Karina Longworth’s house is, quite possibly, haunted. Although she doesn’t necessarily have this experience, she tells of the hauntings she witnessed in her 1926 Mediterranean. Longworth can be seen on the patio, frond-shaded, one July morning. She has it on authority of a friend who, after a drunken stumbling in from the pool, heard a party upstairs in the dining room. Since then, the hauntedness or unhauntedness of Longworth’s abode has become a matter of some debate. “My friend thinks my house is haunted,”She says it wryly. “I think he drinks too much.”
Either way, there is certainly no one better at reviving Hollywood’s ghosts than Longworth. Longworth is an historian and film critic, but her best-known podcast is the one she hosts. This is what you must rememberShe records, researches and writes in a small, foam-lined closet located downstairs from her husband, Rian Johnson. The podcast has been launched eight years ago with an episode about Kim Novak and a promise of exposing “the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century,” Longworth has proven herself to be a definitive source on Hollywood lore, from the abuses of MGM’s studio system to the politics of the Rat Pack. Even though Charles Manson’s season has been called one of the most important cultural examinations of his Family, it is still highly regarded. “I didn’t come to it from the perspective of true crime,”She said. “I came to it through Doris Day.”
The skill with which Longworth can connect those dots has garnered her hundreds of thousands of listeners and a cult following that includes Tavi Gevinson, Chloë Sevigny, and Natasha Lyonne, who heard about the podcast from producer Eli Roth and then reached out to Longworth in the hopes of developing a show based on a Hollywood-blacklist episode. “I remember cold-calling her, and I was kind of shaking, you know, just totally star-struck,”Lyonne is the voice of Clara Bow and Mae West in the podcast. Lyonne also created the Peacock series. Poker FaceJohnson with Johnson as they waited for Longworth’s signature on books after a book reading. “Karina sees the underbelly of all our systems, what we’re capable of in the reach for power and relevance,”Lyonne. “It’s dark. It’s inherently eerie material.”
Longworth has always been attracted to that eerieness from the beginning. (“I feel like I don’t even have to talk about David Lynch because he’s obviously the patron saint of the podcast,”She said. The show almost has the feel of a séance — a comparison Longworth herself has made — from the opening, in which the distorted voice of Dooley Wilson singing “As Time Goes By”is drowned by ghostly murmurs. She invites the listener in with her breathy, sighing voice. “Join us, won’t you?” But the ghosts she conjures, fleshes out, and humanizes aren’t just the famous ones. They are also the ones who’ve long been forgotten, buried in the archives of the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, lost to the fleeting fancies of public opinion, starring in films that will never be seen again because not a single copy is still in existence. Her signature move is to use a subject people think they know about to tell a more profound story — especially if it involves a woman whose legacy has been plastered over by that of a man.
Longworth, 42, has the heart-shaped visage of a silent film star. Longworth is dressed in houndstooth pants with loafers and is sat at a wicker patio set with 1990s editions. Movieline (“How Luke Perry Spent His Spring Vacation”), Premiere (“Richard Woos Another Pretty Woman”), and Ms. (“Shere Hite Is Back”). She is currently in the process to research her 211th episode. She thinks it will be about Julia Roberts.Pretty WomanAnd which will start a season called “Erotic 90s,”It is scheduled to be released in the fall. It’s a follow-up to “Erotic 80s,” Longworth’s most recent season, begun after the pandemic shut down the libraries and archives where she usually turns for research. Since her youth, she had collected entertainment magazines. So she began to dig in. “If you read every single review of a film that you can find, you do see narratives,”She said. “You do see waves. You see a lot of people coming to the same conclusion at the same time.”
She takes a cigarette. Movieline,Drew Barrymore is seen on the cover wearing pink satin gloves with a sultry expression. “I vaguely remember this,”She said. “I definitely remember the narrative that they’re telling, which is: ‘She went to rehab, but she’s still a bad girl. She’s so sexy. Who cares that she’s only 17?’ ”
A new episode of YMRT,This narrative would be analyzed, teased out, and animated by removing any assumptions that the past was more contradictory or confusing than the present. The through line of Longworth’s work is her skill for not only untangling myth from reality (no, Jean Harlow was not killed by her hair dye), but also interrogating the cultural conditions that led to the creation of the myth — and using the contours of myth to do so. “I love a rise and fall,”She said. “I love a three-act narrative.”
Suddenly, there’s a noise from the house. Longworth investigates the noise, but it is not a ghostly visitor. It’s just her salad being delivered from Sweetgreen.
If Longworth’s lifeIf it were a movie it would be difficult to identify its genre. A sardonic, self-aware tragedy? A coming-of-age dark comedy? These are the facts: She was born in Studio City, California at a time when she claims, “every Starbucks was filled with half-employed screenwriters who’d talk about what it used to be like to work at Mary Tyler Moore’s studios. At 13 years old, you could just get a mocha and sit and listen.”
Longworth was naturally inclined to. Longworth was raised by an accountant dad and a mom who were both. “sort of an artist, but mostly a housewife,”Valley, and the feeling of being so close to home. When she was a kid, her mom took her to all the rereleases of the Disney films, but didn’t pretend that life was a fairy tale. “I definitely saw my mother chafing against expectations and being very depressed and wanting to do something outside the home, but not really knowing what it was,”Longworth. Their mother, who was British and stiff-upper-lipped, killed their mother when Longworth was 11 years old. Their father — British and stiff-upper-lipped — was “overwhelmed”Single parent. Longworth says that this is the best time. “I really had a hard time making friends and just being a person in the world.”She spent many hours alone in her bedroom, reading about the glamorous lives of stars.
The turning point was junior high. Kurt Cobain sang about Frances Farmer. David Lynch was channeling Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini. Longworth had already found a group of friends by the time she started high school. “it was important to go see movies from the Sixties and Seventies. You were supposed to have seen things like Easy Rider or 2001. I felt like it was also important for me to rent Citizen Kane. I should see Kurosawa movies. I should see Godard and Truffaut.”She began to read the old movie listings at the back. TV Guide: “I knew that Myrna Loy was a thing before I had ever seen a Myrna Loy movie.”
Longworth fled home as soon she could to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then the San Francisco Art Institute. There she studied experimental film and made videos that combined autobiography and film analysis. Her thesis was on “this probably apocryphal story that Judy Garland had an affair with Frank Sinatra, that I was also loosely connecting to my own [breakup].”
When no one knew what to make of this, she decamped to NYU for a master’s in cinema studies, taking classes and working full time at a specialty grocery store to cover rent. She was still a student and helped to set the tone for the early blogs by writing insightful, funny, and snarky reviews (at $7 per piece) for sites such as Cinematical. This eventually led her to the position of film critic at. LA Weekly2010 It was her dream job, but she found it exhausting to have to do it every day. “take”Everything.
Longworth shifted to Orange County’s Chapman University to teach, but “it was very difficult to speak with all those people looking at me.”She also wrote several books. In 2014, she decided to start a podcast, hoping that it would open doors and help her get a job at Turner Classic Movies. Over spring break she learned GarageBand and recorded her very first episode. Surprised when she found out that only three to four episodes had been completed. Entertainment Weekly mentioned YMRT.After the semester was over, she started the podcast full-time. “She has an incredible ability to see the big picture and also know exactly what detail captures it, brings it to life, and makes you understand exactly what happened,”Amy Nicholson was Amy’s friend and she took over as film criticism at LA Weekly. “You just feel like if she’s interested in something, there’s a reason it’s interesting.”
Longworth once she has decided on a topic turns to Google. She reads everything and then uses it to point her to books, biographies, contemporaneous sources, magazines, studio correspondence and blind items. She organizes the information using her production assistant and research.“I can only think chronologically”), sometimes color coding what she thinks she’ll use. She can spend months researching and preparing a single episode.
“She is the most disciplined writer I’ve ever met,” says Johnson, who met Longworth in 2009 when she moderated a Q&A for his film The Brothers Bloom. “And with any of the topics that she explores, she always finds a personal, emotional way into it.”Longworth believes that this is the way to go. “If I can humanize anybody who makes movies to the extent that it makes people want to watch the movies, and then the movies help them understand themselves better, that’s the ultimate goal.”
How to choose the right place to dineLongworth is a Hollywood history lesson all by itself. There’s Musso and Frank, the steakhouse where Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford started United Artists. There’s the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi fatally overdosed. There’s Dear John’s, where Sinatra and his crew hung out, and the Smokehouse, plopped across the street from Warner Bros. Longworth had even recommended my hotel, the Hollywood Roosevelt, where Marilyn Monroe (Room 1200) and Montgomery Clift (Room 928) had been posthumously sighted; according to her, it is famously haunted.
But she eventually admitted that Old Hollywood can be like going to movies. “cosplay.”According to her, “People sometimes have this idea that I’m wearing a vintage dress all the time. I’m not Dita Von Teese.” In the end, we decided on Silver Lake’s Cafe Stella, about which she texted there would “probably be someone that is famous from a streaming show.” There wasn’t, but our sidewalk table did have a distant view of the Hollywood sign, the “H” of which actress Peg Entwistle had thrown herself off in 1932 when her part in a film was cut from 16 minutes to four, as I’d learned while listening to episode 93 in my haunted hotel.
Longworth read the old movie listings at the back of the newspaper in high school. TV Guide. “I knew that Myrna Loy was a thing before I had ever seen a Myrna Loy movie,”She said.
Longworth is not Dita von Teese. However, there’s something about her that is anachronistic. She’s got a fairly bookish quality in person, but after a glass or two of Bordeaux, the lines between the actual Longworth and her dishy podcast persona blur: The YMRT version does not seem like a character she’s playing so much as a slightly heightened version of who she is, if with more precise and clipped diction. “I have more of a Valley Girl voice when I’m not speaking in front of a microphone,”She said.
She is also a more realistic person than her subject matter would suggest. It is here that Old Hollywood can still be seen. “hazy space of smoke and wish fulfillment,”As a Garland episode shows, Longworth doesn’t succumb to nostalgia by simply commenting on its appeal. She regularly compares accounts and teases out her own assumptions, and then highlights the times when the answers are not clear. “Most of the time it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack — and understanding what that needle looks like,”She speaks highly of her research. “You are making choices. What if in a moment I was tired and didn’t see the most important thing?”
And it’s possible that the most important thing just doesn’t exist anymore. “Los Angeles is very good at erasing its own history,”She says, “As night falls.” “It’s the same impulse that caused the film industry to set movies on fire, to melt them down, to save the silver nitrate, which is why most silent films are lost.” YMRTRecognizes that loss is a natural part of the landscape. “There’s a loneliness to Los Angeles. There’s a lot of isolation here,”Longworth:
Just as the best movies reveal something of the human condition, Longworth’s work helps her explore something of her own self. Her most poignant season may be 2017’s “Dead Blondes,” which explores the lives of stars from Marilyn Monroe to Veronica Lake — and our fascination with their tragic ends. It’s the season she wrote after her father’s death from cancer. She was there for him all the time.
“It was really, really hard for me,”Longworth had earlier told me. “I didn’t connect it at the time, but as soon as the season was over, it was so obvious to me that it was my grief season.” She can see why the past beckons to her, why she’s made a career “thinking about the ways that the people left behind deal with the legacy.”
But the past doesn’t make that easy. The past can’t be erased. Even if they are revived, ghosts keep their secrets. Longworth doesn’t begrudge them. “I wish I believed more that the line between life and death was porous,”She says, “Not unhappily.” “But I don’t.”