pplpod

In 1906, a 33-year-old French woman named Alice Guy-Blache directed a production with 300 extras and massive painted backdrops, one of the most ambitious films ever attempted at that point. A few years earlier she had been a secretary typing letters to pay her family's rent. This episode traces how a childhood of instability, a fierce boarding school mother superior, and a string of family deaths...

The endless government warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark never existed. It was painted on a sheet of glass by Michael Pangrazio at Industrial Light and Magic. This episode traces the hidden history of matte painting, from mid-nineteenth-century photographers painting over glass plate negatives, to Norman Dawn's 1907 use of a glass painting to restore crumbling California missions, to...

On the Champs-Elysees in the late 1950s, cinematographer Raoul Coutard crammed himself inside a three-wheeled postal cart with a hole hacked in its side and secretly filmed actors walking down the sidewalk. That image captures the spirit of the French New Wave, a group of broke, movie-obsessed critics who dismantled the rules of traditional filmmaking. This episode explains what they were rebellin...

Roscoe Arbuckle was the highest-paid entertainer in the world, a mentor to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and the man credited with the first on-screen pie in the face. Then, almost overnight, his films were shelved or destroyed, his name became a punchline, and he was banned from the industry he helped build, all for a crime he did not commit. This episode traces his life from a 13-pound birt...

In the spring of 1978, two men dug up Charlie Chaplin's coffin from a Swiss village cemetery and held it for ransom. When it was recovered, he was reburied under reinforced concrete. This episode uses that bizarre postscript to examine a life of extreme contradictions, beginning in London in 1889, where a father's abandonment and alcoholism and a mother's psychosis and repeated institutionalizatio...

The most famous film critic in American history did not learn to dissect movies in a prestigious film school. He learned by obsessively reading parodies in Mad Magazine. This episode follows Roger Ebert from his childhood in Urbana, Illinois, where he published his own science fiction fanzines and worked as a sportswriter at fifteen, to the Chicago Sun-Times, where in 1967 the editors handed the f...

When Billy Wilder died in March 2002 at 95, the French newspaper Le Monde ran a front-page headline that read simply: He is dead. Nobody is perfect. This episode traces the life of the Austro-Hungarian refugee who rewired the DNA of Hollywood storytelling, from his birth as Samuel Wilder in 1906 to a family running railroad station cafes, to a nickname inspired by Buffalo Bill, to his years as a V...

The man who made top hat, white tie, and tails famous actually hated formal wear, held up his slacks with an old necktie, and in his late seventies joined the National Skateboard Society and broke his wrist skateboarding in his own driveway. This episode explores how a reluctant kid from Omaha, born Frederick Austerlitz in 1899, became the architect of the modern movie musical, starting as the les...

One of the most notoriously bad casting decisions in Hollywood history is tied to a real-world radioactive disaster. This episode digs into the troubled 1956 RKO epic The Conqueror, in which John Wayne played the Mongol leader Genghis Khan after Marlon Brando backed out. Director Dick Powell tried to talk Wayne out of it, took the job for the money, and later asked who he was to turn down John Way...

A gravestone in Great Bend, Kansas reads simply: a man ahead of his time. This episode argues that phrase is a massive understatement for Oscar Micheaux, who wrote, funded, directed, and distributed more than 40 independent films at the height of the Jim Crow era. Born in 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois, the fifth of thirteen children and the son of a formerly enslaved father, Micheaux rejected farm...

In January 1929, with no television, internet, or social media, Clara Bow received more than 45,000 fan letters in a single month. This episode looks past the champagne-glass mythology of the roaring twenties to uncover the raw and often tragic story of Hollywood's first major sex symbol, from a brutal Brooklyn childhood marked by poverty, an abusive and absent father, and a mother living with an...

Bruce Lee is remembered as the ultimate martial arts icon, but the historical record reveals a far more complicated figure: a teenage cha-cha champion, a University of Washington drama major, and a writer of dark introspective poetry. This episode traces his life from his 1940 birth in San Francisco, through a turbulent Hong Kong childhood as a prolific child actor and street brawler, to the 1958...

In an 1894 New York parlor thick with cigar smoke, you drop a coin into a wooden cabinet, lean over a peephole, and watch a tiny man bow and tip his hat, alone in a crowd. This episode traces the rise and rapid fall of the Kinetoscope, from Thomas Edison's 1888 encounter with Eadweard Muybridge's zoopraxiscope and his vision of doing for the eye what the phonograph did for the ear, to engineer Wil...

A stuntman is catapulted over a chariot rail toward trampling hooves, and instead of locking the footage away, the editors splice it with a close-up of Charlton Heston hauling himself back aboard. This episode digs into the 1959 epic Ben-Hur as a dying MGM's last bet: stripped of its theaters by the 1948 consent decree, losing audiences to television, and forced to spend frozen Italian lira inside...

As a boy he met the assassins of Rasputin. In his twenties he hunted Nazi war criminals across post-war Europe. In his nineties he became the oldest performer to score a top 20 Billboard hit, with a heavy metal Christmas song. This episode explores Christopher Lee, born in London in 1922 to an Italian countess and step-cousin of Ian Fleming, whose family fortune vanished to a stepfather's gambling...

In a British POW camp in 1945, a teenage German paratrooper stood naked in the freezing night, ate cigarettes and drank his own urine to get sent home sick. It did not work, but it was the blueprint for Klaus Kinski. This episode follows him from his 1926 birth in Zoppot and the childhood poverty he invented, through capture on his second day of combat, a torpedoed transport ship, and camp variety...

A gleaming female robot from a 1927 silent German film inspired C-3PO and echoes through music videos by Madonna, Lady Gaga and Beyonce, yet the film itself was butchered partly because a character named Hel sounded like a bad word in English. This episode traces Fritz Lang's Metropolis from his 1924 first sight of the New York skyline, through the novel and screenplay by his wife Thea von Harbou,...

His carrot-chewing, side-of-the-mouth swagger inspired a legendary cartoon rabbit, and comic book writers borrowed his first name for the alter ego of the world's most famous superhero. Yet a studio boss once said he looked like an ape with oversized ears. This episode tears down the illusion of Hollywood's ultimate alpha male: born in rural Ohio in 1901, losing his mother as an infant, pushed by...

Pour your genius, safety and fortune into one project, watch it bomb so badly it ends your independence, then see history call it a masterpiece. This episode explores Buster Keaton through his 1926 film The General, sparked when collaborator Clyde Bruckman brought him a Union soldier's memoir of the 1862 Great Locomotive Chase. Keaton tried to lease the actual historical locomotive from a Tennesse...

In 1980 a single film bankrupted a legendary studio, ended careers and closed the door on an era of filmmaking, only to be hailed as a masterpiece decades later. This episode follows Michael Cimino from his 1974 directorial debut and the Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter to United Artists handing him absolute creative control and an $11.6 million budget for Heaven's Gate, a script written in 1971 as T...

A Marine pinned down in the Pacific was terrified not of enemy fire but of a medic cutting away his uniform and exposing the pink women's undergarments beneath. This episode looks past the worst director of all time label at Edward Davis Wood Jr., born in Poughkeepsie in 1924, dressed as a girl by a mother who wanted a daughter, salvaging discarded lobby cards behind the local theater, and filming...

One of the most famous women in cinema hated her own name because it sounded like crawfish, and it had been chosen by a movie magazine contest. This episode deconstructs the self-made Joan Crawford: born Lucille LeSueur in Texas sometime between 1904 and 1908, abandoned by her father, injured leaping onto a broken milk bottle, working as a live-in servant to pay school tuition, dancing in chorus l...

A destitute actor begs for $200 for his wife's surgery; the director screams, knocks him down and throws him out, then secretly sends a $1,000 check, a chauffeur, a flown-in surgeon, a house and a lifetime pension. That contradiction defines John Ford. This episode traces John Martin Feeney from an Irish immigrant family in Maine, the Bull Feeney football nickname, following his brother Francis Fo...

You have heard the same man die thousands of times, across decades and galaxies, and he recorded those agonized moments over 70 years ago. This episode is the audio biography of the Wilhelm scream, from a 1951 recording session for the Florida Everglades film Distant Drums, labeled Man Getting Bit by an Alligator and He Screams, through six takes, the famous take four, and the anonymous decades it...

In a 1940s Stella Adler class told to act like chickens facing a nuclear bomb, one student calmly pretended to lay an egg and said he was a chicken, so what did he know about bombs. That student was Marlon Brando. This episode goes beyond the leather jackets and mobster parodies to trace a bleak Omaha childhood with a harsh father and an alcoholic actress mother, expulsion and Shattuck Military Ac...