Picture this
Super showrunner Ryan Murphy asks ‘what if?’ in Hollywood, his new Netflix mini-series about the golden age of Tinseltown, writes Emily Colston.
If Hollywood is supposed to be the place where dreams come true, why not dream of a Hollywood with a difference?
That’s exactly what creator Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story, The Politician) has done in this seven-episode miniseries for Netflix.
It’s the 1940s, the Golden Age of Hollywood, but the power dynamics in Murphy’s version are a little different.
“With the present so fraught and the future uncertain, we turned to the past for direction … to spin an aspirational tale of ‘what ifs’,” says Janet Mock (Pose), who wrote, directed and executive produced the series.
“What if a band of outsiders were given a chance to tell their own story? What if the person with greenlight power was a woman? The screenwriter a black man? What if the heroine was a woman of colour? The matinee idol openly gay?
“And what if they were all invited into the room where the decisions are made, entering fully and unapologetically themselves to leave victorious and vaunted, their place in history cemented?”
It certainly sounds a world apart from the Tinseltown of today, where power is still disproportionately in the hands of old, straight, white men.
“I would say that it is almost a revisionist history of Hollywood,” explained Laura Harrier, who plays a Dorothy Dandridge-like character, in a recent interview.
“I love to think about what the world could have looked like had we been able to have representation of women, of people of colour, of people of the LGBTQ community at the beginning of Hollywood.
“How would movies and TV look different? How would the world look different?”
Murphy says he has long been interested in some of Hollywood’s less white-bread players, and what things could have been like for them had the world been a little different.
“I was very interested, even as a young person, in three people: Rock Hudson, Anna May Wong, and Hattie McDaniel,” he said in a recent interview.
These three real-life stars – who were gay, Asian and black, respectively – are featured in his “love letter to the Golden Age of Tinseltown”, alongside other fictional characters.
“The older I got, the more that I was interested in the rot below the surface, the darkness below the glamour, and the idea that what we think we see in movie stars is really not who they were at all. They were projecting something that was created for them, but they were not allowed to be themselves.”
After talking things through with Darren Criss (Glee, The Assassination of Gianni Versace), who ended up starring in and producing Hollywood, he decided to rewrite history to give these guys the (ahem) Hollywood ending they deserved.
“We both wanted to do something that would be inspirational, upbeat, and that had a happy ending, that was about victories.”
With a quality cast that also includes Australia’s Samara Weaving, David Corenswet, Jeremy Pope, Dylan McDermott, Holland Taylor, Jim Parsons and Queen Latifah, it promises to be just the spirit-lifter many of us need right now.
Murphy: What we think we see in movie stars is really not who they were at all. They were projecting something that was created for them, but they were not allowed to be themselves.