pplpod

After 24 years and 190 comedy shorts for Columbia Pictures, the Three Stooges were fired in December 1957 without ceremony, and weeks later Moe Howard was turned away at the studio gate because he no longer had a pass. This episode goes behind the slapstick to reconstruct the trio's history, starting in 1922 vaudeville when Moe joined comedian Ted Healy as an on-stage stooge, followed by Shemp How...

Paramount's readers called Robert Bloch's 1959 novel impossible to film and repulsive, so Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights himself for $9,500, waived his $250,000 directing fee in exchange for 60 percent ownership of the negative, and financed the roughly $800,000 production out of his own pocket. This episode explores how that gamble, and the constraints that came with it, produced Psycho. We c...

A man in round spectacles dangles from the hands of a giant clock a dozen stories above 1920s Los Angeles. It is one of the most iconic images in cinema, and the star hanging there was missing his right thumb and forefinger, lost when a prop smoke bomb exploded in his hand in 1919. This episode breaks down Harold Lloyd's Safety Last!, from its cheeky subversion of the era's Safety First industrial...

The killer's point-of-view shot, the black leather gloves, the heavy breathing behind the camera. These staples of modern slasher films were not invented in 1980s Hollywood but in 1960s Rome. This episode traces the Italian genre known as giallo back to its unlikely origin: a 1929 marketing decision by the publisher Mondadori to give its cheap crime paperbacks bright yellow covers. Those translati...

In 1925, a weary man in his sixties sold toys and candy from a kiosk in the Gare Montparnasse train station in Paris. Two decades earlier he had been the most famous filmmaker on the planet. This episode tells the story of Georges Méliès, born in 1861 into a wealthy luxury boot-making family, who was forced to manage factory machinery instead of studying painting, discovered stage magic at London'...

The Godfather is treated as an inevitable masterpiece, but its origins were driven by desperation. Mario Puzo sold an unfinished 60-page manuscript to Paramount for a $12,500 option because he needed $10,000 to pay off his bookies. Francis Ford Coppola initially called the novel cheap and sleazy and only took the job because his company American Zoetrope owed Warner Bros. over $400,000. This episo...

In 1931, Tod Browning had just handed Universal a genre-defining hit with Dracula and was given a blank check. Instead of another safe blockbuster, he turned down a prestige John Barrymore project at MGM and made Freaks, a film cast with real sideshow performers including conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, Schlitzie, Prince Randian, and Johnny Eck. This episode explains why Browning, who ran...

Federico Fellini gave the world the word paparazzi, the adjective Fellini-esque, and even a manual espresso technique named the Fellini move. This episode traces how a truant schoolboy from Rimini who missed 67 days of class in a single year, obsessed with American comic strips and circus clowns, went from drawing caricatures in Roman cafes to becoming one of the most influential filmmakers in his...

Shoot a feature for roughly 400,000 dollars, then spend a million licensing the rock songs on the soundtrack. Have your custom-built motorcycles stolen from a garage before filming ends and keep shooting anyway. By every industry rule, the 1969 film Easy Rider should have been a disaster. Instead it grossed 60 million dollars, helped kill the classical studio system, and launched the director-driv...

In 1932, Richard Hollingshead Jr. nailed a bed sheet to trees in his Camden, New Jersey backyard, balanced a Kodak projector on the hood of his car, and propped cars on wooden blocks to work out sight lines. The result was the patented terraced ramp layout behind the first official drive-in theater, which opened in June 1933 with room for 400 cars. This episode traces the boom, bust and unexpected...

A man at a carnival sideshow asks a sleepwalker how long he will live and is told: until dawn tomorrow. For the writers of the 1920 German silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, that was no campfire scare but an echo of soldiers in the trenches waiting for the morning artillery. This episode explores how Hans Janowitz, a former infantry officer, and Carl Mayer, who feigned madness before a bully...

A boy in 1940s El Paso rode a horse into town to watch Walt Disney films and went home to copy every Disney comic he could find. That boy, Don Bluth, grew up to lead a walkout from the Walt Disney Company that nearly toppled its animation empire. This episode traces his path from in-betweening on Sleeping Beauty in 1955, a mission in Argentina, a musical theater in Culver City and an English degre...

A sound designer slows down recorded lion and tiger roars, plays them backward, and creates the most iconic monster bellow in film history. This episode explores how RKO Pictures, on the brink of bankruptcy during the Great Depression, gambled on Merian C. Cooper's obsession with gorillas and the box office of a racist hoax documentary called Ingagi to produce King Kong, a film that essentially in...

The greatest American epic about organized crime was directed by a man who thought the source material was sleazy trash and only took the job because he owed Warner Bros. 400,000 dollars. This episode traces the turbulent life of Francis Ford Coppola, from a childhood bout of polio that confined him to a bed and pushed him to stage puppet theaters and splice 8mm film, through UCLA film school on t...

It began with producer Walter Wanger shooting his wife's lover in a Beverly Hills parking lot, and it ended with a 44 million dollar epic that was the highest grossing film of 1963 and still lost money. This episode follows the making of Cleopatra from a 2 million dollar plan to dust off a 1917 silent script into the most expensive film ever made at the time, a production defined by near-death exp...

In August 1939, RKO chief George J. Schaefer signed a theater and radio director with zero film experience to a contract that gave him final cut, total artistic control, his own unproven cast and crew, and no obligation to show the studio a single frame of daily footage. This episode explores how Orson Welles, fresh off the War of the Worlds broadcast, used that unprecedented deal to make Citizen...

Chuck Jones grew up drawing on towering stacks of embossed stationery left over from his father's failed businesses, so when an art school instructor warned that every artist must produce 100,000 bad drawings first, Jones calculated he had already passed 200,000. This episode traces his path from paying tuition as a janitor and washing paint off celluloid at Ub Iwerks' studio to the ramshackle Ter...

Imagine acting in the most famous romantic climax in film history while the director refuses to tell you who your character loves, because the writers have not decided yet. That was the reality on the set of the 1942 classic set in a Moroccan city during World War II. This episode digs into how an unproduced play bought for an unprecedented 20,000 dollars, a fractured writing process with twin bro...

In 1961, after a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard, Mel Blanc lay in a coma for about two weeks. Doctors got no response until one leaned in and asked how Bugs Bunny was feeling. A weak voice answered, and then Tweety chimed in. This episode uses that documented moment to explore how the pioneer of modern voice acting built a physical instrument so deeply grooved into his brain that his charac...

In 1972, Junius Griffin of the NAACP's Beverly Hills Hollywood branch fused the words black and exploitation to condemn a new wave of films he argued mass-produced offensive stereotypes. The insult stuck as the genre's name, yet blaxploitation went on to rewrite film marketing, revolutionize soundtracks and lay visual groundwork for hip hop. This episode traces how the civil rights and black power...

In post-war Rome, a family pawns its wedding dowry bedsheets to buy back a bicycle, because without it the father cannot take the job that will feed them. On his first day, the bike is stolen. That simple premise became Bicycle Thieves, the 1948 film that helped define Italian neorealism and in 1952 topped the Sight and Sound poll as the greatest film of all time. This episode looks at how Vittori...

In 1925, a Soviet propaganda film became so psychologically potent that Joseph Goebbels praised it as a blueprint while Heinrich Himmler banned SS members from seeing it, and Britain kept it illegal until 1954. The irony is that its most famous scene, the massacre on the Odessa Steps, never happened as depicted. This episode explores how 27-year-old Sergei Eisenstein, handed an eight-part epic abo...

A five-year-old boy is sent by his father to the local police station with a note. The desk sergeant reads it, walks him down a corridor, locks him in a cell for several minutes and then warns him that this is what happens to bad boys. That boy was Alfred Hitchcock, and this episode traces how a lifelong terror of the police, a Jesuit school that delayed punishment until the end of the day, and an...

Before 1968, science fiction on screen mostly meant B movies, rubber creature suits and cheap thrills. Then Stanley Kubrick, fresh off Dr. Strangelove and obsessed with extraterrestrial life, was pointed toward Arthur C. Clarke, a prominent author living off the grid in Ceylon. Kubrick initially dismissed him as a recluse who lived in a tree; Clarke cabled back that he was frightfully interested....

The word grindhouse conjures scratched prints, fake blood and 1970s sleaze, but the term first appeared in a 1923 issue of Variety describing a Canadian ticket pricing strategy called the grind policy. This episode traces how continuous, nonstop projection with cheap admission that rose through the day created a parallel track of low-budget oddities, why the grind likely refers to sidewalk barkers...