When They Were Making It

By 1950, MGM was done with Judy Garland — and so, it seemed, was Hollywood. A Star Is Born was the film that was supposed to change all of that. After a devastating breakdown, the end of her studio contract, and an...

Veronica Lake was one of the most unforgettable faces of 1940s Hollywood: blonde, beautiful, elusive, with a curtain of hair falling across one eye. Paramount turned that image into a sensation. But behind the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

<p>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.</p><p>Before he became...

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...

<p>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...

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...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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.<br><br></p><p>By January 1961, Marilyn Monroe had lost almost everything...