HOLLYWOOD DREAMS
R, 101 minutes

Just who the heck is this Henry Jaglom character, anyway? The director of small, often impro vised, comedies putters around his own corner of the movie world turning out small motion pictures that are so entirely unconcerned with commercial viability that he’s practically French. This guy’s never going to have a three-picture deal at Dreamworks, and it doesn’t seem to bother him, which is as close to blasphemy as you can get these days.

His latest movie, “Hollywood Dreams,” is a low-budget film about freaky actors hiding out in the Hollywood Hills, and it’s probably the best movie he’s made. It’s lumpy and uneven, but it also manages to be corrosively funny, and its characters are such bizarre sickos that you watch them with all the undisguised glee of someone who’s just paid a dollar at the county fair to stare at the freaks.

Margie Chizek (Tanna Frederick) is a struggling actor who humiliates herself at every turn. She winds up crashing in the guesthouse of the Gay Mafia and falling in love with a straight actor (Justin Kirk) who’s pretending to be gay in order to advance his career. Meanwhile, a “major producer/manager” (Zack Norman) who, together with his personal and professional partner (David Proval), takes her under his wing.

It would be a typical Hollywood story were it not for its hilarious, go-for-broke commitment to plumb every depth. Margie, for example, is a creature so pathetic and needy that when her photo finally appears in the Los Angeles Times, she masturbates to it. The New York Times I could understand, but to please yourself to the L.A. Times is an act of such utter depravity, showing such a complete lack of self-respect, that it leaves you light-headed.

Who the heck is Henry Jaglom? In “Hollywood Dreams,” at least, he’s the guy rooting around in Hollywood’s underwear drawer, pulling out one dirty, scandalously entertaining and extremely mortifying item after another.