Twister (1996 film)

In June 1969 Oklahoma, young Jo Thornton and her family are awakened by an approaching F5 tornado. The family seeks refuge in their storm cellar, but the tornado rips the cellar door off and pulls Jo's father to his death.

Twenty-seven years after the death of Jo's father, the National Severe Storms Laboratory predicts a record outbreak of tornadoes in Oklahoma over a 24-hour period. Now an adult, Jo, a meteorologist and storm chaser, is reunited with her estranged husband, Bill Harding, a former weather researcher and fellow storm chaser, who has since moved on to become a television weather reporter; he is planning to marry reproductive therapist Melissa Reeves. However, his plans are delayed until Jo signs her long-overdue divorce papers. Visiting to Jo's camp to get her to complete the forms, he finds that she and her team have built four tornado research devices called DOROTHY based on Bill's design. Each unit contains hundreds of sensors that, if picked up by a tornado, will provide data that could lead to breakthroughs in meteorological research. Before Jo can finish the paperwork, her team rushes to intercept a nearby forming F1 tornado, forcing Bill and Melissa to chase after her. Bill encounters Dr. Jonas Miller, a corporate-funded meteorologist and long-time rival storm chaser, and learns that he has created a device called DOT-3, a blatant copy of DOROTHY. Bill vows to help Jo deploy DOROTHY before Jonas can deploy DOT-3 and claim credit for the idea.

In an attempt to deploy DOROTHY and get back to his regular life, Bill maneuvers Jo's Jeep Gladiator off-road into a muddy ditch towards the rapidly growing tornado. They collide with a small wooden bridge and find themselves trapped in the direct path of the oncoming tornado. As they take cover, Jo's truck and DOROTHY I are both picked up and destroyed by the tornado.

A second tornado is spotted. Jonas and his team are also moving to intercept the storm cell, which has at this point grown into an F2 tornado. However, Bill's intuition that the tornado will shift towards another direction sends them off seemingly in the right direction. Bill, Jo, and Melissa have a dangerous encounter with twin waterspout tornadoes on a enclosed road and they're spun round, which leaves Melissa shaken. The rest of the team, however, is ecstatic about the encounter and convince Jo to let them go visit Jo's Aunt Meg in the nearby town of Wakita for food and rest.

While there, the team informs Melissa about Jo's backstory, explaining that Jo has since become obsessed with ensuring nobody else suffers the same fate as her father. Jo, realizing she is falling in love with Bill again, isolates herself from the rest of the group and is confronted by Aunt Meg, who tells her that no matter what happens, they will always end up together.

They learn an F3 tornado is quickly forming in a neighboring county. As the team attempts to intercept the F3, the tornado initially fails to appear. They make yet another attempt to deploy a DOROTHY unit, but the tornado forms on top of them, damaging the truck and destroying DOROTHY II in the process. Overwhelmed by these recent events and racked with guilt over her father's death, Jo begins to despair. As their emotions run high, Bill tells Jo that he's still in love with her, unaware that Melissa is hearing the conversation over CB radio.

That night, the team stays in a hotel next to a drive-in cinema. Jo decides to fill out the remaining divorce papers but is interrupted when an F4 tornado forms nearby, forcing her team as well as townspeople caught in the storm to take shelter. The theater, a repair shop, and much of the team’s equipment are heavily damaged. Finding herself traumatized by the recent near-death experiences and recognizing the re-blossoming love between Bill and Jo, Melissa peacefully ends her relationship with Bill and makes her own way home. The tornado continues on to devastate the town of Wakita, injuring Aunt Meg and flattening her home. Aunt Meg is taken to a nearby hospital but pushes Jo not to give up, reminding her of Wakita having essentially been hit blind by the tornado as they had no warning, the tornado sirens having barely gone off before it struck. The team hears that an F5 is forming close by and in a brief moment of quiet, Jo absently watches Aunt Meg's wind chimes. The image inspires an epiphany and she begins to form a plan to improve and deploy the next DOROTHY unit.

As the sun starts to rise, the team sets out to intercept the F5 tornado, which has grown to be over a mile wide. Bill and Jo lay the newly altered DOROTHY III directly in the F5's path, but it is destroyed by an uprooted tree. Meanwhile, Jonas attempts to deploy DOT-3 in a similar fashion, ignoring Bill's repeated warnings that his team is too close and that the tornado is shifting directly towards them. A metal tower impales Jonas' driver, Eddie, and their vehicle is swept into the tornado and thrown to the ground, killing both men and destroying DOT-3 in the resulting explosion. Bill and Jo press on, realizing that the only way to successfully deploy DOROTHY IV is by driving directly into the tornado and jumping out before Bill's truck is swept away. The plan works and the rest of the team celebrates the successful deployment of DOROTHY IV. However, Bill and Jo's celebration is cut short when the F5 shifts direction towards them. They flee into the nearby cornfields and take shelter in a water pump facility, fastening themselves to deeply rooted pipes. As the tornado passes overhead, they are able to see the interior of the tornado, before the storm dissipates altogether. The rest of the team arrives on scene to celebrate the achievement while Jo and Bill excitedly plan the next phase of research, deciding to run their own lab and rekindle their marriage.

Gary England, Jeff Lazalier, and Rick Mitchell appear as themselves on local television news reports.[4]

Twister was produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, with financial backing from Warner Bros. Pictures and Universal Pictures.[1] In return, Warner Bros. was given the North American distribution rights while Universal's joint venture distribution company UIP got the international distribution.[1][5] The original concept and 10-page tornado-chaser story were presented to Amblin Entertainment in 1992 by screenwriter Jeffrey Hilton. Steven Spielberg then presented the concept to writer Michael Crichton. Crichton and his wife, Anne-Marie Martin, were paid a reported $2.5 million to write the screenplay.

After spending more than half a year of pre-production on Godzilla, director Jan de Bont left the project after a dispute over its budget, and quickly signed on for Twister.[6]

The production was plagued with problems. Joss Whedon was brought in to rewrite through the early spring of 1995. When he got bronchitis, Steven Zaillian was brought in. Whedon returned and worked on revisions right through the start of shooting in May 1995, then left the project after getting married. Two weeks into production, Jeff Nathanson was flown to the set and worked on the script until principal photography ended.[6]

Filming was to originally take place in California, but De Bont insisted the film be shot on location in Oklahoma. Shooting commenced all over the state; several scenes, including the opening scene where the characters meet each other, as well as the first tornado chase in the Jeep pickup, were filmed in Fairfax, Oklahoma and Ralston, Oklahoma.[7] The scene at the automotive repair shop was filmed in Maysville, Oklahoma and Norman, Oklahoma. The waterspouts were filmed on Kaw Lake near Kaw City, Oklahoma. The drive-in scene was filmed at a real drive-in theater in Guthrie, Oklahoma, though some of the scene, such as Melissa's hotel room, was filmed in Stillwater, Oklahoma near Oklahoma State University's campus. The real town of Wakita, Oklahoma was used during filming, and a section of the older part of town was demolished for the film. Additional scenes and B-roll were filmed near Ponca City and Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, among several other smaller farm towns across the state.[8] However, due to changing seasons that massively transformed the look of Oklahoma's topography, filming was moved to Iowa. The climactic scene with the F5 tornado was almost entirely shot around Eldora, Iowa, with the cornfield the characters run through being located near Ames, Iowa.[9][10] The "twister hill" scene was shot on 130th Street near the small town of Pilot Mound, Iowa. After primary filming had wrapped, additional pick-up shots and reshoots, which included the opening scene and additional footage of the drive-in tornado, took place in Bolton, Ontario.

Halfway through filming, both Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps used to make the sky behind the two actors look dark and stormy. Paxton remembers that "these things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I got back to my room, I couldn't see".[6] 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 particularly unsanitary ditch, Hunt and Paxton needed hepatitis shots. During the same sequence, Hunt repeatedly hit her head on a low wooden bridge, so exhausted from the demanding shoot that she stood up so quickly her head struck a beam.[6] During one stunt in which Hunt opened the door of a vehicle speeding through a cornfield, she momentarily let go of the door and it struck her on the side of the head. Some sources claim she received a concussion in the incident. 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".[6]

Some crew members, feeling that De Bont was "out of control", left the five weeks into filming.[6] The camera crew led by Don Burgess claimed 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".[6] De Bont claims that they had to schedule at least three scenes every day because the weather changed so often, and "Don had trouble adjusting to that".[6] When De Bont knocked over a camera assistant in a fit of rage who missed a cue, Burgess and his crew walked off the set, much to the shock of the cast. They remained one more week until Jack N. Green's crew agreed to replace them. Two days before the end of filming, 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 injured his back, requiring him to be hospitalized. De Bont took over as his own director of photography for the remaining shots.[6]

Because overcast skies were not always available, De Bont had to shoot many of the film's tornado-chasing scenes in bright sunlight, requiring Industrial Light & Magic to more than double its original plan for 150 "digital sky-replacement" shots.[6] Principal photography was originally given a deadline to allow Hunt to return to appear in another season of Mad About You, but when shooting ran over schedule, series creator and actor Paul Reiser agreed to delay the show's production for two-and-a-half weeks so Twister could finish. De Bont insisted on using multiple cameras, which led to the exposure of 1.3 million feet of film, compared to the usual maximum of 300,000 feet.[6]

De Bont claims that Twister cost close to $70 million, of which $2–3 million went 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.[6] Warner Bros. moved up the film's release date from May 17 to 10, to give it two weekends before Mission: Impossible opened.

Twister is known for its successful product placement, featuring a Dodge Ram pickup truck and several other new vehicle models.

Prints of Twister came with a note from De Bont, suggesting that exhibitors play the film at a higher volume than normal for full effect.

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. The film's music was released on compact disc.

On May 24, 1996, a tornado destroyed Screen No. 3 at the Can-View Drive-In, a drive-in theater in Thorold, Ontario, which was scheduled to show Twister later that evening, 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.[23] The facts of this incident were exaggerated into an urban legend that the theater was actually playing Twister during the tornado.[24]

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. He had lived in the home since 1978.[25]

Bill Paxton would later narrate storm chaser Sean Casey's 2011 documentary Tornado Alley. After the death of Paxton in February 2017, hundreds of storm chasers and users of the Spotter Network used their markers to spell out his initials across the states of Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma in tribute to the late actor.[26]

A Twister museum located in Wakita, where much of the particularly destructive scenes of the movie were shot, contains various memorabilia and artifacts related to the film.[27]

In June 2020, a reboot was announced to be in development from Universal Pictures, with Joseph Kosinski in early negotiations to serve as director. Frank Marshall and Sarah Scott will serve as producers on the project.[30]

• Into the Storm: A film released in 2014, with a similar film plot to Twister.
• 1999 Oklahoma tornado outbreak

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