Latest / The Kulturecast / Required Viewing 02: Waterworld

Transcript

Required Viewing 02: Waterworld · The Kulturecast

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: We're in Wayne Media.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: We're in Wayne Media. Universal Pictures invites you to a
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: world like none you've ever seen before. Kevin Costner.
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: Waterworld. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Required Viewing. I am
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: one of your hosts, Chris Stashew of the Coultercast, the
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: show that you can find this show on the sub
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: feed of. And I'm joined by my good friend from
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: somewhere on the face.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Of a world covered in water.
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: No, he's actually all the way from West Texas, which
• 1:40
  Speaker 3: hasn't been covered by water yet in the world of
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: our world, but in water world it had. He's the
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: professor of media and communications at Texas Tech, your friend
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: and mine, Dr.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: David D. Perlmutter.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Hi, Chris, and we are at 3,800 feet elevation here,
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: so I'm not sure we have too much to worry about.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: That's right. I agree.
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: I want to set this podcast up because it has
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: one of the the movie has one of the funniest
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: openings of all time. So this show is called Required Viewing.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: It's a sub show.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: It's a feed.
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: It's a sub feed RSS within the culture cast.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: Dr.
• 2:13
  Speaker 3: Perlmutter and I spend every episode doing a 360 degree
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: film study looking at the films that we believe should
• 2:20
  Speaker 3: be required viewing for whatever reason. And we give those
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: reasons on the show from a 360 degree perspective. And
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: I bet you're wondering why we're talking about Waterworld, because
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: if you're a pertinent person of a certain age, you
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: know about Waterworld. But I just I wrote it down
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: this time when I was watching it. And I want
• 2:40
  Speaker 3: to do my best dramatic reading of one of the
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: funniest intro narrations I've ever heard in a movie ever,
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: which is the future.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: The polar ice caps have melted. Those who survive have
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: adapted to a whole new world.
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: Cue to Kevin Costner pissing in a jar. And ladies
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: and gentlemen, that's how we open Waterworld, a film that
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: I think for most people is widely considered to be
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: one of the biggest summer blockbuster bombs ever made. I
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: have my own opinion on it. My opinion is a
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: lot less important than the film itself. But I will say,
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: if you have never seen this movie before, stop this podcast.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Pause.
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: Go watch it. Because if you have only ever heard
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: of it, based on its reputation that is not a
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: fair way to make an assessment of a movie you
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: have to watch it to have an informed opinion not
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: informed as well I'm a filmmaker it's informed as in
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: you've seen the movie and you can talk about it
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: specifically so on this episode of required viewing we are
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: taking a look at a film that for all intents
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: and purposes is is not a film that would show
• 3:49
  Speaker 3: up on most lists of required viewing or lists of
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: movies to even watch. The list that this movie would
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: be showing up on, and I think we both know this, Dr. Perlmutter,
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: is biggest bombs of all time. Worst movies ever made.
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: But we, I think you and I, have a lot
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: more opinions about it than just that.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: So, Dr.
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  Speaker 3: Perlmutter, I am going to, uh... Set up the film
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: a little bit, and then I will ask you what
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: your thoughts are. So the film is directed by Kevin
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: Reynolds on a script by Peter Rader and David Tuohy.
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: It's produced by Kevin Costner, which is important because Kevin
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: Costner is the lead in the film as the Mariner.
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: It also stars one of my favorite actors of all time,
• 4:26
  Speaker 3: Dennis Hopper. Also stars Mickey Blue Eyes' own Jeanne Triplehorn,
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: Tina Majorino, and Michael Jeter, who at one point in
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: his life got eaten by velociraptors in Jurassic Park 3.
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: So the film is more or less, and I will
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: say this very kindly because I don't think that this
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: is an unfair comparison. Have you ever seen Mad Max?
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: You ever wanted to know what it would be like
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: for Mad Max to be with boats instead of cars?
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: That's Waterworld.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: So, Dr.
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: Perlmutter, I am so very curious. Why oh why did
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: you and I come to the conclusion that Waterworld was
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: the film we're going to spend the next... Let's call
• 5:03
  Speaker 3: it our and some change talking about because most people
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: would look at us and go Waterworld. That film came
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: out in the mid 90s. Who cares in 2026? I
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: think you and I will have plenty of reasons to
• 5:15
  Speaker 3: show why it matters. But I am so infinitely curious, Dr.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Perlmutter. Why are we talking about Waterworld? I think in the.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: Past we've discussed how we weren't only going to have
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: the film critics of France Association list of 100 greatest
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: movies of all time as being required viewing, that they
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: were films that were interesting and we could learn from,
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: make observations about, that didn't fall into the category for
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: almost anyone of great art. I mean, there certainly are films,
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: and John Carpenter's original The Thing is a very good example,
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: are films that just did not hit at their time.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: And then over time built an audience and built appreciation
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: and are considered to be excellent, you know, not masterpieces
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: of a kind. This isn't one of them. There's no
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: water world fandom. There's no demand for a sequel. There's
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: no there's no demand for a TV series. I don't
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: think there's ever going to be a remake. I don't
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: think there's been a reappraisal, but just looking at the
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: film and then also the making of the film, the
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: publicity space around Found the Film, you can understand some
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: of the development of Hollywood that we have today, especially
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: the era where so many films, the pressure is on
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: to be a mega blockbuster and the high concept, the
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: one-line elevator pitch sale, because, of course, this film was
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: sold I found interesting that the cinematographer was the same
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: one that did Mad Max, the road war. And it
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: was basically sold as the road warrior on boats on
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: the sea. And we're just starting at that one point there.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: You can understand and not necessarily disagree with the Hollywood
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: executive circa 1995, you know, early 1990s going like, okay,
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: you know, how many, how many hundred million do you
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: need for it? And it's got Kevin Costner, Kevin Costner
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: at the time. I mean, now he's more of a
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: TV icon with his success in Yellowstone.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: When he wants to be, I think is the way
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: of putting it. I mean, he is the one that
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: was like, paycheck, who needs, I'm out of here.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: But at the time there was hope in Hollywood that
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: he would be a Mel Gibson and just star in
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: big blockbuster after big blockbuster. And I guess, after this
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: film and The Postman didn't live up to expectations. Let's
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: put it this way. The expectations were of a Road Warrior,
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: Mad Max-type success. The film, I think, with everything, cost
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: about $ 175 million in that money, the much more worthwhile
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: money of the 1990s. I think it made it back,
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: but of course, you know, Hollywood films are supposed to
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: make maybe double what they cost. So it wasn't like
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: an all-time disaster. When it came out, I remember and
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: I found in my research some funny things that two
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: other films that are almost completely forgotten, the Warren Beatty,
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: Dustin Hoffman comedy Ishtar, which famously cost a huge amount
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: of money. So this was called Fishtar. I thought that
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: was a pretty clever little, little Jape there.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: And then that's amazing. That's amazing.
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: By the way, what a, what a, like what a,
• 8:38
  Speaker 3: what a well thought out insult, frankly, cheese.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: And this is pre, I mean, this is early internet,
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: but like pre Reddit, pre social media. So somebody, some
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: film critic, I have to, I have not found who,
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: who coined the term there, but then also, uh, the
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: other disaster of just a few years before really was heavens.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: Michael Chimino's heaven's gate, uh, which has gotten a sort
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: of reappreciation. You see stuff about it. I'm not on
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: Team Heaven's Gate, but it was called Kevin's Gate. The Waterworld.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Also amazing. My God.
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: Pre-internet people, their pun game was down pat, apparently.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: And there were so many fewer of them. There is a,
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: and I really love this, there is a Ulysses cut
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: of this movie.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: Which is the one that I watched, by the way.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: And now, I watched it in a theater. And I
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: wanted to. No.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Because I wanted this. This was a big.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: At that time, the big-budget, big-screen blockbuster was rarer and
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: there was more hype because there was less hype, if
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: I can put it that way. Now, if somebody said
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: to me, yeah, there's a big you know, Superman or
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: Marvel big, big blockbuster coming out, I would maybe I've
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: aged out of that. But no, thank you. There's one
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: every 15 minutes. Back then, it was more of a
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: big deal. And I, you know, I love Jaws and
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: I loved Road Warrior and. Indiana Jones. And I think
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: there was hope that this would be some sort of
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: a franchise like this. So there's a required viewing and
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: sort of understanding the mechanics of why Hollywood started really
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: with Spielberg and Lucas kicking them off. This idea of like,
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: if we spend $ 175 million, we can make $ 3 billion.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: Whereas it used to be Hollywood, we'll spend $ 20 million
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: and we'll make $ 50 million. And so the blockbuster mentality
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: that we still live in today and that to some extent,
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: affects streaming services as well, where every streaming service, Prime, Apple, HBO, whatever,
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: wants to make some sort of super big budget productions
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: that sort of are the flagships of their streaming. You
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: can see some of the lessons coming from Waterworld. So
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: we'll talk about the movie, but I think it's interesting
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: to talk about, like, production and publicity and reviews as
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: the early, early internet era that it came from?
• 11:10
  Speaker 3: So I was five when the film came out. I
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: don't remember seeing it. I don't remember hearing anything about it.
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: I remember seeing it, let's say, when I was in
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: my mid to late teens. And to your point, as
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: someone who came to it very much later on, Then
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: when the film came out, I did not know at
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: that time the kind of I wouldn't say that the
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: fervor around it, but definitely the kind of expectations versus
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: reality versus what everyone was hoping for versus what the
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: studio was hoping for. versus what clearly Costner, who was
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: one of the producers, was hoping for. And in my research,
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: I found the same things that you did. Heaven's Gate, Ishtar,
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: One from the Heart, which Coppola mortgaged Zotrope against and
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: lost the studio because of. And then the other one
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: that also comes to mind is Sorcerer, the Friedkin film,
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: where it was... this whole thing, whole hullabaloo about, you know,
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: the shoot and it came out after Star Wars and
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: it made like no money. I mean, look, Sorcerer, in
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: the years since the film has come out, has been
• 12:19
  Speaker 3: reappraised as a true Friedkin classic, which is great, because
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: Sorcerer is a great film. If you haven't seen it,
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: go check it out. It's about a bunch of guys
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: driving trucks in the Dominican Republic full of, I think, nitroglycerin,
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: if memory serves.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: It's a great film. We will do that.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: We're going to do the Wages of Fear and Sorcerer together.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: The French film was... A true, true classic.
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: Oh, right, the one that it's originally based on, right?
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: And then there's also Baron Munchausen, which also gets kind
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: of lumped into this because, again, you know, double the budget.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: Columbia wanted nothing to do with it. It's like a
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: two-hour long movie. And it before it even and this
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: is the weird thing right and I know that you
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: are a professor of media and communications I initially went
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: to school for journalism so I have similarly to yourself
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: and I don't have as much of a background in
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: journalism as you do but I had that journalistic drive
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: early on that yes I understand this movie had its failures.
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: But the press and the media surrounding film dictates so
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: much of the public's response then, not so much now.
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: And because of the Internet, because of the kind of
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: democratization and the proliferation of, you know, someone like yourself
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: and myself sitting on the Internet, we have the ability
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: to reach people to talk about films the way that
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: Siskel and Ebert and friends used to. have kind of
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: the only channel to the public. And so now that
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: there is a wider, again, further democratized channel of people
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: to talk about things, things like, like I just mentioned,
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: Baron Munchausen, which is considered to be one of Terry
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: Gilliam's best films, Sorcerer, which, like we've already alluded to,
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: is a great film. The films that have come out
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: that were taken out by the studio ahead of time
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: because they went over budget or... you know what have
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: you these movies have now been given a second life
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: because look as time goes on these movies don't just
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: disappear if it's been released it's still out there you
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: can still watch it and it the the hope is
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: it will eventually find an audience if you're a filmmaker
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: and your film doesn't succeed initially, your hope is in
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: the long run, your film finds an audience. That being said,
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: I think Westworld is one of those films. Just to
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: give my personal thoughts on it, the very small amount
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: of personal thoughts that I need to give, because again,
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: this is not a show about subjectivity as much as objectivity, frankly.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: Waterworld.
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: I enjoy, to give my personal, subjective, minor thoughts on
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: Waterworld before we talk about the film specifically and the
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: things surrounding it, I enjoy Waterworld a fair amount. I
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: actually think it's a pretty good movie. Does it have problems? Sure.
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: And I think the problems in a lot of ways
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: are the same problems you could level against any other
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: film that creates a world that feels very unlike our
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: own and what the film doesn't do. And I think that, again,
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: you can lambast it for this or you can praise
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: it for this. It does not have training wheels on
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: it at all. The opening narration of the world is
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: covered in water. People have to adapt to survive.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: That's it.
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: We find out more about the world through the narrative
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: and the film itself. And I, as someone who watches
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: a lot of film, I appreciate that. I appreciate that
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: the film is not like exposition dumping every five minutes
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: about the world and the way the world is and
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: why the world is. The people in this world don't know.
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: know why Waterworld is the way that it is and
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: I appreciate that conceit immensely because it shows a trust
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: in the audience that look you've seen a film like
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: this before like you've already alluded to if you've seen
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: Mad Max you kind of have already seen this movie
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: in a lot of ways and I appreciate that this
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: movie doesn't take it upon itself to spend half an
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: hour explaining the whys and whos and whats of Waterworld
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: we just get to understand the world is covered in
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: water and And the world is covered in water. And
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: that's and that's about it. And they're looking for dry land.
• 16:24
  Speaker 3: I appreciate about that, about this movie. But I can
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: understand if you're watching this movie in the mid 90s,
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: how you just don't resonate with it at all. because
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: they're not giving you... It's not that they're not giving
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: you a lot to go on, but what they're not
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: giving you is everything laid out immediately so you understand
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: the world. The world is kind of growing before you
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: as the viewer, and you're kind of getting to see
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: it as it unfolds. And for a lot of viewers,
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: that is not something that they want. They want to,
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: and we've talked about this before, go into a movie
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: knowing everything, understanding everything, not wanting to feel like they're
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: out of sorts with the filmmaker. and Waterworld that I
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: kid you not more or less happen without any explanation.
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: There's parts where Kevin Costner is being dumped into what
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: we assume is some sort of sulfuric tar pit maybe?
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Who knows? I don't know and it's not explained.
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: There are things that happen that aren't explained and for
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: me as a viewer it doesn't bother me but for
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: a large portion of the other viewership of the people
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: saying this film, I don't think they resonated with it.
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: And I'm also going to say just outright here, because
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: this is the other piece of subjective opinion that I
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: need to get out of the way before we talk
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: about the movie proper. I don't like Kevin Costner as
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: an actor. His stylings, his acting stylings are not my
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: cup of tea.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: They never have been.
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: I don't vibe with him the way that I think
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: a lot of other people do, because clearly he's been
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: very successful. Like you mentioned, Yellowstone, Whole host of things.
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: Kevin Costner, not my bag. That being said, perfectly cast
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: in a role where he has to be an aloof drifter. Doing,
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: and I think you would agree, doing his best Clint
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: Eastwood man with no name bit. That's kind of what
• 18:08
  Speaker 3: this movie is. Like, Mad Max gets a name, sure.
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: But Mad Max is in that same vein of Clint
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: Eastwood's The Man With No Name, going from town to town,
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: dealing with problems that need to be dealt with, but
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: not staying in one place too long and then going
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: off on another adventure. If that's what you're casting Kevin
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: Costner for in this movie, that was, I kid you not,
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: like the most perfect casting possible. For someone like Costner,
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: because Costner is his aloofness works in this. So all
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: of my subjective stuff aside, I understand why this film
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: objectively was a, quote, failure out of the gate. But man,
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: have you seen a movie that's as creative as this
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: one in the last 10 years that does all the
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: things that this film does, like that creates a world
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: that feels lived in? in a way that it's very
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: hard to do this successfully. And to drag a movie
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: for the things it got dragged for seems a little
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: bit unfair, because that was kind of the intention of
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: the movie. And yes, I know, and it would seem
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: that this movie was a launching point for other things
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: that never came to be. But for me, just sitting
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: down to rewatch this movie in 2026... I feel like
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: anyone who watched it in this day and age would
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: be like, what a wild movie. Look at all these
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: practical effects and look at all these boats and people
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: popping up from under the water on ski-dos and flying
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: through the air on jet skis and stuff. It's out
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: of control, the amount of stunts, Practical stunts that they
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: were doing in this film and I feel like in
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: 1995 people then probably took that for granted a little
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: bit because they don't make movies like this anymore period
• 19:47
  Speaker 3: and if they do they cost four times. the budget
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: of this movie. The fact that this movie was made
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: for $ 175 million is pretty crazy to me.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: So... Well, in those dollars.
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think that's probably like $ 350 million now,
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: I would assume.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: But it looks better than Dial of Destiny.
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: It looks better than a lot of the new things
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: that are coming out in this day and age.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: I want to talk about something you said there. And
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: this is something, I guess, an angle of attack that
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: we're going to take in required viewing.
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: So.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: My perspective as a teacher is that quite often I'm,
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: when I'm in the classroom, standing there and I'm showing, say,
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: a clip from a movie to students, a TV show,
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: video game, something, web page, TikTok video, and I get
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: a sort of unique opportunity. And it started way back
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: in the late 80s when I was a graduate student
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: in the film class. And then 1995 is when my
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: career actually began as a professor at LSU, assistant professor
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: on the tenure track at LSU School of Communication. And
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: I remember I taught the intro class, which I still
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: teach today, the intro class in our field in 1995.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: And I taught in this gigantic auditorium, like 500 students.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: Just imagine all just sitting there looking at you. And
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: a lot of people felt uncomfortable doing that. But for fun,
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: I considered it to be like super fun. I mean,
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: certainly to keep track of them and also keep their
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: attention was a wonderful challenge, and I still look forward
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: to it. But the point was that I could look
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: at them as they looked at something, right? So I
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: could show a clip from an older movie at that time.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: I could show a clip from Lawrence of Arabia. And
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: I could watch 518-year-olds looking at what was then about
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: a 25-year-old movie. And.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: Where are their eyes going? You know, are they paying attention?
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: Are they, they, this was not the era of the smartphone,
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: but like I had students who had the comics from
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: the newspaper and just flapped them out and started reading
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: the back row. So that, I mean, there were, there
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: were signals that people, people weren't paying attention. And I still,
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: when I go to the theater, the rare times I did,
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: but certainly back then I would look and see the
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: reaction of an audience. And so it's important to, in
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: this 360 view that we ask ourselves what we're doing
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: while we're watching a movie. So now studios, creators have
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: this problem of the second screen, right? And we get
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: a feeling that a lot of movies, TV shows, everything
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: are made with this nervousness that the audience is no
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: longer looking at our production, but they're looking at their phone. Right. And,
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: So what do we do? And Richard Haddam, our good friend,
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: made this really great comment. He said the reaction should
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: be what we put on the screen should be better
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: to get the attention.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of other people in Hollywood
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: who would say, well, we've got to have something on
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: the screen that allows these people to look at their
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: phone at the same time. and not miss anything, right?
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: So that's where the over-explanation and repetition and underlining comes from.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: But when I saw this in a theater in 1995,
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: I could edit my encounter. So I remember my goal
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: whenever I went to a theater to see a movie
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: was that I didn't read any review. And you could
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: do that in 1995. You could simply say, okay, the
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: local news, it's in a I'm a little late. I think,
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: I think I didn't see it until like three weeks
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: after it came out and I had to worry because
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: it left pretty soon. So I've, I may have seen
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: it in its last showing in Baton Rouge, but I
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: remember going like, I'm, I'm not going to read the paper.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to read.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: Time magazine or news a week review because it was,
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: because it was given Kevin Costner in a big budget film.
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: It got reviewed. Everybody reviewed it. The local TV. I
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: remember watching local TV news, which was something back then.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: And I, I actually turned off the news because they
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: were just about to do a review of Waterworld. So
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: I put off as much as I could. A little
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: bit of the culture leaked. So I already heard some like, oh, yeah,
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: it's a flop or something like that. But it wasn't
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: today where like 15 minutes after an episode of a
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: streaming show or a movie opens, You already have a
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: massive tide. And then you've had, we didn't have the
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: long tail that we do now, right? So Supergirl opened,
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: but there were three months of saturation discussion about Supergirl
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: before it opened.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: We didn't have that.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: In these stories about troubled production on Waterworld, you could
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: ignore those. I actually did not know that there was
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: any troubled production on Waterworld. because I'd avoid reading any
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: articles about Waterworld. So I went in there with that
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: innocent eye that I've talked about before, and I just
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: looked at a movie. And I remember coming out and going,
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: and I honestly forget, I don't have my ticket stub.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: I usually save ticket stubs. I couldn't find that. I
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: was going to try to show the ticket stub from
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: Waterworld 1995 as a historical document. I couldn't find it,
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: but I think I paid like five bucks to go
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: see this movie. And I remember walking out and saying, yeah,
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: that was worth five bucks. That was worth five bucks
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: in two hours of my time. You know, thrills, chills, spills,
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: as they used to say. Stuff happening on the big screen.
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: It was a big screen movie. I mean, it wasn't,
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: this was not a coffee house movie. This was, you know,
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: lots of big explosions and boats sailing off. It was
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: different because we'd seen a hundred variations of like fast
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: cars crashing into each other and, you know, bombs on,
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: on earth. And so the, the whole water thing. So
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: I got my five bucks in 1995 and, and I
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: didn't think this was ever going to be a film
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: I'd show in class, but for its great artistry, but
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: I gave it credit for entertaining me, which is all
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: I was asking for, for, for this film. And that
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: really sums it up is that, is that, I think
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: this film would have been well served by just people
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: getting to go to the theater, pay five bucks and go, okay, yeah,
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: that was a great way to spend two hours, you know, fun.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: There were, there were so many flaws. There were problems.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: There were plot holes. There were, Performance gaps. I felt
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: that they did these weird topical references, which you should
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: never do at a post-apocalyptic movie.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: One specific one, even.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: I mean, one I completely... I mean, you know, where
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: you have Dennis Hopper as related to the captain of
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: an oil tanker that had famously crashed and lost a
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: lot of oil. And yet, even in 1995, because this
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: hadn't happened just recently.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: I think there was a groan in the theater of
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: like that. Wait a minute. We don't know when this
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: is taking place, right? I read online somewhere that in
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: the script or some production materials, this is supposed to
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: be the year 2500. Which is like.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: Which is how many years?
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: 500 years past the Exxon Valdez happening?
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's like making a Meghan Markle
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: joke in Star Trek or something. Right. Like, I just, what?
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: You know, okay.
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: Well, if you're going to do it, make it a joke. Like,
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: what comes to mind is Spaceballs, right? In Spaceballs, they have...
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: In the far-flung future, they're still making Rocky movies and
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: stuff like that. Normally, it's used as a gag to
• 27:27
  Speaker 3: show that the culture hasn't progressed any further than it
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: is now. In this movie, it is groan-inducing, some of
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: the things that they've done, because it just... It reminds
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: you that this script was being written not by people now,
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: but it's being written for the expectation that the people
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: now are going to get the joke. It's not future-proofing
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: it for anyone in the future. Because if you were
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: to watch it in 2026 and you weren't someone, let's say,
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: between your age, my age, or maybe a little younger
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: than me, does Exxon Valdez even mean anything to you?
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this goes back, and we're going to try to
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: write some rules for people doing say, post-apocalyptic films set
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: in the future. And one of the rules I've just
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: heard over and over again, and I've said it at
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: least once in the show before, is that never specify
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: units of computer memory, never specify money in your fantasy
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: or science fiction. Of course, the film series did did
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: do exactly what you're saying, just like with Fates Balls
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: was Austin Powers, right? Where he says, you know, I'm
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: going to hold the world for ransom for $ 1 million.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: And that was the joke about the idea of, you know,
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: $ 1 million being worth something once upon a time there
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: instead of a trillion dollars. But even today, he said
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: a trillion dollars, maybe 20 years from now, people would
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: laugh at like, what?
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: You mean like one.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: Candy bar worth of American money or something like that?
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: I want to talk about Kevin Costner just a minute
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: because you raised him. I'm not Kevin Costner negative. I
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: think he's one of those actors that needs to be
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: in a certain type of role in a certain type
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: of production. There's no question he does not have the
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: charisma of the traditional actors. Steve McQueen or Mel Gibson
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: action star.
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: Thank you for mentioning Mel Gibson, because that's the one
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: that came to mind with this Mad Max-esque film.
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: He's quiet.
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: He has a thin voice. He's not physically imposing. These
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: are not negatives if you're in the right kind of role. Like,
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: I actually watched all of the Yellowstone series. I was
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: disappointed in the directions it went, but I enjoyed the series. Again,
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: I don't know if it was Waterworld adjacent and it
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: was lots of crazy, interesting things happening that sort of
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: rewarded your hour of watching an episode, but he was
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: very good as the family patriarch who came on the
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: screen every once in a while and said some pithy
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: aphorism or, you know, said something that, you know, sort
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: of summed up the moment and then you took them
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: off the screen and then other people did the action.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: In fact, they had several other stars who were the
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: designated action stars. It's sort of like Star Trek New Generations,
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: at least what it was supposed to be, where Picard
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: would be this sort of cerebral sitting back and the
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: Kirk role was, would be played by Commander Riker. They
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: mixed that up pretty quickly. They didn't follow through on that,
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: where they have Picard going off on missions and everything.
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: But I think that's the kind of role he does
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: well in. And unfortunately, he became labeled as an action star,
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: so they put him in movies like The Postman and Waterworld,
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: where he's supposed to carry the movie by his star power.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: And it just physically doesn't work. Again, going back to voice,
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: it doesn't, you know, Mel Gibson, for whatever other things
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: he is, man, can he carry off a line in
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: an action film star role line? Like his voice is
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: very resonant, right? Right. And you can, Harrison Ford, you know,
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: I remember a hundred quotes from Harrison Ford saying, Some
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: of them are memorable quotes. Also, it's Harrison Ford saying those.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: Right, right.
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: Get off my plane is not a line that really works.
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: Other actors say it, but when he says it to
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: Gary Oldman at the end of Air Force One, it
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: has that resonance to it.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: Get off my plane.
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: Kevin Costner, for me, it's not that he's a wet blanket,
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: but like you've already alluded to, I think my issue
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: with someone like Costner and the thing that I look at,
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: because you've already mentioned it twice, and I think it
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: almost bears kind of having a minor side tangent about
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: The Postman is the other big 90s epic that was
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: a failure, a financial failure. And guess what those two
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: films have in common? They're both Kevin Costner-led film. I
• 32:08
  Speaker 3: have not seen a lot of other Kevin Cost- Robin Hood.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: Robin Hood, yeah, which is great.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: I think it did box office, but he wasn't Robin Hood.
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: Well, he's not the best part of that movie. The
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: best part of that movie is Alan Rick. I mean,
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: Alan Rickman is just chewing the scenery as the Sheriff
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: of Nottingham, which is why that movie is so good,
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: is because- the villain in it is chewing the scenery
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: and we're not asking Kevin Costner to do the heavy lifting.
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: This movie almost gets there because man, Dennis Hopper is
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: chewing the scenery. And that's, I think that ends up
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: being with these Kevin Costner movies that I've seen in
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: terms of having a conversation about like, what does success
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: look like in terms of casting Kevin Costner in a movie,
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: you can cast Kevin Costner in a movie as this
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: kind of stoic hero if the villain is just operating
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: at 11. He's over the top. He's bombastic. He's loud.
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: He's brash. He's, you know, in this film, he takes
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: no prisoners whatsoever. Kevin Costner just doesn't seem to be
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: the kind of actor who... The energy that he brings
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: to things is not an animated energy. He reminds me
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: a lot of William Hurt in that regard. I know
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: Kevin Costner is a great actor. It's not that he's
• 33:25
  Speaker 3: not a good actor. It's just the energy that he
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: brings to the roles that he is in, especially as
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: the lead, the expectation is not that he's going to
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: be a house of fire on screen. He's going to be, again,
• 33:38
  Speaker 3: playing that kind of Clint Eastwood-style role. I would compare
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: Costner to Clint Eastwood in a lot of ways. But
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: Clint Eastwood has a fair amount of charisma to him.
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: Kevin Costner doesn't have a lot of charisma.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: And that, for me, I feel like.
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: I'm not going to say that's the reason this movie failed,
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: because that's not the reason this movie failed. Like we've
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: already alluded to, Kevin Costner was a known quantity... He
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: was a financial success in terms of casting him in
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: things in the 90s. I think, and you've already alluded
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: to this, we have this issue of the studio got
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: frustrated that the movie doubled in budget. And instead of
• 34:16
  Speaker 3: keeping quiet about it, which, by the way, I'd like
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: to point out, If you're a director or an actor
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: or you do that before the movie comes out, you
• 34:24
  Speaker 3: don't get to work in Hollywood again. You don't get
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: to play ball with the studios because the studios are
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: going to look at you and go, why in God's
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: name would we put someone in charge of a movie
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: or cast in a movie that's not going to sit
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: and defend the movie outright? or say how great the
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: movie is even if they know that the movie is
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: incontrovertibly a failure or not great why are the actors
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: not allowed to do that but the studios are i
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: i think of josh trank directing that fantastic four movie
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: that came out a couple years ago with uh miles
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: teller and michael b jordan josh trank came out before
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: the movie came out and said this movie is awful
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: like This movie is not good.
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: Don't go see it.
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: Josh Trank hasn't directed a movie since. He lost the
• 35:06
  Speaker 3: ability to direct the Boba Fett movie for the Star
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: Wars franchise that he had been given because he went
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: out of his way to talk about the fact that
• 35:14
  Speaker 3: the movie that was coming out that had his name
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: on it was not representative of the movie he had created.
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: And he has been more or less blackballed. The fact
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: that the studios are allowed to do that and cause
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: something like Westworld to to more or less not even
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: be given a fair shake out of the gate and
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: there's no repercussions for them is a wild concept to
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: think about because it's effectively the, you know, well, it's the,
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: you know, if it's the boss's fault, it's not really
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: my fault. It's the people who work for me's fault.
• 35:45
  Speaker 3: I won't take responsibility for it.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: That's kind of what it smacks of.
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: Another lesson from this film, Chris, is one you've just
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: raised is that I don't, Defend the classical studio era
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: on all counts. There's a lot of horrible things that
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: went on. A lot of people were treated very badly.
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: A lot of behavior that should be illegal was normalized.
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: Definitely groups didn't get represented on screen very well, but
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: control can.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: Be a good thing.
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: And so like, you know, Gone with the Wind, which
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: made a zillion dollars and is still considered to be
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: one of the greatest movies ever made in terms of production.
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: You know, the shooting of The Burning of Atlanta was troubled.
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: I mean, anytime you do anything big, right, with like
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: a thousand actors.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Cecil B.
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: DeMille, the Ten Commandments, the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, troubled.
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's what it would be called today. But
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: it was just, it was hard. It was really hard
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: to pull off big action sequences with impractical effects days.
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: And we need to keep saying that, that when you're
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: seeing the boats jumping over other boats here, it's like
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: that 80s and 90s, 70s, 60s James Bond, where you're
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: really like, wow, some stunt guy was actually in that
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: car doing a 360 flip over the river. And I
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: remember as a kid going to a James Bond movie because, oh,
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: what's going to be the big stunt? And you knew
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: it wasn't going to be a CGI stunt. Today, there's
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: no anticipation. Again, I can enjoy a film like the
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: special effects in something like Project Hail Mary because I just, oh,
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: those are really nice special effects, but I don't go like,
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: oh my gosh, you know, how'd they risk Ryan Gosling's
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: life like that?
• 37:33
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: There's none of that anticipation there. And you respect Kevin Costner.
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: And we haven't talked about Gene Triplehorn yet, who is
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: a very, very excellent act, excellent casting choice, very dignified.
• 37:46
  Speaker 2: And play is actually better than some of the people
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: cast in Mad Max. We should talk about that, too.
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: There's actually some improvements over Mad Max Road Warrior here.
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: Which which, you know, should be credited to this film.
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: But the point being that this was maybe the beginning
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: of the era where people got on these roles of
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: either trashing a film or maybe overly praising the film
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: and not accepting that there was maybe some middle ground
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: and you could just enjoy your five bucks.
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: Well, and, you know, we've talked about this a little
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: bit before, and I feel like we're probably going to,
• 38:26
  Speaker 3: I mean, not bemoan this is the right word, but
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: I would say bring this up from time to time.
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: We lived in a time and a place from, let's
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: call it the 80s through the early 2000s of thumbs
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: up or thumbs down. binary ratings for films is reductive
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: when it comes to art it's immensely reductive when it
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: comes to art frankly to go and look at a
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: piece of artwork in terms of a painting or a
• 38:56
  Speaker 3: anything anything that is visual that is not a moving
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: image so a painting a mural, you know, a visual
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: representation of something, and to look at it, and I
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: won't say the line, but if you've seen Always Sunny,
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: and you've seen Danny DeVito wearing a white wig in
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: Always Sunny, walking through an art gallery, and looking at
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: pieces of art, derivative, derivative, derivative, BS, derivative, like, that
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: kind of criticism, especially one that was being proffered by
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: Siskel and Ebert, it, what it smacks of is it
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: smacks of a general misunderstanding of what you said just
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: now there doesn't have to be good or bad is
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: almost unimportant when it comes to enjoyment of a film
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: if you didn't like the movie cool that does not
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: affect the quality of the film your ability to like
• 39:49
  Speaker 3: a movie doesn't bears no bearing on the quality of
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: the film itself. All it means is you didn't resonate
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: with the film. There was something about the film that
• 39:58
  Speaker 3: you did not like. There was something about the film
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: that didn't strike a chord with you or struck a
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: discordant tone with you. I have already said it multiple
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: times now and it bears repeating. I don't like Kevin
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: Costner as an actor at all. But in Waterworld, I
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: like him in this role and I appreciate the film
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: immensely because he's in it and what he is doing
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: is exactly what is needed. in this film it's exactly
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: what the film's script is asking for a quiet stoic
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: no-nonsense drifter who has been on his own for who
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: knows how long and he will continue to be so
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: because again by the end of the film thankfully the
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: film just goes he's off back on his own again
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: and you know what good I know why they did
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: it's because there was a sequel or they were hoping
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: for a sequel to turn this into a franchise you
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: know Waterworld 2 and 3 and you know whatever All
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: of that aside to boil something down to a pure binary.
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: I didn't like it because again, like you, we can't,
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: the reductive nature of criticism cannot continue in that direction anymore.
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: In this day and age, you have to be willing
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: to look at a film and go objectively. This is
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: a great film.
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: It's well-made.
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: It's well executed, but subjectively, I didn't like it.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: To your point, the studio did not give anyone who
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: went and saw this film a subjective chance to enjoy
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: it because it was already over budget and it took
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: forever to come out. None of that has any bearing
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: on the quality of the film. I have seen films...
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: that took less time to make, less money, that were 10.
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: Times worse than this film. Not even. Way.
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: So unappealing that I wouldn't even re-watch them if you
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: asked me. I would re-watch Waterworld with... I would rather
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: watch this than several other films like it because, again,
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: there is... interesting weird things going on are they all
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: explored to the fullest to the extent no and is
• 42:03
  Speaker 3: that a failing of the movie yes in some way
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: because the clearly expectation was we'll get another opportunity down
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: the road to explain some of this there was none
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: of that obviously but To have this much creativity on
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: screen in a practical setting should not have just been
• 42:19
  Speaker 3: overlooked as, well, that's just the way things are. Like,
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: there may not always be things like this being made.
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: So to appreciate it for what it is at the
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: time feels a little myopic to just go, well, it
• 42:31
  Speaker 3: was over budget, and so therefore it's not successful.
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: Like, I don't know about that.
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's something that we all... of us who
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: enjoy media criticism, and again, this is part of the 360,
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: is sort of self-analysis as well as analysis of what's
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: on the screen and what we've been told about what's
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: on the screen. But we have to always remember that
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: it's okay to just enjoy something, right?
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, we agree.
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think one of the reasons I reached
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: out to you long ago was that I said to myself, oh,
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: here's somebody who stands up for the right for an
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: audience to just enjoy a film without there being a message,
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: a deep meaning, a crane shot that was taken from
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: Nosferatu and refers to John Ford's The Searcher. You don't
• 43:24
  Speaker 2: need the layers of film criticism or appreciation or illusion.
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: You can just pay five bucks, sit in the theater,
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: you're going on a date, you're going to go see
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: it almost seems like something from another age to say like,
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: you know, go pay 10 bucks for dinner and five
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: bucks each, you know, 20 bucks total, go see a movie,
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: enjoy the movie, talk a little bit about the movie,
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: maybe forget the movie a month later. It doesn't haunt
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: your dreams, but it's just fun on the screen. And that's,
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: that's what this movie fulfilled in 1995 for little old me.
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: And I think that, Today would probably do the same
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: because it's interesting in terms of how a movie ages, right?
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: So certainly I think today Jaws ages so well. You
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: can see Jaws today and you can get some of
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: the same reaction that people, including me, did in the
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: theater watching Jaws. Indiana Jones, the first movie, absolutely. Star Wars, absolutely.
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: This is one of those films that I would put
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: on the list, especially because all these effects were basically
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: practical effects. It's interesting, by the way, practical effects age
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: well when they're done well.
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: They really do, don't they?
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: It's hilarious to me how you look at effects from
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: the 90s that aren't practical and you're like, good Lord,
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: that's awful. Other than Jurassic Park, that seems to be
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: like the high bar, the high watermark, like everything... still
• 44:55
  Speaker 3: gets compared to Jurassic Park, and I think fairly so.
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: But you're right, the practical effects in this film are
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: really astounding in a lot of ways. The level of
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: creativity and, I think, wherewithal that went into the practical
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: effects in this film should be lauded beyond belief, frankly.
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and so I think that's one of my, and
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: we're not wrapping up yet, but I mean, one of
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: my takeaways is that we are perfectly fine with what
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: used to be called a popcorn film, a summer film
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: that you don't ask too much from. That said, there
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: are some moments of like impressive depth here. And I
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: want to talk about some of the little moments, because
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: when you talk about a massive blockbuster, you tend to
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: refer to the big set piece action events. But let's
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: talk first, as I just mentioned, Jean Triplehorn, who is
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: a excellent, excellent actress who doesn't get enough work. I
• 45:54
  Speaker 2: saw her most recently as a government minister in The
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: Terminal List with Chris Pratt. And, you know, The Terminal
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: List was the modern streaming version of a popcorn action.
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: There's lots of shooting and revenge and It was fine.
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: It was absolutely fine. She brought this dignity and gravitas
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: and this layeredness to the villain, one of the villains
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: of the film, that only a great actor can do.
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: And here, she's playing a tough role, right? She's a
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: woman who's sort of stuck in this situation. She's trying
• 46:35
  Speaker 2: to protect this child. we're not pretending that she's Supergirl
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: or Captain Marvelette, that she can do all these amazing
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: physical things. She has to, through her brains and her stalwartness,
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: convince this guy who obviously is pretty burnt out and
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: not trusting the people that, hey, I need you to
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: help me to do this thing and protect this child.
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: And again, she just brings this The centeredness to the role.
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: And it's always a joy when there's a certain actor
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: or actress that you know is just going to take
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: a part that maybe it's not the minor part, but
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: she is not like the co-lead of this film. She
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: wasn't booked that way and she isn't that way, but
• 47:17
  Speaker 2: she just sort of helps the film along and adds
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: to it. the this centered this indignity is there at
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: the same time as all the crazy stuff going on
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: with the boat chases and explosions.
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: And I would also say as well and this is
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: a thing that you know for me is a big
• 47:38
  Speaker 3: not a big no no but I'm just not the
• 47:41
  Speaker 3: biggest fan primarily because of the way that they're written
• 47:44
  Speaker 3: in a film with children but Tina Majorino plays the
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: child at the center of all of it because she
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: has a tattoo on her back which shows where dry
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: land is. She is great as well in allowing Kevin
• 47:59
  Speaker 3: Costner to be humanized as a character and showing a
• 48:04
  Speaker 3: side of his character that is more interesting in terms
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: of where the film could go and what the film
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: could be doing. And I think that Tina Majorino as Enola,
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: I think, also really works in the film's favor because, again,
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: if you think about a film like Fistful of Dollars
• 48:23
  Speaker 3: or For a Few Dollars More or The Good, the
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: Bad and the Ugly, I mean, again, we have a
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: similar character here with the Mariner. Like he's just, you know,
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: he's very put upon. He just, you know, comes into town,
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: deals with thing and leaves. And he's, you know, he's
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: not sticking around. He's just there to, you know, right
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: the wrongs or, you know, stand up for quote, good, unquote.
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: Whatever you want to call that.
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: And I like that we have the child character played
• 48:50
  Speaker 3: by Tina Majorino, who just helps with that humanization of
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: the Kevin Costner character, because without it, I think, and again,
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: his character is a flat character because that's kind of
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: the expectation, but we get to see those moments with
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: him and her. And again, it just, it reminds me
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: that When you actually in these films have a character
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: like that and you have them interacting with your main character,
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: it allows your main character to have a little bit
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: more depth than they would have otherwise. And again, not
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: saying that the man with no name doesn't have any
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: depth but you get some depth with this character that
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: the man with no name doesn't have because he's not
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: interacting with a whole bunch of different kinds of people
• 49:31
  Speaker 3: in those films he's pretty much interacting with desperados outlaws
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: and lawmen and Maybe some, you know, I think in
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: the first one he's I forget there's probably a woman
• 49:40
  Speaker 3: there in one of those films or at least two
• 49:43
  Speaker 3: of them. But in this one, like you said, Jan
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: Triplehorn is given I wouldn't say a lot of agency,
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: but she's given a lot of pushback on Kevin Costner's character,
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: which is so smart for this script. Because, again, I
• 49:55
  Speaker 3: was reading some of the reviews from when the film
• 49:57
  Speaker 3: came out and it was like, oh, it's a cheap
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: rip off of Mad Max.
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: Which one?
• 50:00
  Speaker 3: Which one has Mad Max with children running around and
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: stuff like this? Like Mad Max Fury Road, maybe not
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: really like the comparisons to other things, again, feel derivative,
• 50:12
  Speaker 3: not allowing a film to exist on its own merits
• 50:14
  Speaker 3: and comparing it to other things and saying, well, it's
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: not as good as Mad Max or it's a rip
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: off of Mad Max. That is just derivative criticism that
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: serves no purpose. and doesn't allow a film to exist
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: within its kind of own world that it's created. You know,
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: to say this film had toxic buzz surrounding when it
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: came out is being kind. I can't imagine for the
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: life of me what the point of telling everyone the
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: budget on this film ballooned twice of what it needed
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: to be and that was enough to cause people to
• 50:43
  Speaker 3: not go see it. That is a very pastoral reason
• 50:46
  Speaker 3: to not go see a film. Let's put it that way,
• 50:48
  Speaker 3: especially in 2026. I mean, in the wake of something
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: like Ghostbusters 2016, where it was, oh, it's a female
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: Ghostbusters and all the incels are going to not go
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: see it. No, the movie wasn't funny. That's why people
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: didn't go see it. Waterworld, for me, I'm trying to
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: understand what the film's problem is that would have caused
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: this fervor and backlash towards it. Because if you watch
• 51:12
  Speaker 3: the film, if you actually watch the film, like you've
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: already alluded to, Why is if we can assume when
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: we go out to eat that there are multiple courses
• 51:22
  Speaker 3: at a restaurant and you don't order the calamari as
• 51:26
  Speaker 3: a meal because you have to order five plates of
• 51:28
  Speaker 3: calamari to be full. Why can't you just have a
• 51:31
  Speaker 3: movie that's the equivalent of of a hamburger at McDonald's?
• 51:35
  Speaker 3: It's just it satisfies the need and it doesn't need
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: to be any more than that. And if it is great.
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I started out, we both said that this
• 51:44
  Speaker 2: was an original premise, right? I mean, the one sentence,
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: road warrior on water, is not ridiculous. It's like, oh yeah,
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: you know, we could do this in water. And here's
• 51:55
  Speaker 2: the test, okay? 30 years later, people are still lining
• 51:59
  Speaker 2: up by the thousands to see Waterworld, except... It's the
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: Waterworld Stunt Show.
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: And thank you for mentioning that.
• 52:08
  Speaker 2: Still after 30 years, you can go to Hollywood and
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: you can see the Waterworld at Universal Studios. And they
• 52:15
  Speaker 2: have another one in Japan. And they have another one
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: in Beijing.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: And in Florida. What movie?
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there was one in Singapore that would close.
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: I was looking up. I only heard... I had until
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: this morning... I'd only heard about the one in Universal
• 52:33
  Speaker 2: Studios and I was going like, oh my gosh, that's
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: just amazing that, you know, that, I mean, what other film?
• 52:39
  Speaker 2: I mean, yes, there's Harry Potter World, right? And there's
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: still other blockbusters have their thing, right? But for a
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: film that was supposed to be a failure, and this
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: is why I don't think the movie lost might, because
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: if you count 30 years of people paying tickets to
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: go see, you know, 3,000, some of these arenas are
• 53:01
  Speaker 2: like 3,000 people can go see it, more than my
• 53:04
  Speaker 2: 500 students, then it must have broken even by now.
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's another interesting thing is that maybe this
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: film helped create this other revenue stream. Star Wars famously
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: created the toy revenue stream, right? Like nobody, when the
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: Godfather came out, said, oh, we've got a big hit. Okay,
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: let's have some action dolls of, you know, Sonny and
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: Michael and, you know.
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: Sonny with your real, real, real hole filling action. Yeah.
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: I remember, you know, I don't know whether we're going
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: to ever talk about this movie, but I remember when
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: Warren Beatty came out with Dick Tracy, which I think
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: did actually.
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: I would love to talk about Dick Tracy.
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: It did actually flop in box office wise. But I
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: remember the studio had this idea that they were going
• 53:51
  Speaker 2: to like Star Wars, but they were going to make.
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: money on high-end tie-ins. So, like, you could buy his
• 53:59
  Speaker 2: yellow overcoat for, like, a lot of, like, but from
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: Armani or something like that. I haven't done this research,
• 54:06
  Speaker 2: but I just remember that being a marketing idea that
• 54:08
  Speaker 2: I don't think worked. But it's sort of true that
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: Waterworld helped invent this other revenue stream that is making
• 54:17
  Speaker 2: gobs of money 30 years later. And what 1995 film
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: is still opening today? and still drawing an audience every
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: day from 1995. That must say something about the premise.
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: And I have not seen the show. I've seen some
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: clips of the show. And it's basically the stunts from
• 54:37
  Speaker 2: Waterworld of boats jumping over each other and flames coming
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: out and things like that. And okay, it looks pretty exciting.
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: in 2026 looks pretty exciting in 1995.
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: So I have had the pleasure of going to Universal
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: Studios as an adult in the last 15 years, and
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: I've seen the Waterworld show. And it's as impressive as
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: it sounds. It's an auditorium with a giant pool in
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: the center where people are flying off of jet skis
• 55:05
  Speaker 3: and going off of ramps and there's explosions and all
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: kinds of stuff. And I want to say there might
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: even be like a a plane of some kind. I
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: don't think it's like actually flying. It's probably on like
• 55:15
  Speaker 3: a gimbal arm or something. But for me, that has
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: always been the weird thing about Waterworld in all of is. And,
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: you know, the thing I want to compare this to,
• 55:26
  Speaker 3: because again, this is, you know, this film gets kind
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: of mentioned on the like worst, you know, worst films
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: or biggest flops. Super Mario Brothers movie. There was never
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: a Super Mario Brothers stunt show or anything. But since
• 55:38
  Speaker 3: that movie's come out in the 30 plus years since
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: it's come out, it's been reappraised as well for its
• 55:43
  Speaker 3: creativity and for doing something different and all these other
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: kind of things that the film was doing at the time.
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: It's just, again, with time and distance from things, we're
• 55:53
  Speaker 3: able to understand that the industry is To expect that
• 55:56
  Speaker 3: the industry in 1995 is always going to be this
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: way is the reason you give the criticism that you give.
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's just like Mad Max. Well, you know what?
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: They made more Mad Max movies. So can we really
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: criticize this movie for being Mad Max when they made
• 56:12
  Speaker 3: more Mad Max movies? And other things have been made
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: in that vein.
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: But to your point.
• 56:18
  Speaker 3: How many of those things have a stunt show at
• 56:22
  Speaker 3: Universal Studios that's been running since 1995? That's insanity, Frank.
• 56:29
  Speaker 3: And it's a great show. Like I said, I've seen it.
• 56:32
  Speaker 3: It's exactly what you would expect. There's like a soak
• 56:35
  Speaker 3: zone even where you can sit where the things splash
• 56:38
  Speaker 3: you with water and everything else. It's weird to me
• 56:41
  Speaker 3: that this movie has this kind of weird reputation as
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: a failure or failure Not something worth watching. But yet,
• 56:49
  Speaker 3: like you said, it still has a presence in a
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: place where large amounts of money are being made. And
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: it's one of the attractions. You know how many attractions
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: have come and gone at Universal Studios that are franchises
• 57:00
  Speaker 3: that make more money than this one? The thing that
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: I always think about is the Terminator. There used to
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: be a Terminator... theater show, 3D theater show, you would
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: sit there and there would be all sorts of Terminator
• 57:10
  Speaker 3: stuff happening and a guy would ride out on a motorcycle,
• 57:14
  Speaker 3: a real person would ride out of the screen and
• 57:16
  Speaker 3: it was supposed to be there's things happening in the auditorium.
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: That got replaced for the Bourne Identity show. Waterworld has
• 57:24
  Speaker 3: persisted through all of this. And what's funny to me
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: is I would.
• 57:29
  Speaker 2: Not pay money to take children to the Bourne Identity show.
• 57:34
  Speaker 2: But that's the other part about this, is that this
• 57:38
  Speaker 2: kind of a show, I mean, the movie had violence
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: and had, you know, uncomfortable situations, but you could take
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: your 11-year-old to see this movie and not really feel that,
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: you know, they were going to be permanently damaged. And
• 57:52
  Speaker 2: the Waterworld show, yeah, I mean, of course, and let's
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: remember the other aspect, because, you know, you've been a
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: pioneer in bringing of the Indian cinema to United States audiences.
• 58:04
  Speaker 2: And that's something you've really helped with for lots of people,
• 58:09
  Speaker 2: including me, who I'm just not very familiar with Indian cinema.
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: But let's point out Japan, Tokyo, Japan and Beijing. I mean,
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: this is a universal language, right?
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: Nobody needs captioning. Nobody needs I mean, there is narration,
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: but but like nobody needs to have explained boats shooting
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: each other or stunts flames.
• 58:34
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 58:34
  Speaker 2: That show probably how many of the people there there
• 58:38
  Speaker 2: was probably a huge number of international visitors who had
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: and maybe 95 percent of those visitors had never seen
• 58:45
  Speaker 2: the movie. That's something else.
• 58:47
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 58:47
  Speaker 2: Harry Potter world, you can bet everybody who goes to
• 58:51
  Speaker 2: Harry Potter world, is there still, I'm not.
• 58:54
  Speaker 3: The Harry Potter world still exists in multiple parks.
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: I'm just not, I guess I have to study this,
• 58:59
  Speaker 2: but like Harry Potter world, you can bet 99.9% of
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: people going to Harry Potter world, at least the younger people,
• 59:06
  Speaker 2: maybe even the middle-aged older people have read Harry Potter,
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: have seen, maybe the movies, right? But Waterworld, it doesn't matter.
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: Right. Well, and you know, it's funny because, and this
• 59:16
  Speaker 3: is the other thing we haven't really talked about, and
• 59:18
  Speaker 3: I think it's a choice, right? And you mentioned it already,
• 59:22
  Speaker 3: so I think it bears repeating. Tell me another movie
• 59:25
  Speaker 3: like this one that was filmed all on water. and
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: it wasn't a complete nightmare to make, oh, Jaws. Like,
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: listen to all the.
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, The Abyss or Master and Commander.
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: Where's the Titanic?
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: Every.
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: If you're going to film on water, just don't be
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: a studio surprised that the budget goes up and that
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: there's an accident and they have to build a set
• 59:47
  Speaker 2: again or anything like that.
• 59:49
  Speaker 3: Right. And that's the part to me, and again, as
• 59:52
  Speaker 3: someone who, you know, for those of you at home,
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: including myself, who... tends to sometimes forget that this is
• 59:59
  Speaker 3: the case i have a master's in business so i
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 3: understand better than some the business aspect of what we're
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: getting at here but how could anyone sitting in a
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: meeting in in a in a hollywood boardroom after reading
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 3: the script for this movie go yeah this movie's budget's
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: only gonna be 75 million dollars.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: There's No way.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 3: Anything that we do is going to balloon it past that.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 3: To quote the professor from Fast Times at Ridgemont High,
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 3: what are you all on, dope? If you've seen Jaws,
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: or if you've heard about Jaws, which is the famous
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 3: story about shooting things on water, why would you think
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 3: that this film would be made in a way where
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: it's like, nothing bad can happen with us literally filming
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: in open water? This was not filmed on the Universal
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 3: giant backlot pool that they have, which you go to
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 3: Universal Studios Hollywood and you go on the backlot tour,
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: you can see what I'm talking about. It is a
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 3: pond in front of a giant blue screen. And then
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: they just put whatever on the blue screen in the background,
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 3: but they have enough distance from it where you can
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 3: kind of convince the audience it's a big area. The
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 3: movie that comes to mind that they did that in,
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 3: if you've seen Van Helsing, which is a personal favorite
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: of mine, At the end of the movie, the Frankenstein
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 3: character goes away on a boat. It was filmed on
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 3: that set. You can't film this on a set. So
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 3: you have to film this in open water. How in
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 3: God's name did no one at the studio think there
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 3: might be an overage of the budget? For me, Waterworld,
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 3: I think, is a really good test case for what
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 3: the studio's expectations were not matching what the script laid
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: out clearly.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: Because... Again, like we've.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 3: Talked about so many times on this show, like I've
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 3: talked about on my show, this is not a, I
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 3: turned in my paper, I'm the one who wrote it,
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 3: the grade is therefore my own. Making a movie is
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 3: like the world's worst group project you've ever worked on.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 3: Because guess what? If one person screws the pooch, yeah,
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: I'll get blamed for the most part. Some people can
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 3: avoid it. Some people's careers can evade being blackballed from
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 3: the industry. Kevin Costner obviously didn't take too much of
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 3: a hit. Kevin Reynolds, the director, didn't take too much
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: of a hit. But to go back to the Josh
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: Trank of it all, Josh Trank hasn't worked in Hollywood
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 3: since that Fantastic Four movie came out.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: Because he had the audacity to say, this movie is
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 3: not representative of the movie I shot. It's not very good.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 3: And the studio goes, now, see, we can do that.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: We can disavow a movie ahead of time. But you,
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 3: if you're the one who made it, you better play
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 3: ball until the movie comes out. Maybe once the movie's out,
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 3: you can tell us how you feel. We now live
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: in a society of movie goers and movie watchers who
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 3: are so much more well-informed about the films that are
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 3: coming out, about the information coming off the set. Look,
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 3: you know this, Dr. Perlmutter, as well as I do. 1995,
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: what choices did you have? Entertainment Weekly?
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: Starlog?
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 3: Those are publications that have a vested interest in being
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 3: allowed to come back on set to talk about the movies.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: So they're not going to just heave-ho the movie completely online.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 3: until the movie comes out. And then that's what some
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 3: of them did. Owen Gleiberman actually had a relatively high
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 3: review for this movie.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: He gave it a B.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: But so much of the initial kind of opening salvos
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: of any review of this movie is the toxic buzz
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: surrounding this movie or the initial bad press of this movie.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: Why does any of that factor into the success of
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: the movie? You know, many movies have had bad things
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 3: happen on them that nobody knows about.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: A lot. Like the birds.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 3: You were talking about things that people should not be
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: doing on set. Alfred Hitchcock falls into that mold over
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: and over and over again. The way he treated his
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 3: actors was deplorable and nobody would treat their actors like
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: that anymore.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, we've made this transition, right, where the Hollywood
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 2: press for decades and decades suppressed terrible things, which good
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: journalists don't. should have reported, including the mistreatment of, say,
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 2: actresses and so on, like was just Nobody reported it
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: because they were in bed with the studios.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 3: Right. You report this, you don't get access.
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: That's how that works.
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 2: Now you almost see what's left of the Hollywood press
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: and you see others as more as their provocateurs. They
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 2: want to have a story besides the movie, right? It's
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 2: boring just to have a story about a movie coming
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 2: out and doing well. That only gets you to what
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 2: fun is that?
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 2: But trouble on the set, and then fighting, and then
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 2: Star says this thing which upsets this group, and YouTubers
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 2: say this, that gets you 50 bylines and a bigger audience.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: So it really is interesting. Waterworld, for this film that's
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 2: largely forgotten, embodies these major trends. The soundstage show. which
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 2: is still around and still making money and remarkably for
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 2: a movie that supposedly was a, was a flop. The,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 2: the rise of the sort of backstage controversy, you know,
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 2: the public, I, I, this is not a quote from me.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 2: I remember, I don't know who said it, but somebody
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 2: said long ago, I think I was like a teenager
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 2: and somebody said the publicity surrounding this movie was bigger
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 2: than the movie.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: And right.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: Movies like Cleopatra that there was so much discussion with, uh,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 2: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, about them having an affair
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 2: and everything, that the international press created more buzz about
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: the actors than about the movie. The movie benefited, I think. Supposedly,
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: it's the most expensive movie ever made, if you counted everything,
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: and so it didn't make its money back because of
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 2: that reason, but But the buzz helped. But now we
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 2: have this almost just cloud of people, one reason or another,
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: sometimes for good reason. I've always said that, hey, if
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: the studio has the right to spend money to convince
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 2: us to watch a movie, then some independent YouTuber has
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 2: the right to say, hey, I don't like these trailers
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 2: or teasers. I don't like this actor. I don't like
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 2: this director. I don't like what the star is saying
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 2: in an interview. They have the right to say that.
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: But that is a phenomenon if we're doing required viewing.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 2: Waterworld was an important lesson in the creation of movies
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 2: in the first place.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: And, you know, you just mentioned Cleopatra.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: So I think that there's another inroad to mention a
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 3: couple other things. Same year as this. Same year as this.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: Cutthroat Island. Cutthroat Island. Another movie that is like, you know,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 3: widely reviled and it was dead to speak. OK, you know,
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: I think the way you would look at Cutthroat Island
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: is Cutthroat Island is what many people assume this movie
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 3: was in terms of the way it was received and
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: came out. Cutthroat Island is nowhere near as successful a
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: movie as this one. But. It had that same thing
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 3: where it was disavowed by the studio ahead of time.
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: Karelko like just filed for bankruptcy before the film even
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 3: came out, which is, again, like complete insanity. And then
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 3: to look at more contemporary things, Fantastic Four, the 2015 film,
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 3: the Josh Trank one, like I mentioned, he disavowed it
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 3: ahead of time. The Justice League film from 2017. that
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 3: had all of that hullabaloo about Zack Snyder leaving and
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: Joss Whedon coming on and all the wild stuff. Solo,
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 3: where the two directors, Lord and Miller, got fired halfway
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: through the production and they had to bring Ron Howard
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 3: in to take over. I think of things like Sonic
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 3: the Hedgehog from 2019 where the backlash from the community
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 3: was Sonic looks horrifying you gotta change him and the
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 3: studio did but what the funny thing is like all
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 3: of these are movies that are levels of success or
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 3: failure based on the things ahead of time We've already
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 3: mentioned Jaws. Jaws, for all intents and purposes, was made
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 3: out to be a failure ahead of time because it
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 3: had trouble on the set. Right.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: Trouble on the set. Overscheduled.
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 2: The shark wasn't working. They had to redo the shark.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, the water plus trouble on the set.
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: You could say the same things. Absolutely.
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: That's very, very interesting.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 3: And also Apocalypse Now, another movie that if you go
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 3: back and read the press about it at the time,
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 3: it was Brando's fat and he's showing up fat and
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 3: he's not prepared. Martin Sheen had a heart attack on set.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 3: There was no ending. going into the film. I think
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 3: the nickname for the film was Apocalypse When at one point. Like,
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 3: when is this movie coming out? And I want to
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 3: mention this because this is genuinely the one that makes
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 3: me laugh the most because again, it's a direct comparative
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 3: to Waterworld.
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: Titanic.
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 3: Titanic was $ 200 million worth Over budget. $ 200 million over budget.
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 3: $ 200 million over budget. It is, to me, unconscionable that
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 3: the studio system requires the entertainment media to help dictate
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 3: success or failure. when the film should be doing that alone.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 3: Because James Cameron, for all of the avatar of it
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 3: all and all the other things that he's done since Titanic,
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 3: they were treating him like the director of Heaven's Gate,
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 3: Michael Cimino, before Titanic came out. They were like, this
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 3: movie is going to sink the studio. This movie is
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 3: going to be a massive financial loss and all these things.
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 3: None of that happened. So Waterworld, in a lot of ways,
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 3: is almost a bad and good example of sticking your
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: finger on the scale for seemingly no reason. Maybe I
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 3: don't know where they do. They want things to fail.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 3: That's what I can't figure out, because like you said,
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 3: a failure gives you 50 bylines.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: The success gives you 20.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: Well, I think just to wrap up from my end
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 2: that my conclusion walking out of the movie house in
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: 1995 was that was worth five bucks.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: That was fun. If I had been.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 2: Doing a podcast in 1995, I guess it would have
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 2: to be on internet radio or something.
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 2: I would have talked about like, oh, there were some
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 2: cringe moments and Dennis Hopper. I just didn't think that
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 2: he worked. And there were some plot lines which I
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 2: felt just didn't make sense or were dropped. I'd say
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: those things. We're not saying any film is necessarily critic
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 2: proof from 360 criticism. But part of what we're trying
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: to do here in required viewing is make the case
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 2: that films should be judged at the end of the
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: day within what they're trying to set out to accomplish.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: So like I've used the.
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 2: Example before, it's going to take a lot for you
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: to convince me.
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: And you've tried.
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 2: You've tried, Chris, to say, let's do Minecraft. And I
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 2: have turned you down time after time after time.
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 3: At the end of every episode, I asked Dr. Perlmutter,
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 3: can we do Minecraft now? And he's just like, nope,
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 3: not today.
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 2: There's some films where I just have a block because
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 2: I'm going like, wow, I am so outside the demographic.
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 2: Maybe it would be so painful to watch that film.
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 2: But just from a distance, a wildly successful film, and
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: I don't just mean money, for a specific target demographic.
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 2: And Waterworld was a good example of a general film,
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 2: like a family film. You could take your grandkids to it.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 2: You could, grandpa and grandma could go to it and
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: they would have a fun X number of hours. And
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 2: the proof is that you can relive the best parts
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 2: of Waterworld in Beijing today.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 3: And I think, you know, as you've given kind of
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 3: your closing thoughts, I would say that twofold for me,
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: a couple, or threefold, several things. I am still no
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 3: less of a fan of Kevin Costner than I was
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 3: when I started watching Waterworld. Kevin Costner, for me, is
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 3: the kind of actor who... In the 90s, he had
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 3: successes and failures, but he was always doing exactly what
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 3: was being asked of him as an actor, which I
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 3: think for this film is important because this film needed
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 3: someone like him to be involved to get it made,
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 3: to have certain things happen. It's been communicated in several
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 3: publications that Kevin Costner had a huge hand in certain
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 3: creative decisions in the film. What those creative decisions are,
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 3: I do not know. And without speaking to anyone involved
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 3: in the film, I may not know. But I can
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 3: tell you that this is the only Kevin Costner film
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 3: of his I've seen that I like him in. Because
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 3: if you're the kind of actor whose need is to
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 3: be stoic and hands-off, that's what we're going for here.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 3: And why this kind of movie with that kind of
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 3: actor and this kind of setup was not successful.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: is strange.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 3: To me because these kinds of movies are not unpopular broadly.
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: They're very pop.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 3: And like you said, they're so popular to the fact
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 3: that we have a Waterworld stage show that's still going
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 3: on in four different places across the world. when this
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 3: film has been more or less said like, well, this
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 3: film's not good. Nobody cares. And we should never have
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 3: anything to do with this movie. To think about a
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 3: press in being involved in the success or failure of
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 3: a movie is really, I mean, again, we kind of
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 3: think about it now because it makes so much sense
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 3: now because we're so used to the exposure of the
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 3: press being more or less constant with variety and entertainment
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 3: weekly and, you know, all these movie websites and movie
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 3: news and TikTok and YouTube and all these places you
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 3: can go get your movie news. I am very much
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 3: the kind of person in a lot of ways about
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 3: most things, film included. I feel like if you meet
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 3: the film where it's asking you to meet it, then
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 3: you can make a decision as to whether or not
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 3: the film is successful. If you go and see a
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 3: James Bond film And your takeaway at the end is, well,
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 3: there was too much killing in that movie for me. Well,
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 3: it was a James Bond film. What did you expect?
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 3: And in this film, it's that same thing. It is
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 3: a film about people on the high seas shooting at
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 3: each other in makeshift boats. I don't know why it
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 3: needed to be any more than that. I don't know
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 3: why anyone wanted it to be any more than that.
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 3: If the expectation was that people were going to show
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 3: up for Citizen Kane and instead they got Citizen Gills
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 3: or whatever pun we want to go with, that's fine.
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 3: But like you already said, when it comes to looking
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 3: at something in a holistic 360 direction, take the media
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 3: side out of this and not knowing all these budgetary
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 3: issues and all the... A budgetary issue affects us as
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 3: the audience zero, literally zero. That is just a data
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 3: point for me or you or anyone to know. It
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 3: doesn't affect my ability to enjoy the film at all.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: And that I think is what's so important because as
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 3: film criticism and analysis has gone on, since the 90s,
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 3: like with what you and I are doing here. It's
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 3: more important to look at everything as opposed to, well,
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 3: I didn't like this movie, and therefore, no, no, it's
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 3: my feelings towards the movie don't matter at all. The
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 3: film's success is based purely on whether or not it
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 3: succeeds at doing what it's trying to do. And this
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 3: film is trying to be an entertaining film about people
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 3: on the high seas shooting at each other in boats.
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 3: It kind of makes me sad you don't like Dennis
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 3: Hopper in this movie, Dr.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: Perlmutter.
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 2: I get it.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 3: I love Dennis Hopper in this movie, but Dennis Hopper is,
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 3: I think, hilariously miscast in this movie only because.
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: I.
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 2: Think that's what I'm saying is that Dennis Hopper... One
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: negative criticism of the film, if we wanted to do
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 2: a second episode just on what's wrong with the movie,
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 2: because I hope we haven't made this case that this
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 2: is one of the great masterpieces of the legitimate cinema.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 3: Cinema with a capital C, you mean?
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: There's three or four.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 2: Movies going on at the same time, right? I think
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: there were some issues with the script. Joss Whedon was
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 2: brought on, but not credited. And you sort of wonder
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 2: what it would have been if he'd just written a
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 2: script from the beginning. And, you know, the more screenwriters,
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 2: not the better, as you've pointed out.
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: Too many cooks in the kitchen. Yeah.
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 2: But Dennis Hopper was terrific in some other movie. I'm
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 2: not sure what it was. And there were just, there's
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 2: some other things there, but, but again, it's interesting that you,
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 2: the show that you watched at, at Universal Studios was
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 2: 20 minutes, right? That's what I understand the show.
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: It's about 20, 25 minutes. Yeah.
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 2: That, that seating is between, it's about 2,500 or yeah.
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 2: And what's it, was it pretty full?
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 2: And, and, So people are not going on the other
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 2: rides or attractions. They, five-year-olds and 70-year-olds, it was not
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 2: all 70-year-olds who watched the movie, right?
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 2: I've seen these pictures of the crowds, and you're obviously
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 2: seeing tourists from... Africa and China and all over the
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 2: world coming to see this film that they'd never heard,
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 2: but they've heard about the show. And so just, we
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 2: want to emphasize that success, sometimes it takes a long
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 2: time to measure success. This is the most, one of
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: the most successful films in the world if it's just
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 2: measured by that, this one metric. And I couldn't find
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 2: any stats on like how profitable it is but like
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 2: they wouldn't be doing it if they would have closed
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 2: it it wasn't bringing in the bucks.
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 3: They would have found something else to replace it with
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 3: because universal studios has replaced so many other rides with
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 3: so many other things the thing i think about is
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 3: the king kong experience at universal studios florida was replaced
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 3: with Revenge of the Mummy based on the 1999 Mummy
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 3: film again and that still sticks around too so it's
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 3: it's weird to me that success sometimes is measured we
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 3: consider a film a success or failure based on what
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 3: happens the weekend it came out and nothing else. this
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 3: film has had an extremely long tail to it, which
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 3: for me, as someone who sits here and talks about
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 3: a lot of film, that means it's a success in
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 3: a different way. For me, this is akin to, and
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 3: this is my kind of closing statement for me to
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 3: make a successful movie is not really that hard successful
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 3: movies come out all the time it's not really that
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 3: hard to make a bad movie either bad movies come
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 3: out all the time but you know what is hard
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 3: to do make a film that lasts in the public
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 3: mind or the pop culture zeitgeist for more than five
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 3: minutes and when I think about five films that do
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 3: that there are a couple kinds of film john favreau
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 3: making elf into a literal contemporary christmas classic tell me
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 3: another one There aren't a whole lot. It's so much
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 3: harder to make a contemporary Christmas classic or a film
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 3: that shows up in a Universal Studios park than anything else.
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 3: There are so many successful films out there that exist.
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 3: You know, I think of The Green Book or the
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 3: Catherine Bigelow film where it's the people diffusing the bombs
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 3: in Iraq. Those films won Academy Awards. They're technically successful.
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 3: Who's talking about.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 2: Either of those films in 2026?
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: Nobody.
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 3: But yet, you go to Universal Studios, you pay your
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 3: $ 80 or whatever the hell it is for a ticket,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 3: and you go into that park, you can watch a
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 3: Waterworld show.
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: In 2026! What are we doing here?
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 3: If we're gonna consider this movie a failure, there are,
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 3: you know, there are movies that made more money in
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 3: the 90s that I would consider failures than the movie that,
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 3: you know, kind of broke even eventually. But it has
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 3: four different attractions at four different parks that people can
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 3: still engage. And that's why we that's was the reason
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 3: for us doing required viewing, because it is important to
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 3: understand as someone who watches film and enjoys film and
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 3: wants to take film somewhat seriously, that Success is not
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 3: a single metric item. It's a thing that can be
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 3: measured from multiple facets. And yeah, on the last episode,
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 3: we talked about Sideways, a movie that was successful, won
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 3: Oscars and all kinds. This film didn't win an Oscar
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 3: for anything. This film, for I think most people, has
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 3: more or less been forgotten. But yet if you go somewhere...
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 3: and spend your money there, you can see this film
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 3: represented in a way that you can't go see sideways
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 3: represented at Universal Studios or anything like that. And that's
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 3: a success. And again, not to mention creating a world
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 3: that feels unique, weird, and lived in. Creating an idea
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 3: that I think, you know, there was talk 10 years
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 3: ago about a water world TV show. I would totally
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 3: be game for that. You could do a lot of
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 3: weird stuff with this. I don't understand remaking things that
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 3: are successful. I am more of the mind, take something
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 3: that was slightly successful, do something else with it. I
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 3: don't think this is the last we've heard of Waterworld, frankly.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 3: If they were talking about it in the last 10 years,
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 3: there might be more coming down the pipeline eventually. but
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 3: Waterworld is not a film that's fallen as far out
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 3: of the public consciousness as one might think, based only
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 3: upon the fact that there are long legs elsewhere that
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 3: the film can still, I think, be part of the
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 3: conversation in some even minor way. Because you know what
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 3: the other thing is, and neither one of us mentioned this,
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 3: you think if people go watch Waterworld at Universal Studios,
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 3: they're not going home and maybe watching the movie as well?
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 2: Well, I think, based upon this podcast, I predict that Apple...
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: Or Prime is going to give the go-ahead to the series.
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't be surprised, would you?
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 2: We are willing to serve as consultant producers to shape
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: the future of the Waterworld series, which we have resurrected.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: But something else, too, like what you said, if you
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 2: count all the people who've been at that show, and
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 2: there are multiple shows every day, right? They don't just
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 2: show it once.
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's shown like every half hour or something.
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 2: There are likely hundreds of thousands of people that maybe
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 2: more people have watched the show. the live show than
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 2: the movie. So you could argue there is a built-in
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 2: audience as young as five years old.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 2: They're like, oh, okay, I'd watch a Waterworld series. It's
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 2: not crazy, just like the original premise. But anyway, thank you, Chris.
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 2: This is a great example of a film. It's not
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 2: in the Pantheon. No critic circle has elevated it, but
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 2: it had its successes and should be recognized as such.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 3: I think it's in a pantheon. It's just not in
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 3: the pantheon. And by the way, for anyone who's interested,
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 3: who doesn't want to go look it up, the director
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 3: whose name was attached to the TV show was Dan Trachtenberg,
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 3: who made admittedly the best Predator film that's come out
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 3: since the original Predator with Predator Badlands. So Dan Trachtenberg,
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 3: if you want to make a Waterworld TV show, by
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 3: all means make it because it'll probably be pretty good.
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 3: So until you hear Dr. Perlmutter and I talking about
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 3: not Waterworld and hopefully not another Kevin Costner movie, you
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 3: can find the two of us over at weirdingwaymedia.com where
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 3: this show can be found on the CultureCast subfeed. Required
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 3: viewing is a show that Dr. Perlmutter and I do
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 3: once a week every Thursday. as a little addition to
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 3: the CultureCast where we talk about film from a 360 perspective,
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 3: which is what you just heard. So like, rate, and
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 3: review this show and that show over at iTunes or Spotify.
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 3: If you want to kick a couple dollars my way,
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 3: that goes into the till to help produce the show.
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 3: That's at patreon.com slash culturecast. If you don't, like and
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 3: rate the show on iTunes, then Spotify in that order
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 3: because it helps us out the most that way. And
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 3: as always, we will catch you on the next episode.
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 2: Thank you.