Erotic 80s began with a prologue about the short lived heyday of the X rating, pornography, and feminism. Erotic 90s begins with a prologue about the disastrous rollout of NC-17 –the X rating’s replacement – and the evolving state of both porn and feminism at the dawn of the 90s. Topics include David Lynch, Harvey Weinstein, “pro-porn” feminism, “the new morality,” video stores, Magic Johnson, date rape, and much more.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit:...

American independent film is launched into the mainstream by Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, starring James Spader as an impotent man who gets off on filming women talking about sex. Videotape also plays a role in a Spader film released almost simultaneously, Bad Influence, in which he plays a meek yuppie at the mercy of alpha male Rob Lowe – who was trying to rehabilitate his career after a tape leaked shot by the actor and documenting his real-life threesomes — one with a 16...

The 1988 baseball blockbuster Bull Durham confirms Kevin Costner as the ultimate squeaky-clean, all-American heartthrob, building on a sexual persona sparked the year before with the neonoir No Way Out. Today we’ll talk about why Costner was the quintessential safe hunk for the 80s, his alchemic chemistry with co-star Sean Young in No Way Out, and her subsequent rocky road through Hollywood misogyny. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The erotic thriller goes commercially mainstream with Fatal Attraction, a film which starts a national conversation about whether or not women can “have it all” – “it all” meaning both careers and marriage. Is Fatal Attraction an indictment of working women as “witches” and a call to roll back women’s rights, or a snapshot of extreme toxic masculinity? Plus: Dirty Dancing. Is it evil? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Billed as the hottest Hollywood film since Last Tango, 9 ½ Weeks was considered to have missed the mark by everyone who made it – including director Adrian Lyne, stars Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, producer/writer Zalman King and his wife, writer Patricia Knop. Today we’ll talk about why this intoxicating and troubling film is worth a second look, how to square away the arguably feminist finished product from a production process that robbed Basinger of agency, and we’ll explore the film...

Just as the AIDS-related death of Rock Hudson was finally forcing straight people – and Hollywood – to acknowledge that epidemic, a film was released that transposed the new climate of sexual fear into a murder mystery. The sleeper hit of 1985, Jagged Edge turned Glenn Close from a respected actress into a star, and established the brand of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who would later write Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Almost a decade after radical feminists began to call for a crackdown on...

While the music video was still in its infancy as a cultural phenomenon, two films were released that were accused of aping the “MTV aesthetic”: Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance, and Risky Business, which turned Tom Cruise into a major star. Today we’ll talk about what the “MTV aesthetic” was and why it was considered a big deal for movies to be influenced about it, and we’ll examine how both of these movies treated sex work and race within the context of 80s social mores and Reagan capitalism. Learn...

1982 saw the release of three hit high school-set comedies about sex: Porky’s, The Last American Virgin and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The only one to survive as a classic, Fast Times turned Phoebe Cates – who also appeared in the Blue Lagoon rip-off Paradise the same year – into a frozen-in-time icon of adolescent sexuality. Today we’ll talk about this sudden explosion of teen sex on movie screens, and compare Cates’s public persona and attitude to on-screen sexuality to that of Blue...

The New Hollywood directors of the late 1960s and 70s were the first generation of Hollywood filmmakers to grow up studying Hollywood movies as art. In 1981-1982, a number of those directors made actual or virtual remakes of classic Hollywood noir films, including Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, and Bob Rafelson’s The Postman Always Rings Twice; and Paul Schrader’s Cat People. What was the value of revisiting the tropes and narratives of 1940s noirs in the 80s, beyond the fact that the sexual...

One of the most aesthetically influential movies of the ‘80s, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo sets a template for much of what we’re going to discuss this season: it’s about sex as a conduit for wealth, masks and double lives, and the role of danger in desire. Today we’ll talk about the sexual persona of Gigolo star Richard Gere in the early 1980s; the ways in which Gigolo and other films from 1980 (Dressed to Kill, Cruising) grapple with straight male anxiety over gay male visibility; and...

The sleeper hit of late 1979 was Blake Edwards’s sex farce 10, a comedic vivisection of a male midlife crisis, which turned 23 year-old California girl Bo Derek into a controversial cultural phenomenon. Derek’s early fame was framed in the media through the lens of her marriage to John Derek, who was 30 years her senior and who she met when she was 16. Today we’ll talk about Derek’s reign as a sex-positive bombshell in a time of extreme double standards, 10’s strangely prescient understanding...

In 1968, the Production Code gave way to the ratings system, and the brief legitimacy of the X-rated movie. Today we’ll focus on two massive, X-rated hits released within a year of one another in 1972-1973: Deep Throat, the first hardcore porn movie to become a mainstream blockbuster; and the international art film sensation Last Tango in Paris. Both of these hits were products of a male-centered sexual revolution, and both of their female stars later described making these movies as...

Desperate to be seen as cool and not a relic of an earlier age in 70s America, Sammy gets into porn and drugs. A Rat Pack reunion gives him renewed purpose, but causes Dean to alienate himself further. As their time begins to run out, both Sammy and Dino are forced to contemplate what it was all for. By the late ‘90s, they’re both gone. We’ll try to sort out the incredibly murky legacies they left behind.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the mid-1960s, 47 year-old Dean Martin proves he's still got it by knocking the Beatles off the top of the pop charts, and by launching his long-running TV show, which brought a version of his nightclub act into America’s living rooms every week. But his middle-aged drunk schtick sours as the decade of hippies and Vietnam wears on. Sammy Davis Jr has his own challenges, living up to the expectations of a new generation of activists--and he only makes matters worse by embracing Richard...

Released in 1965, Sammy Davis Jr.'s autobiography became an instant classic, one of the most dynamic celebrity memoirs ever published and a testament to Davis’s barrier-breaking success as a black man in America. But the story behind the book, which was conceived and developed by two white ghostwriters -- and the racial and sexual dynamics of Davis's life during the years leading up to its release, which included two marriages and one relationship with a white movie star which almost got him...

In the early 40s, both Dean and Sammy idolized Frank Sinatra. 20 years later, they became Sinatra’s cohorts in the Rat Pack, and, through Vegas gigs and increasingly disposable movies, the trio set a standard for grown men behaving badly that’s still influential today. In this episode, we’ll reveal what the Rat Pack’s Vegas shows were really like -- racist, homophobic, misogynist warts and all. We’ll also discuss the web of corruption linking these performers to the Mafia and the Kennedys,...

After the breakup of Martin and Lewis, Dino has to figure out how to stand on his own as a solo act. He ends up developing an on-stage persona as a happy drunk, while at the same time, developing a resume as a serious actor in some of the biggest hits of the late 1950s, such as Some Came Running and Rio Bravo, through which he emerged as a kind of icon for the white masculinity crisis of the 1950s. How did Dino pull this off, and why was his interest in being taken seriously so apparently...

Sammy tests the power of his new celebrity, on Broadway and in Hollywood, where he stars in the most controversial movie musical with an all-Black cast of all time -- a movie which is still being suppressed today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the first half of the 1950s, Martin and Lewis mint money as movie stars--and find unique ways to make their access to gangsters payoff--but stardom tears them apart. During this period, Sammy tries to prove himself to a Hollywood that still has little use for Black performers. Then, a horrible accident changes Sammy’s life--and changes his perceived value to the gate-keepers of the entertainment industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dean Martin meets and begins collaborating with Jerry Lewis. Martin and Lewis — an Italian and a Jew — become the most successful nightclub act in the country, and transition to Hollywood. Meanwhile, Sammy Davis Jr, determined to get the attention of the white entertainment world, starts working impressions of white stars into his act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin would become icons for how immigrants and people of color could access the American Dream in the 20th Century. Both grew up in marginalized communities where they learned an ethos of success based on hustle. Today we’ll track both Dean and Sammy to major coming-of-age moments in the middle of World War II. Coming up in industrial Ohio as both a card dealer and a nightclub singer, Dean learns how and why the house always wins. As a child, Sammy joins his...

When Hollywood mogul Walter Wanger (Jon Hamm) shot an agent he suspected was having an affair with his actress wife, Joan Bennett (Zooey Deschanel) — one of the key femme fatales of 1940s film noir — Bennett was the one who paid a public price for her husband’s crimes. Joan and Walter’s granddaughter/filmmaker Vanessa Hope, and film historian/podcaster Karina Longworth (You Must Remember This), tell the untold story of the Bennett/Wanger romance and professional partnership — a film noir...

The Hollywood studio system begins to crumble, and Louella and Hedda decline and fall, too. But just as a new generation of filmmakers rises from the ashes and reinvents the movie business, so too does gossip find new life in a new look. We’ll end our season by talking about a woman who was the antithesis of Louella and Hedda -- liberal, Jewish, sexually forward, and so unwilling to play the industry’s games that she may have ensured the death of the gossip columnist as star.  Learn more...

Appalled by rock n’ roll and its racial and sexual implications, Hedda and Louella find themselves in further danger of obsolescence when the gossip game is turned upside down by CONFIDENTIAL Magazine.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you remember the first time you watched The Wizard of Oz? Those famous red ruby slippers are some of the most iconic objects in Hollywood history that still bring back nostalgic memories every time they’re seen. They became a rare collector’s item worth millions. In the summer of 2005, a pair was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in the small town of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. In No Place Like Home, C13Originals, a Cadence13 Studio, teams up with journalist Ariel Ramchandani and editor...