By Erin Free
With Trumbo and Hail, Caesar!, movies about movies have been hitting a new high lately. There are, however, many, many more, and we’re not talking about biopics or documentaries either. Read on…
THE PLAYER (1992, pictured above)
When any discussion turns to the subject of movies about movies, Robert Altman’s 1992 comedy-drama-thriller, The Player, is justifiably tossed up. That said, it hardly occupies the same lofty heights as other gilt-edged works of the unofficial subgenre, like A Star Is Born or Sunset Boulevard. The Player is too dementedly playful to take on such rarefied “classic” status. The film tracks a self-absorbed studio executive (Tim Robbins) whose life hits a screeching spin when he starts receiving threatening correspondence from a writer whose screenplays he has rejected. Bursting with film in-jokes and cameos, The Player is untouchable when it comes to movies about movies. Made by a man who had been truly battered by the film industry, this nineties milestone comes with the kind of sting that only the truly embittered can impart.
THE PICTURE SHOW MAN (1977)
Australia doesn’t make many movies about movies, and when we do (The Extra, Cut), they often tend to, well, disappear without a trace. Our best entry in this tiny subgenre is undoubtedly the 1977 period charmer, The Picture Show Man, directed by John Power, and produced and written by Joan Long. Starring John Meillon as travelling picture show man, Maurice Pym, who takes movies from town to town on a horse drawn carriage; Harold Hopkins as his sprightly son, Larry; and Aussie superstar, Rod Taylor, as their Texan competitor, the film is driven by the typically raucous humour that characterised so many local films of the era. It’s also a finely etched study of a time when entertainment was so much more difficult to access than it is today.
GET SHORTY (1995)
Many that have exited minus their money and dignity would likely argue that the movie business is equitable to a criminal enterprise, and none have summed that up as amusingly as crime author, Elmore Leonard, who skewered Hollywood with full force fury in his rollicking novel, Get Shorty. The book was expertly reworked for the screen in 1995 by director, Barry Sonnenfeld, with a perfectly cast John Travolta in the role of Chili Palmer, a mobster who hits Hollywood to collect a debt, and discovers that the movie business isn’t that different to his current line of employment. After watching for years as his novels were butchered for the screen, Get Shorty saw Leonard really come out swinging, leading to one of the funniest, snappiest and most in-the-know movies about movies ever made.
WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994)
Has a director ever made a feature film about the legacy of one of their previous films? This self-reflexive slab of horror and social commentary is, in fact, so unusual and incomparable that it rarely rates a mention in the canon of its lauded writer/director, Wes Craven (The Hills Have Eyes, Scream). New Nightmare is Craven’s direct response to the success of his 1984 game-changer, A Nightmare On Elm Street, featuring Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger, a child killer who returns from the dead to kill innocent teenagers in their sleep. In New Nightmare, Wes Craven, actors, Robert Englund and Heather Langenkamp, and even New Line Cinema boss, Robert Shaye, star as themselves in a daring story which has Freddy Krueger angrily manifesting himself in reality after he was killed off in 1991’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.
FADE TO BLACK (1980)
One charge often levelled at movies is that they can serve as the trigger for the future actions of psychopaths. The lurid but cruelly compelling 1980 horror-thriller, Fade To Black, plays with this notion to grim and amusing effect. Minor cult figure, Dennis Christopher (Breaking Away, A Wedding), throws down a creepy, career-best performance as Eric Binford, a hardcore movie geek in an era waaay before that was close to being anything remotely cool. A bullied weakling, Eric develops a dangerous fixation on a neighbourhood Marilyn Monroe lookalike (Wagga Wagga-born Linda Kerridge), before finally snapping. Eric responds by dressing up as his favourite movie characters (Dracula, The Mummy, Tommy Udo from Kiss Of Death), and dispensing with his enemies in disturbingly cinema literate ways.
THE STUNT MAN (1980)
Movies can literally be seen as a kind of madness, as a group of people commune in a dark room, and hopefully – if the film is good – give themselves over to a complete break from reality. There is no better depiction of movies as madness than the much loved 1980 head trip, The Stunt Man, which throws the audience into the unbalanced world of Cameron (Steve Railsback), a fugitive from the law who literally stumbles onto the set of a WW1-set adventure movie. Eyed by the film’s imperious director (Peter O’Toole), Cameron is promptly charged with replacing the film’s recently deceased stunt man, who died on set. But was it an accident? A delirious study in fear and paranoia, The Stunt Man is also a cogent and enjoyably cock-eyed depiction of the inherent insanity of movies.
SPECIAL EFFECTS (1984)
Writer/director, Larry Cohen (It’s Alive!, Q – The Winged Serpent, The Stuff), grinds every ounce of value out of the film-director-as-Machiavellian-creep stereotype with 1984’s Special Effects, his bitingly funny meld of horror, thriller, and scathing satire. In his first major screen role, playwright and actor, Eric Bogosian (Talk Radio), stars as Christopher Neville, a director looking for a job after his last film bombed. When Neville kills Mary Jane (Zoe Tamerlis), a young wannabe actress, during a bout of caught-on-camera sex, he perversely sees this as the kick-off point for his next film, and decides to make a movie about Mary Jane’s sordid, sorry life, with her filmed death as the climax. Sleazy and unforgiving, Special Effects sees Cohen raging against a movie industry that births desperation and broken dreams.
PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (1972)
Play It As It Lays is an experimental study in Hollywood vacuity from director, Frank Perry (David And Lisa, Mommie Dearest), who ingeniously utilises The Dream Factory as the microcosm for a seventies society characterised by emptiness and ennui. The tragically underrated Tuesday Weld (Pretty Poison) is at her strident, dreamy best as Maria Wyeth, a Hollywood queen recounting the going-nowhere-fast nature of her privileged life from the manicured lawns of an upscale psychiatric institution. We eventually discern the source of Maria’s high-strung pain, which largely stems from her arrogant director husband (Adam Roarke), and his diffident producer (Anthony Perkins). Play It As It Lays is a canny film about movies, and in particular the psychological pain that can be wrought on those often damaged souls who make them.
MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)
Movies about movies don’t come much weirder than Myra Breckinridge. Adapted from the novel by Gore Vidal, and directed by cult weirdo, Michael Sarne (Joanna), the film kicks off with the simpering Myron (played by film critic, Rex Reed) getting a sex change and emerging as…Raquel Welch! “I still can’t believe I took this role,” the actress memorably sighs on the film’s DVD audio commentary. Now a pneumatic babe renamed Myra, she becomes a one-woman army for women’s liberation, setting her sights on Hollywood. Sarne’s Hollywood is a surreal, horribly debauched place, and he cruelly uses inserted clips from old movie mainstays to hammer home his often brutal barbs. Myra Breckinridge was excoriated by critics, but Andy Warhol declared it to be twenty years ahead of its time.
HEARTS OF THE WEST (1975)
The movie western forms a vital part of the American pop cultural landscape, and while there have been thousands of “horse operas”, movies about western movies are few and far between. One of the finest in this small field is 1975’s Hearts Of The West, a charming, elegiac comedy-drama from late director, Howard Zieff (Private Benjamin). Set during The Great Depression, Hearts Of The West stars a fresh-faced Jeff Bridges as Lewis Tater, a farm boy with dreams of becoming an author of western novels who eventually finds work as a horse-riding, stunt-performing extra in bottom-of-the-barrel oaters. Tater gets sage advice from an older veteran (the late Andy Griffith) and finds romance with the company’s tough talking but big hearted script girl (Blythe Danner) in what is a sunny, longingly nostalgic paean to the Hollywood western.
