Like many before her, Maria has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of Mass, Maria immigrates to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father's arrest. As the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European emigres: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becomein scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled.
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