Why Is This Not a Movie?

In the 1980s, American journalist Bill Gentile travelled to Nicaragua during the Sandanista revolution, and El Salvador during that country’s decade-long civil war, risking life and limb to tell human stories from these wartorn countries. Now he's written a book, Wait For Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll , and joins us to talk about why it would make a great series.

In the Golden Age of Korean Cinema in the '60s, director Shin Sang-ok and actress Choi Eun-hee were making acclaimed films as a glamorous power couple. But their lives took a turn for the worse as their divorce and new censorship laws hurt both their careers. And then they were both kidnapped... by brutal dictator and rabid cinephile Kim Jong Il. After keeping Shin and Choi prisoner for several ye...

The Russian Revolution wasn't just a political and economic revolution. In the brief moment between the idealism of a revolution that overthrew a monarchy to establish a workers' paradise and the ugly reality of the totalitarian state the USSR became, Russia had its own Roaring 20s, with artists and bohemians exploring the freedom of a society that had just thrown off centuries of monarchy. Friend...

History remembers Genghis Khan as a violent brute, destroying everything in his path. But the truth is more complicated than that. Ostracised from his community as a child, captured and enslaved, he escaped, became a leader, a warrior, united the fractured Mongols, and then conquered an empire twice as large as the Romans. The lifelong military campaign against virtually everyone else he encounter...

Friend of the show Scott Bunn ( Run That Back ) returns so we can co-pitch an adaptation of Lloyd Alexander's delightful YA fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain , which was upending genre tropes only a decade after Tolkein had established them. We discuss Disney's botched attempt to compress the books into The Black Cauldron , give thanks to our 4th grade teacher who introduced us to the serie...

In 1959, nine friends went on a hike in Russia's Ural Mountains and never returned. Their bodies were found with a bizarre set of injuries, including head trauma, internal bleeding, exposure, and traces of radiation. 60 years later, the Dyatlov Pass Incident is one of history's great unsolved mass deaths. Pop culture writer Lauren Thoman ( Collider, Looper, PopSugar, Parade, Vulture ) visits the s...

During the Vietnam War, a student protest at Washington University in St. Louis erupted into violence, with a campus ROTC building being burned down. A student named Howard Mechanic was accused of the crime, and when he was sentenced to federal prison... he vanished. He had been represented by civil rights attorney Louis Gilden, and he and his daughter Nina obsessed over Mechanic's whereabouts for...

In 2012, a fungal meningitis outbreak killed 100 people and infected 750 more. Two doctors at the Center for Disease Control raced against time to stop a nationwide pandemic eight years before the Covid pandemic. Journalist Natalia Megas, whose work has appeared in The Guardian , Washingtonian , and The Daily Beast , joins us to talk about a race-against-time medical drama that's different enough...

A quick special episode, in which we honor the best films and performances of 2020 not nominated for an Academy Award. Hear who won this year's Best Snubbed Supporting and Lead Actor and Actress, Best Snubbed Director, Best Snubbed Picture, and winners in three categories of filmmaking ignored completely by the Academy: Best Stuntwork, Best Voicework, and Best Casting. Then next week we return to...

It's not a secret that Coca-Cola's original formula included cocaine. But what's less well-known is that the soft drink still uses coca leaf, just not the part that gets you high. One plant in all of America is legally allowed to process cocaine—the drug for medical use, and the byproducts for Coca-Cola. Kyle Ryan, TV/film producer and alumni of both The A.V. Club and The Onion joins us this week...

A serial killer is targeting underappreciated artists. The twist: he's their art dealer. Emerson Rosenthal, a script consultant who's instagram account, @freemovieideas, is a nonstop font of clever elevator pitches for movies like this one. The second twist? Instead of pitching me the story, he challenges me to take his germ of an idea, and flesh it out into a full-on movie. 

In 1184, two German nobles had a land dispute. They presented their case to the King at a monastery in the town of Erfurt. Dozens of nobles packed into the room... the floorboards gave way... and 100 people plunged into the latrine in the basement. Annie Rauwerda, the mind behind Depths of Wikipedia , takes us through history's number one number-two-related disaster.

LSD came into vogue in the 1960s, but it came back in a big way in the '90s, as teenagers embraced the cheap, long-lasting high it produced. Jon Reid, host of Radio Free Brooklyn's Race to the Bottom , joins us to talk about how to make a film about the second wave of LSD that's neither D.A.R.E.-style scare tactic, nor rose-tinted nostalgia. 

In the year 2000, a secret military task force discovered Al Qaeda operatives working in the U.S., possible including the 9/11 hijackers. They claim they were ignored or silenced by the government. The government claims they never found anything worth silencing. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. This week Shane Harris, Washington Post senior national security writer and co-host of the podcas...

2,750 New Yorkers died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, but in 2004, the number was updated to 2,751. Sneha Philip was a young doctor who lived in lower Manhattan who was last seen on 9/10/01, and her final fate remains a mystery. Did she run into the towers to help and die in the collapse? Was she murdered the night before and forgotten in the confusion of that day? Or did she fake her death to...

In the '80s and '90s, Spider Robinson wrote a series of books about Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, a watering hole whose regulars included time travelers, aliens, mythological creatures, and the occasional talking dog. Ethan Poschman, co-host of the podcast A Special Presentation, Or Alf Will Not Be Seen Tonight , joins us to talk about why this story about storytelling needs to be a movie, or a ser...

In the mid 1980s, baseball had a coke problem, as cocaine use was rampant throughout the major leagues. When Commissioner Peter Ueberroth cracked down and banned several players, one enterprising minor-league owner struck on a seemingly brilliant idea—sign up a bunch of disgraced players to attract fans. Could this ragtag of misfits band together and learn the meaning of teamwork during a thrillin...

Greetings, true believers!!! The cultural dominance of Marvel Comics has made Stan Lee a beloved American icon, but his creative partner through Marvel's formative years, illustrator/writer Jack Kirby, who co-created the Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and whose ambitious storytelling and energetic artwork came to define the superhero comic for generations. Comic book writer Ted Anderson ( Mo...

Graham Greene wrote 1949's The Third Man , considered one of the best films of all time. But at the end of his life, Greene became fixated on a real-life story that parallelled his movie, when two British spies defected to the USSR in the 1950s, and Mi6 suspected they had a third man who had tipped them off. That man, Kim Philby, let a remarkable life of ambition, betrayal, and secrets. Scott Bunn...

King Arthur can pull a sword from a stone, unite the Britons, and quest for the Holy Grail... but can he surf? Bitter Karella, creator of graphic novels including Misunderstanding Comics and Malleus Maleficarum; co-host of the podcast A Special Presentation, or Alf Will Not Be Seen Tonight , which revisits '80s cartoons based on newspaper comics; and mind behind the @midnight_pals Twitter account,...

Those hip new neighbors you've been hanging out with? They might be aliens. And they want you to play their role-playing game. Author and interactive fiction game creator Steph Cherrywell joins us to talk about Interstellar Pig , William Sleator's 1984 YA sci-fi book, and why it needs a big-screen adapation.

The king is unwell. His sister is insane. Her son, the heir to the throne, is in the thrall of an all-corrupting villain. His sister is the kingdom's only hope, and to save her, please the gods, and ensure the kingdom's future, our hero has to die for his country. Four times. Author and action-movie-fight-scene reviewer TG Shepherd (@tgshepherdvan, tgshepherd.com), takes us through Lois McMaster B...

In May of 2020, a blundering American private security company tried to invade Venezuela. It went even worse than you'd expect, with their speedboat-based invasion thwarted by a local fisherman. Doug Woycechowsky returns to talk about why this has the makings of a great absudist comedy, drawing on everything from Airplane! to the Marx Brothers to It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World , as we start seaso...

Somen Banerjee was a classic American success story — in founding Chippendales, the male stripper troupe, he tapped into a brand new market for exotic dancing that had previously catered only to men. But when the competition showed up, things got ugly, as Banerjee threatened to burn down clubs that booked rival acts, and eventually had a partner-turned competitor murdered. subjectmedia.org Culture...

While Shakespeare was putting on some of the most revered theater in history at the Globe, across town the Red Bull Theater was putting on bawdy comedies, scandalous political satire, plays that were just the funny bits from other plays, and letting women perform on stage. London-based comedian Paul Savage takes us back to a 17th-century London where everyone was drunk all the time, everything sta...