Twister: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone,
and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the
show that brings you the secret histories and little known
facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more.
We are your maestros of meteorology movies. You're wizards of

(00:21):
wind related wise words, your hosts who prove it's possible
to both suck and blow at the same time.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
My name is Jordan Runtagg. That last one was a
Simpsons reference.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
But is it?

Speaker 2 (00:32):
I think it is. I think it is. But my
question is how did you not get anything in there
about hot air? Oh you really left that one on
the table? Oh wait, you sense your sense is of
spiraling scentileae gonna be a great one in the edit, folks.
And I'm Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
Now, folks, something very special happened recently. We had a
little bit of TMI kismet. Last episode we taped Van
Hayle nineteen eighty four, and Heigel mentioned wanting to do
the nineteen ninety six disaster drama Twister because Van Halen
had done a song for the soundtrack, and I mentioned
wanting to tackle a topic that involved a Dutch person

(01:13):
because the van Halen's are Dutch and they have a.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Lot to answer for.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
So I put this idea out of my mind until
I saw a trailer for the upcoming Twister sequel, Twisters,
during the Super Bowl, and I thought, this is a
sign we gotta do Twister. And then I realized that
Twister was directed by a Dutchman named Jan de BoNT.
So all in all, we have no choice. This was
the universe telling us it was time to do Twisters,

(01:38):
So here we are.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
I loved this movie as a kid.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
It's just one of those perfect, well made nineties action movies.
Lots of practical effects, great performances. It's like a sturdy truck.
It's like a sturdy truck in the movie that gets
picked up and thrown around by the wind. That's how
I see this movie. Haiga, What do you think of Twister?

Speaker 2 (01:57):
It's good. I mean, you're right about that. Yon Dubont
is a very wonderfully I don't want to say workman like,
but he builds things that stand well you know speed,
I mean speed, speed dude. He was He's really just speed. No,
because he was a he was a cinematographer on a
lot of stuff. He worked on die Hard, So anybody

(02:20):
in October, Yeah, anybody, Joe, Yeah, yeah, anybody who anybody
who had a handed die Hard is you know, it's
okay by friend of yours. Yeah, any yon, any yan
who worked on die Hard is a yawn of mine.
You know, I actually like meteorological phenomenon are not like
a pet project of mine. So I think I saw this,

(02:41):
and you know, I saw the cow and I went, yeah, Okay,
it's a good one. I mean, it broke up Van
Halen and it got Fleetwood Mac back together, so again,
can't be all bad.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
How are you feeling about the sequel? You're excited? Do
you think you'll see it?

Speaker 2 (02:58):
I think it's priceless. Hollywood is so bankrupt that they
finally just literally did the Jim Cameron writing an s
over Alien but making him the ship the dollar sign,
like how I mean they already did it with Predator,
they did Predators, but my god, like just stunningly. Uh yeah,
this is where we are happy twenty for twenty four, Baby,

(03:19):
follow an empire. Let's do this.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Both former cast members wanted to do this and take
an active interest in it. Both Bill Paxson and Helen
Hunt wanted to write and direct a sequel, and neither
of them could make it happen for themselves. So that's
what I find so infuriating. And then they went with
option three somebody and I. We'll talk about who it
is later.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
I'm not very excited about it. I like the original
so much. I'm worried that the sequel is going to
be a disappointment. So this is a rare pessimistic take
from me. Dude, did you ever see Frailty, the Bill
Paxson movie that he directed. Yeah, No, it's pretty good.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Actually, Like it's not like, you know, it's not The Exorcist,
but it's like for Bill, and he's great in it,
so I'm like, shim' too. Yeah, he's like a end
to that man's town. I love Bill. We're gonna talk
about this more. I love Bill PAxx. Yeah, man, I
mean we didn't deserve him, No we didn't. And uh yeah,
I really truly think that like he could have. We

(04:15):
should have given him Twisters too. Who like watching that?

Speaker 1 (04:18):
You know?

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Well, also to talk about let's dive in.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
From the nightmarish, injury filled set to the time Bill
Packson won over an entire town, the insane Dutch director
who had physical altercations with his crew, and the bizarre
animal noise is recorded to make that horrific wind sound.
And I'm not talking about Sammy Hagar heo. And of course,
lest we forget the secret history of Philip Seymour Hoffman's balls,

(04:42):
here's everything you didn't know about the film Twister. Hilariously,
this movie was green lit without a script, which I mean,
I guess kind of makes sense because I just I
remember snapshots of it people being chased by a storm

(05:04):
and that's kind of it.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
So that makes all the sense in the world. Respect
to the woman whose name is about to come up,
because she's been in the target of a lot of
misogynous stuff for her involvement in Star Wars. But Ohtain
King Kennedy.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Yes, she works with the legendary special effects company Industrial
Light and Magic. Who I mean that was George Lucas's company.
Did he found that or did he just work with them?
I think so, yeah, it wasn't. He didn't he found
it to explicitly to make Star Wars the stuff stars,
That's what I thought. Yeah, So the folks at Industrial
Light and Magic put together a proof of concept visual

(05:40):
effects clip to show the folks at Warner Brothers featuring
early computer generated imagery of a pickup truck driving towards
a tornado, which was at that very moment spinning around
a tractor with one of the tractors tires snapping off
and smashing through the truck's windshield, which I think was
later used for a scene in the film Twister. As

(06:00):
industriallyton Magic producer Kathleen Kennedy told Wired in a twenty
fifteen roundtable discussion, the minute we took that shot.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Into the studio and they saw it, they said.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Done, we want to make it. We didn't even have
a script yet.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Which for a guy who studied four years of screenwriting
at NYU is like a dagger to my heart. I mean,
ILM just quick shout out to them. They are like,
literally it is a perfect name. First of all, what
a great name, good good, Yeah, one of the I
mean George lucas Man when he was when he had
when he was on he was on Yeah, God bless him.

(06:33):
You know. The just the number of firsts that they notched,
and like obviously up until like the nineties, there's a
lot of you know, there is a lot of stuff
that's just like first use of emotion controlled camera, which
is in a New Hope actually, and oh, you know,
first fully computer generated character in Young Sherlock Holmes in
nineteen eighty five, they did the first morphine sequence in Willow.

(06:55):
A lot of it is compositing, a lot of it
is stuff like that's less less interesting, but like the
way that they've actually been there at every step of
how we render animals and humans on screen, and you
could literally see them do it in like ten years
of real time. Like the first thing that they did
was the thing in James Cameron's The Abyss, like the
the pseudopod creature that later became the T one thousand

(07:17):
and then you know, Death becomes Her Actually is also
a huge milestone in that because that was the first
one where they attempted just the texture of human skin
rather than just have it be like a sort of
matte a matt thing. And then they kept racking up
different ways of using their technology. Jumanji was the first
computer generated CGI hare and fur for the digital lions

(07:40):
and monkeys. Dragon Heart was like the first fully computer
generated main character that was before Star Wars that was
ninety six. The Mummy was the first time that they
had done a computer character that had a full anatomy
by layers so you could see him rot. And I
remember when I was we did The Mummy, I was
watching some of the the scenes stuff and they were like,

(08:01):
this was not a fudge. Like we didn't we didn't
half ask this where we would just like we figured
out how, you know, guts would look through someone's skin
falling off. We like built a human layer by layer
and then made them rot, which is sociopathic, but you know, incredible,
all this, you know, all this mocap stuff. So yeah,

(08:24):
big shout out to ilm baby. I don't know how
new effects you are.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
That's a whole film research that I never really see myself.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
Movie. I just love movie magic, you know.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Well, now we're going to get into the words, which
is more my my my realm, my area of expertise.
The idea for what would become Twister made its way
to Steven Spielberg, of course, who hired Michael Crichton, the
man who had written the novel behind Spielberg's recent blockbuster
Jurassic Park.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
Did he write the script for Jurassic Park? Two or
just the novel. I know he wrote the novel and
Lost World, but I think he might have been adapted
because the guy who did Jurassic Park is just back
for something else. David kemp ah Okay helped with Crichton,
but Michael Crichton man.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
He also wrote the book that Westworld's based on. He
also created the show Er.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
Which I don't think I realized. Hm, that's insane.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
But Michael Crichton came as a package deal with his wife.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
When it came to writing the Twister screenplay.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
Her name is Anne Marie Martin, and together they were
paid a reported two point five million dollars and that's
nineteen ninety six money, so that's closer to four million
dollars today, which made Twister the most expensive screenplay ever
written at the time. And Crichton said that the two
basises for the script were a PBS documentary about Stormchasers,

(09:39):
which we'll talk about in a moment, and also the
plot of the romantic comedy His Girl Friday, where our
newspaper editor and his ex who is engaged to another man,
do one last job together, and that has been a
wife duo. They were the only credited screenwriters on Twister,
but the script was heavily reworked by a number of
Hollywood script doctors, including Joss Whedon, friend of the Pod

(10:02):
Joss Whedon.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
No, he's not, take that back. I know, I know
he's not.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
He was paid a one hundred thousand dollars to work
on the script for a few weeks until he came
down with bronchitis and had to take a break, or
so he said. So they brought in Steven Zallion, who'd
written the Oscar winning Shindler's List and also a clear
and present danger, who was also paid one hundred thousand
dollars to tinker with it, and hilariously exactly none of

(10:28):
his contributions made it into the finished film. He would
later say, for three weeks, I wrote scenes and fax
them to Oklahoma. Well, the film was being shot unbeknownst
to me until much later. Every page I sent was
completely ignored because the director was perfectly happy with the
script he already had. The production company was not. Anyway,
The point is, there isn't a word I wrote for

(10:48):
Twister that actually made it into that film. Cash that check, buddy,
nicely done. Joss Whedon would return, but then he left
the production to leave for his honeymoon. He'd say, I
turned to my last pay on June twenty fourth, nineteen
ninety five. That's the data got married. I had to say,
I hope you like this because I'm leaving the country
now for my honeymoon. And he would take a tepid

(11:10):
view of Twister in later years, saying there are things
that worked and things that weren't the way I intended them.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
Wo wo. Let me ask you a question, what's that?
Because we also talked about wasn't Armageddon that had like
nineteen credited twelve credited writers on it something like that.
I think so. Yeah, that was like the most that
we had had on a movie that we've done. As
you mentioned, you wasted a portion of your life studying art.
What generally is the separating line for something to go

(11:41):
to for it to be taken into like WGA arbitration
versus like a punch up versus just like a paycheck job.
Is it come down to the individual being like I'm
comfortable with just taking the check and walking away, or
is it them being like, no, I have a stake
in this, I'd like to escalate it. And that's when
the WGA gets involved. You know, I think it's the former.
I don't really remember. I think that we were I mean,

(12:02):
in my program, I think we're mostly focused on just
you know, I mean, you know, it's like just the art. Yeah,
well yeah that turned out for you, buddy.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
And nobody teaches you how to pay taxes or anything
like that. It's like, yeah, we were focused on storytelling
and not like, yeah, how to get an agent, or
how to sell things or how to not get ripped off.
So yeah, we didn't really spend a lot of time
discussing those finer points of the business. So I bet
I'm pretty sure it's more of a case by case

(12:32):
like I feel good about this, this is what I
think should happen. Okay, interesting, can I claim things? Do
you want to claim that you co wrote someone Twister?

Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah, go for it. Knock my stulf.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
Out putting that in a Twitter buyer co co render Twister.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
I'm just start telling people I do uncredited punch ups
on things. That's actually kind of a funny bit. Anytime
somebody mentioned something, you're like, oh, yeah, I did an
uncredited punch up on that, Like anytime one of these
like people were like oh.

Speaker 1 (12:59):
What's your favorite movie of all time? In one of these,
you know, a fi jerk offs, just like probably City Lights.
You're like, oh, I did an uncredited punch up on that.
That's like the cinematic equivalent of getting one of those
like Universal Life Church doctorates. Yeah right, and then goung
around and saying that you're a doctor. He gus, what
doctor Hunter s Thompson did.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
I know definitely several people who have done that. You
can also become a necromancer, which is much cooler. That's
someone who raises corpses from the dead. Oh, I thought
it was people who have sex with corpses. I was like, yeah,
you could do that, and you should. Golf swing great
for commercial how we're trying to get who were trying
to get paid for this People magazine? We have some notes, guys,

(13:41):
chemistry is great. Love the topics. She jokes about necro necrophilia,
but also fewer jokes about necromancy. And I walk because
I got my principles, nothing else, he said, shaking a
prescription drug bottle. There's one adamant left in it, nothing else. Petty,
I got my prince. What are you talking about? Oh?

(14:04):
This is actually this is my favorite part.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
They got a script doctor who was I think chiefly
responsible for punching up what they termed the car dialogue.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
This guy Jeff Nathanson. He would later explain, I had
to write dialogue for the cars like look out and
Bill comes and get out of the way, which is
a class I missed in the NYU screenwriting department. Oh
what a magnificent industry.

Speaker 1 (14:32):
I'm sure he got six figures for that too. However,
after Twister was released, screenwriter Stephen Kessler declared that he'd
written a screenplay called Catch the Winds years earlier, and
Twister had stolen his work without permission or payment. Kessel
took Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton, and the studios Waterer Brothers
Ain't Universal to court over the matter, demanding profits from Twister.

(14:54):
The makers of Twister denied Cressler's charges, and he ultimately
lost the case. But he wasn't the only screenwriter to
claim that Twister plagiarized his work. Another writer, Daniel Perkins,
sued over claims that his script Tornado Chasers Little on
the Nose had been ripped off get his matter was.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
The matter was.

Speaker 1 (15:11):
Settled out of court, with both parties agreeing to keep
the details of the settlement confidential.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
Why do they do that? Here's not a business question
for you, okay. Is it like an industry settlement where
they like the classic fight club thing, where they do
like calculate the cost of a recall versus the cost
of a claim like civil action or lawsuits, so they like,
you know, let's just go without craft services for like
a week and throw this guy fifty grand to get
away from us. Is that literally, like, is there an

(15:37):
accountant whose job it is to just crunch that has
to be right? Oh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think that.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
And I think a lot of the like we don't
speak about this is probably just like look, I hate you,
but just go away. Yeah, And like, I think it's
literally the legal equivalent of let's never speak of this again.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
Oh yeah, oh dude, NDA's or nuts. I mean, I'm
probably violating one right now several. But let's talk for
a moment about the real non disclosure agreements, Segway. Let's
talk about the real life Stormchasers that this movie is
based on. We mentioned that the script take some of
its inspiration from a PBS documentary Your Tax dollars at work,

(16:16):
and I'm not saying that sarcastically. No. Yeah, and the
writers consulted with actual scientists to make sure this film
was as accurate as possible. In the movie, Intripid heroes
have a machine they called Dorothy, which is designed to
get sucked up into a cyclone wind tunnel to release
a number of sensors which help measure what's occurring within
the storm, which would aid in advanced detection techniques and
save more lives. Dorothy is based on a real machine

(16:39):
called TOTO I see what they did there, or Totable
Tornado Observatory. It looks again surprisingly similar to the mechanism
that you see in the movie, with a unique barrel shape.
Toto required two researchers to use it, placed in the
back of a truck bed and a special apparatus just
like what we see in the film. There was a
ton of potential risk with these researchers lugging around Toto.

(17:01):
It was decide that it was a metal barrel and
they were dragging it into windstorms. It could have been
struck by lightning and uh. They could have also just
been picked up and thrown around like that poor cow.
Because of how close they had to get to the
tornado to actually launch it. The closest the researchers ever
got to really using it as it was intended was
in April of nineteen eighty four. Oh man, they heard

(17:22):
they heard jump, and they heard you know what, might
as well jump? That was it? That's cannon now?

Speaker 3 (17:29):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
You know the way that the internet works. I truly
hope some like poor fingers to the bone in turn
who works for like I don't know, the AI division
of BuzzFeed dot com is doing like thirty things you
didn't know about twisters and that that fact gets picked
up like ten years from now in the in the
post apocalyptic nucleus land, we're all getting content feeds into
our neuralink and it's just like according to the podcast TMI,

(17:53):
the people who invented the technology depicted and Twister were
inspired by Van Hanlan's for a single jump, I will
be a happy, happy, irradiated corpse. Where was that? Yes,
Steve Smith and Lou Wicker of NSSL Jordan. What's that?

(18:14):
National Storm? Severe severe storms.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
Laboratory Steve Smith, Steve Smith and Low Wicker of the Okay,
I just like thought I had Steve Smith and Low
Wicker of the National Severe Storms Laboratory attempted to deploy
TOTO in Ardmore, Oklahoma, but the machine didn't have the
right center of gravity to withstand the extreme winds. Sounds
like this, does any of us? That was my first one,

(18:39):
And then I was gonna say, like, sounds like a
cracker barrel.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
I went to an Oklahoma r my one with my
right folks like, hey, neither of us are working at
our best. Here the TOTAL homepage shows pictures of the
device lying comfortably on its side after the last failed attempt.
Total's retirement occurred because of how large and potentially dangerous
it was he used so close to a deadly tornado.
It was apparently never successfully deployed, and was retired in

(19:05):
nineteen eighty seven, nearly a full decade before the release
of the film, which sort of bore its name.

Speaker 1 (19:11):
Per Wikipedia, theay we all be retired without ever accomplishing
any film or accomplishing anything useful.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Initially, Steven Spielberg had planned to direct this movie himself. Instead,
he busied himself on pre production for another Michael Crichton
joint Jurassic Park two, The Lost World. But even so
Spielberg remained on as executive producer. Among the other directors
considered for Twister were his good pal Robert Simchis of
Back to the Future Forrest Gump, who framed Roger Rabbit

(19:40):
death becomes her contact cast away. Wow, that's amaze. But
he had a great.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
A sin against God, Press press that god awful CGI.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
There was John Badham or is that's probably his British
name here we call him John Badham Adam United. Next
up for Badam United? Uh, John Badam, director of your
beloved Robots Struck by Lightning and gaining sentience movie short circuit,
great movie. Here's our boy Jimmy Cameron, who instead opted

(20:18):
for a pretty good investment called Titanic. Could call him
that one, Jim, You're my boy. I mean sorry, so
is the guy who ultimately wound up directing Twister. But
we'll talk about that. Yeah. There were some reports that
Tim Burton was in talks to do this, which I

(20:39):
absolutely cannot see. Dude. The Danny Elfman score for Twister
would have been so obnoxious. What would it sound like?

Speaker 3 (20:47):
Boom boom boom, boom, bom boom boom boom new bombs.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
But Ultimately, the man who won out was our boy Yondbant,
the recent director of Speed, Jan Dubont, whose name said
he said the entire time much like a track call
quest and who's the director? Wolf King Peterson of of
uh never antarge boat, never ending story and a large
playing one large plane for us one. Yeah, God, we've

(21:24):
got a size thing here? What kind of size queens here?
At TM I lose another sponsor, just going down the list.
Jan Debant had been working as a cinematographer for twenty
five years before he directed his first feature. As we
mentioned earlier, he was the DP director photography on blockbusters
like Die Friggin Hard, The Hunt for Red, October Kujo

(21:48):
before Speed put him on the map, top of the
shortlist for Hollywood action directors The Bus that Couldn't Slow Down.
He got the job on Twister after he left Hollywood's
first attempt to make an American version of the iconic
Japanese monster, the Only One Godzilla, My boy man. PSA
to anyone who listened to this who has any interest

(22:08):
in Godzilla stuff. If you haven't seen Godzilla, mine is one,
go out and fix that, you dummy. It's an incredible
movie and Man. Did Yon avoid a bullet because that
American Godzilla. I watched that in movie theater with my dad.
I think it was like back to back, like we'd
like a year after each other. We did that, and
like Batman and Robin and those really crystallized my bit

(22:29):
my they robbed me of my boyhood notion that movies
could be not good.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
When Star Wars too, was the Star Wars around the
same time the new Star Wars.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
Yeah, but I was twelve, so I was like fine
with Phantom Menace, like Godzilla and like Batman and Robin
as like a ten year old. I was like, is
this legal, Like you can make a movie that's that's bad? Popa,
was this a bad movie? Yes, We've done this bit
before and yes, and he was like yes. That was

(22:57):
to his credit, he was like, don't ever do this
to me again, because when we saw Godzilla, but Yon
signed on, he helped develop a script that would have
cost two hundred million dollars in nineteen ninety two money
he signed on to do Godzilla, that was what that
would have cost. Oh yeah, So the initial script for
Godzilla was projected when Yon signed on at two hundred
million dollars or four hundred and forty million dollars today,

(23:19):
or roughly what they paid for that last Indiana Jones movie.
The studio TriStar decided that this was not going to happen,
and when they failed to agree to Yon's budget, he
walked and said, if I can't do Big Lizard, I'll
do Big Storm. I'll do Big Wind. No Large Wizard
for Yon, Large Wind instead. Godzilla would eventually ask me,

(23:40):
all know it got made by Independence Day director Roland
Emeric in nineteen ninety eight, and we will never speak
of it again. One of the funniest bits about that
movie is that the next time Toho did a Godzilla movie,
they made a point of having the American Godzilla get
killed in like a laughing like like a version of
that character, like just like it's like swatted off screen
and like die embarrassingly. It's just like, no, we're gonna

(24:02):
spend the extra couple million, yeh, just to just to
make our statement here.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
Spielberg pitched the idea to dubond as a grim fairy
tale where the monster comes out of dark clouds.

Speaker 1 (24:14):
Yeah, right, Spielberg, That's that's why, that's why he's Spielberg
that's why he's the goat.

Speaker 2 (24:19):
Help tall is.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yandbon prices right Roules, I must say five foot seven.
He shoved the camera assistant like into a mud puddle,
so I'm assuming that he's he's gotta be.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
I've seen five to ten. But you know he's Dutch,
so we'll take off a couple of inches. But blut
clutched his tiny little fists. I'm sorry. Just go ahead,
have anything, and now let's move on to casting.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
Among those up for consideration of the role of the
female lead in Twister, no Doctor Twister. No one remembers
the names of the characters in this movie. It's just
it's Twisterrette, It's hell On Hunts and Christina.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
No, no is that close. It's doctor Agent. Joe Harding
is doctor Agent Twister, Doctor Clarice Twister, Doctor Agent Clarice, Twister,
Twister Starling. Eh.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
Clearly, clearly movies have been greenlit on lest someone get
me into Get me into McGee's.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
I don't know. I'm so far out of the loop.
Who even makes this garbage? Get me into Kevin Figey's boardroom,
and I'm just gonna write on his dry risk board.
Twister meets silence of the Lambs. It's gonna be like,
good little Hunting. You're just gonna like leave an incredible
pitch on somebody's blackboard and they're gonna try to like
track down who it was, Get me that drunk janitor.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
What else you got. It's like the Other Sister meets
Air Force Wan, there's a whole idea of like what
if we just did like prestige things meets like night
He's like absolute, it is idiocy, Like the Other Sisters
really good, I mean fine is like, uh, you know

(26:07):
that one of the few truly excellent jokes Kevin Smith
has made is good will hunting to Hunting Season. Yeah, yeah,
that's good stuff. As you meditate on that, we'll be
right back with more too much information after these messages. So,

(26:35):
the lead character in Twister, for anyone who doesn't know
this is probably most people, doctor Joe Harding. They were
considering casting Laura Dern, who'd been in Spielberg's Jurassic Park,
which would have been great, but I guess coming so
soon after Jurassic Park. Yeah, they considered Bridget Fonda and
Kate Mulgrew.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
I don't know Kate Mulgrew Oh my god, it's Captain
Janeway from uh cutric Voyager. Kate mulgrew would have been right, man,
Jane Way. Yeah yeah, that would have been cool.

Speaker 1 (27:03):
Oh yeah yeah, but Helen Hunt is also cool. She
was Yon Deband's first choice for the role, apparently because
he wanted a serious actor rather than a movie star.
He was drawn to the fact that Helen Hunt had
done a great deal of stage work, including a role
in a nineteen ninety production of The Taming of the
Shrew done in Central Park alongside Tracy Ullman and Morgan Freeman.

(27:27):
I had no idea about No one thought it was
a good idea to have a TV actress with some
Shakespeare background to anchor an action flick.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
But yeah, because her TV thing was mad about you,
I feel like you just omitted that in any of
Was that just to be assumed? Yeah? Ok, sorry, my mistake,
my mistake, Helen Hunt would later tell Entertainment Weekly. Everyone
was telling him you can't put an eighty million dollar
movie in the line because Helen has to go back
to her TV show in August Yalan was like, I'm
doing it.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
Dubont actually liked the fact that she wasn't well known
for her film work.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
He would later tell The Morning Hall big stars get
in the way of the movie.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Also, he felt that Helen Hunt had a certain stormy quality.
I wanted Helen because she reminds me of a whirlwind.
Yon dubonn added she can boss people around. She has
a strong persona, which I like. Hilariously, Helen Hunt wasn't
interested in the part at first, saying I just didn't

(28:25):
know what I could really contribute acting wise, but she
changed her mind when Debaunt and Spielberg took her to
lunch at the Ambulance Entertainment Offices to do Twister. Helen
Hunt ultimately passed up working with John Travolta in John
Wu's Broken Arrow, which I assume was quite the sacrifice.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Was that a good movie?

Speaker 1 (28:43):
No?

Speaker 2 (28:44):
But John Who's cool? Okay okay man.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
Hilariously, Hunt would claimed that one of the people doing
rewrites on the Twister script was also a story editor
on That About You, and together they both worked on
rat tat Ram Commie dialogue between her and Bill Paxton's
character and her trailer, which is why I would say
that the relationship in this movie is a cut above
nineties disaster movie for sure.

Speaker 2 (29:09):
They have a good good chemistry, good dialogue. It works.

Speaker 1 (29:12):
And speaking of Mad About You, production on the fourth
season of the show was delayed two and a half
weeks when the Twister shoot ran long, and I realized
that Paul Riser like created that show and I assume
like own a stake in it. So he was the
one getting a call being like, helln's gonna be late. Sorry,
but he was gracious about it. What's his appeal?

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Couldn't tell you.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
He's like Billy Crystal with like the less likability. I
was gonna say, just like somehow more palatable towards women.
But hmmm maybe threatening, Yeah yeah, no, edge less smugging.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
H well, yeah, you know that's a check in my column.

Speaker 1 (29:55):
And now to the undistinguished man in Twister, doctor William Bill,
the extreme hearting who's Joe's estranged husband who is seeking
her signature on the divorce papers. The original choice for
the role was who else? Tom Hanks, who has a
near perfect record when it comes to nineties movies, fantasy casting,
every movie we've talked about on here, When Harry met

(30:17):
SAALLYO that's eighties hook, I believe I just so many
movies he's his first call for like twenty five years.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
Also considered were your beloved Kurt Russell. Hell yeah, how
do you feel about that?

Speaker 2 (30:29):
It would have been amazing? Are you kidding me? Just
like dude, he's good in anything if you just put
him up against an unbeatable, unidentifiable odd and have him
just set that jaw withd had done five hundred mili
foreign and domestic great highest grossing film of all time.
How do you feel about Michael Keaton, who was also considered.

(30:50):
I love Keaton.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
Keaton's good at Batman because he's squirrely and weird and
they don't actually make him fight at all.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
But like a, here's nothing about that man's screams action
to me?

Speaker 1 (31:01):
I mean, nope, Well I guess what Bill Paxon, Now
you're right, I guess Bill Paxton.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
Come on, man to that day. At this point, he
had been killed by an alien, a predator, and a terminator.
That's a great trivia question. Yeah, that's like a pub
trivia like typeated question. Right, Yeah, that's really good. That's
really good. Well, he actually speaking of which got the gig?
Bill Paxon? That is got the gig on the recommendation
of James.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
Cameron, who, as you mentioned, worked with him on Aliens
and True Lies. And this is where I'm legally obligated
to remind listeners that Bill Paxon both waived at JFK's
Motor Kae the day he was assassinated in Texas and
dove on Titanic with James Cameron. And this pretty much
makes him my hero. This makes you my new best friend.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
If you want to one up anyone who thinks they
got you with that Paxton question, if you're like, hey,
do you know the only actor who's been killed by
you know, an alien, predator and a Terminator, and they're like,
du Bill Paxson, do you want how to flex them?
And be like, do you know the makeup artist that
links all of those? Oh, Stan Winston, Baby, Predator and Terminatory?

(32:08):
Do something else we did? I mean almost everything was
on book. Yeah he was.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
Paxton had just started alongside Tom Hanks and Apollo thirteen,
and the clothes that he wears in Twister are supposedly
the same ones that Hanks selected for his wardrobe when
I guess he was doing tests for Twister. I'm quite
sure how that works, I guess Hanks went further along
in the uh in the process than a boy be imagined.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
Paxson would later recall his brief from director Jan Debond.
He kept asking, how close can I put you to
one of these tornadoes? That's all he wanted to talk about.
I'm thinking, oh boy, we'll all be killed. He was
not wrong.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
We'll get more about the incredible danger the actors were
in when making this movie. In a little bit but
still casting. The production initially wanted Mira Servino, who.

Speaker 1 (33:04):
Was fresh off her Oscar wind to play the part
of Bill's fiance, the high strung therapist Melissa Reeves. Or
maybe she's normally strung and being put in an insane
situation being dumped in the middle of a tornado zone, so.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
I scratch that.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
But unfortunately, Jan Dubant wanted Mira Servino to dye her
hair brown, presumably to telegraph the differences between her and
Helen Hunt's character, who was blonde, but Servina refused, and
so she was out in favor of the brunette actress
Jamie Gertz. I don't know much about her. Helen Hult
would later say that the original version of the script,

(33:41):
she was given had much more sniping between her character
and this girlfriend character, which, as we all know, is
an old, tired trope. Helen Hunt told Vulture for the
twenty twenty piece Helen Hunt Answers every question we have
about Twister. There was a draft that I saw where
the women were sort of catty with each other. I
didn't at that point know that I had a feminist agenda,

(34:02):
which I do. I just knew that it wouldn't be
fun to watch and I didn't want to play it.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
The technical term would be yucky.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
I just raised my hand and said there's a better way,
and nobody said, no, you have to do it that way.
Good for her, that's funny. I didn't know at that
point that I had a feminist agenda.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
Here quotes are great.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
Her quotes could like almost be read in like a
Gratcho Marx, like, yeah, no, she's really funny. So they
narrowly avoided one old screenplay trope, but they did not
avoid the stereotype of having a rich British jerk as
the villain. We were talking about doctor Jonas Miller, the
storm chasing rival of Joe and Bill, and if I recall,

(34:44):
they had all worked together at some point, and then
he went and got corporate sponsors or some kind of
dirty money that he used to build a knockoff version
of Bill Paxton's Dorothy Idea.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
I think that was how that went.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
Anyway, The part was offered to a pre House Hugh Laurie,
which I that would.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Have been cool. I would have liked that. Yeah, especially
if you got to play piano at one point in
the Twisters.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, that's been funny. He's a great piano player. Man,
he's an incredible piano player. I know him play piano
and everything.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
It's you or I love Hugh Laurie, But no, you're
actually he's English. You know that right. I'm I'm worried that.
I'm shocked. I love you.

Speaker 1 (35:20):
A couple of bits of Frian Laurie when I was
at home my parents. Oh it's a real good bit
of Frian Laurie's incredible. The Jeeves and Wooster might be
too English for you, but I loved Uh.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, No, this wasn't an invite.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
Incredible episode of House where Dave Matthews is the guest
and uh and he plays her.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
Awful.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
Dave Matthews is like some kind of savant who can
immediately play on the piano whatever he hears, and so
he starts like playing all this complex stuff and yeah,
it's a great episode. Anyway, Hugh Laurie did not get
the part of a bad guy in Twister.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Neither did Alec.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
Baldwin, who would have been an it's ridible, the very
different choice. Ultimately, they went with Carrie. I still can
never say his name. Carrie elw was the guy from
The Princess Bride and Robin Hood Mennon tights.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
We just watch Liar Liar. Oh yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
Wow, he was the bad guy and a lot of
they just needed someone who is like a rogue.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
They just needed someone who is like just handsome enough,
because he's like not he's like not Brad Pitt Hansom
where you're like, my god, put it away, man. But
like you look at him, I mean he's obviously beautiful
as Wesley, but like in Liar Liar, he just like
looks like a vaguely handsome dude who they just make
him like the most annoying guy in the world. But yeah,
he looks a lot like who's the schwashbuckling actor Eron

(36:38):
that's why Aeron fly, that's why he was casting Princess Bride. Right. Oh, yeah,
you're right.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
He's also like a British nepo baby too, is he?
His parents are richer fantous one of the two.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
Are you just saying that because he's English?

Speaker 1 (36:50):
I mean, it's more more statistically likely than not. Over there,
let's see, it's.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
On his Wikipedia page. I remember looking this up at
one point. Oh yeah, portrait painter dominic ELA's father an
interior designer and socialite Tessa Kennedy.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
Whenever they put your profession as socialite, yes, that's usually
a pretty big red flag.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
One of his relatives is the British minor John Elws,
who is the inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge and a Christmas Carol.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
Wow, that's a great thing to have in your family tree. Yeah,
I'm related to the biggest literary prick of all time.
So that's the bad guy.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
And now we're gonna go to the goodest guy of
this whole movie, Dusty. I didn't know his name, but
you definitely know Philip seymour Hoff.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Have a drink. Wow, the lovable.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
Yeah, the lovable slacker of the storm Chasers, apparently Garth
Brooks was potentially offered. He was offered a role in Twister.
Some sources have said it was Dusty.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
The part that I ultimately went to Phillip Seymore Hoffmann.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
I've also seen reports that the role that Garth Brooks
was offered may have been the Bill Paxton character, which
makes a lot of sense. I can kind of see
that they both Bill Paxson's text and I don't know
where Garth book's from, but could very well be Texas.
I could see him playing the lead in Twister.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
Also, I've seen.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
Reports that Garth Brooks was offered the role of the
villain in this movie. I'm not sure specifics on the
roll are vague, but there's not years later in a well.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
No, it gets better. The fact that Garth.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
Brooks was offered a role in Twister at all came
out years later in a lawsuit filed against Garth by
his longtime business partner, and in the suit, his ex
business partner claimed that Steven Spielberg had spent Garth Brooks
the script for Twister, but quote Brooks passed on that film,
saying the star of the film was the Tornado and
Brooks wanted to be the star.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
God that's so funny.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
He also, allegedly, according to the suit, turned down a
role in saving Private Ryan, supposedly for a similar reason
the war is the star. At any event, the role
of Dusty went to Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and then later
asked about his reasons for taking the role, Phillip seymore
Hoffman told Esquire, I was living in la at the time,
and I knew that if I took that job, I'd

(39:09):
be able to move back to New York. Don't know
why that is, but so it was. This is probably
more of a me thing, but my brain accidentally swaps
him and the Harry Stoner dude from Titanic. I guess
I'm getting my rough around the edges, Bill Paxon adjacent
technician characters confused.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
Well with or without the presence of one Garth Brooks.
Shooting began in nineteen ninety five. The original plan was
to film Twister in the United Kingdom in California, two
areas not usually known for the tornadoes or ones that
resemble the American Midwest in really any way, shape or form,
but director Yan debonn insisted on shooting on location in Oklahoma,
boasting that this could be the last great action movie

(39:51):
not shot on a sound stage. Yeah, not not far off.
They filmed all over the state, but the main location
that they chose was the small town of Kita, population
three hundred and forty four. Serves as the hotewn It's Hotown, Hotown.
It serves as the hometown of Lois Smith's character Meg,
which gets leveled by an F four tornado. The town

(40:14):
was chosen because there had been a hailstorm two years
earlier that destroyed many of the homes. Many remained simply unfixed,
and there was still debris laying everywhere. Producers purchased and
then leveled eight blocks of existing houses, as well as
flattening thirty homes that had been built for the shoot.
Greatest industry in the world Baby. Apparently the destruction of
the town was so convincing that an unrelated video crew

(40:35):
flying overhead landed their helicopter down to investigate. That's like
in coolhan Luke, when they created a prison camp so
unappealing that it was the state took notice of it.
I was like, guys, that's right.

Speaker 1 (40:50):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
Given the size of Wikita, production became a town wide affair.
Bill Paxton fostered goodwill, as he did everywhere, by busting
out football soon after arrived and tossing it around with
the locals. Many of the residents signed up to be extras,
earning the princely sum of one hundred dollars a day.
The town was tiny, but mighty and filled with civic pride.
The resident's main concerns that the film would have featured
a sex scene, which they thought would reflect poorly on

(41:15):
their town. To sit the town from footlots, yeah, we
don't have sex here in Wikita. The locals insisted on
the town's name being used, and one citizen even requested
that they include a shot of the water tower with
the word Wakda painted on the side. Despite the wanton
acts of emotional terrorism that the director inflicted on his actors,
which will cover in a moment, relations were warm between

(41:37):
the production and the citizens of Wakita. Locals interviewed by
the Oklahoman noted that the crew did an excellent job
of clearing up the rubble and even planted new trees
in appreciation. The town later opened a Twister Movie museum
staffed by volunteers. It's free to visit and features props
including one of the Dorothy machines, bricks from the wrecked buildings,
and a Twister branded pinball machine donated by Paxton himself.

(42:00):
The actor reportedly donated numerous hand just the pinball machine.
That's what did it for you? Huh? It to us?
It's so good the action. The actor reportedly donated numerous
objects over the years, including the football mentioned earlier, each
with a handwritten note. But that's not even the most

(42:22):
heartwarming aspect of the film's Oklahoma based production. They were
shooting when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred, and when they
received word, they suspended production so that the cast and
crew could assist with recovery efforts.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
I'd just like to add that the Twister Museum also
has a five block walking tour included of different sites
where they shot around town.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Have you been never in Wikida? Check it out? Have
you been there? No? Just this is the best sponsor
I could get, Wakita, when you're here, your family literally.
Production moved to Iowa's the season's changed and these shoots
were not easy due in large part to the weather.

(43:02):
Recalling the experience of The New York Times nineteen ninety six,
director Yan Debamt said that he and the three hundred
and fifty person crew were up against the floods and
the actual tornadoes that beset the state. It was like
nothing I've encountered in my life, he said. We kept
getting stuck in mud. The whole thing was like a
moving circus around dirt roads. This coupled with what have
been described as the battalion of wind machines artificially generating

(43:25):
two hundred mile per hour gusts of winds, made life
less than pleasant for the actors in the film. As
Yandeman onomously added during an interview with The Morning Call,
when they added rain to the mix, he said they
didn't have to act anymore. Stunt doubles were rarely used,
and though the actors used earplugs, they did not use
eye protection. After every shot, someone would come around with

(43:47):
the viazine. Hunt later explained general dryness, redness, and irritability.
Clear eyes. That was their tagline, right, I think so
We're not the only eye injuries that occurred on set.
Both Hunt and Paxton were temporarily black, and when giant
set lights burned their retinas, Paxton Tody w those lights
were like sunballs. They had to pump light into the

(44:08):
cab to get exposure down to make the sky look
behind us look dark and stormy because it was too
bright outside. And these things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I
got back to my room, I couldn't see for two days.
They needed to use eye drops and wear spoke glasses,
and still there were more eye injuries. Hunt and Paxxton
spent several hours shooting a scene in an irrigation ditch,

(44:30):
which they soon dubbed the irritation Ditch got their asses.
The wind in the rain blew mud and dirt and
filth into their eyes, requiring them to get hepatitis shots
just to be on the safe side. Bill Paxson had
just wrapped filming on Apollo thirteen, which required that he
be flown in the zero G, creating KC one three
five weightless Trainer, also known as the Vomit Comet. But

(44:53):
according to him, Twister was even more of a slog
as he asked readers of the Morning Call, I mean,
what would you rather do? Throw up or be hit
in the head real hard but a piece of ice. Well,
let's ask our listeners, hago would you rather do? How
BIG's the ice.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
Hmm, I'm gonna say like softball, softball, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Probably throw up. I really hate throwing up. Yeah, it
means you can get another meal. Jesus Christ. Hunt had
an even worse time due to the repeated head injuries
she suffered on the set. During the mud scene, she
hit her head on the bridge while they were hiding
under it and the seemer she opened the car door
while driving through a cornfield. The door simply swung back
on her and domed her in the head. She would

(45:32):
describe the shoot to Entertainment Weekly as brutal. Director Jan
Dubant was unsympathetic when asked about Hunt's frequent injuries, one
of which reportedly led to a concussion. He had this
to say of his leading lady, I love Helen to death,
but you know she can also be a little bit clumsy.
Hunt had some choice words for him when she heard this.
The guy burned my retinas, but I'm clumsy, perhaps needless

(45:54):
to say, they did not work together again. Her quotes
is too It's good.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
It's like you read them like ratcha Mark's guy Bury
Rat doesn't I'm clumsy like that.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Guess what's the matter about you? Thing?

Speaker 1 (46:05):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (46:06):
Yen bon as really too earlier. It was kind of
a not guy nice. He was in the great piece
of in the set. A member of the crew, remember
what's the was it? No, I can't say that because
Jim when when Jim Cameron gets mad, Midge comes out
and when gets mad Nadge, it's cutting it close. Members

(46:27):
of the crew felt the director was quote out of control.
Matters came to a head five weeks into the shoot
when he struck a camera operator in anger for blocking
a complicated shot involving wind machines and pushed him into
the mud. His relationship with the director of photography, Don
Burgis also deteriorated, with the director angrily calling them all incompetent.
As a result, Burgus and the tire twenty person camera

(46:49):
crew quit in protest, like in the Midnut, Like the
casts were shocked, like they just walk off the set.
Burgus would later claim that Dubaun didn't know what he
wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction
with all the equipment behind the view of the camera,
and then he wanted to shoot the other direction right away,
and we'd have to move everything, and he'd get angry
that we took too long, and it was always everybody
else's fault, never his Debont, for his part, denied calling

(47:11):
the team incompetent and explained to Entertainment Weekly that he
pushed the assistant in about to frustration with the wind machines.
It was very loud, he said, so the crew had
to watch my hand signals a cute action, and he
walked right in the middle of the scene. We kept
losing good performances because of stupid things like that. I
don't think I'm a hothead, but I do believe you
have to be passionate. These crews get paid well, and

(47:32):
when they screw up, I'm going to call them on it.
Cinematographer Jack and Green and his crew took over, but
then Green was hospitalized with an injury from an onset
accident when a hydraulic house set used in the scene
in which Joe and Bill rescued Meg and her dog
from her tornado destroyed home in Wakita. The house designed
to collapse on cue was mistakenly activated with Jack Green

(47:53):
inside of it. A rigged ceiling hit him in the
head and injured his back, requiring him to be hospitalized.
I feel like I've had a dream about my house
eating me before, so that sucks for him. At that point, Devaunt,
a former cinematographer, took over his own director of photography
for the rest of the shoot, which I think was
at least closer to the end of it than the beginning.

(48:14):
The environment became so hostile that, according to sources, crew
members considered printing T shirts emblazed with the director's favorite
expletive fing hell shit. That's almost as good as on
when Ridley Scott was making Blade Runner and he gave
an interview saying complaining about American cruise and how they
were upperty and British crews would simply say yes, Governor

(48:36):
and get it done, where American crews wanted to argue
with you. So the American crews all got T shirts
that said yes Governor, like a whole cottage industry.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
Wasn't this something on Titanic too, of like disgruntled cruise
passive aggressively making T shirts for sure?

Speaker 2 (48:52):
So good.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
And now for a different kind of violence. Philip Seymour
Hoffman's balls. Yes, there was this scene where Phillip Seymour
Hoffins's character claud and Shorts and other slacker attire laughs heartily. Unfortunately,
when he does so, he lifts a leg and one
of his testicles pops out of his shorts.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
This shot was included and early cuts the film until
someone mercifully.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
Caught it, and as a result, the CGI team, who
already had their hands full with you know, all the
tornado stuff, was called into digitally erase psh's offending balls,
thus avoiding on our rating to this otherwise PG thirteen
movie release the ball cut. I wonder if I mean

(49:35):
everybody's got their turning point right? Who do you think
that was? That ended a career? Some guys like real
jazz working ILM.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
And John Debond storms in like we got you, we
need you to a digitally erase H Philip Seymour Hoffman's balls.
I think the guy went home and rethought his life,
went to work on an oil rig.

Speaker 1 (49:58):
Is a cigar chopping executive reading the line items for
all the CGI work.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
What's this one? Five grand to erase Simo Hoffin's balls.
I paid for those balls. Balls are gonna win him
an oscar someday. We didn't get Garth Brooks, we keep
Hoffman's balls.

Speaker 1 (50:21):
It's one of the best uses of the cigar shopping
executive we've had in a while.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
That was not the only last minute change to the film.

Speaker 1 (50:29):
The prologue scene, in which Joe witnesses her father getting
sucked up into a cyclone as he desperately tries to
hold the door to their storm shelter, was added at
the very last minute. It's a classic filmmaking technique to
provide backstory and motivation for the main character, allow Jodie
Foster losing her astronomy loving dad in contact. Initially, they

(50:49):
shot a nightmare sequence which was going to be intercut
throughout the film in order to give insight into the
haunted state of mind of Helen Hunt's character, but they
realized during editing that this didn't really work, so they
hastily wrote an introductory scene and shot it during last
minute reshoots. The young version of Helen Hunt's character in
these scenes is played by Alexa Vega, who went on

(51:10):
to appear in Spy Kids Millennial Childhood Favorite Spy Kids.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
Did you know that I love this?

Speaker 1 (51:19):
Alexa Vega married a guy named Pina Vega, so she's
now Alexa Pina Vega.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
I thought that, but wouldn't it be Alexa Pina Vega Vega.
I know, I think she that's what I thought. I
thought maybe the guy's name was Pina, and so she
just like had an irrational phobia of hyphens, so she
just smashed the two names together. But no, that's like,
that's like you if you changed your name to like
Alex Sakhaigel or something, who's a Sack. I don't know,

(51:47):
somebody if he married somebody that had the last name
of Sack, and you were you Echi Sakamoto deceased Japanese
minimalist composer Reuichi Sacramoto. It was this is not really
an It was a bad comparison, But isn't that weird?

Speaker 1 (52:01):
Like somebody had a really specific last name and then
they married somebody who Okay, it's.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
Like Julia Gulia and wedding singer, right, oh yeah, yeah, okay, okay,
wonder if i'll leave that. I thought we'd get more
mileage out of that. I'm gonna be honest. I thought
that one would pop more.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
One of the most striking moments in Twister, aside from
the Cow, which I assume we'll talk about at some point,
is the scene at the drive in movie where Stanley
Kubrick's The Shining is Playing and.

Speaker 2 (52:38):
The Ringers retrospective on effects used in Twister, which you
should really read.

Speaker 1 (52:42):
You would love that piece Igel Industrial Light in Magic's
Ben Snow said that he was desperate to work on
this specific scene. He said, we wanted to project the
image of the film onto the tornado itself.

Speaker 2 (52:54):
And it's so great. It's of course the here's Johnny
scene and you've got Shelley Duvall freaking out.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
I get the knife being plunged in. It's so wonderful,
and Yon de BoNT said, let's use the shining. It
was a dream come true scene. You had to take
the film footage, it converted into little texture maps and
then project that, which was quite an accomplishment back in
nineteen ninety six. Bizarrely, I love this. In nineteen ninety six,
the year Twister came out, an Ontario drive in theater

(53:21):
was destroyed by a tornado mere hours before a scheduled
screening of Twister. This incident later evolved into a myth
that the Twister actually came when the movie Twister was
being screened, which sadly was just an urban legend. But
it gets weirder on May tenth, twenty ten, the fourteenth

(53:42):
anniversary of Twister's release in the United States, a tornado
destroyed a farmhouse in Fairfax, Oklahoma, where numerous scenes of
the film were shot. The house that was used in
the movie Twister was destroyed by a twister on the
anniversary of its release. I think that's crazy of the hall.
A former Oklahoma state senator named Jay Barry Harrison commented

(54:04):
that the tornado appeared eerily similar to the fictitious one
in the film.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
That was a deep state hit and I actually did that.
I killed that guy. He's alive. He gave a quote
that joke, didn't lurk um. Where were on the topic
of classic Hollywood films that were helmed by abusive directors
who made life hell for their actors, All all the
shining and Twister itself. There are several other references to
movies with nightmarish productions slipped into Twister. For example, the

(54:32):
oil truck scene flying around the tornado bears the same
name ben Thic Petroleum, which is the company in James
Cameron's underwater epic The Abyss, where Ed Harris has taken
a blood oath to never speak of the making of
that film again because it was so horrendous, Like didn't
he kill someone doing that production? Someone was? Yeah, like
someone was like clinically dead. God, Jim Cameron man the

(54:58):
greatest of all time. You're talking about a Nietzsche and
uber Mensch in the Pursuit of Art.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
Director in the world Baby, the name of the instrument
package Dorothy is Did you really feel it was necessary
to put this in, Jordan? Do you really feel necessary
to call attention to the fact that Dorothy is a
character of The Wizard of Oz, a film that revolves
promably around tornadoes.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
Folks? Hey, everyone, everyone listen to too much information. Jordan
wants you to know this really specific and obscure fact
the fuck out of my podcast. You're sicken me. Aunt
Maggie's watching the movie at the time the tornado hits
her house because that wasn't on the nose enough. And

(55:44):
Young Joe's Cairen terrier is the same breed as Toto
in the Judy Garland movie classic whimsical production of Golden
Age Hollywood, where Judy Garland was fed more pills than
nineteen fifties British housewife and sexually assaulted by little people
let's talk about something more uplifting. Cows ly uplifted? Okay, Hey,

(56:09):
arguably the funniest scene in the movies when the cows
come flying through the air and a stunned Helen Haunt
can only offer a play by play cow another cow,
and then Bill Paxton with one of the all time
great grips. I think that's the same cow. The effect
was obviously achieved through CGI. I do you remember the
movie theater SETI Stand Ease that came out in the

(56:31):
lobby that had the cow like jutting out of the
of the post. Oh, I remember seeing those. Funnily enough,
that cow is actually based on a zebra from nineteen
ninety five's Jumanji.

Speaker 1 (56:42):
Yeah, it was like in the way CGI works, they
have like a standard shape or something gets alted.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Yeah, hoofed model to base it on us. But the
cow was inspired by real events. During an interview with
VFX Blog in twenty sixteen, visual effects supervisor Stefan Foungmir
said it was based on actual real occurrences. Farmers after
a tornado had gone through were reporting finding their cows
miles and miles away from the field where they had

(57:09):
last seen them alive. They lived. I guess, well, he
didn't specify.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
I'm choosing to believe no, because I don't want Peter
to pant our podcast read.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
So I'm gonna say that they survived. If Peter painted
a pod of pickled pepper podcast pink, how much wood
would that would? Chuck? Chuck.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more too much information.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
In just a moment. On the topic of special effects,
we should talk about the wind. No, not Warren Zvon's
elegaic last record, a devastating monument to slowly dying and

(57:58):
putting one last stamp on the world before your exited,
but the actual wind. In Twister, we already talked about
the wind machines and the jet engines that blue gusts
of more than two hundred miles an hour that provided
the look for the wind, But the sound of the
wind was achieved by using the unorthodox method of manipulating
a recording of a camel's moan and mixing it with
a lion's growl and a tiger's snarl. I love that stuff, man.

(58:20):
The second silence of the lambs, where they're like mixing
whale sounds and stuff into the submix just to be like,
this is going to sound like hell. According to author K.
Davidson's book Twister, The Science of Tornadoes and the Making
of a Natural Disaster Movie. To make new and different
wind sounds, they constructed a box filled with chicken wire,
stuck a microphone inside, and placed it on top of

(58:41):
a car. Then they rolled the car downhill, turning the
engine off so that it wouldn't interfere with the sound recording.
That rules. That's like David Lynch's buddy Alan Splett oscar punchline,
Alan Splett trailblazing sound designer Alan Splett being like off
grid because he was in the remote highlands of Scotland
recording wind. That's freight. We used to be a proper country.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
And speaking of going downhill, we must talk about the
soundtrack of this movie, which features less than stellar work
from two gargantuans selling bands of the seventies and eighties,
Van Halen and Fleetwood Mac.

Speaker 2 (59:17):
Most of Fleetwood Mac that wasn't technically Fleetwood Mac.

Speaker 1 (59:20):
Hilariously, the Twister soundtrack reunited one of these musical partnerships
and destroyed the other. Oh Hi, you got to talk
about van Halen This is this is so you well,
as we mentioned in the just episode of the episode
we just did about van Halen's nineteen eighty four, van
Halen was on their second front man, Sammy Hagar at
the time, and they contributed the song humans Being is

(59:42):
I can't say that humans being Yeah, it's like a
it's a wordplay, right, but it's.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
Really stupid wordplay. The band had just gotten a new
manager who happened to be Alex van Halen's brother in law.
Family in business, never a losing combination. Sammy Hagar didn't
get along with him very well, and especially didn't appreciate
his suggestion that the band cut into their badly needed
post tour break to record this song for a Bill

(01:00:10):
Paxton movie about the Wind. Eddie and Alex were eager
to do it, but Sammy wanted to take some time
off to recuperate and spend time with his wife, who
was just about to give birth. Eddie and al went
right into the studio, Hagar claimed in nineteen ninety seven.
They said they had to make money, but I said, WHOA,
were you crazy? We're not hurting for money. I wanted
to spend two months with my new baby, then make
another record. But Eddie said, I'm frustrated because you never

(01:00:32):
do what I ask you to do. To be fair,
that was the same reason he was frustrated with David
Lee Roth. Sammy claims that they pressured him into recording
the new song human Being Humans Being. What theck is
the name of this song, Jordan Humans Being? Okay? Sammy
claims that they pressured him into recording the new song
humans Being for the soundtrack, but the sessions were painful

(01:00:56):
all the way through. He wanted to record the vocals
in Hawaii, where he and his wife were staying as
she prepared to give birth to their baby, but the
band wanted him to record the vocals at their fifty
one to fifty studios in LA and it took him
three separate trips to La to nail it down. I
was a reminder, fifty one to fifty studios is in
Eddie Van Halen's backyard, making matters worse. At the last minute,

(01:01:16):
Eddie scrapped another song that he and Sammy had been
writing together, a ballad called Between Us Two. These are
just worse and worse huh yeah, yeah, requiring Sammy to
come back once again and extend humans being to make
it longer with a paid by the man. I know,
I was trying to figure that out. Yeah, I don't

(01:01:38):
really understand. Maybe it was I don't know, I don't know. Well,
he came in an hour and a half before his flight,
wrote two new verses, banged out the additional recordings, and left.
Then it turned out the band required an additional song
after all, and Eddie tried to get him back to
finish between Us two again. Sam He refused, and the

(01:02:00):
Van Halen brothers recorded an instrumental instead, a chain of
events that would ultimately lead to Sammy's departure from the band.
Details of the final split are with anything in the
Van Halen mythos disputed, but it apparently ended up with
a phone call on Father's Day nineteen ninety six. In
Eddie's version, he called Sammy and read him the Riot Act.
If you want to make another record or do another tour,

(01:02:23):
you've got to be a team player. Van Halen is
a band, not the Sammy Hagar show, Not the Eddie
van Halen, Alex van Halen or Michael Anthony show, he
recalled an interview with Guitar World Sammy apparently responded by saying,
I'm fing frustrated. I want to go back to being
a solo artist. Eddie thanked him for his honesty, and
with minimal fury, supposedly said, well, you can't be in

(01:02:46):
a band and do that too, so see you, and
so Sammy quittna huff to go back to being Sammy Hagar. Sammy, though,
disputes this version and said that he was fired and
adding insult to injury, he said he was horrified by
how quickly that they brought David Lee Roth back into
the band to complete the two new songs for the

(01:03:07):
nineteen ninety six Greatest Hits compilation, which was, if I
recall correctly, in and of itself, a giant sticking point
because when they renegotiated the creation of that, they like
everybody got a higher royalty rate than David Lee Roth. Yeah,
what a hilarious what a hilarious band, Hagar said of
this man, that's worse than sleeping with the enemy. We

(01:03:27):
bumped heads, and the next thing I know, Eddie calls
and David Lee Roth is back. Roth or Hagar, whichever
one of them was in the band at this point,
would soon be replaced by Gary Charon of Extreme But
that's another story. There's a Gary Sharon soundboard.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Other artists featured on the Twister soundtrack include Torry Amos,
Katie Lang, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shania Twain, and Buckingham Nicks, who,
although in nineteen ninety six it was more Nick Buckingham,
this was the pair's first time back together since reuniting
someone under Duress at Bill Clinton's request for his inauguration
in nineteen ninety three.

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
More of the point.

Speaker 1 (01:04:11):
This was Stevie Nickson, Lindsay Buckingham's first time reuniting on
records since nineteen eighty seven's Tango in the Night with
sessions that ended with Lindsay quitting the band, feuding with
Stevie and tossing her over the hood of his car
I believe with his hands around her neck.

Speaker 2 (01:04:28):
May maybe not.

Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
That might have been the time he tried to strangle
the engineer during the recording of Rumors I Forget But
what a great Guyah yeah, yeah yeah. Stevie was asked
to provide a song for the soundtrack to Twister, and
she decided to call in Buckingham to produce it, and
also Mick Fleetwood to play drums. Buckingham ultimately shared vocals
with Stevie, which went a long way towards thawing their

(01:04:51):
relations and leading to their nineteen ninety seven reunion concert
and live album, The Dance with that incredible version of
Silver Springs. And I didn't realize that this would lead
to a twenty one year reunion between Buckingham and Nicks,
which is their longest unbroken time together.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Did you know that? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:05:15):
It all came to a crashing end in twenty eighteen
when Nix ousted him from the band in favor of
Check's Notes, the Guys from Crowded House and the Heartbreakers.
The release date for Twister was pushed up a week
in order to avoid competition with Paramount's Mission Impossible two
weeks later, and this caused even more headaches for the
visual effects folks at Industrial Light and Magic, who were

(01:05:37):
already working over time to try to see Gi out
all of the blue skies that have been in the
background during filming, since that sort of spoils the whole
Tornado effect and the aforementioned phillipsy Moore Hoffman's balls. Industrial
Light and Magic had originally been on the hook to
do digital sky replacements on one hundred and fifty shots,
but Yondbon ultimately needed them to double that number. This

(01:06:01):
increased workload put everybody under a time crunch to meet
the delivery date set by Warner Brothers. Visual effects producer
Kim Bromley Carson described it to Entertainment Weekly as as
close to drop dead as it gets, but ultimately they
made it in time for the premiere, which was adorably
held at a theater.

Speaker 2 (01:06:19):
At an Oklahoma City mall. The film would go on
to receive a PG thirteen rating from the Motion Picture
Association of America due to quote intense depiction of very
bad weather. That's gotta be that's gotta be one of
the best ones I've ever heard. Yep, very very bad weather,

(01:06:44):
speaking of great speaking of great phrases. Producers apparently originally
intended to release Twister with the tagline it sucks. I've
checked this Apparently that's for real, but sadly they weresuaded
from doing so when it occurred to them that this
would merely provide AMMO for critics who weren't especially positive

(01:07:06):
about the movie. Instead, they opted for the Dark Side
of Nature, which is nowhere near as good.

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
All the topic of marketing. Snafhoo's Jamie Gertz, who's Bill
Paxson's girlfriend in the movie, recalled a hilarious incident that
occurred during interviews to promote the movie. She told the
av Club, the biggest thing I remember from when we
were doing press for the film was that we went
on Oprah. We came on individually. We were talking about
how tough it was to shoot. We'd get to breathe
in our eyes and the wind machines and we have

(01:07:35):
to use eyew wash, and sometimes when we were in
the makeup trailer, we'd have to turn off the electricity
because we were so close to an electrical storm and
they didn't want.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
To get electrocuted. Blah blah blah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
And then Oprah breaks for commercials, and then she comes
back and says, and now for survivors of real twisters.
So here are all these actors, these dopey actors on stage,
and now you have all these people who were like,
I was burns, lightning hit me, and we're like, oh no, that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
Didn't happen to us. Oh it was just humiliating.

Speaker 1 (01:08:06):
Here are these real survivors of twisters and We're just
the pretend movie version. Helen Hunt also had a funny
moment during the press stour. She said that when they
were doing some show might have even been Oprah. They
took questions from the audience, and one woman asked Hunt
why her character wouldn't put her hair up on a
ponytail when she was a little of a tornado.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
Apparently the whole movie her hair is down.

Speaker 1 (01:08:27):
To which Hunt was apparently replied, screw you don't get
technical with me.

Speaker 2 (01:08:31):
I'm Helen Hunt. Bitch. Twister was a gargantuan success at
the box office, sucking in nearly half a billion worldwide.

Speaker 1 (01:08:40):
This wasn't bad. Concerning the budget, this wasn't bad. Contindering
blowing in. I know, this wasn't bad.

Speaker 2 (01:08:47):
Concerning the budget was ninety million, making one of the
most expensive movies in the nineties, as Perianderbon's wishes. Only
Independence Day made more money in nineteen tenety six at
eight hundred and seventeen point four million. Yeah you figure
what marketing's twice that, so you know, one hundred and
eighty mil all told, maybe call it two fifty just

(01:09:08):
for laughs, making almost half a bill. Good for them.
Roger Ebert, as was his wont was something of a
savage in his review of this well made, generally well meaning,
if a slightly dumb movie. He gave Twister two and
a half stars out of four and wrote, you want loud, dumb, skillful,
escapist entertainment. Twister works that should have just been there
Pool quote you want to think think twice about seeing it.

(01:09:30):
Janet Maslin of The New York Times, though, has what
is surely one of the most puzzling reviews. She writes,
somehow Twister stays as up tempo and exuberant as a
rollercoaster ride, neatly avoiding the idea of real danger, does it, Janet?
I don't know. I thought it was pretty scary. Lisa
Schwartz Bom Entertainment Weekly is more aligned with your thinking,

(01:09:51):
you write in her review, she said, giving the film
a B. She write, the images that linger longest in
my memory are those of windswept livestock in a teacup.
Sums up everything that's right and wrong about this appealingly noisy,
but ultimately flyaway first blockbuster of summer. The reviews took
a serious, almost existentialist view of the Violet Wins questioning

(01:10:14):
whether the film did enough to illustrate the extent of
the horrores. Writing in Time Magazine, Richard Schickel said, when
action is never shown to have deadly or pitable consequences,
it tends towards abstraction. Pretty soon, you're not tornado watching
your special effects watching. Yeah, you know, this movie is
really irresponsible in the way that inspired all those school tornadoes.

(01:10:36):
In his review for The Washington Post, Desson Howe, I'm
wanna bully that guy wrote, it's a triumph of technology.
It's a triumph of technology over storytelling, and the actress
craft characters merely exist to tell a couple of jokes,
cower in fear of downdrafts, and otherwise killed time between tornadoes. Yeah,

(01:10:56):
what do you just want one giant? It's the whole time.
It's not the Seventh Seal, dude. The reviews for this
are really harsh. Yeah, oh, man, I don't know. Do
you think film criticism got no, I mean that's an
interesting point. I do think film criticism has actually gotten
nicer as a whole because we need access, Yeah exactly. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:11:20):
and the people who used to have access and write
this kind of stuff have been replaced by people who
will just write nice garbage in exchange for perks. Despite
all this criticism, Twister was up for two Oscars, Perhaps unsurprisingly,
they were of the technical variety. Movie was nominated for
Best Sound and Best Visual Effects by the Oscars, but
it did not win either award. On the other end

(01:11:42):
of the award show spectrum, Twister earned some Razzie knoms
for Jamie Gertz aka the Girlfriend, for Worst supporting writers
Michael An Crichton and Anne Marie Martin, winning in the
probably limited category of worst written film that grossed over
one hundred mil. Never forget that the Razzies have written
by we're creating a bunch of bitter Hollywood journalists. But

(01:12:02):
once again, you know, history has proven the winner because
Twister would go on to be an important footnote in
the history of cinema. It is the first movie to
be released on DVD for home viewing in October of
nineteen ninety seven, another good pub trivia question. The film's
legacy could also be felt in tourism. Following the release

(01:12:22):
of Twister, there was an uptick in Tornado tourism, with
adventurous souls traveling to twister prone areas and trying their
hand at being amateur storm chasers a dumb thing to do.
Tami does not endorse this behavior unless you have money
for us, in which case I'll do literally anything. And
speaking of dumb, what of our directorial tyrant Yon Debont

(01:12:45):
whatever became of him? Given the success of Twister, he
seemed poised to take over Hollywood, but unfortunately karma is real.
His next films, Speed to Cruise Control and The Haunting
flipped flopped. They flipped and flopped at the box office
and torn apart by critics. As a result, his reputation suffered,
something that apparently failed to happen in the after effects

(01:13:08):
of Twister, when he was beating his crew and taking
shots at his lead actress in the press. Anyway, he
has not directed a movie since two thousand and threes.
Laura Croft tomb Raider colon The Cradle of Life. I
have no memory of this film, do you no? I
mean it was a sequel, I remember the first one.
But yeah, what does he I mean? He's Dutch, right,

(01:13:28):
they get free healthcare. He's probably just back there from
sticking his finger in dykes again. Low hanging fruit people
I'm sorry, but if you want your country to be
more accurately and hilariously made fun of, be more interesting.
The only thing I haven't touched is shots of Pete
because it's just weird.

Speaker 1 (01:13:46):
Well, speaking of woefully misbegotten sequels, naturally, given the huge
success of Twister, there was lots of talk of a sequel. Surprisingly,
the only project to materialize for decades at least, was
a direct to video sequel called Twister Warp Speed, a
film I can find literally nothing about online. No Wikipedia page,

(01:14:08):
no IMDb page, which leads me to believe listical sites
are lying to me. If you were a loved one
have seen this movie, please get in touch. So instead,
let's talk about one of the great near misses in
the cannon of great cinema, a sequel to Twister, directed
by its original star Bill Paxton. I didn't know this
until starting researching this episode. I didn't know that Bill

(01:14:30):
Paxson got into directing at the dawn of the millennium.
I would assume maybe from all that time hanging out
with James Cameron. As you mentioned earlier, he was behind
the acclaimed question Mark two thousand and one horror movie Frailty.

Speaker 2 (01:14:42):
It's definitely like an A minus film. Oh wow, Okay,
got a great crazy Matthew McConaughey performance. Oh yeah, we.

Speaker 1 (01:14:52):
Haven't had an impression this episode yet. You got mcnaughey,
You got to McConaughey seeing a cow.

Speaker 2 (01:14:58):
Now moon Man, that's more. Owen Wilson.

Speaker 1 (01:15:02):
No, I just watched rewatch the first season A True Detective,
So I'm just I'm stuck in that horrible, nihilistic McConaughey.
Let's get back to Bill Packson, who has all the
earnestness that we need right now. He hoped to revisit
Twister with himself behind the lens. He told the AV
Club in twenty twelve, I'd love the direct a sequel
to that movie. I always felt like there was a

(01:15:23):
Jaws version of that movie. I always felt like we
did the pepsi light version of that movie. There was
a tougher version of that movie. I think now I've
kind of designed it so that me and Helen Hunt
would have a daughter, a junior in high school, but
she's already dating a guy in college, and we kind
of hand it off to them. I just like the
idea of the Jaws of this where it's like the

(01:15:46):
Twister sneaks up on them. The Twister doesn't work for
nine of the movie, and you just never see it.
I guess you don't see a twister really, it's just
the wind.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
Also, just like I don't know, just just seemed pretty tough,
but alright, whatever, whatever Paston. I wonder if it's I
think it's it's kind of funny that you're like, this
movie scared the shit.

Speaker 1 (01:16:11):
I mean, for the past ten minutes, we've been hearing
people being about this movie is for WIMPs.

Speaker 2 (01:16:15):
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I was also like nine, well, sure, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
Paxon apparently hoped to use the three D technology that
was being pioneered for the film Avatar by his buddy
JC James Cameron Mauge, not John Carpenter or Jesus Christ,
but apparently Paxon couldn't get studios interested in a Twister sequel,
which I just I don't know if the technology scared

(01:16:44):
them off.

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
I mean, I guess this was like ten years after
the fact of the original Twister.

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
It's like long enough that it's weird, but not long
enough that it's like a classic thing that revisits. I
don't know, I still find that strange. Unfortunately, Bill Paxson
was not able to realize this stream before his untimely
death at the age of sixty one.

Speaker 2 (01:17:04):
This is very sweet.

Speaker 1 (01:17:05):
His passing was marked by real life storm chasers, much
like Top Gun did for the Air Force, Twister went
a long way and helping popularize the profession of meteorology
and storm chasers specifically. A lot of this was thanks
to Universal Studios, who made a grant to the University
of Oklahoma, who acted as advisors on the film and
funded meteorologists to go on a mobile tour of the

(01:17:27):
eastern half of the country, staging safety presentations at science
museums and a dozen major cities about what to do
in the event of a tornado. And then, of course,
following the release of the film, the number of meteorological
majors in the United States universities increased by about ten percent,
and a lot of the glory of this triumph reflected
onto our beloved Bill Paxson, who later narrated a storm

(01:17:50):
chaser documentary twenty eleven's Tornado Alley. Hence why the stormchaser
community loved him, and shortly after Packson's death, a group
of two hundred storm trackers arranged themselves to spell out
his initials using their GPS trackers, which was seen by
a Spotter Network weather report system designed to respond to

(01:18:11):
extreme weather emergencies. I don't fully get how it works,
but there's a YouTube equip of the moment, and it
basically looks like a bunch of radar blips on a
map of the country that formed the.

Speaker 2 (01:18:20):
Letters BP, and it's huge.

Speaker 1 (01:18:22):
The whole tribute it covered regions of Oklahoma and I
think parts of Texas which were also where they filmed
in the movie too, including the real town of Wikita.
So I thought that was very sweet. Spotted Network president
John Wedder said of Bill Packson, his character in Twister
helped to make meteorology and the hobby of storm chasing cool.

Speaker 2 (01:18:42):
Stormchasing a hobby. I guess, man, can you imagine doing
that for free? Yeah? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:18:48):
So Sadly, Bill Packson never got to make his Twister
reboot or sequel or remake or whatever it was going
to be, and for a time there were rumors that
Helen Hunt would pick up the mantle from her fallen
co star and develop a sequel herself.

Speaker 2 (01:19:01):
In June twenty twenty, in the midst of.

Speaker 1 (01:19:03):
The protests that erupted following the murder of George Floyd,
she reportedly met with the studio to discuss directing and
starring in a Twister sequel she had in mind, which
would feature people of color. She was fairly blunt about
the experience in a recent appearance on Watch What Happens Live,
saying I tried to get it made with Davd Diggs
and Rafael Cassal and me writing it. I think all

(01:19:25):
three of them writing it and all black and brown
storm Chasers, and they wouldn't do it. I was going
to direct it. We could barely get a meeting. And
this was June of twenty twenty, when it was all
about diversity. It would have been so cool. There was
an HBCU historically Black College University near Nashville where we
wanted it to take place in a rocket science club,
and in this one, they would shoot the rockets into

(01:19:46):
the tornado.

Speaker 2 (01:19:47):
It was going to be so cool. Davd Diggs elaborated, there.

Speaker 1 (01:19:51):
Was an opportunity that we were talking about, but it
didn't happen, and the reasons that it didn't happen are
potentially shady, but shady in the way that we.

Speaker 2 (01:19:59):
Know the industry is shady. That's really wild man. Good
for Helen Hunt. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
Hilariously, the version of the sequel that is coming out
this summer actually took the step of killing off Helen
Hunt's character, which is the official explanation why she will
not be featured in Twisters. Great, great, great oral history work.
Putting those two right next to each other.

Speaker 2 (01:20:23):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:20:27):
Twisters features a script by Mark L. Smith, who'd previously
written the Academy Award winning film The Revenant. Do we
think this film will win an Academy Award?

Speaker 2 (01:20:36):
I mean The Revenant is like, I mean, it's been
whiles as I see that movie, but it isn't like
sixty percent of it, just like sweeping shots of vistas. Yeah,
and Leonardo DiCaprio like grunting on his belly through the
Dirk like okay, okay, bud okay. Man. Yeah, Mark L. Smith,
It'd be really funny if it was Mark E. Smith,

(01:20:57):
the famously cantankerous frontman of post punk pioneers The Fall,
who is just like hated everything and everyone, who was
like the world's worst person to work with. He died recently,
didn't he a couple of years back.

Speaker 1 (01:21:08):
Yeah, I hit so many people in his band that
like when people kept like alienating so many people. When
people caught him out on it, and his quote was,
if it's me and you're Granny on bongos, it's still
the fall. Ah. The plot of Twisters centers on the
child of Helen Hunt and Bill Paxson's respective characters, who's
become a stormchaser like her parents the most just softball

(01:21:33):
way that could have gone, Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:21:34):
Oh wait, we gotta spend some time pitching this. Do
you think she's gonna go up to a tornado and
say give me back my mom? Will Cats in the
Cradle be played? But not the original version of Cats
in the Cradle but like a Billie Eilish like slowed
down reverb, haunting minor key, single note in the low

(01:21:57):
register of the piano version. That's not bad. Yeah? Will
the tornado be revealed to be like just trauma? Was
the real tornado just within us? All the real storms
that we need to fear are the ones within?

Speaker 3 (01:22:14):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:22:14):
Does the storm? Does she call the storm by telling
it it's not their fault? We could get Van Halen
back together and break him up again for this, the
surviving members of Van Halen reunite. No, no, no, no,
it's Stevie Nixon, Sammy Haycar. Oh yeah, that's the pitch.

(01:22:36):
I mean that's the yeah. Oh man, we have such
good ideas, not even not even for the soundtrack, like
as the stars of the movie. Wait, who is starring
in it? Glad you asked?

Speaker 1 (01:22:47):
It is the where the Crawl Dads Sing? Starred Daisy
Edgar Jones.

Speaker 2 (01:22:51):
In the lead.

Speaker 3 (01:22:51):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:52):
Yes, did she ever find out where?

Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
They do?

Speaker 2 (01:22:54):
In fact? Sing? Amsterdam gulfs Wing And that's a wrap.
Oh t oh, you had you had more.

Speaker 1 (01:23:07):
The film was st to be released on July nineteenth,
twenty twenty four, but I cannot imagine it will hold
a candle to this cinematic classic. Did you already say
a bunch of stuff about Joseph Kasinski and I just
glazed over it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:19):
No, I didn't say it because I didn't care. Yeah,
none of those words are in the Bible. No, this
is this is funny.

Speaker 1 (01:23:25):
Though he was the guy who did Top Gun, Maverick
was initially slated to direct, but this was such a
the possibility.

Speaker 2 (01:23:31):
Of twisters, dude, they should have put his z on it.
Man Zoomers are obsessed with the late nineties and early
two thousands, right now, put his z on it. Yeah, yeah, idiots,
Why are we such good Hollywood executives? Jordan and just
alone talking about David Lee, Roth.

Speaker 1 (01:23:51):
Smashes Beard Can throws it into his empty, hot, empty room.

Speaker 2 (01:23:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:23:58):
Imagine the prospect of this movie being so depressing that
the guy who directed Top Gun Maverick opted out of
this to commit to a Brad Pitt movie about Formula one.

Speaker 2 (01:24:09):
Actually that sounds pretty cool. Actually that sounds but it's
at Apple TV. Oh man, Hollywood screwed up follow of
an empire baby.

Speaker 1 (01:24:19):
Yeah. Well, I'd like to leave you all with the words,
actually my favorite line from this movie, which I do
know from heart, thank you for listening.

Speaker 2 (01:24:40):
I'm Alex Hagel and.

Speaker 1 (01:24:42):
I'm Jordan run Tag. We'll catch you next time. Too
Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive.

Speaker 2 (01:24:54):
Producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk.

Speaker 1 (01:24:56):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show
was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Brundagg and Alex
Heigel with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost
Funk Orchestra.

Speaker 2 (01:25:07):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review.

Speaker 1 (01:25:10):
For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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