The Colorful Life of Carmen Miranda

Carmen Miranda is one of those historical figures who remains hugely iconic – we STILL see her image, or some derivative of it, on a regular basis. She was luminous on camera and an excellent singer, with a personality much larger than her small stature.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's
episode is one that we were working on for a
live show, and then the live show got canceled, so

(00:22):
I kind of put this episode on hold for a
bit because that actually worked out well because I wanted
to spend a little additional time with it. We were
talking today about Carmen Miranda, and right out of the gate,
I will say we're gonna use the pronunciation that is
used here in the Americanized version. This is not in
any way to diminish her her Portuguese Brazilian Spanish speaking heritage.

(00:47):
I know a lot of um Latin American countries say
it with a different accent. Yeah, we're not doing it,
not because we are trying to erase that, but because
when we say it, it sounds comedically bad and kind
of horrible. Yeah, it sounds like we're doing a bad
impression of uh Spanish or Portuguese accented voice. Yes, it
sounds like horrible sitcom acting. And we don't want to

(01:09):
do that. So know that when we are going with
the carbon Miranda pronunciation. It is in fact, out of
respect for that and not wanting to make it sound
silly and goofy. And she is one of those historical
figures who, even though she has been dead for decades,
remains hugely iconic. We still see her image or some
derivative of it on a regular basis in popular culture,

(01:30):
in art, in old movies that still play, even though
it gets less and less likely a lot of the
time that the people that see that image even really
get the reference or understand who it came from. But
Miranda was a really unique performer. She was utterly luminous
on camera. If you haven't ever seen any of her films,

(01:50):
I highly recommend it. Some of them are very silly,
but she is just a delight to watch. She was
an excellent singer. She had a personality that was way
bigger than her tiny, tiny stature. She was very petite.
There was a reason that she was an international superstar.
She kind of was one of those people that when
you hear people speak about that like it factor that

(02:11):
people who sometimes become hugely famous have. I feel like
if you watch her perform, you immediately go, oh, that's
what it is because it's hard to define, but when
you see someone who really has it, it becomes obvious.
And that is the case with Carmen Miranda, and we're
going to take a little peek at her life story today.
She was born Maria Dekarmo Miranda da Kuna on February nine, nine,

(02:33):
and she's usually identified as a Brazilian. She was actually
born in Marco de Converses, Portugal. Her family moved to
Brazil though when she was still just a baby, before
even her first birthday. Her parents had several more children
after they moved to Brazil. Yeah, she always pretty much
identified as Brazilian as well, and she was educated in

(02:53):
a convent school as a child, in part because her
father thought it was the safest option for his daughter's.
Part of that was because they didn't live in a
particularly wealthy part of town and he just thought sending
them to comment school was the safest option. And as
Carmen got older, she started working in retail jobs to
make a little money, and part of that need for
her to be making an income really came, unfortunately from

(03:15):
family tragedy. Her oldest sister had died after battling tuberculosis,
and the medical expenses that that treatment had incurred had
really left a family with very little. Her parents opened
a boarding house in the nineteen twenties and it attracted
Rio's art crowd. This was really pivotal for Carmen because
it was there that she met guitarist Joe's Way to Borrows. Yeah,

(03:39):
she was still working retail jobs during the day, but
nights and weekends she worked at the boarding house. When
Carmen was still a teenager, Da Borrows got her job
singing on the radio. She would sometimes sing to entertain
the people at the boarding house, and he immediately recognized
her talent. But this was a time when entertainers in Brazil,
particularly women entertained ers, were not seen as having particularly

(04:02):
honorable jobs, so this was actually a very real problem
for Carmen's family. She ended up keeping her radio performances secret,
especially from her father. In a very short period of time,
just weeks, she went from unknown to rising star to
just a superstar in the South American music scene, and

(04:24):
it was around this time that she adopted the stage
name Carmen Miranda. Yeah. I had read one thing that
suggested that she initially adopted that name as part of
kind of keeping her work on the d L from
her family and particularly her father, But I think that
was not something that she could have maintained for very
long anyway. Her first two recordings were made in ninety nine.

(04:48):
They were very popular, but then in nineteen thirty she
recorded a song Taye, which became a huge hit. It
sold more than thirty five thousand records, which is a
massive number at the time, and success led to her
first recording contract with r C A Victor and from
the age of twenty one when she was signed to
when she turned twenty three two years later, she recorded

(05:10):
seventy one songs with our Cia for the next nine years.
Carmen Miranda was Brazil's sweetheart. She was tiny, Moss Holly
alluded to earlier, just five feet tall, less than a
hundred pounds, but she was like a charisma bomb. Her
songs were written by the most popular and skilled musicians
of the era, and they were upbeat and playful. And
then when it came to her live performances, nobody could

(05:32):
work the crowd like Carmen Miranda, so it really became
pretty natural for her to carry all of that talent
in charisma onto the silver screen. In she made her
first feature film as du Dante's, followed closely by another
titled Allo Allo Carnival the same year, and her sister

(05:52):
Aurora Miranda also appeared in that second film. Carmen made
five films in Brazil and her records were huge hit.
At the age of seven, she was the highest paid
singer in the country For her nineteen thirty nine film,
but not at a Terra. Carmen adopted a new look
with the costume that referenced those of the Baianists. These

(06:13):
are the women of Baia in northwestern Brazil. Traditionally, the
Baianists were full white cotton skirts with wrapped head scarves
that were sometimes stacked on top of their heads. Miranda's
look was a glamorized version of this traditional dress, and
it became instantly iconic and propelled Miranda to even greater

(06:35):
heights of fame. We're going to come back to, uh,
the women of Baia and just a bit. But a
producer named Lee Shubert saw Carmen perform in a casino
in Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteen thirties, and
he signed her to star in the Broadway musical The
Streets of Paris. On May four nine, Carmen Miranda left

(06:56):
Brazil behind as she sailed away on a cruise ship.
That broad Way show debuted less than two weeks later
on May seventeenth of nineteen thirty nine. Miranda appeared alongside
Louella Gear, Bobby Clark, Budd alt Abbott, and le Costello,
who have been topics on the show before. She also
brought her band along with her to New York to
play in the show, and that was all thanks to

(07:17):
the sponsorship of Brazilian President Utulio Vargas. Vargas had run
for president in Brazil in ninety four as a reform candidate,
and he had lost. There had been plenty of corruption
involved in every camp during this election, but Vargas was
installed as interim president following a military coup which was

(07:38):
catalyzed when the Liberal Alliance vice presidential candidate was assassinated.
Under Vargas, Brazil's identity became focused on cultural identity, and
it was during this time that Miranda assumed the costume
of the bianness and rocketed to stardom. Is this icon
of Brazilian nous. When Carmen Miranda was invited to the
United States to reform. Vargas saw her as a perfect

(08:01):
emissary of Brazil's cultural identity, way more effective than political
diplomats trying to go to the United States to do
the same basic thing. Yeah, he really was happy to
fund this trip because he thought, this is gonna look great.
Brazil is gonna look great. Everybody's gonna think of us
as being as wonderful and vibrant as this young woman.

(08:23):
To him, it was perfect wind. But in addition to
being seen by President Vargas as a way to ingratiate
Brazil to the rest of the world, Carmen was also
part of Lee Schubert's mock Nations. The Streets of Paris
was scheduled to open at the same time that the
World's Fair was underway in New York, and there was
a lot of concern throughout the theater community that the

(08:43):
Fair was going to upstage their shows and tank ticket sales.
But with Carmen appearing and singing in Portuguese, the show
had an international flare and a hook that the audience
has really found irresistible. The Streets of Paris was a
huge hit, thanks entirely to Schubert's higher of Carmen Miranda.
If you look at the play bill for the Streets

(09:04):
of Paris, all the other headliners have multiple parts because
it was a musical review and that was how it
normally worked. Miranda had only two, even though she's listed
as a featured performer in just those two numbers, which
totaled up to less than ten minutes of stage time.
She's credited with saving Broadway that year. Carmen charmed crowds

(09:25):
in America, just as she had done at home. And
to promote the show and to make additional money, Lee
Schubert started arranging for Carmen and her band to play
in nightclubs throughout New York. She also garnered lucrative endorsement
and spokesperson deals. Lee Schubert had cut a deal with
Carmen that was heavily loaded to be beneficial to him,

(09:45):
so he took fifty percent of her earnings. Even so,
she was making a lot of money even after Schubert
took his cut. Yeah, there was one story that she
had saved up something like forty dollars and sent it
back to her family in Brazil. So in the nineteen thirties,
that was no small change. And next up, we're going

(10:06):
to talk about Carmen's transition from the Broadway stage onto
the silver screen in the US. But first we're gonna
pause for a little sponsor break. Almost for the second
that Carmen Miranda stepped onto the New York stage, she
had the attention of Hollywood as well. Studios were very

(10:28):
quickly eager to put her into films in the United
States and capitalize on her appeal as a fresh new
talent from the Tropics. Her first movie made in the
United States was Down Argentine Way, which came out in
nineteen forty. She was still starring in the streets of
Paris while this was filmed, and to accommodate her performance schedule,
the production was shot entirely in New York. Even so

(10:50):
that this is a NonStop situation for her, Based on
everybody I know in theater, I cannot imagine doing a
run of a play while also filming a movie at
the sit That sounds exhausting. Just the same, though her
musical performance in this film is really vibrant and energetic,

(11:11):
you would never know that she was running from one
job to the next with basically no breaks. For the
next six years. She stayed with twenty century Fox in
a ten picture deal. Yeah, she you had to admire
that woman's work ethics. She really like never ever stopped.
She never said no to a job. She basically just

(11:33):
kept going and going and going, which is probably why
she was such a very tiny person. Like I think
she probably could have eaten eighteen thousand calories a day
and not have ever gained a pound because she never
stopped moving. Um and again, I don't know how she
brought that level of energy because she is a really
energetic performer. She did make a trip back to Brazil

(11:55):
in nineteen forty, but unfortunately that did not go especially well.
While she was originally greeted warmly as she returned home,
things changed very quickly during her first homecoming performance. Instead
of welcoming her with open arms, the fans in her
home country felt that she had traded in her Brazilian
identity to become more appealing to American audiences. When she

(12:18):
greeted the audience in Rio in English and then performed
with the campy song the South American Way from the
film Down Argentine Way, she sang to an uncharacteristically silent crowd.
She was so upset by the experience that she canceled
the rest of her Brazilian homecoming performances. There was also
a strange phenomenon at play in the way the United

(12:40):
States embraced Carmen Miranda. Stylized versions of her head wrap
also became really popular at upscale stores, and her costumes
were inspiring fashions that no Bianna could ever have afforded,
and that is part of the complicated nature of Miranda's
success in the US and how it was perceived back home.

(13:00):
So the Biannusts who inspired her original costume in Banana
da Terra were part of Brazil's African culture after Brazilian
abolition in the late nineteenth century, Yoruba peoples who had
been taken to Baia, Brazil from Africa as enslaved people,
then had to figure out how to make a living
once they were free, and one popular vocation was selling

(13:22):
food in street carts, and those carts were traditionally run
by women, the Biannus. And while the Bionics came to
be seen as a really vital part of Brazil's culture,
the version that evolved in Carmen Miranda's representation for audiences
in the US was seen as performative and inauthentic too many.
It was both cultural appropriation and betrayal. There was a

(13:45):
layer of added complexity because again that came from originally
the African population of Brazil, and here was a very
light skinned woman who had taken it into another country,
and then it had gotten really mashed up with a
lot of glitz. I think that's a textbook example when
we talk about the differences between a cultural exchange and
an appropriation, one of the elements is making a big

(14:08):
profit off of it. So when you know clothiers were
making these high dollar fashions that were based off of
this originally after Brazilian attire, like that is is one
of the definitions of like where that line gets crossed. Yeah,

(14:28):
So that ill received homecoming performance really affected Miranda. She
had been so universally loved as a performer that this
was really the first time she had been on a
stage and not gotten thunderous applause. But she didn't immediately
go back to the United States. Two months later after
that one bad performance, she performed a new show as

(14:48):
a one week engagement, and one of the songs that
She's sang was a new samba that she had commissioned
that was titled they Say I Came Back Americanized, and
in it, she made fun of that night that she
had ops so badly. She won back her hometown crowd
by showing that she wasn't afraid to make fun of
herself and that she was able to still put on
a fantastic show. But while the Brazilian audience seemed to

(15:13):
forgive Carmen Miranda a little bit because of this, Carmen
Miranda didn't really forgive them. She was still really hurt
by how things had gone. She quickly returned to the
US to pursue her film career, but because of that
self mocking stage show, she was still able to leave
kind of on her own terms, as something of a
success rather than a disgrace, and she was once again

(15:35):
stepping into the role of ambassador. Her presence and films
quickly became a way that the United States could show
some unity between the US and Latin America, making North
and South America look like a united front on the
world stage. As World War two was threatening to draw
more countries into the conflict. That night in Rio was

(15:56):
Carmen's next film, in which she appeared in a full
silver version of her stylized costume, complete with tall fruit
and flower headpiece and just dripping with beads. That Night
in Rio features the first time that Carmen Miranda had
spoken lines in the in the film in the United States,
rather than just appearing in musical numbers. Next, she made

(16:16):
Weekend in Havannah with Alice Faye and Caesar Romero. It
was once again a performance that included both singing and speaking.
As their speaking roles became more frequent, she continued to
play up an exaggerated version of her Brazilian accent and
awkward English language phrasing, even as her English became progressively
more proficient off screen. Yeah, there are a number of

(16:39):
interviews that I've seen with people that co starred with
her in these films. They were like, that's not how
she actually talked. That was like a character that she
was playing for audiences. Her film Down Argentine Way that
we mentioned earlier was actually banned in Argentina due to
its portrayal of the country and culture. Similarly, Weekend in
Havana anger Cubans in making Carmen Miranda the representative of

(17:03):
all Latin American cultures. Hollywood had managed to just lump
them all together and not represent any of them well
at all. I think that connects to sort of the
the greater legacy of her work is that for a
lot of people in the United States, Uh, the way
people imagine specifically Brazil, but a lot of South American

(17:27):
culture is in this like stylized performative Carmen Miranda kind
of way as like a monolith. Yeah, Like she set
a lot of stereotypes of um Latin American women that
still exist today for sure. Carmen Miranda had a career
endangering scandal in the early nineties as she was cranking

(17:50):
out pictures for twentieth Century Fox. She was taking publicity
photos with Caesar Romero and he lifted her up in
the air just in time for photographers to catch up
photo of her without any underwear on. While she was
known as the Brazilian Bombshell and her sex appeal was
part of what was making audiences really responds to her work,
this incident led to a lot of rumors. Really she

(18:13):
had been getting out of costume when she had been
called to the set for photos, so she had run
out really quickly, either forgetting or skipping her undergarments. I
don't know a dress she was wearing, but sometimes you
need to not have on undergarments because there will be
a panteline in the photos. The tabloid press, though, was
really quick to suggest that she was part of a

(18:33):
Hollywood pornography ring, and there was concerned that her career
would never recover. The studio made the decision to stand
by her, and over time though the scandal faded. Yeah,
her dress was actually like it was a really long,
full skirt, so it was kind of just like the
perfect storm of a lift where her skirt whipped up

(18:54):
over her into the air a little bit, like kind
of like a bell, and so it opened up just
enough that they got a full shot. Uh. It was
very embarrassing for her in the studio, and I'm sure
for Caesar Romero it was a mess. And it's still
the kind of thing that happens all the time with
like women getting out of cars to get on the

(19:17):
red carpet and then photographers taking pictures that are basically
up skirts. Yeah, while I wonder like who took that photo,
because somebody shared it with the press and if it
was a publicity photo for the studio, you would think
they would have locked it down. But I clearly don't

(19:37):
know what was going on there and how it got it.
I'm sure someone offered the photographer a lot of money
to try to ruin someone's life. Um. Not long after
all of this, twentieth Century Fox bought out Carmen's contract
from Lee Shubert for sixty dollars. Up to that point,
she was still giving him fifty of all of her earnings,

(20:00):
so there is some debate about how much more beneficial
things were after this buyout. Caesar Romero's agent had actually
urged twentieth Century Fox to get her out of that contract,
but she was doing I think a lot better afterwards,
and at the age of thirty three, she was able
to buy a huge home in Beverly Hills, large enough

(20:22):
that her entire family was able to move in with her.
Ine she made the movie The Gang's All Here that
which was directed by Buzby Berkeley, and this was, as
Berkeley's other movies, a massive spectacle. It featured the song
and dance number of the Lady in the two D
Fruity Hat, which became an odd defining moment in Carmen

(20:42):
Miranda's career. There were lines of chorus girls dancing with
bananas that were bigger than they were and in some
ways it was really the apex of just absurd, over
the top charcter that wound up defining Miranda's career as
a performer. Yeah, it's one of those things that some
people love it because it really is such a nutty spectacle.

(21:03):
I mean, it is wacky to watch that whole song
and dance number. These bananas are like seven feet talp
um and it is I mean, anybody that's seen a
Buzby Berkeley musical knows there's lots of like geometric and
kaleidoscopic arrangement and choreography of all of the chorus women,
and so it's bananas, you know, swinging into frame and
out of frame. But it is definitely like a silly

(21:28):
sort of thing in a way. It's like some people
will say it's fun, she wasn't taking herself too seriously,
and others make the very valid criticism that yes, but
she also makes it seem like all of Latin America
is like crazy people with giant bananas. And I think
for a lot of people who, um, you say Carmen Randa,
and they have a very very vague familiarity, Like the

(21:50):
image that pops into your head probably has the gigantic
bananas in it, yeah, or the hats. I highly recommend
hunting down just for the historical reference of it, because
this was a time, you know, the the late thirties
and early forties had a lot of very gaudy and
wacky musicals and that was exactly the genre that Carmen

(22:13):
Miranda really succeeded in. But it is sometimes weird to
watch him and be like, who came up with this?
And it's Buzby Berkeley. But Miranda's seemingly endless upward trajectory
in the film industry in the United States finally experienced
a drop in the post war years, because as the
US and the globe rebuilt following World War Two, that

(22:36):
flamboyant style that had made Carbon Miranda a perfect distraction
during the war suddenly seemed kind of over the top,
and the audience tastes were shifting to be a little
bit more focused on kind of family values type entertainment
and more about, you know, this quieter approach um. In

(22:57):
the meantime, Carmen was also ready to move on to
trying something new in film. She certainly was aware that
the novelty of her two D fruity hat had worn
thin at that point. Coming up, we will get into
her efforts to reinvent herself after World War Two, but
first we will take a little break for one of
our sponsors. In Carmen, Miranda underwent an image change, or

(23:24):
at least she tried to. She didn't renew her contract
with twentieth Century Fox when it came up, and she
dyed her hair blonde. She may have had some facial
work done as well. Uh, And she was cast in
the film Copacabana with Groucho Marks. In it, she played
not one character but two, and when Copacabana came out
in it didn't do terribly well. While audiences were not

(23:48):
as interested in Miranda's nutty and extravagant act as they
once had been, which was kind of what one of
those characters was that she was playing, it also seemed
that they weren't really interested in seeing her portray another
type of role either. While she was filming Copacabana, Carmen
met her husband, David Sebastian, who worked as a producer's
assistant on the film, and they got married on March seventeenth.

(24:12):
It was not totally a match made in heaven. David
really struggled in the house where he was the only
person who didn't speak Portuguese, and shortly after the marriage,
Carmen was pregnant and she had a miscarriage. Heartbroken at
this loss, she really threw herself into her work and
she took on a schedule that was a lot like
the one she had in her early career. Yeah, so

(24:33):
just like when she was doing Streets of Paris in
New York on Broadway and filming at the same time.
At this point she was filming and doing concerts and
recording music all the time, because even though her film
career was lagging, she was still doing pretty well as
a singer. And she started a comedy called Scared Stiff

(24:55):
with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in ninety three. Several
years into this, she got terrible reviews for it. Her career,
which was having problems, her bumpy marriage, and her miscarriage
were all really taking an emotional toll on the performer,
and for the first time in her life, she started drinking.
By the end of nineteen Carmen Miranda was not well

(25:17):
to treat her depression, which she was going through because
of all of this problematic stuff going on in her life,
which ironically, if you watch her film, she still looks
like the happiest human on earth, so I can't imagine
what her inner turmoil must have been like. At that point,
she was having shock treatments done to treat this depression.

(25:38):
It caused her memory to falter and she started having
stage right Apparently, she would sometimes forget songs and it
really upset her. Uh So she traveled back to Brazil
once more at the urging of her sister, and being
back in Rio with her friends, relaxing she was not
working at that point, had a really positive effect, and
slowly she really started to feel a lot better. She

(26:02):
was thinking about staying for good, but her husband, David,
who had also become her business manager and her agent,
had jobs waiting for her back in Los Angeles. She
needed to go back to the United States to fulfill
these contracts, and as television was growing more ubiquitous with
every day, this offered another chance at renewal for Carmen
and her career. Her husband David, had gotten her guest

(26:25):
spots on a number of programs and television seemed like
a really, really good fit for the Brazilian bombshell. The
Thursday evening of Augusto, Carmen worked late into the night.
She was filming a show with Jimmy Durranty, and because
of the threat of an actor's strike, they were putting
an extra hours to get as much done as they
could before things might be put on hold with the strike,

(26:49):
and at one point, while filming a dance number, Carmen
fell to her knees. She was out of breath and said,
so this is all on film, you can see it. Uh.
She basically says, I can't catch my breath, and Jimmy
Duranty kind of makes a joke and he helped her
up and she continued to dance, and she finished the
show without any other issues. After they wrapped up filming

(27:11):
for the day, Durante and Miranda performed on a set
for the crew, and then a few of the cast
members went to Miranda's home for a private party. After
the party, at about three am, she and her husband
went to bed in their separate bedrooms. Her body was
found at ten thirty am the next morning. Her husband David,
had thought that he would let her sleep late since

(27:31):
she had been up quite late the night before, and
it appeared that she had gone to the bathroom to
remove her makeup, apply night cream, and basically get ready
for bed, and then she collapsed in between the bathroom
and her bedroom. Her physician, Dr. W. L. Mark Ser
determined that she had a heart attack. She was forty six,
and the news of her passing, which was widely reported,
was really shocking to people. Yeah, I think because she

(27:57):
was such an amazing performer. Like the thought of her
not having that incredible life force when she had been
doing her shows literally right up until the day she died,
was just too difficult to parse for some people, and
in the days after her death, thousands of mourners visited
her body at the Beverly Hills Church of the Good
Shepherd before her remains were then transported to Brazil. As

(28:21):
her coffin was delivered from the airport to its final
resting place in Rio de Janeiro, the streets along a
route were crowded with people. The entire nation really mourned
her en mass and over the course of twenty four hours,
her body was visited by more than sixty people who
wanted to pay their respects. In A permanent exhibit celebrating

(28:43):
Carmen Miranda was added to the Museum of Image and
Sound in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has really sort
of seen a resurgence in popularity. People are examining some
of the problems of her career and its representation of
Latin America culture in a in a way that forgives

(29:03):
her a little bit um recognizing kind of the context
of the times and how she wasn't always in control
of the creative aspects of all of these films. Uh,
you know, keep in mind she was making money and
then often still sending it back to Brazil, so to
her and again she never said no to a job.

(29:24):
She turned nothing down. So I think, you know, people
are are kind of taking that into account while still
being aware of the problematic aspects of some of the
images she created. Yeah, it's a that's a tricky one.
When you and I were talking about what we were
going to do for that um that canceled live show,

(29:47):
uh that and I was sort of poking around trying
to generate a list of things that seemed promising. That
was one of the things that was the most interesting
interesting to me as I was um poking around, was
sort of how the perception of her in Brazil and
in a lot of the rest of uh, you know,
neighboring parts of South America has really evolved in the

(30:11):
decades since she was working in since she died. Yeah, Yeah,
it's definitely a shift. I imagine it's one of those things,
and I hope it's one of those things that will
continue to be examined and discussed and learned from. I
think it's a good example, not in that it is
a good thing, but it is a good example of
how quickly things get out of control when you are,

(30:36):
you know, trying to when people who do not know
about a culture are trying to represent it in an
entertainment venue, which was happening a lot. You know, she
was being put in these films, and while she may
have initially adopted her costume, I don't think she designed
all of them going forward, and probably there were a

(30:57):
lot of hands in that particular pie. So I think it's,
like I said, it's good as an example to be
examined of how those things can even if they are
perhaps well intentioned, I don't know what those people were thinking. Um. Well,
and it's also maybe they just didn't care, which is
also very possible. Yeah. It's also a really good example

(31:18):
coming from the other direction of how easy it is
to glom onto this one representation from another culture, and
so like imagine that that is indicative of the entire culture,
and that it's some kind of monolith. Um. Because, like,
like I said earlier, a lot of ways that that,

(31:39):
especially Latino women are still stereotyped, like they trace really
back to directly to Carmen Miranda, Oh for sure. I
mean her first speaking roles in films made in the
US were almost always a hot headed, jealous girlfriend. Um.
And that I mean continued to carry forward and be

(32:02):
like such a stereotype. And it's like, well, um, it
reminds me of an exhibit that I saw. This is
gonna sound totally unrelated, but give me a second. Uh.
An exhibit I saw years and years ago that was
Treasures of the Forbidden City, which was a lot of
pieces from China's Forbidden City that were on display, and

(32:22):
one of them was a huge, huge tapestry that had
been done that was supposed to represent kind of like
China's people in the global along with their global trading partners.
But what I noticed is that like their representations of
other cultures similarly were very simplified and almost arrested in

(32:46):
one position. Like all of the people who were supposed
to be English were dressed like Henry the Eighth, even
though they were standing next to people who are supposed
to be American who were all dressed like they were
in the middle of the Revolutionary War. So it was similar,
really like they glommed onto one aspect of any given
culture and represented all of the people in the that

(33:06):
tapestry as looking that way, even though they were clearly
like completely discordant in terms of the times that they
existed together. And uh so it's this is a problem
that's gone on for a long time and we're still
examining it today. Do you also have some listener mail
for us? I do. It's about the Loomier Brothers. It

(33:27):
is from our listener, Kelly, and she writes, Dear Tracy
and Holly, I have been listening to your podcast for
about a year now, and I love it. Your shows
are always engaging and informative. I listened to your two
part episode about the Loomier brothers several months ago and
was taken with their story, not least because I'm a
photography and cinema buff. The podcast had faded from memory,
and I thought no more about them until early April.

(33:48):
It was then that my husband and I traveled to
France on vacation, splitting our time between Paris and Leon.
When we arrived at the Ladder and we're setting our itinerary,
he casually mentioned that Leon was the place for the
loop year brothers had lived. I had forgotten all about
where their factory had been. I made him walk about
five kilometers to the Lumier Museum, which is housed in
the former villa of Antoine Lumier, their father. The brother's

(34:11):
house was demolished a few decades ago to make way
for a real estate development that never happened. The museum
itself is wonderful, with a history not only of the
Lumier brothers innovations in photography and cinema, but also the
technological advances that preceded the brothers myriad successes in the
still and moving picture industries. She says she won't get

(34:32):
into describing everything in the museum because it's amazing, she said. Instead,
let me get to the most important part. The frontage
of the Lumier factory, where the first ever movie was
shot still stands. It's been preserved inside a glass and
steel structure, and outside are clear markers of where the
first movie was shot, including where the camera would have
had to have been positioned to record the film. She

(34:54):
also sent pictures of it. She said, visiting this museum
and standing in the place where this first movie movie
was was a cinephiles dream. It was a privilege to
experience them both, especially with the background of the research
you've done for the podcast, the details of which came
flooding back as I walked through the exhibits. I recommend
the visit to anyone with even a meager interest in
film or photography. Uh. And then she suggests another topic

(35:19):
for us. But that is really cool. I, like I said,
I have not been to the Lumire Museum, but I
sure want to go now. I wanted to go before.
Now it is doubly so, so thank you so much
for sharing that with us. Kelly. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at History
Podcast at how stuffworks dot com. You can also find
us at missed in history dot com and across the
spectrum of social media as missed in History. So come

(35:41):
to our website explore all of the back episodes of
the show from way before Tracy and I have ever
been here uh, and you can look at show notes
from the ones that Tracy and I have done together.
We look forward to seeing you at missed in History
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how staff works dot com. Mhm hm