Why Is This Not a Movie?

Jonathan Ames' detective novel A Man Named Doll , and its sequel The Wheel of Doll combine the playfulness of Bored to Death (which Ames created) and You Were Never Really Here (which Lynne Ramsay adapted into a film in 2017. It's a tricky balancing act between tones that Ames pulls of with aplomb. Here to talk about why it should be a movie is Aquarium Drunkard writer and editor Jason Woo...

Paul Chadwick's long-running comics series Concrete is about a man who's transformed into a hulking cement-like monster, who wants to use his newfound power to make a difference... and isn't really sure how to go about it. Comics writer Ted Anderson ( The Spy Who Raised Me , Side Effects, Orphan Age ), joins us to talk about why saving the world makes for a less interesting story than...

2016's The Nice Guys was a terrific action comedy, with a smart script by Shane Black, and two charismatic, bankable leads in Ryan Gosling and Russel Crowe. But it barely made its budget back and was quickly forgotten. Screenwriter Scott Myers, who also runs Go Into the Story , the screenwriting blog for The Black list, joins us to talk about why Hollywood has lost interest in action comedies,...

Rube Waddell was a pitcher in the early days of baseball with one of the most colorful stories in all of sports. In 1903 alone, he threw 302 strikeouts, won 22 games, started the season sleeping in a firehouse, ended it working as a bartender, and in between starred in a play in which he refused to memorize his lines; met, married, and divorced one of his several wives; accidentally shot a friend...

We're back to kick off season 5 with Preeti Chhibber, multitalented podcaster ( Women of Marvel , Desi Geek Girls, Tar Valon or Bust ) and author ( A Jedi You Will Be, Avengers Assembly, Spider Man's Social Dilemma ), who's here to tell us why her favorite Spider-Man movie is a Playstation game. Look for new newest book, Spider-Man's Bad Connection , in bookstores everywhere!

1984's Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension was a fun, pulpy mess of a sci-fi adventure, which promised us a sequel... which we never got. Nearly 40 years later, screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch wrangled the rights to the character away from the studio and gave us a novelization of Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League , the movie he never got to make. And it's not very good. So to wrap...

We take a break from the usual format this week to present the Snubby Awards, given to the best films and performance that were not nominated for an Oscar. Douglas Laman, film critic from The Spool , joins me to present and discuss this year's nominees. Films were nominated and winners were chosen by The Dissolve Facebook group, a community of film-lovers who wanted to keep the spirit of Pitc...

In the 1890s, a British shipping clerk named Edmund Morel noticed the Belgians were shipping vast quantities of rubber from the Congo, then a Belgian colony, but the only thing they were sending in return were guns, explosives, and chains. Morel uncovered a scandal that shook the world, as it turned out Belgian King Leopold II was running Congo as his own private plantation, using horrific violenc...

Franklin Roosevelt was wildly popular when he was in office, and is universally acknowledged as one of our greatest presidents. But in 1933, not everyone agreed. Shortly after FDR took office, a cabal of wealthy businessmen who were worried the New Deal would undermine profits, recruited General Smedley Butler — a widely respected WWI hero and crusader for veterans' rights — and tried to convince...

Billy Haines was a silent movie star who made the transition to sound, but when the studio head made the openly gay actor an ultimatum — a sham marriage to a woman, or the end of his movie career. Haines chose love, quitting the movies, holding onto a relationship his friend Joan Crawford called "the happiest marriage in Hollywood," and got the best revenge of all: living well. Haines reinven...

Boo Morcom was heavily favored to win the gold in pole vault at the 1948 Olympics. But he was playing hurt, in the rain, and missed his shot at the gold. So he tracked down the competitors who beat him, and challenged them all to rematches, just to prove he was the best. Morcom's grandson, former editor-in-chief of Gameological Society and The A.V. Club , and current host of the delightful podcast...

Mark Olmstead found out he had HIV at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was a death sentence. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he pulled off a string of scams including credit card fraud, insurance fraud, dealing crystal meth, and faking his own death, assuming he’d be dead for real before any of the consequences caught up to him. Except he didn’t die. Kim Daly, whose book The T...

For forty years, police in Saskatchewan, Canada were in the habit of arresting Ingdigenous men for minor offenses, or sometimes no reason at all, leaving them to freeze to death. And to this day, the police haven't been held accountable. Comedy writer and performer Tom Murphy joins us with a deadly serious story; the drama behind Canada's deadly "Starlight Tours" and the fight to bring the story t...

In 1966, an El Paso theater actor bet his screenwriter friend he could produce a horror movie all on his own. The result was Manos: The Hands of Fate , an incoherent, no-budget movie considered one of the worst films ever made. And yet, it did somehow get made, and 50 years later, people are still watching it. Pop culture writer and bad movie evangelist Nathan Rabin ( The A.V. Club, The Dissolve,...

Legendary Old West lawman Wyatt Earp fought at the O.K. Corrall, and then rode off into the sunset... but the story doesn't end there. Scott Bunn, who co-hosts the sports podcast Run That Back and authors the Bob Dylan blog ReclinerNotes.com, joins us to talk about Wyatt Earp resurfacing in 1910's Hollywood, where he worked as a bounty hunter and mingled with stars of the silent film era.  Al...

Robert Smalls was an enslaved sailor on a Confederate ship, until late one night, he hijacked the ship, picked up his family and his crew's, and sailed into enemy lines. He went on to be a naval captain, a war hero, and a Congressman, but most importantly, a free man.

In the 1870s, traveling by train through Palisade, Nevada was a heart-stopping experience. It was a Wild West hive of scum and villainy, with a constant tumult of fistfights, gunfights, and robberies in broad daylight. Except it was all fake — a show put on by the townspeople because they were bored and thought it would be funny. No guest this week, as we're adjusting the format — we'll continue t...

DC Comics has had a mixed record at the movies, but Boston Globe writer Nick Zaino, host of the podcast Department of Tangents , and first-ever WITNAM guest, returns to tell us why long-running, lesser-known DC title The Spectre is a better bet for the big screen than yet another take on the Joker. 

In 2020, a local TV host from Nebraska gained internet fame for a montage of her hilariously blunt interviews with A-list actors from the '70s and '80s. But her story goes far beyond one viral clip, as Drake burst into a male-dominated field and succeeded on her own terms, hosting and producing two TV shows that ran for decades, and interviewing everyone from local children and retirees to Hollywo...

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so this week we have a true-life story from Kate Ranta, author of Killing Kate: A Story of Turning Abuse and Tragedy into Transformation and Triumph . Her seemingly happy marriage turned into a nightmare of abuse and attempted murder, but she survived and became and activist who's devoted her life to speaking out about how abuse victims are failed by t...

Something different this week, as we're talking about something that already is a movie: The Moment , a film that's edited in real time by an audience member's brainwaves. Director Richard Ramchurn talks to us about the technology behind his remarkable film, and the hithero-impossible storytelling possibilities it opens up. You can learn more about the film at braincontrolledmovie.co.uk, and see a...

Welcome back to Season 3 of Why Is This Not a Movie? ! Every schoolchild knows the story of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk. But less well known is what came next — a tense couple of years in which the Wrights perfected their design for an airplane in secret, worried that someone might steal credit for their world-changing idea. Matt Voigts, an anthropology researcher who has a sid...

We wrap up Season 2 with a remarkable story, as journalist and author Suki Kim tells us about the six months she spent undercover in Kim Jong Il's North Korea, teaching the children of the country's elite while in constant danger of being discovered. She recounted her experiences in a book, Without You, There Is No Us , now hear how she survived under an astonishingly oppressive regime, why a film...

In 1856, a 23-year-old woman named Kate Warne walked into the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency and demanded a job. They had never hired a woman to be anything other than a secretary, but she impressed them so much they made her America's first female detective. She caught bank robbers, embezzlers, murderers... and prevented the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A quick episode this week, before w...

Dorothy Kilgallen was a beloved entertainment reporter, a regular on What's My Line , when she took a hard left turn into crime reporting. She covered murders and organized crime. She was the only person to interview Jack Ruby after he killed Oswald, and got to see the Warren Commission report even before LBJ. But when she started to challenge the official story on JFK's assassination, she soon di...