When They Were Making It

This is Part 2 of our two-part series on Charlie Chaplin.

At the height of his silent-film power, Charlie Chaplin was one of the most famous and successful people in the world. He owned his studio, controlled his work, and had transformed the Tramp into a global icon.

But the life behind the screen was becoming impossible to keep private.

Part 2 of our Charlie Chaplin series follows Chaplin through the collapse of his marriage...

This is Part 1 of our two-part series on Charlie Chaplin.

Charlie Chaplin, one of the greatest icons of silent cinema and film comedy, built his legend on making the world laugh. But behind his beloved image was a private life that was increasingly troubling — and, throughout his life, increasingly difficult to contain.

Part 1 of our two-part series follows Chaplin from a childhood in poverty and the workhouse, through the Lond...

Shirley Temple was the most famous child star Hollywood had ever seen — a six-year-old who became America's biggest box-office attraction, helped carry Twentieth Century-Fox through the Great Depression, and grew up inside a studio system built around keeping her little for as long as possible.

From the bizarre Baby Burlesks shorts to Little Miss Marker, Bright Eyes, and "On the Good Ship Lollipop," Shirley became a national p...

By 1955, Dorothy Dandridge had done what Hollywood once seemed determined to make impossible — become a genuine leading lady, carry a major studio picture, and earn a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards. But after Carmen Jones, the breakthrough Hollywood celebrated would become a career it had no idea how to sustain.

Part 2 of our two-part series on Dorothy Dandridge begins on Oscar night in 1955, with Dandridge seat...

Dorothy Dandridge was one of the most electrifying talents Hollywood ever tried to contain — a trailblazing performer who would become the first Black woman nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, and whose story began long before anyone in Hollywood was paying attention.

From a childhood spent on the road — singing and dancing through segregated churches and theaters across the South before she'd even learned to read &mdash...

In 1949, Billy Wilder sat inside a theatre in Evanston, Illinois, and watched his new film, Sunset Boulevard, fall apart in front of its first audience.

Wilder had made a picture about the stars Hollywood had abandoned, the illusions it had created, and the cruelty beneath its glamorous surface. But instead of being unsettled by what they saw, the audience was laughing — and the film that would become Hollywood's darkest portr...

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 child...

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...

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,...

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,...

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 blon...

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 himse...

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 &mda...

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 ne...

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...

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 tw...

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 — b...

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 1...