Voices From Hollywood's Golden Age

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Thalberg: Life and Legend

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Las Vegas Connection: Don Rickles

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King Cohn: The Lfie and Times of Hollywood Mogul Harry Cohn

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John Barrymore: The Life and Legacy of Early 20th Century America's Most Famous Actor

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Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy

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Whatever Happened to Hollywood?

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William Powell: The Life and Legacy of One of Early Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Actors

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All in All: An Actor's Life On and Off the Stage

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Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them

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The Awful Truth: Hollywood Stage

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Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming

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Chasing Salome: A Novel of 1920s Hollywood

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The Real Peter Sellers

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All About Eve

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A Life in Movies: Stories from 50 years in Hollywood

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Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America

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Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise

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Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928 – 1937

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American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

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Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood

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Fritz Lang: The Life and Legacy of the Influential German-American Film Legend

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The Farrows of Hollywood: Their Dark Side of Paradise

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Rewrites A Memoir

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The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up

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Starstruck: My Unlikely Road to Hollywood

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Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

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Sinatra and Me: In the Wee Small Hours

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Suspicion: Hollywood Stage

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One Lucky Bastard: Tales from Tinseltown

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Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart

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Demon Copperhead: A Novel

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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

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The Overstory

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77 Days of February: Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Nation’s Own Journalists

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Small Mercies: A Novel

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Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

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Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

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Leave the World Behind: A Novel

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Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

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Swingtime for Hitler: Goebbels’s Jazzmen, Tokyo Rose, and Propaganda That Carries a Tune

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The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living

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Razorblade Tears: A Novel

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Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

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Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

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All the Sinners Bleed: A Novel

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

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An American Marriage: A Novel

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The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

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The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

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The Secret History of the World

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Mary Magdalene: Women, the Church, and the Great Deception

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The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I

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The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

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Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

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The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland

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The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

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Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

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The Story of Art Without Men

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The Book of Five Rings

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Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II

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"The Scandalous Screen Siren" Pt. 2: Mae West

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28: Star Wars Episode II: Carole Lombard and Clark Gable: The queen of screwball comedies married the king of Hollywood in 1939, but Lombard's 1942 death in a plane crash on the way home from a trip to sell war bonds drove Gable into a physical and emotional breakdown, and eventually the Army.

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139: Mary Astor's Diary (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 13): In 1936, actress Mary Astor (who had not yet made her most famous film, The Maltese Falcon) and her husband went to court to fight for custody of their four year-old daughter. The trail made international news thanks to both sides’ use of Astor’s diary, in which she had recorded details of her affair with playwright George S. Kaufman. How much did Astor truly reveal in her diary, and what role did the scandal play in her life and career?

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70: MGM Stories Part 15: Mayer’s Downfall: 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...

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Gossip Girls: Louella Parsons And Hedda Hopper (The First Lady, Episode 2)

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71: The Blacklist Part 1: The Prehistory of the Blacklist: With America increasingly paranoid that it and the Soviet Union were destined to demolish one another through nuclear war, anyone who had connections to Communism was seen by some as a potential threat to national security.

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#412 - The Line (A Chorus Line - feat. Francine Espiritu): A Chorus Line changed everything. It’s a statement theatre lovers have heard time and again. But until this exploration into the proliferation of the line as a theatrical device in musical theatre, I never really understood the depth of what A Chorus Line changed. For the layman, it was the first time in years that a Broadway musical reached the greater cultural conversation. Musical theatre had drifted from the zeitgeist after decades of leading the entertainment industry, but here it was back and in charge. For the theatre aficionados, it was the first Broadway musical to run longer than a decade. For comparison, prior to Broadway’s shutdown there were four musicals running that had opened more than ten years ago. But for theatre artisans, A Chorus Line was the first big musical without a separation between principals and chorus. In A Chorus Line, every character was named and given a point of view - not only in the stagi

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Alison Brie (Re-release)

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8: Follies of 1938, Part 1: Hollywood’s Greatest Year: This micro-episode sets up a topic we’ll be exploring throughout the summer: the films, stars and scandals of 1938. By midway through that year, Hollywood was in such a desperate downswing — and so concerned that Americans were losing...

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72: The Blacklist Part 2: Crossfire – The Trials of the Hollywood Ten: In 1947, HUAC subpoenaed dozens of Hollywood workers to come to Washington and testify to the presence of Communists in the film industry.

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Alfred Hitchcock

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Lee Kline- Restoration of Films: EPISODE 17 - LEE KLINE - Film Restoration Team Deakins is joined by Criterion’s Technical Director of Restoration; Lee Kline. Lee has overseen the restoration of hundreds of films during his tenure at Criterion and undoubtedly left an impact on...

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Evelyn Nesbit and the Crime of the Century: (Samantha) In December 1900 the beautiful, fifteen year old Evelyn Nesbit arrived in New York. Within a year she became the “glittering girl model of Gotham,” the first iconic American sex-goddess. Her fame would transform into notoriety after June 25, 1

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97. Debbie Harry: This is such a great chat with a genius, a trailblazer, and an icon : Debbie Harry. She charmed us all with her beautiful take on the world: why people putting labels on your sexuality just doesn’t work, when being entitled can be a good thing, plus sh...

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Lou Gramm: Lou Gramm

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144: The Trials of Confidential Magazine: Maureen O'Hara (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 18): In part two of our two-parter on the demise of the biggest and most pernicious tabloid of the 1950s, we’ll explore what happened after the magazine’s claim that redheaded star Maureen O’Hara was caught having sex at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. O’Hara positioned herself the “Joan of Arc” of Hollywood, single-handedly defending a cowardly industry against the existential threat posed by Confidential. As we’ll see, this is one story where the Kenneth Anger version is more credible than the version related by one of the subjects. 

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CR030/PH16 - Another Lonely Song: The Tammy Wynette & George Richey Story

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145: Ramon Novarro (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 19): Ramon Novarro was a Mexican actor and singer whose stardom at MGM in the 1920s and 30s was not impeded by his offscreen life as a gay man. In Hollywood Babylon, Anger focuses only on Novarro’s grisly murder in 1968 -- which outed Novarro to a public that had largely forgotten him--and needlessly embellishes a crime scene that was already pretty horrible. Today, in our final episode of Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon, we will explore the life which Anger left out of Hollywood Babylon, and correct that book’s version of Novarro’s death.

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Peter Bogdanovich and the Woman Behind the Auteur (Polly Platt, The Invisible Woman, Episode 2): 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.

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Broken Record Presents: Cautionary Tales - Bowie, Jazz and the Unplayable Piano: Sometimes we do our best work not when things are going well, but when a wrench has been thrown in the works.

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Classic Film Travel Destinations: The James Dean Museum with Curator Dorothy Schultz

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142: Bugsy Siegel (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 16): Jewish gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel is frequently credited with corrupting Hollywood’s unions and “inventing” Las Vegas. Siegel did have movie star friends, but the true story of his involvement with the Flamingo casino is also the story of a much bigger movieland player: Hollywood Reporter founder/publisher/columnist Billy Wilkerson. 

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Best of - Johnny Cash: True To His Own Voice: He had a voice that could make a mountain quake. And his impact on the world of music is legendary. As fans prepare to celebrate the arrival of a new Johnny Cash album -- recorded live in 1968 but never released -- we take a second listen to the very first episode of What It Takes. You'll hear the deeply introspective Cash near the end of his career (1993). He reflects on how he overcame considerable personal obstacles and turned his failures into the stepping stones to success. He also talks about the first music he remembers, the voice teacher who advised him to stop taking lessons, and the source of his creativity.

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141: Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, and the “sewing circle” (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 15): The bisexuality of Marlene Dietrich was not exactly a secret in 1930s Hollywood -- in fact, her ambiguous sexuality was part of her on-screen brand. But there is some debate as to who Dietrich counted among her lovers, and which of her fellow stars participated in what has been called the “sewing circle” of female intimacy. Anger alleges that Dietrich had a “passionate affair” with Claudette Colbert, an Oscar-winning actress with an extremely heteronormative persona. We’ll explore what was going on in Dietrich’s life and career around the time when this affair could have taken place, and then delve into Colbert’s image as a very different kind of on-screen sex symbol, and her complicated off-screen personal life. 

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17: Theda Bara, Hollywood’s First Sex Symbol: Theda Bara might be the most significant celebrity pioneer whose movies you’ve never seen. She was the movie industry’s first sex symbol; the first femme fatale; and she might have been America’s first homegrown goth.

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146: Disney’s Most Controversial Film (Six Degrees of Song of the South, Episode 1): Disney Plus is launching with the stated intention of streaming the entire Disney library... except for "Song of the South," a 1946 animation/live-action hybrid film set on a post-Civil War plantation. It was theatrically re-released as recently as 1986, and served as the basis for the ride Splash Mountain, but has never been available in the US on home video. What is "Song of the South?" Why did Disney make it and why have they held the actual film from release, while finding other ways to profit off of it?

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1987: Fatal Attraction and Dirty Dancing (Erotic 80s Part 10)

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Hit Parade: The Fab Four Sweep Edition: How a major label screw up helped The Beatles sweep the Billboard Top Five.

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22. Bela Lugosi Jr. & Sara Karloff

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BPS 307: How I Wrote Birdman with Oscar® Winner Alexander Dinelaris: Alexander Dinelaris is an Academy Award and Golden Globe winning screenwriter for "Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)", a co-producer on the three time Academy Award® winning film "The Revenant", and the book writer for the Broadway...