Gladiator: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and fascinating facts and
figures behind your favorite TV shows, music, movies, and more.
We are your two sandal class sword brandishing soldiers of Scintilla.
You know, there's not that many synonyms for like trivia.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, I've been learning that now that we're on episode
one sixty.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Nine, Yeah, Jordan. Today we're talking about a turn of
the century classic, turn of the millennium classic that conquered
its its own genre simply by naming itself that. That's right.
We're talking about Ridley Scott's Gladiator, I guess, henceforth known
as Ridley Scott's Gladiator why or Gladiator one, because now
there's Gladiator two.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
I don't think Gladiator two is much of a competitor. Frankly,
Gladiator I, the Phantom Menace, Gladiator and the Furious Glad
Glad in fears.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
It should be it should be Gladiator too Glad and
Furious too Glad too furious Gladiators.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Take a page from the Alien playbook.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Yeap the dollar sign. Now that movie, this, this movie's
gonna flop so hard.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
I know my friend saw it last night and said
it was a giant mess. Yeah, c G I was
the worst thing that ever happened to Ridley.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
God love him, but this movie shows why he's he
should be kept on a leash with that stuff. Anyway. Uh,
that's right, we're talking about Really, Scott's The Gladiator. There's
a sequel. I've heard It's bad. Live your truth. Ridley
Scott still has shooters out there on Twitter. They've come
after me? Really? Oh god? Yeah, may friends of the pod? No, no,

(01:44):
friends of the pod. It was over the whole Alien
franchise cluster. So I don't know. Man, be careful dissenting
on Twitter about about the Rids the ridsler. Uh does
that do anything anything?

Speaker 1 (01:57):
There?

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Skiddy badivity, Skimmitty's Skimbitty Scott skibbe Lee Scott Wow, already
off the rails.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
The og remains a high water mark for the sword
and sandal genre, unless, of course, you prefer three hundred,
in which case that's fine, but you're probably listening to
the wrong podcast. Go check out something that involves human
growth hormone and MMA, and.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
You've probably plugged your headphones into the wrong orifice. Yeah,
just hit yourself in the head with the hammer a
few times. That's sad. People will yell at me. I
saw three hundred the Day Open my friends.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Really yeah, I mean I do remember watching that movie
in college and it ended and we were all like,
should we start working out crazy anyway? All right, we're
gonna just we're gonna dive into this. Jordan, hit me
with your gladiator you're glad's memories. You're glad, You're glad memory.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
Hit me with the gladiator stick. Oh, I'm glad to
be here.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, this is a movie.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
I recall my dad really like it, And when you're twelve,
sometimes that's all it takes you to think something's really cool.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
I saw it with my dad. Yeah, you know, we
got boomer dads. I'm sure there was a lot of
Spartacus memories.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
That went into that much Gladiator movies with our dads.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, how many times are we going to get the
airplane joke in here?

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Just enough? I trust you to be tasteful in the edit.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
There are admittedly a lot of pitfalls the historical dramas,
because I feel like you either run the risk of
coming across as self serious and overblown and therefore ridiculous
or boring as hell. And this movie is charitably neither,
maybe more towards the overblown and ridiculous. I haven't seen
it in a while. I have to admit I love
Gladiator as a kid, and bear in mind I was
a weird kid because it was the last chance to

(03:42):
see a bunch of my beloved sixties hell raiser actors
on film, because part of that I'd only seen them
in like old sixties movies. But suddenly you had Richard Harris,
Oliver Reid, and David Hemmings being cool on screen. So
that was really thrilling to me.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
I mean, I wouldn't say that David Hemmings is cool
in this no. I think the most you could say
about Richard Harris is that he is.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
A lot alive in it barely and didn't even clear
that bar by dying midway through.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
I do actually like I mean, it's we'll get into
it later. It is sad, but I do actually quite
like Oliver Reed in this role. Oliver It's crazy. Yeah,
I forgot so crazy to me that you know David
Hemmings from all his British style from blow Up. Yeah,
But I only know him. I mean I mostly know
him from the from Deep Red, the Dario Argento film

(04:33):
that he's in the Jallo Jallo film.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
I forgot like after the sixties, he just was a
character actor in terrible sci fi movies for like thirty years, Right,
he was almost Alex in a clockwork Orange and that's where.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Two roads diverged in a wood.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, life would have been really different for him had
that worked out or maybe not. Anyway, where were we
Maybe I'm wrong. I know we kind of touched on
this with the whole three hundred point, but I feel
like the this movie did the whole sword and sample
thing so well that there really hasn't been one to
top it since, like at least for like pure drama,

(05:10):
certainly not by Ridley, and he took so many goddamn
stabs at it, you know, Kingdom of Heaven.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
Immediately after this, there was King Arthur h Yeah, there's
a there's like a there were a few others that
I saw dredged up as the kind of aftermath of this,
and none of them. I mean, people will go to
bad for Kingdom of Heaven, because, like I said earlier,
Ridley has shooters out there, but I don't know, not
not like unanimously hailed. You know, it's it's it is

(05:37):
all of those things. It is self serious, it is overblown.
It is not boring as hell though, because it's got
all that great action. And you know, Ridley, God bless
him for as much of pain in the ass as
he might be personally and professionally. Man can move a camera,
you know. And and it's great. I mean, it's Russell.
I like Russell Crowe more than I did at the time.

(06:00):
I think he he's like the best thing he's ever
done is The Nice Guys with Ryan Gosling, No right
as the other Guys.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Oh yeah, The Nice Guys is like a Shane blackfil
I think it's written by Shane Black. That is, like
I sort of flew under the radar, but it is
one of the genuinely most like beloved, non franchise, one
off comedy movies at least on the pockets of Twitter
that I'm in.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
And it's great. He's it's him and Ryan Gosling and
he just they it's hilarious. It's a great film. But yeah,
at the time, I firmly remember this being the era
of like Russell crow sucking. I really didn't realize the
foam throwing thing was like a full five years after this,
because I've kind of into the Gladiator the Gladiator thing.

(06:46):
But yeah, I don't know. I watched this recently and
it still goes that's it. Watch it or don't. I
don't care.

Speaker 1 (06:55):
I was reading some New Yorker profile I think it
was New Yorker on Ridley Scott recently. I didn't realize
that his brother Tony called him from the bridge shortly
before he jumped. Oh Jesus, that was a fact I
learned the other day.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
That hasn't left my mind. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look,
I've read a lot of I've read the whole making
of Blade Runner. There's a great book that's out there
about that, and I've read a lot about that, and
I've read multiple set things about Ridley and I don't
particularly love the direction that he took the Alien franchise in,
and there's a lot of caveats that I have about him.
But great movie. Great movie. Let's talk about Gladiator. So

(07:33):
from the acts of violence, creative and otherwise that Russell
Crowe brought to the set to legendary British hell raiser
all over reads tragic demise and tragic comic demise, to
the thousands and thousands of pieces of arms and armor
they made for the film, to the perils of live
tiger wrangling. Here's everything you didn't know about Ridley Scott's Gladiator.

(08:01):
Of course, it was an Italian. The story of Gladiator
begins with David Franzoni, a screenwriter best known for writing
basically Amistad, Amistad, Amistad Stad. I thought it was okay.
He wrote Amistad, and then he wrote Gladiator, and then
not much else. Grew up in Vermont, got into war

(08:21):
movies thanks to his dad, who was a veteran, Like
a load of people from that generation that it was
John Ford and the Westerns and Roger Corman and like
his World War II sort of stuff, The Hell's Angels
and the flying you know all that right, ringing a bell.
I'm talking out in my ass there Hell's Angels.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
I thought was Howard Hughes.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Oh that is Howard Hughes. Let me take that back.
You could be wrong, It's okay. No. Franzoni, growing up
in Vermont, developed an interest in war movies, likely informed
by his dad, who was a veteran. He name dropped
films by John Ford, Roger Corman and he wants. Described
the experience of seeing all quiet on the Western Front

(09:03):
as quote like being hit with a hammer.

Speaker 1 (09:05):
I'm trying to figure out if that's a good thing
or not gets your attention.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
At least I was gonna say, depends what kind of hammer,
but and where and when and how long? How and pooh,
the five journalistic questions are being struck by a hammer
if we have none of them. Yeah, you won't learn
that in jay school. That said, Franzoni did not pursue
his dream of filmmaking until a good while later. First,

(09:31):
he majored in paleontology at the University of Vermont, as
so many young men did before him, though at least
white boomer men. Franzoni took time off following graduation and
decided to travel. He arrived in Europe, where he about
a cheap motorcycle and took off across Europe and Western Asia.
It was in Baghdad where, whilst living in a yurt,
he traded a book on the Irish Revolution with an

(09:53):
Australian woman in return for those about to die a
book about the Roman gladiator games. That whole thing sounds
like an extended Matt Berry riff. It was in Baghdad.
We're living in a yurrop. I traded a book on
the Irish Revolution with an Australian woman and returned for
those about to Die a book about of a Romania game.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
There's a lot of like mid century man's stories in
this episode, things that never could happen now.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Yeah, yeah, I just walked in there with my shoes,
holding my shoes in my hand, and the guy said,
I like your shoes and how you hold them in
your hand. Would you like to direct a movie? It's
like the story of every mid century man. Anyway, friend
Zone was hooked. He told y'a who everywhere I went
in Europe there were arenas. Even as I went east,

(10:46):
going through Turkey. I began to think to myself, this
must have been a hell of a franchise. Spoken like
a true American, because yeah, Hollywood screenwriter brain there. Then,
in his words, I'm more in India. I decided I
wanted to be a screenwriter. Despite this, Franzoni's first script
in Hollywood was the exact polar opposite of a historical epic.

(11:09):
He sold a treatment that would become nineteen eighty six
is Jumpin' Jack Flash, which is a spy comedy starring
Whoopee Goldberg and directed by Penny Marshall in her theatrical
film directorial debut. There's a little bar trivia question for you.
The whole thing was your typical first screenplay sold nightmare.
This movie was originally intended as a starring vehicle for
Shelley Long, you know, in her Get Me the Hell

(11:31):
Out of Cheers phase, but Goldberg hated the film's director,
who were just peeling with nesting matroysh cadals of trivia here.
Jumpin Jack Flash's director was Howard Ziefe, who's an ad
guy best known for writing alcas Seltzer's That's a Spicy
Meat de Ball TV spot. And then the studio hated

(11:53):
this guy's dailies, so they bought in Penny Marshall, who
sat down with producer Joel Silver, who was also in this,
and they rewrote a bunch of Frianzoni script They brought
in a bunch of other writers, so the whole thing
was a debacle for the guy. His next project, though,
was nineteen ninety two's Citizen Khan, which is an HBO
biopic of framed attorney Roy Kahan played by James Woods.

(12:15):
In a truly one to one ratio bit of casting
a real life scumbag to an actor scumbag. This earned
him one of those famed Cable Ace Awards that we
constantly hear about but that are not real and don't
mean anything. But he won a Peabody.

Speaker 1 (12:31):
That's real.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
It's pretty real, that's real. They got nominated for an Emmy.
Oliver Stone then commissioned Franzoni to write The Mayor of
Castro Street, which is about the assassinated San Francisco councilman
Harvey Milk. That film, eventually, many years later, became two
thousand and Eight's Milk, starring Sean Penn. So from there,
Franzoni became the historical guy. He wrote a script about Shakespeare,
he wrote about one about George Washington, and he was

(12:55):
supposedly tapped to write Ralph Nader's life story, but all
he had to say about that to the La Times
was that doing research, he decided Nader was a crank,
that's it, and then didn't pursue it.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
Further, can you imagine like people lining up to see
the Ralph Naders story like a Bohemian Rhapsody style? Who
would play Ralph Nader? I guess in that era Dustin Hoffman. Yeah,
Ralph Nader's got a lankiness to him.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
She's still alive, Ralph Nader. Yeah. I'm trying to think
of the you know, he's created. Ralph Nader's creating such
a like Lovecraftian blank in my mind, Like trying to
contemplate him is just giving me nothing but horrible, endless
blackness that I don't I don't even know casting. I
wouldn't even shadow cast, fantasy cast him. Kevin Costner.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
It's kind of James Woods if you google him, all right.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Frienzoni's fortunes changed when he wrote the script for Steven
Spielberg's I'm Astad before that film was ever completed, though
or based on the strength of it at the timeline
gets fuzzy Anyway, Works, which was then Steven Spielberg's new
new studio, offered Franzoni a three picture deal. Amistad wasn't
actually like a huge, chart conquering box office success, but

(14:13):
and it was pilloried for its historical inaccuracy, but people
seem to think of it fondly, and I certainly remember
it being a prestige historical piece of the era. The
La Times noted in their review of Abishtad that Frenzoni's
script was praised for its facile, if occasionally hamhanded, synthesis
of historical sources and for its unflinching description of the

(14:34):
whrrors of the slave trade. Newsmax called it the feel
good movie of the year, a laugh a minute, edge
of your seat, thrill ride, wacky for the whole family.
Variety called it FAFO. For his next pick with DreamWorks,
Franzoni dug out his old concept for a gladiator focused movie,

(14:55):
and he pitched Spielberg. And this was the entirety of
the process that he recalled to The La Times. I
get a call from Stephen's office. You got two days
to come up with a pitch. I walk in and
Stephen goes, David, you want to do a gladiator movie
for DreamWorks. Yeah, ancient gladiators, Yeah in Rome, ancient Rome, Yeah,
in the coliseum. Yeah. Okay, he says, that was it.

(15:18):
I said yeah, four times, that was it. That makes
me sad and mad. Yeah yeah, yeah, also ancient gladiators
as opposed to American gladiators. Oh right, right right with
drawn blaze and laser and charger and the rest the aristocrats.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
By the new millennium, Hollywood's rich tradition of ancient epics
was well established, particularly by filmmakers of Spielberg, Franzoni, and
Ridley Scott's age. Arguably the Golden Age of gladiator films
began with films like Henry Costers The Robe, which I'm
not familiar with, and ces B. De Mill's The Ten Commandments,
which pushed the Roman Empire through Judeo Christian lens in
nineteen fifty three and fifty six.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
Tomill's Ten Commandments had also been filmed in nineteen twenty three,
I think also happened to Ben Herd. There's two of
these that were like shot in like Silver Age and
then Golden Age or whichever the ages were.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
All these sword and sandal epics of the fifties were preceded,
of course, by Stanley Kubrick Spartacus in nineteen fifty That
was like the movie that kind of made him starring
a barrel chested. Kirk Douglas as a gladiator who started
a slave revolt. Say it with me now, rapist. Oh
that wasn't what I was going to go with. I
am spartakus, But that works too.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yeah, he raped Natalie would.

Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah, allegedly always dead.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
Finally, kind of how old was he that made me
believe in god? Kirk Douglas living till one hundred and decreptitude?

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Was he one O four?

Speaker 2 (16:56):
No? Just shy of one O four? One hundred and three? Wow? Wow? Yep, rapist,
He's dead and in hell? Hashtag dead and in hell.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
That is a new That's something I've noticed cropping up
a lot in our last bunch of episodes.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Well, it goes back to the Warrens and the Omenyville.
Hohrr guy, Oh you're right, trace the loure back to that. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 (17:21):
There's also nineteen fifty one's quo wattis?

Speaker 2 (17:23):
I think?

Speaker 1 (17:24):
Is how you pronounced that? Because you don't pronounce v's
in Latin. It's woe. It's like w It's the one
that I remember from Latin, starring Robert Taylor and Debor Kerr. However,
the high budget flops of nineteen sixty three is Cleopatra,
famously starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in nineteen sixty four,
Is The Fall of the Roman Empire dented the genre's momentum,
making it fertile ground for parody. In nineteen sixty six,

(17:47):
Is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum starring Zero Mostelle with music by Stephen Sondheim. And
also Fellini's Satrakhan in nineteen seventy, which focused on the
declining decadence of the Empire. Truly weird movie. Never seen it.
I'm not a big Felini guy. I should start. You
would enjoy it?

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Okay? Cool by.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
In eighteen seventy nine, Monty Python's Life of Brian was
using the trappings of the sword and sandal ethics to
mock both Christianity and the Roman Empire, and the year
following that, nineteen eighty, the disastrous spoof Airplane memorably used
gladiator movies as shorthand for a pilot's queer coded conversation
with a young boy.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
What's the actual close?

Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah? Do you like movies about gladiators?

Speaker 2 (18:29):
Jimmy, There's it's a series of it's a series of
It's g and masterclass and editing, because it's like all
this other mad cat is happening, and it just goes
back to keeps cutting back to Peter Graves's pilot character asking, Uh,
He's like what eight. Yeah, kid's name is Joey, just
like Joey. Do you like movies about gladiators? Joey? Have

(18:52):
you have you ever seen a grown man naked? Joey?
Have you ever been in Turkish prison? Do you like
to hang a men's locker rooms?

Speaker 1 (19:02):
Anyway, It's such a great kind of random bit.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
I have no idea what they what the logic behind
it was. That's what makes a truly perfect mad cap bit. Yeah, like,
let's make this guy creepy but in this very specific
way and weave it into the editing and overall pace
of this movie and not addressed. No, they don't lambshade it. Yeah, incredible,
incredible stuff. Great work.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
All this to say that in the late nineties, the
Gladiator of film's influence on culture had waned Ridley Scott
acknowledged in the book Gladiator. The making of the Ridley
Scott epic Spartacus was forty years old, and Ben hur
was even before that. These movies were part of my
cinema going youth, But at the dawn of the New millennium,
I thought this might be the ideal time to revisit
what may have been the most important period of the

(19:51):
last two thousand years. Debatable.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's Ridley Man. He talked
like that just about Breakfast.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
You know, is he the one that the people made,
the that his crew made the t yes Governor, Yes, yes, Govenor.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah yeah, what's the fame it? I think that was
actually on Blade Roy. Let me let me check that out.
I think it was Blade Well been Aliens. It was
an interview that he gave about Blade Runner. He gave
an interview and he said that he preferred working with
British crews because you could give them orders and they'd
say yes Governor. And then the the American crew on

(20:29):
Blade Runner printed up T shirts that said yes Governor,
my ass and then Scott, rather than diffuse the situation,
uh and every other British person on the set printed
up their own T shirts that read xenophobia sucks.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
Not a great rebuttal but okay, but a fair point.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
Is he's one of those guys man where people are
like seemed just short of making him like a David o'
russell like this man, or a Freedkin like. Nobody wants
to say that he's like an outright monster, but people
all these use all these euphemisms like demanding. It's no
secret that a Scott set is a charged one, you know,

(21:09):
like all they write around it and such. He's got
to have I mean, he's got some Jews, but he's
got to have dirt on someone. Anyway, This is probably
a good time to talk about the original book Daniel P.
Mannix is nineteen fifty eight Those About to Die, republished
in two thousand and one as The Way of the Gladiator.
You may remember that quote appearing in the movie, said

(21:29):
by Tigris of Gall in the film's penultimate fight scene.
He says, we who are about to die, salucchu Moron.
Tigris of Gall later Manix as one of those biographies that,
as mentioned earlier, were only available to white men in
the twentieth century. He was born to a naval family,
and he was set to follow in that tradition until
he flopped out of training so badly that his commandant

(21:51):
wrote a letter to his father saying he is definitely
not officer material. Now. This so traumatized the young man
X that he spent the next two months in bed.
Though in nineteen thirty one he earned a degree in
journalism from the University of Pennsylvania after failing out of
zoology first, Mannix did end up working for the Navy
during World War II, where he was tasked with creating

(22:11):
training films. After that, Wikipedia notes helpfully that Mannix's civilian
career could be briefly described as engaging in various adventurous activities,
which he filmed for lectures or wrote about in magazines
and books. One such example was the series of Collier's
articles that he turned into nineteen fifty one's Step Right Up,
a book about Mannix's experience allegedly traveling with a carnival

(22:35):
after college, where he supposedly learned how to be a
sword swallower, fire eater, stage magician, escape artist, mind reader,
and lock picker, working under the stage name The Great Zadma.
Another big thing for Mannix was hunting. He enjoyed hunting
creatures great and small, specializing in ancient or traditional methods
of doing so, like a blowgun, boomerang, or bow and arrow.

(22:57):
He also trained hawks and hounds, and also hunted with
a trained cheetah, otter, seabird, cormorant, all of those things
rule And then somehow, after doing all this magically funded
both he and his wife, who is like his chief
creative collaborator, would create movies, lectures, articles, books. One of

(23:21):
these was turned into an OSCAR nominated short called The
Boy in the Eagle. Here's just a Wild Thing. Mannix
witnessed a famous herpetologist person who studies reptiles, Grace Olive Wiley,
die in real time in front of his eyes when
she was fatally bitten by an Indian cobra at her
house in nineteen forty eight.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
You know, I will say, and I'm being serious right now,
I find this whole story very inspiring. Going from spending
two months in bed to hunting with a trained cheetah,
it is very Yeah, there's hope.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
Well, you know you can do anything with a strong
spirit and a very old white military family connection and funding. Yes.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Mannix wrote a lot on topics ranging from Frank l
Baum in the World of Oz. Frank Olbaum wrote The
Wizard of Oz. He wrote so much about Oz. Why
this guy was wildly prolific. I mean, his Wikipedia page
is endless. But apparently, other than animals and adventuring, his
big thing was oz like how that story was developed

(24:26):
or like fanfic.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
Just like compendium like omni books about it and writings
about it.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
Weird, huh.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah. Also wrote a biography of Aleister Crowley That's that's sick. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
His florid style and writing on historic topics was derided
by real life historians. One Oxford historian and historical fiction
writer called Those About to Die the worst novel ever
written set in the ancient world, pretty unambiguous, but even
without inspiring the basic script and idea of Gladiator.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
Mannix also wrote The Fox and the I know I
buried that so deep I can't that's I would have
led with that. Oh my god. He wrote it.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
He wrote it back in nineteen sixty seven, and it
was in sort of prolonged development hell until nineteen eighty one,
when it was released by Disney. The film adaptation was
incredibly troubled. Disney Production purchased the rights to Manic's novel
the same year it was published, in nineteen sixty seven,
but work on the film adaptation didn't start until ten
years later nineteen seventy seven, and at that time, then

(25:29):
Disney CEO Ron Miller wanted to use the film as
a vehicle for newer talents because the famous nine old
men of Disney's animation, these were the pioneers of the studio,
basically launched the division we're nearing retirement. Consequently, The Fox
and the Hound would be the last film that Ollie Johnson,
Frank Thomas and I can't say that name, Hooly Reitherman.

(25:52):
You've got to be kidding me. Nope, who are some
of the legends of Disney would ever work on? But
arguments developed between Rutherman and the younger director of the film,
Art Stevens. The younger team sided was Stevens, except for
Don Bluth, who eventually walked out of Disney based on
this whole kerfuffle, taking eleven others with him to form
his own animation studio, which you would use to then

(26:15):
traumatize millennials with movies like Lamb Before Time All Dogs
Go to Heaven. I remember, his movies were distinctly sadder
than Disney movies. Anyhow, this exodus forced Disney to bail
on The Fox. In the Hound's original nineteen eighty release date,
though it eventually premiered a year later in nineteen eighty one.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
To enormous success. Also deeply sad. That's the TMI promise, folks,
we get from Gladiator to Fox and the Hound in
one move, really and yeah, one degree of separation off
blank check you rubes? How did this get made? Suck my? Anyway.

(26:55):
David Franzoni finished his first draft in April of nineteen
ninety eight, and about six months later the second draft,
completed with help from John Logan, whose credits include the
HBO film RKO two eight one, which Ridley Scott produced
and Oliver Stones. Any Given Sunday was completed. And this
is the last detail that you'll get about the actual script,

(27:16):
because there were many writers brought in and then, if
you believe many different parties, Ridley and Russell Crowe basically
rewrote it on set. So it's so funny to me
that David Franzoni got a three picture deal out of
one script that he wrote, and his other most famous
one had like charitably four other people writing it.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
Franzoni told Creative Screenwriting dot Com that he studiously ignored
influences from the rich history of Hollywood sword and sandal flicks,
instead looking to the nineteen sixties and early seventies doomed
hero canon like Easy Writer, Five Easy Pieces, more films
with easy in the title one such and Jack mcafoe
of them, Yeah One Flew Over the Cougar's Nest, oh

(27:56):
and nineteen seventy one's classic badass driving movie Vanishing Point. Unfortunately,
there was a back and forth with the studios and
with Scott and Crow once they were all brought on board,
hence why the film is ultimately credited to not just
David Franzoni, but John Logan and William Nicholson and I'm
uncredited Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe. John and Williams's influences

(28:18):
on the shooting drafts were indelible, but there were too
many screenwriters involved, Franzoni said, although he ultimately blamed the studio,
the big differences were between competing drafts, where the studio
was trying to enforce their rules on how a hit
movie was composed. Studio is one of the usual audience
friendly stuff, such as happy endings and heroes triumphing over adversity.
For example, Franzoni wanted to begin the movie with Maximus's

(28:41):
death and then work backwards from there. Irascible King Ridley
Scott came aboard without even seeing a script. Producer Walter
Parks met with Scott, who then had just wrapped Gi
Jane with Demi Moore, and simply pulled up a nineteenth
century painting. Ridley Scott told Variety, I'm a very visual
driven director. Walter Parks opened a picture of a painting

(29:03):
called Pelisse Verso Latin with a turned thumb by a
fellow called Jean Leon Jerome. It shows the armored man
with the TUNEI fork that would kill You, standing over
a netted victim, which is a perfect and poetic description
of a painting of a gladiator. The armored man with
the tune of fork that would kill you. He's looking

(29:25):
up for Italians.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
See if that comes out.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
I want to Google translate that. I'll do it while
you're reading. Um. He's looking up at a black marble wall,
at this purple faced nero out of his mind on
wine or water. Really, it's a weird dude. This is
a weird quote. He's got a thumbs down and I
stared at it for a moment, and it was like
a flash. When you're experienced like me, you can do

(29:54):
a little knee jerk flash decision and normally it's accurate.
So I said, I'll do it. Park said, hang on,
you don't know what the story is about. I said,
I don't care. I'll do it, and that was it.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
I just want to observe that they got on dream
Works by saying yeah four times, and they got Ridley
Scott by showing them a painting, painting that they didn't do.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
Truly a blessed industry. Franzoni said that as he and
Really discussed the film, they continued to ignore Hollywood's tradition
of gladiator movies. He told Variety that some of the
movies that Ridley and I watched and talked about were
the aforementioned All Quiet on the Western Front and ladoce
Vita and The Conformist. I don't know that film off
the top of my head. The only Roman film I'm
pretty sure Ridley looked at was satirra Con.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
As far as casting, Franzoni recalled the Yahoo Mel Gibson
and Antonio Banderiz are both considered for the role of Maximus.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
Gibson would have been coming off Brave Heart and Benderris
had probably just done Mask of Zorro. Oh yeah, these
were just the regular Zorro.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Yeah, I'm not mad at either of those.

Speaker 2 (30:59):
Yeah. Well I did Gibson do The Patriot before or
after this? And it doesn't matter. We don't need to
talk about him.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
There are a couple of actors that Steven Spielberg felt
he needed to go to because of his relationship with them.
This is Franzoni talking, and we were all sort of
hoping they'd say no. One of those actors was apparently
Tom Cruise, who I cannot imagine as a gladiator. I
know he played a samurai and that was weird too.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
I just the greatest White Savior, like the most hilarious
white Savior movie of all time.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Ultimately they went with Russell Crowe,
who was then hot off of La Confidential, and those
has been reported that Mel Gibson turned himself down on
the basis of age. Ridley Scott told CNN in two
thousand that Russell was really always my first choice. I
noticed him maybe five years ago in Romper's Stomper, which
I'm not familiar with, and I.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
Thought it was great. It's a title little, low budget
movie about Australian Nazis. He is genuinely terrifying in it
in the forties, and I thought he was someone worth watching.
Russell crowetl Variety. I read the script and I thought
it wasn't a.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
Movie devastating critical analysis. Then producer Walter Parks said, it's
one hundred and eighty four a d. You're a Roman
general and you're going to be directed by Ridley Scott,
and that was enough for me to want to talk
to Ridley doesn't think much.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Yeah, I had a good pitch, so you want to
punch this in Later. The Italian title of a painting
called The Armored Man with the tune of Fork that
Would Kill You is Luomo corrato conra fouquetta da tono
key ti uchrebe. Sounds like a Jallo title that would
have been directed by Yeah, Daria Argento. The pronunciation all

(32:52):
these languages is so good. I just thought having I
didn't take I did take Italian in college. At least
I got something out of it.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Gladiator cast was filled out by a roster of who's
who British actors like Oliver Reed and Richard Harris, as
well as jimmen holnsu Gemon Gimon Honsu fresh off Amistad,
and there was also Connie Nielsen and also a very
young Joaquin Phoenix. It's been said that Jennifer Lopez. I

(33:19):
don't know why I said her name like that. It's
been said that Jennifer Lopez was in the running for
Nielsen's part, but producer Douglas Wick shot that.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
Down in Any of You with the Huffington Post in
twenty twenty. It's funny because when I didn't throw this
in anywhere else but Joaquin Phoenix when he got on
set for when he met Johnny Cash for Walk the Line,
Johnny Cash just started quoting Gladiator ride him. I could hello,
walking Hello, Joaquin. I loved your work and Gladiator am
I not merciful good stuff? I was gonna say, those

(33:50):
who are about to die, salute you, those who are
about to die Walking the Line, those are about to
I in Reno just to watch them die. Anything there,
no matter. It is a brainstorm, yes, and screenwriter friend zone.

(34:14):
He said, my wife and I will never forget the
day they sent.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
Over Waquin's audition tape because everyone was like Joaquin Phoenix.
Isn't he some kind of stone or surf kid? The
audition tape was a knockout. It was mind boggling. Jude
Law was also in the running but got knocked out
by said tape. That's so weird because he I never
really thought of this until now. They both kind of
look the same.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
Yeah, and Judlaw has that, you know, as he gained
weight and drink drank more, he had that British tendency
of all British men turning and lost some of his harea,
that British thing were all men turn into Phil Collins,
that the British face naturally wants to become a flat,
a flat circle with little hair on top. But then

(34:57):
he got back in control of it and got the
jaw line back. But around this time he did have
that sort of fay aristocratic mia from talent to mister
Ripley that would have I think sold him as this.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
And then Gatica, I always think of him, and too
kind of think I.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
Ever think about Gatka has when from his always study,
when Charlie gets uh, he's trying to rabble rouse and
instead of yelling Attica like in Dog Day Afternoon, he
starts yelling Gatica the funniest throw ray jokes of all time.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
But even with this cast in place, the arguments of
the script continued. Connie Nielsen weighed in obsensively with notes
for her character. Those she wound up just correcting weird
bits of anachronistic phrasing. I had a line where it
just said the police state, and it's like, the police state.
Do you want me to actually use that phrase or
the phrase put it in a museum. I don't think

(35:51):
at the time that people consider the word museum the
same way we consider it a museum today.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
I you know, it's weird because I kept reading things
about like in all these trivia, like Connie Nilssen was
tapped for her extensive knowledge of Roman history, and I
couldn't find if she was actually that or if she
just went through the script, and like common sense was like,
that's dumb. We wouldn't say that in Rome. But either way,
salute to Connie Nilsen.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
These problems persisted even as the films one hundred and
three million dollar budgeted production got underway. Russell Croll told
Radio one and twenty sixteen we had twenty one pages
when we started shooting.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
It's the dumbest possible way to make a film.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
At one point in time, Ridley gave the crew the
day off because we simply didn't know what we were going
to shoot the next day. That is my worst nightmare.
Oh yeah, I mean that's horrifying.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Yeah. According to David S.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
Cohen in his book Screenplays, freen Joni's original draft is
quote different in almost every detail from the finished movie.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
Or Ridley Scott told Variety, in the first act the
Battle of Germania, Russell was saying, what the bloody hell
am I going to say? And I said, well, there's
going to be a bird on a and you're going
to look at this robin, and how ironic this robin
is in the field of battle where we're going to
see a blood bath. So he went okay, and he
looks at this twig and imagines a robin. Then he said,

(37:11):
but what the am I gonna say? I said, I
don't know. Why don't you just say, hmm, morning, it
looks like snow, which he does in the film. Again,
I really like Russell Crowe for nice guys, but his
his loudish Australianism is so godamn funny in every quote
that he gave or excited to, saying in this movie.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
We need to talk about show you my passions. I
feel like this is probably a good moment.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yes, my time, my all time favorite celebrity tweet. Russell
crow is very funny on Twitter. At one point he
was just live tweeting his entire workout thing because his
weight yo yo's so much for rolls and everything. So
there's like a string of tweets from twenty thirteen where
it's just like leg press two hundred pounds, bicep two
hundred pounds, forty minutes on treadmill, like all individually nested

(38:02):
as replies. Let me find the aforementioned explain my passions tweet.
Someone was tweeting at him. I believe about Oh yes so,
Russell Crowe tweeted fight back, humiliation is news, denile of
climate change, etri it over education. Media should not be

(38:25):
the enemy of progress. Brendan McClaskey at T Bones thirty
two on Twitter replied at Russell Crowe, li rural Hollywood.
Just keep acting, pretty boy, leave politics alone. Russell Crowe
at T Bones thirty two, Simple facts. I'm not pretty.
I'm not your boy, you simpleton, Send me your address

(38:46):
so I can visit you and explain my passions. No period.
It is the perfect threat. I love it so much.
There's like there's been a trend like on Twitter lately
or I don't know lately pass a couple of year
of variations on what if I came to your house
with a weapon or something like that. But send me

(39:06):
your address so I can visit you and explain my
passions is the rawest line of all time. Anyway, Hell
was I talking about? Uh oh yeah? So Ridley Scott,
David Franzoni, Russell crow would sit together after day of
filming as new bits of writing would come in, and
over whiskey and cigars, they would just decide what was
going to stay for the next day of shooting. These

(39:27):
editing sessions occasionally crossed over into real on set disputes.
Writer William Nicholson recalled to The Daily Mail that Russell
Crowe said to him one day, your lines are garbage,
But I'm the gradiest actor in the world, and I
can make even garbage sound good. That's bad, I'm not
dialed into it, Nicholson added. And the funny thing is

(39:47):
that it's true extremely beta move. Okay, the lines weren't garbage,
and he was a bit aggressive, but he is a
great actor, so his occasional fits of arrogance didn't bother
me at all. Richard Harris, who was playing Marcus Aurelius,
was too old for the and took a more dignified route.
He simply ignored all rewrites as they came in for
his scenes and said the original lines. This all gets

(40:07):
so much funnier to me when you learn that throughout
filming Ridley Scott wore the red USS Alabama navy hat
that Gene Hackman wears and cribs and tide. It was
given to him by his brother Tony Scott, who directed
that film. So in all these onset photos you can
see Ridley Scott with his like veteran USS Alabama with
the navy wings, like red trucker hat. This is all anyway.

(40:29):
A Time magazine article from May of two thousand and
went a little further detailing Crow's shenanigans on the set
of Gladiator. They quoted a DreamWorks executive who said Russell
was not well behaved. He tried to rewrite the entire
script on the spot. You know, the big line in
the trailer in this life for the next, I will
have my vengeance. At first he absolutely refused to say it.
He did a lot of posturing and put the fear

(40:50):
of God into some people. Thankfully, Ridley never yelled. He
was the voice of reason dealing with many unreasonable factors,
not the least of which was his lead. There was
an Entertainment Weekly article in which Crow remembered originally pushing
Ridley Scott to let him voice Maximus with a Spanish accent,
since the character is from the Iberian Peninsula and he's
referred to thusly as the Spaniard, which is a bit

(41:12):
of historical inaccuracy. Ridley Scott pushed back and asked for
the generic British you know received pronunciation style accent, which
Crow said ended up as Royal Shakespeare Company, two pints
after Lunch. As I mentioned earlier, this is sort of
the ground zero or assent for I guess it really
started with La Confidential, where he plays like a like

(41:34):
a muscle bound passionate La police Detective. But this is
all in the on ramp bleeding up to South Park's
depiction of Russell Crowe as having a show called Russell
Crowe's fighting round the world, which is just that a
very cartoonish Australian accent and Russell Crowe just travel log
style but just getting into fights. The phone throwing thing

(41:54):
is at one point in New York he'd like literally
hawked a desk phone at a clerk, I believe, and
was arrested for it. But also from that time magazine
article is the quote a hard drinking perfectionist Crow got
into brawls with villagers on one occasion and laid such
waste to his rented villa in Morocco that the caretaker
protested to Ridley Scott saying he must leave. He's violating

(42:16):
every tenant of the Quran. Another hilarious story about Crowe, Sorry,
one more, well, a couple more, Sorry, two more. Russell
Crowe once made reference to George Clooney having quote sold
out when Clooney was doing then espresso commercials. George Clooney
supposedly didn't take kindly to this, and ward traveled about
this through Hollywood to Russell Crowe. Russell Crowe's apology to

(42:39):
Clooney was a mail package that included a CD of
Russell Crowe's band thirty odd Foot of Grunts, a book
of Russell Crowe's poetry, and handwritten note saying he had
been misquoted. Fro did supposedly improvise the line at my
signal unleash hell in the Battle of Germania, which is

(43:00):
incredibly raw, so we can call it a wash. He
also did the maximum speech. He also asked to write
a speech when the guy says like, what is going
home mean to you? Or something? And he just jotted
that speech down thinking about his ranch in Australia, which
is a great Yeah, it's a nice little moment as
you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more

(43:21):
too much information after these messages.

Speaker 1 (43:35):
But even Russell Crowe couldn't compare it to one of
his forebears. In on set hell Raising, we're talking about
all of read, oh read. I don't think he's a
big deal in America, but he was a legend in England,
like Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton. Contemporary
's actually an incredible book called hell Raisers about all

(43:58):
those guys in the fifties and sixties who you know,
doing stuff. But we really shouldn't be glorifying but.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
Nope, really incredibly problematic drinking and abuse. Yeah. I think
Oliver Reed is most known in this country for playing
Bill Sikes in Oliver Yeah, yeah, yeah, and Oliver maybe
in Werewolf After Midnight, one of the werewolf of I
think it's Werewolf at either at midnight or after midnight,
the timing doesn't matter. He was a werewolf.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
Oh, he's in Tommy too. He's in the Who's Movie
at that poss of Tommy's. He's the dad or the
step dad. I forget. He's in Margaret's Husband. In England.
He's mostly known for being him drinking, for drinking. Yeah,
basically he was cast as a proximous and Ridley Scott
warned Red again known through his drinking and whacked out

(44:49):
behavior on sets to keep things cool, really fought really
hard for Oliver Reed. German weightlifter Ralph Mohler, who plays
the towering gladiator Hagen, told Yahoo in an interview he
later went to Oliver and said, look, they didn't want you,
but I want you. Don't let me down, and he
never did until he died three weeks before the movie ended.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
But before that, let's just get into.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
Exactly why a lot of people didn't want Oliver reed.
I want to do a quick lightning round of anecdotes
of this man. He famously drank one hundred and twenty
six pints in a twenty four hour sitting, and celebrated
this accomplishment by performing a horizontal handstand atop the bar.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
He invented, Heigel, I've kept.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
These from Heigel, so I want to get your authentic
reactions to these. He invented a drink that he called
gunk gu n K, which consisted of filling an ice
bucket with a little bit of every single drink from
every bottle in whatever. The bar he was currently sitting
in had. Oh so, it's like Long Island iced tea.
It's like the h bomb equivalent of Long Island iced tea.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
I was just saying, it's this. Did they call it
a suicide run when you do with the soda fountain.
I've never heard that. Maybe I made that up. I
don't know.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
His drinking shockingly never impacted his work on set, but
it cost him a high profile part in a Steve
McQueen movie. Apparently, Steve McQueen flew over to England to
meet with him and talk about a role.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
I don't actually know what role is.

Speaker 1 (46:19):
Offhand, they went on what's been described as a legendary
pub crawl, which culminated in Reid becoming ill and vomiting
all down Steve McQueen's front, and that kind of cooled
the whole working together thing. During the filming of the
movie The Sellout, when Oliver Reed learned how much room
service drinks cost, he ordered boxes of wine and spirits

(46:41):
shipped to his hotel room and turned his suite into
a pub.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
While on break filming in Durango, Oliver Reed noticed the
production assistant and his wife sitting at the table in
the restaurant in which he was drinking. Reid then politely
approached them, in the form of the man and his
wife that they should go back to the hotel room
because quote, I'm going to smash this place up in
ten minutes, and I wouldn't want to hurt you or

(47:06):
your lady. The couple left the restaurant just as Reid
hurled tooth tables through the window, not one but two.
He was arrested once for brawling in a pub. I
think this was a separate incident, and he apologized to
the court and sent flowers to all the responding police officers.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
Ow, yeah, he's a real what's the no half measures?
Isn't that a bit from uh A breaking bad? Yeah?
He was a real no half measures kind of drinker. Uh.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
Once, this is a sort of a quieter act of destruction.
Upset with the lighting in his home after an evening
of drinking, he walked through his house and just punched
out all of the light bulbs.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (47:52):
Another occasion, impatient for New Year's to begin, he moved
his clock ahead, called at the New Year, and celebrated
by firing his shot good in the air and then
shooting the clock.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
I mean making that kind of shot. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
Yeah, Well we don't know how far away he was.
It could have been a point play.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
Yeah, he was someone holding the clock still he.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Was actually you know what We talked about him being
more famous in America for being an oliver. He was
probably most famous as a talk show guest, both in
the UK and the United States, because he would famously
show up drunk. Yes he was. His most infamous incident
in the UK was when of many there are probably
half a dozen or maybe even a dozen famous instances

(48:34):
of him on talk shows. But the most notorious is
him on a show called After Dark, when he showed
up drunk and offended the feminist writer Kate Millet by
telling her give us a kiss, big not good.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
He went on The Tonight.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
Show frequently drunk and would share his belief that a
women's place was in the kitchen. Fellow guest Shelley Winters
naturally took offence and eventually dumped her glass of bourbon
on his head. Read would then appear on a UK
chat show months later to defend himself and claim that
those comments on the Tonight Show to Shelley Winners were
tongue in cheek designed to get a rise out of her.

(49:11):
His argument was kind of undercut on this British interview
by falling off his chair and making his exit from
the show by crawling away. He was on Letterman a
bunch of times, and when Letterman tried to ask him
about an incident when he challenged Lee Marvin to a
drinking contest, Reid replied, that's hearsay. When Letterman continued with

(49:35):
this line of questioning, a seemingly genuinely angry Reid told
Letterman that the showrunners knew that this topic was not
to be discussed, and so he said, let's cool it
with that one, get to a new subject. I love
trees and boats. Cool, God bless him.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
I mean yeah, I would talk about trees and boats
with Allie Reid.

Speaker 1 (49:55):
Yeah. And finally, while promoting the film Castaway, Oliver Reid
appeared as a guest on the British talk show Aspell
and Company. He walked on set carrying a picture of
gin and orange juice.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
Hell Yeah, gin and juice Baby, ripped off.

Speaker 1 (50:08):
His sport coat and drunkenly sang along with the show's
band when he sat on the couch. Another guest on
the show asked Reid why do you drink? And Reid
offered this all time quote. It's probably familiar to most
of you.

Speaker 2 (50:22):
Why do you drink?

Speaker 1 (50:23):
Because the finest people I've ever met in my life
are in pubs.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Oliver read ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 1 (50:30):
But his reputation had caught up with him by the
time Ridley Scott cast him again, cast him against the
advice of every studio, and Reid was upset by how
low his stock had sung. He was complaining to director
Michael Winner that Oliver Reid actually wanted him to audition
because you know, oh yeah, people at this stage in

(50:51):
their career, you know audition. Shelley Winters actually famously was
asked to audition once and she showed up with a
big bag, reached in and pulled out an oscar and
slammed it on the table and said, here's my TV.
Reached in and pulled that her second oscar and slammed
it on the table and said, here's my head shot.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
And I believe she was given the role. So yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
Reid was not happy about being asked to audition, but
director Michael Winners, who was very close to him, said, oh,
he don't with me. You're not a FA star, you're
out of work. You're not old enough to retire, so
you need a third act to your career. Obviously, they
think if you're working with me, you can't be as
drunk as people think you are. So go to Ridley
and read end of story. And if he wants you

(51:29):
to read twice, you read twice. I'm getting like Don
Draper and oh you know, watch Man Man nevermind and.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Ollie Bless his soul.

Speaker 1 (51:36):
He was sober from months before filming, and he made
assurances to Ridley Scott that his drinking wouldn't be a factor.
He would limit it only to weekends, and his longtime
friend fellow Gladiator CASTMATEE David Hemmings, who played Cassius, also
promised Ridley Scott that he'd look after Reid. Nevertheless, Oh,
I felt you got You should take this story. Tell
us about the sad, tragic, comic demise of Oliver Reed.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
Yeah, I mean, it depends on how you. He went
down swaying few things he did. He did. On the
day of May second, nineteen ninety nine, the sixty one
year old Reid was parked in a bar in Malta
with his wife Josephine, and some Maltese friends for lunch
break when a group of sailors from the Royal Navy
Frigate HMS Cumberland, who were on shore leave, strolled into

(52:24):
the bar. Eight beers in and with only one scene
left to film, Reid was about to head back to
his hotel when, as the story goes, he was recognized
by some of the officers who called out, shall we
have a drink Alie, which activates something in his brain.
So Reid sits down with these guys and this all
comes from. None of the Western newspapers had this. This

(52:47):
is a Spanish newspaper, El Paiees who all of this
detail comes from so grain of salt, but print the legend. Yeah.
In addition to the eight beers, he'd already had read
down a dozen double shot of rum while chatting with
these naval men and as arm wrestling matches subsequently piled

(53:07):
up also had a bottle of whiskey next to him.
He supposedly won five arm wrestling matches against British navelmen
at age sixty one. Whilsh Shoust at the age of
sixty one will drunker than you or anyone you know
has ever been signed autographs, hugged these guys and bid farewell,

(53:28):
and then just said I don't feel very well, collapsed
on the floor and died in the ambulance before they
made it to the hospital. He was buried in Bruney
Graveyard in Churchtown, Ireland, where he'd been living, and his
epitaph reads he made the air move.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
That's amazing. I don't even know what that means, but
that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
He sure did read more or less predicted his own
death during a nineteen ninety four appearance on something called
The Obituaries Show, saying I died in a bar of
a heart attack, full of laughter.

Speaker 1 (54:00):
You know you can't get sev and you read that.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
You don't want to valorize much of that, but you
know the man went out on his own terms. Russell
Crowe had some very terrible things to say about him,
but we'll grow right. Oliver Reed's final scene, somewhat weirdly,
was his character's death scene, in which he repeats a

(54:23):
bit of a line from earlier in the film. We
mortals are but shadows and dust. A clause in the
production's insurance contract would have allowed them to reshoot all
of Reid's scenes with another actor at a cost of
about twenty five million, even though this would have been
paid for by the insurer. Ridley Scott felt that the
cast and crew were exhausted by this point because the
movie was shot in sequence, so this would have been

(54:46):
near it if they were writing it. Yeah, exactly, so
they were. This is ultimately at the end of both
filming and the plot of the movie. So he accomplished
the final scene of Reid's character by finding an actor
of his similar build and then they just pay did
a CGI version of Reid's face over him and then
overdubbed a bit of dialogue from an alternate take of

(55:06):
that earlier scene. So this is a really early example
of how what they could do with CGI, and I
think it won Best Visual Effects at the Oscars, or
at least was nominated for it. So it's a really
As I said earlier, it's a great example of tasteful CGI,
which Ridley has apparently not leaned into. In the New One,
Iranian British actor Omit Djili, who's also known for his

(55:28):
work in nineteen ninety nine's The Mummy, he has a
tremendous story about working with Reid on the set of Gladiator.
He says he was scared of Oliver Reed, going back
to again read's Roland Oliver. They wrote this op ed
for The Guardian, which we'll quote now. In the script,
Ali was meant to punch me in the face and
say you sold me queer giraffes. I'd worked with some
of the crew a few months before in the Mummy

(55:49):
and they knew I was scared of Oli, so they
decided to play a trick on me. They thought it
would be funny to get Oli to grab me by
the nuts during the scene. Ollie said, do you mind
if I really grab you hard to make it authentic?
I said fine, so he did. Usually you do the scene,
they say cut and you have a few minutes to
reset before you go again. Ollie continued to hold my

(56:09):
nuts during the reset. I was so frightened of him
that I thought it was part of his acting process,
so I allowed him to hold me while we talked
about the food in the hotel. By take three, I
became aware of a massaging sensation. By take four, he said,
you do realize this is a wind up, don't you.
Everyone thought it was so funny they kept it in
the final cut and he didn't have to punch me.

(56:30):
Rip Oliver reed.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Makes me sad, something about like the Line and Winter
type stuff with like guys, powerful guys having the power diminished. Yeah,
I mean again, it's not a healthy thing.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
But no, no, no, but it's you know, there's a
sort of you filter through the Jim Morrison lens and
there's this sort of drunken Jester archetype that people glom onto.
And you know again, man, he went out on his
own terms.

Speaker 1 (57:02):
I didn't even mean that, like anytime, like an older
guy who is like a champion of something goes head
to head with like the younger guy and struggles a
bit that just like hits a certain part in me.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
Oh yeah, yeah, don't drink like that. Well you can
have you can have a longer off rampant Like no,
I don't even mean like I don't know.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
I mean it's I'm not even intentionally thinking about the
Jake Ball Mike Tyson thing, like I oh yeah, not
even just any anything like that, any kind of feet
of skill or talent.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Sure, man, I guess it's the line in winter. Yeah,
the lion in the very drunk lion in the Multese bar.
Arm wrestling naval Navy men. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm sorry,
Like it's just so imagine being the Navy. The Navy
guy who was like I'll over read housed, beat me

(58:01):
in arm wrestling and then died. I would dine out
on that story for the rest of my life.

Speaker 1 (58:05):
It took the last bit of his strength to beat
me in arm wrestling. There are some truly incredible, like
just candid photos of oliveried in bars, like clearly just
taken by other patrons of like Oliver Reed stacking up
all of his glasses into this like giant pillar that

(58:26):
reaches the ceiling of all these pint glasses.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
Oh, the wizard wand oh yeah, is that a term? Uh?
You know you can do that with if you have
a roll at duct tapeley you're drinking, you just do
that with all your empties, ah, wizard staff. Yeah. An
on set death is never easy, but it must have,
especially rattled Joaquin Phoenix. Sorry, serious voice. An on set

(58:49):
death is never easy, but it must have especially ratted
Joaquin Phoenix, who was returning to the screen for the
first time since the death of his brother River from
a drug overdose in West Hollywood on Halloween nineteen ninety three.
Phoenix told Collider in twenty eighteen, Gladiator was one of
the most intimidating films I've done, because it was the
first set I went on that was just massive. It

(59:10):
looked like it was acres of land and tons of
trucks and trailers and you know, hundreds of extras, multiple cameras. Suddenly,
the scale of this hit me, and I was overwhelmed
by that. I didn't think I was going to be
able to make it through. He continued. I went to
Ridley Scott and said, I don't know what to do.
I just can't do this. I don't know what you're
gonna do. This just isn't going to be possible. And

(59:31):
Ridley was really smart. He just shot me for four
hours and he didn't put film in the camera. The
first scene that I did, I was really nervous, and
we shot I don't know, an unbelievable amount of takes,
a shocking amount, over and over again. At some point
at the end, after hours, Scott finally said, okay, we
got it. And then later on when we were working
on the film, he told me that he hadn't been
putting film in the camera for like the first thirty takes.

(59:53):
But everybody did everything. The camera did its movements, sound people,
everyone behaved as if we were shooting takes. I don't
understand that. Well, you just get all the nervousness out
of his system.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
I guess it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
Was another of Oliver Reed's hell raising peers who had
a hand in helping Phoenix. Russell Crowe told the news
service w E N N. Joaquin was very nervous on
the set and I went to Richard Harris and I said, mate,
what are we going to do with this kid? He's
asking me to abuse him before takes so Richard said,
let's get him pissed through a number of hours and
a number of cans of Guinness. I got the point

(01:00:25):
across to Joaquin that is actually an internal journey and
everything he needs to do with the character lives within him.
Just imagining like a all right mate, an act of
prepas handing of a copy of the artists way. Yeah,
how many affirmations you been doing in the morning? I

(01:00:51):
love here, You're great, you can it lives within you.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
May It's amazing that your your sober Australian voice is
kinda B minus is nailed.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
It's incredible. Another great Oliver Reed's story, Richard Harris took
to Russell Crowe, but Oliver Reed hated him instantly and
challenged him to a fight. At one point, Russell Crow
spoke very uncharitably of him in GQ, after saying that
he wouldn't in twenty ten. He said, I never got
on with Oli. He has visited me in dreams and

(01:01:33):
asked me to talk kindly of him, so I should,
but we never had a pleasant conversation. And then he
goes on to say some very uncharitable things. He says
something like disgusting and undignified the way that he behaved,
like striding down the set and wanting to fight people
drunk in the middle of the day and dying in
your own piss and vomit and like blah blah blah

(01:01:53):
blah blah.

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
Who's that sound like minus the dying in your own
pisson fone?

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
I know, I know, right, yeah, bit rich. During the
film's press tour, Russell Kurt told Variety there were a
lot of people in that strange journalistic habit who just
wanted to poke that fire and kept asking Joaquin about
his brother and then about his relationship with me, because
we have that in the film. At one point we
were doing some press conference and he just said something
along the lines of look, Russo treated me like a brother,

(01:02:17):
and it just hit me in a really heavy way. Now,
not to make an immediate pun on heavy, but Joaquin
Phoenix also deliberately decided to gain weight as his character
gained power, which Scott noticed during the dailies and mentioned
to a producer the following day. Ridley explains in the
DVD commentary for the film, Joaquin walks up to me.
Commitis Joaquin. It is full regalia and armor, and he says,

(01:02:39):
I hear, I look like a fat little hamster. He
then didn't eat any food for weeks. But enough about
all this acting and personality and stuff. Let's get to
the real meat of the episode minute production details. As usual,
Ridley Scott, trained Lest we Ever Forget at London's prestigious
Royal College of Art, was heavily involved with storyboarding before

(01:03:01):
filming began. Storyboard artist Sylvan de Fretz, I don't know
recalled for the film's making of book. Several months out
Ridley will give very detailed sketches, shot by shot, blow
blay blow. A couple weeks out, sketches get very rough,
and the instruction's very loose because he just doesn't have
the time. I'm imagining just like a stick figure with
a story.

Speaker 1 (01:03:23):
Like blood Drops.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
Yeah, looks cool. But once filming, Sylvain said, Ridly changes
his mind a lot and sometimes uses the storyboard to
get rid of ideas rather than lock them in. He's
quite loose. He shoots with five six seven cameras sometimes
and can be quite spontaneous. I can't say the storyboard
particularly resembles the final film that sounds like it sucks

(01:03:45):
Yeah anyway. Gattire was filmed in England, Morocco and Malta
between January and May of nineteen ninety nine. Production designer
Arthur Max were called in the book we trumped around
the Roman Empire for six weeks, scouting all of the
existing remains in England, France, Italy, Eastern Europe and North Africa.
But your access to us left of the real Rome
is quite limited. All the ruins are historical monuments and

(01:04:07):
so cannot be touched. Consequently, the film found stand ins
for certain historical settings, and as we will get too shortly,
used CGI to restore others to their period accurate glory.

Speaker 1 (01:04:18):
The film's opening scene, for example, is set in what
was then Germania, a massive swath of eastern and northern Europe.
Production originally wanted a film outside of Bratislava, a port
on the Danube River, not far from where Marcus Aurelia
is actually campaigned, but as scheduling issues pushed the filming
into winter, shooting was switched to England and a forest
near Farmham. Sorry. Another reason why the site was chosen

(01:04:40):
was because production learned from England's Forestry Commission. At the
area Bourne Woods was slated to be deforested anyway, so
as really Scott remembered, I said, I'll do it, I'll
burn it to the ground. And they said, good, incredible sound.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
A phone call, yeah, and a phone call this this forest.
I'll do it. I'll burn it to the ground. Click. Good.
It doesn't even wait to hear the response. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:14):
The weather was actually astoundingly cooperative, to the point where
Crow's last minute line about the snow was actually preceded
by real life snow that had started ten minutes before
the take one rolled.

Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
That makes a bit of him not struggling with what
to say, and that's so much funnier, Like he's staring
at this thing, imagining a robin that'll be there and
be like, what think Russell think what he sick?

Speaker 1 (01:05:37):
Looks up?

Speaker 2 (01:05:38):
Yeah, it starts snowing. Really, Scott's over there waiting to
roll like, well it's snowing. We'll go with that. Go
with that take, do a take of that. I think
his line is literally in the film, just like looks
like snow has so funny? Is Russell Crow a secret idiot?

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
Well yeah, but also like a good actor.

Speaker 2 (01:06:04):
I I mean, like I said, man, I so much
of it is colored by this reputation that makes seem
really shy. But he is hilarious in nice guys. I
don't really he has a very He's very charismatic in
this era when his horizontal proportions kept up with his height,

(01:06:24):
you know. I mean, he's great in La Confidential. But
he does just have to play a loudish, you know,
walking act of violence, and he does bring a sort
of wounded, heavy browed gravitas to this. I don't dislike
him in this, just when you weigh it against all
this priggish stuff that you hear, Like, okay, buddy.

Speaker 1 (01:06:43):
We're leaving out some of the nitty gritty that involved
trucking thousands of extras, animals, hairdressers, makeup artists, armors, choreographers
and the rest of the cast and crew needed to
a location over an hour from London.

Speaker 2 (01:06:58):
That doesn't sound fun.

Speaker 1 (01:07:00):
Following the opening scene, the action moves to Morocco with
a crew of two hundred people, which kind of sounds
small to me and a cast of almost one hundred
so does that. Where scenes of slavery, desert travel, and
gladiatorial training were shot in and around Iite ben had
I think how you say that. The crew used basic
materials and local building techniques to craft thirty thousand mud

(01:07:22):
bricks that make up the arena. The fighter's first battle
in this is according to a Gladiator the making of
the Ridley Scott Epic Making of book. But they were
also aided by the fact that Morocco just kind of
looked like that. David Franzoni, the screenwriter, told Yahoo. The
reason it worked is because Ridley built the real thing.
When you drove up to it, it looked like it

(01:07:44):
was part of the city. The gladiatorial arena, the bedroom
would come in from the desert to watch the shoot,
and so Ridley just put them in the movie. It
has this legitimacy to it that happened naturally. The areas
around ie ban Hado may look familiar to folks at
this point. It's subsequently been used in Oliver Stones two
thousand and four epic, Alexander Releas, Scott's historical drama Kingdom

(01:08:06):
of Heaven in two thousand and five, and twenty ten's
Prince of Persia. Not to mention, portions of Game of Thrones.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
The biggest challenge in filming, though, was recreating ancient Rome,
and in particular the forum, the Senate scenes a shot
and the Colosseum the Hearts of the Empire. Production designer
Arthur Max and Ridley Scott settled on Port Mifha, Salfi,
where the British had constructed Fort Rica Soli in eighteen
oh three. This is in Malta, conveniently done at romanesque

(01:08:34):
yellow limestone, aged nicely by wind and sand in the
intervening in nearly two centuries. All told, the fort's existing
structure and its compounds and parade grounds would be used
for about half the final sets seen in the movie.
So if you go to this place in Malta you
can see about half of Gladiator, which is tight. This
not quite the real thing, but close enough. Approach served

(01:08:56):
the art direction of the film as well, which pulled
in influences from Modernist architect Hugh Ferris and Nazi architects
like Albert Speer. Filmmakers used large scale miniatures to model
the Rome sets before over one hundred British crew members
and two hundred Maltice workers took nineteen weeks to build
the real thing. During the high winds and storms of

(01:09:17):
what was eventually reported to be Malta's worst winter in
thirty years, Production literally used one hundred percent of the
plaster and plywood available in Malta and had to start
importing those materials, eventually using around six hundred tons of
plaster in a process that was also hampered by the
storms that would leave ships unable to dock and unload.

(01:09:40):
This isn't like some obscure substance wood and plaster. You've
taken all of it from the siland there's simply no more.
Ridley puffing on a cigar, chuck it in, burn it,
burn it to the ground. I don't care. The ships
can unload, Ridley, burn them, bring in new ones. The
real coliseum, just a historical note, was begun by the

(01:10:02):
Emperor Vespasian in seventy a d. And finished about ten
years later by his son Titus and then Emperor Nero,
who gifted the public the grounds from his sprawling palace.
So Production thought about using these existing smaller structures, before
eventually determining that they would simply build a small chunk
at full scale of the Colisseum and then expanded digitally

(01:10:26):
so they programmed these initial scale designs into a computer
used that to determine lens angles and camera movements to
figure out how much they would actually need for coverage.
This ended up being a fragment of the coliseum's first tier,
about one third of the circumference of the original and
fifty two feet high. Now, this also included sets for
the lower portions of the arena where the gladiators enter

(01:10:48):
an exit and the animals were released from. And then
they also made a massive seventeen sale PVC and steel sunshade.
This is somewhat historically inaccurate. In the gladiated times, they
did have these massive sheets hanging over the seating crowd
called valarium that were necessary because of the it was
the Mediterranean at high noon. This one was controlled by

(01:11:12):
a massive system of rigs and pulleys, and they used
it to light and shade the set. Accordingly, cinematographer John
Matheson called it the most expensive shadow ever and it's
really beautiful in the film. I mean to know that
they were using this thing to generate all the kirascuro
the beautiful light and shading the shafts of light that

(01:11:32):
come in really something. And then The rest of the
imaging of the coliseum was handled by mill Film in London.
They filled the structure with a combination of cardboard cutouts,
two thousand real extras and about thirty three thousand CGI spectators,
while also adding the rest of the structure digitally. Scott
relied on natural lighting as much as possible for the

(01:11:53):
film to achieve the proper pseudo realism, but they didn't
need to create much of their set dressing. For example,
the elaborate mosaic floor of Commodis's Joaquin Phoenix's chambers. Those
were bespoke linoleum tiles that arrived in Malta in one
hundred and forty boxes, accompanied by a team of employees
straight from the fabricator who spent weeks piecing them together.

(01:12:16):
Movie magic, I love it. Just blank checks. Now, of course,
we have to get into the most fun parts of
historical epic filmmaking. Wardrobe in weapons, costume designer Janty yeats
wonderful name. She had got her start in the world
of high fashion, and so she did research from artists

(01:12:37):
like Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema and George de la Tour,
and the resulting wardrobe that she designed of it. The
Emperor's family was of course the most elaborate for Connie
Nielsen's wardrobe. For example, not only the raw materials, so
the raw fabric has gold thread woven into it, but
then there's also gold thread that's embroidered in and around

(01:12:59):
all the detailing to make it subtly shimmer in lighting.
All of the footwear for the film was handmade in Rome,
although devout vegan Joaquin Phoenix refused to wear period correct
leather and I guess was given full leather. The Royal
jewelry was largely handcrafted by England's Martin Adams, although one

(01:13:19):
of Connie Nielsen's rings was a two thousand year old
signet ring that she found an antique store and I
guess she found it, yeah, and I guess bought it
herself or build it to production which power move The
armour portions of the wardrobeough had to be flexible and
much lighter than they would have been in real life.
So some of them like Committis's beautiful like white marble

(01:13:40):
armor thing that he wears that was made of rubber
which was then covered in leather or I guess vegan
leather in precious Little Joaquin's case, although Crow's armour, since
he was fighting in it, had to be made from
leather covered foam, so these things would have just been
like basically Halloween costumes wouild I love as opposed to
like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones where

(01:14:03):
they like handhampered. This sh it was just an enormous
chore for people to wear. Also, fun fact for Crow
and his stunt doubles every single piece of his armor,
not just the breastplate, but the gloves, all the different
discrete little pieces had to be made twelve times over
every single piece twelve times for continuity so that they

(01:14:25):
could have different stages of combat wear and et cetera.
Production also put together five hundred gladiator tunics out of
rough linen and over ten thousand other costumes for the
rest of the cast and extras. Costume supervisor Rosemary Burrows
had the fun job of supervising the quote costume villages
that had to be set up to manage costume, hair

(01:14:46):
and makeup on location, which for the Germania shoot also
included mud baths. That's right, folks, mud baths. Friend of
the Pod mud babs mudbaths so that they could just
look disgusting and grimy, and Burrows was also responsible for
finding the quaint little British ferrier. Who's that's a horse
equipment maker? I believe I think you're right. Yeah, who

(01:15:08):
made all the film's chain mail?

Speaker 1 (01:15:10):
Oh that wasn't like like fabric made the look like
real chain mail.

Speaker 2 (01:15:13):
It was real chain mail, just rings.

Speaker 1 (01:15:16):
On the film's DVD commentary, Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe
reveal a neat easter egg emblazoned on Maximus's breastplate. He
names the horses Argento and Scatto, which means silver and
more or less trigger and Silver was the name of
the horse ridden by the Lone Ranger, and trigger was
the name of the horse ridden by Roy Rogers. I
love that nice little bit of Americana there hit in

(01:15:38):
an ancient rome, and there are a few other little
Easter eggs nestled throughout the film. You can hear a
sample of chanting from the nineteen sixty four film Zulu
mixed into the beginning of the Germania Battle. That's cool,
and one of the totems carried by the opposing forces
is a mask from the much mocked Sean Connery film
Zardo's that's the one of him in the in the

(01:16:00):
Sling the Sling speedo. Yes, yes, it's painted gray and
subjected to appropriate weathering to make it look slightly less obvious. Meanwhile,
art director Cliff Robinson was responsible for putting together the
film's vehicles, which included the Royal carriage, but more importantly
the chariots used in the Colisseum. They both had the
look cool as hell and served various functions. Twenty four

(01:16:24):
of these were built in total, which is incredible rannging
from the more ornate ones used by a commutus Antigris
of gall and sixteen of these were used for the
battle scene. For that scene, some were stunt ready, meaning
they were able to take a beating and or be destroyed,
but others were constructed with special combat angle camera mounts.
Cliff Robinson, the art director, also built the Roman War

(01:16:45):
weapons like arrow volleying scorpions and two full sized catapults,
each weighing a ton incapable of launching missiles four hundred
and fifty feet.

Speaker 2 (01:16:57):
What a sick day, Yeah at work, I made that catapult.
It works as one would expect. Over twenty five hundred
pieces of weaponry were designed and manufactured by Simon Atherton
and his team, although this figure does not include the
sixteen thousand flaming and ten thousand non flaming arrows used

(01:17:18):
in the opening scene. I saw figures somewhere that they
made twenty seven five hundred individual armor components to be
mixed and matched among the different extras. Simon Atherton is
the real deal. He started his life as an armorer
as an apprentice in a gun shop when he was sixteen,
and subsequently went to work on two Indiana Jones's A Highlander,
Two Aliens, A Bond, The Three Musketeers, Brave Heart, the

(01:17:41):
Fifth Element. I don't know why I emphasized it like that.
He made Ridley's gun, the pulse rifle in Aliens, which
is like one of the most iconic pieces of sci
fi weaponry ever, the mask of Zoro and the Mummy
before getting onto Gladiator once again, Happy Mumvember to everyone. Ironically,

(01:18:01):
Atherton says in the making of book that there was
not much reference to be found in books for weaponry
and armor from this period, sure Man, and so many
of the film's weapons were original concept, like scissor shaped
sword gauntlets and the multi firing crossbow used at one scene.

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
Yeah, we can't really find much. So I got, I got,
I got these cool things I was thinking about, Like
we could just do that.

Speaker 2 (01:18:23):
Wow, scissor hands, any precedent for that in Hollywood recently?
A guy with scissors for hands.

Speaker 1 (01:18:30):
One of the most well documented periods in human history. Yeah,
I can't find much.

Speaker 2 (01:18:35):
We could go scissor hands. Really, Scott literally was like,
give me a machine gun. And he says in that
there's there's an there's like a three and a half
hour making of on YouTube and I did not watch
all of so caught me sleeping. But he talks about
the machine gun, cross crossbone. He's like, I could even
figure out how to sketch this thing out and design it,

(01:18:56):
so I just had to build it. Like so it
after a fashion Athington. This is interesting because there are
like specific if you're a nerd like me, for taxonomy,
there are like a bunch of actually documented types of
gladiators that they got from frescoes and different writings. So
like Murmillos is a specific class of gladiator who have

(01:19:19):
these fish helms, and if you see these, it's hard
to describe with in a podcast. But if you see
these sort of goggle eyed, grilled mask with the big
almost conquistador style helmets, like those archetypes are present in
frescoes and stuff. And now that's how they pulled out
of this. The aforementioned men with a tuna sword who
could kill you in the source painting is called a

(01:19:42):
reterrioris or retire. They were specifically armed with a trident
and a net. Thracians had a very specific kind of
almost boomerang as curved short sword. There were basically guys
who just fought with enormous brass knuckles or like knife
gloves and were otherwise unarmored. And then there was a

(01:20:03):
special guy who appears in the film named for Pluto,
the Roman god of the dead, and you can see
him in the film. His job is to just he
was specifically just to walk around the arena afterwards and
with a giant spear combo spear club combo, just bash
people's heads in real good if it didn't look like
they were going to be able to recover. And so

(01:20:25):
that one of those weapons is on auction, I believe
currently it's called the A lot of this is on auction.
It's all over Julian's in different prop places because they
made so much of it. So if you want to
for a loved one, or say a podcaster you really like,
go buy one. They're called Elysium Dispatchers. So that's cool, man.

(01:20:46):
The fun note that everyone about the hip hop nerds
will note about this is that MF. Doom wears a
version of Maximus's mask. Jordan. Hip hop is a genre
speak rhythmically over beats. It might be a bit of
a blind spot for you since the fifties. But sorry,

(01:21:06):
that was necessarily mean. But yeah, that Maximus's mask that
he first wears just became stage makeup for this for
British rapper m F. Doom, who sadly died a few
years back. At this point, I think Tigris of Gulls sick,
absolutely raw as hell. Tiger head face mask that has

(01:21:28):
a tear on one eye, it's so unbelievably cool as
hell that was made up. Copies of certain weapons were
also rendered in leather or rubber for close ups that
required people to take real hits. And then I just
want to drop in a quote about from Simon Atherton
about archery, which is cool Roman archery. He said, while
Roman soldiers would use they typically use short swords, spears

(01:21:52):
and shields and military situations. He gave this very interesting
breakdown of the Roman field tactics. You know, they had
the They would first throw these spears that were very
weakly constructed so that they couldn't be repurposed. They were
javelins essentially that were designed to break. And then they
would advance either with longer spears that were more sturdy

(01:22:15):
behind shields, or the short swords which are called gladyeye.
That's where you get the term gladiator from. And what
Simon said is that Romans didn't actually like archery very
much as a concept. That was more of a I
think it evolved more of British stuff. But then he
gives this insanely minute detail of how they were made.
They used a horn and sinew bow because from that

(01:22:37):
part of the world, Mediterraneans very dry wood. So you
make a bow on a small wooden cord, and then
on the outside you lay sinew from the achilles tendon
or the backstrap of an animal dried out, and then
the inside of the bow you put horn from an animal.
So in fact what they were making was ancient. Three
layered fiberglass. Wow, I think that's all so neat, really cool.

Speaker 1 (01:23:01):
You titled this next section do you like to hang
around in men's locker rooms? We've been jerry judicious at
the airplane quote.

Speaker 2 (01:23:09):
I must say, yeah, we haven't brought it back that much.

Speaker 1 (01:23:12):
Russell Crowe, Jim and Hansu and Ralph Mohler really hitting
all my pronunciational blind spots.

Speaker 2 (01:23:20):
Here a real international casting of beefy Men.

Speaker 1 (01:23:25):
They were all trained by stunt coordinator Phil Nilsen and
fight master Nicholas Powell. Russell Crow had an uphill battle
from the start, sweating through farm chores at his ranch
in Australia to try to lose forty pounds, and he'd
put on for the insider to get back into fighting shape,
so we maintained he didn't do much more.

Speaker 2 (01:23:43):
Than that, which is good for him.

Speaker 1 (01:23:45):
The three principal gladiators also lifted weights every day in
a mobile gym on set where Moler, a former Mister Universe,
would keep them pumped up. But all the training in
the world doesn't account for accidents, and by all accounts
there were a fair number. Hans So told Variety, I
almost accidentally stab somebody in the head. In the fight
sequence at the coliseum where Maximus gets on the horse,

(01:24:08):
most of us got carried away, and I think when
you're truly doing it for real, the pretend sort of
goes out of the way and the emotion takes over.
So a lot of people got hurt.

Speaker 2 (01:24:18):
He was also one of them.

Speaker 1 (01:24:19):
During the scene where he fights the gladiator and the
horned bullhead Helm, the other actor made an unexpected head
movement and one of the horns missed haunts Who's eyes
by inches, instead cutting a deep gash into his shoulder.
Jesus naturally. Russell Krog got the worst of these accidents.
He was at one point told by production to stop
playing soccer between filming because of the risk it post.

(01:24:42):
He responded to this with a memo of his own, saying,
I can wrestle four tigers, but I can't play a
game of soccer. Get over it, love Russell. You know
that's really missing. That's really lacking when it's not done.
In the Australian accident, can you give us a I.

Speaker 2 (01:24:58):
Can wrestle with four times, but I can't play a
game of soaka, get over it, love Russell. We have
a love Russell, I'm doing a very specific like bogan
like a it's a it's not like the nick Cave
Australian accent, posh. It's a kind of rednecky Australian accent.

Speaker 1 (01:25:18):
It's a holeover from Crocodile dundee. Yeah, an experienced horseback rider.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
Crowd did his.

Speaker 1 (01:25:24):
Own riding during certain scenes, including during the fairly dangerous
initial charge in the Germania battle scene the Betel Variety.
There were shots in there where other people would double
me and then they would complain about a shot and
I would just be like, we'll just let me do
it then. But that particular slope down into the battlefield
with all the fire is going off and the explosions
going off, that was actually a pretty hairy day.

Speaker 2 (01:25:47):
Russell Croade later detailed the breadth of his injuries from
this film on inside the actor's studio. A lot of blood,
a lot of blood, a lot of grazes, you know.
I mean, I've still got a little scar here one
under here on this elbow, a discolouration of the skin
that is directly from Gladiator or just from being Australian.
They are sun drenched people, Okay, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:26:07):
Right under the ozone the hole in the ozone layer exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:26:10):
He said. I've had achilles tendons go out, knees go out,
both shoulders, this shoulders actually had an operation on it.
I've got a lower back thing that just won't go away,
and that's from a couple sort of fall impacts during
fight sequences or whatever. I've got a ribub here that
pops out every now and then, which is not very comfortable.
Twenty years after the film, Crove joked to Variety, when

(01:26:30):
you're younger, you're made of rubber and you can bounce
back again. I do remember saying to my mom when
I got home from that shoot. She said, how do
you feel? I said, I actually feel like a football
player who's played one season too many.

Speaker 1 (01:26:40):
Oh again, getting back to the Ali Reid thing that
makes me sad. I just started, as you know, working
out and training for the first time of my life
at age thirty six, and I'm I'm kind of here's
stories like this, and I'm kind of terrified. For a
delicate flower like me. I'm sort of shocked. I haven't

(01:27:01):
like hurt myself yet in the last couple of months.

Speaker 2 (01:27:03):
Yeah, but here I am here you are. You're surviving
and shouts to your trainer, Lewis Luise. Yes, the Luise.

Speaker 1 (01:27:11):
He knows about the show. He wants me to send
them episodes. Yeah, speak, he has me. Uh, let's see.
It was deadlifting one seventy five this week. Damn dude,
I was bench pressing one thirty five.

Speaker 2 (01:27:25):
Oh yeah, man, check you out.

Speaker 1 (01:27:27):
Yeah trying, I'm trying. Only been a couple months. The
film's menagerie of animal co stars were obviously yet another
logistical hurdle. One particularly fraught situation was actually the dimensions
of the Colosseum. The set was actually about fifteen percent
too small for the horses, and they're five hundred pound
chariots plus actors to turn around it and once they

(01:27:48):
emerged up that long entrance ramp at full gallop, Ridley
Scott says in the making of book, they can't turn
because they're going too fast. They just have to rein
in and slow down fast. And I knew I was
fifteen percent short, so it was really tricky. They were
grazing the other end of the stadium.

Speaker 2 (01:28:05):
Ooh, that sounds dangerous.

Speaker 1 (01:28:07):
They also used cameras on rigs being towed by ATVs
for some of these shots, which added another fun element
of unpredictability. Chief animal trainer Paul Reynolds sourced most of
the animals on the film, including tigers, leopards, girafts, lions, vultures, zebras,
and let's not forget an elephant. Owing to the difficulties
of transporting exotic animals over international boundaries. However, production had

(01:28:31):
to borrow animals from a local zoo when they were
shooting in Morocco, of which Reynolds has the following cheerful
note in the book. Of course, these are not animals
that have been raised and trained for this work. They're
really wild. But everyone survived and we sent all the
animals back healthy.

Speaker 2 (01:28:51):
But you don't want to hear about that. No, you
want to hear about Russell Crowe fighting tigers. Oh yeah,
which would be said to learn he did not actually
do on Phil James Brown Outs bands right now? Yeah, yeah, fellas,
can I tell him about Russell crow fighting tigers? Tell
about Russell coll fighting tigers? He didn't actually do it?
Take him? Yeah, So really, Scott had storyboard in that

(01:29:16):
whole fight, and he had overconfidently budgeted a mere four
days for tiger's shooting purposes. This ended up taking weeks.
The workflow was, at least in some parts alarmingly real.
Animal trainers would use bait to get the tigers to lunge,
leap and roar with, you know, just chunks of meat,

(01:29:36):
and their controls were just the chains you see in
the film, just a caller and some chains to run
through ira eye hooks, you know, in the ground. But
these were done independently of Crow's stuntwork and his stunt actors,
So basically they would composite shots. Basically, the tigers do
something in one take that they put Crow or his

(01:29:58):
stunt double in a you know, another in the same background,
film their reaction, and then they paste it together. And
this happened daily. Film editor patro Scalia would view the
dailies to see if he had enough of these angles
to edit with and then ask for reshoots accordingly, Now
that there were some shots that they did do within
a degree of distance, Ridley Scott in the book says

(01:30:21):
that he allowed for fifteen feet of distance between the
tigers and actors most of the time, although in recent
years that number has shrunk. In the telling, he said
to Variety the tiger would come out of the hole
and Russell would roll out of the way and he
said me, that was close, and I said, we were
there as well, Russell, you were two feet I was
like four feet. Anyway, four six hundred pound tigers were

(01:30:43):
used for that fight scene. Two were more docile ones
from the US that had been hand raised, and two
were quote less predictable ones from France. This is where
you fade in the so fade in that music. In France,
we do not trains italielles MWC and feeds in the
cigarette wine, collected cameo and paperback. Buff.

Speaker 1 (01:31:10):
What does buff means?

Speaker 2 (01:31:11):
It's just like buff is like a standard French interjection
that's kind of like, you know, just saying like m
er yeah, I guess like buff usually a companied by
like an eye roll. So much of the close distance
shots that you do see were created with a full
size animatronic tiger that could be positioned over Maximus's shoulders
and move or on top of him and move suspended,

(01:31:33):
be suspended in mid air for leaping shots, and so
the shots that you see in the final film were
achieved by a combination of compositing, real tigers, with the
actors and the animatronic one and some subtle CGI work.
One of the live tigers actually did get sort of
loose one day. It reared back suddenly on its chain
and it knocked its handler to the ground, and so

(01:31:54):
all this slack went into the chain and he had
to run and scramble to grab it before the thing
had enough lead to I guess eat crow, get it work.

Speaker 1 (01:32:04):
Yeah, that was good. That was nice. That was nice.

Speaker 2 (01:32:06):
Thank you. There isn't a count in the fantastically named
Russell Crowe a life, a book I found in Google
Books that claims there was a point at which Tigers
of gall actor seven ol Thorson was pinned to the
ground by an arrant tiger at one point which Russell
Crowe distracted by swatting it on the butt with his

(01:32:28):
rubber sword. Which, okay, man, I believe that he said,
winking heavily. And Maximus' dog meant to be a wolf, obviously,
the Roman Romulus and rimas you know, the whole thing
about Rome Wolf, et cetera. Britain's strict anti rabies laws
meant that they could not use a real wolf for

(01:32:50):
filming those nanny state Yeah, I know, because of woke
They don't want you to have a wolf for a pack. Yeah,
the woke left doesn't want you to have wolves, so
they used a teruvi teruvein Belgian shepherd dog's name was Kite.
He appears with Russell Crowe in the Battle of Germania scenes.

(01:33:12):
Now that dog may be familiar to the anglophiles among you,
because it plays Robbie Jackson's dog Wellard in the British
TV show east Enders.

Speaker 1 (01:33:21):
English Friends there, John and company. Yes, yes, he doesn't
strike me as an EastEnders fan though.

Speaker 2 (01:33:28):
Yeah, exactly. So. Oh, here's a depressing historical sidebar. Annimal
blood sports were so popular in Rome that records suggest
one emperor killed up to five thousand animals in one
three day stretch of games. Elephants, rhinos. So you'll notice
in the sequel there's a scene with a rhino. Ridley

(01:33:49):
wanted to put a rhino into this film. They could
not wrangle it. So, of course, like what's his name,
Streisan director John Peters, So of course, like John p
who was agitating for a giant spider scene in the
Kevin Smith Superman, didn't get it. That film didn't get made,
and so then in Wild Wild West, which he also produced,

(01:34:10):
got an enormous CGI monstrosity giant spider. Ridley Scott wanted
a rhino ingladiator and twenty four years later got his
damn CGI rhinos scene. So yeah, they would use rhinos, tigers, cheetahs,
all leopards, just anything they could get their hands on,
and throwing an arena against humans bears. Sorry, what are

(01:34:31):
you laughing at?

Speaker 1 (01:34:32):
I just love how you phrased animal blood sports like
animal blood sports?

Speaker 2 (01:34:36):
What are they and what can they do for you?
And now a letter?

Speaker 1 (01:34:40):
Yeah, here's a letter.

Speaker 2 (01:34:44):
Here's a letter. Commodus. So he's the emperor portrayed by
Joaquin Phoenix was in reality quite an ace with a spear.
According to some records, he once gave himself one hundred
spears to kill one hundred lions and did so.

Speaker 1 (01:35:00):
A spear a lion. I appreciate that he I guess
you wouldn't remove your spirit from a dead lion.

Speaker 2 (01:35:04):
That's just he was throwing them, I believe.

Speaker 1 (01:35:07):
Oh oh oh okay.

Speaker 2 (01:35:08):
Yeah yeah yeah. This wasn't out of concern for economy
or the animals.

Speaker 1 (01:35:13):
What was the quote from was a shade O'Connor described
some man as a swordsman.

Speaker 2 (01:35:18):
Oh, that was you're referring to. You were referring to
Sinead O'Connor describing Peter Gabriel as a bit of a swordsman.

Speaker 1 (01:35:27):
Excuse me wrong, member of Genesis.

Speaker 2 (01:35:29):
Yes, yes, yes, yeah, because because Kate Bush turned him
down when they did their duet. Ah right, I'm so
glad she was never sullied by him. As you meditate
on that, We'll be right back with more too much
information after these messages.

Speaker 1 (01:35:56):
The gladiator Tigris is played by a Danish strong man
named spann Ole Thornson. I feel like I could have
given more to that, Penincia.

Speaker 2 (01:36:04):
I'm pretty sure it's svan Olthorson, not ole, as a
Spanish interjection used in bull fighting, him being Danish, right, right,
right right.

Speaker 1 (01:36:16):
He was an old bunny of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Going Back
to the Mister Universe days, and Old Arnie brought him
along with him into the film world for films.

Speaker 2 (01:36:23):
Like Conan, the Barbarian and The Running Man.

Speaker 1 (01:36:26):
He ultimately wound up in fifteen of Arnold's films. He's
the boter hat wearing security guard La Four's in Molrats
also Kevin Smith.

Speaker 2 (01:36:36):
Yeah, well and that's our second Kevin Smith Reverence. John
Peters story is from Kevin Smith Prevence. How about that.

Speaker 1 (01:36:42):
Yeah, for him, the role of Tiggris was a hot
one pension Tigris.

Speaker 2 (01:36:47):
Jesus Christ, he's got tigers.

Speaker 1 (01:36:49):
You're right, I'm sorry, the role of Tigris again, I'm sorry, yes,
but tiger Tigris. I said Tigris. You said Tigris then now,
and now I said Tigris.

Speaker 2 (01:37:03):
There's a really funny pressed junket clip of when they
were doing I think it was Nightcrawler Jake Gillenhall, and
they're doing one of those junket things with the whole
principal cast, and the director says something like, well there's
a real sense of melancholy in this film or something,
and a furious Jake Gillenhal interjects melancholy. It's melancholy, and

(01:37:25):
everyone sort of nervously jitter laughs, and then he just
very cataly goes and it's not the first time today,
So sorry, Yeah, it's it's Tigris, buddy.

Speaker 1 (01:37:39):
The role of Tigris was a hot one production, originally
thought of stunt casting Arnold himself to play the Gladiator
while ex incredible Hulk. Lou Farigno, who I always thought
was kind of a punchline, though I guess he's huge,
claimed that he was originally cast on the role before
Schwarzenegger threw his weight around.

Speaker 2 (01:37:57):
Pun intended you.

Speaker 1 (01:37:58):
Right to get Florence and cast for Igno's quota is
saying Schwarzenegger was jealous and he would rather have his
friend because I was more of a threat. I was
in the film. I had auditioned twice and I had
the part. The casting agent told me that it had
to do with Schwarzenegger. Apparently he was kind of jealous,
so they switched rolls and Spenn felt bad about it.
He's a good friend of mine. Schwarzenegger for Rigno have

(01:38:20):
this weird dynamic because they're both in pumping iron together
or the former can be seen mocking Loo's body.

Speaker 2 (01:38:27):
It's so funny too, because, like you know, if you
see Schwarzenegger, he's actually short for weightlifter, and there's a
pick of him. I mean, he's not short for a human,
but like Forigno towers over him. There's that shot on
Conan two where it's Wilt Chamberlain and under the giant
like lifting up Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he looks like a toddler.

Speaker 1 (01:38:46):
It looks like the Twins poster, but he is.

Speaker 2 (01:38:50):
Two. Macho macha man. I didn't know where else to
put this, but here's a surprise cinematographer moment, yay. John
Matthey detailed his work on the film for the American
Society of Cinematographers, explaining that he and Scott would as
the storyboard artist. Earlier said employed up to seven cameras

(01:39:10):
at a time for various scenes, from handheld cameras to
the so called giraffe cranes, but his real trick for
the film was shooting the battle scenes at various frame
rates and with a forty five degree shutter. This is
a method that had been recently seen in Saving Private Ryan,
which helps make fast moving action feel more real and
better captures minute movements without getting too nerdy about how

(01:39:36):
lens's work. When you're shooting moving images, the anger the
angle of the shutter forms a proportion to the time
that each frame of film, the length of time that
each frame film is exposed. A one hundred and eighty
shutter angle is considered normal for your twenty four frames
per second film shooting, So a tighter shutter angle will

(01:39:58):
constrict motion blur. And when you see this in Saving
Private Ryan, and you see this in Gladiator, that means
when the look in quality changes, that's the shutter angle.
But then what it means is that stuff like swords
rather than blurring or sand in Saving Private Ryan, rather
than blurring, you can see a lot more of the
kind of individual frames of those action scenes. And this

(01:40:22):
is also different from what would then be seen in
three hundred and what has become a signature move of
that jerk Off Zack Snyder called ramping, which is an
effect that happens in the battle scenes where the overall
rate of action suddenly slowed down to like a slow
motion thing, and then very immediately sped up within the

(01:40:45):
same shot. That's called ramping. That's different than shutter angle.

Speaker 1 (01:40:50):
It's like when you're tubing and the boat turns really
quick and the rope hasn't had a chance to catch up,
so you're just sitting there very still and you know
it's about to like whip you, and then it does.

Speaker 2 (01:41:01):
Some people listening may get that that was such a
far field reference from you. I could not bear to interrupt.
I've been tubing. I just wouldn't connect that to movie magic.
Oh you peasant, I connected the pain. Uh sorry. Since
we're talking about camera stuff, it is also worth pointing
out that one of the definitive images of the film,

(01:41:23):
Maximus's hand passing over the grass in his fields as
he dies, was a last second addition to the film,
and that is not even Russell Crowe's hand as really.
Scott explained it to Deadline in twenty twenty three. It
was the last shot of principal photography. Russell didn't come
to Italy. That was his double. The guy was standing

(01:41:43):
there in this field smoking. I say, get out of
the field. Are you joking? It was midsummer dry, He says,
oh sorry, man. He walked off the field and did
that thing with the hand. I said, stop right there,
get the steady camp. We followed the hand. It became
the list for immortality or Heaven if you like. Right there.
It was discovered the last day. Spontaneously, Russell said, you'll

(01:42:07):
never use that. I said I will when he saw
the scene. When he saw on the scene, he groaned,
I said, too late. It's shot I got it, mate.
It was put out that cigarette and get the steady
cam and don't walk on the wheat. What a character
he is.

Speaker 1 (01:42:25):
Hans Zimmer, who sucks before before you, before you go?

Speaker 2 (01:42:30):
Do you see?

Speaker 1 (01:42:31):
There was some junket I must have been for Gladiator too.

Speaker 2 (01:42:34):
Who really?

Speaker 1 (01:42:34):
Scott was being interviewed and the reporter had previously talked,
like in the months earlier to some famous filmmaker. I
forget who it was, and he had the clip up
on an iPad that he showed Ridley and was like,
look look at this this director saying like how much
you mean to him? And really was like I think
I'm gonna cry. And the interview was like really He's

(01:42:55):
like no, and they was just like what.

Speaker 2 (01:43:03):
A dick. Never forget he was an ad man, you know,
he is literally don draper, Hans Zimmer, controversial guy. I
didn't know that. Yeah, some of the charge. I mean,
he doesn't read music, which is sort of the thing
that immediately puts a lot of people off of him.
He's incredibly gifted with a piano midi scoring piano role

(01:43:26):
what they call it in midi when you can just
you basically are just orchestrating an entire thing through MIDI
just to the keyboard. So he's supposed to be very
like a virtue also with that, but doesn't read music properly.
One of the big charges from him is that he's
one of those guys who, you know, this happens all
the time. Composers come in and they just go, here's
the theme, like, here's the melodic structure for this moment.

(01:43:49):
I want to make it sound like ex composer, and
then like five or six interns or staff orchestrators they're
called fill that in. And that is apparently like especially gratuitous.
In Zimmer's studio. It will just come in and be like,
you know, here's this melodic frame, and then like all
of his people who are either not credited or very underpaid,

(01:44:11):
actually make it sound like what you're hearing and do
what a lot of people would consume is the actual
work of composition, harmonies, rhythmic motif elaborations, etc. But that's
not even what we're talking about here. We're just talking
about straight up theft. Zimmer's score for Gladiator contains what,
depending on where you fall in this conception, this understanding

(01:44:34):
of art is either homage references jumping points, or just
straight up theft to Gustav Holst's suite the Planets, in
particular Mars, the Burner of War. Now nerds will also
remember that this dramatically informs John Williams's score for Star Wars,
particularly the Imperial March is the one that's widely cited

(01:44:57):
as using Mars as jumping off point. Zimmer didn't stop there.
He also decided to yank stuff from Wagner, particularly the
ring cycle. Now this this is standard practice, you know,
this happens all the time. But Zimmer's quotation of Holst
was glaring enough to merit a lawsuit from the Holst Foundation,
who sued Zimmer over it in two thousand and six. Now,

(01:45:20):
in the liner notes, Hans himself copped to using quote
the same language, the same vocabulary, if not the same syntax,
which is an incredibly weasily thing to say. Let's parse
that for a second. The same language, the same vocabulary,
but not the syntax, meaning all of the words and

(01:45:42):
all of the specific.

Speaker 1 (01:45:43):
Words put in a different rhythm.

Speaker 2 (01:45:46):
I don't know. You can go on YouTube and find
this in ten seconds and make the judgment for yourself.
This was, of course settled out of court, presumably by Zimmer,
who just wanted to avoid the bad press, I guess,
and he has literally also copped to this in interviews.
I found one where he said, and I love this.
I managed to assume the style of Wagner so easily
that I was able to write that piece and Gladiator

(01:46:08):
in an hour, although also in that interview he says
the whole theft evolved as an accident. I also read
one other thing that says an early part of Zimmer's
queue for the battle lifts a melodic passage from Tchaikowsky's
Symphony Number six. So take all this theft homage however
you will, but the Gladiator score drama doesn't stop there.

(01:46:30):
A few years later, fans noticed a striking similarity between
one of Gladiator's themes and the main theme of the
Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Caribbean. Whatever the emphosisis is
there Paramel. The film's music was originally supposed to have
been done by Alan Silvestri, who left that production over
differences with producer Jerry Brockheimer. Zimmer took over the job

(01:46:53):
with another composer named Klaus Badelt, who was employed by
Zimmer's film scoring company, and Zimmer supposed that they wrote
much of the themes for this for Pirates in a
single night. He repurposed, allegedly, if you will, rather than
self plagiarized or just recycled themes from not only Gladiator,

(01:47:14):
but also a score he wrote for a movie called
Drop Zone. And he may have also taken stuff that
he composed for The Lion King to Simba's Pride. So
punch all this in because it's difficult to describe, but
people on YouTube have done the legwork of comparing the
Gladiator theme to the Pirates theme and yes, also to

(01:48:27):
the line kicked two simplest Pride theme. Yes, so yeah,

(01:49:02):
I don't know. I don't I don't like Han Zimmer
very much. The vocals, though, are interesting. Apparently Pavaratti was
offered a song on the Gladiator soundtrack and he turned
it down. He said later in an interview with Billboard
that it was a regret of his but he performs
the song titled unsurprisingly ill Gladiatore in concert. Lisa Girard

(01:49:23):
is the woman from much of the score. Throughout the
eighties and nineties, she had been one half of the
Gothic world music, experimental Melbourne ensemble. Dead Can Dance music
was described once by Ian McFarlane as constructed soundscapes of
mesmerizing grandeur and solemn beauty, African polyrhythms, Gaelic folk, Gregorian chant,

(01:49:43):
Middle Eastern music, mantras and art rock plug for Dead
Can Dance. The group disbanded in nineteen ninety eight, but
Gerard continued as a prolific solo artist. She comes into
the film world with nineteen ninety nine's The Insider, which
is the film that Russell Crowe got super fat for
and then had to lose a bunch of weight for
for Gladiator, and then she worked with on the Zimmer

(01:50:04):
on Gladiator. Interesting only Zimmer was nominated for Best Score
at the Oscars, but the Golden Globes at least recognized
Gerard's contributions to the film. She has a contralto register,
but she can also access the higher ranges of a
mezzo soprano, which is why you hear music journalists cliches
like otherworldly being fixed to descriptions of her voice. Many

(01:50:28):
of her songs this is interesting, especially in Gladiator, are
sung in what's called idioglossia, which is a technical term
for self created idiosyncratic language. You might hear it reference
in terms of singer ros, where the lead singer Jonzi
sings in a made up language that he has termed Hopelandic,
but the more technical linguistic term for that is idio

(01:50:51):
glossia like.

Speaker 1 (01:50:52):
David Bowie and Lowe or sawa.

Speaker 2 (01:50:55):
Oh he's made up Italian gibberish. Yeah, forever immortalized it.
That parody video, I just sing a bunch of a
weird tangibbirch. Wow, that was a that was a good bullie.
I love the one that the quote from that video
I love is it's really doing depressing piece of music, Brian.

(01:51:17):
If I don't put it on one of my arms,
why don't we just save it for one of your
weird ones.

Speaker 1 (01:51:20):
Tony Visconti doing a lot more than people think.

Speaker 2 (01:51:24):
Can we add some reverb on there? Sure thing? Co
producer Tony Visconti adding reverb. Probably doing a lot more
than most people would actually think on this record. Uh
punch that in, man, Yeah, it's so good instead of
my impression, and folks can compare so well.

Speaker 3 (01:51:43):
Have you been up to while I've been away? Brian, Well,
I've been working on a piece of music. Actually, David,
if you don't like it, I'll use it on one
of my weird albums. Do you want to have a listen?

Speaker 2 (01:51:52):
Yes, I'd love to hear it.

Speaker 3 (01:51:53):
I could use some cheering up. Could you roll the
tape for us, please, Tony Visconti, Yeah, sure, I mean
I am co producing this record, so it's not a
big problem for me doing a lot of co production.
Probably more than people think.

Speaker 2 (01:52:04):
Here we go, so there you go. Lisa Gerard has
stated of this approach, I sing in the language of
the heart, to which I say it is an invented

(01:52:27):
language I've had for a very long time. I believe
I started singing in it when I was about twelve.
I believed that I was speaking to God when I
sang in that language. Sure thing, Lisa Jordan stifling a yawn, No,
I wasn't a yawn it.

Speaker 1 (01:52:40):
I'm just thinking of like her and torri Amos and
died oh uh and who else? And Kate Bush maybe
and maybe even Stevie Nicks. I'm just thinking of this
coven of like slightly Celtic witchy ladies. Yeah, there's something
that's a big one. I'm forgetting only one.

Speaker 2 (01:52:59):
Of them had the brass balls and dame an entire
song after a reverb patch would be our Deer or
an engineer, which would be our dear Enya.

Speaker 1 (01:53:09):
And yeah, that was the one I was thinking of that.

Speaker 2 (01:53:10):
I yeah, Orinoco Flow fun fun fact for people is
both the name of the river and let me just
double check that. Yes, the title of Orinoco Flow is
an illusion to both the river and the studio where
it was recorded. Ah, And she says that in the
song with Rob Dickens at the Wheel also co producer,
this is so funny to me. I just think it's
so funny. Then, and everyone whateveryone thinks about or the Flow,

(01:53:33):
They just go sllo way say hello way way right.
But in those lyrics, she literally says, with Rob Dickens,
executive producer of the album at the Wheel and then
also co producer Ross Column, we can sigh say goodbye
Ross and his dependencies, which is a pun on the

(01:53:53):
Ross dependency region of Antarctica, and yeah, man that whips.

Speaker 1 (01:53:59):
Should we do a I was joking about this with
front of the pod Dora. Should we do a Pure
Moods episode?

Speaker 2 (01:54:06):
Yes, Jordan, we should.

Speaker 1 (01:54:08):
I can't tell if everything sarcastic, but I know I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:54:10):
Being dead series that could be a joint one. And
let's do pure moods. That would be awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:54:18):
Because there's so many great songs on there with insane stories.
I mean, even Mike Oldfield and you what else is
some pure moods?

Speaker 2 (01:54:26):
X Files theme a trance a trance remix.

Speaker 1 (01:54:30):
Of the X Files theme of memory serves right, right,
right right, Vangelis share it's a fire. Of course, there's
Anyo Marconi song which I don't remember which one, uh
Chiemihi's not familiar with. I would have thought they would
have gone with, Oh and the mission and theme from
the mission too.

Speaker 2 (01:54:48):
I was gonna say Gabriels Gabriel's Obo.

Speaker 1 (01:54:51):
Kenny g Songbird of course, another Green World Brian Eno
Twin Peaks theme of course.

Speaker 2 (01:54:57):
Yep, great, Yeah, that would rule. Yeah, No, that's really fun.

Speaker 1 (01:55:04):
And now we get to kind of my favorite section
of this episode, historical fact checking, granular, pedantic No. So yes,
as you may have gleaned from what everyone said so
far about this film, total historical accuracy was very much
not a concern for this production. Aside from the spinning crossbow,

(01:55:27):
which we know for a fact didn't exist. There are
a number of other inaccuracies that have been raised since
the film first hit screens, which allegedly costs historians working
as consultants on the film to either quit or ask
their names be removed from the credits. Fact number one.
Despite looking cool as hell, catapults and the arrow firing
scorpions depicted in the opening scene probably wouldn't have been

(01:55:50):
deployed for ground combat in a forested area. Those were
largely siege tools and considered unwieldly for fighting in open battles,
particularly one surrounded by trees. Fact number two. In real life,
Marcus Aurelius did not ban gladiator fights as his filmic
version did.

Speaker 2 (01:56:08):
He did stop attempted to do right.

Speaker 1 (01:56:11):
However, he did stop funding them from the Imperial Coffers
as a budgetary move, and some historical records also claim
that he suggested a switch to wooden swords so that
skilled gladiators wouldn't die in the arena, which was itself
a way to ensure that he'd have reserves of gladiators
to draft in battle. So okay, anything nice that he

(01:56:31):
did for these people was done purely to benefit the state.

Speaker 2 (01:56:34):
Love it.

Speaker 1 (01:56:35):
Marcus Aurelius was not murdered by his son Commitists in
real life. He died of probably disease related natural causes
in one eighteen CE after three years of essentially acting
as co emperor with Commdasts.

Speaker 2 (01:56:49):
Commonists only ruled.

Speaker 1 (01:56:50):
Alone for about twelve more years until his death in
one hundred and ninety two CE. Common era fact number three,
The film's hero never existed. This one's had of a
gimme Maximus is likely a combination of several historical figures,
including Tarutinus Patronus, the commander of Roman forces at the
Great Battle against the Germanic tribes in.

Speaker 2 (01:57:10):
One seventy nine A. D.

Speaker 1 (01:57:13):
Narcissius, the wrestler who actually killed Commodius in real life.

Speaker 2 (01:57:17):
Which was originally the name in the script. That was
Maximus's character in the script got to give it to
David Franzoni for that.

Speaker 1 (01:57:23):
Did he change it because everyone thinks of narcissists when
they hear that, or.

Speaker 2 (01:57:28):
Just I think Ridley Scott bullied him. Any change of
this could probably come down to like an irascible Englishman
and an old fish Australian man leaned over him and said,
I think we should do this.

Speaker 1 (01:57:42):
And also another real life person who likely factored into
the character of Maximus is Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus. That sounds
like a made up name. That sounds like something from
money Pipon's Life of Barn. He came from a humble
background in Syria and became a favorite general of Marcus
Aurelius in real life, marrying.

Speaker 2 (01:58:00):
His daughter Lucia.

Speaker 1 (01:58:02):
I'll tell us more facts.

Speaker 2 (01:58:03):
I love the facts. Well. Keen, Phoenix's commodist was so
much worse in real life. He was only eighteen at
the time of the death his father and was very
serious about his gladiatorial training. He allegedly boasted six hundred
and twenty victories according to his own writings, and this
is actually probably accurate because nobody would actually try and

(01:58:26):
kill the emperor, so like he was the Harlem globetrotters
of Gladiator or by deforce, he's spinning the sword on
his finger, just stab him. He's got a lumper, he's
got a ladder, so this would he would spare their
lives though, But while he was practicing, though, he did
like to kill his sparring partners. He was just kind

(01:58:49):
of a male slot of the era. A lot of
writings make reference to his good looks and height, but
he didn't have a thing for his sister. Just hundreds
of conki male, one of which may have been a sister.
Who's to say they slip in in the middle of
one of the lurgies done, you know, there'd be no
way of knowing, there would no be yeah, you know,

(01:59:11):
writings about the real Commudists paint him is just kind
of stupid with a sadistic streak, a bit cowardly and
overly impressionable. Mostly just a himbo who was really into
slaughtering exotic animals in Rome's arenas, but not just limited
to that. He publicly slaughtered amputees who were veterans of
Roman wars, a fun little quirk, and though he wasn't

(01:59:34):
actually killed by a gladiator in the ring, he did
meet a suitably brutal end. First, he was poisoned by
his mistress, and although that didn't take while recovering from
this process, his enemies tasked Commatist's wrestling partner, the aforementioned Narcissus,
with strangling the emperor in the bath. The entire thumb system,
and this is much funnier, is actually inverted. In ancient Rome,

(01:59:57):
thumbs up meant raise your sword and strike the killing blow,
while thumbs down meant lower and sheath your sword. But
because of the ingrained modern associations with the gestures, they
have been inverted in pretty much all gladiatorial depictions. Is
that interesting, Jordan?

Speaker 1 (02:00:13):
That's I like that a lot.

Speaker 2 (02:00:15):
I didn't know that. Now we give somebody the thumbs up,
you can really mean I want someone to raise a
sword and kill you. The film's nod to Christianity as
religion are completely incorrect. The movie opens in one ADC,
but Christianity didn't make any headway over the Roman Empire
until about two hundred years later. Most characters in the

(02:00:35):
film referred to the arena as the Colosseum, the twenty
first century name of the massive structure. However, in the
ancient world it is known much less casually as the
Flavian Amphitheater, after one of the emperors who aided in
its construction. Not until the Middle Ages did people refer
to it as the Colosseum. The notion of Maximus being
known as a Spaniard is preposterous. The Romans had occupied

(02:00:57):
the Iberian Peninsula and the region was known as Hispania,
but it was just considered part of Rome. The earliest
use of the term Spaniard didn't even pop up until
the fifteenth century. The entire naming conventions used in the
movie are inaccurate. Romans had three names, the first name,
the family name, and then an added name denoting position
e g. Gayis Julius Caesar, who would went by Caesar.

(02:01:19):
High ranking Romans went by their second or third name,
since they weren't as common, so as in the film,
someone named Maximus Decimus Meritis would have been addressed as
either Decimus or Meredis. While there are plenty of minute
anachronisms as far as the wardrobe, arms, and armor, one
of the worst is probably the every German in the
opening scene are depicted as wearing Stone Age era clothing
like animal skins and such, which ended about two thousand

(02:01:43):
years before the events depicted in the film. Lastly, the
entire note of the film ending on the restoration of
the republic and the rule of the people in Rome
as Maximus peacefully dies, that sure didn't happen. Firstly, horrible
things happened to commentist's sister, Lucilla Chilla. For being Italian,
she was married off twice to her father's political allies,

(02:02:05):
and then after her brother succeeded their father as emperor,
she became concerned about his behavior and concluded that he
must be overthrown. She orchestrated an attempt to rid rom
of her brother, but this plot failed and she was
banished to the Isle of Capri, where she was later executed. Then,
when the next assassination attempt on communist did succeed, rule

(02:02:25):
hardly returned to the people. There was a predictable rush
to fill the power vacuum, and the year one ninety
three CE following his death was dubbed the year of
five Emperors. The last of those guys was Septimius Severus,
and the forty two year dynasty of his messy, messy,
turbulent family then precipitated a period in Roman history known

(02:02:46):
as the Crisis of the third century. So that sucks
for him and his family. Most hilariously, the filmmakers omitted
one actual piece of document historical fact that they simply
found too silly for the film. Gladiators were like today's athletes,
popular figure for product endorsements, and one of the script

(02:03:10):
drafts contained a real life detail that Maximus, who is
then named Narcissus, would have seen himself portrayed in an
ad for all of Oil, with the copy Narcissus would
kill for a taste of Golden Pompeii olive oil. Wait,
is that like actually the extent dead ass? Bro? Wow?

(02:03:33):
Take out the fact that I said that. I don't
know why I responded in that way. Was I going
to find something a little bit more, a little bit
more in detail about this live.

Speaker 1 (02:03:42):
You know, I never really thought of them as being public.

Speaker 2 (02:03:45):
Well you see them, I mean, you see in the
film the action figures, which were a real thing. I mean,
I guess we're splitting hairs over what product placement or
endorsements actually means, because there would have been mosaics and
literal advertisements in the day portraying specific gladiators, But if
there were products associated, they were not They did not

(02:04:08):
receive funds from them. So depending on what you're but yes,
they would they were used in product advertisements. Anyway.

Speaker 1 (02:04:20):
As filming dragged to a close, there was a bit
of a pal around the project. In Hollywood, the death
of Oliver Reed kicked the rumor mill around production into overdrive,
that it was over budget, that it was at the bacle,
that it was dead on arrival. Funnily enough, early in
pre production, Spielberg suggested that the film's producers use a
fake name will shooting, as he'd offered them with his movies.

(02:04:42):
He pitched them the name the hot Rod Project, as
he was worried that other studios would catch wind and
rush their own rejiggered Sword and Sandal epics out to
beat the new studio on the block to the punch.
Because this was very early in DreamWorks life is probably
in the first like four years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The
rumor mill did turn out to be wrong, but in fun,

(02:05:03):
hilarious ways. Screenwriter David Franzoni told Yahoo, a lot of
people thought we were making Cone in three. They had
no idea what the hell we were doing. In fact,
somebody suggested that perhaps we had Schwarzenegger as the big
gladiator with the tigers. The other level was that we
were out of our minds and shooting a terrible, horrible
Sword and Sandals movie that nobody would go see. Franzoni

(02:05:25):
also alleges that Russell quote, until he saw the final cut,
thought it was the end of his career. That's my impression.
I guarantee you he was really worried. Our beloved Australia
need not have worried.

Speaker 2 (02:05:37):
Please don't come to my house, Russell Crowe and explain
your passions.

Speaker 1 (02:05:42):
Gladiator was released in the United States and Canada on
May fifth, two thousand. The film spent a toll of
ten weeks at the top of the box office and
was in theaters for over a year, finishing as theatrical
run on May tenth, two thousand and one, for a
total gross of one hundred and eighty seven point seven
million dollars. Released to the rest of the world, Gladiator

(02:06:02):
grossed two hundred and seventy two point nine million for
total worldwide gross a four hundred and sixty point six
million against the budget of one hundred and three million,
making it the second highest grossing film worldwide in two thousand,
behind Mission Impossible Too. I guess big, no, lot first
one was the first one?

Speaker 2 (02:06:23):
Was DiPalma? Right? Who did the second one? Oh, that's
a good question. I don't know. You forget how big
that movie was that's the one where he's like hanging
on the cliff, John woomb that's why woh hanging on
the cliff and Metallica's like, ooh yeah, that's the fuel song.
Or no it's not no, it's I Disappear.

Speaker 1 (02:06:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was five years before the
next one. It was John Moodon Lately not much eo
ooh yo, this is bad looking.

Speaker 2 (02:06:50):
Yeah, he remade A he remade A well, he got
really obsessed with Oh no, that was Angley that got
really obsessed with sixty frames per second and made that
bad action movie with Will Smith and cgi younger Will
Smith against himself, John Wu I think just recently remade
The Killer for Netflix, but a woke version in which
Chaiu Fat's role has been usurped by a black woman,

(02:07:14):
which I did watch, and it's a perfectly crimulent film.
It's just it's not the Killer. Nothing will ever be
The Killer again. Yeah, I don't know, man, he's kind
of stumbled in Hollywood. I felt bad for him. He
had a great ron he did Hard Target with JCVD,
Face Off Am I two and then.

Speaker 1 (02:07:34):
A lot of the critics, however, really had it in
for the script. Ian Nathan of Empire magazine called the
dialogue pompous, overwritten, and prone to plain silliness. Well, Roger
Ebert said, the script quote employs depression as a substitute
for personality.

Speaker 2 (02:07:50):
That's my thing, Roger, come on, Bud and believes that
if characters are bitter and morose enough, we won't notice
how dull they are.

Speaker 1 (02:07:59):
You're not dull, but you know what, Critics be damned.
It got a decent amount of hardware at the Oscars.

Speaker 2 (02:08:06):
Yes, Gladiator entered the stacked arena of the two thousand
and one Oscars with twelve nominations, and it did face
stiff competition that year. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Almost Famous, Traffic,
and Aaron Brockovich were all popular Academy picks, and Gladiator
won five of the twelve awards. It was nominated for
Best Picture, Best Actor for Crow, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound,

(02:08:27):
and Best Costume Design. Ridley Scott lost out on Best Director,
and Franzoni went away empty handed for Best Original Screenplay
and Joaquin Phoenix lost Best Supporting Actor. Hans Zimmer lost,
which is great, and they also lost Best Cinematography, Art Direction,
and Film Editing. In case you were wondering. Stephen Soderberg
and Benzio do Toro won Best Director and Best Supporting

(02:08:49):
Actor for Traffic. Best Original Screenplay went to Cameron Crow
for Almost Famous, which is objectively correct, and Best Score
went to Tan Done for Crouching Tiger. The other Technical
award we're also given out Ridley's memory. I mean, I
mean it's such a bummer man, Like they really need
to give out a stunt oscar first of all. But like,
even though I'm in ther for this kind of it

(02:09:10):
is just so funny that like they literally give the
technical awards out like a completely different day and broadcast.
People work their entire lives in Hollywood, create all these
magnificent technical you know, contributions push the art form forward,
and they're like, yeah, you get four pm the day
before and we're not going to televise it. No open bar, yeah,

(02:09:35):
cash bar. H Ridley's memory of the night in Variety
was I was knocked over in the trample so bitter.
I love it. I mean, maybe justifiably so. I don't know.
I was knocked over in the trample to get on
stage because I'd actually given up the right to be
a producer. Because there's so many producers. I said, oh,
what the I won't bother and I was run over

(02:09:56):
when they all got up on the stage. So I
just sat down, thinking I'm not gonna do that again.
Why do people go to bat for him? Man? He
seems like such an a It's all because of Alien
and Blade Runner, right, Yeah, I mean, I solid bragging
rights man. Ridley's story does have a semi happy ending,

(02:10:16):
though years later, despite not getting the Best Director trophy,
he did wind up with a different statue Italian actress
jen Nino Faccio, who played Maximus's murdered wife. That's nice.
He just married a lady he met on a film stories.
Yeah now, yeah, you said people finding love? People finding
love on movie sets. He checked at House of Gucci. Jesus,

(02:10:42):
that film has the most preposterously offensive alive face I
have ever seen in my life. Yo. Obviously we should
get to all the sexual misconduct allegations first for Jared Leto,
but then we need to break a pain or a
thumb or something for what he does in that movie.

(02:11:03):
It is so it's, like I say it, it's like
an Italian minstrel show. I said, but enough of this, this,
this preceding two hours has been but a taste, an apport,
not apperteeve an amused boosh for the real meat of
this episode, Nick Cave's batch script for Gladiator too. It

(02:11:28):
is a well known bit of law at this point
that Australian vampire crooner and goth icon Nick Cave was
tapped to write a sequel to Gladiator, And that's basically it.
We don't know that much about this thing other than
one interview and Mark bron and like glancing bits of
commentary from Ridley Scott, but everyone is in love with
it because of how cool it is. Who tapped him

(02:11:50):
to do that? Russell Crowe supposedly Astralia. This is I know, right,
there's like six of them that have succeeded, right, so they.

Speaker 1 (02:11:58):
Have to like Peter jacksone's going to Doric.

Speaker 2 (02:12:00):
No, he's New Zealand doesn't count. It's like ac DC,
Nick Cave, Russell Crowe. I guess they let in old
girl now writing it in John No, not her, Barbie
Macarab obviously Paul Hogan, Oh yes, yeah, And they just
all get together like the QAnon Cabal and plan things

(02:12:22):
for Australia uh. Crow rang me up and asked if
I wanted to write Gladiator two. Nick Cave told Mark
Maron on I think twenty fifteen episode of What the
Mark Marron, I'm gonna.

Speaker 1 (02:12:35):
Call you, just ask you randomly if you want to
write Gladiator too. I guess Gobby three.

Speaker 2 (02:12:39):
Now, yeah, I'll take I'll take a stab at three.
I just don't know if I could top this. So
Nickavid previously only written one film script. It was for
something in the eighties about I think it was about
Australian I remember. Uh. It was quite an ask. He said, Hey, Russell,
didn't you die in Gladiator one, which Crow responded, yeah,

(02:13:02):
you sort that out. Cave did as follows quote. Maximus
goes down to purgatory and is sent down by the
gods who are dying in heaven because there's this one god,
there's this Christ character down on Earth who is gaining popularity,
and so the many gods are dying, so they send
Gladiator Maximus back to kill Christ and his followers. I

(02:13:28):
wanted to call it Christ Killer. And in the end
you find out that the main guy was his son,
so he has to kill his son and was tricked
by the gods. He then becomes this eternal warrior, and
it ends with this twenty minute war scene which follows
all the wars in history right up to Vietnam and

(02:13:49):
all this sort of stuff. And it was wild. It
was a stone cold masterpiece. I enjoyed writing it very
much because I knew on every level that it was
never going to get made. Cave turned this far out
vision into Crow, who, in Cave's words, responded, don't like it. Mate.
Cave asked what about the end, to which Crow responded, again,

(02:14:11):
don't like it, mate. And I guess this got worked
out because Scott had said in the intervening time that
he did actually work on this idea with Crow and Cave.
We tried to go with Cave's script riddle. Scott told
Ugo Russell didn't want to let it go obviously because
it worked very well. And then an all time Ridley
Scott quote. When I say worked very well, I don't

(02:14:32):
refer to success. I mean as a piece it works
very well storytelling. It works brilliantly. I think Cave enjoyed
doing it, and I think it was one of those
things he thought, well, maybe there's a sequel where you
can adjust the fantasy and bring Maximus back from the dead.
In an interview just this month, Ridley Scott gave another
quote it got rich and started to go to time warps,

(02:14:53):
which frankly I thought was bloody silly. But the one
thing I added to it was this great idea of
opening portal of time in death, and it would have
come from the dying soul of a dying soldier in
a battlefield. Isn't that cool. I kept it as a
little silver bullet, thinking I'll use that again somewhere. I

(02:15:14):
hated it, it was silly, we killed it, but my
addition to it was great and I'm keeping it. Love him.
Years prior to all that, Nick Cave was sanguine about
the Project Dissolution. He told Variety, I'm very comfortable my
day job as a musician. The last thing I ever
wanted to get involved with was Hollywood. The way it
works is that people get an idea, you could possibly

(02:15:36):
do something, but there's a one and one hundred chance
that it could get made. It's a waste of time
and I have a lot to do, like being Nick Cave. Yeah, man,
all right, that takes us to the end of Gladiator.
I had this whole idea in here for a bit
of like, oh, here's my day as a twenty one
year old gladiator in film. And then this is a

(02:15:56):
smash cut of a skull getting caved in with a
mace TikTok style. But you'll have to imagine that great film.
Love it, Go watch it with your boys and hit
each other with sticks, as the spirit of the film intended.

Speaker 1 (02:16:12):
And don't watch the second one.

Speaker 2 (02:16:13):
Yeah, and Russell Crowe don't come to my house and
explain your passions, Ridley, I think I could take So
if you're an elderly British man who's pissed off that
I've painted you as a bit of a prick, visit me.
Let's settle this all over a Reek style. This has
been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel, thanks for listening,

(02:16:35):
and I'm Jordan run Talk.

Speaker 1 (02:16:37):
We'll catch you next time.

Speaker 2 (02:16:44):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's
executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.

Speaker 1 (02:16:50):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (02:16:53):
The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run
Talk and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (02:16:57):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

Speaker 2 (02:17:01):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review.

Speaker 1 (02:17:04):
For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Gladiator: Everything You Didn't Know