Biopic: A Podcast Story

Reagan is finally here and boy does it look mighty bad. Rena and Sara try to make sense of the Reagan trailer, a film that has been waiting for its moment since filming in 2020, and speculate on its contents, whether its director is an auteur, and the putty and prosthetics budget. We play a game called “Desperate or Canceled.” This film will star Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan, Mena Suvari as Jane...

Rena and Sara discuss The Conqueror, a 1956 Howard Hughes production starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan. You read that correctly. This one is a doozy. Join us as we dig into all the things that make The Conqueror, er, special, including radioactive sand, a demoralised RKO studios gutted by Hughes, a supposedly tame panther, future Klingon gear, and a script full of insane, stilted, pseudo-archaic...

What do you do when your assessment of a movie is out of step with critical and public consensus? That is a question that we found ourselves pondering on watching Respect, the 2021 Aretha Franklin biopic starring Jennifer Hudson as Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin, Forrest Whitaker as Reverend C.L. Franklin, Marc Maron as Jerry Wexler, Audra Ann McDonald as Barbara Franklin, Titus Burgess as James Cl...

Rena and Sara do an introductory explainer episode for Biopic: A Podcast Story. This is where we explain how the rating system works, how we choose what movies to cover next, and what is and is not a biopic for the purposes of this podcast. We talk about ourselves a little bit, and Rena serendipitously pitches Sara’s dream biopic project: Andy Warhol Presents Abe Lincoln’s Sleep. Spoiler Warning:...