You know how they say that writers should write about what they know? The same goes for filmmakers. Of course, the thing that filmmakers know the most about is making films. That’s why, over the years, movies about movies have grown into their own weird little hothouse subgenre. These are ten of the strangest and most fascinating efforts.
5. Body Double (1984)
After the commercial success of Scarface, director Brian de Palma took a load of Hollywood’s goodwill and made the bizarre, sleazy and thoroughly entertaining Body Double, an update of Rear Window with a dash of pornography and B-movie theatrics thrown in. Struggling actor Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) takes a friend up on an invitation to stay at a swanky house (the real-life Los Angeles landmark Chemosphere House) with a fully stocked bar and a view of a gorgeous neighbor dancing seductively in front of her window. Scully develops an obsession with watching the woman, but soon he realizes that someone else is spying on her. Threaded into this Hitchcockian narrative are films within films, shots that confuse and manipulate, and an ending which suggests that the ultimate fall guy is us. And Melanie Griffith naked, if you’re into that kind of thing.
4. Persona (1969)
Rear Window isn’t the only movie that de Palma was calling out to in Body Double. He also quotes from Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s most famous and much-parodied film about Elizabeth, an actress who suddenly refuses to speak, and Alma, the young nurse charged with taking care of her. Under the weight of Elizabeth’s silence, Alma begins to come apart. Eventually the two, united in terror and sexual neurosis, seem to merge into one person. Despite this spare storyline, the movie is riveting. Bergman, however, doesn’t want us to forget that we’re watching a swiftly moving reel of celluloid, so he forces us to reckon with the apparatus: the film stops, melts, reverts to footage of old silent films, cuts to strange images of a young boy pressing his hand against an image of a woman’s face, and at one point Bergman and the camera are plainly visible, craning down for the next shot. Somehow this doesn’t detract from the emotional punch.
3. The Player (1992)
Does it get more self-referential than Robert Altman’s The Player? This is the movie that heralded Altman’s return from Hollywood exile after the box office disaster of Popeye in 1980. Finally given a decent budget and access to wide distribution, he made a movie so smoothly nasty and amoral that it probably charmed the hell out of the people he was skewering. Tim Robbins plays Griffin Dunne, a studio executive driven by paranoia and beset on all sides by unknown forces that seem to be driving his fate and determining his career. In Altman’s vision, no good deed goes unpunished, great movies turn to crap and the bad guy gets the girl and the great car. The Player also launched the now-common phenomenon of movie stars playing nasty versions of themselves (although Altman had pulled this trick as early as 1976′s Nashville, with cameo appearances from Elliot Gould and Julie Christie).
2. Tropic Thunder (2008)
Scorcher 1-6! Tom Cruise as Les Grossman as Harvey Weinstein! War movies that turn into battles against the elements! Where do I start with Tropic Thunder, a movie so devoted to winking at its reflection that it never escapes its air quotes? The key to appreciating the film is to recognize that nearly every actor in it is playing off against his own celebrity persona. Robert Downey Jr. is spoofing Russell Crowe, but he’s really spoofing himself. Ben Stiller’s action movie character comes off as a Stallone-Seagal hybrid, but the real joke is Stiller’s own vanity and too easily wounded ego. As for Tom Cruise’s rendition of a vitriolic, foul-mouthed studio head, that’s all about Cruise riffing on his relentlessly positive image.
1. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Long before most of us were born, the Golden Age of Hollywood was already a fading memory. Perhaps that’s why Sunset Boulevard is narrated by a dead man (hardly a spoiler: the movie starts with a corpse floating face down in a swimming pool). William Holden plays a broke screenwriter who spends more time dodging debt collectors and repo men than producing work. One day he ends up in the driveway of Norma Desmond, a silent screen star mouldering away in her mansion like a demented Miss Havisham. She hires Holden to write a screenplay that will serve as a star vehicle for her great comeback, but her fondly nurtured dreams end up consuming her.
There are so many great movies about movie making that this list barely scratches the surface. What are your favorites?
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