118: Bela vs. Boris (Bela & Boris Part 4)

118: Bela vs. Boris (Bela & Boris Part 4)

Update: 2017-11-07

3

Share

Description

Lugosi and Karloff, the two stars made by Universal’s monster movies, made eight films together. Today we’ll dive deep into some of these movies (including The Black Cat, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein and Val Lewton’s The Body Snatcher), and continue to explore how even when their careers brought them together, Karloff and Lugosi remained worlds apart. Featuring Patton Oswalt as Boris Karloff and Taran Killam as Bela Lugosi.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Comments

In Channel

145: Ramon Novarro (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 19)

Ramon Novarro was a Mexican actor and singer whose stardom at MGM in the 1920s and 30s was not impeded by his offscreen life as a gay man. In Hollywood Babylon, Anger focuses only on Novarro’s grisly murder in 1968 -- which outed Novarro to a public that had largely forgotten him--and needlessly embellishes a crime scene that was already pretty horrible. Today, in our final episode of Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon, we will explore the life which Anger left out of Hollywood Babylon, and correct that book’s version of Novarro’s death.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

145: Ramon Novarro (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 19)

2019-01-2900:52:001

144: The Trials of Confidential Magazine: Maureen O'Hara (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 18)

In part two of our two-parter on the demise of the biggest and most pernicious tabloid of the 1950s, we’ll explore what happened after the magazine’s claim that redheaded star Maureen O’Hara was caught having sex at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. O’Hara positioned herself the “Joan of Arc” of Hollywood, single-handedly defending a cowardly industry against the existential threat posed by Confidential. As we’ll see, this is one story where the Kenneth Anger version is more credible than the version related by one of the subjects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

144: The Trials of Confidential Magazine: Maureen O'Hara (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 18)

2019-01-2200:35:371

143: The Trials of Confidential Magazine: Dorothy Dandridge (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 17)

Over two episodes, we will explore Hollywood Babylon’s coverage of Confidential Magazine and the two celebrities who testified against the scandal rag in the 1957 trial that helped end what Anger rightfully refers to as its “reign of terror.” We’ll begin with Dorothy Dandridge, the first black actress to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. Dandridge’s testimony against Confidential reveals the publication’s racist agenda, as well as the double standards that governed her real private and public lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

143: The Trials of Confidential Magazine: Dorothy Dandridge (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 17)

2019-01-1500:45:57

142: Bugsy Siegel (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 16)

Jewish gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel is frequently credited with corrupting Hollywood’s unions and “inventing” Las Vegas. Siegel did have movie star friends, but the true story of his involvement with the Flamingo casino is also the story of a much bigger movieland player: Hollywood Reporter founder/publisher/columnist Billy Wilkerson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

142: Bugsy Siegel (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 16)

2019-01-0800:38:16

141: Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, and the “sewing circle” (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 15)

The bisexuality of Marlene Dietrich was not exactly a secret in 1930s Hollywood -- in fact, her ambiguous sexuality was part of her on-screen brand. But there is some debate as to who Dietrich counted among her lovers, and which of her fellow stars participated in what has been called the “sewing circle” of female intimacy. Anger alleges that Dietrich had a “passionate affair” with Claudette Colbert, an Oscar-winning actress with an extremely heteronormative persona. We’ll explore what was going on in Dietrich’s life and career around the time when this affair could have taken place, and then delve into Colbert’s image as a very different kind of on-screen sex symbol, and her complicated off-screen personal life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

141: Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, and the “sewing circle” (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 15)

2018-12-2500:44:02

140: Lupe Velez (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 14)

Mexican actress Lupe Velez was the victim of one of Anger’s cruelest invented stories. His fabrication of her manner of death lays bare a vicious racism in addition to Hollywood Babylon’s usual sexism. Today we will sort out the fact of Velez’s life from Anger’s fiction and consider the star of the Mexican Spitfire series as a comedienne ahead of her time.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

140: Lupe Velez (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 14)

2018-12-1800:48:49

139: Mary Astor's Diary (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 13)

In 1936, actress Mary Astor (who had not yet made her most famous film, The Maltese Falcon) and her husband went to court to fight for custody of their four year-old daughter. The trail made international news thanks to both sides’ use of Astor’s diary, in which she had recorded details of her affair with playwright George S. Kaufman. How much did Astor truly reveal in her diary, and what role did the scandal play in her life and career?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

139: Mary Astor's Diary (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 13)

2018-12-1100:54:28

138: Mae West (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 12)

Mae West was the biggest new star in Hollywood in 1933, thanks to two hit films she co-wrote and starred in as a sexually implicit, wisecracking broad who romanced a young Cary Grant. In Hollywood Babylon, Anger credits West’s abrupt decline in movies to a coordinated conspiracy organized by William Randolph Hearst and carried out by the Hays Office. Today we’ll explore West’s background, her history of pushing the censors past the limits of legality, and the truth of her lightning-fast rise in Hollywood and somewhat slower descent back to earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

138: Mae West (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 12)

2018-12-0400:55:361

137: Gina Lollobrigida (The Seduced, Episode 6)

This Italian pin-up, along with Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot, was emblematic of a brand of post-war European sexuality that America happily imported. But the Hollywood career of “La Lollo” was delayed, thanks to Howard Hughes, whose obsession with Lollobrigida led him to keep her virtually imprisoned in a Los Angeles hotel and sign her to a contract that essentially made it impossible for her to work for any other U.S. producer.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

137: Gina Lollobrigida (The Seduced, Episode 6)

2018-11-2000:41:40

136: Yvonne De Carlo

The future Lily Munster became a star when producer Walter Wanger cast her in Salome, Where She Danced (1945). A curvaceous brunette in her early 20s, De Carlo fit the mold of Howard Hughes’ mid-century girlfriends to a T. But that relationship would be brief, and De Carlo would go on to distinguish herself in movies, television, and as a star of the original production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

136: Yvonne De Carlo

2018-11-1300:43:291

135: Linda Darnell (The Seduced, Episode 4)

A stunning brunette sex symbol married to cinematographer Pev Marley, Darnell thought her affair with Howard Hughes would result in marriage to the aviator. But after Hughes’ near-fatal 1946 plane crash, Marley tried to make a deal to sell his wife to the tycoon--which was not what Darnell wanted. This was not the low point of a life that ended in incredible tragedy, amid a career that, to this day, has not been given the acclaim it deserves.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

135: Linda Darnell (The Seduced, Episode 4)

2018-11-0600:45:19

134: Ann Dvorak (The Seduced, Episode 3)

The child of a silent film actress, Dvorak was so determined to be a star that at first, she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Her big break came when she was cast in Howard Hughes’s production of Scarface. But Hughes would sell her contract to Warner Brothers, and when Ann later accused Hughes of having “sold [her] down the river,” she would swiftly suffer the consequences of going up against Hughes in the press when his mastery over the medium of publicity was at its peak. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

134: Ann Dvorak (The Seduced, Episode 3)

2018-10-3000:47:51

133: The Bacchanal of 1920s Hollywood, via Frederica Sagor Maas (The Seduced Episode 2)

Seduction begins at an MGM sponsored orgy at the Ambassador Hotel, as told through the eyes of one of the attendees, a young female screenwriter named Frederica Sagor. Sagor would go on to pen one of the frankest memoirs of 1920s Hollywood, revealing the systematic sexual exploitation of women in the film industry by men like Marshall Neilan--one of Howard Hughes’ early mentors. Frederica’s story also details how tough it was for a woman to hold on to power behind the scenes in the film industry as Hollywood evolved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

133: The Bacchanal of 1920s Hollywood, via Frederica Sagor Maas (The Seduced Episode 2)

2018-10-2300:38:201

132: Rupert Hughes's Women (The Seduced, Episode 1)

In the new book Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, Karina Longworth explores the lives and careers of over a dozen actresses who were involved, professionally and/or personally, with Howard Hughes. Inspired by the You Must Remember This episodes on “The Many Loves of Howard Hughes” produced in 2014-2015, the book goes in depth, with much new research, into the stories of stars like Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Ida Lupino, Jane Russell and many more. In this short series of You Must Remember This, we’ll discuss some of the women who serve as peripheral characters in Seduction: four actresses who were briefly seduced by Hughes, either professionally or romantically, and one writer whose travails in Hollywood during the Hughes era speak to the conflicted female experience behind the camera in 20th century Hollywood. We’ll begin the season by talking about the complicated, intermingled romantic and professional relationships of Howard’s uncle, Rupert Hughes, who paved the way for his nephew as a Hollywood figure known for his colorful history with women.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

132: Rupert Hughes's Women (The Seduced, Episode 1)

2018-10-1600:47:36

131: Clara Bow (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 11)

We’ll close this half of our Hollywood Babylon season with one of that book’s most famously distorted stories: the tale of “It” Girl Clara Bow’s supposed nymphomania and alleged “tackling” of the entire USC football team. The real story of Clara Bow’s life and career is a much richer tale, involving changing sexual mores, and the change in the audience’s tastes that overlapped with the end of the silent era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

131: Clara Bow (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 11)

2018-09-1101:01:071

130: Rudolph Valentino (Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 10)

Rudolph Valentino was Hollywood’s first “latin lover.” His shocking death at the age of 31 was attributed to side effects from an appendectomy, but Hollywood Babylon forwards theories that Valentino may have actually been poisoned, or killed by the husband of a lover, and/or secretly gay and recently divorced from his second secretly lesbian wife. What was the real story of Valentino’s marriages, and what really led to his untimely demise?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

130: Rudolph Valentino (Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 10)

2018-09-0400:57:081

129: Thomas Ince and the Hearst "Coverup" (Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 9)

Thomas Ince was one of early Hollywood’s most pioneering producers—in fact, some credit him for popularizing “producer” as a job title and for codifying what it meant to do the job, as well as helping to develop the Western as a genre. But today, if Ince is remembered at all, it’s for his death aboard a yacht owned by William Randolph Hearst, amidst a star-studded party attended by Chaplin, writer Elinor Glyn, and actress/Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies. For decades, rumors have swirled that Ince was felled not by “acute indigestion,” as Hearst’s papers claimed, but by “a bullet hole in [his] head,” as Kenneth Anger put it. Who was Ince, what really happened on that yacht, and why have fictionalizations of his death (spread by Anger and others) flourished for so long?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

129: Thomas Ince and the Hearst "Coverup" (Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 9)

2018-08-2800:43:211

128: Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Charlie Chaplin (Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon, Episode 8)

The Kim Kardashian of her day, Peggy Hopkins Joyce was famous for being rich and famous—and for her marriages and involvements with rich and famous men, including Charlie Chaplin. Did Peggy really ask Chaplin on their first date if he was “hung like a horse?” We’ll investigate this and other claims made about the affair in Hollywood Babylon, and chart how the dalliance with Hopkins Joyce inspired Chaplin’s first dramatic film A Woman of Paris, and explain how a woman of the 1910s-1920s could come from nothing and become internationally famous before ever arriving in Hollywood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

128: Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Charlie Chaplin (Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon, Episode 8)

2018-08-2101:02:08

127: Will Hays and "Pre-Code" Hollywood (Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 7)

Who was Will Hays, and how did he come to put his name on the censorship “Code” that would shape the content of movies more than any other single force from the early 1930s into the 1960s? How much power did Hays really have in 1920s Hollywood, how corrupt was he, and why did it take a decade before the Hays Code was fully enforced?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

127: Will Hays and "Pre-Code" Hollywood (Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 7)

2018-08-1400:50:541

126: Wallace Reid (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 6)

According to Hollywood Babylon, actor Wallace Reid—a morphine addict who died in an asylum at the age of 31—was the first sacrificial lamb of the post-scandal era, and Reid’s wife, a former teen star named Dorothy Davenport, was the ultimate opportunistic hypocrite. What made Reid’s case different from the other scandals around this time? Was Davenport the black widow that Anger suggests, or should she be remembered as a pioneering female writer, producer and director? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

126: Wallace Reid (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 6)

2018-08-0700:59:052

Google Play

Download from Google Play

Castbox

Download from App Store

FAQs

United States

00:00

00:00

1.0x

118: Bela vs. Boris (Bela & Boris Part 4)

118: Bela vs. Boris (Bela & Boris Part 4)

slate magazine