pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1932, Richard Hollingshead Jr. nailed a bed sheet to trees in his Camden, New Jersey backyard, balanced a Kodak projector on the hood of his car, and propped cars on wooden blocks to work out sight lines. The result was the patented terraced ramp layout behind the first official drive-in theater, which opened in June 1933 with room for 400 cars. This episode traces the boom, bust and unexpected resurrection of an entire industry.

The conversation covers the sound problem that sank Hollingshead's own theater, RCA's 1941 in-car speakers and the windows ripped out by forgotten cables, and the switch to radio micro-broadcasting. It follows the post-war explosion to more than 4,000 theaters, the bottle warmers and passion pits, the helicopter rides and caged monkeys, and then the real estate inflation, daylight saving time and digital conversion costs that nearly killed the format before guerrilla drive-ins and the COVID-19 pandemic brought it back.

• Why sound traveling slower than light created maddening lip sync delays in the back row
• The 29-acre Johnny All-Weather Drive-In in New York and the 5,000-car Loew's Open Air in Massachusetts
• How the Spotlight 88 signed off after a tornado with Now Playing: Gone With the Wind
• Drive-ins capturing an estimated 85 to 95 percent of North American box office during the pandemic
• Calamari in Greece, a dynamite ban in Coober Pedy, and LED screens that show movies in daylight

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

A man at a carnival sideshow asks a sleepwalker how long he will live and is told: until dawn tomorrow. For the writers of the 1920 German silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, that was no campfire scare but an echo of soldiers in the trenches waiting for the morning artillery. This episode explores how Hans Janowitz, a former infantry officer, and Carl Mayer, who feigned madness before a bullying military psychiatrist to avoid service, channeled their distrust of authority into a mad doctor and his murderous somnambulist.

The conversation looks at the Berlin sideshow that inspired Caesar, the painted shadows and impossible angles of the expressionist sets, the tension between avant-garde ambition and a broke studio's budget, and the frame story that recasts the narrator as an asylum inmate. It weighs Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler thesis against the 1978 discovery of the original script in Werner Krauss' archives, and traces the film's influence on Universal horror, Frankenstein's monster and film noir.

• Why the sleepwalker Caesar works as a metaphor for a populace programmed to kill without thinking
• How producer Rudolf Meinert bet that eccentric sets would sell the film abroad
• Why the asylum courtyard still looks mad if the twist is supposed to restore sanity
• What Kracauer got wrong about the frame story being forced on the writers
• How Karl Freund carried expressionist lighting to Universal Studios and into American cinema

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

A boy in 1940s El Paso rode a horse into town to watch Walt Disney films and went home to copy every Disney comic he could find. That boy, Don Bluth, grew up to lead a walkout from the Walt Disney Company that nearly toppled its animation empire. This episode traces his path from in-betweening on Sleeping Beauty in 1955, a mission in Argentina, a musical theater in Culver City and an English degree, to his second Disney stint animating Robin Hood and directing animation on Pete's Dragon.

The conversation examines why he resigned on his 42nd birthday in 1979 with Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy and nine other animators, the industry's first profit-sharing contract on The Secret of NIMH, two bankruptcies, and the laserdisc ingenuity of Dragon's Lair. It follows the move to Dublin that birthed the Irish animation industry, the Spielberg partnership behind An American Tail and The Land Before Time, the 1990s slump, the triumph of Anastasia, the failure of Titan A.E., and his later crowdfunding, YouTube and children's book projects.

• Why entry-level in-betweening at Disney bored a creative talent like Bluth
• How a laserdisc player inside an arcade cabinet let players direct a movie in real time
• The cancelled 1984 Beauty and the Beast project and other lost ideas
• Whether Bluth's darker instincts needed a populist producer like Spielberg to reach mass audiences
• How the shift to computer animation ended the 2D era and Bluth's theatrical directing career

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

A sound designer slows down recorded lion and tiger roars, plays them backward, and creates the most iconic monster bellow in film history. This episode explores how RKO Pictures, on the brink of bankruptcy during the Great Depression, gambled on Merian C. Cooper's obsession with gorillas and the box office of a racist hoax documentary called Ingagi to produce King Kong, a film that essentially invented the modern special effects blockbuster.

The conversation follows the relay race of screenwriters from Edgar Wallace to Ruth Rose, whose fairy tale framing turned a monster fight into a tragic romance, then digs into Willis O'Brien's 18-inch rabbit-fur armatures, the six-operator mechanical head, traveling mattes and rear projection, and Fay Wray's 22 hours in a fake tree. It covers Murray Spivak's invented Foley, Max Steiner's 46-piece orchestra synced with holes punched in the film, the cut spider pit scene, the Hays Code edits, and the scholarly readings of race, gender and nature versus civilization.

• Why Cooper's original pitch of a real gorilla fighting Komodo dragons was uninsurable
• How animators' fingerprints in the rabbit fur accidentally made Kong's muscles seem to twitch
• Fifty-five weeks of stop motion in a sealed studio where opening a door could ruin continuity
• Why 1933 audiences fled the theater at giant spiders but accepted Kong chewing on victims
• The direct line from O'Brien's puppet to Godzilla, Ray Harryhausen and Jurassic Park

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The greatest American epic about organized crime was directed by a man who thought the source material was sleazy trash and only took the job because he owed Warner Bros. 400,000 dollars. This episode traces the turbulent life of Francis Ford Coppola, from a childhood bout of polio that confined him to a bed and pushed him to stage puppet theaters and splice 8mm film, through UCLA film school on ten dollars a week, to salvaging soft-core comedies and Soviet science fiction for Roger Corman.

The conversation follows the founding of American Zoetrope with George Lucas, the debt that forced him into The Godfather, the fights with Paramount over casting and lighting, and the unprecedented decision to number a sequel. It then heads into the typhoons, heart attacks and borrowed military helicopters of Apocalypse Now, the soundstage musical that cost him his studio, the years of directing for hire, and the pivot into vineyards, resorts and a literary magazine that finally bought him the independence he had chased since the 1960s.

• How the Kuleshov effect and Corman's salvage jobs taught Coppola the geometry of editing
• Writing Dementia 13 in a single night and shooting it in nine days with leftover budget
• Why Paramount hired a desperate, indebted director and how he turned their thriller into a family saga
• Two Palme d'Or wins, including one for the surveillance thriller The Conversation
• Why he stopped being a professional director so his wine and hotel profits could fund experimental films

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

It began with producer Walter Wanger shooting his wife's lover in a Beverly Hills parking lot, and it ended with a 44 million dollar epic that was the highest grossing film of 1963 and still lost money. This episode follows the making of Cleopatra from a 2 million dollar plan to dust off a 1917 silent script into the most expensive film ever made at the time, a production defined by near-death experiences, a global scandal, and the collapse of the old studio system.

The conversation covers Elizabeth Taylor's deliberately absurd demands, including a million dollar salary and ten percent of the gross, that Fox accepted within an hour, the decision to shoot an Egyptian epic in rainy London for film subsidies, the pneumonia and emergency tracheotomy that shut down production, and the 7 million dollars spent for ten minutes of usable footage. It then follows Joseph L. Mankiewicz writing the script at night on amphetamine injections, the Richard Burton affair that drew a Vatican rebuke, Darryl F. Zanuck's decision to fire the director and cut the five-hour version down, and the lost footage quietly destroyed to save warehouse space.

• How the sunk cost fallacy trapped Fox executives after the London disaster
• Why the studio had to buy Mankiewicz's entire production company for 3 million dollars just to hire him
• Clearing live World War II landmines from an Italian beach before building ancient Alexandria
• How the paparazzi siege of Rome helped invent modern tabloid celebrity culture
• The 120 miles of exposed film, 65 costume changes, four Oscars and the Kansas salt mine rumor

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In August 1939, RKO chief George J. Schaefer signed a theater and radio director with zero film experience to a contract that gave him final cut, total artistic control, his own unproven cast and crew, and no obligation to show the studio a single frame of daily footage. This episode explores how Orson Welles, fresh off the War of the Worlds broadcast, used that unprecedented deal to make Citizen Kane, and how the film's reception nearly ended his career.

The conversation covers the failed attempts at Heart of Darkness and The Smiler with a Knife, the writing partnership with Herman J. Mankiewicz and the decades-long credit dispute later stoked by Pauline Kael and settled by Robert Carringer's archival research, and Welles' crash course that included watching Stagecoach roughly 40 times. It examines Gregg Toland's deep focus, the secret shooting disguised as camera tests, the painful contact lenses and broken ankle, William Randolph Hearst's media blackout, and the film's resurrection in Paris through critic Andre Bazin.

• Why Toland sought out a director who did not know the rules of Hollywood
• The lightning mix and overlapping dialogue Welles imported from radio
• How a pinhole aperture and blinding arc lights kept every plane of the frame razor sharp
• Hearst's threats to theater owners and Welles' offer to buy the film for one million dollars
• Losing final cut, the recutting of The Magnificent Ambersons, and 50 years atop the Sight and Sound poll

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Chuck Jones grew up drawing on towering stacks of embossed stationery left over from his father's failed businesses, so when an art school instructor warned that every artist must produce 100,000 bad drawings first, Jones calculated he had already passed 200,000. This episode traces his path from paying tuition as a janitor and washing paint off celluloid at Ub Iwerks' studio to the ramshackle Termite Terrace at Leon Schlesinger Productions, where he and colleagues like Tex Avery and Bob Clampett built a laboratory of slapstick anarchy.

The conversation covers his early, sluggish attempts to imitate Disney with Sniffles, the 1942 breakthrough of The Dover Boys and the smear technique, the studio's attempt to fire him that was thwarted by wartime labor shortages, and his role in the animators' strike. It follows the Private Snafu cartoons made with Dr. Seuss, the golden age of Wile E. Coyote, Marvin the Martian and Pepe Le Pew, his 1962 firing over Gay Purr-ee, and the second act at MGM that yielded The Dot and the Line and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

• What cell washing and in-betweening taught Jones about the anatomy of motion
• Why the 14-frame pause before the Coyote falls is where the comedy actually lives
• How Jones removed racially insensitive caricatures when he took over Tom and Jerry
• The unpublished 1975 letter challenging Bob Clampett's claims of sole credit
• Why Robin Williams called him the Orson Welles of animation at the 1996 honorary Oscar ceremony

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Imagine acting in the most famous romantic climax in film history while the director refuses to tell you who your character loves, because the writers have not decided yet. That was the reality on the set of the 1942 classic set in a Moroccan city during World War II. This episode digs into how an unproduced play bought for an unprecedented 20,000 dollars, a fractured writing process with twin brothers hiding pages and walking off for a month, and a production forced to shoot sequentially with only half a script somehow produced Casablanca.

The conversation explores the refugee actors who filled the nightclub, with only three American-born members of the credited cast, and the genuine tears during the dueling national anthems scene. It explains how the Production Code Administration forbade a married woman leaving her husband and thereby forced the noble sacrifice ending, debunks the Ronald Reagan casting myth and the misquoted piano line, and follows the film's rise from a topical 1942 hit to a Harvard exam-week ritual and a 1980s colorization battle.

• Why the playwrights' 1938 trip to Vienna and the south of France shaped the nightclub at the film's center
• How shooting in chronological order and playing it evenly between two men produced authentic ambivalence on screen
• The refugee actor cast as the German major, paid to wear the uniform of the regime that wanted him dead
• How censorship pushed the writers toward subtext, lingering glances and layered dialogue
• Why the letters of transit make no geopolitical sense and why audiences never cared

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1961, after a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard, Mel Blanc lay in a coma for about two weeks. Doctors got no response until one leaned in and asked how Bugs Bunny was feeling. A weak voice answered, and then Tweety chimed in. This episode uses that documented moment to explore how the pioneer of modern voice acting built a physical instrument so deeply grooved into his brain that his characters could pull him back to consciousness.

The conversation follows Blanc from a teacher's insult that prompted him to change the spelling of his name, through vaudeville and a stint as the country's youngest orchestra conductor, to the Jack Benny Program where he improvised the sound of a broken-down Maxwell with his throat. It covers his arrival at Leon Schlesinger Productions in 1936, the anatomy of his unusually thick vocal cords, the raw carrots and spittoon in the booth, his fight for an on-screen credit, recording The Flintstones from a full body cast, and the industry's struggle to replace him after his death in 1989.

• Why doctors compared the structure of his throat to opera legend Enrico Caruso
• The truth about the carrot allergy myth and why timing, not taste, required the spittoon
• How the credit Voice Characterization by Mel Blanc forced Hollywood to treat voice acting as a billable art form
• Stan Freberg's refusal to fill in for Bugs and Porky, and how recording gear was hauled into the hospital room
• Decades of smoking, emphysema and COPD, and the epitaph he chose: That's all folks