The Planet of the Apes (1968): Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone,
and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings
you the secret history is a little alone, fascinating facts
and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and apes.
We are your evolved chumps of esoteric charm. I'm Alex

(00:24):
Heigelber and I'm Jordan Roun talking. I'm not going to
be able to make it through this episode, and Jordan,
today we are celebrating the end of April. Oh my god,
upon that doesn't make any sense until you see it
spelled out. We share listeners never will Anyway. We're doing
the original Planet of the Apes from nineteen sixty eight
because there's a new entry in the actually really good

(00:44):
rebooted chronology that's coming out this summer. It's really good.
Everyone should check it out. You can probably skip the
first one actually because Franko's in it and it's not
as good. But I think it's three now, two or
three now that have come after that are super good. Anyway,
you know, I don't know. This episode might get delayed,
it might drop next week, in which case, welcome to May. Anyway,

(01:11):
Planet of the Apes Whips. It's a hilarious movie, just
one of the weirdest and best things to stumble across
on cable as a kid. I don't think I ever
actually sat down and watched this movie in its entire
really until like college, and it was hilarious. But we're
watching it this week. I was like, no, this is
a good movie. Like it's really well shot and the

(01:34):
makeup is still pretty good, which must have really, I mean,
I can't stress how much it must have blown people's
minds in the sixties. If it like we're looking at
it today and we're like, that's not bad. I mean
it is, but it's like it's uncanny and accurate enough
to achieve the really intended effects anyway, Yeah, I mean
I just I my dad or the Simpsons had pretty

(01:55):
much already explained everything about this movie to me, from
take your stinking pot off me, you damn dirty ape
or you maniacs, you blew it up. But it is
a foundational and really interesting piece of sci fi, and
an equal masterclass in the art of spinning crap off.
Even though I still don't understand how it's possible to
be beneath the planet of the Apes. Is that a

(02:17):
subterranean thing. Yeah, I assumed it was subter apian anyway,
Jordan talking about your relationship with Planet of the Apes, Uh,
similar to yours.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
But my mom was really into all the Twilight Zone
type stuff and all the kind of creepy, weird sci
fi things, and so she kind of, if I recall correctly,
I think she definitely spoiled the ending of this for
me before I actually saw it. But I actually sat
down to watch it as a little kid, and my
mind was absolutely blown. I thought it was one of

(02:49):
the most just deep, incredible cereble works of fiction I'd
ever seen. And then over the next couple of years,
the humor started to reveal itself to me, probably having
watched the Tim Burton movie and being like, oh wait
that that wasn't that good? And then The Simpsons of
course with Doctor sayis the musical.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Peak era Simpsons writers loved this movie, Yes, because not
just there's obviously like the musical in the one episode,
but like they just keep throwing it in. Why do
I remember the phrase apes of popping? Yeah, like that
rings a bell for some reason. Apes of Wrath too,
I think is a Simpsons puns. I'm just like.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
And then I feel like the phrase get your hands
off me, damn dirty apes was like one of the
things that kids in my playground used to say a
lot at recess, and so it sort of took on
this hokey kitchy which is fair, But revisiting it for
this episode, I feel like I did when I was
a kid again, like wait, you're right, this is amazing.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, I mean it is kind of the bell curve
you come around when when you're like in the sixth
or if you're a child, you were like, holy shit,
this is the best movie I've ever seen, and then
you come around to it being hilarious and overblown in
all the ways that it is, and then you come
back around and be like, this is actually really well shot,
and like, you know, Charlton Heston's doing something in it,

(04:18):
as is Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter and doctors Ais.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
But the problem is just the word apes. As we
talked about, it's a hilarious word. Oh my god, I
was gonna say, there's gonna be a lot of me
just laughing at nothing in this episode, because well, the
monkeys monkey and Monkey Planet is monkeys plural, isn't funny?
Monkey singular is funny to me, Apes, Apes is hilarious.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
I mean, yeah, it's gonna be just me giggling an
idiot in this episode. So now, I mean, you know
what's funny, and I'm just thinking now Simeon isn't really
as funny to me. No, truly a mystery. She got
a linguist on that you woke up this morning with
h much like Paul McCartney I woke up with yesterday
in his head. Yeah, from a dream. You woke up
with a song today. It's not true.

Speaker 3 (05:04):
I did, I did.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
I woke up this morning, was stuck in the middle
with you in my head, and I've been unable to
stop singing. Jim's left me. Gorilla is too my right here,
I am stucky in the middle with Apes. I don't
know what the actually lyrics are. And your apes they
all come crawling. Throw you in a net and say chimpanzee, chimpanzee,

(05:36):
and there you go. Folks. Well, from the original author's
time in one of World War two's less famous atrocities,
to the groundbreaking makeup that made all of them go
so ape, to the role that Sammy Davis Junior played
in queueing the film's producers into a whole new take

(05:57):
on their film. Here's everything you didn't know about nineteen
sixty eight's Planet of the Apes. It turns out that
I was wrong about the French not contributing anything to
society beyond w C and possibly as an ede case,
the fifth element the cinematic empire, that is apes, and

(06:19):
we will probably be referring to it as just apes
because it's funnier, was launched by a nineteen sixty three
novel called La planet de SiGe or, as it was
translated to the UK, Monkey Planet. This franchise would have
bombed planet. Yes, it's such a case study in like

(06:41):
a correct linguistic foibles, you know, because like, yeah, Monkey Planet, hilarious,
Planet of the Apes, gratas.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
That book.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
Monkey Planet was written by Pierre Boule, who also wrote
The Bridge over the River Quhi. That's incredible. Which if
you paid me one million dollars to guess that the
man responsible for Bridge over the River Kuai was also
responsible for Monkey Planet, never could have gotten him. Yeah,
that just blew my mind. Man Bridge of the River

(07:11):
Kui for like zoomers, or we don't have any zoomers
who listen to the show is like, you know, one
of the more famous World War two movies. That's where
you get the dent dent d d d d dun
Denton and also like a gripping performance by Sir Alec
Guinness a pre obi Wan m HM. Anyway, Bull was
a He was trained as an engineer and he worked

(07:33):
for the Luxembourg based petrochemical concern sock Finn in what
was then known as British Malay collection of states on
the Malayan Pleninsula and Singapore. He was like scraping rubber
out of trees, and Sockfinn I looked up has their
roots in the Belgian Congo, which means they are monsters

(07:55):
and their empire is built on blood.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
If there's a country that has another country's name as
the prefix, it's probably built French Guiana.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, and Belgian and Belgian especially King Leopold's Ghost was
a book that I read about that of just like
the extensive atrocities they committed.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
In the Name of Rubber.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
One of the less successful U two songs. Come on,
give us guess a little bit of it. Come on,
I can't sing that high In the name of Rubber.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, what about it's a
beautiful aide. Okay. When WWII A big one broke out,
boull enlisted with the French army in Indo, China, and
after the German troops occupied France and the French surrendered,

(08:48):
he joined the Free French Mission in Singapore. He wrote
that he was trained at a place called the Convent,
where as he wrote, serious gentlemen taught us the art
of blowing up a bridge, attaching exposos to the side
of a ship, derailing a train, as well as that
of dispatching to the next world as silently as possible.
A nighttime guard dispatching to the next world. That's the

(09:11):
most French way to describe killing someone that I've ever heard,
not a serious people. As a secret agent under the
assumed name Peter John Rule Bull helped the resistance movement
in China, Burma and French Indo China until in nineteen
forty three, So basically two years later he was captured
by Vichy Frants loyalists on the Mekon River. Because as

(09:35):
a true Frenchman, he caved under interrogation, that's not entirely accurate.
His mission was to make contact with. You know, France
at the time was split between the VC government who
were Nazi loyalists, and the French resistance, and as a
member of the resistance, he was hoping to make contact
with a resistance sympathetic VCH official and he bet on

(09:58):
the wrong one. He was being in terror and he
was like, okay, guys, actually here's my thing. I'm a
spy and I'm hoping that you are sympathetic to my cause.
And they were like, we are not, and sentenced him
to a lifetime of work. Aren't we all sentenced to
a lifetime of work? Well, not as bad as the
Burma railway where Bull worked, because it is perhaps best

(10:20):
known by its more whimsical name, the Death River. It
was built from nineteen forty to nineteen forty three by
Southeast Asians and a smaller group of captured Allied soldiers,
and the brutal conditions there resulted in the debts of
over ninety thousand civilians along with twelve thousand Allied soldiers.
That's horrible and that's what bridgeram Require is about. But

(10:42):
Booll's novel and the subsequent film about his experience, was
a worldwide hit. Cleaned up at the Oscars, won seven
in nineteen fifty seven, including Best Picture and Best Actor
for Alec Guinness. Sir Alec Guinness, please excuse me. Boole
himself won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay, despite not
having written the screenplay and by his own admission, not
even speaking English, because the film's actual screenwriters, Carl Foreman

(11:05):
and Michael Wilson, had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era,
which is a theme we will return to. This all
brings us back, of course, to The Apes. Writing.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
High off the success of River Qui, Boule kept writing,
publishing five other novels along with essays and non fiction
before he got started.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
On what would become known as Planet of the Apes.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
At least one person has suggested that Boule brought his
experience in World War Two into Apes. But from what
you've read, Bull, who gave very few interviews in his
life which he basically ended as a semi recluse, didn't
consider Planet of the Apes a work of pure fiction. Rather,
he preferred the term quote social fantasy, another very French term,

(11:48):
which placed him on a lineage of satirists like Jonathan Swift,
who wrote honest proposal about the.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Rich eating they're young. Yeah, I mean it was it
was about eating. It was about eating Irish children, yeah,
oh that was it. Yeah, and making them into handbags
and gloves right, and also was not received well. Gulliver's
Travels too is kind of a similar. Yeah. I think
that that kind of stuff was the was the impetus
for Bull doing this, And I've heard multiple people refer

(12:17):
to this as like a Gulliver's Travels analog. That's interesting.
I never would have made that connection. Huh. Yeah, I
mede neither.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
He told a French television program that sought him out
and somehow was successful in getting an interview in nineteen seventy.
I regard the absurd as an extremely powerful poll of
attraction and human activity. Whenever I look around me, I
am plunged into an ocean of absurdity. Should get that
embroidered on a thrill pillow, Jesus.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, he's not wrong. You know.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Bull would say that he was inspired to write monkey
Planet by watching gorillas at the zoo.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
That is the official translated name. I was impressed by
the human like expressions, he said. It led me to
dwell upon and imagine the relationships between humans and apes.
Boule's novel doesn't actually take place on Earth, however, it's
setting is a planet in the system of Beetlejuice, where
two travelers find a literal message in a bottle floating

(13:15):
in space. They read the manuscript within by a French
journalist named Ulysses Moreau, and much of the memorable bits
of the film are included here. It's just so funny
to me. It's a pistolary, like he went with like
the oldest framing device of all time. The characters found
someone else's diary. That's really cool.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
There's character plot points with Zerra, Cornelius, doctor Zayas, as
well as an archaeological dig in which traces of an
earlier human society are discovered, including a human doll that
cries Papa, oh oh.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, you don't remember that? Oh now I do. Oh
that's part of the archaeological dig. Although when I when
I when I heard it, I was like, they didn't
really get the best toy doll to do that, because
it literally just sounds like that's pretty scary though. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's a great gotcha moment in the film. Oh doctor.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
It makes me think of about when the guy had
discovered the Titanic went diving down there, and at the
time they didn't know whether or not there would be
human remains down there or not. And so he's in
the sub going across you know, featureless sand, and suddenly
he sees this face staring back at him through the porthole,
and it's a child's porcelain doll, but just like perfectly preserved.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
Oh god, yeah, you told me that. Yeah, yeah, dolls
when you don't expect dolls are the scariest kind of dolls.
We'll shout out to front of the pod alley. He's
frending a broken dolls, eagerly anticipated by Stephen King, friend
of the podtya, give it to Stevie. We'll give it

(14:57):
to Stephen Stevie King or Steve King. That's what his
like campus paper called him, with that famous picture of
him looking absolutely like unhinged with the full beard and
long hair Steve King. Anyway, at the end of the account,
in Boole's original Planet of the Apes book memorably titled

(15:17):
Monkey Planet, the man writes that upon his eventual return
to Earth, he's greeted at the airport by an ape
driving a truck, leading to the horrified twist you have
to read it lake Zoribird or you use on Earth
on Earth in the future maybe. And then the final
twist is that the people reading the letter are chimps themselves,

(15:39):
so we hear the chimps. The readers of the book
are chimps. Well, no, the couple reading the letter are chimps.
Oh okay. The novel ends with the double twist of
the guy in the who wrote the account ending up
on Ape Earth, and then the people reading his account
in a spaceship are also apes, so it's like a

(16:00):
double ape Jeopardy kind of situation.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
That's like might Shyamalan would like go walk into the ocean?
If you heard that, that was like, that's that's too
many twists.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
Yeah, it's a little too many, and.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
So many twists that it doesn't register as a twist.
That's what happens. If you twist too many times, you're
right back where you started. It's like going three sixty.
This is the largest difference between the book and the
nineteen sixty eight movie. Ironically, though Tim Burton's adaptation was
closer to the books ending than the one Charlton Heston started,

(16:33):
how does that one end?

Speaker 1 (16:34):
I forget Abraham Lincoln, your love Jesus of course at
the Lincoln Memorial. Oh my god, that's right, that's right,
that's right. God, that movie is so bad. They really
thought they had something, they thought they were cooking. But
on the other hand, could it be good? I mean,
everybody who's an ape is amazing. It's just that it

(16:54):
hangs on Wahlberg, you know, and he can't summon the
manic energy of Heston in that movie. His like a
version of intensity is to just look like sleepier and
a little bit more angry. Just so funny because he
literally blinded a man in his youth. Oh yeah, that's
a PSA and everyone h and he is trying to

(17:16):
get that expunge from his record so that he can
become a sheriff's deputy in the Greater Boston area. Yeah,
in market market. Yeah, it's funny because that movie has
a stacked apes cast. It's like Helena Bonham, Carter is Zerra,
Michael Clarke Duncan is the Gorilla General, Tim Roth is

(17:39):
the chimp bad guy, and they're all so good just
hanging it on, uh, hanging it on market. Mark was
a bad idea anyway, I do you think it could
have been saved?

Speaker 2 (17:48):
Who would you have cast in the the Tim Burton
Planet of the Apes to make it.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
Not suck as the man you know who? I instantly
thought Kanu was Nick Cage, but also good. Oh yeah,
Cage would have been good. He would have brought the
requisite level of insanity. Yeah. Yeah, two thousand and one
era Burton. I could have seen if he'd gone back
to the world with Johnny Depp. Oh yeah. My problem

(18:16):
with Marky Mark is that I around the same time
he had that movie rock Star that came out, and
I've like blended the two in my head. So I
just think that he's an ape singing hair metal.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
Singing hair metal like kind of like slouching around with
like a guitar strap to his back on Planet of
the Apes and which is kind of a much better
movie in my head.

Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah, Like he goes there and teaches them to rock. Yeah,
it's like School of Rock meets Planet of the Apes
verbal contract. There's a brilliant idea, and we're gonna make it.
I'm not sure where Boole's stock was. Six years after
River Kwai came out, but it was apparently high enough
that Monkey Planet was optioned before publication by producer and

(18:58):
former Hollywood power publicist Arthur P. Jacobs. He was actually
Marilyn Monroe's publicist right before she died.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
I mean, for our purposes, he's going to talk like
the cigar shopping executive.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Oh he will, He very much will. Funnily enough, Jacobs
was so focused on family friendly movies that he'd made
Doctor Doolittle prior to this with Rex Harrison, that he
sold the rights to Midnight Cowboy because he didn't want
to make a Let's just say he uses the worst
term for gay people in the one book or the

(19:29):
one interview I read, let's say flick about Urban Decake.
Give me more animals, give me more apes. I want
another movie where the guy talks to the animals. Well,
this next graph is even more funny than that voice.
He said. It started in Paris in nineteen sixty three.
Two primary sources for this is The Wonderful Planet of

(19:49):
the Apes Revisited and the Behind the Planet of the
Apes documentary, which you can find on Internet archive, hosted
by Roddy McDowell. Jacob said, I was looking from A
and I would meet with various literary agents. Asked what
he was looking for, he mentioned something like King Kong,
which is again the cigar shopping executive meeting like a

(20:12):
Parisian bistro, being like, I need a King Kong pick?
What do you beget? It has gotten me a slush pile.
One agent, while pitching a different client, told Jacobs, speaking
of King Kong, I've got a thing here and it's
so far out. I don't think you can make it.
It can't be filmed. How can you make talking apes believable?

(20:33):
Who actually didn't like his own novel very much. He
called it second tier. But I guess when you're ranking
your own work behind Bridge on the River Khy, that's fair.
Jacobs immediately embarked on getting the film rolling. He passed
copies of the novel version of Monkey Planet to MGM,
Paramount Pictures, and Marlon Brando, offering him the role that
Charlton Heston would eventually land with a groveling letter that

(20:56):
Brando never answered. Jacobs, even with the X mile of
having a Warner Brothers studio artist, draft up some concept
art and send it to Brando. After the initial letter
and Brando was so like, no, I'm very invested in
this high calorie diet of mine.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
It was really bad.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
That was a good brand though, simply something he would
have done. The I mean, what was that island of
Doctor Moreau? Like maybe it was later.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
I guess that was later enough that he was like,
all right, fine, yeah, what was he doing?

Speaker 1 (21:30):
I mean this was this is fat Brando era, right,
because that's why they have to shoot around him in
Apocalypse Now.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Paclos Now was seventy nine. This was like the weird
mid period between On the Waterfront and The Godfather when
he was doing like, wasn't he like Julius Caesar.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
Or something in the sixties? He was in like a bunch.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
Of what I believe to be bad sixties movies.

Speaker 1 (21:54):
Well, Paul Newman was another early candidate for the lead,
and aside from those two, they were also thinking of
Steve Queen, who would have been good, Rob Taylor, and
George Peppard who I don't know who that is.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
George Papard He is the male lead in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Did you know that Marlon Brando was Zappatta the Mexican Resistance.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
In a horrifying fake nose in brown face and brown face,
and they did something to his eyes. I don't know
what they did to his eyes? What have you done
to his eyes? Rosner's baby?

Speaker 3 (22:28):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (22:29):
What was I gonna say?

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (22:30):
He has that in common with Charlton Heston, because Charlton
Heston made a touch of evil with Orson Wells where
they put him in brown face. Oh yeah, Anyway, I've
also heard that insanely they were courting Jack Lemon, which
I guess he has like a scrawny kind of everyman
appealed to him, but.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
Hey, get your goddamn hands off me, damn daddy as Yeah, that's.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
How Yeah, and Rock Hudson. They also suggested Ursula Andress
as Lady Ape. The most unsettling thing about this movie
to me is like being attracted to the ape. Yeah,
like the sexual tension between Taylor and Zero, which is
amplified dramatically in the Tim Burton one. One of the

(23:12):
ideas for the sequels Treatments was that they were going
to have like a half a half human thing, and
then they were like, wait, that implies beast reality directly.
We scrapped it. Well, is that the same.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Deal with Avatar? Let's go down like movies that have
like interspecies.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
Uh, well, Avatar, I'm not sure that it counts because
their human consciousness projected into like lab grown beings. I
think I think they're cloned or vet grown movies with
you're talking inner species. Yeah, oh god, the fly. Oh okay,

(23:49):
that's certainly a union of sorts. Uh. I'm not going
to keep talking about this. This is weird Superman Superman.
I mean, I guess none of the studios wanted this movie.
Jacobs did. Yeah, okay, that one I would accept. Yeah,
what would their love child be? Half fish half man?

(24:10):
But which half roll of dice?

Speaker 3 (24:12):
Baby?

Speaker 1 (24:13):
I guess that's my question is like, how does it
work when you with mermaids, Like are they locked into
fish bottom human half? Or could you end up with
fish top human bottom? It's hustle Miss Piggy and Kermit
the frog. Oh yeah, man, what is it? But they
have kids, right? Yeah, well at least in in uh
muppets Christmas Carol. Yeah, and they're frogs. Tiny Tim is

(24:37):
a frog. He's not a horrific They just split the
difference like some of them, some of them frogs. Yeah,
I'm about to write a letter. I mean there's Shrek too.
Oh yeah, the donkey dragon abominations. Yeah, those actually are
horrifying and accurate. Uh. Anyway, none of the studios wanted it,
and Jacobs did get as far as negotiations with but

(25:00):
they bulked at the budget and put the project and
turn around. Paramount also stalled out on the money end
of things, and United Artists felt that the novel was
impossible to translate. They were talking to Fritz Lang, who
famously directed Metropolis, about this, but he was deemed a
hard sell for the studios. Eventually they attached Pink Panther

(25:20):
director Blake Edwards' names to it, and with that Warner
Brothers was on board. I mean, were they going to
try to play it for laughs?

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Would they have had like a Peter Seller's ulf who
just like bubbles his way through an ape civilization.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
Or I don't think so. I think like an early
concern for all of them was that this would just
be laughed at. So they were like trying to play
it as po faced as possible, like at every stretch
like they initially if you see the old initial like
the test footage that they shot of it with Edward G.
Robinson as doctor zais he's like dressed in a suit,
and they were quickly like no, no, no, give them

(25:56):
like Roman togas or whatever, like neighbor suits or whatever
they're actually wearing. They were like, we cannot have them
wearing actual human clothes. Arthur Jacobs sent a letter to
his French lit agent buddy because this guy had been
getting antsy, and was like, I can't hold the rights
I can't have to give you this exclusivity for much longer,
and told him that Shirley McClain was going to star

(26:17):
because she had been in one of Jacob's previous films,
and ultimately she would not star in Planet of the Apes,
but Jacobs had already secured a crucial presence for the
film by that time. Rod Serling, baby, I always forget
that he was a WWII paratrooper.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Whoa can you imagine like him and Kurt Vonnegut like
at some officers bar swapping human horror stories that yeah,
chain smoking.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, oh god, that would be so depressing actually, because
Vonnie was deeply haunted by it. I assume Surling may
have been when he was sober well.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
I don't know if Surling was a pow like Vonnagut
was because it wasn't Slater based on his own like
being caught in Dressden during the fire bombs.

Speaker 1 (27:03):
Yeah, Serling parlayed a bunch of disparate TV and film
writing gigs into his own show, The Twilight Zone, which
you may have heard of. It was launched in nineteen
fifty nine and became a hit. Scooped up a Peabody
Award and fort Writer's Guild Awards during its run. Shortly
before his death in nineteen seventy five. According to Planet
of the Apes Revisited, Serling explained, I first became involved

(27:27):
with Planet of the Apes about ten years ago, so
sixty five, although he funnily enough said it was through
a production company called King Brothers and Curling Ads. They
mostly did Indian elephant pictures shot for about a dollar eighty.
I have no idea what that phrase means, so he
must have gotten confused. I just thought that was funny.

(27:48):
I don't know what Indian elephant pictures were. I guess
that's a film where you just get an Indian elephant
and go from there. But regardless of who he was
approached by, and he did a whole treatment for it,
he was called by Blake Edwards, who said not to
worry about the money, as the film was going to
be a big one.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Serling honed in on the fact that Bull had not
written a sci fi book per se. Serling said in
nineteen seventy two, as talented and creative a man as
Boll is, he does not have the deafness of a
science fiction writer. Boull's book was prolonged allegory about morality
more than it was a stunning science fiction piece, but

(28:30):
it contained within its structure a walloping science fiction idea.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, it was interesting to me to learn that one
of Serling's early episodes of The Twilight Zone, called I
Shot an Arrow into the Air, is based around a
group of astronauts who turn on each other after crash
landing on a planet that in the end is revealed
to be Earth. Oh yeah, that's right. They're just like
outside Vegas, Like they literally see like a highway sign
that says Vegas or Vegas. I think at the end

(28:56):
that's like the big horrifying moment. But I don't know,
Maybe it was self plagiarism gone on there.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
But in his initial version of the adaptation, Serling went
a little too far. He would later admit as much, saying,
my earliest version of the script featured an ape city
much like New York. Of course that was much too
expensive to do, he continued. The script was very long,
and I think the estimate of the production people was
that if they had to shoot that script, it would

(29:23):
have cost no less than one hundred million dollars by
the time they created an eight population, clothed it, and
build a city for them to live in. That's like
between a quarter and a half a billion dollars today.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah. Soling was also concerned about.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Adapting the tone of bulls essentially satirical novel into a
serious sci fi film. Now, as soon as you put
a shirt and tie on an orangutang, he says, you
invite laughter. This is true, but our story is serious satire.
Soling would eventually produce thirty drafts of the Planet of
the Ape screenplay. This is according to the documentary behind

(29:59):
the Planet of the Ape thirty drafts. Wow, would you
classify Planet of the Apes as satire?

Speaker 1 (30:06):
You know, I personally wouldn't see why it kind of
I mean, you know, we'll touch later on Sammy Davis
Junior's interpretation but I think maybe unintentionally, like most of
the creatives in it are people who were products of
the fifties system, and it just took so long to
get made that they accidentally dropped something into nineteen sixty eight,

(30:31):
the most turbulent year of a famously turbulent decade. But
like Bull wrote it in he was like a you know,
greatest generation. Arthur P. Jacobs was like coming I mentioned earlier,
he was like a Marilyn Monroe era publicist. Heston was
certainly more famous, I think, as a leading man through
their early part of the decade, and then they just

(30:52):
wound up by sort of coincidence, making this thing that
was a great allegory about class differences and class structures,
which they even not within the apes, because there's a
point where like Cornelius and Zero are talking and they're like, oh,
you know how orangutanks hate chimps or whatever, so like,
there is a bit of that that is textual. But
I think just by virtue of taking so long to

(31:14):
get this thing made, it transcended the generation that created
it and achieved unintentional resonance with the people who actually
saw it.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
That makes sense, Well said, yeah, I mean, I wonder
if it's almost like George Romira doing another Living Dead,
which became an allegory for racism as well, and somebody
although I guess he probably intentionally made some of those
scenes look like the you know, the he.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Did He did not. He did not. The character was
not black in the screenplay, and he just cast for
the best actor he was able to find. And then
later he started saying, oh yeah, oh yeah, it was
a civil rights thing because George, if anything, knew what
he was savvy about what that would do.

Speaker 4 (31:57):
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more too much information in just a moment.
The plan of the Apes movie, as you said, part
of the long gestation period, was Warner Brothers, after years

(32:19):
of development, killed the whole thing in January nineteen sixty five.
After taking a long hard look at the projected budget,
which was nearly seven point five million, which is i'd
say about close to like seventy five million today. Blake
Edwards departed and producer Arthur Jacobs was back at square one.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
But Jacobs, he was a tenacious bastard.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
He never gave up, and one of his first moves
was to send Rod Serlings draft to the book's author
Pierre Boole. Bill did not like the It was Earth
All Along ending, also known as one of the greatest
film twists of all time.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
The man who couldn't keep his twist straight in the
book version hated one of the best twist endings ever. Okay,
French Yeah Mule felt that it cheapened the story, saying
that it served as quote temptation from the devil. What
does it even mean? I have no idea?

Speaker 2 (33:19):
French Man producer Arthur Jacobs, however, didn't care and didn't
ask Boule.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
To write a new version of the script to his
own novel. And he's just funny. Charlton Heston talks about
like the tremendous hustle that Jacobs had as a producer.
He was just like, they don't want it. I'm taking
it over here, Like Bull doesn't want a new screenplay, Great,
I'm gonna go lock down. Heston like he was just constant.
He really believed in this thing, and he was right.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
He took the script over to Charleston Heston and attempted
to woo him to star as the astronaut initially called
Thomas and later renamed Taylor and Charlton. Heston me, what
where do you start with him? I mean, he started
as a stage actor. You'd become a huge name in
splashy period dramas like ben Her, The Ten Commandments, and
The Warlord, where he eventually worked with the eventual director

(34:07):
of Planet of the Apes Franklin J.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
Schnaffner Schafnaffner shaff Schnaffer. Yeah, you know, I kind of
had a negative opinion of Chuck Heston before this. I
kind of thought he was like a because I only
ever knew him from being an NRA advocate. But he's
like quite delightful in the documentary and the book. He

(34:30):
kept extensive journals which are written in very erudite, funny ways,
and he really took care of the other people on
the set, as we'll talk about. But so I'm like, yeah,
good on you, Chuck.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
And yeah, like you said, he speaks very admirably of
producer Arthur Jacobs. He says in the book Planet of
the Apes Revisited.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
That he didn't even know how Jacobs found him quote,
because I usually didn't accept submissions other than those accompanied
by firm fully funded offers, which of course.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
He was not in the position to make at that point.
Hessen would eventually inc a deal for a quarter of
a million dollars, which again in nineteen sixty seven was
nothing to sneeze at, and ten percent of the box office.
There it is, is that for just this movie or
for the whole franchise.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
I don't think it could be in the franchise because
he he only came back for two on the condition
that he would it would be his last one, but
still ten percent of the gross of this movie and
sixty sixty eight would have been a chunk of change.
It's like coming back to alec Innes. It's funny because
he thought Star Wars was gonna be nothing, so he didn't.
He like just took He took like a lower scale
in exchange for I think merchandise rather than back end,

(35:40):
and just like lived out the rest of his life
on the strength of that decision.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
So all of this was still taking place over months
without any real development in terms of actually getting this
thing made at a studio. Charlton Hesson developed a running
gag with Jacobs, who would call and say that the
project had been killed at MGM, but he was taking
it back to Warner who'd previously killed it, because they
have people over there. This has been taking so long
that the turnover rate of executives at all these studios

(36:05):
was total.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
Hessen has he writes about it in the or he
I think he writes about in his journal what he's like.
Jacobs had calls me up and he's like, well, it's
killed in Fox, but I'm going to take it over
to you United Artists, and Heston would finish his sentence
because they have new people over there. Director Franklin J.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
Schaffner would say, it seemed to me a fascinating project
which would never get made, So when Arthur said would
you do it, it was easy to say yes. Two
years later, Arthur called me up and said, we have
enough money to do a makeup test.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
It took him two years to get enough money to
just do a makeup test. Yeah, I mean this was true.
Fox executive Richard Zanek had wisely honed in on the
fact that the movie would be made or broken by
the makeup or ape up situation, and eventually Jacobs and
the rest of his crew. Associate producer Mort Abrahams, which

(37:01):
is such a funny Hollywood guy name, which is constantly
begging for money from him, and they eventually got together
around seventy five hundred for a makeup screen test shot
on thirty five millimeter in Fox's lot in early nineteen
sixty four. This featured an more elaborate and therefore ultimately
unused EPE makeup, starring Edward G. Robinson as Zayas, along

(37:23):
with James Brolin as Cornelius and Kim Taylor, who would
play Zero Edwige. Robinson was so taken aback by the
makeup process and also being half dead, that he was like,
I don't want to do this, and he was replaced
later in production by Maurice Evans Ebrogie.

Speaker 2 (37:44):
Robinson's best known to me for Looney Tunes, basically because
he was he in the original scarface or something. He
was like an ottle gangster movie actor in the thirties
and forties.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know much about him, but
he was basically like mar Heart will not take it.
It's probably fair. Actually. The screen test did reveal some
shortcomings with the initial makeup design, but it did show
that the makeup would hold up under film lights and
that the actors' voices would be unaffected. Fox's response was
once again to back out, and Jacobs resumed his grind.

(38:15):
He hired another writer, Charles Eastman, to punch up some scenes,
and the forty pages that he's been produced were deemed unusable,
and then they turned back to writer Michael Wilson, who,
as I mentioned earlier, had been blacklisted as a communist
during Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare campaign and brought that experience
into like the trial scenes for example, oh wow, it
was his way of commenting on that. Yeah, He'd done

(38:38):
uncredited rewrites on Bridge over the Requi Lawrence of Arabia
and born an Oscar for a Place in the Sun.
So then Jacob's associated producer, the aforementioned mort Abrahams explained
that production continued to eke money out of Fox like
a couple grand at a time to keep refining the
makeup design Jacob's associate producer, the afore mentioned mort Abrahams,
explained that production continued to eke money out of Fox

(39:00):
like a grand at a time to keep refining the
makeup designs, and ultimately they made one last Hail Mary pitch.
They went back to Dick Xanik at Fox, who immediately
forbade them from bringing up Apes, and then undeterred, they
bluffed their way into a meeting with a presentation of
how well these different sci fi films have been doing
at the box office, and Xanik said, come back in

(39:23):
four weeks to see if this is still like a
trend that's continuing at the box office. He actually said
in their meeting, I give you three minutes, and this
is the last time, because I'm really bored with it.
So they came back and with the box office trend
continuing apace, and he finally greenlit the film at Fox
with a provision that they could bring it to around

(39:45):
five million dollars as its budget.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
Production designer William Kreeber was tasked with creating the literal
titular planet.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
Which planet was that Haigo monkey planet.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
He've worked on a number of sci fi properties on
Tea like Lost in Space, Voys to the Bottom of
the Sea, and The Time Tunnel.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
It would eventually go on to the big.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Screen with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno Incredible
Movies both. His biggest task was to whittle the sets
down from Serling's proposed.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
Ape City to the film's eventual look. He and associate
producer More Abraham poured through architectural books and stumbled on
the Spanish architect Gouty and his churches, which had nature
inspired forms a sensibility. They combined with.

Speaker 2 (40:33):
The real life rock cut architecture of Cappadocia in central
Turkey that dated back to the first century AD.

Speaker 1 (40:39):
Yeah, it's really crazy. Like if you look up pictures
of this region of Turkey and it's like it looks
like the planet of the Apes. They're just these kind
of like I don't want to say crude because they
were building, like they had like full buildings and churches
and stuff, but they're just hewn out of rock.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
I mean for a production that's trying to keep an
eye on its budget, using as a design of inspiration Goudy,
the guy who designed the church that took something like
one hundred and something years to build in Barcelona. That's
the grout A Familia.

Speaker 1 (41:09):
Maybe maybe isn't the ones you gold to go? Well,
where do you explain how they got around that? Jordan? Okay,
all right.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
Having arrived at a design theme, they decided to speck
it out. Wood was initially considered, but that was costly,
so they decided on polyarthane foam, which was cheaper and lighter.
Head of studio construction Ivan Martin explained to American Cinematographer
magazine in nineteen sixty eight the material is NKC coorophoam,
a combination of resin and a catalyst. When these are

(41:40):
fired under pressure from a gun, the mix rises like
bread dough. Then the heat quickly dissipates, and within ten
minutes it's cold and solid. Using Creeper's designs, they designed
the city with thin iron rods, which they'd cover with
cardboard and craft paper. They'd spray the whole thing and
peel off the paper, leave them with structures to paint

(42:01):
and dress. Not unlike I'm getting paper mache vibes here.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
Basically, yeah, like crude children structures which then they'd paint
and they go ye and make look like rock. The
opening sequence of the movie was filmed near Lake Powell, Arizona,
and cut together with a man made pool that was
actually reused from Arthur Jacob's previous production Doctor Doolittle. All

(42:26):
I wonder if they used any like animals or anything
from Doctor Doolittle. Maybe some horses, oh maybe, Yeah, And
they also filmed at the waterfall at the Fox Studio
a lot for the sand in which Charlton Heston is
being chased by mounted apes. That's correct.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
They literally just grew a field of corn on the
Fox Ranch studios.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
It's so funny. In the movie they talk about like, yeah,
we needed to be like about six feet high, and
they like they grew a field of corn with like
fertilizer and water, and it actually went up to eight
feet tall. And they're like, uh, what do we do?
And I forget if it was the director or the
or zanak, but he was like, cut it down to
six feet. So they grew and trimmed an entire field

(43:12):
of corn on the Fox back lot for this.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
To me, the Fox back lot, which was this huge
expanse of land I think out by Malibu, was to
me best known as the where they shot some of
the exteriors for mash and I'm sure many other things,
which casting a Sundance Kid, some old Tarzan movies from
the thirties. Yeah, I guess those are the big ones.

(43:41):
And of course this brings us to the film's final
beach scene, which was filmed on a stretch of California
Sea coast between Malibu and Axnard, with one hundred and
thirty foot cliffs. It was so inaccessible that the cast crew,
film equipment, and yes, even the horses had to be
lowered in by.

Speaker 1 (43:58):
Helicopter and mules. They took a lot of mules out there.
The remains of the Statue of Liberty were shot in
a secluded cove on the far eastern end of Westward
Beach in Malibu, between Zuma Beaches and Point Doom. And
that's also where the end of Barton Fink and whatever
happened to Baby Jane was filmed, as well as bits

(44:19):
of airplane. I believe that's a storied location. Yeah, weird energy.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
In that location, costumes were coming together thanks to the
awesomely named Morton Hawk, who quickly abandoned the idea of
having the apes dressed in suits or dresses because that
just would have been hilarious. He suggested grouping the apes
by clothing color instead, chimps and green orangutangs in brownish orange,

(44:46):
and gorillas and black. Associate producer Morton Abraham were called Bill.
Must have submitted fifty to seventy five drawings. Thankfully, he
was working on these designs as the set was still
coming together, which helped him kind of craft the colors
of the outfits to the colors and textures of the set.

Speaker 1 (45:03):
Yes, the real star of this department was John Chambers,
ultimately the first person ever awarded a special Oscar just
for makeup. Chambers was a jewelry designer and carpenter before
he joined the army and wound up as a dental technician.
While enlisted, he developed a new line of adhesives and
rubber compounds, which ultimately ended up in the service of
creating prosthetic devices for those wounded in war. Haunted by

(45:28):
the cost of dealing so intimately with another person's tragedy,
he turned to the television industry for a respite, which
was an error. It was in this capacity that he
first worked with Heston, transforming him into the Beast for
a Shirley Temple production of Beauty and the Beast. Just
imagine craggy like, lantern jawed Chuck Heston romancing sort of

(45:51):
Shirley Temple gives me a deep chill. Chambers also worked
in a huge swath of the fifties and sixties sci
fi boom on TV Outer Limit. He crafted Spock's ears
on Star Trek, whoa worked on The Munsters, Lost in Space,
The Invaders, and Rod Serling's Night Gallery. My favorite quote
in this piece is that he was set to go

(46:12):
to London and research the ape makeup that Stanley Kubrick
was using to film two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey.
Though Kubrick backed out of the arrangement, he was famously
weird and secretive and concerned that this might have been
a conflict of interest. Chambers, for his part, responded thusly,
I backed out of the whole idea as a personal affront.
I'm an Irishman, and I said, anytime an Englishman can

(46:34):
teach me anything, it's going to be a cold day
in hell. Chambers was tackling the ape makeup from an
unusual if iconic source, Jack Dawn's Cowardly Lion makeup for
Bert Lair and Wizard of Oz, which allowed Lair to
still make his trademark comical facial expression based on how
the appliance was mounted to his face. Chambers said, to

(46:55):
arrive at our final concept, we turned to sculpturing. We
would take a base human head in plast and then
in clay model. On this head are ape variations. We
came up with how things looked like the Neanderthal man
and so forth, which we discarded. The concepts were too ambiguous.
We needed the pleasantness yet the strength of the animal
without being too grotesque. The set designer in the documentary

(47:17):
says that one day he came into the makeup department
and they had just a live chimp there hanging out
to model it on. Chambers' practical concerns for the makeup
were twofold. One that the mask wouldn't muffle the actors' voices,
which meant using material light enough to let it escape
from under the makeup, and two that the makeup's lips
were synchronized with the actors, so they had to glue

(47:39):
the inside of the processes directly to their lips and
jaw muscles so that the outside of the mask would
wrinkle and crease realistically. And then they had to make
the whole thing visually appealing as well. Chambers said that
they had to modify the sort of wrinkle structure that
go into apes faces to make them not just look
like horrifying the age humans, and the fact that their nostril,

(48:02):
their nose structure looked like giant slits in the middle
of their face, so seeing that enlarged to a talking
human scale would have been similarly horrifying. So they small
and smallish. They smallish to them down Jesus.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
I mean, I.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
Wonder if there was any considerations to the fact that,
you know, you were paying top dollar for decent level stars,
you didn't want to completely obscure their faces entirely.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
Yeah. One of the funniest bits in the documentary was
them talking about how like they quickly learned that you
couldn't keep your face still in a scene, like if
the camera was on you. They would kind of have
to be using constantly, like moving their face around in
these like weird over exaggerated contortions so that that would

(48:47):
translate through the makeup and the makeup wouldn't just look
like a still static mask. So like Roddy McDowell and
Kim Hunter talk about just like making these comical faces
under eth all the makeup and then when it translates
through the makeup, it just happens to look like expressions
of interest or what have you. And they eventually landed

(49:08):
on a multi piece latex appliance for the forehead nose, mouth,
and chin, and then they coated with they plastered the
whole thing together. They made individual molds of the various
parts of each lead actor's face and built multiple latex
appliances from them. And this is really the big revolution
that was taking place in makeup around this time. It
Dick Smith was doing this with Little Big Man, where

(49:31):
instead of just doing these big, one piece appliances, the
solution was to do many small pieces that were individually
placed according to like facial muscles, so that you could
get as much individual movement out of it. And now
they just do it in a computer. They couldn't use
the same ones twice because the liquid latex bonded to

(49:52):
the foam rubber underside of it, and that tore easily
and was damaged easily. And the groups of apes in
the film, each group of apes in the film's makeup
was designed to highlight character traits. The chimps were supposed
to look sympathetic and kind of cherubic. The gorilla's makeup
was actually they made the gorillas look meaner than they
do in real life. And the orangutangs had this naturally,

(50:16):
as in the real animal have this kind of aristocratic
bearing actors came to the makeup trailer before dawn and
had the makeup appliances placed over their faces, covered in
a cream inside to protect them from the spirit gum
that glued these things to the actors. Because the spirit
gum was so concentrated at this point, was like both
abrasive to sensitive skin and would like the fumes would

(50:39):
like get them, you know, somewhat high as they were
working on it. Once the appliance was in place, Chambers
used grease paint to blend the mask with the actor's
skin and applied the wig, which was a set of
side burns on the face and a bald cap with
a wig glued to it over their natural hair. They
then got rubber ears and false teeth, and then their

(50:59):
natural teeth were painted black so they wouldn't show up
on camera. Given the amount of apes on the film,
which included like up to two hundred for some group scenes,
Chambers whittled down the total amount of time to apply
the makeup from six hours to a slightly more reasonable
three three and a half. Frequently, in the run up
to this movie was crowed that they spent like a

(51:20):
million dollars on makeup alone, but Abraham said it was
closer to half that. So it's like five million today. Yeah,
I was gonna say, still an egregious amount of money
for monkey makeup. At this point in the production, they
only had Charlton heston lockdown. Jeez. So all this time
developing this makeup and they had no idea who they

(51:42):
were going to put it on. Essentially, yeah, great.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
They filled the role of Zira with Kim Hunter, who'd
had a promising career in Hollywood starring opposite Marlon Brando
in the Broadway and feature film version of a street
car name Desire before being.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Blacklisted by McCarthy running theme.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
Yeah, producer Arthur Jacobs actually helped get her off the
blacklist through some weird back channels.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
Do you have any further info on that. She has
this long anecdote in the book about the films where
she basically says like Jacobs got a call from someone
that was like, if you cast Kim Hunter, you'll never
work in this industry again, like trying to threaten him
out of casting her and keep her on the blacklist,

(52:25):
And they eventually got into some kind of like pseudo
extortion scheme where they like found the master keeper of
the Blacklist, and the guy was like, you have to
pay me two hundred dollars to find out the reason
you're on this And it just turned into this whole
like byzantine. This is like a page long story in
the book. It's like the most Kim Hunter talks. And
it was this whole byzantine thing that took place over

(52:47):
like phone calls and letters and this whole like shadowy,
weird thing where this guy was trying to get money
out of them to like pull her off the Blacklist
or even reveal the reason that she'd been blacklisted in
the first place. And she wound up off it and
acting in this movie. And what a hell of a career.
You go from freaking opposite Brando in Streetcar to Monkey Makeup.

(53:08):
You got a claw your way back from the Blacklist somehow.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
Yeah, I don't think I realized it was an actual
literal list that was kept by a presumably a guy.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
I mean, it has to be locked in McCarthy's, Like
it was like locked in McCarthy's cupboard somewhere, and this
guy just found it and was like, I can squeeze
two hundred dollars out of these Hollywood roots got.

Speaker 2 (53:30):
Kim Hunter had not read Bull's original book when she
was cast, and ultimately did not, hoping to avoid picking
up anything in the book that wouldn't appear on screen, which,
as we discussed earlier, it was a lot.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
Roddy McDowell was cast next. Everybody loves Roddy McDowell.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
Good friend of Elizabeth Taylor and certain circle of Hollywood women.
He was famous for throwing dinner parties, and after he died,
his very famous bathroom in his home was placed in
a museum.

Speaker 1 (54:00):
Yeah. I just remember him from Fright Night, the eighties
movie where he plays like he plays like a horror
movie presenter who mass grades is a vampire hunter, and
then they enlist him to be an actual vampire hunter.
He's great in it anyway.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
Yes, the Hollywood History Museum at the Max Factor Studio
is preserved for future generations to enjoy. You can use
Roddy McDowell's bathroom.

Speaker 1 (54:26):
I enjoyed this. I went, I paid money to go there.
I was gonna say, you've got I try, Yes, I have.
It's very good anyway.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
Roddy McDowell was cast as Zero's fiance Cornelius.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
Incidentally no one in production cared.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Whether the apes would have consistent accents or not. It
was just so burnt out on the makeup. But like
a talk over, you want, I don't. Just let's just
get this gone. Ask me about the accents now. Frank
Schaffner and I talked about it an ape with an
English accent for about thirty seconds. This is Roddy McDowell talking,

(55:04):
and we thought, no, no, this is more. Abraham's associate producer,
Martin Abraham, said, Frank Schafter and I talked about an
ape with an English accent for about thirty seconds, and
we thought, no, Roddy McDowell would be so good, and
nobody's going to pay any attention to the accent.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
An ape with an English accent is pretty hilarious. It
is naturally funny. It seems like it should have been
like a bigger cornerstone of British comedy. Like their whole
thing was cross dressing. But they really could have gotten
so much more mileage out of species dressing. Species dressing, yeah,
ape dressing. I was trying to make a drag ape

(55:41):
thing but it didn't really work, so just move on.
Oh yeah, I don't know who they went who they
were looking for. After Edward g. Robinson was like, I
will literally die if you put me in this makeup
for an entire film shooting. Oh god. And then he
clung on for like another twenty years. But they landed
Maurice Evans, another British guy who became an American citizen

(56:05):
right as World War Two was hopping up, and then
he started appearing in plays and TV roles throughout the fifties.
I don't know anything else about this guy. I mean,
this is making me think of in the Wizard of
Oz the Tin Man, when they almost killed Buddy EPs
and the original tin Man. Oh yeah, by just painting
him with actual silver paint. Yeah, that just like coated
his lungs and he was like, oh, I'm gonna die,

(56:28):
I will die. Put me in an oxygen tent. Yeah.
And then not only did they almost kill him, they
took his role away and learned from their mistake and
gave Ray Bulger I think no he was yah, Yeah,
gave the new guy a less deadly makeup treatment. I
actually I did Maurice Evans dirty here. He Oh he
wasn't bewitched, playing a character named Maurice. Uh. But he

(56:51):
had done a bunch of stuff in the old vic.
He was like peers with Olivier. Oh he's in Rosemary's Baby.
Oh yeah, he's like one of the neighbor he's one
of the good neighbors. No good for you, Mary Sevans,
I was not familiar with your game.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
Getting back to the tin Man for a minute, the
part actually went to Jack Haley, not Roy Bulger. And
that's interesting to me because Jack Hayley's son, Jack Hayley Junior,
married Liza Minnelli, who's Judy Garland's daughter. So the daughter
of Dorothy and the daughter of the tin Man got
married in real life for like ninety days in the

(57:27):
studio fifty four era.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
Is that weird? Interesting? I think it's smacks of like
arranged marriage, which I sort of hate. But sure, trauma bonding, Yeah,
that's more likely explanation.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
Oh sorry, they lasted from seventy four to seventy nine.
I take it back in Liza and Liza realm. That's
a long marriage.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
Oh well, hell are Oh?

Speaker 2 (57:50):
The ape actors, that's another inherently funny term, found themselves
in these similar straits of not being able to figure
out how to play a humanoid ape. McDowell said he
based some of his eight Movements on Groucho Marx and
took it to Kim Hunter. They also took a trip

(58:10):
to the Zoo, which they found very quickly was not
that helpful.

Speaker 1 (58:14):
Mcdalell said, the characters we were playing were much more
evolved than the ones you see in the zoo. Yeah,
they talk. That's why I hit upon the idea of
the sort of crouch and using the knees. It's very,
very tiring to stand that way. This next part kills
me because, oh you take this well. Poor Kim Hunter

(58:35):
did not have a good time making this movie. McDowell
thought he would be affected because he was slightly laustrophobic.
He said he didn't even like the idea of having
a pillow over his face, so he was unsure of
how you cope with the makeup. But he got to
the point where you could just sleep through the whole thing,
while Kim Hunter had to take a valium to sit
through it. And similarly, they had different reactions the first
time they appeared on set in makeup. Mort Abraham said

(58:57):
that McDowell came onto set and just acted like a
chin for fifteen minutes, letting his arms dangle at his
sides and scratching his armpits. He put his tongue underneath
his upper lip and started making jabbering noises while jumping
with two feet. Meanwhile, Kim Hunter approached mort Abraham's on
the set and broke down in tears in his arms
for ten minutes.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
Which.

Speaker 1 (59:19):
Which Abraham said, pretty much ruined the makeup. Yeah, poor
Kim Hunter is just like she talks about like having
like ego death because in this specific moment, she was
walking with another actress and when Abraham's greeted her, he
was like, hey, I'm sorry, I don't know which one
of you is Kim Hunter, and she just like broke

(59:40):
down into tears at the enormity of that statement. And
then later would have the like she would like go
to her trailer and have these like horrifying existential moments
where she was like starting to she would dream that
she was an ape. It's just like, come on, lady.
The making of this seems like a French existentialist novel,
especially the outside parts where they were just like out

(01:00:00):
in the middle of Arizona. It is like one hundred
and ten degrees, not much interesting about Linda Harrison, who
plays the human Lady Nova. Might not be surprising for
you to learn that she was Richard Zane's then girlfriend,
and he was the head of Fox at the time,
and she was cast at his suggestion. They shot and
subsequently cut a scene though, in which she was revealed

(01:00:22):
to be pregnant by Taylor, and then they cut that
out of fear that they were pushing things too far.
They were like, wow, we've already got an eight movie.
That'll be you know, thinly veiled allegory for racism in
class in America. Let's keep abortion out of it. Kim
Hunter remembers the following about Harrison. I remember her in
relation to the valume I used to take to relax

(01:00:43):
because of the makeup. She asked what my strength was.
It was five milligrams or whatever, and she said, oh
my god, that little I never go to sleep without
ten at least, I guess when you're sleeping next to
Dick xannit. They got married. Good for them? How long?
Nine years? Oh it's okay, okay, what else? Did she

(01:01:05):
even do something about Batman? Okay? Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
She was a cheer She was cheerleader number two on
the Batman series. So yes, technically something with Batman.

Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
Man banging Dick Xanik only gets you two roles in
Fox movies.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
Oh, she was woman in cart in Tim Burton's remake
of Planet of the Apes.

Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
Okay, okay. Oh she was in Cocoon and Cocoon, the
return Cocoon harder, A good day to Cocoon, Back in
the Cocoon, back in the Cocuon. Yeah, I feel like
we should start using beneath the as the secret construction

(01:01:51):
Sister Act two, beneath the habit, beneath the Planet of
the Sister Act, anyway, beneath the Immediately, the film immediately
got behind beneath the Diety. As you meditate on that,
We'll be right back with more too much information.

Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
After these messages, the.

Speaker 1 (01:02:23):
Film immediately got behind schedule on its first day of shooting,
which was at the Grand Canyon and the desert surrounding
Page Arizona, because a Heston was the only person quite
sensibly pushing for beards on the Astronaut and they're woken
up to indicate the passage of time, and they had
not packed beards, even though he drew his own and

(01:02:44):
b all the ape makeup had been left in Phoenix,
where they landed before taking a puddle jumper to Page,
so then they had to charter a separate plane to
take them from Page to Phoenix to pick up the
makeup that they had left behind and then go back
to Page. The makeup became like an army that they
had to feed throughout the entire shoot. I mentioned earlier

(01:03:05):
that they were up to two hundred apes that needed
makeup in some of these different group scenes, and there
was an eighty person strong team dedicated to maintaining the makeup, appliances,
hair and wardrobe, which actually caused a rippled delay through
Hollywood as other productions couldn't hire qualified makeup artists because
everyone else was working on apes. The makeup was put

(01:03:27):
above virtually everything else, including the actors. Actors had to
use cigarette holders and subsisted on liquid diets through a straw,
and when they did eat solid food, they had to
eat staring at themselves in a mirror so they could
guide the food past the appliance and into their mouth.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
That's the most horrifying part of this entire ordeal that
you've described as this watching yourself intently eat.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Yeah. As an Ape. Yeah, as an ape. Yeah, the
other Kim Hunter had Ego death. The early Astronaut sequences
were shot around Lake Polo on the Colorado River in
Utah and Arizona, a spot that NASA, along with nearby
Glen Canyon, as the closest representation of the lunar surface
that could be found on Earth, which should interest you
as a space guy. I was gonna say very much so,

(01:04:10):
although I mean, yeah, there's a lot of rocks here.
Eh oh works like yeah, I mean it's either this
or the what's the famous one in Utah. It's like
a red red rocks thing that always stands in for Mars.
Oh yeah, I forget what it's called. I know what
you mean. Apes was also the first time that the
government allowed anything to be shot near Glen Canyon Dam,
which supplied power to most of the Southwest. It was

(01:04:33):
desolate and extremely hot. Jeff Burton, who played the astronaut Dodge,
fainted at one point, and given these circumstances, it may
shock you to learn that the mummified corpse of the
dead astronaut that they find in stasis was a real
woman and not a model. Heston later quipped, it has
to be the only seventy year old woman who ever
played an astronaut. Paus for applause. Yeah. Uh. They got

(01:04:57):
into an early stalemate with Fox over the amount of
time time that director Franklin J. Shaffner was spending shooting
the landscape there. Like basically Zanak was like, I will
not give you another day to shoot this landscape, and
they just kept begging, we need more shots of the
landscape because they just wanted to showcase that and really
build up to the discovery of the apes. And that
opening scene is incredible. There's this amazing moment where they're

(01:05:21):
hiking over a horizon and they get the lens flare
from the setting sun is actually like a halo effect
around one of the actors, and the camera follows him
in such a way that the Lenz flair also follows
with him and he remains enclosed in it. Whether it
was luck or intentional, it's one of the more incredible

(01:05:41):
shots I've seen because you can also do lens flares
digitally now as really fail Sun what's his name, Oh J. J.
Abrams eagerly reminds us every time he gets behind a camera.
He's a fail Sun. He's a famous Coal was like
an exec or something, and he's not a fail siun.

(01:06:03):
He's made tremendously financially successful properties. I just think is
a hack. They also ran into, let's say, a cultural
issue with rounding up extras from Page. The problem was
that all of the women of the nearby town were
concerned about leaving their homes to act in the movie
while their Native American housekeepers were in their houses. One

(01:06:24):
of them finally said, you don't understand, mister Abraham's because
you've never been around Indians. You just can't trust these
people as far as you can throw them. This woman
went into an explanation of Indians, and I thought to myself,
I'm in Mississippi. In nineteen thirty five, Producer MORET. Abrahams remembered,
you can't walk around Page without seeing Indians. They live
all over the place. It was originally Indian Land, but

(01:06:44):
the people of Page had this terribly racist attitude. Great grim, Yeah,
I thought we did escape it fitting for that production,
I guess, though I know right now. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
Eventually getting over that with some creative scheduling, they moved
on to battling the oppressive heat faced by the actors
in makeup was Charlton Heston helped by requesting a helicopter
for the cast to get back and forth from the
Fox Ranch to Arizona as ahead of the Screen Actors
Guild at the time.

Speaker 1 (01:07:12):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:07:13):
Charlton Heston was also able to push the studio to
pay the actors for time they spent in the makeup chair,
not just for shooting hours.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
Why is it interesting that they used to like they
would consider your day that start and end in front
of the camera, and even if you were doing three
hours in a makeup chair, they were or an hour
and a half to remove it afterwards, they were like nope.
And I mean Chuck is also he's pretty self aggrandizing,
as you would expect from someone who played Moses, but

(01:07:42):
he suggests that it was the first time that this
that he was like, this film was instrumental in getting
that changed, So good on him.

Speaker 2 (01:07:50):
I mean, that's just gotta be wild being an actor
on the set with the head of the Screen Actors Guild, Like.

Speaker 1 (01:07:55):
I know, right, like nice, yeah, kick back, hang.

Speaker 2 (01:08:00):
Out craft surfaces a little longer than I maybe ordinarily
would have. They're also constantly revising the actor's technique under
the makeup. Kim Hunter remembers director Frank Schaffner after seeing
some dailies, telling them, You've really got to keep those
facial muscles moving. Otherwise, whenever the camera's on you and
you're absolutely immobile or at ease listening as people do

(01:08:22):
without moving a muscle, it looks like a mask when
the camera is on you. You've got to be conscious
of keeping it moving. Roddy McDowell would, when the shoot
moved to the Fox Studios, sometimes get driven home with
this full makeup on, obviously scaring the other drivers out
of their minds.

Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
I think Abraham says in the documentary that a bunch
of the Gorilla actors did that once too, where they
were just like they were literally driving, and there was
four of them in like an Oldsmobile driving down Pch.
It must have been really one of the joys of
being on this movie, just tripping out people in your
ape makeup. Roddy McDowell also snuck onto the stage where

(01:08:59):
jew Andrews was shooting The movie Star and crawled into
her dressing room on all fours, dressed as an ape,
scaring the hell out of her. That's amazing. Only Rody
McDow cal pulled that off. Yeah, can you Oh my god,
I would have lost my If it was like a
mid sixties and a chimp crawled into my dressing room,
I probably would have shot him. Maybe that was why

(01:09:21):
Charlton Heston got involved in the NRA A protection against apes.
He glimpsed the future and was deeply worried by what
glimpsed back. I gotta do something about these apes. Do
you remember the VH one, like one hundred and eight
shocking Moments of Rock and Roll when it was like
the body Count cop Killer coming out and they just

(01:09:42):
kept running that clip of Heston reading the lyrics out loud,
it being like, die die Die, Die, Die, Die Die
pig die. I was trying to remember, like why I
had that in my head. It was absolutely from that
yep yep yep.

Speaker 3 (01:09:58):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
As you note, somewhat creepily, the actors on the set
began flocking to their own respective ape groups age groups.
I don't know if that was an intentional pun or
an actual typo Charlton Heston said, in a sort of
unfortunate choice of words, it was an instinctive segregation on set.

(01:10:19):
Not only would the apes eat together, but the chimpanzees
ate with the chimpanzees, and the gorillas ate with the gorillas.
The orangutanks also ate with the orangutangs, and the humans
we'd eat off by themselves. It was quite spooky. A
contested bit of the film.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):
Is shot at Taylor's trial, where the orangutanks make the
see here Speak No Evil signs, which was a spur
of the moment bit of onset improv Some people felt
that it derailed the otherwise serious tone of the film,
but Dick Xanik and Arthur Jacobs, also known as the
Guys who held the purse strings for this movie, both
battled for its inclusion. Kim Hunt and Roddy McDowell, however,

(01:11:01):
hated it, and Charlton Heston also wasn't a fan, but
he caved to the test audiences who loved the bit.

Speaker 1 (01:11:07):
What do you think. I think it's funny. I mean,
they might linger on it for a beat or two
too long, but it is funny. It's like probably the
purest moment of comedy, intentional comedy. It is the most
the purest moment of intentional comedy in the film. I
think it's fine.

Speaker 2 (01:11:26):
No m you disagree, considering this whole movie is veering
way too close to you know, comedy at all times.

Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
I think you got to really commit to the bit
and keep it straight faced. Yeah, I see that. I
do see that. A test audience has loved it, though,
so you know, what are you gonna do? The people
have spoken, spoken like a true cigar chopping executive apes
was important to remember that it was a total inversion

(01:11:58):
of Heston's image at the time he's playing these you know,
with that jaw in that barrel chest. He was always
playing leaders and heroes, and in this movie he's just
absolutely bodied by ape after ape after ape. He would
later remember, I didn't realize until we got into it
that almost throughout the whole picture people were chasing me
or throwing things at me, or hitting me with sticks,
or hosing me with water, or pushing me around or

(01:12:20):
tying me up. I was constantly being mistreated. I had
done a lot of pictures on horses driven chariots, part
of the Red Sea, a horse or a chariot, and
you're an important person here I'm being chased by monkeys,
for God's sakes, And believe me, even rubber rocks hurt Tah.
In his journal, he notes his stunt double on the film,
guy named Joe Cannet, after a long day of this treatment,

(01:12:42):
quipped to him, you know, Chuck, I remember when we
used to win these fights.

Speaker 2 (01:12:47):
Oh man, that's les like a cut line from Once
upon a Time in Hollywood.

Speaker 1 (01:12:52):
That's good. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And in the
ultimate indignity, they made little flesh looking booties for Heston
to wear while running around the set and dirt paths
because his character was ostensibly barefoot. And he actually got
the flu from the sort of what we mentioned on
the thing of the kind of constant yin yang of
being outside and boiling heat and then like in an

(01:13:13):
air condition setting, and he got the flu right before
he was supposed to film the damn dirty ape line.
And that's why his voice sounds absolutely like shot. And
it's not just that he's like putting his full chest
of like disgust and bile into it. It's that his
voice was like physically run ragged. He also what's also

(01:13:34):
really funny to me, what this film historian points out
in the documentary is that this was like the first
serious film that had apes in it since like King
Kong and Mighty Joe Young because like, once they had
developed the gorilla suit, it quickly became just an object
of comedy, like Benny Hill running around a gorilla suit,

(01:13:55):
and like all these b movies that were made, like
Gorilla at Large, which weirdly enough starred Raymond Burr Ann Bancroft.
So this movie was really, you know, quintessential in restoring
cinematic dignity to the mighty ape.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Raymond Burr as in Perry Mason, I guess he kind
of seems.

Speaker 1 (01:14:16):
Like seems like he track down an ape.

Speaker 2 (01:14:20):
I mean, I'm incapable of determining whether or not a
movie with a gorilla and it is supposed to be
a comedy.

Speaker 1 (01:14:25):
Slee Arvin was in it, so was Lee Cobb who
Lee J. Cobb was in on the Waterfront, And oh
he originated the role of Willie Lowman. That's why I
know that name the.

Speaker 2 (01:14:40):
Prestige drama to gorilla movie pipeline, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
Right, Yeah, And Cameron Mitchell had appeared in the movie
adaptation of Death of a Salesman and Bancroft, of course,
went on to win an Academy Award for Miracle Worker.
The Gorilla was played by George Barrows, who was acting
a gorilla suit specialist. You can believe it or not.

(01:15:04):
He often is this is this This is the first
draft of his wiki article. He often wore a gorilla
suit for his film roles. Excluding his gorilla roles, Barrows
usually played bit parts in films and was rarely credited
for his work. Oh, he built his own gorilla suit
for Gorilla at Large.

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):
That's how to make sure. That's how to future proof yourself.
Build your own gorilla suit.

Speaker 1 (01:15:28):
He also played a gorilla in an episode of The
Incredible Hulk. Yeah, Oh my God. Gorilla in the movie
Hillbillys in a Haunted Place, Baby gorilla in a Baby,
the gorilla in The Man from Uncle Hill, Gorilla in
the Beverly Hills I'm Not Done. A gorilla in The
Beverly Hills Billies, a gorilla in The Adams Family something,

(01:15:49):
a character called Monstro, the godzilla in the nineteen sixty
six film The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini.

Speaker 2 (01:15:55):
Oh, that's a classic beach party movie. Yeah, that's the
last of the Aipe beach party films. Yeah, it seems
like that's when he really doubled down on the gorilla thing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:03):
I mean, wouldn't you. I sure would. You're known as
the gorilla guys. Get me, the gorilla guy. I've had
enough with your cheap, second string non union gorillas.

Speaker 3 (01:16:17):
Get me.

Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
George Barrows. A gorilla shaped phone lights up in his
house where he's been sitting. He's been sitting motionless, like
like Puddy and Seinfeld, just like alone and motionless in
his apartment. The ape phone lights up, and he turns
toward it, and he's like, at last a reason.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
He's in the entire gorilla suit except for the head. Yeah,
pulls the loaded gun out of his mouth. I'm sure
he was a lovely man.

Speaker 1 (01:16:43):
Ah, what sound does the gorilla phone make? You're not
going to get me to do a monkey impression on this,
although it is well. I'll talk about that later. There
were a few different versions of the Statue of Liberty
scene being bandied around. Apparently quite a few people involved
in production thought that Taylor should have been wounded by
the Apes in a final confrontation and just die in
front of the Statue of Liberty after his big moment,

(01:17:05):
which I think would have enhanced the film like a peta. Yeah, yeah,
just it'd be better if he was cradled by an
ape in front of the statue liberty zero. Yeah, yes,
actually that kind of I agree with you. That's a
better ending. Come on. It's funny because Heston refers to
the He refers to it as the speech that I
wrote and actually had to battle for the use of

(01:17:28):
God to stay in there. He made an edge case
that it wasn't being used as the profanity damn, but
as his character Taylor literally imploring God to damn all
of humanity to hell. I mentioned Heston's journal earlier and
it is so hilarious. He describes the weather one morning thusly,
the fog didn't creep in on little cat feet. It

(01:17:50):
squatted sullenly on the sand all morning. That sounds like
something out of a good day for banana fish or
something like aw. Yeah. In the documentary Behind the Planet
of the Apes, we see how the shot of the
half buried statue was achieved. They basically just blended a
matte painting with the existing rock structures for the far shots,

(01:18:13):
but they also wanted to have an anticipatory shot that
would be seen from the POV of the statue, essentially
as Taylor and Nova approach on horseback. So what they
did there was just build a seventy foot scaffold. Again,
this is over the beach and the cliffs and the ocean,
and then they built a half scale paper mache model
of the statue of Liberty's head and just shot the

(01:18:35):
camera angled downwards above it. I think it was Jacobs
who said in the documentary he was like, we built
this whole thing in my first ad. Or the cematography
guy was like, I'm nearing seventy I'm not getting up
on that thing. And then like three other people refused
to do it, so it was just came down to
Frank Schaffner and I think Dick Jacob's on top of

(01:18:56):
this seventy foot scaffold. Our man Jerry gold Smith turned
into Score planned into the Apes. Score is pretty standard
orchestral stuff, big orchestral things inspired by like Stravinsky and
bar Talk, but it's notable for its use of bizarre
percussion instruments. They used like metal mixing bowls and lots
of different ethnic percussion liberally treated with echoplex. You can

(01:19:20):
hear this best during the chase scenes. The chase scene
early on where it's like peak bomb, like all these different,
very weird percussions stuff. And that was because they had
a guy named Emil Richards who is like one of
the most legendary percussionists of time. I guess he played
with Charles Mingus and George Shearing. He toured with George Harrison,

(01:19:42):
recorded with Frank Sinatra, Frank Zappa, Doris Day, Judy Garland,
Steely Dan, and Sarah Vaughan. And this is what's really interesting.
He was interested in pitched percussion, and so he subsequently
spent time with Harry Parch, who is this insane outsider
figure in twentieth century music. Parts was concerned with working
outside of the Western tempered scale, which music theory wont.

(01:20:06):
Alex's music theory wont corner. The way that there are
standard eight tone scale works is by squashing the frequency
ratios that naturally occur with certain frequencies, right, like they're
in non tempered tuning, they're even ratios, right, And then
going back to Pythagoras, he invented this tuning system where

(01:20:28):
the intervals between the frequencies are made uneven, they're like
three to two instead of So what that essentially does
is cram too many notes into the seven tones. Of
the major scale, the route through seven and then the octave,
and so a bunch of different guys from Harry parts
on were like, no, that's not the way they should sound.
And that's what just intonation is is a tuning system

(01:20:50):
in which you get an instrument and adjust its mechanisms
to be able to play outside of this tempered scale.
And on the guitar you have to move the frets around.
On a piano, you have to retune it. You can
technically do it on a fretless instrument, like you could
technically play with just intonation on a fretless instrument, but
you Harry Partsch and early experiments with this just had

(01:21:12):
to build their own instruments. Parch had this one thing
build out of like trash and tuned bits of metal
that could play a scale of forty three tones. And
he was also homeless for most of his life. He
would literally hobo around America with his collection of instructions
for how to build his instruments and how to maintain
these systems, and Emil Richards just hung out with this guy.

(01:21:34):
Richard's other credits include the bongos on the theme song
for Mission Impossible. He finger snapped on the Adams Family theme,
and that is him playing xylophone in the theme to
The Simpsons. I just love that. I love how much
work and varied experience that these session guys could get
in their careers. Some of the ape sounds that you

(01:21:54):
hear in the score are played by a Brazilian instrument
called a kuka, which is a pitch drum that has
like a rod basically inserted through the bottom and up
into the backside of the drumhead. And by pushing on
this rod and rubbing the drumhead, you can create these
weird pitch variances in the tone of the drum. And

(01:22:16):
the way it's used in Brazilian music is to as percussively,
and you can hear it American is just can best
hear it in Me and Julio down by the schoolyard.
So all of the little in the background of me
and Julio are this instrument, the kuika, and they used
it in Planet of the Apes to make like ape

(01:22:36):
pooting sound effects that they mix into the chase scene. Anyway,
Alex's sound theory corner over.

Speaker 2 (01:22:43):
Your interpretation of a Quico is so much better than
Me and Julio down by the school yard.

Speaker 1 (01:22:49):
I probably just gonna leave it with that. There's a
really funny there's a great live Miles set at Isle
of Wight. It was filmed really beautifully and it's with
like a combination of the Bitches Brew and some of
the other bands that Miles had around the time. It's

(01:23:09):
chick Corea, Jack Johnett, Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland is on bass.
Gary Bart is playing soprano sax an airto Morieira, who
is a percussionist with Return to Forever actually his wife
saying on the return of the Forever some of the
Return to Forever stuff. Is playing a kuika at one
point and it looks it's like you kind of have

(01:23:32):
to like fist it because like the drum is, it's
hollow on its bottom, and that's where this rod gets inserted,
so you have like a wet rag to or something
to like scrape along the drumhead as you're like rhythmically
sort of penetrating this thing. It's deeply bizarre and he
is heavily on acid in that performance. It's really a

(01:23:54):
funny thing to watch. There's different close up of him
where he's clearly like watching things that are not actually there.
Great performance, everyone look up Miles Live at the Isle
of Wight.

Speaker 2 (01:24:06):
As the actors prepared for the tedious task of looping,
which is re recording dialogue filmed live that was deemed
unsuitable in the final print, they were all surprised to
learn that the ape makeup actually hadn't stifled that much
of their dialogue after all, though the few lines they
did have to redom meant they had to partially reape
up again in order to make sure their voice would

(01:24:26):
sound consistent. Actually, Charlton Hessen and the astronauts were the
ones who had to do the most post production dubbing, because,
as Hesson himself contends, Apes was the first movie to
use radio mics, and the quality of the new technology
wasn't good enough. One other dubbing story, the actor who
played Julius Buck Cartillian actually wound up having the dub

(01:24:47):
his entire role over again, which sucks.

Speaker 1 (01:24:50):
He the ape who's smoking a cigar? Oh oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:24:53):
He had the dubb his entire role over again because
the studio had over dubbed him with five or six
other actors, decided none of them worked and went back
to Buck.

Speaker 1 (01:25:02):
Why did they do that. I guess they found him
but intelligible or like something. I mean, they wanted to
redub his whole performance, which happens, like Mee. Gibson's whole
performance in the first Mad Max is overdubbed by an
American guy. I didn't know that. It's just funny to
me that they did this like four or five times,
and they were like, yeah, we can't find anything better.
Get Buck to go it and redo his entire part

(01:25:23):
that we surely had to race by this time. When
the film was released in the spring of nineteen sixty eight,
it immediately became a hit. Pauline Kale called it quote
one of the most entertaining science fiction fantasies to ever
come out of Hollywood in her New Yorker review.

Speaker 2 (01:25:38):
And Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars,
calling it very understated review much better than I expected
it to be. It is quickly paced, completely entertaining, and
the philosophical pretensions don't get in the way.

Speaker 1 (01:25:52):
That was what an early review sixty eight. If you
get along he's been when he was at that, he
was at the Sun Times, then wow.

Speaker 2 (01:25:58):
Audiences agreed with Rout. The film was a box office hit,
earning a lifetime domestic gross of thirty three point three
million dollars, and was nominated for two Oscars Best Costume
and Best Score, aside it from John Chambers Special one
for Makeup.

Speaker 1 (01:26:14):
It lost to both competitive Oscars. So that's that's sad.
But due to its release in the most turbulent year
of a very turbulent era, it gained the level of
allegory that baffled its creators, who were clued in by
none other than Sammy Davis Junior. Sammy Davis Juniors like
the nineteen sixty eight equivalent of what's jaw thin? Well,

(01:26:38):
I mean, yes, I understand the bit that you're referencing,
but they didn't go to him. They read the No
I know, I know the story producers, you short, cell,
sweet Sammy Davis ja jaw Rule. Have you ever seen
Sammy Davis drum or sing or dance or do anything? Yeah,

(01:26:59):
jaw Rule looks like a US compared to him, I
mean a Pots compared to him. Was the Putts probably period,
But yeah, it wasn't detigrading Sammy. It was just not
the person I would have thought for pop cultural criticism.
You just watch how you how Sammy Davis Junior's name
comes out of your bitch ass mouth. Produce keeps sucking it?

(01:27:19):
You want to keep sucking eggs through that eye hole
when when Frank's and I just say or else it's
it's curtains for you guys.

Speaker 2 (01:27:27):
It's a ring a ding ding for you bozos. You'd
about to knock it with that Sammy Punk.

Speaker 1 (01:27:35):
Only I get to say bad things about Sammy Friend
of the Pods, Sammy Davis Jr.

Speaker 2 (01:27:41):
We bestow upon you a posthumous honor of Friend of
the Pod.

Speaker 1 (01:27:44):
He wins the greatest posthumous honor anyone ever. Could we
see you, Sammy, and we wish better for you? Okay, anyway,
getting how Sammy Davis Junior clued in the producers to
the deeper meaning of Planet of the Apes. Produce, there's
Arthur P.

Speaker 2 (01:28:01):
Jacobs and mort Abrams were at a restaurant in London
where Sammy was already eating. He knew Arthur Jacobs, and
he came over to the parent too enthusiastically seeing the
film's praises, ending with and it's the best statement film
of the relationship between blacks and whites that I've ever
seen on film. Jacob's immediate reaction, he recalled, was I
didn't know what the hell he was talking about. He

(01:28:23):
assumed that we were conscious of this as an allegorical
treatment of the relationship between blacks and whites.

Speaker 1 (01:28:28):
It never occurred to any of us, really, I mean,
I don't think they had the astronaut. I'm not sure
if they had a single black person on the set. Wow. Yeah,
good work, guys. That's one of the stronger arguments for
diversity in the workplace I've ever heard. Yeah, yeah, there's

(01:28:50):
a really I took out this really awful thing from
Chambers where he was like the makeup guy. Yeah. At
some point was mentioned that all of his makeup tests
were done on Asian people. Uh, and he was like,
I mean I just did it that way because they
have such small noses and big eyes and and apparently

(01:29:13):
he said that the head of the NAACP came to
who was an actor like, came to him at one
point and was like, you know, why don't you, like,
why aren't you hiring more black people for this film?
Or or had heard that there's this big budget thing
that black people were not being hired for. And Chambers
was like, I just need guys with small noses, and
then he phrases it's something. There's a quote from him

(01:29:34):
in the book where he's like, and I made a
promise to the guy. I just wanted to say, if
there's any black out there who has a problem with this,
you know, he can come right to me. And I
don't want to offend blacks at all. It's just kept
digging himself deeper.

Speaker 2 (01:29:47):
And I don't get that they used to I'll do
that thing they used to measure phenology, and I'll measure it.

Speaker 1 (01:29:52):
He's like the skull, I just used skull calipers. I
took that all out. But this is really funny when
you think of the racial implications of this movie that
the makeup artist was just so tenered about that. Thanks
to its end the succession of sequels, the film lodged

(01:30:13):
in the pop consciousness for long enough to become a
permanent cultural touchstone, and in two thousand, of course, two
thousand and one, the same year of Tim Burton's Misbegotten reboot,
it was selected. The original was selected for preservation in
the Mother Trucking United States National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress for being quote culturally, historically, or esthetically significant.

(01:30:39):
I just get so hyped on the United States National
Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Have you ever
gone the Library of Congress. I feel like we should
make a field trip. No, I haven't. I'm an avid
user of its rights free photo collections and design things.
They have an incredible archive online that's just like free
to and some of the photos are so fascinating. Anyway,

(01:31:00):
our album for our band, one of our album covers
was from there, right, if not several, yeah, yeah, at
least two of them. Yeah. Anyway, Obviously Hollywood and couldn't
leave this thing simply there having made all this money,
and talk of a sequel quickly picked up. Eventually. They
also made a TV show, Unanimated series, plus the four

(01:31:22):
theatrical sequels, Total comic books Tim Burton's Remake, and the
reboot series that are currently running, which will be four
strong by this summer. A lot of apes out there.
The TV series, though, at least gave us Fox's merchandising
an ad campaign, which is twentieth century Fox wants you
to go Ape with an ape doing the classic Uncle
Sam point. It's one of the best ad campaigns I've

(01:31:44):
ever seen. It was a coincide with the TV show,
and they also had like sixty different companies licensed to
crank out three hundred different kinds of Planet of the
Apes merch which the film historian who's quoted in the
documentary says like pre dates the Star Wars merchandising blitz
and maybe even paved the way for it.

Speaker 2 (01:32:05):
Only fourteen episodes, though, yeah, I did not do well.

Speaker 1 (01:32:10):
So that's all insane.

Speaker 2 (01:32:12):
But of course why would we cover any of those
because none of them are as good as the original.
But the lead up for the first sequel, the Planet
of the Apes does have one interesting bit, which is
that they went back to Rod Serling for it and
also the French author of the original book.

Speaker 1 (01:32:26):
Pierre Buell.

Speaker 2 (01:32:27):
Producer Arthur Jacobs told Cinema Fantastique, we didn't plan any
sequels in the first one, but it became so successful
that Fox said you must do.

Speaker 1 (01:32:36):
A sequel if he can come up with one.

Speaker 2 (01:32:38):
First, I went to Pierre Boull to write the screenplay,
and he did write a treatment for a sequel titled
Planet of the Men, but it wasn't cinematic Bull's treatment,
which you recall was titled Planet of the Men, featured
Tailor leading and uprising against the Apes, fourteen years after

(01:32:58):
the events of the first So he would have he
was like, it was middle aged in the first film.
He would have been like sixty yeah, Booll told sin
a fantastic They accepted the treatment that I worked on,
but they have made so many changes that very few
of my ideas were left. It was completely different from
what they finally used on the screen. He didn't particularly

(01:33:19):
like writing a screenplay and ultimately said, in his French way,
I played the game, but my film was never made
and I don't even want to publish it and it
will never be.

Speaker 1 (01:33:33):
Spoke a cigarette and glasses, staring at a window, rain
splattered Parisian window, shirt unbuttoned to his waist, an underage
child in bed next to him. No, sorry, I am
not in tarring all of the French's pediasques, just many
of their most important cultural figures and politicians. Rod Serling

(01:33:54):
then heard from the producers, have you ever seen the
lemon incest video? Of course, want to tell our listeners
what that's all about. It depends how much is French slandering.
You'd keep in the final edit of this but Serge
Gainsburg in bed with his real life then twelve year
old daughter, Oh yeah, I forgot about the age thing too.
Yeah yeah, And they're underpants and like top shirts.

Speaker 2 (01:34:18):
Set to the melody of Friedrich Chapone's twoed up ten
number three Incredible. As an adult, Charlotte Gainsberg routinely defended
the song. It's lyrics, written by Serge Gainsburg, describes an
incestuous relationship between him and his daughter Charlotte, the latter
of whom sings in French the love we will never

(01:34:39):
make together is the most beautiful, the most violent, of
the purest.

Speaker 1 (01:34:44):
I should have a meme of that video and then
like send it to the French social account. That's like
from black Panther, like is.

Speaker 3 (01:34:53):
This your King.

Speaker 2 (01:34:55):
Charlotte denied claims that the song was actually about insets,
saying that although the song uses the word incest, her
father was quote just talking about the infinite love of
a father for his daughter and of a daughter for
her father.

Speaker 1 (01:35:08):
Weird people, man. So back to the Planet of the
Ape sequel. Rod Serling then heard from the producers he
called an interview printed in the pages of Marvel's Planet
of the Apes comics, which I have seen. There is
a fool PDF scan of this issue out there.

Speaker 3 (01:35:25):
Well.

Speaker 2 (01:35:26):
Serling told Planet of the Apes comics producer Arthur Jacobs
offered it to me the sequel job from London, and
I remember spending two or there dollars on a phone
conversation about what we do with it. The sequel, we
literally got into the hydrogen bomb and the resurgence of
civilization over the Apes, and we very much plugged the
concept of the apes desperate fear of the humans because

(01:35:47):
the humans repeated what they'd done before, which essentially was
direct the Earth. As it turned out, I couldn't do
the script when Arthur wanted it done. I was on
another assignment, so I didn't have the remotest connection with
the approach. Jacobs eventually went with what did what he
was doing? That's a shame?

Speaker 1 (01:36:02):
Uh, let's tick a look um? He was doing television
commercials in the seventies, probably paid better. Yeah, now, he wrote.
He was back on radio by nineteen seventy three, and
his final hit Dude, his final do you know this
about Rod Serling? His final radio performance was a forty

(01:36:25):
eight hour long rock concert with who It reunited the
Beatles among one and it was completely imaginary, uh, but
it was like it used live records, crowd noise, interviews,
other sound effects as like a hoax. Whoa, that's cool,
and Serling hosted it and did like the radio bumpers. WHOA.

Speaker 2 (01:36:49):
God he was only fifty when he died in nineteen
seventy five. Cheesus w Jaane Smoker baby oh man Wow,
three to.

Speaker 1 (01:36:55):
Four packs of cigarettes a day. Wow. So unfortunately we
never go out a Rod Serling Penn's Planet of the
Ape sequel instead.

Speaker 2 (01:37:03):
It was written by associate producer mart Abrams. Never good
idea when the producer writes he's the ideas man, He's
the ideas guy. And a guy by the name of
Paul den Dan, you say, is a British writer who
is no slouch. He'd written Goldfinger, Okay, all right, and
two John mccarr adaptations, and his last script was an

(01:37:23):
adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express for
Sidney Lumet, which was nominated for an Oscar. It lost,
but it lost to Godfather too, so it's okay, but
damn he loved these apes. He would go on to
get a credit on every Abe sequel.

Speaker 1 (01:37:43):
The sort of world weariness like flat affect you put
into that. But damn did he love these apes? That
was my favorite line reading I've ever done on the
show Boogaloo until we puke. Well, Jordan, do you have
anything to have anything to add to the to the
Apes buddy? We still don't know why that's such a

(01:38:06):
funny word. No, never, never, some linguist can. We'll VEMOI
your five bucks. Some linguist wants to write in and
tell us why it's so inherently hilarious. Uh oh wow, folks,
We've gone as far as we can at the original
plan of the Apes, and we are unwilling to go
further down the madness inducing sprawl of its legacy, which

(01:38:27):
means we're at something of a stale mape hold for applause.
We can only hope that this episode spurs you to
go on your own exploratory mission into the world of
the Apes, where in the end you'll at least be
armed with the knowledge to tell them authoritatively to finally
get their stinking pause off. You folks. This has been

(01:38:49):
too much information, too much inform Mapes shun the real
apes were the friends we made along the way. And
I'm Alex Heigel and I help and I'm Jordan run Talk.
We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a

(01:39:13):
production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown
and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael
Alder June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by
Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with original music by
Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like
what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review.
For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(01:39:36):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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The Planet of the Apes (1968): Everything You Didn't Know

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