For nearly 20 years, one of the most acclaimed films ever made was legally forbidden from theaters and television, pulled from circulation by the people who created it. This episode digs into Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 thriller Rear Window as an engineering marvel, a legal battleground, and a psychological trap that makes the audience complicit. It begins with the premise: photojournalist L.B. Jefferies, played by James Stewart, confined to a wheelchair in a Greenwich Village heat wave, watching his neighbors through an open window.

The conversation details the life-sized courtyard built on Paramount's Stage 18, with 31 apartments, 12 of them fully furnished with electricity and running water, a torn-up soundstage floor, a custom drainage system for a single rain scene, and switchable lighting banks for different times of day. It then examines ...