In 2008, Ben Stiller made a war movie about people making a war movie, and in doing so, accidentally made one of the more prescient satires of 21st-century Hollywood ego, method acting, and the studio system's addiction to spectacle.

Tropic Thunder arrived as a big, dumb action-comedy on the surface and a razor-sharp industry roast underneath, skewering everything from Vietnam war epics to blockbuster bloat to the cult of the "serious actor."

Starting life as a Stiller passion project over a decade in development, it was championed by Steven Spielberg, and has an unrivalled mid-2000s ensemble; Stiller, Jack Black, and a nearly unrecognizable Robert Downey Jr., whose performance as a white Australian actor undergoing "pigmentation alteration" surgery to play a Black soldier showcased both his talent and the thin line of satire in Hollywood. It also, ironically, ended up with him getting an Academy Award nomination.

Tropic Thunder brilliantly satirizes Hollywood's ridiculousness, especially the extremes actors go for awards, but it remains controversial. Despite its flaws, Tropic Thunder remains a relevant critique of the film industry and its egos, prompting discussions about depictions of race, disability and the evolution of comedic boundaries in cinema.

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Hi, everyone. I'm Em, and welcome to verbal diorama, episode 354, Tropic Thunder.

This is the podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies, you know, and movies you don't. That's also the mini vanilla of patriots. Welcome to Verbal Diorama.

Whether you're a brand new listener, whether you're a regular returning listener, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast. I am, as always, so happy to have you here for the history and legacy of Tropic Thunder.

And if you are a brand new listener, welcome to this podcast.

You've got a lot of episodes to catch up on, but if you are a regular returning listener, thank you for continuing to listen and support this podcast for as long as you have this podcast has been going for over seven years now and 354 episodes, so it's been a long time in the making for this podcast. But I'm so happy to have you here. Thank you so much for your support. It genuinely means so much if you are new this podcast.

I do completely by myself. I have no help doing this podcast. So literally all the support is so grateful and so appreciated.

And I have been on a bit of a historic run on this podcast because recent episodes have included movies like the Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction, which are two of the biggest movies of all time that a lot of podcasts talk about.

Not a lot of podcasts seem to talk about Tropic Thunder or at least no podcasts that I'm aware of have talked about Tropic Thunder and and this is a movie that's been on the big list, which is a list of movies that I want to cover on this podcast for such a long time. And like all of the movies on the big list, I always say I'll get to them eventually and I've just never got round to Tropic Thunder until now.

And I think that's mostly because it is a very controversial movie for so many reasons. But the main reason is probably not the reason that you think so. War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Except being lampooned by Hollywood.

Grab a can of Booty Sweat and let's get into it. Deep in the jungles of Vietnam, the most expensive war movie never made is being filmed.

However, nothing is going well for first time director Damian Cockburn. The set is in disarray, the big name actors egos are taking over the production and so far filming is a disaster.

There's failing action star Tug Speedman, drug addicted comedian Jeff Portnoy, five time Academy Award winning method actor Kirk Lazarus, the only guy who's read the script and attended the boot camp, novice actor Kevin Sandusky and closeted gay Booty Sweat rapper Alpa Chino.

So Cockburn, after being threatened by profane ill tempered studio head Les Grossman that he'll shut down the movie, decides to film the whole thing guerrilla style to get the performances he needs from his prima donna actors.

He helicopters his cast deeper into the jungle with a skeleton crew, informs them that the real life set is rigged with hidden cameras, gives them the script and leaves them to their own devices, only to immediately step on an old landmine. Let's run through the cast.

We have Ben Stiller as Tug Speedman, Jack Black as Jeff Portnoy, Robert Downey Jr. As Kirk Lazarus, Nick Nolte as Four Leaf Tayback, Steve Coogan as Damian Cockburn, Jay Baruchel as Kevin Sandusky, Danny McBride as Cody Underwood, Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino, Bill Hader as Rob Slohom, Brandon Soo Hoo as Tran, Reggie Lee as Byong, Matthew McConaughey as Rick Peck and Tom Cruise as Les Grossman.

It also features cameos by Tobey Maguire, Tyra Banks, Maria Menounos, Martin Lawrence, the Mooney Suzuki, Jason Bateman, Lance Bass, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Alicia Silverstone, Christine Taylor and Jon Voight.

Although Bale nearly quit acting as a result of the gruelling production, the film received acclaim for showing a realistic depiction of being a prisoner of war.

Stiller was a relative unknown at the time of the film's production and observed the other actors returning from intense actor boot camps during used to prepare them for war scenes and he found it hilarious when his peers treated a two week simulated camping trip like a life changing traumatic combat experience. This contrast between Hollywood vanity and real world warfare became the core premise for a comedy script. Stiller met Justin Theroux in the mid-90s.

Thoreau was doing a play in New York with a friend of Stiller and the friend introduced them. They wanted to work together and Stiller mentioned this idea of a war based comedy. The idea made them laugh.

It was part Vietnam comedy, part making fun of Oscar winning actors and part action movie. A satire of the serious Vietnam based war movies that had made a name of Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola.

The initial script concept was to have actors go to a mock boot camp and return with post traumatic stress disorder.

Stiller already had a lot of the characters and the tone of the movie that he wanted to do, but it needed to be organised and turned into a proper script.

Estimates of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 970,000 to 3 million. Some 275,000 to 310,000 Cambodians, 20,000 to 62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 US service members died.

So Stiller, Theroux and Cohen would watch the DVD extras on Vietnam War movies. And not just Vietnam War movies, but war movies in general.

There would be interviews with the young actors playing these war heroes where they would liken their experience to fighting in an actual war. And this amused Stella, Thoreau and Cohen because what do you mean it's like fighting a war? It's nothing like fighting a war.

And it would be Steven Spielberg, a director who has won Best Picture and or Best Director awards for serious war movies like Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan and been nominated for War Horse, Letters From Iwo Jima and Bridge of Spies. Who would get credited for Tropic Thunder being made at all?

There was no Les Grossman character in it at all at this point, and Cruise suggested they needed a secondary villain other than the flaming dragon and its 12 year old leader. He suggested a greedy studio executive monitoring the movie and really showing how gross the back office of Hollywood could be.

A couple of weeks later he was renamed Philip Green and then in his final form Les Grossman. But the frequency of discussions with Tom Cruise slowed down because he's Tom Cruise.

It was to do allegedly with his off screen antics. Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom Inc. Which owned the studio, claimed Cruise's recent conduct had not been acceptable to Paramount.

His public appearances had been attracting increasingly negative publicity over the years. He had recently started a well publicised relationship with Katie Holmes.

Some might say that a role as a bold foul mouth studio executive would be exactly what was needed to overhaul his public image and win back critical favour. But I guess we'll come back to that. Originally, Ben Stiller had no intention to star in the movie. He was just the writer and director.

And then he had an idea, according to Vulture, to cast Keanu Reeves as Tug Speedman. And that is the obligatory Keanu reference for this episode in the bag.

Stiller frequently played a sleazy, fast talking Hollywood agent on the Ben Stiller show. And with Reeves as the potential movie's lead, Stiller could position himself as Speedman's two faced agent Rick Peck.

But somehow he nixed the idea of Keanu and opted to cast himself as Tug Speedman, leaving the role of super agent Rick Peck wide open.

Stiller wanted to cast Tom Cruise in the part, which was a cameo at the time, but Cruise couldn't get the script out of his head and kept coming back to Les Grossman with two caveats. One, that he wanted to play the role with large hands and two, he wanted to dance. And Cruise went all in on creating the character.

He didn't hold back at table readings. He went fully into the character and worked hard to make the character unique.

He'd never done anything like it before, he's never done anything like it since, and he fully embraced Les Grossman. Ben Stiller approached Robert Downey Jr. And he was in Hawaii on holiday during pre production on Iron Man.

Stiller and Downey met up in Hawaii, where Stiller told him he was casting for Tropic Thunder and he wanted him for the at the time, Irish method actor Kirk Lazarus.

After being told the character was going to have a pigmentation alteration to become African American, Downey was initially hesitant, saying casting him was the stupidest idea he'd ever heard.

But after thinking on it, he realised he wanted to do it to make fun of the extreme lengths actors will go, how pretentious they are and the absurdity of blackface.

Downey admitted he knew the role carried a massive risk of being a disastrous offensive misfire, but accepted because the target of the satire was was the actor's ego and not people of colour. It was Downey who changed Lazarus's nationality to Australian, mostly because he felt he could keep the accent up.

Downey also went method, choosing to continue playing the character outside of takes. He improvised many of his lines and yes, he stayed in character up until the DVD commentary, which is great, by the way.

I highly recommend listening to it. Downey modelled Lazarus on a mix of Russell Crowe, Colin Farrell and Daniel Day Lewis, but he'd also kind of take inspiration from his own father.

It was dubbed in post production by Robert Downey Senior. So technically, both Robert Downeys have voiced black characters in their time.

Howell plays a wealthy white man whose father refuses to pay for Harvard Law School, and when he's denied a student loan, he decides to take tanning pills to look like an African American man. As the only scholarships available are for black students, it was supposed to expose racial stereotyping and the ridiculousness of racism.

But members of the NAACP spoke out against the film and an African American student group at UCLA organised a picket of a cinema screening. And that's why no one ever really talks about Soul man anymore.

Downey would spend two hours in makeup for the role of Kirk Lazarus, including prosthetics by Rick Baker. Baker designed the specialised skin darkening and aesthetic look on set. Application was managed daily by makeup artists John Blake and Greg Nelson.

Baker had been originally asked to Photoshop several well known white Hollywood actors into black men by a DreamWorks executive and he didn't know why. Included in the list was Robert Downey Jr. The actual makeup Baker did in real life differed from his original Photoshopped images.

And where Tropic Thunder differs is the inclusion of an actual black actor to call out the ridiculous nature of a white Australian actor taking the role of black Staff Sergeant Lincoln Osiris for the role of Alpa Chino. After offering the part to Kevin Hart and him turning it down due to not being confident he could play a gay character, Mos Def was offered the part.

Not wanting to parody the rap industry, Mos Def asked the writers to change the character to an R and B musician. But R and B musicians don't tend to try transitioning into acting like rap stars do. It would lead to the actor leaving by mutual consent.

Brandon T. Jackson had taken part in 13 auditions for the character and would then get the call to offer him the role. Jeff Portnoy was written with Jack Black in mind and was partially based on Chris Farley, but the Eddie Murphy comparisons are right there.

Six people were charged with hand punching the curly human hair into the scalp, arms and chest. Each hair had to be punched individually. Producer Stuart Kornfeld would joke that Grossman was based on him as he was chubby and balding.

But then he would insist Grossman wasn't based on anyone in particular. It's been claimed though, that he's partially based on Scott Rudin, Joel Silver, Harvey Weinstein and Paramount head Sumner Redstone.

The same Sumner Redstone who had severed Paramount's relationship with Cruise a few years prior. A coincidence? I think not.

Cruise would don a whole body fat suit for the role A cotton jumpsuit that they attach layers of muscles and fat, and custom pads made out of foam and beading from the inside of a pillow. To mimic the fat movement, they had to make three suits.

The character moved around a lot, and Cruise would be so soaked in sweat that they rotated the suits. He would have one in the morning and then put on a fresh one after lunch.

His makeup would also be designed by the same person who did his makeup on Interview with the Vampire, Michele Burke. And it was Cruise who made up his own dance moves in a makeup test. It was Stiller who added the music.

And Les Grossman was unlike any character he'd played before, not just in looks, but in personality and mannerisms. Justin Theroux would come up with more vulgar lines for Cruise to read. The more F bombs, the better.

And within three days of filming, Cruise had the character in the bag. With the plan being the character wouldn't be used in promotional material and would be a surprise for fans.

They approached various sites that were hosting the image and quickly had it removed. Filming in Vietnam was outside of the realm of possibilities, so instead the production filmed on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

Mexico had also been considered, but Kauai offered generous tax breaks and had similar foliage, terrain and weather to Vietnam. Stiller spent more than 25 hours over six weeks exploring the island using all terrain vehicles, boats and helicopters.

Tropic Thunder was the first major studio production on Kauai in five years.

Much of the filming took place on private land as well as conservation status designated areas. Two units shot simultaneously on the island from the ground and an aerial unit shot shot from helicopters. And this is a wholly practical movie.

Many of the sets and the bridge used for one of the final scenes were built specifically for the movie in three months.

The island's erratic weather hampered filming with rain and lightning, which when you're working with minimal natural light and explosives, is not ideal. The production consulted with famed military advisor Dale Dye.

To make sure the military action and jargon depicted in the movie in the film's war sequences was accurate.

Dye and his company, Warrior Inc's advisors Mark Ebonhoek and Mike Stokoe were also on set as technical advisors for the first few weeks of filming the Vietnam battle sequences. Stiller wanted the movie's opening scene to be as real as possible, as if the actors had been through actual boot camp.

So Ebonhock, a retired Marine gunnery sergeant, worked to get the actors up to speed with weapons handling, tactical moving, basically giving them the look of realistic soldiers. They took them out for training with the weaponry, showed them how to fire, how to hold their weapons and reload.

And Jack Black took to working with the weapons. Like Jeff Portnoy to his jellybeans. Black became very proficient with the heaviest gun, an M60 machine gun which holds six several hundred rounds.

He injured himself during filming and spent most of the movie with bruised ribs.

Dale Dye also worked closely with costume designer Marlene Stewart to check all the military uniforms for authenticity as well as with stunt coordinator Brad Martin and his team of stuntmen who portrayed the US army infantrymen, Viet Cong soldiers and trans guerrilla army. The opening war scene was filmed over three weeks and required few 50 stuntmen to capture the feeling of being in a grand war movie.

Helicopter pilot and aerial coordinator Alan Perwin was brought in.

His credits include some of the best known war films of the last two decades, as well as Die Hard, the Lost, Jurassic park and Transformers, among others.

He was responsible for bringing in and flying the Vietnam era Huey military helicopters used during filming, as well as manning the aerial choppers used for air to air and air to ground filming. Perwin was a pioneer of the aerial cinematography industry and often put himself in danger to get shot.

Ben Stiller paid tribute to him at the time saying, quote, shocked about the loss of Alan Perwin, one of the best people I knew and the greatest pilots ever. I put my life in his hands many times, unquote.

Special effects coordinator Michael Manardas and his team are responsible for all the practical effects such as bullet hits Fire and smoke rocket explosions, Squibs and the Napalm Explosion.

The entire staggered explosion consisted of 12 separate explosions, the full run of which was completed in 1.25 seconds. Due to the size and cost of the 1.25 second explosion, it could only be performed once for the safety of the crew and cast.

The detonators were added one hour before the explosion and nobody was allowed to be within 400ft during detonation. Every actor except for Danny McBride's character who detonates the explosion was added digitally.

Some of the explosions and crashes were enhanced by CG to make them look more bombastic, excuse the pun, such as a crashing helicopter created by cg.

It was the first comedy that Academy Award winning visual effects supervisor Michael L. Fink had worked on and he quickly realised that making war funny would mean exaggerating things that were already pretty big.

The exploding bridge at the end was practical, but Stiller was shot separately and the explosion was enhanced by compositing several explosion elements into one shot. Mostly because real explosions don't tend to look as exciting once a dust cloud forms.

The effects within the fake trailers that pop up to give Hollywood context to the characters were handled by a variety of companies including CIS Vancouver, CIS Hollywood, cfe, Ignition in Santa Monica Asylum and Digital Backlot. CIS Hollywood worked on the Scorcher and Satan's Alley trailers and CFE did the Fatties trailer.

Asylum created Al Pacino's Booty Sweat commercial and CIS Vancouver worked on the Simple Jack trailer Digital backlot and Robert Stromberg created matte paintings for a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. Stromberg would later win Academy Awards for his work on Avatar and Alice in Wonderland.

And just speaking of those trailers, as a last minute replacement, Tobey Maguire agreed to two hours of filming for the fake Satan's Alley trailer as a favor to Stiller and his Wonder Boys co star Robert Downey Jr. Due to the extremes on the set, the extreme weather issues, extreme explosions and just extremes to the max of everything the production dished out, I survived Ben Stiller's comedy Death Camp T shirts for all the cast, the crew of the movie in the movie were all actual crew of Tropic Thunder, there were no actors playing crew members, but it just meant extra confusion because when Ben Still Stiller as Tug Speedman called cut because was it actual cut or was he just acting? So a new phrase was coined which was just stop.

And this would normally be the time that I go into the obligatory Keanu reference for the episode because I like to try and link him to every movie that I feature and he is the best of men. But I've already done it because as I said, Ben Stiller's original plan was to cast Keanu as Tug Speedman, but it never materialized.

The score for Tropic Thunder was composed by Theodore Shapiro and there were five songs in the movie that were not present on the official soundtrack and they are some of the biggest songs in the movie as well.

So Come On Feel the Noise by Quiet Riot, Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones, which is a Vietnam War movie special for what It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield, Low by Flo Rider and T Pain and Get Back by Ludacris. They were not on the soundtrack despite being very prevalent in the movie, especially Low by Flo Rider and Get Back by Ludacris.

Now this was the studio's big end of summer movie and they intentionally launched a massive multi month screening campaign to build word of mouth buzz and they targeted various demographics to see how audiences would react to the film's highly provocative satirical humor, specifically Robert Downey Jr. S character in Blackface and Ben Stiller's Simple Jack storyline.

Despite over two hundred and fifty screenings, including to the NAACP and to Camp Pendleton to show it to serving military personnel and their families, there was no major pushback and the pushback didn't happen until right before it premiered. Controversy erupted when national disability advocacy groups saw the online marketing materials and MOC posters.

In addition, other promotional websites were created for Make Pretty Skin Clinic, the fictitious company company that performed the surgery on Kirk Lazarus, along with one for the energy drink Booty Sweat, which we could also buy from Amazon and other retailers for a brief period.

The mockumentary was A parody of Hearts of Darkness, a filmmaker's apocalypse, it follows co writer Justin Theroux as a fictitious documentarian named Jan Jurgen documenting the behind the scenes aspect of the film within the film.

Marketing for the fake documentary included a movie poster and an official website prior to Tropic Thunder's release, and the mockumentary was released on the iTunes store after the movie's release and was also included on the home video release.

But even before release the disability advocates were not happy and a consortium of groups including the Special Olympics and the Down Syndrome association of Los Angeles contacted DreamWorks and set up a meeting with CEO Stacy Snyder and other senior executives to discuss their concerns about Tropic Thunder.

At the premiere, several dozen disability advocates converged to protest the comedic use of the R word, chanting Ban the movie. Ban the word. Marchers carried signs with slogans like R Word equals Hate Speech and passed out flyers urging a boycott of the movie.

Security was visibly tighter. Views of the red carpet, which are normally unobstructed to the public, were blocked off by a 10 foot high green fence.

Additionally, there was no premiere afterparty, which is usually customary for such a high profile summer film.

But interestingly, although there were many protests about the R word and the depiction of the character of Simple Jack, there were no protests about blackface.

Tropic Thunder would stay in the top 10 for seven weeks and true to his word, Robert Downey Jr. S Kirk Lazarus didn't drop character till he'd done the DVD commentary, which was recorded the morning of the premiere.

Jack Black was 45 minutes late for the recording, but honestly, it speaks to the talent of Robert Downey Jr. That he holds the accent for almost two hours before he then transitions to an Australian Accent.

On its $92 million budget, Tropic Thunder grossed $110.5 million domestically and $85.2 million internationally, for a total worldwide gross of $195.7 million. Paramount were delighted with the success of the movie because not only was it a financial success but a critical one too.

It has an 82% of rotten tomatoes with a critics consensus of with biting satire, plenty of subversive humor and an unforgettable turn by Robert Downey Jr. Tropic Thunder is a triumphant late summer comedy.

Ads were produced by Paramount Pictures featuring Downey as Kirk Lazarus, showcasing unseen scenes from the Satan's Alley and intended for early for your consideration awareness for Downey's multi layered role in the movie. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would nominate Downey for Best Supporting Actor.

But at the 81st Academy Awards Downey lost to Heath Ledger who won posthumously for his role as the Joker in the Dark Knight. And I think even five time Academy Award winning Kirk Lazarus would concede his award award to Heath Ledger.

It's worth adding at this point that no one has won an Academy Award for acting five times. Four is the record held by Katharine Hepburn.

Daniel Day Lewis, who Lazarus was partially based on, has three, as does Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman, Frances McDormand, Sean Penn and Walter Brennan.

There of course is no sequel to Tropic Thunder, but a Les Grossman spin off has been in the works for some time and something Tom Cruise has always talked about fondly.

Tropic Thunder is interesting in the context of it being a movie I genuinely enjoy, but a movie that also shows its flaws quite openly and honestly.

As a satire of the lengths actors will go to get these coveted awards, it's pretty flawless the idea that an actor will go fully method live as the character behave as the character when the camera stops rolling. It's a pretty silly thing, especially when the character isn't a great character.

But the varied response to Tropic Thunder genuinely interests me because generally speaking, reading the thoughts of black people who've seen this movie and the fact it was viewed by black journalists and members of the NAACP, Robert Downey Jr. Isn't seen as a controversial depiction of blackface. In fact, considering the topic is blackface, the backlash was minimal and continues to be so.

And that's simply because blackface has historically been a way for white people to create caricatures of black people, to mock them and to promote racial stereotypes. Now, you could think that was what Downey was doing. He was using the African American vernacular, English. He was using slang.

He was using stereotypical black mannerisms. He was, to all intents and purposes, masquerading as a black man.

So much so that when Brandon T. Jackson's mother visited the set, she had no idea who the other black man was supposed to be. But Downey was never mocking black people. He was mocking the actors who would have done this. It doesn't excuse blackface.

And just because Downey did it, it doesn't give anyone else the right to have their own pigmentation alteration procedure. But the intention seems to be very clear. Hollywood was the aim. And I think this is where the Simple Jack stuff unfortunately took it way too far.

Because while Downey was subtle, as subtle as you can be pretending to be black when you're white, Simple Jack did turn into a caricature of mentally disabled people.

And while the intention was still to satirize emotionally exploitative depictions of of mental disability in movies like Rain Man, Forrest Gump, I Am Sam, as well as the actors who take these roles, it unfortunately offended a lot of people and it does not hold up well. The copious usage of the R word is really unfortunate because this movie would hold up so much better without it.

I've always been a fan of Tom Cruise. When he steps outside of being Tom Cruise, I like it when he plays against type. So I thought he was hilarious in this movie.

But again, that's not really something that's generally spoken about as much as the controversy surrounding the Simple Jack character. Ben Stiller says he makes no apologies for this movie.

Hollywood doesn't like to satirize itself much nowadays, and audience tastes have changed somewhat, but it still remains relevant to Hollywood's hypocrisy and hubris. It remains an absurd peek into the Hollywood machine and to what lengths a studio executive will go to make money and keep things under wraps.

It shone a light on the industry not many movies will even attempt to try and highlighted the absurdity, the gall and the self importance of actors who will do anything for that Oscar. And if anything, we got a movie where Tom Cruise twerks, Apple Bar and jeans and boots with the fur. Thank you for listening.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on Tropic Thunder. And thank you for your continued support of this podcast.

So if you do enjoy a good Hollywood satire then I would highly recommend the movie Zoolander. And I'd also recommend my episode on Zoolander which is episode 265. So the next episode Come on babe, why don't we paint the town.

Join me next episode for maybe more of my singing for the history and legacy of Chicago. And finally,

Bye.