Only Murders In The Building Season 4: Is The Sunset Swan A Real Place?

Contains spoilers for "Only Murders in the Building" Season 4, Episode 1 — "Once Upon a Time in the West"

The gang heads off to the West Coast to open the funny, fresh fourth season of "Only Murders in the Building" for multiple reasons. Charles Haden-Savage (Steve Martin) is trailing his stunt double, Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), who has disappeared without a trace. Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) is caught in a quandary about his relationship with Loretta Durkin (Meryl Streep, who joined the already star-studded "Only Murders" cast in Season 3). And Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) — well, she's lost her apartment in the Arconia and is looking for a place to crash.

Along the way, Charles, Mabel, and Oliver stop at an old haunt of Charles' — a residential hotel called the Sunset Swan. There, he explains, many a wild celebrity party took place, and many a famous face has stayed. While poking around its courtyard, he gets a further clue about Sazz's whereabouts, which leads the whole team back to New York City. 

Sadly, if you're looking to book a room at the Sunset Swan, you're as unlucky as Sazz is; it was made up for the show. It appears to be a mashup of actual hotels such as the Chateau Marmont and the Beverly Hills Hotel, and closed locales such as The Garden of Allah. And at least one of the people Charles remembers having a place at the Sunset Swan wasn't living in a hotel when she died — but she did disappear from one.

Charles Haden-Savage namedrops Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, who was infamously and violently murdered in Los Angeles back in January 1947, as one of the people who lived in the Sunset Swan. Naturally, the real Short didn't live in the Sunset Swan, though she was staying near a hotel when she disappeared. At the time she went missing from The Biltmore Hotel — where her sister had been staying on vacation — Short was living at an apartment behind a nightclub, The Florentine Gardens, and working as a waitress while trying to launch an acting career.

Plenty of other actors and actresses have drifted in and out of hotels like the Chateau Marmont during their time in Hollywood. Some did indeed lose their lives there, like John Belushi, who overdosed on heroin and cocaine at the hotel in 1982. Hopefully, Charles, Oliver, and Mabel's journeys will be much less harrowing as the fourth season of "Only Murders in the Building" rolls out and airs every Tuesday.