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You Must Remember This

D.W. Griffith, the Gish Sisters and the origin of "Hollywood Babylon" (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 1)

You Must Remember This

Karina Longworth

Tv & Film

4.715.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2018

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This season will interrogate Kenneth Anger’s controversial and influential gossip collection, Hollywood Babylon. Is this cult classic a needed subversive attack on Hollywood’s false idols, or a dangerous work of “fake news”? In our first episode, we’ll look at how D.W. Griffith’s follow-up to his racist smash The Birth of a Nation gave Anger the structuring image of his gossip bible, helping to set the ironic tone of the book. But what of Anger’s accusations that Griffith was a known pedophile, and that his stars, sisters Dorothy and Lillian Gish, were incestuous? To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:23.0

Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring the secret and or forgotten stories of Hollywood's first century.

1:45.0

On your host, Kareena Longworth. Today we begin a new season which will unfold in two parts over the next six months.

1:56.0

I call it fake news, fact-checking Hollywood Babylon.

2:06.0

Great films of the silent years. This isn't news. This is totally unfounded gossip.

2:13.0

It's a long way from Hollywood. Criticized for dealing too frankly with such themes as sex and nudity.

2:20.0

Hollywood Babylon.

2:28.0

As you may remember from episode number 49 of this podcast, Hollywood Babylon is a book published by Kenneth Enger.

2:36.0

A child actor turned experimental filmmaker, turned pioneer in a form of Hollywood gossip that verges on conspiracy theory.

2:49.0

Enger spent the 1940s and 1950s drifting between various inner circles and marginalized subgroups in and around Hollywood.

2:59.0

And as such, he came to hear a lot of versions of scandalous Hollywood stories that ran counter to or went further than the accepted narratives of these events.

3:11.0

By the late 1950s, Enger was living in Paris and in need of money. He started writing up for Kayet de Cinema magazine, some of the stories that he had heard through what amounted to, a Hollywood party game of telephone.

3:27.0

Enger eventually compiled these articles into a book, which paired usually partially fantasized or at the very least embellished versions of true stories with sometimes-grotesque, often surreal or all-too-real photos, some from crime scenes and others from Hollywood still galleries.

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