Ryan Murphy (writer) in 2017. The first season focused on the rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford on the set of their 1962 film "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?". With newcomer Steven Canals, a research assistant for Dustin Lance Black before his Master of Fine Arts at UCLA, Murphy and Falchuk launched a new series set in the Ball community in mid-1980s New York City. Murphy had wanted to adapt "Paris is Burning" as a series and Canals had been writing a script while at graduate school centered on a young African American teen made homeless for being gay, who moved
Ernest Haller received his fourth nomination for "Mildred Pierce", and Crawford won the award for Best Actress. With this as a start, Haller continued to photograph Crawford in several other films, including "Humoresque" (1946) and "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" Although Haller terminated his contract with the Warner Brothers in 1951, he was the best choice to photograph Bette Davis and Joan Crawford— two of the closest actresses that Haller has worked with and the ex-Warner stars. He was brought back to photograph the only film the two would appear together. In "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?", Davis made the