The Sun Always Shines on TV
Millions of people all over the world dream of a career in the movie world. Aspiring actors travel to the hubs of the industry, the most famous being Hollywood. When Emma Stone (Academy Award Best Actress for La La Land) was 14, she created a PowerPoint presentation to convince her family to move to Hollywood to pursue her dreams of becoming an actress. Although Stone ‘made it’ and became the highest paid actress in 2017, there are thousands of others whose dreams never came true.
‘Hollywood’ is a Netflix show created, written and directed by Ryan Murphy. It follows a group of aspiring actors in 1947, the golden age of films. Murphy based his characters on real personalities such as Rock Hudson, Anna May Wong and Henry Wilson. Murphy’s stance of the time period was idealistic: Rock Hudson, for example, was a closeted homosexual until 1985 when he died of AIDS, and was even briefly married to a woman from 1955 to 1958. In Hollywood, however, he embraces his sexuality and comes out as gay. While this is commendable, it wouldn’t have been possible at that time. Society had stringent rules, if one wasn’t a white, straight male they had no power.
The characters in Hollywood are working to create a film named ‘Meg’, with a coloured woman as the lead and an interracial love story. Interracial marriage was illegal in the US until 1967. Murphy’s creative liberties added a sense of hope and passion to the story no matter how unrealistic. He depicted Hollywood not as it was but how it should have been. Films have the power to break stereotypes, however at the time, they fortified them. A black woman was always a servant, an Asian always a villain and the whites were the heroes. While the heads of hollywood may have been open minded (no evidence suggests this), there is a limit to bravery.
Hollywood may have a happy ending but it is not a happy story. The saddest past is, while it is based on real time and real people, it never happened. Gay men were ostracised and beaten, black people were stereotyped as dangerous and slavery was celebrated as a glorious way of life. We are still seeing the effects of decisions made by film producers 80 years ago, today.
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