Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts. 

As an Oscar-nominated production designer, screenwriter, producer and executive who put her stamp on some of the greatest and most loved films of the 1970s and 80s – including Paper Moon, Bad News Bears, Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, The Witches of Eastwick and more—Polly Platt had a major impact on the careers of Barbra Streisand, Tatum O’Neal, Garry Marshall, Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson. She also lived an epic Hollywood life off-screen; her personal life was the stuff of a Great American Novel, full of romances, heartbreak, alcoholism and the challenges of adapting to cataclysmic cultural change as an independent, professional woman – and single mom. And yet, despite all of this, if you know Polly Platt’s name today, it’s probably because, in 1970, her husband and creative collaborator Peter Bogdanovich had an affair with Cybill Shepherd while shooting the film that made both Bogdanovich and Shepherd major stars of their era, The Last Picture Show. But Platt was much more than a jilted wife: she was the secret, often invisible-to-the-public weapon behind some of the most loved American “auteur” films (many of them comedies, directed by men) of the last decades of the 20th century. 

Drawing on Platt’s unpublished memoir (which remained unfinished when she died in 2011), as well as ample interviews and archival research, The Invisible Woman will tell Polly Platt’s incredible story from her perspective, for the first time. A trailblazer in jobs rarely held by women in Hollywood to that point, Polly Platt’s story helps us understand the obstacles preventing gender equality behind the scenes in Hollywood — in the 1970s through the 1990s, and in the present day — and allows us to contemplate what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood during a time when the feminist movement may have been remaking American society to some extent, but failed to make major inroads in the movie industry.

Today, we’ll begin with a look at how Polly Platt’s legacy was appraised when she died in 2011. Then we’ll go back in time to tell Polly’s story from the start, beginning with her Revolutionary Road-esque childhood in Europe and America as the neglected daughter of two alcoholics; to her years studying scenic design in environments in which women weren’t welcome; the secret pregnancy that halted her formal education, and the early marriage that took her West and cemented her desire to tell stories through design. Throughout, we’ll talk about how Platt’s experiences, as the product of an American military family of the 1950s—and the daughter of a mother who had been forced to abandon a career for motherhood––shaped her view of gender roles and relations, and her idea of what it meant to be the wife of an important man.