TV REVIEW : PBS’ ‘Hyde’ a Sendup of ’39 Hollywood

Tired of all those deathless backstage Hollywood odysseys about the bad and the beautiful? Want a real hoot about life in the studios? It doesn’t get any more ripe than “Hyde in Hollywood” tonight on “American Playhouse” (KCET Channel 28 at 9 p.m.; Friday at 9 p.m. on KPBS Channel 15).

The curious thing about this movie, originally produced as a play at Playwrights Horizons in New York two years ago, is that it starts off suggesting a parody of the current hit “City of Angels” and winds up spinning off “Sweet Smell of Success” with a wicked twist of “The Big Knife.”

The story is set in 1939, Hollywood’s mythical year. Thank God for the ‘30s and ‘40s and Art Deco. Where would Hollywood stories be without that? Little did F. Scott Fitzgerald, Budd Schulberg and Nathanael West know what a cottage industry their filmland stories would spawn.

You would think the agony of stardom had been covered to death by now, but playwright Peter Parnell finds a comparatively untapped theme: homosexuality in Hollywood. More specifically, Parnell is writing about institutional hypocrisy and, by implication, how those values seep into our pastime. Homosexual stars quiver, the Jews at the studios hide their Jewishness, the Red sympathizers conceal their politics. “Everybody is hiding something,” says one of the characters.

As broad and occasionally cartoony as this show is, it certainly is not mindless satire. It’s not art either. But it is a blast. The fictional title character Hyde (Robert Joy) is a famous director who also stars in his own pictures. He’s in the closet, the classic outsider who triumphs at fitting in. The dramatic conflict comes from a venal gossip columnist known as Hollywood Confidential who is clearly patterned after Walter Winchell (Keith Szarabajka). This cretin discovers Hyde’s secret and blackmails him for salacious items about the stars.

Director Gerald Gutierrez’s grip on all this is brisk but not always steady. The two hours are never boring, though: They include insider banter referring to Clark Gable, Charles Laughton and others, a standout performance from Fran Brill as the columnist’s love-smitten secretary, and homosexual encounters (the word gay wasn’t heard in ’39 but homosexualist and fairy pop up) that are blunt.