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

Gary Oldman as Herman J Mankiewicz in ‘Mank’ (Gisele Schmidt/Netflix)

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.

Strangely, though, by far the most barbed and vicious portraits of Hollywood have always come from within Hollywood itself.

David Fincher’s Mank, soon to appear on Netflix, is just the latest in a very long line of films focusing on the venality and corruption of the studio system. It’s about how Herman J Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) came to co-write Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), still acknowledged by critics as among the greatest films ever made. On the one hand, this is a story of triumph. On the other, it’s about score settling, stealing credit, feuding and back-stabbing.

At the time he is writing Kane, Mankiewicz is a washed-up, alcoholic has-been, not so different from all those other washed-up, alcoholic has-beens shown in movies, from the 1937 and 1954 versions of A Star Is Born to 2011’s The Artist. “I won’t work with half the producers on the lot and the other half won’t work with me,” Mankiewicz mumbles drunkenly early on in the film.

We see flashbacks to him in better days. He’s shown a decade before, at Paramount in the early 1930s, holding court among the other cynical, seedy, wise-cracking east-coast hacks. They are churning out screenplays for producers like David O Selznick and Irving Thalberg. Mank may talk big and show plenty of swagger but, even then, he is “just a writer” (as Thalberg witheringly refers to him), the lowest in the food chain.

Media magnate William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) takes a shine to the bedraggled Mank. Hearst has high-minded dreams of making movies with serious literary scripts. Mank becomes his court jester, but those films never come to be.

As the movie makes very clear, characters like Mank, feted at first, are always eventually spat out by the Hollywood system. He may be “super” at writing screenplays, but he rarely gets much credit for it.

“This is a business where the buyer gets nothing but a memory. What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That’s the real magic of the movies,” says Louis B Mayer (played by Arliss Howard), summing up the strange economics of the so-called dream factory. Mayer’s cynicism is breathtaking. He blithely asks the MGM staff to take pay cuts because of the Depression, but there is no sign of him curbing his own expenses. He is a snivelling sycophant to Hearst. His politics, and those of his fellow studio bosses, are determinedly right-wing. In the film, they’re shown doing their very best to make sure that socialist author Upton Sinclair isn’t elected governor of California, cooking up fake newsreels to undermine his campaign.

One of the more intriguing sub-genres of “Hollywood on Hollywood” films is the cautionary tale of the star suddenly plummeting from grace. Johnny Depp, sacked by Warner Bros from the Fantastic Beasts series last week after losing his libel case against The Sun over a story labelling him a wife beater, would be the perfect subject for one of these films. He is a latter-day equivalent to the characters played by Kirk Douglas in Vincente Minnelli dramas The Bad and The Beautiful (1952) and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). In the former, Douglas was a once celebrated producer who can’t even get his old friends on the phone and in the latter he was a big-name actor reduced to eking out his career in obscure European movies.

You can see the trajectory of such a film: the child-like, innocent Depp from Edward Scissorhands gradually turning into a drug-addled, self-pitying caricature of his former self, scrawling in blood on the mirror.

That, in a sense, is the Citizen Kane story too. The doe-eyed kid with the sledge ends up as the abandoned, jaded old man on his deathbed. It’s the story of Mankiewicz himself, the toast of the Algonquin Round Table and the wittiest writer in Hollywood struggling to get a job. It’s the story of Orson Welles as well, the wunderkind who made Kane when still in his mid-twenties but ended his career as a pariah in the eyes of the very same studios who once, briefly, had given him complete creative control. Welles had the temerity to challenge Hearst, one reason the studio bosses quickly grew so wary of him. He was too much of a liberal for them and far too adventurous in his film-making techniques. Many in Hollywood felt he behaved as if he owned the town and they couldn’t wait for the day he got his comeuppance.

There are many moments in Hollywood films in which the biggest names are toppled and ritually humiliated. Take the excruciating scene in George Cukor’s A Star is Born in which James Mason’s drunken, ex-matinee idol Norman Maine stumbles on to stage when Judy Garland is receiving an award. Drawling his words, he pathetically begs the bigwigs in the audience for a job. Everyone turns against Maine. The lowly publicists who slavered over him during the good times let him know that, actually, they despised him all along.

When the US studios turn their gaze inward and make movies about themselves, the stories invariably have a morbid obsession with loss and failure. Even a musical as exuberant as Singin’ in the Rain (1952) has its abject moments, for instance when shrill-voiced actors like Lina Lamont, played by Jean Hagen, make utter fools of themselves trying to adjust to the “talkies”.

As F Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his Pat Hobby stories, “Hollywood is full of has-beens.” Those who are successful are painfully conscious of how quickly their power and influence can be snatched away. Pat Hobby, loosely based on Fitzgerald himself, is a 49-year-old screenwriter whose best years are a very long way behind him. A drunk whose car continually breaks down, he tries increasingly desperately to get himself back on the studio pay roll. Hobby is a comic figure, but from Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place (1950) to John Turturro in Barton Fink (1991), there are plenty of films about screenwriters even more hopeless and tormented than him. They’re considered a dime a dozen, a point re-emphasised in Robert Altman’s 1992 satire The Player when a studio executive gets away with murdering one.  

It’s axiomatic that everybody wants to work in the movies. That work, though, can be joyless and depressing in the extreme. Kitty Green’s The Assistant, released in the UK earlier this year, serves as an important corrective to the notion that there is any glamour or escapism in a low-level, desk-bound job for a Harvey Weinstein-like producer. The reality, as experienced by the junior assistant (Julia Garner), is mind-numbing tedium in a New York office environment in which harassment and abuse are everyday occurrences. Green’s film is groundbreaking in that it focuses on workers who are generally shunted to the margins, and reminds us how badly many are treated.

You can’t help but be struck by the relentless chauvinism in most of the stories Hollywood tells about itself. The Pat Hobby tales contain throwaway references to script girls attempting suicide and needy, lovelorn secretaries spurned by their bosses. In Fincher’s Mank, whenever the bed-bound Mankiewicz has inspiration for a new scene in Citizen Kane, his dutiful British secretary Rita (Lily Collins) is always there, ready to take down the dictation, regardless of the turmoil in her own private life. Whenever Mank is too drunk to take off his clothes and put himself to bed, his long-suffering wife Sara (Tuppence Middleton) will do it for him.

It’s not just the secretaries and wives who are treated with contempt and indifference. The brightest young executives are also often made to suffer. “Guy has just started working for the biggest producer in Hollywood and he thinks he’s in heaven. Too bad, he has gone to hell,” runs the trailer slogan for George Huang’s autobiographical satire Swimming with Sharks (1994). The loathsome and bullying producer (reportedly based on real-life prototypes Scott Rudin and Joel Silver) tormenting Guy is played by Kevin Spacey. Given Spacey’s later comeuppance, the casting seems very apt.

“The way Hollywood works, the unspoken rule is that once you survive this hazing and abusive behaviour, once you get to the top, you get to repeat that cycle and unleash hell on the people beneath you,” Huang explained to the Chicago Tribune in a 2018 interview. It’s why that sourness in 1930s Hollywood satires can still be tasted today, the bad habits continuing from generation to generation.

From the brattish teenage actors in David Cronenberg’s Map to the Stars (2014) and Gloria Swanson’s raddled ancient diva in Sunset Boulevard (1950), to the creepy studio bosses, the drunken, badly paid screenwriters and the harassed, overworked assistants in the mailroom, characters in films made in and about Hollywood are a very dysfunctional bunch.

David Fincher’s Mank is being tipped for Oscars for the glorious performances of Oldman and of Amanda Seyfried as Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies. It’s an act of homage, beautifully shot in lambent black and white and full of lyrical, often ingenious echoes of Citizen Kane itself. It will remind the world that Kane couldn’t have happened without Mankiewicz. However, the nostalgia comes crusted with bile. Mank also gives us an insider’s view of the studio system – and that view isn’t pretty at all. Hollywood, it seems, can’t look at itself without experiencing a sudden surge of extreme self-loathing.

‘Mank’ launches on Netflix on 4 December