‘HOLLYWOOD’ SWINGIN’
JAKE PICKING AND LAURA HARRIER IN “HOLLYWOOD”
If someone were to distill the essence of producer/director Ryan Murphy and put it in a bottle, they could call it “Hollywood,” his seven-part Netflix series starting May 1.
Take a thirst for celebrity (“The Politician,” “Glee”) — though minus the grimness of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” or “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” — pour in sexual or gender nonconformity (“Pose,” “The New Normal”) and a spritz of pre-TV, old-guard glamour (“Feud”), shake well, and the resulting concoction is Murphy’s effervescent cultural revisionism that joyfully remixes Hollywood history in his image, though the end result, too, is mixed.
Fact and fiction — not to mention nudity and smoking, lots of smoking — swirl together in this tried-and-true story of the country kid who blows into post-World War II Tinseltown looking for stardom, which Murphy gives a very 21st-century twist of intersectionality. It’s “La La Land” by way of such exposés as Kenneth Anger’s book “Hollywood Babylon” and the documentary “The Celluloid Closet.”
David Corenswet (“The Politician”) is Jack, the 23-year-old kid in question, a lifelong movie fan who, after serving in the war, arrives in L.A. with his wife and a dream. After failing to land work as an extra, he bumps into Ernie (Dylan McDermott) at a local watering hole who has a job offer for him at his gas station. But this just isn’t any gas station — it’s one where the pump jockeys moonlight as escorts. (It’s based on the real-life station run by the late Scotty Bowers.)
When Jack does well by his first customer, the well-connected Avis (a fantastic Patti LuPone), a former silent-film star who’s unhappily married to powerful Ace Studios head Ace Amberg (Rob Reiner), a whole new world opens up to him.
It’s a world where a young, black, gay screenwriter, Archie (Jeremy Pope, “Choir Boy” and “Ain’t Too Proud” on Broadway), is peddling a screenplay about Peg Entwistle, the desperate British actress who jumped to her death from the Hollywoodland sign in 1932. But Archie, whom Jack recruits to work at the station to handle the male clients, can’t let any of the studios know that he’s black.
It’s a world where a closeted Rock Hudson (Jake Picking, “Sicario: Day of the Soldado”) falls head over heels for Archie but finds his romance thwarted by his bullwhip of an agent, Henry Willson (a riotous Jim Parsons, who’s reason enough to tune in), whose put-downs sting so badly they leave a mark. “Listening to what an actor has to say is like taking career advice from a farm animal,” he snaps at Rock.
It’s a world where Raymond (Darren Criss, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace”), a half-Asian neophyte director who can pass for white, and his black girlfriend, Camille (Laura Harrier, “BlacKkKlansman”), are out to undermine Hollywood racism. He singlehandedly wants to rescusitate the career of Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec), the ChineseAmerican star denied the lead role of a Chinese woman in the 1937 film “The Good Earth” in favor of a white actress.
It’s a world of elegant soirées at the mansion of director George Cukor (Daniel London) that play host to what passes for scintillating conversation among this smart set — “He doesn’t like my moods, and that doesn’t leave much of me to like, now does it?,” whines Vivien Leigh (Katie McGuinness) — and sexual shenanigans, some involving members of the USC football team.
The problem with “Hollywood” is that it starts off as such a lampoon of ’40s sentimentality that when it becomes serious, the puzzle pieces feel as if they don’t quite fit. Joe Mantello (“The Normal Heart”) has the miniseries’ most heartbreaking scenes as a middle-aged studio flunky who realizes that he has been spending so much his life making other people’s dreams come true that he has had no time for his own.
But Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan’s desire to have “the good guys” win in this fictionalized Hollywood is so at odds with what really happened that it goes beyond fantasy and fairy tale into fever dream.
Still, “Hollywood” is fun to look at — the clothes, the cars, the colors, the music. So come for “We’re in the Money” and “Embraceable You,” stay for Parsons, LuPone and Mantello.