Warning: contains spoilers
It’s got orgies, arrests, scandals and eccentrics. But is the central story – about gay and black people triumphing in 1940s Tinseltown – realistic? We sift the ugly facts from glossy fiction
Hollywood loves a happy ending and Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series of the same name is no exception. This seductively glossy drama is a speculative story about postwar Hollywood, a revisionist fantasy in which a group of gay men and people of colour sweep prejudice aside on the road to box-office victory and Oscar glory. Thanks to the show’s attention to set design, costuming and name-dropping, it certainly looks a lot like 1947, but the events that take place bear a complex, ironic relationship to history.
Murphy, the creator of hits including Glee, Pose and Feud, about the rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, has taken inspiration from the cheerfully lewd, largely unverifiable memoirs of Scotty Bowers. In his book Full Service, best read with a shaker or two of salt to hand, Bowers recalls decades spent hooking up with stars or supplying them with sex partners, starting with the days when he picked up clients while working at a petrol station in Hollywood.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zSd5qO
