Basic Trope: Hollywood is portrayed as a corrupt institution.
- Straight: Hollywood is portrayed as a corrupt, wretched industry filled with scamming producers, backstabbing studio politics, blatant nepotism, and sexual harassment.
- Exaggerated:
- Hollywood is portrayed as being literally satanic.
- Not only is Hollywood portrayed this way, but so are Bollywood and other foreign film industries, and even "outsider" filmmakers are bad. It's suggested that filmmaking itself is inherently corrupt.
- Downplayed: Hollywood is portrayed as having serious institutional problems, but not especially worse than anywhere else, and the protagonists of the story can eventually succeed.
- Justified:
- There are plenty of real-life cases of appalling behavior in Hollywood.
- When you work in a part of Hollywood that has some dirt (such as the porn industry), obviously you're going to run into shady individuals.
- Inverted: Hollywood is portrayed as being a beacon of glamorous artistic freedom, perhaps the only good thing about an otherwise Type 2 Eagleland.
- Subverted: Alice the failed actress tells some horror stories about her experiences trying to break into the film industry, but it turns out she was just trying to make excuses for her awful acting.
- Double Subverted:
- Despite not being suited for acting, Alice was still the victim of some ridiculous abuse.
- Alice changed those stories so she would be the "protagonist" of them, but they are not lies.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: Hollywood is presented as a nice place, but only if you're well-connected, but it's suggested that networking is fairly easy, but that requires putting up with abuse, but...
- Averted: Institutional problems in Hollywood are not touch upon.
- Enforced:
- The creator has come under fire for the kind of behavior displayed in this trope, and is trying to deflect suspicion by criticizing Hollywood.
- The movie takes place when this was Truth in Television and the producers aren't sugarcoating it.
- Lampshaded: "Wow, Hollywood sucks." "You realized that just now? Everyone knows it sucks."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: A sadist breaks into the film industry and becomes a Prima Donna Director as an outlet for their depraved desires.
- Defied: The government puts its foot down and establishes zero-tolerance policies for anything that this trope involves, and scorched Earth for any studios that try to hide them. It may not completely prevent Hollywood from being awful in a myriad other small ways (good luck trying to find affordable housing, for example) but it surely stops being a Hell on Earth.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Hollywood becomes mockable on a mass scale, which distracts people from other problems.
- Reconstructed: People draw attention to problems in other institutions by comparing them to Hollywood, in a strange version of Godwin's Law.
- Implied: Alice at one point wanted to be an actress, but she gave up on it, and gets very cagey when asked why.
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