You Must Remember This

By Karina Longworth

TV & Film

What's You Must Remember This about?

You Must Remember This is a storytelling podcast exploring the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century. It’s the brainchild and passion project of Karina Longworth (founder of Cinematical.com, former film critic for LA Weekly), who writes, narrates, records and edits each episode. It is a heavily-researched work of creative nonfiction: navigating through conflicting reports, mythology, and institutionalized spin, Karina tries to sort out what really happened behind the films, stars and scandals of the 20th century.

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90’s Lolitas Volume 2: Adri...

10.03.2023

In the previous decade, Adrian Lyne had made two movies (Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal) that had grossed over $100 million in the US alone. With carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, he made an adaptation of the Nabokov ...

You Must Remember This episodes:

10.03.2023 90’s Lolitas Volume 2: Adrian Lyne’s Lolita (Erotic 90’s, Part 18) In the previous decade, Adrian Lyne had made two movies (Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal) that had grossed over $100 million in the US alone. With carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, he made an adaptation of the Nabokov ...
09.26.2023 The Lynch Family: Boxing Helena & Lost Highway (Erotic 90’s, Part 17) One of the most notorious – and least seen – erotic narrative films of the 90s, Boxing Helena was the misbegotten passion project of Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David Lynch. Four years after Boxing Helena, the elder Lynch released one ...
09.19.2023 Crash and David Cronenberg (Erotic 90’s, Part 16) One of the only high-profile NC-17 releases post-Showgirls, David Cronenberg’s Crash was the kind of dark adult art film that the rating was supposedly created to support. We’ll talk about how Crash fits into Cronenberg’s filmography, why it was controversial ...
09.12.2023 “Lesbian Chic”: Bound and Anne Heche in Wild Side (Erotic 90’s, Part 15) At the beginning of the 90s, lesbians were a punchline for a male-gaze-oriented media, an easy target for expressing the anxiety that women might not need men after all. By the middle of the decade, women-loving-women had become the heroes ...
08.25.2023 Introducing: Glitter & Might In Glitter & Might, a new series exploring the intersection of show business and politics, bestselling author Shawn Levy unpacks the story of Lew Wasserman, the shadowy legend who lorded over Hollywood for half a century. He was a feared ...
06.27.2023 Showgirls, Jade, and the fall of Joe Eszterhas. (Erotic 90’s, Part 14) Joe Eszterhas’s tenure as the hottest screenwriter in town ended with two notorious 1995 flops: the NC-17 rated Showgirls (directed, like Basic Instinct, by Paul Verhoeven) and Jade (produced, like Sliver, by Robert Evans), We’ll analyze why these films failed ...
06.20.2023 The Last Seduction, Disclosure, & Fear of the Female Boss (Erotic 90’s, Part 13) The 90s were obsessed with what magazine writer Tad Friend would describe as “do me feminism” – and the attendant fear that men could be victims of female sexual aggression. Two films from 1994 married these anxieties to the still-lingering ...
06.13.2023 Sliver and Sharon Stone as Superstar (Erotic 90’s, Part 12) Sharon Stone and Joe Eszterhas’s post-Basic Instinct reunion film was one of the most troubled productions of the 90s. A post-Hitchcock tale of sexual surveillance given a technological update for the 90s, after a long battle with the MPAA the ...
06.06.2023 Indecent Proposal (Erotic 90’s, Part 11) Are men okay? Several films from 1993 answered that question with a resounding no. One of the highest grossing movies of its year, Adrian Lyne’s Indecent Proposal was misunderstood as a gimmick, and its insight into toxic masculinity and male ...
05.30.2023 Sex, Erotica and Body of Evidence (Erotic 90’s, Part 10) In the early 90s, Madonna was the biggest pop star in the world, and she used – and in the minds of some, squandered – her star capital to launch a multi-media exploration of sexuality: the album Erotica and its ...
05.23.2023 Red Shoe Diaries and sex on TV in the 90s. (Erotic 90’s, Part 9) While the MPAA’s confusing and hypocritical ratings decisions were leaving filmmakers flummoxed in the early 90s, cable TV was opening up new possibilities for erotic content. Today we will offer a brief history of sex on TV, and then focus ...
05.16.2023 90s Lolitas, volume 1: Drew Barrymore, Amy Fisher and Alicia Silverstone (Erotic 90’s, Part 8) Culture in the 90s was obsessed with the sex lives of teenagers. This is a theme we will come back to several times throughout the season. In this episode, we’ll talk about Drew Barrymore, who became a massive star at ...
05.09.2023 Murphy Brown, Dan Quayle and Damage (Erotic 90’s, Part 7) In the early 90s, one of the biggest scripted shows on TV was Murphy Brown, starring 40-something Candice Bergen as a product of the 60s whose high-powered career precluded marriage and family. When the character became a single mother, and ...
05.02.2023 Basic Instinct (Erotic 90’s, Part 6) One of the biggest hits of 1992, Basic Instinct was sold as Michael Douglas’s return to Fatal Attraction territory, but its success owed to an alchemy of three other creatives: a writer (Joe Eszterhas) who was driven to become the ...
04.25.2023 The Blanks From Hell: Fatal Attraction’s Children (Erotic 90’s, Part 5) In the five years after the release of Fatal Attraction, Hollywood scrambled to make one movie after another about homes and workplaces invaded and threatened by sexy outsiders. Today we’ll talk about five of these films: Presumed Innocent (1990), The ...
04.18.2023 Thelma & Louise (Erotic 90’s, Part 4) One of the most controversial movies of the 1990s, Thelma & Louise pushed every hot button of the new decade: date rape, sexual harassment, the failure of the feminist movement to create real change for the working class, and how ...
04.13.2023 Introducing This Little Light with Flea Hosted by Flea, founding member and bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, This Little Light is a podcast about falling in love with music. Flea interviews musical guests from all genres to discuss the teachers who guided them, the ...
04.11.2023 “The actress everybody wants to fuck”: Theresa Russell and Sondra Locke (Erotic 90’s, Part 3) An enigmatic sex symbol dating back to the 70s, Theresa Russell made a play for Hollywood stardom in the late 80s and early 90s, making a number of films about the sexual commodification and role playing. Ken Russell’s Whore was ...
04.04.2023 Pretty Woman, Sleeping with the Enemy and Julia Roberts in the early 90s (Erotic 90’s, Part 2) The first blockbuster about sex of the 90s, Pretty Woman both reinvigorated Richard Gere’s career, and turned Julia Roberts into the biggest female movie star of the era. We’ll dissect the gender politics of this fantasy about love between a ...
03.28.2023 Prologue: Porn, Feminism & the folly of NC-17 (Erotic 90’s, Part 1) Erotic 80s began with a prologue about the short lived heyday of the X rating, pornography, and feminism. Erotic 90s begins with a prologue about the disastrous rollout of NC-17 –the X rating’s replacement – and the evolving state of ...
06.21.2022 1989: sex, lies and videotape: Rob Lowe and James Spader (Erotic 80s Part 12) American independent film is launched into the mainstream by Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, starring James Spader as an impotent man who gets off on filming women talking about sex. Videotape also plays a role in a Spader film ...
06.14.2022 1988: Kevin Costner, Sean Young, No Way Out & Bull Durham (Erotic 80s Part 11) The 1988 baseball blockbuster Bull Durham confirms Kevin Costner as the ultimate squeaky-clean, all-American heartthrob, building on a sexual persona sparked the year before with the neonoir No Way Out. Today we’ll talk about why Costner was the quintessential safe ...
06.07.2022 1987: Fatal Attraction and Dirty Dancing (Erotic 80s Part 10) The erotic thriller goes commercially mainstream with Fatal Attraction, a film which starts a national conversation about whether or not women can “have it all” – “it all” meaning both careers and marriage. Is Fatal Attraction an indictment of working ...
05.31.2022 1986: 9 ½ Weeks, Mickey Rourke & Zalman King (Erotic 80s Part 9) Billed as the hottest Hollywood film since Last Tango, 9 ½ Weeks was considered to have missed the mark by everyone who made it – including director Adrian Lyne, stars Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, producer/writer Zalman King and his ...
05.24.2022 1985: Fear Sex. Jagged Edge & AIDS (Erotic 80s Part 8) Just as the AIDS-related death of Rock Hudson was finally forcing straight people – and Hollywood – to acknowledge that epidemic, a film was released that transposed the new climate of sexual fear into a murder mystery. The sleeper hit ...
05.17.2022 1984: "Vioporn," Body Double and Crimes of Passion (Erotic 80s Part 7) In a time of bombastic blockbusters (and Reagan’s re-election), two auteurs defy the norms by releases violent films about sexual obsession, sparking a controversial mini-trend which one critic dubs “Vioporn.” Kathleen Turner, then also starring in a family-friendly blockbuster, plays ...
05.10.2022 1983: MTV Aesthetics, Flashdance and Risky Business (Erotic 80s Part 6) While the music video was still in its infancy as a cultural phenomenon, two films were released that were accused of aping the “MTV aesthetic”: Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance, and Risky Business, which turned Tom Cruise into a major star. Today ...
05.03.2022 1982: Teen Sexploitation, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky's and The Blue Lagoon (Erotic 80s Part 5) 1982 saw the release of three hit high school-set comedies about sex: Porky’s, The Last American Virgin and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The only one to survive as a classic, Fast Times turned Phoebe Cates – who also appeared ...
04.26.2022 1981: Neonoir, Body Heat and Postman Always Rings Twice (Erotic 80s Part 4) The New Hollywood directors of the late 1960s and 70s were the first generation of Hollywood filmmakers to grow up studying Hollywood movies as art. In 1981-1982, a number of those directors made actual or virtual remakes of classic Hollywood ...
04.19.2022 1980: Richard Gere and American Gigolo (Erotic 80s Part 3) One of the most aesthetically influential movies of the ‘80s, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo sets a template for much of what we’re going to discuss this season: it’s about sex as a conduit for wealth, masks and double lives, and ...
04.12.2022 1979: Bo Derek and 10 (Erotic 80s Part 2) The sleeper hit of late 1979 was Blake Edwards’s sex farce 10, a comedic vivisection of a male midlife crisis, which turned 23 year-old California girl Bo Derek into a controversial cultural phenomenon. Derek’s early fame was framed in the ...
04.05.2022 Porno Chic and The Brief Heyday of X Ratings (Erotic 80s Part 1) In 1968, the Production Code gave way to the ratings system, and the brief legitimacy of the X-rated movie. Today we’ll focus on two massive, X-rated hits released within a year of one another in 1972-1973: Deep Throat, the first ...
12.21.2021 Sammy and Dino Episode 9: Is That All There Is? Desperate to be seen as cool and not a relic of an earlier age in 70s America, Sammy gets into porn and drugs. A Rat Pack reunion gives him renewed purpose, but causes Dean to alienate himself further. As their ...
12.14.2021 Sammy and Dino Episode 8: Generation Gap In the mid-1960s, 47 year-old Dean Martin proves he's still got it by knocking the Beatles off the top of the pop charts, and by launching his long-running TV show, which brought a version of his nightclub act into America’s ...
12.07.2021 Sammy and Dino Episode 7: Yes I Can Released in 1965, Sammy Davis Jr.'s autobiography became an instant classic, one of the most dynamic celebrity memoirs ever published and a testament to Davis’s barrier-breaking success as a black man in America. But the story behind the book, which ...
11.30.2021 Sammy and Dino Episode 6: The Rat Pack In the early 40s, both Dean and Sammy idolized Frank Sinatra. 20 years later, they became Sinatra’s cohorts in the Rat Pack, and, through Vegas gigs and increasingly disposable movies, the trio set a standard for grown men behaving badly ...
11.23.2021 Sammy and Dino Episode 5: A Serious Man After the breakup of Martin and Lewis, Dino has to figure out how to stand on his own as a solo act. He ends up developing an on-stage persona as a happy drunk, while at the same time, developing a ...
11.16.2021 Sammy and Dino Episode 4: Mr. Wonderful Sammy tests the power of his new celebrity, on Broadway and in Hollywood, where he stars in the most controversial movie musical with an all-Black cast of all time -- a movie which is still being suppressed today. To learn ...
11.09.2021 Sammy and Dino Episode 3: Nothing But a Dollar Sign In the first half of the 1950s, Martin and Lewis mint money as movie stars--and find unique ways to make their access to gangsters payoff--but stardom tears them apart. During this period, Sammy tries to prove himself to a Hollywood ...
11.02.2021 Sammy and Dino Episode 2: Martin and Lewis, Sammy and Mickey and Frank Dean Martin meets and begins collaborating with Jerry Lewis. Martin and Lewis — an Italian and a Jew — become the most successful nightclub act in the country, and transition to Hollywood. Meanwhile, Sammy Davis Jr, determined to get the ...
10.26.2021 Sammy and Dino Episode 1: The Hustle Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin would become icons for how immigrants and people of color could access the American Dream in the 20th Century. Both grew up in marginalized communities where they learned an ethos of success based on ...
08.17.2021 Introducing Love is a Crime When Hollywood mogul Walter Wanger (Jon Hamm) shot an agent he suspected was having an affair with his actress wife, Joan Bennett (Zooey Deschanel) — one of the key femme fatales of 1940s film noir — Bennett was the one ...
06.29.2021 Gossip Girls: Louella Parsons And Hedda Hopper (The Queens Are Dead, Episode 9) The Hollywood studio system begins to crumble, and Louella and Hedda decline and fall, too. But just as a new generation of filmmakers rises from the ashes and reinvents the movie business, so too does gossip find new life in ...
06.22.2021 Gossip Girls: Louella Parsons And Hedda Hopper (Interracial Panic and Confidential, Episode 8) Appalled by rock n’ roll and its racial and sexual implications, Hedda and Louella find themselves in further danger of obsolescence when the gossip game is turned upside down by CONFIDENTIAL Magazine. To learn more about listener data and our ...
06.17.2021 Presenting: No Place Like Home Do you remember the first time you watched The Wizard of Oz? Those famous red ruby slippers are some of the most iconic objects in Hollywood history that still bring back nostalgic memories every time they’re seen. They became a ...
06.15.2021 Gossip Girls: Louella Parsons And Hedda Hopper (Sex and Shame in the 1950s, Episode 7) The 1950s were a decade of massive contradictions in terms of national and cultural attitudes towards sex. As Louella Parsons struggled to keep up with these rapid changes -- and to compete with her bolder, bitchier rival Hedda Hopper -- ...
06.08.2021 Gossip Girls: Louella Parsons And Hedda Hopper (Witch Hunt, Episode 6) During an era in which Hollywood and Washington are shakily aligned in the witch hunting of actual and reputed socialists, Louella struggles to maintain her position as cheerleader for the status quo, while Hedda grabs a torch and tries to ...
06.01.2021 Gossip Girls: Louella Parsons And Hedda Hopper (The Queer, Female Film Producer You’ve Never Heard Of, Episode 5) Louella’s daughter, Harriet Parsons, became a groundbreaking female film producer at a moment in history in which virtually all mainstream filmmakers were male. She was also a lesbian, at a time when being openly gay was unacceptable in Hollywood -- ...
05.25.2021 Gossip Girls: Louella Parsons And Hedda Hopper (War! Episode 4) World War II begins to reveal the gulf between Louella’s conservative but essentially business-minded politics, and Hedda Hopper’s virulent right-wing fervor. These differences — and the glee with which Hopper would destroy lives to shore up political power and further ...
05.18.2021 Gossip Girls: Louella Parsons And Hedda Hopper (The Feud, Episode 3) In 1938, washed-up actress Hedda Hopper is installed as a movie gossip columnist with the express purpose of puncturing the success of Louella and Hearst. But Hedda quickly establishes a voice of her own, revolutionary for its insistence on making ...

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