Wet Hot American Summer: Everything You Didn't Know

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

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. I really bit into the annunciation on that one.
Good luck with your compressors trying to tame my natural exuberance.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Machines can't cage me.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Where are your two camp counselors of crap that really
doesn't matter?

Speaker 3 (00:33):
I'm Alex Heigel, and I'm Jordan run Talk and Jordan.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Today we're going to be talking about one of the
great cult hits from the turn of the century, a
little slice of life summer camp comedy that was made
for pennies and then just made pennies and then went
on to become one of the most widely loved comedies
of its era. That is right, folks, we are talking
about wet Haught American Summer. You can turn off right
now if that movie's not your jam, because I subscribe

(00:58):
to the If you don't like this movie, than if
you don't, I can't convince you otherwise. Right, But it's
a great movie, and it's hilarious, and I think This
has been so much fun learning about just the process
of making it.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
But it's a polarizing film.

Speaker 4 (01:13):
Wait, what was the especial, Like if you don't like
so and so.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
It was it's actually no, well it's it's I get
it from Talladegan Knights, which is like one of the
like they're going through bloopers of all of his sponsored
content and he just goes, if you don't like Big.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Red, oh yeah, but.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Like I've seen, like if you don't like Thin Lizzy,
you owe this.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yeah, that was it. That was it. Yeah, okay, uh,
you know I.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
Missed this movie when it came out, Like a lot
of people.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
It was the summer of two thousand and one. Steely
Dan had performed on this day show in May. I
was just as hopeful about everything as every other rube
in this country.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
And then it all changed.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
And I'm referring, of course, to the release of Glitter
by Mariah care.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
I mean, most of my summer camp experiences were with
The Boy Scout and sorry, Dad, I know you listen
to these, but except for shoot Getting to Shoot twenty two's,
I didn't enjoy that.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Oh that was for you, father.

Speaker 4 (02:09):
I got to shoot crossbows at my scout camp shouts
the camp split rock.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
That's sick.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah, that ruled.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
I actually have like one of my most hilarious like
cringe fail memories is from one of these summers, because yeah,
they were like, archery is a thing, right, so you
could get your archery merit badge, and so they I get.
They had some guy who must have been like a
historical reenactor or even just like a garden variety archery
dork which I've learned or out there.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
So they had like it was like a special assembly.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
They were like, oh, we have this art guy's gonna
do an archery oh oho, he's gonna do archery bhah.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
Historically accurate long bow.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
And they set up this target like twenty feet away,
twenty five tops, and we just watched this guy go
through a quiverfool, not even approaching the top, with the
presenter trying to desperately see being like you, well, you
don't want to understand. You don't understand about the long

(03:04):
bow is the amount of pressure that it actually holds
to take This arrow goes six feet into the dirt.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
So that was that's very fair.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
It's like the sun was setting behind him It was
just like vermally sconced in my memory of like, this
is what it looks like when adults fail, And now
I'm on the other side of it, and I don't
think it's so goddamn funny. But I can't shoot an arrow,
or at least I know enough about myself to not
volunteer that in front of a bunch of preteens. Yeah yeah,

(03:34):
and sign up for abject humility.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
Anyway.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Were you a good shot with the twenty two?

Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah? Actually, very good?

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Me too, Yeah, yeah, I kind of wish I still
had one for many reasons.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Help San Francisco.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
I told you I downloaded a VPN so I could
google ghost guns. Right, that's not legally binding. I didn't
actually say that. Sorry, FBI, it's too late. You already
heard this through Zoom, who I'm sure has military contracts.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
Anyway, what was I talking about?

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Oh yeah, wet, hot American summer, When hot American summer,
great film, Summer of two thousand and one, Everything looking up,
Mariah Carey, et cetera. Yeah, so, but like when I
did catch up to this movie, I didn't give a
shit about the summer camp thing. It was just so
off the Wall. It was like the first I think
one of the first things. Well, no, actually, because I
had seen Anchorman and Talladay Knights before this, which is

(04:29):
funny because we'll mention that later. So I saw Wet
Hot after all this, and I was just like, Okay,
this is that same style of like absurdist surreal humor.
But it just is like such a mortant even more
like they just cranked it up ten percent, and everybody
that followed in their mold was not brave enough to
match that. And then, especially when you look at in

(04:50):
two thousand and one, man like, the non animated comedies
in the box office top twenty were Rush Hour, to
American Pie two and Doctor Dolittle too.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Lee Blond came into twenty two.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
That's wild, and none of those films involved a protracted
gag involving a heroin den so like in a montage. Yeah,
I mean god, even just that montage alone, they should
have won an Oscar for it.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
But yeah, anyway, what about you.

Speaker 4 (05:15):
Yeah, I came to this movie really late too. It
was a favorite of a friend of mine, and I
might have only seen it during the pandemic. Actually it
was like that reason, and yeah, it scratched that same
itch that offbeat early two thousands comedies like super Troopers
and Shown of the Dead scratched a little bit of
Strangers with Candy thrown in there too, sure, and rewatching
scenes of.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
It today, I found myself thinking.

Speaker 4 (05:37):
It walked so that I think you should leave, could run,
like I feel like, I oh sure. It was like
probably one of the closest things that's come to that
kind of outlandish absurdis grotesque comedy. That's really interesting because
a lot of these oral histories that I would that
I was doing were from twenty fifteen, right, were twenty eleven.
So either it was like time to the reboot, which

(05:59):
I still haven't seen, or re or sequel series or
whatever it is, I will never see it. It does
not exist in this episode yet, No, no, or twenty eleven,
so they haven't even taken into like Tim Robinson was
like eighteen maybe I don't know, but it was like,
you know, I don't.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
Actually think that's true. I think he I don't know
how old is that.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
He's probably older than us. I think he's probably like
forty two forty three.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
That's crazy anyway.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
The point is that nobody could have predicted that that
was going to become like a flavor of comedy. Yeah,
I mean even when you look at like I really
consider it's kind of insane. I don't really think people
give it's always Sonny the credit for literally just changing
the landscape of comedy.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
That's a really good point.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
When that show had.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Made it into like even it's like fifth or sixth season,
you were already seeing that kind of like talking over
like really not joke set up, but just kind of
like I mean, you know, I don't have to call
it other than the and it's always sunny blueprint, and
so like the impact that has had on comedy. I
think people still kind of overlook and I'm happy to

(07:02):
see that people. Some people do come have come around
to wet hot.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (07:07):
I mean, it's just I don't remember the plot at all.
For me, it's just.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
All there's no plot. It doesn't matter, right, it's all
singular moments. No, it doesn't matter. Plot is in plot
is in air quotes for this, I mean, as we'll talk,
it hangs together.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Though it is incredible that really it's hard to do.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
It's funny because like how does it strike your sapometer?

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Like you love sap.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
You're like a squirrel or a pecking bird that loves
the sweet sap of the maple tree.

Speaker 4 (07:37):
Well, I mean, I obviously it probably comes in those
surprises that I see myself in the Michael Showalter character
of Coop, who's madly in love with Katie, the mistreated
fellow camp counselor who's dating Paul Road who treats her terribly.
I also, in real life, I had a huge crush
on Marguerite Moreau, the actress who played her. She was

(07:58):
in she was in The Mighty Ducks. She Wasntrond. Yeah,
that was how I knew her, and so yeah, I
just I liked the mocking. Somebody recently, for reasons that
will remain private, sent me a the clip of the
montage when the Michael Showalter character is getting trained by
the Christopher Maloney. Uh, you know, like the Rocky training

(08:20):
sequence or Karate Kid.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
I guess it's all of them.

Speaker 1 (08:24):
Yeah right, yeah, no, totally, no.

Speaker 4 (08:26):
I it mocks the inherent sap that sustains me, and
I appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
Good.

Speaker 4 (08:33):
Yeah, great, I need that. I need that, I need
to be punctured. But it also does bring up some
unpleasant memories of camp for.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Me, which I know, Yeah, I don't know if it's
been shared on the show before.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah, I'm trying to remember.

Speaker 4 (08:47):
So, like, I was way too much of a whimp
to do sleep away camp because I hadn't even successfully
completed like a sleepover.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
In my neighborhood.

Speaker 4 (08:55):
But then my my aunt got me a trip to
to Space Camp for Christmas one year, and I I'm
percent sure they lied about my age to get me
in there. So I was probably like eight or nine
years old, and suddenly I'm being shipped off to Huntsville,
Alabama to this military like compound. I swear they had
group showers, and I know they had like barracks, Like

(09:17):
it's just a giant open room with a bunch of
bunk beds, and it was it was like being in
the Army. And I had a meltdown on day three
and was sent home and in immense shame. So my
camp experiences were mostly relegated to day camps in addition
to Scout Camp and Camp Invention, where we were just
giving garbage to play with.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
And page together and make.

Speaker 4 (09:42):
Little homemade contraptions out of like refrigerator boxes and toilet
paper tubes.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
I went to a JCC camp. She was a camp
that I'm.

Speaker 4 (09:51):
Pretty sure was only for Jewish kids, and I'm not Jewish,
So I spent the entire time there as a good Catholic,
being terrified that I'd be found out that I didn't
belong there. Yeah, I gotta talk to my dad about that,
about why I was allowed to go to that.

Speaker 3 (10:05):
That's funny, but.

Speaker 4 (10:06):
That that actually resembled watching what Hot American Summer that
day camp looked a lot like the camp and went
American Summer.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
That's my camp stories.

Speaker 4 (10:14):
Well, oh, actually I forgot I for Actually I don't
count this as camp. But the school I was at
had a mandatory week long thing at the beginning of
sixth grade where they shipped us off.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
To Maine and we had to like go live in
the woods.

Speaker 4 (10:31):
And it was like for a bunch of sixth graders,
it was intense, Like we didn't have toilets. We'd like
dig a hole and like cook our food over the
fire and like take baths in the river.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
It was it was intense. That sucks.

Speaker 3 (10:43):
Yah, it's called camping.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeah, I didn't want to, but we had to.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
It's funny. Man, at the one Boy Scout Camp.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
I also remember being like my first experience being in
like pure pitch black nothingness. Oh yeah, in the complete wilderness,
like are you no?

Speaker 3 (11:02):
It had to be somewhere in Pennsylvania, like I don't
think we it's.

Speaker 4 (11:06):
Probably not far from like where my dad's Scout camp was,
because my dad grew up not far from you.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, maybe anyway, but like you know, being off the
like paved paths and going back to our campsite and the.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
Sun setting and just being like this is.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Dark, like this is actually this is what real dark
actually means. Like, and the terror of like hearing things
moving around in it and doing the Blair witch thing
and whipping around with your flashlight and being like what
the was that I didn't see anything? I can't see
beyond this narrow cone of light. So that's yeah. Fear
and archery related humiliations are my most lasting memories of

(11:45):
Boy Scout Camp. Feel free to put that on the brochure, guys,
right next to all the child molestation stuff. So, as
Jordan mentioned, we're not going to do the reboot. There
was a television series that they were gonna do even
before the original tvent. We're not gonna do that. I
don't care, just talking about the thing. So, without further
ado from the exact Jewish summer camps that inspired David Wayne,

(12:07):
to the pitiful filming conditions and budget restrictions that the
production faced, to anything possible I can mention about Christopher Maloney.
Here's everything you didn't know about Wet Hot American Summer
director and writer David Wayne and fellow screenwriter and the

(12:28):
film's nominal star Michael Showalter World NYU Buddies. And they'd
already had some cult cachet for being members of the
comedy troupe The State, which had a one season eponymous
show on MTV in the mid nineties when MTV was
doing cool things and like The Ben Steelers Show and
this and just given comics money to do fun stuff,

(12:49):
the early John Stewart Show yep, and then The Osborns
came on two thousand and one and nothing was ever
the same. What a great year for us, Actually, Steely, Dan,
gig Maria Carrey, you know mystery Man. I actually love
mystery men. And it's funny that and it's funny that

(13:11):
that is relevant to this episode.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
Oh wait, that was nineteen ninety and I apologize, we
regret the air.

Speaker 4 (13:17):
Oh you you know what I was thinking of. I
was confusing it with Master of Disguise with Dana Carvey,
which filmed on nine to eleven.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
That was what I was thinking about.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
Where the air, Yeah, where they had deposit and he
was standing there in a turtle costume or whatever, and
they were like ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
The second ty has hit the towers, He's got the
turtle prosthetic on his nose.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
This is like Pistachio, Parcheesi or something.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
Yes, Pistatio DISGUISEI was his man. Poor Dana Carvey.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
Uh maybe anyway, other guys from the state who turn
up in Wet Hot are obviously people who are now
kind of just household names, like Michael ian Black, Joe Latrulio,
who's been on Brooklyn ninety nine, finally got his network payday,
Ken Marino from a party down and just all the
Ken Marino I might have to mention, didn't have to
introduce Ken Reno. Also so weirdly buff in this movie,

(14:15):
like kind of hot, yeah, kind of kind of toned,
real toned. Anyway, After that show failed to get a
second season, David Wayne told Details magazine. We spent a
bit of time writing something called Cleveland Rocks, which we
were hoping would be our epic classic high school movie.
This was sometime in nineteen ninety seven, and we were
hoping to shoot the movie that fall, and we realized
that we were not going to get it written been there,

(14:37):
so during a second draft rewrite, that's when they kind
of started to morph this over into Wet Hot, And
both of them were inspired by these similar memories they
had at these various summer camps as kids, Camp Wise
in Clarendon Township, Ohio, Camp Moding in Belgrade, Maine, which
that name could have gone back to the drawing board,

(14:59):
and Mohawk in the Berkshires in Cheshire, Massachusetts. Berkshire, Oh, sorry,
Berkshires and Cheshire probably Camp Mohawk is such a you
to the it's like the white it's like the whitest
state in the world now, and they're just like, yeah,
well we'll name it after those people we killed with blankets. Anyway,

(15:21):
So real memories did make it into the movie. Ken
Marino's Character's whole subplot of like rushing kids out to
a trip and then rushing back and crashing a van
because he hoped you could make out with a girl.
That is something that happened to David Wayne when he
was sixteen. And he was also at camp when Skyfall
was a thing. So like the whole point in the
air quotesky sorry that Skyfall. Yeah, he was in summer

(15:42):
camp when Skyfall came out. James Bond Yeah, sung by
Adele great song. Actually that is anyway. Yes, so he
was at campter for Skylab, which is why that is
part of this movie's air quotes plot. Two of those
camps were exposed Jewish sleepaway camps, which I think is

(16:02):
what lends this film. It's sort of like borsh Belt sensibility,
including your favorite part at the end where Michael Showalter
is just doing like the entire joke of that scene
is that he's doing hackneyed, awful borshed Belt material and
everyone in the audience is losing their minds. But David
Wayne has been adamant that he didn't set out to
make a specific parody of this subgenre of summer camp

(16:26):
comedies that we often think of, like Meatballs and Little Darlings.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
I don't know, little darlings.

Speaker 3 (16:32):
That's weird. I didn't I mean, it's not weird that
you don't know that. I didn't either.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
It is a weird movie with like like jailbait.

Speaker 4 (16:38):
It's like jailbait style and yeah, this is really where
Tatum on the old Christy McNicol. Yeah what, Yeah, that's weird.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Matt Damon is like a predatory camp counselor in there.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
It's armandis Sante is in there? Need I say more?

Speaker 4 (16:52):
But the slogan is the bet is on whoever loses
her virginity first wins.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
Little darlings. Don't let the title fool you. Wow.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
So anyway, moving on, Wayne was attempting to do something
more in the vein of films like Nashville, Do the
Right Thing and Dazed and Confused. He mentioned all three
of those hangout movies basically with these large ensemble casts.

Speaker 3 (17:14):
Of air quotes, quirky characters.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Michael ian Black cut to the quicker the matter quite
more directly. I think he just goes counselors in real
life are just teenagers. Teenagers are idiots and apples. He's
so mean in this it is so funny. I wish
I liked him more. You know, I first saw him
in like.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
In the VH one.

Speaker 3 (17:36):
Yeah, the VH one.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
I love the blankety blank and I you know, like
people when people saw that and they were like, does
how Sparks own VH one because his every other cutaway prominence.
In that same with Michael ian Black, I had no
idea about the show. I'd know ida about the state,
I'd know it about Stella. I just remember then he
went nuts. He wrote a whole goddamn book about like
trying to heal the Red Blue Divide with Megan mc so, you,

(18:02):
Michael ian Black, what are we talking about?

Speaker 4 (18:05):
Well, David Wayne and Michael Showalter paired with an independent
film producer named Howard Bernstein instead of looking for financing.
It was a time in New York City when there
was a booming indie film movement. Wayne later said, she's
remember that time. There were a lot of characters that
were wanting to get into the business and pretending to
have access to money. Over and over and over again,
we were told we're giving you the money.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
Then these people would disappear.

Speaker 4 (18:27):
I remember trying to track someone down in their office
in the East Village to confront them, and the supposed
office was someone's house and there was no one there
by that name. Stringing the money together would ultimately take
three years. The initial script for Wet Hot American Summer
not only had fun to write, but impossible to film.
Visual gags like a whipan over to Morgan Freeman and

(18:48):
Tim Robbins, carving chess pieces like a shawshank redemption, but
also some incredibly dark elements too, David Wayne told e W.
In the original script, when one of the swimming buddies
drowns Andy Paul Rudd character takes the other one into
the woods. He's like, we're gonna go on a pizza party.
Just close your eyes. Then he takes out a gun,
screws on a silencer and shoots him two bullets in

(19:09):
the brain. My father read the script and said, if
you do that part, I'm disowning you. Instead, the scene
is him pushing the kid out of a movie man,
which is a great site side the road, which is yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
It is arguably a better site. Guy. Yes.

Speaker 4 (19:24):
Funding started to trickle in when names like Janine Garoffalo
and David Hyde Pierce who was flying High and Fraser
started to come aboard. The film is justifiably known for
the rest of its stacked cast, which alongside the State alumni,
includes Paul Rudd, Christopher Maloney and Molly Shannon, was soon
to be famous stars like Bradley Cooper, which still blows
my mind.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
With Banks and Amy Poehler.

Speaker 4 (19:46):
I don't think Bradley Cooper showed up for the sequel, though,
I think he was, yeah, replaced by.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
It doesn't matter. He's actually kind of funny about this.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
He's like clearly at the point where he's like, I mean,
skin ahead spoilers. He didn't graduate. He didn't go to
his graduation ceremony at the actor's studio because he was
filming Wet Hot, right, So he's like.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
Clearly resemble him.

Speaker 3 (20:11):
No, no, No, I think.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
He's clearly like he's clearly been willing to play ball
to the point of being like he's like, yeah, my
best on screen kiss was Michael Ian Black and like,
you know, I didn't graduate because I was having sex
and a shed. But like among us, the more people
ask him about it, the more he's like, he's like,
I already did this interview, Like there's a there's one
of these oral histories that literally said. Bradley Cooper declined
to comment, but simply pointed us to comments he'd given

(20:34):
in a previous interview. So his relationship with this movie
is quite funny now that he's like the thirstiest man
alive for an oscar. You know, Yes, Christopher Maloney would
never No.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
I could see him shown up for this any day
of the week.

Speaker 4 (20:48):
Paul Rudd met David Wayne in nineteen ninety eight at
a New York City performance of the play and You
Are Not Making This Up Sex aka Wieners and Boobs,
which was written by and Start David Wayne, Michael Scholwaltz,
and Joe.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
David Wayne gave me the script for.

Speaker 4 (21:04):
Wet Hot American Summer not long afterwards. Read told he
Entertainment Weekly in twenty eleven, and he remembered it as
the funniest script I'd ever read. He modeled his character
of the distinctly dickish Andy camp counselor Andy on Matt
Dillon in Little Darlings the movie mentioned earlier, right down
to the bandana in his back pocket.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
I believe. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (21:25):
Also, he had a dw I'm not sure I got paid.
I'm not kidding. If I did, I would have gotten
the very minimum. But it was such a small production
and stuff falls through the cracks. David Wayne in The
Familiar with Amy Poehler from her work in New York
City's sketch comedy incubator team, The Upright Citizens Brigade, which.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
Probably around the same time was a show on Comedy Central.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
Oh that's right, I forgot they had a show.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, they've just been like such a briefly.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
They've been such a predatory institution in the New York
comedy scene for me for years of like completely unpaying
labor and paying in prestige and access and all that stuf.
So it's funny to imagine them as like scrabby little upstarts.

Speaker 4 (22:03):
Yes, yes, yes, but both Elizabeth Banks and Bradley Cooper
came up organically in the casting process. Banks was a
cocktail waitress and Cooper, as you mentioned earlier, was studying
at the Actors Studio drama school, and he said he
ended up missing his graduation ceremony because he was shooting
wet hot. There's a some episode of Inside the Actors
Studio with James Lipton where when they go to the

(22:25):
audience at the end and take questions, He's like, what.

Speaker 3 (22:28):
It was, Robert de Niro, Oh was it DeNiro.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
It's like an incredibly bright faced little Bradley Cooper acting
about like talking about like acting, talking about like how
an actor prepares. And again there's a great Chris Maloney
story about this coming up.

Speaker 4 (22:42):
Oh right, yes, I do remember that Elizabeth Banks actually
auditioned for the role that went to my beloved Marguerite Moreau,
and vice versa. She said, I had a callback later
that day and there was this really serious dude in
the back. This is Marguerite Moreau remembering the Details magazine,
and I was like, I don't think that went well.
That guy didn't laugh at all. And it turns out
it was Wet Hot producer Howard Bernstein. I talked to

(23:03):
him later when we were at the camp the day
in my audition. He had been on his way to
a funeral and just dropped in for the casting.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
And it's such a hilarious thing to discover later, like, yeah, man,
I kind of thought you hated me.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
He was like I was, I was on my way
to the funeral.

Speaker 4 (23:18):
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more too much information in just a moment.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Uh, wet Hot Maloney, I've been You've been asking the people.

Speaker 3 (23:46):
Nobody asked for it, but it's here. I love Christopher Maloney.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
My mom is a big Law and Order fan, so
I just grew up watching him and it was such
a pleasure to like discover that he was on.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
OZ and he's this like he's just like a.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Really lovely guy, you know. And my personal story with
him is when, oh, I know this well, so when
David Wayne and I can't remember if Shoe Walter was involved,
but David Wayne made a romantic comedy parody called They
Came Together with Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd that, much
like Wet Hot, was so successful in appearing to be

(24:21):
the thing that it was skewering that people like flew.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
Under the radar.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
And I'm pretty sure it flopped, but it's a very
funny movie and Chris Maloney is in it, and so
I got my chance to like interview him. This was
in I think twenty fourteen, so I was so pretty
green to interviewing, you know, big name celebrities. And it
was clearly like he was in the middle of a
junket and he was clearly tired, but he was very
very kind to me and and I just it was

(24:49):
I would off on the wrong foot because I was like,
I mean, I you know, lavish praise on him and everything,
blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
But at one point I was like, you can get
confused with.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
That guy Elias Codias, and he goes he where I
could even get out, he goes Elias Ktaeus. Yes he's
actually a friend of mine. So he kind of shut
me down on that one. But he did tell me
this really funny story about they were in uh, they
were filming Law and Order in like Grand Central at
one point and someone shoved a copy of The Thin
Red Line at him, which is a movie that is

(25:19):
a Terrence Malick movie that has Elias Kotaus. It is
ensemble cast, and because when he goes yeah, so I
just took it to him and signed my name on
it and gave it back. And just like for this
he seems like the best he's he's I mean, yeah,
I think he like people have like come around to
him because he got like some different starring vehicles and

(25:41):
everyone's like, oh, this guy's like hilarious and has a
really great sense of humor despite being this like playing
this hard ass TV detective. But it took a while
for I think people to understand that side of him.
And the point that I'm making is he is som
funny in both of these movies. And he had just
wrapped his first season of SVU when he went to

(26:01):
film this, and he'd been coming off of HBO's OZ,
and he was like a decade older than everyone else
in the cast. So it's just so funny to me that,
like he rolled in there fresh off OZ in Law.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
And Order SVU and was like, I will hump this fridge.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
And you know, he told Entertainment Weekly he said, to
be honest, some stuff about the script I didn't understand,
and some stuff I thought, that's so fucking out of bounds.
It's got to play. And he recognized Michael Showalter at
his audition and said I'd bumped into him at a
chess shop. I'd played chess with him. My first thought
was I shouldn't have beaten him.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
I think, I wonder if it's a chess shop down
in Granwich.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
Village on Thompson.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Yeah, yeah, he mentioned that in a different interview. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
Yeah. That's the other thing too.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
There's like seven oral histories of this movie, so they're
not interchangeable and details has the best one if you care. Also,
there's a making of documentary that's about an hour long
with a lot of like on set camera footage that's
just incredibly endearing because it's everybody having this hilarious time
in their lives in the middle of this stygy in hell.
So he said of his character Gene, the camp chef

(27:10):
with issues, he said he someone read Gene in front
of him and he was like, oh man, that guy's
got it totally wrong. Like I didn't, And he says,
I didn't think of the character as bombastic or threatening.
I saw him as kind of a whacked out, cuddly rambo.
I grew that facial hair out for four months. I
didn't shave, I gained weight, I didn't get as chunky

(27:31):
as I wanted to. I did the do rag intentionally
to have my ears stick out and give me an
elfin quality. Everything had a purpose. It was very clear.
And again I think it's because I understood Gene. So
this is faus here, like I don't think so, I
really don't think. So, it's just I mean maybe I

(27:51):
don't know, but so he's in, he's in. They came
together and He is an equally hilarious character in that
and the reason I keep bringing him up in relation
to that movie not only because I got to talk
to him and blah blah blah. But Michael Showalter, in
one of these oral histories, tells this story that does
that I don't think made it into wet hot, and

(28:13):
he says, when I was a camper, I needed to
make a number two and had to walk a quarter
of a mile to get to the bathroom. When I
crested a hill, I could see it one hundred yards away,
and the excitement made me go to the bathroom in
my swim trunks. Michael Showalter actually talks like this, I
was probably ten years old, and at that time of
your life, there is nothing funny about that.

Speaker 3 (28:32):
That is a life or death situation.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
So I hid my bathing suit in the woods under
a bunch of bushes and went back to my bunk
and chained and took a shower. But a bunch of
my bunk mates found the bathing suit. I denied that
it was my bathing suit, but they were like, your
name tag is sewed into it. I said the most
ridiculous lie known to man, which is someone must have
stolen my bathing suit, took in my bathing suit, and
then hid it in the woods. And I'm insulted that

(28:54):
you would think that that's not what happened. That joke
appears virtually unaltered in They Came Together, but with Christopher
Maloney as the butt of it is he's at a
costume party and that exact situation happened. So it's just
so funny to me that this guy is like Oz

(29:16):
veteran actor who's played this hard ass like famous for
like abusing suspects because he just cares so much. In SVU,
this guy was so moved by being on Wet Hot
that he would return years later for another David Wayne
project and submit himself to being the butt of this
ridiculous joke that they had thought was not worth including

(29:36):
in Wet Hot and recycled thirteen years later. A champion
among men, he is yes, yes, and this is my
last and what no, this is not my last?

Speaker 3 (29:46):
Sorry.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
My penultimate point about Chris Maloney, he goes before his
big monologue at the end of the film, which was
actually filmed his first day on set. Oh wow, he
was standing around holding a map to the camp because
they were filming on an actual camp and the locations
all needed to be spelled out. So he's sitting around
looking at a map, waiting to film, and in his words,

(30:08):
Bradley Cooper sidles up next to me and he says, hey,
do you mind me asking what you're doing. I look
at him and go, what do you mean? He goes,
are you looking at a map of Vietnam? Remembering where
your character came from? He thought, I was like looking
at this map to get some kind of inspiration or
get to the moment by my sense memory work. I
was like, no, I'm looking at a map of the campground.

(30:30):
It's like, poor, sweet earnest little Bradley Cooper, man, are
you doing?

Speaker 3 (30:34):
Are you doing? Is this from what page of unactor prepares?
Is this from? It's probably being like I just got
here and now you.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
Listeners at TMI will also know exactly how Christopher Maloney's
last day on the set of Wet Hot American Summer went,
and it was all Jeanine Garoffalo's fault. Apparently, her dogs
came to this entire shoot with her and they did
not have boundaries, and they followed her to Chris Maloney's
room one night, eyebrows raised. I think in his quote,

(31:04):
he's like, and Janine just wanted to yap late at night,
and one of these dogs dove into his sleeping bag
with him completely covered in mud, and he just like
got up, packed his things and drove back to New
York City.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
Jenny Crawler goes. She remembered, I'm.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Walking after him, going, are you serious? Are you seriously angry?
I'm already sensing this is not funny. My stomach has dropped,
and you know when people are angry and they're really
really quiet. Chris just walked right to his car, drove
back to New York and Chris Money's final word was
I love Jeanine, and I'm a dog person. I'm just
not a muddy dog person. That's my Maloney section. I

(31:41):
want to tweet this at him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he
was just so nice to me, you know, because I
asked Hi about his bit part in Fear and Loathing
where he's like the hotel clerk.

Speaker 3 (31:54):
And they do that.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
That's him.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Yeah, right, it's like a baby faced Chris Maloney.

Speaker 4 (31:58):
And I've been to a round by a fair large
cross section in pople and now, yes, it's my t.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
So I had to I don't believe it is.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
And I asked him specifically about it, and he was like, Oh,
that was just like a fun shoot to be on,
you know. And he was like, I actually really would
have loved to have read for the Johnny Depp part
because I'm a fan of Hunter S.

Speaker 3 (32:18):
Thompson.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
But he was just very gracious about me asking for
like literally a thirty second scene in a completely different movie.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
I had no idea that was him. Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Anyway, other New York City comedy folks that fill out
this cast include Judah Friedlander eventually of thirty Rock, and
I think at this time, other than being a comic,
was best known for that Dave Matthews video he did
where he's just walking around hugging random people that even
as a child, revolted me at its cloying sincerity. A
guy named Ady Miles, who's one of those that guy

(32:52):
comedy actors. You'll see him in and go, oh, that guy.
And he's been Jimmy Allen's head writer for like almost
ten years running, moved with him when he got Tonight Show. Anyway,
this slightly better than ragtag ensemble cast contributed to the insular,
close knit feel of the film and it's deeply weird sensibility.
David Wayne told CinemaScope, we didn't have to emulate anybody

(33:12):
else or connect to some committee's a sense of humor,
and we were coming out of doing The State, which
was a show that we made inside a bubble. We
weren't coming from Second City or the Groundlings or anything
like that. But despite all that, this is not an
improvised movie. I mean, he let people kind of play
with stuff for maybe a little or let cameras roll,
like I think Molly Shannon. In Molly Shannon's one scene,

(33:32):
really she's like the all the campers are consoling her
through her divorce, and she's like the one kid starts
massaging her and she's like, Aron, oh that's good, that's good.
It's so wrong. But that was nad lib that she
was like, and he would let me go with that.
But the rest of this was, like Mike Weam Black
was like, this script was locked in. When your budget

(33:54):
is that small and you have to make your days
and you're fighting the weather, there is not time to
fit around. So it's unbelievable as it is the entire
stupid his words, the entire stupid spectacle of that movie
was scripted.

Speaker 4 (34:06):
Also, there were a ton of interesting alternate casting choices
for this movie, mostly because it took so long to
get out of development hell and raise the funds Mary
Louise Parker, Amanda Pete, Dan Castanetta voice of Homer Simpson,
and Sam Rockwell, we're all at different table reads or calls.
Billy Cruddup, who's an old friend of David Wayne's from NYU,
is also thanked in the credits, as is leave Shreiver

(34:26):
for as Wayne puts it, in the grand tradition of
first time independent filmmakers, you thank everyone who's ever said
hello to you. During the process of making the movie.
The movie was filmed at Camp Telnada.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
Oh Taowan Taowandawanda Close Now the movie was filmed at
Camp Towanda in northeastern Pennsylvania, not far from the New
York state line.

Speaker 4 (34:48):
In May and June of two thousand, Ginny Garoffalo was
surprised to find Hank Azaria, another Simpsons veterans name, on
a plaque at the camp, so she called up her
former Mystery Men co star and in Hankazaria had attended
camp Towanda between ages six and fifteen, calling those years
quote some of.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
The happiest of my life.

Speaker 4 (35:07):
He's mentioned by name as a former camper in the film,
alongside former Prime Minister of Israel David kuria Is.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
I think the roll call the end and they just
said they wanted to throw every possible random name in there,
including David Benker.

Speaker 4 (35:23):
In the most obvious grand irony possible. It rained nearly
every day of the twenty eight day shoot, and it
was so cold that many scenes were moved indoors, which
created weather continuity errators in the background, which contributed to
the film surrealistically untethered relationship with reality.

Speaker 1 (35:38):
Beautiful way to write that, Oh thank you.

Speaker 4 (35:40):
In some of the outdoor scenes that remained in the
final film, the actor's breath can be seen.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
It was May. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
I mean that's the thing about like hard to not
take it personally.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah, although having been on a boy Scout camping trip
in April that was canceled because we got a torrential
f blizzard, snow, nightmare rain, freezing rain situation that will
happen in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
Yeah, that's true, save in New England.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
These conditions were especially hard on Elizabeth Banks, whose bikini
based costume left her shivering between takes. She told it
Entertainment Weekly, my favorite outfit is the red bikini top
that I wear in the opening, and that almost didn't
happen because it was so cold that I put on
something else. Then we took this van ride out in
the middle of the woods and there was this huge
bonfire and it was so hot. I actually remember going
back to the costume designer and saying, I'll wear the.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
Bikini, but she continued. I did a lot of scenes
on the lake, so it was.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
Very much like, Okay, we're going to go out on
the lake. It's seven thirty in the morning, it's forty
degrees out. You're going to wear this bikini, and then
we're going to get on a boat and drive around.
So the wind's going to be whipping and water's going
to be spraying up on you from this freezing cold lake.
But honestly, I couldn't complain because there were people in
the water. There were like water skiers and stuff, so
I was not complaining. The cast also lodged in and

(36:50):
on the camp's facilities as well, which was not particularly
pleasant either. Chris Maloney said, they literally set you up
on these circa nineteen thirty eight bed springs with a
one inch thick plastic mattress, if you want to call
it that.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
There was mud everywhere.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
You didn't take off your clothes because you're not going
to be comfortable anyway. You just laid out a sleeping bad.
Everything was muddy, Everything was damp. Other people talk about
they had planks running over the ground, like you know,
to walk on and not be submerged in inches of mud.
David Hyde Peers, who plays the astrophysicist, as a tremendous
He's very funny. I didn't know this about him and

(37:25):
all these orld histories. He's hilarious. His quote was it
felt like the Korean War more than a summer camp.
Amy Poehler managed to one up him with the following quote.
What we thought was going to be this healthy, outdoorsy,
activity driven movie turned into a dark, Irish indoors Eugene
O'Neil play. Molly Shannon was only there for a few
days of for filming her scene in the Arts and
Crafts building, but most of that audio had to be

(37:48):
replaced because the rain was so loud on the roof outside.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
That's crazy.

Speaker 4 (37:53):
Cole's cutting measures also extended to gasp the craft services
like Away on Black explained it d details it contracted
the actual people who make food for the camp to
make food for us. And you know, pizza bagels every
day when you're eleven is a dream. When you're thirty
and it's pizza bagels every day, you want to kill somebody.
David Wayne two Grafts later in that oral history, said

(38:15):
they staged the mutiny and forced us to bring in
food from a restaurant. Amy Polar remembered that the camp director,
whose name was Mitch Writer, not to be confused with
Mitchrid of Mitch Writer in the Detroit.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
Wheels, spelled a different way. Yeah, a different way.

Speaker 4 (38:30):
I was charged with protecting the property from this isolated
group of hard party and comedy nerds who were in
their thirties.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
He was kind of pissed off that we were there.

Speaker 4 (38:38):
Polo later told The Entertainment Weekly, as he should be,
because he made a terrible decision to let us come
there before he had the open camp, so he was bummed.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
He became that guy.

Speaker 4 (38:48):
We were all like, oh God, don't let him see
us do this. It was like the ultimate authority figure.
Now having ten years behind me, I can only imagine
how difficult his job was, having to be the buzzkill
in terms of making sure that nobody was throwing their
cigarettes in the grass of this beautiful camp. Juela Tuggio
recalled that the gentleman also banned gum on the set,
and he was understandably not thrilled either when the cast

(39:09):
lit fireworks off on the beach volleyball court.

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Details was one of the only outlets that actually tracked
this guy down to get his side of the story,
and it.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
Turns out he was probably right.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
Literally saved the film's opening scene, which is of course
set to the Jefferson starship Classic Jane.

Speaker 3 (39:27):
It was pouring, everyone was in the middle of the woods,
and no one on this crew could start a fire.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
So, as writer recalls, I was actually in my office
and I heard them on the radio they couldn't get
the thing started. I went down there and said, listen,
I'm a camp director, would you like me to start
the fire. I had slipped one of those fire starters
up my sleeve and I stuck it in the pile
and I lit it, and of course it lights because
it's waterproof, and I got a nice standing ovation and
they shot the scene and eventually everyone went to bed.

(39:55):
They liked me that night. Oh well, nobody could begrudge
this guy his frustration. As he said, they were here
until about ten days before the kids showed up. Everything
was inside out and upside down. I would find mess
hall chairs and tables in the woods. They were probably
shooting a scene, but they never put the stuff back.
They were supposed to stay in a restricted area, but
I suppose some people weren't told or weren't paying attention

(40:15):
to the instructions, and they really were destroying our property.
And I definitely got upset. I would say it took
three years to recover from some.

Speaker 3 (40:22):
Of the mud damage.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
Oh man, his attitude is even more understandable when you
read again only in details. Folks that production showed him
the script before he agreed to let them film there,
which is kind of a courtesy measure you do when
you're doing location stuff. You say, hey, here's the script.
You know, I hope that you're okay with having your property.
He's name associated with this, of course, David Wayen later admitted,

(40:47):
I think we may have forgotten to put some of
the scenes in the script.

Speaker 3 (40:50):
When we showed it to Mitch, do.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
You think it was intense enough?

Speaker 3 (40:53):
Of course? And so writer continued.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
We were promoting this and making a big deal out
of it with all our campers. We kept talking about
it and talking about it, and when the movie came out,
we never mentioned it again and everyone saw the film.
I got a couple of humorous emails from parents saying
we now understand why. And then, to add one last
final insult to injury, he remembered my scene with my
wife was cut after Howard the producer guy got angry

(41:16):
with us for yelling too much.

Speaker 4 (41:18):
Ah, that's cold savage. Unsurprisingly, this damn the Torpedoes approach
extended to the rare bits filmed off site.

Speaker 1 (41:29):
Like the count lists are narcic.

Speaker 4 (41:31):
Foray to Town, there's a hilarious bit of oral history
editing by details where cast member Zach Orth plays JJ
says I assumed they had all the necessary permits and
crowd control and everything, and this was followed by David
Wayne saying, without.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
Question, we did not.

Speaker 4 (41:45):
It was definitely a situation where we had to say, Okay, look, team,
here's what we're doing. We're going in the van. We're
gonna run around town. We're gonna get the shots. We
can't really stay anywhere for long because we'll get kicked out.
And we probably should have mentioned this earlier.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
This was David Wayne's directorial debut.

Speaker 4 (41:59):
Souh, yeah, reconsider everything that we've told you see it
through that lens now.

Speaker 3 (42:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Why he said he had he had an ad who
was a little bit more experienced, but he was like,
this guy was literally telling me, well, first you say
roll sound, then you say roll camera, then you say action.

Speaker 4 (42:19):
Aside from being part of the glorious before times, before
the Internet, laptops and smartphones were ubiquitous, which we've commented
on before in Super Time.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
But in Scream particularly, I think that's the one that
I remember the most famous because even what's his name,
the spas Matthew Lillard, was like, yeah, man, people used
to people used to hang out on movie sets before.
Now it says, everybody goes back to their chair and
stares at their phone.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 4 (42:44):
But because this was the before times, the isolation of
boredom forged strong bonds, which were helped along by the
casts ever present partying.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Here's a weird TMI guarantee I fact checked Amy Poehler's
disparate memories of this time. In two separate oral histories,
she remembers Ken Marino having a portable TV set and
bringing that up is like the only instance of technology.

Speaker 3 (43:08):
That they had.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
They were like, there was a crappy phone that we
used to call back and check in New York, but
there was nothing else. Ken Marino had a portable TV
that was like the height of technology, and Amy Poehler
remembers him quote running around the hallway crying after watching
an episode of Er. Now, she remembers it in one
interview as being Clooney's last Er, but wet Hat was

(43:31):
filmed across May in June of two thousand and Clooney's
last episode of Er, not including return cameos, was in
the series fifth season, which.

Speaker 3 (43:38):
Aired from nineteen ninety eight to nineteen ninety nine.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Now, both Entertainment Weekly and Details ran oral histories celebrating
wet Hot's tenth anniversary in twenty eleven. EW's ran in May,
while Details ran in September. Amy Pohler correctly remembers to
Details that Marino's crying jag was precipitated by Juliana Mark
Gooley's last episode of Er, which she remembers because Marino
was yelling, she went back to Clooney. She went back

(44:03):
to Clooney while again crying. That episode Such Sweet Sorrow
was aired on May twenty eighth, two thousand, as part
of the show's sixth season, and is therefore indisputably the
episode that made Ken Marino cry on the set of
Wet Hot American Summer Hugh Entertainment Weekly. Not that they
had fact checkers then or even when I worked for them.

(44:25):
Yes I did work there, and yes I was laid off.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
This is a personal Evandeta or is this a desire for.

Speaker 3 (44:30):
Trude Well, heaves both.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
You know it was snapchat that got me laid off
there actually, but you know, uh oh yeah, sorry, speak
of Ken Marino, just some fun details about his character.
He told details. I immediately went.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
To meat Balls, the movie Meatballs, and I.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Was like, I want to be the guy with a
jew fro So I went to the local wig shop
off Hollywood near Vine and got a fro wig. That
was my big contribution. I think I also insisted on
birkenstocks and cutoffs. I wanted my pockets to show. That
is a deeply era specific memory.

Speaker 3 (45:05):
Dude.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
Even my beloved father was rolling around in some cut
offs with the pockets hanging out in well into my youth.

Speaker 1 (45:12):
Really wow.

Speaker 2 (45:13):
Yeah, it was his painting clothes, a full range of movement, nothing,
not much to stain.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
Paining clothes. Oh man. Well.

Speaker 4 (45:25):
Paul Rudd recalled it was like being in summer camp
and everybody hung out with everybody.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
It was the only thing I've ever worked on.

Speaker 4 (45:31):
Where people would just watch scenes being shot, not so
much to support because it was just really fun.

Speaker 1 (45:36):
So there was a very communal feel to the whole thing.

Speaker 4 (45:39):
And if somebody wasn't working, they would make the run
in the town, which is about a half hour away
and get all the beer and stuff for that night.
It was a really fun experience. We all knew it
at the time. It was like, Wow, this doesn't happen
a lot. Amy Polar echoed that sentiment. Even when I
was shooting it. I remember thinking, this is the most
fun I will ever have making a film. I never
went to summer camp. Imagine being in your thirties and

(46:01):
being told you have one last chance to go to
summer camp. Only this time, you're with the funniest people
around and you're getting paid.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
What's that like?

Speaker 4 (46:08):
But not sorry, All of the positive vibes came solely
from friendship.

Speaker 2 (46:12):
It was a seven nights a week party. David Wayne
told EW of his cast and cruise debauchery. The line
between being at summer camp and making a movie about
it was very gray. The biggest difference was that we
were a little older and nobody was going to take.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
Our beer away.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
Janine Garoffolo, Woman after my Own Heart, added, I was
drunk ninety percent of the time.

Speaker 3 (46:31):
I'm being very serious. I don't drink anymore.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
I was always punctual and I always knew my lines,
but it was freezing and raining every night, so I
put away.

Speaker 3 (46:38):
A lot of whiskey.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Garofflo and many others also admit that these conditions created
a lot of quote bunk hopping among the cast as well.
I think meg Waian Black goes I could speak to
the phrase bunk hopping, but I won't. Even David Hyde Peers,
who was only on hand for two weeks of shooting,
remembers having a good time, even if his relations with

(47:01):
the rest of the cast may have been slightly skewed
because he was pulling down like a half a million
dollars an.

Speaker 3 (47:05):
Episode for Fraser. At this point, Paul Rudd recalled.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
We would all hang out in the infirmary and it
was David Hyde Pierce's first night, and he was in
his room, which was right down the hall, and we
were making a.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
Lot of noise.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Finally, about midnight, he walks into the room and we
all stopped because we thought, oh god, he's going to
tell us to keep it down. David Hyde Pierce did
ask them that, but not before Ken Marino diffused the
situation by yelling, Oh great, it's Frasier. David Hyde Piers
says to Details, it was really hard to find scripts

(47:37):
that weren't basically Niles Niles Crane, the character he played
in Fraser. I read the Wet Hot script and I thought,
this is really funny if these guys know how to
play the material. There's a scene where I discover that
Skylab is going to come crashing down on the camp
and I have the line, oh fuck my cock. When
I first read it, I thought, okay, that, weirdly is

(47:58):
one of the greatest lines I've ever read. Correct And
it is He described his mustache as a rental, though
sadly it was not natural Hyde peers.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
Natural Hyde Peers no.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
GMOs inexplicably cost seven dollars more at your grocery store.
The film's campers were played by mix of real camp
twanda attendees, local extras, and the worst among us professional
child actors. However, as filming wore on and the parents
learned of the exact nature of the material their children
were being exposed to, As zach Orth said, their numbers

(48:36):
certainly dwindled as their parents.

Speaker 3 (48:37):
Realized not only what was going on, but just sort.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
Of the drudgery of it. They were like, daff this,
I'm going to take him to a real camp. David
Wayne then added, there were basically ten of them. We
just kept shuffling them around at every shot. There was
one scene though, for which David Wayne spared no expense,
No expense, no expense, the tender love scene between Radley

(49:00):
Cooper and Michael Ian Black's characters. From the beginning, the
entire point to those two characters arc was to subvert
what people would have expected.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
From a movie like Wet, Hot, cheap gay jokes.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Essentially, Wayne said, we like the notion that the only
sort of real and powerful and intimate sexual moment in
the film is between two men, and that extended to
filming it. It was something I talked about with Ben Weinstein,
our director of photography, from moment one. This is the
one scene where there is no time limit. Let's take
this time and really light it, really make it beautiful.

(49:34):
It's also one of the only two scenes that we
built a set for because we wanted to have the
space to move the camera around and really get it right.
Michael Ian Black did feel, however, that he was slightly unprepared.
In a great quote, he says, neither of us had
made love to a man before. There was no technical assistance.
You'd think there would be. In fact, the kind of

(49:56):
penetration I performed on Bradley, I don't know if it's
actually physically possible.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
Christopher Maloney is a follow up to that.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
I wanted to give them tips from Oz, but I thought,
you know what, I'm not going to jump in the game.
I'm gonna let him work it out for themselves. And
also Maloney, I just feel that there was a little
more reciprocation between the Fridge and myself than there was
between Cooper and Black. What I think I'm saying is
that the refrigerator had a wider emotional range than Cooper.
I just hope he really hates Bradley Cooper. Yeah, yeah,

(50:27):
that's so much funnier than just a bit. He just
really sincerely hate Bradley Cooper's cloying, theater kid energy.

Speaker 4 (50:35):
The other thing that united the crew was the moment
was Skylab makes his climactic drop into camp. There was
only one prop maid, so everyone had just been looking
at this thing dangling from the crane until that moment.

Speaker 1 (50:47):
We did have any money to build it.

Speaker 4 (50:48):
Production designer Mark White said, so he went to home
depot and just bought a bunch of crap and put
it together. And we tried to make it as sturdy
as we could. But I remember a lot of the
conversations were like, can it be on fire? No, it
can't on fire because then we'd have to bring the
fire marshal. Plus it's made out of rubber and plastics.
Pretty good, honestly. There were two maybe actually kind of

(51:08):
dangerous stunts in the film. One was the kids in
the rapids while there were tethered, did their point in
the river and had a safety team in the water.
They were still quite close to the edge of the
actual waterfall down river, and they had a hard time
getting the child actors look anything other than hysterically jubulant
in the moment. Zach Orth remembered, I heard that about
stand By Me. Rob Bryner couldn't get them upset enough,

(51:30):
so what he did was actually make them upset in
real life and then roll the cameras.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
David didn't do that. He was like, okay, fine, we'll
shoot around it.

Speaker 4 (51:38):
The other one was the we've only got one take
for this van crash.

Speaker 5 (51:42):
Which actually I was thinking about when I was watching this,
which is literally just a stunt driver ramming the van
into a tree of forty miles an hour, well basically
just wearing a slightly beefed up seatbelt.

Speaker 4 (51:54):
Kem Marina remembered the guy came out and was really
shaken up. But stunt guys are really cool. There's this
unspoken code, but they're not allowed to admit with it.

Speaker 1 (52:02):
They're hurt.

Speaker 4 (52:03):
So he came out and put his arms over his
head and then he just walked in the other direction.
I think he got the wind knocked out of him.
Julotuzzio's added, no one said anything because you're told that
the stuntman and the sunt coordinator needed absolute quiet immediately
after so they could see if he's okay, and of
course he was.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
And there was this eruption of like, hell yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
It's funny too, because he talks about not being able
to see it actually being filmed, but just hearing this
old ass van like slowly ratchet up, like.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
Just to get up to a whopping forty.

Speaker 1 (52:33):
Miles an hour.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
Oh man, yeah, what's that like? Do you think have
you ever been a head on collision or a moving collision?

Speaker 1 (52:43):
Oh? No, no, thankfully, have you?

Speaker 2 (52:49):
I rolled a truck once and I was lucky to
escape alive, but never had an airbag.

Speaker 3 (52:55):
Go off on my face? Do they do?

Speaker 1 (52:59):
They?

Speaker 2 (53:00):
They had to have had the airbag right, because that's
like those older models, like before they had collapsible steering
wheel shafts.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
They'd just impale you.

Speaker 4 (53:08):
Yeah, but wait, let's go back to that a minute
about rolling the truck.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
Oh, I mean, Pennsylvania has this stupid thing called a
Cinderella license where you can if you're like a certain
you're not allowed to drive past eleven I.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
Think basically two Massachusetts.

Speaker 2 (53:24):
Yah, yeah, under eighteen, I think yeah, or it's like
it's like until a year after you've had your regular license.
It was after a show that my high school band played,
and I got roped into giving someone I did not
bring there or had any emotional stake into bringing them home.

(53:45):
And it was ten forty five at night and I
was trying to get speeding along a back road driving
a big Dodge Ram filled with you know, bansh and
just started fishtailing and rolled the truck and got out.
And my first thought was, maybe this will be fine.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
Whe the wheels are on the ground, I would have
just driven it away.

Speaker 3 (54:09):
Yeah, well, yeah, I might have tried to.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages, So obviously we

(54:39):
have to talk about these sounds of the movie other
than Jefferson Starships Jane, which, as I mentioned, soundtracks, the
indelible opening sequence I am, of course referring to Higher
and Higher, the pitch perfect pastiche of an eighties pop
song that would have made it into one of these films. Soundtracking,
the training montage show me the Fever into the fire,

(55:01):
taking it higher and higher, nothing to fear, its only desire,
taking you higher and higher. I believed that that was
the entirety of the lyrics, but I was wrong. There
is another verse that says ending is near, the future
is brighter, taking you higher and higher. Be a believer,
a spirit igniter taking it higher and higher. Anyway, song

(55:21):
whips crazy enough. I had no idea until I was
doing this that it was written by Shudder to Think
frontman Craig Wedren. There's not really much reason that someone
who wasn't as invested as I am in the DC
post hardcore scene Washington DC.

Speaker 3 (55:39):
Of course, they would no shutter to think.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
They were on Discord, which is the record label that
was started by Minor Threat and Figazzi frontman DC era
stalwart Iatan McKay.

Speaker 3 (55:54):
They formed in.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
The mid eighties, like their first song was released in
nineteen eighty seven, but like throughout the late eighties and
into the early nineties, they benefited from the whole rising
tide lifts all boats of American alternative music of the era.
They toured with Fugazi. They also toured with Smashing Pumpkins.
But what you didn't know is that Craig Wedron of

(56:19):
the band was like best friends with David Wayne since,
in his words, as a toddler, Wedron wrote that song
with a guy named Teddy Shapiro, but he told the
forward quig Regrind did that We've literally been working together
since we were toddlers. Him and David Wayne, he said,
we used to do it in our parents' basement, and
now we do it for Netflix. Wedron and David Wayne

(56:43):
also went to Jewish summer camp together and then met
the rest of their sort of the State buddies and
different people in college. Wedron moved to DC after being
in NYU to joined Shutter to Think. He actually wrote
the theme song for the State, and when he said
he had like the kind of the same reaction as
everyone else did when they were working on this soundtrack.

(57:03):
He said, when Teddy Shapiro and I were working on it,
we kept looking at each other like are we crazy?
Or is this movie groundbreaking and going to change comedy completely?

Speaker 3 (57:11):
Both is the answer.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
Budron told Consequence of Sound in two twenty fifteen that
he wanted to actually put this stuff out as a
complete soundtrack, but they only recorded snippets when they were
originally putting it together. Quaig Radrin and David Wayne went
to Jewish Summer camp in Waterville, Maine from nineteen eighty
to nineteen eighty five. He said, in nineteen eighty they
were ten years old, and this is a consequence. There
was a first year of summer camp and they were

(57:36):
listening to Glasshouses by Billy Joel, Emotional Rescue by the
Rolling Stone, Rolling Stones, Panorama by the Cars, The Game
by Queen, which is quite funny. A movie called Times Square,
which I don't know anything about, but has like the Ramones,

(57:56):
xtc Patti Smith, the Cure, Garland, Jeffries, He's different new
wave bands, and so he said that was all going
into kind of what they were listening to at the time,
and that went into the mix tape. When he was
creating the soundtrack to this. He said he hadn't revisited
the music for the original one since having to or
before having to do the Netflix reboot first d at camp,
but he did say there were times over the years

(58:18):
when I did revisit it because Higher and Higher became
this weird cult hit. It was never released, but people
would ask for it are other songs online and we
would just send it for them or license it, but
he said, but it was never far from us, and
we would often joke about how our high watermark was
a novelty song, a joke of a song remained fifteen
years ago called Higher and Higher, and we still have that.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
He said.

Speaker 2 (58:36):
When the movie landed flat on its ass upon release
and was so quote roundly, uniformly and universally lambasted by critics,
we thought maybe we were crazy, which he actually said
was kind of akin to being and shudder to think,
because he said, I thought we were making extraordinarily special music,
and a lot of people really hated.

Speaker 3 (58:51):
It, he said.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
Funnily enough, he said, of the Wet Hot American Summer
title track, he said, I remember I was surprised at
how unresponsive David was to that song because I thought
it was a slam dunk. And he also said, interesting,
David is a drummer. David Wayne is a drummer, and
the snare sound in that title track is so terrible.

Speaker 3 (59:11):
He said.

Speaker 2 (59:12):
We were making all this music in our apartment and
we didn't have any money, and he grabbed one clean
snare hit, literally one from ac DC's Highway to Hell
and cut and pasted it throughout the song.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
David Wayne.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
Actually, this is something Craig Wadgron said, David Wayne.

Speaker 3 (59:31):
His dad was a radio guy. So they had a
two track, a.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
Real real tape machine, drum kit, couple amphires, beta cam video,
cassette recorder, and quote all of David's mother's old discarded
wardrobe from the sixties. So that's day we would have.
They would have band practice down there. They would film
these little short videos. About six months after wrapping filming,
in January of two thousand and one, Wayne and some
thirty cast and crew members traveled to Park City, Utah

(59:55):
for the traditional Sundance Film festival Fellatio and begging Rich, No,
that's being mean. That's where you screen your movies and
you beg people to give you enough money that they
can release them and make more money off of you.
It's very stupid. It's a discussing industry. The Sundance experience
in general was amazing, David Wayne remembered. There was so

(01:00:17):
much buzz and so much talk, and audiences seemed to
go nuts for it. Part of their pitch is quite funny.
They lied and said that the film cost five million
dollars to make it costs under two. They were just
hoping to make it look slightly more legitimate. They had
four different sold out screenings at Sundance, but Wayne recalled,
not only did we not get a good offer, we

(01:00:38):
did not get even a bite, not even a phone
call from even the bottom feeding distributors. Basically, several months
after Sundance, USA Films called and said, Okay, here's a
completely low ball, ridiculous, insulting, pathetic offer. We were like,
we'll take it. Jenninger off of theory was that there

(01:01:01):
was a bidding war over super Troopers at that time,
which was also at Sundance at that time by Broken Lizard,
And she said, people just thought, oh, this is the
same type of thing, like the State Comedy Troop put
out a movie and Broken Lizard. The Comedy Troop put
out a comedy movie, Let's go with Broken Lizard. So
after the ink was dry on that one hundred thousand

(01:01:23):
dollars deal, just like the budget for craft services on
a major motion picture for a day, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
I would say, yeah, weh hot.

Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
American Summer premiered in New York City on July twenty seventh,
two thousand and one, in two theaters and One of
them was the Critics Screening Room at the AMC Empire
twenty five. For those of you not in the industry,
it is essentially a closet or like a very small
office that they shove critics into and let them watch

(01:01:54):
movies to get their reviews done. One of the podcasts
I listened I do listen to is I've mentioned them before,
called the New Flesh Horror Movies podcast, and they these
two guys are critics in New York and they have
said that the window for embargo has gotten so low
when studios know that their movie sucks. For those of
you not in the industry, like the press embargo would
be like Okay, you can watch the movie and write

(01:02:16):
your review, but you will not be able to post
anything about it until such and such time. Now it's
gotten so bad with some of these movies that they
won't even let them see the movie until like two
hours before.

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
The embarco lives.

Speaker 2 (01:02:31):
So they're just basically put in this position of like, okay,
I have to first draft review this thing or not
at all. Anyway, Then it was expanded to LA for
three theaters. Eventually it got put into something like twenty
six additional theaters across the country, but little to no
publicity campaign, naturally, and the film is basically dead in

(01:02:53):
the water.

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
Paul Rudd told.

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
The La Times, the people that were the heads of
USA Films, they didn't get this movie at all.

Speaker 3 (01:03:00):
They didn't know what to do with it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
But every one of the assistants, the interns, the people
answering the phones, they were obsessed with it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:06):
And it's like, yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
You're beloved Marguerite Moreau, who must be one of the
most boring people alive. She's like not quoted in any
of these at all, and no one ever heard from her.

Speaker 3 (01:03:15):
Again.

Speaker 4 (01:03:17):
I also like Alison Williams, and she's also one of
the most boring people alive, So yeah, it would scan.
I have a type. I have several types. My other
type is the type is really not that. But I
just want to let you keep straightening yourself along out there.
Alison Williams huh yeah, yeah, I know.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
Yeah, she does seem boring, quite boring.

Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
Oh great teeth though, m oh yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 (01:03:39):
Yeah. There were so many obstacles to seeing this movie.
Marguerite Moreau said, I took a bunch of people to
La to see it in the one theater it was
in on the one weekend it was open, and something
caught fire in the snack bar halfway through the movie,
and we had to go out, and we had to
go outside, and while we were outside, there was.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
A fifth quake.

Speaker 1 (01:03:59):
It's a great quote, yeah it is.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
It's just funny how little she's actually quoted in this,
Like all these other people clearly gave, like all these
dreams of jokes and reminiscences, she's in there like the
average she's in the You know again, I've read four
or five of these, not joking, and she's in them
for an average of like two to three lines each.

Speaker 4 (01:04:18):
Oh well, things did not get better for the film
from there.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
Well.

Speaker 4 (01:04:22):
Critics Entertainment Weekly in Newsweek like the film. Most didn't,
and it still hasn't cracked forty percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
That's criminal.

Speaker 4 (01:04:31):
Roger Reebert was moved to write a review entirely of verse,
riffing on Alan Sherman's novelty hit Hello Mata, Hello Father,
et cetera.

Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
Here I am at Camp Granada, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):
Do you want to talk about that?

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
I feel like people don't know what the we're talking
about when we say this and because we're weird, people know,
like we know what it is.

Speaker 4 (01:04:49):
It's a I mean, I feel like there's nothing we
could possibly say if you don't know it by now,
But based on Camp Granada, there there's nothing we could say. Yeah,
it was a novelty song from the early six these
about a kid writing a letter home from camp having
a misery, but.

Speaker 3 (01:05:03):
Like explicitly Jewish, right, that's the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
It's like transliterated in the title of the song is
hello Muda, Hello Foda.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
Oh. I just I don't even I didn't think.

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
That far or was that he was just forcing a
rhyme with Granada.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
I think it was just forcing a rhyme.

Speaker 4 (01:05:19):
Heck Rodger Ebert rhymed I hated something Fierce with David
Hyde Pierce, which just medium funny and according to Box
Office Mojo, What Hot American Summer only made two hundred
and ninety five thousand, two hundred and six dollars and
domestic growths.

Speaker 1 (01:05:37):
It just fizzled out.

Speaker 4 (01:05:38):
Michael Showalter said it was like, this is not fun
at all. David Wayne told Details it got not just
bad reviews, but savage hostile reviews. Like we did something
personally bad to every reviewer, and maybe there was something
revealing about the fact that the reviewers took extra time
and care to find ways to explain how much they

(01:05:59):
hated our movie. Michael Showalter continued, there was a total
disconnect between the kind of movie we thought we'd made and.

Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
The way that it was being received.

Speaker 4 (01:06:07):
One of the things that David and I really find
funny isn't all the stuff we've done together is the
certain kind of stilted dialogue that's overly scripted, orderline bad
and to me, really funny.

Speaker 1 (01:06:18):
And the reviews would be like.

Speaker 4 (01:06:19):
God, this movie is such bad dialogue, Like Okay, you
don't get it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:23):
I want to die on a certain hill about this.
People think m Knight Shyamalan writes dialogue that way, and
they're stupid. They're dumb idiots if they think that, And
that illustrates how you can and can't write purposely awkward dialogue.
His dialogue it sounds like he was written by someone
who does not speak to humans, And people were like, oh.

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
That's intentional. He's you know, the joke with you. He's not.
I guarantee it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:53):
If he let his daughter be in that last piece
of shit after screen testing her. He's not smart enough
to write purposely bad dog. Uh what am I kidding?
He screen tested his daughter? No, he forced her on
America's eyeballs like you two and the songs of Innocence?

Speaker 3 (01:07:10):
What else can I tie in?

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
I'm found a bad mood today.

Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
Sidebar over.

Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
Well.

Speaker 4 (01:07:18):
Unfortunately, the cast and crew were not all that shocked
by the reception or the negative reception tout Hot American Summer.
To quote David Hyde Pierce, it's not like we thought
we were making the French lieutenant's woman and then we
can't believe it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:31):
Nobody liked it.

Speaker 4 (01:07:33):
David Wayne admitted, Wet Hot has the out of trappings
by design of a certain kind of comedy, and it
doesn't deliver on that at all. And so if you're
going in with the mindset of wanting to see a
regular comedy, this movie's going to disappoint you.

Speaker 1 (01:07:45):
What's sad I know it is.

Speaker 2 (01:07:48):
The film did gradually find its intended cult audience, helped
along by its DVD release in two thousand and two,
the year after, midnight screenings of the film popped up
around the country, and the film stars mostly say that
the percentage of people yelling wet hot lines at them
is vastly out of proportion to the rest of their filmographies.
Like Elizabeth Banks was like people yell at me, I

(01:08:08):
hope your car is a big trunk because I'm putting
my bike in it, and your mouth tastes like burgers.

Speaker 4 (01:08:13):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:17):
DVD sales unfortunately flat line by the time the film
turns ten. David Wayne repeatedly tried to get a tenth
anniversary special edition come out and was told by the
studio nobody cares. But the arc of history bends toward
justice for those brave enough to make insane art.

Speaker 3 (01:08:36):
It doesn't. Actually, we're all gonna die soon. Your art
will go on. Appreciate it for your entire lifetime. There's
not gonna be much art anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:08:46):
Actually, okay, but Podcaster Voice. The tide did eventually turn
for wet hot, and by twenty fifteen, The New York
Times described it as the old comedy er text. I
mentioned this at the top of the episode, But there's
one funny coincidence that popped out in these oral histories.
In the two thousand and one to details, Michael ian

(01:09:08):
Black says, I do think this movie was a little
bit ahead of the curve. I'm reluctant to say that
any film is directly influenced by this one because it
sounds very presumptuous, but Anchorman springs to mind almost immediately,
that kind of heightened absurd insanity, that anarchic tone. We
were sort of on that territory with Wet Hot, even
if the producers never saw it.

Speaker 3 (01:09:28):
I hope there's some direct correlation.

Speaker 4 (01:09:30):
Four years later, Paul Rudd, who obviously was also in Anchorman,
confirmed that with nearly the exact same phrasing to the
La Times, Wet Hot was a little ahead of its time.
When I would meet comedy writers, anybody that was way
into comedy, that's the movie that people would talk about.
When I met director Adam McKay the first time, years
before he made Anchorman, he'd say, oh, wet Hot American summer.

(01:09:52):
I could always tell this person's a wet Hot.

Speaker 2 (01:09:54):
Fan, usually by the demented stare. There's one last thing
I want to go out on here. It feels like
an appropriate outro. Damn, we brought this in Titan Lean.

Speaker 1 (01:10:04):
Ooh yeah wow ooh.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
Almost not longer than the actual movie. What a shot
you can actually listen to. This is a commentary track.
Speaking of commentary tracks, segue and improvised off the coff
Nail dies, off the Dumb. Those who purchased a DVD
edition of this film and thoroughly combed through its extras
may have been surprised by the inclusion of an entire
commentary track for the film consisting solely of fart noises.

(01:10:33):
The idea for the fart track was similar to how
a lot of the ideas we had come up. David
Wayne said, one or the other of us being like,
there should be an extra track on the DVD. That's
only farts, right, and the other would be like, of course,
you don't even need to say that out loud. Of course,
that's what we have to do. A couple of us
just went into the studio, he remembered. I think it
was me, Michael Showalter, maybe Zach Worth. I mean just

(01:10:54):
sat in there and made fart sounds for a while
until we got bored. Then we stopped and just looped
the other We were just going with our mouths. I
think we had a couple of whoope cushions in there
as well. It's possible we wanted live sounds had to
be live. It sure did, guys. Thank you for everything,

(01:11:17):
and thank you folks for listening.

Speaker 3 (01:11:19):
This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
And I'm Jordan run Talk. We'll catch you next time.

Speaker 4 (01:11:30):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (01:11:33):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.

Speaker 4 (01:11:37):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 3 (01:11:40):
The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtalk
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 4 (01:11:44):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
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Speaker 3 (01:12:00):
That clack then m as Clack, Batmu and

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Episode Transcript

Host

Jordan Runtagh

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