When They Were Making It

Edward G. Robinson helped invent the modern movie gangster. As Rico Bandello in Little Caesar, he made the short, sharp-eyed criminal not only the centre of a Hollywood picture, but a defining figure in American pop culture. And in doing so, he became a star almost overnight.
This episode follows Robinson from his early years as Emanuel Goldenberg, a Romanian Jewish immigrant and serious Broadway actor, through Little Caesar, the Warner Bros. gangster cycle, and his long fight to prove he could be more than Rico. Along the way came The Whole Town's Talking, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, and Key Largo.
Also along the way came the House Un-American Activities Committee — HUAC — and the threat of the Hollywood blacklist.
Robinson was never a Communist, but his public support for liberal and anti-fascist causes made him a target. He was not formally blacklisted, but "graylisted" — pushed from major pictures into smaller films and television.
What began as a fight to be seen as more than the gangster became a fight to remain in Hollywood at all.
This is the story of Edward G. Robinson — one of Hollywood's greatest screen actors, far more than the role that made him famous — and of his fight not only to build a career beyond the gangster, but eventually to save it when Hollywood decided he was through.
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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 1950, MGM was done with Judy Garland — and so, it seemed, was Hollywood. A Star Is Born was the film that was supposed to change all of that.

After a devastating breakdown, the end of her studio contract, and an industry convinced she was finished, Garland spent the next two years rebuilding herself — on concert stages in London, Dublin, and New York. By 1952, she and her husband-manager, Sid Luft, were betting everything on one extraordinary project.

This episode follows the making of the 1954 musical remake of A Star Is Born — the second of four A Star Is Born films, later remade with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in 1976, and with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in 2018.
The picture was designed to bring Garland back to Hollywood. It traces the unlikely partnership behind it: Luft, an ambitious outsider with little producing experience; George Cukor, one of Hollywood's most respected directors; Warner Bros.; and a cast led by Garland and James Mason as the rising Esther Blodgett and the fading star Norman Maine.

From the search for a leading man — including George Cukor's pursuit of Cary Grant — to the arrival of Mason, Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin's songs, and the creation of 'The Man That Got Away,' A Star Is Born became far more ambitious than a simple remake: a lavish CinemaScope musical, a personal comeback vehicle, and one of the most closely watched productions in Hollywood.
But the production was troubled almost from the beginning. Eight days into filming, Warner Bros. abandoned its new widescreen process and ordered the film restarted. The shoot stretched across nine months, the budget more than doubled, and Garland's ongoing struggles with exhaustion and prescription medication collided with the immense pressure of carrying a major studio picture.

And yet, the work on screen was remarkable.
When A Star Is Born premiered in September 1954, critics hailed Garland's performance as the triumph everyone had hoped for. The film was a major event, drawing rapturous reviews and positioning Garland as the frontrunner for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
But the triumph wouldn't last.
This is the story of Judy Garland's great screen comeback: the film that proved exactly what she could do, the studio decisions that changed its fate, and the decades-long effort to recover the lost version audiences had fallen in love 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 ★

Veronica Lake was one of the most unforgettable faces of 1940s Hollywood: blonde, beautiful, elusive, with a curtain of hair falling across one eye. Paramount turned that image into a sensation. But behind the "Peek-a-Boo Girl" was Constance Ockelman — a young actress whose life was far more complicated than either the glamour or the later downfall headlines allowed.
From Brooklyn, Saranac Lake, Miami, and, finally, Beverly Hills, Lake arrived in Hollywood as a teenager and drifted through a handful of small parts before Paramount saw something different in her. For I Wanted Wings, the studio gave Constance Keane a new name, a new look, and a nightclub role that made audiences take notice. Veronica Lake was born.
This episode follows Lake through her remarkable early rise: Sullivan's Travels with Preston Sturges and Joel McCrea; the creation of the Peek-a-Boo Girl phenomenon; and the dark, charged crime pictures that paired her with Alan Ladd, including This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key, and The Blue Dahlia. It explores how Lake became one of the defining women of the emerging film-noir cycle — cool, funny, watchful, and never quite as easy to read as Paramount's publicity suggested.
It also looks behind the image: a difficult first marriage, the loss of her infant son, her growing reputation as a difficult star, wartime stardom, and the series of professional and personal blows that slowly changed Lake's place at Paramount. By the end of the 1940s, the studio that had built her into a star had chosen not to renew her contract.
What followed was not one simple collapse, however much the newspapers later preferred that version. Lake kept working — in live television, regional theatre, touring productions, and low-budget films — while navigating financial hardship, troubled marriages, alcoholism, and long periods of uncertainty.
Then, in 1962, an Associated Press reporter recognized Veronica Lake working as a cocktail waitress at Manhattan's Martha Washington Hotel. The resulting headlines turned her into a national fallen-star spectacle. Lake herself saw it differently.
This is the story of the actress behind one of Hollywood's most enduring images: the woman Paramount made famous, the performer audiences too often underestimated, and the person who kept finding a way forward long after the cameras had moved on.

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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 ★

This is Part 2 of our two-part series on Charlie Chaplin.

At the height of his silent-film power, Charlie Chaplin was one of the most famous and successful people in the world. He owned his studio, controlled his work, and had transformed the Tramp into a global icon.
But the life behind the screen was becoming impossible to keep private.
Part 2 of our Charlie Chaplin series follows Chaplin through the collapse of his marriage to Lita Grey, the devastating divorce scandal that threatened his fortune, studio and reputation, and the making of The Circus. It follows his refusal to let the Tramp speak in an industry transformed by sound — and the extraordinary successes of City Lights and Modern Times.
Then comes The Great Dictator: Chaplin's first full talking picture, his furious satire of Adolf Hitler, and the film that pushed him into an increasingly public political life. As the war ends and the Cold War begins, Chaplin finds himself under growing scrutiny for his support of the Soviet Union, his refusal to become an American citizen, and the scandals that have long followed him.
The episode traces the Joan Barry case, Monsieur Verdoux, the campaign to drive Chaplin from America, and his departure for Europe in 1952 — a journey that became an exile. It also follows his final films, Hollywood's eventual welcome home, and the long reassessment of an artist whose work helped define cinema itself.
This is the story of Chaplin's long, complicated final act: a filmmaker celebrated as a genius, condemned as an outsider, and forced to reckon with the distance between the beloved Tramp and the powerful man who created him.

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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 ★

This is Part 1 of our two-part series on Charlie Chaplin.
Charlie Chaplin, one of the greatest icons of silent cinema and film comedy, built his legend on making the world laugh. But behind his beloved image was a private life that was increasingly troubling — and, throughout his life, increasingly difficult to contain.
Part 1 of our two-part series follows Chaplin from a childhood in poverty and the workhouse, through the London music halls and Fred Karno's comedy company — where he learned the precision and physical storytelling that would transform silent film — to Hollywood, where he arrived at twenty-four as an unknown English comic and, within little more than a decade, would become the king of silent comedy.
It traces his extraordinary rise in Hollywood: Keystone and the birth of the Tramp; Mabel Normand, Edna Purviance and The Tramp; the phenomenon of 'Chaplinitis'; and the creative freedom that came with unprecedented contracts at Mutual and First National. Along the way came Easy Street, The Immigrant, Shoulder Arms and The Kid — films that made screen comedy more humane, ambitious and emotionally expansive than it had ever been before.
The episode also follows the relationships and losses beginning to complicate that success: his marriage to sixteen-year-old Mildred Harris, the death of their infant son, and his relationship with Lita Grey as he made his largest and most ambitious film yet, The Gold Rush.
This is the story of how a boy from the slums of Victorian London became the most famous comedian in the world — and how, at the very height of his early power, his private life threatened to overwhelm everything he had built.
Part 2 of our Charlie Chaplin series — covering the scandal surrounding his marriage to Lita Grey, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, political controversy, exile from America and his final years — releases next Tuesday, September 8.

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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 ★