[major spoiler warning for the entire miniseries, although if you know the premise, you can probably see how this is going to go]
The switch happens over dinner, in a scene so dull it’s easy to miss. Jeremy Pope plays Archie, a black man whose screenplay about the real-life story of Peg Entwisle, the woman who jumped to her death off the “H” in the Hollywood sign, has been greenlit. After renaming the film Meg and casting a Camille (Laura Harrier), a black woman, in the lead role, a white producer suggests that such an ending may send the wrong message to black women who aspire to be actresses. The camera pulls in on Archie’s face as he has the realization that’s been coming all along, inching closer with each strained divergence from reality within the show itself: “What if she doesn’t jump?” he says.
That’s the trick of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Hollywood, a shallow, arduous act of fantastical revisionism: grant salvation from the unsettling truth of history, transform the world through superficial representation.
The first episode centers around a gas station where handsome young men hoping to break into the industry are paid to have sex with the most powerful people in Hollywood. Props, at least, that this is played as simply a job, with accompanying hardships and perks, and makes sure to delineate between the work and the sexual abuse of Rock Hudson. Of course, come the final show’s final moments, the gas station has to close, because those liberated by open expressions of homosexuality in the media no longer feel the need to hide and pay for sex. If business really does go down for sex workers in the real world bc of lessened shame, nobody told actual SW-ers and their clients.
The middle five episodes slog through the production of Meg, with endless obligatory networking and lifeless budgetary disputes. There are a few breaks from the tedium of such an uninspired story, such as a jarring appearance from Eleanor Roosevelt(???) in the studio executive’s office, but it mostly adheres to a strict underdog tradition. Ryan Murphy is known for being “campy,” though this has never sat right with me. Camp is about the uncanny and disreputable, reclaiming the shallow remnants of low-grade pop culture as a playground. What Murphy does is a callous, hyper-active recycling of disconnected iconography without purpose; it might feel like camp, but it offers none of its predecessor’s trademark ecstasy. With Hollywood, even that energy is gone, and in its wake is a dreary show that recoils at any mention of counterculture. The show is dismissive of the gay underground, lacks any seduction or beauty or style, pays no respect to the black filmmakers who would later become the lifeblood of independent film in the latter half of the 20th century. Murphy doesn’t seek to reclaim post-war Hollywood for a brighter, more radical future; he seeks to reclaims the middle-brow biopic.
If I were being generous, I would call the show "expansive,” but that just means it has a cast too big to give any single character a meaningful arc; The half-dozen heros are never in the wrong, or placed in a situation where the choice to do the right thing proves a struggle. Every problem is solved briskly and without any internal logic: Two actresses compete for a role and at the last minute one simply decides to back down, and she gets another part anyway; A print of the film is destroyed, but a secret back-up is revealed; The KKK places burning crosses on the lawns of those involved in Meg’s production, and security measures are put into place without any dramatic impact on the following scenes. One might call it an experiment in radical happiness, a subversion of hardship to give every character, as the title of the final episode suggests, a “Hollywood Ending.” I would be more inclined to call it lazy and dishonest. By skipping over these obstacles, it highlights how insubstantial this show’s proposed solution to discrimination really is. Murphy is willing to wander endless scenes of abuse of power within the industry before suggesting that, without any explicit action against these evils, they can be solved through bringing marginalized people to positions of control within the hierarchy.
There are hints of a bleaker, more cynical show: In one scene, Archie, laments that he cannot tell his own stories in Hollywood, yet the film he makes winds up making is just a white woman’s narrative given different context. Jim Parson’s abusive agent becomes the impetus behind the creation of the first-ever gay on-screen romance. But these plot points are depicted uncritically, harbingers of a progress with an assumed but unclear impact.
Technically, the show is an absolute travesty. Scenes drag on twice as long as they ought to, and the camera seems too shy to uproot itself from basic coverage. The set is noticeably bare-bones, as if they lost the prop list and had to decorate in five minutes from memory. With the exception of Paget Brewster’s hysterical and woozy Tallulah Bankhead, the performances lack charisma or gravitas, filling the show with the kind of deliberate, anonymous line deliveries you’d find in a high school production of The Crucible. The lighting is flat and uniform and only the Janet Mock-directed episodes bother to light non-white faces properly. Hollywood discourages active viewing. There is nothing worth looking at, there’s no point really listening.
But if one were to actually watch the show, one might notice something, one tinyyyyy little blind-spot: There’s no communism.
Set in the midst of McCarthyism, here is a show that makes zero reference to the Red Scare, where no marginalized person working under the studio system is in danger of getting blacklisted. This is set during a time where Hollywood’s role as a capitalist propaganda machine was never more obvious, and yet the show stays silent on this; Hollywood has neither the guts nor the craft to reckon with the notion that the dream is rotten, that it was built to enforce oppression and cannot be reversed from within. McCarthyism couldn’t be combated by a single studio head, and therefore it would have stopped production on Meg, or shut down the studio. That finale, where the film sweeps the Academy Awards, a show implemented by MGM to quell talks of unionization, would not happen. All that salacious gossip weaved through the early episodes turns out to be minor window dressing, meant to give a sense of historical accuracy to its foundation before turning to increasingly outlandish delusions. Yes, it’s fantasy, but it’s a fantasy that ignores the real roots of bigotry, and what’s the dream, there, besides ignorance and self-aggrandizement for those who have already made it?
Nobody wants to live in the harshest realities of the present, and sometimes examining the broken institutions that brought us here can be overwhelming. But there is no use in lying, not right now, especially when the grift is so unconvincing. What awaits Ryan Murphy at the top of the Hollywood sign? Can you not see the world grieving from up there, as it did in 1948, as it still does?
sincerely,
helmet girl
Your review was totally offside . It was fucking entertaining . You write as if the production is the worst series ever made and barely give credit to anyone involved . All you do is tear down .
There are so many redeeming parts and sequences in " Hollywood " but you as the " revered " critic decide to try and entertain readers by trying to imitate a real movie critic and try to be seen as insightful and knowledgable . Sorry, but you suck really bad at this .
You obviously are neither gay, lesbian, black, Asian or any other minority. It was a great production as a “What if.....” story. Of course it is going to gloss over certain parts of history. It was a very uplifting story right to the end. I bet your name is Karen and you now want to speak to Murphy’s manager.