by Rosalie Kicks, Old Sport and Editor in Chief

I remember the day I started listening to the famed movie podcast, You Must Remember This like it was yesterday. Picture it! circa 2015, I had been having a dreadful day at work and desperately needed an escape. After a quick search for classic Hollywood podcasts, I stumbled upon Karina’s show and I instantly downloaded episode 011, “The Many Loves of Howard Hughes: Katharine Hepburn”. From the moment I started listening, my ears were hooked. Since then, her enchanting voice has accompanied me on numerous walks and road trips. Karina has been my guide down so many rabbit holes of Hollywood history that I have tumbled down and continues to have the ability to transport me to another time.

Over the years it has been fascinating to follow along with the progression of her show and the various seasons she has thoughtfully put together. Of the nineteen seasons she has recorded, some of my favorites include: Season 05: MGM Stories, Season 07: Six Degrees of Joan Crawford, Season 08: Dead Blondes and the one that is closest to my heart, Season 10: Bela & Boris. Something that I have always been curious about is how Karina selects her topics. Often her program seems topical, despite the material she is unearthing being from another era.

Take for example her highly discussed Season 04: Charles Manson’s Hollywood. When it came out in 2015, it seemed to reignite an interest in the cult leader. I personally found it to be a great companion piece to listen along with while I watched the short-lived television show of the same year, Aquarius and later the Quentin Tarantino picture, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019). Fate also seemed to be at play when she released Season 015 on Polly Platt: The Invisible Woman. Almost simultaneously, Turner Classic Movies dropped their podcast, The Plot Thickens hosted by Ben Mankiewicz, which took a look at the now late Peter Bogdanovich’s career with Peter serving as a cohost on the show. Bogdanovich had previously been married to Platt and it was fascinating to hear Longworth’s insight into how Platt played such a pivotal role in Peter’s filmmaking. Prior to listening to this season, I had never even heard of Polly Platt and by the end of the ten episode series I was not only a devoted fan, but looked at Peter’s early work in a whole new light. As the season was so appropriately titled, Polly Platt truly was an invisible woman in terms of the work she had done on Bogdanovich’s films.

These little coincidences have often led me to wonder how Karina selects her topics. I think it is safe to assume that she not only has a finger on the pulse on the latest cultural trends, but has a keen eye on what’s happening in the world around her. This is apparent with her latest work, Season 020: The Old Man Is Still Alive. In this season she takes a look at the late careers of motion picture directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks and Vincent Minnelli, in addition to ten other filmmakers. What each of these movie makers share is that they got their start in the silent or early talkie era and still found themselves behind the camera through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. This gaggle of geriatrics were making flicks well into their old age while being faced with an ever-changing landscape in Hollywood. One could say history does indeed repeat itself when thinking about filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Ridley Scott (just to name a few) who presently find themselves late in their career attempting to helm the turbulent of waters of Hollywood and the tech age.

Longworth hopes this season (like many previous) will inspire listeners to watch the movies she discusses and uncover a long forgotten gem of the silver screen. Earlier this week, Karina kicked off the fourteen episode series with a part one of a look at Frank Capra’s career between the years 1959-1971. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Karina about her new season, airing Tuesdays and available wherever you snag pods. Find more information on You Must Remember This via their website or on Instagram here.

Rosalie Kicks (RK): What interested you in this specific topic for a series? 

Karina Longworth (KL): In the summer of 2023 I was in Paris while there was a Vincent Minnelli retrospective at the Cinematheque Francaise, and it allowed me to see some of his later films for the first time. I was particularly struck by Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which was so unlike anything that I had associated with Minnelli before. At that point, I started thinking how interesting it would be to examine a number of filmmakers who got their starts in the 1930s and 40s or even earlier, but were still around in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, trying to make movies in a vastly changed Hollywood, amidst really significant cultural changes.

RK: Did you find any new favorites while watching the films for this series? 

KL: I should note here that I’m only about halfway done researching this season, and I will be writing the second half of it as the first half is being released. But so far, in addition to Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, some first time watches that I have been really impressed by include John Ford’s Seven Women, Vivacious Lady by George Stevens (not one of his later films but a great one), and several of the late films of Otto Preminger, which no one talks about anymore, are really interesting.

RK: Any particular director that you now have a greater fondness for? 

KL: I feel like I have a much richer understanding of John Ford’s filmography and the extremely complicated point of view he employs in a number of his films than I had before. 

RK: Did you face any challenges while working on this series?

KL: Every series is extremely challenging to write and research. When I do a format like this, where it’s essentially a different topic every episode, it’s even more challenging because I have to start from scratch every episode, and there is just much much more to read, to watch, and to think about.

RK: While working on the series, what were some of the most surprising things you learned? 

KL: I don’t know that I ever really get surprised. But I hope there will be plenty of surprises for the listener, which I wouldn’t wanna spoil here!

RK: After working on this series, what is your take: do directors improve with age? 

KL: Sometimes! I don't think it's as simple as that, and the series doesn't try to make a blanket statement on the correlation between age and quality. Much of the season is about all the factors that made it more challenging for these specific directors to keep doing what they had been doing, and the more granular I get into each case study, the less comfortable I would feel applying any kind of thesis to all of the disparate stories.  

RK: Please share a few motion pictures that you are hoping people seek out after listening to the series… 

KL: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Seven Women, Fritz Lang‘s Indian Epic: The Tiger of Eschnapur, and The Indian Tomb, and many more.

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