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Horrible Hollywood (view source)

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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"I'm in a funny business, Ray. Everybody talks like hippies and acts like they're in the Sicilian mob."''|'''Lisa Lundquist''', ''[[Law and& Order (TV)|Law and Order]]''}}
 
When you think of Hollywood and other places within the entertainment industry, as well as the stars that inhabit them, you think of glamorous men and women who create the magic you see in movies and television, right?
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* ''[[The Bad and The Beautiful]]''
* [[Robert Altman]]'s ''[[The Player]]'', [[Up to Eleven]]
* ''[[The Party (Film)|The Party]]'' has this as one of its themes, but is (mostly) light-hearted about it.
* ''[[Scream (Filmfilm)|Scream]] 3''.
* ''[[Swimming Withwith Sharks]]''
* ''[[Film/Living In Oblivion|Living In Oblivion]]'' is the independent film version of this trope.
* ''[[The Real Blonde]]'' does this with the New York fashion and cinema scene.
* Taken together both ''[[WaynesWayne's World]]'' films show the television and music industries to be this. Except for Alice Cooper.
* ''[[Bowfinger]]'' takes this as its premise and plays it for comedy more than satire.
* ''[[Get Shorty]]'' conflates this trope with organized crime.
* While focusing solely on a small group ''[[Boogie Nights]]'' is actually an inversion of this trope... in the porn industry, typically portrayed as being even more corrupt and exploitative than the mainstream film industry. However, while it's implied that this is the case in a larger context (several of the producers are hinted to have mob ties at the very least), the film focusses on the main characters bonding together as a loving family unit.
* ''[[Tropic Thunder]]''
* There is elements of this in ''[[Sunset (Film)|Sunset]]''. Tom Mix himself is a decent fellow, but there is plenty of corruption and decadence.
* ''[[SOBS.O.B.]]'': The title is an abbreveation the term one character uses to describe how Hollywood operates: Standard Operational Bullshit.
* ''[[Film/Americas Sweethearts|Americas Sweethearts]]'': Mostly focused on the tropes surrounding celebrity romances and an agent exploiting it for movie promotion.
* ''[[The Cats Meow]]''
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* ''Money: A Suicide Note'' is a [[Martin Amis]] book about a really unpleasant advertising man writing a movie script and getting it published. He is a truly horrible character, and so are most of the other people he meets.
* Nathanael West's novel ''[[Day Of The Locust]]''
* ''[[LAL.A. Confidential]]''.
* [[Evelyn Waugh]]'s novel ''[[The Loved One]]'', as well as [[The Film of the Book]].
* Pretty much the point of ''Bright Shiny Morning.''
* [[Clive Barker]]'s ''[[Coldheart Canyon]]'' starts with this trope, and proceeds into more supernatural territory...
* All the characters of ''[[Imperial Bedrooms]]'', the sequel to [[Bret Easton Ellis]]'s ''[[Less Than Zero (Literature)|Less Than Zero]]'', are members of the Hollywood machine.
* [[Raymond Chandler]]'s fifth novel, ''The Little Sister'' is all about this. Story features a producer named Oppenheimer, because Chandler's subtle like that.
 
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* ''[[Californication]]''
* The ''[[Supernatural]]'' episode "Hollywood Babylon".
* The ''[[Law and& Order (TV)|Law and Order]]'' three-parter about a Hollywood producer who gets murdered, forcing the New York-based detectives and prosecutors to spend time in Los Angeles, takes this approach, with almost everyone involved in that world painted as grasping, backstabbing, narcissistic and neurotic. It's aptly summed up by a disillusioned junior executive (and one of the few 'Hollywood' characters who ''isn't'' an utterly horrible human being) who bitterly comments that everyone around her "talks like they're a hippy and acts like they're in the Sicilian Mafia."
* The 70s ''[[Ellery Queen]]'' episode "The Adventure of the Sinister Scenario" had the Queens, father and son, witness this for themselves when they go on the set of an adaptation of one of Ellery's books. This being an Ellery Queen mystery, this trope's horrible aspects culminate in murder.
* ''[[Di RT]]''
* ''[[Made in Canada]]'', except it's about [[Exactly What It Says Onon the Tin|the Canadian industry]].
** And yet, universally believable enough to be exported south of the border (as ''The Industry'').
* The depiction of the behind-the-scenes world of ''[[The Larry Sanders Show]]'' isn't exactly flattering.
* ''[[The West Wing]]'', of all things, touches on this every so often. C.J Cregg's backstory involves her working as a publicist for a selection of spoilt and neurotic Hollywood types who throw tantrums if they get placed lower on a magazine's 'who's most influential in Hollywood' list; a job she hates and considers meaningless (and eventually gets fired from). Another episode has the President go to a fundraising event in Beverly Hills swarming with these types; he doesn't have fun. A few other episodes also have mentions of this kind of thing.
* Played with in the ''[[Castle]]'' episode "One Life To Lose"; the behind the scenes environment of the popular soap opera isn't exactly free of intrigue, bitchiness and people sleeping with and / or hating each other and playing their own agendas, but it's no worse than some of the other walks of life the characters have entered.
* ''[[30 Rock (TV)|Thirty Rock]]'', while more sympathetic than the others, does portay the more shallowier / nastier / crazier elements of showbiz.
* In one episode of ''[[Boy Meets World (TV)|Boy Meets World]]'', Eric goes to Hollywood be a cast member of the [[Self-Parody]] show ''Kid Gets Acquainted with the Universe'', he finds out that the actors on the show are either [[Jerkass|jerkasses]] or highly neurotic, the so-called "best writers in town" are actually small children, and the scripts are [[Recycled Script|recycled]] many times and full of [[Stylistic Suck]].
* In ''[[Murder, She Wrote]]'', Hollywood, Broadway and the TV industry are all full of people lying, cheating, sleeping around to get ahead, and above all, plotting to kill each other. Admittedly, this doesn't distinguish them from ''[[Murder, She Wrote]]'''s portrayal of newspapers, book publishing, computer firms, toy companies...
 
 
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== Western Animation ==
* ''[[The Simpsons (Animationanimation)|The Simpsons]]'': Bart sees this in the episode "Bart Gets Famous", where he becomes the "I didn't do it kid" and is exposed to the full force of showbiz and a hideous bitch goddess. The trope is arguably inverted in "Radioactive Man", where Milhouse becomes Fallout Boy in the Radioactive Man film, and it's Springfield that's shown to be the ones gouging the simple yet not that unpleasant Hollywood folks out of their money.
{{quote| '''Producer''': Thank god we're back in Hollywood, where people treat each other right!}}
* ''[[The Critic]]'' frequently invokes this trope.
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