If you’ve lived in Los Angeles for more than two years, actually if you’ve lived or worked near Sunset Blvd, there is a good chance you’ve spotted the city’s mercurial angel, Angelyne. A fixture in the city for almost 40 years, Angelyne is part sex goddess, part wannabe celebrity, and a good chunk of aspirational businesswoman. She never truly hit the peak of show business she was aiming for, but her ability to get free billboards all over the city endeared her to the masses.
When Allison Miller (“Brave New World”) was brought on as the showrunner of “Angelyne,” a mini-series based on Angelyne’s life starring Emmy Rossum as the big hair and big-breasted ingenue, she was pretty well versed in the media personality’s life (or at least thought she was). She was also very cognizant of not over-explaining key moments. And, that more people outside of LA might recognize her than you’d think.
“One thing you have to remember is that she has made herself kind of shorthand her Los Angeles. A place that has no center, its strength comes from its sheer size, and its complexity and diversity,” Miller says. “And if you watch ‘The Simpsons,‘ or movies from the ’90s like ‘Volcano,‘ her billboards appear almost as a shorthand for being in Los Angeles. She’s created herself as a logo, almost. Where it’s like, ‘Oh, we know we’re in Los Angeles because there’s Angelyne’s billboard.’ And some people get that, and some people don’t. But it’s enough. And I think that hopefully, the story spans on its own and just a person trying to be who they want to be.”
Over the course of our interview Miller discusses the long three-year window to get the series made, whether Angelyne has watched it, the wonderfully surreal moments of the series and much, much more.
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The Playlist: Is this the longest project you’ve ever worked on? Because, if my memory is correct, weren’t you guys supposed to start shooting before the pandemic started?
Allison Miller: Yeah, we did. We shot a third of it even before the pandemic started. I took the job. I thought it was a six-month job. I was like, “Cool, I’ll do this while I’m waiting to hear about my pilot.” And then three years later I’m talking about it, and it’s just aired. It’s been a long time coming. Emmy Rossum and I were talking the other day. She was like, “Are you so happy that it’s finally out?” And I was like, “I’m kind of sad. It’s weird.” It’s been a part of my life for so long. It’s hard to imagine it not being something I think about all the time.
How did you get involved in the first place?
They were looking for a showrunner. I think they were kind of having trouble finding what the right notes were to hit about the project. We’ve seen a lot of biopics this year, and they’re hard. It’s really hard to make something about someone’s life. And I think that when we realized that it was less about being a biopic, and more about the failure of biopics, really, to tell someone’s story. We have these impulses. We hear these stories, and they’re so great, and we want to bring them to life. First of all, it’s a huge responsibility knowing that person is inevitably going to have feelings about it, and as an empathetic person, it was very stressful to kind of figure out what we wanted to include and what we didn’t. I think when we realized that Angelyne was an unconventional person and that her story was asked to be told in an unconventional way, it really brings us up to kind of hold our mirror up to what we’re doing, and our process, and what The Hollywood Reporter did in the article about her. Culturally what we do to mysteries, what they do to us, and why we feel like we need to solve them. I just kind of clicked creatively with everyone. Lucy Tcherniak, the director. Emmy Rossum. It felt really good to work with a team of women and we were all so inspired by her and we all saw her probably in a slightly different way. But that’s kind of what’s great about it.
You must’ve known there was no way she was going to sign off on the finished product, right? You’d never get a like, “Oh my God, I love it. It’s the greatest thing ever.”
Her consent was so important to us, and being able to get her life rights. I mean, we got her life rights. She gave us the consent to recreate her music, to use her art, to use everything that, to us, was so inspiring. We were so happy when she signed that contract. We just really didn’t want to do it without that, and so we were really glad that we were able to get that.
Angelyne certainly knows how to get attention and I saw that when it came out, that she did some interviews where she was like, “No. This is not my life.” I guess my feeling was, did you at some point realize that she would probably do something like that?
It was important to us the entire time that the power rested with her, right?
O.K.
She gave us the right and she was able to be as involved as she wanted to be. We wanted her to be an executive producer, we wanted her to be in. But ultimately, she has the power. She got the money either way. She was in control, and I think that everyone should be. She wants to be in control of her own image and I mean, that’s her ability to control her own image as a businesswoman is one of the things that I most respect about her. I think she’s a badass, and I learned a lot about how to value myself, I think, through how she values what she’s created.
Did she have the right to sign off on scripts and stuff? Or did she, by giving her rights, sort of agree to be like, “O.K. You’re going to tell my story however you want to tell it”?
Yeah. I think you hit on something really important, which is what she said is, “This isn’t my story.” And I think when we made that part of our story, that this could never be her story, that this our story, which is different than her story.
Right.
And she’ll say things like that all the time. “I want you to be able to make your story. But that isn’t going to get in the way of my story.” She’s got a documentary that’s coming out this summer that I cannot wait for. It’s going to make me mad with jealousy because it’s going to be so much footage that we’ve never seen before. And so, I think that she knows that there’s kind of room in this space for both the projects because all our project does is kind of, I hope, make people more interested in who she is, and build her brand even further. And she knows how to capitalize on that, and that’s one of the things that’s so impressive about it.
And so, one of the really interesting things about the show is the fantastical journeys that pop up in each episode. Beginning with the car going off Mulholland drive and then you sort of continue pushing it further and further each episode. Where did that idea come from? Was that in the writers’ room?
I mean, that was definitely a team decision That was one of the greatest things about this creative team, is that Emmy, Lucy, and all of the writers in the writers’ room were kind of all really dug into this idea of, how do we tell an unconventional story about an unconventional woman? And if you look at her, the magazines that she, herself, put out and [that] very short documentary on YouTube. And it is a fantastic world full of imagination and I mean, as a storyteller that was just such an opportunity to do all of these wild things that I had always imagined doing. And one thing, like the dance number, was something that came, an idea that Lucy Tcherniak had that came out of our COVID restriction. We had planned a really large party scene with hundreds of extras before we shut down. We had it all planned out and we were ready to go. But because of the number of people we could have on set post-COVID, we had to find a way to tell the story a little differently.
Oh.
And so, when I wrote that in the episode, it just felt so Angelyne, and it felt like such a great visual opportunity to kind of say what people, what celebrities, what famous people do for us. They transcend reality for us, and it’s a really amazing thing.
I did love the Mulholland Drive moment. I feel like as a Los Angelino, that spoke to me for some reason. And that’s something I wanted to ask you about. How cognizant were you that if you’ve lived in LA for a few years you likely have seen Angelyne drive up and down Sunset Blvd, but if you live in another part of the country you’ve likely never heard of her?
No, It’s obviously something we’ve thought a lot about and were always kind of fighting over-explaining things. One thing you have to remember is that she has made herself kind of shorthand her Los Angeles. A place that has no center, its strength comes from its sheer size, and its complexity and diversity. And if you watch “The Simpsons,” or movies from the ’90s like “Volcano,” her billboards appear almost as a shorthand for being in Los Angeles. She’s created herself as a logo, almost. Where it’s like, “Oh, we know we’re in Los Angeles because there’s Angelyne’s billboard.” And some people get that, and some people don’t. But it’s enough. And I think that hopefully, the story spans on its own and just a person trying to be who they want to be.
Have you been surprised by some of the people who knew who she was?
I feel like I’ve been in L.A. for 22, 23 years, and I feel like everyone has had a sighting and maybe they have a story, or maybe they don’t. But even my seven-year-old came home the other day and was like, “I had my first celebrity sighting.” And I was like, “Who?” He’s like, “Angelyne.” And my husband’s like, “It’s true. She was at Gelsons.” It was so bizarre because now he knows the pink Corvette means Angelyne. That is crazy. People will call me and say, “Oh, I think Angelyne got a pink Jeep.” And I’m like, “No. She drives a Corvette, you guys.” But that color pink on a vehicle has become so iconic to her that people think that any pink vehicle is Angelyne, or could be Angelyne. She has created this instantly recognizable thing. And that’s hard to do.
Earlier in our conversation, you mentioned the idea that this was your story and not her story, and you alluded to the fact that maybe you didn’t think that the THR article might not have been as fair as it should be. Rereading the story, there is so much of the article that isn’t in the show. Did you not feel that as a public figure, they didn’t have the right to sort of find out who she really was?
Oh, I mean, I think what’s come up for me, and thinking about the show and the article. We have the right to the article. Obviously, it’s based on the article. Gary Baum an amazing job. I think it’s a beautifully written article. It was a pleasure to have that as a starting place. And I think what we wanted to capture was kind of the process of reading that article. And I think that we all kind of obviously view it differently, but when I read it, it was like, “Oh, this is so interesting,” and then I was like, “Huh,” and so you’re left with the feeling of having read it, and you’re like, does this matter? Should I know this if she doesn’t want me to know this? Do we need to know everything about each other? I mean, I guess I feel like, in a way, we have ruined someone’s life, right? By needing to know everything. In a silly way, just having a child now, we struggled with really… What do we tell him about Santa Claus? Is something magical but untrue? Is it a lie? Is it not a lie? These kinds of things that we do, that we give ourselves this kind of magic in a life that can be, especially recently, pretty awful and depressing.
Sure.
Did we ruin that mystery by knowing the darkness that’s underneath? Gary Baum, himself, and the character based on him in the show would say that that complexity deepens our understanding of what that person is. But I think that you could equally argue the other way. That it kind of takes the magic away. And I think that what we want to go in on the show is that, she has refused to let that magic be taken away and I think that that’s really amazing. That’s why we kind of planned the show on her own words about the article in an interview she did on NPR just after the article came out, to kind of fully give her the last word on her story, or whatever parts of our story are her story.
Angelyne says she hasn’t watched it. She’s only peeked at it, which could mean the trailer or whatever. Do you believe her?
I don’t know. I mean, I want her to. I want her to love it. I hope that if she does, she’ll realize that it was really… I feel like it’s a love letter to her, to everything in Los Angeles, and what she means to Los Angeles, and what Los Angeles means to the world in terms of this idea of fantasy, and kind of being who you want to be, the quest to reinvent yourself, they say. And I think that it’s ultimately a Los Angeles story, and that’s an American story, really.
“Angelyne” is available on Peacock