Karina Longworth’s Podcast Reframes Old Hollywood Through Queer History

Karina Longworth wears Jacket Loro Piana. Skirt and Shoes Karina’s Own.

Karina Longworth’s work starts with the gaps in Hollywood history: the stories left out of polished accounts, the people reduced to rumors, and the creative careers that time has pushed to the margins. On You Must Remember This, she assembles those fragments into richly researched histories, drawing on old magazines, books, newspapers and original documents. Her latest season, “The Bisexuals,” follows torch singer Libby Holman while tracing how queer lives in entertainment were shaped by changing degrees of visibility.

Longworth spoke with actor and filmmaker Griffin Dunne on September 2, 2026, in Los Angeles. A longtime listener, Dunne brought his own memories of the city and its film history to a conversation about Longworth’s research, the people who have stayed with her, and what it meant for Hollywood’s early directors to grow old in a business increasingly focused on youth.

A Los Angeles education

Longworth grew up in Studio City in the 1980s and ’90s, in a family with no ties to the entertainment business. Yet Hollywood history felt close at hand. Her parents kept Lauren Bacall’s book at home, and local news might cover what Bob Hope or Elizabeth Taylor had done that day. The past didn’t seem as distant as it can now.

Dunne recognized that kind of everyday proximity. Growing up in Los Angeles meant passing studios on ordinary drives; in Studio City, Radford Studios had been home to productions including Gunsmoke, McHale’s Navy and Gilligan’s Island. For residents, he suggested, the film business was part of the city’s texture.

Longworth recently spent a year in Rochester studying film preservation, where she saw a similar relationship between a place and the industry that shaped it. Kodak had employed tens of thousands of people there, she said, but many people living and working in Rochester today don’t know that history. The comparison offers a useful lens on her work: cultural history isn’t only about famous names. It also lives in the places, industries and memories that communities can lose sight of.

She began her career as a film critic, writing about new releases. She met filmmaker Rian Johnson when she was hired to interview him after a screening of one of his films. They were friends for a couple of years before they started dating. Hollywood history wasn’t the foundation of their relationship, Longworth said, though Johnson joined her as her interests shifted. At home, he often lets her choose the film.

Research that restores the moment

Dunne singled out Longworth’s season on Charles Manson and its cultural shadow as a turning point in his own understanding of the subject. He drew on her work while making a documentary about Joan Didion, whom Longworth also made a character in a podcast season, using Didion’s perspective to illuminate the surrounding events. Dunne, who had unknowingly driven past the scene of the murders as a child, said Longworth’s research supplied details he hadn’t encountered elsewhere. He also praised her episode on Jean Seberg, particularly its connection between Seberg and Jane Fonda.

Longworth’s season on production designer Polly Platt grew from a friendship and working relationship with producer Stacey Sher. Sher had known Platt and was close to her daughters, Antonia and Sashy, who wanted their mother’s unfinished memoir to reach readers. The manuscript was vivid but incomplete, Longworth recalled, and needed context. Its voice gave her a strong impression of Platt, and she wanted to share as much of that perspective as she could.

Longworth initially tried to sell the project as a book. Her agent told her the idea wouldn’t sell; she ended their working relationship over the disagreement. The story instead found a home in podcast form. Peter Bogdanovich heard the season, she confirmed to Dunne, though she never had the chance to discuss it with him before he died not long after its release.

The research behind her Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin season shows how a star’s career can open onto wider social histories, including racism and interracial marriage. Longworth credited Nick Tosches’s Dino as a vital starting point, describing it as one of the great biographies. She had admired the book for years and wanted to celebrate it, then pursued extensive research on Davis.

Vintage magazines are central to her method. They capture how a person’s fame functioned in the moment, before later accounts recast that celebrity as settled history. Longworth reads broadly, follows magazine and newspaper coverage, and visits archives such as the Margaret Herrick Library, the Academy’s library in Los Angeles, in search of original files and documents. The result is a portrait built from evidence about both the person and the way their era chose to see them.

Jacket Loro Piana. Skirt and Shoes Karina’s Own.

What happens when Hollywood’s old guard ages

Dunne praised another season, “The Old Man Is Still Alive,” for its attention to directors confronting age, relevance and cultural change. Its subjects had helped define Hollywood’s movie language in the 1920s and ’30s. Longworth was interested in how their experiences diverged as the culture shifted toward youth and projects became harder to secure.

Howard Hawks, who continued working into his early eighties, offered one kind of story; Vincente Minnelli, who struggled to get projects off the ground, another. Longworth wanted the season to hold those different paths together rather than reduce them to a single account of what it meant to age in the business.

Dunne pointed to John Huston as a particularly striking case. In the last years of his life, he made three films Dunne considered among his best. Longworth contrasted the paycheck feel of Annie with the more personal qualities she sees in Under the Volcano and The Dead. The late work complicates the idea that a director’s most vital period must belong to youth or peak commercial success.

Longworth doesn’t interview people for every subject. Speaking to the few people who are still alive can give those episodes an uneven advantage, she explained. Her approach keeps the emphasis on a consistent body of archival research, while allowing the surviving record to guide the story.

Libby Holman and the uneven history of openness

“The Bisexuals” takes its title from a deliberately provocative angle, Longworth said; she never intended the season to serve as a complete history of bisexuality in Hollywood. Its center is Libby Holman, a torch singer with a stage career who, according to Dunne, loathed microphones. Longworth first became interested in Holman in 2020, then read Jon Bradshaw’s book Dreams That Money Can Buy.

Holman was a Jewish girl from Cincinnati who arrived in New York City in the 1920s. Her throaty delivery and blues repertoire prompted rumors that she was Black and passing as white. She wasn’t, Longworth said, but during the late 1920s, allowing the rumor to circulate could benefit Holman’s career. She became a Broadway star and moved within a queer social scene.

In the early 1930s, Holman shocked people by marrying Zachary Smith Reynolds, the teenage heir to the Camel cigarettes fortune. Eight months later, he died from a gunshot wound, and Holman was charged with his murder. She did not go to jail, but the case never fully cleared her name. Longworth described the ensuing media attention and legal drama as a burden that followed Holman for the rest of her life.

Longworth compared Holman’s lingering reputation to Courtney Love’s: both women, she said, were never convicted of killing their husbands, yet some people continued to believe they had. In Holman’s case, the suspicion was compounded by the untimely deaths of several other men in her life. The season’s subject is therefore not just an enigmatic performer, but the way rumor can harden into a public identity long after a case has ended.

Dunne also raised an unexpected family connection: Holman’s distant uncle, Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was a Jewish sculptor who lived in the South, studied in Italy and became one of the leading makers of Confederate monuments. The detail places Holman’s story amid a complicated family history that crosses art, identity and regional culture.

Longworth’s account of queer social life resists a simple timeline of steady progress. She found stories of Holman and her friends, including Tallulah Bankhead and Bankhead’s girlfriend, Louisa Carpenter, living relatively openly in New York. In Harlem clubs, they could be open about queer relationships; their connections were also understood in parts of the Broadway speakeasy scene. Bankhead’s openness narrowed when she moved to Hollywood. Marlene Dietrich, meanwhile, played with bisexuality onscreen in the early 1930s.

By the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the room for openness had changed sharply. Longworth said a man of Montgomery Clift’s stature could not be openly gay. Dunne pointed to the public shaming and risk of arrest that queer people faced in the 1950s and early ’60s. The contrast pushes back on the familiar idea that the 1960s brought an uncomplicated release. Longworth sees the sexual revolution as a slow process, and neither Holman nor Clift lived to benefit from it.

The studio system sometimes shielded stars who were known to have private lives outside public expectations, Dunne observed, recalling a remark attributed to Harry Cohn: “If you must get into trouble, at least do it at the Chateau [Marmont].” Longworth’s response was that the hotel is now a place where photographers gather. The larger point is that protection depended on cooperation: studios helped people who were willing to play the game.

Stories that remain in motion

Longworth’s archive-first approach makes Hollywood history feel less like a finished record and more like a set of competing memories. A magazine profile, an unfinished memoir or a film made late in a director’s life can shift how a familiar figure looks. Her work also connects screen history to the social conditions surrounding it, from race and marriage to queer visibility and the changing value placed on age.

In October, Longworth planned to be in New York showing films from the podcast season. Dunne said he would attend. For listeners, the screenings extend the work beyond the headphones: each film offers another way to see the people and eras her research has brought back into view.

Hair: Caitlin Krenz using Oribe Hair Care at Exclusive Artist Management.

Makeup: Agostina using MAC Cosmetics at Exclusive Artist Management.

Photography Assistant: Julio Lane.

Fashion Assistant: Hannah Loewen.

On-set Production: Lily Hyde.

Jacket Loro Piana. Skirt and Shoes Karina’s Own.

The post Karina Longworth and Griffin Dunne Raise Old Hollywood From the Dead appeared first on Interview Magazine.