports and unscripted, even though a lot of it's pseudo-scripted in sports too, there's something about unscripted drama.

And that's what is so fun for us telling the stories of these movies.

It is the unscripted drama behind the scenes.

Like if I could watch a reality TV show that's just every movie being made,

that would be my dream.

That would be, I would love it.

But think about even script notes on Catwoman.

If they had a camera and just for those script notes meeting, I would watch that in a heartbeat because it would be some of the most like like the darkest comedy that you would ever watch your soul would leave your body as certain things were pitched and then a cat would breathe into you and feed the soul again

all right guys go kiss your cats get some special powers and listen to so bad it's good with ryan bailey thank you ryan for being here thank you guys

thank you so much for tuning in for another episode of what went wrong if you guys are enjoying this show and you can't get enough of us and you want to see our faces maybe even our whole bodies we don't know how this is going to be filmed, you should check out the live stream of our first live show.

That's right.

We are heading to New York to the Caveat Theater in Manhattan on October 8th and 9th.

Those shows are sold out.

We're stunned.

Maybe our parents bought all the tickets.

It's unclear.

But we are going to live stream the event on our Patreon.

If you sign up for our $5 tier, you will get access to the Patreon live stream of our first show, October 8th and October 9th at the Caveat Theater in Manhattan.

Doors open at 9.

The live stream should start about 9.30.

It'll last an hour.

It'll be a great time.

It may be a disaster.

It might be like one of the movies we cover, but I assure you, you will be entertained.

So again, head to patreon.com slash whatwentwrong podcast for access to our live stream.

You can also vote on films we cover in the future.

You can join for free if you'd like.

If you say, you know what, I don't want the live stream, but I'd like updates from you guys sometimes.

For a dollar, you can vote on films that we're covering in the future.

We just had a Halloween poll.

Very exciting.

For $50, you can get a shout-out just like this.

Like the view, it's the only thing you'll be catching tonight.

Adam Moffat, Adrian Pang, Korea, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaise Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, rabbiting?

I've never rabbited in my life.

I've pussy-footed, I've cat-scratched, I've even kiddie cornered, but I don't rabbit.

See Grace B., Chris Leal, Chris Zaka, D.B.

Smith, David Friscolanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Scheibo, Ellen Singleton, M.

Zodia, Evan Downey, film it yourself, live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a good smelling corpse.

Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kids, Grace Potter, Half Greyhound, Jake Killen, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, Jen Mastro Marino, JJ Rapido, Joy Hillpiper, Jose Salto, Kay Canaba, Kate Rington, Kathleen Olson, Wendy Olgeschlager-McCoy, Felicia G.

Little birds should stay away from big, bad kitty cats.

Lon Relad, Lena, Lydia Howes, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate the Knife, Nathan Sentinel, Rosemary Southward, Rural Juror, Sadie, just Sadie, Scary Carrie, Soman Chinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, and the Provost family, where the O's sound like O's.

You are part of the night, just like me.

We're not afraid of the dark.

We come alive in it.

We're thrilled by it.

And we are thrilled to have you as our patrons.

Thank you all for supporting this show.

We couldn't do it without you.

All right, guys.

Next week, we have an incredible film.

We're starting off our spooky month next week.

with Interview with the Vampire.

So get ready for a month of spooky scary, starting with a film that a lot of people didn't think would work.

But boy does it ever get ready for some vampire smooches.

Vampire smoochies.

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

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

Editing music by David Bowman.

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

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