Hello, and welcome back to What Went Wrong. I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here, as always, with your other host, Chris Winterbauer. Hello. And today we're talking about a pretty A remarkable movie. I'm very excited to learn more about. But Chris, how are you doing? Have you seen any dead people lately?

Only when I look in the mirror. I'm exhausted. My daughter, two and a half. Tough age. But I was thrilled to rewatch this film. It's a favorite of mine, one of my favorites of the '90s, right at the end of that decade. Of course, we are talking about 1999's The Sixth Sense. Tough one to say. The Rurgeur, as it's known.

The Sixth Sense. And of course, guys, what went wrong?

We are about celebrating films that are oftentimes flops and showing how difficult they are to make. But of course, we also cover some of the best movies ever made. And I would throw this much closer to that end of the spectrum. I agree. It's really an incredible movie, and I think it's held up really, really well. But Lizzie, before I dive into the details, what's your relationship with The Sixth Sense? The Sixth Sense.

When did you see it? I can't remember if I saw this in theaters or immediately thereafter, but I know I saw this pretty close to when it came out. My mom loved this movie, understandably, and we watched it more than once. I know we had this on DVD. I've seen it a lot of times, but hadn't seen it all the way through as an adult for a long time, I don't think. And man, does it hold up? It's great. There's so much. I always remember my mom talking about Tony Colette in this movie. And as a kid, you don't really get it because you're focused on Haley Joel-Ozman, who's also absolutely amazing. I don't understand how that's a child. Got to be a full-grown adult. They just shrank down to child size for this. But watching her in this movie this time, I was really, really blown away. Yes. And to be clear, your mom was a single parent at the time?

Yes. And you were also... You were terribly Terrible creepy as a child as well. So there were those two aspects that she related to. Yeah. Listen, well, David and I already had this conversation and asked Chris to be a tiebreaker.

I said you should be minimum of 10 years old to watch this movie And David was appalled by that. You thought that was too young?

Yeah. Yeah.

I agree.

I agree 10. I think I was actually 11 when I... Like you, we're the same age. It came out '99. I don't think I saw it in theaters because I do think my parents thought, Probably too young, but I did see it shortly thereafter on VHS at a friend's house. And it really scared me. I was really scared when I saw it when I was younger. I then watched it when I was older, and it's so emotional. It is just an amazingly emotional movie, and it actually devastated me even more this time than the last time I'd seen it, especially since having kids.

And so it's an amazing movie. That's true. Honestly, the horror as an adult now is imagining, what would I do if my child said to me, I see dead people. It's like, get out of the car.

Now, that's actually a common thing a lot of children say. Oh, no. Well, when I was little, I remember my mom did to shoot with me because she was bored, and I was about to. And I kept looking up the stairs, and my mommy said, Who are you looking at? And I said, Oh, who are you talking to? I said, Oh, the lady in the blue dress. And she's like, Excuse me? So kids are creepy in general. And Haley Joll, though, does it with aplomb. So Lizzie, of course, I agree. I think this movie feels timeless in so many ways. We've watched a lot of films out of the '90s, and even the good ones sometimes feel dated. I think this movie feels like a classic Hollywood prestige picture that really even the music feels timeless, the production design elements.

Aside from the lack of cell phones, it could have taken place today. Yeah, there is also one very dated shot at the school play when it shows all of the parents, and they're all holding the most enormous camcorders you've ever seen.

But other than that, it's absolutely not stuck in time. One of my favorite sight gags. Yeah, when they reverse on all the parents and every single camera comes up at the same time. So The Sixth Sense was released in 1999.

It featured a twist so effective.

I would actually argue it's the greatest twist in film history. Other people would disagree with me. We got another big twist coming up next week, so we'll We do. We do. That twist actually was so big, it became synonymous with the director himself. Ultimately, that might be considered more of a curse than a blessing for Mr. Shyamalan. This movie feels like a miracle to me, although a strange one when you learn about the details. And the question remains, how did Disney wind up distributing a $40 million horror drama, starring a prickly action hero, directed by a 20-something punk from Philadelphia, whose first two films gross to combined $320,000. This was $40 million?

Yes, indeed. And we will learn why.

Yeah, that's more than I would have thought by a lot. It's more than Disney thought it was going to be at the beginning as well. And it's for a very specific reason. But of course, before we begin, we need to provide the IMDb Logline. Malcolm Crow, on theme, a child psychologist starts treating a young boy, Cole, who encounters dead people and convinces him to help them. In turn, Cole helps Malcolm reconcile with his estranged wife. I would say that that logline gives away basically the last third of the movie.

Yes. You could have stopped it after. I would That child psychologist takes on a new patient who claims he can see dead people.

That's it. That's all you need. Now, of course, the Sixth Sense has a famous twist.

If you somehow do not know what that twist is. No, I'm not even... We're not even beginning to accommodate people who don't know what the twist is at the end of the Sixth Sense.

If you don't know what the twist is, you've probably been dead the whole time. All right, Lizzie, there is a character that often shows up in our episodes as the de facto villain. Any guesses as to... Just Just like an archetype. It's a job title in Hollywood. A studio head. The studio executive. That's exactly right. Easy to pillory in their corporate offices, these executives having to straddle the line between creative advocate and responsible fiduciary often make decisions that befuddle us, given the lack of insight into their worlds. One might recall the executive showing up to the set of Mad Max and in the middle of the desert being confused. However, for every David Zaslow lighting finished movies on fire for tax write offs, there are dozens and dozens of folks who simply love movies and really truly will do anything in their power to get them made. And one such man was David Vogtle. Now, this is someone who won't often show up in the research that I did for The sixth Sense because he seems to have been erased from much of the quote unquote official documentation about the film, including a book I read called I See Dead People: The Making of the sixth Sense, which is one of the worst books I've I've never read for this podcast.

It is a hagiography of The Making Of. And so instead, I turned to a book that I want to recommend to everyone called Disney Wars by James B. Stuart. It is a phenomenal Game of Thrones-like accounting of the snake pit that was the mouse house in the late '80s, 1990s. I mean, the Katzenberg era, the Ovitz era, Michael Eisner, the rise of Bob Iger back in the day, and of course, David Vogel. So let's learn about the guy who brought the Sixth Sense to the mouse house, which is just so weird. It's really weird. I didn't know this was Disney. Yes. So let's get into the logistics of it. So it's the late 1990s. David Vogel was the President of the Walt Disney Motion Picture Group, which was their live-action division. We've talked about their animated division when we did Emperor's New Groove. This is the live-action division. He took a lunch break and he sat down with a new spec script that had been sent around town from a screenwriter named M. Knight Shyamalan called The sixth Sense. He decided to buck Protocol and buy it the same day that he read it. That's how good he thought the script was.

He's right. In order to understand how a risk this was. We need to do a little bit of a brief history on where Disney was at this point. So David Vogtle, very interesting guy. I'm not going to give you his full backstory, found his way into film via a hippie commune, a degree at Portland State University, a failed art gallery in New York. He makes it to LA. 1979, he reaches out to the one guy he knows who works in film, Richard Rubenstein, Laurel Entertainment. That's George Romero's producing partner. Okay. And he says, I need a job in film. Can you hook me up? And he says, I got a closet. You can come sit in and answer phone calls. And he says, I'll take it, even though Vogtle hates horror. That's the genre he does not like at all. Ironically, Sixth Sense would be the biggest film he ever greenlit in many ways. So he moves to LA with his husband, Larry Fulton, and Vogtle is given a closet as an office. He does some producing work on anthology, low budget shows, tales from the Dark Side, and creep show. And it's off of those that he gets hired by Steven Spielberg to help produce amazing stories.

Fun fact, Lizzie, I don't know if you remember during the auditions for Indiana Jones, Ridders: The Lost Dark, Spielberg would bring them in to bake cookies with him in the studio kitchen and ask them questions. Yeah. And I couldn't figure it out if that was true or not. He apparently did the same thing when he was interviewing David Vogel. So that is like a Steven Spielberg test. Okay. The cookie test. And Anywho, he gets this job with Spielberg. He's Spielberg's producer. Everything's great. And enter Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is the wild card. Katzenberg comes in. He's under Michael Eisner at Disney, and he had turned around Disney's box office prospects. And in 1989, he formed a subsidiary of Disney called Hollywood Pictures. And that's actually the production company you see on the credits of The sixth Sense. So Hollywood Pictures is Disney like Touchstone. It's like a live-action subsidiary of Disney, and it's for films that Disney wouldn't necessarily want their logo on, such as Super Mario Bros. Uh-oh. Or a movie where a lady shows her recently slit wrists. I can't believe this was Disney. Yeah, it was. So Katzenberg says to Vogtle, Come work for me.

You can revamp Disney's live-action slate. Vogtle says, I wouldn't even know where to Katzenberg says, Why don't you start at Disneyland? So Vogtle goes to Disneyland. He walks around. He goes, I have no idea how I can turn any of these characters into live-action movies. But he says, I see all these adults at Disneyland. Why can't we make movies for adults through Disney? He comes back. He gives an hour-long speech to all of the executives at Disney about how we can make adult movies that, quote, show the triumph of the human spirit. And the example he gave was Schindler's List. Heavy stuff. Michael Eisner and the rest of the C-suite guys who were less than convinced, they told Vogtle, Focus on Kids Movies. And so he did, and he made some great live-action kids films in the '90s. Homeward Bound? Yes. Love that one. Did 57 million against a tiny budget. He did 101 Dalmatians, the Glenn Close action version. Great. That was 320 million against a 67 million dollar budget. And of course, Georgia the Jungle, Peek Himbo, oh, yeah. Brenan Fraser. Yeah. 75 million against its 55 million dollar budget. So Vogtle had a bunch of hits at a time when the animation department had actually started a bit of a decline in the back half of the '90s with things like Pocahontas.

So he says, I've earned the credibility to start making the adult films, phrasing Chris, but making the movies for adults that I want to hear. So he gets the spec script from M Night Shyamalan and basically unilaterally decides, I'm going to buy this thing, which was shocking for a couple of reasons, not the least of which because M. Knight Shyamalan was far from the household name that he is today. So Shyamalan, he was an NYU grad. He's from Philadelphia, and he was actually best known for his writing work at the time. So he had a spec script called Labor of Love that had been passed around and bought by Fox, but ultimately was never made. It's about a guy whose wife dies, and he decides to prove his devotion to her by walking across the United States.

That's the whole movie. I'm good.

That's basically the straight story, but walking. He then actually rewrote 1996's Stuart Little. Oh, a much beleagered project.

Yeah, we'll cover it at some point.

And he also did an uncredited rewrite of 1999's She's All That. Oh. Yeah. Okay. He was not known as a director. His first film, 1992's Praying with Anger, which he wrote, produced, directed, and started, was financed through friends and family and never received a wide release. He actually a just wrapped production on his second feature in 1995, which is called Wide Awake, which is a faith-based coming-of-age comedy featuring Rosie O'Donnell, Dennis Leary, and Julia Stiles.

Yeah, I got to say this is a wild movie poster. It is Rosie O'Donnell in what looks like maybe a nun's habit, but she also has a baseball glove and a baseball hat on. And then there's a small child standing on a hole a whole bunch of books. I have no idea what this is about.

I actually saw it. It came out in '98. So it was shot in '95, and we'll get into why it got stuck until 1998. He had a tough start of his career. So Vogtle finishes reading The Sixth Sense, And for a lack of a better word, he had found his Schindler's list. As he later said, quote, This script had more potential to be a big hit than any other movie I had ever read. Smart man. So what's the big deal? The man buys a script. It's his job. Scripts are bought every day. The issue was that the script came with two somewhat unusual conditions, Lizzie. Any guess as to what those are?

Yeah, M Night has to direct. That's one of them. Oh, there's another one.

It's going to be weirder. And it's even juicier.

Give me a hint.

It has to do with the sale price.

Oh, it's very expensive.

M Night Shyamalan set the starting bid when the script went out at $1 million.

Fuck, yeah. Good for you.

He was 27 years old, and he wasn't bluffing because M Night Shyamalan had been here before. Born in Mahe, India, to a neurologist in OB-GYN, raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, Manoj Neliatu Shyamalan, better known as M. Knight Shyamalan, is many things. But perhaps more than anything, Lizzie, this guy is insanely confident. Raised Hindu, but educated in a series of parochial schools, hence the volume of Christian faith in M. Knight Shyamalan's films. He seemed to always have faith in the inevitability of success in Hollywood. So he made Super 8 films growing up. You can actually see a lot of them in the special features of the DVDs of his films. If you buy them, he tends to put one of his childhood movies in the special features of each of his released films, if you guys want to check them out. He was very smart. He was a national merit scholar. And at the age of 18, he said, Mom, dad, I'm not going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a filmmaker, to which his dad said nothing. And his mom said, I'm proud of you. I support you. He was accepted into NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and he basically got there on a scholarship because of his National Merit scholar.

So he shot his first film, as I said, Prying with Anger, which was effectively a flop. He then followed it up with Labor of Love. But we'll talk about that in a second, because a year out of film school, he actually triggered a bidding war in Hollywood with his first spec script, Labor of Love. So this was an era when scripts were selling for insane amounts of money. I mean, there are plenty of examples that we can go into, but this movie supposedly sold for $750,000, and he was a year out of film school.

I mean, how much would something go for now? Let's say there's a script that's top of the blacklist. Everybody is I'm not talking about it, everybody wants it. But let's say it's a first-time screenwriter. What are we talking about for a bidding war at this point?

If there's a competitive package, maybe you could get into seven figures. I mean, Zack Krieger famously sold We weapons, his a follow-up to Barbarian for, I believe $10 million was his combined directing writing fee on that movie. Wow. So that's ridiculous. But that's absurd. Most wonderful scripts on the blacklist don't sell. That's why they're on the blacklist. So this is a time When studios were paying a lot to lock up the ability to control as many scripts as possible. It was like an arms race. Okay. I read actually that in 1990 alone, 14 scripts were sold for over $1 million. So that's 14 seven-figure script sales in just 1990. So Shyamalan wants to direct. He flies to LA to meet with the chairman of Fox. He's wearing a borrowed suit. It's too big. He does not get the job on his own movie. So he is brought on as the writer. He's effectively fired as the director. They do a couple of rewrites with bigger directors trying to reshape the movie. He did tell Malcolm Gladwell on Revisionist History that the script got worse with every pass. Despite the setback, Labor of Love and Praying with Anger did get him behind the camera for a different film, his third script, Wide Awake.

He had actually written it before Praying with Anger, and then he brought it back around. The chronology is a little weird. Unfortunately, he partnered with the worst person in Hollywood to make this movie. Any guess as Lizzie?

Harvey Weinstein.

Harvey Weinstein. So the movie was set up at Miramax. They shot it in 1995, and Harvey hated it. Now, to be fair, Harvey said- Well, listen, was Harvey wrong?

Harvey's been wrong about a lot of things. Was he wrong about Wide Awake?

I don't think so. He basically said it's sentimental nonsense, which I think it is very sentimental. And basically, it got trapped in reedits and reshoots. And the problem was Shyamalan had signed a directing contract, not unlike Peter Jackson's with Miramax at the time, where he could only make movies with Miramax. So he was trapped, and Weinstein didn't want to let him go. So basically, by the age of 25, Shyamalan was convinced that his career was over. However, he had one way out, Lizzie, and that is that Miramax owned his directing, but they didn't own his writing. And Shyamalan actually says that this might have been an error in their legal department. Basically, there was a loophole in his contract. And so he decided the one way out of his circumstances was to write, quote, the greatest screenplay he possibly could and shackling himself to it as the director, such that whoever bought the script would effectively have to buy out his contract with Miramax to save him from Harvey Weinstein. It's the equivalent of putting a message in a bottle when you're trapped on an island. Help me. Exactly. So As he later said, I sat down, I looked at the Jaws, Alien, The Exorcist, and Poltergeist posters on my wall, and I said, I'll just write one of those.

I love those. So I went into genre and suspense for the very first time, and everything just clicked. I was having so much fun. I had unlimited ideas. So I think a lot of people assume Shyamalan always wanted to write genre films. Yeah. He actually came to it by necessity when he was coming up with this movie.

It makes a lot of sense that he's looking at a Jaws and Poltergeist poster there. What else was it? Exorcist and Alien. Alien. All extremely story-driven horror, but in particular, the Spielberg of Poltergeist and Jaws as not as focused on the gore as they are on the fear of the story. So that comes through.

Absolutely. The first draft of the film was very different. As he told Yahoo in 1999, quote, Originally, the Sixth Sense was some version of a serial killer movie. It was more coming out of my love of Silence of the Lambs and that genre, mixed with the supernatural. In the first iterations of the screenplay, there was a crime scene photographer whose son saw ghosts. So that was how it started to come to me. But then it evolved. Halfway through, I came up with the idea of a therapist, and that changed everything and concentrated on two families. He later stated that he wrote 10 draughts of the script before he was satisfied, and it wasn't until nearly the last draft that the twist was implemented.

Wow.

So in nearly every version of the script, Bruce Willis was not dead the entire time. According to an interview he gave while promoting The Servant for Apple, the reveal that Malcolm Crow was in fact a ghost didn't come until he tried to crack the home life of the character. When coming up with reasons why Crow and his wife weren't speaking, he realized the ending of the movie was planted in Cole's ability to see what Crow and Crow's wife couldn't.

The way it's done is so smart, by the way. That was something that struck me this time is that I didn't realize when I was younger, the way that he mentions drifting in and out of time a little bit, and that that's how he is coming in and out of the spaces with his wife. It's just done really, really well.

There are so many good subtle things, too. Bruce Willis never pulls the chairs out when he sits across from his wife. He always just slips into them. So he never moves anything when he's around her. The camera work is very subtly done to keep her so her back's to screen and we don't see her eyeliner as much as possible. And like you said, I missed her appointment. I can't seem to keep track of time. Great details there. So by 1997, Shyamalan actually was married and his wife had given birth to their first child. So he was only, I think, 27 at this point. And life was moving quickly. Wide Awake was still locked up in postproduction at Miramax. So he sent the sixth Sense to his agents, and he put a plan in place. He said, I'm going to fly to LA, stay at the Four Seasons, send the script to every major studio via Messenger at the same time, wait in a hotel, and hope that I will get a meeting that will lead to an offer on this script. And he later said he could not afford this hotel, but the way he figured, worst case scenario, if everybody passed, he would feel like he had a nice vacation, then he got to go.

It's true. He did not get one offer on the script. He got four. So Columbia Pictures, Dream works, Jeffrey Katzenberg, New Line Cinema. Makes sense. Which I think makes a lot of sense. And Disney, unusually enough, all wanted in. Price was not an issue. That $1 million starting bid, no problem. New Line Cinema reportedly offered $2 million for the script. However, it was Disney, via Hollywood Pictures, that had the winning bet. I've seen the number as high as $3 million online, but it seems like the more accurate figure is $2.25 million dollars with somewhere around a $500,000 to $750,000 directing fee as well. So less than 12 hours after reading the script, David Vogtle had placed a seven-figure bet on a 27-year-old director who didn't live in LA and whose second film, Harvey Weinstein, was butchering in a basement across town. And he'd done so without the approval of his boss, Joe Roth, or his boss's boss, CEO Michael Eisner. So Philip Muhl, Senior VP of Legal and Business Affairs, was stunned by Vogtle's deal on the script, but Vogtle was adamant. He said, quote, If this is not the moment in my career to try this, then it never will be.

This is what you wait for. He was confident they could land an affordable but talented lead. Kevin Spacey was actually who he had in mind.

He's a good actor, but I still- Listen, Kevin Spacey aside, he's a great actor.

Yeah, Yeah, I'm glad it was Bruce Willis- Me, too. Creatively as well. And Spacey actually might not have been able to do it because he was in American Beauty at the same time that they shot this. That's right. So the other deal that Vogtle made, so obviously, he guaranteed Shyamalan the right to direct. He also said that as long as we can make the movie for 10 to $14 million, Disney will not kill it. You effectively have a green light upon purchase of the script. His bosses were not as hot on the script when they got it from him. So according to Vogtle, Joe Roth said it was, quote, Okay. Michael Eisner was not thrilled, and basically, Vogtle didn't have any air support anymore because Jeffrey Katzenberg, who brought him in- Had left at this point. Had left Disney. And not only had he left Disney, he was actually suing Disney at this point.

He turned around and then lit the bridge on fire.

I think he nuked the bridge from space. And then he said, Pay for that Bridge. He won that lawsuit, too. We'll get to that. So basically, the higher ups were like, You can't mess this up. And so Vogtle needed to ensure that this movie was as successful as he knew it could be. And Lizzie, that meant they needed a star. And lucky for them, they were about to catch a falling one. Travel back with me, if you will, to 1997 in Wilmington, Delaware, where Hollywood superstar Bruce Willis is having a very bad, no good time on the set of his most recent movie, Broadway Brawler.

What now?

Have you ever heard of that film? No. Well, it was never released. Following the success of Pulp Fiction, Die Hard with a Vengeance and Twelve Monkeys, Willis, the wise-cracking TV star turned action hero, was taking a crack at the Tom Cruise dominated romantic dramedy space with a film described as a, quote, sports rom-com in the vein of Jerry Maguire.

Remember when Tom Cruise wasn't just hurling himself off cliffs on motorcycles?

He was so good. I just rewatched Jerry Maguire, and he is so good in that movie. He's amazing. He is incredible.

Yeah. So good. I wish he would throw himself off fewer cliffs. I'm glad he can do it, but he's done it now. What if you go back?

He's very good as a comedic actor, actually, and I missed that as well. So Broadway Brawler was directed by actress turned director Lee Grant. It co-starred Maura Tierney and Danny Baldwin. And the film, I couldn't find a lot about the plot. It was about a retired hockey player who... Falls in love.

No.

That's basically all I knew. More importantly, 20 days into filming on February 28, 1997, Bruce Willis, who was a producer on the film, halted production, and he had director Lee Grant, cinematographer William A. Fraker, wardrobe designer, Carol Oditz, and coproducer, Joe Fury, who was Lee Grant's husband, fired from the project. The LA Times ran a story at the time that stated that practically every key player was terminated from the film. Willis brought in a new director, Dennis Dugan, who he had met on Moonlighting. Dugan had been a TV director at the time. Dugan lasted one day, and then Synergy, the financing entity for the movie, effectively shut the movie down. Wow. And said, This isn't happening. So Willis, who was being paid, I believe, in excess of $10 million on this film, had shut it down. It's unclear exactly what his concerns were 20 days in. There was plenty of speculation at the time. Cinematographer William A. Faker said that Willis was attempting to direct the other actors in in the film. Take it with a grain of salt. He had just been fired by the man. So it's entirely possible, but we don't know.

It's also it seems likely he didn't get along with the director, Lee Grant, although she actually spoke very warmly of him and graciously after being fired from the film. We will cover her at a later date because this movie represented another instance of an actress getting the opportunity to direct, someone who'd worked a long time in Hollywood getting the opportunity to direct, only to have it blow up her face. And it really does not seem like it was her fault. It reminded me of Ishtar in a lot of ways, a more brutal version.

Yeah, for sure.

Maybe he was anxious about the film's prospects and where things stood in his career. Willis Had had a number of flops in the '90s, not the least of which Bonfire of the Vanities, which we covered on this podcast. Whatever the reason, he killed the movie. So Andy Vajna, Chief of Synergy, shuts the movie down. They've spent $17 million on the movie. And that doesn't include Willis' reduced fee of seven and a half million plus perks. But lucky for them, they were owned by a very big company. Lizzie?

Disney.

So Disney steps in.

Disney Daddy says, You need to pay up Bruce.

Oh, they did. Disney said, You owe us nearly $20 million. And if you don't want to be sued for that amount of money, you owe us one. In fact, you owe us three, Mr. Willis. So they proposed a payment plan of sorts. Bruce Willis would act in three films for them at a significantly reduced rate. I read $10 million in some sources, as low as $3 million in others. I guess he was getting upwards of $20 million a film at the time. I also read it was a two-picture deal in some sources, a three-picture deal in others. Regardless, he did end up doing three Disney movies in a row. So take that for what it is. So Willis says, Of course, no problem. I don't want to lose $20 million right now. There's one caveat. He gets to choose the projects, and he gets to read every script that Disney has with a leading man role in it to see if he wants to do it. So he started with Michael Bayes' Armageddon. More on that another Another Day. He actually stepped in to replace Sean Connery. Again, more on that.

Another day.

Wow. Yeah, that movie is a whole other can of worms. So he now had the right to select his next Disney project. And of Of course, his agent then has to be sent every script that is purchased by Disney that has a role that could be appropriate for Bruce Willis. So David Vogtle sends the script to Bruce Willis' agent as a formality, thinking this is not the type of role that Bruce Willis has ever done before. Further, it wasn't in Vogtle's interest to get Willis for the movie because that would push the budget up too high. So he didn't want Willis to take it either.

Yeah, you're blowing your entire budget with just the fee for M Shyamalan and Bruce Willis.

Exactly. So Disney also didn't want Bruce Willis to do this movie because Disney didn't think they could make enough money off of this movie with Bruce Willis. So they're losing one of their- Freebies.

Yeah.

Freebie coupons with Bruce on this movie. They want him to do the big movies. Six Cent is a lost cause, basically, is everyone's perspective. Imagine David Vogel's surprise when Bruce Willis' agent calls Kathleen Kennedy, who had been brought on to produce the film with Frank Marshall, and tells her, quote, This is our movie, me and Bruce, because I'm his agent.

Vaguely threatening, but great.

Well, it came with another threat. M Night Shyamalan is not directing it.

Okay.

Yeah. So he says, This kid's not directing it. It's cute that he thinks he's going to, but Bruce is going to be in this movie. We need a big director. He just fired his last director. How do you think this 27-year-old Indian-American kid from PA is going to do? And Vogtle goes, Oh, hold on, hold on. I guaranteed that no-name kid, $3 million and the right to direct the movie. And the agent said, What the fuck is wrong with you? Literally over the phone. And then Vogtle said, What the fuck is fuck you? He went off on him and said, I found this script. It's my movie. And then he thought that would be the end of it. And then the agent called back and said, Bruce will do it with M Night Shyamalan. That's how much you like the script. Good for Bruce. Yeah. So Bruce loved it. He said that he was stunned by the twist. He really thought it was amazing. I also think he was a young father at this time, and I'm guessing that the material may have resonated with him for that reason. So Willis agrees he's attached to the project.

M Night Shyamalan has the man that will sell this movie, and now he needs something far rarer, Lizzie, and that is the little boy who's going to carry it.

Yeah, because this could have been so bad if that kid had sucked.

Yes. Lucky for them, 1998, nine-year-old Haley Joel Osment was stuck in television. A career The Year That Began with a Pizza Hut commercial quickly led the Los Angeles-born prodigious child actor to Forrest Gump. That's right. In which he played the titular character's son. He won a Young Artist Award for that film. The funny thing, the only award that Wide Awake won, I believe, was a Young Artist Award as well back in 1998. So the following three years, Haley Joel-Osmett mostly does TV roles. He's on the Jeff Foxworthy show, he's on Murphy Brown, the Larry Sanders show, Touched by an Angel, Ali McBeal. He's not getting the type of challenging material that the Sixth Sense would represent. According to interviews and profiles written around the release of the Sixth Sense, Osment was extremely intelligent and extremely mature for his age.

Yeah, you can tell. Yes. So he's nine or 10 when this is being made?

Yes. He's nine years old going into production. I believe he might have turned 10 in production. In.

That's younger than I thought.

Yes, it is, because I thought perhaps he was just small for his age, but it actually seems like he was just very young when this movie was made.

That's what I thought.

So he was reading by the age of three, and apparently, he was very interested in talking to other adults. He was extremely conversant, and he just felt wise beyond his years is how he was described. And I think you definitely get that sense here. Lizzie, you mentioned that he seems almost like a fully grown man in the body a child. Yes. In terms of his capacity to emote. I think that's for a very specific reason, because whether or not Osment at age nine could fully grasp the career opportunity that the Sixth Sense represented, his father could. So Michael Eugene Osment was a Birmingham-born thespian who had moved to LA to try to strike at acting and had never really found his footing.

Birmingham as in Alabama or England?

Birmingham, Alabama. Okay. Yeah. So he's from the south, moves to LA. His wife's a school teacher. It seems like things were tight when Haley Joel was young, and he was acting in plays and stringing jobs along. But Haley Joel's career ended up being the boon financially for their family that they were missing at this point in time. And it turned out to be, in a weird way, the career that Eugene didn't know he had been seeking, which is acting coach. In 1997, he is his manager, his acting coach, his chaperone. I mean, he's effectively his representation. He's traveling with him everywhere while his wife stays home with their daughter back in LA. There was a funny article in the Daily Telegraph that said he was also, Haley's number one fan, and I don't think they meant it necessarily in a good way. So take that for what you will. Oh, no. So he took this role very seriously. There are shades of other child actor situations like the Colkins, et cetera. I have to live the role as thoroughly as Haley does, so I do all the character analysis with him, and many times without him, because he goes to bed at 8:30, And I'll carry on working until I figure it out.

So Eugene very much views it as like, We're both acting this role. I'm acting it, so then Haley can act it effectively. And I do think that comes across.

I mean, it did pay off. Yeah. Yeah. There is a very adult sensibility about the way that he handles himself in this and just how genuine he comes across is what's almost... It's like bordering on disturbing how good this kid is in this movie.

Absolutely. Also, the way that Haley would at the time speak when he was with his father is very interesting. He would apparently use the plural first person. So we've auditioned, we would like to do more comedy and voiceover work. The script bowled us over. He would speak of his father as if they were this tandem unit. And I do think there is an irony to that, this adult ghost of a career following an unusually precocious young boy that is echoed in the film. It's a striking image. So it was Eugene who prepped Haley for his audition and impressed upon him the true theme of the film, communication. From there, they developed Cole's wardrobe together, and it was, I believe, Eugene who helped him to figure out how Cole might dress in clothing, cobbled together, that feels a little older than his age, stuff he stole from his father, et cetera. Despite Osmond's Cherubic look, he apparently just looks like a little angel when you meet him. Shyamalan was specifically looking for a more brooding performer, as he said at the time. Osmond's video audition was very strong. It got him an in-person read with Shyamalan and the casting director, and Shyamalan later described the experience.

There was something magical about his audition. When I left the room, I told the casting director, I don't know if I want to make the movie if it's not with that kid.

Yeah, I believe it.

So in August of 1998, very close to production, Haley Joel Osmond is cast as Cole Seer, the very on the nose name of the boy who sees Ghost. One notable actor I do want to mention who auditioned but did not get the role. Lizzie, any guesses?

A child actor?

Yeah, you would know him more in the pubescent years, I think. He's from Canada, and he was on a very popular, I guess not that popular, but cult hit TV show in the early 2000s.

It can't be Seth Rogen.

It's not, but he's related. It's Michael Sarah.

Oh. Yeah, so- Yeah, probably for the best.

Well, you'll like this, too. He later told Esquire, I auditioned for the Sixth Sense, which I didn't know was about seeing dead people. They didn't mention that in the breakdown. After seeing the movie and remembering the scene they had me read, it was the scene with the Penny. Bruce Willis is saying, I can't be your doctor anymore. And Haley J. Osment starts crying and slides the Penny over to him. It's a very emotional scene, and I did not do it that way. I did it upbeat. I said, Some magic's real. Very optimistically. So he did not get the role.

He didn't have a dad who was explaining everything to him. No.

He did not. I also read that Liam Aiken, who was a very successful child actor at the time, he would go on to act in Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunately Events, was also offered the role. However, his mother turned it down on his behalf due to the subject matter. I couldn't verify that. That was actually a quote from Liam Aiken's mother, so I don't have a quote from the production verifying that. So take that with a grain of salt. He might have just auditioned. Anyway, Lizzie, not everybody was as thrilled to be cast as Mr. Willis and Mr. Osment were. And of course, I'm talking about Australian actress and possibly greatest Australian export, Toni Colette. 1998, she traveled to New York to meet with two American directors about their forthcoming features, The Sixth Sense, and Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead. Toni had, of course, broken out with Muriel's Wedding. Have you seen?

Yes, which I love.

It's great. It's so fun. A 1994 film. She put on a bunch of weight for it. It's a really, really great performance. Yeah, she's amazing. And so she was obviously ecstatic to be meeting with Martin Scorsese, or as she would say, Marty. She was, I'm thrilled to be meeting with Marty. And also But M night was there. She's just not that excited to meet with M night. And I don't blame her for having a clear preference. The shooting schedules would have conflicted, so she would have been able to only commit to one of these movies, presumably. And she knew which one it was going to be. Plus, the Sixth Sense, apparently, was not sold to her in the way that it should have been. So this is how it was described to her by her agent, quote, It's a Disney film, and Bruce Willis is attached, end quote.

Yeah, that might lead you astray.

As she later told Entertainment Weekly. Night hadn't done anything. Scorsese Scorsese. Yeah, of course. So I had both my meetings and I had my high hopes. And David was pushing me to do a Tony Colette accent. It's terrible. So I'm just going to play you a quote from the woman herself. This is Tony Colette on hearing about being cast in the film.

And I was walking along the street one day with a friend, and I was like, I have a feeling some news has come through. And it's before cell phones. So I go into a little booth and I call a hotel. I get put through to my voicemail, and there was a message. There was indeed a I got a message from my agent and my manager at the time, and I could feel that all excited. They're like, Okay, okay. I was like, Oh, my God. I got to call them back. I call my agent and he goes, Okay, you've been offered. Before he could get it out, I screamed. He goes, No, no, no, wait. You didn't hear me. You She'd been offered the sixth sense, and I was like, Amazing. Which, of course, she would get her first Oscar nomination for.

Ironically, Shyamalan actually never showed Tony Colette's audition tape to the studio. And that's because she had shaved her head shortly before traveling to New York. She's apparently shaved her head five times for fun or to wear a wig in film. And he was concerned that the studio would focus on her look rather than on her performance. So instead, he sent them the tape of Muriel's Wedding, and he also got an assist from Bruce Willis, because when he said he wanted to cast Tony Colette from Muriel's Wedding, Bruce Willis said, I love that movie. I love Tony Colette. And he threw his weight behind casting her as well.

All right. Bruce Willis is getting a lot of brownie points from me on this so far.

He's getting a few. Started off on shaky ground. Sure. But we'll get there. Okay. Now, Lizzie, as we've discussed in previous episodes, when a studio is betting on a relatively unknown director, they prefer to surround them with as many experienced crew members as possible. And they actually did this on the sixth Sense, and it started at the top. So as I mentioned, David Vogtle hired veteran and producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall to produce the film. They had an overall deal at Disney. Cinematographer Tak Fujimodo was brought in behind the camera. If you guys are unfamiliar with his work, at the time, he was perhaps best known as Jonathan Demi's DP He had most recently shot Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, beloved, and he had broken out with Terrence Malek's Badlands in 1973. Andrew Monshine was brought in to cut the film Monchin Monchin. I couldn't look up the pronunciation, and And he and Shyamalan had collaborated on Wide Awake, but he was actually best known probably at the time for What's eating Gilbert Great, the Johnny Depp, Leo film. And then Joanna Johnston, who was an oft-sought collaborator of Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, did the costumes.

She actually got her start on Clive Barker's Hellraiser. We'll be covering that film soon. And of course, composer James Newton Howard provided the film's haunting, piano-driven, understated score. I really love the score in this movie. And one unusual fact about the Sixth Sense's production, Lizzie, where it was shot.

Oh, Philadelphia.

Yeah, it was not shot in Los Angeles or New York City, but rather M Night Shyamalan's hometown, Philadelphia.

Yeah, because he shoots everything in Philadelphia.

Well, he does now, but he didn't then. He was a no-name director. So how did he get this big concession from the studio? Apparently, that was actually the third condition that went out with the script. It was $1 million, I'm directing, we're shooting it in Philly. So I buried the lead on that one. Production began in late summer, early fall of 1998. It was far from the oversight of the studio. As a result, much of the film was shot not on sound stages, but sets built inside the Philadelphia Convention Center, which was abandoned and super spooky. Okay. Osmet later described it as big empty marble hallways, a The Shining feel around the set itself. I believe JFK did a speech there during a campaign in 1960. It was very old and ornate and had these cavernous marble stairways that went really deep down. Yes, it really had a creepy feeling. So setting the right vibes on this set. Now, Lizzie, did you notice anything about Lynn Sears, Tony Colette's hair in this film?

It's red and it's very poofy.

It is a wig.

And it's not her hair. Yes. Yes. It does. It looks like a good wig.

It is a good wig, but it is not the wig that she was originally supposed to wear. Lynn Sears' character was supposed to be blonde, and they had actually built a very expensive wig that she rejected. Tony Colette said, This does not feel like my character. And the Brunette number you see in the film was actually from Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine, the movie that she had acted in shortly before the sixth Sense. So they borrowed that wig from that movie for the sixth Sense.

It's a great wig. She looks great.

She looks She apparently also didn't love a lot of the costume choices. And so she actually went out to thrift stores by herself and picked out a lot of the numbers that you see in the film as well. So she must have had a good sense for this character.

I love her long nails, too.

Yes. When she at the end of the car scene.

They're click-clacking together.

Yeah. A couple of other fun facts. Malcolm Crow does not wear his wedding ring throughout the film since his wife has it. I read that Bruce Willis did have to learn how to write with his right-hand because he's actually left-handed for the close-up shots in order to avoid revealing the lack of a wedding ring. It's also entirely possible they used a hand double, but I did read that. Now, in order to get the fogged breath to show the presence of ghosts, they did build ice sets where they wrapped the sets in a cellophane material, and they pumped freezing cold air into it, and then they stripped a nine-year-old boy to his tidy whities and made him act in there. Yeah. It was very cold in real life when poor young Haley Joel was doing those scenes.

Just like the Exorcist.

Exactly. Despite the spooky environment, the vibe on set was apparently very upbeat, so much so that apparently Bruce Willis would throw parties at night and on the weekend and DJ them. Bruce was a big musician, blues musician, and he would DJ them for the cast and crew. And apparently, he would also haze M Night Shyamalan and just make him take shots until M Night I would not wake up the next morning because he was too hung over. Great. In general, if you want to learn a little more about Bruce Willis, check out our episodes on the Fifth Element or Bonfire the Vanities. Lizzie, there's a very important actor we haven't talked about yet in this film, or a very unusual performance, I would say. Maybe a peak performance. Any idea who I'm talking about?

The only other people I can think of in this that I even know by name are Misha Martin and M Night Shyamalan himself? Dr.

M Night? No, he's terrible in this movie. No. Donnie Walberg.

Donnie D. Yes, of course. Okay. He's really good.

He is really good. In a movie filled with folks taking both small and large leaps away from their usual fare, perhaps none were in such alien territory as 30-year-old Donnie Walberg. Yeah. Markey Mark's older brother was, at the time, best known or perhaps only known as a member of the defunct boy band, New Kids on the Block, an extremely successful late '80s outfit that had fallen apart nearly five years prior in 1994. He had transitioned into acting with various roles in a series of mid '90s crime readers of various quality. There's a bullet, Payback with Mel Gibson. He plays a thug in most of these. He had not broken through yet. When he read the sixth Sense on a Flight, he knew that the role of Vincent gray, even though it was only five minutes long, represented an enormous opportunity. Not only would he be a cross from Bruce Willis, but he would get to play an emotionally conflicted, tormented character that really showed off some acting range.

I was just going to say I find it really interesting that he was drawn to this part, especially looking at the early roles that Mark Wahlberg took. They are so very far away from something like this. You look at something like fear, which, listen, I love fear just as much as the next person. But I do think it's interesting that Donnie was after this.

Yeah, Donnie did take a lot of thug roles before this, and I think he wanted to move away from that. He wanted to move away from some of the tough guy stuff that he'd done. And there were two big problems, though, that he could see in the script. Number one, Vincent gray, as originally written, was 20 years old, but Donnie Walberg was 30 at the time. And the other problem was that Vincent gray was supposed to be this skinny, malnourished character, and Donnie Walberg was a put together Yeah. Double C thick mofo at the time. And he still is. He's a very strong- Yeah, he's a big dude. Solidly built gentleman. So they used Walberg's age to the production's advantage. Obviously, he would seem like he had been aged by the affliction of the Sixth Sense in the film. And then it was agreed that he would lose some weight for the movie. If he had five weeks to shed weight, and I believe it was initially agreed that it be 15 pounds. However, he showed up having lost 43 pounds.

Yeah, it looks like it.

It's a lot. The cast and crew were stunned when they saw him. Shyamalan later said the seriousness of their endeavor was impressed upon them by the magnitude of that transformation. The fun and games vibe disappeared when he showed up. He had also basically gone method with the role, and so he was very on edge. At the first table read, he pulled Bruce Willis aside and said, Look, I think Vincent would be naked in this scene. So originally the character was just closed in the bathroom. He said, If he's leaving, I think he would have been stripped clean. He's trying to get clean. Everything's done. I think he'd be nude. Bruce Willis said, I think that's a great idea. They take it to M Night Shyamalan. It seems like Shyamalan was up for it, and they take it to the studio and they say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're going for a PG 13 rating, folks. And Donny's D is not going to help us get that, a PG 13 rating. So apparently, they went back and forth until it was agreed that a very dirty pair of tidy Whities, an outfit that evokes Cole Sears' outfit later in the film, I think it's a really great creative choice, is The Compromise.

He shot his scenes. Apparently, he thought he only had one take for whatever reason to nail it. So he went all out on the first take and was crying in a ball on the floor. And M night comes up and That was so good. He goes, So good. Did you get what you needed? Emily is like, Oh, no, we're going to go again. Very sweet. Here's a good Bruce moment. As Walberg later told The Hollywood Reporter, quote, He was called back to set for one more take. I walked onto the set and the crew was there and they parted like the seas. At the center of them was Bruce Willis standing on an apple box. He just made this speech talking about the efforts I went through and the sacrifice I made for this film. I was just blown away. So it seems like he really did set the tone for what they were going to do. And I did read that as much as possible, Shyamalan shot the film in chronological order. So it is likely that this was one of the earlier scenes that they shot.

Yeah. I mean, he's remarkable. He is really, really good, and it sets the movie off in such an unsettling direction from the very beginning.

Absolutely. So things were relatively calm on set. In fact, it seems like the only Kubrickian behavior actually came from Eugene Osment, Haley's father. Apparently, when Haley was struggling to sum in tears in one scene, I believe it's the scene where he says, I'm not going to be your doctor anymore. Eugene told Bruce Willis to yell at the boy from off camera, giving him explicit permission to do so. He did, and they got the performance that they needed. Now, while things were going well in Philadelphia, unfortunately, the monster was already inside the mouse house. There's a reason this movie is not remembered as a Disney film, and that's because as the production rounded the three-quarter mark, David Vogel, executive, receives a truly horrifying phone call. It's from independent producer, Roger Burnbaum, the head of Spy Glass Entertainment, and he says, The Sixth Sense is my baby now. Without telling David Vogel or anyone involved in the production, Joe Roth, Vogel's boss, had sold Spy Glass, both foreign and domestic rights for the film in order to hedge against a potential loss at the box office at the $40 million budget range.

Wow. Betty regreted that.

Yeah. So Vogtle now had to run any budget overages by an outside production company for approval. He had lost control of his movie. This happened for a very specific reason. So Michael Eisner, in 1997, had declared that Disney's live-action studio had had its most profitable year ever. However, there was an internal memo at the time that declared that over the last seven years, the live-action business had destroyed nearly $575 million in value. They lost $180 million in 1996. They were tracking to lose $100 million in 1998, the year the Sixth Sense was green-lit. And ironically, the only reason they made money in 1997 was because of projects green-lit by David Vogtle, 101 Dalmatians and George of the Jungle. So Joe Ross, who wanted to be promoted and was under pressure to cut costs, decided that he was going to offload the Sixth Sense. Of course, I should also mention Disney just lost a $280 million our lawsuit to Jeffrey Katzenberg. They were bleeding money. Hollywood Pictures and Touchstone were effectively merged and put under the purview of Pete Schneider, formerly of the Animation Division. It actually comes up in our episode on The Emperor's New Groove.

David Vogtle was effectively stripped of any and all power and responsibility, having to run all decisions by his new boss, who apparently had nothing good to say about Vogtle's tenure at Disney at all. Again, for more on that, check out Disney Wars by James B. Stuart. It's really an incredible book. Divesting Themselves of the sixth Sense was not the only short-sided decision that Disney made in this period. They also passed on making Lord of the Rings by way of Miram Max. Listen to our episode on that. And they also passed on the opportunity to buy Pixar at another time. So Disney divested the Sixth Sense, and shortly after, David Vogel left the company.

Wow.

So So the man who had brought it in was out before the film was released. The last thing he apparently said to Michael Eisner, I've left you with two of Disney's biggest pictures, Inspector Gadget in the sixth Sense.

Well, one of those is going to hit.

Rounding the corner here. Production on the sixth Sense wrapped without any major hitches. The one scene that the actors and Shyamalan felt unsure of at the time was actually my favorite scene in the film. And that's the final moment between Cole and his mother, Lynn. Me too. When he tells her he's ready to communicate. Yeah. So apparently, they didn't feel that they had necessarily captured what they needed in the scene because if you notice, a lot of the film is actually shot in long, unbroken takes in a lot of instances. And this was a scene that was split up with a good deal of coverage. They did, of course, get that scene, and that scene plays amazingly. It's really a powerful moment. Many of the actors didn't realize they were actually in a horror movie at all. Misha Barton later recalled that it wasn't until she did ADR that it really clicked for her. So, I actually had my little sister in the room doing ADR because we went to the studio in New York City, and she's just literally flipping out. You know how you're not supposed to make any noise in ADR? She screamed at the top of her lung.

My mom was like, Oh, my God. She had to take her outside. My sister's like, That's the scariest thing I've ever seen. I I never went back to school as just a regular kid anymore. All these kids went to the movie theater, and they were like, Is that you? The whole school treated me differently. I don't think the teachers knew what to do with me. That makes sense.

I mean, she leaves an impression.

She does, yeah. It was like a combination of cereal and bananas. They had her chew and spit up as well. It was pretty gnarly. There are also a number of scenes that were cut for pacing as well as rating. You guys can see those on the special edition DVD. There's a whole hospital floor of mutilated people that Cole sees before he tells Bruce Willis It's a secret. You just don't need it. And there are a couple of other things that made him seem too precocious. He speaks German to an old man at one point in the beginning. There's a whole Mr. Marshall character who gets cut. I think they're very good edits, as well as the very end of the film, originally ended with Bruce Willis' character in the wedding video, giving a wedding speech where he saying goodbye to his wife. And it's a hat on a hat. You didn't need it emotionally. So great editing. Great job to the whole team. Now, of course, Lizzie the Sixth Sense would make perfect sense as a fall release, right? Yes. It's spooky. It's spooky.

It's got a lot of fall foliage. It's in the northeast.

But it's a prestige picture as well in so many ways. Well, it was originally slated for a fall release, presumably around Halloween. Joe Roth was later quoted saying it had an October date originally. However, Spy Glass and Disney pulled that release up to the worst month of the summer, August, when everyone's on vacation and Like the Meg 2 comes out, for example. I actually enjoyed that one. But anywho, August eighth is going to be the release date, the dull drums of summer.

That's a bizarre time to release this.

Yeah, I couldn't find any super firm information about why. There are some quotes, and there are some reasons that make sense. So MGM's Stigmata was set to drop on September 10th, which was going to kick off a very... I don't know if you've seen it, Gabriel Byrne, Patricia Arquette.

I feel like they have I've seen that.

It was a crazy year for horror. Let me just run you through these titles. So the fall slate is going to be Stigmata, September 10th. Then it's Warner Brothers' remake of House on Haunted Hill on October 29th, the Jeffrey Rush, Fumke Janssen, Tay Digg's Hip version. Then Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow on November 17th.

Which I secretly love.

Oh, it's great. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Action Horror Vehicle, End of Days on November 24th, which is basically Stigmata with the Arnold in that one. And then The Mummy was that summer, as well as The Haunting that summer, as well as Lake Placid that summer. And my personal favorite, Deep Blue Sea. Also that summer, which we will cover at some point. I actually, though, researching this, believe that the real reason they wanted to pull it into August was because of a little scene movie called Stir of Echoes, starring Kevin Bacon. Have you ever seen that?

No, but I think it's written by Is that written by the same guy that wrote Jurassic Park? David Kep?

Yeah. It is. And it was directed by David Kep, too, I believe. Yeah. And it's based on a Richard Matheson short story. Actually, it's a really good movie. It's underrated. Kevin Bacon is great in it.

I love Kevin Bacon.

He's great. It's thematically very similar to the Sixth Sense. So it takes place in Chicago. A ghost is trying to find peace by communicating through the living. At first, we think they mean harm. They actually do not, Kevin Bacon's son has the ability to commune with ghosts.

Oh, wow.

It's very similar. And I think it's entirely possible that Spy Glass said, We're going to have to get our Ghost Story to the big screen first. We don't want to compete with this one. Now, unfortunately for M Night Shyamalan, Artisan had another film up their sleeve from 1999 that revolutionized horror films in a big way that came out of Sundance that year and had been made for almost no money. And it is actually back in the headlines today. Lizzie?

The The Blair witch Project.

The Blair witch Project. It was a found footage Sundance sensation. It was the perfect foil for the Sixth Sense. It's its opposite in so many ways. No name cast, no studio, no cinematographer.

Everything's handheld. You're going to barf while watching it.

Exactly. It was released wide in July of 1999, and the movie was a viral sensation. It grossed nearly $250 million worldwide, beat out all those other horror films I just listed. By comparison, studio horror films looked like dinosaurs with outdated price tags. And I think Shyamalan and the rest of the team were nervous that the Sixth Sense was going to be the also-run horror film of the year as a result. The test screenings for the Sixth Sense did go well. However, they'd lost their studio backing translation, more modest marketing campaign. And further, the trailer and promotional materials were focused on the horror-thriller elements as opposed to the emotional through line that Shyamalan cared about more, and the fact that Bruce Willis was the lead of the movie. But they had something that none of the other films they were competing with did. And Lizzie, that's that PG 13 rating.

The other ones are all R.

So the Sixth Sense, I would argue, is one of our best examples of a gateway horror crossover sensation.

Yes.

It became a four quadrant hit. It It opened wide on August eighth, 1999. It was M. Knight Shyamalan's 29th birthday, the day it released. Wow. It grossed $26.7 million its opening weekend, which was good for a $40 million movie. Very good, but not amazing. It unseated Runaway Bride for top of the box office. It was the biggest August opening weekend to date at that point in time. However, what really was incredible were its legs. So in its second weekend, when you normally expect a film to dip 40%, the Sixth Sense dived less than 5% to $25.7 million. It had found that mythical, fabled Sixth Sense force that executives dream of, Word mouths. Everyone and their mother wanted to see the sixth sense and that twist. And by everyone and their mother, I mean Lizzie and her mother.

That's right. My mother.

Roger Ebert had written of it, I have to admit, I was blindsided by the ending. The solution to many of the film's puzzlements is right there in plain view, and the movie hasn't cheated. But the very boldness of the storytelling carried me right past the crucial hints and right through to the end of the film, where everything takes on an intriguing new dimension.

That's the thing, is that I know that Shyamalan will become synonymous with the twist moving on, which is potentially a bit of a detriment more than anything else. But what is so good about this is to your point and that point as well, it doesn't come from nowhere. It is literally in front of your face. And the twist is what makes the whole rest of the movie makes sense. It's not there for the sake of being a twist. It's there because it gels everything altogether in this moment. And it's an emotional twist more than anything else. And I don't think he ever really hit that again.

I agree. I also think one of the reasons it's such a wonderful twist is that even if you were to end the movie on the scene of Cole and his mother, it It would still be an excellent movie. Yes. But it then just takes it to another level when you get the closure between Malcolm and his wife.

Well, and you realize what Cole was doing the whole time, too. Exactly.

It refocuses the entire film from an emotional perspective. And it doesn't feel like trickery meant to make you feel dumb. No. In fact, it actually feels like it's attempting to tell you the real power of this film is this little boy's ability to communicate in this big way. Anyway, Anyway, it's remarkable. So The Sixth Sense holds on to this number one position at the box office for five weeks in a row, grossing over $20 million each weekend. It's only the second film to do this after Titanic. So it's an enormous release. It violated not only every other horror release that year, but nearly every other release entirely. It ended its run with a worldwide gross of $672 million.

Whoa.

Good enough to be the second-highest Grossing Film of 1999.

Behind what?

Star Wars: The Fantom Menace. It doesn't even feel fair. No. I think. It remained the highest grossing horror film until 2017's It, and it is still the highest grossing horror film not based on IP.

Wow.

As a result of its agreement with Spy Glass, Disney only retained 12.5% of the back-end.

Dumb.

Conservatively, they missed out on a quarter of a billion dollars in profit. Joe Roth was later asked if he would have taken a different path regarding the distribution of the film. He did say, Would I do it again, knowing how it turned out? No, I would not have cofinanced it. But again, you can see going in with a rookie director, you would try to cover your downside. Hindsight is 2020.

To be fair, yes. I do understand.

I do, but also it was short-sighted because the moment it was sold, they were over halfway through production. And you have to believe that the dailies-were pretty good.were very good coming off of this movie. That's true. So I still understand. That being said, I don't want to let him entirely off the hook in this instance. I did read and take this with a hefty grain of salt because it comes from my least favorite book, I See Dead People: The Making of the sixth Sense. Don't buy it. I did read that Bruce Willis earned a total of $100 million off of the film because of his back-end points. Wow. That seems insane. Yeah. However, given that it did 672 million at the box office and became an extremely popular home video rental.

Yeah, it's possible.

Perhaps. I don't know. It seems high, but he certainly did well off of this film. The Sixth Sense was, of course, as much a critical success as a commercial one. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, Best picture, best director, best supporting actor for Haley Joel Osment, best supporting actress for Tony Colette, best original screenplay, and best editing. It unfortunately came out in what I would argue is one of the strongest years in the history of film. It won none of these awards. It was crowded out by that year's dramatic darling, American Beauty, which I believe took director, picture, and screenplay.

I would argue Sixth Sense should have gotten screenplay over American Beauty.

I would argue it probably should have gotten three, but that's just me. I like American Beauty, but I think this movie is more evocative of the time. Of course, Tony Colette lost to Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted. Sure. And Haley Joel-Osmett lost to Michael Cain in the Cider House Rules.

I'm going to go also boom. Even though I love Michael Cain.

Legacy Award.

I actually love Angelina Jolie, too.

They're both great. I just like this movie a lot. James Newton Howard was not nominated. Just absurd, in my opinion. And I believe it was Bruce Willis, oddly enough, who was most given short shrift- Yes. And not receiving a nod for best actor. I think this was his best last chance to receive a nomination for his work. I think it represents the pinnacle of his dramatic acting chops.

He's really good. He doesn't overdo it. There's a real softness to him in this that you don't get to see in so many other places. And yeah, I agree.

I think a lot of people who want to disparage him in the film or the film say, this was the movie that Shyamalan simply said, don't act. And I think they miss a lot of the subtlety. Yes. And candidly, the grace to give your young co-star the moment because he knows that Haley will carry these scenes and he doesn't need to overwhelm him.

Who said that? I'm mad at them.

It was a review. I read somewhere. I'll find them. You can dox them later. Call them up. Bruce concluded his contractual agreement, I believe, with Disney's The Kid, which I actually really liked with Spencer Breslin and Jean Smart. It's a John Turteltaub film. And then aside from his work with M. Night Shyamalan, of course, he moved away from this restrained pensive material and back into the action comedy fair that had been his bread and butter. He, of course, would do Antoine Fouquo's Cheers of the Sun, Live Free or Die Hard, Sin City, Looper. And I love Looper, but it's a much bigger movie than this. He is obviously now retired from acting following a diagnosis of aphasia and has a mixed track record of his relationship with directors. He obviously worked with Shyamalan multiple times. Antoine Fouquat once described him as the biggest pain in the ass on any set he's worked on. And Kevin Smith, I know, has no nice words to say about him. So it seems like a mixed record. But in terms of the sixth sense, it seems like he was a really positive force on the set. Haley Joel-Ozment went on to Steven Spielberg's AI, a movie that I think is criminally underrated, and we will cover at some point, Secondhand Lions and others.

He avoided many of the common pitfalls of being a child actor. But of course, the Whiz-Man doesn't quite fit like the Whiz-Kid did. He attended NYU just like M. Knight Shyamalan, and he does continue to find good work on screen, and he's carved out a great niche and animated voiceover. Tony Colette, of course, returned to Horror Lizzie with...

Yes, Hereditary.

I think in many ways, that is a Perfect Funhouse Mirror performance in reflection to her role as Lynn Sears in this film. Yes. The Sixth Sense was, of course, a cultural phenomenon. It jumpstarted M. Knight Shyamalan's flatlining career. He was claimed, or maybe self-proclaimed as the next Steven Spielberg. Very sentimental, precociously talented, but very good at genre. I don't think it's a ridiculous comparison to have made at that point in his career.

No.

But his name became synonymous with that genre and a cheap sleight of hand in later years. Lizzie, as you've said, the Shyamalan twist fell out of favor very quickly. I think folks soured on it around the time of signs, and then especially with the village. Signs.

Yeah. I mean, listen.

I'm a science apologist. Myself.

Is it fun? Yes. Is it incredibly dumb that they landed on a planet that's 70% water when they were allergic to water?

Let's not do that here. Yes.

Why would you do that?

Fair enough. Regardless of how you feel of his artistic merits, his His films have, on the whole, delivered at the box office in a way that few have, especially for someone who does mostly original material. They've cumulatively grossed well over $3 billion to date. We'll cover many more of his films in the future. Of course, he remains the only Indian-American man ever nominated for best director. He was only the third Asian-American man nominated for best director, and remains the fifth youngest person ever nominated for best director. I believe he's right behind Kenneth Brauna on that list.

Really?

Henry the Fifth, I want to say.

Yeah, that makes sense.

His next feature, Trap, starring Josh Hartnett, is set to release on August ninth, 2024. I'm in. Exactly 25 years after the Sixth Sense. I also secretly think that it's connected to the sixth Sense and that Haley Joel-Osmett's character is working with the police to find the guy killing all of these people because he can talk to the dead victims. Just a theory.

I hope that's what's happening. I mean, I do love that Shyamalan seems to have been building his Cinematic Universe from even his Super 8 films when he was a kid.

I love it. I love his Cinematic Universe, and now he's bringing the family into it. Listen, I'm all for the Netbo thing. His daughter has a film coming out called Watchers with one of the fanning girls in it. I actually think it looks really fun. And his other daughter is actually this musician that you see on stage at the concert in the trailer for Trap. She's like a rhythm and bluesman.

Oh, Raven something or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. Sakela Raven, something like Miss Raven or whatever. That's actually his other daughter. Listen. I'm fine with it. Go for it, guys.

I don't care. I'm going. I can't wait. Exactly.

Now, Lizzie, of course, there's one last character we're forgetting, and that is the former head of Hollywood Pictures, Casualty of the Disney Wars, David Vogtle, who was unceremoniously shuffled off before the film was released. After leaving Disney, he struggled to find another role in Hollywood at the same tier that he'd been at. I think got tired of the Machiavallian games, and he eventually left Tinsaltown to move to Palm Springs. He toyed with a few other things, including a brief period of retirement, but it didn't suit him. So he returned to what he knew best, which is cultivating young talent. So after working as City Commissioner, he spearheaded an initiative to teach students in the Palm Springs area, many of whom are lower income, digital literacy, specifically to give them the resources, meaning cameras and editing equipment, to create their own short films and to show in a film festival that he co-founded with his husband, Larry, called Digicom, that runs to this day.

That's amazing.

Yeah. He is not credited on the Sixth Sense. He never heard from his old bosses at Disney following the film's release. Wow. Not even a phone call. But he will always know that whatever that sense is for seeing a great film and a script that comes across your desk, he certainly has it. And that concludes our coverage of M Night Shyamalan's The sixth Sense.

Well, that was great, Chris. Good job.

Thanks.

What went right?

So many things. Lizzie, do you want to start or do you want me to start? I mean, there's so much to choose from in this film.

Sure, I can start. I mean, I think I'm going to go with an obvious one. I think it has to be Haley Joel-Ozment because even if you had everything else in place, but that kid wasn't quite right, this this just wouldn't work. If he was too sacrin, if he was too self-aware, overplayed, even just the tiniest bit, I do not think that this movie would be as successful as it is, but he is just pitch perfect in a way that's really crazy for a nine-year-old. So I will give it to Haley Joel and not his dad. I'm going to give it to just Haley Joel.

Well, Haley says, We thank you. Great. I will give mine, as you said, there's many that you could go with. You could Bruce Willis, obviously, Tony Colette. Amazing performance. It's Donnie Wallberg. I'd like to throw mine to M. Knight Shyamalan, the writer. Yes. I think regardless of what you think of him, most people would agree he's a very talented director, especially of the camera. I think that he lives and dies at the mercy of M. Knight Shyamalan, the writer. I think that sometimes his screenplays do pull rabbit out of the hat, and other times, they pull a very dead rabbit out of the hat, depending on how you feel. And this script is so understated in its approach. It's so simple. The scenes are not over explained. The logic of the film is treated in a mature way that assumes the audience will be able to figure things out and keep up. There are so many great moments where both the script and then the way in which it's executed with the camera feel seamless. One of my favorite scenes is when Bruce says, Let's play a game, and if I can read your mind, you take a step closer to me.

That scene is so well done. It's so simple. It's such a great trust exercise, and it's shot perfectly on top of it. So I will just say, not a lot of people could sit down and say, Oh, look, Jaws, Alien, Poltergeist. I'll write one of these, and then write something that in many ways transcends what those films did. Because Those films are amazing from a technical perspective and from a thrill perspective, and this movie has more heart than any of them. So mine goes out to M. Night Shyamalan, the writer. Kudos to you, good sir. I look forward to Trap, and I hope I'm right.

Yeah, me too. Well, I guess I'll give a little tease for our next episode, which I am deep in research on and I'm very, very excited for. Come back and join us next time for another movie with a very famous and very disturbing twist, which is Chinatown. My God, I saw one or two stories from this when I was like, We should do Chinatown. And I was like, Oh, this is going to be a wacky one. And now that I'm into it, I'm like, This is incredibly depressing and insane. So come back for cups full of pea. And forget it, Chris. It's Chinatown.

I'm very excited. Of course, guys, we have to give a shout out to our full stop patrons on Patreon. If you are interested in supporting this podcast, there are three ways to do so. One, stream at people on the street to tell them to listen to it. Two, log in to Apple podcast. Leave us a rating and review. Five stars, five stars. And three, head to www. Patreon. Com/whatwentwrongpodcast. You can sign up for free. You can also sign up at our $1 tier to vote on films that we will cover. You can sign up for $5 and get an ad-free RSS feed. Listen to all of our beautiful episodes with no ads. Or you can sign up at the $50 level to get a shoutout, just like the shoutouts we're about to do to Jake Killing. Kang, Just Kang. Andrew, Just Andrew. Matthew Jacobson. Grace, Just Grace. Ellen Singleton. Jewish Risa Mott. Lachland Morrow. Scott Gerwin, Sadie, just Sadie. Chris Leal, Leah Bowman.

My mother-in-law.

No relation. Steve Winterbauer, my dad, Don Shival. George, Just George, Rosemary Southward, my mother-in-law, Tom Christen, Nathan Orloff, Somen Chinani, and Michael McGrath. I really hope David put music behind that. To all of our full stop patrons, thank you so much for your continued support of this podcast. We love making these episodes for you guys, and we deeply appreciate it. Lizzie, anything else before we let these fine folks go?

No. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We appreciate it so much, and we'll see you next time for Chinatown.

Bye. Go to patreon. Com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong, and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod. Com. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman.