No./16 Welcome to the anti-entourage
Jim Cummings takes a scalpel to Hollywood in The Beta Test
ENTOURAGE’S ARI GOLD might have established Hollywood agents as shrewd, charismatic, sometimes sympathetic power players, but Jim Cummings’ new comic drama The Beta Test dismantles that image. “The agency world is a bit like Wall Street: they have the same wardrobe but they’re bad at math,” the Thunder Road filmmaker/actor tells Empire with a chuckle. “They watched Entourage at the frat house and their parents had money; they became even more toxic to each other because they’re in their dying breath, trying to make money however they possibly can before it goes away.”
It’s in this world that Cummings sets his latest self-made film. He plays Jordan, a soon-to-be-married agent on the verge of a nervous breakdown; after getting ensnared in a dangerous sexual mystery, his luxury life unravels. Though the plot is fictional, Cummings and filmmaking partner PJ Mccabe based the abusive sides of the characters on reality, in an industry where workplace harassment and toxicity are still a problem.
“We were getting real data from sources of ours, who are still anonymous, who are at the top four agencies in Hollywood,” Cummings says. “It felt like South Park where we were able to make a bunch of jokes and humiliate some people about something that was real and affecting our field. Harvey’s [Weinstein] in prison because he’s a rapist, but other support systems are still there. We’re firm but fair.”
That firm approach went all the way down to the way the characters speak; Cummings took care to accurately depict the artificiality of the world they were satirising. “There’s a lot of bullshit in Hollywood,” Cummings says. The script utilised every bit of “corporate doublespeak” to ensure the artifice of the industry felt authentic in the black comedy. “A lot of the dialogue of, ‘We’re excited,’ and, ‘Let’s keep talking,’ was taken directly from our experience of the bullshit facade that is that job.” Ultimately, Cummings says, this is a film about fake people doing fake jobs in a dishonest age. “We wanted it to be about corporate America — and people feeling that they can’t be themselves or honest in the age of the internet.”
THE BETA TEST IS IN CINEMAS FROM 15 OCTOBER