Karina Longworth brings You Must Remember This to Screenland Armour Nov. 11

Photo by Lee Jameson

For folks who live at the Venn diagram overlap of film nerd and podcast listener, Karina Longworth is likely a household name. Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This has been going strong since 2014, covering stories of classic Hollywood ranging from the Manson murders to erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s to the lives and careers of Sammy Davis Jr., Joan Crawford, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

The latest season of You Must Remember This, titled “The Bisexuals,” covers the intersecting lives of singer Libby Holman and actor Montgomery Clift, as well as other bisexual stars of the time, including Tallulah Bankhead. Longworth is taking the season on tour this fall, with screenings of podcast-related episodes at indie theaters across the country.

On Nov. 11, she’ll make a stop at Screenland Armour for a showing of the classic John Huston-directed 1948 noir Key Largo.

Ahead of Longworth’s visit to Kansas City, she talked to The Pitch about this season of the show and the screening series. Anyone who buys a ticket for the event at Screenland will get a discount code for this season’s merch, including a perfume inspired by Holman’s signature scent, Jungle Gardenia.

The Pitch: What sparked your interest in Libby Holman?

Karina Longworth: I first read about her in 2020, and once I discovered the depths of her Wikipedia profile, I wanted to learn more. So I read what seemed like the most substantive biography of her, and after that I felt like I was collecting as many questions as fascinating anecdotes.

I wanted to examine her story through the lens of sexuality and race, and when her biographers talked about those subjects, they barely scratched the surface or spoke about them in ways that were really outdated. So, there was room for me to bring a fresh perspective but it took a while to figure out how. At first, I thought about writing it as a revisionist biography, but when I tried to pitch it to various agents and publishers, I got the same response I often get: “No one has ever heard of this person.” To me I feel like that’s the reason to write a book, but the industry feels differently.

I thought, “I can’t do it as a podcast because she never starred in a movie, then I realized I could do it kind of as a dual biography of her and Montgomery Clift, and feature these movies that had other people they knew, and particularly movies that seemed to be based on Libby’s own story.

One of the movies you mention as being based on Libby’s story is Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind, which is a great movie. How does that connect to her?

I didn’t realize it was connected to Libby’s story at first. The movie Written on the Wind is based on a novel also called Written on the Wind that, at the time it was published, was very transparently about (tobacco heir) Zachary Smith Reynolds’ family. Zachary Smith Reynolds was Libby’s first husband who died of a gunshot wound under mysterious circumstances, and Libby was indicted for his murder.

Written on the Wind was meant to be about that, but because the author was worried about the living Reynolds family’s litigious nature, names and several other details were changed, like moving it from a tobacco plantation to Texas Oil Country. But some of the other details were very close to what happened in real life. Douglas Sirk is one of my favorite filmmakers, and I’d seen Written on the Wind many times, but seeing it again made me think about it differently.

Key Largo, which you’re showing in Kansas City, connects to Holman through the song “Moanin’ Low.” What themes in the movie are you looking forward to talking about? What’s the significance of how the song is used in the film?

I wanted to show Key Largo because of Claire Trevor’s “Moanin’ Low,” Libby’s signature song. But it’s also a testament as to how this song Libby Holman introduced into the American songbook had a life beyond her and kind of became a signifier of a woman in disgrace, or a woman who’d been brought low by her sexuality. I found that to be really fascinating.

Key Largo is a really interesting movie. It’s film noir, and it’s often considered one of the great American film noirs, but it also reflects the end of the gangster genre, what gangster films represented in the 30s, and how the world was in the mid-to-late 1940s after WWII. It’s a film that asks a lot of questions about “What did we as Americans go through over the last two to four decades?”

On the podcast, I talk about the film at this point in the season, where the story is making a transition from Libby’s adventures and infamy in the 1930s to the 1940s, where she’s figuring out her place in the world and what kind of creative work she wants to do, and then very soon after that Montgomery Clift enters her life.

 

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You’ve done programming and film discussions before related to seasons of You Must Remember This, but have you done a multi-city tour before? What made you decide this was the season to do it with?

Not exactly. I did a smaller-scale tour like this when my book about Howard Hughes (Seduction) came out. I did events for “The Old Man is Still Alive” season; I did a long series of events with American Cinematheque in Los Angeles and the British Film Institute.

It wasn’t a thing I thought I ever would do because up until about a year ago I thought doing public speaking was something I wasn’t very good at and I was really nervous and insecure about it. But then I took a year off to study film preservation at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, and I was in an environment where I was unfamiliar with a lot of what I was being asked to do, and I wasn’t good at many of those things.

One aspect of the program is learning about exhibition, and you’re required to write and give introductions for the films they screen in their space. As I went through this experience as a novice in many ways, I found I have a talent for introducing a film. I came to appreciate that this is something I’m actually good at and enjoy doing. It can be something I can do to get people excited about the movies, which is all I wanted to do with the podcast anyway.

What movies had you not seen before recording this season of the show that you enjoyed the most? 

I hadn’t seen Victor Fleming’s Reckless, which I probably should’ve seen earlier because I’ve written about Jean Harlow, but it kind of eluded me. It feels like it’s become marginal in both Fleming’s and Harlow’s filmographies, but it’s a really interesting film. Victor Fleming is now best known for Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind, neither of which he directed in full. He made so many other really interesting movies, and wasn’t given the credit he deserves for being a great film stylist.

Reckless is also the film that tries to tell the broadest version of Libby Holman’s story where it’s not just concerned with her first husband’s death, but tries to talk about her life in the aftermath and how she was trying to put things back together. Another one I liked is the Montgomery Clift film Lonely Hearts, which is definitely a deep cut. It was not well received when it was released, but really deserves another look. It’s based on the Nathaniel West novella Miss Lonelyhearts, which I read as a teenager and never knew was a movie until this podcast season.

So speaking of Reckless, that movie is about a love triangle, and you mentioned that in reality that love triangle was a bisexual one. I’m curious how you think attitudes towards bisexuality have changed since then. Like, if that movie were being made today, would we still be getting a heterosexual love triangle?

I doubt it. I think there’d be a lane in which you could talk about being split between a male lover and female lover. But who knows? I think one of the points of the podcast season is that progress isn’t linear. It’s often one step forward, two steps back, especially in our attitudes toward sexuality.

A few years ago when I did two podcast seasons especially when we did a season about sex in Hollywood movies in the 80s and 90s—one of the reasons I wanted to do that was because I felt like in my social life and the lives of people I knew when we were making those seasons, there was more understanding of different types of sexualities than there’d ever been in my lifetime, but less depiction of sex in Hollywood movies than had been in my lifetime. Sometimes movies reflect the culture, and sometimes they really don’t.

On Nov. 11, Longworth performs at Screenland Armour for a showing of the classic John Huston-directed 1948 noir Key Largo.