The (Suddenly, This) Summer Experiment! / May 30, 2014 by Karina Longworth

I started this podcast in April, and have managed to produce four episodes in two months. I didn’t know what I was doing at first, technically (as I’ve noted elsewhere, I taught myself how to use GarageBand by editing the first episode), but also in a larger sense. I wasn’t sure what this even was, but I knew I needed to do something creative, and that I had to start making it in order to figure it out.

I think I’m still figuring it out (technically, and otherwise), but the response has been encouraging (thanks, you guys!), at least encouraging enough that I’ve decided to try something. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working a job which more or less ends today. I have nothing planned, work-wise, starting next week (although I do have a book coming out in September and I figure I’ll probably need to devote some time to asking people to pay attention to it around then). So, for the next two months, I’ve decided to do nothing except for work on this podcast. My goal is to try to crank out one episode per week, beginning next week (although realistically, the episode I’ve just started to work on might not be ready for publishing until Monday June 9) and continuing through the end of July. I want to get faster, in terms of how long it takes to make these, and I want the storytelling to be a little tighter. Most of all, I want to see if it makes sense to treat this like a full-time job.

Wish me luck! And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the podcast, check out our website, and/or rate and review us on iTunes.

You Must Remember This Episode 4: (The Printing of) The Legend of Frances Farmer / May 27, 2014 by Karina Longworth

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Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

During the last year of his life, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain was obsessed with Frances Farmer, an actress from his hometown of Seattle who died in 1970. Farmer’s beauty and unique screen presence made her a star, but her no-bullshit ballsiness made her a pariah — and a target of the hostile media — in 1930s Hollywood. Farmer’s career went down the tubes in the 1940s when a couple of incidents of inconvenient drunkenness led to her being committed to an insane asylum by her own mother, and given a lobotomy.

Or, so Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, frequently told journalists while Cobain was promoting In Utero, the Nirvana album that includes Cobain’s tribute to the actress, “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” (Love also claimed to have been married to Cobain whilst wearing a dress once owned by Farmer, and the couple named their daughter Frances, although that was likely at least co-inspired by Frances McKee of The Vaselines). Unbeknownst to them, the notion that Farmer was lobotomized was a fiction invented by a biographer with ties to Scientology, a lie which was then dramatized in an Oscar-nominated, Mel Brooks-produced movie which helped to make Jessica Lange a star. By the time Kurt and Courtney were championing Farmer as a proto-punk martyr in the 1990s, the legend of Frances Farmer as patron saint of…well, women like Courtney Love, had been printed so many times that it had swallowed up the truth of Farmer’s experience, and loomed much larger than her actual body of movie work. Today we’ll explore how, and why, that legend got printed, and try to explain how Frances Farmer became the patron saint of beautiful, bright, potentially batshit women whose self-destruction can be traced back to their signing of a studio contract.

We have special guest stars! Nora Zehetner (Brick, Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men and most recently IFC’s Maron) played Frances Farmer; Brian Clark played Kurt Cobain, and Noah Segan IS Rex Reed.

And now for a few Show Notes:

Farmerology is a tricky field, because each new contributor to the canon seems to make a point of debunking those who came before them…and also quotes those same predecessors as though their works are unchallenged fact. So while the goal of this episode was to explain how and why Frances Farmer’s legend got printed, I’ve also used aspects of that legend (such as clips from the movie Frances) as “evidence.” When in Rome?

The main texts examined in this episode are Shadowland by William Arnold, and Will There Really Be A Morning? by “Frances Farmer.” As explained in the episode, these texts cannot be taken at face value, and the following resources were invaluable in providing additional information and context:

“Shedding Light on Shadowland” by Jeffrey Kauffman

“Burn All The Liars” by Matt Evans, The Morning News

Frances Farmer: The Life and Films of a Troubled Star by Peter Shelleyhttp://www.amazon.com/Frances-Farmer-Life-Films-Troubled/dp/0786447451

Also cited within and/or relevant:

Hollywood Babylon, by Kenneth Anger

“Dark Side of the Womb, Part 2” Melody Maker, August 28, 1993

“Strange Love” Vanity Fair, September 1993

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright

In the podcast, I’ve included a quote in which Kurt Cobain admits that he is worried that what happened to Frances Farmer could happen to his wife, Courtney Love. I could do a second episode just on that, but if you’re at all interested in what’s happened to Courtney after Kurt, read Nancy Jo Sales’ excellent November 2011 Vanity Fair profile, “Courtney Love in a Cold Climate.”

Music used in this episode

“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” by Nirvana

“Knife Fights Every Night” by Joan of Arc

“Night City” by Dirty Beaches

“Paracosm” by Washed Out

“Lenny Valentino #3” by The Auteurs, remixed by Mu-ziq

“Prelude” by Gene Harris

“ Oh Brother #3” by Joan of Arc

“Pennyroyal Tea [Demo]” by Nirvana

“Rub Til it Bleeds” by PJ Harvey

“Big Day Coming” by Yo La Tengo

“Asking For It” by Hole

You Must Remember This on AV Club's Podmass! / May 12, 2014 by Karina Longworth

One of the reasons why I started this podcast is because, as a podcast consumer, I feel like there’s never enough to listen to. One of the resources I use regularly to find new fodder for my addiction is the AV Club's weekly feature Podmass, which evaluates each week’s “best podcasts,” usually breaking down the new output from the big, mostly comedy oriented podcasts (Marc Maron’s WTF, Julie Klausner's How Was Your Week), and also citing a new (or new to them) podcast as being worthy of checking out. This week, to my pleasant surprise, they gave the “New” slot to You Must Remember This!

They even gave us blurbs! We are “well worth a listen for anyone with even a passing interest in cultural history!” And, “every episode is packed with fascinating trivia!” And they praise my “deep pathos for what it means to be a person, not just a star, in Hollywood.” !!!

What’s funny, is that last week, after I published the Val Lewton episode, I thought, “Huh. Is it time to email Podmass and ask them to pay attention to me?” And I decided that no, it was not time, because I still consider the podcast to be in “beta.” I think it gets better with each and every episode, but right now technically it’s maybe 80 percent of what I want it to be, and in terms of storytelling, only a little bit further along. So I decided that I would wait a few weeks, maybe until after the fifth episode, at which point I might even have a real logo. Oh well! I’m happy for the incentive to get better faster.

And with that, back to work on episode 4…

You Must Remember This #3: Happy 110th Birthday, Val Lewton! / May 7, 2014 by Karina Longworth

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

A Very Special Halloween Episode! The writer-producer Val Lewton produced and ghost-wrote 11 films in just three years as head of the horror unit at RKO, many of which — Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Curse of the Cat People,The Body Snatcher — were huge hits, helping to keep the troubled studio afloat in the early 1940s, and becoming influential genre film classics. Lewton died super young, but he crammed an enormous amount of life into his 46 years. Before establishing his unique style of horror at RKO, he was a publicist and a terrible journalist; he published at least a dozen books (including at least two porno novels, one of which he was very proud of), and through his career-making apprenticeship with David O. Selznick, collaborated with Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and countless other classical Hollywood luminaries. Today — which would have been Lewton’s 110th birthday, if not for his untimely death in 1951 — we take a look back at his life and career, break down his groundbreaking aesthetic, and ask and answer an incredibly reductive question: did Hollywood kill Val Lewton?

SHOW NOTES!

Bibliography:

Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career, by Edmund G. Bansak

Icons of Grief, by Alexander Nemerov

Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror, by Joel E. Siegel

Music:

Excerpts from the scores of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Bedlam, The Body Snatcher and The Seventh Victim, performed by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra

The Bride of Frankenstein theme, performed by the Cincinatti Pops Orchestra

"Cat People (Putting out fire)" by David Bowie

Film clips:

Cat People

I Walked With a Zombie

Bedlam

The Seventh Victim

You Must Remember This Episode 2: Frank Sinatra in Outer Space / April 16, 2014 by Karina Longworth

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Welcome to the second episode of You Must Remember This, the podcast devoted to exploring the secret and or/forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century. Today, we look back to 1979, when — while the music world was full of punk and post-disco coke rock, and the movie world was making the transition from the “New Hollywood” of the ’70s into the blockbuster age — Frank Sinatra recorded Trilogy: Past, Present and Future, a triple album with one disc each devoted to big band standards (“The Past”); covers from “the rock era” including Billy Joel and Beatles songs and also “Theme from New York, New York” (“The Present”); and, most amazingly, a 40 minute song cycle about life, love, death and visiting outer space (“The Future”). We’ll take a look at how and why “The Future” was made, and theorize as to why it’s fallen into the dustbin of pop cultural history.

Show Notes

Songs

Tracks from Trilogy: Past, Present and Future, performed by Frank Sinatra:

“Let’s Face The Music and Dance”

“Theme from New York New York”

“Something”

“What Time Does the Next Miracle Leave?”

“World War None!”

“The Future”

“The Future (Continued)”

“The Future (Conclusion)”

“Before the Music Ends”