In Netflix’s ‘Hollywood,’ One Movie Fixes Racism. Hooray!

I was 12 years old when I first fell in love with the dreams spun by “classic” Hollywood: the myth of simpler times, the seductive glamour of men and women who often spoke in a quasi-British accent.

For a time, I longed to live in that period. But as they say, you live and you learn — and what I learned was that in reality, there was little glamour in being a black girl anytime from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Still, “Hollywood,” a splashy, star-studded Netflix mini-series set in the late 1940s and created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, is aimed squarely at my 12-year-old soul. In this alternative universe, the fictional Ace Studios serves as the backdrop for a series of history-making acts of good will on the part of straight white people, resulting in the production of “Meg,” a feature film penned by a gay black man, starring a black actress and directed by a half-Filipino filmmaker, whose wild success solves racism in show business for good. Hooray!

Mr. Murphy and his co-creator Ian Brennan have described the series as a fantastical experiment in “What ifs?” around gender, race and sexuality. What if Hollywood legends like “Rock Hudson and Anna May Wong and Dorothy Dandridge had had happy endings?” is how the actor Jeremy Pope recalled the story being pitched to him in an interview with Elle magazine.