“Strip away the phoney tinsel of Hollywood,” the saying goes, “and you will find the real tinsel underneath.”Footnote ¹ Hollywood films have done this themselves since the silent era, promising a view behind the scenes and, as Steven Cohan puts it in Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies, purporting “to demystify the production of entertainment as a condition for remystifying it” (2). Cohan stresses the industrial authorship and institutional self-reflexivity implied in the “by Hollywood” of his title. Films about starstruck innocents coming to Hollywood may have given way to the cynical portrait of aging stardom of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1949), more recently to the affectionate pastiche of the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (2016). All contribute to the Hollywood brand.

Hollywood by Hollywood is not the first book on the subject. Others have examined the genre that Cohan identifies as the backstudio picture, notably Christopher Ames in his Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected (1997). In discussing films such as The Bad and the Beautiful (1954) and The Player (1992), Cohan covers some of the same ground but offers a fresh take on a broader field. His remarkably wide-ranging study has room for the little-known silent comedy Souls for Sale (1923), as well as the virtual stardom imagined in The Congress (2013), and even King Kong (1933). He is particularly interesting when he moves beyond the main feature to examine how the insider knowledge promised today by the filmmaker's audio commentary previously operated through the press book for the 1937 version of A Star Is Born and in the trailer for the 1954 version. This breadth is used to examine how Hollywood exists in all these films “as a place, an industry, and a fantasy” (249). The backstudio picture is thus a genre, linked to “Los Angeles, recurring themes about ambition, success, power, and labor, a predictable set of character types, and a self-reflexive mode of representation” (3). It is also central to how Hollywood sells itself.

One of strengths of the book lies in the way in which Cohan's central thesis allows for shifts and complexities. Initial chapters on “Self-Reflexive Hollywood” and “Imaginary Hollywood” range across decades, but in what follows Cohan historicizes the genre, examining cycles and trends. The celebration of the myth of success in the 1930s and 1940s made way for postwar films that debunked that myth (while developing their own). In turn, this was followed by a trend towards looking back to, in the words of one example, The Way We Were (1973), and away from contemporary, corporate mismanagement (14). More recently, Hollywood has revived the backstudio picture, “mostly but not always as a source of postmodern satire, parody, or pastiche” (16). Contemporary Hollywood may be a multimedia, global industry but the backstudio genre continues to identify Hollywood with film production and often with an earlier era when films were made not just by but in the studio. Alongside these developments, Cohan traces an overall shift from stories about female stars towards male producers, directors and writers, while the black filmmaker has remained on the “independent” margins.

Individual films combine different trends. Cohan discusses Sunset Boulevard as illustrating “Hollywood as a State of Mind” (72–74), the “Monstrous” female star (124–27), and the emergence of the male screenwriter as a character in the backstudio picture (161–63). Hail, Caesar! features here as a nostalgic fiction that celebrates rather than critiques an earlier business model, complete with joke Communist screenwriters and stars and a central character, Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who is “a kinder, gentler, and untrue version” of his very near namesake, the real-life MGM fixer (206). For Cohan, however, the film is also a response to the limitations of contemporary blockbuster filmmaking and a film that retains “an undeniable truth” (207) about Hollywood's historical exploitation of its labour force within its invented story.

The book's range has limits. There are films such as Heat (1972), Inserts (1975), Stranger's Kiss (1983) and The Disaster Artist (2017) that, located on the outer reaches of Hollywood, find no place here. Cohan's focus is on how the backstudio picture plays on the “fascination with Hollywood as a site of glamour, modernity, consuming, and leisure” (249). As such it provides a thorough overview of its genre, as well as an insightful discussion of what that genre does reveal about Hollywood's hold on the popular imagination.