Sidebar: Movie Star Edition

Weekly Entertainment Picks: Must-Watch Shows, Essential Reads, and Top Podcasts

This is my weekly roundup of links and recommendations. If we talked IRL, I’d likely derail our entire conversation with “sidebar, have you read | watched | listened | deep dived on this?”

Have you watched?

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes (HBO)

This doc was a really interesting portrait of Elizabeth Taylor in her own words. Drawing on newly-discovered tapes of interviews conducted by journalist Richard Merryman from the 1960s forward, it explores the shift in pop culture of viewing movie stars as unknowable to the hungry gaze to see stars when they’re “just like us” (or hounded by the paparazzi). She emerges as smart, self-aware, and insecure about a talent that appeared as natural as her famous violet eyes in a world where actors were increasingly performing not only their roles, but the “methods” used to create them.