The Blair Witch Project

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.

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Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong Special Spooky Month,

your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a seminal classic of the found footage genre that punches well above its weight and held up remarkably well upon rewatch.

As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my diligent, tireless, fearless co-host

who has not let me get lost in the woods yet.

Thank you for that, Lizzie.

Lizzie Bassett.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

First of all, we have gone camping to

it.

Fun fact, Chris actually left that camping trip early.

David and I stayed behind, and David and I did get lost in the woods.

Yes, you did.

And I'll be honest, it was one of the scariest nights of my entire life.

It is horrifying to be lost in the woods at night.

That is the closest this podcast has ever come to not happening because

big old fight.

Either one of you wasn't going to make it out, both of you weren't going to make it out, or the relationship wasn't going to make it out.

Like those were all fortunately, we all did, but it was very scary.

All the stronger for it.

Yes.

Well, and you know, part of the reason I bring that up is because I had no idea how disorienting the woods are at night.

Yes.

And not like, you know, car camping, like there's some light and stuff.

Like the deep, we were deep in the Sierra Nevadas, backwoods.

And it's without anything going wrong, it is completely terrifying because nothing looks like it does in the daytime.

And I bring that up because today we are covering the Blair Witch Project.

And special just for you all, I have brought as much snot as Heather Donahue has in her famous shot because I am still recovering from my child's daycare plague.

So that's just an added bonus.

for you all.

Chris, I'm sure you'd seen the Blair Witch Project before but tell me a little bit about the first time you saw it and what you thought upon re-watching it for the podcast did not see it in theaters we were 10 when this movie came out so we were a bit young but saw within a couple years of that probably 11 or 12 i did not appreciate it when i first saw it the group dynamics were somewhat lost on me the slow burn of this movie i did not appreciate at all This movie actually, I think, does incredible character development given the resources that they have.

I did not appreciate that.

The ring was much more up my alley at that point in time, this less so.

I've rewatched it a couple times since.

Every time, I've been more and more impressed with it, and now it's the first time I've seen it since working in Hollywood.

I was blown away.

I thought it was so good, it held up so well,

it is so restrained, and it is such

an indelible reminder of the fact that the human imagination will be able to trump whatever Hollywood can show us.

And that you cannot beat a sound in the darkness in terms of what my brain will come up with as the source.

And so I really, I thought it was tense and scary.

Again, I thought the actors actually were all just firing on all cylinders.

Really, really good performances, believable, felt like real people.

I know we'll talk about the way in which this franchise let them down, I think, in a lot of ways.

And that's a common thread amongst a lot of found footage horror films.

And I have a minor connection to a different one.

But anyway, all to say, I've long been a fan of found footage horror films.

And all of them have they've tended to devolve more toward the schlocky jump scary sort of stuff.

And even something like Wreck Out of Spain, which I really loved, is still more found footage action, right?

As opposed to this is truly

found footage.

Oh my God, we're just going to watch these people die in the woods, which or not, because they are lost.

And

it's really mature and impressive and assured.

And I'm really excited to talk about it.

I am right there with you.

I think this movie is phenomenal.

Yeah.

And it's, we will talk about this.

In many ways, it is unlike anything that came before it.

I think it is unlike.

really anything that came after it because they truly did not understand what was so successful about this movie as they have tried to continue the franchise and and even as you pointed out, as they have tried to continue in the sort of found footage footsteps of this.

So I did not see this in theaters either.

As you pointed out, we were too young.

I didn't see this until in its entirety.

I had seen bits and pieces of it, obviously, you know.

Or you'd seen it spoofed, right?

I'd seen it spoofed a million times.

I had seen clips of it.

I have seen, you know, Heather's very famous monologue.

And just a note, I am going to refer to her as Heather until chronologically the point at which she does change her name because she does change her her name.

So, just a heads up.

But I had seen all that, I'd never seen it all the way through.

And David had me watch it a couple years ago.

And I was so blown away because it was so beyond what I had expected this movie to be.

It's so heavily spoofed, and you know, all I'd ever heard is like, oh, the camera work, it's, you know, it'll make you barf, make you sick.

It's just like, it looks so shaky.

It's so, you know, it's so ridiculous.

It's so hokey.

No, it's not.

No, it is not.

I think,

yes, it's handheld camera work.

Sure, it's shaky.

There are moments where you can't see some things, but I actually think, and we're going to get to this, I think the camera work in this movie is remarkable.

Yeah, it's very intentional.

Who's doing it?

Yes, yes.

So we're going to talk about that.

But the smartest thing this movie does is they don't show you the witch.

They don't show the monster.

Yeah.

Which the reboot infamously does

to,

I mean, it's well executed, but it deflates everything that's come before yes i mean the most brilliant thing about the blair witch is that they do not show you the blair witch they don't even well they did try which we will talk about but you don't see it and the choice to just never show it even at the end i think is so brilliant to your point the character development, the way that the dynamics of the group change, which as we're going to discuss, is both a function of what what the actors brought to the table and what the directors very smartly changed during the shoot and were able to also change in post-production.

You probably know this, but it was in the Guinness World Book of Records for the top budget box office ratio for a long time, based on the ratio of $1 spent for every $10,931

made.

It was overtaken, though, by Paranormal Activity in 2009, which I also love.

I think Paranormal Activity is great.

So, some basic info.

The budget, I'm just going to put it up here because I think everybody knows this.

Extremely low budget.

It's somewhere between $35,000 and $60,000.

There's a lot of dispute around that.

We could not find a very concrete source as to how much it cost, but pennies is the answer.

And I believe there are some higher numbers floating around, but that is after it had been bought, is my understanding.

Correct.

And we're going to talk about that.

Yes.

It is directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez.

It stars stars Heather Donahue, Michael C.

Williams, and Joshua Leonard as Heather Donahue, Michael C.

Williams, and Joshua Leonard.

Released July 30th, 1999, it was rated R, and the IMDb log line is: Three film students vanish after traveling into a Maryland forest to film a documentary on the local Blair Witch legend, leaving only their footage behind.

Might I also just say we discussed the R rating briefly during interview with the vampire, and I said you know I defend why is this rated R?

That was my point.

This now in terms of how scary it is

sure I guess but this is PG-13 for sure.

I agree.

I think this is a great PG-13 film.

Oh, it's for language.

It is for language, but my point is to me, this is actually an excellent example of the type of gateway horror that 13, 14 year olds 100% should be allowed, in my opinion, to watch because

not only is it not graphic, it's a pretty good don't fuck around in the woods warning for kids.

Yeah.

You could get lost.

Yes.

I don't know.

Yeah, pay attention.

Don't be an asshole, you know, if you, if you get lost.

I agree.

All right.

So let's dive into this.

I want to get this out of the way.

Right at the top, we mentioned the found footage format.

Chris, can you explain what found footage refers to in terms of movies?

Sure.

It's a structural conceit in which the filmmaker is presenting you with the idea that this footage, this film, was captured by real people, non-actors, and it was subsequently found.

Now, it could be that it was then edited to the best of the attempts of whoever found it, and it is now being presented to the audience, or in other instances, it plays out in more or less real time.

Wreck would be an example of that.

Out of Spain, the famous zombie apartment building found footage film.

And there are various formats, you know, that it kind of plays within and mixed media.

But yes, broadly speaking, captured by real people.

Perfect.

So we have to acknowledge, no, the Blair Witch Project did not originate the found footage format.

You actually can really trace the genre's origins all the way back to October 30th of 1938.

Chris, do you know what happened on that date?

In the United States or internationally?

United States.

Oh, I don't know.

I was going to say Hitler invaded Poland.

No, I don't know what happened on October 30th, 1938.

Orson Welles released his groundbreaking broadcast of the War of Worlds.

War of the Worlds.

Very cool.

So very quickly on this, if you are not familiar, Orson Welles aired a dramatized version of H.G.

Wells' The War of the Worlds in a primetime radio slot.

But the way that he did it was groundbreaking.

It had never been done before.

He used the format of a radio news broadcast to tell the story of Martians invading the world.

So, to Chris's point, it was portrayed and done so very well that it sounded like a news broadcast that was being interrupted.

Now, he had aired an intro at the top of the program introducing himself, the show, his Mercury Theater Company, and in fact, it was airing as part of CBS's weekly Mercury Theater on the Air program.

But the problem was this intro ran at 8 p.m.

and many listeners didn't switch over to his channel until about a quarter past the hour.

So, while Wells did not intend for people to believe his broadcast was real, many did.

And for a brief moment, it was terrifying.

As we will find out, the Blair Witch Project very much did intend people to think that it was real.

So the first official found footage film is generally thought to be 1961's The Connection, directed by Shirley Clark, and the first found footage horror film is 1980's Cannibal Holocaust, which I suppose we may have to cover at some point.

I really don't want to.

I really have been avoiding it too.

I know people have requested it.

I really don't want to.

It does not interest me particularly, and I apologize.

There's a lot of like animal harm in it, and I don't want to watch it.

It's pretty gnarly, so apologies to fans out there.

We may be slow to get to that one.

Well, and also, Chris, you mentioned the ring.

Even Ringyu, the original Japanese film that would spawn the ring, had come out a year prior to the Blair Witch Project and arguably updates the found footage format to some degree.

So, why was it that the Blair Witch Project turned found footage into a blockbuster genre?

And, Chris, as we're going to see today, timing is everything.

So let's dive in.

Our two co-directors and co-writers and co-everything are Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick.

So let's talk about them briefly.

Myrick was born and raised in Sarasota, Florida.

And growing up in the mid to late 70s, he was always very fascinated with UFOs, cryptids, and the paranormal from a very early age.

My kind of guy.

He'd also always been freaked out by the idea of stick figures hanging from trees.

That's where that came from.

Sanchez was five years younger than Myrick and born in Havana, Cuba.

He moved to Spain when he was very little and then eventually settled in Maryland with his family around four years old.

He took a lot of camping trips in the Shenandoah National Park.

And Chris, I don't know if you've been getting served all of these videos on TikTok and Instagram about the creepy shit that happens in Appalachia, but I sure have.

I stay off TikTok for fear that it will reveal to me something about myself that I don't want to know.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, it's revealed to me that I apparently love looking at ghosties in the mountains.

Yeah, you do.

That's all I'm getting.

I remember you told me some story about a baby doll being left on a string in the middle of a road.

That's my favorite ghost story ever.

I'll share it with you all at some point if you want to hear it.

The area is rife with cryptid sightings.

Can you explain briefly to people what a cryptid is?

Oh, a cryptid, it's a critter.

It's an unidentified critter.

It is a

mystical, folkloric, mythical creature, like a Yeti would be a cryptid, for example, or Mothman would be a cryptid.

Oh, i love mothman's my favorite

i love him he just wants to warn them about the bridge

apparently chris it is not advised to answer any calls you might hear from outside your house at night when in appalachia all of which to say it's a spooky place to camp and there were plenty of strange noises and people lurking around to scare a kid on camping trips so the two met in the early 90s while at the university of central florida school of film And one thing they really bonded over was they just did not find horror movies scary anymore.

In fact, it's very fitting that we just covered a nightmare on Elm Street because they had just seen the latest installment in the franchise, Freddy's Dead, the Final Nightmare, and they were not impressed.

No, no, diminishing returns with that one.

Yes.

I stand by a new nightmare, but other than that.

So they really didn't care for slashers.

And what freaked them out instead were things like the Patterson Gimlin film.

Have you ever seen this, Chris?

I have.

It's a famous shaky cam shot of a big old Yeti loping across the river in Humboldt County, California.

That's right.

It's one minute of Yeti.

It is.

And there's also a really fun found footage film kind of built around that called Willow Creek, directed by Bobcat Goldwaite.

Not the legend of Boggy Creek, because that was another one they really liked.

No, that's not the one.

I haven't seen that one, but I liked Willow Creek has a 15-minute uninterrupted tent scene that is very much an homage to the Blair Witch Project.

That's very well done.

So they also gravitated towards formats that played with the idea of truth, like the Belgian, I guess, very, very dark mockumentary Man Bites Dog, and particularly Leonard Nimoy's docu series In Search of, which was basically Unsolved Mysteries before Unsolved Mysteries.

Now, you'll notice Cannibal Holocaust is not on their list, and that's because neither of them had seen it or really heard of it.

They actually count themselves very lucky that they hadn't, because if they had, they probably wouldn't have pursued Blair Witch because they might have felt like the concept had been done.

But fortunately for us, they started noodling on the idea of making a fake documentary about a crew that goes out into the woods to investigate a legend.

And Cannibal Honocaust is, just to be clear, a fake documentary crew, college A students, but they're doing it down in the Amazon, and it's much more gore horror than it is.

It really is, in terms of taste, it's diametrically opposed to the Blair Witch project.

But setup is very similar, yes.

Exactly.

So

in 1994, they both graduated.

And at that point, they dropped their idea for the Woods movie, which is what they were calling it.

But fast forward to 1996, and Sanchez was in a very tough spot financially.

He reached back out to Myrick to restart their idea.

And Myrick agreed, this is the best idea we've had yet.

So they start working on it in earnest.

And over the years, the Blair Witch project had a lot of iterations.

An early concept was to make a documentary horror where the crew discovers a creepy house full of spooky symbols and kind of the whole whole thing is a haunted house.

It would be one take where you're winding through the halls with them.

They also knew that they wanted to shoot on film, so they considered setting it in the 70s and having the footage be found, you know, many, many years later.

But period pieces are expensive, costumes, et cetera, and so is film.

So they moved it up to the early 90s and came up with the conceit that the filmmaker would want to shoot the documentary on film, but that they would shoot their BTS content on a digital camera.

So that's why they get the best of both worlds there, which is very smart.

And the film is black and white, which is more affordable than black and white, which is cheaper.

Exactly.

So it all very smart.

It ties in.

It all makes perfect sense.

Yes.

They also initially considered the legend to be some kind of monster or cryptid.

And one has to imagine that that would have involved seeing the monster.

Again, they tossed this because of the cost of special effects, costumes, and everything.

Instead, they turned to two things that really fascinated them, the Salem Witch Trials and the Bermuda Triangle.

This informed the lore that they built out for the Blair Witch, particularly the idea of a concentrated area in which bad things are happening and where time and space seem to be manipulated by something or someone else.

They came up with the scares first, so walking in circles, arriving in the same spot, the stick figures, sounds getting louder every night.

And by 1996-ish, towards the end of the year, they'd created a 35-page treatment that covered the basic idea.

character descriptions, plot beats, but no dialogue because they always knew that they wanted this this to be basically completely improvised.

Curb your enthusiasm, Mr.

Blair Witch.

Yes.

Could you imagine Larry David and the war ends with Heather?

You dropped the map!

I can't believe it hasn't been done yet.

Hello, dear listeners.

We wanted to take a moment to give you a heads up that on Friday, we're going to be airing a special bonus episode that will be covering both Natalie Wood's life, her still pretty mysterious death, and her final film, Brainstorm.

We will be discussing the film Brainstorm quite a bit over the course of the episode.

So if you would like to watch it prior to that episode releasing, go ahead and do it.

You have until Friday to watch it.

And again, that's Brainstorm.

It is Natalie Wood's final film.

We will talk to you then.

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Because they wanted this to be improvised, and also because they had approximately $0,

they knew they wanted unknown actors for this project.

So in August of 1997, they posted the following casting breakdown to Backstage magazine.

Attention, casting, improvisational feature film.

HFP is holding an open call for the Black Hill Project, non-union, with pay, travel, and meals, shooting October to November for three weeks in Maryland, seeking women and men 18 to 25 with natural look, extremely challenging roles in all caps and bold.

To be shot under very difficult conditions.

Saturday, August 23rd, 1 to 7 p.m.

third floor musical theater works.

Callbacks Midday Sunday by selection only.

It's a good ad.

Well, it was a good ad.

I don't think they realized how good an ad it was, but it read a lot more enticing than they had anticipated.

And much to their surprise, there were lines out the door and down the stairs for this casting.

They're actually paying people.

Yes.

I bet you there's a lot of backstage stuff that's student film, bring your own lunch, see you on Sunday.

Well, so that's what Michael C.

Williams said is he was like, so much of the work I had done was completely unpaid that I saw this and it was like, oh, it's shit, it's paid.

And they're going to feed me and they're going to house me in a tent in the middle of the woods, but still.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So Sanchez and Myrick gave attendees an information sheet that said, quote, if you don't like camping, being in the woods, sleeping in sleeping bags with strangers, don't audition.

At least they were upfront about that.

Anybody who showed up with a ton of hair and makeup was pretty much immediately sent home.

And also, if it seems weird that this many people showed up to an audition like this, to Chris's point, A, it was paid.

And B, this was the absolute financial heyday of independent films making it big.

Think Reservoir Dogs, Slacker, Sex Lies and Videotape.

Clerks.

Yeah.

And if I may, I, when I was in film school, we would host these auditions for our student films.

These are are five to seven minute student films, the vast majority of which are not particularly good because we're all learning, you know, to be clear.

And we would get dozens of people who would take time out of their day to come and audition for these roles, many of whom are wonderful actors who are completely overqualified to be working with us because it, you know, work is hard to come by.

And at least with a student film, you know that the project's going to be completed and you're going to get a copy of it for your reel.

And so the bar is so low, unfortunately, you know, for a lot of these jobs.

Totally.

The directors told actors that the audition starts as soon as you walk in the room, and they meant it.

They would immediately throw a scenario at the actors, like, you're at a parole hearing.

Why should we let you go?

And if they didn't start the scene on the spot, they were out.

So, 22-year-old Heather Donahue, who had just graduated from drama school in Philadelphia, blew the team away by really freaking them out because they asked her the parole question, and her response was, I probably shouldn't be released.

Cool.

Great answer, Heather.

Yeah.

Also, a little fun fact about her: her mom was very afraid that this was a snuff film.

Yeah, I would be too.

And so she did send her with a butcher knife to the shoot.

Yeah, I know.

It is a little sketchy.

It's two male directors, two male co-stars.

Right.

There's no other women.

Right.

I don't know who else is on the, you know, who's running sound, but, you know, we're going to go shoot in the middle of the woods.

But then what's really interesting is her character, I would argue, if you just put it on paper, would be the most male-coded, right?

Because she's a little man-splainy arrogant.

Let's talk about that.

Okay, yeah.

Because it's so cool that it's played by a woman, I think.

It was intended to be three men.

But I think Heather very much blew them away and they were very smart.

Yeah.

And they added her and they gave her that role, which her direction was to be like a take-no bullshit, you know, don't let these guys walk all over you filmmaker.

We're going to get to some of the complications that that caused in a little bit, but that was, I think, a very smart choice on the part of the filmmakers.

I agree.

While her character can be infuriating, you completely understand why she's motivated to do what she does.

And so I think it really works.

I agree.

I think we do now.

I think we have more sympathy for her now than perhaps 1999 audiences did, which we will also talk about.

I know.

Yeah.

I found all of them.

Actually, I found Michael to be the

sound operator.

I had the hardest time with him in in this watch.

Well, speaking of him, so he worked at an ice cream shop in Queens and was auditioning on the side when he showed up to the auditions and got the part.

And Joshua Leonard probably had the most experience out of all of them.

He had acted a bit as a kid, but he had become fascinated by early 90s indie film and enrolled in a course at the New York Film Academy, ended up taking a job at the academy shortly thereafter.

Fun fact, this job allowed him to borrow equipment on the weekends, just like in the movie.

So he actually couldn't make the initial in-person auditions, but he was so interested in the project that he kept contacting Myrick and Sanchez and he actually just showed up at the callbacks.

He got hired because of his persistence, because of his acting skill, and also because of his filmmaking experience and crucially, his ability to run a camera.

So you might be wondering, where did they get the money they used to make the film?

Again, reported as anywhere from 25K, 30K, 60K, it's all over the place.

Well, they'd scraped together money from personal funds, credit cards, and thanks to a a demo reel they put together called the Blair Witch Tapes, they'd gotten a few investors as well.

Evil Dead style, right?

Like it's Sam Raimi going out selling shares.

Yes.

And then in August of 1997, John Pearson, who is an indie film producer who had discovered quite a few other very successful indie filmmakers, helped them get the Blair Witch tapes onto IFC's show Split Screen, which he produced and hosted.

And according to production designer Ben Rock, they paid the guys like you would for seven minutes of television.

So that obviously doesn't equal the whole budget, but what it did was it covered enough to make it possible for them to film phase one.

Chris, what do you think phase one was of this project?

Phase one.

Is it all of the stuff in town?

No, it's a trick question.

Oh, it is.

It's them in the woods because that.

was not supposed to be the whole movie.

So

let's get into this.

That was just supposed to be phase one.

Myrick and Sanchez debated between filming in Florida and Maryland because those were the locations they knew they had resources.

And by resources, I mean they settled on Maryland because Sanchez's girlfriend's house was close to Seneca State Park where they would film.

Yeah, when you're making something like that, it's like, do we have an apartment we can shoot in?

Do we have parking for people?

Those are invaluable resources when you're making something this scale.

They also liked that Maryland was at least kind of close to New England if they're going with sort of a Salem Witch Trials vibe.

There's some skinny little trees out there, but yes, that is true.

I know.

It's giving cereal.

It's not giving Salem Witch Trial.

Yeah.

So they set aside $500 per week for each actor, which means these actors were paid around $1,000 total for their almost two weeks of work that they did on the Blair Witch project.

They also required each actor to sign a 1.5-page deal memo.

But one particular clause in this one and a half page deal memo did catch their attention.

Should the project net Hackson Films, that's the production company of Myrick and Sanchez, over $1 million, the actors were entitled to a 1% participation in profits in excess of $1 million.

Okay.

Myrick and Sanchez, of course, also knew they wanted to use the actors' real names in the film.

And on paper, this makes sense.

They know they're going to be improvising and basically filming 24-7 for the entire shoot, so they didn't want to have the added layer of them having to remember a fake name.

But because of this, part of the deal memo required that the actors give the filmmakers in Hacks and Films the right to use their real names for the purposes of the film.

Including promotion, etc.

And yeah.

Correct.

And as you would, as a 20-something actor excited about what is probably your first feature film, they all signed it.

I mean, when you see that number, a million dollars on the deal memo, you probably think, that would be so cool, but that's not going to happen.

You're really thinking

maybe we play a film festival.

Maybe this gets me my next audition.

Right.

There's no way you're looking that far around the bend.

That's exactly right.

So crucially, the actors were also told that their footage would likely only account for 10 to 15 minutes of the film.

The rest would be documentary with talking heads.

And as far as I can tell, this was their intention going into the production.

The deal memo was copied from a book by Blair Witch producer Greg Hale without the help of a lawyer.

Again, this makes sense.

They don't have any money, and there's no reason to think this will ever be a big hit.

Speaking of Greg Hale, he had the brilliant idea to forego a typical set and just dump the actors in the woods.

So Hale had met Myric and Sanchez in film school.

Most of the people that worked behind the scenes on the Blair Witch project had met in film school.

But he'd also served four years in the military.

And at one point, as part of his training, he had basically been put into an immersive experience designed to show the trainees what it would be like to be in a POW camp.

Even though he knew it was an exercise at a certain point, because it was so immersive, he crossed over into being genuinely scared.

So Hale's like, let's do that, but this time for theater.

Sanchez was concerned, but not for the reason you might think.

Chris, why do you think he'd be hesitant?

I mean, aside from safety issues.

Yeah, don't worry about those.

All right.

I don't know.

I mean, that's all I can think of is safety issues at this point.

What's the concern?

Well, in order for Hale's plan to work, they would have to turn quite a bit more control than they had anticipated over to the actors.

Ah, yes.

Right.

You kind of are leaving them alone and coming back to collect the footage.

Exactly.

So not only are they improvising all of the dialogue, this also requires them to shoot everything themselves because because you want them to be able to do 360 shots, which means you cannot have any crew members around.

It also means no regular check-ins with the directors and almost no contact with them during the eight-day shoot.

So

Hale suggested, all right, here's a workaround.

We're going to have a system where we use GPS to track the actors and also they will use it to help them navigate, even though GPS was really bad in the 90s.

But this way the crew could essentially follow the actors unseen and be able to drop off film, batteries, batteries, notes, and pick up the previous day's tapes.

Right.

So they mapped out the park and Myrick and Sanchez proceeded to create an emotional obstacle course for them.

Josh, Heather, and Mike were given a two-day crash course in camera work, and Heather spent time researching Wicca and how to stay alive in the woods.

Meanwhile, three days before the shoot began, Sanchez and Myrick still did not have an ending.

They finally noodled something up, but apparently the idea would have required an art department, which, again, they barely had.

So they were told they needed to come up with something that would not require any makeup, special effects, props, nothing.

And that is how they came up with the idea of one of them just standing in the corner of the room.

Production design was led by Ben Rock, who was asked if, quote, Blair Witch Project were to happen, what's the least amount of money you could live on?

And he answered, honestly, $300 a week.

And they were like, you're hired.

Sold.

Greenlit.

He made the stick figures based on ancient runic figures and also, of course, the effigy in 1973's The Wickerman.

Yeah.

And we mentioned that two-day crash course, Neil Fredericks served as the director of photography.

And in addition to teaching the actors over the course of those two days, which honestly, I don't want to diminish what he did there.

He did a really good job.

His job was basically you have 48 hours to teach them everything you possibly can in terms of what they're going to need to know about how to operate both the 16 millimeter film camera and the camcorder that they have.

Exposure, lighting, everything.

He's also keeping everything, you know, tuned up.

He's bringing them batteries.

I understand he did not shoot the portions in the woods where, you know, they're filming themselves, but he did a lot to prepare them for this.

Fredericks tragically died just five years after the Blair Witch Project while filming a movie called Crossbones.

This is really sad.

He had tied himself to a Cessna 206 plane to capture a shot, and it crashed into the ocean, and he was unable to untie himself and drowned.

Jesus Christ.

Early October 1997, the production team arrived in the park and mapped out the route they wanted the cast to take.

They also discovered the Griggs house, which is the house that's used at the very end.

It's in a different park, Patapsco Valley State Park.

And Ben Rock told Dred Central, nothing about it seemed safe.

No.

Graffiti tags covered the walls, and clearly homeless people had been living there.

There were no rails on the stairs going up three floors.

So when climbing the creaky stairs, it was best to hug the walls.

Every surface would smear or blot its residue onto you or your clothes, so leaning against walls or touching anything was a bad idea.

And the basement, a tiny brick-enclosed tomb with a low ceiling.

In the dark, cold humidity, we tried to read the graffiti off the walls through my flashlight beam, despite the dust we kicked up and our frozen breath, and the sense that at any second, a ghost or the devil, or a meth head, or a raccoon might tap us on the shoulder or attack us.

It's perfect.

And by October 23rd, 1997, it was time to go.

Heather, Josh, and Mike were given walkie-talkies, a high-eight video camera, and a 16-millimeter film camera, camping gear, story prompts, and plopped in the middle of the woods by themselves.

Put a couple lizards in a jar and tell them to fight.

Shake it up.

Anyone else do that as a kid?

Nope, just me.

That's exactly what they do here.

So they were instructed to hike from point to point, stopping only to pick up fresh batteries, supplies, supplies, and food left for them by the crew.

They would also, as we said, drop off the old tapes to be reviewed by the directors.

But because this was basically a 24-7 film shoot, Myrick and Sanchez didn't really have that much time to review the footage.

Sanchez told Backstage Magazine, the greatest challenge was staying on top of everything.

It was just a 24-hour a day shoot.

So once we started, there was this timeline that we had to maintain.

The end of the shoot was going to happen on that hour of that day.

We had to continue to build and plan stuff ahead ahead of time and direct and write directing notes and watch footage and get up at two o'clock in the morning to go scare the actors.

So it was a matter of always trying to keep ahead of the actors.

I just want to point out, it's 24-7 for the actors as well.

Yeah.

And they're not sleeping in hotel beds.

No, this is kind of like George Lucas's dream right now.

He doesn't have to talk to the actors.

He doesn't have to be on set with the actors.

That's true.

He just gets sent the footage and he gets to go and edit it and do his fun thing.

That's true.

So they would sometimes creep up to listen in on the actors, but for the most part, they had almost no interaction with them during the filming.

And they will say this, that they really did not do a lot of typical directing of the actors.

The actors agreed to remain in character the entire time, only if one said the safe word, taco, and they all agreed to break could they drop the act.

But it turns out when you're cold and hungry, because the crew keeps leaving less and less food for you because they're running out of it.

And then they figured, hey, let's just use it to our advantage.

And you can't sleep because there's noises outside your tent every night and dropped in the woods alone.

It's not really that much of an act.

They'd always had some conflict in mind when they drew up the plot points and scenarios, but they got quite a bit more than they had bargained for.

So, as we said, the direction Heather had been given from the beginning was to be a no-nonsense director who did not take any bullshit from anybody.

In the film, Chris, who do you see her butting heads with the most?

Michael, who's the sound operator who

has rented the DAT, the digital audio tape, and he's got the rented equipment and

he's the first to say, like, basically, I didn't sign up for this shit, you know, sort of thing.

Right.

So, I was very interested to discover that it was not Mike that she was butting heads with during the shoot, but instead it was Josh who was constantly fighting with Heather in the woods.

One of the only times the actors asked for the directors to step in was when Mike and Josh actually reached out to Myrick and Sanchez and asked them to please have Heather tone it down.

They gave her the note, and she did for what it's worth.

She took the note very well.

But the conflict levels did reach a potentially dangerous place, which you can see a little bit of when Josh finally explodes at Heather in the final film in that sort of what's your motivation, what's your motivation argument.

That was real.

I mean, that's real frustration.

Like, yes, what they're doing is incredible because, yes, they are staying in character and they're staying in the scenario, but they are so fucking pissed off at each other at that point.

Right.

And he's telling her to turn off the camera, right?

Like, this is is the big, and she can't, both because her character wouldn't, but also because she can't, right?

Her job is to keep filming.

Yeah, they explicitly told them, do not ever turn the cameras off.

So they had initially planned for Mike to be the one who would disappear.

But because of what they were seeing in the tapes, they pivoted and instead removed Josh.

They left a note for him saying, quote, when everyone goes to bed tonight, stay awake.

Once you're sure they're asleep, leave the tent if anybody wakes up tell them you're going to take a piss

none of them had any idea this was going to happen although apparently josh was very relieved to get the out of there he left took a really long shower got stoned and went to denny's nice which is amazing grand slam that's honestly all i want to do right now

He did not like love the experience.

He said he was less scared than he was more uncomfortable.

He told the guardian, your body would have finally warmed up the sleeping bag enough for you to fall asleep, and then you'd hear baby noises outside.

It was more annoying than anything else.

We've got to act now.

This is a really smart move on the part of the directors.

It totally changes the dynamic between Heather and Mike.

Heather and Mike also had no idea they were going to wind up at that house.

Per usual, they had been told to hike in a certain direction, and much to their surprise, they popped up in this creepy-ass derelict, you know, shack.

Production had blocked certain entrances so that they would force Mike and Heather's path into the house, and they placed radios with Josh's voice broadcasting to guide them where to go.

When Mike got to the basement, two PAs grabbed him and just told him to stand in the corner.

And when Heather got down there, the PAs grabbed her and put her camera on the floor.

Apparently, the first time they went through this, she was so scared that she started hyperventilating and shaking, and she had to be calmed down by the crew, which is understandable.

It's really scary.

I can't imagine just having two like black clad PAs crawling out of the corner to be like, Heather, put your camera down.

Well, I don't know if they sound like gremlins, but yes.

They have to.

One of the things that I think is so smart about this pivot is that when the crew first starts, Josh seems like the peacemaker, right?

And so it's unexpected, but it feels natural when he finally snaps and you realize, oh, he's long fuse,

but he will snap.

And then the unexpected alliance between Mike and Heather is really satisfying because they have to rely upon each other and we know that they hate each other.

And the fact that Josh, because he's the peacemaker, this idea that he's the one susceptible to the curse and the witch is also really interesting and I think supported by the way that the characters are developed.

Totally.

So, again, great character dynamics.

It totally works.

It tracks really nicely, in my opinion.

And I think that it works to the strengths of all the actors.

There's an insolence to Mike, you know, like that's that sarcastic, annoying pessimism.

He plays it so well.

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So a couple other fun facts about the filming.

The teeth and hair in the little bundle of sticks delivered to Heather, those are real teeth and real hair.

Whose teeth?

Supplied by a dentist.

Oh, okay.

I don't know who's coming from a dentist.

Yeah.

Well, I hope that kid got $20 of tooth for.

They look like adult teeth.

What are you going to do do with my teeth dr franklin oh don't donate them to science don't worry have you seen poltergeist

well you know about my weirdest the weirdest job i ever had right no what was the weirdest job you ever had surely you know about this very brief aside it is applicable here to the question of where does one get human teeth i very briefly covered for a friend when she was off to shoot a film somewhere this was a long time ago when i was between writing jobs and the job was to drive around to dentists offices in Los Angeles County and sometimes Orange County and offer them cash to buy the teeth

that had precious metals in them.

Oh, nice.

And so I had just jars of teeth.

Was it like you were working for like a pawn shop or something?

Who is no, it was like a cash for gold type thing.

Okay.

And then you, yeah, you would bring it back to the tooth boss and they would just give you a check for all of the teeth that you had collected.

Nice.

But I had to keep them in my car and in my house, like lining my bathroom was just a bunch of jars of, bunch of jars of teeth.

All of which is to say, if you have a tooth extracted, you do not know where that thing is going.

No.

Because dentists, they got something up their sleeve and it's your teeth.

All right.

So one of the cameras had even been bought at Circuit City.

And because their budget was so tight, they returned it.

That's the move.

It's the Guitar Center move.

David and I were in abandoned high school.

It's like, oh, you need a good amp for this show?

Let's buy it and return it afterwards.

It's what you do.

They did it.

They got the 500 bucks back.

And remember the big reveal that Mike kicked the map into the creek?

That was not planned or scripted.

That was just something that Mike did.

And he held on to that information until just the right moment.

Also, Heather's very famous monologue, completely unscripted.

Wow.

She was just told that she knows she's going to die.

So it's time to make amends.

Zero direction on how to shoot it.

meaning that iconic shot and the framing and everything was all her.

Ties back into the parole thing, too, right?

That kind of recognition of guilt.

This was my fault, you know, to the families of Mike and Josh.

I'm so sorry, you know.

Yeah.

And I am calling out the fact that like they're not getting any direction on how to shoot this stuff.

Intentionally, it's not to diminish the work that the DP did, because again, I think that his job was actually very hard on this.

But he did cede control to the actors.

And sometimes there were problems, like Heather keeping a camera zoomed in by accident for like almost almost a whole day, which resulted in unusable footage.

But for the most part, they did a really incredible job considering none of them, with the exception of Josh, had any experience with filmmaking.

That is amazing when you watch this movie.

It is.

And yet it's still amateur enough that it really strikes that perfect balance, right?

Yes.

It's intelligible enough that I can track what's going on and I am scared, but it's amateur enough that it doesn't break the reality of these are.

Because sometimes found footage films, you can tell, look too polished.

Yeah, like, oh, the camera's really pointed right here, right now.

Oh, they really knew to pan here, right now.

That never happens in this movie.

No, because they don't know to do that.

No one's telling us.

Exactly.

So filming wrapped on Halloween, 1997, and I'm sure everyone was relieved that it was done.

Yeah.

But for the actors, the nightmare was just beginning.

The original idea was that this would be presented as more of a standard documentary.

As we said, what was shot in the woods was only phase one.

Then you have like the interview with the sheriff and the interview with the exact same.

Yeah.

So the premise was someone discovered the footage after the case went cold.

It was turned over to Heather's mother, who reached out to Hacks and Films to try to make sense of it and turn it into a doc.

So they hired an actress who looked like Heather, an actor to play a detective.

They shot fake newscasts, fake in search of type episodes.

But over the course of the eight months that Myrick and Sanchez edited this, the movie started to take an entirely different shape.

They had over 22 hours of footage to sift through, which was a daunting task for them.

They were working full-time jobs trying to do this.

But as they worked their way through it, they began removing everything except for what was shot in the woods.

Yeah.

They ended up abandoning what was originally supposed to be over 50% of the film.

And it wasn't until shortly before the film's Sundance premiere that Heather, Michael, and Joshua even learned that the footage they shot would not be 10 to 15 minutes of the film, but instead the whole fucking thing.

They did not know.

So the edit was additionally stressful because they had this deadline looming to submit it for the Sundance Film Festival.

And just before the edit wrapped, the filmmakers did something else very smart that was also motivated by having no money.

At the time, Earthlink would apparently give you a website for free.

So they launched www.blairwitch.com.

And Chris, what do you know about the internet in 1999, 1998?

Fragmented,

GeoCities, Angel Fire,

slow, the Wild West dial up.

But also, it feels so authentic, right?

Whenever you go to any website.

Yes.

And so I feel there were a number of these types of sites, and it did seem like, oh, this is, this is real.

This could be real.

This could be a real website, or these are real people.

You know, there was something unvarnished about the internet at this point in time.

It's like what I imagine the dark web is, although I'm sure sure it's not.

I've never been.

Yeah.

No, it's a lot worse, I think.

Yeah, it's also worth calling out.

This was the peak of the dot-com bubble.

Only about 36 to 40% of America had access via their home or their work, but it is right at the tipping point where, yes, it's not quite accessible to the majority, but it is becoming part of the daily life for the people who use it.

So I said, timing is everything.

This is the timing.

It's the internet.

The site was pretty rudimentary, but it had some info about the project, some fun, spooky Blair Witch lore, and information about the filmmakers, aka Sanchez, and Myrick, clearly showing that the movie was indeed a movie.

So the film got into the Sundance Film Festival and premiered on January 23rd, 1999, to

not a lot of fanfare.

Audiences really liked it, but they got basically zero interest from distributors except for one, Artisan Entertainment.

Yep.

They were pretty small at the time, but they had just had success one year earlier with Darren Aronovsky's debut feature, Pie, which also came out of Sundance.

So Artisan offered them $1 million for the Blair Witch project, including the rights to spin-offs and sequels.

Now, because they had very limited options, and that probably sounded like a lot of money, Myrick and Sanchez said yes.

One of Artisan's early requests was that they find an alternate ending.

They were like, people are not going to be happy with a guy just standing in the corner.

Myrick and Sanchez really pushed back on this.

They did not want to film the alt endings.

So they took the money that artisan had given them to shoot those endings.

I believe they did shoot some additional options, but they did something else.

They replaced some of the really shaky handheld footage.

So some of the stuff that you see is not shot by Heather, Josh, or Mike.

And I believe this is actually when they tried to capture footage of the Blair Witch running in the background of certain shots.

And it was just a guy in long johns and white pantyhose running around the woods but when they got the footage back he did not show up so you just couldn't see him so that's why there's no witch

but the big thing they did was they captured those interviews about rustin parr yeah those were not in the original sundance cut that's so crucial because this is it's a curse movie more than anything right and the setup of

What the Blair Witch really is is it's this manifestation of violence, right?

This man had murdered these children, but he puts one in the corner and then he kills the other one so that one doesn't watch.

And it's very brutal and intricate.

And it sets up the ending perfectly.

Exactly.

And you understand, oh no, it's Josh under the influence of the Blair Witch.

And it kind of everything ties together really nicely.

And those interviews are really well done.

I love those.

The mom who's like, it's not real to the little girl.

Then she turns to the camera and she goes, it is real.

It's really good.

I love those.

Really good.

Those people are wonderful.

I love the two guys fishing.

They're so much fun.

Oh, yeah.

And right there over there.

It was very fargo-y, running with those two guys.

Yeah, it's great.

With their like Maryland Delco accents.

It's great.

So that was all added after.

So they came back.

They made their case to Artisan, who was like, okay, fine.

If that's really what you want to do, but it's going to cost you millions at the box office.

And Myrick and Sanchez are like, millions?

Great.

Cool.

So in addition to giving the filmmakers, honestly, a surprising amount of creative control, the smartest thing Artisan did was the way they marketed the film.

Couple of fun things.

They aired a fake documentary called Curse of the Blair Witch on the sci-fi channel right before the film came out.

Oh, I missed the sci-fi channel when it was like a Hokey and B movie.

It was great.

It was so fun.

They created missing posters with the actors' faces on them and would drop them on people's cars after the screenings.

They also...

had their interns hand out these missing posters at bars and cafes while asking people casually,

what do you know about the blue witch?

I definitely, at age 10, some friends and I thought this was real.

When the movie was coming out, it was just like, it was pitched to me as, Did you hear about this?

These three kids

fucking disappeared in the woods, and there's a movie about it.

That was very much their intention.

And I was like, no way.

That sounds so scary.

So scared.

So they leaked word of the movie to MTV and Ain't It Cool News.

They had IMDB list the actors as deceased.

Yep.

And most crucially, they completely revamped the website.

So suddenly, any mention of this not being a real documentary was removed.

Instead of Sanchez and Myrick, the filmmakers were now listed as Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams.

Also included some pretty real-looking fake documents, police reports, news articles, and photographs of evidence all popped up on the the site.

It's estimated that within a year of the original website launching, 2 million people had visited it.

Wow.

So the Blair Witch had birthed the viral marketing campaign.

Now, sources differ pretty wildly on this, but Artisan likely spent somewhere around $1.5 to $2 million on marketing and post-production.

I believe that included a $340,000 complete sound remix.

The sound is really good in this movie because it's, you can understand it.

Yeah.

What's really cool is that obviously the DAT and the camcorder are the only two devices capturing sound.

And therefore, whenever you're in the perspective of the 16 millimeter film camera, you're hearing sound from a different perspective, which then becomes really disorienting when Heather goes into the house at the end.

It's really cool.

It's a really, really neat conceit that they come up with.

It's entirely, I think, budget-driven and convenience, but they do it very well.

But then it's very well executed in the mix.

Very well.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

I wonder what the initial Sundance screening of this was like.

It must have been

pretty rough.

Not that it wouldn't be fun, especially at like a midnight screening, but I bet you it was pretty rough.

Yes.

So other sources do say the amount they spent on marketing may have been way higher, but I'm inclined to believe this because a lot of the marketing they're doing is not.

a super heavy money lift.

That also might have been what they did leading to the release, at which point, after the movie starts performing well, they probably reinvested a lot more money money to keep it going.

That's true.

In May of 1999, it premiered at Cannes, but the stars of the movie were nowhere to be found.

In fact, they were banned from appearing because they're dead, right?

It was the Disney voices of the animated characters dilemma, right?

Back with Snow White.

Mm-hmm.

On July 14th, it premiered with a limited release, and on July 30th, 1999, it opened wide.

Now, reportedly, somewhere around 50% of the original viewers thought it was real found footage of a dead documentary crew.

It got so bad that Heather's own mother was receiving condolence cards for her daughter's death, and a police officer reached out to the filmmakers about the case.

But Artisan had a problem.

Three problems, really, Chris.

Josh, Heather, and Mike were not dead at all, though they were starting to feel like it.

Once the movie had been in market for a bit, Artisan did drop the Are They Really Dead gimmick and allowed the actors to do some press, but it was becoming pretty conspicuous that the stars of one of the biggest movies of the year had no money.

Heather was driving her shitty car to her temp job when it broke down literally underneath a billboard of her face.

And Josh ended up serving his own agent food at a catering gig just a few days before he appeared on the tonight show, to which apparently his agent was like, What the fuck are you doing?

What's happening here?

And he was like, I don't have any money.

I knew not particularly well, but Katie Featherston, the lead and co-lead in Paranormal Activity, I helped her film a little project when I was in film school.

And she's wonderful.

She's really nice.

She's a really good actor.

She's very funny.

She's great.

I think she told me the story of how shortly after Paranormal came out, she would be, she was, I believe, waiting tables.

And people would, had seen that movie and they would say, excuse me, like, are you the woman from Paranormal Activity?

And I'm sure some of them thought, is this a viral marketing thing?

You know what I mean?

In some way.

And she's like, no,

that movie was made for $12,000.

I do think eventually she made money on the back end, but those checks don't clear right away.

And so, yeah.

Well, I hope she did.

She did better than these guys did.

So in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Heather said something like, quote, I'm the poorest famous person in America right now.

And Artisan did not like that.

They immediately reprimanded her and banned her from saying anything like it again.

She hired a publicist who was promptly banned from booking her on any more interviews.

Joshua Leonard was cast in another indie film and he was slapped on the wrist for that.

You're not supposed to be an actor.

You're supposed to be dead.

So why are you in this movie?

So go die.

Yeah.

On top of all of this, Heather was on the receiving end of some good old-fashioned misogyny, people attacking her for being annoying, and their hate was directed at her because it's her real name in the film.

It was by no means what any of them had signed up for.

By August, the Blair Witch Project broke $100 million at the box office.

So Heather, Michael, and Josh were holding on to hope that they were going to see at least some of that money.

Instead, to commemorate the success, Artisan sent each actor a fruit basket.

There it is.

You motherfuckers.

Yep.

$100 million.

I hope they all get sucked into a house and have to stand in the corner as one by one they're beaten with fruit baskets.

Seriously.

What assholes.

So Heather would later tell The Guardian, quote, it's a strange thing to get no credit where credit is deeply due.

By strange, I mean shitty.

We were supposed to be really scared, so we weren't actors.

Yeah.

All of us were formally trained.

We improvised all dialogue from an outline, but we weren't writers.

We shot it and independently provided the impetus for many of the scenes you see in the film, but we were not directors.

While this work became record-breakingly profitable, what we were was dead.

She makes such a good point here.

They're doing everything.

Yeah.

Everything.

Without these three people, this movie does not work.

It does not happen.

It's the curse of found footage, which is they have done such a good job in creating a reality that does not exist.

The fact that you can't see the artifice makes people assume they weren't really acting because their acting is so seamless.

It's so good.

Yeah.

And then Artisan,

because they can only see the value of what they've added, which is a marketing budget, anything that gets in the way of their own profits is obviously, it needs to go.

And that includes the people that created the very, it's the whole capital versus labor debate, like played out in real time.

Without the labor of these three, this movie does not exist.

But because Artisan has the capital to market it, we're going to step on you as we make a ton of money off of it.

It's ridiculous.

It's awful.

At the end of the summer, the actors received a performance bump in the low five figures.

It was enough for Michael C.

Williams to spend a little bit more on the cocktail hour at his wedding.

For reference, like they probably each got 10 to 20 grand.

I don't even think they got 20.

Yeah, so like the 10 to 15, let's say.

Yeah.

That is

insane.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the experience with Artisan for Sanchez and Myrick had been very positive in the lead up to the film's release.

Again, they gave them a lot of creative control.

But once it was making hundreds of millions of dollars, the tides turned for them too.

Artisan immediately wanted to capitalize on the success and release a sequel.

Sanchez and Myrick were hesitant, but pitched the idea of a prequel instead.

And according to Sanchez, this might have looked quite a bit like Robert Egger's The Witch,

where we get an origin story for the Blair Witch herself.

Artisan's like, yeah, sure, fine, whatever, we don't care, but it has to come out in October of 2000.

It's December of 1999.

Sanchez and Myrick are like, no, you need to slow down.

They were especially concerned about the franchise being overexposed, which is smart.

And Artisan's like, fuck you, we're doing it live.

And they pushed on without the directors.

Josh, Heather, and Mike were also never approached about their involvement in Blair Witch 2 Book of Shadows, and yet their faces sure do appear in it and in all the promo material for it.

So right before Blair Witch 2 came out, Heather rounded up Josh and Mike and hired a lawyer to try to block the release of the film until they were paid for what they considered to be unauthorized appearances in it.

But artisans, like,

you remember that one and a half page deal memo you signed?

Because it gave the filmmakers and therefore us the rights to do whatever the hell we want with the quote-unquote characters' names and likenesses.

Blair Witch 2 Book of Shadows came out on October 27th, 2000 to extremely bad reviews and pretty also bad to mediocre box office return.

It made about $47.7 million compared to Blair Witch's almost $250 million worldwide gross.

But Heather, Mike, and Josh didn't drop their suit.

They came back and sued Artisan for over $4 million each in damages.

And they did indeed incur damages to their careers from the way that Artisan had handled this.

According to Heather, quote, the very presence of our names, pictures, portraits, and voices in and connection with Blair Witch 2 creates confusion.

People believe I was involved, and I had to individually, with each person that asked me, set the record straight.

Meanwhile, Myrick and Sanchez were also pissed the artisan may have been inflating marketing costs in order to reduce the supposed profit.

Hacks and Films was technically entitled to $250,000 for every $2 million the film grossed above $10 million.

And as we know, it grossed way more than $10 million.

So they ended up settling with a payment to Hacks and Films of, I've seen anywhere between $25 and $30 or $40 million.

Now, the math here, anywhere in that range, really is about right for the worldwide gross of Blair Witch based on their original deal.

In 2003, Lionsgate acquired Artisan.

Myrick and Sanchez wrote a sequel for Lionsgate, but ultimately it was determined that it would have cost too much money.

Myrick told The Week, that's part of the duality of Blair Witch.

All we want you to do is shoot another $35,000 movie that makes another $140 million at the box office.

What's the problem?

From this point on, Myrick and Sanchez were effectively out of the loop for good.

Now, in February of 2004, Heather, Mike, and Josh received a $300,000 settlement from Artisan paid out over several years.

Worth noting, again,

the original deal memo said they would receive 1% participation in profits of anything Hackson earned over $1 million.

So if Hackson got a payment of $30 to $40 million,

that would mean they are entitled to $300,000 bare minimum.

And this took five years for them to get even this.

Something else the settlement got them, though, was that Lionsgate was no longer able to use their names and likenesses without their permission.

So in 2016, Lionsgate released Blair Witch, a sequel following Heather's supposed younger brother, was directed by Adam Wingard.

According to Heather and Variety, in 2024, when Lionsgate first came to her about the film, they fully intended to use her name and likeness again until she politely reminded them about the settlement and they took her out of it completely.

She was happy with this and felt like for the first time they were actually concerned about disrupting her life and they did the right thing.

Reviews on this one were mixed to bad, but it was moderately successful at the box office.

So in April of 2024, Lionsgate announced plans at Cinemacon to reboot the Blair Witch project with Jason Blum's Blum House producing.

Now, Joshua Leonard was pissed because A, A, his, Heather, and Mike's faces, particularly others, were all over the announcement at Cinemacon, but he hadn't been given any heads up that this was happening.

And he'd been trying to get Lionsgate to set up a charity screening of the Blair Witch for Artists Without Healthcare for over a month at that point, and no one had returned his calls.

In fact, Lionsgate hadn't given a heads up to any of the actors that this was happening.

And look, I can see how that might not be standard to give regular actors a courtesy call before a sequel that they're not involved in is coming out.

But these people literally wrote, starred, shot,

essentially directed this film, not to mention the fact that you are using their faces all over the material.

So the three main cast members released an open letter to Lionsgate requesting consultation on future projects and residual payments, quote, equivalent to the sum that would have been allotted through SAG AFTRA had we had proper union or legal representation when the film was made.

Michael Williams told Variety, I'm embarrassed that I let this happen to me.

You've got to put that stuff away because you're a fucking loser if you can't.

Because everybody's wondering what happened, and your wife is in the grocery line and she can't pay because a check bounced.

You're in the most successful independent movie of all time and you can't take care of your loved ones.

And Heather pointed out in the same article,

Is there value there or not?

If there's value, compensate us accordingly.

And if there's no value, then just stop using us.

So where are they now?

Michael C.

Williams left the biz to become a high school guidance counselor.

Good for you, Mike.

Joshua Leonard kept up his career as an actor and filmmaker, starring in movies like Hump Day, If I Stay, and directing and starring in Fully Realized Humans, among many other credits.

And as the only one who maintained an arguably successful career in the film industry, You might think Joshua would be hesitant to speak out against a company as big as Lionsgate, but you would be wrong.

He told Variety, quote, I don't need Lionsgate to like me.

I don't care that they know that I think their behavior has been reprehensible.

I don't want my daughter to ever feel like anything is more valuable than her self-worth.

Heather continued to try acting after the film's release, but her career eventually fizzled out.

In 2007, she retired from acting, moved out of Los Angeles, and became a cannabis grower.

She released her memoir, Grow Girl, in 2012 about her unusual career pivot, and it got pretty good reviews.

Good for you, Heather.

Yeah.

In 2020, she legally changed her name to Ray Hance because of how deeply she regretted the decision to let the filmmakers use her real name in Blair Witch.

And bizarrely, it's not just the Blair Witch franchise that has continued to exploit her performance.

In Todd Fields' 2022 Tar, starring Kate Blanchett, Ray's iconic screams from the finale of Blair Witch certainly seem to be what you are hearing when Kate Blanchett is running, jogging through that park and hears someone screaming.

You can watch videos on YouTube that sync up the Blair Witch finale audio with the tar audio.

It is pretty undeniably her voice.

It's very strange.

Yeah, I wonder why Todd Fields decided to use that.

It's really weird.

And Ray went to Lionsgate to inform them of this usage.

And instead of looping her in, they just went without her and sought their own settlement from focus features without including her.

Eduardo Sanchez went on to have a very successful career as a TV director.

And for his part, Myrick worked more in the documentary space, but has also written and directed a few features.

And the two have not worked together since the Blair Witch Project.

So, Chris, what went right?

Well, artists and entertainment.

They actually, I mean, listen, the marketing was very smart.

No, they did a good job on that front.

Yeah, but then they were assholes.

Morally bankrupt individuals.

And, you know, it doesn't surprise me from Lionsgate either, from any studio.

I think we've learned over time, you have to pry every earned cent away from these corporations.

Yeah, from their cold, dead hands.

I would like to give mine.

Look, I'll steal it.

I'm giving it to the three actors slash writers slash cinematographers slash directors.

And as Myrick and Sanchez, it's an incredibly creative conceit and idea that they came up with.

It's a really inventive way of doing it.

But as you mentioned, Lizzie, man, with an open casting call in New York, they landed the three perfect people, not only for these roles, but to do all of the other jobs that needed to be done.

Yeah.

And

what an alchemy there.

And it's so deeply frustrating that

these people,

not only did they not benefit from

this film.

No, it actively hurt them.

It set their careers back.

And so, you know, you're getting reprimanded for being in an independent film after this.

That's ridiculous, obviously.

You know, you're being reprimanded for speaking to the press.

You're being reprimanded for X, Y, and Z.

And you're having to expel all of your energy and probably money on trying to recoup what you are owed.

And for anybody who might say, well, eventually they were made whole, timing is everything.

Not really.

No, I'm just saying, even if somebody were to say, you know, as you mentioned, Lizzie, 300,000, that's 1% of 30 million.

Okay.

It was not paid out in an appropriate timely fashion and therefore they were unable to take advantage of that windfall to support career decisions that they could have made yeah being an actor is so hard pursuing any creative pursuit is hard because you do not know when you will get paid again for that creative pursuit therefore you are working other jobs you are attempting to put food on the table and make your next rent payment and if you

again are waiting on a three hundred check that may come and eventually comes in five years, you know what you're not doing in those five years is taking other opportunities that you might not be able to afford because, again, you don't have the money to take a break from your waiting job or whatever it is.

So that's right.

Also, you're extremely famous and you have no security.

You have no ability to pay for that unless it's out of your own pocket.

Like this is a nightmare.

And I just think, again,

these corporations are not our friends.

And corporations are important and they serve important functions in our society and they employ a lot of people.

But at the end of the day, you know, HR exists to protect the corporation.

These attorneys exist to protect the corporation.

The corporation exists to protect the corporation.

The corporation exists to provide a monetary return for its shareholders at the end of the day.

It doesn't give a shit about anything else.

Like David Zaslov has enriched himself to the tune of $350 million as Warner Brothers has axed movies and lost money, you know,

because the corporation exists to enrich people who are invested in it, not to benefit anybody, you know, on the creative side.

And so again, it is a brutal lesson, but it goes to show this is why you need representation, good representation.

This is why you need unions, effective unions.

This is why regulation is important to protect people, again, from

not being able to reap the reward of the fruits of their labors.

It's ridiculous.

It's absolutely ridiculous.

It's ridiculous.

That's a very important lesson that I think all young people need to learn is that

nobody in business has your best interest at heart.

No.

No one.

Don't believe them when they say that, you know, oh, but we're a family.

You know, this is like never, never.

If you hear that, run for the hills because it's not true.

I'm not saying don't trust people, but I am saying protect yourself.

And to Chris's point, get a lawyer.

Have somebody look at the contract.

Even if it's, you know, cousin Cousin Vinny, like, have somebody look at it.

Cousin Vinny was pretty good.

That would be a cousin Vinny was really.

That's a pretty good lawyer.

Yeah.

All right.

So, my what went right, since you gave it to really, really the big, the what went right for this movie, I will give it to Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick because what they did in the way that they set this up, and frankly, in the way that they were willing to relinquish control to the actors, because that's hard, was really smart.

It was really well done.

Their ability to pivot both while they were shooting in terms of them pulling out Josh, even their ability to pivot in the edit and realize that, you know, half of what they shot, we don't need.

That's so hard to do.

And I don't want to diminish what they did on this movie.

What they did is really remarkable, particularly in the post-production of it.

So I think they are a big what went right on this as well.

And I would just like to end the episode by saying, I know that there has not been resolution yet to the discussion about these three, as you said, actors, cinematographers, directors, writers receiving some kind of compensation for this forthcoming Blair Witch project franchise entry.

And I would just like to say to Lionsgate and everyone involved, please, for the love of God, do the right thing.

They are not asking for a ton.

They're asking for like the baseline SAG residual payments.

Give them to them, please.

I don't think they heard you.

I think they were stuffing dollar bills in their ears to block you out.

All right.

That wraps up our coverage of The Blair Witch.

May I give a quick shout out?

I saw Eduardo Sanchez's, I don't know if it was his second film, but it's called Altered.

It's an alien invasion cryptid movie.

It's pretty fun.

It's a pretty fun bee whole.

He's a really good director.

You guys should check it out.

Yeah, I agree.

I think Sanchez and Myric are such talented storytellers because they found the story and they had the confidence to stick with it and follow it.

I also just want to give a shout out to one of my favorite pseudo-found footage horror films that I think is really scary, Norai, N-O-R-O-I, The Curse.

It's a Japanese horror film from 2005.

Highly recommend it, especially if you guys like something like The Wailing out of South Korea recently.

I think it's great.

And again, it's a little closer to what you're talking about, Lizzie.

It's a little more polished than a Blair Witch, but it still, I think, works very well.

So highly recommend it.

And again, pay people, let them participate in the success of what you are creating.

Generosity is one of the most attractive qualities in a person or an endeavor.

It's not gonna hurt you.

It will help you in the long run.

And there is nothing less attractive than miserliness.

Yes.

And artisan, yes, great marketers.

And they will hopefully, because of this podcast, always be remembered as the people who screwed over three hardworking, talented actors who made them hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yeah.

Screwed them over so hard, so much harder than anybody ever deserved.

And there's one other lesson, I think, from this episode that I want to call out to any, any creatives out there, which is just because something has technically been done before does not mean you shouldn't try it.

Yeah.

The fact that they said, you know, had we seen Cannibal Holocaust, we probably wouldn't have made this, like, don't let that stop you.

Just because a format exists, what you make does not have to be the most original piece of content ever made in every possible way.

It needs to be a good piece of content.

It needs to be a good story.

It needs to be told well.

And that's what these guys did.

So just don't let it stop you.

If you've got a good idea, make the good idea.

All right.

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Back to Patreon for $50,

you can get a Heather up-the-nostrils shout-out,

just like one of these.

I just want to apologize.

Adam Moffat,

Adrian Ben Caria,

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I'm so sorry, Ben Schindleman.

It's really nice to meet you at the live show.

Blaze Ambrose,

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It's all my fault that you're patrons of this podcast.

C.

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Smith,

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Zodia,

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It's all because of me.

Then we're all here right now.

Film it yourself.

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What was that?

What was that?

What was that?

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I am so sorry.

I'm so sorry.

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I'm scared to open them, Rocher.

Sadie, just Sadie, Scary Carrie, Soman Chinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, and the Provost family.

The O's sound like, oh God, we're gonna die out here.

All right.

Thank you guys so much for joining us.

Make your art.

Pay your collaborators.

Lizzie, what do we have coming for the good folks at home next week?

It's Halloween.

That's right.

And I'm going to tell the story of how my brother-in-law accidentally started a gang because of this movie.

and I'm only half kidding.

Which one?

The French one?

No, not that one.

That would be more interesting.

No.

The birth of the Loomis crew as it was known.

Amazing.

Can't wait.

All right, guys.

We'll see you next week.

Bye.

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

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

Editing and music by David Bowman with research from Laura Woods and additional editing from Karen Krebsaw.