UnFictional

First… there’s a story that Joanna Solotaroff‘s mother, Claudia, once told her; a story so shocking that Joanna impulsively pushed her in the street when she heard it. (Mom was fine) The story goes like this… When Claudia was a young woman in disco-era Minneapolis, she met a guy in a Bee Gees suit who invited her to his house for dinner. What followed was one …

There’s an obscure monument in London, tucked within a small park behind a church. It’s easy to miss, just a few humble rows of tiles commemorating some brave souls who died while saving others. Each tile has a handful of lines describing the moment when the event happened. It’s called The Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice. Most of the tiles reference events that happened a …

In this story from the Love + Radio podcast, a chance meeting in the Nevada desert that leads to a series of court battles that lasted for over 30 years.
Love + Radio comes from producer Nick Van der Kolk. He and his collaborators make strange and intense sound stories while aggressively bending and breaking almost every rule of conventional radio. Plus their topics are bloodier, stranger and …

The ‘Robbers Cave’ experiment has been cited for many years as a definitive study of inter-group conflict. It was lead by psychologist Muzafer Sherif, who staged the experiment at a summer camp in an Oklahoma state park. Local boys arrived with no knowledge of the fact that they were being studied. They were split into two groups, given team names, and assigned to separate quarters. …

In an attempt to advance his career in Hollywood, a screenwriter finds himself implausibly in Auschwitz. As his film project  — which has nothing to do with the infamous death camp — implodes, the screenwriter sees his life unraveling on a revolving road to nowhere.

Photo by Michal Story
This episode was produced by Joe Frank and written in collaboration with Michael Meloan. It was mixed by Ray Guarna, …

While looking for ideas on Craigslist, radio producer Emily Hsiao finds a post from a man looking to remove a Swastika tattoo from his arm. Needing to find out the story behind the ad, she meets a man named Bruce. While the two of them sit in his truck, he looks back on a life spent in and out of prison, and he talks about the tattoo …

Whenever Liza would get in a serious relationship with a man, she would introduce him to her mother. Liza’s mom Peggy, like many parents, would quickly offer unsolicited advice about whether the guy was a suitable match for her daughter. The frustrating thing for Liza was, her mother was almost always right. That’s because for 26 years Peggy had been a foreign service officer for …

In our first story we meet Angielyn Hamilton Lowe.
Nowadays she’s a working mom who just bought her first home, but back in college, Angielyn Hamilton Lowe was better known for her alter ego – Ivy, the Mistress of Metal. Most of the students at her small liberal arts college couldn’t have cared less about Welcome to the Metal, Angie’s weekly heavy metal radio show. But for a few dozen …

Legendary radio storyteller Joe Frank presents A Conversation, his newest program produced for UnFictional. Let yourself get drawn into this surreal, disturbing and and hilarious discussion. It’s an examination of race, religion, sex and more that walks a fine line between fiction and reality.
A Conversation was recorded and mixed by Ray Guarna, edited in collaboration with Michal Story.

In 2005, director Richard Shephard took his film “The Matador” to the Sundance Film Festival.  While he’d made three indie films and directed some cable TV, his dark comedy with Pierce Brosnan as a washed up assassin and Greg Kinnear as his unwitting accomplice was his last, best hope to make it into the big time.  KCRW’s Matt Holzman followed Richard during that tense week, and produced …