‘Hollywood’: ‘La La Land,’ but more sex
If someone were to distill the essence of producerdirector Ryan Murphy and put it in a bottle, they could call it “Hollywood,” his new Netflix series that started Friday, May 1.
Take a thirst for celebrity — though minus the grimness of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” or “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” — pour in sexual or gender nonconformity and a spritz of preTV, oldguard glamour, 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 swirl together in this triedandtrue story of the country kid who blows into postWorld War II Tinseltown looking for stardom, to 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 23yearold kid in question, a lifelong movie fan who, after serving in the war, arrives in Los Angeles 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 reallife station run by the late Scotty Bowers.)
When Jack does well by his first customer, the wellconnected Avis (Patti LuPone), a former silentfilm 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), 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) falls head over heels for Archie but finds his romance thwarted by his bullwhip of an agent, Henry Willson (Jim Parsons), whose putdowns sting so badly they leave a mark.
It’s a world where Raymond (San Francisco’s own Darren Criss), a halfAsian neophyte director who can pass for white, and his black girlfriend, Camille (Laura Harrier), are out to undermine Hollywood racism. He singlehandedly wants to resuscitate the career of Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec), the Chinese American star denied the lead role of a Chinese woman in the 1937 film “The Good Earth” in favor of a white actress.
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 has the miniseries’ most heartbreaking scenes as a middleaged studio flunky who realizes that he has been spending so much of his life making other people’s dreams come true that he has had no time for his own.
But Murphy and cocreator 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 stay for Parsons, LuPone and Mantello. Cary Darling is the arts and entertainment editor at the Houston Chronicle.