Twister (1996 film)

Twister
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Jan de Bont
Written by	Michael Crichton Anne-Marie Martin
Produced by	Ian Bryce Steven Spielberg Michael Crichton Kathleen Kennedy
Starring	Helen Hunt Bill Paxton Jami Gertz Cary Elwes Philip Seymour Hoffman Alan Ruck Zach Grenier
Cinematography	Jack N. Green
Edited by	Michael Kahn
Music by	Mark Mancina Eddie Van Halen
Production companies	Amblin Entertainment Constant C Productions
Distributed by	Warner Bros. (US) Universal Studios (International)
Release date	May 10, 1996 (1996-05-10)
Running time	113 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$75 million
Box office	$494,471,524

Twister is a 1996 American disaster/thriller film starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as "storm chasers" researching tornadoes. It was directed by Jan de Bont. The film was based upon a script by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin. Its executive producers were Steven Spielberg, Walter Parkes, Laurie MacDonald and Gerald R. Molen. Twister was the second-highest grossing film of 1996 domestically, with an estimated 55 million tickets sold in the US.

In the film, a team of storm chasers try to perfect a data-gathering instrument, designed to be released into the funnel of a tornado, while competing with another better-funded team with a similar device during a tornado outbreak across Oklahoma. The plot is a dramatized view of research projects like VORTEX of the NOAA and the device, called Dorothy, is copied from TOTO used in the 1980s by NSSL.

Twister is notable for being both the first Hollywood feature film to be released on DVD format and the last to be released on HD DVD. Twister has since been released on Blu-ray disc. It was nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound in 1997.

Plot

In June 1969, a young family takes shelter from an impending tornado. The father, in an attempt to save his family, tries to hold the cellar door down, but gets sucked into the tornado and killed. Watching in horror are the man's wife and his daughter Jo, who, despite the horror of the storm and losing her father, is entranced by the funnel. The film fades into the orbiting GOES 8 weather satellite in the present day and meteorologists at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) are discussing a building storm system over Oklahoma which could produce a record outbreak of tornadoes.

Meanwhile, retired storm chaser Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) and his fiancée Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz) are heading out to meet Bill’s former storm-chasing team to get the final divorce papers from Bill’s soon to be ex-wife, Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) who, since the day her father died, has sworn to hunt down as many tornadoes as possible, not wanting the same fate to happen to someone else. Besides Jo, the team consists of the eccentric Dusty Davis (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Robert “Rabbit” Nurick (Alan Ruck) navigator, Laurence (Jeremy Davies) photographer, Joey (Joey Slotnick), Alan Sanders (Sean Whalen) Rabbit’s driver, Tim "Beltzer" Lewis (Todd Field), Haynes (Wendle Jospeher) who rides with Beltzer, and Jason "Preacher" Rowe (Scott Thomson).

Jo, who is still in love with Bill, tries to stall because she does not want the marriage to end. Jo then tells Bill she wanted him out on the field because his idea for a tornado-analyzing device called 'Dorothy' has been built. They will put it in the path of a tornado to measure it from inside. Four of the so-called "Dorothy" weather machines have been built. Haynes tells them of storm activity, and they head out. Bill’s rival team shows up, led by Dr. Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes) with his assistant Eddie (Zach Grenier).

According to Bill, Jonas is in the storm-chasing business "for the money, not the science." Bill sees Jonas giving an interview to some local reporters and finds out that Jonas has stolen his idea for the Dorothy weather machine, building his own version called D.O.T. 3, or Digital Orphagraphic Telemeter. Bill accuses him of stealing his idea, but Jonas says it was an "unrealized idea." Bill decides to stay with the team for one day in an attempt to beat Jonas.

Bill's team heads out and Bill and Jo have a frank discussion of their marriage. Beltzer notices a small tornado, an F1, touching down in a nearby field and alerts the team. Jo and Bill drive into a ditch to get in front of it, but cannot get out of the ditch as the tornado closes in. They crash into a small wooden bridge and take cover under it. Jo wants to see the tornado up close, but Bill stops her just as the tornado lifts Jo's truck off the ground. Jo's truck falls in front of Melissa, who is driving Bill's truck. She drives around it, narrowly missing a collision.

Bill comforts her as Jo inspects the damage and takes some of the sensors from the destroyed Dorothy 1 machine. Jonas' team shows up but is too late to see the storm and keeps driving. Jo, with no truck of her own, manages to convince Bill to use his new truck to haul the Dorothy machines.

Bill's team heads out again as Bill, Jo, and Melissa ride in his truck. Another tornado, a slightly larger F2, has touched down, and both Bill's team and Jonas's team are heading to intercept it. Bill believes the tornado will shift its track, and his team heads off on a back road. Bill soon drives onto a bridge and they are caught in some waterspouts, which spin the truck. The team arrives just after the incident and while Jo celebrates with the team, Melissa breaks down, questioning Bill's old lifestyle.

The team goes to visit Jo's aunt, Meg Greene (Lois Smith), in the nearby town of Wakita, Oklahoma to rest and eat. Meg tells Jo privately that Jo's marriage with Bill ended because, "He didn't keep his part of the bargain."

As the team is watching TV, it mentions an F3 tornado is active, and the team heads out. Bill and Jo drive together in his truck, and Melissa rides with Dusty in his converted schoolbus. They almost crash into Jonas' team in an attempt to beat them. Bill's team attempts to figure out where the tornado is because according to their computers, it is heading towards them on the same road. Bill and Jo realize it is over a hill, and they go through a hailstorm to find it. Upon finding the tornado, Bill and Jo try to set up Dorothy 2, but run out of time. A power pole falls on the truck, ruining Dorothy 2. The tornado then lifts back into the clouds. Jo attempts to gather the scattered sensors, but Bill, realizing that the tornado has not dissipated but is simply back-building, pulls her into the truck as the tornado drops once more.

They drive to a safe distance, where Jo jumps out of the truck and again attempts to gather the scattered sensors. She grows angry about Bill's attempt to stop her, but Bill tells Jo she is obsessed to succeed with Dorothy to prevent what happened to her family from happening again. He also tells her he still has feelings for her. Melissa and Jo's whole team hear their conversation over the CB radio.

Bill's team heads to a drive-in theater, where Jo signs the divorce papers, while Melissa is in a motel room across the road watching a weather report of more tornadoes nearby. Dusty is watching the radar. Both Melissa's TV and the TV at the concession stand lose their reception as Dusty warns Bill that an F4 tornado is heading right for them. Everyone takes shelter in the pit of a car mechanic's garage while Jo watches it approach, spellbound, much like she had when she was a girl when her father was killed, until Bill's shouting breaks her trance and she gets the theatre employees to take cover. The tornado obliterates the theater, destroying several of the team's vehicles and Preacher is hurt when he is hit in the head by a flying hubcap.

The tornado passes, and the team emerges to inspect the damage. Dusty looks at the radar to find that the same tornado is now heading directly for Wakita - much to Jo's horror. Bill tells Melissa they are leaving to check on Aunt Meg, and Melissa peacefully breaks up with him, saying that she does not want to compete with his need to chase tornadoes. She tells him she is not at all upset about breaking up, knowing that their relationship would have ended sooner or later, and assures Bill that Jo needs him more.

Upon arriving in Wakita, they find the town is destroyed, and Jo realizes there had been no warning. Bill and Jo find Meg’s home on the verge of collapse. Upon entering, they find Meg pinned underneath a bookshelf. Jo and Bill rescue her and her dog Mose before the house collapses. Meg manages to escape the tornado with nothing more than "a bump on the head" and a broken wrist, and is taken to a hospital. Before leaving, she tells Jo that she needs to succeed to make sure what happened to Wakita doesn't happen again. Dusty listens to the radio, hearing that meteorologists are predicting rare F5 tornadoes. Jo comes up with a way to make Dorothy work while watching some wind chimes. She has Bill's team fabricate pinwheels out of aluminum cans, and attaches them to the sensors with screws to make them fly.

Bill and Jo come alongside a huge, mile-wide F5 tornado in the countryside. They put Dorothy 3 on the road in front of the tornado and then back up, but the winds push Dorothy around, and then a tree knocks Dorothy 3 over, scattering the sensors. The storm turns toward Bill and Jo, and they attempt to drive away. They become stuck when a tree wedges underneath the back end of their truck. A tanker fuel truck is pushed along the road toward their truck by the tornado, and knocks them free before exploding. Bill drives around the wreckage through the fireball, narrowly avoiding catastrophe. Bill drives ahead of the tornado, dodging as it drops farm vehicles on the road in front of him. They end up driving through a small house that is rolled by the tornado onto the road.

As Bill and Jo drive away, Jonas and Eddie ride to intercept the tornado and place their D.O.T. 3 pack. Jo and Bill, noticing that Jonas is driving too close to the tornado, warn him to change course but he ignores them. Eddie wants to heed Bill's warning, but Jonas orders him to keep driving. The tornado hurls a section of a TV tower through their windshield, impaling Eddie. Both teams watch in horror as Jonas's truck is lifted up by the tornado and thrown into the ground where it explodes, killing both Eddie and Jonas.

Bill and Jo then conclude there is one last option left. They head toward a new intercept point, turn on Dorothy 4 without releasing it from its moorings on the truckbed, and then drive the truck straight at the tornado. With the truck on cruise control they jump out, letting it drive into the center of the tornado where it successfully deploys Dorothy 4.

The team starts to celebrate as the Dorothy sensors work, analyzing the inside of the tornado, but then notice the tornado shifting. Bill and Jo notice it as well and flee to a nearby farm. They first take cover in a barn, but it is filled with sharp metal tools. It destroys the barn, and they dodge debris as they run to take cover in a small outbuilding. They find metal pipes inside this shelter and tie themselves to the pipes with leather belts. The tornado destroys the structure, and they are pulled upside down while anchored to the pipes. They manage to see the inside of the F5 tornado as it passes over them. It is filled with lightning and a smaller tornado in the core. Seconds later, the entire storm dissipates, and the family from the farm comes out of their underground storm shelter and observe their damaged farm. Bill and Jo debate who will run the lab and who will analyze the new data from Dorothy while the rest of the team arrives. The movie ends with Bill & Jo reconciling their relationship with a kiss, while the team celebrates their accomplishment.

Cast

• Helen Hunt as Dr. Jo Harding: The leader of her storm-chasing research team.
• Bill Paxton as Bill Harding (AKA The Extreme): Jo's estranged husband and former fellow storm-chaser.
• Jami Gertz as Dr. Melissa Reeves: Bill's new fiancée; her love for Bill is strained after she too takes part in storm-chasing.
• Philip Seymour Hoffman as Dustin 'Dusty' Davis: A wise-cracking member of Jo's chase team.
• Alan Ruck as Robert 'Rabbit' Nurick: The navigator for Jo's chase team.
• Jeremy Davies as Laurence: A quiet member of the team, in charge of photographing tornadoes.
• Joey Slotnick as Joey: In charge of taking measurements of wind and taking care of their Doppler radar.
• Sean Whalen as Alan Sanders: Rabbit's driver, usually chastised by Rabbit for folding instead of rolling the maps.
• Todd Field as Tim 'Beltzer' Lewis: Driver of the van that holds the Doppler and one of the more wild and dedicated members of the team.
• Wendle Josepher as Haynes: The youngest member (and only other female) of the team, rides with Beltzer.
• Scott Thomson as Jason 'Preacher' Rowe: Member of Jo's team, called Preacher because of the numerous religious references he gives.
• Lois Smith as Aunt Meg Greene: Jo's aunt and mother-figure to her team.
• Cary Elwes as Dr. Jonas Miller: The leader of the rival storm-chasing team; he aims to take credit for Bill's idea for DOROTHY in the pursuit of fame and profit.
• Zach Grenier as Eddie: Jonas's reluctant assistant.
• Alexa Vega as Young Jo: Witnesses her father killed by a powerful tornado.

Production

Twister was a joint production between Warner Bros. and Universal Studios. This fact is reflected on the marquee of a drive-in theater featured in the film: The Shining, a Warner Bros. release and Psycho, a Universal-owned production. Both studios had often collaborated with another of the film's production companies, Amblin Entertainment, prior to this film.

The original concept and 10-page tornado-chaser story were presented to Amblin Entertainment in 1992 by motion picture business consultant and award-winning screenwriter Jeffrey Hilton. Spielberg then presented the concept to writer Michael Crichton.

After spending more than half a year on pre-production on Godzilla, director Jan De Bont left after a dispute over the budget and quickly signed on for Twister. The production was plagued with numerous problems. Michael Crichton and his wife, Anne-Marie Martin, were paid a reported $2.5 million to write the screenplay. Joss Whedon was brought in to do rewrites through the early spring of 1995. When he got bronchitis, Steve Zaillian was brought in. Whedon returned and worked on revisions right through the start of shooting in May 1995. He left the project after getting married and two weeks into production, Jeff Nathanson was flown in to the set and worked on the script until principal photography ended.

Halfway through filming both Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps used to get the exposure down to make the sky behind the two actors look dark and stormy because it was too bright outside. Paxton remembers that "these things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I got back to my room, I couldn't see". To solve the problem, a Plexiglas filter was placed in front of the beams. The actors took eye drops and wore special glasses for a few days to recuperate. After filming in a ditch that contained bacteria, Hunt and Paxton had to have hepatitis shots. During the same scene, she repeatedly hit her head on a low wooden bridge because she was so exhausted from the demanding shoot that she forgot not to stand up so quickly. Hunt did one stunt in which she opened the door of a vehicle that was speeding through a cornfield, stood up on the passenger side and was hit by the door on the side of her head when she let it go momentarily. As result, some sources claim that Hunt got a concussion. De Bont said, "I love Helen to death, but you know, she can be also a little bit clumsy." She responded, "Clumsy? The guy burned my retinas, but I'm clumsy ... I thought I was a good sport. I don't know ultimately if Jan chalks me up as that or not, but one would hope so".

Some crew members felt De Bont was "out of control" and left five weeks into filming. The camera crew led by Don Burgess left the production after five weeks, claiming that De Bont "didn't know what he wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction, with all the equipment behind the view of the camera, and then he'd want to shoot in the other direction right away and we'd have to move [everything] and he'd get angry that we took too long ... and it was always everybody else's fault, never his". De Bont claims that they had to make schedules for at least three different scenes every day because the weather changed so often that "Don had trouble adjusting to that". When De Bont knocked over a camera assistant who had missed a cue, Burgess and his crew left, much to the shock of the cast. Burgess and his crew stayed on one more week until a replacement was found in Jack N. Green. Just before the end of the shoot, Green was injured when a hydraulic house set, designed to collapse on cue, was mistakenly activated with him inside it. A rigged ceiling hit him in the head and he injured his back and had to go to the hospital. Green missed the last two days of principal photography and De Bont took over as his own director of photography.

De Bont had to shoot many of the film's tornado-chasing scenes in bright sunlight when they could not get overcast skies and asked Industrial Light & Magic to more than double its original plan for 150 "digital sky-replacement" shots. Principal photography had a certain time limit because Hunt had to return to film another season of Mad About You but Paul Reiser was willing to delay it for two-and-a-half weeks when the Twister shoot was extended. De Bont insisted on using multiple cameras and this led to the exposure of 1.3 million feet of raw film (most films use no more than 300,000 feet).

De Bont claims that Twister cost close to $70 million with $2–3 million going to the director. It was speculated that last-minute re-shoots in March and April 1996 (to clarify a scene about Jo as a child) and overtime requirements in post-production and at ILM, raised the budget to $90 million. Warner Bros. moved up the film's release date from May 17 to May 10 in order to give it two weekends before Mission: Impossible opened.

The film is rated PG-13 in the USA for an "intense depiction of very bad weather".

The film is also rated PG in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom (not Ireland), which is odd, as the 'f-word' is used twice (once at the beginning, when Helen Hunt is on top of the van fixing the Doppler satellite dish, and second by Bill Paxton during the tornado chase when Paxton is activating Dorothy II, Hunt slams on the brakes, Paxton is launched forward into the edge of the cab of the Dodge Ram truck, yells and says "f***!")

Soundtrack

Twister featured both a traditional orchestral film score (by Mark Mancina) and several rock music songs, including an instrumental theme song composed and performed for the film by Van Halen. Both the rock soundtrack and the orchestral score were released separately on compact disc.

Rock Soundtrack

1. Van Halen - "Humans Being"
2. Rusted Root - "Virtual Reality"
3. Tori Amos - "Talula (BT's Tornado Mix)"
4. Alison Krauss - "Moments Like This"
5. Mark Knopfler - "Darling Pretty"
6. Soul Asylum - "Miss This"
7. Belly - "Broken"
8. k.d. lang - "Love Affair"
9. Nine Stories Feat. Lisa Loeb - "How"
10. Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Melancholy Mechanics"
11. Goo Goo Dolls - "Long Way Down"
12. Shania Twain - "No One Needs to Know"
13. Stevie Nicks Feat. Lindsey Buckingham - "Twisted"
14. Edward & Alex Van Halen - "Respect the Wind"
15. Deep Purple - Child in Time
16. Eric Clapton - Motherless Child

Orchestral Score

1. Oklahoma: Wheatfield
2. Oklahoma: Where's My Truck?
3. Oklahoma: Futility
4. Oklahoma: Downdraft
5. It's Coming: Drive In
6. It's Coming: The Big Suck
7. The Hunt: Going Green (Featuring Trevor Rabin on guitar)
8. The Hunt: Sculptures
9. The Hunt: Cow
10. The Hunt: Ditch
11. The Damage: Wakita
12. Hailstorm Hill: Bob's Road
13. Hailstorm Hill: We're Almost There
14. F5: Dorothy IV
15. F5: Mobile Home
16. F5: God's Finger
17. Other: William Tell Overture/Oklahoma Medley
18. Other: End Title/Respect the Wind - written by Edward and Alex Van Halen

There are some orchestrated tracks that were in the movie but were not released on the orchestral score, most notably the orchestrated intro to Humans Being from when Jo's team left Wakita to chase the Hailstorm Hill tornado. Other, lesser-known tracks omitted include an extended version of "Going Green" (when we first meet Jonas) and a short track from when the first tornado is initially spotted. Ironically, there are several parts released on the orchestral score that did not appear in the movie itself. Some of these parts include - but are not limited to - "Where's My Truck," the second half of "Ditch," the second half of "We're Almost There," and the first half of "Mobile Home."

Possible Sequel

While doing an interview with Bullz-Eye to promote the new season of HBO's Big Love, Bill Paxton revealed that he recently had a meeting with film producer Kathleen Kennedy about making a Twister 2. This would be the sequel to the 1996 film Twister that starred Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes and Jami Gertz. Paxton stated that he would like to direct the sequel if and when it is produced.

Reception

Reception to Twister was mixed, with a 58% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and a weighted mean score of 68 at Metacritic.

Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "You want loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment? Twister works. You want to think? Think twice about seeing it". In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Somehow Twister stays as uptempo and exuberant as a roller-coaster ride, neatly avoiding the idea of real danger". Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "Yet the images that linger longest in my memory are those of windswept livestock. And that, in a teacup, sums up everything that's right, and wrong, about this appealingly noisy but ultimately flyaway first blockbuster of summer". In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "But the ringmaster of this circus, the man without whom nothing would be possible, is director De Bont, who now must be considered Hollywood's top action specialist. An expert in making audiences squirm and twist, at making us feel the rush of experience right along with the actors, De Bont choreographs action and suspense so beautifully he makes it seem like a snap". Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "when action is never shown to have deadly or pitiable consequences, it tends toward abstraction. Pretty soon you're not tornado watching, you're special-effects watching". In his review for the Washington Post Desson Howe wrote, "it's a triumph of technology over storytelling and the actors' craft. Characters exist merely to tell a couple of jokes, cower in fear of downdrafts and otherwise kill time between tornadoes".

Urban Legend

On May 24, 1996, a tornado destroyed a drive-in theater in Niagara Falls, Ontario which was scheduled to show the movie Twister in a real-life parallel to a scene in the film in which a tornado destroys a drive-in during a showing of the film The Shining. The facts of this incident were exaggerated into an urban legend that the theater was actually playing Twister during the tornado.

On May 10, 2010, a tornado struck Fairfax, Oklahoma, destroying the farmhouse where numerous scenes in Twister were shot. J. Berry Harrison, the owner of the home and a former Oklahoma state senator, commented that the tornado appeared eerily similar to the fictitious one in the film. Harrison had lived in the home since 1978.

Theme park attraction

Main article: Twister...Ride it Out

The film was used as the basis for the attraction Twister...Ride It Out at Universal Studios Florida, which features filmed introductions by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

External links

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• Official site for the film
• Twister at IMDb
• Twister at AllMovie
• Twister at Rotten Tomatoes
• Twister Museum Wakita, Oklahoma
• Hear the theme song