Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: How WWI Trauma Invented Horror Cinema
Episode 10717
A man at a carnival sideshow asks a sleepwalker how long he will live and is told: until dawn tomorrow. For the writers of the 1920 German silent fil…
5 days ago
Don Bluth: The Disney Fan Who Walked Out and Challenged the Empire
Episode 10716
A boy in 1940s El Paso rode a horse into town to watch Walt Disney films and went home to copy every Disney comic he could find. That boy, Don Bluth,…
5 days ago
King Kong 1933: How a Desperate Studio Invented the Blockbuster
Episode 10715
A sound designer slows down recorded lion and tiger roars, plays them backward, and creates the most iconic monster bellow in film history. This epis…
5 days ago
Francis Ford Coppola: Debt, The Godfather and Building an Empire
Episode 10714
The greatest American epic about organized crime was directed by a man who thought the source material was sleazy trash and only took the job because…
5 days ago
Cleopatra 1963: The Runaway Epic That Nearly Sank 20th Century Fox
Episode 10713
It began with producer Walter Wanger shooting his wife's lover in a Beverly Hills parking lot, and it ended with a 44 million dollar epic that was th…
5 days ago
Citizen Kane: How Orson Welles Won Total Control and Paid for It
Episode 10712
In August 1939, RKO chief George J. Schaefer signed a theater and radio director with zero film experience to a contract that gave him final cut, tot…
5 days ago
Chuck Jones: From Cell Washer to Architect of Animated Comedy
Episode 10711
Chuck Jones grew up drawing on towering stacks of embossed stationery left over from his father's failed businesses, so when an art school instructor…
5 days ago
Casablanca: The Chaotic Production Behind Hollywood's Masterpiece
Episode 10710
Imagine acting in the most famous romantic climax in film history while the director refuses to tell you who your character loves, because the writer…
5 days ago
Mel Blanc: The Voice Actor Who Woke From a Coma as Bugs Bunny
Episode 10709
In 1961, after a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard, Mel Blanc lay in a coma for about two weeks. Doctors got no response until one leaned in and …
5 days ago
Blaxploitation: The Genre Named as an Insult That Changed Pop Culture
Episode 10708
In 1972, Junius Griffin of the NAACP's Beverly Hills Hollywood branch fused the words black and exploitation to condemn a new wave of films he argued…
5 days ago