‘Hollywood’ on Netflix: How they made the Oscars episode – Los Angeles Times

The following story contains spoilers from the Netflix series Hollywood.

Soon after presenter and screen star Ernest Borgnine takes the stage at the 1948 Academy Awards, a few attendees depart to another corner of the venue for a brief intermission from the nights nervous excitement. One is using the lull to fiddle with a crossword puzzle app on his cellphone.

Oh, this is a good one... cause here we are at the Oscars, David Corenswet says. Eight letters. The clue is snub. It ends in I-N-G.

Ignoring, Samara Weaving replies, without hesitation. (Shes right.)

This is the time- and mind-warp taking place as new has a break from the old on the set of the finale of Netflixs Hollywood.

From Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the TV drama conceives a more progressive history for Hollywoods Golden Age. The seven-episode season explores showbizs racist, sexist, homophobic past through a parallel universe in which its underdog cast of characters, who are working to get a feature film off the ground, get their fairy-tale ending or close to it.

A production shot of the stage for the Oscars ceremony featured in Netflixs Hollywood.

(Saeed Adyani / Netflix)

The series features portrayals of real-life icons like Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec), Rock Hudson (Jake Picking) and Hattie McDaniel (Queen Latifah) alongside fictional characters played by the likes of Corenswet, Weaving, Darren Criss, Laura Harrier, Jeremy Pope, Dylan McDermott, Holland Taylor, Patti LuPone and Jim Parsons.

In the dramas season finale, titled A Hollywood Ending, the shows central film, Meg, becomes a box office hit upon its theatrical release and, subsequently, receives multiple Academy Award nominations. A portion of the episode follows the characters as they attend the 20th Academy Awards and ultimately change the course of Hollywood history with some big wins for its marginalized characters.

I was interested in doing a piece specifically on buried Hollywood, says Murphy, whose grandmother kept him occupied as a child with books on old Hollywood. The darker, more upsetting social-injustice aspects of the town that you really cant believe. I grew up reading about Anna May Wong and Hattie McDaniel and Rock Hudson. And really how they should have had happy endings but didnt. And I wanted to write about giving them a happy ending.

Its bustling inside downtown L.A.'s historic Orpheum Theater in mid-January as crew members dart around between shots and hundreds of background actors take their seats for the episodes Oscars ceremony, the culmination of the dramas revisionist history fantasy.

The whole concept of the show is incredible to see and be a part of, says Pope, who plays screenwriter Archie Coleman, who is black and gay. Its nice to see these outcasts of the time have their moment and for the audience to question the what-if had things played out similarly then, how different things could look now.

Surviving newsreel footage of the 20th Academy Awards in 1948 including Celeste Holm accepting Best Supporting Actress for Gentlemans Agreement, Ronald Colman accepting Best Actor for A Double Life, Edmund Gwenn accepting Best Supporting Actor for Miracle on 34th Street, Francis Lyon and Robert Parrish accepting for Film Editing for Body and Soul, and Loretta Young accepting Best Actress for The Farmers Daughter.

Its not the first time Murphy, who went to the 1989 Oscars ceremony as a reporter, has featured the event in his work. His FX period drama Feud: Bette and Joan, another love letter to old Hollywood, re-created the spectacle of the 1963 Academy Awards. In fact, the Oscars get the Hollywood treatment twice in Hollywood. But its the finales 1948 ceremony that plays a major role.

The actual Academy Awards ceremony in 1948, which was broadcast over the radio, was held at the Shrine Auditorium. Securing the location for the episode proved difficult because filming landed on the same week as the SAG Awards. But the essence of the Shrine can still be felt: The venue was used for exterior shots of the arrivals/red-carpet sequence, which were filmed the following week.

To re-create the night, the shows production designer, Matthew Ferguson, relied on newspaper clippings, books and information culled online about the ceremony because the Academy doesnt typically cooperate with sharing its materials.

It was difficult, but not as difficult as you think, Ferguson says.

While the design of the Academy Awards in the modern era is often ornate and intricate the 2020 stage was decked out with more than 40,000 Swarovski crystals the ceremony of 1948 had a more streamlined look: cream-colored fabric draped around four white columns and, at the center, an Oscar statue resting on an off-white tiered base whose silhouette resembles a chocolate fountain. (Fake statuettes lining the base of the two tiers had to be destroyed within five hours of filming, at the Academys request.) The prop department even replicated the ceremonys program, which lists the order of awards and nominees.

Anytime you do the Academy Awards, if you do it in a cheap way it feels terrible, Murphy says. So we kind of have an obligation to blow it out.

The Orpheum had its lighting rigs and speakers removed from the venue to rid the space of any modern elements.

Jeremy Pope as Archie Coleman in a scene from the season finale of Netflixs Hollywood.

(Netflix)

Hollywoods take on the ceremony features many of the years actual nominees and presenters, such as Borgnine and Vivien Leigh. But instead of Loretta Young winning lead actress for her performance in The Farmers Daughter, its Camille Washington (Harrier), who had nearly been prevented from sitting in the theater for the ceremony because of her skin color. And instead of Sidney Sheldon winning for screenwriting for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, its Coleman, proudly kissing Hudson, his boyfriend, before taking the stage.

We had a lot of repetition because in a situation like that, were getting it from every angle, Parsons says. All I will say is that that we got punch-drunk loopy by the end of the day. They were doing like a six-shot of six different people with us in that front row watching one speech that was happening. And I heard it so many times. ... I was laughing so hard I was crying. I finally had to look right in the lens and mouth, Im sorry, because I dont know that Ive ruined anybody elses shot, but mine is trash.

About 160 background actors, each dressed in period-appropriate attire, are crammed into the first dozen-plus rows near the front of the stage. (To fill in the surrounding empty seats, more were tiled into the frame in postproduction.)

Patti LuPone, left, Dylan McDermott, Holland Taylor and Samara Weaving in the season finale of Netflixs Hollywood.

(Netlfix)

The color palette of the wardrobe also was very specific. After getting a sense of the styles and designers that were worn for the ceremony, the shows costume designer, Sarah Evelyn, had to mold it to fit Murphys vision of the young casts dreamlike glow: the women in soft sherbet colors, the men in cream jackets.

For director Jessica Yu, the time at the Orpheum was frenetic. In addition to capturing the main ceremony upstairs, the crew was shooting downstairs for the green-room scenes, which feature Taylor, LuPone and McDermotts characters listening to the ceremony over the radio.

It was seven cameras going, Yu says. I was literally running up and down the stairs. And in a weird way, all the chaos felt like we were shooting the Oscars.

Laura Harrier as Camille in a scene from Netflixs Hollywood.

(Netflix)

Its the episodes acceptance speeches, though, that distinguish each characters experience of taking home an Oscar.

Wong talks of the significance of winning the award as an actress of Chinese descent for a role that wasnt a caricature. Coleman expresses his love for his boyfriend and signals that his win is proof to everyone whos been othered that their stories are important. In her tearful acceptance speech, Washington points out what the moment means for all young girls.

I think the thing that we were trying to get into speeches was they were shocked that they won, Murphy says. They were not entitled to anything. And when you dont think youre entitled, I think youre speaking in a much more raw, emotional way.

Its a bittersweet reality, Murphy says, to imagine where Hollywood would be today if gains in representation, and recognition of that representation, had been made sooner. He refers to what happened with Wong as an example. In 1937s adaptation of Pearl S. Bucks The Good Earth, about a family of Chinese farmers, Wong was passed over for the female lead, O-lan. Instead, German actress Luise Rainer won the best actress Oscar in the role.

Through the lens of todays political correctness, Murphy says, you literally cannot believe that a white woman played the greatest Chinese part of all time with her eyes Scotch-taped in yellowface, and yet thats exactly what happened.

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'Hollywood' on Netflix: How they made the Oscars episode - Los Angeles Times