You Must Remember This: Podcast Host Brings Film Tour to Kansas City

Karina Longworth, host of the Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This, will appear at Screenland Armour in Kansas City on Nov. 11 for a screening of Key Largo. The 1948 film was directed by John Huston. Longworth is taking the podcast's current season to indie theaters across the country this fall.

You Must Remember This has run since 2014. Past seasons have covered the Manson murders, 1980s and 1990s erotic thrillers, and the careers of Sammy Davis Jr., Joan Crawford, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

The current season, titled 'The Bisexuals,' follows singer Libby Holman and actor Montgomery Clift alongside other stars of the period, including Tallulah Bankhead. Longworth first read about Holman in 2020. She said her biographers treated Holman's sexuality and race superficially or used outdated framing, and that publishers rejected a book pitch with the response, 'No one has ever heard of this person.' She shifted the project to a podcast structured as a dual biography of Holman and Clift.

Key Largo connects to Holman through the song 'Moanin' Low,' which Claire Trevor performs in the film. Longworth said the song became a signifier of a woman brought low by her sexuality. The screening ties into the season's shift from Holman's 1930s notoriety to the 1940s, just before Clift enters her story.

Ticket buyers at Screenland receive a discount code for season merchandise, which includes a perfume based on Holman's Jungle Gardenia scent. Longworth said she spent a year studying film preservation at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, where she wrote and delivered film introductions for screenings. She had previously done smaller-scale events around her book about Howard Hughes, Seduction, and a series of programs with American Cinematheque in Los Angeles and the British Film Institute.

Longworth said she had not seen Victor Fleming's Reckless before recording the season, nor Lonely Hearts, the Montgomery Clift film adapted from Nathaniel West's novella Miss Lonelyhearts. Her Nov. 11 appearance at Screenland Armour includes the Key Largo screening.