In Conversation with Karina Longworth of 'You Must Remember This'
“Old Hollywood,” as a concept conjures a million things. It’s glamour, smokey rooms, transatlantic accents and finger curls. Old Hollywood is red lipstick, intrigue and seduction. More than anything else, Old Hollywood is a romantic mystery. It tugs at the heartstrings of anyone with a shred of winsome nostalgia running through their veins.
One of Hollywood’s greatest tricks was getting the collective nation to romanticise it — in doing so, we forget some of the horrors happening behind the scenes as we’re instead dreaming of sepia tones and Marcel Waves.
Hollywood historian Karina Longworth isn’t exactly here to shatter that conception, but, as she says in the intro to her critically acclaimed podcast You Must Remember This, she is here to “explore the secrets and/or the forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century.”
You Must Remember This started as a passion project in April 2014. “Well, it was in 2014 and I just kind of heard it in my head”, says Karina. “I heard what it would sound like, and I was not really happy with my professional situation at the time. And so, I just thought ‘I can hear what this podcast sounds like in my head. Why don't I try to make it?’ So, I did.” Since it’s conception, You Must Remember This has covered topics like The Blacklist, Charles Manson, the concept of Hollywood Dead Blondes, Joan Crawford, Jean Seaburg and Jane Fonda, and countless more. Guest stars throughout the years have included the likes of Dana Carvey, Adam Goldberg, Fred Savage, and our favourite Mid-Century White Faced Man himself, John Mulaney.
The list of topics Longworth has covered is exhaustive; in five years, YMRT has released 145 episodes about pretty much every Old Hollywood topic you can think of. When asked about how she comes up with ideas, Longworth said; “At first I had a list of just things that I kind of always wanted to learn more about.”
Before starting the podcast, Longworth studied Film at the San Francisco Art Institute, then got a Masters in Cinema Studies from New York University. She realised that her future lay in Old Hollywood during her undergraduate studies. “I was making these personal, documentary, diary films about stuff I was watching, and my professors were really encouraging, but the students in my classes would give me really negative, hurtful critiques. They just didn't see what I was doing as art, and there was no environment for it. It was before YouTube, it wasn't appropriate for art galleries, and so I had to analyse like, ‘what is it that I was doing? Where did my talents lie? What parts of what I was doing were the most interesting to me?’ I decided the thing that was most interesting was watching movies and learning about them and writing about them. So, I applied to the graduate school program to do that.”
“In 2014, when I started the podcast, I found that as a consumer of media, I wasn't really reading people's personal websites, I wasn't reading as much stuff on the internet as I had in the past, but I was starting to listen to podcasts more and more, and I felt like, as somebody who listened to podcasts — and I still feel this way — there's just never enough good, interesting podcasts to listen to. Every week, I get to a point where I listened to everything that I subscribe to that I'm interested in, and I felt like there would be room in the marketplace for a new podcast. At that point, I didn't know of any podcasts about old Hollywood that I felt were cinematic sounding. I thought that, at the very least, nobody can say, “We don't need this podcast.””
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood, was released in November 2018 to rave reviews. The Associated Press called it “an astute and entertaining takedown of the movie industry, the press and the multimillionaire turned wannabe filmmaker Howard Hughes” and Entertainment Weekly called it “a compelling and relevant must-read.” Seduction tells the story of Howard Hughes via his many female lovers, and it ends up telling the story of Hollywood. “I decided which actresses I wanted to make the focal point because I wanted to tell the full story of this time period where Hughes was active in Hollywood. I strategically chose actresses to kind of like be able to walk the reader through the whole time period from the 1920s through the end of the 1950s.”
The book is excellent; it’s compelling, well-researched and impossible to put down. For anyone remotely interested in Old Hollywood, it’s an absolute must-read. The book holds Howard Hughes fully accountable and holds no bounds in calling him out for what he truly is. Time has been kind to Howard Hughes, as for the most part people remember him as an eccentric genius, who spent his later years peeing in Mason jars; throughout all the eccentricity, his straight up abuse of women has gone forgotten. His portrayal in the book shows the importance of thorough research, especially when researching people who have become mythic through time. When asked about how she chose to portray him, the answer was simple: “It didn't really occur to me to try to write about him as being anything other than what the research told me he was.”
“At first I had a list of just things that I kind of always wanted to learn more about”
Despite having uncovered some of its grimmest secrets, Longworth still loves Old Hollywood; she always has been. “It was just always been a part of my life. I grew up in Hollywood in the 80's. You know, this stuff wasn't that old then. My parents were interested consumers, so it was just very normal to me. We'd just watch movies at home, and we'd watch what was on TV, and what was on TV was old movies.” Around the time of the interview, Twitter had recently discovered that an old John Wayne interview in which he a bunch of problematic things, including “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people."
Yikes.
Large parts of the internet were quick to cancel him, while others pointed out that there’s very little to be gained by cancelling an old actor who’s been dead for 40 years. When asked about the retroactive cancelling of old problematic people, Longworth said: “I think, in general, our culture right now is in a "cleaning house" mode, and I think people need to decide for themselves on an individual basis what artists and public figures they're gonna be allegiant to. And so, I would never tell anybody to cancel anybody or to not cancel anybody.” When asked if any women of the Old Hollywood age could be considered feminists, “I think that it is really difficult to judge the past by the standards of today. I think that a lot of women were in a situation where they felt like it was dangerous of them to support other women because there was only room for one women in whatever field they were in, so it's very complicated.”
Karina Longworth's dedication to unravelling the secrets of Old Hollywood has created a renewed interest in the cultural pastiche of old films and has revolutionised podcasts as a medium of storytelling. Following a brief hiatus, You Must Remember This is back and, as expected, it’s bloody brilliant.
You can follow Karina at @KarinaLongworth, and the podcast at @rememberthispod. Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood is available at all good bookstores, and for more info about the podcast, including episode show notes some of Longworth’s must see films, check out http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com.