Hollywood: Netflix's seven-episode soap about post-WWII movie star wannabes is a lurid guilty pleasure

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-minus

At times posthumous character assassination, at others an improbable parade of hearts-of-gold in a sybaritic post-War Tinseltown, Netflix’s seven-episode series Hollywood is best experienced as lurid soap opera with long-ago legendary names sprinkled about.

Was Rock Hudson (Jake Picking) ever that awkward, ungainly and dumb? Was his movie-star image created in exchange for sex by a cartoonishly evil closeted super-agent (Jim Parsons, in the series’ most attention-getting portrayal).

The boys at the gas bar will “service” you, and even act in your next movie.

(You could, by the way, create a drinking game out of all the times some character is ordered in crude, plain language to submit to oral sex or give it).

Through it all, Hollywood maintains an admirable fiction. It is that its outsider characters - gay, Asian, and most notably a black, gay writer who wants to write movies for mainstream audiences - have a hope in Hell of succeeding. Some of them use, as a springboard to success, day jobs at a notorious Hollywood gas station whose jockeys sexually “service” the biggest names in movies.

That last part, at least, isn’t fiction. There was such a famous gas station, run by a guy named Scotty Bowers, who hooked up movie stars and later told-all (and was the subject of a documentary). 

Hollywood is a guilty pleasure co-created by Glee co-creators Ryan Murphy (who also created American Horror Story) and Ian Brennan, that opens breezily and energetically with period music, gleaming old cars and lots of cigarette smoke. We meet Jack Castello (David Corenswet), a corn-fed Midwestern kid, fresh from the Battle of Anzio, with a wife (Maude Apatow) and twins on the way. The starstruck Jack is betting his future on lining up with hopeful extras outside the gate of Ace Studios.

It’s a continuously losing bet, and soon the handsome Jack is recruited to work at Golden Tip Gas by its gigolo proprietor Ernie (Dylan McDermott). His first client: ex silent actress Avis Amberg (Patti LuPone), who’s married to a sexually disinterested studio mogul. 

That goes fine, and Jack and Avis even have a bittersweet rapport. But he draws the line at his next client, the playwright Noel Coward, because he just doesn’t have sex with guys. So, to save his job, he recruits someone who does – Archie (Jeremy Pope), the aforementioned gay African-American writer. 

For his part, Archie soon falls for one of his clients, a wide-eyed slab of beef named Roy Fitzgerald, who would become the aforementioned Rock Hudson.

Rounding out the cast of cross-connected hopefuls, Raymond Ainsely (Darren Criss) is a half-Asian director who hides his half-Asian-ness, but dreams of making a non-exploitative movie with stereotyped screen “dragon lady” Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec). He’s also committed to bringing Archie’s dream project to the screen, a biopic about Peg Entwistle, an actress who committed suicide by jumping off the fabled Hollywood sign.

This is, to be sure, a Hollywood that never really existed. But it’s a fun parallel world, with parties at George Kukor’s house, dinner parties with Vivien Leigh, and… could there be an inevitable date with Oscar at some point? That’s the dream.

Hollywood is a throwback in another way, to ‘80s network mini-series in which wronged protagonists persist over sensational obstacles and defined villains. Other than Parsons and McDermott, none of the actors actually jump out at you with energy (the ersatz “Rock Hudson” least of all). But if you buy into this fictional screen history, it’s an entertaining time waster, fit for those of us who recently have time to waste.

Hollywood. Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. Starring David Corenswet, Jeremy Pope and Jim Parsons. Available on Netflix, Friday, May 1.

Click HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s interview with Hollywood star Holland Taylor.