America's Sweethearts: Mostly focused on the tropes surrounding celebrity romances, a studio executive exploiting it for movie promotion, and a publicist trying to keep the whole thing from blowing up in their collective faces.
Argo: One of the reasons for disguising the extraction operation as location scouting for a movie is that, with the Iran Hostage Crisis in full bloom, movie producers are some of the only people sleazy enough to still be doing business there. Chambers describes it as a place full of hacks and untalented people or productions and a shot of the famous Hollywood sign missing some letters underscores it.
Tony: It's an exfil, from the worst place you can think of... Chambers: Universal City?
The Assistant: While the film is set in the New York office of a Hollywood studio, it centers on an extremely unflattering look behind the scenes of the American film industry. Studio executives rule their companies like petty tyrants, and their minions are too beaten down or self-absorbed to fight back.
Lampshaded in Austin Powers in Goldmember: after two movies of having to get headaches dealing with Dr. Evil exploiting Virtucon's resources in childish attempts to Take Over the World, Number Two presents Dr. Evil with a business venture that is both highly profitable and vile in an attempt to curb his chronic Bond Villain Stupidity — a Hollywood casting agency. Didn't really work, but the Doctor was sorely tempted for a few seconds there, so hey, points for trying.
Babylon (2022): Early Hollywood is opulent and glamorous, but hedonistic, loose with morals, and exploitative with a criminal underbelly. The characters either die when their time in the spotlight is up (Jack, Nellie) or leave it for what are implied to be more peaceful and fulfilling lives (Sidney, Fay, Manny).
The Barefoot Contessa depicts the movie business as full of cynical Jerkasses, with the occasional Knight in Sour Armor around to make them look even worse by comparison. Titular character Maria Vargas has great success but doesn't enjoy it, writing everything off as phony.
Barton Fink: Fink is forced to write an inane wrestling movie when he comes to Hollywood after a successful theatrical career.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: An amateur Girl Group travels to Los Angeles in search of fame and fortune, and while they do find it, they also fall to dissipation and moral corruption as they get acquainted with the various selfish hedonists that populate the place. It takes a few harsh wake-up calls (including the death of one of the band members) before the protagonists can get their happy ending.
Big Fat Liar: Hollywood in and of itself is not shown as a horrible place... but working for Marty Wolf definitely falls as an exaggerated (for comedy, and compensation) example of this: the man is an absurdly colossal Jerkass that spends every waking moment treating every single human being he interacts with like worthless trash, often by screaming belittling insults to their faces (a deleted scene also very heavily implies that Wolf loves to pretend he will hire actresses if they have sex with him). When the Kid Hero duo looks for people to perform a scam to get back at Wolf at the climax, they manage to enlist a literal army of pissed-off employees.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) doesn't deal with Hollywood directly but the title character struggles with his past in Hollywood and his desire to be respected critically drives the film's conflicts.
While focusing solely on a small group Boogie Nights is actually an inversion of this trope... in the porn industry, typically portrayed as being even more corrupt and exploitative than the mainstream film industry. However, while it's implied that this is the case in a larger context (several of the producers are hinted to have mob ties at the very least), the film focuses on the main characters bonding together as a loving family unit.
Bowfinger takes this as its premise and plays it for comedy more than satire. Bobby Bowfinger is an ultra-low budget, Grade-Z filmmaker who has to do things like hire Mexican immigrants as his crew.
The Cat's Meow is a tale of infidelity, murder, cover-up and blackmail that takes in Hollywood, "the place just off the coast of the planet Earth,": a place where the rich and powerful can get away with murder, everyone has their price, and the murder of a good man can go unmourned and unpunished.
Represented in The Con is On by Jackie's second husband Gabriel. He is an egotistical film director, surrounded by an entourage of yes-men and hangers-on. He is having affairs with his leading lady and his assistant, regards his films being described as self-referential as a mark of genius and is obsessed with achieving legitimacy by winning awards.
Ed Wood, while buoyed by the performance of Johnny Depp and direction of Tim Burton, still deals with this in its sympathetic but unsparing examination of Bela Lugosi at the end of his career.
A Face in the Crowd portrays the television industry much this way, at least the part revolving around Lonesome Rhodes, though the industry at the time was based in New York City.
Get Shorty conflates this trope with organized crime, as a loan shark's enforcer winds up taking over a movie when the producer can't pay his debt. Also, nearly all of the Hollywood "insiders" are vain, shallow, and self-absorbed to the point of obliviousness. Despite this, most of them are still fairly likable because they're not actually malicious, just kind of stupid.
Hollywood Boulevard is a cheap, sleazy, slightly exaggerated, and darkly funny look at the world of cheap, sleazy, 1970s exploitation film.
Discussed at length in Hollywood Paparazzo. It is explained that the rise of tabloid journalism and the paparazzi has led to celebrities becoming insular, screwed-up and totally alienated from the rest of society, who often go down a self-destructive path. In turn, the Paparazzi are self-obsessed people who run and hide from anyone they don't know to conceal their identities, people in a position of power are vain and power-hungry, and the fans are crazed lunatics who will stop at nothing to harass celebrities. The film highlights the absurdity of this culture with a well-adjusted young boy who acts just as cutthroat as the Paparazzi when it comes to getting celebrity photos.
In Inside Daisy Clover, the eponymous protagonist played by Natalie Wood is a poor tomboyish girl who becomes a movie star from one day to the next and deeply resents that Control Freak studio mogul Raymond Swan (Christopher Plummer) wants total control over her life to the point of driving her to a mental breakdown.
Downplayed with In a Lonely Place. Struggling screenwriter Steele is accused of murdering a young coat-check girl that he invited to his house. He isn't taken seriously by other Hollywood crew and has a history of having severe anger issues towards staff, which Laurel finds out once the two of them start dating. At one point, he nearly kills a man with a rock as they argued over their dangerous driving.
Ivansxtc doesn't paint a flattering picture of the movie industry, showing the egos, dirty politics, crass commercialism, and drug abuse involved in a seedy production company.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang portrays Hollywood as a weirdly glamorous and seriously fucked-up place that attracts the damaged and disturbed.
Harry: It's abandonment, it's abuse, it's, "My uncle put his ping-ping in my papa!"... and then they all come out here! I swear to God, it's like somebody took America by the East Coast, and shook it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on.
Downplayed in La La Land but the film shows just how often Mia is disrespected by casting directors — at one point her emotional audition is interrupted for the sake of a phone call (which is based on something that actually happened to Ryan Gosling). She has to go to endless parties filled with shallow and vapid industry people in the hopes of making connections. Sebastian even calls it "the city where they praise everything and value nothing". The film's cynical look at Hollywood tends to get lost in pop culture, where the splashy musical numbers (particularly "City of Stars") are what's remembered.
The Last Command is about a former Tsarist Russian general living out a degrading, poverty-stricken life as a Hollywood film extra. He gets $7.50 a day.
The Last of Sheila: the main characters are a Hollywood producer, agent, writer, actress, wannabe producer, and a woman who grew up in Hollywood. They're all either selfish, ladder-climbing venal types or selfish, successful venal types, and ends with two characters letting a double murderer go free so that they can get a movie produced to boost their careers.
In The Legend of Lylah Clare, the inherent sickness of Hollywood and the people who work there are examined at length. A young starlet is hired to play a famous silent movie actress (who died under mysterious circumstances) in a Biopic directed by the actress's collaborator/lover, and as she's pushed into inhabiting her role, she becomes seemingly possessed by the dead woman's spirit, causing the threat of history repeating itself. It does, and the biopic ends with the actual footage of her death, which apparently no one in town objects to. (This is from the same director who made Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, and that movie's world could easily fit into this one.)
The experimental short film The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra portrays working in Hollywood as a dehumanizing experience in which you are identified only by a number stamped on your forehead, and success is unobtainable.
Living in Oblivion is three vignettes illustrating the nightmares involved in being an independent filmmaker.
Pretty much the entire point of Maps to the Stars. Delusional, past-their-prime actresses? Spoiled-rotten child stars? Smiling, sanctimonious agents? Having to play nice with a rival actress who just stole the role of a lifetime from underneath you? Check, check, check, and oh HELL yes.
Mulholland Dr. is a particularly surreal take on the horrors lurking in Hollywood. Shadowy figures, who may be mobsters or some kind of supernatural beings, control people's fates in the industry. Success seems to have nothing to with talent and everything with who you know. One possible interpretation of the movie is as the tragic tale of the corruption and descent into evil of Betty/Diane as a result of the Hollywood environment.
Film Quarterly, describing David Lynch's vision of Hollywood in it: "Human putrefaction ... in a city of lethal illusions."
In Notting Hill the heroine has lived her life as a movie starlet amid boyfriends who mistreated her.
The Real Blonde satirizes the shallowness and dysfunction of the New York fashion and cinema scene.
Scream 3: The third movie in the trilogy reveals that the entire series was the result of Sidney's mother Maureen Prescott's failed attempt to become a Hollywood actress, only to be forced into a Casting Couch gang rape by unscrupulous Hollywood producers.
The documentary Showbiz Kids stops short of condemning the entire film industry, but it is a cautionary tale about the exploitation of child actors, and singles out widespread practices that have lifelong consequences on the young stars.
Evan Rachel Wood: Any industry that has that much power and is that competitive, after a while it starts to become 'Well, who can take the most abuse?' Because somebody is in line to take your place, so you just start to allow yourself to be abused in some form or another. Every actor is guilty of that. They're lying if they say they're not because it's just part of the deal at this point. Until things change, there's always going to be somebody willing to take abuse and stay quiet.
S.O.B.: The title is an abbreviation of the term one character uses to describe how Hollywood operates: Standard Operational Bullshit.
Starry Eyes, a horror film about a young aspiring actress who finds that the Casting Couch is merely the least of the horrors she has to endure on the road to fame.
David Mamet's film State and Main humorously portrays the trials and pitfalls and sacrifices in conscience that come with getting a Hollywood film made.
There is elements of this in Sunset. Tom Mix himself is a decent fellow, but there is plenty of corruption and decadence.
Sunset Boulevard, though its attitude toward the studio system was neutral enough that Paramount allowed the use of its own name and several names associated with it.
Swimming with Sharks examines the systematic abuse of production interns, who must endure a year of abuse at the hands of their sadistic Hollywood bosses in order to get a foot in the door.
The movie stars and celebrities who appear As Themselves in This Is the End are pretty uniformly a bunch of self-obsessed, preening, pretentious, entitled, spoiled, debauched and decadent phonies and prima donnas who care about nothing but themselves and pretty clearly don't like each other very much once the surface of their cool personas is scratched. In fact, when people are raptured up to Heaven, no one at James Franco's party notices, implying that no one there is good enough to be raptured. The implication is dampened somewhat as the film goes on, however, since it's gradually revealed that this version of Heaven forgives people's sins pretty easily, and the conditions for being allowed into Heaven are unusually specific.
Torture Garden: In "Terror Over Hollywood", ruthless young starlet Carla Hayes deliberately ruins her housemate's dress so she can steal her housemate's date with a producer. She then dumps the producer to go out with a Hollywood leading man. As she climbs the ladder, she inadvertently discovers that Hollywood is controlled by an elite that have had their brains uploaded into robot bodies.
Tropic Thunder is a merciless satire of selfish, cynical Hollywood moviemaking (Tom Cruise's rageaholic producer is perfectly willing to let his actors die).
Under the Silver Lake depicts the titular Los Angeles neighborhood as an outwardly bright and friendly place inhabited by hipsters and aspiring artists, only to reveal a dark underbelly: A mysterious dog killer is decimating the neighborhood pets, young actresses are forced to prostitute themselves to make ends meet, there are creepy urban legends about a shadowy, succubus-like being called the Owl's Kiss that kills men in their sleep, and the protagonist eventually uncovers a sinister cult of millionaires and Hollywood celebrities that controls all of popular culture and goes to murderous lengths in order to keep its existence a secret.
Taken together both Wayne's World films show the television and music industries to be this. Except for Alice Cooper.
In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, humans are intolerant and exploitative towards toons, while the toons themselves tend to wreak havoc with their wacky antics. There's also the one director who berated Roger for forgetting his lines and the film producer who was complicit in Roger's frame-up.
