INCREMENT VICE - EPISODE #9: "...she's gone, man..." with Alicia Malone (Author, TCM Host)

Near the end of Douglas Sirk’s 1954 Technicolor melodrama, Magnificent Obsession, Otto Kruger makes a pretty heavy declaration:

We agree that’s a sentiment that our pal Doc Sportello would be in a nodding, bleary-eyed acquaintance with, drawn inevitably as he is to the flame of beloved ex-old Shasta Fay Hepworth; it’s also something Bigfoot Bjornsen, Hope Harlingen, and the rest of Pynchon’s alliteratively named rogue’s gallery of drop-outs and dopers and heroes and hopefuls understand: “once you find the way, you’ll be bound.”

They’re bound all right, though magnificent isn’t a word they’d probably use, what with their hopes and dreams all being squashed beneath the boot of time and time’s mercenary, The Golden Fang. But obsessions can be magnificent. Whether focused on a person or a time or maybe just a screen flicker at 24 frames per second, to passionately dedicate yourself to something you love can unlock doors you never even knew where there, sending you tumbling into worlds you never knew existed.

That’s something our host would know a thing or three about; our guest Alicia Malone does, too. From sitting in the cave-dark of a theater for the first time to jockeying a video store to fanatically freaking about favorite films, Travis and Alicia understand obsession. How it can be magnificent. How it can be inherent.

“Once you find the way, you’ll be bound.” Boy, don’t we know it, Otto.

A film reporter, broadcaster, historian, author, podcaster, and “self-confessed movie geek," Alicia Malone has talked about film on the Today show, NPR, MSNBC, ABC’s Academy Awards Red Carpet Preshow, CNN’s THE MOVIES docuseries, and her own show Indie Movie Guide for Fandango. She was the host of the late, the great, the never to be forgotten FilmStruck (as well as the host and producer of the The FilmStruck podcast); she is now a host on Turner Classic Movies and TCM Imports, and (seriously, the lady never sleeps) the podcast Magnificent Obsession, in which she talks to people with below-the-line jobs in the film industry about how they got their start and how movies shaped their lives. Additionally, she’s written two amazing books that are an incredible resource for film fanatics, BACKWARDS AND IN HEELS: THE PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE OF WOMEN WORKING IN FILM and THE FEMALE GAZE: ESSENTIAL MOVIES MADE BY WOMEN. You can buy both books here.