Today, we celebrate our.... Doomsday??
... and how one draft speech cemented the title "Independence Day"
“Now that's what *I* call a close encounter.”
Welcome to Earth! And welcome to Blurbal Diorama!
The master of disaster, Roland Emmerich, and his writing partner Dean Devlin, wanted to do a big budget alien invasion movie, inspired by Star Wars, The War of the Worlds, and disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.
Surely no one else was doing one at the same time? Well, no one apart from Tim Burton.
Burton’s movie, Mars Attacks, had been in development for over ten years by this point, and was due out in August 1996. Emmerich and Devlin refused to let a spoof comedy alien invasion beat them to the punch, so they manoeuvred their chess pieces to ensure their movie would invade cinemas first. In fact, the whole concept of the American holiday of Independence Day and 4th of July was so they could release it the month before Mars Attacks.
But would it have done better if it were called Doomsday, like the studio originally wanted?
“We can't be consumed by our petty differences any more. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive!
Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!”
That speech has become infamous in pop culture, often imitated, hardly bettered.
It actually started out as a placeholder for a speech that writer Dean Devlin was going to come back to later. The problem was, he forgot to come back to it! On the day they were set to film the speech, at 2am, he raced to quickly rewrite it as Bill Pullman rehearsed the scene.
But then he saw Pullman’s speech, saw how the extras reacted, and ended up changing absolutely nothing, except one single line…
“Today, we celebrate our Independence Day”
That was enough to get 20th Century Fox to agree on the name Independence Day, to acquire the rights to use that name from Warner Bros., and to finally forget the idea of calling the movie Doomsday!
And finally…
“Look at this. Look at what they make you give.”
Em x
"The most fun I’ve had listening to a podcast whilst burying a dead body. The facts presented in the episode made me re-think my life. I’ve never been so turned on. I wish the episode didn’t end. Em knows her stuff.”
Adam, Die Rollin’
(yes, this is a real quote, and I can confirm there are no dead bodies. Everything else is true though, according to Adam.)
ETA: The studio was originally referred to in this text as Universal - that’s incorrect, it was actually 20th Century Fox - apologies for the mixup!