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Film My Required Reading

Film Historian Karina Longworth Shares Her Tinseltown Book Canon

Longworth, who spends her days unearthing scandalous stories from Hollywood's golden age for her podcast, You Must Remember This, has a soft spot for Nathanael West and is waiting for a (better) Kay Francis biography.

Karly Quadros

September 17, 2026

Karina Longworth host of the podcast You Must Remember This — Photography by Lee Jameson and courtesy of Karina Longworth.

Since 2014, Karina Longworth has excavated Hollywood’s past on her richly narrated podcast, You Must Remember This. (Yes, like the song from Casablanca.) The native Angeleno can’t remember a time when she wasn’t enamored with the icons of its black-and-white era, a fascination that led her to film school at NYU, then to LA Weekly as a film editor in the early 2010s, and finally, once she was fed up with the churn of journalism, to her podcast. After more than a decade writing, producing, and narrating the project, Longworth is an expert not just on the scandals, feuds, and legends of Hollywood’s Golden Age, but also the overlooked tales that can teach us a thing or two about the current tribulations of the entertainment industry and American culture at large.

Longworth has also emerged as something of an expert in sex on screen. Look no further than her latest season, “The Bisexuals,” which began airing Tuesday, exploring the fluid life of crooner Libby Holman—a queer woman branded a black widow after her lovers, including the heir to the Camel cigarettes fortune and leading man Montgomery Clift, wound up dead. Using Holman’s life story, Longworth paints a picture of the sexually daring 1920s, which calcified into a more repressed 1940s, a pendulum swing that likely feels familiar to queer people today.

CULTURED caught up with Longworth to learn more about the trove of reference materials that provided her an education in a bygone era, including a vintage magazine collection, some Bret Easton Ellis, and numerous trashy Hollywood paperbacks.

Were there books that shaped your interest in old Hollywood? Obviously Hollywood Babylon, printed in 1959, is up there—you have a whole season of the podcast debunking its stories.

I’ve always been interested in the history of Hollywood. It was just a normal thing when I was growing up. I grew up in Los Angeles in the ’80s and ’90s, and a lot of the old stars were still with us. We used to visit Bob Hope’s house once a year because he would have an open house at his mansion in Toluca Lake.

My parents had Lauren Bacall’s autobiography on their shelf, and that was certainly one of the first books I read about old Hollywood. They had a photo book of Humphrey Bogart. My mom had a cheapy, trashy paperback biography of James Dean. That kind of thing was just always part of my life. For grad school, I [did] cinema studies at NYU, and that’s when I really started getting very deep into reading about cinema.

There are often two pathways for some of these books about old Hollywood: film criticism and pulp.

When I talk about a trashy paperbacks, what I mean is something that has no footnotes, no sense of sourcing, is written like a pulp fiction novel and is completely unverifiable. There might be true stuff in it, and there might be stuff that’s totally embellished or completely made up. You, as a reader, have to have your critical mind on in order to sort it out. They were sold for somebody who wanted to consume something like that for the soap opera aspect of it.

So much of Hollywood is built on this idea: “print the legend.” When you’re doing research for your own podcast, how difficult is it to parse through that?

I definitely dealt with that a lot with the Hollywood Babylon season. I do enjoy flipping through that book and seeing the lurid photographs, and [author] Kenneth Anger certainly had a way with a turn-of-phrase. But he also put forward some stuff about movie stars that was untrue that became tied to their legacy. It was interesting to me to, in that specific case, trying to sort out using many other sources, what was likely true and what wasn’t. I feel like I do that to some extent in every podcast season.

Do you ever go back to the early Hollywood magazines?

I’ve definitely sifted through microfiche, although now a lot of it is digitized. I bought a lot of vintage magazines when I was doing the “Erotic ’80s” and “Erotic ’90s” because the ’90s and ’80s were a glory time for Hollywood press. Somebody like Kathleen Turner would do a really extensive interview in Playboy about her movies. Entertainment Weekly‘s coverage was very substantive.

I have an almost complete collection of Confidential from when it had its original publisher. There’s two that I’m still trying to get. One is the cover with Orson Welles and Eartha Kitt; anytime it comes available on eBay, because it’s so rare, it’s hundreds of dollars, so I haven’t felt comfortable pulling the trigger on that yet. I do have a lot of vintage Playboys, but mostly from the ’80s.

There were times where People magazine had great interviews and great coverage. I’ve repurchased a lot of my favorite issues of Spin magazine. I think I internalized the voice of 1990s Spin magazine, so when people ask me what my writing influences are, it’s basically just that. I would read those issues over and over again, and almost memorize them.

Libby Holman photographed by Lusha Nelson. Image courtesy of *You Must Remember This*.

Were you a zine fan? Did you ever make your own?

I did make my own zine, and I made three issues. I was on America Online when I was, like, 15. I would sell it to strangers on the Internet, but I would never show my friends. It would be too embarrassing.

Do you still have them?

No, no. My dad was whatever the opposite of a hoarder is. After I moved out to go to college, he threw away all my stuff. That’s why I’ve had to rebuy all these magazines. I’ve rebought compact discs of some of my favorite albums.

Some of that stuff is important to have. Your Polly Platt season is based on her unpublished memoirs. How did you end up connecting with her daughters about that?

I connected to her daughters, Antonia and Sashy, through Stacey Sher, who’s a film producer and who was a fan of my podcast, and we were working on trying to develop films or TV shows based on some of the podcast seasons. Shortly after she and I started working together, Sashy and Antonia told her that they really wanted to try to get their mom’s memoir out into the world. I met them, and they trusted me. I tried to do it as a book, but I couldn’t sell it. They took a leap of faith and allowed me to do it as a podcast season. They still own the rights to the memoir, and I hope that they get it published someday.

Is film writing and history the bulk of your media diet? When you’re going to the beach, what are you bringing with you?

You know how your phone will send you memories of past things? [Mine] sent me a memory of a vacation from, I don’t know, a long time ago now, maybe 10 years ago, but it’s just all me sitting on the beach reading a book about Hedy Lamarr. Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, blah, blah, blah—before I ever had a podcast about old movies, my favorite thing to do was sit in the sun and read a book about old Hollywood.

I don’t turn it off. Most of the reading I do has to do with the podcast, or it’s potential research for something I might do in the future. I do try to keep a novel going most of the time that I’m reading 10 minutes at a time before bed. But I don’t read nearly as much for pleasure as I do for work.

What’s the novel you have going right now?

I just started a book called The Plunge [by Lila Raicek], which was recommended to me. I just finished reading The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis.

Really? What did you think?

I loved it. I’ve been a fan of Bret Easton Ellis for a long time. His work was pretty important to me as a teenager growing up in LA, and then I’ve ebbed and flowed in my fandom over time. But, when the TV show was coming out, I thought, I don’t know if I’m gonna watch it or not, but I definitely don’t wanna watch it before I’ve read the book.

I had a really emotional experience with the book. Part of it was him capturing a way of thinking about Los Angeles that I felt very connected to, from growing up here in the ’80s and ’90s. Even just the way he talks about driving around, it made me think about how if somebody was gonna pick you up, you’d have to get on the phone with them with a Thomas Guide in front of you and say, “Okay, so you’re gonna take the 5 to the 101, and you’re gonna get off at this exit, and then you’re gonna drive down Laurel Canyon…” That is the type of thing that we used to do that just doesn’t exist anymore, but it was such a big part of my life: telling people how to take the freeway to my house. So, there was a nostalgia for that.

But also, it’s the first book he’s written that I’m aware of where he really talks about being gay, and the experience of being a queer teen in the ’80s in Los Angeles, having an active sex life, but it’s totally secret. He’s using the whole idea of a serial killer and the fear and paranoia inspired by that relating to the fear and paranoia of his sex life being found out. I found that to be really moving.

I had a stronger emotional experience reading that book than most of his books, even when I’ve enjoyed them. Just this feeling of teenage alienation that he conveys, it made me think, Why have I always felt so alienated? I’m not gay. I’m white. I don’t have experiences of being oppressed. But, I still have felt like I don’t fit in, my whole life. What really affected me the most in that book was reading about the character’s loneliness, and how he cannot be himself around anyone. I found that very relatable.

Who are the LA authors that have really shaped your thinking about the region?

I’m a big fan of The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s book, and also his book, Miss Lonelyhearts. That was something that I read when I was pretty young that I enjoyed quite a bit, and there’s a film based on that book, a loose adaptation, but I talk about it in the podcast season because Montgomery Clift starred in it. I think that he is probably the greatest screen actor of all time when it comes to conveying interiority without doing too much externally. When I watch his films, and Lonelyhearts is a really good example of that, I do get that sense of what it feels like to be lonely and alienated.

Are there any books in particular that you turn to for inspiration?

I used to pick up A Moveable Feast [by Ernest Hemingway] every now and then and just read a few pages when I didn’t feel like writing but I had to write.

What was it about that book?

It was a combination of the quality of the writing but also the sense of the writer’s life. Maybe a year or two ago, I read the novel that remained unfinished when Hemingway died, The Garden of Eden. That was another fairly recent novel experience that really blew me away.

Is there anyone that you think deserves a biography but hasn’t gotten one yet?

Oh, yeah, for sure. There’s a lot of stars where I’m not satisfied with the amount of information, or the depth of coverage they’ve had. One of my favorite actresses of all time is Kay Francis. There’s an okay biography about her, but I think it gives short shrift to her movies. What’s interesting to me about Kay Francis, besides her screen presence and her acting, is that she was replaced by Bette Davis at Warner Bros. Kay Francis was the right star for the early ’30s: She was somebody who could do light comedy or tragedy, and she was beautiful without being intimidatingly beautiful. She was tall and thin and could wear incredible clothes. By the time Bette Davis comes around and becomes a star in the mid-’30s, what Kay Francis had to offer was not enough anymore. I’m very interested in how eras begin and end, and I think that she is a really interesting icon of a very specific micro era.

Do you have any pet peeves when it comes to writing about film?

There’s a tendency in writing about film to conflate box office performance with quality, especially when it comes to films of the past. You’ll find people in a biography of an actor or a director writing off a film that didn’t do well commercially as a flop. It often feels like the person who wrote the book didn’t even revisit that film and give you their actual opinion of it. They’re just taking the received wisdom, and that bothers me a lot.

It certainly wouldn’t be reflective of our time period if we just looked at box office.

Things have changed so much, but even when I was growing up, the films that were nominated for Best Picture were often also blockbuster hits. Now there is a real disconnect between what we value as being quality and what people actually go to see.