You Must Remember This

Monty’s cataclysmic car accident throws a wrench in his stardom, his mental and physical health, and his relationship with Libby, who begins to see Monty’s other beloved female friend, Elizabeth Taylor, as an enemy. Monty tries to get his career on track by making a number of interesting films, including Lonelyhearts and Wild River. But by the time he’s shooting The Misfits in 1960, his relationship with Libby is so strained that she marries someone else – a man who doesn’t want his new wife to have anything to do with Clift, or anyone else who presents as queer.(00:00) Raintree County and Clift’s Crash(07:40) Libby vs. Liz Taylor(13:02) Written on the Wind(20:49) Jane Bowles’s amour fou(31:17) The Young Lions and Monty’s Broken Heart(38:30) Lonelyhearts(48:48) Monty’s Last Chance at Straight Romance(55:34) The Misfits (01:01:44) Libby Gets Married

Monty’s arc as a tragic romantic figure continues with I Confess and Terminal Station – even as his relationship with Libby becomes all consuming, in the decadent party scene at her secluded estate. Meanwhile, Libby brings her act singing black folk music to Broadway, but her dreams of renewed stardom turn out to be one thing money can’t buy.(00:00) Montgomery Clift’s Juggling Act(07:54) Partner Swapping with Paul Bowles(11:13) An American Tragedy vs. A Place in the Sun(16:09) I Confess(28:43) “Love relationships are ludicrous”(36:20) “Everything seemed erotic”(44:03) Blues, Ballads and Sin-Songs(50:49) Oedipal Overtones

With Red River, Montgomery Clift becomes a new kind of movie star, projecting a new kind of sexuality – while still figuring out how he wants to express his own sexuality. Meanwhile, Libby becomes entangled with bisexual couple Jane and Paul Bowles, whose globetrotting becomes an inspiration to Libby’s teenage son, ending in tragedy. Plus: did Libby forbid Monty from starring in Sunset Boulevard because the story of a young man and a haunted older woman hit too close to home?(00:00) Affair with Nick Ray and Influence on Key Largo(09:42) Digging Deeper into Black Folk Music(14:32) Jane and Paul Bowles(25:00) The Tragedy of Libby’s Son, Topper(32:15) Montgomery Clift’s Bisexuality(40:34) Red River as Queer Melodrama(48:53) The Heiress and Monty Reconnects with Libby(57:48) Did Libby Bar Monty From Starring in Sunset Boulevard?

Montgomery Clift enters the chat as a teenage acting prodigy who immediately attracts 34 year-old Libby’s attention. Through her sometime-lover Nicholas Ray, Libby starts exploring Black folk music, launching a new singing career in collaboration with guitarist Josh White (“One Meatball”). Plus Libby’s old friend Clifton Webb becomes a late-in-life, closeted movie star, and Tallulah – effectively banished from Hollywood a decade earlier due to her refusal to be discreet about her sexuality – triumphantly returns to the screen thanks to Alfred Hitchcock.(00:00) Libby and Monty “Under the Sheets”(03:51) Appreciation or Cultural Appropriation?(06:23) Nicholas Ray, Leadbelly, Josh White(13:24) No White Person Has Ever Sung Them in Public(22:02) Everybody is in Love With Monty(28:44) Tallulah Bankhead in Movie Jail(36:13) Lifeboat(40:20) Clifton Webb’s Queer Success Story(45:46) Libby Lashes Out at Older Women(51:08) The Black Widow and Josh White(58:45) Libby’s Only Movie

While the racist, antisemitic Southern authorities try to indict a pregnant Libby for the murder of her husband, the national media effectively puts her on trial. When Libby gives birth to a new Reynolds heir, the circus only grows bigger. Meanwhile, Hollywood gets to work dramatizing the case with the aid of stars such as Claudette Colbert, Jean Harlow and Libby’s friend Franchot Tone.(00:00) A Pre-Code Anti-Heroine(04:53) A “Peculiar Opinion” of Jews(11:09) Libby Testifies(17:23) Indicted by Jury, Convicted by Media(29:09) Who Actually Killed Smith Reynolds?(34:19) Pre-Code Movies Inspired by Libby’s Story(42:50) A Career Tainted by Scandal(52:38) Jean Harlow as Libby Holman(01:02:02) An American Tragedy(01:09:11) Lupe Velez, Libby’s Nemesis

While riding a crest of Broadway stardom – and in a serious romance with a woman – Libby is pursued by Zachary Smith Reynolds, the reckless, emotional teenage heir to the Camel tobacco fortune. Just months after their marriage, at the close of a drunken party, Reynolds is dead of a gunshot wound to the head. Was Libby responsible? Also: Tallulah Bankhead is brought to Hollywood to compete with bisexual icon Marlene Dietrich, while Libby, no stranger to blackface, wants to star in a film about Josephine Baker.(00:00) Libby’s Heiress Girlfriend(13:15) Libby’s Tobacco-Heir Boyfriend(19:25) Tallulah Bankhead & the Gary Cooper Threesome(37:16) Libby Tries to Play Josephine Baker in Movie(43:56) A Yankee Jewess on the Plantation(54:36) Who Shot Zachary Smith Reynolds?

Libby Holman, a Jewish girl from Cincinnati, arrives in Manhattan in 1925 and begins to make a name for herself as a torch singer, trading on her racially-ambiguous skin tone and deep voice at a time when white hipsters think the height of cool can be found in Harlem. Libby and friends like Tallulah Bankhead sojourned uptown not just to listen to Black music, but also to explore their bisexuality. Through mutual co-star Clifton Webb, Libby meets Jeanne Eagels – one of the greatest actresses of her generation, and a high-profile casualty of Roaring 20s debauchery.(00:00) Torch Singer, Accused Murderess, Bisexual(09:05) A Confederate Jew(17:53) Sex Appeal to Burn(25:59) “Coon Shouting” and Libby’s Racial Ambiguity(41:32) Blackface on Broadway with “Moanin’ Low”(49:10) Sex Tourism in Harlem(58:28) Jeanne Eagels

Listen to a trailer for The Bisexuals, the new season of You Must Remember This, coming September 15.A sultry, racially-ambiguous singer who became a sensation on Broadway in the late 1920s and 30s, Libby Holman popularized a number of jazz and blues standards of the Great American Songbook. At the height of her fame, Holman shocked her mostly queer coterie by marrying the heir to the Camel cigarettes fortune. Within months, Libby’s husband was dead, and Libby was accused of his murder. The ensuing scandal marked the star as a “black widow,” and in the years to come, a number of friends and lovers who drifted into Libby’s web wound up dead. The most famous of these was Montgomery Clift, who like Libby was bisexual, struggled with substance abuse, and felt misunderstood within a pop culture that increasingly demonized anyone who didn’t fit neatly into the post-WWII American ideal. Over 8 episodes – with a cast of characters including Elizabeth Taylor, Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Billie Holiday, Jane and Paul Bowles, Nicholas Ray and more – The Bisexuals will begin by describing Libby’s rise to stardom, and her sexually-fluid social life, in the New York theater scene of the 1920s. From there we’ll explore the murder scandal that transitioned her from fame to infamy in the 1930s. Then, we will skip to the 1940s and 50s, and a very different climate than the free-wheeling 1920s when Libby Holman thrived. The cultural pendulum had swung back the other way, and there was no possibility for a movie star like Monty Clift to be openly queer. By the time the social and sexual revolutions of the 60s began to be felt, both Libby and Monty were too deeply scarred by trauma, stigma and addiction to benefit.

If you're a fan of You Must Remember This, we think you'll also enjoy Talking Pictures, a podcast from TCM and HBO Max. On this episode, Oscar-nominated actress Rosie Perez sits down with host Ben Mankiewicz to discuss the films that shaped her career—Do the Right Thing and Fearless—as well as early favorites like Saturday Night Fever and Double Indemnity. She reflects on building a career in an industry that didn’t readily accept her for who she is, and speaks candidly about being raised in a strict Catholic home for girls. In the Super 8 segment, she tells Ben about an amazing boxing story she’d love to see on the big screen.Listen to Talking Pictures wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on HBO Max

If you like You Must Remember This, you might also enjoy Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford, a podcast about stories of historic human error, catastrophes, and heists, and the lessons we can learn from such mishaps. In this episode of Cautionary Tales, Tim examines what happens when the bright lights of Hollywood collide with the far less glamorous world of tax evasion. When Ernest Borgnine was cast as the lead in the 1955 romantic drama, Marty, he thought it was his big break. But he soon discovered Marty was not exactly a dream gig. Listen to Cautionary Tales every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’ve finished all episodes of The Old Man is Still Alive, I’ve got another treat for you from Jake Brennan at Hollywoodland.  Have a listen to this episode of Hollywoodland about John Waters, from his beginnings in X-rated art films to cult classics like Hairspray and Crybaby, as he created and cultivated his own peculiar niche in film while nurturing a legendary troupe of players who became a family of outcasts.

In part two of our season finale, we explore the final decade of John Huston’s life and career. As he was slowly dying of emphysema and undergoing massive turmoil in his personal life, Huston continued to work almost compulsively on both passion projects (The Man Who Would Be King, Wise Blood, Under the Volcano) and paycheck gigs (Annie). His career ended, fittingly, with two collaborations with the next generation of Hustons, Prizzi’s Honor and The Dead.

This series began with the story of a director who wrote his autobiography to secure his place in history after his career had gone down the drain. It ends with the story of a man who wrote his autobiography as a “dead man walking”...and then continued to make movies for another half a decade, until the literal last breath left his body. Hollywood’s original “nepo baby” director, John Huston was never a conventional studio system stalwart, and in some respects he was able to go with the flow of changing times a lot better than some of his contemporaries. In part one of our two-part season finale we’ll talk about his flight from Hollywood to Ireland, literally playing God, Huston’s long fallow period in the late 60s, Anjelica Huston’s misbegotten film debut, Huston’s reinvention in the New Hollywood era and the health crisis that almost ended it all.

This episode was originally released on March 3, 2015. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.She was the raven-haired beauty whose lily-white persona was forged by her supporting roles in Gone With the Wind and several Errol Flynn swashbucklers. He was the real-life swashbuckler, the heroic lover/drinker/fighter whose directorial debut The Maltese Falcon, was an enormous success. They met when Huston directed de Havilland in his second film, In This Our Life, and began an affair which would continue, on and off, through the decade, as he joined the Army and made several controversial documentaries exposing dark aspects of the war experience, and as she waged a war of her own, taking Warner Brothers to court to challenge the indentured servitude of the star contract system. De Havilland’s lawsuit went all the way to the California Supreme Court, and had massive implications on the future of labor in Hollywood and beyond.

How does an artist once perceived to be ahead of his time fall behind the times? The choreographer/director of Golden Age classics like Singin’ the Rain and Funny Face left Hollywood for all the 60s and the first half of the 70s, perfecting a certain brand of sophisticated comedy/romance abroad with films like Charade, Bedazzled and Two for the Road. His rough Hollywood re-entry was marked by exercises in nostalgia for eras gone by (Lucky Lady, a movie about Prohibition Era gangsters starring Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli; the 1930s spoof Movie Movie) and attempts to give audiences of the 80s what it was assumed they wanted (the sci-fi debacle Saturn 3, the sex comedy Blame it on Rio).

This episode was originally released on December 22, 2015. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.In the 1940s, Louis B. Mayer was the highest paid man in America, one of the first celebrity CEOs and the figurehead of what for most Americans was the most glamorous industry on Earth. In 1951, Mayer was fired from the studio that bore his name. What happened -- to Mayer, and to movies on the whole -- to hasten the end of the golden era of Hollywood?

George Cukor had always experimented within his relatively broad lane, often finding nuanced ways to explore women’s lives, including their sex lives, under the constraints of the Production Code. But after winning the best Director Oscar for Best Picture-winner My Fair Lady in 1964, Cukor’s career slowed down considerably, and as the 60s turned into the 70s and both gender roles and the movies went through massive changes, Cukor was still making the same kinds of things he would have made at the peak of the studio system, regarding which he adopted an extremely defensive stance. Then, suddenly, in 1981, with Rich and Famous, Cukor caught up with the sexual revolution – a decade too late.

This episode was originally released on March 21, 2017. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.How did a star whose persona seemed to be all about childlike joy and eternally vibrant sexuality die, single and childless, at the age of 36? In fact, the circumstances of Marilyn Monroe’s death are confusing and disputed. In this episode we will explore the last five years of her life, including the demise of her relationship with Arthur Miller, the troubled making of The Misfits, and Marilyn’s aborted final film, and try to sort out the various facts and conspiracy theories surrounding her death.

Henry Hathaway started directing in the early 1930s and though he made movies of all genres, he was particularly associated with Westerns. This allowed him to ride out the 1960s making pretty much the same kinds of movies with the same stars (Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum) that he had been working with for decades. But shortly after the massive success of Hathaway’s True Grit in 1969 – for which John Wayne won his only Oscar – the director felt he was being put out to pasture by a changing industry. His last film would be Hangup (also known as Super Dude) a work-for-hire that he claimed he took only as a favor to the producer, and which was dismissed at the time as a sop to the Blaxploitation trend - not least by Hathaway himself.

For over 40 years, William Wyler was one of Hollywood’s most dependable classicists, culminating in 1968 with the ultimate New Hollywood-era throwback to Old Hollywood, Funny Girl. Then, for his final film in 1970, Wyler uncharacteristically directed a searing indictment of contemporary race relations, called The Liberation of LB Jones.

This episode was originally released on January 6, 2015. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.This is the story of how Bette Davis evolved from a wannabe starlet who was constantly told she was too ugly for movies, to the most powerful woman in Hollywood, by playing heroines that had never been seen on screen before — to borrow a term from Davis herself, sympathetic “bitches.” After Pearl Harbor, the tenacious Bette became the figurehead of the Hollywood Canteen, a nightclub for servicemen staffed by stars, which was the locus of the industry’s most visible support of the troops on the home front.The Hollywood Canteen was a catalyst for propaganda in more ways than one, aims Hollywood furthered by telling the story of the Hollywood Canteen in a movie called, um, Hollywood Canteen, starring Davis, John Garfield, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre and other celebrities as “themselves.” The movie and most press accounts of the Canteen portray it as a miraculous force for good in the world, which it probably was, but that narrative leaves out a lot, including illicit affairs, a murder, and an FBI investigation whose findings would have an impact on the blacklist of the following decade

Hollywood’s 1960s began with Billy Wilder winning three Oscars for The Apartment. But Wilder’s biggest success would also prove to be his last film to be afforded such respectability, as Wilder largely abandoned the type of material that the Academy embraced, and veered gleefully into disreputability. Of the 9 films Wilder made in the 20 years after The Apartment, in this episode we’ll pay special attention to three that were engaged with the rapidly changing culture – in Hollywood and beyond: One, Two, Three (1961); Avanti (1972); and Fedora (1978).

This episode was originally released on December 14, 2021. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.In the mid-1960s, 47 year-old Dean Martin proves he's still got it by knocking the Beatles off the top of the pop charts, and by launching his long-running TV show, which brought a version of his nightclub act into America’s living rooms every week. But his middle-aged drunk schtick sours as the decade of hippies and Vietnam wears on. Sammy Davis Jr has his own challenges, living up to the expectations of a new generation of activists--and he only makes matters worse by embracing Richard Nixon. After disastrously dabbling with Motown, Sammy records “The Candy Man” -- a silly novelty single that he hated, but which ended up saving his career.

As a cameraman during World War II, George Stevens shot footage of the liberation of Dachau that showed the world the horrors of the Holocaust – and scarred Stevens himself for life. Pre-war, he had been a director of frothy comedies; post-war, he committed himself to making epic films about “moral disasters.” This yielded a number of masterpieces – A Place in the Sun, Giant, Shane – but by the mid-60s, though more in demand than ever as a director, Stevens felt he lost touch with the audience. He only released one film in the 1960s, The Greatest Story Ever Told – an epic about Jesus, and an epic flop – and then, in an attempt to come full circle to his comedy roots, concluded his career with The Only Game in Town (1970), an awkward mashup of old and new featuring the two biggest transitional stars of the day, Warren Beatty and Elizabeth Taylor.

This episode was originally released on October 28, 2014. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift were best friends and co-stars in three films. The first, A Place in the Sun, is an undisputed classic which captures both stars at the peak of their talents and physical beauty. The shoot of the second, Raintree County, was interrupted by a horrible car accident in which Clift’s face was disfigured. This episode tracks Taylor’s relationship with the troubled Clift, from their first, studio-setup date through his untimely death — the result of what some have called “Hollywood’s slowest suicide.”

Long an antagonist to Hollywood’s norms (not to mention its actresses), Preminger began the 1960s by directing a massive blockbuster (Exodus) and earning his second Oscar nomination (for directing The Cardinal). But towards the end of the decade, with 1967’s Hurry, Sundown, he began a run of six films which attempted to respond to changing times, all of which flopped. We’ll focus primarily on two of these: the much-maligned Skidoo, an indictment of both hippies and the true American establishment which Preminger prepared for by dropping acid with Timothy Leary; and the unfairly forgotten Such Good Friends, the rare sex comedy of the era to understand the extent to which the sexual revolution did little to liberate women from the expectations of men.

This episode was originally released on July 4, 2017. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.Jean Seberg made her first two films, Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse, for director Otto Preminger, a tyrannical svengali character whose methods would traumatize Jean for the rest of her life and career. No wonder she rebelled against this bad dad figure by marrying a handsome French opportunist. Meanwhile, Jane Fonda moves to New York, joins the Actors Studio, takes up with her own hyper-controlling male partner, and tries to define herself as something other than Henry Fonda’s daughter.

Hitch’s most iconic decade – a decade of Technicolor grandeur and peril inflicted on famous blondes – came to an end in 1964 with Marnie, a critical and box office flop which wounded Hitchcock’s ego and left him unsure how to move forward in a changing world. His subsequent four final films – Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, Family Plot – are the result of his efforts to mix up his formula for an era in which he felt ripped off by James Bond and mourned the decline of the Golden Age stars.

This episode was originally released on April 11, 2017. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.The quintessential “Hitchcock blonde,” Grace Kelly had an apparently charmed life. Her movies were mostly hits, her performances were largely well-reviewed, and she won an Oscar against stiff competition. Then she literally married a prince. Was it all as perfect as it seemed? Today we’ll explore Kelly’s public and private life (and the rumors that the two things were very different), her working relationship with Hitchcock, her Oscar-winning performance in The Country Girl, the royal marriage that took her away from Hollywood and Kelly’s very specific spin on blonde sexuality.

Vincente Minnelli was the ultimate creature of the studio system, spending twenty years working for MGM and perfecting a distinct brand of big-budget, beautifully designed, often musical entertainment, from Meet Me in St. Louis to An American in Paris, The Bad and the Beautiful to Gigi. Minnelli’s late period begins with two films he made toward the end of his run at MGM, his proto-psychedelic remake of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) and Two Weeks in Another Town, which painted such a caustic picture of moviemaking decadence that MGM forcibly recut it. Knocked off his game, with both his faculties and his power waning, Minnelli made a trilogy of films about reincarnation and rebirth, one of which starred his famous daughter, Liza. (00:00) Minnelli's Forgotten Masterpiece (06:08) The Ultimate Creature of the Studio System (09:51) Inventing the MGM Musical (12:48) Was Judy Garland's Husband Gay? (19:16) Gigi (24:12) Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (43:27) Orgies and Nervous Breakdowns (52:11) Minnelli's My Fair Lady (56:09) Barbra Streisand's Past Lives (01:01:20) Liza

This episode was originally released on December 1, 2015. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.Lana Turner, the legendary "Sweater Girl" was one of MGM’s prized contract players, the epitome of the mid-century sex goddess on-screen and an unlucky-in-love single mom off-screen who would burn through seven husbands and countless affairs. After nearly twenty years as a star not known for her acting prowess, Turner's career suddenly got interesting in the late 1950s, when the hits The Bad and the Beautiful, Peyton Place and Imitation of Life sparked a reappraisal of her talents. In the middle of this renaissance, Turner became embroiled in one of Hollywood history’s most shocking scandals: the murder of Turner’s boyfriend Johnny Stompanato at the hand of her 14 year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane.

In the 1960s, many American directors saw their fortunes turn after they notched massive hits. In the case of Howard Hawks – a director who had thrived in virtually every Hollywood genre since the late silent era– the undisputed masterpiece of Rio Bravo gave way to four poorly-received efforts, each of which bared the marks of a dying studio system, if they weren’t compromised by the literal dying off of the previous generation of stars. In the middle of this run, Hawks made Red Line 7000, a car racing drama which was at once familiar and personal to Hawks, and also totally foreign in that it was a movie set in the 1960s, infused with ‘60s sexual politics, and built around future New Hollywood star James Caan.  (00:00) Intro(01:33) The Auteur Theory(10:53) Hawks the Man's Man and the Hawksian Woman(15:03) Need for Speed(18:20) William Faulkner in Ancient Egypt(21:45) Megalomania(26:38) European Exile(29:03) Rio Bravo(32:11) On Safari for Hatari!(38:16) Man's Favorite Sport(42:25) Hawks's Sexual Revolution Movie(51:42) The Worst Night of Hawks's Professional Life(54:36) El Dorado(57:43) Accusations of Manipulating/Abusing Women(01:03:49) "It must be a nation of morons."(01:09:09) Hawks Dies After Tripping Over Dog

This episode was originally released on September 9, 2014. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.Humphrey Bogart is perhaps the most enduring icon of grown-up masculine cool to come out of Hollywood’s first century. But much of what we think of when we think of Bogart — the persona of the tough guy with the secret soft heart, his pairing on-screen and off with Lauren Bacall — coalesced late in Bogart’s life. Today we take a look at how Humphrey Bogart became Bogey, tracing his journey from blue blood beginnings through years of undistinguished work and outright failure (both in the movies and in love), to his emergence in the early 1940s as a symbol of wartime perseverance who could make sacrifice seem sexy. Finally, we’ll look at what it took to get him to take the leap into a fourth marriage that seemed to saved his life … until the world’s most glamorous stoic was faced with cancer.

Born in the 19th century, his career forged in the silent era, John Ford helped to invent the genre of the Western and still holds the record for the most Best Director Oscar wins of all time. Though he made films in all genres, and sometimes even tackled the same historical territory from different angles in different films, Ford had by the 1960s become synonymous with depictions of American history that honored maverick white men, while often villainizing, distorting or erasing Native Americans. In this episode, we will talk about the influence of Ford’s last masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and will look at Ford’s last two films, which to some extent feel like “mea culpas” for the offenses of his earlier career: the revisionist Western Cheyenne Autumn, and the female-centric adventure film 7 Women. (00:00) John Ford, Master of Manifest Destiny (07:59) John Ford, Joan Didion and John Wayne (15:37) Honorary Navajo in Monument Valley (36:22) Printing the Legend (41:22) Hawaiian Holiday (46:37) The "Mea Culpa" Era (58:47) Noble Failure or Turkey? (01:01:30) A Liminal Lesbian Classic (01:10:01) "I don't like porn!"

This episode was originally released on June 3, 2020. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.After the death of her first husband and creative partner, Polly moves to New York, where she swiftly meets and falls in love with Peter Bogdanovich. Together Polly and Peter build a life around the obsessive consumption of Hollywood movies, with Polly acting as Peter’s Jill-of-all-trades support system as he first ingratiates himself with the previous two generations of Hollywood auteurs as a critic/historian, and then makes his way into making his own films. Together, Polly and Peter write and produce Targets, Bogdanovich’s first credited feature, and also collaborate on a documentary about the great director John Ford. By the time Polly gives birth to their first daughter, she believes she and Peter are an indivisible, equal creative partnership — regardless of how credit is distributed in Hollywood.

In the mid-1930s, Fritz Lang fled Hitler and left a successful film career in Germany behind to come to America. After a 20 year career in Hollywood, Lang went back to a much-changed Germany to make two films that he had first developed in the 1920s, set in India but largely cast with non-Indian performers in brownface. Even Lang’s collaborators were concerned that these films, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb, were politically incorrect and out-of-date. How did the director behind some of the most influential films ever made end up here, and how can we understand his late movies – and his appearance as himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt – as the culmination of all that came before? (00:00) Fritz Lang (05:30) Femmes Fatale (15:28) Was Lang Blacklisted? (23:15) Marlene Dietrich and Baseball (30:40) Newspaper Noir (41:42) Fetishizing India in Post-Nazi Germany (51:30) A World-Class Troll (01:02:03) The Return of Mabuse (01:09:22) Lang and Godard

The director of It’s a Wonderful Life, who won five Oscars in the 1930s for films that embodied the pre-World War II notion of American exceptionalism, was pushed into semi-retirement by the early 50s by changes in tastes and political priorities. Capra was brought back to the Hollywood director’s chair by Frank Sinatra in the 1960s, but Capra quickly became embittered by an industry that he felt had left him behind, and in 1971 published an autobiography airing grievances about an industry that he believed was “stooping to cheap salacious pornography in a crazy bastardization of a great art to compete for the 'patronage' of deviates and masturbators.” (00:00) Introducing The Old Man is Still Alive (02:11) Frank Capra (06:22) Antisemitism and Adult Circumcision (11:59) Fascism vs. Communism (19:53) Propaganda (21:55) It's A Wonderful Life (26:22) Naming Names (37:15) "The new look in conformity" (01:02:03) Hitting Bottom

This episode was originally released on March 1, 2016. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season,The Old Man is Still Alive.In the late 1940s, as the country was moving to the right and there was pressure on Hollywood to do the same, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and John Huston all protested HUAC in ways that damaged their public personas and their ability to work in Hollywood. Hepburn’s outspokenness resulted in headlines branding her a "Red" and, allegedly, audiences stoning her films. Bogart and Huston were prominent members of the Committee For the First Amendment, a group of Hollywood stars who came to Washington to support the Hollywood Ten -- and lived to regret it. With their career futures uncertain, the trio collaborated on the most difficult film any of them would ever make, The African Queen.

A preview of the new season of You Must Remember This, which covers the late careers of Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli and ten other directors who began their careers in the silent or early sound eras, and were still making movies in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, in spite of the challenges posed by massive cultural changes and their advanced age. In this mini-episode we’ll discuss the parallels between this history and today, from the tech industry takeover of Hollywood to the late work of Coppola and Scorsese; the interview with George Cukor that inspired the title of this season; the Orson Welles-Peter Bogdanovich-Quentin Tarantino connection that informs the way we think about “old man” movies, and much more.

A new season of You Must Remember This is just over a month away, but to tide you over, have a listen to a special presentation: an episode of Nate DiMeo's wonderful podcast "The Memory Palace." This episode, titled "AKA Leo," tells the story of the lion that became iconically associated with MGM. If you like what you hear, check out Nate's fabulous new book, The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past, out now!

If you're enjoying You Must Remember This, you may also like Talking Pictures, a movie memories podcast. On this episode of Talking Pictures, you'll hear Ben Mankiewicz in conversation with Carol Burnett. Carol Burnett’s life has always spun around the movies. She tells Ben about her childhood spent in Hollywood movie theaters, the famous actor who helped her break into showbiz, and the movie parodies in her groundbreaking television variety show. In fact, at 91, Carol Burnett remembers more about movies than Ben! We cap it all off with a delightful Super 8 complete with seasonal gems. Plus, Carol and Ben discuss their Wordle stats…listen to find out who’s winning. Listen to Talking Pictures wherever you get your podcasts.

The first episode of You Must Remember This tells the story of actress Kim Novak -- a top box office draw of the late 1950s and the iconic star of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo -- and her painful struggles to assert herself from the mid-20th century through well into the 21st, in a Hollywood that repeatedly sent her the message that she was only valuable for the way she looked, while also insisting that she didn’t quite look good enough. Originally released in April 2014, this episode has been “lost” for almost as long due to copyright issues with its soundtrack. Today, in honor of the podcast’s ten year anniversary, we’re rereleasing this episode with new music, largely re-recorded voiceover, and just enough of the original episode intact so you can hear how far the show has come over the course of a decade.

Our first guest on Talking Pictures is writer director Nancy Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, The Holiday). Recorded at her home, host Ben Mankiewicz talks with Meyers about casting Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, getting script advice from Sunset Boulevard director Billy Wilder, and they discuss what it’s like to become famous for her interiors. Spoiler: it’s frustrating! Nancy Meyers also answers our Super 8 questionnaire and reveals which film had her running from the theater in absolute terror.

In part 2 of the Eyes Wide Shut story, the movie is finally unveiled, and critics are divided on its quality, and the use of digital effects to evade an NC-17 rating. Where could Hollywood eroticism go from here? We’ll wrap up the Erotic 90s story with some thoughts on Richard Gere’s two-decade journey from American Gigolo to becoming PEOPLE Magazine’s 1999 “Sexiest Man Alive,” and other ways in which time and politics combined to make that which was once transgressive harmlessly mainstream.

At the peak of their careers, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman left Hollywood for two years to collaborate with legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick on an erotic drama that the media speculated would pull back the curtain on maybe the most fascinating famous couple in the world. Though the meta element can’t be ignored, what Eyes Wide Shut actually ended up being is much more interesting. It’s a culmination of every theme and trope we’ve discussed across Erotic 80s and 90s, and the last film of the twentieth century headlined by American superstars to question the moral rot of the rich and powerful. In part 1 of the Eyes Wide Shut story, we’ll analyze the film and the media frenzy over the mystery of its making.

If Adrian Lyne’s Lolita became a case study of what Hollywood and America didn’t want to acknowledge about its sexualization of young girls, as the 90s came to a close the culture was full of “acceptable” depictions of teens in heat. Two hit films from 1998 and 1999, Wild Things and Cruel Intentions, adapted classic templates of adult sexual manipulation to turn teen girls into femme fatales (probably not coincidentally, both featured actresses, Neve Campbell and Sarah Michelle Gellar, who were famous for playing high school students on TV). Also no coincidence: these films entered the culture simultaneous to the debut of 17 year-old Britney Spears, whose videos and persona centered her status as “not a girl, not yet a woman.”

In the previous decade, Adrian Lyne had made two movies (Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal) that had grossed over $100 million in the US alone. With carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, he made an adaptation of the Nabokov novel about a 40-year-old pedophile’s obsession with his adolescent step-daughter – and no distributor wanted to release it. In a decade rife with the commodification and sexualization of young teens (see our previous episode on Drew Barrymore), what lines did Lyne’s Lolita cross?

One of the most notorious – and least seen – erotic narrative films of the 90s, Boxing Helena was the misbegotten passion project of Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David Lynch. Four years after Boxing Helena, the elder Lynch released one of his most controversial films, Lost Highway, which tackles similar themes as Boxing Helena, including male sexual fragility and the “Madonna-Whore” complex. Today we’ll talk about how Boxing Helena became bigger as a punchline than a movie, and we’ll trace David Lynch’s career as a provocateur to try to explain why his excavation of the dark, sexual core of Americana was celebrated when he made Blue Velvet, and pilloried a dozen years later when he made Lost Highway.

One of the only high-profile NC-17 releases post-Showgirls, David Cronenberg’s Crash was the kind of dark adult art film that the rating was supposedly created to support. We’ll talk about how Crash fits into Cronenberg’s filmography, why it was controversial when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 and when it was released in the US in 1997, how it played into the UK general election of 1997, how it functioned as an early warning against charismatic billionaires, and how it embodied a post-Prozac and pre-Viagara moment.

At the beginning of the 90s, lesbians were a punchline for a male-gaze-oriented media, an easy target for expressing the anxiety that women might not need men after all. By the middle of the decade, women-loving-women had become the heroes of a number of neo-noir crime films, but the culture at large still rejected lesbianism when not intended to arouse men. While The Matrix has widely been reappraised as a trans allegory after the transitions of its directors the Wachowski sisters, their previous feature Bound was transparently queer, but its reception was complicated by the media’s perception of its makers. Bound was released just a few months after the burial of an extremely similar film called Wild Side. Barely seen on its initial release amidst studio recutting and the suicide of its director, today Wild Side plays as a heartbreaking and troubling example of what could have been for its star Anne Heche, who would soon after become one-half of the most famous lesbian couple in Hollywood – and suffer the career consequences.

In Glitter & Might, a new series exploring the intersection of show business and politics, bestselling author Shawn Levy unpacks the story of Lew Wasserman, the shadowy legend who lorded over Hollywood for half a century. He was a feared deal-maker, credited with breaking the impasse that ended the 1960 actors’ and writers’ strike. Wasserman oversaw seismic innovations in the entertainment business, but none as impressive as the way he connected it to Washington. Every president from Kennedy to Clinton took his calls. And he was as comfortable dealing with gangsters as with politicians.Through original research and interviews with Wasserman's associates and the journalists who observed him, we learn how this mystery man definitively ruled many worlds.

Joe Eszterhas’s tenure as the hottest screenwriter in town ended with two notorious 1995 flops: the NC-17 rated Showgirls (directed, like Basic Instinct, by Paul Verhoeven) and Jade (produced, like Sliver, by Robert Evans), We’ll analyze why these films failed to connect with audiences in 1995, and, more importantly, why the media at the time seized on them as major embarrassments for the industry.

The 90s were obsessed with what magazine writer Tad Friend would describe as “do me feminism” – and the attendant fear that men could be victims of female sexual aggression. Two films from 1994 married these anxieties to the still-lingering bugaboo of the 80s, the powerful career woman. But though the female stars of The Last Seduction and Disclosure (Linda Fiorentino and Demi Moore) were styled almost identically, the films had very different points of view on the panic over female power.

Sharon Stone and Joe Eszterhas’s post-Basic Instinct reunion film was one of the most troubled productions of the 90s. A post-Hitchcock tale of sexual surveillance given a technological update for the 90s, after a long battle with the MPAA the sanitized, R-rated version of Sliver was rejected by critics and audiences, but the movie and the juicy gossip leaked from its production (which included a love pentagon involving both actress and screenwriter) only enhanced Sharon Stone’s aura as an old-school Hollywood star for a decade that didn’t know what to do with her.

Are men okay? Several films from 1993 answered that question with a resounding no. One of the highest grossing movies of its year, Adrian Lyne’s Indecent Proposal was misunderstood as a gimmick, and its insight into toxic masculinity and male sexual insecurity got lost in a media frenzy, much of it sparked by feminists. What had changed since Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, in Hollywood and in the culture? We’ll also talk about Proposal star Demi Moore as the controversial “diva” of the moment.

In the early 90s, Madonna was the biggest pop star in the world, and she used – and in the minds of some, squandered – her star capital to launch a multi-media exploration of sexuality: the album Erotica and its companion book Sex, followed by her starring role in the much-maligned erotic thriller Body of Evidence. What was Madonna really trying to do in 1992-1993, how was it perceived and misunderstood at the time, and how does the blowback she experienced then relate to how she is being criticized today?

While the MPAA’s confusing and hypocritical ratings decisions were leaving filmmakers flummoxed in the early 90s, cable TV was opening up new possibilities for erotic content. Today we will offer a brief history of sex on TV, and then focus on Red Shoe Diaries, the cheesy-but-charming late night softcore soap that was the brainchild of 9 ½ Weeks writers/producers Zalman King and Patricia Knop.

Culture in the 90s was obsessed with the sex lives of teenagers. This is a theme we will come back to several times throughout the season. In this episode, we’ll talk about Drew Barrymore, who became a massive star at age 7 in E.T., went to rehab at 13, became an emancipated minor at 15 and immediately started pushing buttons with naked photo shoots and her comeback role as a murderously seductive teen in Poison Ivy. With teenaged Drew scantily clas in magazines and on screen – and “Long Island Lolita” Amy Fisher making headlines for shooting her adult lover’s wife – the media was eager to exploit the precocious sexuality of other teen girls. But while she made her film debut in the Poison Ivy-esque The Crush, Alicia Silverstone vocally pushed back on being branded “the next Lolita”.

In the early 90s, one of the biggest scripted shows on TV was Murphy Brown, starring 40-something Candice Bergen as a product of the 60s whose high-powered career precluded marriage and family. When the character became a single mother, and was criticized for it by vice president Dan Quayle, a massive conversation about “family values” began that would change the culture – and, arguably, American politics. Off-screen, Bergen was married to French filmmaker Louis Malle. While his wife was in the middle of the “family values” maelstrom, Malle was making Damage, one of the most sexually intense films of the 90s, and one which used sexuality to explicitly critique the hypocrisy of politicians.

One of the biggest hits of 1992, Basic Instinct was sold as Michael Douglas’s return to Fatal Attraction territory, but its success owed to an alchemy of three other creatives: a writer (Joe Eszterhas) who was driven to become the highest-paid scribe in movies; a director (Paul Verhoeven) who was determined to redefine the amount of sex considered acceptable in a Hollywood movie; and a female lead (Sharon Stone) who had waited a long time for her breakout role, and finally found it in a bisexual murderess with the sheen of a Hitchcock blonde. We’ll talk about all of that, detailing the extremely messy production that was protested by LGBT activists – and its screenwriter – virtually from beginning to end, and examine Basic Instinct as a collision of toxicity and commerce that was emblematic of just-pre-Clinton era.

In the five years after the release of Fatal Attraction, Hollywood scrambled to make one movie after another about homes and workplaces invaded and threatened by sexy outsiders. Today we’ll talk about five of these films: Presumed Innocent (1990), The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992), Single White Female (1992), Consenting Adults (1992) and The Temp (1993).

One of the most controversial movies of the 1990s, Thelma & Louise pushed every hot button of the new decade: date rape, sexual harassment, the failure of the feminist movement to create real change for the working class, and how pissed off women were, or were not, entitled to be about all of the above. Though it made more noise as a media phenomenon than at the box office, Thelma & Louise made so many people so mad that it had the feeling of a turning point. We’ll talk about the anger the movie communicated, the anger it inspired, and debate its lasting legacy.

Hosted by Flea, founding member and bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, This Little Light is a podcast about falling in love with music. Flea interviews musical guests from all genres to discuss the teachers who guided them, the influences that inspired them, and how the lessons they learned as young musicians have shaped their creativity, resilience, and careers. This Little Light, a production of Cadence13 and Parallel, available now with new episodes dropping weekly, is available for free wherever you get your podcasts.

An enigmatic sex symbol dating back to the 70s, Theresa Russell made a play for Hollywood stardom in the late 80s and early 90s, making a number of films about the sexual commodification and role playing. Ken Russell’s Whore was marketed as a gritty answer to Pretty Woman, showing the “truth” about Los Angeles street prostitution. In Impulse, a neo-noir romance in which Russell plays an undercover cop posing as a sex working in a hopelessly corrupt LAPD, Russell was directed by Sondra Locke, longtime girlfriend and co-star of Clint Eastwood. When Eastwood dumped Locke while she was directing the movie, she fought back, instigating a series of lawsuits that revealed that Eastwood and his studio had conspired against her.

The first blockbuster about sex of the 90s, Pretty Woman both reinvigorated Richard Gere’s career, and turned Julia Roberts into the biggest female movie star of the era. We’ll dissect the gender politics of this fantasy about love between a streetwalker and a corporate villain, analyze its lasting appeal, and trace the wild rollercoaster ride of the first few years of Roberts’ movie stardom. Virtually unknown before 1989, within a year of Pretty Woman’s release Roberts was considered the most bankable woman in movies, a controversial icon of 90s womanhood and, eventually, a romantic antihero whose performances and personal life were put on a pedestal by a breathless media, only to be swiftly knocked down.

Erotic 80s began with a prologue about the short lived heyday of the X rating, pornography, and feminism. Erotic 90s begins with a prologue about the disastrous rollout of NC-17 –the X rating’s replacement – and the evolving state of both porn and feminism at the dawn of the 90s. Topics include David Lynch, Harvey Weinstein, “pro-porn” feminism, “the new morality,” video stores, Magic Johnson, date rape, and much more.

American independent film is launched into the mainstream by Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, starring James Spader as an impotent man who gets off on filming women talking about sex. Videotape also plays a role in a Spader film released almost simultaneously, Bad Influence, in which he plays a meek yuppie at the mercy of alpha male Rob Lowe – who was trying to rehabilitate his career after a tape leaked shot by the actor and documenting his real-life threesomes — one with a 16 year-old girl. We close the first half of this season talking about Lowe, Spader and how camcorder mediation of sex changed pop culture forever.

The 1988 baseball blockbuster Bull Durham confirms Kevin Costner as the ultimate squeaky-clean, all-American heartthrob, building on a sexual persona sparked the year before with the neonoir No Way Out. Today we’ll talk about why Costner was the quintessential safe hunk for the 80s, his alchemic chemistry with co-star Sean Young in No Way Out, and her subsequent rocky road through Hollywood misogyny.

The erotic thriller goes commercially mainstream with Fatal Attraction, a film which starts a national conversation about whether or not women can “have it all” – “it all” meaning both careers and marriage. Is Fatal Attraction an indictment of working women as “witches” and a call to roll back women’s rights, or a snapshot of extreme toxic masculinity? Plus: Dirty Dancing. Is it evil?

Billed as the hottest Hollywood film since Last Tango, 9 ½ Weeks was considered to have missed the mark by everyone who made it – including director Adrian Lyne, stars Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, producer/writer Zalman King and his wife, writer Patricia Knop. Today we’ll talk about why this intoxicating and troubling film is worth a second look, how to square away the arguably feminist finished product from a production process that robbed Basinger of agency, and we’ll explore the film Rourke and King re-teamed on as a re-do, Wild Orchid. We’ll also talk about Rourke’s “bad boy” persona, and his problematic relationship with his second wife and co-star, supermodel Carre Otis.

Just as the AIDS-related death of Rock Hudson was finally forcing straight people – and Hollywood – to acknowledge that epidemic, a film was released that transposed the new climate of sexual fear into a murder mystery. The sleeper hit of 1985, Jagged Edge turned Glenn Close from a respected actress into a star, and established the brand of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who would later write Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Almost a decade after radical feminists began to call for a crackdown on violent sexual imagery, Jagged Edge tried to have its cake and eat it, too: infusing its sex and violence – and its depiction of a career woman – with a fundamentally conservative point of view.

In a time of bombastic blockbusters (and Reagan’s re-election), two auteurs defy the norms by releases violent films about sexual obsession, sparking a controversial mini-trend which one critic dubs “Vioporn.” Kathleen Turner, then also starring in a family-friendly blockbuster, plays a sex worker with a double life in Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion. Brian DePalma, the most talked-about director of the moment, takes his tribute/critique of Hitchcock to the next level by casting Melanie Griffith – daughter of Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren – as a porn star in Body Double.

While the music video was still in its infancy as a cultural phenomenon, two films were released that were accused of aping the “MTV aesthetic”: Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance, and Risky Business, which turned Tom Cruise into a major star. Today we’ll talk about what the “MTV aesthetic” was and why it was considered a big deal for movies to be influenced about it, and we’ll examine how both of these movies treated sex work and race within the context of 80s social mores and Reagan capitalism.

1982 saw the release of three hit high school-set comedies about sex: Porky’s, The Last American Virgin and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The only one to survive as a classic, Fast Times turned Phoebe Cates – who also appeared in the Blue Lagoon rip-off Paradise the same year – into a frozen-in-time icon of adolescent sexuality. Today we’ll talk about this sudden explosion of teen sex on movie screens, and compare Cates’s public persona and attitude to on-screen sexuality to that of Blue Lagoon star Brooke Shields.

The New Hollywood directors of the late 1960s and 70s were the first generation of Hollywood filmmakers to grow up studying Hollywood movies as art. In 1981-1982, a number of those directors made actual or virtual remakes of classic Hollywood noir films, including Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, and Bob Rafelson’s The Postman Always Rings Twice; and Paul Schrader’s Cat People. What was the value of revisiting the tropes and narratives of 1940s noirs in the 80s, beyond the fact that the sexual relationships implied in the original movies could now be depicted graphically? Today we’ll talk about how these films played into the personas of stars Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner, how they challenged the standards of what could be shown in movies of the 80s – and how and why they were received extremely differently.

One of the most aesthetically influential movies of the ‘80s, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo sets a template for much of what we’re going to discuss this season: it’s about sex as a conduit for wealth, masks and double lives, and the role of danger in desire. Today we’ll talk about the sexual persona of Gigolo star Richard Gere in the early 1980s; the ways in which Gigolo and other films from 1980 (Dressed to Kill, Cruising) grapple with straight male anxiety over gay male visibility; and the tension between the promotion of sex-positivity for women and the anti-feminist backlash.

The sleeper hit of late 1979 was Blake Edwards’s sex farce 10, a comedic vivisection of a male midlife crisis, which turned 23 year-old California girl Bo Derek into a controversial cultural phenomenon. Derek’s early fame was framed in the media through the lens of her marriage to John Derek, who was 30 years her senior and who she met when she was 16. Today we’ll talk about Derek’s reign as a sex-positive bombshell in a time of extreme double standards, 10’s strangely prescient understanding of toxic masculinity, and the problem of how to frame teenage sexuality for adult consumption.

In 1968, the Production Code gave way to the ratings system, and the brief legitimacy of the X-rated movie. Today we’ll focus on two massive, X-rated hits released within a year of one another in 1972-1973: Deep Throat, the first hardcore porn movie to become a mainstream blockbuster; and the international art film sensation Last Tango in Paris. Both of these hits were products of a male-centered sexual revolution, and both of their female stars later described making these movies as equivalent to being raped. We’ll talk about how both films gave Hollywood permission to intermingle sex and violence in the name of both profits and art, and how both have been reassessed as documents of violence against women.

Desperate to be seen as cool and not a relic of an earlier age in 70s America, Sammy gets into porn and drugs. A Rat Pack reunion gives him renewed purpose, but causes Dean to alienate himself further. As their time begins to run out, both Sammy and Dino are forced to contemplate what it was all for. By the late ‘90s, they’re both gone. We’ll try to sort out the incredibly murky legacies they left behind.

In the mid-1960s, 47 year-old Dean Martin proves he's still got it by knocking the Beatles off the top of the pop charts, and by launching his long-running TV show, which brought a version of his nightclub act into America’s living rooms every week. But his middle-aged drunk schtick sours as the decade of hippies and Vietnam wears on. Sammy Davis Jr has his own challenges, living up to the expectations of a new generation of activists--and he only makes matters worse by embracing Richard Nixon. After disastrously dabbling with Motown, Sammy records “The Candy Man” -- a silly novelty single that he hated, but which ended up saving his career.

Released in 1965, Sammy Davis Jr.'s autobiography became an instant classic, one of the most dynamic celebrity memoirs ever published and a testament to Davis’s barrier-breaking success as a black man in America. But the story behind the book, which was conceived and developed by two white ghostwriters -- and the racial and sexual dynamics of Davis's life during the years leading up to its release, which included two marriages and one relationship with a white movie star which almost got him killed -- are even more fascinating.

In the early 40s, both Dean and Sammy idolized Frank Sinatra. 20 years later, they became Sinatra’s cohorts in the Rat Pack, and, through Vegas gigs and increasingly disposable movies, the trio set a standard for grown men behaving badly that’s still influential today. In this episode, we’ll reveal what the Rat Pack’s Vegas shows were really like -- racist, homophobic, misogynist warts and all. We’ll also discuss the web of corruption linking these performers to the Mafia and the Kennedys, culminating in the death of an actress, and the death of the pretense that the Rat Pack racket was all innocent fun.

After the breakup of Martin and Lewis, Dino has to figure out how to stand on his own as a solo act. He ends up developing an on-stage persona as a happy drunk, while at the same time, developing a resume as a serious actor in some of the biggest hits of the late 1950s, such as Some Came Running and Rio Bravo, through which he emerged as a kind of icon for the white masculinity crisis of the 1950s. How did Dino pull this off, and why was his interest in being taken seriously so apparently short-lived?

Sammy tests the power of his new celebrity, on Broadway and in Hollywood, where he stars in the most controversial movie musical with an all-Black cast of all time -- a movie which is still being suppressed today.

In the first half of the 1950s, Martin and Lewis mint money as movie stars--and find unique ways to make their access to gangsters payoff--but stardom tears them apart. During this period, Sammy tries to prove himself to a Hollywood that still has little use for Black performers. Then, a horrible accident changes Sammy’s life--and changes his perceived value to the gate-keepers of the entertainment industry.

Dean Martin meets and begins collaborating with Jerry Lewis. Martin and Lewis — an Italian and a Jew — become the most successful nightclub act in the country, and transition to Hollywood. Meanwhile, Sammy Davis Jr, determined to get the attention of the white entertainment world, starts working impressions of white stars into his act.

Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin would become icons for how immigrants and people of color could access the American Dream in the 20th Century. Both grew up in marginalized communities where they learned an ethos of success based on hustle. Today we’ll track both Dean and Sammy to major coming-of-age moments in the middle of World War II. Coming up in industrial Ohio as both a card dealer and a nightclub singer, Dean learns how and why the house always wins. As a child, Sammy joins his father’s touring dance act, and eventually becomes the main attraction, before the war forces him to encounter racism at a level he’d never experienced before.

When Hollywood mogul Walter Wanger (Jon Hamm) shot an agent he suspected was having an affair with his actress wife, Joan Bennett (Zooey Deschanel) — one of the key femme fatales of 1940s film noir — Bennett was the one who paid a public price for her husband’s crimes. Joan and Walter’s granddaughter/filmmaker Vanessa Hope, and film historian/podcaster Karina Longworth (You Must Remember This), tell the untold story of the Bennett/Wanger romance and professional partnership — a film noir played out in real life.

The Hollywood studio system begins to crumble, and Louella and Hedda decline and fall, too. But just as a new generation of filmmakers rises from the ashes and reinvents the movie business, so too does gossip find new life in a new look. We’ll end our season by talking about a woman who was the antithesis of Louella and Hedda -- liberal, Jewish, sexually forward, and so unwilling to play the industry’s games that she may have ensured the death of the gossip columnist as star.

Appalled by rock n’ roll and its racial and sexual implications, Hedda and Louella find themselves in further danger of obsolescence when the gossip game is turned upside down by CONFIDENTIAL Magazine.

Do you remember the first time you watched The Wizard of Oz? Those famous red ruby slippers are some of the most iconic objects in Hollywood history that still bring back nostalgic memories every time they’re seen. They became a rare collector’s item worth millions. In the summer of 2005, a pair was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in the small town of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. In No Place Like Home, C13Originals, a Cadence13 Studio, teams up with journalist Ariel Ramchandani and editor Seyward Darby for this documentary podcast to investigate a heist that dives into small town suspicions between local cops and the FBI, the fraught relationship between Grand Rapids and its most famous daughter, Judy Garland, and brings listeners inside the peculiar world of Hollywood memorabilia and the market for lost and stolen art. Although the shoes were eventually recovered, there are more questions left than answers. Who stole the shoes and where were they hiding for more than 13 years? No Place Like Home is available now on all podcast platforms.

The 1950s were a decade of massive contradictions in terms of national and cultural attitudes towards sex. As Louella Parsons struggled to keep up with these rapid changes -- and to compete with her bolder, bitchier rival Hedda Hopper -- she reflected and steered the sexual panic through her coverage of two stories: Rita Hayworth’s marriage to a Muslim prince, and Ingrid Bergman’s “illegitimate” pregnancy. Plus: the emergence of Sheilah Graham, the international woman of mystery who would eventually beat the gossip girls at their own game.

During an era in which Hollywood and Washington are shakily aligned in the witch hunting of actual and reputed socialists, Louella struggles to maintain her position as cheerleader for the status quo, while Hedda grabs a torch and tries to burn it all down, using celebrity gossip to further the racist, xenophobic interests of the FBI. There’s also a new competitor in town, who at once subversively spoke to and for Hollywood’s gay community, while also deflecting attention from his own sexuality by attacking others.

Louella’s daughter, Harriet Parsons, became a groundbreaking female film producer at a moment in history in which virtually all mainstream filmmakers were male. She was also a lesbian, at a time when being openly gay was unacceptable in Hollywood -- and, in much of America, illegal.

World War II begins to reveal the gulf between Louella’s conservative but essentially business-minded politics, and Hedda Hopper’s virulent right-wing fervor. These differences — and the glee with which Hopper would destroy lives to shore up political power and further her ideology — come through loud and clear in the stories of two controversies: the casting of Gone with the Wind, and the paternity trial of Charlie Chaplin. Meanwhile, Louella shows her devotion to Hearst by using her power to cripple Citizen Kane.

In 1938, washed-up actress Hedda Hopper is installed as a movie gossip columnist with the express purpose of puncturing the success of Louella and Hearst. But Hedda quickly establishes a voice of her own, revolutionary for its insistence on making movie gossip political. Once friends, Louella and Hedda become bitter rivals, egged on in their feud by a third party who sees Hedda as an ally in right-wing conservatism.

In 1923, Louella Parsons signed a contract with William Randolph Hearst for nationwide syndication of the first major Hollywood gossip column. Parsons quickly built a brand based on protecting (and whitewashing) Hollywood’s interests, as well as Hearst’s, relentlessly promoting — and spying on — Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies.

Both Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper worked for papers created by charismatic barons whose publications were nakedly corrupt, totally biased -- and absolutely mainstream. Once we get a feel for this media climate, we’ll trace Louella’s early years of struggle and reinvention on the road to her pioneering bylines, and, finally, her role in canonizing The Birth of a Nation -- the most viciously racist Hollywood blockbuster of all time.

You Must Remember This presents an exclusive first listen of the audio trailer for Mank, a David Fincher film about the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, coming to Netflix on December 4.