Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
A rose-tinted version of Golden Age Hollywood that asks “What if…?”
The series was visually stunning, beautifully shot and has a great cast doing a wonderful job with a story that soon turns predictable and cringe-worthy.
The gay-agenda is pushed hard throughout the whole series, but it doesn’t do any of the characters justice. I was excited when I saw they had the gas station in the story, but it turned out to be more plot device than anything deeply meaningful.
Though not named “Golden Tip” as in Hollywood, the gas station was very real.
It was run by Scotty Bowers, a discharged Marine and the conduit between the Hollywood stars and the sexual practices that would have been stigmatised by their fans. Read: he provided a space where the publicly straight members of the LGBTQ+ community were able to keep their sexuality on the down-low.
If you haven’t seen the documentary about Bowers, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, I highly recommend it.
It’s a warm film that neither lionises nor judges its subject, and tells the story of how Bowers ended up doing his own thing long before that was culturally acceptable.
In it, Bowers talks about how he saw fighting during WWII that made him happy to be alive, and those that love him describe how he was driven by making people happy.
Considering this history, as well as the rich history of Hollywood in general, it made me sad that the show ended up in such a poor place when it came to the writing.
There aren’t any history lessons here, just playing fast and loose with history.
I didn’t at all appreciate how Rock Hudson was portrayed as a complete dummy. By all accounts he was a movie fan himself and ambitious about acting, and he should have easily recognised Vivian Leigh, accent or no.
I do think it would have been a better story, had they chosen to go with a completely fictional universe, filled with completely fictional people, characters that didn’t even try to resemble any old Hollywood stars.
They could have also chosen to stick closer to history, showing the real-life struggles of those hoping to make it in Hollywood – the actors, writers, directors, non-white, poor, LGBTQ+ (as many Hollywood stars were, including Rock Hudson).
The series is very good in the beginning, the set-up is intriguing and you begin to root for the characters. But then the show loses itself in la la land, as the story becomes more entrenched in wish fulfilment what-ifs, starts pushing in too many directions at once (with not enough time to complete each theme with a satisfying arc), and the characters become mere caricatures of what they could have been.
The writing relies heavily on the audience already knowing the struggles of women and black people at that time, so they don’t take any time in educating viewers and do very little work in setting up what it means personally for the characters (beyond their struggles being stereotypical labels).
I appreciate what they were trying to do with this “What if…?” kind of thinking, but they should have then gone with a 100% fictional world populated with fictional only characters and left out the direct comparisons to real people.
And, in the end, it all becomes too sappy when they take the wish fulfilment too far to feel like it’s rooted in any sense of reality.
Just like they end up bungling the story of the film they’re making, so the story itself of the show gets bungled. (This is a risk when doing meta storytelling.)
By making all the dreams come true, what the story says is that you can’t be happy unless all your dreams come true, and I dislike that message.
The truth is, that most of us will never have all of our dreams come true, so it feels out of touch with reality.
It also feeds the productivity culture by inadvertently encouraging you to keep going, don’t stop, until you’ve had all your dreams fulfilled.
I would rather the takeaway would have been that even when the odds are stacked against you, you can fight your way to the top and achieve success. Sure, it will require you to make compromises and sacrifices, but such is life.
That would have been a much more relatable story.
I will say that I love the symbolism of the opening jingle, the main cast of characters climbing the Hollywood sign and helping each other up along the way to the top.
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