While detractors of Ryan Murphy will be (and have been) quick to decry his latest creation, Hollywood (a seven-episode miniseries), as hokey or oversweeping in aim, the emphasis with Murphy has never exactly been entirely on story. Or thoroughly developed plotlines. No, with the creator of such satire as Scream Queens (too satirical for this world, as it was cancelled), the objective is always to say something. To undercut the hypocrisy of institutions, whether political or pop culture-related (granted, the two entities have long been intertwined). And that goal was surely achieved in the unlikely form of Murphy providing a revisionist history to the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood.
If it sounds like another premise slightly Once Upon A Time in Hollywood in nature, you wouldn’t be wrong. Except where Tarantino left out the overt racial and sexual orientation injustices, Murphy addresses them at full force, making the central focus of his narrative an aspiring black, gay screenwriter named Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope) and a black contract player at the fictional Ace Studios (based on Paramount), Camille Washington (Laura Harrier). With the latter having a director boyfriend named Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss, who famously said he would no longer play gay characters), her chances at success seem a bit more likely than Archie’s, who turns tricks at a movie theater when he’s found by Jack Castello (David Corenswet), in search of a gay gigolo he can bring to the gas station he works at, Golden Tip (yes, a front for prostitution), so that his boss, Ernie (Dylan McDermott), will stop trying to make him suck and/or fuck any male patrons rolling up to the station with the code word “Dreamland” dripping from their lecherous lips.
With Ernie’s character based on that of real life Hollywood pimp Scotty Bowers, it is here that we meet one of our first intersections between Murphy’s fantasy and Old Hollywood’s reality. Which quickly escalates to our introduction to Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec), the real life Chinese-American actress subjected to playing stereotypes and supporting roles that branded her as the archetypal Dragon Lady of cinema. In Murphy’s rewrite of her tale, Raymond shows up to her house (evocative of the one Diane Selwyn [Naomi Watts] rents in Mulholland Drive), where she’s already drinking scotch before noon, to talk to her about starring in a movie he wants to direct called Angel of Shanghai. While she’s pleased with the script, she assures him the movie will never get made, at least not with her as the star. After all, this is the actress who lost out to playing the part of the Chinese leading character in The Good Earth to a white woman (actress Luise Rainer). And why? Because the studio heads were there to safeguard Americans from the big, bad reminder of other races. Ironic, considering the Jewish men who ran the studios were ostracized for their own “non-white” race and non-Christian beliefs. Yet still, they were the gatekeepers of peddling the fantasy of post-war U.S. ideas: conservative white Americanism drenched in “good” Christian values.
That did not include the likes of Anna May Wong or Camille Washington or “sex degenerates” like Archie and his new beau, Rock Hudson, formerly Roy Fitzgerald (Jake Picking). The recently remade Roy has been branded as Rock by his smarmy, closeted agent, Henry Willson (another real life character created anew in Murphy’s image). Played by Jim Parsons, the ex-Big Bang Theory star is clearly having the time of his life in a role that allows him to be as wretched as Satan’s most loyal stool pigeon. That is, when he’s not doing Salome’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” (one of the most memorable scenes of the series). Henry’s evilness stems from an obvious place of his own self-hatred, for this was a boy who, in his childhood, had his father quickly deter him from his interest in tap dancing by directing him to more “manly” sports. Thus, it became clear quite early on that Henry was going to need to suppress who he really was in order to survive. Eventually, this led to Hollywood, where hiding in plain sight was the name of everyone’s game–skulking around seedy, “unspokenly” homo bars and demanding sexual favors from his clients if they wanted to make it big time. Rock is just one of those clients.
Initially complacent about Henry’s skeevy demands, everything seems to come to a head (no pun intended) at one of George Cukor’s illustrious sex parties during which Rock declares that Archie (whom he previously picked up at the Golden Tip) is “his”–stealing him away from the clutches of Noël Coward. Alas, this doesn’t stop Henry from continuing to abuse him. In the backdrop of it all is the casting of Archie’s script, Peg, about unwitting Hollywood legend Peg Entwistle. At twenty-four years old, Peg jumped off the H of the sign when it was still written as Hollywoodland, a real estate advertisement that they decided to leave up for all the recognition it was getting. With all those letters to choose from, it was the H she went for (making one wonder if Lana Del Rey wasn’t subconsciously thinking of her when she wrote the lyric, “Climb up the H of the Hollywood sign”).
In the show’s promo poster, too, the H is prominent in its placement next to the O, the two letters alone in this shot forming the telling word, “HO.” As in everyone who comes to Hollywood with a dream ends up becoming one. And they’re all perfectly happy to do it if it means the light at the end of the tunnel, the pot of gold at the end of Judy Garland’s fabled rainbow. Yet, we all know how Garland’s life turned out (thanks to Renee Zellweger refreshing all of our memories). Even so, no amount of cautionary tales could ever keep the hordes from bombarding H’wood with their fantasies (often delusions) of grandeur.
Entwistle, representative of how toxic this initial idealism could become to those trying so desperately to break into an industry with nothing but predatory and abusive manipulators at the top, is a talisman for the entire narrative. Of how it might have been in Murphy’s alternate reality (one that offers a sort of reverse option to the horrific alternate one experienced by Diane Selwyn after a taste of the good life as Betty Elms in, again, Mulholland Drive). A reality in which all colors, genders and sexual orientations were embraced by Hollywood. The very industry filled with just those types (for Hollywood was always a veritable funhouse of every persuasion), except one would never know it, for they were constantly being forced to hide or alter themselves in some way, to make themselves smaller so as not outshine those shiny, clean values that only white America could possibly embody.
As the story goes increasingly “Hollywood” (the final episode is even called “A Hollywood Ending”)–a term that would come to be derisive for expected tropes and plotlines ultimately leading to the predictable happy ending–Murphy completely subverts what that means by allowing the underdogs to triumph. Would this have changed the entire trajectory of how Hollywood functioned? Broken down barriers sooner? Maybe. Or maybe it would have stymied the slow build to all-out revolution in the 60s–and certainly would have made Marilyn Monroe less prone to perform her “sexy baby” shtick, instead perhaps landing the serious roles she always wanted, including Grushenka from The Brothers Karamazov. What’s more, who among us can’t admit that we haven’t delighted in the scandalous and absurd stories of the era that thrived precisely because of this suppression (all one need do is read Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon for that much to be proven)? And repression, as history has shown time and time again, always leads to an out and out period of decadence and so-called sexual depravity. A free-for-all where nothing matters (whether because the economy is great or because it’s absolutely terrible) so everybody wins.
In the end, of course, Murphy’s version of events as they could have been were it not for the assholes in charge (how poignant that the second a woman takes control of the studio, progressiveness and fearlessness ensue) is only all the more bittersweet because the viewers know this absolutely never would have or could have happened. The masses were still too narrow-minded, still too comfortable with the status quo. And remain so even in the wake of movements like #MeToo, quickly falling by the wayside as production companies grow more concerned with how to make film and TV bankable in the present climate of total shutdown.
As for things changing so soon in the film industry’s history before enough decades of oppression went by, maybe it all comes down to what a now repentant Henry Willson tells Ernie in the final scene of the show when Ern informs him, “Business is down with the queer clientele. That’s 75% of my business.” Henry replies, “Yeah, I’ve been feeling that around town myself. This refusal to accept shame any longer. You know, some guys made out of my kind of shoe leather, they’ve been pretty vocal about the fact that they’re tired of skulking in the shadows. I guess Archie and Rock showed them there’s another path.” Ernie shrugs, “Hmm, well it’s a start.” Henry, reminding that the grass isn’t always necessarily greener, so much as a different shade of green, returns, “Sure, holding a guy’s hand in public, walking down the street, you know, you wait for a brick in the back of the head. It doesn’t come. Well, then, before you know it, your guy wants to play house. Have you ever spent a Saturday picking out some cheerful, daffodil-colored linoleum for the kitchen? I have, Ernie. And it is enough to make you wistful for the days of secretive sodomy.”
Would things have been better in Hollywood if a progressive outlook had taken hold sooner? Undoubtedly (and maybe more actresses would have survived for longer without a steady diet of barbiturates thrust upon them by the studios). But, by god, did many enjoy the thrill of sexual escapades when they were given the tincture of licentiousness. Just ask George Cukor.
