TARGETS with Karyn Kusama and new virtual screening series schedule / June 5, 2020 by Karina Longworth

Due to the very necessary national conversation about race and police brutality that has been happening over the past 10 days, this week we postponed our schedule second installment of our Virtual Screening Series, in partnership with Vidiots Foundation. The conversation that had previously been scheduled for June 2, about Targets and episode 2 of Polly Platt, The Invisible Woman, is now rescheduled for this coming Tuesday, June 9.

Here’s the new Virtual Screening Series schedule…. Join us, won’t you?

June 9: Targets
Polly Platt got her first story and production design credits on her then-husband Peter Bogdanovich’s feature directorial debut, a bone-dry, bare-bones thriller about the real horror -- ie: mass shootings. Platt found the locations and designed the total look of the film around an aesthetic that, as she put it, "I thought would make a murderer out of me."

June 16: The Last Picture Show
While he and Polly were making this now-classic, Oscar-winning film, Peter Bogdanovich began an open affair with actress Cybill Shepherd. Humiliated though she was, Polly felt so much ownership over this movie that she refused to leave the production.

June 23: What's Up Doc
Though their marriage was over, Polly Platt agreed to production design her now ex-husband’s next two movies, What’s Up Doc (1972) and Paper Moon (1973). What’s Up Doc would be an anomaly in Polly’s filmography as a production designer: a trailblazer in American realism, here Platt went all in on designing a live-action cartoon.

June 30: A Star is Born (1976)
In production designing the Barbra Streisand-starring remake of one of Hollywood’s oldest myths, Polly got an up-close-and-personal glimpse into what it really looked like to be a powerful woman in Hollywood. She also got a chance to subtly work some of her own story into the design of the film.

July 7: Pretty Baby
Platt began a major career transition with this controversial film, which she wrote and produced. Though set in a brothel in early 20th century New Orleans, Pretty Baby is infused with much of Polly’s own autobiography, and shows how deeply she was grappling with her feelings of abandonment—and worries that she was abandoning her own children.

July 14: Terms of Endearment
A decade after her creative partnership with Bogdanovich ended, Platt began a new collaboration with an incredibly talented writer/director: James L. Brooks. This was the perfect job for Polly; many of those close to her believed that the novel that the movie was based on had been at least partially inspired by her.

July 21: The Witches of Eastwick
Polly Platt’s last film as a production designer — a job she took after she had established herself as a writer/producer and announced her intention to direct –– also features the most production design of her career, as she matched her instinct for visual storytelling to the format of the 80s special effects blockbuster.

July 28: Say Anything...
During one of the last phases of her career, Polly became a mentor to a number of first-time directors, including Cameron Crowe, whose now-classic rom-com features Polly on-screen in a memorable cameo.

August 4: Bottle Rocket
Polly shepherded Wes Anderson’s first feature through a long development process, believing strongly that he and the Wilson brothers were telling an independent, American story that would fall in the lineage of The Last Picture Show.

VIDIOTS FOUNDATION & YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS VIRTUAL FILM SCREENING SERIES / May 21, 2020 by Karina Longworth

Karina Longworth, film historian, and creator and host of You Must Remember This podcast, and Vidiots Foundation, the iconic L.A. video store-turned-film non-profit, are teaming up for a VIRTUAL FILM SCREENING SERIES, running Tuesday, May 26 through Tuesday, July 28, 2020. Follow @karinalongworth and @vidiots on Instagram for more information.

The virtual screening series will follow the new season of You Must Remember This -- Polly Platt, The Invisible Woman. YMRT listeners, Vidiots fans, and classic movie buffs are invited to watch a movie every week, handpicked by Karina and Maggie, that relate to the week's podcast episode. Every Tuesday during the series they’ll be on Instagram Live at 6:30 PST/9:30 EST to discuss the movie and that week's episode with fans, and special guests.

Films include:

May 26: One-Eyed Jacks
When Polly Platt was a kid, she sought escape from her troubled home life by going to see Westerns. At age 20, in the midst of paralyzing grief, she saw One-Eyed Jacks — directed by and starring Marlon Brando — and the experience made her take action to follow her dream of working in movies.

More about Karina and YMRT: Karina Longworth is a film critic, author, and journalist based in LA. Longworth writes, hosts and produces the podcast You Must Remember This, about the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century. Since launching as a passion project in April 2014, YMRT has become a critically acclaimed top podcast. "Ms. Longworth has hit on a peculiar sweet spot, where Hipsterdom meets Turner Classic Movies!" —The New York Times; "This podcast will change the way you think about movies" —Esquire Magazine; "Deep research, delicious tidbits & eyebrow arched narration!" —Flavorwire. The newest YMRT series stars Polly Platt -- producer, writer and Oscar-nominated production designer -- who lived an epic Hollywood life. If you know Platt’s name today, it’s probably because in 1970 her husband and creative collaborator Peter Bogdanovich had an affair with Cybill Shepherd while shooting the film that launched their careers, The Last Picture Show. But Platt was much more than a jilted wife: she was the secret, often invisible-to-the-public weapon behind some of the best films of the 1970s, '80s and '90s. Drawing on Platt’s unpublished memoir, as well as ample interviews and archival research, The Invisible Woman will tell Polly Platt’s incredible story from her perspective, for the first time. Learn more about the podcast at youmustrememberthispodcast.com.

About Vidiots: Vidiots, the iconic Los Angeles video store-turned-film non-profit, is relaunching as an expanded entertainment, social, and community space at the historic Eagle Theatre in Northeast L.A. Vidiots' new home will include a 250-seat state-of-the-art cinema for a full calendar of screenings, special events, and educational programs; beer, wine and food; a 40-seat flexible screening space, and Vidiots' over-50,000-title film and media collection. To learn more and support Vidiots' relaunch with a donation of any size, please visit vidiotsfoundation.org

EMPIRE, "Fake Ass Lena Horne" and the Real Lena Horne / February 20, 2015 by Karina Longworth

Like, apparently, most Americans, my favorite thing on television right now is Empire, Lee Daniels and Danny Strong's nutty prime time soap about Lucious Lyon, a gangster rapper-turned-multimedia mogul who finds out he has ALS at the exact moment that Cookie -- his ex-wife/mother of his three sons/mastermind of his empire -- is released from prison after 17 years. Cookie, played by the incredible Taraji P. Henson, blasts into rooms like a hurricane; pretty much everything that happens on the show, she makes happen, and she gets most of the best lines. A major plot this season has been Cookie's rivalry with Anika, Empire Entertainment's new head of A & R and Lucious' new fiancee.

Played by the stunning Grace Gealey, Anika is very light-skinned (the show has introduced us to her black mother and white father), and is a self-proclaimed "debutante." The street-smart Cookie, who still loves Lucious and has given Anika the derogatory nickname Boo Boo Kitty, firmly believes that Anika is too polished and naive to interface with Empire's artists, who have a host of issues ranging from drug addiction (what's up, guest star Courtney Love) to ongoing criminal activity to, in the case of Lucious' own sons, homosexuality, baby mama drama and potentially violent misogyny. Where Cookie can put on a head scarf and manipulate the devoutly Nation of Islam mother of a rapper, Lucious had to protect Anika when her meeting with the same rapper is interrupted by a drive-by. In a variety of different ways, Cookie tells us and the other characters on the show over and over again that Anika isn't able to get her hands dirty, that she isn't street, that she isn't black enough.

At the end of this week's episode, Fox showed a preview of the remaining four episodes of the season, in which Cookie refers to Anika as "fake-ass Lena Horne." This was interesting to me for a number of reasons, not least because this week I published a very special, very long episode of the podcast about Lena Horne. As the podcast details, Lena Horne -- whose skin tone was similar to Grace Gealey's) was signed by MGM in 1942 to represent the hopes and dreams of entire black community. They hired her and agreed, for the first time, never to cast this black actress as a servant or maid, and they did this so that Hollywood on the whole wouldn't have to make any significant changes in its depictions and attitudes towards race -- they could always point to Lena Horne and say, "See?"

But as my episode explains, this "special treatment" made Lena Horne a pariah within the black Hollywood community, because everybody else was still playing maids, and still being forced to feed into white people's stereotypes about how black people should look and act, in order to get a paycheck. Lena Horne was used to this reaction from fellow black people; as far back as kindergarten, she was taunted on the playground for being "too white," and when her caucasian-style beauty helped her get a promotion at the Cotton Club, the other girls working at the club saw it as a signifier of the racism operating within an establishment that only hired black performers. In Hollywood, Lena wasn't "black enough" to fit in with the black community, but she wasn't white. She was, as she put it, "suspended in midair" between the two communities, and this was a terrible place to be. She became a symbol not of black advancement in Hollywood, as she was groomed to be, but of the double standards that allow people of color who can "pass" between worlds. Because her "special treatment" was still horribly racist and demeaning, Lena Horne eventually told Hollywood they could take their special treatment and shove it, and she became a passionate civil rights activist.

Anika is the least sympathetic character on Empire, and Cookie is pretty much everyone's favorite, and given that, it's pretty remarkable how far the show is willing to go in showing Cookie's frustrations at being surpassed by this lighter-skinned beauty, and how much she expresses that frustration in racial terms (she also has a problem with her son Andre's white wife, who is also pretty much evil, but that's a topic for another day).

There is a lot more I could say about this, but it's also all in the episode. Bottom line: when Cookie compares Anika to Lena Horne, it's a lot more than a wisecrack.