‘Hollywood’: The Naked Truth

The real Hollywood sign is a dollar sign.

Probably only tourists who bus in from the boonies hoping to sight Tom Cruise at Hollywood and Vine don’t know that global big business is the headliner in the world’s entertainment capital. It’s surely old news to most Americans that the industry’s true mega-stars are its power brokers and that everyone else, no matter how talented or glamorous, is a lounge act.

But it takes “Naked Hollywood” to fully undress the siliconed beast on television. This irreverently revealing documentary from Britain’s BBC starts Sunday on cable’s Arts & Entertainment network, airing at 9 p.m. for five consecutive weeks.

Note that of the many talking heads in these five hours, only three are women, one an assistant script editor, and there are no faces of color--the unspoken message being not that “Naked Hollywood” is biased against females and minorities, but that the industry’s elite upper strata remains almost monolithically male and white.

“Naked Hollywood” producer Nicolas Kent educates entertainingly and caustically while pointing each of his episodes at a different facet of the business: The star, the studio, the agent, the writer and the director.

A sixth episode, about producers, already shown to British viewers, is omitted from the A&E; version, reportedly because Hollywood producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer disliked how they were presented. The program relied heavily on them and clips from their Paramount movies such as “Top Gun,” “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Days of Thunder.” The studio has said it honored the pair’s request to block these clips from inclusion in the U.S. airing of “Naked Hollywood.” Hence, no episode.

The incident itself shows how some in Hollywood flex their muscles.

Speaking of brawn, the opening episode is an elaborate look at how movies are sold to the public, the super-salesman in this case being the ever-present Austrian-American beefcake some have nicknamed McStar. He is, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who shrewdly pumps profits along with iron, his mere presence reminding us, says journalist Elizabeth Kaye, “that Hollywood is a community whose gaze is fixated on the bottom line.”

The segment, which is the best in the series, is much less a devastating indictment of Hollywood than of Arnie’s Army, the gallery of fixated media boobs who cue up just begging to be manipulated by him and pressed into service as his unofficial publicists. More about Conan the conglomerate shortly.

In fascinating Episode 2, 20th Century Fox Chairman Joe Roth sits at his desk in front of a huge blowup of a poster for “They Drive by Night,” a 1940 melodrama pitting purity against crookedness.

Slicing in scenes from the Mel Brooks film “Silent Movie,” Kent makes Roth a metaphor for the job insecurity faced by studio heads. Hired to revitalize Fox’s profits quickly, Roth has survived so far, thanks in large part to that box-office behemoth “Home Alone.” But former studio heads have grimmer stories to tell. And interviewed here, Brooks equates the occupational hazards of a studio chief with those of a mating male spider: “It’s a glamorous job, it’s a powerful job, and you’re doomed.”

Although the last three episodes of “Naked Hollywood” are the least interesting, each has its illuminating moments. One of these in the third episode is former agent Freddie Fields appearing to say, in effect, that he remained Steve McQueen’s friend for years solely in hopes of “some day, somehow” getting him as a client. He did.

The episode on screenwriters demonstrates the long odds against them ever retaining creative control over their creations. It traces the evolution of “Kindergarten Cop,” for example: First we meet the original writer, then the two writers brought in to help the original writer, then the two writers hired to help the two writers helping the first writer.

Power-wielding director Sydney Pollack, maverick director Joe Dante and independent director John Sayles share Episode 5. “It has to be seen by a lot of people or it’s a major flop,” Pollack says in 1990 about his $40-million-plus movie “Havana,” which later turned out to be a major flop.

Heavily bankrolled Pollack is shown here working within the system, Sayles as a shoe-stringer on the outside and Dante somewhere in the middle as a pragmatist who defies the Establishment but ultimately plays ball. He laments having to “fight for every frame” of his whimsical “Gremlins 2,” then adds: “And if you have to fight over every frame of this , what hope can you have of making serious films?” It’s a telling point.

Episode 1, meanwhile, is titled “The Actor and the Star,” the latter being the image-correct Schwarzenegger. He’s superimposed here over the historically rebellious James Caan, whose film career until the recent hit “Misery” had been mostly sleeping with the fishes since he was Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather” nearly two decades ago.

Although at times awkward, the actor/star juxtaposition does provide for a captivating primer on basic Schwarzenegger. In his own charming way, he is quite candid here about the high priority he gives to marketing himself and the movies he makes. “I’m doing good work, and I sell it,” he boasts.

And how! With the possible exception of Madonna, there is no one on the scene as clever or prolific about self-advertisement as Schwarzenegger, who recently succeeded in turning much of TV into the “Terminator 2” show in his quest for free publicity for his latest blockbuster release.

Not that making every talk show and newscast along with about every newspaper on behalf of self-promotion necessarily requires much of a seduction. Stars attract viewers and sell newspapers and magazines: witness the record business done by Vanity Fair from its provocative cover showing a pregnant--and nude--Demi Moore. So ravenous are the media for the mere presence of Schwarzenegger and other celebrities that they willingly make the space-for-face trade, even when the result is clearly free publicity and devoid of news.

Schwarzenegger himself is cynically blunt about how he views the press in the documentary: “This guy’s only there for one thing, and that’s to sell your tickets. And you have 100 interviews a day like that . . . and you say right away to the guy when he sits down, or the woman: ‘OK, we talk about the movie.’ ”

“Naked Hollywood” eavesdrops on one of these 100-interviews-a-day bashes, a 1990 press junket for “Total Recall” where, one after the other, TV personalities from stations across the nation are separately granted three minutes to interview Schwarzenegger for the purpose of asking him soft questions.

Later, one of the interviewers says to him: “I hope we have a chance to talk about ‘Kindergarten Cop,’ because we’ve talked nearly every time, haven’t we, and it’s fun.”

Schwarzenegger is appreciative, replying to her: “Remember one thing. I totally rely on you to sell my movies.”

Will this frankness on TV cost him his media patsies? Hardly. They want him too desperately, along with Sonny Bono, Kathleen Turner and the others now making the TV rounds on behalf of their projects.

The media, naked in Hollywood.