When They Were Making It

Mae West shook up Depression-era Hollywood with a persona unlike anything American audiences had seen before — sexually confident, unapologetically funny, and always in control. She became one of the biggest stars in the country, only to face increasingly strict censorship from the same industry that had embraced her.

This episode of WTWMI follows the rise, fall, and reinvention of Mae West — from her working-class childhood in Brooklyn and years in vaudeville to the Broadway scandals, Hollywood triumphs, censorship battles, and late-career returns that made her an American institution.

It traces the creation of her famous pers...

By 1970, Hollywood had decided Marlon Brando was finished.

He had gone more than a decade without a major hit. His films lost money. His reputation had become almost impossible to insure. He was deep in debt, increasingly isolated, and more interested in escaping to his island in Tahiti than proving anything to the industry that had once crowned him its greatest actor.

Then came The Godfather.

Part 3 of our three-part series on Marlon Brando follows one of the most extraordinary reversals in Hollywood history — from the actor Paramount refused to cast as Don Co...

By the end of the 1950s, Marlon Brando had everything he had spent his career fighting for. An Oscar. Money. Power. His own production company. And the freedom to make films on his own terms.

Then he began discovering what complete freedom could cost.

Part 2 of our three-part series on Marlon Brando follows what came after Hollywood crowned the actor who changed movie acting — from Guys and Dolls and Sayonara to One-Eyed Jacks, the Western he took over from Stanley Kubrick and directed himself, and Mutiny on the Bounty, the troubled epic that helped transform hi...

On December 3, 1947, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York, a twenty-three-year-old actor in a torn T-shirt walked onto a Broadway stage — and American acting was never the same again.

Before he became Marlon Brando, he was Bud: a restless, wounded kid from Omaha, raised in a house of drinking, silence, violence, and disappearing love. A boy who searched bars for his mother, fought his father, failed school, got expelled, and somehow found, on a stage, the one place where all that sensitivity finally had somewhere to go.

Part 1 of our three-part series on Marlon Br...

On Good Friday, 1958, a man lay dead on a pink bedroom floor in Beverly Hills — a severed aorta, almost no blood, a knife with no fingerprints in the bathroom sink, and the most famous actress in America asking the police chief if she could take the blame. By the time he arrived, the story of what happened that night had already been written.

Before she became Hollywood's "Sweater Girl" — before she was the platinum blonde MGM built in a dead woman's image — Lana Turner was Julia Jean Turner, a bootlegger's daughter from a mining town in Idaho, raised...

By 1958, Truman Capote had written something he knew would cause trouble. A heroine who danced along the edge of prostitution. An ending that refused resolution. A character built from abandonment, reinvention, and survival — and designed, deliberately, to resist being saved. Harper's Bazaar bought the novella and then refused to publish it. Esquire ran it without changes. And when Hollywood came calling, Capote allowed himself to believe the right people might understand what he'd made.

They didn't.

This episode traces how Breakfast at Tiffany's got made — and what it cost to get there.

It f...

In August 1926, a man in black lay inside a New York funeral home while a hundred thousand people rioted in the streets to get closer. Windows shattered. Police charged the crowd on horseback. There were reports of suicides. 

None of them had ever met him. They had only ever known the image — and the image, it turned out, was immortal in a way the man never got to be.

Before he became the most famous face in the world — before he made America question what it meant to be a man — Rudolph Valentino was Rodolfo Gugliel...

This is Part 3 of our three-part series on Marilyn Monroe — marking her centennial on June 1, 2026, what would have been her 100th birthday.

By January 1961, Marilyn Monroe had lost almost everything. Her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller was over. Her latest film The Misfits had flopped. Clark Gable was dead. And somewhere in New York, behind drawn curtains, the most famous woman in the world was alone.

What came next was the last chapter. And the one that still has the world asking questions.

Part 3 traces th...

This season on When They Were Making It — Marilyn is just the beginning.

The stars. The classics. The faces history almost forgot. 

Elizabeth Taylor. Casablanca. Rudolph Valentino. The Wizard of Oz. Marlon Brando. Anna May Wong. Breakfast at Tiffany's. Alfred Hitchcock. Audrey Hepburn. Gone with the Wind. Dorothy Dandridge. Charlie Chaplin. Singin' in the Rain. Grace Kelly. Bette Davis. Citizen Kane. Lana Turner. Clara Bow. Mary Pickford. James Dean. Greta Garbo. Judy Garland.

And so many more.

The lives underneath the legends. Each one a story all its own.

—

...

This is Part 2 of our three-part series on Marilyn Monroe — marking her centennial on June 1, 2026, what would have been her 100th birthday.

By 1956, Marilyn Monroe had everything she'd fought for. Her own production company. The most unprecedented studio contract any actress had ever signed. The most respected playwright in America at her side. And the chance, for the first time, to be happy.

It would take less than two years for it all to begin falling apart.

Part 2 of our three-part series on Marilyn Monroe traces what came after she'd arrived — the...

This is Part 1 of our three-part series on Marilyn Monroe — marking her centennial on June 1, 2026, what would have been her 100th birthday.

On September 15, 1954, on the corner of New York's Lexington and 52nd, a wind machine lifted a white pleated dress — and Marilyn Monroe, already the most famous woman in America, became something more. An icon.

Before she became Marilyn Monroe, she was Norma Jeane Mortenson — born in the charity ward of Los Angeles County Hospital to a mother who would be committed before her daughter turned eight. A childhood divided between foster homes and an orp...

Marilyn Monroe. Breakfast at Tiffany's. Rudolph Valentino. Casablanca. Anna May Wong. Gone with the Wind. Sidney Poitier. The Wizard of Oz. Audrey Hepburn. Singin' in the Rain. Alfred Hitchcock.

The stars you think you know. The films that became legends. The people the world almost forgot.

When They Were Making It — a narrative documentary podcast about classic Hollywood's greatest icons, from the silent era to the early 1960s.

Not the myths. Not the takedowns. The whole human story of the glamour, the ambition, the machinery, and the damage behind the icons.

...