When They Were Making It

She was the face of the Roaring Twenties, Hollywood's original It Girl, and one of the biggest box-office stars of the silent era. Then the headlines stopped being about her movies. From a Brooklyn tenement to Paramount superstardom, Clara Bow's rise was extraordinary. With Mantrap , It , and the Oscar-winning Wings , she helped define a generation. But the arrival of talking pictures, relentless...

With Psycho , Alfred Hitchcock bet his own money on a low-budget shocker — and changed Hollywood forever. What followed would bring some of his biggest hits, his most troubling partnership, and a final chapter like no other. Concluding our October Halloween series, this is Part 3 of our three-part look at the life of Alfred Hitchcock. When plans for a new thriller starring Audrey Hepburn fell thro...

When Alfred Hitchcock's first bid for independence failed, he pivoted — and began a career-defining decade that would bring some of his most celebrated films, transform him into a household name, and lead him toward a gamble that would change Hollywood forever. Continuing our October Halloween series, this is Part 2 of our three-part look at the life of Alfred Hitchcock. After Rope and Under Capri...

Before he became the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock had to start somewhere. He started in a British film industry struggling to survive — and in a fight for control that would carry him all the way to Hollywood. Continuing our October Halloween series, this is Part 1 of our three-part look at the life of Alfred Hitchcock. Over half a century, Alfred Hitchcock perfected the art of suspense, b...

The first in our October Halloween series: four weeks of classic Hollywood's darker, stranger, and more monstrous stories. Fay Wray was already one of Hollywood's busiest young leading ladies when RKO cast her in King Kong . She had risen from Hal Roach shorts and the WAMPAS Baby Stars to Erich von Stroheim's The Wedding March , then made a name in the fast, precarious world of early-1930s picture...

Edward G. Robinson helped invent the modern movie gangster. As Rico Bandello in Little Caesar , he made the short, sharp-eyed criminal not only the centre of a Hollywood picture, but a defining figure in American pop culture. And in doing so, he became a star almost overnight. This episode follows Robinson from his early years as Emanuel Goldenberg, a Romanian Jewish immigrant and serious Broadway...

By 1950, MGM was done with Judy Garland — and so, it seemed, was Hollywood. A Star Is Born was the film that was supposed to change all of that. After a devastating breakdown, the end of her studio contract, and an industry convinced she was finished, Garland spent the next two years rebuilding herself — on concert stages in London, Dublin, and New York. By 1952, she and her husband-manager, Sid L...

Veronica Lake was one of the most unforgettable faces of 1940s Hollywood: blonde, beautiful, elusive, with a curtain of hair falling across one eye. Paramount turned that image into a sensation. But behind the "Peek-a-Boo Girl" was Constance Ockelman — a young actress whose life was far more complicated than either the glamour or the later downfall headlines allowed. From Brooklyn, Saranac Lake, M...

This is Part 2 of our two-part series on Charlie Chaplin. At the height of his silent-film power, Charlie Chaplin was one of the most famous and successful people in the world. He owned his studio, controlled his work, and had transformed the Tramp into a global icon. But the life behind the screen was becoming impossible to keep private. Part 2 of our Charlie Chaplin series follows Chaplin throug...

This is Part 1 of our two-part series on Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin, one of the greatest icons of silent cinema and film comedy, built his legend on making the world laugh. But behind his beloved image was a private life that was increasingly troubling — and, throughout his life, increasingly difficult to contain. Part 1 of our two-part series follows Chaplin from a childhood in poverty and...

Shirley Temple was the most famous child star Hollywood had ever seen — a six-year-old who became America's biggest box-office attraction, helped carry Twentieth Century-Fox through the Great Depression, and grew up inside a studio system built around keeping her little for as long as possible. From the bizarre Baby Burlesks shorts to Little Miss Marker , Bright Eyes , and "On the Good Ship Lollip...

By 1955, Dorothy Dandridge had done what Hollywood once seemed determined to make impossible — become a genuine leading lady, carry a major studio picture, and earn a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards. But after Carmen Jones , the breakthrough Hollywood celebrated would become a career it had no idea how to sustain. Part 2 of our two-part series on Dorothy Dandridge begins on Oscar nig...

Dorothy Dandridge was one of the most electrifying talents Hollywood ever tried to contain — a trailblazing performer who would become the first Black woman nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, and whose story began long before anyone in Hollywood was paying attention. From a childhood spent on the road — singing and dancing through segregated churches and theaters across the South before she'd eve...

In 1949, Billy Wilder sat inside a theatre in Evanston, Illinois, and watched his new film, Sunset Boulevard, fall apart in front of its first audience. Wilder had made a picture about the stars Hollywood had abandoned, the illusions it had created, and the cruelty beneath its glamorous surface. But instead of being unsettled by what they saw, the audience was laughing — and the film that would be...

Mae West shook up Depression-era Hollywood with a persona unlike anything American audiences had seen before — sexually confident, unapologetically funny, and always in control. She became one of the biggest stars in the country, only to face increasingly strict censorship from the same industry that had embraced her. This episode of WTWMI follows the rise, fall, and reinvention of Mae West — from...

By 1970, Hollywood had decided Marlon Brando was finished. He had gone more than a decade without a major hit. His films lost money. His reputation had become almost impossible to insure. He was deep in debt, increasingly isolated, and more interested in escaping to his island in Tahiti than proving anything to the industry that had once crowned him its greatest actor. Then came The Godfather . Pa...

By the end of the 1950s, Marlon Brando had everything he had spent his career fighting for. An Oscar. Money. Power. His own production company. And the freedom to make films on his own terms. Then he began discovering what complete freedom could cost. Part 2 of our three-part series on Marlon Brando follows what came after Hollywood crowned the actor who changed movie acting — from Guys and Dolls...

On December 3, 1947, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York, a twenty-three-year-old actor in a torn T-shirt walked onto a Broadway stage — and American acting was never the same again. Before he became Marlon Brando, he was Bud: a restless, wounded kid from Omaha, raised in a house of drinking, silence, violence, and disappearing love. A boy who searched bars for his mother, fought his father...

On Good Friday, 1958, a man lay dead on a pink bedroom floor in Beverly Hills — a severed aorta, almost no blood, a knife with no fingerprints in the bathroom sink, and the most famous actress in America asking the police chief if she could take the blame. By the time he arrived, the story of what happened that night had already been written. Before she became Hollywood's "Sweater Girl" — before s...

By 1958, Truman Capote had written something he knew would cause trouble. A heroine who danced along the edge of prostitution. An ending that refused resolution. A character built from abandonment, reinvention, and survival — and designed, deliberately, to resist being saved. Harper's Bazaar bought the novella and then refused to publish it. Esquire ran it without changes. And when Hollywood came...

In August 1926, a man in black lay inside a New York funeral home while a hundred thousand people rioted in the streets to get closer. Windows shattered. Police charged the crowd on horseback. There were reports of suicides.  None of them had ever met him. They had only ever known the image — and the image, it turned out, was immortal in a way the man never got to be. Before he became the most fam...

This is Part 3 of our three-part series on Marilyn Monroe — marking her centennial on June 1, 2026, what would have been her 100th birthday. By January 1961, Marilyn Monroe had lost almost everything. Her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller was over. Her latest film The Misfits had flopped. Clark Gable was dead. And somewhere in New York, behind drawn curtains, the most famous woman in the world...

This season on When They Were Making It — Marilyn is just the beginning. The stars. The classics. The faces history almost forgot.  Elizabeth Taylor. Casablanca . Rudolph Valentino. The Wizard of Oz . Marlon Brando. Anna May Wong. Breakfast at Tiffany's . Alfred Hitchcock. Audrey Hepburn. Gone with the Wind . Dorothy Dandridge. Charlie Chaplin. Singin' in the Rain . Grace Kelly. Bette Davis. Citiz...

This is Part 2 of our three-part series on Marilyn Monroe — marking her centennial on June 1, 2026, what would have been her 100th birthday. By 1956, Marilyn Monroe had everything she'd fought for. Her own production company. The most unprecedented studio contract any actress had ever signed. The most respected playwright in America at her side. And the chance, for the first time, to be happy. It...

This is Part 1 of our three-part series on Marilyn Monroe — marking her centennial on June 1, 2026, what would have been her 100th birthday. On September 15, 1954, on the corner of New York's Lexington and 52nd, a wind machine lifted a white pleated dress — and Marilyn Monroe, already the most famous woman in America, became something more. An icon. Before she became Marilyn Monroe, she was Norma...