6.0
A deliciously scandalous portrait of unsung Hollywood legend Scotty Bowers, whose bestselling memoir chronicled his decades spent as sexual procurer to the stars.
Scotty Bowers
Self
William Mann
Self
David Kuhn
Self
Stephen Fry
Self
Peter Bart
Self
Lois Bowers
Self
Matthew Hoffman
Self
Paul Teetor
Self
Jack Kimberling
Self
Michael Childers
Self
Lee Shook
Self
Robert Hofler
Self
Dian Hanson
Self
Tony Charmoli
Self
Paul LaMastra
Self
Phyllis Bowers
Sef (voice)
Dale Bowers
Self (voice)
Liz Smith
Self
Myke Dodge Weiskopf
Self
Randolph Scott
Self (archive footage)
Laurence Olivier
Self (archive footage)
Ramon Novarro
Self (archive footage)
Orry-Kelly
Self (archive footage)
Vivien Leigh
Self (archive footage)
Elsa Lanchester
Self (archive footage)
Rock Hudson
Self (archive footage)
J. Edgar Hoover
Self (archive footage)
Katharine Hepburn
Self (archive footage)
William Holden
Self (archive footage)
Cary Grant
Self (archive footage)
Whoopi Goldberg
Self (archive footage)
Ava Gardner
Self (archive footage)
Greta Garbo
Self (archive footage)
Tom Ewell
Self (archive footage)
Beach Dickerson
Self (archive footage)
Bette Davis
Self (archive footage)
George Cukor
Self (archive footage)
Joseph I. Breen
Self (archive footage)
Lauren Bacall
Self (archive footage)
Jennifer Aniston
Self (archive footage)
Judith Anderson
Self (archive footage)
Walter Pidgeon
Self (archive footage)
Cole Porter
Self (archive footage)
Elvis Presley
Self (archive footage)
Sherri Shepherd
Self (archive footage)
Spencer Tracy
Self (archive footage)
Lana Turner
Self (archive footage)
Barbara Walters
Self (archive footage)
Edwin B. Willis
Self (archive footage)
Wallis Simpson
Self (archive footage)
Director
Matt Tyrnauer
August 3, 2018
“Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood” wears a lot of hats, none of which quite fits. A salacious tell-all about the hidden sex lives of postwar movie stars; a peek at the underbelly of the repressive moral dictates of the studio system; a breezy biography of a self-described Hollywood prostitute and procurer; and a psychosexual study of a possibly damaged victim of extreme childhood abuse.
Only the last offers a clue to interpreting the movie’s more astonishing revelations and unprobed corners. Until then, Matt Tyrnauer’s gossipy portrait of Scotty Bowers, an impish nonagenarian and former Marine, listens without judgment as he describes decades of servicing the closeted hungers of stars like Rock Hudson and Katharine Hepburn, helped by an eager network of World War II buddies. Back then, in a couple of trailers behind a gas station on Hollywood Boulevard, $20 could buy just about anything.
Meandering behind Mr. Bowers as he shares faded photographs of extravagantly endowed young men and prurient factoids about his famous “tricks” — cheekily illustrated with scenes from classic movies that read rather differently in hindsight — Mr. Tyrnauer surreptitiously hoses away the layers of dirt to reveal the fragility of his subject’s anything-goes hedonism. Benevolent hustler (he never took a cut of others’ action) or naughty fabulist — perhaps both — Mr. Bowers putters around his hoarded Hollywood Hills home and gazes into the hole in his patio deck as if searching for something lost long ago.
Consequently, what starts out salty ends up as something sadder and more complicated. And when he unabashedly recalls a childhood rife with sexual encounters — which he insists were consensual — with adults, the camera fixes on his mile-wide grin and we wonder if his mission to meet the needs of others has somehow ignored his own.