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And welcome to another episode of Shortland.

On the 30th of October, the day after my birthday, 1993, River Phoenix crashed onto the pavement outside Johnny Depp's Sunset Boulevard Bar, the Viper Room, and started convulsing wildly.

The world knew Phoenix as a clean-cut vegan, and at 23 years old, already one of the biggest stars of the past decade.

Yet here he was, dying on the street, having snorted a lethal combination of cocaine and heroin,

known as Speedball. River Phoenix died before the paramedics even arrived. Following his death,

rumours swirled about exactly what happened that night.

Who sold this former teen idol, a fatal dose of Class A drugs? Why did nobody call for an ambulance sooner?

And what happened to Johnny Depp's infamous den of Iniquity. This is the shorthand.

Before we can get into how River Phoenix ended up at the Vipa Room,

we need to talk about how the Vipa Room ended up at 8852 Sunset Boulevard.

The building that became Johnny Depp's infamous bar actually started out as a greengrocer in the 1920s.

For decades, Sunset Boulevard had been a relatively sleepy three road in LA County that connected a few local farms.

However, by the end of the 1920s, sunset began to change, fast, and that all had to do with what lay at one end of it. Hollywood.

What was once a dusty track, used predominantly by farmers, became a key avenue, in and out of La La Land,

...