What I Am Listening To: "You Must Remember This: Fake News - Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon" by Karina Longworth

This may seem like an odd article for me to write. I have never delved deeply into world of podcasts, nor am I a frequent filmgoer. However, in this case, I found a podcast to be the right medium to educate myself on a topic I had some interest in: early Hollywood scandals.

I know a smattering of early Hollywood history about the silent film era and the period before WW2 from Gore Vidal novels and from books on the second Red Scare like Victor Navasky’s Naming Names; and from one of my favorite campaign books, The Campaign of the Century by Greg Mitchell, about Upton Sinclair’s campaign for Governor of California in 1934. As might be obvious from these disparate sources, this knowledge was at best unsystematic. I think that what most attracted me to the subject was the same interest in celebrity and in tawdriness that draws anyone to Hollywood gossip, but with the intellectualized patina of having taken place in a different historical era, with plenty of time to analyze the outcomes.  I will be honest that I first looked for a good book, but didn’t find any to be to my liking. I had come across the podcast previously because it is publicized on Slate, a site I read often. After reading a little about the concept of this season, I decided to dig in a couple of weeks ago, and listened to an episode over dinner (this was right around when I started Killers of the Flower Moon, and was looking for some additional interwar true crime). I found it ironic that I dipped a toe into podcast listenership now, while carless, instead of in the five years after college when I did a lot of driving for work.

Anyway, the podcast itself has run for several years and 145 episodes, and 19 of the most recent episodes are dedicated to the (concluded) series “Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon.” This series criticizes the book Hollywood Babylon by art house film director Kenneth Anger, a book recounting early Hollywood gossip that was published in France in the ‘50s and in the United States in the ‘70s. It tells a “secret history” of Hollywood scandals and shady maneuverings, collected by Anger during the early part of his career in the ‘40s. The subversive narrative was one that the country was in the mood for (as Longworth points out) after the breakdown in trust in traditional institutions following Watergate and the Vietnam War. This book was overdue for a fact-checking, as at the time of publication there were few comprehensive works on Hollywood history, and thus no sources to turn to for debunking. The book included some real revelations and kernels of truth, as well as lurid photographs that were both doctored and real (and taken out of context). In many ways, as Longworth says in her introduction and her re-introduction after a mid-season intermission, the book takes advantage of Hollywood’s own hyperreality, as the true origins and activities of actors and directors were propagandized, spun, or manufactured by the spin machine of the studio system in this era.

In any event, the book also contains a great many factual inaccuracies, many of which have ossified into Hollywood scandal canon. There is a disturbing trend of inaccuracies that draw on or reinforce racist, sexist, or homophobic stereotypes. It is my understanding that while these distortions have been rebutted piecemeal in the case of individual celebrities victimized by them, Longworth is the first to do a wholescale pushback on Hollywood Babylon itself; which only reinforced some tales, but introduced many into the larger culture for the first time. Longworth does a good job of noting which untrue stories can be documented as having arisen separately from Anger, through either primary or secondary sources; or which details (accurate, inaccurate, or both) appear to have been combined by Anger into a new story. The podcast is a great example of historiography in action.

Longworth is an established film journalist. This season is her most recent, and she clearly has the NPR Voice down pat (which means I get a chuckle when she occasionally describes someone as a “woke bae” or a “fuckboy” apropos of nothing).  Each episode is straightforwardly formatted: an excerpt of Babylon is read, first by unnamed celebrity guests, and then briefly by “the Anger-bot” as Longworth looks toward “the post-celebrity future, in which all actors will be replaced by digital replicas, and all big-name podcast guests will be generated by artificial intelligence.” This was said with a straight face, but I was relieved when she gave up on the gimmick after a couple of episodes. Longworth then recaps Anger’s main claim of the episode, so we know exactly what will lie ahead. Longworth then recaps the real story, noting at the end how it differs from Anger’s version. On the podcast’s website, each blog post gives a thorough overview of the episode’s topic, the sources used, and any other notes on the episode. The website overall is frustrating to navigate, but this is unsurprising for a Squarespace site. I am probably out of the loop on this aspect anyway, as presumably most listeners get their podcast through whatever app or program they prefer to use.  

I liked this podcast a lot and might consider listening to future seasons or catching up on previous ones. I think that Longworth provides a valuable service by covering this book. Hollywood is, obviously, a major part of American and world culture. Many people don’t just consume the finished products of Hollywood, but are interested in the process of their creation, a process that has been both leered at and heavily romanticized. The stories told in Anger’s book have entered the cultural memory, and shaped the way that people view both films and historical events. Longworth not only restores dignity and respectability to many figures degraded by Anger’s text, but she purifies their creations from the distortions as well. Perhaps I’ll remember that if I ever find myself watching one.