Allow me to explain myself

So... to my great surprise/honor, the penultimate entry of my whole "Best Movies about the Movies" series of posts was chosen over the weekend to be part of the IMDB's awesomely awesome "Hit List."

As a dedicated reader of the Hit List, and as someone who has just recently joined the thriving write-about-movies-on-the-internet industry, getting chosen to be part of the Hit List is sort of like getting an award at one of those big award shows, only this doesn't happen.

I'm not usually wearing a dress, either.

Anyhow, what I thought I would do here is talk a little about a few of the more notable movies that, for one reason or another, didn't make the cut.

Now, I realize that this is an inherently stupid idea, since in the list making business talking about why you made a list the way you made it and what you may or may not have left off of it is well... it's just not done. For one thing, by revealing your underlying methodology, it leaves you that much more open to being called an ignorant douchebag.

Pictured: me, apparently.

But that's okay. Because, as one of my favorite philosophers once said: "I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not." And whatever else might be said about this hill of beans, well... to paraphrase another famous philosopher: this is my hill, and these are my beans.

So keep in mind, gentle readers, that I certainly haven't seen every movie in this particular genre. And know that I am well aware of how stupid I am for having missed, you know, whatever it is I've missed.

The Nearly Made-Its

The Player

As I documented in my entry on Ed Wood, The Player nearly made #2 on my list. Sadly there was a clerical error (read: I screwed up), and I had to omit it. But suffice to say I truly love The Player -- the story Griffin Mill, a jackass Hollywood producer played by Tim Robbins who begins to get threatening messages from a writer he once dismissed. When he confronts the man he thinks has been doing it (Vincent D'Onofrio), Mill kills him in a rage. Later, he learns the D'Onofrio character had nothing to do with it. Will he get away with murder?

Directed by Robert Altman, The Player is a truly brilliant and completely fearless movie that, not unlike Adaptation, dares to deliberately flirt with the form. As Mill's predicament gets more and more melodramatic and he's saved by senseless hairpin turns of fortune (like the movies he produces), we sense the laughing hand of the filmmaker, grinning at the cliche that's transpiring on screen.

Like all great movies, it's a high wire act. And Altman, always one of the most inconsistent of directors, navigates the minefield here flawlessly.

Why it didn't make it

Well, like I said, it almost did. But at the end of the day, when forced to chose between it and Ed Wood, I just felt like Ed Wood was a better (and, for the purposes of a countdown, a more different) movie. Besides, I'd already written about The Bad and the Beautiful, a movie about a similar (and, with all due respect, better exectued) character who faces more realistic circumstances.

Bowfinger

A mostly forgotten satire starring Steve Martin (who also wrote the script) and Eddie Murphy and directed by Frank Oz, Bowfinger has never gotten it's due respect.

The story of flea pit level producer Bobby Bowfinger (Martin) and his desperate, clandestine attempt to film a major movie star (Murphy) and put him into his movie with the star knowing it, Bowfinger hones in on the desperation of the talentless hustler willing to do anything to get his movie made.

Why it didn't make it

Well, it's basically the same story as Ed Wood, and Ed Wood's a better movie. Bowfinger also works against itself, shoehorning a funny but unnecessary series of digs at the Scientology stand-in Mind Head, with which the Murphy character is obsessed.

Bowfinger is at it's best when, like Ed Wood, it focuses in on the weird troupe of people Bowfinger surrounds himself with: an awkward kid named Jeffery who looks exactly like the Murphy character (played, of course, by Murphy, who somehow manages to avoid getting into a fat suit in the movie), a fresh off the bus actress looking for her break (Heather Graham, playing a roller skates-less and clothes-on version of her character from Boogie Nights), and a series of other, you know, losers.

Essentially, Bowfinger's problem is that it doesn't quite have the guts to go far enough, settling instead for more surface jabs that, in the end, also rob the movie of a truly enduring heart.

State and Main

Leaving State and Main off this list was another hard choice, as it's one of the few movies that really delves into what it's like to be on location, trying to actually shoot a movie.

Written and directed by David Mamet, the story focuses (if you can really call it that) on a writer, director, star, producer and Local Educated Townsperson played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, David Paymer and Rebecca Pidgeon respectively.

Written and acted in Mamet's mile-a-minute style, State and Main's true attribute is in showing how little about the act of shooting a movie is about art, giving life to that old notion that directing a movie and getting art out of it is like trying to write War and Peace in the back of a taxi cab.

Macy's director character, in particular, navigates problems with ruthless efficiency. After they're kicked out of one town because of the star's relationship with an underage girl, they move the production (called "The Old Mill") to another town. As the title suggests, an old mill features heavily into the plot of the movie, and the new town is supposed to have one.

The problem? Well, uh... the old mill burned down years ago.

The solution? Rewrite the movie.

Macy's character wants a certain shot dolly shot of a firehouse. He's insistent. The problem? A valuable stainglass window on the firehouse the town won't let him remove.

The solution? A brick through the window in the middle of the night.

State and Main is filled with little moments like this, but the main thread of the movie happens when the Baldwin character starts a new relationship with a new underage girl (played by underage girl specialist Julia Stiles). Driving drunkenly back from what in polite society is called a "dalliance" but what I'll just call "banging," Baldwin and Stiles get in a car accident that's witnessed by the neurotic writer played by Hoffman.

Their relationship (and the accident, which is quickly covered up) could ruin the movie, but when the stereotypical dickhead local politician gets wind of what's happened, it falls to the Hoffman character to uphold the story or tell the truth.

Will he live up to the principles of his script, which he claims is about "purity," or will he succumb to the pressure of douchebagdom?

Why it didn't make it

It's hard to talk about without ruining the ending, but suffice to say the decision Hoffman makes, and what happens after, sews things up in a gimmicky manner that's too cute by half. It might have worked if the intention -- like The Player or Adaptation -- was for the ending to be a commentary on the movie making (and watching) world's obsession with happy endings. But in a movie that deals at least fairly realistically (if sarcastically) about the movie business, it strikes the wrong note.

Stay tuned (if you can really call it that) for Part 2, where I'll bash a few well-known, well-respected movies about the movie business that I nonetheless thought were shit. Buckle your chin straps. You will be offended.

The Best Movies About Movies (part 5 of 5)

Finally! Decisively! Definitively! Inexorably! Eventually! Irrevocably! Inescapably!

We have reached the end of our countdown of the best movies ever made about the movies.

So who has earned this title of distinction, this term of endearment, this crowning of achievement, this...

Ok, I'll stop now.

Sunset Boulevard

Look out, she's craaaazzzzy!

Allow me to be honest here for a moment. Sunset Boulevard is really the reason I come up with this whole "best movies about the movies" thing. This is not to say there haven't been a bunch of great movies about the movies. There have, obviously. A few of them didn't even make the list (a fact I'll have to rectify at some future point).

But really, it begins and ends with Sunset Boulevard.

Co-written and directed by one of my favorite co-writers and directors, Billy Wilder, the story of Sunset Boulevard is really two stories. On the one hand is Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-on-his-luck hack screenwriter evading collection agency stooges who want to repossess his car. Unable to sell a script, Gillis is close to moving back to his hometown with his tail between his legs to restart his career as a newspaperman.

On the other hand is Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a silent screen star whose fall from grace has left her teetering on the edge of madness. Cooped up in her crusty Sunset Boulevard mansion, tended to by her protective butler (and former director and husband), Desmond broods delusionally about what's happened to her.

On the verge of bankruptcy and unable to raise quick cash from anyone he knows, Gillis finds himself literally on the run from the repo men when he blows a tire and swerves suddenly into the driveway of what he assumes is a deserted mansion. Only it's not deserted. It's the home of Norma Desmond.

Dun dun dun!

Desmond sees Gillis and calls him into the house, assuming him to be (and this should tell you something) an undertaker sent to prepare her recently deceased pet chimpanzee for burial. After talking to her for a minute, Gillis recognizes her, setting up this famous exchange:

Gillis: You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.

Desmond: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

Forgotten in Hollywood, Desmond has been plotting what she has come to believe will be a triumphant return. And as soon as Gillis tells her he's a screenwriter, Desmond immediately tries to hire him to write a movie she's been plotting. She still has plenty of money, but though Gillis is aware of the weirdness of the situation, he's too desperate to avoid a sure payday.

He accepts.

Note: this sound effect doesn't actually play in the movie.

This leads to the creepy second half of the movie, where Gillis, unable to go back to his apartment, moves into a spare room over the garage and begins working with Desmond on the script. Desmond begins to dote on him, buying him clothes and food, at first over his objections and then not. The spare room floods during a rainstorm and Gillis moves into the room of the house where Desmond's husbands once lived.

You see where I'm going with this.

Finally Gillis realizes she's in love with him, and he rejects her coldly. He flees to a friend's apartment, but when he finds out Desmond's tried to slash her wrists, he comes back voluntarily, finally surrendering to the notion of being a kept man.

All the while, Desmond meets with famed director Cecil B. De Mille (playing a much nicer version of himself). She thinks it's about her and Gillis' awful script, but all De Mille really wants is to use her old, expensive car in a movie he's planning.

Believing DeMille's evasions to be confirmation of a deal, Desmond throws herself into a grueling beauty regimen. Meanwhile, a friend of Gillis' is a script girl at Paramount who's desperate for a break and begs him to work on a story with her. They have chemistry, and when Desmond finds out she flies into the jealous rage of a 14-year-old, calling the girl, threatening her and telling her about where Gillis spends his nights.

The resulting confrontation -- what Gillis does and what happens after -- I dare not reveal, only to say it leads to one of the most famous scenes in the movies; Desmond descending the stairs among a haze of reporters and news cameras, so finally and completely insane she thinks she's on the set of a De Mille movie, beckoning towards the camera and "all those wonderful people out there in the dark" (us).

It's the source of that picture up there, if you're wondering.

Anyhow, Sunset Boulevard is the best movie about the movies because it's one of the few to unflinchingly explore the sad and crushing reality of one minute being a big star and the next minute being a has been. The other movies on this list talk about it's cutthroat nature, or the zany pseudo families it creates, but Sunset Boulevard dares to explore the really icky side of it's sudden and ruthless abandonment.

The movie sees with such clarity and honesty we cringe at times. Desmond's sanity is held together with packing tape. Her loyal butler (played by has-been filmmaker Eric Von Stroheim) writes fake fan letters for her to read. Desmond doesn't (or can't) realize that the handwriting is the same in every one.

She screens her own movies every night. Her house is covered up in pictures of herself. All the door locks and knobs have been removed from the house because, as the butler notes ominously to Gillis early on, "the madam is prone to fits of melancholy."

Swanson's performance as Norma Desmond is one of the best performances I've ever seen from anyone. It's a true high wire act, as she slams, in the flamboyant manner of a silent movie actor who can't stop acting like one, from arrogance and self importance to wounded pride and helpless, pitiable agony. And that final scene. Oh, man.

It helped that Swanson knew her character inside and out. After all, she was a silent movie star who'd had a fall from grace once the talkies came in. When Wilder finally asked her to screen test (after being aggressively rejected for the part by the likes of Mae West and Mary Pickford), she refused, claiming in a way that reminded Wilder of Norma Desmond that she'd done twenty pictures for Paramount and no longer needed to test for anyone. It took famed director George Cukor to finally convince her, telling her "if they ask you to do ten screen tests, do ten screen tests, or I will personally shoot you."

Holden's Joe Gillis, on the other hand -- a hack writer without prospects, finally giving in to an easy life -- represents a wholly different colony of Hollywood failures. The battle with Hollywood to make it has worn his principles completely away, and his act of surrender to Desmond makes me think of a man on a battlefield who decides he doesn't want to fight anymore, so he looks up, sees someone charging at him and drops his weapon with a shrug, welcoming death.

He nearly pulls himself back from the brink as he works on the script with his friend's girlfriend, but he can't even do that without fucking things up. First of all, it's a stupid idea for a movie. And secondly, they fall for each other. So Gillis then not only betrays himself, he betrays his friend. And when forced to choose, he betrays his friend's girl, too.

Wilder, once of the best (and most cynical) writers and directors around, treats these two deeply flawed people with a measure of sympathy. Poor Norma, we say to ourselves. Poor Joe.

Of course, it's also not lost on me that one of the movie's main characters is a failed screenwriter named Joe who gave up on the journalism business for dreams of Hollywood and struggled to the point of giving in.

Maybe that's why I look at Sunset Boulevard as a horror movie, where instead of fighting zombies or aliens people fight their own failures and personality flaws as they simultaneously fight the exploitative nature of Hollywood. It's a sobering, brilliant movie, and as I look ahead to what awaits me out there in the town o' tinsel, I can't help but hope I'll meet the trials, tribulations and, yes, humiliation, better than Joe Gillis did.

Because, as the movie proves, the cost of failure can be steep.

The Best Movies About Movies (part 4 of 5)

Well, it's been more than a week since I've been able to update the blog, and there's a good reason for that.

I've also been absorbed in the first season of Dexter, though not while at the urinal.

But more important than even that is that I've been struggling to decide which of two movies to put at number 2.

I know what you're thinking here. Wasn't I supposed to figure that out before I started doing this? Well, uh... yes. I guess you're right about that. But what happened is, uh.... Well. You know.

I fucked up.

Sorry.

Here's what happened: when I came up with the idea for this series, the first thing I did was make a list of every movie dealing with the movie business that I had seen. This numbered about 20 or so titles. I got rid of the ones I didn't like, of course, and then over the course of a few days began to whittle it down to the ones that were actually pretty good. This list numbered about eight or so, and then the hard part began.

I knew right away which one would be at the top of the list. But figuring out two through five took a while. I would rearrange and change the list every time I looked at it. And eventually what happened was that I accidentally made two different movies number two.

So I've spent the last week trying to figure out which one of those two would make the list and which one wouldn't. And, well, here's my pick.

Ed Wood

Not making the cut: The Player.

The (mostly true) story of a massively untalented director, Ed Wood is nonetheless a great movie directed by the far more talented (but massively emo) director Tim Burton.

Starring Johnny Depp as the eponymous Wood in probably the best performance of his I've seen, Ed Wood is the story of a director who had a lot more ambition, determination and optimism than he had little things like, you know, ability.

The movie starts during the filming of the (in)famous Glen or Glenda, a totally unsubtle movie about transvestites that starred Wood himself (who, as you probably can guess, was a transvestite). Despite the movie being shot for the cost of a Happy Meal, Wood is elated to be shooting it, printing every take no matter what happens (short of feces being thrown at the camera, though probably not even that).

Glen or Glenda was also the first collaboration between Wood and Bela Lugosi (played by Martin Landau). By the 1950's (when the movie takes place), Lugosi was long past his glory days of playing Dracula and was deep in a heroin-induced fog.

But at their bottom was where Wood met people, and as the movie goes along it becomes a story about the relationship between the upbeat, talentless Wood and the bitter, foul-mouthed Lugosi (Landau deservedly won an Oscar for his hilarious portrayal).

Awesome.

Like Boogie Nights, Ed Wood shows how the movie business creates its own fucked up families. When Lugosi goes into rehab for drug addiction, for example, Wood watches out for him, stays with him. Lugosi, in turn, encourages Wood, relies on him, and gives his name to Wood's string of terrible movies.

Surrounding those two is an equally oddball cast of characters. There's John "Bunny" Breckenridge (played by Bill Murray), a flamboyant queen who wants a sex change but is too scared to go through with it, Criswell the Amazing, a worse-than-average psychic who dressed up in crazy costumes and predicted totally bizarre futures, Vampira, an unemployed TV host who agrees to be in the movies as long as she doesn't have to talk, and Tor Johnson, a huge Swedish wrestler whose English is unintelligible.

These people make their own dysfunctional family, held together by the notion, sure -- Wood's movies are terrible -- but without them, they wouldn't be working at all.

The second half of the movie deals with the story of the making of Plan 9 From Outer Space, a movie so legendarily bad it is generally considered, you know, the worst movie ever made (this is really saying something).

First, Wood shoots some footage of Lugosi outside his home. An old man in a cape, he reaches down, plucks a flower, smells it and looks up at the sky. Suddenly distraught, he crushes the flower in his hand and begins to cry.

Shortly after shooting this scene and a few others for a completely different project, Lugosi died. Wood had him buried in his Dracula cape (that's not made up. The real Lugosi was actually buried in a Dracula cape. Peter Lorre, who attended the funeral, is said to have wondered whether they "should drive a wooden stake through his heart, just in case").

With this small roll of film in hand, Wood spins an entire (and it must be said, ludicrous) movie out of it, dealing with an alien plan (number 9 in their little alien takeover manual) to raise people from the dead and make an army out of them. In the movie (which I've seen), this process is apparently done by shining lights at the ground in cemeteries.

Wood got the funding to make the movie after coming in contact with a preacher who wanted to make a series of religious movies. After hearing this, Wood convinces him that if he makes a monster movie, they'll have enough money for all the religious movies he wants to make.

The preacher agrees, as long as:

1) Wood changes the name of the movie from Grave Robbers from Outer Space to Plan 9 from Outer Space (grave robbing is sacrilegious, after all).

2) Wood and his crew get baptized.

Wood quickly agrees, takes the money, gets he and his friends to get baptized in a pool in Hollywood, and proceeds to make a tremendous piece of shit. With Lugosi dead, Wood casts his wife's chiropractor, Dr. Tom Mason, who, besides being bald, taller, thinner and younger than Lugosi, looks exactly like him (except not at all).

Woods solution for this? Mason covers his face with a cape.

Seriously.

Once the movie's finished, Wood actually gets to premiere it at a low rent theater in Los Angeles. Watching it, he says, "this is my masterpiece. This is the one I want them to remember me by."

Once the movie is finished, the angry audience hates it so much they tear up the theater and chase Wood and his friends out of the building.

But Wood has made his movie, and he's happy with it. And that's part of why he's so endearing. At least he got to do it. And as shitty as Plan 9 is: it's more than any of us have done. And though people remember Wood for being talentless and inept, at least they remember him.

As optimistic as he was, Wood probably would have been just fine with that.