The Podcast Bringing Forgotten Hollywood Lore Back Into the Zeitgeist

Karina Longworth has a penchant for things that are out of time, and ahead of it, too: as creator of the beloved podcast You Must Remember This, she has an almost preternatural sense for the pockets of Hollywood history soon to resurface in the popular consciousness.

Longworth’s gripping series Charles Manson’s Hollywood came out a year before Emma Clines’s California cult-set novel The Girls, and four years before Quentin Tarantino revisited Cielo Drive and Spahn Ranch with Once Upon A Time … in Hollywood. Her 2017 series Dead Blondes – among them, naturally, Marilyn Monroe – is essential listening in light of Andrew Dominik’s polarising 2022 film Blonde. “There certainly have been times where I would say the way I’ve shaped an idea has been in response to the zeitgeist,” she says, citing Fake News, the title of her 2018 series on Kenneth Anger’s studio gossip bible Hollywood Babylon. “But I really cannot make choices based on what other people are going to be interested in.” Through the alchemy of her podcast, she makes those pockets and apocrypha in the cultural memory bank feel vital once more.

After her series Erotic 80s and 90s, which came out in 2022 and 2023, Longworth delved further back in time for her podcast’s new season, The Old Man Is Still Alive. An examination of late-period, offbeat works by some of Hollywood’s golden-era greats, the series delivers an insightful look at how proto-auteur figures like Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder were forced, for better or worse, to “get weird” in their later years. (The perma-threat of obsolescence isn’t just for the Norma Desmonds rattling around their Hollywood mansions.)

“When I finished Erotic 90s I knew I needed to take some time off to just find a new idea,” says Longworth from Los Angeles, where she lives with her director husband, Rian Johnson. It was in Paris that summer that the spark for the new season came to her, in the form of a little-known Vincente Minnelli film called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse showing at the Cinémathèque Française. “I couldn’t get anyone to go see it with me on a Saturday night,” she laughs, “and so I almost didn’t make the screening myself, but I was so glad that I did because the movie really blew me away.” Audiences in London can catch a showing at the BFI this April as part of a season Longworth has curated, alongside a collection of other deep cuts. The bill includes George Stevens’ The Only Game in Town, starring Elizabeth Taylor as an ageing showgirl alongside Warren Beatty’s gambling piano man; a 1971 Otto Preminger sex comedy (Such Good Friends); and John Ford’s final western (Cheyenne Autumn), switching focus to the plight of Native Americans.

The Minnelli is Longworth’s favourite of the group, though. “I really think it’s [his] unknown, forgotten masterpiece,” she says of the film, a box-office failure from a director known for high-calibre musicals like Gigi and Meet Me in St Louis. Though a historical drama set during the German occupation of Paris, Longworth was struck by its modernity. “There’s some kind of experimental filmmaking in it that was really dismissed at the time by critics who essentially accused Minnelli of showing off. But given how ugly contemporary movies are and how reticent they seem to be to take chances, I find it really exciting.” Getting weird sometimes clicked and sometimes didn’t, but often these late pieces, some of them remakes, were nevertheless circling something that hadn’t yet been done.

Longworth is something of a trailblazer herself, starting her podcast in 2014 when “there weren’t ever enough podcasts to listen to”. A film writer by trade, she realised she could use the form to show what she was interested in researching when it came to film. “It wouldn’t be like, ‘Oh, God, another podcast about Hollywood history,’ because at that point there were no podcasts about Hollywood history.” It’s since become an indispensable podcast for both lovers of film and students of celebrity, with listeners in Natasha Lyonne and Bret Easton Ellis.

Longworth starts her research watching films and reading autobiographies and “old-fashioned magazines that have these long profiles that we don’t do any more”. A lot of her research involves trying to understand how things were written about at the time they were happening, and how narratives were shaped. “I think for each director ‘getting weird’ means something different,” she says of the auteurs she turned her attention to for the series, who began experimenting as the studio system was disintegrating. “But in each case it tends to be a response to the industrial and economic environment.” Resurrecting ghosts and uncovering curios in some of Hollywood’s most storied careers, Longworth makes of these inflection points a brilliant prism through which to view the times, both then and now.

You Must Remember This Presents … “The Old Man is Still Alive” curated by Karina Longworth is on at BFI Southbank in London until 30 April 2025.