Television

“Let me guess,” Patti LuPone says as she plinks olives into a martini. “You came here to be a movie star.”Here, of course, is Hollywood, where dreams are made, faked, defeated and deferred. In Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood,” a seven-episode limited series that comes to Netflix on Friday, LuPone plays Avis Amberg, a former actress married to the head of Ace Studios. Ace Studios, while fictional, looks like Paramount Pictures, walks like MGM and green-lights pictures more progressive than any the Golden Age birthed. Set in the late 1940s as the studio system began to wane, “Hollywood” enjoys this dizzy cocktail of history and hopeful make-believe.As a kid, Murphy watched Hollywood oldies with his grandmother and became particularly attached to three actors: Anna May Wong, Hattie McDaniel and Rock Hudson — all of them, he felt, stifled by the studio system.“I was attracted to the idea of lost potential,” he said in a telephone interview last week. “And maybe worried about it myself, that I was not going to be allowed to be who I wanted to be because of who I was.”After completing the first season of his series “Feud,” set in 1960s Hollywood, he mulled a more factual series honoring the system’s victims. “But ultimately, it was just too fragmented and also, to be honest, too depressing,” he said.He began to think along revisionist lines, instead, imagining what might have happened if people of color had been offered work commensurate with their talent, if the industry had allowed its queer members to live openly. Happy endings all around.“Hollywood,” which he created with Ian Brennan, mingles actuality and what-if. Real people — like Hudson (Jake Picking), Wong (Michelle Krusiec) and McDaniel (Queen Latifah) — rub elbows and more with invented ones like David Corenswet’s Jack, an aspiring actor and sometime gigolo, and Darren Criss’s Raymond, a biracial director who passes for white. Others merge fact and fictions, like LuPone’s Avis, inspired by David O. Selznick’s wife, Irene Selznick, or Joe Mantello’s Dick, a homage, at least in part, to the movie whiz Irving Thalberg.To help sort entertainment history from fantasy, here is an introduction to the real-life figures who populate this counterfactual “Hollywood” and the inspirations for several of the series’s fictional characters. Action!PrincipalsRock HudsonAn actor who would ride the beefcake craze of the 1950s, Hudson, born Roy Harold Scherer Jr., came to Hollywood in the late 1940s.“He knew how he looked,” said Picking, who wore facial prosthetics to play Hudson, a former Navy aircraft mechanic. “He would stand out in front of the studio gates in his uniform hoping to bump into someone influential.”A bit player in the ’40s, Hudson, who signed with the talent manager Henry Willson, graduated to westerns, adventure pictures and melodramas, earning an Oscar nomination for his work in “Giant.” In 1959, he starred opposite Doris Day in “Pillow Talk,” a comedy in which his character briefly masquerades as gay. “He projected an attractive yet unthreatening masculinity,” said Steve Cohan, an author and film historian.Willson thwarted tabloid attempts to out Hudson as gay and Hudson later married Willson’s secretary, Phyllis Gates, in what was possibly a “lavender marriage” meant to further allay suspicion. (Gates denied this. “We were very much in love,” she told a biographer.) In 1985, Hudson’s publicist confirmed a diagnosis of AIDS, and two months later, Hudson became one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS-related complications.Henry WillsonA serial abuser and a starmaker with an impeccable eye for brawny, unformed talent, Willson helped rename and introduce actors such as Hudson, Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue, as well as women like Natalie Wood and Lana Turner. “For a while there, he understood how to make his own little factory of these strapping all-American men and plug them into the movies,” said Jim Parsons, who plays Willson in “Hollywood.” “That doesn’t excuse the despicable behavior by any means.”The well-documented behavior included demanding sex from his male clients and various forms of psychological abuse, even as he protected his roster from hostile press and blackmailers. “He ranks right up there with Harvey Weinstein as one of the town’s greatest monsters of all time,” Murphy said. Deserted by his clients in later life, he died destitute.Anna May WongHollywood’s first Asian-American star, Wong, a third-generation Chinese-American, grew up in Los Angeles, where her parents ran a laundry, and went on to appear in dozens of silent and sound films.“She was captivating,” said Emily Carman, a film professor at Chapman University. “Her presence radiated charisma and elegance.”A fashion plate and a publicity darling, she rarely won principal parts (her later B movies are an exception) or unexoticized roles. As Wong, played by Michelle Krusiec, says in the series, “They don’t want a leading lady who looks like me.”The role of O-Lan in “The Good Earth,” the film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s China-set novel, seemed made-to-measure for Wong. But the production code, a self-censoring charter major studios adopted, prohibited romantic scenes between actors of different races. Since Paul Muni, a white actor, had been cast as O-Lan’s husband, the part instead went to Luise Rainer, a white actress who played O-Lan in yellowface and won an Oscar for it. “The Good Earth” producers offered Wong the role of a seductress, the movie’s villain, but she refused it.An alcoholic who experienced periods of depression, she died in 1961 at the age of 56. “Her lonely death, that for me was very sad to discover,” Krusiec said.Hattie McDanielThe first person of color to win an Oscar, McDaniel, the daughter of former slaves, began her career in vaudeville, as did several of her siblings. She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1930s and soon found screen work playing maids.“She was a scene stealer,” Carman said. “She knew how to mobilize that stereotype to her advantage.”She fought for the role of Mammy in “Gone With the Wind,” arriving for her screen test in a real maid’s uniform. She won an Oscar for it, though at the ceremony itself she was relegated by the event’s organizers to a segregated table. While she hoped the award might unlock a broader away of roles, Hollywood only saw her as a maid.Later in her career, some African-American activists attacked McDaniel for accepting regressive roles. Her stock response: “I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be a maid and make $7.”“A woman had to make a living,” said Queen Latifah, who plays McDaniel. “But it was a waste of her talent. She was a powerhouse. She could sing. She could dance. She could act. She was smart. She was funny. She had timing. She was brilliant.”Supporting ActorsGeorge Cukor, Vivien Leigh and Tallulah BankheadIn the third episode of “Hollywood,” the film director Cukor (Daniel London) throws a wild party with an elite guest list, including Leigh and Bankhead, and a crew of sex workers to provide postprandial entertainment. Cukor, who directed “The Philadelphia Story” and “Gaslight,” did host louche parties, many of them all-male. Leigh (Katie McGuinness), who played Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” and Bankhead (Paget Brewster), who tested for the role, were both close friends of Cukor’s. In the late ’40s, Leigh was about to appear in the stage version of “A Streetcar Names Desire” and was experiencing episodes of bipolar disorder. Bankhead, known as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished seducers of women (including McDaniel, according to a persistent rumor) as well as men, had recently had a hit with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat.”Background PlayersScotty BowersThough Murphy disclaims any interest in Bowers, Dylan McDermott’s Ernie runs a service station that doubles as an anything-goes bordello. This dovetails with Bowers’s claims, aired in a controversial 2012 memoir, that he spent decades providing sexual services to the Hollywood elect, first as a pump jockey then as a party bartender.“Whatever folks wanted, I had it. I could make all their fantasies come true,” he wrote in the introduction to “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.” The book alleges that Bowers arranged liaisons for the likes of Hudson, Cole Porter and Leigh (who all appear in the series as clients), as well as Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (The stars he wrote about were already dead but the families of some of them, like Cary Grant, disputed the claims.)Peg EntwistleWithin “Hollywood,” Jeremy Pope’s screenwriter character, Archie Coleman (glancingly inspired by James Baldwin’s Hollywood experience), sells a script about Entwistle, a 23-year-old aspiring actress who finally achieved brief fame by jumping from the “H” of the Hollywood sign, back when the sign still spelled Hollywoodland.Born in Wales, she moved with her father to New York and began acting as a teenager, including a tour with the New York Theater Guild and in a number of Broadway plays. In the spring of 1932, she came to Los Angeles with a play and stayed to shoot her only film. Her contract was not renewed. After telling her uncle she planned to visit friends, she disappeared. A hiker discovered her body at the foot of the sign. More

What’s StreamingHOLLYWOOD Stream on Netflix. Hollywood’s golden era is viewed through a gilded but piercing lens in this soapy new mini-series, from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, both of “Glee.” Set in a sumptuous version of 1940s Los Angeles, “Hollywood” imagines a more inclusive version of that era’s Tinseltown. Many characters are people to whom the real Hollywood would have been hostile. They include Archie (Jeremy Pope), an aspiring screenwriter who is black and gay, and has a movie to sell. He teams up with a young director (Darren Criss) to make that dream a reality. “The bid to make Archie’s movie starts as a glitzy, funny, gimlet-eyed dissection of bigotry and power,” James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Then it lurches, halfway through, into a pep talk about what some kids can accomplish if they gather up their moxie and put on a show.”PROP CULTURE Stream on Disney Plus. Where is the snow globe from Disney’s original “Mary Poppins” movie? Find out in this new series, in which Dan Lanigan, a prop collector, tracks down Disney artifacts. (Note to viewers: A tolerance for corporate self-promotion is required.) Lanigan spends the first episode revisiting props from “Mary Poppins,” and speaking with some of the members of that film’s creative team. Among them are the costume and set designer Tony Walton and the songwriter Richard M. Sherman, who describes Walt Disney asking Sherman and his brother and songwriting partner, Robert B. Sherman, to come to his office and play their song “Feed The Birds,” from “Mary Poppins,” for Disney. “He would say, you know, ‘play it, play it for me,’” Sherman says.SAVING FACE (2005) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. In a recent interview with The Times, the filmmaker Alice Wu described her intention when she made her first feature. “I was trying to make the biggest romantic comedy I could on a tiny budget,” she said, “with all Asian-American actors, and half of it in Mandarin Chinese.” The result? “Saving Face,” which revolves around a young Chinese-American surgeon, Wil (Michelle Krusiec). Set primarily in Flushing, Queens, the plot involves a romance between Wil and Vivian (Lynn Chen), a dancer. Wil hasn’t come out to her mother (Joan Chen), which complicates her relationship — as does the discovery that her mother is pregnant. While “Saving Face” proved influential (Last year, The Los Angeles Times named it one of the 20 best Asian-American films of the last 20 years), Wu’s new movie, “The Half of It,” out this week, is her first film since.What’s on TVIT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) 10:15 p.m. on TCM. An alien spaceship slams to Earth at the beginning of this sci-fi horror movie, based on material by Ray Bradbury. The story that follows may be less frightening to contemporary cable viewers than it was to the film’s original movie-theater audiences, who got to experience it with early 3-D effects. More

Peter H. Hunt, who had a triumphant success with his directorial debut on Broadway, the musical “1776,” which ran for almost three years and won the Tony Award for best musical, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.His wife, Barbette (Tweed) Hunt, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Hunt was also well known in theatrical circles in the Northeast for his long involvement with the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, where he was lighting designer on productions as early as the late 1950s and advanced to become artistic director from 1989 to 1995. He also directed for television, including numerous episodes of the family drama “Touched by an Angel,” seen on CBS from 1994 through 2003, and several adaptations of Mark Twain stories.“1776,” with music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards and a book by Peter Stone about the American colonies’ debate over whether to declare independence, won three Tony Awards in 1969, including a best director statuette for Mr. Hunt. Among the shows it beat out for best musical was “Hair.”“‘1776’ is a near miracle, a highly skilled entertainment taken from historic fact,” Kevin Kelly wrote in his review in The Boston Globe, “and it is unquestionably one of the most intelligent musicals in the history of the American theater.”The musical’s characters include towering figures in American history, among them Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Mr. Hunt said the intent was to humanize them — to show them, as they debated independence, as people with the traits everyone has, including stubbornness.“It’s the same problem we have in Washington every day,” he told The Winston-Salem Journal in 2002. “How do we get these people to agree on anything? Not a whole lot has changed in 225 years.”Peter Huls Hunt was born on Dec. 16, 1938, in Pasadena, Calif. His father, George, was an industrial designer, and his mother, Gertrude, was a homemaker.He graduated from the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut and attended Yale University, receiving a bachelor’s degree there in 1961 and a master’s degree at its School of Drama in 1963.Mr. Hunt was a well-regarded lighting designer early in his career, working not only at Williamstown but also on Broadway. His first four Broadway credits were as lighting designer, including on a 1966 revival of “Annie Get Your Gun” that starred Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley, reprising a role she had first played 20 years earlier.At first Mr. Hunt only dabbled in directing. He directed his own version of “Annie Get Your Gun” at Williamstown in 1966, and a “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” there in 1968 with a cast that included Ken Howard, who would go on to play Jefferson in “1776.” According to a 2016 article on Broadway World, the theater website, one of his directorial side projects was his ticket to the “1776” job.He had directed a workshop production of a musical by his friend Austin Pendleton and several others that Jerome Robbins, the noted choreographer and director, had seen. When the producer Stuart Ostrow, who was developing “1776,” asked Mr. Robbins for ideas on a director, he suggested Mr. Hunt.The Broadway success of “1776” led to touring productions and, in June 1970, to the somewhat incongruous sight of the show being performed in the Mother Country, at the New Theater in London, by an all-British cast. The opening performance there drew five curtain calls.The Broadway cast was asked to perform the show at the White House for President Richard M. Nixon, but with some cuts, including the song “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men,” sung by conservative politicians who want to steer the country “forever to the right.”The cast and producers declined to censor the show, and the demand was dropped; the full version was performed at the White House in early 1970. But in 1972, when Mr. Hunt directed a film version of the musical, Jack L. Warner, the film’s producer and a friend of Nixon (who was then running for re-election), cut the song in postproduction. Mr. Hunt, learning of the excision after the fact, was not happy.“I asked him, ‘Jack, how could you do this?’” Mr. Hunt told The Los Angeles Times in 2001. “And he said, ‘With a pair of scissors.’”The cut material was restored in later DVD releases.The film of “1776” led to directing assignments for television. In the 1970s Mr. Hunt directed episodes of “Adam’s Rib,” “Ellery Queen” and other shows. In the 1980s his credits included “Life on the Mississippi,” a 1980 adaptation of the Twain story for PBS’s “Great Performances” series, as well as a very different water-related effort, the premiere episode of “Baywatch” in 1989.Mr. Hunt also directed TV adaptations of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn saga and “The Innocents Abroad.” In 1993 he gave himself a cameo as a parole officer in “Sworn to Vengeance,” a TV movie he directed starring Robert Conrad.Mr. Hunt continued to work in the theater as well, directing at Williamstown, in regional theaters and, five more times, on Broadway. His most recent Broadway credit, in 1997, was “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” which went on to a long run, although Robert Longbottom was brought in to rework the production midway through.In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1972, Mr. Hunt is survived by a brother, George; a son, Max; two daughters, Daisy Hunt and Amy Hunt; and four granddaughters.In the 2001 Los Angeles Times interview, Mr. Hunt recalled that after the kerfuffle over “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men,” the players gave that number a particular charge when delivering it at the White House.“Let’s just say the cast performed with additional verve,” he said. “I was sitting right next to Nixon, and even I was getting nervous.” More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Tim Brooke-Taylor, who helped define British comedy in the 1970s as a star of the long-running television sketch show, “The Goodies,” died on April 12. He was 79.His death, from the coronavirus, was announced by the BBC, which did not say where he died. He had been a regular on the BBC Radio 4 parody game show, “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue,” since 1972.Mr. Brooke-Taylor got his start as a performer at Cambridge University alongside the future “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” stars John Cleese and Graham Chapman. And “The Goodies,” seen on the BBC from 1970 to 1980 and later briefly on ITV, shared an anarchic, anything-goes sense of humor with “Monty Python,” which made its debut in 1969. But whereas the Pythons mixed silliness with a certain degree of sophistication, “The Goodies” — to the delight of its audience, which largely consisted of children — was mostly just silly.The sketches on “The Goodies” were tied together by the premise that the members of the troupe traveled around on a bicycle built for three doing good deeds and often confronting surreal menaces, among them a giant cat terrorizing London. The Goodies even had hit records; one, “The Funky Gibbon,” reached the British Top 10 in 1975.Timothy Julian Brooke-Taylor was born on July 17, 1940, in Buxton, England. His father was a lawyer, and he studied law at Cambridge. But Tim abandoned thoughts of following his father’s career path after joining the Footlights, the university’s dramatic club, where his fellow performers also included his future “Goodies” co-stars, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie.“Cambridge Circus,” the Footlights revue in which he appeared, had a successful run on the West End in London and was briefly seen on Broadway in 1964.In his autobiography, “So, Anyway …” (2014), Mr. Cleese remembered Mr. Brooke-Taylor as the best performer in that show and praised his “talent for funny, precise physical comedy.”In 1967, Mr. Brooke-Taylor, Mr. Cleese, Mr. Chapman and Marty Feldman created the ITV sketch series “At Last the 1948 Show.” (The title, Mr. Cleese explained, “was intended as a joke about the slowness of program planners making a decision.”) One of Mr. Brooke-Taylor’s most lasting contributions to comedy, both as a writer and a performer, was a sketch first seen on that show, “The Four Yorkshiremen.”In that sketch, later a highlight of Monty Python’s live performances, four wealthy and pompous men take turns trying to top one another with increasingly absurd tales of how poor they were growing up. “There were over 150 of us living in a small shoe box in the middle of the road,” Mr. Brooke-Taylor says as the absurdity accelerates, and he had to “work 23 hours a day at mill for a penny every four years.”After “The Goodies” ended its long run, Mr. Brooke-Taylor was seen on several British sitcoms. He was also heard on “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue,” on which two teams of comedians were given ridiculous tasks to perform, from its debut in 1972 until his death.He is survived by his wife, Christine (Wheadon) Brooke-Taylor, and two sons, Ben and Edward. More