Shortly after the end of World War II, the veteran Jack Castello dreams of breaking into Hollywood, but his career does not take off and in addition his wife is pregnant with twins, so Jack accepts the indecent offer of Ernie, owner of a station of service in which boys prostitute themselves. In order not to be forced into gay marches, he convinces Archie, an African-American gay man and screenwriter, to work for Ernie and take care of male clients. This is how he meets the boy who will become famous as Rock Hudson, but is also obsessed with the evil and powerful agent Henry Wilson. Meanwhile, Archie’s script, dedicated to a suicidal girl thrown by the big word “Hollywoodland” on the hills, ends up in the hands of director Raymond Ainsley, who lives with the promising African-American actress Camille Washington and dreams of becoming a star.
The reconstruction of a scandalous Hollywood, between prostitution, parties and depravities is gradually lightened in a mecca of cinema that never existed, where the various minorities miraculously emerge.
Cinema can rewrite history, as Quentin Tarantino has shown several times in recent years, and in particular with his latest film he has dedicated himself to Hollywood. Ryan Murphy, however, takes this idea much further and if he starts with a light but at the same time sordid portrait, in a kind of cross between a comedy and Hollywood Babylon, he ends up in an open-eyed dream, a super-progressive and chronicle fantasy: a kind of alternative reality, where political correctness was already established in the late 1940s and spaces for diversity open up in Hollywood, implicitly changing the whole world.
Just three years ago, Murphy made one of his best works with Feud, dedicated to 1960s Hollywood and the feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. A portrait of the unfair treatment suffered by women in a society so masculine as to vampirize and vilify even their female stars.
He now takes the liberty, along with co-author Ian Brennan with whom he had previously collaborated on Glee and Scream Queens, of staging the Hollywood of his dreams, taking the same period as James Ellroy’s novels as “LA Confindential” and playing ribaltarlo.