Having watched the "Hollywood" mini-series from Netflix, I came away being both very impressed by many aspects, but uncomfortable --very uncomfortable-- with how the series was concluded.
[MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD]
I watched "Hollywood" without having heard much about it. Caught a trailer, looked good, and How-Hollywood-Sausage-Gets-Made is one of my own interests, so went into it fairly cold, almost like catching a sneak preview of a film.
"Hollywood" is set in Post-WW2 Hollywood...but not quite. My first impression was that it was a story overlaying fictional characters, set in a fictional studio, onto actual Hollywood history. But then real people from Hollywood history (Rock Hudson and his agent Henry Wilson, in particular) entered the story line as prominent characters...
...and the story became an alternate history of Hollywood, rather than a fictional overlay. Or an uncomfortable mashup of both. (In real life, Hudson was first signed as a contract player by Universal, not the fictional Ace Studios depicted here.) Or something. I wasn't certain where the plot was heading.
[AGAIN, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. SPECIFIC PLOT POINTS! DETAILS! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!]
The overall plot revolves around a screenplay titled Peg, based on the true story of Peg Entwhistle, young promising actress most famous now for her suicide by leaping from the "H" of the "Hollywoodland" sign in 1932. The screenplay's writer is Archie Coleman, a gay black man who blind-submits his screenplay to prevent an automatic rejection. Overlapping stories involve actors struggling to break in (Jack Costello, Claire Wood, the aforementioned Rock Hudson), other performers minimized or past their prime and struggling to stay relevant (aging-out actress Jeanne Crandall, and real-life characters Anna May Wong and Hattie McDaniel). directors, studio executives, agent Henry Wilson, and a slew of others. Dylan McDermott gives an especially standout performance as Ernie West, a former actor whose career petered out, now running a gas station as a front for a prostitution ring of handsome men servicing the Hollywood elite (both male and female); Jack and Archie both end up working for Ernie to make ends meet before their big breakthroughs. Ernie's a charismatic mix of charm, buried regrets, and a mercenary attitude. (McDermott has described the character's personality as a mix of Clark Gable and famed Hollywood pimp Scottie Bowers.)
A lot of these plot elements --the struggle to "make it" in Hollywood-- are standard in Hollywood-set films. For the most part, they're handled well, if unevenly. The performances here are good to great across the cast, and the sets and costumes are gorgeous.
But my willing suspension of disbelief was strained at a number of points as the mini-series progressed. When it's suggested that the script for Peg be changed to one where Peg Entwhistle doesn't jump off the Hollywood sign, Archie...agrees to do it. Peg Enthwhistle is cut from the screenplay and replaced by a fictional character, Meg Ennis. (Peg Entwhistle supposedly jumped to her death after her first big screen role was cut; the change from Peg to Meg felt like the same thing was being done to the poor woman yet again.) It becomes a counter-factual story, tragedy turned into a happy-ending fantasy, much as "Hollywood"'s own story veers further and further from realistic scenarios.
But the script change opens an opportunity to go beyond casting a young white blonde woman in the lead role. Camille Washington, a young black actress struggling to break out of minor roles as maids and servants, pressures the movie's director Raymond Ainsley (half-Filipino, passing for white, and oh yeah, Camille's boyfriend and lover) to let her take a screen test. She's so impressive in the screen test that acting studio head Avis Amberg --husband Ace Amsberg, not so open-minded, has been incapacitated by a heart attack-- decides to greenlight the first major studio picture to star a black actress.
And...there's blowback. Big blowback: Theaters in the South begin to boycott Ace Studios films; the studio's own lawyers forecast financial doom if Meg's filming proceeds. The studio is picketed by angry racist mobs. And burning crosses appear in front of Archie's and other principals' homes in the midst of the night.
But tough broad Avis Amberg isn't willing to give in. Filming proceeds. And then Ace Amberg, who'd been adamantly against greenlighting a script written by a black man, recovers from his hear t attack, returns to the studio, thanks Avis for her work...and sends her home to make dinner. Meg, final reel still fresh in the can, appears doomed.
Until Ace watches that finished print, and is so impressed by what everyone had done, he decides to press on with its release. His near-death experience has made him a different man; he reconciles with Avis and offers to make her co-chair of Ace Studios.
And then has a second heart attack and dies the next morning before his decision can be put into effect.
And then the studio's head lawyer, always opposed to the film, uses the ensuing disruption to seize the only print of Meg and throw it into a burning furnace. That's where Episode 6 (of 7) ends, and it looks like there's no way back, no way to recover the film. Everyone's efforts have gone for naught.
But then...and I gotta admit, I really liked how they pulled this off...at the beginning of the final episode, at Ace's funeral, it's revealed there was a second print of Meg made. And the reason that other print exists is because Henry Wilson, Rock Hudson's agent, is an evil, selfish piece of shit.
(Jim Parsons oozes slime in his portrayal of Henry Wilson. Cruel, heartless, emotionally sadistic, Henry is a character you only want to drop into a dumpster. From the top of a tall building. And then set the dumpster on fire.)
Earlier in the previous episode, after Henry's more or less extorted his way into a producer's position on Meg, at a showing of the completed film with the director Ray Ainsley and the film's editor, he wants the film to be re-cut to reflect his own creative choices. Ainsley says "No", and the editor --an old pro who's been editing films since the early silents-- tells Henry off. Henry then goes behind Ainsley's back and try to have the film re-cut in secret by an inexperienced young editor, but is discovered and stopped in time.
But that old pro editor knows Henry can't be trusted, so he takes the film, copies it in secret, and hides the copy in his own home. At Ace's funeral, he reveals and turns the second print over to Ainsley. Meg has been rescued from the dead. And only because despicable Henry Wilson's own selfish actions inadvertently sabotaged the lawyer's attempt to destroy the film.
And...unfortunately, that was about the last scene in Hollywood where I was able to exercise any kind of willing suspension of disbelief.
Meg is released...and is a hit. A big hit. A stupendous hit. Even some of the big-city Southern theaters relent and start showing it.
(My suspension of disbelief is getting creaky.)
And the film and its creators are nominated for numerous Oscars. And sweep almost all of them.
(Really, really creaky.)
And then...Meg changes America. The protests against a black lead actress fade away. And when Archie and Rock come out at the Oscars, holding hands, out and proud...that's mostly accepted with little blowback beyond Rock having trouble getting more than minor parts...a year after the film's premiere. (In real-life, Hudson's early roles, even presenting as straight, were minor for a number of years, slowly growing meatier until his big break in Magnificent Obsession.) In the late 1940's. America begins to accept blacks, accept interracial romances, accept homosexuals.
Sorry, but that's not a happy ending, it's sheer wish fulfillment.
I grew up in the 1950's & 60's, a straight white kid among other straight white kids.. I remember how "othered" homosexuals were. They were regarded as..."things". Not real people. Not human. The object of jokes and derision and disgust. One of the things I heard growing up, when someone was short of pocket money, was "Hey, let's go down to the bus station and roll some queers." Now, I never knew anyone to actually do that...but they could have. You could beat and rob a homosexual, and the police wouldn't stop you. The most they might do is stop the beating if it was going too far...and then arrest the person who'd been beaten, maybe with a few baton licks of their own for good measure.
So, no. No way I could have any measure of suspended disbelief in that final episode. (And even beyond that paradigm shift, the finale also presents Henry Wilson having a road-to-Damascus turn of heart --offscreen! we only see the result!-- and trying to make amends for his dogshit behavior up until then. Nope, that's just as unbelievable.)
Even more, I came away feeling that Hollywood did a disservice to gays' and blacks' actual struggle to achieve acceptance and equality. In reality, the struggle for that has been going on for almost all of America's history, with thousands of activists facing persecution, beatings, murder. That struggle is still ongoing. But in Hollywood's world, this one film, this one Magic Movie, achieves a paradigm shift in America that still hasn't been fully achieved in reality.
(And really, when Peg Entwhistle's true story is abandoned and Meg is given a happy ending, it turns from something that might have been an insightful biopic into a standard Hollywood cookie-cutter plot distinguished only by controversial casting. Meg never comes across as anything more than a B-movie to me.)
In the end, it was the most disappointing ending to a tv series I've seen since that enraging end to Ron Moore's version of Battlestar Galactica. That's a hella low bar to try and limbo under.
1 comment:
I haven't seen the series, but I have to agree that the ending you describe strikes me as wlidly unrealistic, but then again I'm OK with wish-fulfillment sometimes.
On the other hand, what really annoyed me, nerd that I am, was the notion of being able to destroy a film by burning the "only print." At the time (and until quite recently) making a movie involved shooting film that was developed into a camera negative that was printed overnight to produce dailies that were checked for problems and also saved to be used in editing a "workprint." I won't go into the complex details of what happened next (especially with sound, by far the most complicated part of the editing process), but I will note that the final edited work print was used as the basis for editing the negative the same way ("conforming" it). The negative was then printed to create one or more trial "answer prints" with exposure and color correction (called "timing" because it involved flashing a printing light for a specific amount of time for each frame). Once the answer print was approved a final pristine print called an interpositive was made with optical soundtrack incorporated and the interpositive was used to in turn to create one or more internegatives from which final release prints were made to distribute to theaters. Internegatives or interpositives were also made for foreign distributors along with separate dialog-free music-and-effects ("M&E") soundtracks for a basis of a dubbed version.
There were variations and complications, and all this changed over time with such things as the switchover from optical sound reels to magnetic fullcoat film at the start of the 1950s and the gradual adoption of digital postproduction in the 1990s and 2000s.
Anyway, one way to fix the series would be to have the villain destroy *everything* -- the original negative and all prints -- only to have it revealed that one or more copies had already been sent to one or more foreign distributors. I realize that the screenwriter was trying to simplify matters to make them understandable for people unfamiliar with the details of moviemaking, but it seems to me that talking about the loss of everything from camera negative to all prints would be clear enough to anybody, as would discovering the existence of a copy sent to a foreign distributor.
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