Imagine pitching a 1949 studio executive a story narrated by a dead man floating face down in a swimming pool. This episode explores the 1950 cinematic masterpiece that twisted the manufactured glamour of Los Angeles into a gothic satire about a struggling screenwriter, a forgotten silent-film star, and the fiercely protective butler who enables her delusions of a comeback. We look at how the film's expatriate director, observing the grand mansions of obsolete 1920s stars while driving through the city, turned exiled Hollywood royalty into the subject of a movie the studio never would have approved.

We reveal how the creators submitted the script a few pages at a time under a fake comedy title to dodge the Hays Code and studio executives, how an abandoned adaptation of a satirical novel about a pet mortuary left behind a chimpanzee funeral, ...