The series was explicitly framed as a dramatization, not a documentary. Its creators acknowledged that scenes were invented, that dialogue was created to serve dramatic purposes, and that the internal lives of historical figures were necessarily products of imagination rather than documentation. The California Supreme Court, in ruling on a defamation suit brought by Olivia de Havilland over her portrayal in the series, established the principle that audiences watching the show would understand it as a creative interpretation.
What the series did—and what it was designed to do—was translate the rivalry narrative into premium television with a feminist subtext: the claim that two women of extraordinary talent were pitted against each other by a system designed to benefit from their conflict, and that the enmity between them was partly the industry’s creation as much as their own. This reading of the rivalry has genuine merit as a structural analysis of Hollywood, even if the specific events and conversations it dramatized cannot be verified.
The result was that millions of viewers acquired a detailed and emotionally vivid mental image of what happened during the making of *Baby Jane*, during the 1963 Oscar season, and at the ceremony itself—an image constructed by skilled dramatists from historical material filtered through creative imagination. Jessica Lange’s Crawford and Susan Sarandon’s Davis became, for many viewers, the authoritative versions of these women, more vivid and immediate than the actual photographic and film record.
This is what television does with historical material when it is well executed: it provides an experience of events that displaces the incomplete and uncertain original record with something more emotionally complete and narratively satisfying. The displacement is not entirely unwelcome—the series illuminated something real about the conditions in which both women worked—but it came at the cost of the ambiguity and evidentiary uncertainty that more honest accounts of the historical record require.