There’s a lovely simplicity to When They Were Making It, film historian Patrick Rankin’s new podcast about classic Hollywood’s biggest stars. There’s music, but just the right amount. There are no clips or gimmicks; the sole voice is Rankin’s, telling you about the life of each iconic actor. From time to time, you can even hear him turning over the pages of his script. It all adds up to an sonic experience that feels intimate and heartfelt.
This stylistically unadorned approach underlines the show’s whole thesis: that the stories of the stars who made the movies were often as exciting, sometimes even more so, than the movies themselves. While still in its nascency, episodes so far have been well over the hour mark, sometimes bordering on two. Fittingly feature-length.
To mark her centenary year, the first three instalments of When They Were Making It focus on Marilyn Monroe. All too often in her career, Monroe would be pigeonholed as the busty blonde with no hint of an inner life, and no purpose but to titillate the men around her. In reality, she fought her way up from a childhood bouncing between foster homes to become one of the most famous movie stars of all time, eventually managing to carve out a lane for herself making more substantial films. The story of how she kept reinventing herself, fighting back against both her own inner demons and the studio determined to keep her in her lane, is completely absorbing.
Other episodes so far have covered Rudolph Valentino, Lana Turner, Marlon Brando, and the making of the 1961 classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Although all have been engaging, the Tiffany’s instalment proves Rankin is able to conduct deep dives into an individual movie as well as he can with whole careers, which bodes well for the podcast’s future.
When They Were Making It clearly owes something of a debt to Karina Longworth’s granddaddy of movie narrative history podcasts, You Must Remember This, substantially and stylistically (even their logos are alike). While they cover similar ground, Rankin tends to be a little more focused on the emotional lives of the stars, and Longworth on the movies themselves and their historical context. Rankin’s narration, like Longworth’s, is silkily languorous in a way that helps transport us back in time to the classic era. His delivery is a whole lot slower, however - in this writer’s opinion, listening at x1.3 speed is optimum here, though your mileage may well vary.
At this early stage, there’s just one glaring flaw with When They Were Making It: Rankin’s chronic overuse of "the rule of three."
It's an old writing maxim that lists have more impact when three items are used; that calling something "big, tall and strong" sounds better than "big, tall, strong, and mighty." Perhaps that's true in moderation. Yet there are seven examples of this device in the opening vignette of the Valentino episode alone, a vignette that lasts less than four minutes. Used at that level it becomes a real distraction, and it’s only emphasized by Rankin’s aforementioned languorous delivery. Each new instance of the rhetorical crutch pulls you out of the story.
That's a real shame, because otherwise the narratives are very well judged. There's a nice mix of the stars' onscreen and offscreen lives, and the tales are told at a pace where we get plenty of fascinating details without being bogged down in anything unnecessary. By the end of each episode, it does feel as if you’ve been on a significant journey with the star in question. There’s so much good here, it’s frustrating that something that could be solved with one more pass at the script could run the risk of ruining it.
But it’s still early days, and there’s an easy fix. If that detail gets ironed out in future episodes, then When They Were Making It could just become an essential listen for film buffs as You Must Remember This.
