Inspired by the 1974 film "Chinatown", "City of Angels" adopted the same cynical view of Depression era Los Angeles, a place where Hollywood and crime competed for attention. This series also found its roots in Roy Huggins’ hard-boiled 1946 detective novel, "The Double Take", which had earlier provided the source material for another Huggins-created series, "77 Sunset Strip". Individual installments of this show were based on real-life events. The three-part pilot episode, “The November Plan,” was based on a notorious 1933 American conspiracy known as the Business Plot, which involved wealthy businessmen trying to bring down United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a coup. Another episode, "The Castle of Dreams," featured a pricey brothel where the prostitutes were movie-star lookalikes. That establishment was based on the historical T&M Studio (later fictionalized in "L.A. Confidential" as the "Fleur de Lis Club"). During the show's run, Nazism, communism, railroad-riding hoboes, and the Ku Klux Klan all figured into the plots.