Each episode in this second season of You Must Remember This has some relationship to Karina’s book Hollywood Frame by Frame, released in September 2014. The book compiles contact sheets from still photo sessions related to Hollywood movies from the early-50s through the mid-90s. Some of the episodes are inspired by or related to images in the book, while others deal with other great moments in Hollywood still photography/promotional image making.
Hollywood Frame by Frame Episodes:
MADONNA: FROM SEAN PENN TO WARREN BEATTY, PART ONE: The biggest female pop star of the last decades of the monoculture, Madonna was also perhaps the first and last contemporary pop star who was also a serious Classical Hollywood cinephile, to extent that, for awhile, she seemed to be using pop music as a vehicle for a kind of conceptual art about movies and movie stardom. When she kept her passion for Hollywood cinema in the realm of celebration, commentary and critique, Madonna was able to engineer a number of truly transcendent images and cultural moments; when she aimed for straight movie stardom, however, her efforts more often than not fell flat. Over the course of two episodes, we will explore the high-cinephile period of Madonna’s life and work, roughly bracketed by her relationship with Sean Penn (whom she met on the set of the “Material Girl” video, while dressed as Marilyn Monroe), and ending with the dissolution of her rebound affair with Warren Beatty, as documented in the self-consciously Felliniesque tour film Truth or Dare. Here in part one, we start with Madonna’s typecasting in Desperately Seeking Susan, trace her tumultuous and allegedly abusive relationship with Penn from “Material Girl” through Shanghai Surprise and beyond, and explore how processing her first divorce through the concept album Like a Prayer led to Madonna’s highly cinematic collaborations with David Fincher, including the zenith of her public cinephilia, the video for “Vogue.” Listen
BOGEY, BEFORE BACALL: Humphrey Bogart is perhaps the most enduring icon of grown-up masculine cool to come out of Hollywood’s first century. But much of what we think of when we think of Bogart — the persona of the tough guy with the secret soft heart, his pairing on-screen and off with Lauren Bacall — coalesced late in Bogart’s life. Today we take a look at how Humphrey Bogart became Bogey, tracing his journey from blue blood beginnings through years of undistinguished work and outright failure (both in the movies and in love), to his emergence in the early 1940s as a symbol of wartime perseverance who could make sacrifice seem sexy. Finally, we’ll look at what it took to get him to take the leap into a fourth marriage that seemed to saved his life … until the world’s most glamorous stoic was faced with cancer. Next week, we’ll present the sequel to this story: Bacall, After Bogey.. Listen
BACALL, AFTER BOGART: Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart fell in love on the set of To Have and Have Not in 1944 and were together until his death in 1957 (see YMRT #13, Bogart Before Bacall). The marriage was blissful, but it required Bacall to put her own acting career on the back burner. When her beloved Bogie died, Bacall was just 32 years old, and at first, she was totally adrift, both personally and professionally. Today on what would have been the former Bette Perske’s 90th birthday, we tell the story of how Bacall spent the remaining 57 years of her life, from the disastrous rebound affair with Frank Sinatra to the almost as misbegotten second marriage, from her midlife reinvention as a musical theater star to her lifelong struggle to find a balance between being Mrs. So-and-So, and being Lauren Bacall. Listen
MADONNA FROM SEAN TO WARREN, PART TWO: In the concluding chapter of a two-part episode about Madonna and movies, we talk about her mutually beneficial professional and personal involvement with Warren Beatty. In 1989, Beatty, the self-described “president of Hollywood,” was coming off the disaster of Ishtar, and decided to star in and direct Dick Tracy as a way to prove that he still had his finger on the pulse of the culture. Madonna, who was still reeling from the end of her marriage to Sean Penn, saw Beatty and Dick Tracy as her avenue to legit Hollywood movie stardom — but she hedged her bets by producing her own cinematic showcase, Truth or Dare. Listen
MARLON BRANDO 1971-1973: In the early 1950s, Marlon Brando became the first post-war mega-movie star, redefining screen acting and heralding the end of the star system by refusing to sign a studio contract. But as the studio system fell apart in the 1960s, and a new generation of moviegoers rejected the previous decade’s movie stars, Brando acquired a reputation as box office poison. This is the story of how, with two movies shot in 1971 — The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris — Brando turned his career around. He then spent his regained celebrity capital on an act of social activism that simultaneously drew attention to a good cause, and put Hollywood’s culture of self-adoration in its place. ListenTHEDA 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; the first silent film actress to have a fictional identity invented for her by publicists and sold through a receptive media to a public who was happy to be conned; and she might have been America’s first homegrown goth. She was one of the three biggest stars in Hollywood during her heyday — the other two being Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford — but by the early 1920s, the Victorian sexual panic she represented was way passé, thanks to the rise of the flapper, and Bara couldn’t get a job. Today most of her films are lost, and culturally she’s all but been forgotten. In this episode, we’ll trace her life and brief, bright career, and talk about what it was like to be a working actress, one of the most famous women in the world, and the embodiment of an intentionally scary fantasy during the very first days of Hollywood. Listen
RAQUEL WELCH, FROM PIN-UP TO PARIAH: The poster for Raquel Welch's second film,One Million Years B.C., became the top pin-up of the late 1960s, and Welch — a divorced mom of two who had been a cocktail waitress just a few months earlier — found herself in the odd position of being an old-fashioned sex goddess in the age of flower children and feminism. With her unprecedentedly athletic curves, Welch was willing to exploit her natural gifts to some extent, but was adamant about not doing full nudity. Her stubbornness about maintaining control over the representation of her body made her unpopular in an industry which wasn’t interested in anything about her but her body; at the same time, Welch was disdained by contemporary feminists for her sexualized image, even though in several of her films, Welch set the prototype for the modern day action heroine. Fed up at age 40, Welch sued a major Hollywood studio for conspiracy to defame her and end her career. Listen
LIZ <3 MONTY: Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift were best friends and co-stars in three films. The first, A Place in the Sun, is an undisputed classic which captures both stars at the peak of their talents and physical beauty. The shoot of the second, Raintree County, was interrupted by a horrible car accident in which Clift’s face was disfigured. This episode tracks Taylor’s relationship with the troubled Clift, from their first, studio-setup date through his untimely death — the result of what some have called “Hollywood’s slowest suicide.” Listen
THE BIRTH OF BARBRA STREISAND’S A STAR IS BORN: There have been four Hollywood films made under the name and/or with the basic story of A Star is Born. The definitive version may be the one starring Judy Garland, directed by George Cukor in 1954; the most reviled version is the one starring Barbra Streisand, made in 1976 and produced by Barbra’s hair dresser-turned-boyfriend Jon Peters. In the middle of the New Hollywood 1970s, when American film was supposedly engaged in a mass project of questioning establishment myths, Streisand and Peters embraced Hollywood’s oldest, most institutionalized myth and appropriated it as a way to build an enormous (and enormously un-self-aware) monument to their own lives and their real-life romance. The result was both a huge success and a disaster. It paved the way for Streisand’s future directing career and Peters’ future as a Hollywood mogul, while also branding both with bad reputations — partially thanks to an expose on the production of the movie published by its jilted director. Listen
AUDREY HEPBURN: SEX, STYLE, AND SABRINA: Like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, it sometimes seems as though Audrey Hepburn’s actual movies have been swallowed up by a superficial image of her as a star. When you think of her, you probably think of her in a black cocktail dress, swinging a cigarette holder — an image from the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a film about a golddigging party girl which somehow convinces the viewer that it’s about a girl-next-door princess. This ability to mix sex and class and innocence was Hepburn’s real trademark, and along with her ballerina/waif body type - the total opposite of the bombshell look that was in vogue at the time — it made Hepburn not just a great star, but a groundbreaking one: she was the first glamorous actress whose style seemed to be to dress for herself, and not to appeal to men.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s came along fairly far along in Hepburn’s evolution as a star. Today we’re going to talk about a film which sparked that evolution, Sabrina — Hepburn’s second Hollywood film, on which she was romanced by William Holden, resented by Humphrey Bogart, and first dressed by Givenchy. It was also the first film on which her complicated star persona as a “new woman,” who used fashion to both broadcast her individuality and negotiate around the censors, started to come together. Listen
MIA FARROW IN THE 1960S PART ONE: MIA AND FRANK: Before MiaFarrow was an outspoken activist, devoted mother to 14 children, and the famously jilted partner of Woody Allen, she was … a lotof other things. Today in the first of a two parter, we’ll begin to explore MiaFarrow’s life and career from 1960-1970 — a time period during which she lived in both a Catholic convent and an Indian ashram; married and divorced Frank Sinatra and became pregnant by Andre Previn, who was still married at the time to the songwriter Dory Previn. Farrow also starred in Peyton Place, the first prime time soap sensation;Rosemary’s Baby, one of the key films of the “new Hollywood” of the 1960s-1970s; and a couple of nearly forgotten but really interesting smaller films which are just as much of their era. Today we’ll cover Mia’s life up to early 1968, tracing her emergence as a star and her relationship with Sinatra. Also: Salvador Dali, Ava Gardner, Roman Polanski, Dean Martin and more. Listen
MIA FARROW IN THE 1960S PART TWO: MIA AND DORY: In our last episode. we learned about Mia Farrow’s transition from Catholic school girl to wife of Frank Sinatra, and her breakout role in Rosemary’s Baby, which cost her her first marriage. This episode, while continuing the story of Mia Farrow’s life and career in the 1960s, is a little different. We’ll trace Mia’s flight to India, her time studying transcendental meditation with the Beatles, and the production of two of her most interesting movies, Secret Ceremony and John and Mary. It was whilst shooting the latter film that Mia fell in love with Andre Previn, who was married at the time to lyricist Dory Previn — whose story will guide the second half of this episode. A schizophrenic pill addict who was afraid to fly, Dory Previn tried, and failed, to fly to London to stop her husband from leaving her for Mia. Instead, Dory wrote a song about it — and touched off a new career as a groundbreaking autobiographical singer-songwriter. Listen
THE SHORT LIVES OF BRUCE AND BRANDON LEE: A martial arts master on the verge of major movie stardom, Bruce Lee died suddenly in 1973, at the age of 33; the official cause was “death by misadventure.” Twenty years later, Bruce Lee's son, BrandonLee, died suddenly in an accidental shooting on the set of The Crow — the movie which was poised to turn Brandon into a major star. These parallel tragedies have led some to suggest that the Lee family have been the victims of a curse, or a conspiracy. In this episode, we’ll explore what really happened to Bruce and BrandonLee, and discuss what happened over several decades, so that an extraordinary talented artist who was essentially run out of town thanks to Hollywood’s racism came to be one of the industry’s biggest moneymakers long after his death. Listen
TALES OF CELEBRITY DRUNKENNESS 2014: In our first annual end-of-year clip show, we’ll listen to some of the booziest excerpts from the 25 episodes of You Must Remember This released thus far. Highlights include day drinking with Judy Garland; the irresistible antics of Kay Francis; the drunk driving arrest that wrecked Frances Farmer’s career, plus stories about Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and more. Also: a zone-out-for-a-second-and-you’ll-miss-it mention of the topic of our first show of 2015! Listen