HOLLYWOOD AMBITION
Ryan Murphy's Netflix Series Tackles Race, Sex + more
Whenever screenwriter/director/producer Ryan Murphy releases a series, it feels like a monumental occasion. People ask, “Have you seen the latest episode?” or “What did you think about that scene?” But unlike his past projects, you can devour Murphy’s ambitious 7-part production Hollywood in one day because it hits Netflix May 1.
In the Golden Age of Tinseltown, young, opportunistic actors are get a shot at stardom — but not in a traditional way. With a gas station as a backdrop, a mustached man (Dylan McDermott) offers Hollywood movers and shakers access to Dreamland, a place where they can live out their fantasies and be who they are. It’s a place where the sex that you have is your business. There, Jeremy Pope and David Corenswet‘s characters satisfy the most influential people in exchange for work. Corenswet and McDermott are the fictional versions of Scotty Bowers, the Pimp to the Stars who ran the “Full Service” gas station. But Hollywood doesn’t stop there. Ryan Murphy takes it further.
“We were less interested in the lurid sexual nature of it [than] the idea that there was a time when people had to go to this gas station to be themselves, to be able to express their sexuality, to be able to express their fantasy,” Murphy told Vanity Fair. “What we’re dealing with here is a complete look at an idea of buried history in Hollywood. The idea of people not being able to be who they were and to show their best side of who they were. What if we went back and sort of did a revisionist look and created an alternative universe?”
In that fictional world, Darren Criss‘ Raymond serves as a boundary-breaking director during the era of the Hays Code. That code restricted kissing and sex, among other things, in features. The young man’s film gets a greenlight by a woman (Patti LuPone) and he casts a black woman (Laura Harrier) as the daring lead. Harrier, a rising star in Hollywood, chats with Hattie McDaniel, played by Queen Latifah, the first black woman to win an Oscar. Segregation forced McDaniel to accept her award from an alternate location.
“With the present so fraught and the future uncertain, we turned to the past for direction, uncovering buried history to spin an aspirational tale of what-ifs,” Mock told The Hollywood Reporter. “What if a band of outsiders were given a chance to tell their own story? What if the person with greenlight power was a woman? The screenwriter a black man? What if the heroine was a woman of color? The matinee idol openly gay? And what if they were all invited into the room where the decisions are made, entering fully and unapologetically themselves to leave victorious and vaunted, their place in history cemented?”
Murphy based the revisionist history premise on three people’s stories: McDaniel, Rock Hudson and Anna May Wong (played by Michelle Krusiec). Jake Picking plays matinee idol Rock Hudson (with whom Scotty Bowers had the occasional hookup). If the series is revisionist by nature, we at PROVOKR hope Rock Hudson, who died of AIDS in 1985, comes out of the closet. Then we could imagine a world with him in it.
The stellar cast features so many names it will make you dizzy: Jim Parsons, Samara Weaving, Rob Reiner, Mira Sorvino, Maude Apatow and more. The trailer, which you can watch above, teases a world that doesn’t seem different from the present. So get ready, PROVOKRs, it’s a worthwhile adventure.
