Hollywood Story (1951) on Netflix
Larry O'Brien, a New York theatrical producer, buys a disused silent-film studio in Hollywood and learns a director was murdered there twenty years earlier. He plans a film about it.
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- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.8/101,280 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Plot summary
Larry O'Brien works in the New York theater and intends to set up a film company in Hollywood. He buys an old studio once used for silent pictures and left standing empty. A famous director was killed in the studio office two decades earlier, and nobody was ever charged. O'Brien grows interested in the crime and chooses to make a movie about it. He seeks out the people who worked at that studio and takes many of them on for the production. Danger soon comes his way as well.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hollywood Story (1951)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The plot is believed to be based on the real unsolved murder of silent-film director William Desmond Taylor. The film invents its own conclusion but otherwise closely follows the circumstances of the actual case.
- The silent-film stars who cameoed were paid $55 a day for speaking parts, while others, such as Elmo Lincoln, the first screen Tarzan, received only $15 a day as non-speaking extras.
- Universal Pictures made Hollywood Story to cash in on the success of Paramount's Sunset Boulevard, which had been released the previous year.
- Director William Castle shot many scenes at Charlie Chaplin Studios, built in 1917, to lend the film the air of old Hollywood.
