When They Were Making It

By 1955, Dorothy Dandridge had done what Hollywood once seemed determined to make impossible — become a genuine leading lady, carry a major studio picture, and earn a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards. But after Carmen Jones, the breakthrough Hollywood celebrated would become a career it had no idea how to sustain.
Part 2 of our two-part series on Dorothy Dandridge begins on Oscar night in 1955, with Dandridge seated alongside Grace Kelly, Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, and Jane Wyman as the first Black woman ever nominated for Best Actress. A new contract with Twentieth Century-Fox seemed to promise that Carmen Jones was only the beginning. Instead, leading roles disappeared, major projects stalled, and Dandridge found herself caught inside an industry willing to celebrate a Black star but still deeply uncomfortable building films around one.
The episode follows Dandridge through the years that followed — from becoming the first Black performer to headline the Waldorf-Astoria's Empire Room and her increasingly complicated relationship with director Otto Preminger, to Island in the Sun, the controversial interracial romance that provoked bans, protests, and Ku Klux Klan pickets while still becoming one of the year's biggest hits. It traces her battle with scandal magazine Confidential, her testimony in one of Hollywood's most sensational trials, and her search for better roles outside the studio system in films including Tamango and The Decks Ran Red.
And then came Porgy and Bess — the enormous Samuel Goldwyn production that reunited Dandridge with Preminger, placed her opposite Sidney Poitier, and finally offered another major starring role four years after her Oscar nomination. But neither the film nor the years that followed could restore the career Hollywood had once seemed ready to give her.
Part 2 also follows Dandridge's marriage to Jack Denison, the financial losses that helped push her into bankruptcy, the devastating decision to place her daughter Lynn in state care, and her attempts to rebuild a career and a life in the years before her death at just forty-two.
And it follows the legacy that grew after she was gone — from her gradual rediscovery to Halle Berry's long fight to bring her story to the screen, and the night in 2002 when Berry became the first Black woman to win the Best Actress Oscar Dandridge had been the first to reach nearly half a century earlier.
This is the story of what happened after the breakthrough — when Dorothy Dandridge discovered that becoming Hollywood's first Black leading lady did not mean Hollywood was prepared to let her remain one.
Part 1 of our two-part series on Dorothy Dandridge is out now.

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When They Were Making It is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Rankin. Original artwork by Simone Beech and original music by Lionel Ziblat.
Join WTWMI: The Backlot — our Patreon — for exclusive extras including mini and full-length bonus episodes, episode companion pieces, and behind-the-scenes materials at https://www.patreon.com/WhenTheyWereMakingIt.

For episode information, show notes, upcoming episodes, and more, visit whentheyweremakingit.com.
Follow WTWMI on Instagram and TikTok: @whentheyweremakingit. On Instagram, we share visual companion pieces for every episode, bringing the images, people, places, and atmosphere behind the story to life.
New episodes of When They Were Making It drop every Tuesday. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Dorothy Dandridge was one of the most electrifying talents Hollywood ever tried to contain — a trailblazing performer who would become the first Black woman nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, and whose story began long before anyone in Hollywood was paying attention.
From a childhood spent on the road — singing and dancing through segregated churches and theaters across the South before she'd even learned to read — to performing at the Cotton Club by sixteen, Dandridge spent her early years chasing a stage of her own. While still a teenager, she'd walked away from the singing trio that had defined her childhood to chase something Hollywood almost never gave Black actresses: real, dramatic roles.
Part 1 of our two-part series on Dorothy Dandridge follows her from a Depression-era childhood split between a controlling guardian and a mother chasing her own Hollywood break, through the Dandridge Sisters' years on the Cotton Club stage, in films like The Big Broadcast of 1936 and A Day at the Races, and on a European tour disrupted by the outbreak of World War II. It follows her star-making specialty number in Sun Valley Serenade alongside the Nicholas Brothers, and back to the one thing she'd wanted all along: training at the integrated Actors' Lab alongside a young Marilyn Monroe, and taking the small, hard-won dramatic parts — including her first starring film role in Four Shall Die and MGM's Bright Road — that would eventually put her in the running for the role of a lifetime: Carmen Jones.
The episode also traces her tumultuous personal life — her marriage to star Harold Nicholas, the birth of her daughter Lynn, and the devastating diagnosis that would shape the rest of Dandridge's life.
This is the story of a woman who spent her childhood performing for other people's whims — and spent her adulthood fighting to perform on her own terms.

Part 2 of our two-part series on Dorothy Dandridge releases next Tuesday, August 18.

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When They Were Making It is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Rankin. Original artwork by Simone Beech and original music by Lionel Ziblat.
Join WTWMI: The Backlot — our Patreon — for exclusive extras including mini and full-length bonus episodes, episode companion pieces, and behind-the-scenes materials at https://www.patreon.com/WhenTheyWereMakingIt.

For episode information, show notes, upcoming episodes, and more, visit whentheyweremakingit.com.
Follow WTWMI on Instagram and TikTok: @whentheyweremakingit. On Instagram, we share visual companion pieces for every episode, bringing the images, people, places, and atmosphere behind the story to life.
New episodes of When They Were Making It drop every Tuesday. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 glamorous surface. But instead of being unsettled by what they saw, the audience was laughing — and the film that would become Hollywood's darkest portrait of itself seemed in danger of collapsing before anyone had truly seen it.
This episode goes behind the scenes of Sunset Boulevard — the film Billy Wilder conceived not as a love letter to Hollywood, but as an autopsy report. It traces the film from its dangerous beginnings: Wilder's collapsing writing partnership with Charles Brackett, a screenplay kept deliberately vague from Paramount, and a story about Hollywood that few established stars were willing to touch.
It follows the search for Norma Desmond — the forgotten silent-film goddess still waiting for her return to the screen. Greta Garbo refused. Mary Pickford was considered. Mae West was above it. Then Gloria Swanson returned to Paramount, the studio she had once ruled, to play a woman who could not accept that Hollywood had moved on without her.
The episode traces the last-minute casting of William Holden, brought in only weeks before filming began, and Erich von Stroheim, the director whose unfinished epic with Swanson had helped damage both of their careers, now reuniting with her more than twenty years later. Around them, Hollywood's past stepped in front of the camera: Cecil B. DeMille as himself, Buster Keaton among the forgotten silent stars at Norma's card table, and the ghost of Rudolph Valentino lingering over her mansion.
And it follows the film to the edge of disaster — preview audiences laughing through the whole thing, an entire sequence abandoned, and a dead man returned to a freezing swimming pool so the picture could begin again. Then came the private screening for Hollywood itself: Barbara Stanwyck kneeling before Gloria Swanson, Louis B. Mayer erupting at Billy Wilder, and a confrontation that became movie-business legend.
Sunset Boulevard received eleven Academy Award nominations, setting up a head-to-head showdown with All About Eve on Oscar night. In time, its images and lines would become inseparable from Hollywood mythology: the staircase, the close-up, and the faded star insisting that she was still big — it was the pictures that had grown small.
This is the story of Sunset Boulevard — and how, before it became one of Hollywood's most enduring portraits of fame, ambition, and delusion, it was a film audiences laughed at, studio executives recoiled from, and Hollywood almost didn't know what to do with.

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When They Were Making It is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Rankin. Original artwork by Simone Beech and original music by Lionel Ziblat.
Join WTWMI: The Backlot — our Patreon — for exclusive extras including mini and full-length bonus episodes, episode companion pieces, and behind-the-scenes materials at https://www.patreon.com/WhenTheyWereMakingIt.

For episode information, show notes, upcoming episodes, and more, visit whentheyweremakingit.com.
Follow WTWMI on Instagram and TikTok: @whentheyweremakingit. On Instagram, we share visual companion pieces for every episode, bringing the images, people, places, and atmosphere behind the story to life.
New episodes of When They Were Making It drop every Tuesday. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 the same industry that had embraced her.
This episode of WTWMI follows the rise, fall, and reinvention of Mae West — from her working-class childhood in Brooklyn and years in vaudeville to the Broadway scandals, Hollywood triumphs, censorship battles, and late-career returns that made her an American institution.
It traces the creation of her famous persona through Sex, The Drag, and Diamond Lil, her arrest and jail sentence, her arrival at Paramount, and the enormous success of She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel. It also follows her battles with Joseph Breen and the Production Code, the radio performance that got her banned from NBC, her years away from Hollywood, and her later appearances in Myra Breckinridge and Sextette.
This is the story of the woman who wrote herself into stardom, turned innuendo into an art form and a business, and redefined what female sexuality could look like on the American stage and screen.

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When They Were Making It is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Rankin. Original artwork by Simone Beech and original music by Lionel Ziblat.
Join WTWMI: The Backlot — our Patreon — for exclusive extras including mini and full-length bonus episodes, episode companion pieces, and behind-the-scenes materials at https://www.patreon.com/WhenTheyWereMakingIt.

For episode information, show notes, upcoming episodes, and more, visit whentheyweremakingit.com.
Follow WTWMI on Instagram and TikTok: @whentheyweremakingit. On Instagram, we share visual companion pieces for every episode, bringing the images, people, places, and atmosphere behind the story to life.
New episodes of When They Were Making It drop every Tuesday. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 Tahiti than proving anything to the industry that had once crowned him its greatest actor.
Then came The Godfather.
Part 3 of our three-part series on Marlon Brando follows one of the most extraordinary reversals in Hollywood history — from the actor Paramount refused to cast as Don Corleone to the performance that returned him, almost overnight, to the height of his power.
It traces the making and enormous success of The Godfather, before following Brando into the deeply personal and emotionally exposed Last Tango in Paris — a film built partly from his childhood, his parents, his grief, and the parts of himself he would later feel he had revealed too completely. It also examines the film's complicated legacy, Maria Schneider's experience, and the decisions made by Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci behind the camera.
As Hollywood attempted to celebrate his return, Brando remained as resistant to the industry as ever. His refusal of the Academy Award for The Godfather, delivered through Sacheen Littlefeather in protest of Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans and the occupation at Wounded Knee, became one of the most controversial moments in Oscar history.
From there, the episode follows Brando through Superman, Apocalypse Now, retirement, his return for A Dry White Season, and the increasingly chaotic final decades of his career.
It also explores the tragedies that overtook the Brando family: the fatal shooting of Dag Drollet by Brando's eldest son, Christian Brando; Christian's manslaughter conviction and imprisonment; and the devastating final years of Brando's daughter Cheyenne. The case exposed the instability, absence, conflict, and complicated love that had shaped Brando's sprawling family for decades — and permanently severed his connection to Tahiti and Tetiaroa, the island he had imagined as his escape from Hollywood.
This is the story of Marlon Brando's return to the top — and of the long, complicated years that followed after he had nothing left to prove, but could never entirely escape the consequences of the life he had built.
Parts 1 and 2 of our Marlon Brando series are out now.

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When They Were Making It is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Rankin. Original artwork by Simone Beech and original music by Lionel Ziblat.
Join WTWMI: The Backlot — our Patreon — for exclusive extras including mini and full-length bonus episodes, episode companion pieces, and behind-the-scenes materials at https://www.patreon.com/WhenTheyWereMakingIt.

For episode information, show notes, upcoming episodes, and more, visit whentheyweremakingit.com.
Follow WTWMI on Instagram and TikTok: @whentheyweremakingit. On Instagram, we share visual companion pieces for every episode, bringing the images, people, places, and atmosphere behind the story to life.
New episodes of When They Were Making It drop every Tuesday. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★