Billy Haines was a silent movie star who made the transition to sound, but when the studio head made the openly gay actor an ultimatum — a sham marriage to a woman, or the end of his movie career. Haines chose […]
Boo Morcom was heavily favored to win the gold in pole vault at the 1948 Olympics. But he was playing hurt, in the rain, and missed his shot at the gold. So he tracked down the competitors who beat him, […]
Mark Olmstead found out he had HIV at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was a death sentence. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he pulled off a string of scams including credit card fraud, insurance fraud, […]
For forty years, police in Saskatchewan, Canada were in the habit of arresting Indigenous men for minor offenses – or sometimes no reason at all. Rather than bring him to jail, the captive was instead paraded outside – taken on […]
In 1966, an El Paso theater actor bet his screenwriter friend he could produce a horror movie all on his own. The result was Manos: The Hands of Fate. This incoherent, no-budget movie is considered one of the worst films […]
History remembers Genghis Khan as a violent brute, destroying everything in his path. But the truth is more complicated than that. Ostracised from his community as a child, captured and enslaved, he escaped, became a leader, a warrior, united the […]
1984’s Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension was a fun, pulpy mess of a sci-fi adventure, which promised us a sequel… which we never got. Nearly 40 years later, screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch wrangled the rights to the character away […]
We take a break from the usual format this week to present the Snubby Awards, given to the best films and performance that were not nominated for an Oscar. Douglas Laman, film critic from The Spool, joins me to present and discuss […]
In the 1890s, a British shipping clerk named Edmund Morel noticed the Belgians were shipping vast quantities of rubber from the Congo, then a Belgian colony, but the only thing they were sending in return were guns, explosives, and chains. […]
Legendary Old West lawman Wyatt Earp fought at the O.K. Corral, and then rode off into the sunset… but the story doesn’t end there. Scott Bunn, who co-hosts the podcast Run That Back, and authors the Bob Dylan blog ReclinerNotes.com, […]
