Plus, her recommended viewing before you listen to this season.
“But I don’t really want to talk about contemporary Hollywood.
What made you want to go a bit more modern?
Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock; Everett Collection (2)
So, it was always in the back of my mind that that was on the table.
It’s part of Hollywood’s first century.
Even though not everybody wanted it to be.
Was there one major inciting incident for this season?
Or was it an accumulation of things you were noticing?
I don’t think there was an inciting incident.
Is that part of the story for you?
I’m definitely going to talk about cable.
I’m going to talk about VHS.
Your research is always very in-depth.
But I would think maybe sometimes it’s more straightforward, especially if it’s particularly biographical.
This season feels a lot more analytical.
Can you tell me about the research process, and if it changed a lot from previous seasons?
Since the pandemic started, it’s been a huge challenge to do research.
Because I can’t go anywhere.
This whole season is almost entirely based on vintage magazines that I bought.
That is where the analytical stuff comes in because it becomes media criticism.
Is it just that your access to that has gotten greater or what has driven that shift?
Will we see a lot of that this season?
There wasn’t anywhere to go for this information.
There was no book.
There wasn’t any way to answer these questions other than talking to people who knew Polly.
That’s not what this season is at all.
I haven’t done any interviews for this season yet.
Never say never.As the season unfolds, I might decide that it’s important.
I was more interested in doing this media criticism.
Would you say that’s something you included a lot of here?
It depends on the episode.
There’s a lot of that in episode 2 about Bo Derek because she did every talk show.
When that stuff is available, it’s fun to use and I’ll use it.
But it’s not right for every episode or every story.
What would you say is the most surprising thing you learned while researching and writing this season?
And how that creates a dialogue with this moment in popular culture.
For me, the most challenging thing is having to start from scratch from one episode to the next.
I have to go and find the story every time.
That’s really hard.
I don’t know.
There’s certainly been an element of introspection.
I don’t know if it comes from the media criticism.
I think it more comes from the fact that I was alive when these movies came out.
But I don’t think it’s really that the magazines cause me to be introspective.
If anything the movies do more.
You mentioned many feminists being against this throw in of content in the era.
it’s involved in a lot of the episodes.
There are a lot of things at once and some of it feels progressive to our eyes in 2022.
And some of it really doesn’t.
That’s something that doesn’t even happen enough in movies today.
It still feels fresh and radical.
But at the time when it came out, it blew people’s minds.
But you could separate out things about them that are not dated at all and feel very modern.
If people want a primer for the season, what three to five films should they watch?
American Gigolo.9 1/2 Weeks.10because people don’t watch that movie or talk about it.
And it’s really interesting.
People have seenFatal Attraction, so maybe not that one.
