I was listening to the DVD ...
Jacques who?: Bill Murray
Question: I was listening to the DVD commentary for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and noticed that when cowriters Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson discussed inspirations for the character of Zissou, the name was bleeped out. I'm guessing they were saying "Jacques Cousteau," but regardless of whether or not I'm right, why was the commentary censored?
Answer: They were clearly saying "Jacques Cousteau," and my best guess is that Miramax Home Entertainment's legal department counseled bleeping the name. Not because there's any legal reason you can't mention a person's name, particularly that of a famous person, but because there may have been concern about potential legal actions stemming from the claim that The Life Aquatic either exploited Jacques Cousteau's reputation without compensation or, worse, defamed Cousteau and damaged the commercial value of the name. Oceanographic adventurer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is, after all, a middle-aged lecher who smokes pot, breaks into another oceanographer's mid-ocean facility to "borrow" his equipment, exploits student interns and is less knowledgeable about sea life than his wife. It's one thing for everyone to assume that Zissou was modeled on Cousteau, and another to have the filmmakers actually saying so on the record. Though Cousteau himself died in 1997, at the age of 85, the Cousteau Society lives on and oversees a wide range of programs designed to protect and increase public awareness of water-based ecosystems. In 1996, two years before he died, Jacques Cousteau himself sued his own son, Jean-Michel Cousteau, to force him to rename his ecotourism resort in the Fiji Islands; Jacques argued that people might think the resort was somehow connected to the nonprofit Cousteau Society. That's the kind of litigious spirit that keeps lawyers in business and inclines in-house corporate counsel to recommend caution at all costs.
