FishbowlLA

Karina Longworth’s December 2012 LA Weekly exit — and the long arc to You Must Remember This

By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, December 2012

In mid-December 2012, LA Weekly film critic Karina Longworth announced she was leaving the staff to go freelance. Her stated reason was that a book project had come along — a Cahiers du Cinema commission on Meryl Streep — that she wanted to make her priority. The original FishbowlLA framing noted that the LA Weekly film-editor position she was vacating was one of the choicer film-criticism postings still available in the LA market.

Then

Longworth’s exit from LA Weekly capped a multi-year run as the paper’s film editor and lead critic. She had built a reputation as one of LA’s sharpest younger film writers across the broader Voice Media Group alt-weekly system. Her freelance plans included a continuing relationship with LA Weekly plus the Streep book for Cahiers du Cinema’s English-language program — a follow-up to the George Lucas overview she had completed in 2011 for the same imprint, which Phaidon Press had published in 2012.

The film-editor opening she was leaving behind was, as the original FishbowlLA piece noted, one of the more-sought film-criticism postings on the LA market. The Orange County Register’s parallel full-time film-critic slot was also expected to fill at around the same time. The 2012 LA film-criticism market was still operating on the alt-weekly-plus-daily-paper structure that had supported a substantial bench of full-time critics across the preceding decade.

Now

Longworth has gone on to become one of the most-cited LA-based film historians of her generation. Her You Must Remember This podcast, which she launched in 2014 — eighteen months after the LA Weekly exit documented in the original piece — has been one of the most-acclaimed Hollywood-history audio series of the decade and a half since. The show has covered Manson-era Hollywood, blacklist-era Hollywood, the Polly Platter / Peter Bogdanovich circle, the Howard Hughes story, and many other detailed historical reconstructions of the studio era.

The Meryl Streep book that was the proximate cause of her 2012 LA Weekly departure was published as Masters of Cinema: Meryl Streep in 2013. Longworth’s broader Cahiers du Cinema portfolio has continued across the years. She has additionally published Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, which got mainstream-trade attention in 2018, and has remained a recurring byline across major film outlets.

LA Weekly itself went through ownership transitions across the decade after Longworth’s departure. The paper’s 2017 sale and the subsequent staff-purge under the new ownership was a substantial diminishment of the alt-weekly’s film coverage — exactly the kind of institutional collapse the 2012 piece could not have predicted. The film-editor position itself has effectively dissolved in the years since.

The 2012 FishbowlLA framing — which treated the LA Weekly film-editor slot as a continuing prestige posting — reads now as an artifact of an alt-weekly economy that was already collapsing. Longworth’s decision to leverage the moment toward independent book work and (eventually) the podcast was, in retrospect, a clear-eyed read of where film criticism’s center of gravity was actually heading.

Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.

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