pplpod

When Vertigo opened in May 1958, it barely broke even, critics were divided, and Alfred Hitchcock blamed the age gap between James Stewart and Kim Novak before eventually locking the film in a vault. This episode follows the story of Scottie, a San Francisco detective with acrophobia hired to follow a woman named Madeleine, and the obsession that consumes him when he meets her lookalike Judy. It e...

The man dangling from the clock face in 1923's Safety Last was missing the thumb and index finger of his right hand, gripping with three fingers and a prosthetic glove that fooled audiences completely. This episode tells the story of Harold Lloyd, born in Nebraska in 1893 to a father of failed business schemes, who sneaked onto the Universal lot by blending into a crowd of extras in full makeup, t...

Greta Garbo reached the summit of Hollywood fame and then spent half a century engineering a vanishing act, walking Manhattan in trench coats and sunglasses under the name Harriet Brown. This episode begins in a freezing Stockholm cold-water flat, where a shy girl staged elaborate pretend games to control a world she could not, nursed her father through the Spanish flu until his death when she was...

The line about doing everything Fred Astaire did backwards and in high heels did not come from a 1930s critic but from a 1980s comic strip, Frank and Ernest. This episode looks past that shorthand at the life of Virginia Katherine McMath, born in 1911 in Independence, Missouri, kidnapped twice by her father before her mother Lela secured custody, and raised in the wings of a Fort Worth theater whe...

As a kid in the 1950s, George A. Romero rode the subway from the Bronx to rent 16mm reels of The Tales of Hoffmann, a film only one other boy, Martin Scorsese, checked out as obsessively. This episode follows Romero from that childhood to Carnegie Mellon, a $20,000 loan from his uncle to start The Latent Image, commercials for Iron City Beer and Calgon, and segments for Mister Rogers' Neighborhood...

Days before his 1962 high school graduation in Modesto, George Lucas was broadsided in his Autobianchi Bianchina, and a snapped seatbelt threw him clear of the car before it wrapped around a tree. This episode traces how surviving that crash pushed a would-be race car driver to tell his father he would be a millionaire by 30, then through USC film school, where he saw himself as a maker of abstrac...

Gene Kelly got into street fights as a boy because he hated the dance classes his mother enrolled him in, and dreamed instead of playing shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates. This episode follows how the 1929 stock market crash turned those abandoned dance skills into a way to keep the lights on, how he left law school to run the family dance studio, and how his athlete's mindset produced the lege...

A crew that shot educational segments for Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and industrial films for Pittsburgh steel mills ended up in a condemned farmhouse with no running water, pouring Bosco chocolate syrup over amateur actors and passing around organs from a local butcher. This episode explores how George A. Romero, Russell Streiner, John Russo and their partners at Image Ten turned $600 contributi...

Frank Capra arrived in New York Harbor in 1903 as a seasick five-year-old in steerage, and grew up to visually define the American dream on film. This episode follows the Sicilian-born chemical engineer from selling newspapers for ten years in Los Angeles, working his way through Caltech, contracting the Spanish flu in the army and losing his father, to years of drifting the American West by freig...

Elizabeth Taylor was once the most famous woman on the planet, and this episode traces how she turned that suffocating attention into a new blueprint for celebrity activism. It begins with her London birth to American parents, the genetic mutation that gave her a double row of eyelashes, and the Universal contract terminated after a year because executives thought her eyes looked too old. MGM then...

In 1982, Werner Herzog released Fitzcarraldo, a film whose central image, a 320-ton steamship dragged over a muddy 40-degree jungle slope, was achieved not with miniatures or effects but by actually doing it in the Peruvian Amazon. Drawing on production diaries, retrospectives and Les Blank's documentary Burden of Dreams, this episode explains why Herzog rejected the sensible shortcuts, how the re...

Douglas Fairbanks was expelled from a Denver high school for cutting the strings on a piano, bluffed his way into a Wall Street clerking job by claiming a Harvard education, and went on to invent the swashbuckler, co-found United Artists, and serve as the first president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This episode follows the restless kid born in Denver in 1883, whose father a...

Dorothy Dandridge was the first African-American nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, but this episode looks past the awards to what being first actually cost her. It begins in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1922, with a childhood spent touring the Chitlin Circuit as one of the Wonder Children under a harsh disciplinarian, follows the Dandridge Sisters to the Cotton Club and the coin-operated Soundies of th...

On March 13, 1995, at a Paris conference marking the 100th anniversary of cinema, Lars von Trier showered the audience with red pamphlets containing a manifesto and a Vow of Chastity, a document he and Thomas Vinterberg reportedly drafted in 45 minutes in a café. This episode unpacks what the Danish directors were rebelling against, from ballooning blockbuster budgets and the rise of CGI to studio...

Dario Argento built a career on the idea that your eyes lie to you under stress. This episode traces the Italian director from his birth in Rome in 1940, with a pragmatic Sicilian producer father and a Brazilian fashion photographer mother, through his teenage years washing dishes in Paris, his stint as a genre-film columnist, and his surprising co-writing credit on Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time...

What would it take to wager your house, your car, and your life savings on one work project while your lead actor was secretly having a heart attack and a typhoon was swallowing your sets? This episode explores the making of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 war epic, a production so chaotic that Coppola said it mirrored the war itself. It starts with screenwriter John Milius taking a pr...

Imagine leaving a theater full of champagne-sipping characters on pristine sets and stepping into a bombed-out city where neighbors are starving. This episode explores Italian neorealism, the brief window from 1943 to 1952 in which filmmakers turned their cameras away from the studio and toward the rubble, stripping away Hollywood glamour to record working-class survival. It begins with the white...

In the late 1930s, Carole Lombard earned roughly five times the salary of the U.S. president and told the press she was happy to hand 80 percent of it back in taxes, a stance that earned her a handwritten thank-you from Franklin D. Roosevelt. This episode follows the life of Jane Alice Peters, born in Fort Wayne in 1908, a baseball-playing tomboy discovered in the street by director Allan Dwan at...

A two-ton house facade falls toward a man who does not flinch; he passes through the open attic window with inches to spare. This episode reconstructs the life of Buster Keaton, born in 1895 into a traveling vaudeville family whose act, The Three Keatons, involved his father hurling him into scenery, orchestra pits, and audience laps. Authorities repeatedly examined the boy for injuries and never...

A man sharpens a straight razor, a thin cloud crosses the moon, and a blade slices through a woman's eye. Nearly a century later, the opening of Un Chien Andalou still short-circuits the brain. This episode traces how two ambitious twenty-somethings, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, turned a lunch conversation about their nightmares into a 17-minute silent film shot in 10 days in 1928 on less than 1...

For nearly 20 years, one of the most acclaimed films ever made was legally forbidden from theaters and television, pulled from circulation by the people who created it. This episode digs into Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 thriller Rear Window as an engineering marvel, a legal battleground, and a psychological trap that makes the audience complicit. It begins with the premise: photojournalist L.B. Jeffer...

A film about a talented newcomer secretly dubbing the voice of a screechy silent star was itself built on the same deception: Debbie Reynolds was dubbed by Jean Hagen, the very actress playing the star she was supposedly dubbing. This episode explores the making, myths, and legacy of the 1952 MGM musical, starting with producer Arthur Freed handing writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green a catalog o...

Brandon Lee chose a passage from Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, about how few times we will truly watch a full moon rise, for his wedding invitations; it is now etched on his tombstone. This episode looks past the two events that dominate his public story, being the son of Bruce Lee and the accident on the set of The Crow, to illuminate the driven artist in between. Born in Oakland in 1965 and...

In 1987, an exhausted Seoul high school student studying for entrance exams looked out his window toward the Jamsil Bridge and saw a vision of a creature climbing the pillars and plunging into the Han River. He vowed to make a movie about it, and 19 years later The Host became South Korea's highest-grossing film at the time. This episode traces Bong Joon-ho's path from a design professor's son in...

On a shoestring summer shoot in 1950, Akira Kurosawa's crew poured black calligraphy ink into their rain machines because plain water vanished against the gray sky. That desperate workaround opened Rashomon, a film that gave the world a psychological and legal term still in use today. This episode explores how a script rejected by Toho and reluctantly accepted by Daiei, shot on just three sets, br...