Hollywood: a fairytale that fails
07 May 2020. -

Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Hollywood (what a bland title) is about a guy named Jack who comes to Hollywood in 1947 to become a movie star. His wife is pregnant and he has no money, so he takes a job at a gas station where the attendants double as male hookers for Hollywood’s elite. This idea is based on Scotty Bowers’ memoir Full Service, in which he ran a similar establishment. The employees of Bowers’ gas station were all former WWII vets who most certainly engaged in some sort of gay sex while overseas. Statistically, a male prostitute’s clients are overwhelmingly male because let’s be honest, women don’t usually have to pay for it.  Except Jack is so straight that he’s strictly for the ladies, so right away we’re in TV show nonsense territory.

The silliness continues when Jack, dressed as a cop, pretends to arrest a black gay guy who later reveals himself to be the gifted author of a screenplay about Peg Entwistle. Entwistle was a Welsh-born stage actress of the '20s who made one movie in 1932, Thirteen Women, then committed suicide by jumping off the Hollywood sign. Somehow, the movie gets made with a black woman in the lead, so they have to retitle it Meg. Everybody wins Oscars except the straight white guy. All this is so very contrived, but the worst thing about Hollywood might be the depiction of the young Rock Hudson. Earlier, he hooks up with the black screenwriter and they go to the Oscars holding hands, a bold act that seems to have no real consequence. In 1947.

Hollywood is typical woke bullshit, so ludicrous it defies all logic, like using the phrase ‘woman of colour’ 30 years before it was created by black women activists at the National Women's Conference. At one point, when Meg goes $25,000 over budget, the male whores get busy and pool their money to rescue the picture. While it is ludicrous that they could raise that amount of money in a short while, it is more ludicrous that a Hollywood studio would take the money and thus forfeit total ownership of the picture. But Hollywood is full of this sort of contrived writing. Why not just tell the real story of the men and women who pioneered civil rights by taking risks? Why reinvent a history that is so thoroughly documented? And why tell a story where every risk pays off? That doesn’t even happen in fairytales. It’s as offensive as making a movie about a bunch of Jews escaping from a concentration camp and then pushing Hitler into an oven, only if Ryan Murphy produced it, it would feature a diverse cast of Jews.

I am the kind of guy who revels in this material. I’ve read Bowers’ book, the Kenneth Anger books, the biography of talent agent Henry Willson called The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson, and countless other things about the era. In the end, Hollywood takes this remarkable material and infantilizes it. It’s so disappointing when one considers what the same producer did with The People Vs. O. J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and Feud, all of which went out of their way to fictionalize the facts correctly. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, but those who reinvent it are just liars.