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
Bette Davis (1976), but she clashed with Karen Black and Faye Dunaway, the stars of the two latter respective productions, because she felt that neither extended her an appropriate degree of respect, and that their behavior on the film sets was unprofessional. In 1977, Davis became the first woman to receive the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award. The televised event included comments from several of Davis' colleagues, including William Wyler, who joked that given the chance, Davis would still like to re-film a scene from "The Letter" to which Davis nodded. Jane Fonda, Henry Fonda, Natalie Wood, and Olivia de Havilland