Speaker 1: All the leather outside.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody, welcome back to the Surely You Can't
Be Serious Podcast?
Speaker 3: Jason?
Speaker 2: How you doing? I'm doing great? How you doing tonight?
I'm doing fantastic. I've got my Seagrum's golden wine cooler.
Speaker 3: Over here, and I'm practicing some martial arts. 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.
I had a fantastic year. 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. I
can't wait to get into these two movies.
Speaker 3: Man, these are two of my all time favorite movies.
Speaker 2: What a great way to end the season.
Speaker 3: 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.
I know, right.
Speaker 3: Hey, before we get too far in the podcast, I
want to give a quick shout out.
Speaker 2: We got a really nice.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: This is what he said.
Speaker 3: 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 you, and we've.
Speaker 2: 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. That was really cool. I had to refresh
my memory. I was like, I don't remember what we
were talking about. Why did they send us a picture
of Bill Bellamy? That's a strain.
Speaker 3: 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 3: 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. All right, well,
how you feeling. 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 is it
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we have the Duke's Brothers level, and we have the
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you become executive producer of one of our episodes.
Speaker 3: James Beckley, appreciate you, buddy, It's fantastic.
Speaker 2: Sign me up. I'm ready to do this. Yes, well,
you already pay for our episodes, so Cup for friend.
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, oh,
enough of the pledge drive campaigning that we're doing here.
Time to jump into these movies. Jason, are you ready?
Do you really want to jump?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: Do you Well, that's just fine with me. Let's do it, man,
Let's do it. 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 3: It's interesting that you say that I didn't know a
whole lot about him before that. Of course, familiar with
some of his movies, and we talked about him very
very briefly back in our Bill and Ted episode, Chris
Mavison 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, A 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. Tragic. 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 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 another 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. It's fantastic. 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. Yay,
all right, right, so those are the bad guys from
Lethal Weapon 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 in Lethal Weapon. Nice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know one of the things when we were
talking about prepping for this. So I know Shane Black
as the writer Leth the Weapon. He wrote Kiss Kiss,
Bang Bang, he wrote Long Kisk and Night, 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 Leith
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 the movies because they're the
obvious comparison, right, They're both Christmas movies, yes, and abs are.
And they are both urban cowboy movies, right they are.
They're the urban gunslinger movies. Right, yep, for sure, one
hundred percent. But they're related in so many other ways.
You have the you've got the overlap of at least
three actors in both of the movies. You've got the
script writer of Letha 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 3: When you look at the casting. And I know we'll
get into casting here in a minute. But Ur Schwarzenegger
starred in Predator, directed by John McTiernan. John mc tee,
you're in. His 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. Oh, that would
have been awesome. I would have loved that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I think for whatever die Hard Leath the Weapon sequel
that's coming up, if they did some sort of overlap
like that, I might just lose my freaking mind.
Speaker 3: 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 I know, they were twin brothers or something.
Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about that for just a second. So
agent Johnson, no, the other one, he was in Diehard, right,
Grandell Bush, and he was also a cop in Lethal Weapon.
Speaker 2: Then you have Al Leon, who.
Speaker 3: Was the guy who tortured Rigs with the battery cable. Yes,
he was also ginghis Khanan.
Speaker 2: Written by Ed Solomon, who is the room made of
Shane Black, as we've established.
Speaker 3: 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 3: Also, yeah, you have Roberts Mex's ex.
Speaker 2: Wife, Mary Ellen Trainer.
Speaker 3: She plays the police psychologist who says Riggs is he's
on the edge.
Speaker 2: You don't want to be around him when he goes.
And he's also the TV reporter in Diehard yep.
Speaker 3: 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 3: 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. Hit Shane Black,
who wrote Lethal Weapon. Then we've hit John McTiernan, who
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 Brosnan 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 building as I was, 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 Steven desusa who wrote and really kind of rewrote Diehard.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, you know, just to backtrack, just to touch
Richard Donner.
Speaker 2: We have now.
Speaker 3: 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 Goonies.
Speaker 2: No question. It will be one of the movies for
season two, for sure.
Speaker 3: Richard Donner has his fingerprints all over the eighties.
Speaker 2: Stephen Desuso 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 3: He wrote Nothing Last Forever by Roder Thorpe.
Speaker 2: Yes, which in that novel, John McLain is not named
John McClain he has a different first name.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: Called Nothing Lasts Forever by Roder Thorpe.
Speaker 3: This is the sequel book to another book called The Detective.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: The Detective was made into a movie in the late
sixties starring Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra played Joe Leland and
when they remade Nothing Last 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 3: Come on, I say, Yippi Kaya, 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 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 Desuso. 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 3: 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? Yeah? I like it, Okay,
I have whatever.
Speaker 3: It doesn't blow my freaking doors off like Diehard does, though, no,
of course not, because it's comedy.
Speaker 2: 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 you're like, well, crap, who else do we have? Yeah,
I mean we want to go. I've got the list
of go, Go, Go go. Okay, so we've already talked.
Speaker 3: In its original incarnation, you had Frank Sinatra offered the part.
Speaker 2: At that time it.
Speaker 3: Was a father daughter relationship rather than a husband and wife,
so they offered to Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds.
Speaker 2: Richard Gear was Joel Silver's first choice. 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. No, thanks, okay,
so let's keep going.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Richard Gear, Sylvester Stalone, as you said, Harrison Ford
l Schwarzenegger, as we talked about Clint Eastwood.
Speaker 2: Had a shot at this too old.
Speaker 3: At that point, Robert de Niro was very close to Diehard.
Speaker 2: That had been a different movie altogether, that would have
been Don Johnson. Yeah. Yeah, So Don Johnson at this
point is very hot with Miami Vice, and then Bruce
Willis is very hot with Moonlighting. Hang on, I'm not done.
Speaker 3: 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 mcgiver.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, not gonna.
Speaker 3: Okay, And finally mel Gibson was offered this part. What yeah,
what mel Gibson.
Speaker 2: Ah, that's amazing, that is amazing. All those guys it down,
all those guys not interested. 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 3: Okay, we got to talk about this for a second.
Were you a fan of Blind Date?
Speaker 2: Never seen it? Okay?
Speaker 3: I am an unapologetic fan of the movie Blind Date.
I like Blake Edwards movies. They're freaking funny.
Speaker 2: Blake who did Pink Panther movies? If that helps anybody out.
Speaker 3: There, Yes, and the movie Skin Deep with John Ritter.
I think they're so funny. And I think Bruce Willis
is very charming, very funny in the movie Blind Date,
and it kind of gets beat on a little bit.
But I am a huge fan of Moonlighting.
Speaker 2: How about you? Absolutely watched every single episode. We loved it. Yeah, great,
great TV show. 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
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 his agent. I heard this.
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 fired 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. Simple 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, movie magic.
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 Dejeruse 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 Grueber.
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 Billy, which
is weird because Bill Clay, of course nothing like Hans Kruber.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 2: And he said, well, I don't.
Speaker 3: 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
gotta 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 Stephen
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 McClean doesn't know,
And so Steve J. Susan gets busy writing this scene
and then they think back when they're like, no, shoot,
he sees him shoot to Kagi 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
McClain never sees Hans's face.
Speaker 2: Oh, so that's why he's under the table. That's it.
Speaker 3: He's under the table, and 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 the scene 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, Yes freaking length a weapon, And this
is the 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
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? Heck, yeah, let's do it. Okay,
you jump on it, man.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: They just kind of came together through casting.
Speaker 3: Initially, they wanted Brian Denahey.
Speaker 2: To play Roger Marta.
Speaker 3: I could see that he had just 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.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure, Yeah, you want.
Speaker 3: To get nuts, Liam Neeson, Sean In, Dennis Quaid, Kurt Russell,
I mean, Tom Selleck, 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.
Speaker 2: Riggs, Right right.
Speaker 3: I worked with Donner previously on Superman.
Speaker 2: Yeah, seems like maybe a fit. But no, I don't know.
Uh uh, I'm gonna go ahead and disagree on that.
Bob Well not a fit for the character.
Speaker 3: 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. 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. Right,
So Mel Gibson was considered for John McClain and Bruce
Willis was considered for Martin.
Speaker 3: 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 3: Right he turned down flashback to our Jurassic Park episode.
Speaker 2: He turned down the role of doctor Grant. Oh is
it doctor Grant? Oh?
Speaker 3: Okay, but he is the most boring actor in the world.
Speaker 2: To me, I'm not, Oh my gosh, that's funny.
Speaker 3: Casting 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 perfect chemistry right meet you, 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 leth A Weapon two. By the way,
they've become good friends at this point. So what are
you going to do to have bickering. Well, you're gonna
have Joe PESHI that's what you're gonna do.
Speaker 3: Whatever you need Leo gets, you get it.
Speaker 2: I use it all the time to break the ice
when I meet people. You know.
Speaker 3: I asked my wife right before I came out here.
I'm like, all right, I'm getting ready record leth the
webon die Hard, what's your favorite part of Leith a Weapon?
Speaker 2: And she's like, here's what she said.
Speaker 3: She goes, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 2: I thought you were going to say they get the
drive through.
Speaker 3: Leave the weapon two takes h 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 Baum, who
we talked about in The Lost Boys. Yeah right right,
at which you mentioned, makes an appearance 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. Really.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would love to see that.
Speaker 2: I would. I'm sure there are lots and lots of
people who would love to see it, but I don't
think anybody ever will.
Speaker 3: Man 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 Elliott Ness and the Intouchables?
Speaker 2: Yes, kind of kind of cool, right, Yeah, he could
have done that.
Speaker 3: I love all these what if scenarios, eighties what if Well.
Speaker 2: 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 is like Russell Crowe, He's like,
I got to 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 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. Yeah,
that's pretty cool. I love that story.
Speaker 3: Hey, I want to drop a little eighties tidbit real quick.
Very minor, I say, a minor character.
Speaker 2: The whole plot revolves.
Speaker 3: Around this character, but she's only in it for a
few moments. Jackie Swanson plays Amanda Huntsecker.
Speaker 2: She is the prostitute to her death, jumps to her death.
Speaker 3: Jumps to her death at the very beginning of the movie, right,
you know, topless drugs, prostitute.
Speaker 2: Your growing boy needs.
Speaker 3: 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.
That's it. She's Kelly. She's Woody's wife on Cheers. She's
the pretty little rich.
Speaker 3: Girl who's pristine and prude and sweet and playing absolutely
the exact opposite of that character.
Speaker 2: I love it, okay, real quick.
Speaker 3: Gary Busey was hired as mister Joshua. Now, if you
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. I think
it's called The Buddy Holly Story. 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.
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 a 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 heavy.
Speaker 3: 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? You guys
are gone man, you're like, out there, Edo Ross, Edo
Ross is that guy, And I feel like 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 Moonlight. It had two episodes of Moonlighting as mister Navarone.
So there you go. It's interesting again, intertwined these movies.
Speaker 3: Very intertwined, kind of. The next big movie that he
did was Red Heat with Oor 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 3: Other people that were considered for mister Joshua James Woods,
Christopher Walkin, Tommy Lee Jones, Scott Glenn, John Saxon, I
don't know.
Speaker 2: I like Gary Busey 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
firm that gets roasted and he's his laugh and that
is awesome. I think his comedy is great. I was impressed.
Speaker 3: Tracy Wolf plays Rhianne Murtau 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 obsession with Martin Riggs a little less creepy.
Speaker 3: Every time I see this, I'm so empathetic with the
Murta character, Roger Murta, uh huh that.
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, she does need to go upstairs and
put on small pers.
Speaker 3: 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 3: And he makes a big deal fifty years old. Fifty
years old, I'm supposed to be retiring. Danny Glover was
actually forty years old.
Speaker 2: When he shot this, Yeah, and was an 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 a 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 try
to do this one more time? And Danny's like, what
do you mean to Mike? Okay? He gets up, runs
around the block, comes back. He's like, let's do it.
He's like, I think genius, Thank you.
Speaker 3: Okay, just a couple more things flip back to Diehard
really quick. Bonnie Badillia was hired as Holly Gennaro. Bruce
Willis really went to bat for her. He had seen
her in a movie called Heart Like.
Speaker 2: A Wheel where she played a race car driver.
Speaker 3: 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 Gennaro.
Other people that they were interested in were Linda Hamilton,
Gena 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 as 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, I can't
remember what does he say? Do you remember what he says?
Speaker 3: She's like, she says, I missed you, and he's like,
you miss me, but 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 improve 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 3: I love how you even get a little bit of
that with our guyle in the limo on the way there,
right yep? Why do you go with them? Man?
Speaker 1: What's up?
Speaker 2: So I'm a New York cup, I got a six
month back log in New York's come. I'm still trying
to put behind bars. I can't just pick up and
go that easy. In other words, you thought she wasn't
gonna make it out here.
Speaker 3: It's he'd come carawling up back to you, So why
bother it back? Right?
Speaker 2: Like I said, you're very fast, I go. The actor
Deverro White, who plays Argyle, is hilarious in this movie. Absolutely.
Speaker 3: 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 1: Ain't making thirty to dispatch a Yeah, that's a wild
goose chase over here at Knocking Tomy pleasant everything he
is okay over but nobody has.
Speaker 2: Let it Snoo.
Speaker 3: Who played a cop in per E Strangers, Yes, who
then became the lead character in the TV show.
Speaker 2: Family Matters that.
Speaker 3: He does an awesome job of kind of being in
the heart of the movie. Right, everybody loves Sergeant al Pau.
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?
Absolutely it is. With that I mean out, I mean,
he's really like Sergeant Awl. 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 coop movie. I think it is.
Speaker 3: I think it's a buddy cop movie where the cups
are separated and it belonged to be back together.
Speaker 2: You know. 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 3: I do know for a fact on my research they
Bruce Willis and Reginald vel Johnson did not meet until
the last scene of the movie. They never met until
the famous It's Knowing Bear Bond scene.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about William Atherton for just a second.
Speaker 3: This guy played the world's greatest eighties butthole in every
movie they give us.
Speaker 2: A break thorn burden at Harvey right, he like tops
himself in every movie. 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?
I'm telling you so.
Speaker 3: William Atherton plays the professor in Real Genius, who is
out to flunt Chris Knight Val Kilmer's character.
Speaker 2: Yep. And then he's.
Speaker 3: 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 sick.
Speaker 3: And then, as you said, Paul Gleeson plays the principle
in the Breakfast Club.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, they'll mess with the bull you get the horns.
Also the corrupt inspector in Trading Places.
Speaker 3: 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 3: I saw an interview with Joel Silver and when he
was discussing Alexander Goudnoff, 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, which
is tragic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just a couple more 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 Knacotomy Plaza is actually the headquarters of
twentieth Century Fox. Yes, this building was incomplete, but there
were people working.
Speaker 2: In this building.
Speaker 3: 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 3: Imagine trying to do work and you know you've got
machine guns and people jumping off buildings with fire hoses
and helicopters and miss 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 Nakatomi 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 until he said that,
But I was like, holy cow, Nakatomi 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. That's awesome.
Speaker 3: 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 McTiernan talked publicly
about how they didn't really know who John McLean was
until about halfway through shooting. WHI then just the flying,
the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in
ish right, But.
Speaker 2: I thought this was interesting.
Speaker 3: 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: Do you hear the story? No, this is good, Go ahead, Okay,
So he was.
Speaker 3: 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 swerved and thought, I'm this
is it, this is it for me. And it turns
out the box was empty. It 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 3: The original script called for terrorists to hijack the building.
John McTiernan he didn't like the idea of terrorists season
control of Knokotoni Tower. Nobody likes terrorists, right, right, But
if their robbers, a bank heist is way more fun
to common thief.
Speaker 2: 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? Are you done?
I haven't even got started yet.
Speaker 3: 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, Get the block out of here.
We'll see you all next time.