Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - Karina Longworth

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

Karina Longworth -- author, film critic, and host of the award-winning Hollywood history podcast, "You Must Remember This" -- joins Gilbert and Frank for a deep dive into a variety of fascinating topics, including: the reclusiveness of Dean Martin, the kinkiness of "The Black Cat," the mysterious deaths of Thomas Ince and William Desmond Taylor, the curious friendship between Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi and the premiere of YMRT's new season, "Erotic 80s." Also, Orson Welles romances Eartha Kitt, Patton Oswalt portrays Boris Karloff, JFK turns his back on Sammy Davis Jr. and William Randolph Hearst "takes a shot" at Charlie Chaplin. PLUS: The genius of Polly Platt! The trials of Fatty Arbuckle! The "secret" life of Errol Flynn! The dark magic of Kenneth Anger! And Gilbert and Karina debate the talents of Lon Chaney Jr! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Only $4 on now. Dine-in only Frank Santopadre. Our guest this week is a writer, researcher, journalist, historian, and the creator, writer, producer, and narrator of the award-winning storytelling podcast, You Must Remember This, dedicated to the secret and forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. She's also a former editor at the LA Weekly and Village Voice, as well as a contributor to Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Slate, and The Daily Beast, just to name a few. Her collected film criticism won Entertainment Reviews of the Year Award from Los Angeles Press Club. And she's also received a National Entertainment Journalism Award, along with other honors.

As an author, she's also written a book, Seduction, Sex and Lives and Stardom in Howard Hughes Hollywood. And Hollywood Frame by Frame about the history of Hollywood still photography. She's also the author of Masters of Cinema, George Lucas, as well as books about the acting careers of both Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. Her immensely popular and much admired podcast, now in its ninth year, has covered topics ranging from the careers of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. to Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, to the history of MGM Studios, to the Hollywood Blacklist, and has featured guest voices and appearances

from performers including John Mulaney, Dana Carvey, Fred Savage, and Pat Noswald. The show has also garnered praise from the Washington Post, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, and the New York Times, and was named the best podcast of 2020 by Time, Rolling Stone, Vulture, and Sight & Sound. Frank and I are looking forward to talking to a fellow podcaster and showbiz obsessive, and a woman who says she finds herself strangely attracted to Bela Lugosi, possibly because of his resemblance to Ben Gazzara. Well, that's something we have in common.

The talented Karina Longworth. Wow, what an intro. Thank you so much. Karina, it doubles. Giving her a blessing. It doubles as an obituary. You just have to add, found dead in Hollywood apartment. Was any of that accurate, Karina?

Most of it, yeah. Okay, good. We like to hit on about 75 percent but so that we get to it and get it out of the way and apologies I had to sneak that in because listening to the Bela and Boris series when you you mentioned his his likeness or his similarity to Ben Gazzara who's one of Gilbert's favorite actors I had to laugh. Yeah me too I love them both. yeah me too i love them another one of my favorite actors and this is we're gonna have a fight now uh and that's like anyone who knows me or has listened to me on the podcast knows i am a major league fan of lon chaney jr oh no we're getting to it right away. All right. Have it out. Okay. In fact, I mean, it's like one of the movies I picked when I was a guest programmer was the original of Mice and Men, which I thought Cheney was great in that.

And I thought he was great as the sheriff in High Noon. This is something for you obsessive fans out there. There was also an old TV series, an episodic TV series called Telephone Line or Telephone Time. Telephone Time. And there's an episode starring Lon Chaney Jr. called The Golden Junkman, which I think he was also great in. Okay, Karina, it's your turn. I mean, if people haven't heard, you know, I, in my podcast season, Bella and Boris, which is about Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, I get to the topic of Lon Chaney Jr. kind of entering their world in these universal monster movies as the Wolfman. And, you know, I say that I think Lon Chaney Jr. sucks.

And, you know, I'm saying it, you know, in the context not of High Noon, some of these other performances, but in the context of him kind of showing up as um as the wolf man and after i think the audience and me as somebody you know trying to watch these movies uh consecutively chronologically beginning with dracula and moving through the universal monster movies i don't think he measures up to baila lugosi or boris karloff and i certainly don't think he measures up to his dad um and for me there's a huge gulf in terms of between the performances of Karloff and Lugosi. And then somewhere down a few steps is Larry Talbot. I thought he was very sympathetic as Larry Talbot.

You know, you know, Karina, we posted on our Patreon, we said, Karina Longworth's coming, and about a half of the responses were, uh-oh, does Gilbert know about her disdain for Lon Chaney Jr.? So we wanted to get it out of the way. I think Lon Chaney Sr.,

though, I think Lon Chaney Sr. was a Jew-hater, among other things. He was friends with an... I read he was friends with an author who was a member of the uh american nazi party well i can't speak to that i don't have that information but um you know yeah i I do not support those political beliefs. As somebody whose mother's last name is Shiman, I cannot support. There you go. She's a member of the tribe.

You know, we started this show right around the time you started in spring of 2014. The difference is that we've done 400 shows, and in 398 of them, Gilbert has talked about anti-Semitism in Hollywood. My favorite topic. His favorite topic. You do a very good job, too. And we had Bela Lugosi Jr. here on this show, and we had Sarah Karloff on the show. And by the way, Sarah cannot watch The Black Cat. cat she finds it too personally disturbing to see her father playing this kind of twisted uh necrophiliac i suppose and a torturer yeah that's one of my favorite films of his oh we love it we

talked about that several times on the show the we can't get enough of it art deco look yeah and and a and a digital clock in it and the weird kind of like sex uh necrophilia and incest and everything it's it's amazing i mean she's missing out obviously i understand where she's coming from but yeah just the imagery of the women like suspended in the formaldehyde is pretty incredible. It's a wild movie. And you, Gilbert, has repeatedly pointed out on this podcast how the dialogue in that movie was particularly challenging to Lugosi with his heavy accent. And you actually mentioned that in your episode.

And the skin flaying. Yeah, yeah. The skin flaying scene. He says, flare the skin from your body so it was like kind of uh uh uh fray and a tear i think the word is together i think the word is flay but yeah but you you said karina that you have to get drawn in to to to do and you do a massive amount of research and it takes you how long to write an episode it depends it totally depends on on the subject matter how much i know going in how much i have kind of um re-examine my own pre-existing ideas about something how

many movies i have to watch so it i mean it's i feel like I used to be faster for some reason as I get older. And as I, as the podcast has gone on for longer, I think I want to be more of a completist. And I want to, you know, really challenge myself to find information in places that are not the obvious places. And so, you know, the season that I'm working on right now, which is going to debut April 5th, I'm really scrambling to get the scripts done. And I started doing the research in October. Oh, my gosh. And I've only written six episodes. In that case, I really appreciate you giving us this valuable time.

And one incident that I've spoken about a few times on this show that I've always found disturbing. few times on this show that I've always found disturbing. And that was when Frank and Dean were dining with a bunch of friends. And I think it was like one of them was the at another table, the chairman of Hunt's Foods. And they know this story, Karina. Yeah, I think it was Dean's 45th birthday or something at the Polo Lounge. Polo Lounge. And they asked them if they could hold it down a little because they were getting really drunk and loud. And, well, you could tell the story. Yeah, you know, I mean, it's been told a couple of different ways.

But the essence of it is that um can i swear on this podcast we we insist okay with me here you have to frank sinatra beat the shit out of one of these guys i think he hit both of them but one of them he really really pummeled and one of the stories is that he took a like a hard telephone and smashed his head in with it. I think in one of the other stories, it's a lamp. But the guy was, he was comatose and had significant brain damage. And it was suspected that he wasn't going to live. After a couple of days, he started to improve. But Frank, you know, went on the run, basically. He left town and didn't tell anybody where he was going so that the Beverly Hills police couldn't find him. And both Sammy and Dean were kind of put in the position

of having to cover for him. Oh, I didn't know that part of the story. And I heard he... That's a nice twist. I also heard that he crashed through a glass table. That seems possible as well. I haven't heard... I don't remember that specific

part of the story it was a hunts food executive yeah the scariest part for me was that they said he never pressed charges yeah yeah very creepy there's something going on there yeah yeah no i'm sure that i mean i i'm just speculating i'm not sure but i imagine that what happened was that when frank skipped town um his associates stepped in and made it clear that it would be um problematic for the injured party to press charges and either a payment was made or threats were made yeah right or some version of both version of both. Tell me this, too. And it's interesting because I saw you interviewed. You were talking about the Manson series and your way into that series was your fascination with the idea that Doris Day could be part of the Charles Manson story. So before you embark on something like this, on one of these series, and there are

obviously a lot of work, you have to find a way in. You have to find something that really intrigues you or hooks you. What was the hook and what was the grabber in the Dean and Sammy series? I think for that one, I had read the Nick Tosh's book, Dean, several years ago. several years ago. And, you know, the more research I do about the history of Hollywood, the more it's apparent that there are very few biographies that are extremely well-researched and beautifully written at the same time. And that's one of them. And so I always wanted to kind of just do something where I could get more people excited about that book. It's so rich and it's so beautifully written. And so I started

thinking like, is there something to say about Dean Martin that hasn't been said? And is there something to be said that goes over and above what is said in this wonderful book? And so I, you know, I just started thinking about it. And I realized that there is an aspect of his career specifically that I didn't feel like was totally fleshed out in that book, which is this idea that he and the other members of the Rat Pack represent this kind of middle period between World War II and Vietnam of adult men kind of letting loose, kind of letting loose, experiencing kind of a midlife crisis party vibe before the counterculture takes in and sort of changes culture. So I wanted to talk about that, but then I really didn't want to do, you know, the Rat Pack as a season. First of all, I think that it, I think it's more of a cultural idea than it was an actual thing. And I didn't really want to spend much time talking about Frank Sinatra because I've already

done two or three episodes about him. And I just didn't have that much more to say specifically about him. But so I got the idea that there was something really interesting. And, you know, one of the things that I think the Tasha's book does really well is it talks about Dean as an Italian in the first half of the 20th century and how that meant something different than it did in the second half of the versus the African-American experience in comparing and contrasting Sammy and Dino. I think he did it well. Thank you. And he never mentioned that you say in the last episode, there's no record of him ever acknowledging the Tasha's book. Yeah, no. I mean, he he he was alive when it was published.

He if you know, he He made some public appearances. I include some audio of when his daughter was on, I think, the Phil Donahue show. And he called in and that was one of his last media appearances. But he didn't make any sort of public comment about it that I could find. And you said in one of your podcasts that it sounded like Dean Martin was the first one to know that the whole Rat Pack thing was over. Well, I think that he I don't think he ever cared about it as as a like social club in the way that some of the others did. And he didn't really care about it as a driver of his own career. And so for him, it was like it was something he could take or leave.

Whereas I think for both Sammy and Frank and certainly somebody like Joey Bishop, it was much more important to their livelihood and to their sense of self and belonging. What about Sammy? And we started to say, Gil, before we turn the mics on how we found. First of all, your show is so educational going through that whole Dean and Sammy series. I never knew that Orson Welles dated Eartha Kitt. I never knew that Sammy dated Chita Rivera. I never knew that Sammy dated Eartha Kitt. I learned all this this great history. But you confirm several things that we have talked about on the podcast. You know, the draining of the swimming pools at the Vegas hotels when black performers dared to swim in the

pools, which is horrifying. You know, being gouged by the owners of boarding houses on the outskirts of town because they knew that Sammy had no other recourse, no other, and the Wilmeston trio, they had no other place to stay. The racism that these guys faced, they could perform on the stage for these people, but they could do little else. It's one of the most emotional parts of that series. Yeah, it was, you know, I think there's a couple of interesting things about that. I mean, one of them, first of all, is how long those conditions persisted. I mean, it really was until just before the Rat Pack that Sammy was not allowed to stay in these hotels, was not allowed to drink at the bar, had to leave through the kitchen right after he performed.

And so that's in one way, that is one of the reasons why the Rat Pack itself is sort of a transgressive thing. It was a big deal for Sammy to be allowed on stage with all these white guys in what was presumed to be a white space. The entertainment industry had been for up until that point so segregated where if black talent was being celebrated, it was often being celebrated in all black venues. And, you know, this is 15 years after MGM said that they were going to start basically treating black performers like stars by signing Lena Horne to a star contract. Yeah. Then they kind of had their bluff called on that because theater owners in the South and the Midwest, in some cases, wouldn't show her movies.

You know, and also there was the production code, which up until 1968, forbid so-called miscegenation. Sure. That there couldn't be even a suggestion that white people and black people were having relationships with one another. So for Sammy to take the stage with all these white guys in 1960 was a really big deal. And I think it did have a positive influence. But, you know, within that space, I mean, they were making Klan jokes about him in front of him.

It wasn't necessarily a safe space for him. I know in front of him. It wasn't necessarily a safe space for him. And even his friends like Belafonte thought that he was. This is another thing, too, that I that I learned from listening to your show that they he thought he was demeaning himself to to endear himself to Frank and to other white performers. Yeah. I mean, you know, I hungered for he hungered for that acceptance. Certainly. And, you know, I think he felt like he was lucky to be there. And, you know, he was the only guy who was there in these white spaces. You know, Belafonte was playing Vegas, but he was doing it as a solo act. He wasn't doing it on stage with Frank Sinatra.

Yeah, sure. And another thing that he got in trouble for. Frank Sinatra. Yeah, sure. And another thing that he got in trouble for. But it's interesting that Kennedy turned his back on Sammy Davis and then Sammy Davis went with Nixon. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that didn't work out so well either. No, I think I think that. So basically basically Kennedy disinvited Sammy from his inauguration after Frank Sinatra had put together this whole entertainment program for the inauguration. And Kennedy continued to sort of treat Sammy badly because he was afraid of the Southern Democrats who had helped him get elected. And so those were a couple of insults that Sammy felt from the Democrats. They weren't the only ones. I mean, he had,

you know, sort of tried to be a good foot soldier for the Democrats and just kind of continually had a door slammed in his face. And so Nixon and his Republican Party, they sensed an opportunity there to woo Sammy and at the same time make themselves look good to black voters. And I don't know if it worked with black voters, but it worked with Sammy. I got you. Gil and I were talking earlier today about that rat, the Rat Pack shows, you know, and there was also homophobic jokes in the in the in the Rat Pack Act. You know, and there was also homophobic jokes in the in the in the Rat Pack Act. And the irony is that there's a strange kind of homoeroticism in the relationship of these guys. They're always talking. How's your bird? They're always talking about their genitals. Yeah. And they're also I mean, they're also, you know, hanging out all night with each other and, you know, not with the women in their lives. I mean, this is something that Mia Farrow writes about in her book.

Like every sort of Sinatra wife has talked about it. You know, you can't find Frank because he's at the bar with his boyfriends. I love that. You know, you also make that great, you mentioned Ocean's Eleven and you talk about the twist that here they are, JFK's actual brother in law before the mob helps Kennedy, you know, get elected. And they're talking in Ocean's 11 about buying off politicians. Yeah.

Yeah. There's a whole scene where they're just making jokes about it in this movie where they frankly acknowledge that the mob runs vegas um and you know i think one of the interesting things about oceans 11 is that people today you know if they have seen the original it was probably a long time ago people yeah like this stodderberg version has sort of supplanted the original in the cultural conversation and the cultural memory but the original movie like they don't get away with it. They all sort of, they all try to have this moment of glory and they kind of walk away with

their tails between their legs. I like that about the original movie. I, I didn't like any of the Clooney pit ones. I really liked that ending of the original. Yes. And, and,

uh, it's also, um, Sammy got into devil worshiping sammy's the last episode that you did of dean and sammy takes the weirdest turns and it's i'll have to recommend it to our listeners it's it's really fascinating it's it's really about their declines yeah you know but sammy gets into weird stuff is incredibly in debt has a cocaine problem has a booze problem he's what he's or he's holding having orgies yeah i i'm kind of i had to make a judgment call as to what to to get into because there's so much stuff and i was

really kind of trying to um make a narrative out of it and make sense out of it because you get sort of different orders of events and different accounts, maybe understandably, given all the drugs and alcohol involved. And to focus a little bit more on his sex life, because I thought it was pretty interesting how his wife, Alta Vese, was sort of brought into his life and then not treated very well. And I think there were some interesting things involving race in terms of the girls that were in his life, even throughout that marriage. one of whom was Linda Loveless. I mean, he was a prodigious consumer of porn kind of just before this moment of porno chic with Deep Throat. Yeah. And he was into car crash videos? Did I hear you right on the podcast? He partnered with this guy who was a – they started like a –

Sammy invested in this video duplication house and he partnered with this guy who was a big car crash video guy. So Sammy got into that with him. I mean, basically at that era of videotape, the things that were being distributed were sort of bootlegs like videos of car crashes, you know, real or in most cases, probably manipulated snuff films and porn. Wow. And to borrow to borrow a line from Archie Bunker to Sammy Davis, look, I know you had no choice in being colored, but what made you change you? choice in being colored but what made you change you and and so what actually i hear several different stories what made him go to jeff that jeff jeff chandler was involved and in on your podcast what did you say that uh another famous performer yeah you know i have to admit i don't remember because it was somebody who visited sammy in the hospital i mean he had this car crash right in which he he lost i think it was eddie canter

it was eddie canter yeah um so he he had this car crash where he lost his eye and um eddie canter visited him in the hospital and and brought him a hebrew star necklace to wear and sort of talked to him about the relationship historically or the connections historically between Africans and Jews. And so that was part of it. He started, after he was recovered, he started talking to a rabbi in Los Angeles to kind of learn more about some of this stuff. There is a story in one of his books about how it was a Christmas Eve and he was alone

and somebody spray painted a sort of hateful anti-Black message of the garage of the house he was at. And he really felt at his lowest moment. And he like, at that moment, he looked at his bookshelf and he saw a book called The History of the Jews. And he pulled it off the wall. And he claims he opened it up to a passage that was about how

basically the Jews never give up. No matter what hardships are thrown at us we never give up and he said he at that moment he decided to go all in on judaism wow gilbert has the same story that's how he became jewish and see see i heard a similar story but with jeff chandler uh allegedly put a star of David in Sammy's hand, and he was holding it because his hand was in a fist the whole time. And then when he opened up his hand, it was a Star of David. But who knows?

Now, also, speaking of Jew haters, Errol Flynn. Who? Errol Flynn. Who? Errol Flynn. Uh-huh. You have anything on Errol Flynn being a Jew hater, Karina? Well, yeah, I did an episode on Errol Flynn. And, you know, there was a book by Charles Higham which suggested that Errol Flynn was a Nazi spy. And then there's been like quite a bit of scholarship refuting that.

So I talk about it in that episode I did on Errol Flynn. You know, I think that. I think, you know, the jury's out a little bit. There's evidence on both sides. Interesting. Well, I think one of my favorite things about your show is is how you do debunk things like the entire kenneth anger series right yeah but then that what and what was your way into that other than the fact that we all read that book we were all kind of perversely fascinated by it you you at some point you were motivated to do the research to say well that can't be true the loopy velez story can't be true i'm gonna get to the bottom of the fattyuckle story first. And the research that you must have done for that series, I can only imagine it was daunting.

Yeah, thank you. You said you had to start new every week as opposed to. Yeah, and that's the kind of what I'm doing for the series I'm working on now, too. So that's always the hardest with something like Bela and Boris, you know, when you have sort of people whose stories you're telling over the course of several episodes, it's a little bit easier because you're not starting fresh every week. But with something like Hollywood Babylon, what I decided to do was take, I think, I think it was about 20 of the stories that Kenneth Anger tells in that book

and do one episode, you know, sort of fact checking each one. And so that was really kind of, there are some characters that continue, but that was really starting fresh each time. My way into it was just that that book was really important for me when I was 18, 19. Oh, you were young when you discovered it. 19 oh you were young when you discovered it yeah in terms of um getting to know some of these stories about especially silent hollywood um i think that those had pretty much like the idea of silent hollywood and the specifics of it beyond maybe charlie chaplin and and uh mary pickford had kind of fallen out of the cultural conversation by the 90s when I found Hollywood Babylon. And so, you know, I think the first, like a lot of people, the first thing that

made me excited about it were the photos, which range from being kind of grotesque outtakes of publicity shoots to candid photographs, newspaper photographs um and then the stories themselves are these gossipy you know kind of um lurid gossipy um reducing people's whole lives and whole careers down to a few um snide remarks basically um but even though that is what it is it did make me want to see these silent films and it did get me excited about people like Clara Bow, whose work I had never seen before. Speaking of Bela Lugosi. Yeah.

One of my favorite Hollywood couples of yours. He commissioned a nude painting of her that she did not pose for. Do I have this right? Yeah. Based on his description to the artist. That hung in his home for decades. Yeah, if I could ever get my hands on that painting.

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The Glenlivet. Live original. Please enjoy our products responsibly. One of the craziest deaths of anyone, and that was the death of actor Albert Decker. Do you know about Albert Decker? I don't think I know this story now. Okay. He was found.

This would have fit right into Hollywood Babylon quite neatly. Oh, yeah. He was found hanging in his shower, and he was bound and gagged, and he had, like, obscene words and drawings all over his body and the police ruled it a suicide. They ruled it a suicide by autoerotic asphyxiation. You're such a film buff. He's in East of Eden.

He's in Kiss Me Deadly. I think his last picture is The Wild Bunch. You'd recognize him. But he died in this rather strange manner. Are you guys investigating? No, we leave that. wild bunch you'd recognize him but he died in this rather strange manner and and uh are you guys investigating but no we leave that we just always don't have your skills it just always seems like the cop said all right we'll make it a suicide yeah i mean when i when i read a book about howard hughes i came across you know quite a few stories where something would actually make

it to the the newspapers and make it to the evening paper, but then the story would disappear. And so I think there was this sort of play of certain people could pay off the newspapers and pay off the police, but sometimes they didn't do it in the right order. So we got a little bit of information about something before everything got buried. I think one of the most fascinating things about your show, Karina, is that I learn about how many people misbehaved and misbehaved terribly. I mean, the sociopathic behavior, like you take the Fatty Arbuckle case and Hearst, and who knows, we don't know what happened in the Fatty Arbuckle case. It remains, as you point out in your episode, really well-researched and well-done. It's still, like William Desmond Taylor, it still remains largely a mystery. But people behaving badly from Hearst, who you imply was trying to get back in some ways at Paramount.

So he prints all of these rumors, the most salacious stuff, the most damning stuff about Fatty in the Hearst papers. And so, of course, this led to Arbuckle, and I have no comment as to Arbuckle's actual guilt or not, but he was tried in the court of public opinion with Hearst's help. help yeah and then and then and then the other thing is what was the chicanery with the jury in the in the last case where our buckle was acquitted when they only what they only were sequestered for 10 minutes five minutes yeah i mean i think at that point it was people were kind of starting to see through the media narrative um and look at the actual actual evidence in the case um which was specious um But, you know, yeah, there's actually a great book. I think that I'm bad with names. I think the author is Greg Merrill. And the title of the book is, I think, Room 1917. It's the name of the hotel room in San Francisco where the whole

thing went down. But that's the only reason why I felt like I was able to do a fatty Arbuckle episode, um, was because of this book, which is, does such a great job of going through all three trials and talking about how, um, the media narrative was this sort of overarching thing. And then each of these juries came to these different conclusions and how that, you know, even though he was ultimately acquitted, Arbuckle's career just never, you know, never recovered. Well, I found it strange that in the third acquittal or the third trial, they not only acquitted him, they apologized. Yeah. They went overboard to say that he was never had was never i mean do you have and you don't have to share it if you don't want to but having done all of those those weeks of research do you

have an opinion or do you for what went down between virginia rap pay and and our buckle or do you not want to speculate yeah i don't think i really want to speculate um on something you know that happens in a hotel room that only two people were in 100 years ago. But it is interesting to see the ways in which the it seemed clear that you could sort of sell more newspapers by speculating on this lurid idea of a large man crushing a small woman. Yeah. Like that seemed like an exciting story. But the actual evidence didn't suggest that that's what happened. You know, I also think that like we're talking about people who are drinking a lot of bootleg alcohol and they're doing it

like seven days in a row. And it's one of those things where because it's illegal, you're almost doing it more because it's like, well, this, you know, this is just a party. And so like, let's just blow it out. And so I don't, I don't know that that's a condition that can sustain life for everyone. You know, I think they they've spoken with a few actors that they were going to do the ultimate Fatty Arbuckle star. they've spoken with a few actors that they were going to do the ultimate

Fatty Arbuckle star. And I think they were talking with Chris Farley. Well, that would have been interesting. There was a, there was a not so great movie made in the seventies with James Coco. You know, that actor called the wild party.

Oh yeah. I know that film. Yeah. It's loosely based on, on, on Arbuckle-related incidents. Speaking of bootleg liquor, it plays a role in Thomas Ince's Mysterious Death 2, which is another episode that was riveting in your Hollywood Babylon series. Yeah, I didn't know much about Thomas Ince in terms of his actual contributions to cinema

before I researched him, you know, because unfortunately, the thing he's become famous for is dying mysteriously after a night on her yacht. But, you know, he was he was so important in terms of of the production of these early westerns and and building studios that are still in use today in Los Angeles. And according to the story, I think it was like Hearst's girlfriend, Marion Davies, was having an affair with Charlie Chaplin, who was also on the boat, and Hearst pulled out a gun and shot who he thought was Chaplin. Yeah, that's that's the rumor that has has swirled, and it's more or less dramatized in the Peter Bogdanovich film, The Cat's Meow. But by the way, did that start? Did that rumor start? That was that was that was not Kenneth Anger floating that that had been around. Did that rumor start?

That was not Kenneth Anger floating that. That had been around. So there are aspects of the rumor that are in Hollywood Babylon. But Bogdanovich said that his sort of elaborated version came from Orson Welles' gossip. Wow. You know, Peter and Orson Welles were great friends for a long time. And Orson Welles obviously had an interest in gossip about Hearst. Obviously. So that's that's where that came from. But I you know, there is there is no evidence that Thomas was was shot at all.

There's no evidence that a gun was fired at all. Yeah. Yeah. And likely, as you point out, and you did the research, it was likely a heart attack. Yeah. And likely, as you point out and you did the research, it was likely a heart attack. Yeah, he had been he had been on medication. He had been told to have a moderate diet and not to drink. And then he went on this yacht and he drank and ate like a lot of salted nuts, which I guess is very bad if you have whatever heart condition he had. Right. And I heard heard weird, perverted stories about Van Johnson from other people. And you did a thing.

Van Johnson. Karina, you look like you're thinking, what have I gotten myself into? I mean, I don't know. I don't know that I would say that his story is particularly perverted. I don't know what you've heard. The gist of it, as far as I recall,

because I actually did an episode on him maybe seven years ago, the gist is that he was a closeted gay guy and basically got in this situation where he convinced his best friend to divorce his wife so that Van Johnson could marry the wife and have a beard.

I heard stories that the studio had people follow him around on his days off because he would uh get up and he put on drag oh really i i haven't heard drag um associated with him but you know there there was like a kind of like gay bar scene in hollywood at the time and um there was a drag element to a lot of like gay bar scene in Hollywood at the time. And there was a drag element to a lot of those places. So it's definitely possible. And it's certainly possible that MGM was following him. I mean, MGM was following most of their stars around.

I love that you the extra element on your show. There's a fun production element. We mentioned it in the intro where you have actors voice characters. Our friend Patton Oswalt voices does a pretty good Boris Karloff. Yeah, and Taron Killam was Bela Lugosi. Taron Killam was Bela. Your husband, Rian Johnson, does a pretty good Roger Corman. Yeah, Rian likes it.

Rian's favorite one to do is John Huston. I didn't hear that one, but I'll find it. I didn't hear that one, but I'll find it. I didn't hear that one, but I want to ask you. Go ahead, Gil. Oh, no. Another actor who I've always enjoyed in horror films and got in trouble was Lionel Atwill. Do you know about this? Yeah, I vaguely remember something about Lionel Atwill.

Why didn't you tell me? I think he used to have orgies at his house. Inspector Krogh in Son of Frankenstein. Yeah, he was at sex parties and he was brought up on charges a couple of times. Yeah, they never really

did anything. I think they said he was doing less quality films after that. Like some people. Oh, answer this for us, Karina. We were talking about Gene Tierney, who was somebody you covered on the show. In fact, I heard you— This is horrible.

I heard you with Ileana Douglas, too. That was a great episode of Ileana's show with you. And you guys were talking about the tragedy of Gene Tierney. You guys were talking about the tragedy of Jean Tierney. What is this? The child that she had had birth defects and it connects to something to do with the Hollywood Canteen. Yeah. So I'm sure you're listening to the Hollywood Canteen was this club that was for active servicemen during World War Two that Betty Davis started. Yeah.

And all the stars would volunteer their time to serve drinks or dance with the people there. So Jean Tierney had a daughter who had, I guess today we'd call it learning disabilities, but very severe and had to be institutionalized. And it was a horrible, horrible heartbreak for Jean, ruined her marriage, touched off a period of depression, which certainly impacted her career and her life. And so I think it was maybe when the child was one or two years old. Jean is, I think, at a country club playing tennis and a fan approaches her and says, you know, you've just always been my favorite. I love you so much saying all these nice things. And then she says, you know, I had German measles, but I found out you were going to be at the Hollywood canteen and I just had to go and I had to go and meet you. So, um,

basically the German measles, I guess, um, when communicated to a pregnant woman can cause these kinds of birth defects. Oh, terrible. Terrible. And made all the more terrible by the fact that she was doing a good thing. She was doing something charitable. And then once again,

I heard it was rubella that she had. And I heard it was a woman who ran over and hugged her. See, different brands. It is a female fan, yes. It was a woman who ran over and hugged her see different story different it is a female fan yes it is it was a female fan and um possibly hugged her at the hollywood canteen yeah tell us about to william desmond taylor another we we like these we like these sort of unsolved uh hollywood mysteries and that's another episode of, and then I want to ask you about Peg Entwistle,

but that's another episode you did in the Hollywood Babylon series. It remains unsolved. He was murdered in his home, and an actress on her deathbed confessed? Yeah, she was an actress. She was not very successful. Most people have, you know, the two actresses that have been sort of drawn into the case historically have been Mabel Normans and Mary Miles Minter, who were much more famous. But there's a book by William Mann called Tinseltown in which he he basically got her deathbed confession that she says she did it. But a lot of people don't necessarily believe that, you know, at some point. I think that. You know, because nobody will ever know exactly what happens, it creates room for people to kind of step into that void and fill it. Of course. Also, a hundred years ago. Yeah. what happened, it creates room for people to kind of step into that void and fill it. Of course. Also 100 years ago. Yeah.

And another horrible murder was the murder of Raymond Navarro. That's another part of Karina's series. Yeah. Ramon Navarro. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he was murdered in his house as well by somebody he picked up on the street. And he's he's somebody interesting, too, because he was also a closeted gay man who was living a secret life. And I heard like the story, he had two guys there, brothers, and and he something like, he was talking about the money he spent to, you know, put the house together. And he says, this room has $5,000 in it. And they thought that meant literally there was $5,000 in the room. And they started beating him to get him to uh tell him where the

money was yeah and then they tore the house apart but they didn't find any cash on another sad story but that is that is a you know it's lurid stuff the kenneth anger stuff by the way he's still alive at 91 and i heard you say that he practices some strange kind of religion. I heard you making a joke that you were a little afraid he was going to cast a spell on you. Yeah, he does black magic. Black magic? I don't know. I wonder if any of the misfortune I've had has anything to do with that, but I haven't had much misfortune. Here's a question from a listener for you, Karina. Todd Luoto. I'm curious, as a

former film critic, and I also want to ask you a little bit, in a little bit, what you miss, if anything, about being a film critic. Nothing. What's that? Nothing. Nothing is the answer. He wants to know if there are any films or filmmakers that you wrote about in past years and that you have

had a reassessment over? You look, you look back on, you look at them differently now, thanks to time and perspective. Anybody come to mind? I think that the years that I was a film critic are not the greatest years. And so I don't really think that much about the movies that I wrote about when I was a film critic. What's the hardest part of being a critic? I heard you say being forced to have an opinion about everything. Yeah. It became tiresome to you?

I mean, you know, I think that we're entering a different phase of film releasing. And so maybe this won't be so true anymore. as a critic, you know, from about the late 2000s up until 2013, there would be between 10 and 20 movies released in a given week. And as a newspaper film critic, I was expected to see all of them and have an opinion about all of them. Yikes. And it's just too much. And, you know, the fact is, is that of those, let's say, 15 movies, maybe two are interesting, either good or bad, but interesting. And then the others just, to me, were not. And I'm not interested in superhero movies. I'm not interested in comic books.

And so it just kind of got to the point where the new movies that I was mostly interested in were international films or documentaries. There's also only so much time in a day. If you have to see the 15 films that are released that week, you don't have time to go back and watch classic films. Right, yeah. You don't have the time to watch Betty Davis and Howard Hawks. I would always try to take advantage of series at the American Cinema Tech or new DVD releases to be able to write about those things in the newspaper.

But, yeah, I mean, I was, you know, often seeing at least one, often two new releases a day. And it's just too much. It sounds like it was exhausting. Offhand, are there any films you could think of that when you first saw them, you thought were great and then you went back and watched them again? Or time hasn't been kind to them. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think that with film history, like I'm constantly revisiting stuff and I'm constantly having different opinions and maybe more nuanced opinions with newer movies.

nuanced opinions with newer movies um i think i'm more likely to dismiss something on first viewing and then like find reasons that it's more interesting on a second viewing i very rarely like watch something and get kind of caught up in it and then see it later and think like oh i was wrong this is actually bad let me mention two movies that we share your love for one is the swimmer which guilt we do i I think we hadn't turned. Had we turned the mics on when we talked about The Swimmer? No. We'll mention that. Yeah.

A Frank Perry film. That's one thing me and Corinne agree on. You also agree on Sidney Lumet's The Verdict. And I don't know if you're as big a Lumet fan as we are. I mean, I like a lot of Lumet's films, yeah. I don't know that I'm a completist, but I mean, certainly, you know, the Dog Day Afternoons of the world are some of the best films. Oh, absolutely.

Because I remember with The Swimmer, that's one of those movies I knew nothing about. It came on late. I figured, ah, Burt Lancaster, I'll watch five minutes. And then, I don't know, it came on late. I figured on a Burt Lancaster, I'll watch five minutes. And then I don't know, it just grabbed me. you know, almost growing pains, adult growing pains. And because I feel like it's really tied to what the culture is going through at the time. At some point, my favorite era of movies were the thirties, but I feel like over the past few years, it's become the fifties. And I talk about this a lot in the Dean Martin series in terms of like the great movies he made in 1958. Some came running and the young lions.

Yeah. You give him credit for actually be making a decent actor of himself. Yeah. Which he did. Yeah. Yeah. He's to be admired, too. After the Dean and Jerry thing ended. I didn't know this. He hired you. I learned this from you. He hired a writer named Ed Simmons, who was Norman Lear's writing partner, by the way, for a time to write him an act to write him a drunk act. Yeah. Loosely based on Joey Lewis's act. Yeah. And so there's, he's very smart about his career. Yeah. And I mean, he, he could not have drunk as much as he pretended to drink and still get up

at 6. A.m. Every morning to play golf. You know, Frank Sinatra was not playing golf at 6. A.m. Every morning. And,

and there's also stories like, you know, like when Frank brought Dean onto the telethon, that that was the first time in 20 years that the two spoke. But then I've heard stories that they did speak over the years and got together. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Jerry's account of it is that they didn't. And, you know, Jerry has done a lot of sort of myth-making about his relationship with Dean. He's written at least two books about it. For sure. He certainly spoke to Nick Tosh's for that book. So I don't know. I don't know if he's the most reliable source, but he suggested that they

didn't speak. I was alluding to this before because we live in an era, you know, where you read a lot about separating the art from the artist. This is something we hear about all the time. Now, we just were, we just, Jerry Lewis's misdeeds were just, were news just a week ago or two, you know. Oh, I didn't see that. Oh, he was accused by several actresses of sexual harassment and improprieties and all kinds of things. You know, and we're in the post-Cosby era. Reading these things about Dean and Sammy, I mean, I said to my wife after I finished the series, it was fascinating. And I said, what a mess these guys made of their personal lives. Yeah.

Yes, these guys made of their personal lives. Yeah. I mean, all the talent in the world, all the money in the world, all the accolades in the world. And Dean made a mess of things with those three women. I think that Dean, you know, I think there's two things that are kind of going on. One is that I do think it's true that hurt people hurt people. And so I think like I think in a lot of ways, certainly Sammy is kind of working out his frustrations and working out his personal pain from his personal experiences on some of the women in his life um yeah he winds up making a deathbed apology to poor altavis yeah absolutely with dean i think it might be more of a personality defect

um it's not necessarily even a defect. It's just that his personality was that he liked to be alone. And, you know, he would get in these situations with women where, you know, he'd get caught up in the romance of being with them. And, you know, his first marriage happened very young. His second marriage was an affair that broke up his first marriage happened very young his second marriage um was an affair that broke up his first marriage right third marriage was just sort of um you know i an older man kind of having a a fling with a younger woman that turned into a marriage who may have shot him in the hand by the way my may have shot him in a hand but i mean dinaina Martin believes that seems to believe that that is the case.

But I think that, you know, like a lot of people, sometimes you run towards something and then realize pretty quickly that you actually want to run in the other direction. And that's Dean. You know, he he really just kind of wanted to be alone. And so that's unfortunate for his wives and many, many children. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, this is one of the things that, like, I never expected this to be the case when I started talking about these stories of old Hollywood. But, I mean, it really does turn you into a student of human behavior. And so, you know, you talk about people ruining their lives

and all of this bad behavior in Hollywood, but I actually think that, like, this is, it's not, it's not special to Hollywood. I think that this is human behavior and sort of the human tragedy just writ large. Certainly. Maybe more inflated because it's on a public scale. One time we had John Biner on this show and I,

cause I think he worked with Martin and Lewis a couple of times. And I asked him what that relationship was like of Martin and Lewis. And he said it, imagine two guys who hate each other taking a road trip around the planet. Yeah. Painful. Yeah. I've got another question for you because we're talking about movies specifically.

Dan Fisher, what does Karina think the future of movies are? Is there a promising future for anything besides sequels and superhero films? And Gilbert and I will add to that. What is the future of movie theaters and seeing films theatrically? We're here in New York where so many theaters have closed. You're in L.A. I guess you've still got The Egyptian. Yeah, we lost the Arclight, though. You lost the Arclight. And what's happening with the Cinerama Dome? Yeah, we've heard that it's going to reopen,

but it hasn't reopened. And I think that was the most important venue for new movies in Los Angeles. And one of the things that was great about it is, sure, they would have, you know, three screens for the new X-Men movie or whatever. They had 14 screens there and some of them were pretty small, so they could also show much smaller releases and just have a wider range of stuff. And so, you know, that's a multiplex model that I think was working really well until the pandemic. And, you know, all of a sudden it seems to be gone. So I don't know. I really don't like predicting the future because I just think that it always turns me into an idiot. Well, we lost the Ziegfeld here. we've lost uh you know so so many i moved back from la i moved to new york and uh back in 20 in 2003 i think i've seen 20 theaters close

yeah if not more uh since i came back it doesn't bode well i used to know every movie that was out and now i don't remember the last time I knew what. And whenever I saw a newspaper, I always loved turning to the entertainment section. And I don't remember the last time I've seen an entertainment section in the paper. Well, they still have in the Times, in the L.A. Times, in the Sunday Times. You have to look. I actually I was flipping through the Sunday calendar section in the LA Times this week, and I'm sure this is not the first week where it hasn't

been there, but I noticed for the first time that only one local theater chain still puts the show times in the paper. And so that seems like a huge cultural shift. Cause I just, you know, for me, it was like, you'd read these big profiles they'd have in the Sunday calendar section with like the big gorgeous photos of the stars. And then you'd be interested in the movie. And so then you could turn the page and see where it was playing and that's just not a thing anymore. Um, so yeah, I don't like to predict the future, but I, I'm certainly like if the theatrical experience entirely goes away, I think it'll be a huge loss. Yeah, I think I keep thinking it's going to be people will be saying, oh, you know, I read that people used to have to leave their house and go to these places to watch movies.

And I mean, when you think about it as something that's been going on for 120 years for it to just suddenly end is is pretty shocking. Yeah. Well, of course, you're in you're in L.A. and that's you know, that's the L.A. is not going to go down without a fight. That's the that's the movie. That's the movie. But L.A. is not a big movie going town. New York's a much better. It's people in New York are out on the street and they're more likely to to go see a movie just as an impromptu thing. Whereas in LA, you have to make plans to do anything because of driving. And so when these big hubs of moviegoing like the Arclight close, it makes it so hard to even figure out where things are playing. And so it turns moviegoing into something where it's at least convenient enough that you know how to do it into something where

you have to figure out how to do it. And I just don't think that the film going culture in Los Angeles is strong enough for that. Oh, that's interesting and a little worrisome. Let's talk about when movies were in theaters. Let's talk about this book that you wrote, Hollywood Frame by Frame. Yeah. Which is a fun book and full of full of beloved movies and really great. I mean, it's subtitled The Unseen Silver Screen and Contact Sheets. How did you get involved with this project? And I just want to talk a little bit about it because wonderful backstage stuff. Yeah, that was maybe about 10 years ago.

This publisher, Illix, contacted me and they had this idea for doing a book that was all contact sheets because nothing like that existed on the market. And contact sheets are really interesting. It's a very specific moment in cinema history because basically contact sheets were only made when people were using 35 millimeter film. And so that starts after World War II and it goes away by the mid to late 60s because at that point they're being um replaced by slide film and then polaroids um and so yeah it's just this kind of brief moment that's like post-war classic hollywood and you can see you know some of these great stars like elizabeth taylor and robert Redford and Marilyn.

You can kind of see not just the famous photo that you know, but you can kind of see the photographer's progress of getting there. And a lot of backstage stuff, like you see Willie Moscone showing Paul Newman, Gilbert. I'm going to send you a copy of the book. You see Willie Moscone showing Paul Newman how to line up a shot. You see the cast of The Magnificent Seven kind of bonding on set by playing poker. Yul Brynner is smoking, very notably. And you wrote little bits of information about each film, little synopses. Yeah, I also worked with the archives to kind of find the best photos.

I love the pictures of chaplains sitting at the at the at the moviola uh editing limelight yeah i told you i sent dick van dyke there's some great backstage photos of dick and uh and julie andrews and mary poppins i said i sent them to dick's wife i i'd be surprised if he had seen them in recent years. Bogart was unkind to Audrey Hepburn on the set of Sabrina, according to your, we'll call them liner notes. Yeah, it's a good term for them. Yeah. I think you said, though, that Bogart was very kind to Jean Tierney. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people had great things to say about Bogart. It was one of the certainly the most genuinely beloved people in Hollywood.

And where the Rat Pack kind of started. Yeah. Technically, the first Rat Pack started in his living room. It was coined by Lauren Bacall. Let me see. I got a couple of other really good questions for you. Zoran Samardzia, favorite B-movie director of Karina's, Joseph E. Lewis or Edgar Ulmer? I would say Ulmer. Ulmer was the guy that directed The Black Cat

and got in some trouble with Universal. Yeah. And we also heard he was a bit of a sadistic guy to the actresses. You know, a lot of these Teutonic filmmakers

have the reputation of being dictators. I mean, certainly Fritz Lang as well. Preminger. Yeah, Preminger. Yeah. We had a guy named

Gregory Mank on this show who you should read if you're interested in horror films. He writes a lot about the Universal classics and and karloff uh and and you touched on this in your series karloff was very kind uh to the actresses who were being mistreated by people like ulmer on the set of the black cat let me ask you too about and i i touched on it before you did a fascinating dead blondes series and i have to ask too about uh this is a very very sad uh tale the tale of

peg entwistle who was famously jumped to her death from the hollywood sign yeah i actually i live near the hollywood sign and and you it's. People still like stop their car in the middle of the street to get out and take a photo of it. It still has so much power. But yeah, when the, when it was new, when it was in its sort of original intention, which was to sell a real estate development called Hollywood lands this actress, Peg Entwistle, who had had, um, a couple of rejections, uh, climbed to the top of one of the letters and jumped to her death. Very, very, very sad story. Yeah. Yeah. But also like it's very sad story, but also

it's the kind of sad story that I think Hollywood enjoys having as part of its mythology in a way. Because, you know, I really love the Judy Garland, George Cukor version of A Star is Born. That's one of my favorite movies. But that is kind of the foundational myth of Hollywood. This idea that there's only so much room for stars. And so, you know, there's a number of spaces. And so for one new star to be made like one has to fall of course and i think the pegan whistle story is is sort of a related myth which

is you know this idea of like um you know hollywood when the when hollywood closes the door you know for some girls there's just nothing left she was only 24 or 25 and she really she really and she had been cut from a film, which I suppose made her despondent, but she, she had a stage career. I mean, I guess it,

I guess at 25, by the way, since you've mentioned A Star Is Born, we're going to treat you. Gilbert, Gilbert, this is your, this is your reward for doing the show,

Karina. Gilbert's going to do a little of James Mason from A Star Is Born. Oh, nice. Congratulations, my dear. I seem to have made it just in time. I had a speech I prepared in my head and seems to have gone out of it.

There's no need to be formal. I know most of you on a first-name basis. Well, I need a job. Yes, that's the whole speech. I need a job. Not just a drama. I could do comedy as well.

Wow. What do you think? That's incredible. For people who don't know that movie, that was word for word. It's almost as good as your Eddie Mannix impression. I like the fact that you slide. It's fun. I like the fact that you slide in and out of these character voices.

Yeah, I don't do it as much anymore because I've been hurt by the reviews. Oh, you have? Don't listen to them. It's fun. It adds a fun element. We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal podcast after this. Let's talk about another series before we let you get out of here. We want to talk about your upcoming series on erotic 80s.

But I do have to ask you about Polly Platt, which really moved me. And first of all, credit to you. You did her a service. I mean, this is a woman who made major contributions to major films, to say nothing of the fact that there would be no Simpsons without her because she introduced James Brooks to Matt Groening. But she is somebody whose notoriety escaped her or she did not get the credit that she deserved for many, many reasons. And it was really, as I said, it was a service to her for you to remember her in that way and

do all of that digging. Well, thank you. I mean, the only reason why I was able to tell her story, which I had been interested in for decades, was because her daughters, Sashi and Antonia Bogdanovich, let me have access to her unfinished, unpublished memoir. And at first, the idea was that

I would finish it as a book. But my book agent was not supportive of that. He said, nobody's ever heard of this lady. You'll never sell a book. But my book agent was not supportive of that. He said, nobody's ever heard of this lady. You'll never sell a book about her. And then kind of as a way to like prove him wrong that there was a story there, I decided to do it as a podcast. And so I used the memoir as a starting point. And then I kind of called everybody who was mentioned in the memoir that I could get in touch with to kind of help me fill in the blanks, because it was an unfinished memoir and hadn't been edited, hadn't been fact-checked or anything.

Including our friend Lisa Maria Rodano, who's a friend of this show. Yeah, I love her. She was really helpful. Yeah, but it was eye-opening and it was heartbreaking and it was maddening. I mean, she made significant contributions to not only the best Bogdanovich films, but Jim Brooks' films, and nurtured Cameron Crowe, and nurtured Wes Anderson. And nurturer is the word that comes up again and again. And we had Peter Bogdanovich on on this podcast and you pointedly did not consult him when you put the series together he had been telling his side of the story for a long time and i just thought polly didn't really get a chance to tell her side of the story and so her

memoir was um the way that she was able to kind of speak from beyond the grave and and that was the you know the venue for that but I mean I tried to be fair to Peter I really love his movies I think he's us too he's a great filmmaker um you know and I tried to make it clear that it's not like Polly directed the movies I mean it was a collaboration um but she did a lot yeah she did a lot and when people talk about the last picture show and paper moon and what's up doc and targets they should they should be talking about her as well she did a lot yeah she did a lot and when people talk about the last picture show and paper moon and what's up doc and targets they should they should be talking about her as well yeah i mean i think you know she her point of view especially at that time in the late 60s and early 70s while

she and peter were together is that this is just what a wife does she helps her husband and we're not going to quibble over credit but she probably deserved a writing credit on the movies that she didn't get one on. And she certainly deserved a producer's credit, which she didn't get until later working with Jim Brooks. She deserved a lot of credit. Tell us before we talk about the new series. I have one last question about Lugosi, because you asked the question in the Lugosi series. Was Ed Wood, who befriended Lugosi late in life, was he exploiting Lugosi or was he assisting Lugosi? And maybe a little bit of both. Yeah, I mean, I think—

That's a fascinating relationship. That's obviously been dramatized in Scott and Larry's movie. Yeah, which I love. We love it to death. And I love Scott and Larry. Yeah, they're the best. But we don't but we don't know the truth no it's kind of like the relationship of aaron fleming and groucho marx

there seems a little bit of a yeah except yeah except without the elder abuse well i mean i don't know that we know you know. I don't know that we can say that there definitely was no elder abuse. But, you know, yeah, it's just I think that I think that Edward is a great movie about friendship. And what we don't know is exactly the nature of of that friendship in real life and to what extent, you know, there was maybe some exploitation. Certainly, like, I think Bela's story ends up being pretty sad. He's rather a tragic figure, isn't he? You can't escape that. Yeah, and I, you know, that was one of the things that made me really interested in kind of pairing Bela and Boris together

is their somewhat different trajectories. Certainly, Karloff did not die tragically. He worked up until the end. But there are other aspects of his life that you could say are maybe tragic or, you know, not that heartwarming. But I think they're both great actors. You know, maybe Bela's a little limited in his range, but certainly a powerful actor. Maybe Bela's a little limited in his range, but certainly a powerful actor. One thing I think we agree on is his performance as Igor in Son of Frankenstein. I thought that was Lugosi having fun.

Yeah. And it's a great performance. Well, Karina likes Dracula, too. I mean, obviously, you know as well as we do that a lot of people think Dracula was stagey and slow, and you don't feel that way. You like the stillness of it. You like the absence of music. You find the silences kind of creepy. I mean, that movie and a lot of those 1930s horror movies, but that being sort of the foundational one, is one of the things that got me interested in classic cinema. Uh-huh.

You know, just it having that different pace than what I was used to as somebody growing up in the 80s and 90s. And there being a sense of true mystery and, like, truly tapping into something unknown. I have to ask you this about starting the podcast. You must be pleasantly surprised. These are stories that mean a lot to you. These are films that mean a lot to you. You wanted to talk about film in a way where you didn't have to edit yourself. You didn't really have to censor yourself too much.

You didn't want to have to have an opinion on everything, as you've stated. The show has been met with overwhelming success. Did you see any of this coming? You must be pleasantly surprised. No, yeah, definitely. To state the obvious. Yeah, I mean, you know, one thing that I think the biggest surprise was that it was successful pretty much right away and that I didn't have to do much to get people to listen to it.

It found its audience really fast. And I thought that I would just, you know, maybe make a couple of episodes from my bedroom and, you know, That's what we thought. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, in the beginning I did everything myself, edited. In addition to doing all the writing and all the research,

I uploaded the files myself. Wow. I designed the first logo. And now you have a team in place. It's a little easier. I have a little bit of a team. I have like one editor. I have a research assistant who works part time. But I, you know, I still do all of the writing myself. I still do most of the production myself um but yeah I thought I would just do a couple episodes and then maybe it would lead to something you know maybe I'd get a job writing on TCM or something um it was just this thing where I I knew I didn't

want to be a critic of new movies anymore but I didn't really see any jobs out there for um talking or writing about classic film and so I just thought I wanted to kind of make a demo of what I wanted to do. And then, yeah, maybe it would lead to something else. But instead, it's been the most successful thing I've ever tried to do in my career. And, you know, so I'm just happy that anybody still wants to listen. Well, it's a it's a labor of love and a lesson to people, too, in the business to do what you love yeah i mean i really love that yeah and especially in this media climate i mean i'm somebody that i wrote on uh film websites for a long time throughout my 20s and those websites just don't exist anymore that

you know they got the brands got bought sure and killed and the archives don't even exist anymore in most cases. And so when you're kind of just working for like a small living wage and somebody else owns all the content, you know, you're kind of left with nothing at the end of the day. Right. And so I think you can't even you can't even sum it up on the Internet and look at it because. Yeah. And so, I mean, you know, for better or for worse with a podcast, I own it. It's mine. And so I don't have to share the profits with anyone except for the people who help me with ads. But they don't have any ownership over the IP. And so at least I'm making something I can control. You know, I think we do similar shows only in the sense our podcast is not a storytelling podcast and doesn't involve the laborious weeks of writing and recording that yours does. But I think we're both coming a little bit from the same place because we're trying to keep this history alive. Yeah, totally.

And we're trying to keep these films alive and we're trying to introduce these films and these filmmakers and these actors to new to new generations we i mean we've had robert wagner here bogdanovich bruce stern peter fonda uh you know richard donner we've had some uh some wonderful people here on the show uh joel gray cabaret just turned uh just turned 50 and we try to tell the story through their accounts yeah and uh we. We're very proud of it. And like you, I think we've been pleasantly surprised by the reaction to it, which I guess proves that there's an appetite. You know, I think

there is. I think there's definitely an active sort of film Twitter, classic film community online where people find each other. And the TCM Film Festival, they all come out to LA. Um, so yeah, I think, I mean, I've been really surprised and also surprised by how many different generations of people seem to be interested in this stuff.

Yeah. What, what, what is the bulk of your mail from? Is it 20, is it 30 somethings? So 40 somethings? I mean, I would say, you know, it can range, it can really range from people in their mid twenties to, you know, people in their 60s, 70s, 80s. But, you know, I think it does depend a little bit on what the topic is that I'm covering. Sure. But, yeah. Frank mentioned Bruce Dern before.

before and Bruce Stern said that you know originally for Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte was going to be another Bette Davis Joan Crawford and that uh Bette Davis fired Joan Crawford from it yeah yeah I did I did an episode about that and she did a whole Joan Crawford series yeah um you know Bette Davis I had a much better relationship with Olivia de Havilland. We heard a lot of strange stories. Do you know who Bruce Valanche is? Yeah, of course. Bruce Valanche told us a story that Joan Crawford peed on David Niven. We're just throwing these out there because it's probably not in your series.

It's one of those things. That's the kind of story I say it's true. I mean i mean why not it's too weird to be made up right i love david niven us too that's the kind of flashy story we're telling on this show not betty davis was joan crawford hated in hollywood um i think that she was just a strong personality um so she had her she certainly had her friends. My last question before we ask about the new 80s series is going into the Manson show and you didn't set out to do a show about Manson. You were intrigued when you found out about the Doris Day Terry Melcher connection. What did you learn in doing that series that you didn't know that was that was most shocking?

I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything about Charles Manson because I just was not a true crime person. So everything was news to me. You know, I think that I certainly didn't know how much time he actually spent with Dennis Wilson. I think Dennis Wilson's story was maybe the most fascinating to me. I had never

listened to his solo stuff before I did that season and then I kind of became obsessed with his album, Pacific Ocean Blue. He has his own tragic story, which I think is really fascinating. He does. Yeah. I'm just getting into that one. I just started the

Manson series and I just finished Polly Platt. Tell us about what you're working on now that you took. April 5th, which is called Erotic 80s. And there's going to be a second part called Erotic 90s, which comes out in October. And the idea is to basically talk about sex in Hollywood movies in the 80s and 90s with the idea that it's going to end with Eyes Wide Shut and then start, like, basically work back 20 years. Oh, I love it. So it's sort of about, about like why there is no sex in hollywood movies anymore um it's sort of about how the ratings system came in in 1968 and changed what was possible in terms of sex in hollywood movies but at the same time it's not like a switch flipped and like movie holly became pornographic as the culture kind of ebbed and flowed and politics changed and cultural mores changed.

So did the movies, you know. So the first It's about this moment of the where there's sort of a brief heyday of the X rated mainstream film with Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat. And then from that point on, it's every episode is one year from 1979 to 1999. And so the first 12 episodes are going to basically cover the 80s. And then in the fall, we'll do the 90s. And you are you talking about really mainstream films like basic instinct and yeah totally fatal attraction those kind of films yeah so um like you know some of the films that i've already written about that are definitely going to be in the show are um flash dance risky business um right now i'm writing about brian de palma's body double um you know

Nine and a Half Weeks all of the Adrian Line movies but also Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the Blake Edwards movie Ten you know so some American Gigolo a lot of the movies I take one or two movies

from a single year as kind of representative of that year and And I talk about the movie. I'll talk about, in some cases, the star of the movie and their career. So the American Gigolo episode is a lot about kind of the first phase of Richard Gere's career when he was on a lot of magazine covers, shirtless, and was being sort of promoted as a himbo and like a sign that, you know, now women could like think about sex the way men thought about it a lot of it is media criticism um i bought a lot of vintage magazines and so i'm talking about the way these things were portrayed in the media this is interesting

and sometimes you could hit upon it earlier uh about the time that there were those double features of uh deep throat and the devil and miss jones oh yeah that was a popular one yeah and and uh made major movie theaters were showing porn and that was like jack benny jack benny went to see deep throat they say well then when deep throat was um put under federal charges for obscenity um you know, supposedly Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson gave money to its defense. Tony Bill actually testified in defense of it because people were worried about a First Amendment issue and sort of the slippery slope that could affect Hollywood as well. Yeah, it was definitely a mainstream moment. And Deep Throat was I think it was number five in terms of the top 10 grocers

of all movies in 1972. So that's a list that starts with The Godfather at the top and Deep Throat's in the middle. And so there is this brief period of where there could be an X-rated movie, and X-rated could mean Deep Throat, but it could also mean Midnight Cowboy or Last Tango in Paris. but it could also mean Midnight Cowboy or Last Tango in Paris. And very quickly that, you know, bloom sort of wears off the rose and X-rated only means deep throat and more extreme than that. And so all throughout the season is this sort of, how does the rating system actually reflect what's going on in movies? How does it function as censorship?

How does it function as kind of a shell game where filmmakers are editing their movies to make sure they get that r and nobody wants to challenge that that's that's still happening and i think the pawnbroker almost got an x rating speaking of that too yeah yeah i mean it's interesting it's i think one thing that's really interesting in the season is talking about movies that have this sort of reputation or this air of being very sexy. But when you actually get down to it, they don't show much sex. I mean, nine and a half weeks is a movie like that where, you know, there's, you know, one of the sex scenes. He is just feeding her food out of the fridge. And Flashdance is another movie where it was reviewed.

of the fridge and um flash dance is another movie where it was reviewed people use the phrase soft core porn in reviewing that movie and that's a movie without a sex scene without any conventional nudity at all how odd i remember when uh charlie's angels was on they would all talk about that as being you know such a big sex show like jiggle TV. And there was nothing remotely sexy going on in Charlie's Angels. Yeah, no, it's just attractive women, you know, maybe wearing a bathing suit.

So it's really interesting to encounter the discourse about some of these movies and just, you know, think about how there just seems to be no sex in contemporary Hollywood movies

at all anymore. It's almost just like something people are not interested in not only depicting, but just this idea that like adult people have sex like doesn't is not a topic of Hollywood movies anymore. And I'm just trying to look at this last period where it was a topic of Hollywood movies, a very popular and critically and commercially successful movies, and just try to figure out what happened. Oh, and you were talking before about interracial romances in movies. And I heard that scene of Bojangles and Shirley Temple

dancing up and down the stairs. Oh, Bill Robinson. Holding hands was, people were outraged at that. Yeah, I mean, technically, I think that could be perceived as a violation of the production code. And, you know, certainly that's one of the reasons why somebody like Lena Horne, even though she was given this contract by MGM,

they didn't know how to cast her because they didn't have an equivalent black male star. And so you have this gorgeous woman, but it's like against the laws of the movie industry to cast her in a movie where she's having any kind of relationship with a white man. Yeah. And so that kind of thing limited the possibilities for a lot of black performers. And so that kind of thing limited the possibilities for a lot of black performers. You speak in a very fascinating way as well in the Dean and Sammy series about you got to see a film that nobody can find or a film that's not available, which is Porgy and Bess. Yeah. Yeah. And that's another case of – by the way, the thing with Sammy, the wardrobe person saying don't wear underwear.

Really strange. We're going to recommend these series. First and foremost, I want to recommend to our listeners who care about the stuff that you care about and that we care about is the Polly Platt series. Really moved me. Great. I'm so glad. I mean, the other ones were fascinating and scary. And I think after I listened to the Dean and Sammy thing, I was just in a state of shock.

But the Polly Platt series moved me. So we want to tell our listeners to find that one and find all of them because there's such variety in your show that there really is something for everybody. I hope so. That's the idea. I know that, you know, the people who are super into the William Desmond Taylor stuff might not be super into Flashdance and vice versa, but hopefully everybody can find something. Well, and you've got a series about the blacklist. I knew a blacklisted writer, a screenwriter. I went to the School of Visual Arts, and he was my thesis professor, and he worked with Kazan, and I think Kazan named him.

And so, yeah, so stories about – we've talked about the blacklist on this show. And I heard – But that's a fascinating topic, too. You did great work with that one. Thank you. It was that one point where there was a march where Bogart and Danny Kaye were all, you know, anti blacklists. But then I heard they really cracked down on those actors. I heard they really cracked down on those actors. Yeah. So Bogart actually had to write a public apology for appearing at this, supporting the First Amendment march in defense of the black screenwriters. Right around the time John Huston decided he didn't want to live in America anymore

and move to Mexico because he didn't like he didn't like the way things were going down. But what's that and then Ireland and then Ireland there's so much in that uh in that blacklist series as well but like I said there's something for everybody there's a Joan Crawford series you do the history of MGM there's a fascinating series on Disney's Song of the South uh you must be exhausted Karina that's all I can say. I am. But, I mean, I think we're all tired after two years of pandemic. I had jet black hair when I started this show, and now 600 episodes later, I look like Will Gere.

So we'll plug the show again. Let me thank our friends at Starburns who set this up, our friends Debbie Pressman and Lan Romo and Lisa Rudin and Heidi Vanderley, who made this possible, and they knew this would be a natural marriage. And I can't say enough about the show and your labor of love and the effort and the energy that you've put into this. Oh, thank you. Thank you, guys. As my people say, it's a mitzvah.

All right, Gil, she's got to go right. Okay. We're going to let her out of her soundproof booth. Well, this has been Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast with my co-host Frank Santopadre. And although we'll continue fighting tooth and nail about the career of Lon Chaney Jr. Corina, will you at least see him in Of Mice of Men and keep an open mind?

Sure. Okay. That's all I get. That wasn't that convincing. Let me plug the book, too,llywood frame by frame and also your book about howard hughes that we mentioned in the opening uh yeah seduction sex lies and stardom and howard hughes absolutely we could talk to you for an hour and a half just about howard hughes i'll come back okay carina longworth that it. Thank you so much, guys.

Karina, this was a blast. Thank you so much. And thanks for doing what you do. We'll see you out there. Thank you, guys. Nice to meet you. Bye-bye. Bye.

I heard the breeze in the trees Sang away melodies and they made a... Yeah, there you go. It started with a little bit of a break. And from the jail there came a wail. Don't you know it came from a down-hearted frail. And they played that Ow!

As a part of the blues Go ahead, take the spot Half-proud, we're poor, we're peen They took a new note They pushed it to a horn Till it was worn Into a blue note. And then they nursed it, got rehearsed it,

and gave out the news that the southern land gave birth to the blue So forget your troubles And wear a smile And you will never go wrong If you learn to call A happy tune A happy tune A happy tune We'll call them

Sam's songs Dean's songs Our songs Good evening, friends