Bowie reportedly declined the first offer for Qualen. — Bill Simmons
Walken was reportedly cast but left before filming, and Lithgow joined late. — Bill Simmons
Walken is preferred hypothetically as a colder villain and more plausible physical opponent; the timing of True Romance is corrected from two years earlier to the same 1993 release year. — Bill Simmons
Dana Delany reportedly declined Jesse; Turner is preferred as the eventual choice. — Bill Simmons
Maddie's drug-overdose death is thrown in by the narrator with no payoff; no great poker scene despite the Oriental; faro is never explained; odd edits make the day unclear; the unexplained killing spree after Doc kills Johnny Ringo; the unnecessary Robert Mitchum narration; the Billy Zane and Dana Delaney characters are hard to understand
Maddie dying of a drug overdose is thrown in for no reason: she could have had a happy ending, or died in the middle so the heavily invested addiction plot paid off, rather than the narrator announcing it; one reading is that it exists to forgive Wyatt for running off with Dana Delaney, making him a widower anyway, and the real problem is that her character does not need to be in the movie.
Josephine, whom Wyatt ended up with, reportedly spent the rest of their life together trying to bury that part of his past, inserting herself into the Wyatt Earp story where Maddie had been.
It is upsetting that there is no awesome poker scene despite the Oriental, beyond the early game where a man gets stabbed; a heated Wyatt Earp, Powers Booth and Kilmer poker game would have been a better choice than the twelve-minute theater scene, and 1880s poker is what one host wants to watch.
Faro (transcribed 'Farrow'), the game the Earps actually came to make money on, a weird French game casinos no longer offer, is never explained in a film that over-explains everything; Kilmer's line that he does not play games of chance is noted, though he plays plenty of poker, which may be a natural game.
Weird edits make it night twice and unclear whether it is the same day, attributed to Cosmatos just trying to get the thing out; one host's only nitpick is how the others assessed Dana Wheeler Nicholson's performance.
The biggest problem: after Doc kills Johnny Ringo, an amazing scene, there is a lot of killing nobody understands, presumably hunting down Ike, the last third turning into a lynch mob like the end of Cobra where the heroes kill everybody; it all leads to Doc succumbing to TB, Wyatt's final sit-down with him and the happily-ever-after with Josephine, but that third-act interlude is strange.
Earlier asides: the Billy Zane and Dana Delaney characters are not totally understood, and Robert Mitchum's narrator is called completely unnecessary, the cliche of how a Western gets told.
The Joey Pants Award goes to the 'hey, it's that person' actor, and this movie has a lot of them; Stephen Lang is considered, since most people still could not recognize him, especially here with the beard, hat and mud-covered face looking like a homeless man rather than his Avatar look.
Dana Wheeler Nicholson (also transcribed 'Dana Willard-Nickerson') is the answer: the girl from Fletch, 'can I borrow your towel, my car just hit a water buffalo', where everyone aged 30 to 50 has a massive crush on her as a platonic ideal; one theory for why she did not become a massive star is that Elizabeth Shumacher (as transcribed) took that same lane; her other credits recalled are Bye Bye Love with Paul Reiser, The X Files, Friday Night Lights as the mother of one of the main characters, and Nashville.
She is one host's Joey Pants winner because the film casually tells us at the end that she died of a drug overdose, a bad beat for a character who has to be on laudanum the whole time while everyone else balls out; the running joke of the same cough-syrup bottle, obviously not the same bottle, and the scene where Wyatt returns from Dana Delaney and tries to make her into Dana Delaney while she cries because she is so high.
Another host thought she was miscast and not subtle, drooling mucus and crying for her laudanum in her first shot, which draws a defense of 'Gail Stanwyck', as the hosts call her after her Fletch character, and leads into the overacting award.
Kurt Russell first, with the reminder that the question is the highest point of his career, not the favorite: one case is The Thing in 1982, after Escape from New York and with Silkwood, Swing Shift and Big Trouble in Little China coming; a no is cast because Escape from New York was only later a cult hit, raising whether apex is judged at the time or on reflection.
Reading about Tombstone makes it sound like Russell was able to finance the movie coming off Backdraft, a relatively big hit he starred in, likened to LeBron in the 2018 Finals; a controversial case is made for Tango and Cash, when after the well-liked Tequila Sunrise with Michelle Pfeiffer a hit with Stallone, an absolutely ridiculous movie only those two could pull off, left him looking like an A plus list star.
Tango and Cash was not a huge hit, costing $55 million and making $66 million, though $55 million in 1988 is like $160 million today, and it is not that good; the counter is that it opened up Backdraft and his ability to finance Tombstone; the actual answer may be that there was no apex at all, a range of rolling hills, which is what is cool about his career.
Russell was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Silkwood, which is why his Apex Mountain is around The Thing in 1982 or 1983, when Escape from New York was becoming a cult movie. — Sean Fennessey
Whether Russell was ever Oscar-nominated is disputed, Miracle floated and rejected, until the Silkwood nomination is recalled; the host who forgot it concedes, a 180 the others tease.
Russell could have had a different career as a serious dramatic actor rather than leaning into the masculine hero; he and Harrison Ford are cut from the same cloth, smart throwbacks to Paul Newman charisma, but Ford got two franchises while Russell alternates three good films and three bad; he is also just a good-looking dude, at his most handsome here, a man who should be on a poster.
Val Kilmer: a no, with Top Gun imagined as his apex, since coming out of it people saw him neck and neck with the star, though another calls that the star's movie and goes Heat, where as De Niro's wingman in the biggest mid-90s movie he is the next wave; his pre-Batman run is traced through True Romance, Tombstone, The Real McCoy, Thunderheart and The Doors.
1987 right after Top Gun is floated, when Willow was hopefully going to be his Han Solo and did not work out; one host's personal apex for him is The Doors, where he was out of control, and a Doors rewatchable is wanted, though JFK would have to come first among the Oliver Stone movies.
Jason Priestley is a thousand-percent yes: 90210 was never bigger, he is in a movie with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer and has a couple of heat-check scenes, the steepest mountain of all time, very high with a precipitous drop on either side; a caution that a later show (transcribed 'Natuna') was big for three and a half years does not change the view that this literally was his Apex Mountain and his first dabbling in movies.
Dana Delaney's apex has to be China Beach, which was probably already gone by this point, so she is not a yes; nobody else is proposed except George Cosmatos as ghost director, already covered, with the joke of a Ringer video secretly directed by someone else.
The late Bill Paxton: this is not a Mount Rushmore Paxton performance next to Aliens, Near Dark, One False Move, Weird Science, True Lies and Twister, though it may be his sweetest spot while figuring out how to be Bill Paxton; in Aliens Sigourney Weaver is the hero but Paxton and Biehn would in any other world have been the stars, and One False Move is incredible though arguably Billy Bob's movie too.
Twister was Hollywood's first concerted effort to make Paxton a major star, marketed with Helen Hunt and Philip Seymour Hoffman as people who were going to be stars rather than actual stars; the shift from needing a movie star to needing a tornado, meteor or alien invasion is traced to Speed, where Keanu was the guy and Sandra Bullock turned out to be one of the biggest stars of the next twenty years.
Paxton is one of the all-time great number two or three guys: here he sets picks and makes a couple of corner threes, telling Wyatt he is the one, spits a lot, works the scorer's-table handshakes at the start, and gets the 'hey' when Doc responds to Wyatt's description of his new wife with 'pure as the driven snow'.
The mustaches, all real and magnificent: an hour and a half in, one host wonders why nobody wears hats and mustaches now and says producer Craig should have one right now; another cannot grow one, Kurt Russell can grow incredible facial hair, and a Christmas challenge is set to grow a Tombstone mustache or goatee for the fans.
Powers Booth and Val Kilmer actually have a soul patch with a mustache rather than goatees; the challenged host is in, even though a mustache makes him look like a dirtbag cop from 1974, which is when the challenger feels most like his friend, like being friends with Gene Hackman.
The crazy loaded cast, already discussed, and Dana Delaney, whose good career felt like it could have been better; a China Beach fan likens her to Carla Gugino, first said as 'Carlo Gugino' and mocked as a Fellini actor and the Godfather toll-booth gunman, as a why-aren't-you-a-bigger-star actress, asking why Demi Moore was so much bigger.
Delaney had a bigger career than Gugino, whom everyone loves, but should have been an A list star; this was the one time a big movie made her the female lead, Exit to Eden being the joke about where it went wrong, and she remains one host's second-favorite actress in the film.
The 1880s Wild Wild West world-building: liquor, brothels, gambling, hats and mustaches; the Godfather tone Russell talked about shows in Wyatt moving in, taking over the faro game (transcribed 'Pharaoh') at the Oriental and winning the deeds to mines, a man who stands for law and order screwing people out of things because fame left the Earps with nothing to show for it.
The film is called the bridge from John Ford Westerns to Deadwood, one of the first Westerns full of people cursing each other out and then shooting somebody in the head; the blood in the Bill Paxton scene and Sam Elliott being told he will never use his arm again were new and intense for a Western.
The closing credits, four solid minutes of the cast walking in their outfits for no reason like a Vanity Fair photo shoot, are unintentionally funny but cool, compared to a Countdown segment one host once shot with Jalen.
That era of Val Kilmer, all the way through Heat, is savored like old Fab Five tapes from Michigan: it did not totally work out, but if you could bottle this there was something special, and he really should have been a bigger star.
Why the film is special: you can watch the other actors recognize what Kilmer is doing and change their performances to elevate his, making themselves more buttoned-down and austere, solid American oak, while he is free jazz, a coughing, sweating, feverish, green Byron or Shelley figure; the Kansas Earps versus Georgia Doc contrast is credited, with colleague Amanda Dobbins invoked as the poetic Georgian, and tuberculosis explaining the rest.
Kurt Russell's Wyatt is looking for a wife who gets him and stokes his soul, but the real partner is Holliday, from the first 'how the hell are you' line; the friendship is the love story at the center of the movie, an amazing portrayal of it.
Revisiting the 1993 Best Supporting Actor field (Tommy Lee Jones, DiCaprio, Ralph Fiennes, Malkovich, Pete Postlewaite), it is amazing Kilmer was not nominated, though the category was stacked; Malkovich is good in In the Line of Fire but not as memorable, and with the wished-for five-year Oscar delay Kilmer gets nominated.
The film was a modest hit that took on a new life: one host is not sure he saw it in theaters despite seeing everything then, another definitely did over Christmas break when movies were the only thing to do, and another watched it maybe 25 times in a friend's basement because it was always on TV.
The tuberculosis vaccine has aged best, in the sense that the film shows how much having tuberculosis sucked: Doc turns green, coughs blood, is insulted as a 'lunger' by everyone, and keeps smoking and drinking whiskey around the clock until the doctor orders no more whiskey, cigarettes, sex or gambling.
Joanna Pacula, whose name nobody can pronounce, is the last pick: she was around for a while as a why-not-bigger actress and then just never made it, her credits being Marked for Death (transcribed 'Mark for Death') with Steven Seagal, Tombstone and My Giant; while her credits are looked up, Kilmer's 'I have not even begun to defile myself' is performed, his accent likened to Yosemite Sam reading Oscar Wilde, ridiculous but perfect.
Asked again later, Billy Bob Thornton is one host's answer; another sticks with the mustaches.
The 135-minute runtime; the twelve-minute theater sequence; the picnic scene; Bill Paxton's slow-motion death scene; the unstructured violence of the final act; the fiercely independent portrayal of Dana Delaney's character
The 135-minute runtime: about twenty minutes would have been chopped, starting with the theater scene, which could have been 45 seconds; they do two plays that night, a reading from Henry V and Faustus.
A defense of the theater scene: it shows why Jason Priestley's character is loyal to men he probably should not befriend, the constitution of the town and who is in charge, and that Wyatt Earp is officially out of the game when the mayor introduces himself; twelve minutes is still probably unnecessary, but the Priestley point wins the objector over.
Priestley sitting beside Powers Booth is read as a stan, just a big fan; the movie opening with the cowboys executing a wedding party is liked as a way to set the tone for how bad somebody is, with the joke that it copies Three Amigos and that is why Kevin Jarrett (as transcribed) was fired.
Three stretches of intense, unstructured violence, especially the end where it is unclear what they are trying to accomplish and the heroes are just murdering people, are called the George Cosmatos effect, the film turning into Cobra or Rambo for five minutes; the opening sequence itself is fine and sets up a gnarly, bare-knuckled, masculine movie.
The theater was too long; the film is called weirdly woke about a woman's place in the old West, Dana Delaney playing a fiercely independent woman; another notes that Wyatt leaving Maddie for the actress is the real story and is also in Wyatt Earp, though doubt is cast on how independent she really was.
Their picnic scene sucked: nobody comes to Tombstone for picnics, and the late-80s, early-90s habit of establishing a romantic connection is unnecessary when we already get that they like each other.
Bill Paxton's slow-motion death scene is really bad and dated, one of several very long deaths that would be done differently in 2018.
Asked again later, the 135 minutes is still the answer: it is way too long.
