Ep 862: Michael Koresky • Josh Karp

In the first segment, a returning Michael Koresky ("Films of Endearment"), the Museum of the Moving Image’s editorial director, with his latest book "Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness" (Bloomsbury, 2025). The book is an original history celebrating the persistence of queerness onscreen, behind the camera, and between the lines during the dark days of the Hollywood Production Code. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Motion Picture Production Code severely restricted what Hollywood cinema could depict. This included 'any inference' of the lives of homosexuals. Gay activist Vito Russo famously condemned Hollywood’s censorship regime, lambasting many midcentury­ films as the bigoted products of his titular “Celluloid Closet.” Koresky reexamines these scorned films to tell the story of how filmmakers, straight and queer, in-the-closet and out-in-the-open, smuggled queer themes and ideas into their work, incrementally paving the way for recognition and representation. There is more to the movies during this period of popular filmmaking than meets the eye: The Golden Age set in motion many of the ways we still talk about queerness in the twenty-first century. In this insightful, wildly entertaining book, cinema historian Michael Koresky ­finds new meaning in 'problematic”' classics of the Code era like Hitchcock’s "Rope," Minnelli’s "Tea and Sympathy", and—bookending the period and anchoring Koresky’s narrative—William Wyler’s two adaptations of "The Children’s Hour," Lillian Hellman’s provocative hit play about a pair of schoolteachers accused of lesbianism. Lifting up the under-appreciated queer filmmakers, writers, and actors of the era, Koresky finds artists who are long overdue for reevaluation. Through his brilliant analysis, "Sick and Dirty" reveals the 'bad seeds' of queer cinema to be surprisingly, even gleefully subversive, reminding us, in an age of book bans and gag laws, that nothing makes queerness speak louder than its opponents’ bids to silence it. In the second segment, Filmwax friend Josh Karp returns once again to discuss his latest article for the online magazine, Air Mail: "The Miracle at the Truck Stop", about the long shuttered Burt Reynolds Theater in Jupiter, Florida. At the height of his fame, Burt Reynolds had a dream: to open a dinner theater in the middle of nowhere! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szjlaU00vKw