A little over two years since the resolution of SAG-AFTRA and Writers’ Guild of America strikes, Hollywood is still not back on track. Fewer movies are being released in theatres. The threat of Trumpian tariffs looms, despite widespread confusion about how to apply them to a film. And AI actors are apparently a thing now. Life at the dream factory is looking rather bleak.
Which is perhaps why What Went Wrong feels like such a balm for the cinephile’s soul. Between shifting from bi-monthly to weekly episode releases and having their first live show this month despite tough times in the wider industry, it’s been a big year for the increasingly popular podcast.
At the top of each episode of this film podcast, we’re told that the show is about “movies, and how it’s nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one.” Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett, longtime hosts, take turns telling each other about the troubled production histories of movies across the last century. The films have so far spanned from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), all the way up to Cats (2019). Bonus Patreon episodes cover some current releases, too.
Both Winterbauer and Bassett are well-versed in how the film industry works; he is a director, and she is an ex-actor who spent years working at IMDB. As such, they come at What Went Wrong from a place of empathy, even when discussing some of the most easily and frequently derided films of the last few decades. We’re talking Glitter, Gigli, 50 Shades of Grey, Cats...
Jokes are still made – no one here is trying to pass off nonsense as great art – but they’re affectionate jibes, not cheap shots. The only people who get ripped apart are those whose reckless cruelty has made the lives of people who work for them and with them so much harder. Harvey Weinstein is a frequent villain, and in the episode on Braveheart, Bassett’s evisceration of Mel Gibson’s abhorrent behaviour is both justified and bracing. They also give short shrift to those who have implemented poor standards of on-set safety, which, in the cases of movies like The Crow and Twilight Zone: The Movie, have cost lives.
The decision to cover some of the worst of cinema right alongside the pantheon of greats is one of the show’s best. Because What Went Wrong is primarily concerned with films from a production standpoint, rather than a reception one, the podcast serves as something of a cinematic equalizer. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve made Howard the Duck or The Shawshank Redemption; difficult studio executives, unexpected injuries, bad press cycles, casting problems, and budgetary issues do not discriminate based on quality.
The podcast is not so much a love letter to the movies as a love letter to making movies. It celebrates the miraculous nature of the process and all the people who push each film further along the production line that ends up on the big screen.
Consequently, as well as being entertaining, What Went Wrong is also educational. Winterbauer in particular is deft at explaining technical jargon in a comprehensible, yet never patronising way. There are semi-regular ‘Below the Line’ episodes, which feature illuminating interviews with people who’ve worked in movies in positions that don’t typically get a lot of attention, like script supervisors and casting directors. Sporadic ‘Primers’ (or, as Winterbauer insists on calling them in a running joke of a pronunciation battle, ‘Primmers’) offer quick guides to genres and major Hollywood figures that wouldn’t fit in a main episode.
Above all, the key to why What Went Wrong is always such a compelling listen is that Winterbauer and Bassett are excellent storytellers. They take their research seriously, and that research pays off; these stories are detailed and fascinating, offering both valuable behind-the-scenes insight into the nitty-gritty of movie-making and all-too-human tales of ambition, arrogance, hope, and disappointment.
It’s funny how similar the feeling of pressing play on a new episode of What Went Wrong is to sitting down in a movie theatre, waiting for the show to begin. In a number of cases, the behind-the-scenes stories our hosts weave so wonderfully are more engaging than the films themselves.
Like almost every area of our lives at the moment, the movie industry is in wild, unnerving flux; it’s hard to know what the state of things will be in five years, let alone fifty. Listening to What Went Wrong each week offers a comforting, enlightening reminder of an industry that’s weathered many storms over more than a century of existence, and the multitudinous ways in which it’s continued to endure.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.