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Hey, everybody.
Happy Saturday.
Chuck here with your Saturday Selects.
And this week.
I think it inspired me because recently we did an episode on the movie Roar, the most dangerous movie ever made, supposedly.
And so let's go back to November of 2017, the 16th to be exact, to talk about movies being cursed.
In this episode that runs at 56 minutes long, can movies be cursed?
Please enjoy it right now.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
There's Jerry.
My tongue is super big today for some reason.
Gross.
And this is stuff you should know.
I know.
It's like I sound like Peter Overby for God's sake.
Who's that?
You know that guy's voice anywhere.
He's like an NPR reporter.
Oh, yeah.
And he has me even beat for the large tongue candy sucking sound.
Do you remember when we first came out and people would write in and be like tell Josh to stop sucking on candy while he's podcasting?
And I'd just be like, that's my normal voice, man.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Yeah, appreciate that.
But now that we're high rollers, they provided me with a private nurse to suction out the saliva every 30 seconds.
Oh, my God.
And then Jerry has to edit it out.
So gross gross, but true right, like a cursed movie story.
True yeah, do you know what i hated the dentist, besides everything man, that was a pretty good segway.
I know that.
I just totally yeah, mowed over, that's all right.
I hated the dentist.
Now you know you don't have to spit anymore because they do have those suction things, but it's still like i still do the fake swallow.
You know how it feels, like it builds up in the back of your mouth.
So like they'll be in your mouth and you'll just go like that.
I hate that.
That's funny.
Do you do that?
Does everyone do that?
The gag reflex thing?
Well, it's not even a gag reflex.
It's just the hard swallow, the dry swallow.
Yeah, the sort of swallow reflex, if that's such a thing.
You feel like you're going to break your vocal cords or your throat muscles?
God, I hate that.
I know what you mean.
I don't hate it, though.
I think it's kind of not enjoyable, but I don't know.
And I hate it when they talk to you and expect you to talk back.
They can talk, but yeah, there can't be any questions involved.
Maybe rhetorical questions that you can shrug at.
My last hygienist, I really didn't care for.
Like it was a personality thing.
And they have TVs at my dentist that they'll put down in front of you, which is fine.
I don't really care.
But she would stop and like look and make comments about the news and stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Why don't they just let him do his job?
I didn't like it.
It was really annoying.
And then I came back in not too long ago and there was a new hygienist for me and she was awesome.
And on the way out, I was like, by the way, I was like, I won't say her name.
I was like, but this new hygienist, I really like a lot.
She was like, what about before?
I was like, I wasn't crazy about her.
And she went, no one was.
And you guys need to tell us that.
And we let her go because we got all these complaints started flooding in.
I was like, well, I feel bad.
Like, I don't want to get anyone fired.
Sure.
But I didn't.
She wasn't good.
Huh.
So anyway.
Was this in Brookhaven?
Yeah.
Is it Brookhaven?
How do you know where my dentist is?
Well, I just had an experience in Brookhaven and I'm like this town is just small enough for that to be possible.
Well, I'll go ahead and shout out my dentist, the great Dr. Daryl Kimchi.
She's wonderful.
Kimchi?
Uh-huh.
That's one of my favorite foods.
Well, but is that your dentist?
No.
Okay.
But it's possible that we're talking about like a hygienist that gets fired pretty frequently.
Maybe.
You know?
She's making the rounds in Buckhead, Brookhaven.
Right.
Yeah, Dr. Daryl Kimche of Atlanta Cosmetic Sports Dentistry.
Wow, that is quite a shout out.
I think Dr. Kimche owes us some free kimchi.
Maybe.
Maybe.
As a thank you.
She's sort of a celebrity then.
She does a lot of the sports people in Atlanta.
And the Real Housewives?
Maybe, but I went in and they have memorabilia up everywhere.
And when the TV show was out, I gave them a poster and they never put it up.
Oh, no way.
That's hilarious.
Yeah.
Wow, that's great.
That reminds me of the friends when Joey tried to get his head shot up at the dry cleaner or something.
Man, that is so stuff you should know.
All right, well, this has got a nice loose start.
Indeed, Chuck, but this is a fun one.
But let's begin, shall we?
Well, yeah, this was written by The Grabster.
The article is 10 movies that were supposedly cursed.
And Ed goes to great lengths to point out how there is no way that anything can ever be really cursed.
Right.
I think probably a couple lines where he's like, just so stupid.
I know.
Where it was edited out, you know?
I get the feeling he got assigned this and was like, oh, God, are you kidding me?
I want to write about real stuff like satanic panic.
But he does love writing about movies.
He's definitely a movie guy.
Yeah.
Especially horror movies.
And it seems like, more than any other movie, horror movies they're the variety that that tend to be associated with curses more than other types.
Right.
Or at least the marketing department cooks that up.
Yeah, that's definitely par for the course these days.
But there was a more innocent, gentler time when rumors of Satan influencing the production of a movie was a legitimate rumor.
You know, it wasn't a PR stunt.
Right.
So, like you said, Ed goes to some trouble to point out what's actually behind the idea of a movie curse, that some things are bound to happen on just about any movie set.
Especially when you stop and consider, especially in the early days, the kind of stuff they were doing with the technology they were working with at the time.
Of course bad things happened on movie sets.
Of course people died.
Like, for example, I looked this up, right?
There was a 1928 movie called Noah's Ark and they used 600000 gallons of water to create the flood scene.
One take, they did one take and three extras drowned.
One guy who did survive had to have a leg amputated.
It was broken so badly, because this is this is the flood scene and you needed to to basically get it as real as possible.
Isn't that crazy?
That is.
Yeah, especially back in those days.
But they didn't care back then.
They were just like, oh, they're just extras.
Who cares?
Although John Wayne, it turns out, was an extra on that movie, but he survived, obviously.
And he factors into another curse.
He does.
He also worked in the special effects department on that movie.
Or prop, prop, sorry, prop.
Like special effects was what?
He did early CGI.
Right.
He would clap the coconuts together.
For all the horse scenes.
Right.
But hold on.
I have another one, okay?
Uh-huh.
So this is another movie.
Years later, they die with their boots on.
I think it's about the Charge of the Light Brigade maybe?
Okay.
It was a 1941 movie starring Errol Flynn.
And during this cavalry charge that they recreated – three extras in that movie died just in that one shot, that one scene.
One of the guys was thrown from his horse and he threw his sword like away from him, unfortunately threw it ahead of himself and the sword stuck into the ground handle first and he was impaled on the sword.
Wow, This happened on a movie set and it's not just like back in the day either.
1983, the Twilight Zone movie, very famously, there was a disaster, right?
Yeah, that was very sad.
That's when Vic Morrow and two children were chopped up by a helicopter blade.
Right.
Very sad, infamously.
It was terrible, terrible tragedy.
Yes, xinyi chan and micah din lee yeah, were the two child actors who were killed.
So things do happen on movie sets and again, when you stop and think about what they're doing, it's often very dangerous.
So what ed is saying is, when you start to put these things together and then you get rid of all of the things that don't support your point, you got a curse on your hands.
Should we start with poltergeist?
Yes.
Poltergeist.
That's one where people always list this as a cursed movie because uh quite a few of the actors uh died sort of unexpectedly after the movie.
Um.
And then Ed goes on to say very astutely but it's also a textbook example of why the idea of curses is silly.
Have I mentioned that curses are silly?
So right over and over.
So three of the – those first three Poltergeists, 82, 86, and 88, I didn't see the remake, did you?
I didn't even know there was one.
Yeah, of course there was.
They remade it a few years ago.
No, I didn't see it.
No, I don't think it was very popular.
But Dominique Dunne – Dominique.
Dominique, excuse me, her father –
Dominic done, correct?
Yeah, and her brother was Griffin done.
There is Griffin done.
Yeah, she was Well, she was murdered She was murdered by her boyfriend John Sweeney.
Yeah, and that was a very disturbing case.
Have you ever poked around that case?
Yes like the signs were all there and It was one of those things that could have been prevented.
And he got away with it for the most part.
He did like three years in prison.
And Dominic Dunn, her father, he was there every day for the trial of the man.
Oh, yeah. just crushed by the injustice of the sentence that the guy received.
Well, it changed his life.
He became a crusader.
It did, yeah.
You can read some of the best coverage of high-profile murder cases um, in the pages of vanity fair that he he covered for years and years and years as a direct result of him basically covering his own daughter's uh murder's trial.
Yeah oj, very famously, he covered that.
Yes, he did um, and he uh, apparently the duns uh spent a great deal of time basically keeping tabs on john sweeney for years and he was a chef for a while.
He was uh, and i even started tracking him down this.
I just went down the rabbit hole like six or eight months ago on this for some reason.
Really yeah, this is one of those you know things where you see something on facebook and then all of a sudden you go oh yeah, and then you go down the rabbit hole And I was trying to find this guy.
I was like, where is this guy?
Where is he?
And the last I saw, he was some chef somewhere.
I think he had changed his name even, of course.
Yeah, to John Mora, M-A-U-R-A.
Yeah, well, keep changing that name, buddy, because it's going to follow you around.
Yeah.
And I mean, like there was no question whether he did it or not.
He admitted to it, like he told this guy who had been in the house at the time in Dominique Dunn's house rehearsing lines to call the police that he just killed his girlfriend.
Yeah.
But yeah, he he was hounded for many years.
And I guess toward the end of his life, Dominique Dunn said, you know what?
I can waste my life like keeping tabs on this guy anymore.
And, um, just, just dropped it.
But yeah, there's a lot of people out there who don't like that dude.
Yeah, I would imagine so.
So, um, So she died by murder.
Then the young girl.
And this is like a couple months after Poltergeist came out, right?
So it was very close to the production.
Yeah, yeah.
She was not in the sequels, obviously.
Heather O'Rourke was the little girl in Poltergeist.
And she passed away.
After in 1988, after Poltergeist II was wrapped and she initially was diagnosed with the flu.
We talk about this in our flu episode a little bit.
Yeah.
But what she really had was an intestinal blockage.
And at the tender age of 12, she had a heart attack and sepsis and passed away.
Super tragic.
Yeah.
And so those two dying so close to the production of the actual movie, she died.
It was Poltergeist 3, I believe, that Heather O'Rourke died after filming.
They were basically done.
Did Ed get it wrong?
Ed got it wrong.
Oh, man.
And then Dominique again died just a couple months after the first Poultry Guys came out.
So that's like one big hallmark of a movie being cursed.
Story is the deaths that happen typically need to happen either during production or right around production.
Right.
So those two are the big ones.
But then people say, oh, oh, still not convinced?
Well, listen to this.
In Poltergeist 2 there's an actor named Will Sampson who played Taylor, the medicine man who helps the family.
Yeah.
And he is better known for playing the chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Yes.
One of the great characters of all time.
He died, I guess, after filming, a few years after filming, the year after filming in 1987.
He died following a heart and lung transplant.
Right.
Yeah, and he had a history of health issues.
He was a giant man.
Yeah.
And so that was, you know, again, tied to the curse.
But what can you say about someone who just dies sort of of natural causes?
After a heart and lung transplant, I think there's pretty good odds.
Yeah.
And then there's Julian Beck, who played the scary scary, scary preacher Kane, also in Poltergeist 2.
Man, he was creepy.
He died, I guess, before Poltergeist 2 actually came out.
So that would have been close to the production as well.
So it checks those boxes, but he died of stomach cancer and he apparently had a longstanding issue with battling it as well.
So you can make the case.
It doesn't really count.
But are you really trying to make a case about curses?
Yeah.
Let's just talk about him instead.
How about that?
Agreed.
Okay.
What's next?
The Wizard of Oz is next.
That's right.
1939.
Great, great movie.
But a great movie that was marred by for such a happy movie.
It had some some rough stuff going on because it was in the early days of making movies.
And like you said earlier.
Back then, they didn't know or care as much about safety.
Like, for instance, the Tin Man, Buddy Epson.
They said, all right, we need to make you look silver, and so we'll just coat you with aluminum powder.
And that stuff was really dangerous.
He went to the hospital.
It irritated his lungs, and he could not even continue in the role.
No, luckily he survived to go on to play Jed, the dad in Beverly Hillbillies.
That's right.
Thank God.
But he was out of The Wizard of Oz.
He was.
So Buddy Epson was replaced by Jack Haley and they said well, we probably shouldn't use that same aluminum powder.
So they used an aluminum paste which didn't get into his lungs but did give him a really bad eye infection.
Right, so just the Tin Man role itself had a bunch of problems, but that was just one of many.
Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West.
She was burned pretty badly with some of the pyrotechnics from the movie.
And I think she was hospitalized, but she came back and completed work on the movie.
Yeah, but she said she wasn't going to do any more firework.
Apparently the trap door that she was standing on, the timing of it wasn't, wasn't right.
Yeah, so it didn't open up and drop her right before the fireworks went off, but did it simultaneous to the fireworks going off, which is not what you want.
No, but it was 1939.
Right, so they were like, whatever, what are you going to do?
There's the very famous urban legend, which is not true, but it bears mentioning that one of the munchkins hanged himself in the background of a scene.
And if you just Google image that junk hanged munchkin Wizard of Oz, it will have a screen cap with a little circle around it.
I mean, he doesn't even look, it just looks like something that is not a tree.
In other words, it's not attached to the ground.
Right.
It doesn't necessarily look like a hanging munchkin, but apparently there was a bird.
Yeah, it doesn't look like a bird to me either, though.
Supposedly, it's a silhouette of a bird.
And if you watch a close-up of the video of it, it does sway back and forth above the ground.
So, I mean, you can see where people came up with that for sure.
Yeah, but that is not the case.
There was no munchkin that just couldn't take it anymore.
There's actually – there's a really great horror fiction story by, I think, a guy named Steve Nagy, called The Hanged Man of Oz.
Oh, yeah?
Looking up and reading.
It's pretty good, but it's about this dude kind of becoming obsessed with that rumor and seeing it on video and not being able to unsee it and all the stuff that happens after.
Wow.
I think it's Steve Nagy.
It's definitely called The Hanged Man of Oz.
All right.
I'll check that out.
Other tragedies in Wizard of Oz.
Auntie Em, Miss Clara Blandick, she killed herself.
At age 81.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And she left in her suicide note that she was going on her greatest adventure.
Well, that's kind of nice.
I guess so.
It's about as pleasant as it can get with the suicide note, I think.
The wizard himself, Frank Morgan.
He was injured in a car wreck just a few months after they released the movie.
And then, of course—
Judy Garland had one of the more tragic lives in Hollywood history.
Yes.
They're making a movie about her soon, I think.
I can't believe they haven't already.
I think they've done it on TV, but not a big movie thing, I don't think.
She was basically owned by MGM.
Yeah.
Like almost – almost the definition of being owned, right?
She was discovered at age 13, I think in Kansas, actually, at a state fair.
And they said, well, we're just going to buy you from your parents, basically.
And they took her and they said, you can't get fat.
So smoke 80 cigarettes a day.
Yeah.
They basically prescribed her that.
They got her on amphetamines to keep her going.
They let her have one square meal a day.
Terrible.
Yeah, really.
So she – yeah, Ed makes a really good point.
If there was any – real tragedy that came out of The Wizard of Oz.
It was Judy Garland's life.
Yeah, absolutely.
So she eventually would die by suicide herself on an overdose of barbiturates.
And I think it's she had the equivalent of 10 uh, seeking all capsules in her body.
Lord.
Yeah.
Wow.
Man.
That's sad.
I want to see that movie.
Do you know who's going to play her?
Oh man.
I just saw this the other day.
I can't remember who, but I remember thinking, yeah, good casting.
Oh, okay.
Like it wasn't Owen Wilson.
That'd be pretty bad.
Uh troubles, come on, get happy.
So right uh, she was uh 47 years young, by the way, which is far, far too young, sure to have lost judy garland.
Yeah uh, you want to take a break?
Yeah, on that downer.
Yes, all right, we'll come back and talk about the man of steel right after this.
The podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes, for a full year.
Within probably 10 days, I put on 10 pounds.
I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.
Listen to Superhuman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fans, so we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand new week of fun, thought-provoking Star Wars-related episodes.
Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far, far away, such as the biology of tauntauns and wampas on the ice planet Hoth, or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith rule of two.
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My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it.
Wait a minute, dakota.
How bad did it get?
Well, it got bad enough that her son-in-law had to eventually arrest her himself.
Oh, she moved in for two weeks, lasted for five.
She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to the furniture and then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door and burst in screaming.
She did not burst in while they were, She did.
They kicked her out and paid for her hotel, and they thought, it's finally over.
Days later, she called her son-in-law at work, claiming that his partner had been in some kind of freak accident and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
He called every hospital in the city, and his partner was making coffee the entire time.
She faked a medical emergency just to test whether or not he loved her son?
Yeah, and she sat in the hospital parking lot waiting for him to see if he would show up.
When that didn't work, she walked into the son-in-law's police station and filed a kidnapping report against him.
She filed a kidnapping report against him in his own police station.
And spoilers, karma's going to show up in the best way possible.
So if you want to hear how this story ends, search OK Storytime on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to podcasts.
All right, Chuck.
So there's actually a role, Superman, that's considered a cursed role.
Did you know that?
I did know that because I remember as a kid even though I'm not, you know, 65 years old I like to watch reruns of stuff like Gilligan's Island and Green Acres and petticoat junction.
Oh really, i've never seen petticoat junction.
Is it good?
Yeah, i mean, you know, it's one of those old shows.
They're all great.
What about f troop?
F troops, probably one of my favorites.
Yeah, i watched f troop.
I watch all that stuff.
Uh, superman uh, the name of the show that i watched was called adventures of superman and that was straight up from the 1950s and still in reruns in the mid 70s at least, Because that's where I watched it and that was the one starring George Reeves as the not even very muscular and slightly tubby Superman.
Yeah, like that kind of like 50s fit.
Yeah, kind of barrel-chested.
Chunky and just weird, like weirdly shaped.
Yeah.
Like what were they – what kind of exercise were they doing back then?
Well, I don't think they did exercise back then.
Wasn't that the deal?
Oh, is that what it was?
Yeah, they were just like, you know, you're going to play Superman, so eat a bunch of steak.
Right.
Like buff up a little bit.
Right.
Do some push-ups maybe.
So George Reeves –
He's George Reeves.
Christopher Reeve is not plural.
It's a singular version, right?
George Reeves became synonymous with Superman.
Everybody thought of him as Superman.
Too much.
He wouldn't be cast in anything else, right?
And he had some...
He had to put up with quite a bit being known as Superman or recognized as Superman.
Apparently, kids would come up and punch him in the stomach to see if he was made of steel.
I looked into it.
I learned this years ago from the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
And I looked into it, and I think it actually may be correct.
But at one public appearance, he... had to talk a kid out of shooting him.
Like this kid had brought his father's loaded 38 caliber pistol to shoot Superman to see if the bullets really bounced off of him.
And George Reeves got the kid to hand the gun over to like a cop or something because he told them that sure, of course the bullet would bounce off of him but it could ricochet and hurt somebody else who was standing nearby.
Yeah, that was in the Ben Affleck movie, Hollywoodland.
Is that right?
It's about George Reeves, and that scene was in the movie.
Okay.
I have not seen that movie or heard of it.
It's okay.
It's not great.
You lost me at Ben Affleck.
It's not bad.
But yeah, he talks the kid out of it in the movie and said exactly what he said like, of course blah blah, blah.
And then he takes it.
Then you can see him.
He's just like oh God Jesus, like i almost got shot right.
Yes yeah, that was.
I can't imagine the the relief that would wash over you after that.
Yeah, so george reeves reeves, Reeves.
Yeah, he's the plural.
It's tough to keep up with.
It is.
He had a very sort of sad life, which is in that Hollywoodland movie.
He like you said, he couldn't get other work and he was only known as Superman.
So I think he turned to the booze and was not a happy guy.
And eventually in June.
Of 1959, there was a he was having a party at his own house.
His fiance was throwing a party and he said, I'm going to go upstairs and shoot myself in the head.
Yeah.
And Ed makes it sound like he was upset about the noise or something like that from the party.
I mean, that may have been the straw, but he was upset about life.
I gotcha.
And I got the sense like legitimately depressed, you know, clinically depressed.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean like it's.
It's as we get to know more and more about, like depression, it's so much easier to look back at, like you know.
People who were depressed before, but you just never really kind of pegged them like that because people didn't know about that kind of thing.
Then it's just sad to see, like how many people suffered like that because no one knew what was going on, or they just thought it was the blues, or you should just snap out of it.
Right.
Yeah.
We've never done one on depression.
I think we should.
Have we not?
I don't believe we have, man.
Well, then we should definitely do that.
We have done one on cats.
And then Christopher Reeve played Superman, and that is why some say it is a cursed role because –
He was very sadly injured in a horse riding accident in the mid-90s which left him paralyzed from the neck down.
And he became very much an inspiration to people because he became an advocate for research into spinal cord injuries and he went on to direct and even act some as well after that.
And ed also points out, um that after christopher reeve died, his wife dana, who saw him through this whole thing yeah um, she died of cancer like two years afterward.
Yeah,
I've just, man, I felt so awful for that family and those kids.
Yeah.
I mean just to get like that random, to be thrown from a horse and then just be paralyzed from the neck down.
Yeah.
So you put those two together and everyone says, well, Superman is a cursed role.
Correct.
What would, what would the grabster say?
No such thing as curses.
So stupid.
The Conqueror is a movie that, like we said, John Wayne factored in.
And this one was definitely, I don't know about cursed, but, well, here's the story.
It is very unlikely that John Wayne would play Mongolian Genghis Khan.
He did, though.
But it was Hollywood back in the day where they just would cast white people to play whoever.
Right.
And he played Genghis Khan.
And they shot the Conqueror in Utah, less than 150 miles from the Nevada test site – sorry, Nevada test site – where our own US government set off 11 nuclear detonations above ground the year before.
Just in the year before.
Yeah, and that area was crawling with bad stuff lingering – um fallout in the dirt and in the the, the rocks and like everything it was in the soil, and they were just running around in there filming movies.
Yeah, I read this really interesting article in The Guardian called Hollywood and the Downwinders about the people who lived in that area who suffered tremendously from health problems from the fallout.
And the government went to great lengths to cover it up and just assured everybody that there was no danger whatsoever to them, even though their houses and schoolyards were covered in radioactive ash.
And so from filming there.
When this production came to town and they filmed there yeah, they were exposed to the same radioactive debris and dust and dirt that these people who lived in the area were as well.
And as a result, supposedly something like 91%
Out of 220 cast and crew members who worked on location for the movie The Conqueror came down with cancer later on in life, which is highly unusual statistically speaking.
Yeah, that's like 40-something percent of the crew.
Yeah.
Years later, in People Magazine in 1980, they actually did a special report on that movie and the cancer connection.
Like John Wayne, Agnes Moorhead, Gene Gerson, Susan Hayward, the director, Dick Powell.
They all died of cancer.
And in that People Magazine, Dr Robert C Pendleton he was – director of radiological health at the university of Utah said that like this would hold up in a court of law.
That's such an outstanding number of people.
Yeah.
And apparently not even um, just the people who worked on the production.
It came to be known the conqueror came to be known.
By the way, it's considered one of the best bad movies of the golden age of Hollywood.
But people who visited the set battled cancer later in life too.
Both of John Wayne's sons who came to visit him.
There's a famous picture of him with two of his sons and a guy using a Geiger counter On set.
Wow.
Both of his sons had cancer later in life, too.
But supposedly the family and Dick Powell's son Norman, who's interviewed in that article I read they discount the idea that it was that people got cancer from that test site.
They say maybe it was a contributing factor, but these people all smoked heavily, ate steak like eight times a day and that they had a lot of other risk factors that probably led to it.
But it's also entirely possible that they may not have died of cancer As early had they not filmed at that site.
Well that Dr Robert Pendleton said.
Essentially, that is about three times the rate of cancer that you would expect.
Right.
I think that it definitely contributed.
It's pretty curious.
I want to see it.
Have you ever seen The Conqueror?
No.
I got to see this.
I've seen pictures of John Wayne as Genghis Khan.
Yeah, it's pretty, pretty cringy.
Yeah, super racist, but apparently like, even if you take all that away, just like the dialogue is awful.
Yeah, like the whole premise of it is he kidnaps a woman and forces her to marry him and, of course, romance blossoms as a result.
You know, just the usual stuff from the 50s the omen.
Yes, This is a good one, because this is one of those where it's a movie about the devil.
And so all these stories are going to be heightened.
Right.
Because it's kind of like poltergeist.
Like it wouldn't. if this was when Harry met Sally and some of this stuff happened.
When Harry met Sally was cursed with great laughs.
It was.
I love that movie.
One of the few romantic comedies that were legit good movies.
Yeah.
So let's go back to the beginning of this one.
Obviously the omen everyone knows was The great movie from 1976 about the Antichrist taking, well, I guess possession, you could call it, but it's not like an exorcist thing.
Basically, the Antichrist is this little boy.
He comes back as a little boy.
Yeah yeah bad bad, naughty little boy damien, who dresses like angus young.
Uh yeah sure okay so um, damien is adopted by gregory peck in the movie um, and in real life, gregory peck's son um, killed himself.
He died by suicide.
Uh, apparently out of the blue, no suicide note or anything like that.
Yeah, and this was before production had started, but after peck had agreed to do the movie right, and he still went ahead and did the movie um, he left the us and went to london and Even on the way to London, before he even got to London to start shooting, something happened to him right.
Yeah, he said, I'm going to get on a plane and fly to London.
His plane was struck by lightning.
Right.
And the producer's plane was struck by lightning.
Separately, these are two different...
Two different planes struck by lightning on the way to start shooting in London.
So this curse thing is feeling legit this time.
This is the one that even Ed got a little shaky on, if you ask me.
How about this?
The hotel where they stayed at least where the producer and some other folks stayed was bombed by the Irish Republican Army.
Yeah, Hilton, the London Hilton.
I don't know about a curse in that case because in the mid-'70s, there was a lot of that going on.
Yeah, the IRA was bombing all sorts of stuff back then.
Yeah, like a restaurant where the crew and the cast went to eat one night.
Yeah, they were about to go eat there.
So there's actually like all these close calls actually make it seem like this movie production wasn't cursed, but instead was actually being looked out for on high by the Dark Lord.
Right?
So like the crew that was going to go to dinner... didn't go to dinner.
They didn't make it there in time for the bombing.
The people who were staying in the hotel when it was bombed weren't there yet.
There are a lot of close calls, but there is one close call that really is is just mind numbing.
I would have freaked out had I been one of the people involved.
The private jet.
Yeah.
So they chartered a private jet to fly them around London to get some good aerial footage of London.
And at the last minute, the charter service switched planes to accommodate a group of Japanese businessmen.
Well, the plane that the Japanese businessmen took, that the crew was supposed to be on, crashed on takeoff, actually crashed into a car and killed everybody on board the plane and everybody in the car it crashed into.
How about that?
And this is like a last-minute switch, too, supposedly.
Yeah, those make you think.
Yeah, that—I mean, curse or no, just knowing that you were that close would just—that'd get you.
How about this?
A worker—there was an animal sanctuary where they filmed, and a worker there was killed by a tiger.
Yep.
That one—
I think that was the actual animal wrangler for the movie was killed.
Oh, really?
Yeah, which makes it even closer.
This is the one, though, Chuck, you got to take this one home.
This is the one that really gets everybody, even though I think it's like a lot of it's made up.
Yeah, there was a car crash with John Richardson, who was a special effects worker.
He designed the effects for The Omen.
Including a very famous decapitation scene toward the end.
Yes, very famous.
And I thought that was the beginning.
Was it the beginning?
I think so.
I think it's out open if I remember, but it's been a while.
Oh, okay.
Either way.
He was in Holland after working on a movie called A Bridge Too Far and he was involved in a head-on collision in his car and was injured.
But his assistant, Liz Moore, was decapitated and killed in that car wreck.
Mm-hmm.
He claims, and I don't know if this is lore or not.
Sounds lore-ish.
It does sound lore-ish.
But he claims that he awoke from that crash and looked up and there was a street sign where they crashed that said the distance to the next town.
And it was the town of Omen, O-M-N-E-N, at a distance of 66.6 miles. kilometers bam now is that true there's no way it's true because i looked up on the internet that sign trying to find any picture of that sign if that sign existed there would be so many pictures from tourists taking taking photos of it on the internet there's not a single one you think from back then those pictures would still be around The sign would probably still be around.
Well, see, I think that's the presumption that may not be true.
Like they may have taken the sign down for that reason.
Maybe.
I guess that's possible, but no picture of it whatsoever.
No AP photographer went, I've got to get a picture of that sign.
Right.
Nobody did that.
There's no existing photo of that sign.
For sure.
Yeah.
That's the one that makes me think like, although there is a town called Omen in the Netherlands, so it's entirely possible a crash took place by there.
So that checks out.
That definitely checks out.
So we're going to take a break, everybody.
We just decided.
But we're going to be right back.
So don't worry, because we're going to talk some more about cursed movies.
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The podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year.
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My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it.
Wait a minute Dakota.
How bad did it get?
Well, it got bad enough that her son-in-law had to eventually arrest her himself.
She moved in for two weeks, lasted for five.
She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to the furniture.
And then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door and burst in screaming.
She did not burst in while they were... She did.
They kicked her out and paid for her hotel.
And they thought, it's finally over.
Days later, she called her son-in-law at work, claiming that his partner had been in some kind of freak accident and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
He called every hospital in the city and his partner was making coffee the entire time.
She faked a medical emergency just to test whether or not he loved her son?
Yeah, and she sat in the hospital parking lot waiting for him to see if he would show up.
When that didn't work, she walked into the son-in-law's police station and filed a kidnapping report against him.
She filed a kidnapping report against him in his own police station?
And spoilers, karma's going to show up in the best way possible.
So if you want to hear how this story ends, search OK Storytime on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to podcasts.
All right, we're back as I promised.
And we're on to Brainstorm, which I think Ed was just kind of showing off with this one.
Because he even says, like, you're not going to find this on many lists of cursed movies.
Yeah, I'm not sure I get the curse in this one, but we'll talk about it.
Brainstorm was the 1983 sci-fi movie.
Most famously known as being the great Natalie Wood's final film.
Right.
Because she died in real life after the movie obviously, when she drowned after being out on a boat one night partying with her husband, Robert Wagner.
And her co-star, Christopher Walken.
Right.
Under some say, many say, mysterious circumstances.
Yeah.
I was reading up about that case and they apparently have been drinking since at least four in the afternoon and they made it back to the boat pretty late and they've been drinking through dinner.
They were all just pretty, pretty crocked.
Right.
And supposedly Natalie Wood was either afraid of water and or couldn't swim.
Yeah.
And for some reason she had had tried to get into a dinghy that was attached to the boat that they were staying on and probably hit her head and drowned.
That's the story.
That's the official story.
Right.
But apparently in 2012 it was reopened or her cause of death was was changed from accident to undetermined.
Yeah.
I mean, there were stories that she and Robert Wagner had been fighting, though the captain even many years later said that he actually killed her.
No charges were ever brought.
Christopher Walken, I think he's never talked about it publicly, if I'm not mistaken.
No, he finally did years and years later in a Playboy interview and he basically said it must have been an accident.
No one knows, but surely it was an accident.
That was what he said.
And that's probably the only thing he said, because I didn't think he ever said anything.
Yeah.
He said, it's an accident, clearly.
That was great.
Because that was Christopher Walken with just a hint of John Travolta.
Yeah, it was a little Travolta-esque.
Yeah.
Um, so yeah, I mean that's tied to brainstorm as being a curse, I guess, because they were both in the movie.
Um, even though the grabster points out that some people tie this back to a rebel without a cause curse, because that makes way more sense to me.
Yeah.
Because James Dean and Salminio, um, And Natalie Wood then all died from that movie.
Relatively young.
She made it the longest.
She was in her early 40s, I think, when she died.
But James Dean died very young in a car crash right after Rebel Without a Cause was released.
I think
Yeah, and I think when Salminio murdered?
He was murdered in 1976 at a pretty young age still.
He was stabbed to death. uh, to death in the heart, uh, in an alley behind his house.
Yeah.
So I have pizza man to me.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Huh?
It's a weird, well, it is, but I mean, we're talking about curses.
So, well, I mean, usually the pizza man gets stabbed.
You know what I'm saying?
Right.
I think this guy was actually a serial killing pizza man.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
I just saw recently, is there a serial killer in like central Florida?
I don't know.
I hadn't heard anything.
But aren't there like at least 50 serial killers operating at any given point in time?
I don't know.
But I do know that I saw something that I heard.
That like three murders in the Tampa area were just linked.
Oh, man.
I think.
And that made me think it's been a while.
Yeah, you don't hear about them very often.
But as I grow older and wiser, I'm starting to think like there's a lot more serial killers out there than you would imagine.
Yeah.
That like human life has very little value to more people than you would hope, you know?
Isn't that the darkest thing you can think of?
It's pretty dark.
The last high profile one I remember is BTK, but surely there's been one since then, right?
Yeah, because he was like early 2000s, right?
I know, but I can't think of one.
I can't either, man.
But it's been a long time since we've heard of Jeffrey Dahmer's and Ted Bundy's and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Thankfully.
Sure.
The Son of Sam's and the Zodiac's.
It seems like the 70s and 80s were sort of the time where that was happening more.
Yeah, i don't know why.
Maybe it was harder to get away with it or easier to get away with it, or i don't know who knows.
I'm listening to that heaven's gate podcast uh, have you heard?
I haven't heard that.
No, it's good.
It's from uh, our buddy uh, chris bannon, over at midroll, put it out, and um, is he hosting it?
No no, glenn washington uh narrates it.
But um, i've been through three episodes now.
It's really good.
But It's kind of funny man, that that time of the 60s and 70s it was just and we talked about it some in our cults episode.
It was people just believed more in trying stuff out like that and UFOs.
And it was all just kind of in the in the mainstream.
Right.
And it just all seems so.
Unbelievable now, but back then it was kind of believable that someone might join up with a cult.
Well, a lot of people were on grass back then.
Yeah, on the grass.
That's crazy.
I got to hear that podcast, man.
That's just a fascinating story.
But now that means we can't do Heaven's Gate because bannon did it.
Yeah, and then they did.
You know, you can't cover in 45 minutes what they cover in whatever 10 episodes.
10 sounds about right.
I'm not sure i haven't.
I don't think they released it all at once, but it feels like a 10.
Let's say 7 to 10 uh so anyway, can we close on brainstorm or are we still?
Uh, did we miss something?
Uh yeah, i think.
Yeah, I mean, Natalie Wood's murder is – or death sorry, is unsolved still, and it's a mystery.
It may always be.
I had no idea about that, about Robert Wagner.
I just knew Natalie Wood drowned.
I never heard anything about it being mysterious.
Yeah, it's long been mysterious.
And, well, here's how we'll finish it then.
She wasn't even able to finish filming on that movie, and they did use a body double to complete some of those scenes.
And it was a big flop.
Yeah.
Yes, it was.
Okay Chuck, so for the last one then, we're going to combine two together right, great idea.
Strangely, they are almost the same story but with two different films, and both of them were films that were never made or have yet to be made, i guess is a better way to put it.
The first one is a confederacy of dunces, the film adaptation of john kennedy tool's book um, I guess, novel.
Great book.
Yeah.
I've never read it.
I really want to have just never read it for some reason.
Yeah.
It's a classic, classic book and, very sadly, tool killed himself in 1969 and the book was not out yet.
And part of the reason he killed himself is because he, He could not achieve success as a writer.
His mother gets it published.
It wins a Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
And posthumously, he became a famous author.
Yeah.
So people when it first was published in the early 80s people were like oh, we've got to turn this into a movie.
This is a great idea.
A great book will be a great movie.
And they said, who can possibly play the main character?
Belushi.
He'd be perfect.
Belushi dies.
Well, who's next?
Let's wait a few years and let's see.
Who else could play this main character?
John Candy.
John Candy died.
Okay.
All right, everybody.
Let's just take a breather.
We'll wait a year or two.
Who's the next guy who's going to play this?
I got it.
This young up and comer named Chris Farley.
Yeah.
Chris Farley died.
So a confederacy of dunces just kept getting put off and off and off.
Right.
And then finally, Will Ferrell steps in and it looks like it's going to happen, because Will Ferrell is obviously indestructible.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, and if you haven't gathered by hearing the people cast as Ignatius Riley.
He was a heavy man in the book.
So obviously Belushi, Candy, and Farley were all big dudes, and they all died.
So finally you go to Farrell, and they're like, well, he's in shape.
We can bulk him up, maybe use some special effects.
I have no idea.
But at least he's probably not going to drop dead of a heart attack or something.
Right.
He was a safe bet.
Yeah, but that didn't happen either.
I think it was sort of in turnaround forever.
It took a long time in development.
And eventually the head of the Louisiana State Film Commission.
It's set in New Orleans, so they would have shot there.
He was murdered.
And Hurricane Katrina came along to wipe out a lot of where the film would be shot.
Right.
And so I think that kind of just helped to put it on indefinite hold at the very least.
Right.
But they are.
I just saw I was looking this up, see if it was back on track.
And I saw there's a movie called The Butterfly and the Typewriter about John Kennedy Toole.
Oh neat.
So they're doing a biopic on him with um owen wilson, thomas man now uh, thomas man playing tool, who's he?
He's an actor right obviously, but what has he been in?
The thing that i saw him in was a movie out a couple years ago called Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.
Oh, okay.
It's a good little indie film.
So he's good.
So he's playing Tool, and then I think Susan Sarandon plays his mom.
Oh, yeah.
And Diane Kruger's in it as well.
And Susan Sarandon's going to totally try to date him too, I'll bet.
Why would you say that?
Oh, she likes younger dudes.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
Well, maybe I have a shot.
She likes young hipster dudes.
No, way younger than you, my friend.
Maybe not.
Good for her.
I love Susan Sarandon.
So, oh, yeah, more power to her.
I think she's great.
But she is totally going to try to date Thomas Mann.
All right.
Well, good for him, too, then.
Sure.
I'm not being judgy.
No, I know.
Okay.
So then that's a confederacy of dunces, right?
Yes.
There's another script out there called a took that has virtually the same story to it, right?
Well, but the story is totally different.
But the curse story is virtually the same.
Right.
With it took.
It's like a fish out of water movie about an Inuit man who comes to New York and has to make his way in the big city.
Right.
Yes.
That script was.
Early on it was optioned and John Belushi was scheduled to play the main character, right?
That's right.
Well, what happened to John Belushi?
He died.
So who was up next, Chuck?
John Candy.
Isn't that crazy?
Yeah.
Okay, well, John Candy passed, God rest his soul.
Who was after John Candy?
Chris Farley.
That's right, Chris Farley.
And so the narrative to this curse story takes a huge sudden turn when the next person up after Chris Farley is Sam Kinison.
Yes, and Sam Kinison, they were actually –
I mean, they were actually going to make the movie.
It was happening.
And Sam Kinison kind of destroyed that because he wanted to be really heavily involved in the script he writes in the direction of the film.
He wanted creative control.
He battled with the studio.
I think there may have even been lawsuits going on.
And he eventually got to the point where he was like, You know what?
If you're not going to give me creative control, I'll be in your movie and I'll suck on purpose.
On purpose.
And they said, oh, yeah, we're going to sue you.
And he said, oh, yeah.
Right.
And then he died in a car wreck.
Yeah.
Before anything could happen as a result.
So I took... for the moment, died with him again.
Isn't that bizarre?
It is.
The idea that those two things crossed over like that.
That one.
Obviously it's not a curse, but I think that it's pretty interesting, at the very least.
Yeah, for sure.
Well, if you guys want to know more about movie curses, just go start watching movies and ask people is this one cursed?
And then if they say no, go watch another one and ask about that.
And then eventually someone will say, yes, this one's cursed, and then ask them the story behind it.
And in the meantime, since I said all that, it's time for Listener Mail.
I'm going to call this just a very kind email from a kind Aussie.
Nice.
Hey, guys.
Discovered your show a couple of months ago and I reckon I have listened to two or three podcasts a day since then.
Awesome.
I absolutely love you guys, and to say that your show is addictive would be an understatement.
Until very recently, I was a news junkie.
I lived in Melbourne, Australia and would listen to –
Thank you.
That is so nice.
Isn't it?
Yeah.
Which, by the way...
Bridget.
I did not make that up.
No, that was another listener.
But we love to say it for sure.
And I'm glad you've adopted that.
But I love the podcast so much.
I've got my husband and kids into it as well.
My husband is a radio ham.
Listen to your episode on ham radio together.
He was impressed with your efforts.
Keep it up, guys, and thank you for all the joy and information you brought to my life.
Cheers.
That is from Bridget Foster in Melbourne.
Cheers with some Fosters.
And I tell you what, Bridget, we're coming to Melbourne in September of next year for shows.
Yep.
And you write in with a friendly reminder, and you and your family can get on the old guest list.
How about that?
Awesome, man.
Chuck, you're the guy.
You're the guy.
They're your passes, too.
All right, cool.
Well, thank you.
I'm just giving them out.
Thanks a lot, Bridget.
It was Bridget and family, right?
Yeah, Bridget with a D. Bridget, thank you for writing in.
And if you want to get in touch with us, like Bridget did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradiocom.
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On the Look Back At It podcast.
1979, that was a big moment for me.
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Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it.
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84 was a wild year.
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Imagine an olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged.
It's the enhanced games.
Some call it grotesque, others say it's unleashing human potential.
Either way, the podcast superhuman documented it all embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year.
Within probably 10 days, i put on 10 pounds.
I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.
Listen to superhuman on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an I heart podcast guaranteed human.
