You Must Remember This unpacks a Hollywood love triangle, and on Rivals, Billy Corgan’s got beef
Aux Features Podmass
Inappropriate Questions
How Are You?
Recorded before the pandemic, the most recent episode of Inappropriate Questions deals with grief, particularly the ways in which the question “How are you?” affects people dealing with loss. One of the guests this episode, Michael Cruz Kayne, lost his son a decade ago, and the other guest, Kayla Moryoussef, is a grief counselor. With 10 years having passed since the death of his infant son, Cruz Kayne has experienced a shift from avoiding the subject to feeling compelled to open up about it. In doing so, he has found that other people often have stories of their own losses to share, leading to fruitful interactions that otherwise wouldn’t have had occasion to arise. Co-hosts Elena Hudgins Lyle and Harvinder Wadhwa have different experiences with death. Hudgins Lyle, who lost her mother at a young age, wants to be able to talk candidly about that loss, while Wadhwa often feels uncomfortable broaching such subjects with friends. Inappropriate Questions examines the discomfort of not knowing what to say, finding the beauty in that challenge, and making it more bearable. [Jose Nateras]
Rivals: Music’s Greatest Feuds
Alt-Enemies: Smashing Pumpkins Vs. Pavement
While each episode of Rivals typically finds journalists Steven Hyden (a former music editor for The A.V. Club) and Jordan Runtagh diving into the history of some of pop music’s most explosive conflicts, this week features such a low-key feud from the ’90s alternative scene that it seemingly only exists in the mind of Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan. In 1994, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus improvised a line on the song “Range Life” that gently mocked Corgan and his band. Malkmus meant no malice in the lyric, but Corgan, as our hosts explain, saw this as an attack by an elitist indie darling and would hold on to this resentment for decades. At this point, Malkmus pretty much disappears from the narrative, as Hyden and Runtagh spend the rest of the episode dissecting Corgan’s psyche to try to work out what the hell his problem is. They unpack Corgan’s hatred of so-called elites and the fact that, despite his phenomenal success, he still views himself as a persecuted nobody from the Midwest. After assessing all the symptoms, the hosts make a startling diagnosis: Billy Corgan is the Richard Nixon of alternative rock. [Anthony D Herrera]
Truth Vs. Hollywood
Goodfellas, Part 1
This brand-new series turns its focus to the movies claiming to be based on a true story and measures them up against the actual events. It’s easy to see why hosts David Chen and Joanna Robison select the 1990 classic Goodfellas as their inaugural film, as there is no shortage of source material. Plumbing the same 1985 nonfiction book that introduced the world (and director Martin Scorsese) to mobster Henry Hill, our hosts gain insight into Scorsese’s decision to use dual voice-overs of Henry and his wife, Karen. Hill himself consulted with the actors as they were shooting and received close to $500,000 for use of his likeness. Joe Pesci, meanwhile, drew from a scary childhood encounter when he improvised the famous “You think I’m funny?” scene. Mafia researchers are brought in to discuss finer points of the trade that didn’t make the final cut, like pulling off heists and the code of silence. Yet the hosts are not so caught up in their fact-checking mission that they can’t enjoy the movie, and there’s a lot of discussion of Goodfellas’ artistic achievements and legacy. [Zach Brooke]
You Must Remember This
“Last Picture Show Love Triangle”
This season, Karina Longworth’s cinematic nostalgia podcast You Must Remember This is focusing on one Hollywood story in particular: the saga of “Polly Platt, The Invisible Woman.” Platt was a writer, producer, and Oscar-nominated production designer who was married to director Peter Bogdanovich while the two were working on his breakthrough movie, 1971’s The Last Picture Show. Unfortunately for Platt, Bogdanovich wound up falling for the movie’s 20-year-old star, Cybill Shepherd. Platt’s perspective on this painful event is covered in episode three, “Last Picture Show Love Triangle.” Platt had recently given birth to the couple’s second child, and as actor Maggie Siff reads from Platt’s unpublished memoir, she recounts harrowing tales like dragging two small kids to the grocery store while faced with Shepherd’s perfect visage on magazine covers. It soon became clear that her husband was in love with the star, but Platt refused to leave the set of the film she had worked so hard on; after all, she was the one who brought the Larry McMurtry novel to her husband in the first place. YMRT is always an engaging, gossipy listen, but the deep exploration into one woman’s largely ignored contributions to the film industry makes this season especially engrossing. [Gwen Ihnat]
42 Comments
Only an overrated, feckless twerp like Bogdanovich would throw away a marriage to a smart, talented and (as if it mattered) beautiful woman for a brainless, one dimensional cunt like Shepherd. He deserved the ass reaming Orson Welles gave him.Billy Corgan may be a paranoid dweeb but comparing him to Nixon massively over inflates his transitory micro relevance.
“ throw away a marriage to a smart, talented and (as if it mattered) beautiful woman”Why does talent, but not beauty, matter in a spouse?
Being a bit hard on Cybill Shepherd there.
That guy’s full of shit takes.Being a bit hard on Cybill Shepherd there. But probably not as hard as Bogdanovich was!
I was not expecting to see someone go in so hard on Cybill Shepherd to day. Yowza.
I’m with you on Bogdanovich – the guy was a typical Hollywood predator who couldn’t keep his hands off his starlets.
Yeah he has an incredibly creepy pattern, which gets overlooked to paint him sympathetically in light of the Dorothy Stratten murder. But he dated Shepherd when she was 20, Stratten when she was 20 … and then he marries her sister Louise when SHE was 20. Yeesh. Nothing illegal about any of it but gahhhh, it’s creepy. Shows an immaturity that he masks in extreme arrogance. It’s Dazed and Confused Wooderson’s motto “I get older they stay the same age…” in real life.
It’s like he was slightly put off by what Polanski was doing and decided to set a boundary at age 20.
Be that as it may, but I’d still like to see the numbers on married men (esp. married men who look like Peter Bogdonavich) who would bang 20 year old Cybill Shepard given the opportunity. I’m guessing it’s well over 75%.
Likely well over 95%
Charles Grodin would.
Be that as it may, but I’d still like to see the numbers on married men
(esp. married men who look like Peter Bogdonavich) who would bang 20
year old Cybill Shepard given the opportunity. I’m guessing it’s well
over 75%.
Cosigned. You’d like us men to do better, but not many would have that kind of self-control.
It’s like I’ve said about the (initial) Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie affair: I don’t get how a guy cheats on Jennifer Aniston. . . but by the same token I don’t know how you’d resist Angelina Jolie coming after you either.
True. Jolie is smoking hot, but once you get passed that it seems she is very high on herself and that gets old real quick. Pitt just did not see that until it was too late.
Eh, I like Cybil Shepherd. She might be difficult to work with, I don’t know, but she is great in the right part.
Also, as You Must Remember This clearly documents, being married to Bogdanovich was no gift. He was a tiresome, self-satisfied, moderately talented boor who took all the credit. I haven’t gotten to Platt’s post-Bogdanovich career on the podcast yet but it’s pretty clear that split was not just inevitable but probably the best thing that could have happened to her.
However Orson WAS married to Rita Hayworth and he tossed her by the wayside so., yeah.
Big Bruce Willis fan then, huh?
I worked with Bogdanovich about 20 years ago. He’s relatively self-deprecating, but the sleaze oozes off of him.
I know, Watergate and Vietnam and all that, but if Nixon made Siamese Dream and Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, I’d vote for him.
What if Nixon put all his money into a terrible backyard wrestling organization?
As long as he also opened a tea shop and posed for the cover of cat magazines to balance it out, we’re still good.
I’ve been listening to a half-dozen songs from Mellon Collie on Spotify quite often lately, and they hold up about as well for me as they did in the 90s. (Quite well, to be exact.)
Very interested to check out the podcast about Polly Platt. It’s really disgraceful how overlooked her contributions were to Last Picture Show. On a semi-related note, I recently watched They All Laughed, Star 80, and One Day Since Yesterday: Peter Bogdanovich & the Lost American Film. Watching those three films back to back was…well, I don’t even know how to describe it.
I had no idea who Polly Platt was, but YMRT does a good job of representing her.Also I just love the podcast.
I love Bob Fosse’s work, but Star 80 is a tremendously difficult watch. Perhaps because it was made so soon after, there’s an immediacy and rawness to it without the benefit that distance would give. Eric Roberts gives a brutal performance, no doubt helped by Fosse seeing himself in Snyder, saying something like he’s afraid without his success Fosse easily could have become like Snyder. Tough stuff.
Completely agree. It’s absolutely a tough watch and just a bizarre (completely sleazy, imo) film. I suppose I can see how it fit into Fosse’s wheelhouse but it’s just so damn dark and tragic.
That’s it- it’s sleazy. There’s not even a hint of a redeemable character in it, and he dangles the killing over and over again, like it’s bait or something.
It’s the rare Fosse with no real style to it, which makes it especially bleak. Nothing really identifies it visually as a Fosse. It seems like the darkness of the story overcame him that he couldn’t really even identify a bigger theme other than Snyder being a monster. Through 2020 eyes you can see glimpses of taking down toxic masculinity, but that was not a prevalent thought in 1983, and if it was Fosse would have gone even harder at Hef and Bogdanovich. He also may have been afraid of lawsuits, making it more convenient to focus mostly against Snyder.
Yeah, it’s shot like a TV movie or something.
Star 80 seems like Bob Fosse having some kind of breakdown. It’s just unbelievably creepy the way he handles the material. It’s like he’s rubbing your face in it.
He was getting tons of pushback from everyone in the story, from Hef to Bogdanovich and of course the Strattens. Fosse’s insistence on making it anyway resulted in an especially mean spirited “fuck you” without having anything to say other than just reveling in the ugliness of the story. I think you’re right, it does seem like he was having a breakdown. It was about three years before his death, he was estranged from his daughter and just about anyone he loved. His career was in a funk too. His recent shows on Broadway fizzled and he was soon to mount a revival of Sweet Charity – something he never wanted to do because he said when directors start restating their old shows, you know it’s near the end and they have no new ideas. Sadly seemed accurate. After the poor reception to this film, he had another bway flop before dying out of town during the opening night of the Charity revival.
It was an ugly, difficult, sleazy film about an incredibly ugly crime. I remember watching it when it cam out (I was a college student) and just feeling sick and angry, and very sad.
I can’t believe that you mentioned the Polly Platt episode of “You Must Remember This” without mentioning TCM’s recently concluded podcast season, “The Plot Thickens: I’m Still Peter Bogdanovich,” which obviously covered some of the same territory. https://theplotthickens.tcm.com/
“Rivals” sounds fun so I’ll check it out. And as long as we are talking about Hyden, for old times’ sake… DAWES!(I really like their song “All Your Favorite Bands”).
We lost our way as a nation when we turned our backs on Dawes.
Malkmus was totally busting on the Pumpkins from the vantage point of a too-cool for school indie rock snob. You just don’t mention the band, together with the also hated “Stone Temple Pilots” if you don’t mean it. I could never quite get into Malkmus for a variety of reasons but his writing that lyric and then blow it off like he didn’t mean anything by it always bugged me. Billy has every right to be pissy about the whole although he by the selling of his 100th million copy of Mellon Collie you figure he would have gotten over it.
You and Billy might want to try getting over a mild 26-year-old burn. Nas and Jay-Z seem to get along well enough these days and Range Life is no Ether or Takeover.
If you do listen to The Polly Platt podcast, TCM now has one called The Plot Thickens and Ironically their first run is about Bogdonavich titled I’m Still Here. TCM host Ben Mankiewicz hosts and interviews Bogdonovich and it is interesting hearing the story from both sides. Some things stand out such as Dorothy Stratten’s death had such an effect of Bogdonovich that he never truly recovered from and it cost him his career to a degreee. There are also differences in the stories such as coming up with the title for Paper Moon. Ben also speaks with Cybil Shepherd and both feature the kids as well. It would be interesting for Longworth and Mankiewicz to have a discussion with each other about their respective programs.
I’m also a big fan of the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. They don’t gloss over the gossip, but they also do a good job of balancing that with a good look at Polly Platt’s very concrete role in Bogdanovich’s output.
It does seem that he was a lesser filmmaker without her as the only real big success he had later was Mask, and he was pretty much a director for hire on that.
I like YMRT, but Karina Longworth puts a slant in her podcasts that makes them not as truthful or unbiased as they should be. If someone’s really interested, I think seeking out other sources to get a more complete picture is the best way to go. I will say this though, Longworth is not wrong about Hollywood Babylon. It should be sold under fiction.
I agree that her political and social views temper her reporting but she does such an excellent job that I still enjoy her show. Her series on Charlie Manson was excellent and I hope there are more episodes on Hollywood Babylon. Granted those involved had little desire to straighten the record when it could harm their career if proven as true instead of it just being a rumor or a fabrication and leave it at that. I do remember Karina discussing Marcia Lucas and her contributions to Star Wars but as she was with Rian Johnson at the time, she had to step lightly which was too bad as it would be interesting to hear from Lucas directly after all these years of her ex apparently rewriting history.