Warning: Spoilers ahead for Netflix’s Hollywood season 1. In the first episode of Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, viewers learn that the gas station that Jack Castello works at isn’t a gas station at all. It’s a front for male prostitutes. So…was the gas station real in Netflix’s Hollywood? While parts of the show are fictionalized, the gas station is based on a real Hollywood gas station run by a man named Scotty Bowers in the 1940s.
According to Vanity Fair, Bowers, whose full name was George Albert Bowers, was a young ex-United States Marine who worked an attendant at the Richfield Oil service station at 5777 Hollywood Boulevard, at the corner of Van Ness Avenue, in Los Angeles. While the service station was a real service station, Bowers used it to start his sexual career as a pimp for himself and other men. He worked there from 1946 to 1950. In 1950, he started to work as a party bartender, where he continued his sexual services and provided both men and women as prostitutes for Hollywood executives. Because of his past, Bowers, who died in 2019, became the subject of the 2017 documentary, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood.
In Hollywood, Bowers inspired two characters. The first is Ernie West, the owner of a Hollywood gas station who recruits handsome young men to work as prostitutes for Hollywood executives who pull up to the gas station and tell the attendant the magic word: “Dreamland,” at which point the employee jumps into their car for a sexual escapade. Both Bowers and Ernie worked as pimps.
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But Bowers also partly inspired Jack Costello, a handsome aspiring actor that Ernie meets at a bar and recruits for his gas station. Like Bowers, who was a former United States Marine, Jack is a World War II veteran who comes to Hollywood to try to make it as an actor. In a way, Jack represented Bowers’ early days at his gas station, where he worked less as a pimp and more as a prostitute. Long story short, the gas station from Hollywood is somewhat real. Though the events are clearly exaggerated. The more you know.