With film productions on hold indefinitely, your Be Reel hosts turn their sights to the Hollywood of the past … well, sort of.
Ryan Murphy’s Netflix original miniseries “Hollywood” follows the cast and crew of the fictional film “Meg” in 1947 as they rewrite American movie lore and vanquish countless social obstacles for LGBTQ artists and artists of color. But is “Hollywood” an alluring political reverie or anachronistically reductive mumbo-jumbo?
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Murphy, who brought us “Nip/Tuck,” “Glee” and “The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” focuses the majority of the story on characters of color and queer characters (played by Laura Harrier, Jeremy Pope, Jake Picking, Darren Criss, Jim Parsons, and more) to not only shine a light on the seedy-but-earnest underbelly that kept the movie business satisfied but also show movies never gave the hardest workers a chance to succeed. Then, very quickly, the revision begins, and we answer (relatively conflict-free) the question: What would happen if Golden Era Tinseltown had actually given these marginalized people a spotlight? What if Rock Hudson and Anna May Wong had been allowed the lives and careers they deserved?
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What develops is an alternate reality where race, gender, class, and sexuality mean both everything and nothing. At best, it’s seven hours of steroidal and occasionally magnetic melodrama standing in for actual historical criticism, and at worst it robs actual Hollywood groundbreakers of their due celebration by presenting a much easier mountain to climb.
If you’re still catching up on “Hollywood” try using the episode discussion time stamps below:
- Ep. 1 – 6:20
- Ep. 2 – 15:40
- Ep. 3 – 26:20
- Ep. 4 & 5 – 32:30
- Ep. 6 – 41:05
- Ep. 7 – 48:45
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