The Farrows of Hollywood opens in 1992 with Mia Farrow finding smiling nude photos of her adopted 19-year-old daughter in current boyfriend Woody Allen's apartment. Six months later, Farrow accused Allen of molesting the seven-year-old daughter they co-adopted. Allen denied all allegations. The case was investigated repeatedly over the next three decades and no evidence of a crime was found; Allen was never charged. Marilyn Ann Moss (Raoul Walsh) then backtracks to the volatile household Farrow grew up in as the daughter of film director John Farrow and actress Maureen O'Sullivan, who both understood that "you could find fiction to make real life bearable."
Moss describes the home Mia and her six siblings grew up in as "a tense, rigid, tightly wound and religiously bound environment where the children hardly saw their parents." John Farrow's numerous affairs led to separate bedrooms and separate lives. "Maureen loved having children," writes Moss, "but after giving birth she had absolutely no idea what to do with them." Mia, who would later have four biological children and adopt 10 more, remembers her father drunkenly chasing her mother with a long knife before running off into the night. Her mother's response was to put young Mia in her bed and go sleep elsewhere.
Moss expertly sifts through the Farrow family's struggles and tragedies: one of Mia's brothers and two of her adopted children died by suicide, and another brother was imprisoned for molesting two boys and later claimed he was molested by their father. This is a deeply researched, attention-grabbing and previously untold tale of generations of dysfunction in one Hollywood family. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant