Doc Watch: Secrets

SCOTTY AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD (B) - This fascinating character study follows Scotty Bowers, a super-spry nonagenerian, as he looks back on his postwar glory as pimp to the stars, mostly closeted gay men. Matt Tyrnauer ("Studio 54") brings Bowers' memoirs off the page and onto the big screen, and he is an engaging subject, full of stories, most of which seem corroborated by contemporaries.

Bowers was sexualized by men when he was a boy (he doesn't see it as abuse) and then had a romp-filled stint in the military, emerging from World War II with a gas station in Hollywood, where he set up shop procuring buff young men for randy actors looking for $20 action. Bowers, boyishly handsome and long married to a woman, comes across as either the most well-adjusted pansexual libertine or the most deluded victim of delusion ever.

We watch his hoarder lifestyle take over his house, as the stories pour out of him, whether it's pornographically gay romps, orgies, or feeding women to Katherine Hepburn. Tyrnauer shrewdly scrutinizes America's views of sex and the power of pop-culture tropes. It's a fantasy world wrapped in a fantasy world. While you pity some of the stars who were trapped in the closet, you have to tip your hat to the old folks -- they sure had a wild time back then.

RUNNING FROM CRAZY (C-minus) - This disappointing profile of the haunted Hemingway clan comes with a major red flag -- it is brought to you by Oprah Winfrey's fawn factory. Turns out that fatally counteracts the power of legendary documentarian Barbara Kopple ("Harlan County U.S.A.").

Mariel Hemingway anchors this examination of the clan descended from legendary writer Ernest Hemingway, who famously took his own life in 1961 at his home in Idaho. Very little illumination is shed on a family that has suffered through nine suicides over the generations. Mariel's daughters seem fairly well adjusted, but there really are no deep insights that delve into the family history. Mariel is treated with kid gloves, and we have to slog through scenes of her yoga routine and bickering road trips with her boyfriend.

Kopple captures it all with the production values of a church video from the '80s. Truly a lost opportunity.

Bonus Track
The trailer for "Scotty":