September 7, 2024 • 12 mins
This podcasts focuses on The Wizard of Odd, American film director Tim Burton,
the filmmaker who launched the modern era super hero blockbuster with Batman
in 1989, has created such memorable characters as Edward Scissorhands and
Jack Skellington in his Halloween/Christmas stop motion animated classic
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, and brought the Broadway musical
SWEENEY TODD to cinematic form. Prolific, creative and practically his own
genre, Tim has a sequel to his 1988 comedy horror film BEETLEJUICE in the
theatres and John Wesley Downey, host of True Film Fan, GIVES YOU LOTS OF
so you can decide if you want to see it.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, I'm John Wissey Downey, and welcome to this edition
of True Film Fan on the iHeartRadio podcast network. Today
we're going to talk about Tim Burton and his new movie,
his sequel to his nineteen eighty eight horror comedy Beetlejuice.
This new one is called Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. But before we
get to that, I'm going to give you a little
bit of a recap of Tim Burton in his career.
(00:21):
If you're not familiar with him, of course, he is
one of the most famous directors in the world. He's
had a long filmography. He started making big studio feature
films in nineteen eighty four when his first film, Peewee's
Big Adventure. It was a fairly decent little hit for
somebody who'd never made a movie. It was given a
four million dollar budget and made about forty five million
(00:42):
dollars for Warner Brothers. So a couple of years later
they let him make Beatlejuice, starring Michael Keaton. That was
nineteen eighty eight. It also was a hit. And this
is not well known to a lot of people, but
in March of nineteen eighty eight, when Beetlejuice was released.
It had a very successful first weekend. It made a
lot of money that first weekend, and on that Monday
(01:04):
morning following the weekend, the executives at Warner Brothers decided
to give Tim Burton, at the age of thirty, the
keys to the Batman franchise, and it was on that
day that they said, yes, you can direct our big
forty five million dollar Batman film that we're about to launch.
They'd been thinking about giving it to him for a
long time, but the success of that first Beetlejuice movie
(01:25):
way back when is what convinced them he was the
guy to handle that very, very valuable piece of intellectual
property known as Batman, and of course what he did
with it became legend. He made it very dark. He
dared to cast a non action hero in the lead role.
He chose Michael Keaton after Beetlejuice, and a lot of
people were really puzzled because they thought that the choice
(01:48):
of an actor who had mainly been known for comedy
indicated that he was going to do something with the
new Batman movie along the lines of the old Batman
TV show, which was very camp. But he had no
intention of doing that, Tim planned to make a very
dark movie. He cast Jack Nicholson as the joker, and
the rest is history. That movie was the number one
(02:08):
American movie in nineteen eighty nine and led to really
some of the massive film franchises that we have today,
such as Marvel. After Batman, he had a script he
wanted to make called Edward Scissor Hands, which in many
people's opinion, continues to be one of his masterpieces out
of the movies that he's made. It's a very sweet tale.
(02:29):
It's a fable about an outsider who has a rather
bizarre situation. He has scissors for hands, and it also
is especially well known for its beautiful score by Danny Elfan.
A lot of people think that's the best thing about
Edward Scissor Hands. He went on to make a whole
lot of other movies. He's had a fairly consistent track
(02:49):
record as far as commercial success. His biggest success was
in twenty ten when he directed an Alice in Wonderland
movie for Disney, which may over a billion dollars, and
some of his other biggest hits include Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, which he made with Johnny Depp. That movie
(03:09):
made almost half a billion dollars. The reason I mentioned
these amounts of money is because they're very important, not
only to indicate the popularity of the director's work, but
also it determines whether or not he's going to get
to make more movies. If your movies don't make a profit,
the studios are not going to give you more opportunities. Anyway,
Tim went on to make a lot of interesting movies,
(03:30):
some of which people haven't heard of. One that I
would recommend to you would be Big Eyes. It's very
unlike most Tim Burton movies. It's about a real woman,
Margaret Keene, who used to draw these pictures of kids
with big eyes that were hugely successful in the fifties
and sixties. But the controversy was her husband took credit
(03:53):
for coming up with these paintings and she was not
given credit. And they were very, very successful. They made
hundreds of million millions of dollars from these paintings, and
yet she wasn't given credit, and eventually she divorced him
and there was a big showdown in court on who
actually was the artist of Margaret Keane's big eyed children
in those paintings, and Tim Burton made a movie about it,
(04:16):
probably because it's about art and painting and about commercial
success and commercial art versus promotional art. All of these
are factors in his work and in his life, and
he wanted to do a movie that commented on that.
But I would recommend that as a surprise for a
lot of people to check out something Tim did that
didn't have scarecrows or ghosts or horror in it. Big
(04:39):
Eyes is quite a good movie. Also, Big Fish is
one of Tim's most emotional movies. An interesting factor about
that is big Fish is a movie about tall tales,
which Tim certainly tells in his movies. It's also a
movie about losing one's parent. In the story, the main
character loses his father. And interesting side note, Tim Burton
(05:00):
lost both his parents in the year before making Big Fish,
so he chose that subject matter because grieving over his
parents was something that he was going through right then. Anyway,
let's skip ahead to what's going on right now. After
thirty six years, Tim, Michael Keaton, and Warner Brothers finally
got around to making a sequel to Beetlejuice. Now. The
(05:22):
original Beetlejuice was made for about fourteen million dollars. It
earned about five times that at the box office, which
means that Warner Brothers made a pretty healthy profit on it.
The problem over the last thirty six years is they
couldn't come up with a script that satisfied everybody, but
they finally did. If you have not seen the original Beetlejuice,
it's kind of a bizarre movie to try to describe.
(05:45):
It's about a couple that lives in a house in
Connecticut and they die come back as ghosts, and they're
stuck in their house and then some people move in
the living These are living people that they can't stand
so as ghosts, the Cup played by Alec Baldwin and
Geena Davis try to get the people out. They try
(06:05):
to haunt them. They're not very good at it, so
that's when they call on the skills and talents of Beetlejuice. Unfortunately, Beetlejuice,
played maniacally by Michael Keaton, is something of a trickster
demon and is very dangerous and it all is somewhat
silly but entertaining in a strange way. There's not much storyline,
(06:25):
and yet it holds your attention and it makes you laugh.
So that's what the original Beetlejuice was like, and the
question is, how do you write a sequel to that? Well,
I saw what they did with it. I went and
saw the movie. In fact, I've seen it twice, and
they did some smart things. They made something that is
similar to the original, but they added some new things,
(06:48):
and some of the new things are an extension of
what was in the original movie. Probably one of the
most distinctive things about the original Beetlejuice was that it
trade the afterlife as a bureaucracy. And we all know,
if we've ever been to the DMV and waited in line,
(07:11):
what hell on Earth is like. So Tim decided a
wonderful metaphor for the afterlife in his ideas, from his
point of view, would be a monstrous bureaucracy that would
process all of the dead souls from Earth. So that's
part of it. One of the highlights of the original
Beatle Juice is when the ghosts make some living people
(07:33):
at a dinner get up and dance to a song.
It's a banana It's a song called the Banana Boats
Song by Harry Belafonte. It's quite a showstopper. And very amusing.
And Tim has put a similar scene to that in Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice.
He's brought back most of the old cast. He brought back,
(07:54):
of course Michael Keaton and when known a writer. He
also has Jenna Ortega Ann who is one of the
hot young stars, and she plays Winona Ryder's daughter. And
I'm going to simply say to people that if you're
thinking about seeing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, you should definitely watch the
original to find out if this is something you're interested in.
(08:16):
This is lightweight entertainment. It's a horror comedy heavy on
pop culture references, and it's kind of zany and crazy.
It has a little bit of a feel of a
mel Brooks movie in that mel Brooks simply throws so
much stuff in there that he figures, well, you're bound
to like some of the jokes, so I'll put in
three or foursts per minute, And particularly in the second
(08:40):
hour Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice gets so frantic that you really almost
need a scorecard to keep up with everything that's going on.
But overall, a good time was had by all and
all of the cast that comes back is great, and
Willem Defoe makes an interesting character. He plays a dead
act who functions as a police officer in the afterlife.
(09:03):
But if you're expecting anything serious or heavy or weighty
and or anything political, you're definitely not going to get
it in Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. It's a lark. It's a fun one,
but it's of a very particular variety. And if you
don't like comedy, or if you're not open minded to
really silly comedy, then I would not recommend Beetlejuice Beetle
(09:26):
Juice for you. This movie has had tremendous expectations. For
some reason, all of a sudden, everybody in the last
year or two decided they were ready for a Beetlejuice sequel,
even people who'd never seen the first one. So the
expectation has been very, very big on this and there
are predictions that this first weekend, Beetlejuice may make one
(09:47):
hundred million dollars, which is very unusual for a thirty
six year old sequel. This is what's called in the
Hollywood vocabulary a legacy sequel, in the sense that it's
movie everybody's pretty much heard of, even if you haven't
seen it. People seem to have a good memory of it.
They don't necessarily want ten Beetlejuice sequels, but one good
(10:09):
one would be nice. I predict that this will still
be in theaters by the time we get to Halloween,
because having seen it twice, it's got a lot in there.
I caught things on the second viewing that made me
laugh that I didn't even notice in the first one.
So who's all in the cast? Let me see Michael Keaton,
(10:29):
Catherine O'Hara, of course, she played the mom and home alone,
and she was in the first Beetlejuice. Wenona writer Jenna Ortega,
Willem Dafoe, and Danny DeVito, and of course Danny Elfman
provides the scores he does for almost all of Tim
Burton's movie, and it's really good. The showstopper scene, this
is the last thing I'm going to tell you about.
The showstopper scene in Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice is similar to what
(10:53):
I was mentioning earlier. In the first movie. They had
a scene where the ghosts, using their hours, force living
people to sing and dance a song and they have
no control over their bodies or their mouths. So Tim
brought back that idea and the climax of Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice
(11:15):
is the cast being forced to perform MacArthur Park, which
is a very famous song. It was popular in the
sixties by the actor Richard Harris, who performed it, and
then Donna Summer made a head out of it. Some
people love it and think it's a great song. Other
people think it's a pretentious song. But the way Tim
presents it is so exaggerated and funny you can't help
(11:35):
but laugh at it. I'm not going to give Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice a particular numerical score or anything. I'm just going
to say, if you want some laughs, and they can
be kind of silly, go see it anyway. I hope
you'll tell your friends about the True Film Fan podcast.
It's all over the place on the Internet, on the
iHeart system, iHeart podcast, as well as others. We're going
to be doing a lot more content on movies here
(11:56):
in the near future. Thanks for listening. I'm John Wesley
Downey and this is True Film Fan, a podcast on
the iHeartRadio podcast system,
Hello, I'm John Wissey Downey, and welcome to this edition
of True Film Fan on the iHeartRadio podcast network. Today
we're going to talk about Tim Burton and his new movie,
his sequel to his nineteen eighty eight horror comedy Beetlejuice.
This new one is called Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. But before we
get to that, I'm going to give you a little
bit of a recap of Tim Burton in his career.
(00:21):
If you're not familiar with him, of course, he is
one of the most famous directors in the world. He's
had a long filmography. He started making big studio feature
films in nineteen eighty four when his first film, Peewee's
Big Adventure. It was a fairly decent little hit for
somebody who'd never made a movie. It was given a
four million dollar budget and made about forty five million
(00:42):
dollars for Warner Brothers. So a couple of years later
they let him make Beatlejuice, starring Michael Keaton. That was
nineteen eighty eight. It also was a hit. And this
is not well known to a lot of people, but
in March of nineteen eighty eight, when Beetlejuice was released.
It had a very successful first weekend. It made a
lot of money that first weekend, and on that Monday
(01:04):
morning following the weekend, the executives at Warner Brothers decided
to give Tim Burton, at the age of thirty, the
keys to the Batman franchise, and it was on that
day that they said, yes, you can direct our big
forty five million dollar Batman film that we're about to launch.
They'd been thinking about giving it to him for a
long time, but the success of that first Beetlejuice movie
(01:25):
way back when is what convinced them he was the
guy to handle that very, very valuable piece of intellectual
property known as Batman, and of course what he did
with it became legend. He made it very dark. He
dared to cast a non action hero in the lead role.
He chose Michael Keaton after Beetlejuice, and a lot of
people were really puzzled because they thought that the choice
(01:48):
of an actor who had mainly been known for comedy
indicated that he was going to do something with the
new Batman movie along the lines of the old Batman
TV show, which was very camp. But he had no
intention of doing that, Tim planned to make a very
dark movie. He cast Jack Nicholson as the joker, and
the rest is history. That movie was the number one
(02:08):
American movie in nineteen eighty nine and led to really
some of the massive film franchises that we have today,
such as Marvel. After Batman, he had a script he
wanted to make called Edward Scissor Hands, which in many
people's opinion, continues to be one of his masterpieces out
of the movies that he's made. It's a very sweet tale.
(02:29):
It's a fable about an outsider who has a rather
bizarre situation. He has scissors for hands, and it also
is especially well known for its beautiful score by Danny Elfan.
A lot of people think that's the best thing about
Edward Scissor Hands. He went on to make a whole
lot of other movies. He's had a fairly consistent track
(02:49):
record as far as commercial success. His biggest success was
in twenty ten when he directed an Alice in Wonderland
movie for Disney, which may over a billion dollars, and
some of his other biggest hits include Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, which he made with Johnny Depp. That movie
(03:09):
made almost half a billion dollars. The reason I mentioned
these amounts of money is because they're very important, not
only to indicate the popularity of the director's work, but
also it determines whether or not he's going to get
to make more movies. If your movies don't make a profit,
the studios are not going to give you more opportunities. Anyway,
Tim went on to make a lot of interesting movies,
(03:30):
some of which people haven't heard of. One that I
would recommend to you would be Big Eyes. It's very
unlike most Tim Burton movies. It's about a real woman,
Margaret Keene, who used to draw these pictures of kids
with big eyes that were hugely successful in the fifties
and sixties. But the controversy was her husband took credit
(03:53):
for coming up with these paintings and she was not
given credit. And they were very, very successful. They made
hundreds of million millions of dollars from these paintings, and
yet she wasn't given credit, and eventually she divorced him
and there was a big showdown in court on who
actually was the artist of Margaret Keane's big eyed children
in those paintings, and Tim Burton made a movie about it,
(04:16):
probably because it's about art and painting and about commercial
success and commercial art versus promotional art. All of these
are factors in his work and in his life, and
he wanted to do a movie that commented on that.
But I would recommend that as a surprise for a
lot of people to check out something Tim did that
didn't have scarecrows or ghosts or horror in it. Big
(04:39):
Eyes is quite a good movie. Also, Big Fish is
one of Tim's most emotional movies. An interesting factor about
that is big Fish is a movie about tall tales,
which Tim certainly tells in his movies. It's also a
movie about losing one's parent. In the story, the main
character loses his father. And interesting side note, Tim Burton
(05:00):
lost both his parents in the year before making Big Fish,
so he chose that subject matter because grieving over his
parents was something that he was going through right then. Anyway,
let's skip ahead to what's going on right now. After
thirty six years, Tim, Michael Keaton, and Warner Brothers finally
got around to making a sequel to Beetlejuice. Now. The
(05:22):
original Beetlejuice was made for about fourteen million dollars. It
earned about five times that at the box office, which
means that Warner Brothers made a pretty healthy profit on it.
The problem over the last thirty six years is they
couldn't come up with a script that satisfied everybody, but
they finally did. If you have not seen the original Beetlejuice,
it's kind of a bizarre movie to try to describe.
(05:45):
It's about a couple that lives in a house in
Connecticut and they die come back as ghosts, and they're
stuck in their house and then some people move in
the living These are living people that they can't stand
so as ghosts, the Cup played by Alec Baldwin and
Geena Davis try to get the people out. They try
(06:05):
to haunt them. They're not very good at it, so
that's when they call on the skills and talents of Beetlejuice. Unfortunately, Beetlejuice,
played maniacally by Michael Keaton, is something of a trickster
demon and is very dangerous and it all is somewhat
silly but entertaining in a strange way. There's not much storyline,
(06:25):
and yet it holds your attention and it makes you laugh.
So that's what the original Beetlejuice was like, and the
question is, how do you write a sequel to that? Well,
I saw what they did with it. I went and
saw the movie. In fact, I've seen it twice, and
they did some smart things. They made something that is
similar to the original, but they added some new things,
(06:48):
and some of the new things are an extension of
what was in the original movie. Probably one of the
most distinctive things about the original Beetlejuice was that it
trade the afterlife as a bureaucracy. And we all know,
if we've ever been to the DMV and waited in line,
(07:11):
what hell on Earth is like. So Tim decided a
wonderful metaphor for the afterlife in his ideas, from his
point of view, would be a monstrous bureaucracy that would
process all of the dead souls from Earth. So that's
part of it. One of the highlights of the original
Beatle Juice is when the ghosts make some living people
(07:33):
at a dinner get up and dance to a song.
It's a banana It's a song called the Banana Boats
Song by Harry Belafonte. It's quite a showstopper. And very amusing.
And Tim has put a similar scene to that in Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice.
He's brought back most of the old cast. He brought back,
(07:54):
of course Michael Keaton and when known a writer. He
also has Jenna Ortega Ann who is one of the
hot young stars, and she plays Winona Ryder's daughter. And
I'm going to simply say to people that if you're
thinking about seeing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, you should definitely watch the
original to find out if this is something you're interested in.
(08:16):
This is lightweight entertainment. It's a horror comedy heavy on
pop culture references, and it's kind of zany and crazy.
It has a little bit of a feel of a
mel Brooks movie in that mel Brooks simply throws so
much stuff in there that he figures, well, you're bound
to like some of the jokes, so I'll put in
three or foursts per minute, And particularly in the second
(08:40):
hour Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice gets so frantic that you really almost
need a scorecard to keep up with everything that's going on.
But overall, a good time was had by all and
all of the cast that comes back is great, and
Willem Defoe makes an interesting character. He plays a dead
act who functions as a police officer in the afterlife.
(09:03):
But if you're expecting anything serious or heavy or weighty
and or anything political, you're definitely not going to get
it in Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. It's a lark. It's a fun one,
but it's of a very particular variety. And if you
don't like comedy, or if you're not open minded to
really silly comedy, then I would not recommend Beetlejuice Beetle
(09:26):
Juice for you. This movie has had tremendous expectations. For
some reason, all of a sudden, everybody in the last
year or two decided they were ready for a Beetlejuice sequel,
even people who'd never seen the first one. So the
expectation has been very, very big on this and there
are predictions that this first weekend, Beetlejuice may make one
(09:47):
hundred million dollars, which is very unusual for a thirty
six year old sequel. This is what's called in the
Hollywood vocabulary a legacy sequel, in the sense that it's
movie everybody's pretty much heard of, even if you haven't
seen it. People seem to have a good memory of it.
They don't necessarily want ten Beetlejuice sequels, but one good
(10:09):
one would be nice. I predict that this will still
be in theaters by the time we get to Halloween,
because having seen it twice, it's got a lot in there.
I caught things on the second viewing that made me
laugh that I didn't even notice in the first one.
So who's all in the cast? Let me see Michael Keaton,
(10:29):
Catherine O'Hara, of course, she played the mom and home alone,
and she was in the first Beetlejuice. Wenona writer Jenna Ortega,
Willem Dafoe, and Danny DeVito, and of course Danny Elfman
provides the scores he does for almost all of Tim
Burton's movie, and it's really good. The showstopper scene, this
is the last thing I'm going to tell you about.
The showstopper scene in Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice is similar to what
(10:53):
I was mentioning earlier. In the first movie. They had
a scene where the ghosts, using their hours, force living
people to sing and dance a song and they have
no control over their bodies or their mouths. So Tim
brought back that idea and the climax of Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice
(11:15):
is the cast being forced to perform MacArthur Park, which
is a very famous song. It was popular in the
sixties by the actor Richard Harris, who performed it, and
then Donna Summer made a head out of it. Some
people love it and think it's a great song. Other
people think it's a pretentious song. But the way Tim
presents it is so exaggerated and funny you can't help
(11:35):
but laugh at it. I'm not going to give Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice a particular numerical score or anything. I'm just going
to say, if you want some laughs, and they can
be kind of silly, go see it anyway. I hope
you'll tell your friends about the True Film Fan podcast.
It's all over the place on the Internet, on the
iHeart system, iHeart podcast, as well as others. We're going
to be doing a lot more content on movies here
(11:56):
in the near future. Thanks for listening. I'm John Wesley
Downey and this is True Film Fan, a podcast on
the iHeartRadio podcast system,
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