inside film

Hollywood on Hollywood: The dark side of the dream factory

From ‘Swimming with Sharks’ to ‘Mank’, some of the most barbed and vicious portraits of Tinseltown seem to come from Hollywood itself, writes Geoffrey Macnab

Friday 13 November 2020 07:53 GMT
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<p>Gary Oldman as Herman J Mankiewicz in ‘Mank’</p>

Gary Oldman as Herman J Mankiewicz in ‘Mank’

You can’t blame outsiders for being deeply suspicious of Hollywood. Whether it’s Donald Trump, gossip columnists sniffing out a scandal or the Catholic Legion of Decency railing against ungodly behaviour, all sorts of people have fulminated against the decadence in Tinseltown. Some have been plain jealous of all those rich, good-looking people living such pampered, self-indulgent lives. Others have simply been outraged.

Writers and intellectuals have long scorned the superficiality of the studio system. “It’s Hell, it’s Heaven: the amount you earn / Determines if you play the harp or burn,” German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in his Hollywood Elegies when he was in exile in Los Angeles in the early 1940s.

There was snobbery and even antisemitism in the way studio bosses and producers like Louis B Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn were mocked for their vulgarity.

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