Ryan Murphy’s and Ian Brennan’s miniseries rewrites the history of Tinseltown
“ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD”, Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-nominated comedy-drama film, appeared for much of its running time to be set in and around the film studios of Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Then, in its final act, it was revealed to be a counterfactual yarn set in an alternate reality. “Hollywood”, a seven-part Netflix series co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan (“Glee”, “The Politician”), takes a similar approach to the movie business of the late 1940s. It would have benefited from some of Mr Tarantino’s wit as a scriptwriter and style as a director, but it turns out to be a provocative and tender thought experiment which is ultimately the more intriguing story.
In the opening episodes, the viewer meets a clutch of implausibly attractive wannabes, including Jack Costello (David Corenswet), a second-world-war veteran and Superman lookalike who is trying to support his pregnant wife (Maude Apatow). Every morning, Jack hangs around the gates of Ace Studios in the hope of being picked as an extra, and if he is turned away he goes to work as a male prostitute for Ernie, a suave pimp (Dylan McDermott). One of Jack’s fellow gigolos is Archie (Jeremy Pope), an aspiring screenwriter. And one of Archie’s clients is Roy (Jake Picking), a square-jawed actor who signs with a reptilian agent (Jim Parsons).
At this point, “Hollywood” is somewhere between a daytime soap opera and a soft-porn movie. Both strenuously wholesome and deeply sleazy, it is laden with clunky expository dialogue and fixated on the sight of gym-toned men stripping down to their white underwear in brightly lit motel rooms. It is a mess, but it is always watchable, especially if you are partial to the gleaming vintage cars and immaculate retro tailoring of such glossy period television hits as “Mad Men” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”.
It is not until the series’ second half that it finds its sense of purpose. When Ace Studios’ owner (Rob Reiner) is hospitalised by a heart attack in flagrante, Avis (Patti LuPone), his long-suffering wife, assumes control, thus making her the first female head of a Hollywood studio. She green-lights a biopic of Peg Entwistle, a Welsh actress who killed herself in 1932 by jumping from the “H” of the Hollywood sign—or the “Hollywoodland” sign as it then was. The biopic is considered a risky proposition given that Raymond (Darren Criss), the first-time director, is half-Filipino, and the screenwriter, Archie, is black and gay. It becomes riskier when the producers change the heroine’s name to Meg, and hand the main role to the director’s black girlfriend, Camille (Laura Harrier). Ace Studios’ next film now has a black woman playing a complex lead role opposite a white love interest.
At long last, it becomes clear that Mr Murphy and Mr Brennan aren’t just dropping a group of fictional characters into a glamourised but generally authentic Tinseltown. They are establishing a parallel universe as different from ours as the one in any Marvel superhero blockbuster. In our universe, “Meg” could never have been made in the 1940s, however many studio bosses had heart attacks. But in the enlightened universe of “Hollywood”, the production is barely any trickier than one of the high-school shows in Mr Murphy’s and Mr Brennan’s earlier series, “Glee”. An evil lawyer grumbles that such a progressive film will bankrupt the studio, a couple of burning crosses are planted on lawns, but all it takes is a dash of courage and suddenly the protests go away, villains reform, sins are forgiven and characters of all ages, genders, races and sexualities unite to defeat bigotry.
Some critics have complained that Mr Murphy and Mr Brennan are insulting real civil-rights campaigners by suggesting that such changes could have occurred if only gay people and people of colour had made an effort. But “Hollywood” isn’t meant to be a gritty recreation of genuine struggles. It is meant to be a flight of fancy: a romantic whirl of anachronisms, co-incidences, melodramatic revelations and conveniently blissful resolutions. On one level, yes, it is a call to arms. But like Mr Tarantino’s similarly titled film, it is also a fairy-tale. That is what makes it unexpectedly touching.
The series is essentially one long liberal dream sequence (the phrase “dreamland” crops up regularly in the dialogue.) It is deliberately, absurdly unrealistic, and so the melancholy satirical message beneath the twinkly wish-fulfilment is that equal rights in the film industry are the stuff of far-fetched fantasy—the kind of far-fetched fantasy, indeed, which exists only on the silver screen. That was undeniably the case in the 1940s. The lingering question is whether the situation has moved on much since then.
“Hollywood” is streaming on Netflix now
"Hollywood" - Google News
May 08, 2020 at 07:13PM
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“Hollywood” is an absurd, enjoyable flight of fancy - The Economist
"Hollywood" - Google News
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