Halloween

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Speaker 12 Hello, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a genre-defining slasher made by a Renaissance man who can be behind the camera and behind the keyboard.

Speaker 12 As always, I'm your host, Lizzie Bassett, here with my co-host, Chris. And Chris, what do you have for us on this Halloween?

Speaker 2 I have Halloween, somehow the first movie ever called Halloween, which is crazy when you really think about it.

Speaker 2 And the filmmakers were as surprised as anybody that the name was available, as we will get to.

Speaker 2 It is a classic Lizzie, as you mentioned, you know, credited in large part with revitalizing the slasher subgenre subgenre of horror. I am assuming you had seen Halloween before.

Speaker 2 And this is perfect to culminate our spooky months with Halloween, only four days from Halloween. What were your thoughts upon watching it or re-watching it for the podcast?

Speaker 2 How has this movie evolved with you? Tell me, walk me through it.

Speaker 2 I love this movie.

Speaker 12 I had not seen this movie growing up because my parents were just very averse to the idea of a slasher and it was just not, that was not the kind of horror that they enjoyed they were much more psychological and or religious horror that's what i got exposed to at an early age so i kind of grew up thinking that this movie was probably pretty dumb and it wasn't until i was in probably my early 20s that i finally watched it and I began to just really fall in love with John Carpenter.

Speaker 12 I love him so much. I think this movie is remarkable.
Yes, it's a slasher. Yes, you know, there's some things that may read as a little bit hokey today, but honestly, not many.

Speaker 12 I think this movie holds up incredibly well.

Speaker 12 The thing that I noticed upon this viewing for the podcast is that I had never appreciated how great the cinematography is in this movie, which, of course, it is Dean Kundi who went on to become, I believe, he did Jurassic Park and Apollo 13 and, you know,

Speaker 2 everything. Escape from New York.

Speaker 12 Of course. Of course.
One of my, one of my favorites. But yeah, this is so great.

Speaker 12 And I love, I love that you're kind of seeing John Carpenter beginning to establish the John Carpenter cinematic universe as early as Halloween.

Speaker 12 You know, you've got the thing appearing on the TV in this movie. And we talked about this a little bit in Nightmare on Elm Street.
And, you know, the question was kind of posed:

Speaker 12 why didn't Heather Langenkamp break out since she was the final girl in Nightmare on Elm Street the same way that Jamie Lee Curtis did in Halloween?

Speaker 12 And upon re-watching it, I think the answer is Jamie Lee Curtis.

Speaker 12 Like, I do support your theory about the villain in this movie is so faceless and personalityless on purpose, which I really enjoy about this franchise and this movie in particular.

Speaker 12 But Jamie Lee Curtis is so good. Like she is just clearly a star from the second she shows up on screen.
No disrespect to Heather Langenkamp.

Speaker 12 She doesn't pop off the screen in the same way that Jamie Lee Curtis does. So all to say, I loved this movie.
I loved rewatching it. What about you, Chris?

Speaker 2 Well, I'm excited because we have slightly different opinions here. I think Halloween is fine.
Whoa.

Speaker 2 Bad and wrong.

Speaker 2 I'm sure most people will agree with you. I did grow up watching this movie.
Again, as I've mentioned, I have a bias because when I saw Scream, it exploded my brain.

Speaker 2 And once I had seen a slasher deconstructed, I had a hard time watching what had preceded it. I do agree with a lot of your praise.
I think it's very elegantly set up. It's very naturalistically shot.

Speaker 2 As you say, Dean Cundy's cinematography is really beautiful, especially the daytime scenes that pepper the first act of the film.

Speaker 2 I agree, Jamie Lee Curtis has a very easy and believable screen presence. She does not feel, she never feels forced.
She feels extremely natural. And this was her first theatrical feature film.

Speaker 2 I think the movie has really interesting use of POV throughout it.

Speaker 2 I think Hereditary later pays homage to a trope that's somewhat set up in the film, which is the classroom exploration of the theme of the film that's being ignored by the protagonists.

Speaker 2 So they're talking about fates and

Speaker 12 Twilight, New Moon, obviously.

Speaker 2 Twilight, even Nightmare on Elm Street does something not dissimilar when they discuss Hamlet and Heather Langencamp falls asleep.

Speaker 2 But all of that to be said, again, the movie just feels a little lumbering to me in the same way that Michael is lumbering to me.

Speaker 2 And as I'm a huge John Carpenter fan, but I tend to like his Zanier films. I actually kind of prefer Assault on Precinct 13, which was his movie before this.
I love the thing.

Speaker 12 I mean, can we agree that the thing is his best?

Speaker 2 Probably, yeah. Without giving it much thought, I would probably say that is his best film.
Big Trouble in Little China is one I'm a big fan of. Love it.
I like The Fog.

Speaker 2 Prince of Darkness, a lot of people are not fans of. I do really like it.

Speaker 2 I understand the importance of this film, and there are flourishes that I really do like, little grace notes, like Michael's mask coming off and the kind of desperate, childlike pulling down to, you know, hide his face at the end.

Speaker 2 Donald Pleasance, I think, gives a really good, fun performance and lends some gravitas to the movie. Donald Pleasance, who plays Dr.
Loomis, Michael's six-shooter-toting psychiatrist.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 So, all to say, say, this evil has left.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 While I appreciate a lot about this movie and the place that it holds in cinematic history, it's not one that I go back to to rewatch very often.

Speaker 2 That being said, I really love the story behind how it was made. the research that my sister put together for us to talk about today.
And I do have one funny Halloween story.

Speaker 2 Kind of. My brother-in-law, back in high school, watched Halloween with his friends, and they loved it.
They loved it because they thought it was so cool that Dr. Loomis was strapped.

Speaker 2 They thought that was awesome. So they started a fake gang called the Loomis Crew, and they would blast the Halloween theme song from their cars while they went like this,

Speaker 2 and made finger guns.

Speaker 2 And it got so out of hand that the Fairfield Police Department added the Loomis crew to their list of official gangs, not knowing that it was a bunch of dumb high school boys referencing Halloween.

Speaker 2 That's incredible. So that's my one Halloween story.

Speaker 12 Well, there's a couple other things I think we would be remiss in not mentioning right at the top, which is that, Chris, are you aware of the real housewife who has a role in this movie? Yes. Okay.

Speaker 12 Kyle Richards.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 12 Kyle Richards, yes, who plays Lindsay and did, again, it returned in the most recent franchise entry.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Sorry.

Speaker 12 Which I watched mostly because of the real housewives.

Speaker 2 I watched all three of them. Kyle Riches was good.

Speaker 12 She was good. She's a good actor.
That is something that I always forget. She's a good little actor.
She does a great job in this. She's very cute.

Speaker 2 Eight years old.

Speaker 12 So I have to mention the Bravo connection for anybody who's not familiar. And the only other thing I'll say is that this movie really takes its time with the killing spree, which I appreciate.

Speaker 12 Obviously, you get a kill right up top. You get some boobs, you get a kill right up top.
What more do you need? And then you have to wait like 50 minutes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's not until the third act that the killer starts again, right?

Speaker 12 Yeah, and I think that's really successful. And I think that, you know, he's a slow killer, which is also.

Speaker 2 He is.

Speaker 12 I really like. He's so slow.

Speaker 2 He's very slow.

Speaker 12 Like an ice skater.

Speaker 2 He's strong. Yeah.
But he's slow. It's a slow burn.
I appreciate that as well. You know,

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 2 maybe pick it up a hair. Maybe we go 10% faster than the next one.

Speaker 2 All right. I do want to start us thematically

Speaker 2 in a place that I feel one of the reasons this film was so successful is because of

Speaker 2 babysitters.

Speaker 2 And I think babysitters hold a unique place in American society, especially I think for folks that grew up in the 70s, 80s, 90s,

Speaker 2 the use of the high school babysitter really became a mainstay. And I think has petered out a little bit.

Speaker 2 But when we were growing up, at least I remember a couple of high school babysitters quite fondly. And I'm curious, Lizzie, if you had babysitters or babysat when you were in high school.

Speaker 12 Yes, definitely. I think frequently my cousin babysat me and she was quite a bit older.
So that was. a more responsible choice.
But I babysat some children when I was like 13, 14 years old.

Speaker 12 And these were like, you know, two-year-olds. And I don't think that's a good idea.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 12 In retrospect. Also, I have to call out Annie, world's worst babysitter, literally the worst one you could hire, and also a terrible friend.
And then the best babysitter is Lori.

Speaker 2 Who needs Michael when you got friends like these?

Speaker 2 They're terrible. They're terrible.

Speaker 12 Lori is a great babysitter. And we did bring up the final girl in the Nightmare on Elm Street episode.

Speaker 12 And, you know, this movie kind of crystallizes the idea that the final girl is the one who is sort of pure and is the one who's good. Right.
And all the other sickos die.

Speaker 2 I do think Carpenter and Hill have said it was not their intention to make any sort of commentary on sexuality.

Speaker 2 And I think what they're doing is they're trying to create a shorthand for responsibility, which is Jamie Lou Curtis's the responsible one.

Speaker 12 Is that true, though? Because Michael's first kill is directly related to his sister being sexual. So I don't know that I buy that.

Speaker 2 That's just what they've said.

Speaker 2 They've said that Laurie not having sex was not meant to be a differentiating factor on the basis of sex, but rather, I think what they're getting at is she's being responsible. She's with the kids.

Speaker 2 Right. She's skeptical.
She does not just let people into her home unless it's other children.

Speaker 12 Unless it's Kyle Richards, which is understandable. Right.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And that's where I do think this movie does something interesting, which is these babysitters are both,

Speaker 2 we see them as vulnerable, but I think as children, we see them as these almost mythical protectors, you know what I mean, of us.

Speaker 2 And so it does something, I think, interesting in pitting Laurie Strode against this automaton, right, who's going to bust down the door and there's no adults to help. And Dr.

Speaker 2 Loomis is about as effective as Bob in one battle after another. He shows up at the very end.
He's just walking up and down the street. Yeah, exactly.
Actually, that's not true.

Speaker 12 He's mostly just standing outside of Michael's house for the majority of this movie.

Speaker 2 And just saying, like, hey, get out of here, you kids. And he's just waiting.

Speaker 12 Or calling the cop and going, he's not here yet.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, this was not a chic production, as we'll learn.
Great. But before we get there, the details.
Halloween is a 1978 horror film directed and co-written by John Carpenter.

Speaker 2 Co-written by his then-girlfriend and longtime collaborator, Deborah Hill, with music composed, as you mentioned, Lizzie, by John Carpenter at his

Speaker 2 chord keyboard or the Moog or whatever he's at.

Speaker 2 It was produced by, of course, John Carpenter, who was uncredited, and Deborah Hill, along with Erwin Yablons, who is an executive producer, and Mustafa Akkad, who is an uncredited executive producer.

Speaker 2 It stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, great name, I will say, fantastic protagonist name in her feature debut. Nick Castle and Toni Moran, and maybe some other people as Michael Myers,

Speaker 2 A really, really

Speaker 2 clutch Donald Pleasance as Dr. Loomis.
He's great. PJ Soules as world's second worst friend, Linda.
And Nancy Keys, then Nancy Loomis, as world's worst friend, Annie.

Speaker 12 I noticed the last name. Was that just a total coincidence?

Speaker 2 It is. We'll get to it.
Yeah, it is. It's an interesting coincidence.
And obviously, Billy Loomis later would be named after Dr. Loomis, but Dr.

Speaker 2 Loomis' name comes from a different character from a different movie that we will get to.

Speaker 2 Charles Cypers as Sheriff Brackett, and as you mentioned, future real housewife Kyle Richards as Lindsay Wallace.

Speaker 2 It was released by Compass International Pictures, an Aquarius releasing on October 25th, 1978, and as always, the IMDb log line reads: 15 years after murdering his sister on Halloween night, 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Speaker 12 AKA South Pasadena. This did make me very homesick because it is very clearly Pasadena.
It is Pasadena. And I love it.

Speaker 2 All right, sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Halloween, A Cut Above the Rest, the documentary, Halloween Unmasked, the documentary.

Speaker 2 The films of John Carpenter by John Kenneth Muir, the book, John Carpenter, The Prince of Darkness by Jules Boulanger, Boulanger, and many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews of those involved in the film.

Speaker 2 Now, how did Lizzie, a low-budget horror film, very low-budget horror film, with, whether you like it or not, a pretty thin plot, and one of the slowest-moving villains since the introduction of the mummy in early Hollywood, become the seminal slasher that came to define the sub-genre?

Speaker 2 And what went wrong.

Speaker 2 Well, we got to go back, Lizzie. We got to start with a man who's as synonymous with horror as basically anybody.
I would argue anybody except Wes Craven. And that is John Carpenter, right?

Speaker 2 If you think of the, who are the two horror masters of, let's say, 1975 to 2000 or so, I feel like it's those. Those two guys are

Speaker 2 top of the pantheon.

Speaker 12 For sure.

Speaker 2 But John Carpenter did not grow up in a house of horrors. He didn't even grow up in a strict fundamentalist house like West Craven.
He grew up in a wonderful house of music.

Speaker 12 I'm not surprised.

Speaker 2 He was born in New York. He moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky when he was five.

Speaker 2 He was an only child, and he and his family lived out in a log cabin in the woods on the grounds of the University of Western Kentucky. His dad taught music history and theory.

Speaker 2 He was an accomplished violinist. He was in the university orchestra.
He accompanied for local plays and even performed in studio sessions with the likes of Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Brenda Lee.

Speaker 2 And young Johnny Carpenter would go and listen to them play. And he grew up in this really supportive environment.
His parents would tell him, try your hand.

Speaker 2 And his father once gave him this blank sheet of music paper. He sat down, filled it out with little notes, and then he played it for him on the piano.

Speaker 2 And it sounded terrible, but they were always really encouraging of young John. He described music music as being second nature, but he wasn't a natural, I think, like his dad.

Speaker 2 He tried the violin, but he did not have a talent for it. He was unable to play.
As he later said, it was a very sad, sad situation.

Speaker 2 But operating a camera, a lot easier than the violin. And by the time he was eight, John Carpenter thought, maybe I want to be a director.

Speaker 2 But Lizzie, he was not inspired by the films you might expect. The first movie he ever saw starred Catherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.
Oh, the African queen.

Speaker 2 The African Queen, which we just covered. He was four years old when he saw it.
The image of Bogart with all those leeches on him just stuck with him.

Speaker 2 And a year later, I mean, of all the imagery, that's the one. Oh, that would be what John Carpenter remembers.
A year later, he watches 1953's It Came from Outer Space in 3D, and he was hooked.

Speaker 2 He daydreams about the movies he wants to make, and then he sees Forbidden Planet in 1956, and it seals the deal. Partly because it has an all-electronic score, which totally blows his mind.

Speaker 2 So he starts making 8-millimeter films with his friends, and by 14, he's making 40-minute genre movies. Revenge of the Colossal Beasts, Terror from Space, Gorgo vs.

Speaker 2 Godzilla, Gorgon the Space Monster, La G monsters in this universe. But Hollywood was a long way away from Kentucky.
He falls in love with the Beatles. He grows out his hair, which he would keep long.

Speaker 2 It's still long. He's missing most of it, but what he has is long.

Speaker 12 I know. I've seen John Carpenter live in concert, and he sure does have long, stringy hair and a ponytail.

Speaker 2 He does.

Speaker 2 He studied English and history at Western Kentucky University. He plays bass, sings with a band called Kaleidoscope, but deep down, he's restless.
He wants to make movies.

Speaker 2 So two years in, he transfers to USC Film School, flies across the country, lands in Los Angeles, and as Miley Cyrus once said, I hopped off the plane at LAX with a daydream and my cardigan.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the land of fame excess.

Speaker 2 Am I going to fit in? Well, John Carpenter didn't have a cardigan. Lori Strode would in Halloween.
But Lizzie, he had a map. And he got off the plane and thought, USC doesn't look that far.

Speaker 2 So he decided to walk from LAX to USC. It's very far.

Speaker 2 How far do you think? How long do you think it would take to walk from LAX to USC?

Speaker 12 Oh, that's probably six miles. Is that right?

Speaker 2 Nine and a half miles. Okay.
Three and a half hours walking at a good clip. It's actually 14 and a half driving miles because of, you know, turns and whatnot.
He finally makes it to USC.

Speaker 2 And he feels out of place because USC wants their students to make meaningful personal films. They're an art school, and John Carpenter says, I want to make money.
I want to make big movies.

Speaker 2 I want to make commercial movies, much like Zemekis, right? With later experience.

Speaker 2 Or even, I've heard Paul Thomas Anderson, when he showed up at, I don't know if it was Columbia or NYU, and they were like, Terminator 2 is not a real movie.

Speaker 2 And he's like, Terminator 2 is one of the best movies ever. Get the fuck out of here.
It's true.

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Speaker 2 Your next obsession is waiting, and they might even have the movie that we're going to cover next week.

Speaker 2 So. The school did host some retrospectives with commercially successful directors, including John Ford and Howard Hawkes.

Speaker 2 Did you see Howard Hawkes' name on the television screen? I did, yes, for The Thing. That's right.

Speaker 2 He produced The Thing from Another World, the 1951 black and white film, which John Carpenter would later remake as The Thing, arguably his best movie. Now, Carpenter loved Howard Hawkes.

Speaker 2 He was an Oscar-nominated genre agnostic writer, producer, and director. Some of his credits that you guys might know.
His Girl Friday, the original Scarface, he is prolific.

Speaker 2 This is what Carpenter wants. Complete control, commercial budgets, every genre, comedies, westerns, war.
He actually doesn't mention horror, which is interesting.

Speaker 2 But the seeds were there because his first credit is a seven-minute black and white film he made at USC called Captain Voyeur, which you can see online. It has almost no dialogue.

Speaker 2 It's about a peeping Tom wearing a cape and balaclava who lurks around the neighborhood at night and then gets shot by a woman who spots him in her window.

Speaker 2 There are several point-of-view shots where you can hear him breathing heavily. Sound familiar?

Speaker 12 Most of Halloween, yes.

Speaker 2 And just John Carpenter experiencing his fantasy as he's filming. Yeah, he would actually breathe heavier than that, just trust me.

Speaker 2 Now, his most famous film school credit is a 20-minute short film called The Resurrection of Bronco Billy.

Speaker 2 Carpenter did not direct this, but he did co-write the story, which is about a young man who lives in the city and dreams of becoming a cowboy. He also scored and edited the film.

Speaker 2 So as you mentioned, Lizzie, he's a Renaissance man from the get-go. Now, The Resurrection of Bronco Billy won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Short Film.

Speaker 2 And the producer of the film mentions Carpenter by name when accepting the Oscar. And so we really have the sense that Carpenter is this Wundekund, right? He

Speaker 2 comes from this musical household. His parents tell him he can accomplish anything.
He shows up in Los Angeles, walks to USC, gets an Oscar. He is on his way.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 everything

Speaker 2 grinds to a halt. So he decides it's time to make a feature film.
Well, it starts as kind of a long, short film, but this will eventually become a feature film.

Speaker 2 Lizzie, have you ever heard of the movie Darkstar?

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 2 Okay, so Dan O'Bannon, who would go on to write Alien, perhaps most famously, and John Carpenter decide to make this sci-fi comedy called Darkstar,

Speaker 2 described as waiting for Godot in space. And they are filming it piecemeal, literally.
So they get, I heard $1,000, maybe $6,000 from USC, and decide to shoot 45 minutes or so.

Speaker 2 And this is going to be Carpenter's directorial calling card. They'd make like 10 minutes of it, screen it for family and friends, potential investors, raise more money, shoot 10 more minutes.

Speaker 2 And by the way, this movie is actually pretty fun. It's very low budget, but you can see it owes a lot to Stanley Kubrick.
There is so much Doctor Strange love to this movie.

Speaker 2 There is so much 2001 Space Odyssey. There's like a self-aware bomb in this movie that the main character is having a conversation with at the end, trying to get it not to detonate.

Speaker 2 And the bomb realizes that it can only be certain of its own existence. And so therefore, it has to detonate itself.
It's very absurd. It's very fun.

Speaker 2 It's definitely low budget, but you can kind of see its influences. And, you know, it wears all of these influences on its sleeve.

Speaker 2 This process of raising money and shooting 10 minutes at a time goes on for four

Speaker 2 years. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 It is like walking from LAX to USC.

Speaker 2 During this time, Carpenter drops out of USC. At one point, he thinks they're done, but then the movie's too short, but it's too long to be as short.

Speaker 2 Carpenter is composing the score, but the investor who funded post-production wants reshoots. It's a complicated, complicated story that we will get into when we cover the film.

Speaker 2 Long story short, they finish it. It releases in LA in 1975, and it makes basically no money.

Speaker 2 And Carpenter's crushed because I think he really thought this was going to be it. Like he had gotten here, everything's going well.

Speaker 2 He's going to make his first feature and the studios are going to come calling. He's going to be the next Howard Hawks.
But making it in Hollywood is hard. It's like learning the violin.

Speaker 2 It's really hard. So he lands an agent.
The agent sends him out on these generals at the fringes of Hollywood, people with sketchy money and weird projects that they want made.

Speaker 2 And Carpenter's terrible at selling himself. So none of these are going anywhere.
And the studios aren't calling. And he's taking checks from his dad to stay afloat.
So he shifts to writing.

Speaker 2 And over the next few years, he puts directing on pause and he writes a bunch of scripts. And it turns out he's good at it.

Speaker 2 And a a number of them get made and i just want to talk about a couple that are relevant to our story so eyes of laura mars have you heard of eyes of laura mars have you ever seen it no eyes of laura mars was released in 1978 so same year as halloween it was directed by irvin kirshner stars tommy lee jones and faye dunaway and it's the story of a woman who can see through the eyes of a killer it's like a reverse peeping tom i have heard about this i've never seen it You know what's funny?

Speaker 2 You think as a package, Kirshner, Tommy Lee Jones, Faye Dunaway, and it's a good log line. And the movie just, for me, it didn't really come together.

Speaker 2 I still think it would be an interesting movie to remake.

Speaker 2 And then he directs this TV movie called Someone's Watching Me, which was actually also released in 1978, and is about a woman tormented by a mysterious stalker.

Speaker 2 Think we're picking up on a theme, maybe a secret interest of Mr. Carpenter's here? Unclear.

Speaker 12 John, what are you doing between the hours of 9 and 11 p.m. at night in your neighborhood?

Speaker 2 Breathing heavily. Now, the most important script that he would write during this period of about six years was actually written in eight days.

Speaker 2 It was a modern-day Western about a group of cops and prisoners trapped in a police station that was being shut down, defending themselves against a local gang.

Speaker 2 It was inspired by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. Carpenter called it the Anderson Alamo, because it takes place in a little town called Anderson.

Speaker 2 And then he called it the siege, which makes sense because they talk about it being a siege in the movie. And finally, at the suggestion of his distributor, the name changed to Assault on Precinct 13.

Speaker 2 Have you ever seen Assault on Precinct 13?

Speaker 12 I have not, but I know I need to.

Speaker 2 It's good. It's really fun.
It's kind of like a nasty little, it's not quite an exploitation film, but it's more in the vein of like an Escape from New York, for example. One of my faves.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think you can kind of see where Carpenter has a real strength, in my opinion, and that's in ensemble films. And I think he does a good job managing a lot of the characters.

Speaker 2 Importantly, it does feature Nancy Loomis, who would go on to join the cast of Halloween as a young woman who's working at the telephone.

Speaker 12 And sorry, he wrote this, but did not direct it.

Speaker 2 He wrote it and directed it. And directed it.
Okay. That's right.
And Charles Cyphors, who would go on to play Sheriff Brackett in Halloween.

Speaker 2 And of course, art director Tommy Wallace, who would go on to do production design in Halloween.

Speaker 2 And perhaps most importantly, his assistant editor and script supervisor was a woman named Deborah Hill.

Speaker 2 Now, Romance Blooms between Hill and Carpenter. Production wraps.
They start dating. And Assault on Precinct 13 was released in November of 1976,

Speaker 2 and it flopped. Got mixed reviews.
Strike two.

Speaker 2 Carpenter is devastated. I'll read you the quote.
It was the second time I'd had a film make no no money. I tried not to get too upset or take it too personally, but no one wanted me as a director.

Speaker 2 I went back to writing. Writing was opening a door to another door to another door.
It was keeping me alive and paying the bills, but I was programmed for failure. Assault didn't do a thing.

Speaker 12 It's since become a classic, though, right? It's been remade?

Speaker 2 It has become a classic, and it was remade with Lawrence Fishburne and Ethan Hawk. I didn't love the remake, but it's fun.

Speaker 12 I think I actually have seen the remake. Anyway, continue.

Speaker 2 Carpenter may have regretted Precinct 13 in the moment, but he would not regret it long term because without it, Halloween probably never would have happened.

Speaker 2 So, a year after Precinct comes out, Carpenter's wrapping production on that TV movie, Someone's Watching Me.

Speaker 2 He's hanging out in the commissary at Warner Brothers, and a stranger walks up to him and they say, Hey, Assault on Precinct 13 is breaking attendance records in the UK. Oh.

Speaker 2 Carpenter goes, how is that possible?

Speaker 2 And it's possible because of a man named Erwin Jablons.

Speaker 2 He was the pushy distributor who insisted on the name change to Assault on Precinct 13.

Speaker 2 Now he ran an upstart indie distribution company called Compass International Pictures, but he was actually an experienced Hollywood operator.

Speaker 2 He had worked in sales and distribution at Warner Brothers, and he had even worked on distributing Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo.

Speaker 2 He hopped from Warner Brothers to Paramount and became known as the president's brother when his younger brother, Frank Jablantz, was promoted to the president of the studio in 1971.

Speaker 12 I was going to say, yeah. So they are actually related.

Speaker 2 They are brothers. Okay.

Speaker 2 Nepotism did not work in his favor. In 1975, Frank was canned, and two weeks later, Irwin went too.
It was a huge blow.

Speaker 2 They just started producing, so Irwin decides he's going to form a distribution company. To be clear, Frank is not involved in this.
This is just Irwin. They had fewer than 10 employees.

Speaker 2 By 1976, they had distributed exactly one movie, but they knew how to market themselves. They'd put announcements in the trades.
Compass International making big moves.

Speaker 2 Hollywood Reporter says, who knows if it's true? And that's when he got a call from John Carpenter's agent about Precinct 13, which was looking for distribution.

Speaker 2 And unlike the studios, Irwin thought Carpenter had the goods. Here's his quote.
I was excited. This was a movie that I could sell.

Speaker 2 Carpenter was obviously a very talented guy, and I wondered how the major studios had not seen what I had.

Speaker 12 Quick question, just for clarification. Sorry.
So you said he insisted on the name. Was the name different in the UK?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 So Carpenter's agent connects connects with Irwin after production has wrapped. Precinct 13, I believe, costs around $100,000 to make, which is incredible.

Speaker 2 That is one-third the budget of Halloween, and it's an action movie.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's nothing.

Speaker 2 The movie needs distribution. Erwin gets on board before it distributes in the United States and insists on the name change.
I believe it was actually going by the name The Siege when Erwin comes on.

Speaker 2 Got it.

Speaker 2 The movie flops in the United States, and that's when Irwin gets creative.

Speaker 2 He finds all these revenue streams that he'd never been aware of when he was at a big studio, because big studios would never need these revenue streams.

Speaker 2 Non-theatrical rights, school screenings, cruise lines, prisons, the new line cinema model of distribution. So basically, cobbling all this together, he's able to meet payroll.

Speaker 2 And then he takes the movie to, it's a film festival in Milan. I will do my best to pronounce this name.
Mercato Internacionale del Film del TV, Film del Documentario.

Speaker 2 It is an international cinema and television market held annually in Milan. And he's got something that could sell.
It has sex, action, little dialogue. There is

Speaker 2 interest. And by sex, I mean there's some women in the film.
There's not actually really any sex in this movie. But he realizes: hey, maybe we don't have to just distribute movies like this.

Speaker 2 Maybe Maybe we could make movies like this. I could raise $100,000.
And that's when he's approached by a tall man in his 50s named Michael Myers. Oh no.

Speaker 12 How slow is he?

Speaker 2 And he kills him.

Speaker 12 Okay, well, what did this actual Michael Myers man do in order to deserve being the namesake of one of the most infamous slow-moving serial killers?

Speaker 2 He killed a lot of people. Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 No, he didn't know. He actually asked John Carpenter, John, was there something about me that inspired you to create this mindless, lumbering automaton murderer? And Sean said, No, of course not.

Speaker 2 I just wanted to pay homage to you because without you, Assault on Precinct 13 never would have been successful and Halloween never would have happened.

Speaker 2 And I mean, I guess it's a compliment, but it feels like a little bit of a weird one.

Speaker 2 But to maybe to John, he's like, what an honor. You are now synonymous with one of the greatest villains in cinema history.
Sure. So I guess I can see that.

Speaker 2 Myers works for a distributor called Miracle Pictures, and he wants to talk about Precinct 13. They agree to meet at the end of the week.
It's the day of the meeting. Erwin's sick.

Speaker 2 He wants to go home. He thinks about canceling, but then the phone rings.
Myers is already in the lobby. Classic slasher material there.
He can't bail. So he goes downstairs.

Speaker 2 Myers says, look, I want to take Assault on Precinct 13 to the London Film Festival and then do a UK release.

Speaker 2 So in November of 1977, Assault on Precinct 13 becomes the surprise hit of the London Film Festival. And it's in this moment that Irwin knows something that nobody else does.

Speaker 2 He knows something that John Carpenter doesn't even really know. He knows that John Carpenter is a good director.
That's right.

Speaker 2 And he decides, I got to get him to make a movie with me before he figures it out because then I won't be able to afford him. So, Erwin has an idea for a movie.
It comes to him on a long flight.

Speaker 2 He knows he wants to do horror because comedy is too divisive.

Speaker 2 The quote he has is: you know, you tell a joke at a dinner party, a third of the people think it's funny, a third of the people don't laugh, and a third of the people think it's offensive.

Speaker 2 But if you run in with a knife at a dinner party, everybody gets scared.

Speaker 2 That's his justification. Horror is unifying, humor is divisive.
Great.

Speaker 2 He decides the movie should be about a killer who stalks vulnerable teenage girls as they babysit even more vulnerable little kids. Basically, the whole film.
And the flourish,

Speaker 2 it takes place on one night, Halloween. And he decides, I want to call this movie Halloween.
But then he says, Erwin, don't be an idiot. There has to already be a movie called Halloween.

Speaker 2 So he calls John Carpenter and he pitches him The Babysitter Murders. That's going to be the title.
Erwin, go back. Yeah.
So Carpenter says,

Speaker 2 okay, fine. I'll do it.
Because he's unemployed and has nothing else to do. They meet at the local hamburger hamlet.
They talk over details, not over hamburgers, but apparently tuna fish sandwiches.

Speaker 2 Ew, guys. Maybe they're great there.
I don't get it, but they're into it. Carpenter's pretty blase until Erwin reveals.

Speaker 2 Actually, we can call it Halloween because I did some research and nobody's ever called a movie Halloween before.

Speaker 2 And I did some research, and I think the only horror movie that used a holiday in its title was Lizzie Black Christmas. Wow, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 Until that point in time, there are about 100 movies named Christmas something made, you know, until this point. None named Halloween.

Speaker 12 That's crazy. It's also a very smart device, the way that he uses it at the end of the film, where, you know, she's banging on the neighbor's doors and they're not answering.

Speaker 12 theoretically because it's Halloween and kids are acting up and doing crazy shit and they think it's a prank. So exactly.

Speaker 2 Very well done. Carpenter also thinks this is a cool idea.
He says, I can do it. I need four weeks and $300,000,

Speaker 2 which is a really low ask, but it's a lot more than what he'd done Precinct 13 for.

Speaker 2 He'll write, he'll direct, he'll compose and produce the music. All he wants, a $10,000 fee and 10% of the profits.
Great. Along with complete creative control.
That's a pretty good deal.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Irwin says for $300,000, you can have whatever you want, John, because that's a steal.

Speaker 2 Now, where that $300,000 actually came from is a bit difficult to pin down. So Erwin and Carpenter take the movie to another USC grad, director and producer Mustafa Akkad.

Speaker 2 He was actually a mentee of Sam Peckenpah and an immigrant from Syria, and he'd long been interested in bringing stories of Islam to the United States.

Speaker 2 He faced a lot of resistance in Hollywood, so for his big desert epic, Lion of the Desert, he got some unique financing.

Speaker 2 Specifically, Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya gave him $35 million to make this movie about the second Italio-Senussi War starring Anthony Quinn and Oliver Reed. Okay.

Speaker 2 Now that movie flopped hard.

Speaker 2 I think it made a million dollars against its budget, but one source did suggest that Halloween was financed by leftover funds from Lion of the Desert, which would mean that Halloween was technically financed by Gaddafi.

Speaker 2 Mumar Gaddafi was the autocratic leader of Libya for 40 years until the Arab Spring.

Speaker 12 Okay, so it's safe to say not a cool guy.

Speaker 2 Probably not. Had access to a lot of money, sovereign wealth.
I don't think this is true. This is just what it said on one Halloween resource website because Lion in the Desert wasn't shot until 1979.

Speaker 2 That timeline doesn't actually make sense. I would like to debunk that.
I do not think that this was financed by leftover funds from that movie because that movie was made after Halloween.

Speaker 2 A Vulture retrospective says that Irwin and Akkad split the budget between their respective companies, Compass International and Falcon International, but the AFI states that Akkad advanced the entire budget.

Speaker 2 I don't know which one to believe, but it was independently financed. There is not a big investment group.

Speaker 12 They got the money. Whether they got the money from a dictator is right, exactly.
Potato, potato, potato.

Speaker 2 Potato, potato. Hollywood has taken money from worse.

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Speaker 2 We may not know who paid for it, but we do know who wrote the first draft. And it wasn't John Carpenter.
It was Deborah Hill. Oh.

Speaker 2 Now Hill had Hollywood in her blood. Her father, Frank Hill, had worked in art direction, but he left that to become a salesman.
And Deborah took the opposite approach. She got a degree in sociology.

Speaker 2 She worked as a flight attendant. She moved to Jamaica.
She wrote liner notes for albums. And then she came back to California, started working as a PA, climbed the ranks.
And this was a quantum leap.

Speaker 2 She's going from script supervisor and assistant editor to being a credited producer and writer on a feature film. It's a big deal.
And Carpenter needed her. He needed her humanity.

Speaker 2 As she said, the story was a complete 50-50 collaboration.

Speaker 2 I wrote the first draft, laying in the kids, the teenagers, and John came back with a pass for the Sam Loomis character, All the Stuff About Evil, is Really John, which makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 I do think Carpenter is very good at writing the dialogue amongst men, for example, in some of his films, but I do think...

Speaker 2 His best movies have, we talked about this with The Thing, which was written by the screenwriter who had done Bad News Bears and does an exceptional job setting up the characters really economically.

Speaker 2 And while I think Carpenter's a really good director, I do think when he brings in another screenwriter, his work really shines. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So Hill sets the story in Haddenfield, Illinois, an homage to her hometown of Haddenfield, New Jersey.

Speaker 2 She likes the idea of exposing what's underneath the veneer of the suburbs, and she pulls from her personal experience as a teenage babysitter.

Speaker 2 And so for Michael Myers, Carpenter decides he wants a villain that's more mythical force than human man.

Speaker 2 And if Myers seems robotic, Lizzie, that's intentional.

Speaker 2 Are you familiar familiar with a movie that came out in 1973 that had a big influence on the likes of Jurassic Park and became a very popular HBO series not too long ago? Written by Michael Crichton?

Speaker 12 Wait, Michael Crichton. Oh, oh, yes, yes, Westworld.

Speaker 2 Westworld, that's right. About a theme park gone awry with robotic cowboys.

Speaker 12 Yes, it's Pirates of the Caribbean, where they actually do start eating the passengers.

Speaker 2 They do.

Speaker 2 Now, Carpenter also pulled from personal experience. He had taken a psychology class in college and he'd visited a mental institution in Kentucky.

Speaker 2 And he did say, and this is a slightly insensitive quote, but he did say that Dr.

Speaker 2 Loomis's line about the six-year-old child with devil eyes was inspired by an encounter that Carpenter had had with a severely mentally ill 12 to 13-year-old kid.

Speaker 2 Children are not possessed by the devil. I hope that child got the psychological help that they needed.

Speaker 2 So they crack the structure and then they make a list of scares and they just start weaving these scares methodically into the story. And Lizzie, you mentioned the name Sam Loomis.

Speaker 2 It does not come from Nancy Loomis. It comes from Psycho.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's right.

Speaker 12 Of course.

Speaker 2 So Tommy Doyle was named after Lieutenant Thomas Doyle from Rear Window in one Hitchcock reference. And then Dr.

Speaker 2 Loomis and his nurse Marion at the beginning of the film come from Sam Loomis and Marianne Crane. Yeah.
From Psycho. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Now, Halloween's biggest psycho connection is

Speaker 12 Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of the original screen queen, Janet Lee.

Speaker 2 That's right. Janet Lee, who had been nominated for her work on that film for an Oscar.
And of course, Jamie Lee's father is Tony Curtis. Yes.

Speaker 12 Star of Some Like It Hot.

Speaker 12 And if anyone is not familiar with Janet Lee, or if I have, for any reason, not seen Psycho, she is famously in sort of a what nightmare on elm street is playing on she is the person you think you're following at the beginning of the movie she's the one who stolen the money and she is the one who is very famously murdered in the shower that's right she had a hard time showering after that famously as well i had a hard time showering i saw psycho way too young and i took only baths for a really long time because i was really afraid that someone was going to stab me in the shower i'm not a bath guy not a fan of baths love a bath got to be standing i was scared of pools after seeing Jaws.

Speaker 2 Like pools, oceans. I was afraid of those after Jaws for sure.

Speaker 12 There's no sharks in pools, Chris. And there's no psychos in my shower.

Speaker 2 You can't know that for sure. That's true.
You just can't. You cannot know that for sure.

Speaker 2 All right. Jamie Lee Curtis, Lizzie, was not who John Carpenter had in mind for the role of Lori Strode.
In fact, Jamie Lee Curtis didn't seem to be what anyone had in mind.

Speaker 2 A few years earlier, she was eyed for the role of Regan in The Exorcist. Exorcist.
Oh, that's right. But her mom, Janet, said, no, no, no.
No, no, no. Good for me.
You're too young.

Speaker 2 You're not going to be in this schlocker movie. No.
Now, Janet Lee, to be clear, was not against Jamie Lee doing genre work.

Speaker 2 She would later be very supportive of her work in Halloween, and she would even make some cameos in the series. I think she felt, you're too young.
This movie is extremely adult. No.

Speaker 12 I mean, to be fair, it requires extreme, far more adult content of Reagan than this movie does of Laurie Strode.

Speaker 2 And Laurie Strode's older than Reagan. Yes, she would have been, I believe, like 13 at the time.

Speaker 12 And she's, what, 19 in this?

Speaker 2 Yes, she is.

Speaker 2 All right. So Carpenter and Hill start casting as Jamie Lee is fired from her first big role, Lieutenant Barbara Duran, in the comedy series Operation Petticoat.

Speaker 2 She was distraught, but she was also available. Now, Carpenter wanted a different Nepo baby, Lizzie, 24-year-old Anne Lockhart, daughter of June Lockhart, granddaughter of Jean and Kathleen Lockhart.

Speaker 2 But Lockhart turned him down and moved on to Battlestar Galactica, the 1978 version.

Speaker 2 So, Deborah Hill says, John, I got just the actress for you. And she brings in 19-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis.
And Carpenter falls in love for three reasons. One,

Speaker 2 she had innocence. Two, she had strength.
Three, the girl he really wanted turned him down. So we're going with you, Jamie.

Speaker 12 Well, it ends up being a really fun commentary to use her because her mother is sort of the OG scream queen.

Speaker 2 Well, Lizzie, I'm glad you mentioned that because no one was more excited than producer Erwin Yablock

Speaker 2 immediately finds a photo of Janet Lee doing the famous scream in the shower from Psycho, puts it next to a photo of Jamie doing a scream, and they send it out to every newspaper in the country.

Speaker 2 Yes, absolutely. Brilliant marketing.
All right, let's talk about the rest of the cast briefly. So, PJ Souls lands the role of Linda, world's second worst friend.

Speaker 2 She's fresh off playing Norma, one of Sissy SpaceX's tormentors and carries.

Speaker 12 I knew I recognized her and her big 70s hair. Another question for you: Why does everyone's hair in the 70s look so good and full? What were they eating that we're not eating now?

Speaker 2 Lead? Microplastics were not a a thing. I don't know.
Probably lead. Lead.

Speaker 12 We all look like shit. No, they looked great.

Speaker 2 Great hair, violent tendencies. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Great hair.

Speaker 2 And Nancy Loomis, who had been in Assault on Precinct 13, along with Charles Cypher's, joins Charles Cypher's plays, Sheriff Brackett in this film.

Speaker 12 And Nancy Loomis, by the way, is great. She's very fun.

Speaker 2 She's really good. And she's good in Assaults on Precinct 13, too.
I do think that she and PJ, like, it's weird.

Speaker 2 Curtis looks older than she is, I think, a little bit, but she, I don't know, they all feel a little old.

Speaker 12 Nancy Loomis looks older, but it's okay.

Speaker 2 Nancy Loomis looks older. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 The way they treat her as if she's younger, I think, makes it work fine.

Speaker 12 I'm actually glad that they all look a bit older because this movie is so sexual and the way that it handles the teenagers that it's a bit easier to stomach that you're not looking at someone who looks like Heather Langenkamp, for example.

Speaker 12 They look like they're in their 20s.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I agree. And like you mentioned, there's so much nudity

Speaker 2 asked of these actresses that it starts, you know, I have a hard time watching Euphoria, for example, at times, because you have to, you remind yourself, this is supposed to be a 17-year-old, and we're getting a lot of shots of your boobs right now.

Speaker 2 And it's a little weird as a 36-year-old man.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 As everybody tells me, shut up, Chris. Shut up.
It makes sense for the story.

Speaker 12 Sam Levinson does not agree. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Future housewife of Beverly Hills, Kyle Richards. Yes.
Lends the role of Lindsay. She's only eight years old.

Speaker 2 And like Nightmare on Elm Street, Lizzie, the young actors all worked for scale. So the only way we're going to get this movie in under budget is if everybody's doing it for scale, with one exception.

Speaker 2 If there's one role in this movie, Lizzie, that you're going to break the bank for, who is it?

Speaker 12 Dr. Loomis.

Speaker 2 Dr. Loomis.

Speaker 2 And the first choice was not Donald Pleasant, but instead Peter Cushing, who's probably best known now as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. Okay.

Speaker 2 Darth Vader is number two

Speaker 2 in Star Wars, the original trilogy. He was a veteran of the British Hammer horror films alongside Christopher Lee.

Speaker 12 That's right, of course, played Dr. Van Helsink

Speaker 2 and Baron Frankenstein. And Carpenter was a huge fan of Cushing, and he thought, this guy's accomplished.
I believe at this point, Star Wars had been released. That was 1977.

Speaker 2 He's just been in this huge movie, but he's an experienced genre actor. So he calls his agent and he's, oh, man, we want Peter.
And his agent's like, yeah,

Speaker 2 Peter's above this, to be honest. So it's a pass.
And Cushing never got asked. He never got past his agent.

Speaker 2 So Carpenter goes to Cushing's former co-star, Christopher Lee, who would, of course, later be part of Star Wars, playing Count Dooku in the prequels and Saruman and Lord of the Rings.

Speaker 2 And Christopher Lee turns down Halloween.

Speaker 2 Now, Deborah Hill says that she and Carpenter later ran into him at a party and he said, meaning Lee said, it was the biggest mistake of his career. Take that with a grain of salt.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 Well, think about it, though. He'd done at that point like seven of the Hammer Dracula films, I think.

Speaker 2 I think seven or eight. Yeah.
Yeah. Probably tired.
Probably tired, but Halloween became such a franchise and Pleasance did return, you know what I mean, to a few of them.

Speaker 2 So like he could have, it's a lot of work is the point, you know, that he passed up on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Now, Irwin was happy that it didn't work out because he didn't want this to feel like another Hammer horror film. And he had a different actor in mind.

Speaker 2 Back when he was at Paramount, he distributed a Western called Will Penny, which starred Charlton Heston.

Speaker 2 Charlton Heston actually calls this his favorite movie that he's ever worked on, and he got great reviews in it. It was directed by Tom Greese, who's John Grease's dad.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 You guys would remember as Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite.

Speaker 12 Or the guy in the closet from Real Genius.

Speaker 2 Or The White Lotus, most recently, Tanya's dastardly ex-husband. It co-starred Slim Pickens,

Speaker 2 fan favorite, and Donald Pleasance played one of the film's villains.

Speaker 2 So, as Erwin later said, that character had stayed with me for years, and I suggested Pleasance for the part of the obsessed doctor.

Speaker 2 My feeling was that he would give the character a quirky originality and a sense of dignity. That's exactly right.
That's exactly what he does.

Speaker 12 I agree also, though, this character is so funny because he's like, A, he says, you know, he's like, you can't understand the evil that Michael has. You don't, you don't know what he's capable of.

Speaker 12 And it's like, you don't either, sir. You just said he hasn't spoken a word in 15 years.

Speaker 2 So how do you know

Speaker 12 what he's going to do? Has he been coloring his plans for you? One wonders if had Michael had a better, more compassionate therapist,

Speaker 12 would we be in this place?

Speaker 2 Most of the movie is Dr. Loomis like kicking rocks and wandering around going, I hope that Michael shows up at some point.

Speaker 12 His whole plan is literally just, we're at his house. Let's just wait at his house.
And then he just walks down the street looking for something amiss.

Speaker 2 Eventually, he'll get bored of killing these babysitters and come home to take a nap.

Speaker 2 Like, I'll kill him then. I do love when he's talking to the sheriff and Michael just drives behind him

Speaker 2 at the corner. So Donald Pleasance, he was 58 at the time that the film was getting made.
agrees to take on the role, much to Carpenter's surprise, but he wants $25,000.

Speaker 2 So Yablons increases the budget to $325,000.

Speaker 2 So they'd get Michael Myers at a great price. Carpenter hires Nick Castle, an old USC friend who had helped write the resurrection of Billy Bronco and who had played an uncredited alien in Darkstar.

Speaker 2 But Castle remembers his hiring a bit differently. Here's the quote.

Speaker 2 When I found out that John was going to be shooting Halloween pretty close to my house, I went down there and asked if I could stick around the set, because at that time I was trying to get my own pictures off the ground as a a director.

Speaker 2 He said, okay, fine, but as long as you're going to be here, why don't you do something? And he said, here, put this on. You'll be the guy running around, the killer.
And I said, fine.

Speaker 2 Do I get any money? And he said, yes, $25 a day.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's so low. It's so low.
And Kesselply said, deal,

Speaker 2 I'm thrilled. I'm getting paid.
What are you guys making? Nobody tells him. Oh, no.
He was available. He was cheap.
And Lizzie, he also had a family lineage working in his favor.

Speaker 2 His dad was a choreographer for Fred Astaire.

Speaker 12 What damn. Again, there are 12 people in Hollywood in the 70s, and they all had kids, and they're all in Halloween.

Speaker 2 Now, Carpenter liked the way that Nick Castle walked, but he didn't like his face. So he casts a different actor for the brief moment when Myers removes his mask, Tony Moran.

Speaker 2 And I agree with this. He has a more quote angelic look.
He looks like a giant child in that moment, which I think is effective.

Speaker 12 Is there a makeup effect on his eye?

Speaker 2 There is from when Kazlori pokes him through the mask with the clotheshanger before that.

Speaker 12 Also, the child version of Michael, very cherubic, very angelic. Very effective.
I think that sequence is great. Although, who has a knife of that size in their kitchen?

Speaker 12 It is like a four-foot machete that he's just pulled out.

Speaker 2 It's a sword. Yeah.
It's one of those classic turkey carving swords. Yep.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Well, let's talk about the mask a little bit, because it was described two slightly different ways in the script.

Speaker 2 Here's the first description. A large, full-head Platex rubber mask, not a monster or ghoul, but the pale, neutral features of a man weirdly distorted by the rubber.
Okay, nailed it.

Speaker 2 Here's the second description. A Halloween mask made of rubber with the grotesque features of a man.
Meh, pretty close. Yeah.
Lizzie, have you ever seen the movie Eyes Without a Face? No.

Speaker 2 Oh, you'd like it. Really good French film, 1960s.
This woman becomes disfigured. She wears this blank, full face mask.
I'm sure you have seen the image of her. It's got the eye holes are too big.

Speaker 2 Her whole rest of her face is covered. Her mouth is closed.
It's very much referenced in Good Night Mommy. Have you seen that film?

Speaker 12 Oh, yeah, with the bandages.

Speaker 2 Also, that Alma Dovar movie, The Skin I Live In, very much referenced in that.

Speaker 12 Okay, I have to watch this because I love Good Night Mommy, not so much the American remake. And, you know, I had no idea.

Speaker 2 Check out Eyes Without a Face. Good movie.
Now, Myers almost wore a clown mask.

Speaker 12 Well, that makes sense because he does as a child.

Speaker 2 That's right. Production designer Tommy Wallace goes shopping at a magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard and he finds two options.

Speaker 2 The first is that classic Emmett Kelly sad clown mask with the big downturned mouth. And the second is a blank mask.
He's trying to find a blank mask.

Speaker 2 So he goes to look at the masks of people and tries to see which one has the least amount of features. Richard Nixon looks too much like Nixon.
Spock looks too much like Spock.

Speaker 2 And then he finds Lizzie.

Speaker 12 I'm sure you know this. I do know it.
William Shatner.

Speaker 2 William Shatner. And it just looks kind of blank.

Speaker 2 And so he takes it off the shelf, takes it home, cuts the eye holes bigger, takes off the sideburns, darkens the hair, paints it white. They bring both masks to the office.

Speaker 2 They try the clown mask first, and it works. Like it looks, it'll be scary.
And then they put the blank mask on, and it is apparently terrifying.

Speaker 12 It is terrifying.

Speaker 2 Wallace has said that's when he knew that Halloween was going to be a very scary movie. But there's one person who disagreed.
Erwin Jablons. He said, I think it's dumb.
I think it's phony.

Speaker 2 I don't think this works at all. He's admitted he was wrong and that was his one wrong instinct with this franchise.
But there were other people with doubts, Lizzie.

Speaker 2 Donald Pleasance was feeling a little doubtful. about this movie he'd signed up for.
So he sits down with John Carpenter before filming starts and he he lays it out.

Speaker 2 I don't understand the script. I don't like this script.
I don't know who my character is. The only reason I'm doing this is because my daughter thought your movie was cool.

Speaker 2 So tell me why I'm doing this. And John Carpenter's like, uh, uh, uh, like his most expensive actor just told him he hates the script, doesn't understand his character.

Speaker 2 He must have come up with something. Pleasant sticks around and Carpenter later realizes when we became friends, he wants to find out how much you want to do the the movie.

Speaker 2 He wants to find out how passionate you are. So that's his little trick.
Pleasance didn't actually mean any of it.

Speaker 2 He just wanted to make sure that Carpenter could stick by his guns if he was going to work with him. Rude.
Which is like, on the one hand, I get it. But yeah, terrifying.
What do you like? Traumatic.

Speaker 2 So traumatic. Why do you want to make this movie? It sucks.
Go.

Speaker 12 Probably how he therapized Michael.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And then he went back to his keyboard and

Speaker 2 played by himself. So they only have three weeks of pre-production, which is crazy.
Production starts in in March of 1978.

Speaker 2 As you mentioned, Lizzie, much of it is shot in Pasadena and South Pasadena, along with West Hollywood, and the schedule is tight.

Speaker 2 22 shooting days, of which Donald Pleasance is only available for five. Okay.
So they've got their biggest name for five days.

Speaker 2 And after day one, Jamie Lee Curtis is convinced she's going to get fired. She knows she...
sucks. She goes home.
The phone rings. Her roommate answers.
Jamie, it's John Carpenter. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 It's Operation Petticoat all over again. John's going to let me go.

Speaker 2 She picks up the phone and Carpenter goes, hey, darling, it's John. I just want to tell you how happy I am and how fantastic you were today.
And I just know it's going to be amazing. End quote.

Speaker 2 It's very nice. And she said that no director does that, but John did that.
So kudos to John. Now, Carpenter wasn't always that hands-on or verbose with with all of his actors.

Speaker 2 They didn't all get the Jamie Lee Curtis treatment. Nick Castle kept asking for Michael Meyer's motivation.
John, where's this guy coming from? And Carpenter said, Nick, don't act. Just walk.

Speaker 12 I mean, he doesn't have a motivation, basically. No, yeah, he's just a monster.

Speaker 2 That's what Carpenter wanted, right? He says Meyer should be blank so the audience can project their fears onto him.

Speaker 12 That's the goal. Right.
He's the shape.

Speaker 2 Now, Castle does appear maskless very briefly, Lizzie, during the Mental Institution escape. You can see his face for a brief second, and the shooting that scene was brutal.
It's 3 a.m.

Speaker 2 He's barely dressed. He's getting repeatedly hosed down with cold water because it's supposed to be raining.

Speaker 2 I also want to mention that's one of my favorite moments directorially is when they pull forward and you see the other patients wandering.

Speaker 12 I love that.

Speaker 2 You know, do they let them out at night? It's very eerie, really well done.

Speaker 12 The nurse is like, since when do they let them wander around? Yeah, it's great. It's very, very well done.

Speaker 12 The sort of realization that the gate has been broken down and that, you know, Michael has escaped happens very slowly.

Speaker 2 It does.

Speaker 12 And it's a very, I think, smart way to get all the exposition out. Not that you need much for Michael.

Speaker 2 And they avoid showing the institution. Right.
Which is also very smart.

Speaker 12 Yeah. It's just a fence.

Speaker 2 It is.

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Speaker 2 Now, the $325,000 budget is barely enough. Everybody's Everybody's wearing multiple hats.

Speaker 2 Deborah Hill, that is her hand grabbing the knife in the POV opening when Michael Myers stalks and kills his sister. Oh, wow.
Okay. Yeah.
It's little Deborah's hands. Not a child's hands.

Speaker 2 A little boy's hands.

Speaker 2 Now, Michael Myers was played by multiple crew members, including the dog trainer, stuntman.

Speaker 12 I'm glad it was a dog trainer because the way that that dog went limp really upset me. And I was, I hope the dog was fine.

Speaker 2 I'm pretty sure that's because it's the dog trainer. Okay, good, good, good.

Speaker 2 Yeah. In that instance, as he said, sleep.

Speaker 2 The dog goes limp very convincingly in that scene.

Speaker 12 I know. It's an amazing actor dog.

Speaker 2 That's why I was a little nervous. Maybe a sedative was used.
I don't know. I didn't find anything about that.
Also, production designer Tommy Wallace did also play Michael Myers.

Speaker 2 And there were a lot of struggles, Lucy. Like making springtime in Los Angeles look like fall in Illinois.
Yeah. I'm sure you noticed how verdantly green everything looks in this movie.

Speaker 12 There's also at least one shot where she turns one corner, it's very dry and sunny, and then she turns another corner and it's soaking wet.

Speaker 2 Yeah. That being said, great pains were taken to avoid palm trees.

Speaker 2 There are a cobble visible at the beginning of the film, but I think they overall do a very good job, especially compared to Nightmare on Elm Street, where they just say, they don't even try.

Speaker 2 Here's the Venice Canals

Speaker 2 of Springfield. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Well, also, you know, South Pasadena famously has stood in for the East Coast and particularly New England many, many times.

Speaker 12 You know, Mad Men, Don Draper's house in Austining, New York, you can drive right past that. That's in South Pasadena.
Father of the Bride is there.

Speaker 12 So if you want to shoot for East Coast Fall, that's kind of your only option in the LA area.

Speaker 2 It is. And you could go to like Sierra Madre, for example.

Speaker 12 Yeah, which they do, I think, in this.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 One of the big things that they were trying to do was get some sort of brown into the frame. So they had a team of six to eight people on leaf duty.

Speaker 2 They actually painted a lot of paper leaves, autumn colors. They put them in front of a fan, scatter them across the yard, rake them up, bag them for the next scene.

Speaker 2 And that's why in every single shot and scene, you see like the equivalent of a bunch of freeway trash of paper leaves like on people's perfectly green yards. And they couldn't find any pumpkins.

Speaker 2 The Jack-o' Lanterns in the movie are squashes that are painted orange

Speaker 2 because, again, we're not in season. But the the mood on set was light and happy.
Unlike Nightmare on Elm Street, there wasn't a lot of top-down pressure.

Speaker 2 Jamie Lee Curtis said there were basically 15 to 20 people on set at any given time because everybody's doing multiple jobs. Almost everybody's under 30 years old.
The cast shares one Winnebago.

Speaker 2 And Curtis said it was magic. A friend of somebody cooked the food each day and we all ate on the ground together.
And so it sounds like the actual production itself was a pretty pleasant experience.

Speaker 2 And then we got to post-production and things got a little nerve-wracking. First, John Carpenter doesn't know how to end the movie.

Speaker 2 So Carpenter actually shot two versions of Loomis' reaction to Michael Myers disappearing. And this is actually because Donald Pleasance asked him, how do you want me to play this?

Speaker 2 So in the first version, Pleasance goes, oh my God, he's gone like a great Scott. And in the second version, he goes, oh my God, I knew this would happen.

Speaker 2 And Carpenter really liked the second version. He knew that's the version we got to go with.

Speaker 2 And then the montage that ends the film was not in the script. They found it in the editing room to show all the places that Myers had been or could be.

Speaker 2 Evil is everywhere, which also left the door open for a sequel. You gotta.

Speaker 2 Which was not intentional, according to Hill and Carpenter. They just wanted to give the movie a creepy ending.

Speaker 2 Now, according to production designer Tommy Wallace, they used nearly every foot of film that they shot.

Speaker 2 So the shooting ratio of a film, right, the number of feet that you shoot versus the actual length of the finished film.

Speaker 12 Makes sense. They didn't shoot for very long.

Speaker 2 No. And so, you know, we've talked about films with a shooting ratio of 50 to 1, meaning for every one minute of finished footage, you've shot 50.

Speaker 2 I would guess this is something a lot closer to, you know, two, three, four, five to one, single-digit ratio. Great.

Speaker 12 Very economical.

Speaker 2 The honeymoon phase ended as John Carpenter started to show the movie to people. He showed it to an executive and the executive said, this doesn't work.
It's not scary at all.

Speaker 2 Nancy Loomis saw it and she thought, holy shit, this movie's completely forgettable. And you know what the problem was, Lizzie?

Speaker 12 Music?

Speaker 2 It didn't have any music. There you go.
You need John Carpenter going, beat Dee Dee Bdee Dee B D.

Speaker 2 This is conjecture. Carpenter must have done so much blow because he wrote this score in three days.

Speaker 12 I mean, it kind of sounds like it.

Speaker 2 It does. Like in a great way.
I love it, but yeah. He didn't even score the picture.

Speaker 2 He He just wrote the themes blind in a room and then flew them into the editing suite. And he's like, this goes here.
This one kind of goes here. And it generally worked really well.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Now, you mentioned the main title theme. It's iconic.
It's arguably the most iconic theme in 5-4 outside of Mission Impossible. The dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum.

Speaker 2 It's a piano riff based on his dad teaching him 5-4 time on the bongos when he was 13. He sat down on the piano, he played it, and then he then called his dad and played it for him.

Speaker 2 And it, of course, became one of the most iconic pieces of music in Hollywood history, arguably.

Speaker 12 You only need

Speaker 12 three days and four pounds of cocaine.

Speaker 2 Well, Irwin might have been doing some stress relief cocaine as well, because he is desperately trying to get a major studio to distribute this movie.

Speaker 2 He sets up a screening and he invites Paramount, Warner Brothers, Columbia.

Speaker 2 Nobody shows up. They didn't even show up.
It's not like Paramount Turning Down Nightmare where they watched it. It's just Irwin sitting there waiting for them to come.
No. No, nobody comes.

Speaker 2 So then they screen the movie at some local colleges. At UCLA, a third of the audience apparently walked out.

Speaker 2 At USC, one of these douchebag film students asks why they'd waste the chance to make a movie on a disgusting horror story, to which...

Speaker 2 Accomplished cinematographer Dean Cundy politely says, we're trying to do something fresh with a genre that's a little stale. And Deborah Hill says, yeah, we kind of hope it'll become a classic.

Speaker 2 And the student says, that's pretentious and ridiculous.

Speaker 12 Wow, and that student was Bradley Cooper.

Speaker 12 Sorry, that's a reference to Bradley Cooper appearing in the audience of Inside the Actor's Studio.

Speaker 2 That is, Bradley Cooper, I think, at this time would have been two years old, but he still might have said that. He was precocious.

Speaker 12 Honestly, I could see it.

Speaker 2 Now, it seems like that student was right at first. They had no distribution, they were lost at sea.
But sometimes, Lizzie, you gotta walk from LAX to to USC. You gotta.
Because it's the only way.

Speaker 2 So Erwin sells the movie one city at a time.

Speaker 2 And he starts in Kansas City on October 25th, 1978. We're going great barbecue.
The first night goes okay. Opening grosses are about $200 per theater, according to the AFI.

Speaker 2 And then the ticket sales just kept... going up.
Within a week, daily grosses were between $1,600 and $2,000 a day. Audiences were returning to see it again and again.

Speaker 2 They were talking back at the screen, like in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Yes.
They rushed the movie to New York and Los Angeles for Halloween.

Speaker 2 It plays the San Diego Film Festival, and Deborah Hill and Jamie Lee Curtis led a screening at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Arts. Wow.

Speaker 2 On November 10th, 1978, the Hollywood Reporter claims that Halloween had made $2 million in the United States and another $1 million in advance advance sales from foreign markets after a single screening at the Mercado Internacionale del Film del TV film del Documentario in Milan is back where Yablans had first met Michael Myers years earlier two weeks in Halloween had nearly 10xed its $325,000 budget and it found an unexpected friend in Roger Ebert, patron saint of low-budget horror films, whose positive review started with a Hitchcock quote, I enjoy playing the audience like a piano, to which Ebert says, so does John Carpenter.

Speaker 2 Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to Psycho. Nice.
An apt comparison.

Speaker 2 Now, it wasn't all positive. Lizzie, could you imagine any criticism that Halloween might receive? perhaps from female critics.

Speaker 12 Sure. I mean, there's some unnecessary, one could argue potentially unnecessary toplessness.
And the majority of the movie is just Michael Myers stabbing young teenage girls.

Speaker 12 Well, not the majority, the majority of the kills are Michael Myers stabbing young teenage girls, although he does kill a boy as well.

Speaker 2 That's true. And he also chokes one of them to death.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 12 And well, he stabs her too. They're sort of,

Speaker 2 they are treated. Step step.
That's what he does.

Speaker 12 He does a choke, choke, stab, stab. Yeah.
I mean, look.

Speaker 12 I find it very hard to believe that there is no commentary on, you know, teenage girl sexuality and boy sexuality, to be honest, in this movie, because they're, they're murdered for doing the sexes.

Speaker 12 You can't tell me otherwise. I've seen it.
I watched it. That's what it is.

Speaker 2 Well, that was a major criticism of the film. The one female character who did not die was the one who was not sexually active.

Speaker 2 And again, for years, Carpenter and Hill have denied that this was intentional.

Speaker 12 Which, I guess, fair because he does try to kill her. He's just really bad at it if you haven't had sex.
If you have had sex, he's very good at it. Or maybe you're just very slow to react.

Speaker 2 It's once you have sex, you are bad at defending yourself. That's what I mean.
Yes. Right.

Speaker 2 Got it. So in late November, the Rivoli Theater in New York had to pull Halloween to make room for Universal's big Christmas release, Steven Spielberg's 1941.

Speaker 12 Whoops.

Speaker 2 Which flopped so hard they said,

Speaker 2 you're out of here. Halloween's back.
Two weeks later, they put Halloween back,

Speaker 2 which is great. Halloween grossed roughly $50 million in the United States and nearly $70 million

Speaker 2 worldwide.

Speaker 2 I presume, given his 10% profit participation, John Carpenter became a millionaire after this film. It was the most lucrative independently produced film of all time for 12 years.

Speaker 2 Do you know what surpassed it, Lizzie? It didn't have as low a budget, but it was just independently produced.

Speaker 12 1978 would have been 1990.

Speaker 2 You're never going to guessed it. It would have been 1990.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 I'm not going to get it.

Speaker 2 No. Okay, what is it? What is it? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Speaker 12 There's literally no way I would have ever gotten that.

Speaker 2 Even if Michael Myers was chasing you and your life depended on it.

Speaker 12 And he's so slow. Yeah, still with him.
He is slow.

Speaker 2 He'd catch me eventually.

Speaker 2 All right. Alongside Toby Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween is, as we discussed, credited with revitalizing the slasher genre.

Speaker 2 Now, even though Deborah Hill and John Carpenter claim they never planned a sequel, Halloween spawned a hell of a franchise.

Speaker 2 There were a dozen more movies, two reboots, and the Laurie Strode saga seemingly came to an end with the somewhat miserable, in my opinion, Halloween Ends, released in 2022.

Speaker 12 Pretty not good.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm thrilled. Jamie Lee Curtis, get the bag.
Jamie Lee Curtis is great in those movies. All the actors are great.
Yes. I did not enjoy those films.

Speaker 12 You know what? I was fine watching it. But again, I was watching it mostly for the novelty of a Beverly Hills housewife being in it.

Speaker 2 Kyle Richards is good in it.

Speaker 2 Jamie Lee Curtis did appear in most of these films, but I would argue, for the most part, transcended the franchise. She became a star and a sex symbol in her own right, independent of Halloween.

Speaker 2 The movie did mark the end of Carpenter and Deborah Hills' romantic relationship, but it solidified their professional partnership.

Speaker 2 They went on to make several more movies together, including a couple of Halloween sequels, but also a few favorites of mine, The Fog, which I really like, Escape from New York, which is great, and Escape from LA, which is one of the best so bad it's good movies of all time.

Speaker 12 It's fantastic.

Speaker 2 Oh, and it's just to this day contains my biggest, like funniest map blunder.

Speaker 2 So, when they show the map of Los Angeles and it says La Cañada up to the north, I thought they were making a joke that Canada had been taken over by Mexico and it was La Canada when I was a kid because that's how dumb I was.

Speaker 2 Little did you know, little did I know, La Cañada, real place that I can't afford to live. All right, Moving on.

Speaker 2 Carpenter achieved, for the most part, the directorial status that he'd sought, but he never enjoyed the genre malleability that Howard Hawkes once did.

Speaker 2 He squarely worked inside the horror and action genre, I would say. Although he did try to make a Western for a long time.

Speaker 2 Hill also went on to create one of the first big female producing partnerships when she joined forces with Linda Oapst, and some of their movies include The Wonderful The Fisher King, Clue, which we just discussed on Spooled, and Adventures in Babysitting.

Speaker 2 Oh, great. What a fun tieback.
Which was Chris Columbus's directorial debut. Deborah Hill passed away from cancer in 2005.
She was only 54 years old.

Speaker 2 Financier Mustafa Akkad died that same year in the 2005 Amman bombings in Jordan. He was 75 years old.
And in 2006, Halloween was added to the National Film Registry.

Speaker 2 Like Michael himself, the Halloween franchise collapses occasionally, but never stays down.

Speaker 2 The brand has threatened to swallow up the original work, yet Halloween the film retains a stature apart from Halloween the franchise and the Empire, and its presence in the National Film Registry is a testament to its singular and continuing power.

Speaker 2 And I'm sure we'll get another reboot any day now.

Speaker 12 Oh, yeah, of course. Of course, because Michael's never done.

Speaker 2 He's never done. But I have to ask you, in his origin story, what went right?

Speaker 12 I think a lot went right. As we discussed, I really enjoy this movie.
I am going to stick with it, though, and give it to Dean Kundi for the cinematography on this. I think

Speaker 12 it could have looked so hokey, particularly the way that they were shooting this, whether it's, you know, the shot from when he, at the very beginning, when he puts the mask on, all the POV shots.

Speaker 12 I think the way that he just establishes space and quiet in the frame and in this movie is really fantastic. And I just don't think it would be as scary or as successful without him behind the camera.

Speaker 12 I really, it's worth looking at it to see, you know, what he blooms into in terms of Jurassic Park and later things. I think you can see a lot of it starting here.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. He is a generational talent behind the camera.
And that was one of, I completely agree with you. One of the first things I felt, actually, it's in the slow dolly in

Speaker 2 on Jamie Lee in the corner of the classroom. It's such a beautiful shot, and like she looks so beautiful.

Speaker 12 A lot of them are beautiful, like when she's standing outside, and you sort of these shots also the way that they capture him appearing and disappearing, and him just like just exiting frame.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's very simple. Well, yeah, when he's in the clotheslines outside of in her backyard, it's a great shot.
Yeah, it's a really, really wonderfully shot movie.

Speaker 2 And especially, and when you know the budget they had and how quickly they must have been moving and how little time he probably had to light, it's it just reinforces the creativity because it's an economically shot movie too.

Speaker 2 And that's what you get the sense of with a lot of his early work, including Assault on Precinct 13.

Speaker 2 I would like to cheat and give a tie. Okay.
So Deborah Hill, because I think I would imagine if Carpenter had tried to write the teenage girls in this movie, it might have felt very different.

Speaker 2 And I think the kids are really well written and they don't try to act older than their age. They're just little kids.
I think, you know, the girls are well written.

Speaker 2 And that most of the movie is you're just hanging out with these babysitters. Yeah.
Like dreading what's going to come next. So in a lot of ways, she wrote a lot of the meat of the movie.

Speaker 2 And then I want to, on the flip side, give it to Donald Pleasance, who has some of the most insane dialogue. He sure does.
You are ever apt to hear and yet totally grounds all of it.

Speaker 2 And it's, it's believable. And I kind of buy his character.
And when he says, like, you have the wrong feeling. Like, he just says so many weird deaths has come to your little town, sheriff.

Speaker 2 I met him 15 years ago. I was told there was nothing left, no reason, no conscious, no understanding, and even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong.

Speaker 2 I met this six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes, the devil's eyes.

Speaker 2 It's so over the top, but the way he delivers it

Speaker 2 is so earnest and yet also he kind of throws it away a little bit too, because he's almost too busy to be talking to the sheriff, and it totally works. And he is wonderful.

Speaker 2 And I think without him opposite Jamie Lee, I don't know. I just don't think the movie would work.
And so I would like to give it to him, too. Great.

Speaker 12 And obviously, we love Jamie Lee. We do.
But she has enough. She doesn't need her own what went right yet.

Speaker 2 No, we'll give it to her with any number of films that follow this one. All right, Lizzie, that concludes our coverage of Halloween.

Speaker 2 Would you like to tell the folks at home what we have coming their way next?

Speaker 12 Sure. A natural follow-up, I would say.

Speaker 2 This is what I throw on after Halloween every time I watch it.

Speaker 12 Yeah, you know what? I'm very excited because we are actually entering into our first directorial double feature and it's double man. It's man on man, meaning Michael Man.

Speaker 12 And we are starting next week with The Last of the Mohicans. I'm very excited about this one.
It's a really interesting story. I also, I love that movie.

Speaker 2 It is like, in a dark sense, maybe kind of a Thanksgiving movie.

Speaker 12 That was not the intention.

Speaker 2 I'm just saying, you slotted it into November, Lizzie.

Speaker 12 Unfortunately, it is in November. That's not what we were intending.
But yes, it does star. Hey, it does star a lot of Native Americans.

Speaker 12 And we are going to discuss over the course of that episode how its portrayal of Native Americans on camera and then also treatment of them off camera was a big point of discussion in Hollywood at the time and how it differed from dances with wolves.

Speaker 12 Spoiler alert. So that will be next.
And then the week after that, we will be covering Chris.

Speaker 2 When you feel that heat around the corner, it's go badass. That's the quote that we should use.
Great. Every film bro's favorite movie, heat.
Yes. It's a great movie.

Speaker 12 It is great.

Speaker 2 It is great. We will first discuss The Theft of America by the colonizing Puritans, and then The Theft from the Banks by Robert De Niro, Tom Sizemore, Val Kilmer, Wangro.

Speaker 2 I am excited. It's going to be Heat, Michael Mann's Heat.
One of the greatest love stories put to the screen, in my opinion.

Speaker 12 Man on Man.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it really is. Two men addicted to each other who...

Speaker 2 ultimately can't live without each other. Amazing.
And I think it's a beautiful movie. So I'm excited to talk about it.

Speaker 12 And I meant our double feature will be Man on Men, Mano Amano.

Speaker 2 That's right. Man on Man on Man.
That's right.

Speaker 2 Man on Man on Man. We should do that.
That's good. That's the musical we're going to write.
All right, guys.

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Speaker 2 Loomis himself, like this.

Speaker 2 Hey Lani, get your ass away from there.

Speaker 2 I told everybody! Adam Moffat, Adrian Pang Correa, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaise Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B.

Speaker 2 He was doing very well last night. Chris Leal, Chris Zaka, D.B.
Smith, David Friscalante, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Scheibel, Ellen Singleton, M. Exodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G.

Speaker 2 He's gone. He's gone from here.
The evil is gone. Film it yourself.
Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kids. Grace Potter.

Speaker 2 Half Grey Greyhound, Jake Killen, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, Jen Mostromarino, JJ Rapido, Juri Hillpiper. Okay, now from the sequels.
I shot him six times. I shot him in the heart.

Speaker 2 Jose Salto, Kay Kanaba, Kate Elrington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Olgeschlager-McCoy, Frankenstein, Lon Relaud, Lena LJ, Lydia Howes, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath.

Speaker 2 I am talking about the real possibility that he is still out there.

Speaker 2 Nate the Knife, Nathan Sentineau, Rosemary Southward, Rural Jur, Sadie, just Sadie, Scott Oshida, Soman Chainani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, and the Provost family, where the O's sound like O's.

Speaker 2 And just when you think he's dead. No, he's not.
He's still breathing. Look at him.

Speaker 2 All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we will see you next week for The Last of the Mohegans.

Speaker 12 Run away fast.

Speaker 2 Stay celibate. Yes.
That's the only way you're surviving. Okay, bye.

Speaker 2 Go to patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentrongpod.com.

Speaker 2 What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman.

Speaker 2 Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer with additional editing from Karen Krebsaw.