When They Were Making It

When They Were Making It

Patrick RankinPatrick Rankin
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Sunset Boulevard (1950): Hollywood's Autopsy — Gloria Swanson, Billy Wilder, and the Film That Shook an Industry

In 1949, Billy Wilder sat inside a theatre in Evanston, Illinois, and watched his new film, Sunset Boulevard, fall apart in front of its first audience.Wilder had made a picture about the stars Hollywood had abandoned, the illusions it had created, and the cruelty beneath its gla ...  Show more

 . 1h 40min

All Episodes

Sunset Boulevard (1950): Hollywood's Autopsy — Gloria Swanson, Billy Wilder, and the Film That Shook an Industry

In 1949, Billy Wilder sat inside a theatre in Evanston, Illinois, and watched his new film, Sunset Boulevard, fall apart in front of its first audience.Wilder had made a picture about the stars Hollywood had abandoned, the illusions it had created, and the cruelty beneath its gla ...  Show more

 . 1h 40min
Mae West: The Most Dangerous Woman in Hollywood — Sex, Censorship, and the Star Who Redefined the Movies

Mae West shook up Depression-era Hollywood with a persona unlike anything American audiences had seen before — sexually confident, unapologetically funny, and always in control. She became one of the biggest stars in the country, only to face increasingly strict censorship from t ...  Show more

 . 1h 41min
Marlon Brando, Part 3: The Final Act — The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now, and the Death of a Legend

By 1970, Hollywood had decided Marlon Brando was finished.He had gone more than a decade without a major hit. His films lost money. His reputation had become almost impossible to insure. He was deep in debt, increasingly isolated, and more interested in escaping to his island in ...  Show more

 . 1h 39min
Marlon Brando, Part 2: The Wilderness Years — Guys and Dolls, Mutiny on the Bounty, and the Road to The Godfather

By the end of the 1950s, Marlon Brando had everything he had spent his career fighting for. An Oscar. Money. Power. His own production company. And the freedom to make films on his own terms.Then he began discovering what complete freedom could cost.Part 2 of our three-part serie ...  Show more

 . 1h 30min
Marlon Brando, Part 1: The Early Years — A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and the Oscar That Changed Everything

On December 3, 1947, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York, a twenty-three-year-old actor in a torn T-shirt walked onto a Broadway stage — and American acting was never the same again.Before he became Marlon Brando, he was Bud: a restless, wounded kid from Omaha, raised in a ...  Show more

 . 1h 15min