Garden of Allah Hotel

I think just that the meta quality of, well, for me, let me go back.

For me, it's a fantasy for movie lovers to, we read about these movies and you read, but like, what did it feel like to be at MGM? And again, it may be because again, I, you know, I love this idea of the writers and they would live at the, you know, when I read these books of like, oh, and they're all living at the Garden of Allah and they'd show up drunk to work and Hemingway's living with Scott Fitzgerald.

And, but I thought, what if I could take all of these things and combine it into, you know, feeling like you were actually there at the studio.

And I think that that's what I was trying to do, that for me, use the films the women as a device to tell the story of what is it, what did it actually feel like to be in making a movie in the greatest year of, of, of 1939 and beyond just the factual, get a little bit more personal take.

He signs a contract with MGM.

And he moves into a hotel called the Garden of Allah on the Sunset Strip.

We have to appreciate the cruel irony of that hotel name, the Garden of Allah.

Yeah, why is that ironic?

Because it evokes this manufactured, cheap Hollywood-style exoticism.

We endured the commute through the literal trash, the soot, and the industrial decay of the Valley of Ashes in Queens, trapped under the watchful, indifferent eyes of a forgotten optometrist's billboard.

We fled across the Atlantic to the red-roofed houses of the French Riviera, where the sensory beauty and the perfect weather masked a repressed carnival of marital collapse, betrayal, and mental decline.

And finally, we ended up in the script rooms of Hollywood, in the faux paradise of the Garden of Allah, where the American Dream Factory finally consumed its greatest critics.

But there was even more scandal around The Garden of Allah than just a questionable manager.

In 1942, the hotel became a center of true crime scandal when the German night manager, Carl Aldinger, was found shot to death in the doorway of his office in The Garden of Allah Hotel.

The cash drawer was open and emptied, and a handful of quarters were sprawled beside the body of the attendant.

A stolen car was found in front of the reception building, and several guests who had been woken by the sound of the gunshots congregated in the lobby.

The only answer came days later when a homicide robber was stopped while robbing a club in Las Vegas.

The man's name was Farrington Graham Hill, and he had gone on a multi-stop robbery spree that had carried him all the way from Hollywood to Las Vegas.

Big distance, right? He was arrested in Nevada and brought back to California, where he was tried for the murder of Aldinger at The Garden of Allah Hotel.

Hill was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.