LOS ANGELES — “The stories begin. The stories end. But the work of Eddie Mannix will never end.”

So says a booming voice at the end of “Hail, Caesar!” — a movie set for release by Universal Pictures on Feb. 5.

The film is a Hollywood fantasy, written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. Josh Brolin stars, in a role inspired by and named for Eddie Mannix, a studio “fixer” who for decades kept obstreperous celebrities in line, and out of the gossip columns.

The real Mr. Mannix, who died of a heart attack in 1963, was the general manager of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. According to E. J. Fleming’s “The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine” and other sources, his was an all-purpose job. It involved keeping tabs on movie budgets (Mr. Mannix reported daily to Louis B. Mayer, and spied on him for the studio’s New York-based overseer, Nicholas M. Schenk); monitoring Western Union traffic (he was said to have been handed every telegram sent or received by an M.G.M. player); and burying the misdeeds of stars like Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer (who married the production chief Irving Thalberg, after a fling with Mr. Mayer, or so writes Mr. Fleming).

In “Hail, Caesar!,” Mr. Brolin gets into the spirit. He hunts up a husband for his bawdy, pregnant water ballet star, played by Scarlett Johansson, and slaps some sense into George Clooney, who plays a none-too-bright actor kidnapped, and intellectually seduced, by a ring of Communist screenwriters. That group is supervised by a Soviet agent, Channing Tatum, who escapes to a Russian submarine off Malibu.