“It’s a thread that has been there for as long as Hollywood has been Hollywood,” says Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald, a film historian at the University of Kent. “Marion Davies starred in a 1928 film, Show People, which contains a lot of satire about movie-making. And then, in 1932, the original version of A Star is Born came out: George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? In that film, a waitress played by Constance Bennett becomes an Oscar-winning actress, while the director who gave her her big break spirals towards alcoholism and suicide. It’s a story we’ve seen countless times since.”

In part, this is a straightforward matter of life imitating art. Hollywood has never been short of real-life scandals, and many of them have been transferred directly to the big screen. Lana Turner’s gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, turns up as a character in LA Confidential; the mysterious death in 1924 of a studio mogul, Thomas H Ince, was the subject of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow; and the famous section in The Godfather, in which a producer is menaced into giving a comeback role to the mob’s favourite crooner, is derived from rumours about Frank Sinatra’s casting in From Here To Eternity.

All that glitters…

It’s easy to see why viewers should be drawn to such outrageous narratives. When Hollywood puts out an anti-Hollywood film, it offers us the frisson of peeking through a curtain and into a hidden world of power and decadence. It also allows us to have our cake and eat it. We get to gaze covetously at the luxurious lifestyles enjoyed by Tinseltown’s gods and goddesses, but then when the characters’ fortunes plummet, we can reassure ourselves that we’re lucky not to have their lifestyles after all.