When They Were Making It

Programming note: Our Marlon Brando series has been expanded from two parts to three, allowing us to give the final decades of his life and career the space they deserve. Part 3 releases Tuesday, July 21.

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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 discove...

Programming note: Our Marlon Brando series has been expanded from two parts to three, allowing us to give the final decades of his life and career the space they deserve. Part 2 is out now — Part 3 releases Tuesday, July 21.

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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 a...

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...