Laura Harrier – Memphis Flyer

The period immediately after World War II was a crucial time in film history. The studio system, which had arisen over the former 30 years, was trying to get back to normal, as its stars, craftspeople, and audience returned home. But the prewar status quo, with the all-powerful studio bosses controlling vast empires of theaters that they fed with a steady output of A and B pictures, was never to return.

In 1948, United States vs. Paramount Pictures forced the studios to sell off their theater chains. Under the Paramount Consent Decree, no longer would Paramount-owned theaters play exclusively Paramount pictures. The power of the studio bosses began to wane, setting the stage for a new era of agents, managers, independent contractors, and upstart indie producers that shaped Hollywood as we know it today.

The films, too, took on a darker tone.

Laura Harrier (left) and Darren Criss are outrageously good looking

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had agreed not to pursue the anti-trust action against the studios in exchange for the bosses agreeing to produce wartime propaganda for the government. With the war finished, rah rah military films such as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (written by noted socialist Dalton Trumbo) gave way to the darker meditations such as It’s a Wonderful Life and The Best Years of Our Lives. Hardboiled crime pictures that French critics would later tie together as film noir became incredibly popular. If the dominant mood of the war years was “We’re all in this together!” noir saw capitalist America as a war of all against all.

Tinseltown in turmoil seems like ripe pickings for story material. That’s the promise of Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix miniseries Hollywood. Taking some of the old Hollywood Babylon legends of sex, corruption, and debauchery out for a thinly fictionalized spin could make for some quality kicks. Especially the sex part. This is Hollywood, after all. Everyone’s ridiculously good looking. In the right hands, a figure like the deeply closeted heartthrob Rock Hudson seems like perfect fodder for post-Empire soapy drama.

Jeremy Pope, Samara Weaving, Laura Harrier, Darren Criss, and David Corenswet

Hollywood starts promisingly enough. Jack Costello (David Corenswet) is one of thousands of former G.I.s who, we are told in the opening newsreel sequence, flocked to Southern California to seek their fortunes. His wife Henrietta (Maude Apatow) is pregnant, and the meager work Jack is getting as an extra just isn’t cutting it. While drowning his sorrows at a Hollywood watering hole, Jack meets Ernie West (Dylan McDermott) who offers him a job as a gas station attendant to help make ends meet.

Once he puts on the garrison cap and starts to fill tanks, Jack finds out the real nature of Ernie’s business. The gas station is a front for a high-end prostitution ring, and Jack is expected to service the oversexed daughters of the rich. The money is excellent, and Jack has few qualms about becoming a himbo for the likes of Avis Amberg (Patti LuPone), whose husband runs Ace Studios. But his gigolo days come to a premature end when he refuses to schtupp Cole Porter in a trailer behind the gas station. “If you won’t go have some fun with national treasure Cole Porter, you’d better find me someone who can!” fumes Ernie.

Jake Picking (left) as Roy Fitzgerald, aka Rock Hudson.

Jack dresses as a cop and dragoons Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope), a black, gay screenwriter reduced to turning tricks in stag houses, into service at the gas station. Archie is a hinge for Hollywood‘s action. He has written a screenplay called Peg, about an actress who committed suicide by jumping off the Hollywood sign. His film attracts the interest of Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss), a director under contract at Ace. Through the service station, Archie meets a young actor named Roy Fitzgerald. Their clandestine relationship starts to bloom just as Roy is taken in by agent Henry Wilson (Jim Parsons of The Big Bang Theory, sleazier than you ever thought possible). Wilson insists on changing Roy’s name to something more manly, like Rock Hudson (Jake Picking), then takes advantage of him on the casting couch.

Sexual exploitation is the order of the day in Hollywood, and at least that feels pretty authentic. But for all the sleaze and the betrayal, Hollywood feels kinda lifeless and sterile. Part of the problem lies with the leads. Murphy has a type: dark-haired guys with giant, square jaws. Corenswet, Criss, and Picking all fit the description, and the recurring joke of actors being picked more for their looks than their acting ability seems to apply to the show itself. A story with this much fornication set in the underbelly of dreamland needs to be more fun.

Hollywood is streaming on Netflix.

Netflix’s Hollywood is a Revisionist Romp Through Tinseltown History

Spike Lee is many things, but subtle is not one of them.

Some directors like to seduce you into their world by offering up a figure with whom you can relate, then putting them in jeopardy. As the relatable hero feels threatened, so do you, and the thing which threatens them becomes, by proxy, your enemy, too. When Clint Eastwood opens American Sniper with his hero killing Iraqi women and children in order to “protect his brothers,” he assumes that you will identify with Chris Kyle because he’s a red-blooded American Navy SEAL.

Lee has never been like that, even when he’s doing a traditional war movie like 2008’s Miracle at St. Anna. A Lee hero is faced with an ethical dilemma and spends the film either weighing both sides before deciding to act, or explaining why he made his decision. The classic example is Mookie, the protagonist played by Lee himself in Do the Right Thing, but you can also see the same dynamic in 25th Hour. The central question is not “will our hero prevail?” so much as “will this person choose to act heroically?” The fact that, decades later, people still debate whether or not Mookie did the “right thing” speaks to the intellectual and moral power of Lee’s approach.

But while Lee’s approach to heroism is nuanced, the way he presents his heroes’ worlds and their choices is stark, bold, and in your face. Some directors are afraid to do anything that might puncture the veil of realism. Lee’s concern is immediate emotional impact. If a split-screen is what’s needed to drive the point home, Lee’s gotta have it. If he thinks an exaggerated, stagey performance will create the emotional beat he’s looking for, he’ll rev up his actor: Compare Giancarlo Esposito’s manic turn as Buggin’ Out in Do the Right Thing to his stoic, richly textured portrayal of Gus Fring in Breaking Bad. When it works, we get the majestic sweep of Malcom X. When it doesn’t, we get the disjointed, barely watchable Chi-Raq.

With the republic under siege by Trumpism, the time for subtlety has long passed. Lee rises to the occasion with BlacKkKlansman. When we meet Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), he’s fresh out of the police academy when he gets a job at the Colorado Springs Police Department. At first, he’s assigned to the evidence room, but when Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael, played by Corey Hawkins) comes to town to speak at the university, Stallworth is assigned to infiltrate the local campus activists, because he’s the only black man on the force. Stallworth just wants to keep his head down and do his job, but the speech pricks his conscience. When he meets the supposedly menacing black radicals, they turn out to be nerdy kids led by beautiful student Patrice (Laura Harrier). Lee’s impressionistic presentation of Ture’s speech — and Stallworth’s awakening — is the film’s first transcendent moment.

John David Washington and Topher Grace in BlacKkKlansman

To deepen Stallworth’s dilemma, his superiors are so impressed with his first undercover assignment that they promote him to detective. While perusing the newspaper at the office one day, he happens across a recruitment ad for the Ku Klux Klan, and on a lark, calls the number. Expecting to hear a recorded message, he’s shocked when someone actually picks up the phone. Stallworth was not raised in the South and his years among cops at the academy have helped him perfect his code switching, so he sounds white enough to convince the Klan recruiter to set up a meeting. It’s all so unexpectedly easy, he makes a rookie mistake: He gives out his own name instead of making up a cover identity.

Since Stallworth’s giant natural haircut won’t exactly fit under a Klan hood, he has to send in a ringer, in the person of Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). Flip finds that the local blood-and-soil types aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and is instantly accepted into the haters club, despite the fact that he is clearly Jewish. Meanwhile, Stallworth works the phones until he’s on a first-name basis with the Grand Wizard himself, David Duke (Topher Grace).

In Washington and Driver, Lee finds two actors who understand his methods and deliver exceptional performances. If Lee is unsubtle, it’s because he’s trying to point out America’s racial blind spots to half his audience. His didactic tendencies that came off as too preachy in the Obama era seem all too timely now. Personally, I would have cut the coda that ties the “for real shit” of BlacKkKlansman to last year’s deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, leaving it to the audience to make the connection on their own. But this is a Spike Lee joint, and the great director wants to be damn sure you understand.