Jonathan Ames' detective novel A Man Named Doll, and its sequel The Wheel of Doll combine the playfulness of Bored to Death (which Ames created) and You Were Never Really Here (which Lynne Ramsay adapted into a film in 2017. It's a tricky balancing act between tones that Ames pulls of with aplomb. Here to talk about why it should be a movie is Aqua…

Paul Chadwick's long-running comics series Concrete is about a man who's transformed into a hulking cement-like monster, who wants to use his newfound power to make a difference... and isn't really sure how to go about it. Comics writer Ted Anderson (The Spy Who Raised Me, Side Effects, Orphan Age), joins us to talk about why saving the world makes…

2016's The Nice Guys was a terrific action comedy, with a smart script by Shane Black, and two charismatic, bankable leads in Ryan Gosling and Russel Crowe. But it barely made its budget back and was quickly forgotten. Screenwriter Scott Myers, who also runs Go Into the Story, the screenwriting blog for The Black list, joins us to talk about why Ho…

Rube Waddell was a pitcher in the early days of baseball with one of the most colorful stories in all of sports. In 1903 alone, he threw 302 strikeouts, won 22 games, started the season sleeping in a firehouse, ended it working as a bartender, and in between starred in a play in which he refused to memorize his lines; met, married, and divorced one…

We're back to kick off season 5 with Preeti Chhibber, multitalented podcaster (Women of Marvel, Desi Geek Girls, Tar Valon or Bust) and author (A Jedi You Will Be, Avengers Assembly, Spider Man's Social Dilemma), who's here to tell us why her favorite Spider-Man movie is a Playstation game. Look for new newest book, Spider-Man's Bad Connection, in …

1984's Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension was a fun, pulpy mess of a sci-fi adventure, which promised us a sequel... which we never got. Nearly 40 years later, screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch wrangled the rights to the character away from the studio and gave us a novelization of Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, the movie he never…

We take a break from the usual format this week to present the Snubby Awards, given to the best films and performance that were not nominated for an Oscar. Douglas Laman, film critic from The Spool, joins me to present and discuss this year's nominees. Films were nominated and winners were chosen by The Dissolve Facebook group, a community of film-…

In the 1890s, a British shipping clerk named Edmund Morel noticed the Belgians were shipping vast quantities of rubber from the Congo, then a Belgian colony, but the only thing they were sending in return were guns, explosives, and chains. Morel uncovered a scandal that shook the world, as it turned out Belgian King Leopold II was running Congo as …

Franklin Roosevelt was wildly popular when he was in office, and is universally acknowledged as one of our greatest presidents. But in 1933, not everyone agreed. Shortly after FDR took office, a cabal of wealthy businessmen who were worried the New Deal would undermine profits, recruited General Smedley Butler — a widely respected WWI hero and crus…

Billy Haines was a silent movie star who made the transition to sound, but when the studio head made the openly gay actor an ultimatum — a sham marriage to a woman, or the end of his movie career. Haines chose love, quitting the movies, holding onto a relationship his friend Joan Crawford called "the happiest marriage in Hollywood," and got the bes…

Boo Morcom was heavily favored to win the gold in pole vault at the 1948 Olympics. But he was playing hurt, in the rain, and missed his shot at the gold. So he tracked down the competitors who beat him, and challenged them all to rematches, just to prove he was the best. Morcom's grandson, former editor-in-chief of Gameological Society and The A.V.…

Mark Olmstead found out he had HIV at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was a death sentence. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he pulled off a string of scams including credit card fraud, insurance fraud, dealing crystal meth, and faking his own death, assuming he’d be dead for real before any of the consequences caught up to him…

For forty years, police in Saskatchewan, Canada were in the habit of arresting Ingdigenous men for minor offenses, or sometimes no reason at all, leaving them to freeze to death. And to this day, the police haven't been held accountable. Comedy writer and performer Tom Murphy joins us with a deadly serious story; the drama behind Canada's deadly "S…

In 1966, an El Paso theater actor bet his screenwriter friend he could produce a horror movie all on his own. The result was Manos: The Hands of Fate, an incoherent, no-budget movie considered one of the worst films ever made. And yet, it did somehow get made, and 50 years later, people are still watching it. Pop culture writer and bad movie evange…

Legendary Old West lawman Wyatt Earp fought at the O.K. Corrall, and then rode off into the sunset... but the story doesn't end there. Scott Bunn, who co-hosts the sports podcast Run That Back and authors the Bob Dylan blog ReclinerNotes.com, joins us to talk about Wyatt Earp resurfacing in 1910's Hollywood, where he worked as a bounty hunter and m…

Robert Smalls was an enslaved sailor on a Confederate ship, until late one night, he hijacked the ship, picked up his family and his crew's, and sailed into enemy lines. He went on to be a naval captain, a war hero, and a Congressman, but most importantly, a free man.

In the 1870s, traveling by train through Palisade, Nevada was a heart-stopping experience. It was a Wild West hive of scum and villainy, with a constant tumult of fistfights, gunfights, and robberies in broad daylight. Except it was all fake — a show put on by the townspeople because they were bored and thought it would be funny. No guest this week…

DC Comics has had a mixed record at the movies, but Boston Globe writer Nick Zaino, host of the podcast Department of Tangents, and first-ever WITNAM guest, returns to tell us why long-running, lesser-known DC title The Spectre is a better bet for the big screen than yet another take on the Joker.

In 2020, a local TV host from Nebraska gained internet fame for a montage of her hilariously blunt interviews with A-list actors from the '70s and '80s. But her story goes far beyond one viral clip, as Drake burst into a male-dominated field and succeeded on her own terms, hosting and producing two TV shows that ran for decades, and interviewing ev…

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so this week we have a true-life story from Kate Ranta, author of Killing Kate: A Story of Turning Abuse and Tragedy into Transformation and Triumph. Her seemingly happy marriage turned into a nightmare of abuse and attempted murder, but she survived and became and activist who's devoted her life to spe…

Something different this week, as we're talking about something that already is a movie: The Moment, a film that's edited in real time by an audience member's brainwaves. Director Richard Ramchurn talks to us about the technology behind his remarkable film, and the hithero-impossible storytelling possibilities it opens up. You can learn more about …

Welcome back to Season 3 of Why Is This Not a Movie?! Every schoolchild knows the story of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk. But less well known is what came next — a tense couple of years in which the Wrights perfected their design for an airplane in secret, worried that someone might steal credit for their world-changing idea. Matt…

We wrap up Season 2 with a remarkable story, as journalist and author Suki Kim tells us about the six months she spent undercover in Kim Jong Il's North Korea, teaching the children of the country's elite while in constant danger of being discovered. She recounted her experiences in a book, Without You, There Is No Us, now hear how she survived und…

In 1856, a 23-year-old woman named Kate Warne walked into the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency and demanded a job. They had never hired a woman to be anything other than a secretary, but she impressed them so much they made her America's first female detective. She caught bank robbers, embezzlers, murderers... and prevented the assassination of Ab…

Dorothy Kilgallen was a beloved entertainment reporter, a regular on What's My Line, when she took a hard left turn into crime reporting. She covered murders and organized crime. She was the only person to interview Jack Ruby after he killed Oswald, and got to see the Warren Commission report even before LBJ. But when she started to challenge the o…

In the 1980s, American journalist Bill Gentile travelled to Nicaragua during the Sandanista revolution, and El Salvador during that country’s decade-long civil war, risking life and limb to tell human stories from these wartorn countries. Now he's written a book, Wait For Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll, and joins us to talk about why…

In the Golden Age of Korean Cinema in the '60s, director Shin Sang-ok and actress Choi Eun-hee were making acclaimed films as a glamorous power couple. But their lives took a turn for the worse as their divorce and new censorship laws hurt both their careers. And then they were both kidnapped... by brutal dictator and rabid cinephile Kim Jong Il. A…

The Russian Revolution wasn't just a political and economic revolution. In the brief moment between the idealism of a revolution that overthrew a monarchy to establish a workers' paradise and the ugly reality of the totalitarian state the USSR became, Russia had its own Roaring 20s, with artists and bohemians exploring the freedom of a society that…

History remembers Genghis Khan as a violent brute, destroying everything in his path. But the truth is more complicated than that. Ostracised from his community as a child, captured and enslaved, he escaped, became a leader, a warrior, united the fractured Mongols, and then conquered an empire twice as large as the Romans. The lifelong military cam…

Friend of the show Scott Bunn (Run That Back) returns so we can co-pitch an adaptation of Lloyd Alexander's delightful YA fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain, which was upending genre tropes only a decade after Tolkein had established them. We discuss Disney's botched attempt to compress the books into The Black Cauldron, give thanks to our 4t…

In 1959, nine friends went on a hike in Russia's Ural Mountains and never returned. Their bodies were found with a bizarre set of injuries, including head trauma, internal bleeding, exposure, and traces of radiation. 60 years later, the Dyatlov Pass Incident is one of history's great unsolved mass deaths. Pop culture writer Lauren Thoman (Collider,…

During the Vietnam War, a student protest at Washington University in St. Louis erupted into violence, with a campus ROTC building being burned down. A student named Howard Mechanic was accused of the crime, and when he was sentenced to federal prison... he vanished. He had been represented by civil rights attorney Louis Gilden, and he and his daug…

In 2012, a fungal meningitis outbreak killed 100 people and infected 750 more. Two doctors at the Center for Disease Control raced against time to stop a nationwide pandemic eight years before the Covid pandemic. Journalist Natalia Megas, whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Washingtonian, and The Daily Beast, joins us to talk about a race-agai…

A quick special episode, in which we honor the best films and performances of 2020 not nominated for an Academy Award. Hear who won this year's Best Snubbed Supporting and Lead Actor and Actress, Best Snubbed Director, Best Snubbed Picture, and winners in three categories of filmmaking ignored completely by the Academy: Best Stuntwork, Best Voicewo…

It's not a secret that Coca-Cola's original formula included cocaine. But what's less well-known is that the soft drink still uses coca leaf, just not the part that gets you high. One plant in all of America is legally allowed to process cocaine—the drug for medical use, and the byproducts for Coca-Cola. Kyle Ryan, TV/film producer and alumni of bo…

A serial killer is targeting underappreciated artists. The twist: he's their art dealer. Emerson Rosenthal, a script consultant who's instagram account, @freemovieideas, is a nonstop font of clever elevator pitches for movies like this one. The second twist? Instead of pitching me the story, he challenges me to take his germ of an idea, and flesh i…

In 1184, two German nobles had a land dispute. They presented their case to the King at a monastery in the town of Erfurt. Dozens of nobles packed into the room... the floorboards gave way... and 100 people plunged into the latrine in the basement. Annie Rauwerda, the mind behind Depths of Wikipedia, takes us through history's number one number-two…

LSD came into vogue in the 1960s, but it came back in a big way in the '90s, as teenagers embraced the cheap, long-lasting high it produced. Jon Reid, host of Radio Free Brooklyn's Race to the Bottom, joins us to talk about how to make a film about the second wave of LSD that's neither D.A.R.E.-style scare tactic, nor rose-tinted nostalgia.…

In the year 2000, a secret military task force discovered Al Qaeda operatives working in the U.S., possible including the 9/11 hijackers. They claim they were ignored or silenced by the government. The government claims they never found anything worth silencing. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. This week Shane Harris, Washington Post senior …

2,750 New Yorkers died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, but in 2004, the number was updated to 2,751. Sneha Philip was a young doctor who lived in lower Manhattan who was last seen on 9/10/01, and her final fate remains a mystery. Did she run into the towers to help and die in the collapse? Was she murdered the night before and forgotten in the c…

In the '80s and '90s, Spider Robinson wrote a series of books about Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, a watering hole whose regulars included time travelers, aliens, mythological creatures, and the occasional talking dog. Ethan Poschman, co-host of the podcast A Special Presentation, Or Alf Will Not Be Seen Tonight, joins us to talk about why this story…

In the mid 1980s, baseball had a coke problem, as cocaine use was rampant throughout the major leagues. When Commissioner Peter Ueberroth cracked down and banned several players, one enterprising minor-league owner struck on a seemingly brilliant idea—sign up a bunch of disgraced players to attract fans. Could this ragtag of misfits band together a…

Greetings, true believers!!! The cultural dominance of Marvel Comics has made Stan Lee a beloved American icon, but his creative partner through Marvel's formative years, illustrator/writer Jack Kirby, who co-created the Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and whose ambitious storytelling and energetic artwork came to define the superhero comic fo…

Graham Greene wrote 1949's The Third Man, considered one of the best films of all time. But at the end of his life, Greene became fixated on a real-life story that parallelled his movie, when two British spies defected to the USSR in the 1950s, and Mi6 suspected they had a third man who had tipped them off. That man, Kim Philby, let a remarkable li…

King Arthur can pull a sword from a stone, unite the Britons, and quest for the Holy Grail... but can he surf? Bitter Karella, creator of graphic novels including Misunderstanding Comics and Malleus Maleficarum; co-host of the podcast A Special Presentation, or Alf Will Not Be Seen Tonight, which revisits '80s cartoons based on newspaper comics; an…

Those hip new neighbors you've been hanging out with? They might be aliens. And they want you to play their role-playing game. Author and interactive fiction game creator Steph Cherrywell joins us to talk about Interstellar Pig, William Sleator's 1984 YA sci-fi book, and why it needs a big-screen adapation.…

The king is unwell. His sister is insane. Her son, the heir to the throne, is in the thrall of an all-corrupting villain. His sister is the kingdom's only hope, and to save her, please the gods, and ensure the kingdom's future, our hero has to die for his country. Four times. Author and action-movie-fight-scene reviewer TG Shepherd (@tgshepherdvan,…

In May of 2020, a blundering American private security company tried to invade Venezuela. It went even worse than you'd expect, with their speedboat-based invasion thwarted by a local fisherman. Doug Woycechowsky returns to talk about why this has the makings of a great absudist comedy, drawing on everything from Airplane! to the Marx Brothers to I…

Somen Banerjee was a classic American success story — in founding Chippendales, the male stripper troupe, he tapped into a brand new market for exotic dancing that had previously catered only to men. But when the competition showed up, things got ugly, as Banerjee threatened to burn down clubs that booked rival acts, and eventually had a partner-tu…

While Shakespeare was putting on some of the most revered theater in history at the Globe, across town the Red Bull Theater was putting on bawdy comedies, scandalous political satire, plays that were just the funny bits from other plays, and letting women perform on stage. London-based comedian Paul Savage takes us back to a 17th-century London whe…