The old Hollywood studio system is no longer just the stuff that legends were made of. Now it's the stuff that a short-run TV series is made of.
American Movie Classics, logically enough, has put together a four-part, two-hour miniseries titled "The Lot" -- the fictional story of a rising young starlet in the '30s that cleverly mixes fact and near-fact into a tale of hopes, dreams and cut-throat business dealings. It's an entertaining little diversion that's gorgeous to look at, what with the period costumes, props and settings and all.It was filmed on the Sony lot, which once was the MGM lot.
(Part 1 of "The Lot" airs tonight at 6 p.m. and repeats at 11 p.m.; Part 2 airs tonight at 6:30 p.m. and repeats at 11:30 p.m.; Parts 3 and 4 air at those times on Friday.)
The story plays out like an old-time movie, while at the same time coming across as oddly believable in the strange context in which it takes place. It's 1937, and the jumping-off point (so to speak) is the death of starlet Maxine Montaine, who leaps to her death off the Hollywoodland sign.
(In real life, starlet Peg Entwistle did just that in 1932.)
Montaine's untimely death leaves Sylver Screen Studios in a bind -- she was in the middle of production on the film "Call Me Veronica Blaire." And into the search for a replacement steps sweet, young, innocent June Parker (Linda Cardellini), the daughter of the studio's longtime makeup artist, Mary (Stefanie Faracy). Mary knows what the movie biz is really like and doesn't want her daughter caught up in it, but after unscrupulous studio publicist Jack Sweeney (Perry Stephens) digs into Mary's past, the mother has no choice but to give permission to her underage daughter.
What follows is the creation of a star from scratch, set against a backdrop of corporate infighting and both professional and personal competition. And the fictional events, outlandish as they might be, seem somehow plausible given the sprinkling of real events that are tossed into the mix.
Names like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Blondell, Mickey Rooney, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Tallulah Bankhead, Paulette Goddard, Barbara Stanwyk, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Irene Dunne, Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland are tossed about. In the midst of filming "Call Me Veronica Blaire," the Hindenberg disaster makes the news.
And there's a subplot in which a millionaire/playboy/studio executive designs a dress with a torpedo-shaped bustline for June, which is rejected by the guardian of movie propriety, the Hayes Office -- which, of course, really happened with Howard Hughes and a dress he designed for Jane Russell.
It's pretty obvious that the actors in "The Lot" are having a wonderful time. What's not to like for them -- they get to dress up in great costumes, spout theatrical lines and relive the glory days of Hollywood.
Even some of the smaller roles are a hoot. Allen Garfield and Jeffrey Tambor are perfectly cast as the Sylver brothers; the former playing harried studio chief Myron, who's at the mercy of his purse-string-holding brother, Harry, in New York. Sara Botsford is a delight as the aging screen diva Norma St. Clare. And Holland Taylor is delicious as gossip columnist Letitia Devine, a character obviously based on real-life gossip monger Louella Parsons.
That's just one of several characters based on actual figures from Hollywood's golden age.
Jonathan Frakes ("Star Trek: The Next Generation"), for example, stars as Roland White -- who is patterned on Howard Hughes.
"My nails started to grow," he joked. "I was filled in by the team at AMC on some of the eccentricities of his character that this character possessed and they put some of them in the series as well. So I had a good role model. And a good suit. And a pencil-thin mustache."
Not that every character is directly drawn from a real-life counterpart. June Parker is sort of an amalgam of any number of young starlets, and Cardellini tried to play her that way.
"There isn't anybody specific," she said. "My mother is a huge AMC fan and old movie fan and she always had me watching old movies. And I would mimic the way they spoke. There was a certain rhythm to their speech. So it was sort of a mix of everything I had seen.
"And also, I think, as a little girl watching those movies, they seemed so glamorous and so mysterious that it was a little girl's dream to dress up in these beautiful clothes and have this make-up and be a star."
Which makes "The Lot" sort of a dream come true.