Conversations Across Time
The podcast One Handshake Away resonated on such a tectonic level for me, it’s hard to believe it runs just eight episodes. It’s a project conceived and hosted by Peter Bogdanovich, an acclaimed director, actor and general participant in the saga of the film industry whose import I had very little knowledge of before I first discovered it. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and if anything in retrospect I probably knew him best for his role as Dr Elliot Kugferberd (aka Dr. Melfi’s therapist) on the Sopranos. But he’d actually begun his foray into the cinematic universe by writing about film and the people responsible for them, and early in his career he recorded interviews with legends like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and pretty much the full roster of any Film 101 course.
The concept of this podcast series was to sit down with respected contemporary directors, and to explore the work of the legends of old who inspired their own work, intertwining the old interviews with the new ones. Bogdanovich died unexpectedly in 2022 before they’d finished recording all the episodes, and the baton was picked up by Guillermo del Toro, with the intention of honoring this last piece of his legacy by seeing it through to the end.
The experience is striking: Bogdanovich speaking directly with his peers decades earlier, and then hearing him in old age talking with modern equivalents as they listen back to those earlier tapes. Two different vantage points, but the same heartbeat: conversations across time, creatives talking to creatives about the creative process and experience of living life in pursuit of creation.
Listening, I felt the echoes in what I was trying to do, without fully knowing it, with my own podcasts that I’d recorded on Jolt Radio over the course of two years leading into the pandemic. Sitting down with artists and other creatives, not as an outsider collecting soundbites, but as someone who’s lived in the trenches too. Hoping that if another creative stumbles across it years from now, they’ll feel less alone. Maybe they’ll find a spark, or a piece of themselves, in someone else’s story.