61: MGM Stories Part 6: Jean Harlow
As part of the publicity campaign for his film Hell’s Angels, Howard Hughes made Jean Harlow a star, branding her “The Platinum Blonde.” But after Hell’s Angels, Hughes couldn’t figure out what to do ...
20 Okt 201541min
60: MGM Stories Part 5: William Haines and Hollywood’s First Openly Gay Marriage
The rare silent star who made a relatively smooth transition to sound films, William “Billy” Haines was one of the top box office stars of the late 1920s-early 1930s. Beginning in 1926, Haines started...
13 Okt 201537min
59: MGM Stories Part 4: John Gilbert and Greta Garbo
Rising romantic lead John Gilbert signed with MGM in 1924 and the next year he starred in King Vidor’s The Big Parade, the studio’s biggest hit of the silent era. That same year, Louis B. Mayer brough...
6 Okt 201535min
58: MGM Stories Part 3: Buster Keaton’s Biggest Mistake
In 1928, silent comedy star Buster Keaton made what he would later call “the worst mistake of my career”: against the advice of fellow silent comedy auteurs like Charlie Chaplin, he gave up his indepe...
29 Sep 201542min
57: MGM Stories Part 2: Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, and Citizen Kane
Marion Davies is enshrined in memory as the gorgeous but questionably talented mistress of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst -- thanks in part to the depiction of a Davies-esque character in ...
22 Sep 201536min
56: MGM Stories Part 1: Louis B. Mayer vs. Irving Thalberg
This season we're going to tell 15 stories about different people who worked at the same movie studio over the course of five decades, as the movie industry transitioned from silents to sound, into it...
15 Sep 201539min
55: Charles Manson’s Hollywood, Part 12: The Manson Family on Trial
The trials of the Manson family became a kind of public theater which a number of current and future filmmakers found themselves caught up in. Joan Didion bought a dress for a Manson girl to wear to c...
11 Aug 201552min
54: Charles Manson’s Hollywood, Part 11: Death Valley ’69
After the murders, Manson moved his family to the depths of the California desert. There, even before they were finally apprehended by the law, their utopia started to fall apart. Hollywood was in the...
4 Aug 201543min
