It’s no secret that with the wonderful golden-age Hollywood movies, as with sausage, you didn’t want to know what went into making them.
The prolific Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series, appropriately titled Hollywood and becoming available Friday, wants to show us some of what we’d been missing. Or looking away from.
Hollywood is set in the late 1940s, just after the war ended, and the entertainment industry was starting to explode. It’s a visual delight, cotton candy for the eyes, showcasing the just-slightly-sunbleached pastels and sepia tones of a city selling dreams.
If only the stories were equally enchanting.
Hollywood starts on the nuts-and-bolts level, with a swarm of acting hopefuls clustered outside the gates of a movie studio hoping to be picked as an extra for a crowd scene in whatever pictures are being filmed that day.
It looks like the longest of long shots, which it is. But while there are multiple paths for actors and actresses to make it into the movies, many of them involving sheer luck, they all one common thread: somehow getting noticed.
Real-life Hollywood legends tell us that the lucky few can get noticed in any number of random ways. Murphy’s Hollywood series buys into the somewhat cynical precept that many of those ways are corrupt, immoral and degrading – and that those involved accept it.
“By any means necessary” seems to be the mantra here.
The Hollywood story begins with Jack Castello (David Corenswet), a small-town war veteran who came to L.A. to become a star. While he tries to figure out how to make that happen, he’s living in a tiny apartment with a wife who works as a waitress and is pregnant with twins.
None of the signs look good for Jack, because he’s one of several thousand good-looking war vets with the same dream and the same lack of a path to get there.
Then one day, while he’s pounding down a few self-pity drinks at the local bar, he gets noticed. A guy named Ernie (Dylan McDermott, looking like you’ve never seen him) offers him a job pumping gas. Jack waves him off until Ernie explains that gas isn’t all that gets pumped at his place.
It’s not a terrible metaphor for the way the Hollywood world treats aspiring performers. It’s even an interesting twist because stories of this sort traditionally focus on how women are abused and exploited. Hollywood brings an element of gender parity to the exploitation game.
We gradually meet other characters, some of the clients, and others in the same position as Jack. That includes Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss) and Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope). We meet some familiar names like Rock Hudson (Jake Picking) and Hattie McDaniel (Queen Latifah).
Eventually, we work our way inside the studio gates to see how things work there. Unsurprisingly, that’s also a bit of a snake pit in which the high ground is hard to see, never mind maintain.
In truth, however, none of this is shocking or even surprising because we have seen it all before. While Hollywood offers some fresh setups, situations, and characters, it doesn’t ultimately advance the conversation very far.
It’s not exactly cartoonish, but neither does much of it feel multi-dimensional. The characters often feel more symbolic than real, making it hard to work up the empathy for which Hollywood theoretically seems to be striving.
It often feels contrived and artificial, a sense reinforced by an early scene that uses an almost complete rendition of “Catch A Falling Star.” It fits the scene well. But the song didn’t come out until ten years later.
There may be better ways to make the point that Hollywood isn’t real.