Speaker 1: All the leather outside.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody, welcome back to the Surely You Can't
Be Serious Podcast. Jason, How you're doing? I'm doing great?
How you doing tonight? I'm doing fantastic. I've gotten my
Seagrum's golden wine cooler over here, and I'm practicing some
martial arts.
Speaker 1: I guess we're gonna have to register you as a
lethal weapon.
Speaker 2: Jason. I cannot believe it. We have reached the final
comparison of season one. We have done our first season,
and I'm so excited and so happy. It's been amazing, Man.
Speaker 1: I had a fantastic year.
Speaker 2: It's been great. It has been so fun to do
this with you. And I can't wait to tackle season
two coming up in in the year with two of
our favorite movies of all times, right at Christmas time
where they need to be.
Speaker 1: Wait to get into these two movies. Man, these are
two of my all time favorite movies.
Speaker 2: What a great way to end the season.
Speaker 1: I know, Man, I literally have lost sleep thinking about
these episodes, Like I lay in my bed going, I
can't wait to talk about these two movies.
Speaker 2: I've lost sleep because I feel like I'm not going
to do justice to these movies because they're so good.
Speaker 1: I know, right. Hey, before we get too far in
the podcast, I want to give a quick shout out.
We got a really nice review and I just want
to send it out there. If you're enjoying the show,
please rate us, give us five stars on Apple Podcasts.
That helps people find us, that helps us kind of
get where we want to be. Thank you to Royals
Fan eighty three. This is what he said. The title says,
my new favorite podcast. This is such a fun show
that reminds me of the friendly debates my friends and
I used to have in high school. The host are
very upbeat, informed in their enthusiasm for music movies is infectious.
It's also one of the few podcasts that I can
listen to with the kids in the car and not
worry about their profanity. Keep up the great work, and
I can't wait for the next episode. Royals Fan eighty three, thank.
Speaker 2: You, And we've got to give a special shout out
to the Beckett Foundation. They on Twitter referenced something I
said back in April. Back April twenty first, and we
were doing coming to America versus Trading Places. I said
something about Ralph Bellamy versus Bill Bellamy and that they
were not related and post a picture and my gosh,
these guys, what is it now? Eight months later they're
the ones who posted the picture of Bill Bellamy. Thank
you guys for getting the joke, Thank you for being
in on it. We really appreciate you. Check out them
at the Beckett Foundation on Twitter.
Speaker 1: That was really cool. I had to refresh my memory.
I was like, I don't remember what we were talking about.
Speaker 2: Why did they send us a picture of Bill Bellamy
that's his same.
Speaker 1: Well, like you said, this is the end of season
one one. We will be taking a break after the
completion of the die Hard Versus Lethal Weapon comparison, and
we will be back in February. Hopefully that'll give us
a chance to get ahead, do some studying and see
our families.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, the good news is that right as we're
coming to our pause, the Soundtrack Show is starting to
drop some new episodes. Check them out because the Soundtrack
Show is the bomb.
Speaker 1: Also check out our friends at the thirty something Movie Podcast.
They're getting ready to start nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've got to go. Check out thirty something guys,
John and Pat and Bow and occasionally Jeff and some
of the other guys. Always brilliant, always funny.
Speaker 1: All right, well, how you feeling.
Speaker 2: I feel fantastic. I'm excited to be here. I'm drinking
out of my custom engraved. Surely you can't be serious
Podcast Stainless Steel Cup, which you listener out there? Yes,
you the one that's listening right now. You can get this.
All you have to do is go to our Patreon
page and you if you subscribe at the the Duke's
brother level we have. We have the Billy Ray Valentine level,
we have the Lewis Winthorpe Winthorpe level, we have the
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If you subscribe at the Duke's Brothers level, you will
get a set of awesome headphones and a custom engrave.
Surely you can't be serious Podcast Cup and you become
executive producer of one of our episodes.
Speaker 1: James Buckley, appreciate you ready, It's fantastic, Sign me up.
I'm ready to do this.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, you already pay for our episodes, so Cup
for free. But yes, if you have loved what you've
heard so far this year, please sign up. Become one
of our Patreon subscribers. It's so much fun to engage
with those guys, and we we can always use the support,
all right, So, so enough of the pledge drive campaigning
that we're doing here, Time to jump into these movies. Jason,
are you ready?
Speaker 1: Do you really want to jump?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: Do you Well, that's just fine with me. Let's do it, man,
Let's do it.
Speaker 2: Okay, I gotta say this. In this entire year, it's
been amazing to learn about the different people involved in
all of our favorite music and movies. The guy that
I didn't know that I am excited to have learned
about is Shane Black. He was a guy who was
just a name up until we started doing our research
for this. But what an interesting guy he is. You know,
he's like your friend, that is this just this always angry,
hating on life guy, but he is so intelligent and
so funny that you still love him. And that's to me,
that's Shane Black. You know.
Speaker 1: It's interesting that you say that I didn't know a
whole lot about him before this. Of course, familiar with
some of his movies, and we talked about him very
very briefly back in our bill and Ted episode. Chris
Mathison and Ed Solomon were in class with Shane Black
at UCLA, and they would talk about how they would
work and work struggle to come up with these ideas.
And this guy barely came to class, didn't say two
words in class, but when he turned in a writing
assignment was the best thing that anybody in the class
I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: So he actually shared a house with Ed Solomon. They
weren't just in class together. They shared a house him,
Ed Solomon, and Fred Decker, who's the guy who wrote
Monster Squad and Knight of the Creeps and RoboCop three.
They all shared a house together, which they called the Pad.
Oh guys, and they considered it a fraternity for the
movie Buffs of Ucla, and they would go out and
recreate John wu fight scenes in their front yard at
three o'clock in the morning. That sounds exactly like what
my house was like when I was in college. I
was a theater major, so I had a house full
of actors And this is the kind of crap that
we would do. We just did not become internationally famous afterwards.
Speaker 1: Tragic.
Speaker 2: Okay. So Shane Black starts off in childhood as a reader.
He is a book lover and he likes the Hardy Boys,
but he also likes the Mickey Spallaine grown up books,
and so he becomes this big mystery thriller reader. And
when he gets into UCLA, he becomes interested in writing
and starts developing this screenplay. And he's got an older
brother named Terry Black, who at the time was not
a screenwriter, but at the time with somebody that Shane
Black adored. And Shane Black was working on this screenplay
that he was really excited about. And he actually took
a break from college to finish up this scene and
the screenplay that he was working on, and he showed
it to his brother to see what he thought of it,
and his brother said, I don't like it. It was
this kind of weird mix of like a platoon of
army guys in Vietnam and some sort of supernatural stuff
going on. And so Shane is devastated. And he's sitting
there in front of his typewriter contemplating whether he should
bother to go on writing anything ever again, and the
page is just staring at him, and he's staring back
at the page, and he decides to write a sentence,
and that sentence gets followed by another sentence, and then
the words just kind of start flowing out of him,
and he writes an entirely different scene, which becomes an
entirely different script, which ultimately he shows to somebody who
gets him an agent who then finds a way to
get the script that he's written sold. And that script
that he wrote at twenty one, which he sells at
twenty two is the script for Lethal Weapon.
Speaker 1: It's fantastic.
Speaker 2: That moment in front of the typewriter was a moment
of precarious history because he said, had I not typed
that sentence, had I not typed that sentence, I would
have given up writing forever. But something just was staring
back at me that said, just type something. It is
because of that that we have Lethal Weapon, and that
we have Iron Man three, and that we have the
nice guys. I mean, pretty huge deal. And the name
of that script that he showed his brother that he
changed the Shadow Company.
Speaker 1: Yay, all right, right, so those of the bad guys
from Lethal Weapon.
Speaker 2: Exactly if you haven't if you haven't seen Lethal Weapon
in a while, that is the company that all of
the bad guys got together. In Lethal Weapon. Nice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know one of the things when we were
talking about prepping for this, So I know Shane Black
as the writer of leth a Weapon. He wrote Kiss Kiss,
Bang Bang, he wrote Long Kis Knight, he wrote Ironman three.
But he's also he acts in Predator. He's the guy
with glasses. He's like the one guy that's not totally musclebound.
That's Shane Black.
Speaker 2: Yes, he's the first guy to die. He sold leth
a Weapon and so he's got two hundred and fifty thousand,
which is pretty nice for a guy who's twenty two
years old. Right. And so Joel Silver, the producer of
Lethal Weapon and the producer of Diehard, both the movies
we're talking about, he says, hey, Joel, can I be
in this movie Predator? And Joel's like sure, we just
we want you to come in and we want you
to help out with the script writing on this deal.
And he's like okay. So Shane Black goes and he
is the he's the first soldier to die in Predator.
He's Hawkins, that's his name. But you know who. The
director of Predator was John McTiernan, who then goes on
to direct die Hard isn't amazing. So these movies, I mean,
we just we jumped on these movies because they're the
obvious comparison.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: They're both Christmas movies.
Speaker 1: Yes, and they.
Speaker 2: Are both urban cowboy movies, right they are. They're the
the urban gunslinger movies.
Speaker 1: Right, yep, for sure, hundred sent But.
Speaker 2: They're related in so many other ways. You have the
you've got the overlap of at least three actors in
both of movies. You've got the script writer of Lethal
Weapon is in a movie directed by the director of
die Hard, and later on he becomes a writer for
Last Action Hero, which is also directed by the director
of die Hard. It's all just they're just intertwined so
so tightly. I've never seen two movies that were more
closely related than these two.
Speaker 1: When you look at the casting. And I know we'll
get into casting here in a minute. But Arne Schwarzenegger
started Predator, directed by John McTiernan. John mctiernan's next project
is die Hard. He was going to hire Schwarzenegger. This
was going to be a Commando sequel, yeah, right, And
instead of his wife being in trouble, it was Alyssa
Milano his daughter. I mean these movies are from the
same DNA.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you were talking to me earlier and said these
two movies could almost be in the same universe. And
they really could. I mean they're both in LA You
could really see, you know, Sergeant al Powell walking in
as Merton Riggs are walking out. Right.
Speaker 1: Oh, that would have been awesome. I would have loved that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2: I think for whatever die Hard Lethal Weapon sequel that's
coming up, if they did some sort of overlap like that,
I might just lose my freaking mind.
Speaker 1: Al Powell tosses Rigs a Twinkie on the way by,
you know.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, we'd have to figure out how Agent Johnson
who died now I guess he died in both of them.
He'd have to.
Speaker 1: I know, they were twin brothers or something. Well, let's
talk about that for just a second. So Agent Johnson, no,
the other one he was in Diehard, right, Grandell Bushes,
and he was also a cop in Lethal Weapon.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Then you have Al Leon who was the guy who
tortured Rigs with the battery cable. Yes, he was also
ginghis Khanan.
Speaker 2: Written by Ed Solomon, who was the roommate of Shane Black,
as we've established.
Speaker 1: And he was also the terrorist who, if you'll remember,
reached under and got a baby Ruth right before they
shot the two x two formation coming in the building.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also, yeah, you have Roberts Mex's ex wife, Mary Ellen Trainer.
She plays the police psychologist who says Riggs is he's
on the edge. You don't want to be around him
when he goes. And she's also the TV reporter in
Diehard YEP, she's the one standing next to the news
reporter who says, eat it, Harvey, right.
Speaker 2: And she's also the mom and Goonies, which is directed
by Richard Donner, who's also the director of eth a Weapon,
It's Amazing. And the police chief in Lethal Weapon is
also the police officer in Superman One, which is also
directed by Richard Donner.
Speaker 1: His name is Steve Kahan. He is the cousin a
film writer, producer, and director Richard Donner.
Speaker 2: There you Go. I watched some of the interviews with
Richard Donner on Lethal Weapon back when it was first out.
He was rocking the mullet just like Mel Gibson was.
It was the like mullet two point zero where it's
all feathered. Oh yeah, like swooping. Who. Okay, So we've
we've hit Joel Silver, who produced both movies with hit
Shane Black, who wrote the the Weapon. Then we've hit
John McTiernan, who is the director of Die Hard. Now,
he had come off of Predator. As you said, he
got that job because he had written and directed a
movie called Nomads, which had Pierce Brosenan in it. This
was Pierce Brosnan's first role. And you probably didn't see
that movie. It wasn't really well regarded. But if you
happen to watch it, there's a scene where a guy falls.
You're it's got your point of view and you're watching
him fall off of a buildings and I and I'm like,
what this is the same Oh well it's the same director.
And I listened to him. He's like, yes, I stole
it from myself. I think I didn't. You think I
didn't know what I was doing there? Of course what
I was doing. You've got Richard Donner directing Lethal Weapon.
And then the guy that we haven't mentioned yet but
we have mentioned previously in some of our other episodes,
mister Steve even Desusa, who wrote and really kind of
rewrote Diehard.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, you know, just to backtrack, just to touch
Richard Donner. We have now covered Superman one, Superman two
ish with Richard Donner, the Lost Boys, Lethal Weapon, and
I promise you at some point we're going to cover the.
Speaker 2: Goonies, no question. It will be one of the movies
for season two, for sure.
Speaker 1: Richard Donner has his fingerprints all over the eighties.
Speaker 2: Stephen Desusa was not the original writer of Diehard. The
original writer was a guy named Jeb Stewart. Now, Jeb
Stewart had signed a contract with Disney. It was a
four movie contract, and so he's obligated to write four
movies for them, and basically they paid him so little
that he was about to go broke. And so after
he completed his first script for them, he had like
this six week time period that he could write a
movie for somebody else. And so what he did was
to go and find a novel that he liked, and
he decided to write that script.
Speaker 1: He wrote Nothing Least Forever by Roder Thorpe Yes, which
in that novel, John McClain is not named John McLain.
Speaker 2: He has a different first name.
Speaker 1: The character in The book is called Joseph Leland. I
don't know if we want to dive into Yes, go
for it, Joe Leland. Okay, so you're absolutely right. So
die Hard is the movie version of a book called
Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderic Thorpe. This is the sequel
book to another book called The Detective. Now. The Detective
was made into a movie in the late sixties starring
Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra played Joe Leland and when they
remade Nothing Least Forever as die Hard, contractually they had
to offer the part to Frank Sinatra. Can you imagine
a world where die Hard instead of Bruce Willis, we
had a seventy three year old Frank Sinatra.
Speaker 2: Not a chance, and neither could Frank Sinatra. Hey kid
me baby, give me another drink.
Speaker 1: Come on, I say, Yippika shooby dooby doo. Thankfully he
had the good sense to say no, thanks, I no,
I'm not doing that right.
Speaker 2: So Jeb Stewart takes this opportunity to write the movie
die Hard, and really Joel silver is just kind of
rolling this point. Joel Silvers is a producer that has
suddenly come out with Predator and lethal weapon. He's literally
out promoting them. At the same time, the studio calls
him because they say, hey, we've got this book and
we've got this script. That's okay, can you can you
do something with it? And he's like, sure, let's put
it together. So Jeb Stewart's script ultimately gets substantially rewritten
by Steven Desusa. So, like you said, they had this
plan that it would be Commando two, which was all
well and good until Arnold Schwarzenegger said no, thank you.
Speaker 1: Right, he wanted to take a shot at comedy, and
so he went and did the movie Twins.
Speaker 2: Right. Have you seen Twins?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I like it, Okay, I have whatever.
Speaker 1: It doesn't blow my freaking doors off like Diehard does, though.
Speaker 2: No, of course not, because it's comedy. It's not an action.
But he wanted he wanted to show his range, and
that's fine. So you don't get Arnold Schwarzenegger. Obviously, the
second choice has to be Sylvester Stallone and he says no,
no thank you as well, and they're like, well, crap,
who else do we have?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I mean we want to go. I've got the
list of go go go. Okay, so we've already talked.
In its original incarnation, you had Frank Sinatra offered the part.
At that time it was a father daughter relationship rather
than a husband and wife, so they offered to Charles Bronson,
Burt Reynolds. Richard Gear was Joel Silver's first choice.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He pushed hard, pushed hard on Richard Gear, and no,
I don't really like it. I don't want to be
running around with the gun and doing my own stunts.
Speaker 1: No, thanks, okay, so let's keep going. Yeah, Richard Gear,
So that's your salone. As you said, Harrison Ford, Yeah,
Arl Schwarzenegger. As we talked about, Clint Eastwood had a
shot at this too old. At that point, Robert de
Niro was very close to Diehard.
Speaker 2: That'd have been a different movie altogether.
Speaker 1: That would have been Don Johnson.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So Don Johnson at this point is very
hot with Miami Vice, and then Bruce Willis is very
hot with Moonlighting.
Speaker 1: Hang Out. I'm not done. Oh sorry, so sorry, no, no, no,
So speaking of hot on TV, you have Don Johnson,
you have Richard Dean Anderson ring a Bell mcguiver.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, not gonna.
Speaker 1: Okay, and Finally, Mel Gibson was offered this part. What yeah,
what mel Gibson.
Speaker 2: Ah, that's amazing, that is amazing.
Speaker 1: All those guys turned it down, all those guys not interested.
Speaker 2: And so Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis again was a choice
of Joel Silver like he had seen him in Blind Date,
which was the Blake Edwards movie that had come out before,
and obviously he had seen him in in Moonlighting, and
so he didn't have big a big box office pull
at this point. But Joel Silver thought that he could
make it happen. He thought that he could do it.
Speaker 1: Okay, we got to talk about this for a second.
Were you a fan of Blind Date?
Speaker 2: Never seen it? Okay?
Speaker 1: I am an unapologetic fan of the movie Blind Date.
I like Blake Edwards movies. They're freaking funny.
Speaker 2: Blake Edwards who did Pink Panther movies? If that helps
anybody out.
Speaker 1: There, Yes, and the movie Skin Deep with John Ridder.
I think they're so funny. And I think Bruce Willis
is very charming and very funny in the movie Blind Date,
and it kind of gets beat on a little bit.
But I I am a huge fan of Moonlighting. How
about you?
Speaker 2: Absolutely watched every single U episode. Loved it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, great, great TV show.
Speaker 2: So weirdly, this is kind of a weird thing that happens.
I mean, they've gone through a whole bunch of people
and are basically kind of left with Bruce Willis and
Joel silver Is having to push to get him in
the movie. But then they offer him five million dollars
to play this part, which is insane. That's a crazy
amount of money to offer even a star at this point.
And he's a guy who has has done one movie
that's been released. It's actually two movies, but one that's
been released at this point, and it only did kind
of good. And so Robert Murdoch, the head of the studios,
green lights it. He's like, yep, go ahead, give him
five million dollars. And so the next day Richard Dreyfus
fired hiss agent.
Speaker 1: I heard this.
Speaker 2: What he's never done anything, and I've done all that.
You can't get me five million dollars to fire. So
the question is then at this point, hey, we've hired him,
We've got him for five million dollars, but he's still
in Moonlighting. I mean, that's a TV show that's constantly filming,
but they've got this little miracle that happens. Sybil Shepherd
gets pregnant and they have to stop filming Moonlighting for
six weeks, and so they have exactly six weeks to
film die Hard with Bruce Willis. They don't film the
whole movie in that six weeks. They just filmed the
Bruce Willis parts in the first six weeks, and then
they go on and film the other parts after that,
which is kind of I mean, you know, we watch
movies and we kind of, you know, we have this
image that it's all filmed chronologically, which of course it's not.
But it's just kind of interesting to think that so
much of the conversation that occurs on the radio between
Al and John and Hans and John didn't really ever
really happen. It was just the magic of movies.
Speaker 1: Magic.
Speaker 2: And so interestingly, the villain in die Hard this is
his first major motion picture. Yep, mister Alan Rickman had
never been in a motion picture before. He had done
some British television. He had done quite a bit of
stage work and that ultimately is how he got discovered.
He was in Liaisons Desrouse as the bad guy in
that on a Broadway production and John McTiernan and Joel
Silver happened to catch the play and they see him
being the bad guy and they're like, there's our Hans Gruber.
There is our villain right there, and they offer him
the part. So, as we just discussed, the first scenes
that they're shooting are the scenes with Bruce Willison, So
that means the first scene that they film with Alan
Rickman is the scene where he meets John McClain as
Hans Gruber pretending to be Bill Clay Clay Bill, which
is weird because Bill Clay is of course nothing like
Hans Gruber.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's an interesting story with this. So they're
sitting around at lunch one day. Of course, Alan Rickman
has a heavy English accent, but they're asking him, Hey, Alan,
do you do an American accent? And he said, well,
I don't. I don't really do an American accent, but
I do do like a California accent. And he cracked
everybody up and everybody was dying laughing, and they're like, man,
we got to do this. The characters have to meet,
and to me, this blows my mind. Okay, so we
have this really amazingly well constructed action movie, maybe the
best action movie ever. And they were building it on
the fly. So Steven DeSUS is sitting right there and
they're like, hey, we got to figure out a way
to get these two guys together. They have to meet,
and we have to use this accent so you know,
John McLean doesn't know. And so Steven Jes Susan gets
busy writing this scene and then they think and they're like, no, shoot,
he sees him shoot Takagi And Stephen DeSUS is like, well,
wait a minute, have we shot that scene yet. They're
like nope, it's set for tomorrow. And so they have
to play with the angles to make sure that John
McClean never sees Hans's face.
Speaker 2: Oh, so that's why he's under the table. That's it.
Speaker 1: He's under the table. And then if you watch the scene,
you don't see Hans from John's perspective.
Speaker 2: So they shoot that first scene between Bruce and Alan,
John and Bill and John and Hans. Too many things
going on there, and so they start showing dailies to people,
and they've got people from the studio there, and when
they're watching the scene with Alan Rickman playing Bill Clay,
there's a casting director there named Nancy Klopwright who loses
her mind. She gets like super upset, and it's like,
we can't have this guy as the bad guy. He's
too weak. And Joel Silver's like, that's what it's supposed
to be. In a scene, he's he is playing Week.
He's not actually week, He's playing Week. And she goes
on this huge campaign to get Alan Rickman fired, which now,
I mean, can you imagine that? I mean, if there
is I love, love, love Bruce Willis, but if I
got to pick one actor that made this movie, it
was Alan Rickman. So that is kind of the beginnings
of Diehard, which I don't know why we talked about
it first, because it was the second movie. What had
come out a couple of years before was a movie
called Lethal Weapon.
Speaker 1: Yes freaking length Weapon, And this is the.
Speaker 2: One that Shane Black wrote that we were talking about.
So Shane Black has this script. Richard Donner hates action movies,
but he reads this script and he enjoys the humor
and he enjoys the fault in each of the main characters,
like you've you've got the guy who's suicidal and a
little bit crazy, and you've got the guy who's too
old for this shit, and so to him makes it
a much more compelling story. And then, like I said,
it's got the humor in it. And so Richard Donner's like, yes,
this looks like a great movie. Now, they had wanted
other people for this. You ready for casting on lethal Weapon?
Speaker 1: Heck, yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2: Okay, you jump on it, man.
Speaker 1: So initially when they were hiring for Lethal Weapon, they
had no ethnicity specifically in mind. So the black family
cop and the white suicidal cop that wasn't necessarily in
the script. They just kind of came together through casting. Initially,
they wanted Brian Denahey to play Roger Marta.
Speaker 2: I could see that he had just.
Speaker 1: Done First Blood and thought, no, I've already done the
cop thing for Riggs. They looked at Alec Baldwin, Jeff Bridges,
Pierce Brosnan, Robert de Niro, Don Johnson, Michael Keaton. I
could see him being the suicidal cop. Oh, for sure,
you want to get nuts, Liam Neeson, Sean Penn, Dennis Quaid,
Kurt Russell, I mean, Tom Seller, Charlie Sheen. These are
all eighties action stars. But here's the one that I
find the most interesting. Yes, Christopher Reeve was considered for
the role of Martin Riggs. Right right, I worked with
Donner previously on Superman. Yeah, seems like maybe a fit.
But no, I don't.
Speaker 2: Uh uh, I'm gonna go ahead and disagree on that.
Speaker 1: Bob Well not a fit for the character. A familiar
face with Donna, right right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, but yes, very interesting choice. But I would
say probably the most interesting consideration is Bruce Willis.
Speaker 1: See that's crazy, right, I'll tell you a little secret
what I'm not crazy? These movies are so connected it's unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Right, So Mel Gibson was considered for John mc and
Bruce Willis was considered for Martin Riggs.
Speaker 1: Do you know who Shane Black wanted to play Martin Riggs?
William Hurt.
Speaker 2: I can see that, and as we know, William Hurts
a guy who's not afraid to say no.
Speaker 1: Right, he turned down flashed back to our Jurassic Park episode.
He turned down the role of doctor Grant.
Speaker 2: Oh is it doctor Grant? Oh?
Speaker 1: Okay, Grant, But he is the most boring actor in
the world to me.
Speaker 2: Oh gos, that's funny.
Speaker 1: Castiing agent Marion Doherty wanted to cast Danny Glover after
seeing him in the movie The Color Purple YEP. So
she arranged to fly Mel Gibson from Sydney and Danny
Glover flew from Chicago. They met in Los Angeles and
the buddy Cop movie of the eighties was made.
Speaker 2: It was instant chemistry, like they were immediately playing off
each other, riffing off each other and just immediately had
that chemistry right meet your new partner. And that, by
the way, is one of the things that makes this
movie so good is they've got this animosity throughout the
movie and that's you know, we talked. We talked in
our Raiders and Back to the Future episode about the
hero's journey and how characters, you know, have to go
through this cycle of change as they go through the movie. Well,
these two guys both go through that cycle of change,
but it's really the relationship that goes through the change,
because at the beginning of the movie, it's like, you
know what, I don't want to work with you. But
and by the end of the movie, he's given him
back the bullet and he's going to eat the crummy
Christmas dinner with the family. So when we get to
Lethal Weapon two. By the way, they've become good friends
at this point. So what are you gonna do to
have bickering. Well, you're gonna have Joe PESHI. That's what
you get to do.
Speaker 3: What you need.
Speaker 1: Leo gets, you get it. I use it all the
time to break the ice when I meet people.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I asked my wife right before I came out here.
I'm like, all right, I'm getting ready to record Leth
the Weapon, die Hard, what's your favorite part of Leth
the Weapon? And she's like, here's what she said. She goes, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 2: I thought you were gonna say they get the drive through.
Speaker 1: Leave the Weapon two takes it. So this this franchise
is so great.
Speaker 2: Listen, we're not here to talk about Leth a Weapon Too,
but since we're since you brought it up. The script
for Leith the Weapon Too was originally written by Shane
Black and they didn't use it. He got frustrated, walked
off the movie, and they brought in Jeff Bauham, who
we talked about in The Lost Boys. Yeah, right right,
that's right at which you mentioned, makes and appears in
Lethal Weapon because of Richard Donner. It shows up on
the movie Marquee behind them as they were walking along
having their hot dog. It says lost Boys hit of
the year, and so Jeff Boheme is the one that
comes in and rewrites this script to give it more
comedy and not as dark. Shane Black had written a
very very dark Lethal Weapon two that ends with the
death of Martin Riggs, and they said thanks, but no thanks.
You know, here's your money, thank you, have a nice day.
But he maintains to this day that it is the
best script he has ever written.
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, I would love to see that.
Speaker 2: I'm sure there are lots and lots of people who
would love to see it, but I don't think anybody
ever will. Man.
Speaker 1: Hey, just a little side note, mel Gibson turned down
starring roles in the movie The Fly and the Untouchables.
Can you imagine Mel Gibson as Elliot Ness and the Intouchables?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Ye, kind of cool?
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, he could have done that.
Speaker 1: I love all these what if scenarios, these eighties what ifs.
Speaker 2: Well, the interesting thing about mel Gibson is he had
not done a movie in over a year at the
time that they started filming Lethal Weapon. He had had
some crazy success with Mad Max and he had done
I think like four movies in one year, which is
a huge undertaking, and he just he is like Russell Crowe,
He's like, I gotta go back to the farm. He
went back to the farm on Australia and just put
a do not disturb sign on the door. And so
there is there is an original opening for Martin Riggs
that nobody unless you've seen like the outtakes or the
special features, you haven't seen it. Where he is in
a bar drinking and he gets into this fight with
these other guys and he's looking in the mirror before
all this happens, and he looks like he was roaded
hard and hung up wet. He looks bad, and he says,
I look that way because I had gotten any sleep
the night before we shot this scene, because it had
been so long since I filmed a movie. I was
scared to death.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's pretty cool. I love that story. Hey, I
want to drop a little eighties tidbit real quick, very minor,
I say, a minor character. The whole plot revolves around
this character, but she's only in it for a few moments.
Jackie Swanson plays Amanda Huntsecker. She is the.
Speaker 2: Prostitute to her death, jumps to her death.
Speaker 1: Jumps to her death at the very beginning of the movie, right,
you know, topless drugs, prostitute.
Speaker 2: Your growing boy needs.
Speaker 1: So the whole plot of the movie revolves around her death.
Jackie Swanson plays Kelly on Cheers.
Speaker 2: She plays Kelly Kelly. Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly
k e L L. Why because she's Kelly Kelly Kelly.
She's Kelly.
Speaker 1: She's Woody's wife.
Speaker 2: On Cheers.
Speaker 1: She's the pretty little rich girl who's pristine and prude
and sweet and playing absolutely the exact opposite of that character.
I love it, okay, real quick. Gary Busey was hired
as mister Joshua nephew. Would kindly tell me everything you know,
I promise you I'll kill you.
Speaker 2: He asked for the part. Did he Yeah? So he
hadn't done a lot like he was kind of on
the downward slide. He had obviously had a lot of
success with what's the Buddy Holly movie called.
Speaker 1: I think it's called the Buddy Holly Story.
Speaker 2: Okay, well that makes sense, all right, So anyway, he
had quite a bit of success, but then he had
not been getting good quality offers for a while and
he saw a lot of promise in this script, and
so he asked, He was like, can I be in
this movie? I'm like, of course, sure.
Speaker 4: Because it's weird to think about both of these movies.
They were not expected to be big hits. Neither one
of them were expected to be big hits. It was
just kind of, hey, see what you guys can do
with this crazy bunch of stuff. And like you said,
they were both of them throwing them together on the fly,
And so that's why you get. I mean, Gary Busey
you kind of think of as a major actor, but
I mean, he does have the final fight scene, but
he was number two in the movie, and so it
was interesting to see him in that part instead of
the head bad guy. He was just kind of the
biggest evvy.
Speaker 1: His most memorable scene in the whole movie is when
the general tells him to hold out his arm so
he can hold a flame under his arm to show
how tough he is and how devoted and loyal he is.
Speaker 2: So who's the other guy in that scene?
Speaker 1: You guys are gone, man, You're like out there.
Speaker 2: Edo Ross, Edo Ross is that guy, and I feel
like I was. I could never figure out why that
part wasn't bigger because he was. He was, I mean,
obviously a major part in that scene, but he was
a pretty big actor at that time. He seemed to
be like, it was this big, big scene that goes on.
I expected to be in more in the movie. But
the interesting thing is the role he had done just
before he did this movie was in Moonlighting. It had
two episodes of Moonlighting as mister Navarone. So there you go.
It's interesting again, intertwined these movies.
Speaker 1: Very intertwined, kind of. The next big movie that he
did was Red Heat with Oro Schwarzenegger, who was in Predator,
directed by Johnny Tiernan.
Speaker 2: I just cannot I still can't figure out why that
was our one brief moment we got with this guy
and then he wasn't in the rest of the movie.
Speaker 1: Other people that were considered for mister Joshua James Woods,
Christopher Walkin, Tommy Lee Jones, Scott Glenn, John Saxon, I
don't know. I like Gary Busey.
Speaker 2: Then the main bad guy. The only other movie that
I can remember him in is liar liar. He's like
the head partner at the law farm that gets roasted
and he's his laugh and that is awesome. I think
his comedy is great. I was impressed.
Speaker 1: Tracy Wolf plays Rhanne Murta in Lethal Weapon. I have
not seen her in anything else that I can think of. Yeah,
every time I see her, I'm like, that's Roger Murta's daughter.
She was twenty five when they filmed this. Playing a
sixteen year.
Speaker 2: Old makes her upsession with Martin Riggs a little less creepy.
Speaker 1: Every time I see this, I'm so empathetic with the
Murta character. Roger Murta, uh that. I'm like, yeah, she
does need to go upstairs and put on small pers
She's not going out dressed like that. Mel Gibson's character,
Martin Riggs is supposed to be thirty eight in Lethal Weapon.
H Gibson was only thirty at the time he shot this.
Roger Murta is supposed to be fifty. They make a
big deal of this. He even blows out a birthday
cake candles while he's sitting in the bath with his
entire family around.
Speaker 2: Most uncomfortable scene in both of these movies.
Speaker 1: And he makes a big deal fifty years old. Fifty
years old, I'm supposed to be retiring fifty. Danny Glover
was actually forty years old, how when he shot.
Speaker 2: This, Yeah, and was in incredible shape, Like they constantly
talk about how good a shape he was in, and
so you I mean, you know the scene where they're
running down the road, right like Mel Gibson trucking along,
sprinting down the road with the machine gun in his hand,
and then Marta Danny Glover is kind of hobbling along
down the road, dragging his foot out of breath, has
to sit down, all this stuff. They shoot this scene
and Richard Donner comes over to Danny Glover. He's like, okay, okay, Danny,
can we can we try to do this one more time?
And Danny's like, what do you mean, Mike? Okay? He
gets up, runs around the block, comes back. He's like,
let's do it.
Speaker 1: He's like, I think genius, Thank you, Okay, just a
couple more things, fut back to Diehard really quick. Bonnie
Vidilia was hired as Holly Gennaro. Bruce Willis really went
to bat for her. He had seen her in a
movie called Heart Like a Wheel where she played a
race card driver. I don't know if you remember that one,
but he really just loved her performance in that movie,
and he personally recommended her to play his estranged wife,
Holly Jennero. Other people that they were interested in were
Linda Hamilton, Geena Davis, Debra Winger, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jamie Lee Curtis,
Kelly McGillis, and Kerrie Fisher.
Speaker 2: My gosh, all of those just scream eighties movies. So
it's interesting, you know the part of the wonderfulness of
this movie is that it doesn't spoon feed you everything
that's going on. Like, we know there's a problem with
John and Holly, but we really don't know what it is.
There isn't some big exposition as to what went wrong
in their marriage, why they're a strange. We just have
this kind of general idea that she's pursuing a career
and he's not happy with that. But what we have
is this fantastic, short little scene right before all of
the action starts, where he's just finished walking around making
fist with his toes in the carpet and they're doing
their best to get along for about thirty seconds before
he has to torpedo the ship and say what does
he say? Do you remember what he says?
Speaker 1: She's like, she says, I missed you, and he's like,
you miss me. I guess you didn't miss my name?
Huh except when you're signing checks.
Speaker 2: So yeah, So that the classic dumb head husband thing
to say, and he does it, and they've got this vicious,
short little exchange, but it informs so much as to
their relationship, and you believe their love and animosity for
each other in just that brief little scene and the
way that they did that. Steven Desusa had Bruce Willis
and Bonnie Badelia improv some stuff, and they would improv
long bits that go into the detail. But then once
they actually shoot the scene, they don't give you all
that detail. They just let it be the subtext behind
what they're saying, and they did it fantastically.
Speaker 1: I love how you even get a little bit of
that with our gyle in the limo on the way there, right, yep?
Why do you go with him?
Speaker 2: What's up?
Speaker 1: Because I'm a New York cop, I got a six
month back log in New York's Scumbags.
Speaker 2: I'm still trying to put behind bars. I can't just
pick up and go that easy. In other words, you
thought she was gonna make it out here is he
come calling them back to you?
Speaker 1: So why bother it back?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 4: Like I said, you're very fast, I go.
Speaker 1: The actor dever White, who plays Argyle, is hilarious in
this movie.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: A couple other people we really need to talk about,
casting wise and Diehard. I want to talk a little
bit about Reginald Villa Johnson.
Speaker 2: He'd making thirty to Dispatch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a wild goose chase over here at knocking
Tony pleasant everything he is.
Speaker 2: Okay over but nobody has let it.
Speaker 1: Snooker, who played a cop in Peri Strangers who then
became the lead character in the TV show Family Matters
That but he does an awesome job of kind of
being in the heart of the movie, right everybody of
Sergeant al Powell.
Speaker 2: I had this thought, you just you tell me what
you think about this. So obviously, leitha Weapon is a
buddy cop movie, right, right? Is Diehard a buddy cop movie? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Absolutely it is.
Speaker 2: With that I mean out, I mean, he's really like
h Sergeant al Powell is the mentor, he's the guy
who leads John McClain through all of this stuff. He
leads him through the tough times. It's their exchange that
leads to the character transition. I don't know. Maybe this
is a buddy cop movie. I think it is.
Speaker 1: I think it's a buddy cop movie where the cops
are separated and it belonged to be back together.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I love the relationship that they build and it's
still again, like I said before, fascinating to me that
they probably shot all of Reginald val Johnson's scenes after
Bruce had gone back to the moon lighting and wasn't
even there anymore.
Speaker 1: I do know for a fact on my research they
Bruce Willis and Reginald vell Johnson did not meet until
the last scene of the movie. They never ever met
until the famous It's snowing Bear Bond scene. Right, let's
talk about William Atherton for just a second. This guy
played the world's greatest eighties butthole in every movie they
give us a break thorn burden at Harvey, Right, he
like tops himself in every movie.
Speaker 2: Well him or Paul Gleeson. It's a real toss up, right,
But somehow the brilliance of Joel Silver or John mcturnon
or whoever got both of these guys in the same movie.
How freaking awesome is that?
Speaker 1: I'm telling you so. William Atherton plays the professor in
Real Genius who is out to flunt Chris Knight Val
Kilmer's character yep. And then he's also the health inspector
or the safety inspector in Ghostbusters, the one who does
not know the magic word.
Speaker 2: It's true, this man has to pick.
Speaker 1: And then, as you said, Paul Gleeson plays the principal
in the Breakfast Club. Yeah right, don't mess with the bull,
you get the horns.
Speaker 2: Also the corrupt inspector in Trading Places.
Speaker 1: Oh, I totally forgot about that. And then one guy
I really wanted to bring up before we go any further,
Alexander Gudanov. We could do a whole podcast and maybe
we'll do a mini one off on him. He was
a Russian ballet dancer yep, who effected yep. They hired
him because they knew he could be athletic enough to
do fight scenes.
Speaker 2: Right, and the fight scene between him and Bruce Willis
was not like a choreographed thing. It was very much
an improvisational. We're just fighting away, but they did a
fantastic job with it.
Speaker 1: I saw an interview with Joel Silver and when he
was discussing Alexander Gudanoff, he said, great guy, drunk all
the time.
Speaker 2: Yes, which is hilarious until you learn that he died
in the mid nineties of cirrhosis of the liver yep,
which is tragic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just a couple more notes on pre production d
before we wrap it up. I thought it was interesting,
now this is this is pre production, it's also a production,
but the fictional Knakatomy Plaza is actually the headquarters of
twentieth Century Fox. Yes, this building was incomplete, but there
were people working in this building. Yes, at the time
they were filming this movie. The company actually had to
charge itself rent to use this building.
Speaker 2: Had to or or used it as an excuse to
spend money that didn't that was now tax deductible. I
would say, yeah, there was a There was a lawyer
downstairs who didn't represent anybody. He was a pretty high
powered lawyer in la but he did not represent anyone
in the picture, and so he was none too happy
about the full sound effect blasts of all of them,
the machine guns going on.
Speaker 1: Imagine trying to do work and you know you've got
machine guns and people jumping off building with fire hoses
and helicopters and missile launchers.
Speaker 2: I mean, here's something interesting. Nakatomi Plaza. Nakatomi is the
name of a Japanese battleship. That's the way they got
this name. They came across this list of and I
think they're named after like Japanese clans of the past
and stuff the battleships are. And so they're going through
the list of Japanese battleships and they see Nakatomy and
they're like, yeah, that sounds cool, let's go with that.
So Nakatomi just look cool, and that's why they decided
to go with it. But then the logo. I never
realized this before, but Joel Silver was talking about how
they came across the logo. He found it in a
catalog that had Samurai helmets on it. If you go
back and look at the logo, it's these it's these
bars that kind of come up and two little circles
in it above the name Nakatomi, and it looks like
a Samurai helmet. I never noticed Inn till he said that,
But I was like, holy cow, Nakatomy, the Samurai, pretty
freaking awesome. And this movie did fantastic in Japan. You know,
if there's any concerns about, you know, the weird kind
of cultural things that go on with the Japanese comments,
this movie killed one awards in Japan.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. So a couple of things on pre production.
We've talked a little bit about how they kind of
wrote this on the go. Bruce Willis and John mciernan
talked publicly about how they didn't really know who John
McLean was until about halfway through shooting. Who then just
a flying the ointment Hans, the monkey in the wrench,
the pain in the ish, right, But I thought this
was interesting. Jib Stewart, who wrote the original screenplay for Diehard,
was having difficulty writing the screenplay, and while he was
driving at night in Los Angeles after a fight with
his wife, he was driving behind a truck carrying refrigerators.
Speaker 2: The story no, this is good, go ahead, okay.
Speaker 1: So he was driving behind a truck carrying refrigerators and
one of the refrigerator boxes fell out of the truck.
He thought he was going to die. He like swerved
and thought, I'm this is it, this is it for me.
And it turns out the box was empty. He didn't
have a fridge in it. It is just the box,
and so he plowed through it with his car folded
over the top. And he realized that if he had died,
he would not have been able to apologize to his wife.
And that made it into the movie, the whole thing
about how she's heard me say I love her a
thousand times, but she's never heard me say I'm sorry.
That's because Jeb Stewart plowed through a refrigerator box.
Speaker 2: That's awesome. That is a great story. Wow, that's fantastic.
Speaker 1: The original script called for terrorists to hijack the building.
John McTiernan he didn't like the idea of terrorists seizing
control of Knokotoni Tower. Nobody likes terrorists, right, right, But
if they're a bank heist is way more fun.
Speaker 2: Just a common thief.
Speaker 3: I'm an exceptional thief. Since I'm moving up to kidnapping,
you should chose some more respect, You should be more polite. Okay,
So that does it for pre production?
Speaker 2: Are you done?
Speaker 1: I haven't even got started yet, forget that, I forget that.
Speaker 2: You have to be done because that's the end of
this episode. We'll start back up on the rest of
it for our next episode. Thank you everybody so much
for being here. Jason, you know what one shepherd said
to the other shepherd.
Speaker 1: Get the flock out of here.
Speaker 2: We'll see you all next time.