The thing that breaks my heart about [Dennis Wilson] is that he was very naïve from the beginning to the end.

There are [in Hollywood] some endemic problems and some things that happen over and over again. There's the problem of representation of basically anybody but white men. These are things that we talk about a lot in contemporary culture, and it's interesting to me to go look at film history from the perspective of today.

If you look at pictures of David O. Selznick , he wasn't even attractive. There's no way to portray him in a way that is glamorous, but that's one of the things that's fascinating to me about him.

I think, because it's one of my favorite moments in [Charles Manson's Hollywood]. That series got a lot of attention and people talk about it a lot, but they tend to focus on the episodes that have more to do with the murder, Charles Manson doing something particularly weird, or Sharon Tate.

I have a degree in cinema studies and the big paper I wrote at the end of that was about Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. So I thought that I knew quite a bit about Judy Garland, but I read in passing that the Stonewall riots were a reaction to her death and I had never really read enough to know what that meant or how that could be true. I was interested in that I knew so much about Judy Garland, but I really didn't know this story.

One of the reasons why I failed was because I figured out in the research process that I couldn't tell it as just, "This is what Frances Farmer's life was like." There are so many questions as to what her life was like because of the way her story has been seized upon and exploited by different factions.

In terms of the way the industry operates, the studio system was such its own thing. It's so different now that it's a globalized world.