Mark Reviews Movies: SCOTTY AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD

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Capsule review by Mark Dujsik | August 9, 2018

An intimate look at the life of author Scotty Bowers, who claims he was a pimp to the biggest stars of Hollywood from the 1940s through the 1980s, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood has mixed feelings about its subject. In some circles, the man is a hero, who helped people under strict contracts from Hollywood studios be able to fulfill their sexual desires without judgment. In others, he's a villain, who is breaking the ethical lines of "outing" people who are no longer alive to have a say in the matter.

To its credit, the documentary presents decent enough arguments for both sides of the case, with even director Matt Tyrnauer directly confronting Bowers on at least one occasion. The movie also has mixed feelings about its content. It wants to present the now-dead stars, directors, and other filmmakers as the victims of morality clauses, as well as society's more-accepted-at-the-time discomfort with, distrust of, and hated for people who were gay, lesbian, or bisexual. The presentation, though, comes entirely from Bowers' telling of these tales, and whatever one may think of the man, he definitely has a flair for talking about sexual exploits with straightforward but explicit detail.

The result is a movie at odds with itself. The framing of its stories, using a variety of talking heads, tries to put the details of Bowers' tell-all book Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars within the context of a public service—to show us that those rich and famous people of old were just normal people with regular desires. The actual telling of them comes across as mere gossip. It's one thing to point out that a well-known actor was gay. It's another to go into as much detail as Bowers and the movie itself go into here, with the exploitative thrill of a cheap tabloid.

As for Bowers himself, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood shows us a man who has no regrets about his exploits but plenty of demons (survivor's guilt over the death of his brother, unacknowledged sexual abuse as a child, and the death of a daughter) that have long gone unaddressed. His story is fascinating, but one wonders how he would feel if it were told in the same way that he tells other people's stories.

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