You Must Remember This: Podcast reveals the secret history of 20th century Hollywood

Karina Longworth’s atmospheric series on the history of Hollywood’s grit and glamour, has become cult listening.

Hollywood historian Karina Longworth first learnt the names of golden age film stars such as Jean Harlow, Fred Astaire and Greta Garbo not from a cinema screen, but from the lyrics of Madonna’s 1990 single, “Vogue”. “When I was 13 or 14 and started exploring new parts of the video store, I was like, ‘Lauren Bacall? I’ve heard that name...,’” she says. “And I’d heard it because it was in ‘Vogue’.”

Now, Bacall and co are the stars of Longworth’s hit podcast, You Must Remember This..., in which she retells remarkable true stories from behind the scenes of Hollywood’s first century. The podcast’s 60 episodes (so far) range from the silent era to the 1990s and it recently doubled its listenership thanks to its 12-part exploration of the life of Charles Manson, the murders he inspired, and the entertainment industry figures with whom his story became entwined.

The series, “Charles Manson’s Hollywood”, arrived at around the same time as NBC broadcast its Manson-themed television drama Aquarius and just as famed Manson Family prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi died, aged 80. “This summer was just a time when people seemed ready to talk about Charles Manson,” Longworth says.

American model, theatre and film actress Lauren Bacall on 1 January 1954

The episodes examine how Manson’s activities were both inspired and facilitated by the 1960s counterculture, and how the impact of the Manson murders resonated through the 1970s, not least in Hollywood. Longworth debunks the idea of Manson as an evil mastermind, painting him instead as an angry loser with just enough charm to be dangerous. “He was one of millions of people who came to California thinking it was their destiny to get famous, and things just went horribly wrong.”

Born in 1980 and brought up in LA, Longworth was previously a film critic for the alternative paper LA Weekly, but quit in 2013, exhausted by the endless cycle of festivals and film screenings, most of them mediocre. “I wanted to figure out an excuse to watch all the old movies I’d never had a chance to see,” she says. “I found myself being more excited about podcasts as an information delivery service than I was about blogs or magazines or even books, and I started hearing in my head a way to combine the things I was interested in.”

While most film-themed podcasts take the form of interviews, discussions or reviews, You Must Remember This... is consciously cinematic, with atmospheric incidental music and occasional performed dialogue to accompany Longworth’s moody narration. “I try to tell the stories by looking for emotional moments or narrative arcs, because I want people to get inside these stories in the same way they’d be sucked in by a movie,” she says.

The podcast, now part of the Panoply podcast network, is not yet profitable, but its success has helped Longworth to secure a lucrative deal for a book about eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and his Hollywood connections.

Legendary Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas (Getty Images)

The podcast’s listeners include prominent figures in the film community, Longworth admits, though she declines to name names. Surely one of her biggest fans is her boyfriend, Looper director Rian Johnson, who is currently at work on Star Wars Episode VIII. It’s no coincidence that Longworth named a recent run of episodes – about Hollywood during the Second World War – “Star Wars”. “I thought it was a funny joke,” she says. “Basically I was just waiting for the chance to have my boyfriend be a guest on it, so that I could say ‘Star Wars Episode VIII, featuring Rian Johnson.’”

Despite growing up in the 1980s, Longworth’s childhood tastes did not extend to Star Wars, and she didn’t see George Lucas’s space opera until she was in college. “I’m fascinated by George Lucas and what he created, but I’m not somebody who’s super-excited when my boyfriend comes home and says, ‘I saw the original Yoda mould today’.”

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