I knew I wanted to do something hopeful – a celebration of 40s Hollywood
THE NEW DRAMA FROM GLEE CREATOR RYAN MURPHY FOLLOWS A GROUP OF WANNABES AS THEY DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO MAKE IT IN TINSELTOWN. WE TOOK A PEEP BEHIND THE SCENES WITH ITS PRODUCERS
NETFLIX is taking us back to the Golden Age of movies when the studio system ruled and stars like Rock Hudson, Vivien Leigh and Lana Turner graced the silver screen, with its glossy new series, Hollywood.
The brainchild of superproducer and screenwriter Ryan Murphy, the man behind hits like Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story, Pose and Feud, its glittering cast includes acting legends like Patti LuPone and Holland Taylor as well as Oscar winner Mira Sorvino and Glee’s Darren Criss, and is a story of ambition and the desperation to succeed in an industry riven by power struggles and race and gender prejudice.
Here Hollywood’s executive producers Ryan, Janet Mock and Ian Brennan reveal why their ‘outsiders’ story feels more timely than ever.
How did the idea for Hollywood get started? Ryan Murphy: I’d been playing around with the idea of doing something about buried history for a while, and I knew that I wanted to do something hopeful and optimistic – a celebration of 1940s Hollywood.
After working together on The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Darren Criss and I were having dinner and we started talking about a very famous gas station in Hollywood where sex workers mingled with celebrities.
I merged both of those ideas, and we began a lovingly constructed look at how I wished Hollywood would have operated back then; a world where women and gay people and people of colour could flourish. I think the world would be very different than it is today if that had happened.
Janet Mock: Ryan pitched the show to me over dinner as a show about these outsiders in Hollywood who are going to try to make it no matter what. It intrigued me. He told me it was set during the Golden Age of Hollywood in the studio system, and I love that time period. But oftentimes, as a woman of colour, I rarely, if ever, saw myself represented during that time.
This show is set in the 1940s, but it tackles some extremely timely themes... Ian Brennan: Even back then, way before the #MeToo Movement, we were dealing with the same issues in entertainment – and everywhere, really.
Now there’s finally an awareness about abusive power dynamics. But what if these conversations had happened in 1947 instead of 1997 or 2007 or 2017? We wanted to explore that.
Many of the leading characters are fictional, but you’ve also included some real-life figures – Rock Hudson, Henry Willson, Anna May Wong, Hattie McDaniel, Eleanor Roosevelt, to name a few. Why did you choose those people?
Ryan: I was very interested in Anna May Wong, Hattie McDaniel and Rock Hudson because they were all people who should have been able to be themselves and be celebrated, but were not. They were victims of the Hollywood system and they were under-appreciated.
All three of those people had tragic endings. I was interested in this idea of giving them happy endings. What would that look like? How would you do it?
Janet: It was important to us that we tell an aspirational story, and that we show a different kind of portrait of what the winners and dreamers look like.
Because today, we’re still grappling with an industry where there are far too few people of colour on screen, far too few LGBTQ people and women in power.
Ryan: I have a very strong connection to this time period because my grandmother was a big movie buff, and I was raised with her telling me all about Rock Hudson.
We lived in Indiana, but from a very young age she would tell me that Rock Hudson was gay and I remember thinking,
‘Oh, there’s somebody else like me’.
I grew up as a gay guy in Indiana and I didn’t have any role models, and I didn’t see anybody like me succeed, so I felt very alone. Janet, like me, grew up and rarely saw young black women succeed. I firmly believe in this idea that if you can see it, you can be it. And if you don’t see it, you can’t.
You’ve assembled an incredible cast of fresh faces and legends, from Jeremy Pope to Patti LuPone...
Ryan: Casting a television show is like casting a dinner party. It’s like, ‘Well, who do I want to sit next to for the next six months of my life?’
I like to give actors a lot of say and then throw challenges their way. I just called them all up and said, ‘Hey, I have this part for you, and I’m not going to take no for an answer, and you’re going to do it.’
Jim Parsons (from The Big Bang Theory) is terrifying as Hollywood agent Henry Willson – we’re not used to seeing him as a villain. How did you approach writing and casting that character?
Ryan:
Henry Willson was a real-life villain, and that role was very heavily researched. Willson was a true sexual predator and an alcoholic who would take these young men who were vulnerable and from bad homes, who came to Hollywood trying to make it, and then sexually abuse them.
It’s a very tricky thing when you’re writing a monstrous character like Henry Willson, because you may not like what they do, but I want you to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Nobody just becomes a monster. Monsters are made.
When I presented Jim with the role, it wasn’t an instant yes. He worried about it. It was scary. But he had just come off a very long run playing a beloved sitcom character, and he was like, ‘Okay, I want to be scared. I’ve been playing this beloved character. I want to do something scary.’
Why do you think a story about hope and reformation is so important right now? Ryan: In our show, we have Eleanor Roosevelt come into town and she says it best. She says, ‘I used to believe that the government could change the world, but I don’t know that I believe that anymore’.
She believes that we need leadership in other places, one of those places being Hollywood, to show a world that is more compassionate, more empathetic. We learn life lessons from what we see on the screen.
We learn how to act, how to fall in love, how to forge friendships, make enemies. Hollywood has always been a great, great teacher for me, and I think this show offers a world we need to be reminded of – a place where the good guys win and a new day is dawning.
At its core, that’s what this show is about: happy endings.
We lived in Indiana, but from a very young age she would tell me that Rock Hudson was gay and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, there’s somebody else like me’.
Ryan Murphy on his grandmother’s love of Hollywood’s Golden Age