Hollywood

“The aspirations of Hollywood feel genuine, yet glaring moments of oversight make it hard to fully embrace.”

Title: Hollywood
Episodes Reviewed: Season 1
Creator: Ryan Murphy 👨🏼🇺🇸🌈
Writers: Ryan Murphy 👨🏼🇺🇸 🌈 (7 eps), Ian Brennan 👨🏼🇺🇸 (7 eps), Hernando Bansuelo 👨🏽🇺🇸 (7 eps), Janet Mock 👩🏽🇺🇸🌈 (2 eps), and Reilly Smith 👨🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep)

Reviewed by Dana 👩🏼🇺🇸♿

Technical: 4/5

If 1920s starlet Peg Entwhistle haunts anything, it’s Ryan Murphy’s glamour-soaked dreams—not, as legend has it, the Hollywood sign from which she jumped to her death. Contrary to how Murphy’s latest Netflix series Hollywood presents her, Entwhistle was far from a failed movie star and tragic wannabe who dramatically committed suicide after her scenes were cut from her debut feature.

Milicent Lillian Entwhistle adopted the nickname “Peg” as a teenager, after seeing a production of Peg O’ My Heart in 1922. She became a successful Broadway star whose career trajectory ran parallel to Katharine Hepburn for a time, and who inspired a young Bette Davis to pursue acting after seeing Peg perform onstage. Her death at age 24 was preceded by a short lifetime of loss, domestic abuse, at least one depressive episode, and an unscrupulous press more eager to gossip than to report. As with too much of Hollywood, the truth makes for a less appealing story.

Instead, Murphy relies on the gossip and lore from sources like vintage rag mags or the epically inaccurate Hollywood Babylon, a compendium of tall tales that includes a picture of a topless woman who is decidedly not Peg Entwhistle, captioned “Peg Entwhistle, skydiver.”

Using Peg’s death as a launching pad for a larger story, Murphy’s Hollywood reimagines the Golden Age of cinema as a feel-good triumph of diversity centered around a quartet of fresh-faced Hollywood ingenues determined to get their movie made. They form a collective of industry newcomers ready to make it big and change the world: director Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss), a half-Filipino man who’s been passing as white; actress Camille Washington (Laura Harrier), one of Ace Pictures’ few Black contract players who’s dating Raymond; writer Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope), a gay, Black man in a blossoming romance with the still-unknown Rock Hudson (Jake Picking); and Jack Castello (David Corenswet), a straight, white guy with good looks and better luck. Peg, the biopic-within-a-show based on Entwistle’s life and death, quickly becomes Meg, with a starring role Camille was born to play, and a monumental headache for Ace Pictures’ executives who are at least peripherally aware that selling backers and audiences on a feature starring a Black woman amounts to a task as easy as Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill.

Defying the odds, Meg gets made thanks in large part to a series of even more unlikely events including the incapacitation of top boss Ace Amberg (Rob Reiner), a temporary replacement by his wife Avis (Patty Lupone), and a push by Eleanor Roosevelt (Harriet Sansom Harris) herself, who just happens to hear about the whole thing and can’t help but make a rousing speech. It all strains credulity to the limits, and it’s hard not to feel a little exhausted by the naive optimism of the assembled parties. Change doesn’t come simply by force of will or happenstance, but through relentless, thankless work of the chronically unknown. In fairness, Hollywood has its moments of meaningful hindsight—reintroducing icons like Anna May Wong and Hattie McDaniel to (mostly white) audiences who’d forgotten them, but reframing their stories in simpler, happier terms suited to the series’ sticky sweet sanguinity.

Yet Hollywood still borders on masterpiece, despite how irritatingly fanciful it can be at times. Around the main quartet shine blindingly bright stars who deliver career-best performances, among them Dylan McDermott as Ernie, a stand-in for Scotty Bowers and proprietor of a gas station more in the business of filling dance cards than fuel tanks. Ernie, jaded and clever and dashing at every turn, continually steals the spotlight helped by some of the show’s best technical sequences and costume design. Where the never-ending series of earnest monologues about progress feel schlocky coming from Harrier, Criss, Corenswet, and Pope, many of the secondary roles played by seasoned ensemble actors make the material shine.

Still, in a series about progress where idealism wins the day, the contrast feels like a reminder that pinning all our hope on the next generation is not always the best play. Experience, hard-won respect, and a life spent working upwards through the ranks—whether in Hollywood, or Washington, D.C., or elsewhere—shouldn’t be dismissed. New generations of leaders will always stand on the shoulders of those who came before.

Gender: 4/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Truly, one of the tragedies of Hollywood is the decision to center its younger actors, while the supporting cast of familiar faces proves far more compelling—particularly the women. Holland Taylor, as studio exec Ellen Kincaid, and Lupone as Avis give spectacular performances as brassy, whipsmart women in a world dominated by men. Murphy deserves credit for creating a space for women over 50 to unleash their talents and explore later-in-life love. Despite smaller roles, Mira Sorvino as the breathy Jeanne Crandall and Paget Brewster as the no-holds-barred Tallulah Bankhead each move beyond the bounds of their usual fare to remind viewers of just how spectacular the women of post-war Hollywood were.

The strength of Hollywood rests, as it does in reality, on the power of these women. Through Jack’s first date we meet the matriarch of Ace Pictures, Avis, who seems oddly eager to bring a babyfaced man she just paid for sex into her professional world—because things just seem to work out that way for Jack. He receives a similar welcome from studio so-and-so Ellen, who sees a certain something in him that no one else can. It becomes readily apparent that, intentional or not, Jack’s value is singular: He is there to introduce the real substance of the story. It’s hard to tell whether this is some sly parable on Murphy’s part or just another example of white male mediocrity being buoyed by more talented women who’ve put in the work but don’t get top billing.

If it’s a parable, it’s one that needs more emphasis. Despite the notorious, rampant sexism of 1940s Hollywood, only the barest acknowledgment of what it meant to be a woman in that time surfaces. After being thrust into her husband Ace’s executive role at the studio bearing his name, Avis meets only the most cursory resistance from those around her. Their open arms seem woefully unrealistic, thirty-odd years before Sherry Lansing became the first woman to head a major studio. Even when Ace returns to the helm and pushes Avis back out, the conflict reflects that of husband and wife, more than it does the power dynamics between men and women in the movie business. In Murphy’s Hollywood, acknowledging sexism risks damaging the larger narrative, so it’s left on the cutting room floor.

Race: 4/5

Hollywood makes pointed and complex efforts to acknowledge the structural barriers that held back—and continue to hold back—people of color in the industry. But the writers struggle to make their assertions feel organic. When former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt just so happens to run into Avis at a National Organization of Women fundraiser, she’s so inspired by the idea of a film starring a woman of color that she drops by the studio to make an impassioned case for representation. Her speech sounds lifted from a pamphlet called “Representation for Dummies,” and anyone who has ever made a case for a more inclusive room must groan at how easily it lands in an all-white room. Hollywood’s main shortcoming keeps cropping up: It’s just never that easy in the real world, and part of what makes a milestone profound is the perseverance, often absurdly single-minded, to keep fighting after every loss. A victory without loss feels hollow.

That holds especially true for Hollywood’s depictions of Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec) and Hattie McDaniel (Queen Latifah). The real Wong was the daughter of a Chinese laundry owner, and she spent the tips she earned as a delivery girl on movie tickets. Though she became the first Asian American actress to achieve star status in Hollywood, she was relegated to stereotyped roles—and was vocal about the unfairness of only casting “Oriental” actors as villains. When a starring role came up for a film set in China, The Good Earth (1937), Wong saw an opportunity to break through the bamboo ceiling. Instead, she was offered the role of the antagonist, while every other role would be filled by an actor in yellowface. The incident comes up early in the series, with a bit of context by way of flashback. Darren Criss as Raymond laments the injustice aloud and makes a point of casting Wong in Meg, for which she wins her long-deserved Academy Award.

Queen Latifah’s Hattie McDaniel likewise revisits—and conquers—her best-known moment of discrimination. When the actress, nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Gone With the Wind (1939), was initially refused entry to the ceremony held in a segregated hotel, the reimagined McDaniel tells Camille not to tolerate the same injustice. And indeed, Camille stares down the ushers who refuse to open the door and demands entry. She gets it—though the two white stars standing behind her and the white-passing director on her arm almost certainly tip the scales. After the show, McDaniel comes backstage to see a jubilant Camille and gives a satisfied smile, noting that “they let me in this time.”

In both cases, Murphy tries to correct historical injustices, but papers over the complexities of each woman and their hard-won accomplishments. Anna May Wong never won an Oscar. She did break ground as the first Asian American lead of a U.S. television show in The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951), worked on one of the first TV documentaries about China narrated entirely by a Chinese American, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960—all without the assistance of a plucky first-time director like Raymond. Hollywood also fails to account for Wong’s own activism, as she spoke out about stereotyping more than a decade before Hollywood takes place and opting for smaller roles in B-movies where she was able to play professionals, rather than settling for minor, offensive roles in major pictures.

McDaniel did find herself settling for such roles, though, and an indelible part of her legacy remains how she was scorned by the NAACP and much of the Black community for it. She, along with other Black actors who had made careers out of the only roles they could get, knew that rejecting roles as maids and butlers would leave them with few options in which to make a living. In The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, author Michelle Alexander points out the long tradition of Black performers having to participate in stereotyping in order to carve out a space on stage and screen. “Black minstrels,” she explains, “were largely viewed as celebrities, earning more money and achieving more fame than African Americans ever had before. Black minstrelsy was the first large-scale opportunity for African Americans to enter show business.” These early opportunities had been precisely the platform McDaniel used to gain recognition before moving to motion picture work.

A telling sequence in the first episode speaks to Murphy’s failure to grasp some of the more structural issues of racism: Jack, in a police uniform borrowed from a costume house, pretends to arrest Archie, the only Black man he saw in a seedy porn theater where gay men pair off to hook up. Jack’s rationale is problematic to begin with, where he decides to essentially terrify Archie into agreeing to take on the male clientele that he himself prefers to avoid. But the added element of police subterfuge used against a Black man feels spectacularly inept. Eight decades on, the country is only now experiencing a reckoning with acts of police brutality against Black people, just starting to grapple with the long and violent history of law enforcement as a tool of racial oppression. The way in which Jack’s actions go uninterrogated, either by Archie or by the series itself, speaks to the limits of Hollywood.

LGBTQ: 4.75/5

It’s not surprising that Murphy, as a gay white man, tells queer stories more deftly than he does stories of women or people of color; a fundamental argument for representation on both sides of the camera. Murphy depicts Archie, who meets and falls in love with a young Rock Hudson, in ways that echo profound empathy and insight. Archie’s turmoil over having to hide parts of his identity feels visceral and urgent, and it’s in the quieter moments of internal conflict that Pope’s performance rings truest. The affection between Archie and Rock Hudson has an authenticity that feels absent from the other onscreen pairings, and it’s easy to forget for a moment that Hudson’s turn as a trailblazer for gay men’s visibility came decades later, and in death. Of all the moments in Hollywood that wonder “what if?” it’s the question of how things might have been different had Hudson been able to live as a proud gay man that lingers. When he died of AIDS in 1985, the crisis that Hudson’s close friend Ronald Reagan had steadfastly ignored for years suddenly hit home. Hudson’s death is widely seen as a catalyst in forcing Reagan to recognize the epidemic, and it’s hard to know how things might have been different if he’d been out decades before.

This sensitivity doesn’t carry through in all aspects of Hollywood, though. Once again, the series revels in long-standing rumors without credence, this time taking the alleged romance between Hattie McDaniel and Tallulah Bankhead as fact. There’s nothing inherently negative about the story, but the use of gossip as source material feels exploitative and dishonest in the speculation of anyone’s sexuality, dead or alive.

At the same time, Hollywood takes one of the highest-profile lesbians in the industry, whose orientation is a matter of record, and relegates her to a montage of debauchery. Dorothy Arzner, a real-life rulebreaker and legendary director, gets an odd cameo and no lines. It feels insulting to see the woman the British Film Institute calls “the mother goddess of women’s film-making” cast aside in a story about inclusion. That the character is never even named—the only acknowledgment of her identity is through the episode’s cast listing on IMDB—is worse. Dorothy Arzner is a name worth knowing, and Murphy’s decision to boil down her career to a tawdry sequence is inexplicable.

Deduction for Disability: -0.75

Peg Entwhistle died in real life, as she does in Murphy’s series, by throwing herself from the famed Hollywood sign after learning that her part has been cut from Thirteen Women (1932). But this stripped-down version of events adds to the industry’s longstanding problem of romanticizing depression and suicide. When Archie describes the reason he wanted to write about Peg, he describes her as an avatar for his own experience: “Talented as the next gal, but never appreciated. Never accepted. Time ticked by while she watched her whole life, everything she ever wanted slowly drift away.”

But Hollywood was not everything Entwhistle wanted. In her podcast You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth gives a picture of the actress that has been left out of lore, and it becomes clear once her story takes shape that Entwhistle was a fighter in a long line of glamorized dead blondes. Thirteen Women played only a circumstantial role in her death, which came at a time when her personal and professional life were already in tatters: Her foray into Hollywood burned bridges with her Broadway contacts and prospects for further work out west were grim thanks to a canceled studio contract. Having already experienced at least one depressive episode in her life, the loss of her livelihood, aggravated by news that she’d lost both her apartment and all her possessions back home in New York, was overwhelming—as it would be to anyone already struggling with mental illness. As Longworth explains, Entwhistle’s suicide note, proclaiming that she was a coward, didn’t speak to regrets for leaving the world but to regret for not ending it all sooner and sparing those around her the burden of her own existence. Once again, the sentiment reflects a common theme among people with mental illness: the belief that their lives are not only unenjoyable, but undeserved.

In painting over the truth of Entwhistle’s death, Murphy does a disservice to her and to those whose own struggles are often minimized or misunderstood. Making suicide the vainglorious act of a narcissist silences those already grappling with feelings of self-harm, and contributes to the already overwhelming sense of self-loathing and stigma that holds people back from seeking help.

Mediaversity Grade: B 4.00/5

So much of Hollywood delights on a technical level, and its aspirations feel so genuine that it’s impossible to dismiss the show as too naive or simplistic. Yet glaring moments of oversight and insufferable optimism make it hard to fully embrace.

In so many ways, Hollywood really is Hollywood—contradictory, infuriating, spectacular...and badly in need of self-reflection. As Just Add Color’s Monique Jones puts it, “Is Hollywood simply a white cis-gender man’s fanfiction of white Hollywood?” Such “fix-it” narratives are a mainstay of fandom, an outlet for writers to reimagine a less-than-satisfying canon. But rewriting history from the woke view of what Jones calls an “apologetic, hyper-aware white male, who wants to make things right so badly they’re willing to change all of history to be seen as the good guy” isn’t a fix-it; it’s a fantasy without context.

Most of Hollywood’s viewers would not know the name Anna May Wong, nor would they have a sense of just how oppressive Hollywood really was in the 1940s. They wouldn’t know that Billy Haines lived openly and proudly as a gay man and a box office star in the twenties and thirties, or that Hattie McDaniel’s wish to be buried in the famed Hollywood Forever Cemetary was denied due to its whites-only policy. Audiences will merely see a triumphant picture of inclusion. But absent the understanding of how history actually played out, it’s all an exercise in self-delusion, albeit one with some masterful artistry at play. This is not the picture of Hollywood we need to see right now, though. It’s just the one that makes us feel good.

Like Hollywood? Try these movies set in showbiz.

Grade: BLiJuly 3, 2020