The Problem With Hollywood
Hollywood. Image courtesy of Netflix.
When done right, Hollywood satirizing itself can produce some of the all-time great works of film or television. Barton Fink remains, in my mind, the best Cohen Bros film. And Billy Wilder was a master at it, of course. Who knows better how to caricature and send-up the venality, the hollowness and the desperation underpinning Tinseltown than those who have themselves already been through the meat grinder of the Hollywood dream factory?
Ryan Murphy’s new Neflix series, Hollywood, starts out promisingly enough. Set in a sparkling, immaculately re-imagined post-war Los Angeles it dives into the story of a handsome dumb lunk named Jack Costello desperate just to be near the intoxicating, soul-snatching fame of a movie studio lot. He can’t act worth a lick, but that has never really stopped anyone in Hollywood before. He is soon recruited by Dylan McDermott (perfectly cast) to work as a gigolo in a gas station. The character maintains his starry-eyed idealism even as he ruefully starts sleeping with customers for money. His big dreams about making it as a leading man have apparently not been dimmed by the acts he is coerced into performing.
Then Sheldon Cooper shows up as real-life Old Hollywood agent Henry Wilson. Wilson was a star-maker in Old Hollywood, who exploited his clients and treated everyone like shit - in real life, he ended up penniless and destitute. Jim Parsons is maybe not great in the role - I can’t tell if it’s because he’s been cursed to forever bear the cross of Sheldon Cooper or not - but the stunt casting, which deliberately plays against type as a foul-mouth agent of vileness - makes its point well enough. The first few episodes of Hollywood establish that this is a brutal, unforgiving industry - an industry that is openly racist and discriminatory and prejudiced, an industry that preys on people desperate for fame and recognition, forcing them to debase themselves, and lower themselves, and prostitute themselves just so they can have two lines in a nothing movie that will be forgotten in no time.
The plot is about how these young Hollywood up-starts are trying to get a movie about Peg Entwistle - who in real life committed suicide by jumping off the Hollywood sign when the industry spat her out - greenlit and made. I started to think that maybe this show had something. The dialogue is pretty sharp, the acting mostly passable and sometimes even good, and the production values are polished and gorgeous. The sleek, attractive visual look of the show, the stunt casting of Jim Parsons, the naive wonderment of these Hollywood hopefuls - that would have all worked great as a contrast to the brutal reality of the industry, as they were forced to make compromises and reconcile themselves to the morally empty world of the film industry that they want so badly to be a part of. That would have been a dark, complex, fascinating show.
But, alas - it was not the show Ryan Murphy had in mind. Instead, about mid-way through, everything starts to look up for the gang. The movie they want to make - starring minorities and written by a gay black man - goes into production and becomes an immense hit, touching off a cultural revolution. They all fall in love with the right people who are perfect for them. Everything goes about as well as it possibly good. This isn’t a cautionary tale about Hollywood at all - it’s a candycane fantasy-land about an alternative universe where a movie like that in 1940s Hollywood could get made and change the world and the lives of all these marginalized people.
Naturally I think it’s a good thing that Ryan Murphy has made a big budget, high profile show with a diverse cast and elevated their stories. But that is not the most interesting place this story could have gone. In fact, simply from a narrative and thematic perspective, it’s about the most boring, uninspired koombaya ending the show could have possibly gone for. It also falls into a shallow understanding of racism and prejudice, where these issues are just waved away with a magic wand that re-writes history so that everyone has an absurdly happy ending by the time the credits roll. That is about as facile as believing that we have solved racism by, for instance, taking Woodrow Wilson’s name off of building.
In a way, by writing the show to end like that it simply ignores all the complex and difficult questions it raises in the beginning. Hollywood was - and still is - predatory. There is such a surplus of wannabe stars in the labor pool, most of them desperate for recognition and fame and badly damaged from a variety of life traumas, that anyone with any power can prey on them, and exploit their weaknesses for any number of nefarious ends.
That was true in the 1940s, and it’s still true now despite Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby being in prison. And yet the crazy duality of all this, is that even if the way the sausage gets made is pretty awful, people still buy the product - they dream about getting their picture snapped in front of the Hollywood sign, at the Walk of Fame, on Sunset Blvd. That tension, that contrast, between reality and the image created by the film industry, was set up to be explored in all sorts of interesting ways in Hollywood. But instead of doing that, it turned into a complete Leave It to Beaver fantasy about how life rewards those who take risks and try hard and stick together. And that, I’m sorry to say, is the problem with Hollywood.
