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Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information,

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the show that brings you the secret history is a little

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alone, fascinating facts and figures

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behind your favorite movies, music, TV

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shows and apes. We are your

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evolved chumps of esoteric charm.

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I'm Alex Heigelber and I'm

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Jordan Roun talking. I'm not going to be able to make it through

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this episode, and Jordan, today

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we are celebrating the end of April. Oh

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my god, upon that doesn't make any

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sense until you see it spelled out.

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We share listeners never will Anyway.

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We're doing the original Planet of the Apes from nineteen sixty

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eight because there's a new entry in the actually

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really good rebooted chronology that's

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coming out this summer. It's really good.

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Everyone should check it out. You can probably

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skip the first one actually because Franko's

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in it and it's not as good. But

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I think it's three now, two or three now that

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have come after that are super good. Anyway,

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you know, I don't know. This episode might get delayed,

1:03

it might drop next week, in which case, welcome

1:05

to May. Anyway,

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Planet of the Apes Whips. It's a hilarious

1:13

movie, just one of the weirdest and best things

1:15

to stumble across on cable as

1:17

a kid. I don't think I ever

1:19

actually sat down and watched this movie

1:21

in its entire really until

1:24

like college, and it was hilarious.

1:27

But we're watching it this week. I was

1:30

like, no, this is a good movie. Like it's

1:32

really well shot and the

1:34

makeup is still pretty good, which must have really,

1:36

I mean, I can't stress how much it must have blown people's

1:39

minds in the sixties. If it like we're looking at

1:41

it today and we're like, that's not bad.

1:44

I mean it is, but it's like it's uncanny

1:46

and accurate enough to achieve

1:49

the really intended effects anyway, Yeah,

1:51

I mean I just I my dad

1:54

or the Simpsons had pretty much already explained

1:56

everything about this movie to me, from take

1:59

your stinking pot off me, you damn dirty ape

2:01

or you maniacs, you blew it up. But

2:04

it is a foundational and really

2:06

interesting piece of sci fi, and

2:09

an equal masterclass in the art of spinning

2:11

crap off. Even though I still don't understand

2:13

how it's possible to be beneath the planet of

2:15

the Apes. Is that a subterranean

2:18

thing. Yeah, I assumed it was subter

2:21

apian anyway,

2:24

Jordan talking about your relationship with Planet of the Apes,

2:27

Uh, similar to yours.

2:29

But my mom was really

2:31

into all the Twilight Zone

2:33

type stuff and all the kind of creepy, weird

2:35

sci fi things, and so she kind of, if

2:38

I recall correctly, I think she definitely spoiled

2:40

the ending of this for me before I actually

2:42

saw it. But I actually sat down to watch it as

2:44

a little kid, and my mind was

2:46

absolutely blown. I

2:49

thought it was one of the most just deep,

2:51

incredible cereble works

2:53

of fiction I'd ever seen. And

2:56

then over the next couple of years, the

2:58

humor started to reveal itself to me,

3:01

probably having watched the Tim

3:04

Burton movie and being like, oh wait that

3:06

that wasn't that good? And then The Simpsons

3:08

of course with Doctor sayis

3:10

the musical.

3:11

Peak era Simpsons writers loved

3:13

this movie, Yes, because not just there's obviously

3:16

like the musical in the one

3:18

episode, but like they

3:20

just keep throwing it in. Why do I

3:22

remember the phrase apes of popping? Yeah,

3:26

like that rings a bell for some reason. Apes

3:28

of Wrath too, I think is a Simpsons

3:30

puns. I'm just like.

3:35

And then I feel like the phrase get your hands

3:37

off me, damn dirty apes was

3:39

like one of the things that kids in my

3:41

playground used to say a lot at recess, and

3:44

so it sort of took on this hokey

3:46

kitchy which is fair,

3:49

But revisiting it for this episode,

3:51

I feel like I did when I was a kid again, like wait, you're

3:53

right, this is amazing.

3:55

Yeah, I mean it is kind of the bell curve you

3:57

come around when when you're like in

3:59

the sixth or if you're a child,

4:01

you were like, holy shit,

4:04

this is the best movie I've ever seen, and then

4:06

you come around to it being hilarious

4:09

and overblown in all the ways that it is,

4:11

and then you come back around and be like, this is

4:13

actually really well shot, and like, you

4:15

know, Charlton Heston's doing something

4:18

in it, as is Roddy McDowell and Kim

4:20

Hunter and doctors Ais.

4:22

But the problem is just the word apes.

4:25

As we talked about, it's a hilarious word.

4:27

Oh my god, I was gonna say, there's gonna

4:29

be a lot of me just laughing at nothing

4:32

in this episode, because well,

4:34

the monkeys monkey and Monkey

4:36

Planet is monkeys plural, isn't

4:39

funny? Monkey singular is funny

4:41

to me, Apes, Apes is hilarious.

4:44

I mean, yeah, it's gonna be just me giggling

4:46

an idiot in this episode. So now, I

4:48

mean, you know what's funny, and I'm just thinking

4:50

now Simeon isn't really as funny

4:52

to me. No, truly a mystery. She

4:55

got a linguist on that you woke up this morning

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with h much like Paul

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McCartney I woke up with yesterday in his head.

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Yeah, from a dream. You woke up with a song today.

5:04

It's not true.

5:04

I did, I did.

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I woke up this morning, was stuck in the middle with

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you in my head, and

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I've been unable to stop singing.

5:13

Jim's left me. Gorilla is

5:16

too my right here, I am stucky

5:18

in the middle with Apes. I

5:21

don't know what the actually lyrics are. And your

5:23

apes they all come crawling. Throw

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you in a net and say chimpanzee,

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chimpanzee, and

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there you go. Folks. Well,

5:43

from the original author's time in one of

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World War two's less famous atrocities,

5:47

to the groundbreaking makeup that made

5:49

all of them go so ape, to

5:52

the role that Sammy Davis Junior played

5:54

in queueing the film's producers into

5:56

a whole new take on their film. Here's

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everything you didn't know about nineteen sixty

6:01

eight's Planet of the Apes. It

6:08

turns out that I was wrong about the French not contributing

6:10

anything to society beyond

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w C and possibly as an ede case,

6:15

the fifth element the cinematic

6:17

empire, that is apes, and we will probably

6:19

be referring to it as just apes because

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it's funnier, was launched by a

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nineteen sixty three novel called La planet

6:26

de SiGe or, as

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it was translated to the UK, Monkey

6:30

Planet. This

6:34

franchise would have bombed planet.

6:38

Yes, it's such a case study in like

6:41

a correct linguistic foibles,

6:43

you know, because like, yeah, Monkey Planet, hilarious,

6:46

Planet of the Apes, gratas.

6:50

That book.

6:51

Monkey Planet was written by Pierre

6:53

Boule, who also wrote The Bridge

6:55

over the River Quhi. That's

6:57

incredible. Which if you paid me

7:00

one million dollars to guess

7:03

that the man responsible for Bridge over the River

7:05

Kuai was also responsible for Monkey Planet,

7:08

never could have gotten him. Yeah, that just

7:10

blew my mind. Man Bridge of the River Kui

7:12

for like zoomers, or we don't have any zoomers

7:14

who listen to the show is like, you know, one

7:16

of the more famous World War two movies. That's where you

7:18

get the dent dent d d d

7:20

d dun Denton and

7:23

also like a gripping performance by Sir

7:25

Alec Guinness a pre

7:27

obi Wan m HM. Anyway,

7:30

Bull was a He was trained as an engineer

7:32

and he worked for the Luxembourg based

7:35

petrochemical concern sock Finn

7:38

in what was then known as British Malay collection

7:40

of states on the Malayan Pleninsula and

7:42

Singapore. He

7:45

was like scraping rubber out of

7:47

trees, and Sockfinn

7:49

I looked up has their roots in

7:52

the Belgian Congo, which means they are monsters

7:55

and their empire is built on blood.

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If there's a country that has

8:00

another country's name as

8:02

the prefix, it's probably

8:04

built French Guiana.

8:06

Yeah, and Belgian and Belgian especially King

8:08

Leopold's Ghost was a book that I read about

8:10

that of just like the extensive atrocities

8:12

they committed.

8:13

In the Name of Rubber.

8:16

One of the less successful U two songs.

8:20

Come on, give us guess a little bit of it. Come

8:22

on, I can't sing that high

8:25

In the name of Rubber.

8:27

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, what

8:29

about it's a beautiful

8:32

aide. Okay.

8:37

When WWII A

8:39

big one broke out, boull

8:42

enlisted with the French army in Indo,

8:44

China, and after the German troops occupied

8:46

France and the French surrendered, he

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joined the Free French Mission in Singapore.

8:52

He wrote that he was trained at a place called the Convent,

8:54

where as he wrote, serious gentlemen

8:57

taught us the art of blowing up a bridge, attaching

9:00

exposos to the side of a ship, derailing

9:02

a train, as well as that of dispatching

9:04

to the next world as silently as

9:06

possible. A nighttime guard dispatching

9:09

to the next world. That's the most French

9:11

way to describe killing

9:14

someone that I've ever heard, not

9:16

a serious people. As a secret

9:18

agent under the assumed name Peter John

9:20

Rule Bull helped the resistance movement

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in China, Burma and French Indo China

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until in nineteen forty three,

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So basically two years later he was

9:30

captured by Vichy Frants loyalists

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on the Mekon River. Because

9:34

as a true Frenchman, he caved under

9:37

interrogation, that's

9:39

not entirely accurate. His mission was

9:41

to make contact with. You

9:44

know, France at the time was split between the VC government

9:46

who were Nazi loyalists, and the French

9:49

resistance, and as a member

9:51

of the resistance, he was hoping to make contact

9:53

with a resistance sympathetic VCH

9:56

official and he bet on the wrong

9:58

one. He was being in terror and he

10:00

was like, okay, guys, actually here's

10:02

my thing. I'm a spy and

10:05

I'm hoping that you are sympathetic to my cause.

10:08

And they were like, we are not, and

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sentenced him to a lifetime of work.

10:13

Aren't we all sentenced to a lifetime of work? Well,

10:16

not as bad as the Burma railway where Bull

10:18

worked, because it is perhaps best known by

10:20

its more whimsical name, the Death River. It

10:24

was built from nineteen forty to nineteen forty three by

10:26

Southeast Asians and a smaller group of captured

10:28

Allied soldiers, and the brutal conditions

10:30

there resulted in the debts of over ninety

10:33

thousand civilians along with twelve thousand

10:35

Allied soldiers. That's

10:39

horrible and that's what bridgeram Require is about. But

10:42

Booll's novel and the subsequent film about

10:44

his experience, was a worldwide hit. Cleaned up

10:46

at the Oscars, won seven in nineteen

10:48

fifty seven, including Best Picture and

10:50

Best Actor for Alec Guinness. Sir Alec

10:52

Guinness, please excuse me. Boole himself

10:55

won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay, despite

10:58

not having written the screenplay and

11:00

by his own admission, not even speaking English,

11:03

because the film's actual screenwriters, Carl

11:05

Foreman and Michael Wilson, had been blacklisted

11:07

during the McCarthy era, which is a theme we will

11:09

return to. This all brings

11:12

us back, of course, to The Apes.

11:15

Writing.

11:16

High off the success of River Qui, Boule

11:18

kept writing, publishing five other novels

11:21

along with essays and non fiction before

11:23

he got started.

11:24

On what would become known as Planet

11:26

of the Apes.

11:27

At least one person has suggested that

11:29

Boule brought his experience in World War Two

11:31

into Apes. But from what you've read, Bull,

11:34

who gave very few interviews in his life which

11:36

he basically ended as a semi recluse,

11:39

didn't consider Planet of the Apes a work

11:41

of pure fiction. Rather,

11:44

he preferred the term quote social fantasy,

11:46

another very French term, which

11:49

placed him on a lineage of satirists

11:51

like Jonathan Swift, who wrote honest

11:54

proposal about the.

11:55

Rich eating they're young. Yeah, I mean it was it

11:58

was about eating. It was about eating Irish children,

12:00

yeah, oh that was it. Yeah, and making

12:02

them into handbags and gloves right,

12:05

and also was not received well. Gulliver's

12:07

Travels too is kind of a similar.

12:10

Yeah. I think that that kind of stuff was the was

12:12

the impetus for Bull doing

12:14

this, And I've heard multiple people refer

12:17

to this as like a Gulliver's Travels

12:19

analog. That's interesting.

12:21

I never would have made that connection. Huh. Yeah, I mede

12:23

neither.

12:24

He told a French television program that sought

12:27

him out and somehow was successful in getting an interview

12:29

in nineteen seventy. I regard the

12:31

absurd as an extremely powerful poll

12:33

of attraction and human activity. Whenever

12:37

I look around me, I am plunged into an

12:39

ocean of absurdity. Should

12:41

get that embroidered on a thrill pillow,

12:43

Jesus.

12:45

Yeah, he's not wrong. You know.

12:48

Bull would say that he was inspired to write monkey

12:50

Planet by watching gorillas at the zoo.

12:53

That is the official translated name. I

12:56

was impressed by the human like expressions,

12:58

he said. It led me to dwell upon

13:00

and imagine the relationships between humans

13:02

and apes. Boule's

13:05

novel doesn't actually take place on

13:07

Earth, however, it's setting is a planet

13:09

in the system of Beetlejuice, where

13:12

two travelers find a literal message

13:14

in a bottle floating in space. They

13:17

read the manuscript within by a French journalist

13:19

named Ulysses Moreau,

13:22

and much of the memorable bits of the film are

13:24

included here. It's just so funny to me. It's

13:26

a pistolary, like he went

13:28

with like the oldest framing device of all time.

13:31

The characters found someone else's diary. That's

13:34

really cool.

13:34

There's character plot points with Zerra,

13:37

Cornelius, doctor Zayas, as well as

13:39

an archaeological dig in which traces

13:41

of an earlier human society are discovered,

13:44

including a human doll that cries

13:47

Papa, oh

13:49

oh.

13:49

Yeah, you don't remember that? Oh now

13:51

I do. Oh that's part of the archaeological

13:54

dig. Although when I when I when I

13:56

heard it, I was like, they

13:58

didn't really get the best toy doll

14:00

to do that, because it literally just sounds like

14:04

that's pretty scary though. Oh

14:06

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a great gotcha moment in the

14:08

film. Oh

14:10

doctor.

14:14

It makes me think of about

14:16

when the guy had discovered the Titanic went

14:18

diving down there, and at the time

14:20

they didn't know whether or not there would be human remains

14:22

down there or not. And so he's in the sub

14:24

going across you know, featureless

14:27

sand, and suddenly he sees this face

14:29

staring back at him through the porthole, and

14:31

it's a child's porcelain doll, but

14:34

just like perfectly preserved.

14:36

Oh god, yeah, you told me that. Yeah,

14:39

yeah, dolls when you

14:41

don't expect dolls are the scariest

14:43

kind of dolls. We'll

14:46

shout out to front of the pod alley. He's frending

14:48

a broken dolls, eagerly anticipated

14:51

by Stephen King, friend

14:53

of the podtya, give

14:56

it to Stevie. We'll give it to Stephen Stevie

14:58

King or Steve King. That's what

15:00

his like campus paper called him,

15:03

with that famous picture of him looking absolutely

15:05

like unhinged with the full beard

15:07

and long hair Steve King. Anyway,

15:11

at the end of the account, in Boole's

15:14

original Planet of the Apes book memorably

15:17

titled Monkey Planet, the man

15:19

writes that upon his eventual return to Earth,

15:21

he's greeted at the airport by an ape

15:23

driving a truck, leading to the

15:25

horrified twist you have to read it lake

15:27

Zoribird or you use

15:30

on Earth on Earth in the future maybe.

15:33

And then the final twist is that the people

15:36

reading the letter are chimps themselves,

15:39

so we hear the chimps. The readers of the book are

15:41

chimps. Well, no, the couple

15:44

reading the letter are chimps.

15:47

Oh okay. The novel ends

15:49

with the double twist of the guy

15:51

in the who wrote the account ending

15:54

up on Ape Earth, and then the people

15:56

reading his account in a spaceship are

15:58

also apes, so it's like a

16:00

double ape Jeopardy

16:02

kind of situation.

16:04

That's like might Shyamalan would

16:07

like go walk into the ocean? If you heard that,

16:09

that was like, that's that's too many twists.

16:11

Yeah, it's a little too many, and.

16:13

So many twists that it doesn't register as a

16:15

twist. That's what happens. If

16:17

you twist too many times, you're right back where you

16:20

started. It's like going three sixty. This

16:23

is the largest difference between the book and the nineteen

16:25

sixty eight movie. Ironically, though

16:28

Tim Burton's adaptation was closer to

16:30

the books ending than the one Charlton

16:32

Heston started, how does that one end?

16:34

I forget Abraham Lincoln, your love

16:36

Jesus of course at the Lincoln

16:38

Memorial. Oh my god, that's

16:41

right, that's right, that's right. God, that movie

16:43

is so bad. They really thought they had

16:45

something, they thought they were cooking. But on

16:47

the other hand, could

16:49

it be good? I mean,

16:51

everybody who's an ape is amazing. It's

16:54

just that it hangs on Wahlberg, you

16:57

know, and he can't summon the manic

16:59

energy of Heston in that movie.

17:01

His like a version of intensity is to just

17:04

look like sleepier and a little bit

17:06

more angry. Just so funny because he literally

17:08

blinded a man in his youth. Oh

17:12

yeah, that's a PSA and everyone h

17:15

and he is trying to get that expunge

17:18

from his record so that he can become a sheriff's

17:20

deputy in

17:22

the Greater Boston area. Yeah,

17:25

in market market. Yeah,

17:29

it's funny because that movie has a stacked apes

17:32

cast. It's like Helena Bonham, Carter is

17:34

Zerra, Michael Clarke Duncan

17:36

is the Gorilla General, Tim Roth is the

17:39

chimp bad guy, and they're all

17:41

so good just hanging it on, uh,

17:43

hanging it on market. Mark was a bad idea

17:46

anyway, I do you think it could have been saved?

17:48

Who would you have cast in the the Tim

17:50

Burton Planet of the Apes to make it.

17:52

Not suck as the man you

17:54

know who? I instantly thought Kanu

17:57

was Nick Cage, but also

17:59

good. Oh yeah, Cage would

18:01

have been good. He would have brought

18:04

the requisite level of insanity. Yeah.

18:06

Yeah, two thousand and one era

18:09

Burton. I could have seen if he'd

18:11

gone back to the world with Johnny Depp. Oh

18:14

yeah. My problem with

18:16

Marky Mark is that I around the same

18:18

time he had that movie rock Star that came out, and

18:21

I've like blended the two in

18:23

my head. So I just think that he's

18:25

an ape singing hair metal.

18:28

Singing hair metal like kind of like slouching

18:30

around with like a guitar strap to his back

18:33

on Planet of the Apes and which

18:35

is kind of a much better movie in my head.

18:37

Yeah, Like he goes there and teaches them to rock.

18:39

Yeah, it's like School of Rock meets

18:41

Planet of the Apes verbal

18:44

contract. There's a brilliant idea, and we're gonna make it.

18:47

I'm not sure where Boole's stock was.

18:50

Six years after River Kwai came out, but

18:52

it was apparently high enough that Monkey

18:54

Planet was optioned before publication

18:57

by producer and former Hollywood power

19:00

publicist Arthur P. Jacobs. He

19:02

was actually Marilyn Monroe's publicist right before

19:04

she died.

19:05

I mean, for our purposes, he's going to talk like the cigar

19:07

shopping executive.

19:08

Oh he will, He very much will. Funnily

19:10

enough, Jacobs was so focused on family

19:13

friendly movies that he'd

19:15

made Doctor Doolittle prior to this with Rex

19:17

Harrison, that he sold the

19:19

rights to Midnight Cowboy because

19:22

he didn't want to make a Let's

19:24

just say he uses the worst term for gay

19:26

people in

19:28

the one book or the one interview I read, let's

19:31

say flick about Urban Decake. Give me more

19:33

animals, give me more apes.

19:36

I want another movie where the guy talks

19:38

to the animals. Well, this

19:40

next graph is even more funny than that voice. He

19:43

said. It started in Paris in nineteen sixty

19:45

three. Two primary

19:47

sources for this is The Wonderful Planet

19:49

of the Apes Revisited and the

19:52

Behind the Planet of the Apes documentary, which

19:54

you can find on Internet archive, hosted

19:57

by Roddy McDowell. Jacob said, I was looking from

19:59

A and I would meet with various literary

20:02

agents. Asked what he was looking for,

20:04

he mentioned something like King Kong,

20:07

which is again

20:09

the cigar shopping executive meeting like a

20:12

Parisian bistro, being like, I need a King

20:15

Kong pick? What

20:17

do you beget? It has gotten me a slush

20:19

pile. One agent, while pitching

20:21

a different client, told Jacobs, speaking

20:24

of King Kong, I've got a thing here and it's

20:26

so far out. I don't think you can make it.

20:28

It can't be filmed. How can you

20:30

make talking apes believable? Who

20:34

actually didn't like his own novel very much. He

20:36

called it second tier. But I guess

20:38

when you're ranking your own work behind Bridge on the River

20:40

Khy, that's fair. Jacobs

20:43

immediately embarked on getting the film rolling. He

20:45

passed copies of the novel

20:47

version of Monkey Planet to MGM, Paramount

20:50

Pictures, and Marlon Brando, offering

20:52

him the role that Charlton Heston would eventually land

20:54

with a groveling letter that Brando

20:57

never answered. Jacobs,

20:59

even with the X mile of having a Warner Brothers studio

21:01

artist, draft up some concept art and send

21:04

it to Brando. After the initial letter

21:06

and Brando was so like, no, I'm

21:11

very invested in this high calorie diet

21:13

of mine.

21:16

It was really bad.

21:18

That was a good brand though, simply something he would have

21:20

done. The I mean, what was that island

21:23

of Doctor Moreau? Like maybe it was

21:25

later.

21:25

I guess that was later enough that he was like, all right, fine,

21:28

yeah, what was he doing?

21:30

I mean this was this is fat Brando

21:32

era, right, because that's why they have to shoot around

21:34

him in Apocalypse Now.

21:36

Paclos Now was seventy nine. This was like the weird

21:38

mid period between On

21:41

the Waterfront and The Godfather when

21:44

he was doing like, wasn't

21:46

he like Julius Caesar.

21:47

Or something in the sixties? He was in like a bunch.

21:49

Of what I believe to be

21:51

bad sixties movies.

21:54

Well, Paul Newman was another early candidate

21:57

for the lead, and aside from those two, they were also

21:59

thinking of Steve Queen, who would have been good, Rob

22:02

Taylor, and George Peppard

22:04

who I don't know who that is.

22:06

George Papard He is the male lead

22:08

in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Did

22:10

you know that Marlon Brando was Zappatta

22:14

the Mexican Resistance.

22:16

In a horrifying fake nose

22:18

in brown face and brown face, and they

22:21

did something to his eyes. I don't know what they did to

22:23

his eyes? What have you done to his eyes? Rosner's

22:27

baby?

22:28

Uh?

22:29

What was I gonna say?

22:30

Oh?

22:30

He has that in common with Charlton Heston, because Charlton

22:32

Heston made a touch of evil with Orson Wells where

22:34

they put him in brown face. Oh yeah,

22:37

Anyway, I've also heard that insanely

22:40

they were courting Jack Lemon, which

22:43

I guess he has like a scrawny kind of everyman

22:46

appealed to him, but.

22:47

Hey, get your goddamn hands off me, damn

22:49

daddy as Yeah, that's.

22:52

How Yeah, and Rock Hudson.

22:55

They also suggested Ursula Andress as

22:57

Lady Ape. The

23:00

most unsettling thing about this movie to me

23:02

is like being attracted to the

23:04

ape. Yeah, like the sexual tension

23:06

between Taylor and Zero, which is

23:09

amplified dramatically in the Tim Burton

23:11

one. One of the ideas for the sequels

23:13

Treatments was that they were going to have like a half a half

23:16

human thing, and then they were like, wait, that

23:19

implies beast reality directly.

23:21

We scrapped it. Well, is that the same.

23:23

Deal with Avatar? Let's go down like

23:26

movies that have like interspecies.

23:28

Uh, well, Avatar, I'm not sure that it

23:30

counts because their human consciousness

23:33

projected into like lab grown

23:35

beings. I think

23:38

I think they're cloned or vet grown

23:41

movies with you're talking inner

23:44

species. Yeah, oh god,

23:46

the fly. Oh okay,

23:49

that's certainly a union of sorts. Uh.

23:52

I'm not going to keep talking about this. This is weird

23:54

Superman Superman. I

23:57

mean, I guess none of the studios

23:59

wanted this movie. Jacobs did.

24:02

Yeah, okay, that one I would accept. Yeah,

24:05

what would their love child be? Half

24:08

fish half man? But which

24:10

half roll of dice?

24:12

Baby?

24:13

I guess that's my question is like, how does it work when

24:16

you with mermaids, Like are they

24:18

locked into fish bottom human

24:20

half? Or could you end up with fish

24:22

top human bottom? It's

24:25

hustle Miss Piggy and Kermit the frog. Oh

24:27

yeah, man, what is it? But they have kids,

24:30

right? Yeah, well at least in

24:33

in uh muppets Christmas Carol. Yeah,

24:35

and they're frogs. Tiny Tim is

24:37

a frog. He's not a horrific They just split

24:39

the difference like some of them, some

24:41

of them frogs. Yeah,

24:43

I'm about to write a letter. I mean there's Shrek

24:46

too. Oh yeah, the donkey dragon

24:48

abominations. Yeah, those actually

24:50

are horrifying and

24:53

accurate. Uh. Anyway, none of

24:55

the studios wanted it, and Jacobs did

24:57

get as far as negotiations with but

25:00

they bulked at the budget and put the project

25:02

and turn around. Paramount also

25:04

stalled out on the money end of things, and United Artists

25:07

felt that the novel was impossible to translate.

25:10

They were talking to Fritz Lang,

25:12

who famously directed Metropolis, about

25:14

this, but he was deemed a hard

25:16

sell for the studios. Eventually

25:18

they attached Pink Panther director

25:21

Blake Edwards' names to it, and with that

25:23

Warner Brothers was on board. I

25:25

mean, were they going to try to play it for laughs?

25:28

Would they have had like a Peter Seller's ulf

25:30

who just like bubbles his way through an ape

25:32

civilization.

25:33

Or I don't think so. I

25:35

think like an early concern for all of them

25:37

was that this would just be laughed at. So they

25:39

were like trying to play it as po

25:42

faced as possible, like at every stretch

25:44

like they initially if you see the old initial

25:46

like the test footage that they shot of

25:48

it with Edward G. Robinson as doctor zais

25:51

he's like dressed in a suit, and they

25:53

were quickly like no, no,

25:55

no, give them like Roman togas

25:58

or whatever, like neighbor suits or whatever

26:00

they're actually wearing. They were like, we cannot have them wearing

26:02

actual human clothes. Arthur

26:04

Jacobs sent a letter to his French

26:07

lit agent buddy because this guy had

26:09

been getting antsy, and was like, I can't hold the

26:11

rights I can't have to give you this exclusivity

26:13

for much longer, and told him that

26:15

Shirley McClain was going to star because

26:18

she had been in one

26:20

of Jacob's previous films, and ultimately

26:22

she would not star in Planet of the Apes,

26:26

but Jacobs had already secured a crucial presence

26:28

for the film by that time. Rod Serling,

26:30

baby, I always forget that he was

26:32

a WWII paratrooper.

26:35

Whoa can you imagine

26:37

like him and Kurt Vonnegut like at some officers

26:40

bar swapping human

26:42

horror stories that yeah, chain

26:45

smoking.

26:46

Yeah, oh god, that would be

26:48

so depressing actually,

26:50

because Vonnie was deeply haunted by it. I

26:53

assume Surling may have been when

26:55

he was sober well.

26:56

I don't know if Surling was a pow like Vonnagut

26:58

was because it wasn't Slater based on

27:00

his own like being caught in Dressden

27:03

during the fire bombs.

27:03

Yeah, Serling parlayed

27:06

a bunch of disparate TV and film writing gigs

27:08

into his own show, The Twilight Zone,

27:10

which you may have heard of. It was launched in nineteen

27:12

fifty nine and became a hit. Scooped up

27:14

a Peabody Award and fort

27:17

Writer's Guild Awards during its run.

27:19

Shortly before his death in nineteen seventy five. According

27:21

to Planet of the Apes Revisited, Serling

27:25

explained, I first became involved with Planet

27:27

of the Apes about ten years ago, so

27:29

sixty five, although

27:31

he funnily enough said it was through

27:33

a production company called King Brothers

27:36

and Curling Ads. They mostly did

27:39

Indian elephant pictures shot

27:41

for about a dollar eighty. I have

27:43

no idea what that phrase means, so he must

27:45

have gotten confused. I just thought

27:47

that was funny. I don't know what Indian elephant

27:49

pictures were. I guess that's a film where

27:51

you just get an Indian elephant and go

27:53

from there. But

27:56

regardless of who he was approached by, and he

27:58

did a whole treatment for it, he

28:01

was called by Blake

28:03

Edwards, who said not to worry about the

28:05

money, as the film was going

28:07

to be a big one.

28:10

Serling honed in on the fact that Bull had

28:12

not written a sci fi book per

28:14

se. Serling said

28:16

in nineteen seventy two, as talented

28:18

and creative a man as Boll is, he

28:21

does not have the deafness of a science

28:23

fiction writer. Boull's book was

28:25

prolonged allegory about morality

28:27

more than it was a stunning science fiction

28:29

piece, but it contained within its structure

28:32

a walloping science fiction idea.

28:34

Yeah, it was interesting to me to learn that one

28:36

of Serling's early episodes of The Twilight Zone,

28:38

called I Shot an Arrow into the Air,

28:41

is based around a group of astronauts who turn on

28:43

each other after crash landing on a planet that

28:46

in the end is revealed to be Earth. Oh yeah,

28:48

that's right. They're just like

28:50

outside Vegas, Like they literally see like a

28:53

highway sign that says Vegas or Vegas.

28:55

I think at the end that's like the big horrifying

28:57

moment. But I don't know,

29:00

Maybe it was self plagiarism gone on there.

29:02

But in his initial version of the adaptation, Serling

29:05

went a little too far. He would

29:07

later admit as much, saying, my earliest

29:09

version of the script featured an ape city

29:12

much like New York. Of course that

29:14

was much too expensive to do, he

29:16

continued. The script was very long, and I think

29:18

the estimate of the production people was that

29:21

if they had to shoot that script, it would

29:23

have cost no less than one hundred million

29:25

dollars by the time they created an eight

29:27

population, clothed it, and build

29:29

a city for them to live in. That's like between

29:32

a quarter and a half a billion dollars today.

29:35

Yeah. Soling was also concerned about.

29:37

Adapting the tone of bulls essentially

29:39

satirical novel into a serious sci

29:41

fi film. Now, as soon

29:43

as you put a shirt and tie on an orangutang,

29:45

he says, you invite laughter. This

29:48

is true, but our story is

29:50

serious satire. Soling

29:52

would eventually produce thirty drafts

29:55

of the Planet of the Ape screenplay. This

29:57

is according to the documentary behind the Planet

29:59

of the Ape thirty drafts.

30:01

Wow, would you classify

30:04

Planet of the Apes as satire?

30:06

You know, I personally

30:09

wouldn't see why it kind

30:11

of I mean, you know, we'll touch later

30:13

on Sammy Davis Junior's interpretation

30:16

but I think maybe unintentionally, like

30:19

most of the creatives in it are people

30:21

who were products of the fifties

30:23

system, and it just took so long to get made

30:26

that they accidentally dropped something

30:28

into nineteen

30:30

sixty eight, the most turbulent year of

30:32

a famously turbulent decade. But

30:35

like Bull wrote it in he

30:37

was like a you know, greatest

30:39

generation. Arthur P. Jacobs

30:42

was like coming I mentioned earlier, he was

30:44

like a Marilyn Monroe era publicist.

30:47

Heston was certainly more famous, I think,

30:49

as a leading man through their early part of the decade,

30:51

and then they just wound up by sort of coincidence,

30:54

making this thing that was a great allegory

30:56

about class differences and class

30:58

structures, which they even not within the apes,

31:01

because there's a point where like Cornelius

31:04

and Zero are talking and they're like, oh, you know how orangutanks

31:06

hate chimps or whatever, so like, there

31:09

is a bit of that that is textual. But

31:11

I think just by virtue of taking

31:13

so long to get this thing made, it

31:16

transcended the generation that created

31:18

it and achieved unintentional

31:20

resonance with the people who actually saw it.

31:23

That makes sense, Well said, yeah, I mean, I wonder if it's

31:25

almost like George Romira doing another Living Dead,

31:27

which became an allegory for racism

31:30

as well, and somebody although I guess he

31:32

probably intentionally made some of those scenes look

31:34

like the you know, the he.

31:36

Did He did not. He did not.

31:38

The character was not black in the screenplay,

31:41

and he just cast for the best actor

31:43

he was able to find. And then later he started

31:45

saying, oh yeah, oh yeah, it was a civil rights

31:47

thing because George,

31:50

if anything, knew

31:52

what he was savvy about what that would do.

31:57

We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right

31:59

back with more too much information in

32:02

just a moment. The

32:13

plan of the Apes movie, as you said, part of the long gestation

32:16

period, was Warner Brothers,

32:18

after years of development, killed

32:20

the whole thing in January nineteen

32:23

sixty five. After taking a long

32:25

hard look at the projected budget, which

32:27

was nearly seven point five

32:29

million, which is i'd say about

32:31

close to like seventy five million today. Blake

32:34

Edwards departed and producer Arthur Jacobs

32:37

was back at square one.

32:39

But Jacobs, he was a tenacious bastard.

32:41

He never gave up, and one of his first moves

32:43

was to send Rod Serlings draft to the book's

32:46

author Pierre Boole. Bill

32:49

did not like the It was Earth All Along

32:51

ending, also known as one of the

32:53

greatest film twists of all

32:56

time.

32:57

The man who couldn't

32:59

keep his twist straight in the book version

33:02

hated one of the best twist endings ever.

33:04

Okay, French Yeah

33:08

Mule felt that it cheapened the story,

33:10

saying that it served as quote temptation

33:13

from the devil. What does it even mean?

33:15

I have no idea?

33:19

French Man producer

33:21

Arthur Jacobs, however, didn't care and

33:24

didn't ask Boule.

33:25

To write a new version of the script to his

33:27

own novel. And he's just

33:29

funny. Charlton Heston talks about like the tremendous

33:31

hustle that Jacobs had as a producer. He

33:33

was just like, they don't want it. I'm taking it over

33:36

here, Like Bull doesn't

33:38

want a new screenplay, Great, I'm gonna go lock

33:40

down. Heston like he was just constant.

33:42

He really believed in this thing, and he was

33:44

right.

33:45

He took the script over to Charleston Heston and attempted

33:47

to woo him to star as the astronaut

33:50

initially called Thomas and later renamed

33:52

Taylor and Charlton. Heston

33:54

me, what where do you start with him? I mean,

33:56

he started as a stage actor. You'd

33:59

become a huge name in splashy

34:01

period dramas like ben Her, The Ten

34:03

Commandments, and The Warlord, where

34:05

he eventually worked with the eventual director of Planet

34:08

of the Apes Franklin J.

34:09

Schnaffner Schafnaffner

34:12

shaff Schnaffer. Yeah,

34:17

you know, I kind of had a negative

34:19

opinion of Chuck Heston before this. I

34:21

kind of thought he was like a because I only

34:23

ever knew him from being an NRA advocate.

34:26

But he's like quite delightful in

34:28

the documentary and the book. He kept

34:30

extensive journals which

34:33

are written in very erudite, funny

34:36

ways, and he really took care of the other people on the set,

34:38

as we'll talk about. But so I'm

34:40

like, yeah, good on you, Chuck.

34:42

And yeah, like you said, he speaks very admirably

34:44

of producer Arthur Jacobs. He says in the

34:46

book Planet of the Apes Revisited.

34:48

That he didn't even know how Jacobs found

34:50

him quote, because I usually

34:52

didn't accept submissions other than those accompanied

34:55

by firm fully funded offers, which

34:57

of course.

34:58

He was not in the position to make at that point.

35:01

Hessen would eventually inc a deal for a

35:03

quarter of a million dollars, which

35:05

again in nineteen sixty seven was nothing to sneeze

35:08

at, and ten percent of

35:10

the box office. There

35:12

it is, is that for just this movie or for the

35:14

whole franchise.

35:15

I don't think it could be in the franchise because he

35:18

he only came back for two on the condition

35:20

that he would it would be his last one, but still

35:22

ten percent of the gross of this movie and sixty

35:25

sixty eight would have been a chunk of change.

35:27

It's like coming back to alec Innes. It's funny because

35:29

he thought Star Wars was gonna be nothing, so he

35:31

didn't. He like just took He took

35:34

like a lower scale in exchange

35:36

for I think merchandise rather

35:39

than back end, and just like lived out the rest

35:41

of his life on the strength of that decision.

35:44

So all of this was still taking place over months

35:46

without any real development in terms of actually

35:48

getting this thing made at a studio. Charlton

35:51

Hesson developed a running gag with Jacobs, who

35:53

would call and say that the project had been killed

35:55

at MGM, but he was taking it back to Warner

35:58

who'd previously killed it, because they have people

36:00

over there. This has been taking so long

36:02

that the turnover rate of executives at all these studios

36:05

was total.

36:06

Hessen has he writes about

36:08

it in the or he I

36:10

think he writes about in his journal what he's like.

36:13

Jacobs had calls me up and he's like, well, it's killed in

36:15

Fox, but I'm going to take it over

36:18

to you United Artists,

36:20

and Heston would finish his sentence because they have new

36:22

people over there. Director

36:26

Franklin J.

36:27

Schaffner would say, it seemed

36:29

to me a fascinating project which would never

36:31

get made, So when Arthur said would you do

36:33

it, it was easy to say yes. Two

36:36

years later, Arthur called me up and said,

36:38

we have enough money to do a makeup test.

36:40

It took him two years to get enough

36:42

money to just do a makeup test.

36:45

Yeah, I mean this was true. Fox executive

36:47

Richard Zanek had wisely honed

36:50

in on the fact that the movie would be made or broken by

36:52

the makeup or ape up situation,

36:55

and eventually Jacobs

36:57

and the rest of his crew. Associate

37:00

producer Mort Abrahams, which is

37:02

such a funny Hollywood

37:04

guy name, which is constantly

37:06

begging for money from him, and they eventually

37:08

got together around seventy five hundred for a

37:10

makeup screen test shot on thirty

37:12

five millimeter in Fox's lot in early nineteen

37:15

sixty four. This featured an more

37:17

elaborate and therefore ultimately unused

37:20

EPE makeup, starring Edward G. Robinson

37:22

as Zayas, along with James Brolin

37:25

as Cornelius and Kim

37:27

Taylor, who would play Zero

37:30

Edwige. Robinson was so taken aback

37:33

by the makeup process and

37:35

also being half dead, that

37:37

he was like, I don't want to do this, and

37:40

he was replaced later in production by

37:42

Maurice Evans Ebrogie.

37:44

Robinson's best known to me for

37:46

Looney Tunes, basically because he was he

37:49

in the original scarface or something. He was like an

37:51

ottle gangster movie actor in the thirties

37:53

and forties.

37:54

Yeah, I mean, I don't know much about

37:56

him, but he was basically like mar Heart will not take

37:58

it. It's probably fair. Actually.

38:02

The screen test did reveal some shortcomings with the initial

38:04

makeup design, but it did show that the makeup

38:06

would hold up under film lights and that the actors'

38:08

voices would be unaffected. Fox's

38:11

response was once again to back out, and

38:14

Jacobs resumed his grind. He hired another

38:16

writer, Charles Eastman, to punch up some scenes,

38:18

and the forty pages that he's been produced were

38:20

deemed unusable, and then

38:22

they turned back to writer Michael Wilson, who,

38:25

as I mentioned earlier, had been blacklisted as

38:27

a communist during Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare

38:29

campaign and brought that

38:31

experience into like the trial scenes for example,

38:34

oh wow, it was his way of commenting on that. Yeah,

38:37

He'd done uncredited rewrites on Bridge

38:40

over the Requi Lawrence of Arabia and born

38:42

an Oscar for a Place in the Sun. So

38:45

then Jacob's associated producer, the aforementioned

38:47

mort Abrahams explained that production continued

38:49

to eke money out of Fox like a

38:51

couple grand at a time to keep refining

38:53

the makeup design Jacob's

38:56

associate producer, the afore mentioned mort Abrahams,

38:58

explained that production continued to eke money

39:00

out of Fox like a grand at a time to

39:02

keep refining the makeup designs, and ultimately

39:04

they made one last Hail Mary pitch.

39:07

They went back to Dick Xanik at Fox, who

39:09

immediately forbade them from bringing up

39:12

Apes, and

39:14

then undeterred, they bluffed their way into

39:16

a meeting with a presentation of how well

39:18

these different sci fi films have been doing at

39:20

the box office, and Xanik said,

39:23

come back in four weeks to see if this is

39:25

still like a trend that's continuing

39:27

at the box office. He actually said in

39:29

their meeting, I give you three minutes, and this

39:32

is the last time, because I'm really bored

39:34

with it. So they came

39:36

back and with

39:38

the box office trend continuing apace, and

39:41

he finally greenlit the film at Fox

39:43

with a provision that they could bring it to around

39:45

five million dollars as its budget.

39:48

Production designer William Kreeber

39:50

was tasked with creating the literal titular

39:52

planet.

39:53

Which planet was that Haigo monkey

39:55

planet.

39:57

He've worked on a number of sci fi properties

39:59

on Tea like Lost in Space, Voys

40:02

to the Bottom of the Sea, and The Time Tunnel.

40:05

It would eventually go on to the big.

40:06

Screen with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering

40:08

Inferno Incredible Movies

40:11

both. His biggest task

40:13

was to whittle the sets down from Serling's

40:15

proposed.

40:17

Ape City to the film's eventual

40:19

look. He and associate producer

40:21

More Abraham poured through architectural

40:23

books and stumbled on the Spanish

40:26

architect Gouty and his churches,

40:29

which had nature inspired forms

40:31

a sensibility. They combined with.

40:33

The real life rock cut architecture

40:35

of Cappadocia in central Turkey

40:37

that dated back to the first century AD.

40:39

Yeah, it's really crazy. Like if you look up pictures of this

40:41

region of Turkey and it's like it

40:44

looks like the planet of the Apes. They're just these

40:46

kind of like I don't want to say crude

40:48

because they were building, like they had like full buildings

40:50

and churches and stuff, but they're just hewn out of

40:52

rock.

40:54

I mean for a production that's trying

40:56

to keep an eye on its budget, using

40:59

as a design of inspiration Goudy,

41:01

the guy who designed the church that took

41:03

something like one hundred and something years to build

41:06

in Barcelona. That's the grout A Familia.

41:09

Maybe maybe isn't the ones

41:11

you gold to go? Well,

41:14

where do you explain how they got around

41:16

that? Jordan? Okay, all right.

41:18

Having arrived at a design theme, they decided

41:20

to speck it out. Wood was initially

41:23

considered, but that was costly, so they

41:25

decided on polyarthane foam,

41:27

which was cheaper and lighter. Head

41:29

of studio construction Ivan Martin explained

41:31

to American Cinematographer magazine in nineteen

41:34

sixty eight the material is NKC

41:37

coorophoam, a combination of resin

41:39

and a catalyst. When these are fired under

41:41

pressure from a gun, the mix rises

41:43

like bread dough. Then the heat quickly

41:46

dissipates, and within ten minutes it's cold

41:48

and solid. Using Creeper's

41:50

designs, they designed the city with thin

41:53

iron rods, which they'd cover with cardboard

41:55

and craft paper. They'd spray the

41:57

whole thing and peel off the paper, leave

42:00

them with structures to paint and dress. Not

42:03

unlike I'm getting paper mache

42:05

vibes here.

42:05

Basically, yeah, like

42:08

crude children structures which

42:11

then they'd paint and they go ye and make look

42:14

like rock. The opening

42:16

sequence of the movie was filmed near Lake Powell,

42:18

Arizona, and cut together with a man

42:20

made pool that was actually

42:22

reused from Arthur Jacob's previous production

42:25

Doctor Doolittle. All I wonder if they used

42:27

any like animals or anything from Doctor

42:29

Doolittle. Maybe

42:32

some horses, oh maybe, Yeah, And

42:34

they also filmed at the waterfall at the Fox

42:36

Studio a lot for

42:38

the sand in which Charlton Heston is being chased

42:40

by mounted apes. That's

42:43

correct.

42:45

They literally just grew a field of corn on

42:47

the Fox Ranch studios.

42:48

It's so funny. In the movie they talk about

42:51

like, yeah, we needed to be like about six feet

42:53

high, and they like they grew

42:55

a field of corn with like fertilizer

42:58

and water, and it actually went up to eight

43:00

feet tall. And they're like, uh,

43:02

what do we do? And I forget if it

43:04

was the director or the or zanak, but

43:06

he was like, cut it down to six feet. So

43:10

they grew and trimmed an entire

43:12

field of corn on the Fox

43:14

back lot for this.

43:17

To me, the Fox back lot, which

43:19

was this huge expanse of land

43:22

I think out by Malibu, was

43:24

to me best known as the where they shot

43:27

some of the exteriors for mash

43:30

and I'm sure many other

43:32

things, which casting a Sundance

43:34

Kid, some old Tarzan

43:36

movies from the thirties. Yeah,

43:39

I guess those are the big ones. And of course

43:42

this brings us to the film's final beach

43:44

scene, which was filmed on a stretch of California

43:46

Sea coast between Malibu and

43:48

Axnard, with one hundred and thirty

43:50

foot cliffs. It was so inaccessible

43:53

that the cast crew, film equipment, and

43:55

yes, even the horses had to be lowered

43:57

in by.

43:58

Helicopter and mules.

44:00

They took a lot of mules out there. The

44:04

remains of the Statue of Liberty were shot in

44:06

a secluded cove on the far eastern

44:08

end of Westward Beach in Malibu, between

44:11

Zuma Beaches and Point Doom.

44:13

And that's also where the end of Barton Fink

44:16

and whatever happened to Baby Jane was filmed,

44:18

as well as bits of airplane. I believe

44:20

that's a storied location. Yeah, weird

44:23

energy.

44:23

In that location, costumes

44:27

were coming together thanks to the awesomely

44:29

named Morton Hawk, who quickly

44:31

abandoned the idea of having the apes dressed

44:33

in suits or dresses because

44:36

that just would have been hilarious. He

44:39

suggested grouping the apes by clothing

44:42

color instead, chimps and green

44:44

orangutangs in brownish orange, and

44:46

gorillas and black. Associate producer

44:48

Morton Abraham were called Bill. Must

44:51

have submitted fifty to seventy five drawings.

44:53

Thankfully, he was working on these designs as

44:56

the set was still coming together, which helped

44:58

him kind of craft the colors of the outfits

45:00

to the colors and textures of

45:03

the set.

45:03

Yes, the real star of this department

45:06

was John Chambers, ultimately the first person

45:08

ever awarded a special Oscar

45:11

just for makeup. Chambers was a jewelry

45:13

designer and carpenter before he joined the army

45:15

and wound up as a dental technician. While

45:18

enlisted, he developed a new line of adhesives

45:21

and rubber compounds, which ultimately ended up

45:23

in the service of creating prosthetic devices

45:25

for those wounded in war. Haunted

45:28

by the cost of dealing so intimately with another

45:30

person's tragedy, he turned to the television industry

45:33

for a respite, which was an

45:35

error. It

45:37

was in this capacity that he first worked with Heston,

45:40

transforming him into the Beast for a

45:42

Shirley Temple production of Beauty

45:44

and the Beast. Just imagine

45:46

craggy like, lantern jawed Chuck

45:48

Heston romancing sort

45:51

of Shirley Temple gives me a deep

45:53

chill. Chambers

45:55

also worked in a huge swath of the fifties and sixties

45:58

sci fi boom on TV Outer Limit. He

46:00

crafted Spock's ears on Star Trek,

46:02

whoa worked on The Munsters,

46:05

Lost in Space, The Invaders, and Rod Serling's

46:08

Night Gallery. My

46:10

favorite quote in this piece is that he was set to go

46:12

to London and research the ape makeup

46:14

that Stanley Kubrick was using to film two thousand

46:16

and one, A Space Odyssey. Though Kubrick

46:19

backed out of the arrangement, he

46:21

was famously weird and secretive and concerned

46:23

that this might have been a conflict of interest. Chambers,

46:26

for his part, responded thusly, I

46:29

backed out of the whole idea as a personal affront.

46:31

I'm an Irishman, and I said, anytime

46:34

an Englishman can teach me anything, it's

46:36

going to be a cold day in hell. Chambers

46:39

was tackling the ape makeup from an unusual

46:42

if iconic source, Jack Dawn's

46:44

Cowardly Lion makeup for Bert Lair and

46:46

Wizard of Oz, which allowed Lair

46:49

to still make his trademark comical facial expression

46:51

based on how the appliance was mounted to

46:53

his face. Chambers said, to arrive at

46:55

our final concept, we turned to sculpturing.

46:58

We would take a base human head in plast and

47:00

then in clay model. On this head

47:02

are ape variations. We came up

47:04

with how things looked like the Neanderthal man

47:07

and so forth, which we discarded. The concepts

47:09

were too ambiguous. We needed the pleasantness

47:11

yet the strength of the animal without being

47:13

too grotesque. The

47:16

set designer in the documentary says that one

47:18

day he came into the makeup department

47:20

and they had just a live chimp there hanging

47:22

out to model it

47:24

on. Chambers' practical

47:26

concerns for the makeup were twofold. One

47:28

that the mask wouldn't muffle the actors' voices, which

47:31

meant using material light enough to let it escape

47:33

from under the makeup, and two that the makeup's

47:35

lips were synchronized with the actors, so

47:38

they had to glue the inside of the

47:40

processes directly to their lips

47:42

and jaw muscles

47:44

so that the outside of the mask would wrinkle

47:47

and crease realistically. And

47:50

then they had to make the whole thing visually appealing as

47:52

well. Chambers said that they had to modify the

47:54

sort of wrinkle structure

47:56

that go into apes faces to make them not just

47:58

look like horrifying the age humans,

48:00

and the fact that their nostril, their nose structure

48:03

looked like giant slits in the middle of their

48:05

face, so seeing that enlarged

48:07

to a talking human scale would have been similarly

48:10

horrifying. So they small and smallish.

48:12

They smallish to them down Jesus.

48:15

I mean, I.

48:15

Wonder if there was any considerations to the

48:17

fact that, you know, you

48:19

were paying top dollar for decent

48:22

level stars, you didn't want to completely

48:25

obscure their faces entirely.

48:27

Yeah. One of the funniest bits in the documentary

48:29

was them talking about how like they

48:32

quickly learned that you

48:35

couldn't keep your face still in a scene,

48:37

like if the camera was on you. They would kind

48:39

of have to be using constantly,

48:41

like moving their face around in these like weird

48:44

over exaggerated contortions so

48:47

that that would translate through the makeup

48:49

and the makeup wouldn't just look like a still static

48:52

mask. So like Roddy McDowell and

48:54

Kim Hunter talk about just

48:57

like making these comical faces

48:59

under eth all the makeup and then when it translates

49:01

through the makeup, it just happens to look like expressions

49:04

of interest or what have you. And

49:07

they eventually landed on a multi piece latex

49:09

appliance for the forehead nose, mouth, and chin,

49:12

and then they coated with they plastered

49:14

the whole thing together. They made

49:16

individual molds of the various parts of each

49:18

lead actor's face and built multiple latex

49:21

appliances from them. And this is really the big

49:24

revolution that was taking place in makeup

49:27

around this time. It Dick Smith was doing this with Little

49:30

Big Man, where instead

49:32

of just doing these big, one piece appliances,

49:34

the solution was to do many small pieces that

49:36

were individually placed according

49:39

to like facial muscles, so that you could

49:41

get as much individual movement

49:43

out of it. And now they just do it in a

49:45

computer. They

49:48

couldn't use the same ones twice because

49:50

the liquid latex bonded to the foam

49:52

rubber underside of it, and

49:55

that tore easily and was damaged easily.

49:57

And the groups of apes in the film, each

50:00

group of apes in the film's makeup

50:03

was designed to highlight character traits. The chimps

50:05

were supposed to look sympathetic and kind of

50:07

cherubic. The gorilla's makeup was

50:09

actually they made the gorillas look meaner than they

50:12

do in real life. And the orangutangs

50:14

had this naturally, as

50:16

in the real animal have this kind of aristocratic

50:19

bearing actors

50:21

came to the makeup trailer before dawn and

50:23

had the makeup appliances placed over

50:26

their faces, covered in a cream inside

50:28

to protect them from the spirit gum

50:30

that glued these things to the actors. Because the

50:32

spirit gum was so concentrated at this point,

50:35

was like both abrasive to sensitive

50:37

skin and would like the fumes would

50:39

like get them, you know, somewhat high as

50:41

they were working on it. Once

50:43

the appliance was in place, Chambers used grease

50:46

paint to blend the mask with the actor's skin

50:48

and applied the wig, which was a set

50:50

of side burns on the face and a

50:53

bald cap with a wig glued to it over

50:55

their natural hair. They then got rubber

50:57

ears and false teeth, and then

50:59

their natural teeth were painted black

51:02

so they wouldn't show up on camera. Given

51:04

the amount of apes on the film, which

51:06

included like up to two hundred for

51:08

some group scenes, Chambers whittled

51:10

down the total amount of time to apply the makeup

51:13

from six hours to a slightly more reasonable

51:15

three three and a half. Frequently, in

51:17

the run up to this movie was crowed that they spent

51:19

like a million dollars on makeup

51:22

alone, but Abraham said it was closer

51:24

to half that. So it's like five

51:26

million today. Yeah, I was

51:28

gonna say, still an egregious amount of money

51:30

for monkey makeup. At

51:33

this point in the production, they only

51:35

had Charlton heston lockdown. Jeez.

51:40

So all this time developing this makeup and they had no

51:42

idea who they were going to put it on. Essentially, yeah,

51:44

great.

51:45

They filled the role of Zira with Kim Hunter,

51:47

who'd had a promising career in Hollywood starring

51:50

opposite Marlon Brando in the Broadway

51:52

and feature film version of a street car name Desire

51:55

before being.

51:56

Blacklisted by McCarthy running

51:58

theme.

51:59

Yeah, producer Arthur Jacobs

52:01

actually helped get her off the blacklist through

52:03

some weird back channels.

52:05

Do you have any further info on that. She

52:07

has this long anecdote in the

52:09

book about the films where

52:11

she basically says like Jacobs

52:15

got a call from someone that was like,

52:17

if you cast Kim Hunter, you'll never

52:19

work in this industry again, like trying

52:21

to threaten him out of casting her and keep her on

52:24

the blacklist, And they

52:26

eventually got into some kind of like pseudo extortion

52:28

scheme where they like found

52:31

the master keeper of the Blacklist,

52:34

and the guy was like, you have to pay me two

52:36

hundred dollars to find out the reason

52:38

you're on this And it just turned into this whole

52:40

like byzantine. This is like a page long

52:42

story in the book. It's like the most Kim Hunter talks.

52:45

And it was this whole byzantine thing that took place

52:47

over like phone calls and letters

52:49

and this whole like shadowy, weird thing where this guy

52:51

was trying to get money out of them to like pull

52:54

her off the Blacklist or even reveal the reason

52:56

that she'd been blacklisted in the first place. And

52:58

she wound up off it and acting in this

53:00

movie. And what a hell of a career. You go

53:02

from freaking opposite Brando in Streetcar

53:05

to Monkey Makeup. You

53:08

got a claw your way back from the Blacklist somehow.

53:11

Yeah, I don't think I realized it was an actual literal

53:14

list that was kept by a

53:16

presumably a guy.

53:18

I mean, it has to be locked in McCarthy's,

53:21

Like it was like locked in McCarthy's cupboard somewhere,

53:23

and this guy just found it and was like, I can squeeze

53:25

two hundred dollars out of these Hollywood roots got.

53:30

Kim Hunter had not read Bull's original

53:32

book when she was cast, and ultimately

53:34

did not, hoping to avoid picking up

53:36

anything in the book that wouldn't appear on screen,

53:39

which, as we discussed earlier, it was a

53:41

lot.

53:42

Roddy McDowell was cast next. Everybody loves Roddy

53:44

McDowell.

53:45

Good friend of Elizabeth Taylor and

53:48

certain circle of Hollywood women.

53:50

He was famous for throwing dinner

53:52

parties, and after he died, his

53:55

very famous bathroom in his home was

53:58

placed in a museum.

54:00

Yeah. I just remember him from Fright Night,

54:03

the eighties movie where he plays like he plays

54:05

like a horror movie presenter who

54:08

mass grades is a vampire hunter, and

54:10

then they enlist him to be an actual vampire

54:12

hunter. He's great in it anyway.

54:14

Yes, the Hollywood History Museum at

54:16

the Max Factor Studio is preserved

54:19

for future generations to enjoy. You

54:22

can use Roddy McDowell's bathroom.

54:26

I enjoyed this. I went, I paid

54:28

money to go there. I was gonna say, you've

54:30

got I try, Yes, I have. It's

54:33

very good anyway.

54:34

Roddy McDowell was cast as Zero's fiance

54:37

Cornelius.

54:38

Incidentally no one in production cared.

54:41

Whether the apes would have consistent accents

54:43

or not. It

54:46

was just so burnt out on the makeup.

54:48

But like a talk over, you want, I don't. Just let's

54:51

just get this gone. Ask me about

54:53

the accents now. Frank

54:58

Schaffner and I talked about it an ape with

55:00

an English accent for about thirty seconds.

55:03

This is Roddy McDowell talking, and we thought, no,

55:06

no, this is more. Abraham's associate

55:08

producer, Martin Abraham, said, Frank

55:11

Schafter and I talked about an ape with an English

55:13

accent for about thirty seconds, and

55:15

we thought, no, Roddy McDowell would

55:17

be so good, and nobody's going to pay any attention

55:19

to the accent.

55:21

An ape with an English accent is pretty hilarious.

55:24

It is naturally funny. It seems like it should have

55:26

been like a bigger cornerstone of British

55:29

comedy. Like their whole thing

55:31

was cross dressing. But they really could have gotten

55:33

so much more mileage out of species

55:36

dressing. Species dressing,

55:38

yeah, ape dressing. I

55:40

was trying to make a drag ape thing but it didn't

55:42

really work, so just move on. Oh

55:45

yeah, I don't know who they went who they were looking

55:47

for. After Edward g. Robinson was

55:49

like, I will literally die if you put me in this makeup

55:52

for an entire film shooting. Oh

55:55

god. And then he clung on for

55:57

like another twenty years. But

56:00

they landed Maurice Evans, another British

56:02

guy who became an

56:05

American citizen right as World War Two was

56:08

hopping up, and then he started appearing in

56:10

plays and TV roles throughout the fifties. I

56:12

don't know anything else about this guy. I

56:14

mean, this is making me think of in

56:16

the Wizard of Oz the Tin Man, when they almost

56:18

killed Buddy EPs and the original tin

56:20

Man. Oh yeah, by just painting him with actual

56:23

silver paint. Yeah, that just like coated his

56:25

lungs and he was like, oh, I'm gonna die,

56:28

I will die. Put me in an oxygen tent. Yeah.

56:30

And then not only did they almost kill him, they

56:32

took his role away and learned from their mistake

56:35

and gave Ray Bulger

56:37

I think no he was yah, Yeah, gave the

56:39

new guy a less deadly makeup treatment.

56:42

I actually I did Maurice Evans

56:44

dirty here. He Oh he wasn't

56:46

bewitched, playing a character named

56:48

Maurice. Uh. But

56:51

he had done a bunch of stuff in the old

56:53

vic. He was like peers with Olivier. Oh

56:56

he's in Rosemary's Baby. Oh

56:59

yeah, he's like one of the

57:01

neighbor he's one of the good neighbors. No

57:03

good for you, Mary Sevans, I was not familiar

57:05

with your game.

57:07

Getting back to the tin Man for a minute, the part actually

57:09

went to Jack Haley, not Roy Bulger.

57:11

And that's interesting to me because Jack

57:13

Hayley's son, Jack Hayley Junior, married

57:16

Liza Minnelli, who's Judy

57:18

Garland's daughter. So the

57:21

daughter of Dorothy and the daughter

57:23

of the tin Man got married in real life for like

57:26

ninety days in the studio fifty four era.

57:28

Is that weird? Interesting? I

57:30

think it's smacks of like arranged

57:33

marriage, which I sort of hate.

57:36

But sure, trauma bonding, Yeah,

57:39

that's more likely explanation.

57:40

Oh sorry, they lasted from seventy four to seventy

57:43

nine. I take it back in

57:45

Liza and Liza realm. That's a long

57:47

marriage.

57:48

Oh well, hell are Oh?

57:50

The ape actors, that's another

57:52

inherently funny term, found themselves

57:54

in these similar straits of not being able to

57:57

figure out how to play a humanoid

57:59

ape. McDowell

58:01

said he based some of his eight Movements on Groucho

58:04

Marx and

58:06

took it to Kim Hunter. They

58:09

also took a trip to the Zoo, which they found

58:12

very quickly was not that helpful.

58:14

Mcdalell said, the characters we were playing were

58:16

much more evolved than the ones you see in the

58:19

zoo. Yeah, they talk. That's

58:21

why I hit upon the idea of the sort of crouch

58:24

and using the knees. It's very,

58:26

very tiring to stand that way. This

58:31

next part kills me because, oh you take

58:33

this well. Poor Kim Hunter did

58:35

not have a good time making this movie.

58:38

McDowell thought he would be affected because he

58:40

was slightly laustrophobic. He said he didn't even

58:42

like the idea of having a pillow over his face, so he

58:44

was unsure of how you cope with the makeup. But

58:46

he got to the point where you could just sleep through the whole

58:49

thing, while Kim Hunter had to take a valium

58:51

to sit through it. And similarly, they had

58:53

different reactions the first time they appeared on set

58:55

in makeup. Mort Abraham said that McDowell

58:58

came onto set and just acted like a chin for

59:00

fifteen minutes, letting his arms dangle

59:02

at his sides and scratching his armpits. He

59:04

put his tongue underneath his upper lip and started

59:07

making jabbering noises while jumping with two

59:09

feet. Meanwhile, Kim Hunter

59:11

approached mort Abraham's on the set and

59:13

broke down in tears in his arms for ten

59:15

minutes.

59:16

Which.

59:19

Which Abraham said, pretty much ruined

59:21

the makeup. Yeah,

59:23

poor Kim Hunter is just like she talks about

59:25

like having like ego

59:28

death because in

59:30

this specific moment, she was walking

59:32

with another actress and when Abraham's

59:35

greeted her, he was like, hey, I'm sorry, I don't know which one

59:37

of you is Kim Hunter, and she just like

59:39

broke down into tears at the enormity

59:41

of that statement. And then later would have

59:43

the like she would like go to her trailer and have these

59:46

like horrifying existential moments where

59:48

she was like starting to

59:50

she would dream that she was an ape. It's

59:53

just like, come on, lady. The

59:55

making of this seems like a French existentialist

59:57

novel, especially the outside parts where

59:59

they were just like out in the middle of Arizona. It is

1:00:01

like one hundred and ten degrees, not

1:00:04

much interesting about Linda Harrison, who plays

1:00:07

the human Lady Nova. Might

1:00:09

not be surprising for you to learn that she was Richard Zane's

1:00:12

then girlfriend, and he was the head

1:00:14

of Fox at the time, and she was cast at

1:00:16

his suggestion. They

1:00:19

shot and subsequently cut a scene

1:00:21

though, in which she was revealed to be pregnant by

1:00:24

Taylor, and then they cut that out of fear

1:00:26

that they were pushing things too far. They were like, wow, we've

1:00:28

already got an eight movie. That'll be you

1:00:30

know, thinly veiled allegory for

1:00:32

racism in class in America. Let's keep

1:00:35

abortion out of it. Kim

1:00:37

Hunter remembers the following about Harrison.

1:00:40

I remember her in relation to the valume I used

1:00:42

to take to relax because of the makeup. She

1:00:44

asked what my strength was. It was five milligrams

1:00:47

or whatever, and she said, oh my god, that little

1:00:49

I never go to sleep without ten at least,

1:00:53

I guess when you're sleeping next to Dick xannit. They

1:00:55

got married. Good for them?

1:00:58

How long? Nine

1:01:02

years? Oh it's okay, okay,

1:01:04

what else? Did she even do something

1:01:07

about Batman? Okay?

1:01:09

Oh?

1:01:09

She was a cheer She was cheerleader

1:01:11

number two on the Batman

1:01:13

series. So yes,

1:01:16

technically something with Batman.

1:01:18

Man banging Dick Xanik only gets you two

1:01:21

roles in Fox movies.

1:01:22

Oh, she was woman in cart in Tim

1:01:24

Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes.

1:01:26

Okay, okay. Oh she was in Cocoon

1:01:30

and Cocoon, the return Cocoon

1:01:32

harder, A

1:01:37

good day to Cocoon, Back

1:01:41

in the Cocoon, back

1:01:44

in the Cocuon. Yeah, I feel like we should

1:01:46

start using beneath the as the secret

1:01:48

construction Sister

1:01:51

Act two, beneath the habit,

1:01:54

beneath the Planet of the Sister Act,

1:01:57

anyway, beneath the Immediately, the

1:02:00

film immediately got behind beneath

1:02:02

the Diety.

1:02:07

As you meditate on that, We'll be right

1:02:09

back with more too much information.

1:02:11

After these messages, the.

1:02:23

Film immediately got behind schedule on its

1:02:25

first day of shooting, which was at

1:02:27

the Grand Canyon and the desert surrounding

1:02:29

Page Arizona, because a

1:02:32

Heston was the only person quite sensibly

1:02:34

pushing for beards on the Astronaut and they're woken

1:02:36

up to indicate the passage of time, and

1:02:39

they had not packed beards, even

1:02:43

though he drew his own and b all

1:02:45

the ape makeup had been left in

1:02:47

Phoenix, where they landed

1:02:50

before taking a puddle jumper to Page, so

1:02:52

then they had to charter a separate plane to take

1:02:54

them from Page to Phoenix to pick up the

1:02:56

makeup that they had left behind and then go back

1:02:59

to Page. The makeup became

1:03:01

like an army that they had to feed throughout

1:03:03

the entire shoot. I mentioned earlier that they were up

1:03:05

to two hundred apes that needed makeup

1:03:07

in some of these different group scenes, and

1:03:09

there was an eighty person strong

1:03:12

team dedicated to maintaining the makeup,

1:03:14

appliances, hair and wardrobe, which actually

1:03:17

caused a rippled delay through Hollywood

1:03:19

as other productions couldn't hire

1:03:22

qualified makeup artists because everyone

1:03:24

else was working on apes. The

1:03:26

makeup was put above virtually everything

1:03:28

else, including the actors. Actors

1:03:30

had to use cigarette holders and subsisted

1:03:32

on liquid diets through a straw,

1:03:35

and when they did eat solid food, they had

1:03:37

to eat staring at themselves in a mirror so they

1:03:39

could guide the food past the appliance

1:03:41

and into their mouth.

1:03:42

That's the most horrifying part of this

1:03:44

entire ordeal that you've described as this watching

1:03:47

yourself intently eat.

1:03:48

Yeah. As an Ape. Yeah, as an ape. Yeah,

1:03:51

the other Kim Hunter had Ego death. The

1:03:53

early Astronaut sequences were shot around Lake

1:03:55

Polo on the Colorado River in Utah

1:03:58

and Arizona, a spot that NASA,

1:04:00

along with nearby Glen Canyon, as the closest

1:04:03

representation of the lunar surface that

1:04:05

could be found on Earth, which should

1:04:07

interest you as a space guy. I was

1:04:09

gonna say very much so, although I mean,

1:04:12

yeah, there's a lot of rocks here. Eh oh

1:04:14

works like yeah, I mean it's either

1:04:16

this or the what's the famous one in

1:04:19

Utah. It's like a red red rocks

1:04:21

thing that always stands in for Mars. Oh

1:04:23

yeah, I forget what it's called. I know what you mean. Apes

1:04:25

was also the first time that the government allowed anything

1:04:28

to be shot near Glen Canyon Dam, which

1:04:30

supplied power to most of the Southwest.

1:04:33

It was desolate and extremely hot. Jeff

1:04:35

Burton, who played the astronaut Dodge, fainted

1:04:37

at one point, and given these circumstances,

1:04:40

it may shock you to learn that the mummified corpse

1:04:42

of the dead astronaut that they find in stasis

1:04:45

was a real woman and not a model. Heston

1:04:48

later quipped, it has to be the only seventy

1:04:51

year old woman who ever played an astronaut.

1:04:54

Paus for applause. Yeah.

1:04:57

Uh. They got into an early stalemate with Fox

1:04:59

over the amount of time time that director Franklin

1:05:01

J. Shaffner was spending shooting the landscape

1:05:03

there. Like basically Zanak

1:05:06

was like, I will not give you another day to shoot this

1:05:08

landscape, and they just kept begging, we

1:05:10

need more shots of the landscape because they

1:05:12

just wanted to showcase that and really

1:05:14

build up to the discovery of the apes.

1:05:17

And that opening scene is incredible.

1:05:19

There's this amazing moment where they're hiking

1:05:21

over a horizon and

1:05:24

they get the lens flare from

1:05:26

the setting sun is actually

1:05:29

like a halo effect around one

1:05:31

of the actors, and the camera follows

1:05:33

him in such a way that the Lenz flair also

1:05:36

follows with him and he remains enclosed

1:05:38

in it. Whether it was luck or intentional,

1:05:40

it's one of the more incredible shots I've seen because

1:05:44

you can also do lens flares digitally now as

1:05:47

really fail

1:05:50

Sun what's his name,

1:05:52

Oh J. J. Abrams eagerly

1:05:54

reminds us every time he gets behind a camera.

1:05:57

He's a fail Sun. He's a

1:05:59

famous Coal was like an exec or

1:06:01

something, and he's not a fail siun. He's made

1:06:03

tremendously financially successful properties. I just

1:06:05

think is a hack. They

1:06:08

also ran into, let's say, a cultural

1:06:10

issue with rounding up extras from

1:06:13

Page. The problem was

1:06:15

that all of the women of the nearby town were concerned

1:06:18

about leaving their homes to act in the movie

1:06:20

while their Native American housekeepers were

1:06:22

in their houses. One of them

1:06:24

finally said, you don't understand, mister Abraham's

1:06:26

because you've never been around Indians. You just

1:06:28

can't trust these people as far as you can throw them.

1:06:31

This woman went into an explanation of Indians, and

1:06:33

I thought to myself, I'm in Mississippi. In nineteen

1:06:36

thirty five, Producer MORET. Abrahams

1:06:38

remembered, you can't walk around Page

1:06:40

without seeing Indians. They live all over the place.

1:06:42

It was originally Indian Land, but the people

1:06:44

of Page had this terribly racist attitude.

1:06:47

Great grim, Yeah,

1:06:50

I thought we did escape it fitting for that production,

1:06:52

I guess, though I know right now. Yeah.

1:06:54

Eventually getting over that with some creative

1:06:57

scheduling, they moved on to battling

1:06:59

the oppressive heat faced by the actors

1:07:01

in makeup was Charlton Heston helped

1:07:03

by requesting a helicopter for the cast

1:07:06

to get back and forth from the Fox Ranch

1:07:08

to Arizona as

1:07:10

ahead of the Screen Actors Guild at the time.

1:07:12

Wow.

1:07:13

Charlton Heston was also able to

1:07:15

push the studio to pay the actors

1:07:17

for time they spent in the makeup chair, not

1:07:20

just for shooting hours.

1:07:21

Why is it interesting that they used to like they would

1:07:23

consider your day that start

1:07:26

and end in front of the camera, and even if

1:07:28

you were doing three hours in a makeup chair, they

1:07:30

were or an hour and a half to remove it afterwards, they

1:07:32

were like nope. And I

1:07:35

mean Chuck is also he's pretty self

1:07:37

aggrandizing, as you would expect from someone who played

1:07:39

Moses, but

1:07:42

he suggests that it was the first time

1:07:44

that this that he was like, this film was instrumental

1:07:47

in getting that changed, So good

1:07:49

on him.

1:07:50

I mean, that's just gotta be wild being an actor on the

1:07:52

set with the head of the Screen Actors Guild, Like.

1:07:55

I know, right, like nice, yeah,

1:07:58

kick back, hang.

1:08:00

Out craft surfaces a little longer than

1:08:02

I maybe ordinarily would have. They're

1:08:04

also constantly revising the actor's

1:08:07

technique under the makeup. Kim

1:08:09

Hunter remembers director Frank Schaffner

1:08:11

after seeing some dailies, telling them, You've

1:08:14

really got to keep those facial muscles moving.

1:08:16

Otherwise, whenever the camera's on you and

1:08:19

you're absolutely immobile or at ease listening

1:08:21

as people do without moving a muscle, it looks

1:08:23

like a mask when the camera is on

1:08:26

you. You've got to be conscious of keeping it moving.

1:08:29

Roddy McDowell would, when the shoot moved to the Fox

1:08:31

Studios, sometimes get driven home with this

1:08:33

full makeup on, obviously

1:08:35

scaring the other drivers out

1:08:37

of their minds.

1:08:39

I think Abraham says in the documentary

1:08:42

that a bunch of the Gorilla actors did that once

1:08:44

too, where they were just like they were literally driving,

1:08:46

and there was four of them in like an Oldsmobile driving

1:08:49

down Pch. It

1:08:52

must have been really one of the joys of being

1:08:54

on this movie, just tripping out people in your ape

1:08:56

makeup. Roddy McDowell also snuck

1:08:58

onto the stage where jew Andrews was shooting

1:09:01

The movie Star and crawled

1:09:03

into her dressing room on all fours, dressed

1:09:05

as an ape, scaring the hell out

1:09:07

of her. That's amazing. Only Rody

1:09:09

McDow cal pulled that off. Yeah,

1:09:12

can you Oh my god, I would have lost my If

1:09:14

it was like a mid sixties and a

1:09:17

chimp crawled into my dressing room, I probably

1:09:19

would have shot him. Maybe that was why

1:09:21

Charlton Heston got involved in the NRA A

1:09:24

protection against apes. He glimpsed the

1:09:26

future and

1:09:28

was deeply worried by what glimpsed

1:09:31

back. I gotta do something

1:09:33

about these apes. Do

1:09:35

you remember the VH one, like one hundred and eight

1:09:37

shocking Moments of Rock and Roll when it was like

1:09:39

the body Count cop Killer coming out and they

1:09:42

just kept running that clip

1:09:44

of Heston reading the lyrics out loud, it

1:09:46

being like, die die Die, Die,

1:09:48

Die, Die Die pig die.

1:09:53

I was trying to remember, like why I had that in my

1:09:55

head. It was absolutely from that yep yep yep.

1:09:58

Uh.

1:09:58

As you note, somewhat creepily, the

1:10:01

actors on the set began flocking

1:10:03

to their own respective ape groups

1:10:05

age groups. I don't know if that was an intentional

1:10:08

pun or an actual typo Charlton

1:10:11

Heston said, in a sort

1:10:14

of unfortunate choice of words, it

1:10:16

was an instinctive segregation on set.

1:10:19

Not only would the apes eat together, but

1:10:21

the chimpanzees ate with the chimpanzees,

1:10:24

and the gorillas ate with the gorillas. The

1:10:26

orangutanks also ate with the orangutangs,

1:10:29

and the humans we'd eat off by themselves.

1:10:32

It was quite spooky.

1:10:35

A contested bit of the film.

1:10:37

Is shot at Taylor's trial, where

1:10:40

the orangutanks make the see here

1:10:42

Speak No Evil signs, which was a

1:10:44

spur of the moment bit of onset improv

1:10:47

Some people felt that it derailed the otherwise serious

1:10:50

tone of the film, but Dick Xanik

1:10:52

and Arthur Jacobs, also known

1:10:54

as the Guys who held the purse strings for this

1:10:56

movie, both battled for its inclusion.

1:10:59

Kim Hunt and Roddy McDowell, however, hated

1:11:01

it, and Charlton Heston also wasn't

1:11:03

a fan, but he caved to the test audiences

1:11:06

who loved the bit.

1:11:07

What do you think. I think

1:11:09

it's funny. I mean, they might linger on it for

1:11:11

a beat or two too long, but it

1:11:13

is funny. It's like probably the purest

1:11:16

moment of comedy, intentional comedy.

1:11:18

It is the most the purest moment of intentional

1:11:20

comedy in the film. I think it's fine.

1:11:26

No m you

1:11:28

disagree, considering this whole movie is veering

1:11:31

way too close to you

1:11:33

know, comedy at all times.

1:11:35

I think you got to really commit to the bit and keep it straight

1:11:37

faced. Yeah, I

1:11:40

see that. I do see that. A

1:11:43

test audience has loved it, though, so

1:11:46

you know, what are you gonna do? The people have

1:11:48

spoken, spoken like a true cigar

1:11:51

chopping executive apes

1:11:54

was important to remember that it was a

1:11:57

total inversion of Heston's image

1:11:59

at the time he's playing these you know, with that

1:12:01

jaw in that barrel chest. He

1:12:03

was always playing leaders and heroes, and

1:12:05

in this movie he's just absolutely bodied

1:12:08

by ape after ape after ape.

1:12:11

He would later remember, I didn't realize until

1:12:13

we got into it that almost throughout the whole picture people

1:12:15

were chasing me or throwing things at me, or hitting me

1:12:17

with sticks, or hosing me with water, or pushing me around

1:12:19

or tying me up. I was constantly being

1:12:22

mistreated. I had done a lot of pictures

1:12:24

on horses driven chariots, part

1:12:26

of the Red Sea, a horse or a chariot,

1:12:28

and you're an important person here I'm being

1:12:30

chased by monkeys, for God's sakes, And

1:12:32

believe me, even rubber rocks hurt Tah.

1:12:36

In his journal, he notes his stunt double

1:12:39

on the film, guy named Joe Cannet, after a long

1:12:41

day of this treatment, quipped to him, you know, Chuck,

1:12:43

I remember when we used to win these fights.

1:12:47

Oh man, that's

1:12:49

les like a cut line from Once upon a Time in

1:12:52

Hollywood.

1:12:52

That's good. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And

1:12:54

in the ultimate indignity, they made little

1:12:56

flesh looking booties for Heston to

1:12:58

wear while running around the set and dirt

1:13:01

paths because his character was ostensibly

1:13:03

barefoot. And he actually got the

1:13:05

flu from the sort of

1:13:07

what we mentioned on the thing of the kind of

1:13:09

constant yin yang of being outside and boiling

1:13:12

heat and then like in an air condition setting,

1:13:14

and he got the flu right before

1:13:16

he was supposed to film the damn dirty

1:13:19

ape line. And that's why his voice sounds

1:13:21

absolutely like shot. And it's not

1:13:23

just that he's like putting his full chest

1:13:25

of like disgust and bile into

1:13:27

it. It's that his voice was like physically

1:13:29

run ragged. He

1:13:32

also what's also really funny to

1:13:34

me, what this film historian points out in the documentary

1:13:37

is that this was like the first serious

1:13:39

film that had apes in it

1:13:42

since like King Kong and Mighty

1:13:44

Joe Young because like, once

1:13:47

they had developed the gorilla suit,

1:13:51

it quickly became just an object of comedy,

1:13:53

like Benny Hill running around a gorilla suit,

1:13:55

and like all these b movies that were

1:13:57

made, like Gorilla at Large,

1:14:00

which weirdly enough starred Raymond Burr

1:14:03

Ann Bancroft. So this movie

1:14:05

was really, you know, quintessential

1:14:07

in restoring cinematic dignity

1:14:09

to the mighty ape.

1:14:12

Raymond Burr as in Perry Mason,

1:14:15

I guess he kind of seems.

1:14:16

Like seems like he track

1:14:19

down an ape.

1:14:20

I mean, I'm incapable of determining whether

1:14:22

or not a movie with a gorilla and it is supposed to be a comedy.

1:14:25

Slee Arvin was in it, so

1:14:27

was Lee Cobb who Lee

1:14:30

J. Cobb was

1:14:33

in on the Waterfront, And oh

1:14:35

he originated the role of Willie Lowman. That's

1:14:37

why I know that name the.

1:14:40

Prestige drama to gorilla movie

1:14:42

pipeline, I know.

1:14:43

Right, Yeah, And Cameron Mitchell had appeared

1:14:46

in the movie adaptation of Death of a Salesman

1:14:49

and Bancroft, of course, went on to win an Academy

1:14:51

Award for Miracle Worker. The

1:14:54

Gorilla was played by George

1:14:56

Barrows, who was

1:14:59

acting a gorilla suit specialist.

1:15:03

You can believe it or not. He often is

1:15:05

this is this This is the first draft of his wiki article.

1:15:07

He often wore a gorilla suit for his film roles.

1:15:10

Excluding his gorilla roles, Barrows

1:15:13

usually played bit parts in films and was

1:15:15

rarely credited for his work. Oh,

1:15:18

he built his own gorilla suit for Gorilla

1:15:20

at Large.

1:15:21

That's how to make sure. That's how to future

1:15:23

proof yourself. Build your own gorilla

1:15:25

suit.

1:15:28

He also played a gorilla in an episode of The

1:15:30

Incredible Hulk. Yeah, Oh my God. Gorilla

1:15:33

in the movie Hillbillys in a Haunted Place,

1:15:36

Baby gorilla in a Baby,

1:15:38

the gorilla in The Man from Uncle

1:15:41

Hill, Gorilla in the Beverly Hills I'm

1:15:43

Not Done. A gorilla in The Beverly Hills Billies,

1:15:45

a gorilla in The Adams Family something,

1:15:49

a character called Monstro, the godzilla

1:15:51

in the nineteen sixty six film The Ghost in

1:15:53

the Invisible Bikini.

1:15:55

Oh, that's a classic beach party movie. Yeah,

1:15:57

that's the last of the Aipe beach party films.

1:16:00

Yeah, it seems like that's when he really doubled down on the gorilla

1:16:02

thing.

1:16:03

I mean, wouldn't you. I sure would.

1:16:08

You're known as the gorilla guys.

1:16:10

Get me, the gorilla guy. I've

1:16:13

had enough with your cheap, second string non union

1:16:15

gorillas.

1:16:17

Get me.

1:16:17

George Barrows. A gorilla

1:16:20

shaped phone lights up in his house where

1:16:23

he's been sitting. He's been sitting motionless,

1:16:26

like like Puddy and Seinfeld, just

1:16:28

like alone and motionless in

1:16:30

his apartment. The ape phone lights up, and he turns

1:16:32

toward it, and he's like, at last a reason.

1:16:34

He's in the entire gorilla suit except for the

1:16:37

head. Yeah, pulls the loaded gun

1:16:39

out of his mouth. I'm

1:16:41

sure he was a lovely man.

1:16:43

Ah, what sound does the gorilla

1:16:45

phone make? You're

1:16:48

not going to get me to do a monkey impression on this, although

1:16:50

it is well. I'll talk about that later. There

1:16:52

were a few different versions of the Statue of Liberty scene

1:16:55

being bandied around. Apparently quite a few people

1:16:57

involved in production thought that Taylor should have been wounded

1:16:59

by the Apes in a final confrontation

1:17:01

and just die in front of the Statue of Liberty

1:17:04

after his big moment, which I

1:17:06

think would have enhanced the film like a peta.

1:17:09

Yeah, yeah, just it'd be better

1:17:11

if he was cradled by an ape in front of the

1:17:13

statue liberty zero. Yeah, yes,

1:17:15

actually that kind of I agree with you. That's

1:17:17

a better ending. Come on. It's

1:17:20

funny because Heston refers

1:17:22

to the He refers to it as the speech

1:17:24

that I wrote and

1:17:26

actually had to battle for the use of

1:17:28

God to stay in there. He

1:17:31

made an edge case that it wasn't being used

1:17:33

as the profanity damn, but

1:17:35

as his character Taylor literally imploring

1:17:38

God to damn all of humanity

1:17:40

to hell. I mentioned Heston's journal

1:17:42

earlier and it is so hilarious. He

1:17:44

describes the weather one morning thusly, the

1:17:47

fog didn't creep in on little cat feet.

1:17:50

It squatted sullenly on the sand all

1:17:52

morning. That

1:17:55

sounds like something out of a

1:17:57

good day for banana fish or something like

1:18:00

aw. Yeah.

1:18:03

In the documentary Behind the Planet of the Apes, we see

1:18:05

how the shot of the half buried statue was achieved.

1:18:07

They basically just blended a matte painting

1:18:10

with the existing rock structures

1:18:12

for the far shots, but they also wanted

1:18:14

to have an anticipatory shot that would be seen

1:18:17

from the POV of the statue, essentially as Taylor

1:18:20

and Nova approach on horseback. So

1:18:22

what they did there was just build a seventy

1:18:24

foot scaffold.

1:18:27

Again, this is over the beach and the cliffs and

1:18:29

the ocean, and then they built

1:18:31

a half scale paper mache model

1:18:33

of the statue of Liberty's head and just shot

1:18:35

the camera angled downwards above it. I

1:18:39

think it was Jacobs who said

1:18:41

in the documentary he was like, we built

1:18:43

this whole thing in my first ad. Or the

1:18:46

cematography guy was like, I'm nearing seventy

1:18:48

I'm not getting up on that thing. And then like three

1:18:50

other people refused to do it, so it was just

1:18:52

came down to Frank Schaffner and I

1:18:55

think Dick Jacob's on top of this seventy

1:18:57

foot scaffold. Our man Jerry

1:18:59

gold Smith turned into Score planned

1:19:02

into the Apes. Score is pretty standard

1:19:04

orchestral stuff, big orchestral

1:19:06

things inspired by like Stravinsky and bar

1:19:08

Talk, but it's notable for its

1:19:11

use of bizarre percussion instruments.

1:19:13

They used like metal mixing bowls and

1:19:15

lots of different ethnic percussion liberally

1:19:18

treated with echoplex. You can hear

1:19:20

this best during the chase scenes. The chase

1:19:22

scene early on where it's like peak bomb, like

1:19:25

all these different, very weird percussions

1:19:28

stuff. And that was because they had a guy named Emil

1:19:30

Richards who is like one of the most

1:19:32

legendary percussionists of

1:19:36

time. I guess he

1:19:38

played with Charles Mingus and George Shearing.

1:19:40

He toured with George Harrison, recorded

1:19:43

with Frank Sinatra, Frank Zappa, Doris Day,

1:19:45

Judy Garland, Steely Dan, and Sarah Vaughan.

1:19:48

And this is what's really interesting. He was

1:19:50

interested in pitched percussion, and so

1:19:52

he subsequently spent time with Harry Parch,

1:19:54

who is this insane outsider figure

1:19:56

in twentieth century music. Parts was

1:20:00

concerned with working outside of the Western

1:20:02

tempered scale, which

1:20:05

music theory wont. Alex's music theory wont

1:20:07

corner. The way that there are standard

1:20:10

eight tone scale works

1:20:12

is by squashing the frequency

1:20:15

ratios that naturally occur with

1:20:18

certain frequencies, right, like they're in

1:20:20

non tempered tuning, they're

1:20:22

even ratios, right, And then going back to

1:20:25

Pythagoras, he invented this tuning system

1:20:27

where the intervals between the frequencies

1:20:29

are made uneven, they're like three

1:20:31

to two instead of So what

1:20:34

that essentially does is cram

1:20:36

too many notes into the seven tones.

1:20:38

Of the major scale, the route through seven and then the octave,

1:20:41

and so a bunch of different guys from

1:20:43

Harry parts on were like, no, that's not the way they should

1:20:45

sound. And that's what just intonation is

1:20:48

is a tuning system in which

1:20:50

you get an instrument and adjust

1:20:52

its mechanisms to be able

1:20:54

to play outside of this tempered

1:20:56

scale. And on the guitar you have to move the frets

1:20:59

around. On a piano, you have to retune

1:21:01

it. You can technically do it on a fretless instrument,

1:21:03

like you could technically play with just intonation

1:21:06

on a fretless instrument, but you Harry

1:21:08

Partsch and early

1:21:11

experiments with this just had to build their own instruments.

1:21:13

Parch had this one thing build

1:21:15

out of like trash and tuned bits of

1:21:17

metal that could play a scale of forty three

1:21:19

tones. And he was also

1:21:21

homeless for most of his life. He would literally hobo

1:21:24

around America with his collection of instructions

1:21:26

for how to build his instruments and how

1:21:28

to maintain these systems, and Emil Richards

1:21:31

just hung out with this guy. Richard's

1:21:34

other credits include the bongos

1:21:37

on the theme song for Mission Impossible. He

1:21:39

finger snapped on the Adams Family theme, and

1:21:41

that is him playing xylophone in the theme

1:21:43

to The Simpsons. I just love

1:21:45

that. I love how much work and varied experience

1:21:48

that these session guys could get in

1:21:50

their careers. Some

1:21:53

of the ape sounds that you hear in the score

1:21:55

are played by a Brazilian instrument called

1:21:57

a kuka, which is a

1:21:59

pitch drum that has like a

1:22:01

rod basically inserted

1:22:03

through the bottom and up into the backside

1:22:06

of the drumhead. And by pushing on

1:22:08

this rod and rubbing the drumhead,

1:22:11

you can create these weird pitch variances

1:22:13

in the tone of the drum. And the

1:22:16

way it's used in Brazilian music is to

1:22:19

as percussively, and you can hear it American

1:22:21

is just can best hear it in Me and Julio down

1:22:23

by the schoolyard. So all of the little

1:22:30

in the background of me and Julio are this instrument,

1:22:32

the kuika, and they used it in Planet

1:22:34

of the Apes to make like ape pooting sound

1:22:37

effects that they mix into the chase scene.

1:22:39

Anyway, Alex's sound

1:22:42

theory corner over.

1:22:43

Your interpretation of a Quico

1:22:46

is so much better than Me and Julio

1:22:48

down by the school yard.

1:22:49

I probably just gonna leave it with that. There's

1:22:55

a really funny there's a great live

1:22:58

Miles set at Isle

1:23:00

of Wight. It was filmed really beautifully

1:23:02

and it's with like a combination of the Bitches

1:23:04

Brew and some of the other

1:23:07

bands that Miles had around the time. It's chick

1:23:09

Corea, Jack Johnett, Keith Jarrett,

1:23:12

Dave Holland is on bass. Gary

1:23:15

Bart is playing soprano

1:23:17

sax an airto Morieira,

1:23:20

who is a percussionist with

1:23:23

Return to Forever actually his wife saying

1:23:25

on the return of the Forever some of the Return to Forever

1:23:27

stuff. Is playing a kuika at one point

1:23:29

and it looks it's like you kind of have

1:23:32

to like fist it because

1:23:34

like the drum is, it's hollow on its

1:23:36

bottom, and that's where this rod gets inserted,

1:23:38

so you have like a wet rag

1:23:41

to or something to like scrape along

1:23:43

the drumhead as you're like rhythmically

1:23:45

sort of penetrating

1:23:48

this thing. It's deeply bizarre

1:23:50

and he is heavily on acid in that performance.

1:23:52

It's really a funny thing to watch.

1:23:55

There's different close up of him where he's clearly

1:23:57

like watching things

1:23:59

that are not actually there. Great

1:24:02

performance, everyone look up Miles Live

1:24:04

at the Isle of Wight.

1:24:06

As the actors prepared for the tedious task

1:24:08

of looping, which is re recording dialogue

1:24:10

filmed live that was deemed unsuitable in

1:24:12

the final print, they were all surprised

1:24:14

to learn that the ape makeup actually hadn't

1:24:16

stifled that much of their dialogue after all,

1:24:19

though the few lines they did have to redom meant

1:24:21

they had to partially reape

1:24:23

up again in order to make sure their voice

1:24:26

would sound consistent. Actually,

1:24:28

Charlton Hessen and the astronauts were the ones who

1:24:30

had to do the most post production dubbing, because,

1:24:33

as Hesson himself contends, Apes

1:24:35

was the first movie to use radio mics,

1:24:38

and the quality of the new technology wasn't

1:24:40

good enough. One other dubbing

1:24:42

story, the actor who played Julius Buck

1:24:45

Cartillian actually wound up having

1:24:47

the dub his entire role over again,

1:24:49

which sucks.

1:24:50

He the ape who's smoking a cigar? Oh

1:24:52

oh yeah, yeah.

1:24:53

He had the dubb his entire role over again because

1:24:56

the studio had over dubbed him with five

1:24:58

or six other actors, decided none

1:25:00

of them worked and went back to Buck.

1:25:02

Why did they do that. I guess they found him but

1:25:04

intelligible or like something.

1:25:07

I mean, they wanted to redub his whole performance, which

1:25:09

happens, like Mee. Gibson's whole performance

1:25:11

in the first Mad Max is overdubbed

1:25:13

by an American guy. I didn't know that. It's just

1:25:15

funny to me that they did this like four or five

1:25:18

times, and they were like, yeah, we can't find anything

1:25:20

better. Get Buck to go it and redo his

1:25:22

entire part that we surely had to race

1:25:24

by this time. When the film

1:25:27

was released in the spring of nineteen sixty eight,

1:25:29

it immediately became a hit. Pauline

1:25:31

Kale called it quote one of the most entertaining

1:25:34

science fiction fantasies to ever come out

1:25:36

of Hollywood in her New Yorker review.

1:25:38

And Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars,

1:25:40

calling it very understated

1:25:43

review much better than I expected

1:25:45

it to be. It is

1:25:47

quickly paced, completely entertaining, and

1:25:49

the philosophical pretensions don't get in the

1:25:51

way.

1:25:52

That was what an early review sixty eight. If you

1:25:54

get along he's been when he was at that, he

1:25:56

was at the Sun Times, then wow.

1:25:58

Audiences agreed with Rout. The

1:26:01

film was a box office hit, earning a lifetime

1:26:03

domestic gross of thirty three point three

1:26:05

million dollars, and was nominated for

1:26:07

two Oscars Best Costume

1:26:10

and Best Score, aside it from

1:26:12

John Chambers Special one for Makeup.

1:26:14

It lost to both competitive Oscars. So that's

1:26:17

that's sad. But due to

1:26:19

its release in the most turbulent year of a very

1:26:21

turbulent era, it gained the level

1:26:23

of allegory that baffled its creators,

1:26:26

who were clued in by none other than Sammy

1:26:28

Davis Junior. Sammy Davis Juniors

1:26:31

like the nineteen sixty eight equivalent of

1:26:33

what's jaw thin? Well,

1:26:38

I mean, yes, I understand the bit that you're referencing,

1:26:41

but they didn't go to him. They

1:26:44

read the No I know, I know the

1:26:46

story producers,

1:26:48

you short, cell, sweet Sammy Davis

1:26:50

ja jaw Rule.

1:26:53

Have you ever seen Sammy Davis drum or sing

1:26:56

or dance or do anything? Yeah,

1:26:59

jaw Rule looks like a US compared to him,

1:27:01

I mean a Pots compared to him.

1:27:04

Was the Putts probably period, But yeah, it

1:27:06

wasn't detigrading Sammy. It was just not the person

1:27:09

I would have thought for pop cultural criticism.

1:27:12

You just watch how you how Sammy

1:27:14

Davis Junior's name comes out of your bitch ass mouth.

1:27:18

Produce keeps sucking it? You want to keep sucking

1:27:20

eggs through that eye hole when

1:27:24

when Frank's and I just say or else it's it's curtains

1:27:26

for you guys.

1:27:27

It's a ring a ding ding for you bozos.

1:27:31

You'd about to knock it with that Sammy Punk.

1:27:35

Only I get to say bad things about Sammy

1:27:38

Friend of the Pods, Sammy Davis Jr.

1:27:41

We bestow upon you a posthumous honor

1:27:43

of Friend of the Pod.

1:27:44

He wins the greatest posthumous honor

1:27:47

anyone ever. Could we

1:27:50

see you, Sammy, and we wish better for you? Okay,

1:27:54

anyway, getting how Sammy Davis Junior

1:27:56

clued in the producers to the deeper meaning

1:27:58

of Planet of the Apes. Produce, there's

1:28:00

Arthur P.

1:28:01

Jacobs and mort Abrams were at a restaurant

1:28:03

in London where Sammy was already eating.

1:28:06

He knew Arthur Jacobs, and he came over to the parent

1:28:08

too enthusiastically seeing the film's praises,

1:28:11

ending with and it's the best statement

1:28:13

film of the relationship between blacks and whites

1:28:15

that I've ever seen on film. Jacob's

1:28:18

immediate reaction, he recalled, was I

1:28:21

didn't know what the hell he was talking about. He

1:28:23

assumed that we were conscious of this as an allegorical

1:28:25

treatment of the relationship between blacks and whites.

1:28:28

It never occurred to any of us,

1:28:32

really, I mean, I don't think

1:28:34

they had the astronaut. I'm

1:28:36

not sure if they had a single black person on the set.

1:28:38

Wow. Yeah, good work, guys.

1:28:43

That's one of the stronger arguments for diversity

1:28:45

in the workplace I've ever heard. Yeah,

1:28:50

yeah, there's a really I took out this

1:28:52

really awful thing from Chambers

1:28:55

where he was like the makeup guy. Yeah.

1:28:58

At some point was mentioned that all

1:29:01

of his makeup tests were done on Asian people.

1:29:04

Uh, and he was like, I

1:29:06

mean I just did it that way because they have such

1:29:09

small noses and big

1:29:11

eyes and and apparently

1:29:13

he said that the head of the NAACP

1:29:15

came to who was an actor like, came to him at one point

1:29:18

and was like, you know, why don't

1:29:20

you, like, why aren't you hiring more black people

1:29:22

for this film? Or or had heard that there's this

1:29:24

big budget thing that black people were not being

1:29:26

hired for. And Chambers was like, I just need

1:29:28

guys with small noses, and

1:29:31

then he phrases it's something. There's a

1:29:33

quote from him in the book where he's like, and

1:29:36

I made a promise to the guy. I just wanted to say, if there's

1:29:38

any black out there who has

1:29:40

a problem with this, you know, he can come right to

1:29:42

me. And I don't want to offend blacks at

1:29:44

all. It's just kept digging himself

1:29:46

deeper.

1:29:47

And I don't get that they used to I'll do that thing

1:29:49

they used to measure phenology, and I'll measure

1:29:51

it.

1:29:52

He's like the skull, I just used skull calipers.

1:29:58

I took that all out. But this is

1:30:01

really funny when you think of the racial implications

1:30:03

of this movie that the makeup artist was just so

1:30:06

tenered about that. Thanks

1:30:11

to its end the succession of sequels, the film lodged

1:30:13

in the pop consciousness for long enough to become a permanent

1:30:16

cultural touchstone, and in two thousand,

1:30:18

of course, two thousand and one, the

1:30:20

same year of Tim Burton's Misbegotten reboot,

1:30:23

it was selected. The original was selected

1:30:26

for preservation in the Mother Trucking

1:30:28

United States National Film Registry

1:30:30

by the Library of Congress for being quote

1:30:33

culturally, historically, or esthetically

1:30:35

significant. I

1:30:39

just get so hyped on the United States

1:30:42

National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Have

1:30:44

you ever gone the Library of Congress. I feel like we should make

1:30:46

a field trip. No, I haven't. I'm an avid

1:30:48

user of its rights free photo

1:30:50

collections and design things.

1:30:53

They have an incredible archive online

1:30:55

that's just like free to and some of the photos

1:30:57

are so fascinating. Anyway,

1:31:00

our album for our band, one of our album covers

1:31:02

was from there, right, if

1:31:04

not several, yeah,

1:31:07

yeah, at least two of them. Yeah.

1:31:10

Anyway, Obviously Hollywood and couldn't

1:31:12

leave this thing simply

1:31:14

there having made all this money, and

1:31:16

talk of a sequel quickly picked up. Eventually.

1:31:19

They also made a TV show, Unanimated series,

1:31:21

plus the four theatrical sequels, Total

1:31:24

comic books Tim Burton's Remake, and

1:31:26

the reboot series that are currently running, which

1:31:28

will be four strong by this summer. A

1:31:32

lot of apes out there. The TV series,

1:31:34

though, at least gave us Fox's merchandising an

1:31:36

ad campaign, which is twentieth century

1:31:38

Fox wants you to go Ape with an

1:31:40

ape doing the classic Uncle Sam point.

1:31:43

It's one of the best ad campaigns I've ever seen. It

1:31:45

was a coincide with the TV show, and they also had

1:31:48

like sixty different companies

1:31:51

licensed to crank out three hundred different

1:31:53

kinds of Planet of the Apes merch which

1:31:56

the film historian who's quoted in the documentary

1:31:59

says like pre dates the Star Wars merchandising

1:32:01

blitz and maybe even paved the

1:32:03

way for it.

1:32:05

Only fourteen episodes, though, yeah,

1:32:08

I did not do well.

1:32:10

So that's all insane.

1:32:12

But of course why would we cover any of those because

1:32:14

none of them are as good as the original. But

1:32:16

the lead up for the first sequel, the Planet of

1:32:18

the Apes does have one interesting bit, which

1:32:21

is that they went back to Rod Serling for it and

1:32:23

also the French author of the original

1:32:25

book.

1:32:26

Pierre Buell.

1:32:27

Producer Arthur Jacobs told Cinema

1:32:29

Fantastique, we didn't plan any

1:32:32

sequels in the first one, but it became so

1:32:34

successful that Fox said you must do.

1:32:36

A sequel if he can come up with one.

1:32:38

First, I went to Pierre Boull to write

1:32:40

the screenplay, and he did write a

1:32:42

treatment for a sequel titled Planet

1:32:44

of the Men, but it wasn't cinematic

1:32:48

Bull's treatment, which you recall was titled

1:32:51

Planet of the Men, featured

1:32:54

Tailor leading and uprising against the

1:32:56

Apes, fourteen years after

1:32:58

the events of the first So he would

1:33:01

have he was like, it was middle aged in the first

1:33:03

film. He would have been like sixty

1:33:05

yeah, Booll told sin

1:33:07

a fantastic They accepted the treatment

1:33:10

that I worked on, but they have made so

1:33:12

many changes that very few of my ideas

1:33:14

were left. It was completely different

1:33:16

from what they finally used on the screen. He

1:33:19

didn't particularly like writing a screenplay and ultimately

1:33:21

said, in his French way,

1:33:24

I played the game, but my film

1:33:26

was never made and I don't even want

1:33:28

to publish it and it will never

1:33:31

be.

1:33:33

Spoke a cigarette and glasses, staring

1:33:35

at a window, rain splattered Parisian

1:33:37

window, shirt unbuttoned

1:33:39

to his waist, an underage

1:33:42

child in bed next to him. No, sorry, I

1:33:45

am not in tarring all of the French's pediasques,

1:33:48

just many of their most important cultural

1:33:50

figures and politicians.

1:33:54

Rod Serling then heard from the producers, have you

1:33:56

ever seen the lemon incest video?

1:33:58

Of course, want to tell our listeners

1:34:00

what that's all about. It depends how much is French

1:34:03

slandering. You'd keep in the final edit of this but

1:34:05

Serge Gainsburg in bed with his

1:34:08

real life then twelve year

1:34:10

old daughter, Oh yeah, I forgot about the age thing too.

1:34:12

Yeah yeah, And they're underpants

1:34:16

and like top shirts.

1:34:18

Set to the melody of Friedrich Chapone's

1:34:21

twoed up ten number three

1:34:24

Incredible. As an adult, Charlotte

1:34:26

Gainsberg routinely defended the song. It's

1:34:30

lyrics, written by Serge Gainsburg, describes

1:34:32

an incestuous relationship between him

1:34:35

and his daughter Charlotte, the latter of whom sings

1:34:37

in French the love we will never

1:34:39

make together is the most beautiful, the

1:34:41

most violent, of the purest.

1:34:44

I should have a meme of that video and then like

1:34:46

send it to the French social

1:34:49

account. That's like from

1:34:52

black Panther, like is.

1:34:53

This your King.

1:34:55

Charlotte denied claims that the song was actually

1:34:57

about insets, saying that although the song uses

1:34:59

the word incest, her father was

1:35:01

quote just talking about the infinite

1:35:04

love of a father for his daughter and of a

1:35:06

daughter for her father.

1:35:08

Weird people, man. So

1:35:11

back to the Planet of the Ape sequel. Rod Serling

1:35:14

then heard from the producers he

1:35:16

called an interview printed in the pages of Marvel's

1:35:19

Planet of the Apes comics, which

1:35:21

I have seen. There is a fool

1:35:23

PDF scan of this issue out there.

1:35:25

Well.

1:35:26

Serling told Planet of the Apes comics

1:35:28

producer Arthur Jacobs offered it to me the

1:35:30

sequel job from London, and I remember

1:35:32

spending two or there dollars on a phone conversation

1:35:35

about what we do with it. The sequel, we

1:35:37

literally got into the hydrogen bomb

1:35:39

and the resurgence of civilization over the

1:35:41

Apes, and we very much plugged

1:35:43

the concept of the apes desperate fear of

1:35:46

the humans because the humans repeated

1:35:48

what they'd done before, which essentially was

1:35:50

direct the Earth. As it turned out,

1:35:52

I couldn't do the script when Arthur wanted it done.

1:35:54

I was on another assignment, so I didn't

1:35:56

have the remotest connection with the approach. Jacobs

1:35:59

eventually went with what did what he was doing?

1:36:01

That's a shame?

1:36:02

Uh, let's tick

1:36:04

a look um? He

1:36:07

was doing television commercials

1:36:09

in the seventies, probably

1:36:12

paid better. Yeah, now,

1:36:14

he wrote. He was back on radio by nineteen

1:36:17

seventy three, and

1:36:19

his final hit Dude, his final do

1:36:22

you know this about Rod Serling? His final radio performance

1:36:24

was a forty eight hour long rock concert

1:36:27

with who It reunited the Beatles

1:36:30

among one and it was completely

1:36:32

imaginary, uh,

1:36:36

but it was like it used live records,

1:36:38

crowd noise, interviews, other sound

1:36:40

effects as like a hoax. Whoa,

1:36:43

that's cool, and Serling

1:36:45

hosted it and did like the radio bumpers.

1:36:48

WHOA.

1:36:49

God he was only fifty when he died in nineteen

1:36:51

seventy five. Cheesus w Jaane Smoker

1:36:53

baby oh man Wow, three

1:36:55

to.

1:36:55

Four packs of cigarettes a day. Wow. So

1:36:58

unfortunately we never go out a Rod Serling Penn's

1:37:01

Planet of the Ape sequel instead.

1:37:03

It was written by associate producer

1:37:05

mart Abrams. Never good idea when the producer

1:37:07

writes he's the ideas

1:37:09

man, He's the ideas guy. And

1:37:12

a guy by the name of Paul den Dan,

1:37:15

you say, is a British writer who is no slouch.

1:37:17

He'd written Goldfinger, Okay,

1:37:19

all right, and two John mccarr

1:37:21

adaptations, and his last script was an

1:37:23

adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder

1:37:26

on the Orient Express for Sidney Lumet,

1:37:28

which was nominated for an Oscar. It

1:37:31

lost, but it lost to Godfather too, so

1:37:33

it's okay, but

1:37:36

damn he loved these apes. He would

1:37:38

go on to get a credit on every

1:37:40

Abe sequel.

1:37:43

The sort of world weariness like flat

1:37:45

affect you put into that. But damn

1:37:47

did he love these apes? That

1:37:49

was my favorite line reading I've ever done on the show Boogaloo

1:37:52

until we puke. Well,

1:37:57

Jordan, do you have anything to have

1:38:00

anything to add to the to the Apes

1:38:03

buddy? We still

1:38:05

don't know why that's such a funny word. No,

1:38:08

never, never, some linguist can. We'll

1:38:10

VEMOI your five bucks. Some linguist

1:38:12

wants to write in and tell us why it's so inherently

1:38:14

hilarious. Uh

1:38:19

oh wow, folks, We've gone as far as we can at

1:38:21

the original plan of the Apes, and we are unwilling

1:38:23

to go further down the madness inducing

1:38:25

sprawl of its legacy, which means we're

1:38:27

at something of a stale mape

1:38:31

hold for applause. We

1:38:33

can only hope that this episode spurs

1:38:36

you to go on your own exploratory mission into

1:38:38

the world of the Apes, where in the end you'll

1:38:40

at least be armed with the knowledge to tell them

1:38:43

authoritatively to finally

1:38:45

get their stinking pause off.

1:38:47

You folks. This has been

1:38:49

too much information, too much inform

1:38:52

Mapes shun the real apes

1:38:54

were the friends we made along the way. And

1:38:56

I'm Alex Heigel and

1:39:01

I help and

1:39:04

I'm Jordan run Talk. We'll

1:39:06

catch you next time. Too

1:39:12

Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

1:39:15

The show's executive producers are Noel Brown

1:39:17

and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising

1:39:19

producer is Michael Alder June. The

1:39:21

show was researched, written, and hosted

1:39:24

by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with

1:39:26

original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost

1:39:28

Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard,

1:39:30

please subscribe and leave us a review. For more

1:39:32

podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio

1:39:35

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

1:39:37

listen to your favorite shows.