Ryan Murphy's all-star cast.
A made in Hollywood ending is the same as saying “and they lived happily ever after”. In a made in Hollywood ending, the good guys win and the bad guys lose. The girl always ends up with the boy, the good one. The guilty get caught, the innocent go free. That was the white, very white morality that reigned in the Golden Age of Hollywood, that of the birth of super stars, who had to be white, heterosexual and, of course, of remarkable beauty.
Ryan Murphy He grew up in the 70s loving that Hollywood, the golden years, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s... but he never found in them a reference, a model that represented him as a young gay man. Today, turned into a television guru, a pioneer of diverse television, Murphy produces Hollywood, his first series for Netflix reinventing that beloved Hollywood.
“I wanted to do a series about buried history. And he wanted to do something hopeful and optimistic, a celebration of 1940s Hollywood." explains the creator of hits like Glee or American Horror Story. "I wanted to give a happy ending to some people who had to go through terrible things in Hollywood."
The H in Hollywood is not silent.
But an authentic happy ending, without retrograde censorship. Without limits. Murphy asked himself a big question:** “If these people had been allowed to be who they were in the '40s and put that image on the screen,** would it have changed the trajectory of Hollywood and changed my life as a kid growing up? in the 70s without references?
The answer to that question is exposed by mixing reality and fiction. It is based, on the one hand, on that gas station on Hollywood Boulevard where Scott Bowers (author of the book Full service, in which he shook the sheets of all the great figures of those golden years) arranged services and appointments for stars who had to hide their sexual realities. He was looking for boys to Cole Porter, women to Katharine Hepburn, entire harems for George Cukor's parties... That gas station, now disappeared, is one of the main settings in the series Hollywood, Golden Tip is called, the manager Ernie (Dylan McDermott), and it's a two-sided passport to Dreamland, land of dreams, the password to get more than gasoline and a metaphor for the dreams that clients and employees seek.
The gas station that takes you to Dreamland.
In reality, the employees of that gas station, aspiring stars, never managed to get past the bedroom of the already consecrated (according to Bowers). In the Murphy series, that invisible wall can be broken.
One of the employees Jack (David Corensweet) he is a war veteran who arrives in Hollywood chasing the dream of so many. Your first stop from him? The doors of the ACE studios. In reality, the mythical door of the Paramount studios, on Melrose Avenue, in Los Angeles, with more than 100 years of history and a thousand film stories behind it: Twilight of the Gods, The Ten Commandments, The Godfather, Titanic, Forrest Gump...
Inside that historic studio, which can still be visited on guided tours today, the stars mingled with directors, hairdressers, production bigwigs in the canteen, the dining room. A place that has already disappeared, but that Murphy has been able to rebuild for his series using even the same chairs from the original canteen.
When they hit you with the doors of Hollywood in your face.
Faced with the first refusals, Jack ends up going into bars, probably on Sunset Boulevard. And only when he achieves success does he eat where the biggest names in Hollywood have been eating for 100 years, in Musso and Frank Grill, the same restaurant that Tarantino used in his last movie Once upon a time in Hollywood. Those red leather booths and tables, the waiters with red jackets and bow ties, the steaks several centimeters thick...
AND THE OSCAR GOES TO…
Another of the sets that Murphy revives and rebuilds in Hollywood is George Cukor's house one of the most important directors of that Hollywood (Stories from Philadelphia, My Fair Lady…), who according to Scotty Bowers and the gossip of the city, he was celebrating real bacchanals in that Mediterranean-style mansion in the Hollywood Hills, near Sunset Strip. Today, a private residence (it was last sold for more than 5 million dollars), they shot the exterior in a mansion in Pasadena and the interior in another in Beverly Hills.
Musso & Frank Grill, a gold classic still open.
Schwab's Pharmacy, meeting place of the characters, it is also another location reconstructed by the team of the series and very popular in the golden age of cinema. A drugstore? Yes, Classic American pharmacies were born as medicine dispensaries, but also as cafeterias/ice cream parlors. This second part is the one that attracted the workers of the nearby studios. Sadly, Schwab's was demolished in the 1980s.
And they lived happily and ate partridges, while toasting with Oscars... In their reinvention of Hollywood, Murphy presents a Rock Hudson who does not hide his homosexuality and a major production written by a black screenwriter, starring a black actress, with an Asian in the supporting role (the ill-fated and real Anna May Wong). They all end up entering the 20th Oscar ceremony, the one in 1948, which was held at the Shrine Civic Auditorium, event room and Mason temple, still in operation, which served as the stage for the awards that year and during the 90s until it was relieved by the Dolby Theater. In their Moorish-style salon, where they do let in actors and nominees of all races, the protagonists of the series finally step on Dreamland.
Katie McGuinness plays Vivien Leigh.