In putting together the fifth episode of Feud, show runner Ryan Murphy went to great lengths to recreate every detail of the craziest night in Oscar history. (Until this year, anyway.) That moment when Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford takes the stage, while Susan Sarandon’s Bette Davis is left gasping for air in the wings? As you can see from the archival footage, it’s exactly what happened. And in a recent interview, Murphy revealed a few other historically accurate details from the episode that seem even stranger than fiction.

In an hour of Oscar-crazed behavior, one of the more extreme confessions comes courtesy of Feud’s version of Bette Davis, who tells her friend Olivia de Havilland that she clutches her Oscar every night while she watches TV—hence why one statuette is more tarnished than the other. As Murphy explains to Variety, this anecdote was lifted directly from an interaction he had with Davis himself when he was a young reporter:

She told me that she would hold it when she was watching television and it was almost like a pet and it means a lot to her because it reminded her of one night when she was just universally acclaimed and loved, accepted by the world. What she said never really left my memory. I was trying to figure out maybe a way to write something about that or that idea, because I thought that was a very moving thing. So finally when I did the show I was like, “Hot damn, I get to use that moment that I had with her.”

Meanwhile, in Murphy’s attempt to meticulously re-create the scene-stealing silver look Crawford put together for the ceremony, he and costume designer Lou Eyrich crafted a torturous dress for Jessica Lange. “It was 50 pounds,” Murphy says. “It pulled Jessica Lange’s back out like three times.” The Oscar night gowns seen on Patty Duke, de Havilland, Sarandon’s Davis, and the rest were also exact replicas. In fact, a number of Feud’s scenes are plucked almost precisely from archival images. There’s Crawford and Duke (no purse dog in sight, though):

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As well as Crawford leaning coquettishly towards Gregory Peck as she posed with the night’s winners for an Oscar “class photo.”

Even though moments like Crawford stomping out her cigarette and Davis gasping for air as Anne Bancroft’s name was called weren’t captured on camera, they have been meticulously chronicled in biographies. As for more private moments, like the post-ceremony scene in which de Havilland tells Davis she might yet win a third Oscar, Feud captures the spirit—if not every minute detail—of the evening in question. Davis was right to spit back at her friend’s encouraging suggestion by asking, “In what role?” In fact, Davis was never nominated for another Oscar.

But as Murphy explains, even though the antics from both Crawford and Davis around that particular Oscar ceremony were extreme, his goal was to paint their actions in a sympathetic light. “I couldn’t believe that Joan Crawford did all that batshit crazy stuff,” he explains. “So I thought if we’re going to do it, let’s try and understand why she did all that, and then let’s really go to town and do the Academy Awards right.” By allowing both Lange and Sarandon to play the women at their most vulnerable, with tears in their eyes as they confess their weaknesses and Oscar thirst, Feud continues to cast a new light on one of Hollywood’s craziest chapters.