How Podcaster Karina Longworth Does Money

The host of “You Must Remember This” discusses what’s changed, and what hasn’t, since she’s broken through

Hi! Can you introduce yourself in a general way?

My name is Karina Longworth and I am the writer, creator and host of You Must Remember This, a podcast about 20th century Hollywood distributed by the Panoply network.

How did you get into podcasting?

I used to work at a place called Spout, which was trying to be a social network for cinephiles, and I had regularly contributed to a podcast that they had started before I had gone to work there, which was nominated for a Webby award and was probably one of the first big chat show style film podcasts. But that’s really different from the podcast I do now, and there was a gap of about 5 years in between them.

The show I do now grew out of a general frustration I was having as a writer. I was having trouble getting excited about freelancing, in part because all most publications seemed to want was to engage with the news cycle/the constant stream of new movies coming out, and I was increasingly really only interested in old Hollywood. I tried a bunch of things over the course of about a year and a half: I taught, I worked on a couple of commissioned non-fiction books, I started writing Hollywood historical fiction. But nothing felt quite right.

At the same time, as a consumer, I was starting to gravitate towards podcasts as a replacement for the kind of stuff I used to get from blogs. I started hearing in my head the sound of what would become You Must Remember This: an audio documentary of sorts about old Hollywood, told in a cinematic style. I knew there wasn’t anything like that around, and I knew as a podcast listener I was always looking for new podcasts to listen to, so I figured if I could figure out how to make it, there would be room for it in the world. And it would give me an excuse to do the only thing I really wanted to do, which was to research old Hollywood all day every day.

I’m so glad you went this route, because you have a wonderful voice for audio. Your enunciation is dreamy.

Thank you!

Did you have any concerns about issues such as start-up costs?

There really were no costs. I borrowed a microphone from my boyfriend, who had some prosumer recording equipment that he had used for music, and I did everything myself. I think I paid about a hundred dollars for the first podcasting hosting solution, but that was it.

Were you Marc Maron-ing, broadcasting out of your garage? Or how did you deal with setting up good acoustics?

From the beginning, and still today, I’ve always recorded wherever I was living. At my house in Los Angeles I set up the microphone in my office, and at one point I built a fake recording booth out of a folding screen and some foam, but it sort of fell apart and I didn’t notice much of a difference.

Since May I’ve been living in London, and I record out of my home office here, without even a terrible folding screen recording booth. If the acoustics on my show sound good, that’s great! But I’m not doing anything in the recording process to get there, other than use a decent microphone and a mixer. The space I record in is just kind of an echoey room.

How has moving to the Panoply network changed your podcasting experience? It’s been a relatively recent development, right?

I think Panoply does have studios in New York, but I’ve never used them.

I joined Panoply in September. For a year before that I was part of a different network called Infinite Guest, which was started by American Public Media. I had one advertiser during the Infinite Guest period, but it was a sponsor who had come to me — one of the reasons why I left Infinite Guest for Panoply was because there was not much happening on the monetization front at IG, and it was apparent that Panoply had a really robust system set up for ad sales. The podcast was only fully independent from its launch in April 2014 until September 2014 — it got noticed really quickly, and as part of the initial wave of attention, the Infinite Guest deal happened.

The things that are different with Panoply include: Until September, I edited every episode of the show myself, and now as part of my deal with them an editor named Henry Molofsky who works at Panoply edits the show. And the other big change is that the show now has on average two sponsors per episode, so it has gone from something that barely allowed me to break even on the money I was spending on things like books and DVDs, to something that is bringing in real money.

That’s great! Does the money come in the form of a salary?

No, it’s a revenue split.

Can you explain that a little bit?

Panoply’s ad teams sells sponsorship slots on my show, and then they take a cut of the proceeds, and then I get the rest.

When you started out, did you envision this as a hobby or as a central part of your career? And how do you view the show now?

I didn’t know what was going to happen or what I was doing, really. I just knew I was not happy with the options that were out there for me in terms of work in the spring of 2014, and I knew I wanted to create something that was, for better or for worse, all mine creatively. I had quit a job as a film critic about a year and a half before that, for a lot of reasons, but one of the key reasons why I wasn’t out there looking for other full-time jobs in journalism was that I was really frustrated with the limitations on types of content that editors and publications were willing to pay for.

Once I had this idea for a new format for the kind of research and writing I wanted to do, I felt like it couldn’t hurt to try to see if I could do it. So I was in a not-great career place, and I saw the podcast as a kind of calling card of something that wasn’t out there that I could do. But I wasn’t thinking long-term. If anything, I was thinking incredibly short-term. It was like, “I am miserable right now. I need to make something in the hope that I will feel less miserable.”

Now, I feel like it is definitely the center of what I do professionally. Researching and producing the show has always been a full time job for me since the beginning. Over the last few months, I’ve lessened my work load (by doing things like having Henry do the editing) so that I can work on a book which I’m contracted to write. But I definitely got the book deal because of the podcast, and I know that my ability to reach people every week through the podcast will be very valuable when this book is released, and hopefully when future books are released. So I’ve basically created a new career for myself with the podcast, and then the podcast has also created other work opportunities.

Do you think of yourself as an entrepreneur, or had you thought of yourself that way before you embarked on this particular adventure? I know you freelanced for a while, and freelancing is inherently somewhat risky.

I don’t think I would use the word “entrepreneur.” When I was working for startups in the 00s and then later as an employee of a newspaper chain, I saw that there was value in being an owner. But I haven’t thought of, and still don’t think of, the podcast as a business, because I think businesses need to scale. All I want is to be able to make enough money to have it make sense to keep making the show.

That’s interesting. I suppose I do listen to some podcasts that have scaled: shows like Filmspotting that now have spin-offs, for example. But I hadn’t distinguished among them that way before.

I just don’t have a compulsion to expand, really. Filmspotting, for example, does live events, as do a lot of larger podcasts. I’ve had offers to do those, and I’ve been told they can be lucrative, but as of now there is no upside for me in trying to do them. I have way too much work to do as it is, and I don’t feel comfortable with public speaking, so no matter how much money they could bring in or value they could have as a promotional tool, it’s just not worth the added stress for me. That’s sort of where I’m at right now: figuring out how to keep going without losing ground, but also without adding more stress for myself.

How would you characterize your attitude toward money, generally? Is it a means to an end, in your mind? Is it comfort or safety, or something to exchange for pleasure and fun, or something else altogether? And are you generally a saver or a spender?

The fact that the show is now earning money legitimizes it to a certain extent, for me. I don’t know if I would be able to continue to put the energy into doing it at this point if it was at the financial point it was at a year ago.

It’s a funny situation that I’m in right now, because I was paid an advance for the book I sold which is enough for me to live off of for the period in which I’m contracted to write the book, so whatever the podcast earns, I’m using to hire people to help me with it and with the book. I brought on a production assistant recently who does a lot of the administrative and social media stuff, and some research, and I think I’m going to need to hire someone soon to do some research for me on the book that I can’t do from London. So, right now money gives me the luxury of doing slightly less work myself, which is another way of saying that I have to reinvest profits into just getting the work done.

I would say generally that I tend to expand my spending to match what’s coming in, but I’m not, like, buying handbags — I’m going on research trips, paying people decently, etc.

The book is about Howard Hughes? He had an interesting approach toward money.

Howard Hughes and his time in Hollywood and his relationships with actresses is the hook I’m using to basically talk about what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood during the period he was active there — roughly the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s.

What was your take on The Aviator?

I haven’t seen it since it came out. I know I need to re-watch it at some point soon, and some of my research has brought out disputes about its accuracy in certain places. I remember finding it interesting that Scorsese was making a film in the styles of Hollywood film from the period he was depicting, but I don’t remember it well on a story level.

I hope you go into Hughes’ relationship with money in the book. I always appreciate those details in your podcast, like the ones in the recent episode about Dorothy Parker. Finding out that she left $20,000 to Martin Luther King Jr. in her will, for example, told us so much about who she was and what she valued at the end of her life.

Oh, thanks!

You don’t have to answer this if it’s too personal but I’m also curious how being in a romantic relationship with the Star Wars universe has changed things for you too.

What do you mean?

I read that you are dating Rian Johnson, who’s writing and directing the next Star Wars movie.

That’s true. I’m just not sure what you mean by changed … we’ve been together for almost 5 years, and our lives have both changed during that time. Could you be more specific?

I guess I imagined that living in LA as a somewhat-struggling writer/critic must be somewhat different than being romantically involved with someone who has gone from an up-and-comer himself to someone who is quite established. Do you feel pressured to spend more, or to maintain a certain lifestyle, now that you’ve both broken through? Are you interacting with different, more successful Hollywood types, and does that affect your choices or thoughts about money?

This is pretty complicated stuff but I will try to answer as simply as possible.

When Rian and I started dating, I had a full time job and was getting paid a decent salary. I wasn’t struggling. I couldn’t afford luxuries, but I didn’t need them. I had grown up with the mentality that there’s no reason to buy anything expensive when the cheap version will do the job, and that’s still something I deal with. Meanwhile, Rian was doing better than me, but he was just beginning to dip a foot into a more stable Hollywood career. He had made two films and was finishing his third, which turned out to be success, but for the first year-plus of our relationship, it certainly was not possible to predict that he would be directing Star Wars four years later.

It’s difficult for me to have perspective on this, because while our lives have definitely changed (I’m talking to you from London right now only because we’re here to make Star Wars), almost everything is still the same. Like, I’m wearing pants that I bought at a thrift store and a Uniqlo sweater right now. Most of my life is the opposite of glamorous, and the rare situations like premieres or interactions with famous people mostly make me feel uncomfortable, because I’m not very socially adept, I’m not professionally good looking, and I spend most of my time by myself reading books, so it’s hard for me to not feel like a weirdo.

We don’t spend a lot of money on status symbols: We still both drive beat-up economy cars when we’re in LA. I spend almost all of my time by myself working. I may be doing that work in a house that’s being rented through the production of the sequel to the biggest film of all time, but I don’t think about that when I’m struggling to get a podcast episode finished by myself in a room.

Last question: what movie do you want to win Best Picture on Sunday and what movie do you think will win?

I don’t feel like I’ve been following the race closely enough to know what will win. The only choice that I would be excited about would be Mad Max.

Because it was a personal favorite or because it would be such an off-kilter choice for the Academy?

I think it’s the film that’s nominated that embodies what expensive films should be: it’s visually and technologically innovative, it has movie stars giving exciting performances, and it’s hugely satisfying on a level of spectacle while still embodying a completely personal vision on the part of the director. None of the other films nominated feel that exciting to me. I liked The Big Short. I didn’t like the other nominees that I’ve seen.

OK great! Thanks so much for chatting.

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