You Must Remember This

Born in the 19th century, his career forged in the silent era, John Ford helped to invent the genre of the Western and still holds the record for the most Best Director Oscar wins of all time. Though he made films in all genres, and sometimes even tackled the same historical territory from different angles in different films, Ford had by the 1960s become synonymous with depictions of American hist...

This episode was originally released on June 3, 2020. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive. After the death of her first husband and creative partner, Polly moves to New York, where she swiftly meets and falls in love with Peter Bogdanovich. Together Polly and Peter build a life around the obsessive consumption of Hollywood movies, with Polly actin...

In the mid-1930s, Fritz Lang fled Hitler and left a successful film career in Germany behind to come to America. After a 20 year career in Hollywood, Lang went back to a much-changed Germany to make two films that he had first developed in the 1920s, set in India but largely cast with non-Indian performers in brownface. Even Lang’s collaborators were concerned that these films, The Tiger of Eschna...

The director of It’s a Wonderful Life , who won five Oscars in the 1930s for films that embodied the pre-World War II notion of American exceptionalism, was pushed into semi-retirement by the early 50s by changes in tastes and political priorities. Capra was brought back to the Hollywood director’s chair by Frank Sinatra in the 1960s, but Capra quickly became embittered by an industry that he felt...

This episode was originally released on March 1, 2016. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive . In the late 1940s, as the country was moving to the right and there was pressure on Hollywood to do the same, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and John Huston all protested HUAC in ways that damaged their public personas and their ability to work in Holl...

A preview of the new season of You Must Remember This, which covers the late careers of Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli and ten other directors who began their careers in the silent or early sound eras, and were still making movies in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, in spite of the challenges posed by massive cultural changes and their advanced age. In this mini-episode we’l...

A new season of You Must Remember This is just over a month away, but to tide you over, have a listen to a special presentation: an episode of Nate DiMeo's wonderful podcast "The Memory Palace." This episode, titled "AKA Leo," tells the story of the lion that became iconically associated with MGM. If you like what you hear, check out Nate's fabulous new book,  The Memory Palace: True Short Stories...

If you're enjoying You Must Remember This, you may also like Talking Pictures, a movie memories podcast. On this episode of Talking Pictures, you'll hear Ben Mankiewicz in conversation with Carol Burnett .  Carol Burnett’s life has always spun around the movies. She tells Ben about her childhood spent in Hollywood movie theaters, the famous actor who helped her break into showbiz, and the movie pa...

The first episode of You Must Remember This tells the story of actress Kim Novak -- a top box office draw of the late 1950s and the iconic star of Alfred Hitchcock's  Vertigo --  and her painful struggles to assert herself from the mid-20th century through well into the 21st, in a Hollywood that repeatedly sent her the message that she was only valuable for the way she looked, while also insisting...

Our first guest on Talking Pictures is writer director Nancy Meyers ( Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, The Holiday).  Recorded at her home, host Ben Mankiewicz talks with Meyers about casting Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, getting script advice from  Sunset Boulevard  director Billy Wilder, and they discuss what it’s like to become famous for her interiors. Spoiler: it’s frustrating! Na...

In part 2 of the Eyes Wide Shut story, the movie is finally unveiled, and critics are divided on its quality, and the use of digital effects to evade an NC-17 rating. Where could Hollywood eroticism go from here? We’ll wrap up the Erotic 90s story with some thoughts on Richard Gere’s two-decade journey from American Gigolo to becoming PEOPLE Magazine’s 1999 “Sexiest Man Alive,” and other ways in w...

At the peak of their careers, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman left Hollywood for two years to collaborate with legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick on an erotic drama that the media speculated would pull back the curtain on maybe the most fascinating famous couple in the world. Though the meta element can’t be ignored, what Eyes Wide Shut actually ended up being is much more interesting. It’s a culmin...

If Adrian Lyne’s  Lolita  became a case study of what Hollywood and America didn’t want to acknowledge about its sexualization of young girls, as the 90s came to a close the culture was full of “acceptable” depictions of teens in heat. Two hit films from 1998 and 1999,  Wild Things  and  Cruel Intentions , adapted classic templates of adult sexual manipulation to turn teen girls into femme fatales...

In the previous decade, Adrian Lyne had made two movies ( Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal ) that had grossed over $100 million in the US alone. With carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, he made an adaptation of the Nabokov novel about a 40-year-old pedophile’s obsession with his adolescent step-daughter – and no distributor wanted to release it. In a decade rife with the commodification...

One of the most notorious – and least seen – erotic narrative films of the 90s,  Boxing Helena  was the misbegotten passion project of Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David Lynch. Four years after  Boxing Helen a, the elder Lynch released one of his most controversial films,  Lost Highway , which tackles similar themes as  Boxing Helena , including male sexual fragility and the “Madonna-Whore” complex...

One of the only high-profile NC-17 releases post- Showgirls , David Cronenberg’s  Crash  was the kind of dark adult art film that the rating was supposedly created to support. We’ll talk about how  Crash  fits into Cronenberg’s filmography, why it was controversial when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 and when it was released in the US in 1997, how it played into the UK general el...

At the beginning of the 90s, lesbians were a punchline for a male-gaze-oriented media, an easy target for expressing the anxiety that women might not need men after all. By the middle of the decade, women-loving-women had become the heroes of a number of neo-noir crime films, but the culture at large still rejected lesbianism when not intended to arouse men. While  The Matrix  has widely been reap...

In Glitter & Might, a new series exploring the intersection of show business and politics, bestselling author Shawn Levy unpacks the story of Lew Wasserman, the shadowy legend who lorded over Hollywood for half a century. He was a feared deal-maker, credited with breaking the impasse that ended the 1960 actors’ and writers’ strike. Wasserman oversaw seismic innovations in the entertainment bus...

Joe Eszterhas’s tenure as the hottest screenwriter in town ended with two notorious 1995 flops: the NC-17 rated Showgirls (directed, like Basic Instinct, by Paul Verhoeven) and Jade (produced, like Sliver, by Robert Evans), We’ll analyze why these films failed to connect with audiences in 1995, and, more importantly, why the media at the time seized on them as major embarrassments for the industry...

The 90s were obsessed with what magazine writer Tad Friend would describe as “do me feminism” – and the attendant fear that men could be victims of female sexual aggression. Two films from 1994 married these anxieties to the still-lingering bugaboo of the 80s, the powerful career woman. But though the female stars of The Last Seduction and Disclosure (Linda Fiorentino and Demi Moore) were styled a...

Sharon Stone and Joe Eszterhas’s post-Basic Instinct reunion film was one of the most troubled productions of the 90s. A post-Hitchcock tale of sexual surveillance given a technological update for the 90s, after a long battle with the MPAA the sanitized, R-rated version of Sliver was rejected by critics and audiences, but the movie and the juicy gossip leaked from its production (which included a...

Are men okay? Several films from 1993 answered that question with a resounding no. One of the highest grossing movies of its year, Adrian Lyne’s Indecent Proposal was misunderstood as a gimmick, and its insight into toxic masculinity and male sexual insecurity got lost in a media frenzy, much of it sparked by feminists. What had changed since Lyne’s Fatal Attraction , in Hollywood and in the cultu...

In the early 90s, Madonna was the biggest pop star in the world, and she used – and in the minds of some, squandered – her star capital to launch a multi-media exploration of sexuality: the album Erotica and its companion book Sex , followed by her starring role in the much-maligned erotic thriller Body of Evidence . What was Madonna really trying to do in 1992-1993, how was it perceived and misun...

While the MPAA’s confusing and hypocritical ratings decisions were leaving filmmakers flummoxed in the early 90s, cable TV was opening up new possibilities for erotic content. Today we will offer a brief history of sex on TV, and then focus on Red Shoe Diaries , the cheesy-but-charming late night softcore soap that was the brainchild of 9 ½ Weeks writers/producers Zalman King and Patricia Knop. 

Culture in the 90s was obsessed with the sex lives of teenagers. This is a theme we will come back to several times throughout the season. In this episode, we’ll talk about Drew Barrymore, who became a massive star at age 7 in E.T. , went to rehab at 13, became an emancipated minor at 15 and immediately started pushing buttons with naked photo shoots and her comeback role as a murderously seductiv...