Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
Speaker 1: of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: For most people, watching movies is an escape. It's easy
Speaker 1: to forget your worries watching Luke Skywalker blow up The
Speaker 1: Death Star or Lauren Bacall confess her love to Humphrey Bogart.
Speaker 1: But for South Korean director Shing Sang oh and movie
Speaker 1: star Choi yung e, the opposite was true. Films weren't
Speaker 1: an escape. They were a prison, and their tailor was
Speaker 1: future North Korean dictator Kim Jong il. In the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: Shin and Choi were South Korea's it couple. Choi was
Speaker 1: one of South Korea's biggest stars after the Korean War.
Speaker 1: Her husband Shin was an acclaimed director who, along with Choi,
Speaker 1: founded one of the largest film studios in Korea. From
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies, they made
Speaker 1: dozens of movies that defined Korean post war cinema. But
Speaker 1: all was not perfect in paradise, and in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: Shin Studios was forced to shut down. In nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: Shin and Choi's relationship fell apart as well, when Choi
Speaker 1: discovered Shin had fathered two children with another woman. The
Speaker 1: its couple decided to call it quits. By nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: Choi traveled to Hong Kong in the hopes that she
Speaker 1: could direct a film there. It had been hard for
Speaker 1: her to book rolls after the very public divorce, but
Speaker 1: a Hong Kong film company had offered her a job.
Speaker 1: When Choi arrived, however, she discovered it was a ruse.
Speaker 1: She was forced onto a boat and taken away to
Speaker 1: North Korea. News of Choi's disappearance drove Shin to fire
Speaker 1: follow her to Hong Kong, and six months later, North
Speaker 1: Korean operatives kidnapped him as well. He was imprisoned, with
Speaker 1: his sentence eventually stretching to five years due to repeated
Speaker 1: escape attempts. While Shin was languishing in prison, Choi was
Speaker 1: ushered into the inner circle of King Jong Il, son
Speaker 1: of North Korean dictator Kim Jong sung. She was taught
Speaker 1: the government approved history of the country and was taken
Speaker 1: to performances and parties by Kim. Shin was finally released
Speaker 1: from prison in early nineteen eighty three, and at a
Speaker 1: party in March of that year, the former couple were
Speaker 1: reunited after five long years in captivity. They were finally
Speaker 1: told the reason for their capture. Their host, Kim Jong Il,
Speaker 1: wanted their help to make movies. Kim Jong il had
Speaker 1: always been a film buff with a personal collection of
Speaker 1: nearly fifteen thousand movies from around the world. When he
Speaker 1: took over North Korea's propaganda department in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: he dreamed of making movies that would rival the ones
Speaker 1: from the West, But after several attempts, it became clear
Speaker 1: that North Korean actors and filmmaks, who had been cut
Speaker 1: off from new ideas and technology in film for decades,
Speaker 1: couldn't make his dreams come true. So he looked to
Speaker 1: the South, and he kidnapped Choi and Shin. For the
Speaker 1: next three years, Choi and Shin made films with Kim
Speaker 1: Jong Ill. Many were adaptations of Korean myths and folk
Speaker 1: tales or historical epics, all with a communist bent, of course,
Speaker 1: and all making sure to paint the Kims as heroes
Speaker 1: and saviors. But during their captivity, something unexpected happened. Choi
Speaker 1: and Shin fell back in love. Choi was touched by Shin,
Speaker 1: tracking her down to Hong Kong, and after years working
Speaker 1: together under the pressure of a dictator, all her anger
Speaker 1: towards him softened. The two remarried and waited patiently for
Speaker 1: their chance to escape. Their opportunity finally came in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six, when Choi and Shin traveled to Vienna to
Speaker 1: secure funding for a film about Genghis Khan. Typically, Kim
Speaker 1: Jong Ung would send them out of the country before
Speaker 1: film festivals, but usually only one at a time, so
Speaker 1: with both of them in Austria, they saw their chance,
Speaker 1: and they took it. On March twelfth of nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: Choi and Shin arrived at the Intercontinental Hotel to meet
Speaker 1: with a journalist. When their North Korean bodyguards stepped out
Speaker 1: of the room, the two made a break for it.
Speaker 1: They ran out of the hotel, hailed a cab, and
Speaker 1: jumped in. Choi and Shin took the taxi to the
Speaker 1: US embassy and sprinted inside. Once there, they presented American
Speaker 1: officials with secret recordings they made of Kim Jong ung,
Speaker 1: in which he admitted to the kidnapping scheme and holding
Speaker 1: them against their will. The Americans granted them asylum, and
Speaker 1: after eight long years of captivity, they were finally free.
Speaker 1: Shin and Choi ended up in Los Angeles, where Shin
Speaker 1: produced several children's martial arts movies before moving back to
Speaker 1: South Korea in nineteen ninety nine. After extensive interrogation of
Speaker 1: the two kidnap filmmakers, the South Korean government cleared them
Speaker 1: of any suspicion of willingly defecting to North Korea. The
Speaker 1: two remained together until Shin's death in two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: Choi later passed away in twenty eighteen. Choi and Shin
Speaker 1: may have spent their lives making movies, but in a
Speaker 1: real life plot twist, they staged a great escape that
Speaker 1: would put any Hollywood thriller to shame. In today's world,
Speaker 1: we have more sources of entertainment at our fingertips than
Speaker 1: we know what to do with. With a few taps
Speaker 1: on your phone, you can access hundreds of movies thousands
Speaker 1: of hours of television and millions of songs. It would
Speaker 1: take you over four years to watch everything on Netflix,
Speaker 1: and over seventeen thousand years to get through all the
Speaker 1: videos on YouTube. And for those of you who are curious,
Speaker 1: if you listen to nothing but this podcast feed, it
Speaker 1: would take you over one hundred hours to finish all
Speaker 1: of the episodes. With so much content at our disposal,
Speaker 1: it's easy to forget just how good we've got it.
Speaker 1: As recently as the seventeenth century, people's entertainment options were
Speaker 1: much more limited, not to mention expensive. If you wanted
Speaker 1: to veg out by watching a show for a few hours,
Speaker 1: you would need a stage, a director, a writer, and
Speaker 1: a cast of actors. Feel like listening to some tunes, well,
Speaker 1: then you'd better have a singer or a pianist on
Speaker 1: hand to perform. And don't forget the variety and the
Speaker 1: quality of the music will be limited by the performer's
Speaker 1: knowledge and talent. With entertainment options so limited, having access
Speaker 1: to skilled musicians became extremely important. In England, Queen Elizabeth
Speaker 1: the First maintained a Royal children's choir which was ready
Speaker 1: to perform whenever and wherever she desired. The master of
Speaker 1: the choir, a guy named Nathaniel Giles, was charged with
Speaker 1: scouting out new talent and to make sure that he
Speaker 1: got the best singers around. He was given incredible power
Speaker 1: is he Giles carried a warrant that allowed him to
Speaker 1: force any child to join the choir. Whenever he wanted.
Speaker 1: He could walk into a random church or theater in
Speaker 1: the country, pick out the best singers, and decide that
Speaker 1: they now worked for him. If the kid didn't want
Speaker 1: to go, there was nothing they or their parents could
Speaker 1: do about it. Now this seems unbelievable today, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty consistent with Elizabethan society. Children were viewed as a
Speaker 1: kind of property. They were owned by their parents until
Speaker 1: they began an apprenticeship, at which point they then belonged
Speaker 1: to their master. Oh and their training and education weren't
Speaker 1: for their own benefit either. That was simply a way
Speaker 1: to make the kids more useful so that the adults
Speaker 1: could ring every last drop of value out of them.
Speaker 1: At the same time, the British monarch was a symbolic
Speaker 1: parent figure to her subjects. It was everyone's duty to
Speaker 1: serve the crown in whatever way they could, so most
Speaker 1: people wouldn't have found it particularly odd when talented kids
Speaker 1: were forced to sing for the queen, but it was
Speaker 1: still a lot of power for one man to hold,
Speaker 1: and Nathaniel Giles wasn't above using it for his own ends.
Speaker 1: He and a theater producer named Henry Evans routinely abducted
Speaker 1: children right off the streets, then refused to return them
Speaker 1: until their parents bought them back. They were effectively holding
Speaker 1: the children ransom, and while this was a clear abuse
Speaker 1: of power, it was also technically legal. They got away
Speaker 1: with it for years and may never have been questioned
Speaker 1: about it at all had they not taken the wrong child.
Speaker 1: You see, in sixteen hundred, Giles and Evans kidnapped a
Speaker 1: thirteen year old named Thomas Clifton while he was on
Speaker 1: his way home from school. As it turns out, the boys'
Speaker 1: parents were nobles and extremely litigious ones at that. After
Speaker 1: getting their son back, they took Giles to court. Their
Speaker 1: argument wasn't that the choir master had broken the law
Speaker 1: by kidnapping their son. Everyone agreed that that was within
Speaker 1: his rights. The problem was that Thomas couldn't sing to
Speaker 1: save his life. As a result, he'd been made to
Speaker 1: act in stage plays which were seen as less respectable
Speaker 1: than singing, and Thomas's parents won the case. The producer,
Speaker 1: Henry Evans was forced to resign and he was run
Speaker 1: out of town, but Giles got off without so much
Speaker 1: as a reprimand he continued to work as the master
Speaker 1: of the Royal Choir, although his warrant was adjusted to
Speaker 1: clarify that the children he took could not be employed
Speaker 1: as comedians or actors. Singing was the Queen's entertainment of choice,
Speaker 1: and she deserved to hear only the most angelic of voices.
Speaker 1: And apparently if it took a devil of a choir
Speaker 1: master to make that happen, it was still worth it
Speaker 1: so long as the music never stopped. I hope you've
Speaker 1: enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
Speaker 1: for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
Speaker 1: show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
Speaker 1: created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
Speaker 1: a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
Speaker 1: learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.
Speaker 1: And until next time, stay curious,