Anna May Wong’s ‘Good Earth’ Snub Really Happened

In the first couple of episodes of Netflix’s new series Hollywood, viewers meet an actress named Anna May Wong, played by Michelle Krusiec, whom director Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss) approaches about starring in a film he wants to direct called Angel of Shanghai.

She laughs at him, saying a no one in Hollywood wants “a leading lady who looks like [her]” and it comes to light that she lost out on an Oscar when she wasn’t chosen to star in a movie about a Chinese family called The Good Earth.

Here’s how that all went down in real life. WARNING: The first header is spoiler-free, but the second header has a few spoilers for Hollywood.

Anna May Wong Was a Real Movie Star

Netflix

Anna May Wong was a real Hollywood figure who starred in movies in the 1920s-1940s, including The Thief of Bagdad, Daughter of the Dragon, Shanghai Express, Bombs Over Burma, and Lady from Chungking. But her biggest role was one she never got to play.

In 1935, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) was casting for The Good Earth, an adaptation of the novel by Pearl S. Buck that tells the story of a family of Chinese farmers struggling to survive in pre-World War I China. Wong was passed over for the role in favor of Luise Rainer, a German-British actress who won back-to-back Academy Awards in 1936 and 1937 for The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth. It was called “one of the most notorious cases of casting discrimination in the 1930s” by Sarah Berry in the book “Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood.”

In Hollywood, fictional producer Dick Samuels (Joe Mantello) describes Wong’s screentest thusly:

“Best screentest I’d ever seen. Anna May was the only Asian movie star in town and here, finally, was a role she could shine in. It was her big moment and she took it. Head and shoulders above every other girl we tested,” says Samuels, but he says that producer Irving Thalberg was right about not casting Wong. “You can’t open a picture with a Chinese lead or a colored one, a number of theaters won’t run it. Had she gotten it, the picture’s not a hit.”

Ainsley asks him how he knows it wouldn’t have been a hit because they never made the version starring Wong. He then says to Samuels, “Sometimes I think folks in this town don’t really understand the power they have. Movies don’t just show us how the world is, they show us how the world can be, and if we change the way that movies are made — you take a chance and you make a different kind of story — I think you can change the world.”

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the final few episodes of Hollywood. Stop reading if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Wong Never Really Made It Big

Wong always balked at how Asian characters were portrayed in movies and Hollywood never really knew what to do with her. As she says in Hollywood, “Oversexed, opium-addled courtesans. Dangerously exotic far Eastern temptresses. That’s what they wanted to see from someone who looks like me.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, she did some television, but her health began to deteriorate in the 1950s. She was supposed to play the role of Madame Liang in the film adaptation of the stage musical Flower Drum Song in 1960, but could not due to her declining health. Wong died of a heart attack in 1961 at the age of 56.

However, in Hollywood’s re-imagining of the Golden Age of Hollywood in which a fictional movie studio makes a film starring Camilla Washington, who is African-American, and Wong, the character wins the Best Supporting Actress Oscar at the 1948 Academy Awards.

Hollywood season one is available now on Netflix.

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