McDonald offers, “A lot of those places don’t exist any more, so we were trying to capture what their environments were like. I can’t imagine what it was like to get dressed up every night and go to nightclubs like that every night, but George and these people did it. Allen was very specific about certain things, like color palettes. Julie, Jonathan, and I all talked with Allen about that.
“For Simo, we had to find a location for an apartment building in Hollywood. We wanted something that, like Simo himself, has some edges and angles. It was difficult to find in today’s Hollywood, but we found this place down in Long Beach where it’s like time has stopped; interestingly enough, the place had a pool that was shaped like a coffin. It was perfect, because we also wanted to make sure that the minute you saw his environment, you sense that he’s blown it with his wife.”
The seven-week filming schedule for Hollywoodland also included location shooting at Hancock Park and Parkwood Estates. The latter, the former home of General Motors Canada founder Sam McLaughlin, became the Mannixes’ Hollywood mansion because it afforded a rare and completely intact representation of a vanished postwar era.
The party where Reeves and Toni first meet was filmed atop a 1930s department store which had recently been restored to its former glory.
Glenn Williamson marvels, “On the set one day, I was shocked to see all the women extras wearing gloves, but – that was what people wore in those days; it was all very formal. Diane Lane is already so beautiful in person, but from the first wardrobe test, she was just transformed – the hair, the plucked eyebrows, the clothes...”
Lane muses, “The glamour of actors and Hollywood was so exclusive to that time. There is none of that left any more, which is a shame, and all the more reason for why it’s appreciated for what it was.
“Every department on this movie put their best efforts and energy into re-creating the era, and it shows. Although I think it was more because they were responding to the story and to Allen’s wonderful direction, rather than just because it was a movie about Hollywood. Certainly, Julie Weiss and her department outdid themselves with the costumes and wardrobe.”
Weiss, the film’s two-time Academy Award-nominated costume designer, had tracked the project for two years. She elaborates, “I wanted to be a part of this film. It reminds people that we applaud an idol and we leave, and we forget to come back – and the person is still standing onstage. We can be much kinder to the people who have helped us dream than we were to George Reeves. The people in Hollywoodland are on a road of finding out who they are, and it was a time when the city itself was growing, too; orange trees were coming down, and houses were going up. Growing up in L.A. myself, I know that you can either acknowledge the process of getting there, or pretend you’re where you wished you would have been.
“My responsibility was to help the actors find that one little thing so they become the people they’re playing; the moment when the costume becomes clothing for them. It ceases to be dress-up, and audiences watch them move and feel that they have a bridge back in time. Hopefully, when you watch the film, you won’t be able to tell what has been made and what has been borrowed.”
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