May 6, 2022 • 22 mins
Holly and Tracy discuss the ways Europeans explorers wrote about the indigenous peoples of Africa, and just how good the okapi's natural camouflage is. They also discuss the unattainable beauty standards that were in place for women in entertainment from the beginning.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Polly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about oh
copy this week we did Gosh, They're pretty, Yeah they are.
(00:23):
This one was good and I was glad it had
the sort of happy ending of of discussing how captive
populations can be a way to sustain conservation efforts. UM.
I know there are people that have very mixed feelings
about zoos and aquariums that animals should not be held
in captivity. I mean, I feel like for a lot
(00:43):
of them, this is a nice offshoot. Whether it started
out in the right um headspace or not that we
started collecting animals, this is a way that many of
those facilities have become really vital to making sure we
continue to have those animal for theoretically the rest of time.
(01:04):
UM So, I just know that's something that's always on
my mind. I um, you know, have volunteered with various
such facilities, and I know I always get a little
bit heartsick when I hear people talking about how the
people that work there don't care about animals and don't
they're just in it for money, And I'm like, I
don't know any biologists that has worked in one of
those facilities that is rich, and they certainly will sometimes
(01:27):
give up their personal lives almost entirely to make sure
the animals are cared for. So, um, you know I
have I have definitely seen staff. I definitely knew one
that spent Christmas Day, despite having children at the facility,
ran home to do gift time and then came right
back to make sure that an animal that was having
(01:51):
some some health needs was being taken care of around
the clock. So like, just just know there are a
lot of dedicated people in those facilities that kind of
are should not be lumped in as like part of
a capitalist driven problem. Um. Anyway, that's my little mini
soapbox boy. I didn't put a lot of it in here,
(02:13):
but it sure is frustrating to read accounts by white
people traveling through Africa thinking they understand what they're talking about,
saying sort of weird things about the indigenous people's there.
Johnston's brother was with him at one point and wrote
this account about how when they went to get the
(02:37):
men who had been kidnapped from them booty tribe, that
one of the men had died already, and according to
this person, Johnston had negotiated with the ma booty people
that they were supposed to bring home to let him
(02:59):
have the skeletons stripped by ants so he could ship
it back to Europe. And I'm like, are you real
confident about this, dude? But you can't go back in
time and say that to them as they're writing it.
But that was my like, I'm not confident that's really
what happened here. Um. Yeah, that's a whole weird a
(03:20):
whole weird thing. Um. There was one person in the
midst of all of this that was very interesting to me.
He was a Catholic missionary that was in Africa named
Brother Joseph Huts about I'm guessing on that pronunciation, and
he for some reason had the touch with O copy,
(03:40):
like he could manage and raise captive O copy and
keep them very healthy, and various people, including the Belgian government,
asked him if he would be the official guy to
do that, and he was like, I'm here because I'm
a missionary that no, I'm not going to do that
(04:00):
for you. Yeah, And they were like, Okay, we'll find
somebody else and I was like, yeah, but he was
the only one who knew how to take care of them.
Why are you also horrible? Um? Yeah, I thought he
should get a shout out for going no, no, no,
I don't want to be part of this machine. Uh
that's interesting. Yeah, that whole found a new species thing
(04:24):
that always comes up. I'm like, no he did not. Yeah,
I know that's probably picking nts. Well, it makes me crazy.
It reminds me of um, you know when we talked
about the platypus. Uh, and when when we were talking
about the platypus and how it was this argument among
(04:45):
mostly European naturalists to decide how to categorize an animal that,
like the indigenous people, already new lots about, not necessarily
the exact kind of things that the naturalists are trying
to figure out, and not so much like organization into
this Western developed taxonomy European taxonomy, but like there were
(05:10):
some parallels there in terms of multiple different aspects of it.
I mean, right, it's all coded and framed in this
weird conceit of like we know better than anyone else,
which is just so problematic and it comes up on
the show all the time. But I'm always just like, dudes, Yeah,
(05:36):
I'm laughing in frustration because it is hard to read
that stuff and think about how just foolishly conceded so
many explorers have been. While at the same time, I
will confess that I like seeing an O copy from
time to time, so I understand the draw. Oh, I
did want to mention um there was a particularly interesting
(06:00):
he's of footage that was shown during that John Lucas
lecture we mentioned during the show where he was talking
about how hard it is for people to see a copy,
and he was like, just look at this, and it's
literally like fifteen or twenty second piece of footage from
like a what appears to be a set up camera
(06:22):
in the forest that's not manned, and you see the
animal like right up by the camera, and then it
turns and it walks ten feet away and you can't
see it. Wow, because you know it's it's rump is
striped in such a way that once it gets behind
like a stick of foliage, like it just blends right
(06:42):
in and you can't It's really hard to visualize. Um.
If you're I mean, you can see it. You can
be like, oh, I see there's where the head went
there's because you watched it go, But you wouldn't ever
pick it out from the forest naturally if you were
just walking along, even if you were looking for it,
because it's so the stripes are so effective at camouflaging
it um and it is such a quiet, little shy
(07:05):
thing that it's not little. It's a large animal in
my heart, in my heart, it's littl it's little. Uh.
But they're they are so extraordinarily beautiful, So I'm glad
that they're huge conservation movements around them. You and I
also discussed before we started recording how much like political
(07:26):
upheaval there is in that area anyway. And it's one
of those things that I I feel for conservationists and
the people there that just want to like protect animals
and keep these preserves, you know, healthy and and protected,
and like how hard it must be when you are
(07:48):
living in a world that doesn't prioritize that at all
and has its own conflicts that are huge and terrifying
going on around you. So that's just my hats off
to those people, because that happens in a lot of
places around the world, where are people just trying to
preserve the natural species that are being encroached upon by civilization,
(08:08):
that are being you know, endangered through people poaching, like
actively trying to cause problems, but also just people who
are in expanding populations that are trying to find their
own way to live and survive. And it's it's a
hard balance. I know I couldn't do that job. I
think I would be depressed all the time. Just reading
about it is sad making, so so thank you to
(08:31):
everyone does um. Yeah, if you can check out check
out some cool videos of a copy vanishing into the forest.
It's quite striking and moving. Um is a good reminder
that as as busy as our world is, they're still
very shy, beautiful animals just trying to have their vegetarian diet.
(09:03):
We talked about Theda Bara this week. She's very fun
because there's not a lot of tragedy going on. Yeah,
there's absolutely cockamami things that happened in relation to the
studio and now they presented her, but she is a
very fun one. Yeah. She has a lot of things
(09:24):
in her life, more her career than her life that
are just sort of evidence of how early in the
film industry, various standards were set, like the idea that
that thirty is old. Well that was for this just
(09:44):
acting in general, like if you wanted to be any
kind of like in the public eye performer. Yeah, thirty
was hagged out man, that was it. Uh Yeah. There's
also that whole thing about how she was too curvy
to be considered like the cute ideal. And if you
(10:08):
watch a fool there was she looks very long and
lean to me. So the fact that that came up
in several uh sources about her, about how curvaceous she was,
I was like, oh, mon dieu unattainable body standards. Yeah,
already they're already in place. Um. There were some fun
(10:31):
things about her life that didn't make it into the episode.
One is that that first play that she was in,
The Devil. This is for my old school film and
TV buffs. She was, um, you know, a small part.
But one of the leads in that play was Mary
and Lorne. I don't know if that name rings a
(10:51):
bell for you. Tracy does not, And I don't know
if you grew up watching Bewitched like I did. Rabidly
she played Aunt Clara, so she Mary and Lauren was
touches touches basse with Theda Bara Um. I also wanted
to mention this interesting note that we mentioned it that
(11:12):
that she is very pantomime. Earlier on in the filming
of of a Fool there was which was, you know,
her first time on film really other than that one
very small bit part and one biography I read mentioned
that she's very stiff in her early shots but loosens
up as the film goes on. And I, having seen
it before I read this, I thought that was purposeful
(11:34):
as a character development choice because it kind of works right,
and she starts out it's like the presentation of someone
called a vampire would of course be very like theatrical
and kind of oddly formal, and then loosen up as
you see her wild party lifestyle. But um, that one
was very funny to me. It's like I thought, I
(11:56):
thought that was on purpose because she was struggling, not
because she was learning how to make it do. Yeah. Yeah,
there's an interesting audio clip I heard of her later
in life talking about like how hard it was for
silent film actors to like try to find that line
of like conveying all of the emotions you would normally
(12:19):
have in um dialogue without being like a crazy marionette
about it, um, And I think to most of us
they do look often like crazy marionettes. But well, and
especially having done work on stage first, where you were
speaking lines, to go from that into silent film, I
(12:40):
think would be really hard. Silent film, no rehearsal, there's
just like a director yelling at you what to do. Um,
that would be There's a reason she str she felt
very overwhelmed initially, but of course she became very good
at it, did a lot of movies and made a
lot of money. I wanted to also talk about how
(13:02):
uh she negotiated her contract from one hundred dollars a
week to one fifty as a complete unknown, and how
that worked, because there is a reason for that. There's
a logic behind it. It wasn't just that she was
so brazen and skilled at negotiating, although it does sound
like she's a pretty good negotiator. There was a clause
(13:22):
in her contract, which was very common. This was not
just for her, but for a lot of actresses at
the time. One of the things studios would do was
that basically, and I don't know that the men had
the same clause, but women definitely had that they would
provide their own costumes for any any scenario that was
(13:44):
not a period piece. So if it wasn't a historical costume,
you just had to show up to set in your
clothes and they better look great. And she was like, um, high,
I'm poor. I've been struggling to get a career going
in stage for ten years and have gotten nowhere. So
I'm not sure where you think clothes are going to
(14:06):
come from. And she was like, I will do it,
but you gotta at my rate a lot. And that's
how she landed there because they knew this was going
to make her famous. Like they it was in their
best interest to be like, great, will acquiesce and and
give you this money and that way you can do it,
and it paid off. She often was. There were often
comments in reviews about how amazing her clothes were, so
(14:28):
she clearly had great taste and she was good at
picking things out. Um, but yes, I find that so funny.
If that were to happen today on a film set,
people would lose their minds. I'm sorry, what did you
bring to wear for this shot? Your excuse like it
would never went and when at work, um, I really
(14:52):
really wish we had a cut of Cleopatra just for
the costumes. Yeah, there's I mean there's stills from it. Um,
there are stills from a ton of her stuff available,
like a lot of publicity stuff. And going through it
to pick to pick a picture to put on her
(15:14):
social media, I was like, I really, I would rather
have an image that is evocative of her career and
not one where she's definitely a white person playing someone
of another race. Yeah. And fortunately there's a ton of
stuff from a fool there was where she's playing a
(15:35):
you know, random person. But yeah, there's a ton of it.
I'm gonna say something that may make you think I
am completely off my rocker? Are you ready sure? I
(15:56):
don't know if this happened. Every time I look at
pictures of her at our just shots of her like
with her hair down, not in a big costume or anything,
but sort of like probably the equivalent of her head shots.
She's long hair, just kind of a rounded face. She
has very um, you know, almost rubic features. I get
(16:18):
heavy Stevie Nicks vibes there. As I was looking at pictures,
there was one where her hair was down, and I
feel like she also had a cape, and I was like,
Stevie Nicks, I'm glad this is not just me in
the best way. I mean in in the most loving
and girl your fabulous kind of way. But I had
(16:39):
not really put that together until I don't know, recent years.
I remember looking at a picture of her and going
her face structure and the big eyes and especially with
all of the islands and the like Stevie Nicks and
I love it. Um, she's like, you know, one of
the proto goth girls, even though in her regular life
she was kind of not that pri and very modern. Yeah,
(17:03):
which I think really helped her after she retired as well,
because she had that image on screen when she just
went out as herself, Like there are accounts of people
not recognizing her in public and then someone being like, hey,
that was seta Bara and I'm going, oh, that was
like a nice lady in a suit. Um. So it's
(17:28):
I think she kind of got an unexpected benefit from
that whole setup, which is that she could she could
be anonymous on occasions when she wished to. Yeah, she's
pretty cool. Yeah. I do find it very funny how
scant her costumes became, considering how chagrined she was to
(17:51):
wear bathings. You didn't. Yeah, I mean, I'm curious. Do
we know? Do we know how she felt about that?
If that was something like was just her progressing comfort level,
or if it was more like pressure from the studio. Um.
It seems like as things were going on, she got
more comfortable with the idea, and I think she had
(18:11):
a little streak of defiance in her so as more
people complained, she was like, great, I'm wearing nothing but
pasty's in this next movie. Like she was like, I'm
gonna fine. I don't even know that she was conscious
of it, but some of the ways that this gets
written up about her, you know, the fact that she
would respond to a fan letter criticizing her and being like, oh, honey,
(18:35):
if I were that person, I would you would not
be seeing me on a screen. Yeah, I'd be just
living my casual life. I think I think probably that
was a driver. That's pure speculation on my part, but
that letter reminded me of various things that have happened
in more recent years, where like people have become outraged
(18:58):
at a voice act there for playing a toxic character
in a video game, and the actor being like, this
is literally my job to play characters. If I turned
down the roles of the villain, I wouldn't really have
(19:20):
a career and you wouldn't have video games that have
villains in them, right. I Mean, on the one hand, too,
it was a little refreshing to me that to see that,
like even in nineteen fifteen, people could not grasp the
nuances mean reality and fiction, and admittedly, like her presentation
(19:40):
as this fictional character probably did not help that. But
also like, just because you see it on a screen
does not mean that that is a real thing. It
is a it is a play that is on screen. Right. Um, yeah,
you know, we we fight that today. We see it
all the time, so at least we know it has
(20:02):
a long and storied history. Here's the thing. Did you
see a picture while you were looking from Cleopatra where
she is in a spectacular peacock gown. I don't think
I saw the peacock gown. Holy, but Jolie, I really
really want to like find more pictures of that if
I can. And I that's the one thing that like
I would yearn to see of that movie because it's
(20:24):
like just this amazing giant train that's made of feathers
and it's super beautiful, and she's something. I also think
it's interesting that she was not um necessarily like growing up.
She was never considered especially like pretty or attractive, and
she became like the biggest sex symbol for several years,
(20:44):
and that to me just was kind of a funny.
One of those those things we see it all the
time today as well, where actors will be like, um no,
I've always been a dork. I don't know what this
attention is about. Um So it's again has been going
on since the beginning of film. But Theta Bara. I
(21:05):
hope one day we find some secret cut of something
else that she was in, because she's quite so much
early film is lost on it sucks. She didn't seem
to care when everything got destroyed in the fire. She's like,
all right, um, I'm kind of moved on anyway, So
(21:25):
not a lot of sense of her place in history.
I think at that. Yeah, I'm gonna go watch movies now, Okay.
We hope you have a delightful weekend and that you
get to watch movies or do whatever it is that
brings you joy. If you don't have time off and
you have to get a lot of stuff done. I
hope that all of those tasks are easiest pie and
(21:47):
they get done with very little effort. That would be
my dream. And that everybody treats you nicely and that
you do the same in return. We will be right
back here tomorrow with a classic, and then see you
again on Monday with brand new stuff. Stuff you missed
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
(22:09):
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Polly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about oh
copy this week we did Gosh, They're pretty, Yeah they are.
(00:23):
This one was good and I was glad it had
the sort of happy ending of of discussing how captive
populations can be a way to sustain conservation efforts. UM.
I know there are people that have very mixed feelings
about zoos and aquariums that animals should not be held
in captivity. I mean, I feel like for a lot
(00:43):
of them, this is a nice offshoot. Whether it started
out in the right um headspace or not that we
started collecting animals, this is a way that many of
those facilities have become really vital to making sure we
continue to have those animal for theoretically the rest of time.
(01:04):
UM So, I just know that's something that's always on
my mind. I um, you know, have volunteered with various
such facilities, and I know I always get a little
bit heartsick when I hear people talking about how the
people that work there don't care about animals and don't
they're just in it for money, And I'm like, I
don't know any biologists that has worked in one of
those facilities that is rich, and they certainly will sometimes
(01:27):
give up their personal lives almost entirely to make sure
the animals are cared for. So, um, you know I
have I have definitely seen staff. I definitely knew one
that spent Christmas Day, despite having children at the facility,
ran home to do gift time and then came right
back to make sure that an animal that was having
(01:51):
some some health needs was being taken care of around
the clock. So like, just just know there are a
lot of dedicated people in those facilities that kind of
are should not be lumped in as like part of
a capitalist driven problem. Um. Anyway, that's my little mini
soapbox boy. I didn't put a lot of it in here,
(02:13):
but it sure is frustrating to read accounts by white
people traveling through Africa thinking they understand what they're talking about,
saying sort of weird things about the indigenous people's there.
Johnston's brother was with him at one point and wrote
this account about how when they went to get the
(02:37):
men who had been kidnapped from them booty tribe, that
one of the men had died already, and according to
this person, Johnston had negotiated with the ma booty people
that they were supposed to bring home to let him
(02:59):
have the skeletons stripped by ants so he could ship
it back to Europe. And I'm like, are you real
confident about this, dude? But you can't go back in
time and say that to them as they're writing it.
But that was my like, I'm not confident that's really
what happened here. Um. Yeah, that's a whole weird a
(03:20):
whole weird thing. Um. There was one person in the
midst of all of this that was very interesting to me.
He was a Catholic missionary that was in Africa named
Brother Joseph Huts about I'm guessing on that pronunciation, and
he for some reason had the touch with O copy,
(03:40):
like he could manage and raise captive O copy and
keep them very healthy, and various people, including the Belgian government,
asked him if he would be the official guy to
do that, and he was like, I'm here because I'm
a missionary that no, I'm not going to do that
(04:00):
for you. Yeah, And they were like, Okay, we'll find
somebody else and I was like, yeah, but he was
the only one who knew how to take care of them.
Why are you also horrible? Um? Yeah, I thought he
should get a shout out for going no, no, no,
I don't want to be part of this machine. Uh
that's interesting. Yeah, that whole found a new species thing
(04:24):
that always comes up. I'm like, no he did not. Yeah,
I know that's probably picking nts. Well, it makes me crazy.
It reminds me of um, you know when we talked
about the platypus. Uh, and when when we were talking
about the platypus and how it was this argument among
(04:45):
mostly European naturalists to decide how to categorize an animal that,
like the indigenous people, already new lots about, not necessarily
the exact kind of things that the naturalists are trying
to figure out, and not so much like organization into
this Western developed taxonomy European taxonomy, but like there were
(05:10):
some parallels there in terms of multiple different aspects of it.
I mean, right, it's all coded and framed in this
weird conceit of like we know better than anyone else,
which is just so problematic and it comes up on
the show all the time. But I'm always just like, dudes, Yeah,
(05:36):
I'm laughing in frustration because it is hard to read
that stuff and think about how just foolishly conceded so
many explorers have been. While at the same time, I
will confess that I like seeing an O copy from
time to time, so I understand the draw. Oh, I
did want to mention um there was a particularly interesting
(06:00):
he's of footage that was shown during that John Lucas
lecture we mentioned during the show where he was talking
about how hard it is for people to see a copy,
and he was like, just look at this, and it's
literally like fifteen or twenty second piece of footage from
like a what appears to be a set up camera
(06:22):
in the forest that's not manned, and you see the
animal like right up by the camera, and then it
turns and it walks ten feet away and you can't
see it. Wow, because you know it's it's rump is
striped in such a way that once it gets behind
like a stick of foliage, like it just blends right
(06:42):
in and you can't It's really hard to visualize. Um.
If you're I mean, you can see it. You can
be like, oh, I see there's where the head went
there's because you watched it go, But you wouldn't ever
pick it out from the forest naturally if you were
just walking along, even if you were looking for it,
because it's so the stripes are so effective at camouflaging
it um and it is such a quiet, little shy
(07:05):
thing that it's not little. It's a large animal in
my heart, in my heart, it's littl it's little. Uh.
But they're they are so extraordinarily beautiful, So I'm glad
that they're huge conservation movements around them. You and I
also discussed before we started recording how much like political
(07:26):
upheaval there is in that area anyway. And it's one
of those things that I I feel for conservationists and
the people there that just want to like protect animals
and keep these preserves, you know, healthy and and protected,
and like how hard it must be when you are
(07:48):
living in a world that doesn't prioritize that at all
and has its own conflicts that are huge and terrifying
going on around you. So that's just my hats off
to those people, because that happens in a lot of
places around the world, where are people just trying to
preserve the natural species that are being encroached upon by civilization,
(08:08):
that are being you know, endangered through people poaching, like
actively trying to cause problems, but also just people who
are in expanding populations that are trying to find their
own way to live and survive. And it's it's a
hard balance. I know I couldn't do that job. I
think I would be depressed all the time. Just reading
about it is sad making, so so thank you to
(08:31):
everyone does um. Yeah, if you can check out check
out some cool videos of a copy vanishing into the forest.
It's quite striking and moving. Um is a good reminder
that as as busy as our world is, they're still
very shy, beautiful animals just trying to have their vegetarian diet.
(09:03):
We talked about Theda Bara this week. She's very fun
because there's not a lot of tragedy going on. Yeah,
there's absolutely cockamami things that happened in relation to the
studio and now they presented her, but she is a
very fun one. Yeah. She has a lot of things
(09:24):
in her life, more her career than her life that
are just sort of evidence of how early in the
film industry, various standards were set, like the idea that
that thirty is old. Well that was for this just
(09:44):
acting in general, like if you wanted to be any
kind of like in the public eye performer. Yeah, thirty
was hagged out man, that was it. Uh Yeah. There's
also that whole thing about how she was too curvy
to be considered like the cute ideal. And if you
(10:08):
watch a fool there was she looks very long and
lean to me. So the fact that that came up
in several uh sources about her, about how curvaceous she was,
I was like, oh, mon dieu unattainable body standards. Yeah,
already they're already in place. Um. There were some fun
(10:31):
things about her life that didn't make it into the episode.
One is that that first play that she was in,
The Devil. This is for my old school film and
TV buffs. She was, um, you know, a small part.
But one of the leads in that play was Mary
and Lorne. I don't know if that name rings a
(10:51):
bell for you. Tracy does not, And I don't know
if you grew up watching Bewitched like I did. Rabidly
she played Aunt Clara, so she Mary and Lauren was
touches touches basse with Theda Bara Um. I also wanted
to mention this interesting note that we mentioned it that
(11:12):
that she is very pantomime. Earlier on in the filming
of of a Fool there was which was, you know,
her first time on film really other than that one
very small bit part and one biography I read mentioned
that she's very stiff in her early shots but loosens
up as the film goes on. And I, having seen
it before I read this, I thought that was purposeful
(11:34):
as a character development choice because it kind of works right,
and she starts out it's like the presentation of someone
called a vampire would of course be very like theatrical
and kind of oddly formal, and then loosen up as
you see her wild party lifestyle. But um, that one
was very funny to me. It's like I thought, I
(11:56):
thought that was on purpose because she was struggling, not
because she was learning how to make it do. Yeah. Yeah,
there's an interesting audio clip I heard of her later
in life talking about like how hard it was for
silent film actors to like try to find that line
of like conveying all of the emotions you would normally
(12:19):
have in um dialogue without being like a crazy marionette
about it, um, And I think to most of us
they do look often like crazy marionettes. But well, and
especially having done work on stage first, where you were
speaking lines, to go from that into silent film, I
(12:40):
think would be really hard. Silent film, no rehearsal, there's
just like a director yelling at you what to do. Um,
that would be There's a reason she str she felt
very overwhelmed initially, but of course she became very good
at it, did a lot of movies and made a
lot of money. I wanted to also talk about how
(13:02):
uh she negotiated her contract from one hundred dollars a
week to one fifty as a complete unknown, and how
that worked, because there is a reason for that. There's
a logic behind it. It wasn't just that she was
so brazen and skilled at negotiating, although it does sound
like she's a pretty good negotiator. There was a clause
(13:22):
in her contract, which was very common. This was not
just for her, but for a lot of actresses at
the time. One of the things studios would do was
that basically, and I don't know that the men had
the same clause, but women definitely had that they would
provide their own costumes for any any scenario that was
(13:44):
not a period piece. So if it wasn't a historical costume,
you just had to show up to set in your
clothes and they better look great. And she was like, um, high,
I'm poor. I've been struggling to get a career going
in stage for ten years and have gotten nowhere. So
I'm not sure where you think clothes are going to
(14:06):
come from. And she was like, I will do it,
but you gotta at my rate a lot. And that's
how she landed there because they knew this was going
to make her famous. Like they it was in their
best interest to be like, great, will acquiesce and and
give you this money and that way you can do it,
and it paid off. She often was. There were often
comments in reviews about how amazing her clothes were, so
(14:28):
she clearly had great taste and she was good at
picking things out. Um, but yes, I find that so funny.
If that were to happen today on a film set,
people would lose their minds. I'm sorry, what did you
bring to wear for this shot? Your excuse like it
would never went and when at work, um, I really
(14:52):
really wish we had a cut of Cleopatra just for
the costumes. Yeah, there's I mean there's stills from it. Um,
there are stills from a ton of her stuff available,
like a lot of publicity stuff. And going through it
to pick to pick a picture to put on her
(15:14):
social media, I was like, I really, I would rather
have an image that is evocative of her career and
not one where she's definitely a white person playing someone
of another race. Yeah. And fortunately there's a ton of
stuff from a fool there was where she's playing a
(15:35):
you know, random person. But yeah, there's a ton of it.
I'm gonna say something that may make you think I
am completely off my rocker? Are you ready sure? I
(15:56):
don't know if this happened. Every time I look at
pictures of her at our just shots of her like
with her hair down, not in a big costume or anything,
but sort of like probably the equivalent of her head shots.
She's long hair, just kind of a rounded face. She
has very um, you know, almost rubic features. I get
(16:18):
heavy Stevie Nicks vibes there. As I was looking at pictures,
there was one where her hair was down, and I
feel like she also had a cape, and I was like,
Stevie Nicks, I'm glad this is not just me in
the best way. I mean in in the most loving
and girl your fabulous kind of way. But I had
(16:39):
not really put that together until I don't know, recent years.
I remember looking at a picture of her and going
her face structure and the big eyes and especially with
all of the islands and the like Stevie Nicks and
I love it. Um, she's like, you know, one of
the proto goth girls, even though in her regular life
she was kind of not that pri and very modern. Yeah,
(17:03):
which I think really helped her after she retired as well,
because she had that image on screen when she just
went out as herself, Like there are accounts of people
not recognizing her in public and then someone being like, hey,
that was seta Bara and I'm going, oh, that was
like a nice lady in a suit. Um. So it's
(17:28):
I think she kind of got an unexpected benefit from
that whole setup, which is that she could she could
be anonymous on occasions when she wished to. Yeah, she's
pretty cool. Yeah. I do find it very funny how
scant her costumes became, considering how chagrined she was to
(17:51):
wear bathings. You didn't. Yeah, I mean, I'm curious. Do
we know? Do we know how she felt about that?
If that was something like was just her progressing comfort level,
or if it was more like pressure from the studio. Um.
It seems like as things were going on, she got
more comfortable with the idea, and I think she had
(18:11):
a little streak of defiance in her so as more
people complained, she was like, great, I'm wearing nothing but
pasty's in this next movie. Like she was like, I'm
gonna fine. I don't even know that she was conscious
of it, but some of the ways that this gets
written up about her, you know, the fact that she
would respond to a fan letter criticizing her and being like, oh, honey,
(18:35):
if I were that person, I would you would not
be seeing me on a screen. Yeah, I'd be just
living my casual life. I think I think probably that
was a driver. That's pure speculation on my part, but
that letter reminded me of various things that have happened
in more recent years, where like people have become outraged
(18:58):
at a voice act there for playing a toxic character
in a video game, and the actor being like, this
is literally my job to play characters. If I turned
down the roles of the villain, I wouldn't really have
(19:20):
a career and you wouldn't have video games that have
villains in them, right. I Mean, on the one hand, too,
it was a little refreshing to me that to see that,
like even in nineteen fifteen, people could not grasp the
nuances mean reality and fiction, and admittedly, like her presentation
(19:40):
as this fictional character probably did not help that. But
also like, just because you see it on a screen
does not mean that that is a real thing. It
is a it is a play that is on screen. Right. Um, yeah,
you know, we we fight that today. We see it
all the time, so at least we know it has
(20:02):
a long and storied history. Here's the thing. Did you
see a picture while you were looking from Cleopatra where
she is in a spectacular peacock gown. I don't think
I saw the peacock gown. Holy, but Jolie, I really
really want to like find more pictures of that if
I can. And I that's the one thing that like
I would yearn to see of that movie because it's
(20:24):
like just this amazing giant train that's made of feathers
and it's super beautiful, and she's something. I also think
it's interesting that she was not um necessarily like growing up.
She was never considered especially like pretty or attractive, and
she became like the biggest sex symbol for several years,
(20:44):
and that to me just was kind of a funny.
One of those those things we see it all the
time today as well, where actors will be like, um no,
I've always been a dork. I don't know what this
attention is about. Um So it's again has been going
on since the beginning of film. But Theta Bara. I
(21:05):
hope one day we find some secret cut of something
else that she was in, because she's quite so much
early film is lost on it sucks. She didn't seem
to care when everything got destroyed in the fire. She's like,
all right, um, I'm kind of moved on anyway, So
(21:25):
not a lot of sense of her place in history.
I think at that. Yeah, I'm gonna go watch movies now, Okay.
We hope you have a delightful weekend and that you
get to watch movies or do whatever it is that
brings you joy. If you don't have time off and
you have to get a lot of stuff done. I
hope that all of those tasks are easiest pie and
(21:47):
they get done with very little effort. That would be
my dream. And that everybody treats you nicely and that
you do the same in return. We will be right
back here tomorrow with a classic, and then see you
again on Monday with brand new stuff. Stuff you missed
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
(22:09):
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.