Creative license is a funny thing; it’s a sword that cuts both ways. Sometimes when a creative property enters the public domain, or when we deal with a well-known personality and add our own twist to it, that ushers in new nuances and perspectives so we can see it — and ourselves — better. But other times, that interpretation can end up diminishing the power and influence of the original subject.
I kept thinking about this idea as I watched the trailer for Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series, Hollywood — and specifically how it treated the legendary and pioneering figure of Scotty Bowers.
If this is your first time around these parts, then the name may not be as familiar to you. But I’ve written about him a lot. Like, a lot. (I’m not kidding.) Scotty was a fascinating — and queer — figure who worked at a gas service station that became a haven for closeted celebrities and filmmakers in the Golden Age of Hollywood, when morals clauses forbade any non-conservative behavior on or off set.
When I first saw Scotty’s documentary, I knew his life could make a fascinating film — one that could invite viewers to shed sexual shame and reframe our thought process about sex workers.
But Murphy got there first. And boy, did he do Scotty dirty.
To be honest, I took one look at that trailer and my blood boiled for the dearly departed. I didn’t want to do a Unicorn Scale about the 2020 series; I knew this take on the underbelly of the Golden Age would get twisted beyond recognition. I didn’t want to see just how badly they mucked up some important stories.
But then I got to thinking... maybe I was wrong. Trailers are a marketing tool, after all, and they can sometimes be misrepresentative. And this show had a seven-episode arc; that’s plenty of time to flesh out a story. Maybe Murphy would add more details on the back-end to balance out my first impression. So I decided to give it a look.
The very barest parts of Bowers’ story are accurate. Scotty (renamed “Ernie” in the show and played by a silver-haired Dylan McDermott) was a handsome man who ran a gas station that also had sex workers who serviced the closeted Hollywood elite. And there is an element of shamelessness (and sometimes bluntness) perched in Ernie’s charisma which is accurate. (Story time: When Ernie talks about his johnson within his first minute of screen time, I immediately thought of when I first met Scotty at 95 and he good-naturedly and jokingly asked if I wanted to sit on his lap.) Scotty did also frequent George Cukor’s house with his ring of hustles. And yes — he did bang Vivien Leigh.
But Murphy and Co. take monumental liberties after that baseline of facts. (Unfortunately, it mirrors the surface treatment he gives to complex problems of “solving” systemic problems in Hollywood with characters harboring more gung-ho optimism. But I digress.)
First of all, Murphy set the scene in the pilot as if one of the main characters, Jack (David Coronswet), isn’t aware of the brothel part of the gig when he gets headhunted by Ernie to work at his Golden Tip gas station. They also set it up as if Ernie handled the money, when in reality Scotty was just an arranger — all money changed hands specifically between workers and their “tricks". This gets confirmed in the documentary by Scotty’s former hustlers — all insisting it was true that money never changed hands between Scotty and themselves. These hustlers — some of them goddamn Emmy-winning editors — are some of the few people left around from the era. Since they’re not paid to present themselves in the documentary, they have no reason to sugarcoat what happened — or could have chosen to deny appearing if they didn’t agree with what Scotty said transpired.
Murphy himself cops to making this show of magical thinking and the stories it’s based on with about “fifty percent” of reality. He and his co-creator Ian Brennan set out with the explicit purpose of giving cinematic luminaries a revisionist re-take, but it results in dirtying up Scotty’s story — and completely erasing his queerness in the process.
This is an especially disappointing backslide after Murphy’s offer on Netflix last year, The Politician — a show stuffed with so many bi characters I struggled to keep up on documenting the number of sexually fluid characters. Much of Hollywood is a re-imagining of a Tinseltown that was more accepting earlier than it was in its actual timeline across the board — be that racial discrimination, open sexuality, #MeToo, or gender discrimination in power dynamics. Yet here we have a reimagined story that doesn’t even use the term “bisexual”, but in fact invents new phrases for the orientation (looking at you, “sexually ambidextrous” ancillary character). They may have made passing reference to Tallulah Bankhead and Hattie McDaniel’s bisexuality, but if the person isn’t a movie star, like Ernie, their fluidity gets dismissed.
Scotty got his brothel started at the Richfield gas station specifically because he got picked up by a renowned male actor, Walter Pidgeon — and was game. It is due to the fact he took lovers without judgment that he grew his enterprise as quickly and successfully as he did. By comparison, Ernie only alludes in the final episode to maybe doing queer tricks in his past life. Robbing Ernie of this part of Scotty’s storyline — and instead re-forming the character to be straight, manipulative, and not transparent with his workers (who he never took a dime from in real life, by the way) — does a gross disservice to the memory of a good and important man in Hollywood’s LGBTI history. Bowers, a WWII Marine who fought in Iwo Jima, let closeted luminaries have a taste of the life they wanted but were under contract to keep hush-hush.
Murphy may have wanted to do a show about “buried history”, but in the process he managed to dismissively throw dirt on Scotty’s legacy while unearthing the tales of others. The bi erasure is clear and hurtful here. Pretty galling, considering he exploits the queer utopia Scotty created for the LGBTI community as a jumping-point for the rest of the show’s arcs. Instead, Hollywood’s storyline gets structured almost as a morality play where no one gets out clean (even though there’s humanization along the way).
It’s unclear to me why the creators decided to make Ernie straight — and tawdry, at that. When I interviewed Lionel Friedberg last year, Scotty’s co-author on his memoir, the picture he painted was one of a benevolent man whose form of altruism sometimes came out through a sexual manner. “He was an honest man, and a sweetheart,” the Emmy-winning documentarian recalled during our interview. "And I knew he wasn’t a bullshitter; there was no ego involved. At all.”
“[Scotty] really felt he was doing a service to people,” Friedberg continued. “And if the way to do that was sexually, what’s wrong with that? We are all sexual beings. He recognized that, as should we all. But our culture does not, society does not. Most of the world does not. But Scotty knew it... and I admired it.”
Personally, I think keeping “Ernie” queer would have made this gas station a more appealing, accepting haven, instead of corralling Ernie’s tolerance into a hacky speech in order to try to persuade Jack to unwillingly service a gay talent agent at a garden party.
Truly, it’s disappointing to think that Scotty’s original story, while pretty well-known around Los Angeles for decades (and beyond, since the 2012 release of his international best-selling autobiography), will not be the first thing that comes to mind for the general public. Hollywood will likely be an introduction for mass audiences to Bowers. I hate to see Murphy & Co. get it so wrong from the get-go. It feels like they are throwing an underground bi hero under the bus in order to prop up the gay stories they wish had gotten happy endings.
And yet, despite all these musings, I still harbor hope for Scotty’s story getting done right. A decade ago, I made my way out to catch a billing of my local Shakespeare In the Park. I thought it was a truly terrible production (I can be a real snob — shocker). When I was talking it over the show with my friend, Dan, I exaggerated and said they had “killed Shakespeare”. His wife, Cindy (an even closer friend of mine), heard our bitch-fest and astutely observed: “Shakespeare and his stories have survived both great and terrible productions for four centuries. He’ll survive this one, too.”
Here’s hoping Scotty’s life gets a new, better production that does his fascinating life justice. That’s my Hollywood dream.
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