This drawing is based on a real photo, but it’s not a photo of Milford. It’s actually a photo of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856. We could not locate any photos of Milford from the right period that had the right quality of desolation. (See also: note 23.)

Images taken from a real science film from 1940 about endocrine glands, edited to seem as if they are related to the surrounding images referring to Brinkley’s procedure.

Images taken from a fake science film called “Rejuvenation Through Gland Transplanting” which Brinkley almost certainly paid for and then distributed to movie theaters all over the U.S. Stittsworth and son toured with the film in person as “proof” of the operation’s efficacy.

Images taken from a real science film from 1940 about endocrine glands, edited to seem related to the surrounding images that refer to Brinkley’s procedure.

Images taken from a fake science film called “Rejuvenation Through Gland Transplanting” which Brinkley almost certainly paid for and then distributed to movie theaters all over the U.S. Stittsworth and son toured with the film in person as “proof” of the operation’s efficacy.

The book is real, but we hand-copied the fonts from Wood’s book, designed the chapter titles in Photoshop, printed them on vintage book paper, and glued them into its pages to film these chapter breaks. We went to all this trouble because it’s important that we establish this book as a real, physical book that carries with it an apparent credibility, and because we are establishing that we are “adapting” this book and using large portions of its text as our own narration (which is only partly true). Some of the chapter titles are repurposed from Wood’s book. “Something New Under the Sun” is Wood’s title for his Chapter V, which covers the same period I’m covering in the next few scenes.

This is a real photo, but it’s not a photo of Milford. It’s actually a photo of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856. We could not locate any photos of Milford from the right period that had the right amount of desolation. (See also: note 8.)

James Reardon is not a historian by profession or training, but he did spend many years producing a manuscript about Brinkley, for which he did a lot of research and amassed a big archive which he was kind enough to share with us. We gave him this “lower third” ID for two reasons: (1) we didn’t know what else to say; (2) “Kansas Historian” makes him sound more legit than “guy who wrote an unpublished manuscript thirty years ago.” In other words: for expert interviews to work, you have to buy that the person speaking is an “expert” (which, in our opinion, Reardon is).

A real science film which has nothing to do with Brinkley and is probably also from the wrong time period: “Dialogue With Life,” year unknown.

This image is not of Brinkley and a patient; it is from a film made in 1934 about Brinkley’s fishing exploits titled “Making A World’s Record.”

These home movies were taken in the 1940s by John William Worrall at the Children Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Obviously, they are used here in a way that strongly implies what we are seeing here are images, probably taken by Brinkley himself given the home movie quality, of the hospital in Milford. It’s a sneaky substitution, and one which we did to give a more human feeling to the story we are telling. After all, Brinkley did have real patients and supporters who loved him. We wanted to give them faces.

To claim that “everyone knew that Buster Keaton was no stranger to the power of goat glands” is pretty sneaky in the context of this sequence of celebrity endorsements. We’ve never read anywhere that Buster Keaton had the procedure or had anything at all to say about it. However, the fact that Keaton included this gag shows how well-known the goat gland cure was by 1922!

This church was drawn to match the following archival, which isn’t from Milford at all. It’s from the 1934 film “Making a World’s Record.”

These home movies were taken in the 1940s by John William Worrall at the Children Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Obviously, they are used here in a way that strongly implies what we are seeing here are images, probably taken by Brinkley himself given the home movie quality, of the hospital in Milford. It’s a sneaky substitution, and one which we did to give a more human feeling to the story we are telling. After all, Brinkley did have real patients and supporters who loved him. We wanted to give them faces.

This image of Brinkley shaking hands is taken from the 1934 film “Making a World’s Record.”

These home movies were taken in the 1940s by John William Worrall at the Children Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Obviously, they are used here in a way that strongly implies what we are seeing here are images, probably taken by Brinkley himself given the home movie quality, of the hospital in Milford. It’s a sneaky substitution, and one which we did to give a more human feeling to the story we are telling. After all, Brinkley did have real patients and supporters who loved him. We wanted to give them faces.

Image of goat taken from a real science film from 1940 about endocrine glands, edited to seem as if it is related to the surrounding images referring to Brinkley’s procedure.

A real science film which has nothing to do with Brinkley and is probably also from the wrong time period: “Dialogue With Life,” year unknown.

These home movies were taken in the 1940s by John William Worrall at the Children Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Obviously, they are used here in a way that strongly implies what we are seeing here are images, probably taken by Brinkley himself given the home movie quality, of the hospital in Milford. It’s a sneaky substitution, and one which we did to give a more human feeling to the story we are telling. After all, Brinkley did have real patients and supporters who loved him. We wanted to give them faces.

This radio broadcast is actually from later (c. 1939) and was recorded at a different radio station (XERA) Brinkley built in Mexico. We know of no extant recordings of KFKB broadcasts.

This radio broadcast is actually from later (c. 1939) and was recorded at a different radio station (XERA) Brinkley built in Mexico. We know of no extant recordings of KFKB broadcasts. We’re doing our best to edit this broadcast to make sense in 1923, and to make Brinkley seem to be talking about impotence and the goat gland cure. In fact he’s talking about all kinds of other hokum, mostly having to do with the prostate.

Gene Fowler is not exactly a “radio historian,” although the reason we interviewed him was because he co-authored a book called Border Radio containing a section on Brinkley. It might be more fair to call him a Texas historian. Or a storyteller. Or a collector of odd Americana, mostly from Texas and often involving radio and eccentric characters.

The jazz music here is super inaccurate. Brinkley never would have played anything like this; his version of “sexy/badass” music was more like yodellers and singing cowboys. But we needed something that reads at least a little “sexy” to a contemporary audience, and old country music is…. cool, but not especially sexy.

This radio broadcast is actually from later (c. 1939) and was recorded at a different radio station (XERA) Brinkley built in Mexico. We know of no extant recordings of KFKB broadcasts. We’re doing our best to edit this broadcast to make sense in 1923, and to make Brinkley seem to be talking about impotence and the goat gland cure. In fact he’s talking about a prostate operation which later became a specialty of his.

Imagery taken from “Hear and Now” (1958). Unrelated to Brinkley and from the wrong era.

We only had fragments of this album scanned from different sources, so we Photoshopped all of them together to reproduce what we think the album might have looked like.

This radio broadcast is actually from later (c. 1939) and was recorded at a different radio station (XERA) Brinkley built in Mexico. We know of no extant recordings of KFKB broadcasts.

This archival imagery is from a film made in 1934 about Brinkley’s fishing exploits titled “Making A World’s Record.” This pharmacy was not part of Brinkley’s “druggist empire.”

“Henny and Cooper Pharmacy” [home movie, date unknown]; unrelated to Brinkley and probably the wrong era.

“Henny and Cooper Pharmacy” [home movie, date unknown]; unrelated to Brinkley and probably the wrong era.

“The Cobra Strikes” is Wood’s title for Chapter VII in his book, but it covers the same period we are covering here.

This text is not from The Life of Man; we wrote it to describe the next scene, to strengthen the association between what’s in the “biography” we are “adapting” and the action in this film.

These are – intentionally – the least attractive photos of Fishbein we could find. At this point we would like to create the impression that he is a deranged maniac with an inexplicable personal vendetta against our hero Brinkley.

A bit of a tricky edit. Brock actually said in the interview, “a crusader for medical standards and ethics,” but we’ve edited him to say “a crusader for the AMA.” We don’t want Fishbein to seem too reasonable right now; crusading for medical standards and ethics sounds like a good thing, whereas crusading for the AMA can at least be interpreted as a bad thing.

Another tricky edit. Professor Seaholm isn’t saying anything here she didn’t really say in our interview; it’s just that contextually, the editing strongly implies she is “on Brinkley’s side” against Fishbein. In our interview, Professor Seaholm was sometimes critical of Fishbein, but not his activities against Brinkley and other actual quacks.

Really the same note as the previous one: Pope Brock knows that Brinkley is not a “real doctor,” but we’re continuing to edit this scene in a manipulative way that makes it seem that he is on Brinkley’s side against Fishbein.

Brock was not speaking about Fishbein’s relationship to Brinkley or other confirmed quacks when he said Fishbein sometimes went “too far” or was “too narrow in his thinking,” so this is also a bit out of context. In fact, what Brock was referring to in this part of our interview was an anti-trust lawsuit filed against Fishbein/the AMA in 1938. The question of whether the AMA acts as a monopoly is complex and worthy of examination; we are not providing that examination here because we want to stick to a much simpler “good guy, bad guy” dynamic for now.

We created this graphic to make it look like the FRC and AMA are literally “two sides of one coin.” That’s manipulative and oversimplied. They are separate agencies whose interests sometimes align (as they did in this case). However, claiming that anyone who is against you is part of one giant conspiracy of powerful interests in a very common tactic of the quack, so we’re doing it here and it’s something continue to do as we continue to build this story from Brinkley’s perspective.

Basically true, but to call it “Fishbein’s campaign” is somewhat of a distortion. Yes, Fishbein worked hard to take Brinkley down starting in 1928, but he was hardly the sole mastermind we kind of make him out to be. Many others had an interest in “attacking” Brinkley, notably the “Kansas City Star.” The “Star” ran many negative stories about Brinkley beginning in 1930, either because they wanted to educate the public about what a fraud he was or because their own radio station, WDAF, was nowhere near as successful as Brinkley’s KFKB, or perhaps it was a combination of both motives. Newspaper columnist William Allen White wrote many anti-Brinkley editorials in the Emporia Gazette, describing his supporters as a “great seething moronic underworld” that could be taught to read and write, but not to think.

And that’s only a couple of examples of the many persons and institutions that came after Brinkley over his long career.

Regardless, for the sake of simplicity and to create a tighter narrative with a clearer hero/villain structure, we will continue to imply throughout the film that all the bad things that happen to Brinkley come largely because of a personal vendetta undertaken by Fishbein, a powerful and connected person.

This archival imagery is not of the Brinkleys in Milford; it is from a film made in 1934 about Brinkley’s fishing exploits titled “Making A World’s Record.”

This audio is from a record album Brinkley recorded for his son in Chicago in 1933; it’s not from his last broadcast at KFKB, which is strongly implied in this sequence.

Brinkley actually ran for Kansas Governor three times, in 1930, 1932 and 1934. Some of the details of this sequence are “borrowed” from the other two gubernatorial races, which we left out of the film for narrative flow.

These archival images are not of Brinkley running for governor; they are from a film made in 1934 about Brinkley’s fishing exploits titled “Making A World’s Record.”

These archival images are not of Brinkley running for governor; they are from a film made in 1934 about Brinkley’s fishing exploits titled “Making A World’s Record.”

These archival images are not of Brinkley running for governor; they are from a film made in 1934 about Brinkley’s fishing exploits titled “Making A World’s Record.”

These archival images are not of Brinkley running for governor; they are from a film made in 1934 about Brinkley’s fishing exploits titled “Making A World’s Record.”

Images taken from “Behind the Freedom Curtain” (1957). Stock footage used out of context.

Interesting story: Smith really did leave his post as Attorney General to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Kansas a few months after this incident. However, we don’t know if his “promotion” had anything to do with the story we’re telling. Probably not? Maybe? We don’t know, so we feel this is a fairly manipulative insinuation.

“The next move” Reardon is referring to is the move to Texas/Mexico, but we’re about to take an anachronistic detour on a fishing trip…

We have previously been desaturating the archival films from this period to make them look “older”; now we will leave them in color to pick up the “Oz” theme for the middle section of the film.

This archival film isn’t referring to XERA. Rather, it’s a newsreel from the 1950s about a Naval radio station in the Cascade Mountains of Washington.

This archival film also isn’t referring to XERA. Rather, it’s an educational film from 1934 showing how radio works.

We have no idea what this is or where it is. We think it might be a photo of one of many “fake” Brinkley Hospitals that sprung up from time to time, set up by pretenders capitalizing on Brinkley’s fame. But here we’re using it because we didn’t have an image of the hospital in San Juan.

This photo shows the Brinkleys on one of their own yachts, but we’re using it here to put them on board the cruise ship Normandie.

Though this particular radio broadcast didn’t occur “that night” as implied here, and thus probably was not directed at Fishbein, Brinkley indeed took to the airwaves each night to say nasty things about Fishbein during the trial. We know this because Fishbein’s lawyers noted it in court, complaining that Brinkley’s nightly rants could be prejudicial to the jury.

This radio broadcast is edited for length, but the thrust of it (the anti-Semitism and Red-baiting, leading up to a pitch for “a dollar”) has been preserved accurately.

“The Soul of a Man Speaks” (which we’ve shortened to “The Soul of a Man”) is Clement Wood’s title for Chapter VIII. The entirety of Chapter VIII is dedicated to a lengthy analysis of a dream Brinkley has one night. It’s the single most amazing chapter in that book (see also note 294). But the “chapter” of the film is very different from the chapter in the book; we just liked the name.

This letter is actually a compilation of three different (real) letters Brinkley wrote to his wife around the same time. We cut them up and stitched them back together in Photoshop before printing it out for use in this scene.

Tricky edit, sort of. Professor Seaholm did say this in our interview, but she would probably not have said this about Brinkley. We pulled this quote from a section in her interview during which she was speaking on chemotherapy. But we wanted to give her a final word, as with all of the other expert interviews, and her point is relevant to the story even if she was actually talking about something else.