Episode 89 : Victoria Riskin (Fay Wray & Robert Riskin)

Today on the Rarified Heir Podcast we are talking to Victoria Riskin about growing up the daughter of Hollywood royalty. We first became of Victoria via her 2019 book, Fay Wray and Robert Riskin : A Hollywood Memoir and were intrigued not only about her actor mom and screenwriter father but in how she wrote it, which we discuss on this episode. We talk about her father’s Oscar winning career writing for Frank Capra and others as well as her mom’s six decade career in movies. From silent films, talkies, pre code, horror movies, comedies and later in AIP exploitation films and television, it’s a distinguished career that involves much more than giant apes named King Kong. Victoria’s mother’s iconic name is kept alive today as its synonymous in current pop culture in comic strips, punk bands and the lyrics from the  Rocky Horror Picture Show.

We also talk to Victoria about her own career as both a psychologist and later as a producer along with her Emmy-winning writer/husband David Rintels. Their  television work including The Last Best Year w/ Mary Tyler Moore and Bernadette Peters, World War II: When Lions Roared w/ John Lithgow, Bob Hoskins and Michael Caine as well as an adaptation of Willa Cather’s My Antonia among others. Along the way we talk about the gone but not forgotten CC Brown’s ice cream parlor in Hollywood, the first years of Palisades High School and if the term “scream queen” is still valid. It’s all up next, on the Rarified Heir Podcast.