Netflix’s glam alt-history Hollywood focuses on the making of the film, the first call Pegand later, Meg. While some parts of the series are based on the stories of Hollywood, this no: there was no movie called Peg or Meg in the real life. That said, there are some parts of the story that has its roots in the screen of history.
The part of Peg‘s of production that are more obviously based in the reality is that it was not, in fact, a woman named Peg Entwistle who sadly died by suicide in the Hollywoodland sign. She was a theater actress who tried to make the transition to the big screen in the 1930s, but was only able to get a small role in a flop film, Thirteen Women. In September of 1932, his body was found in a ravine beneath the Hollywood sign, along with a brief suicide note, and police were able to deduce that she had gone up to the “H” of the signal and jumped to his death.
In the universe of script about Peg, writer of fiction Archie Coleman (played by Jeremy Pope) includes these specific details about his life and death, but also adds other elements that are not necessarily true to life. For example, the script of the film includes a boyfriend named Sam who tries to stop Peg of his fatal decision, which leads to a competition between Jack Costello (David Corenswet) and Rock Hudson (Jake’s Pick) to play the romantic lead.
In reality, according to an article about his death in the Lewiston Daily Sun, she had divorced three years from a Robert Lee Keith, who had been divorced on the grounds of cruelty. The same article indicates that she was most likely alone when she died, and she was a jane doe, until her uncle, with whom he had been living, identified her body. Hollywood it is the first project of fiction to highlight Entwistle life and death, and even though she barely had a film career, she ended up being the stuff of Hollywood lore.
The fiction Meg the film breaks a lot of new ways in their version of Hollywood, but in reality, the “firsts” did not occur until much later. For example, the first kiss interracial on the screen it did not happen until Island in the Sun in 1957, due to antimiscegenation rules in the restrictive Hays Code that governed the film. While the characters of Hollywood achieve great success in the “golden age”, in reality, these barriers, it is much more difficult to break. Black women, as the leader of the lady Camilla (Laura Harrier), not to win an Oscar as a leading actress until Halle Berry’s win in 2001, and the black writers like Archie did not win Oscars until the year 2009 (by Geoffrey Fletcher’s adapted screenplay) and 2017 (for Jordan Peele of the original script). Hollywood‘s fiction film Meg you may have broken barriers, but in the real world, there is no “miracle movie” — just decades of struggles.
