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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Polly Platt: The Invisible Woman

Most people don’t know anything about the woman behind Paper Moon, Terms of Endearment, and Broadcast News, which is why the podcast about her is called Polly Platt: The Invisible Woman. Part of Karina Longworth’s Hollywood-history podcast, You Must Remember This, this 10-episode, stand-alone season is devoted entirely to Platt, partly because her life was a doozy, but also because her trajectory echoes the progress of—and backlashes against—women in film from the 1960s through the 1990s. A producer and set designer, Platt read Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show and talked her then husband, Peter Bogdanovich, into directing it. They worked on the film together—even after Bogdanovich began an affair with one of its stars, Cybill Shepherd. Platt went on to produce for James L. Brooks, write Pretty Baby for Louis Malle, and design the sets of The Witches of Eastwick. She also discovered directors such as Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson. Her story is a wild, sometimes funny, and often terrifying map of 20th-century Hollywood. —Alessandra Stanley

Polly Platt in 1973. Photo: Warner Bros/Photofest.