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Karina Longworth believesthat Hollywood history is American history.
In some ways, The Invisible Woman is the ultimateYou Must RememberThisseason.
Platts story embodies many of the themes that run through Longworths historiographical work on the podcast.
Its almost as ifYou Must Remember Thisexists outside themuck of capitalism.
There was a certain providence to the timing of this conversation about Old Hollywood.
Longworth has thoughts about all of this.
Youve been makingYou Must Remember Thisfor half a decade now …Six years!
Does making the show still animate you in the same way?
Thats kinda been what Ive been trying to figure out over the past few years.
I wrotea book about Howard Hughes.
Now Im working with a producing partner to attempt to generate other TV stuff.
I really, really want to make a TV version ofYou Must Remember This.
Sort of like theE!
True Hollywood Storyas directed by Adam Curtis.
Do you know who Adam Curtis is?
The BBC documentarian?Yeah!
What Adam Curtis is to the BBC archive, I want to be for the Hollywood archives.
I dont know, were trying to figure it out.
I hope therell be news to report sometime within the next six years.
Basically, I keep trying to come up with new things to shoot for.
I feel really proud of the Polly Platt season.
I feel far more excited about telling stories in this format than I have in a long time.
The Invisible Woman seems to be the clearest embodiment ofYou Must Remember Thisso far.
Really, its become a part of my life.
I agree on some level that its sort of the ultimate version of aYou Must Remember Thisseason.
I got very, very, very lucky that I had pretty much finished archival research before March.
That turned out to be a real accident of my own process.
So, I had done all that before all the libraries and archives closed.
That gave the process not necessarily an ideal quality.
The quarantine changed a few things positively, though.
Previously, a number of people were impossible to reach.
Theyd ignore the requests I made.
But many of the people I was pursuing were older, and they took quarantine very seriously.
The people Iwasable to get to talk to me, they were extraordinarily open and vulnerable.
Second to that might be writers.
In a way, Blum is the auteur of all his movies, right?
And there are still far fewer female directors than there are male directors.
Let me just say, directors should get a lot of credit for movies.
This isnt just about the pandemic, but the economic crisis thats going to affect movie production going forward.
Because of that, its impossible to know how movies are going to be written about.
Its an illusion of intimacy, but still its a publicity set.
Im still trying to get perspective on why that is.
Im trying to figure out what that means in terms of power.
In the corporate context, movies are not the most important product anymore.
It almost sounds like its a supply-demand problem.
People dont have the habit of going to the movies that my generation had.
Its just a different world.
My sense is that you have achieved what can be characterized as cult status.
Is that more or less your ideal level of fame?I certainly dont need any more of it.
Thats pretty much it.
So thats like the perfect level of fame for him.
That manifests for many people in a lot of different ways and in fields that are not stardom-related.
Its just this super-fundamental human thing.
I have no idea ifYou Must Remember Thisis truly influential.
