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- [00:02]
Unknown Host
This episode of Memory palace is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
- [00:26]
This episode of the Memory palace is brought to you by our friends at Quint's. With a new year comes a chance to reimagine ourselves for the better. And for me, that has started with the man in the mirror. Specifically the man in the full length mirror next to my closet. I have decided to step up my fashion game and I have been refreshing my look and building a new stable of staples thanks to Quince, where you can get high quality clothes that look great and still stay on a reasonable budget. Everyone needs Quince's Mongolian cashmere sweaters from $60. This is the most useful thing in my closet. It dresses up, it dresses down. I'm going to be wearing this thing for years. However you choose to refresh yourself this year, all Quint's pieces are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands and of course these premium fabrics and finishes for that luxury feel in every piece. Upgrade your closet this year without the upgraded price tag. Go to quince.commemory for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order that is Q U I N C E.com memory to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com memory.
- [01:33]
Hey, I am doing something different today. There is a new episode coming out next week. If you are new to the show, or honestly, if you've been listening forever and never quite put this together, I wouldn't be able to blame you. But in a typical month, new episodes of the Memory palace come out at the end of the first third weeks of that month. And this year I think I'm going to put in other stuff into the feed during the off weeks now and then. This will almost always be Memory palace stuff. Maybe it'll be an interview with me that aired somewhere else. Or honestly, I've been watching the news here at the end of January and have realized that there have been a number of episodes in the archives that fit these times rather well. And then I think I might rebroadcast and see how they can play in this context. That's a little bonus. Today is something different. I am delighted to present to you a preview episode of the new season of youf Must Remember this. The Cinema history podcast from my friend Karina Longworth. Her show is kicking off its 10th year with a series that I find completely fascinating. This is so up my alley as the guy who does the Memory palace is about a number of directors who are giants of the 20th century American cinema and the work they did after their heyday. I love stories of lions in winter. I love thinking about and telling stories about the lives that people live after they do the things that make them famous. I could not be more excited as a listener for this series and so I'm happy to share it with my listeners. But moreover, I wanted to seize this opportunity to say that one of the things at the heart of my personal connection to my friend Karina isn't that we both like history and both like movies or live near each other in LA or like the same spots for lunch. It is that Karina is out in these streets doing the thing that I might admire most among artists, and it's the thing that I am most proud of when I think of my own career. She has started this thing, her podcast, you Must Remember this to do the thing that she is uniquely suited for if she pitched it, this sort of like long form essay series about film history, these deep dive, you know, pop history that's still intellectually sound and unbelievably well researched. There's no way anyone lets her do that show. They don't greenlight that show and no one ever would have guessed that it would become the success that it has been for going on a decade. But she made this thing her way and the world sort of adjusted itself to make a space for that thing. And I love those things. And you might love it too. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can go to you must remember this podcast.com and browse through other seasons. You can go there and hear me in the role of Charles Manson in a groundbreaking series that she did about Manson's intersection with Hollywood in the late 1960s. And you can listen now here to a preview episode of her new series called the Old Man Is Still Alive.
- [04:33]
A.
- [04:49]
Karina Longworth
Welcome to a new season of youf Must Remember this, the podcast dedicated to exploring the secret and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. I'm your host, Karina Longworth. To set the scene for this season, I'm going to read a paragraph from a book about Henry Hathaway, the director who helped make Marilyn Monroe a star in Niagara, who made noirs, melodramas, romances and a lot of westerns. Including the original True Grit, the only film for which John Wayne won an Oscar. Hathaway started directing in the early 1930s, and over 30 years later he was still going. True Grit was a massive blockbuster in 1969, but after that the massive changes.
- [05:44]
Unknown Host
Occurring in the culture and the film industry started to catch up with him.
- [05:50]
Karina Longworth
Here is an excerpt from Henry the Lives of a Hollywood Director by Harold N. Pomainville from 1965 to 1972, changing cultural mores, political upheaval and falling revenues liquidated the last vestiges of the big studio system which had defined Hollywood for 40 years. The 60s were not kind to filmmakers of Henry Hathaway's generation. When Hathaway and his peers began their careers, they were young, and young men ran Hollywood. By the early 1960s, many of these formerly young men still ran the show in Hollywood, and the industry was stagnating. Aging management relied on an old guard of producers, directors and writers to shore up their authority. By the late 60s, a fresh generation of movie executives was opening opportunities for people closer to their own age. With amazing speed, this new generation embraced innovative independent directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah and William Friedkin. Simultaneously, the new power elite weeded out Hollywood veterans who they considered dead wood. The rise of the new Hollywood not only deprived studio system veterans of their livelihoods, it also obscured their contribution to American cinematic history. It would have been convenient for the younger generations if all of the old guard just retired or died, but as we know from politics in 2024, that is easier said than done. Something similar is happening in today's Hollywood, largely involving directors cited above, who got their start as the old men of previous generations, from Hathaway to Howard Hawks to Billy Wilder and more, were being sidelined. Martin Scorsese's streaming epics, Kevin Costner and Francis Ford Coppola's self financed passion projects Horizon and Megalopolis, Michael Mann's Ferrari and Ridley Scott's Napoleon, both of which show their huge budgets in every frame on screen, but didn't earn nearly enough at the box office to justify their costs to an industry in retrenchment. The mainstream entertainment media has almost gleefully taken these filmmakers to task for being wasteful, out of touch, often implying that the massive ambition of these films from directors over the age of 60 is embarrassing. You might expect this economic Darwinism from trade publications like the Hollywood Reporter and Variety, but it has also infected the New York Times, which misleadingly claimed Megalopoulos was playing to empty movie theaters in the headline of a supposed news story about its opening weekend box office. In today's media climate, how many people even clicked on that headline to read the story? How many people got the message from the headline alone that megalopolis was a joke? If you've learned anything over the past 10 years of this podcast, I hope it is that Hollywood history, like so many other types of history, is cyclical. And so it follows that not only has all of this happened before, in the sense that directors who made ambitious movies later in their lives fought an uphill battle for attention and respect, but also in the sense that then as now, filmmakers who used to be able to get away with making commercial misfires with artistic merit were no longer able to do so during periods when the entertainment industry passed into the hands of controlling interests who are not filmmakers by trade. Today, it's tech companies. In the 1960s, it was banks and corporations like Gulf and Western, which largely owned companies that manufactured car parts and heavy machinery before they purchased paramount studios in 1966. In my research about the directors that will be the subjects of this season and peers of theirs who didn't make the cut for the 14 episodes to come, two grievances about Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s came up over and over again. One was the transplantation of people who knew nothing about movies into positions of power in the movie industry. As Mervyn LeRoy, who directed Gold Diggers of 1933 and produced the wizard of Oz, put it in his 1974 autobiography, Nowadays, Movies aren't made by creative minds but by a cartel of businessmen on the one hand, and a haphazard group of young and undisciplined rookies on the other. Leroy followed this statement up by telling a story about a young producer he encountered on the Warner bros. Lot where Leroy directed Gypsy in 1962. This producer asked Leroy if he could tell him why there are two projectors in each projection booth. Remember, this was back when the only way to show dailies or an edited film to an audience on a studio lot was by threading celluloid through a projector, leroy wrote. I thought he must be kidding. I thought everybody, certainly everybody in the picture business must know that all booths have two projectors, so there will be no pause when they have to change over between reels to fuck with this guy. Leroy told him, they have too, because there's been a lot of thievery on the lot lately. And the guy believed him. I walked away from that encounter stunned to realize how naive and Ignorant he was, and he was a studio producer. To me, that was positive proof that many segments of the industry had fallen into the hands of incompetence. The second grievance had to do with what leroy called young filmmakers playing around with stories that are pornographic and violent and in my opinion, do not advance the art of motion pictures one iota. In 1974 when some of the highest grossing films of the previous year were literal pornos like Deep Throat and the devil in Ms. Jones not to mention Last Tango in Paris. You can see where leroy is coming from, even if you disagree. But some of his compatriots, such as Frank Capra and John Ford were complaining that Hollywood had shifted focus to, quote, unquote, dirty movies as far back as the beginning of the 60s. You have to remember that two men who got their start during the silent era who hadn't ever felt oppressed by the production code something like the shower scene in Psycho was absolutely beyond the pale. That film was released in 1960. By the mid-1970s, even Hitchcock was struggling to figure out where he fit in a culture that seemed determined to make him. Him, the most recognizable director of the 1950s and 60s feel obsolete. This season is about men who started their careers in the 40s, 30s, 20s or even tens who were still around in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It's about how, as old men, they were impacted by a Hollywood hurtling into the future. It's about the movies they made in an industry, a country and a world that bore little resemblance to the context under which they had worked for decades. This is the Old Man Is Still Alive.
- [14:33]
Unknown Host
Is Hollywood dead?
- [14:35]
No, I don't think so.
- [14:37]
Many years ago, when I first started making pictures being in the film business was a little bit disreputable. I hate lives in pictures just as much as I do sex and incest, old stories I've forgotten. Mercifully, I've had such a good time in my life it wouldn't bother me a bit if I died at any time. I think it's up to you younger fellas right now. Now, if there's one thing that I hate more than not being taken seriously is to be taken too seriously. They're being sued by women's lips and I'm still alive to tell the deal.
- [15:12]
Karina Longworth
The title the Old Man Is Still Alive comes from a 1964 interview with George Cukor who was the last voice you just heard in that montage. 1964 was the year of his last blockbuster, the Best Picture winning My Fair Lady. He had been directing movies for 35 years. And he was now one of several American filmmakers whose work was being celebrated by Caillet de Cinema, the French magazine where critics turned filmmakers such as Francois Truffaut and Jean Lucadar celebrated the Hollywood directors who they felt managed to transcend the collaborative and commercial nature of the industry to put a personal stamp on their work. This would come to be known as the highly controversial auteur theory. In this interview, Cukor, who was born in 1899, said this about how it felt to be so celebrated upon the release of the 55th film of his career. I'm touched and slightly amused but really touched at the kind of attention that is being paid to my work by a number of distinguished magazines. I don't know who it was, perhaps Melville or somebody who had lived a long time and they suddenly discovered him and can you imagine? They said, the old man is still alive. Peter Bogdanovich recalled that at some point in the mid-60s, so probably around the same time Cukor gave this interview, he watched Dennis Hopper harangue the veteran director at a dinner party. According to Bogdanovich, Hopper pointed a venomous finger at Cukor and said, we're going to bury you. We meaning Hopper's generation. Cukor put on what Bogdanovich referred to as his customary absent minded smile and said, yes, yes, well, well, I'm sure Cukor was still alive and would remain alive into his 80s. Into the 80s. So he would be around to see Hopper direct the film that for a brief moment would seemed to validate his claim that the youth would bury the Greyhairs Easy Rider. He was also around to see Hopper flame out with his follow up film the Financial the Last Movie. But it wasn't all schadenfreude. Hopper may not have personally buried him, but like many filmmakers we are going to talk about this season. After a major late career hit, Cukor seemed to struggle to get back to the productivity and success rate that he had enjoyed for years during the glory days of the studio system. So much so that he caught a stray from Scott Iman, author of many biographies about many of Hollywood's great men who wrote in his book about John Ford. As everyone from Gantz to Chaplin to Cuchor has proven, directing is no job for an old man. This is a common refrain in certain works of film history. One that has been taken as a truism by none other than Quentin Tarantino, who began telling interviewers in his 40s that he planned to retire at age 60 after having directed his 10th feature here he is explaining why he felt it was important to quit while relatively young and still making movies he was proud of on an episode of the Pure Cinema podcast from 2021.
- [19:04]
Quentin Tarantino
Well, actually, I think it's kind of easy for the simple fact that most directors have horrible last movies. That's usually like, you know, in the. You know, usually their worst movies are their last movies. And that's the case for most of the Golden Age directors that ended up making their last movies in the late 60s and the 70s.
- [19:31]
Karina Longworth
Tarantino turned 60 in March 2023, and as of this writing, he has directed nine features, if you count Kill Bill as one movie instead of two. As of that milestone birthday, Tarantino was developing a 10th feature called the Movie Critic, but it was announced in the spring of 2024 that he will no longer be making it.
- [19:55]
Unknown Host
One thing that links Tarantino to the Golden Age directors he mentioned on that podcast that he didn' want to emulate.
- [20:03]
Karina Longworth
Is that a lot of them also.
- [20:05]
Unknown Host
Went pretty far down the road with.
- [20:08]
Karina Longworth
Projects late in their careers that, for.
- [20:11]
Unknown Host
One reason or another, never got made. A Hollywood Reporter's story about Tarantino's decision not to go forward with the Movie Critic twice speculated that the director had put so much pressure on a 10th movie, as, in his words, a mic drop, that maybe he felt he couldn't move forward unless he was sure the project would fittingly cap his legacy. As we'll see this season, for a variety of reasons, it does feel like as directors get older, it's harder for them to move quickly from movie to movie, like they might have as a younger man. Each individual movie becomes more important because it could be the last. And sometimes that exact pressure for perfection can doom a project that can't support its weight.
- [21:06]
Karina Longworth
It's interesting that Tarantino, in making this declaration, aligned himself with conventional wisdom rather than going the contrarian route and or trying to prove it wrong. In who the Devil Made It? A book compiling interviews with directors, most of whom were out of the business by the 1970s, Peter Bogdanovich recalled a conversation he had had in 1969 with Orson Welles. Welles asked Bogdanovich what some of the other older directors he had interviewed were up to, and Bogdanovich gave Welles what he called a bleak rundown. I think it's just terrible what happens to old people, wells said. But the public isn't interested in that, never has been. The only thing that keeps people alive in their old age is power. And a king or a conductor or a director can go on as long as there's no physical breakdown. And there are these great directors already with their best work ahead of them, really their best. I believe that Jack Ford today, given a script a little better than anything he's ever done, demanding more of him, would give us better pictures than he has ever made. Because it's only in your 20s and in your 70s and 80s that you do the greatest work. By then, Jack Ford John Ford had already made his last movie three years earlier. Bogdanovich actually begins this book by recounting a conversation that took place in the 90s between he, Warren Beatty and Henry Jaglome, who had all known each other since the 1950s and were, at the time of this conversation, middle aged dads whose legacy defining work was, sorry to say, already behind them. Beatty lamented that no one in Hollywood talked anymore about the major directors that had been so important to them when they were starting out. Elia Kazan, who had given Beatty his start, or John Ford, who, in agreeing to be the surly subject of print interviews and a documentary, had helped Bogdanovich establish his bona fides as a critic slash historian before he became very famous as a filmmaker. Jesus, beatty said. Everybody's dead. I knew exactly what he meant because I'd had the same thought repeatedly, bogdanovich wrote, adding, we'd been two young men in an old man's business, and by now nearly all the old men we'd worked with or gotten to know had passed away and we'd become older men in a younger man's business that had, in its very nature, become polarized. Clarity's apart from what we, Warren and Henry and I had grown up with or joined or rebelled against. Bogdanovich is going to come up a lot this season because in so many ways he was the most vital link between the old men who are the subjects of this season and subsequent generations of filmmakers, from his own colleagues in 70s Hollywood to Tarantino, in whose guest house Bogdanovich lived for a while when he was himself an old man. It was a full circle moment. Bogdanovich had welcomed Welles into his Bel Air home in the early 70s, after Welles had cast the younger director in the Other side of the Wind, in which Bogdanovich plays a version of Bogdanovich and John Huston played an older director containing elements of Ernest Hemingway, Ford and Welles himself. I decided not to include Orson Wells in this season because unlike the 14 directors who did make the cut, he never fit comfortably within the studio system and he didn't wait until the 1960s to get weird. But Ford and Houston will each get their own episodes later in the season. A number of the directors to be.
- [25:31]
Unknown Host
Discussed this season found their reputations made.
- [25:35]
Karina Longworth
Or rescued by the French critics of Cahiers du Cinema, who, beginning in the early 1950s, began publishing the articles on men like Hawkes, Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray that would coalesce into what became known as the Auteur Theory, or Enfranchise Politique des Auteurs, the title of a 1964 essay by Francois Truffaut. The basic idea of the Auteur Theory.
- [26:03]
Unknown Host
Was to celebrate the directors who, within.
- [26:06]
Karina Longworth
The collaborative assembly line structure of the studio system in which films were ultimately products and often considered disposable, functioned as artists who put their own stamp on the movies they directed. To quote Andrew Sarris, the American critic who took up the mantle of auteur theory and played the biggest role in popularizing it stateside, Truffaut's greatest heresy was not in his ennobling direction as a form of creation, but in his ascribing authorship to Hollywood directors hitherto tagged with the deadly epithets of commercialism. On the same page of his book the American Cinema, Sarris also playfully chided Truffaut and his peers by writing that no self respecting American film historian should ever accept Paris as the final authority on the American cinema. The subject of our first episode actually claimed to have invented the Auteur Theory. He called it one man, one film. But then he tried to take credit for a lot of things that others deserved credit for. Next week we will return with our first full episode of the Old Man Is Still Alive. Join us then, won't you? Thanks for listening to youo Must Remember this. The show is written, produced and narrated by Karina Longworth. That's me. This season is edited and mixed by Evan Viola. Our social Media Research and Production assistant is Brendan Whelan and our logo was designed by Table Teddy Blanks. If you like the show, please tell anyone you can any way that you can. You can follow us on Twitter. Remember this pod and we're on Facebook and Instagram too. And if you go to our website you must remember this podcast.com you can find show notes for this and every other episode which include lists of our sources and much more at the website. You can also find merch like hats, T shirts and our special limited edition Dead Blondes coloring book@patreon.com Karinalongworth you can support the podcast get lots of bonus you must remember this content, including scripts or transcripts of our full archive and some glimpses into other aspects of my life. Proceeds from Patreon go to help pay all the people who work on the show named above. Finally, subscribing or rating and reviewing the show on Apple podcasts can really help other people find it. So if you want to spread the word, that's a great way to do it. We'll be back next week with an all new tale from the secret and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first Century. Join us then, won't you? Good night. Radiotopia from PRX.