You Must Remember This

If you're enjoying You Must Remember This, you may also like Talking Pictures, a movie memories podcast. On this episode of Talking Pictures, you'll hear Ben Mankiewicz in conversation with Carol Burnett. Carol Burnett’s life has always spun around the movies. She tells Ben about her childhood spent in Hollywood movie theaters, the famous actor who helped her break into showbiz, and the movie parodies in her groundbreaking television variety show. In fact, at 91, Carol Burnett remembers more about movies than Ben! We cap it all off with a delightful Super 8 complete with seasonal gems. Plus, Carol and Ben discuss their Wordle stats…listen to find out who’s winning. Listen to Talking Pictures wherever you get your podcasts.

The first episode of You Must Remember This tells the story of actress Kim Novak -- a top box office draw of the late 1950s and the iconic star of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo -- and her painful struggles to assert herself from the mid-20th century through well into the 21st, in a Hollywood that repeatedly sent her the message that she was only valuable for the way she looked, while also insisting that she didn’t quite look good enough. Originally released in April 2014, this episode has been “lost” for almost as long due to copyright issues with its soundtrack. Today, in honor of the podcast’s ten year anniversary, we’re rereleasing this episode with new music, largely re-recorded voiceover, and just enough of the original episode intact so you can hear how far the show has come over the course of a decade.

Our first guest on Talking Pictures is writer director Nancy Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, The Holiday). Recorded at her home, host Ben Mankiewicz talks with Meyers about casting Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, getting script advice from Sunset Boulevard director Billy Wilder, and they discuss what it’s like to become famous for her interiors. Spoiler: it’s frustrating! Nancy Meyers also answers our Super 8 questionnaire and reveals which film had her running from the theater in absolute terror.

In part 2 of the Eyes Wide Shut story, the movie is finally unveiled, and critics are divided on its quality, and the use of digital effects to evade an NC-17 rating. Where could Hollywood eroticism go from here? We’ll wrap up the Erotic 90s story with some thoughts on Richard Gere’s two-decade journey from American Gigolo to becoming PEOPLE Magazine’s 1999 “Sexiest Man Alive,” and other ways in which time and politics combined to make that which was once transgressive harmlessly mainstream.

(00:00) Introduction and Eyes Wide Shut Ratings Woes

(18:40) Critical Hype and Reckoning

(34:10) Box Office Disappointment

(49:22) Tom and Nicole Divorce

(55:25) Cindy Crawford, Controversies and Gerbil Rumors

(01:07:40) Unfaithful and the End of the Erotic 90s

At the peak of their careers, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman left Hollywood for two years to collaborate with legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick on an erotic drama that the media speculated would pull back the curtain on maybe the most fascinating famous couple in the world. Though the meta element can’t be ignored, what Eyes Wide Shut actually ended up being is much more interesting. It’s a culmination of every theme and trope we’ve discussed across Erotic 80s and 90s, and the last film of the twentieth century headlined by American superstars to question the moral rot of the rich and powerful. In part 1 of the Eyes Wide Shut story, we’ll analyze the film and the media frenzy over the mystery of its making.

(00:00) How We Got From Erotic 80s to Eyes Wide Shut

(14:08) Source Material, Structure, and Events of the Film

(51:50) Kubrick in London and Casting Eyes Wide Shut

(01:11:16) The Mysterious Post-Production of Kubrick’s Final Film

If Adrian Lyne’s Lolita became a case study of what Hollywood and America didn’t want to acknowledge about its sexualization of young girls, as the 90s came to a close the culture was full of “acceptable” depictions of teens in heat. Two hit films from 1998 and 1999, Wild Things and Cruel Intentions, adapted classic templates of adult sexual manipulation to turn teen girls into femme fatales (probably not coincidentally, both featured actresses, Neve Campbell and Sarah Michelle Gellar, who were famous for playing high school students on TV). Also no coincidence: these films entered the culture simultaneous to the debut of 17 year-old Britney Spears, whose videos and persona centered her status as “not a girl, not yet a woman.”

(00:00) The Last Gasp of the 90s Lolita

(15:39) The Subversive Style of Wild Things

(28:43) Press and Public Reaction to Wild Things

(38:50) The Rise of Britney

(53:53) The Teen Boom Fizzles Out

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 novel about a 40-year-old pedophile’s obsession with his adolescent step-daughter – and no distributor wanted to release it. In a decade rife with the commodification and sexualization of young teens (see our previous episode on Drew Barrymore), what lines did Lyne’s Lolita cross?

(00:00) Adrian Lyne Struggles To Get Lolita Made

(20:21) Casting Dominique Swain 

(29:35) The Problems of Adapting Lolita

(39:32) Press Coverage and More Problems

(47:58) Response and Distribution Difficulties

(58:54) “Criminal”, Kids, and Complexity

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 of his most controversial films, Lost Highway, which tackles similar themes as Boxing Helena, including male sexual fragility and the “Madonna-Whore” complex. Today we’ll talk about how Boxing Helena became bigger as a punchline than a movie, and we’ll trace David Lynch’s career as a provocateur to try to explain why his excavation of the dark, sexual core of Americana was celebrated when he made Blue Velvet, and pilloried a dozen years later when he made Lost Highway.

(00:00) OJ Simpson and the Origins of Lost Highway

(05:56) How Boxing Helena Got Made Without Madonna or Kim Basinger

(13:40) Protests and Post-Production Problems

(28:20) Lost Highway’s Enigmatic Structure

(47:34) What Is Lost Highway About?

(59:15) Robert Blake and the Death of Bonny Lee Bakley

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 when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 and when it was released in the US in 1997, how it played into the UK general election of 1997, how it functioned as an early warning against charismatic billionaires, and how it embodied a post-Prozac and pre-Viagara moment.

(00:00) Anti-Depressants and Sex in the 90s

(15:35) Why Cronenberg Made Crash

(25:52) Adaptation Changes Between the Novel and Film

(39:15) What Is Crash About?

(49:49) Crashing Cannes

(56:36) Ted Turner and the V-Chip

(01:02:40) Critical Reception and Box Office

(01:11:31) An R-Rated Version for Home Video

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 of a number of neo-noir crime films, but the culture at large still rejected lesbianism when not intended to arouse men. While The Matrix has widely been reappraised as a trans allegory after the transitions of its directors the Wachowski sisters, their previous feature Bound was transparently queer, but its reception was complicated by the media’s perception of its makers. Bound was released just a few months after the burial of an extremely similar film called Wild Side. Barely seen on its initial release amidst studio recutting and the suicide of its director, today Wild Side plays as a heartbreaking and troubling example of what could have been for its star Anne Heche, who would soon after become one-half of the most famous lesbian couple in Hollywood – and suffer the career consequences. 

(00:00) The Genesis of 90s Lesbian Chic

(12:34) The Unpleasant Origins of Wild Side

(19:20) Why Wild Side is Worth Seeing

(28:40) The Last Days of Donald Cammell

(32:52) The Wachowskis Then and Now

(38:42) Bound As 90s Noir/Crime Film

(46:29) Contemporary Critical and Cultural Reaction

(52:42) Anne Heche and Her Legacy