Allow me to explain myself, part 2

By now, I have been writing about this subject -- movies about the movies -- for more than a month, and if there's anyone more tired of it than you people out there in the dark, it's me.

So I suppose it's a good thing that this will be my last entry on the subject for a while, and that instead of having to be effusive in my praise of this brilliant movie or that, I'll get to do what I do best: rip someone a new asshole.

So with that, here's a movie that didn't make the cut:

Barton Fink

On paper, Barton Fink would appear to be just my kind of movie. After all, it's the story of an idealistic screenwriter (John Tuturro), who is lured to Hollywood to write a movie, only to find a horrific world of compromise. Add to that the fact that it was written by one of the great filmmaking teams of all time -- the Coen brothers -- and you can guess I was understandably excited to watch the movie the first time.

And, you know, it was alright for a while. Tuturro's playright character is an idealist, sure, but he's also a hypocrite and a boob. He talks constantly about his love for the "common man," but when he actually meets a common man -- his salesman next-door neighbor (John Goodman) -- all he talks about is himself.

Tuturro's character struggles with writer's block, meets a William Faulker stand-in, and battles with studio types. All standard stuff, sure, but with one major difference: the strangely inappropriate tone, which instead of being a) light and comic, or b) strangled and dramatic, is actually c) freaky and ghoulish.

Tuturro's character hears things. His room seems haunted. His hotel, the rundown Hotel Earle, has the creepy sliminess of an infected wound. He learns the John Goodman character is actually a serial killer.

All of this is wrong for the story and the characters, and sort of inexplicable. And then this happens.

Ugh.

You want to write a story about a barely talented Broadway playwright who goes to Hollywood and falls on his face because he didn't have the talent he thought he did, fine. You want to write a horror movie, you know, also fine. But shuffling back and forth like this isn't cute or clever. It's just annoying.

In the above clip, the Goodman character is trailed by fire and shoots down two policemen while shouting "I'll show you the life of the mind!" over and over again. So, you know, what does that mean? Is this a fantasy sequence in the head of Tutturo's character, meant to represent the tumultuous inner life of an artist? Who knows? Is the Goodman character, then, even real? Is the Hotel Earle?

Barton Fink apologists point to these unanswerable questions as proof that it's completely open to interpretation. Well, what's good about that? Despite what a legion of surrealistic movie fans will tell you, confusing does not mean good. It means confusing.

In a very real sense, a movie is a contract between it's makers and it's audience. When the movie starts, it tells the audience what it's going to be like, and it's duty, as William Goldman said, is to "give the audience what it wants, but in a way it doesn't expect."

Surrealistic movies like Barton Fink (and 8 and 1/2, which was left off my list for similar reasons) are an affront to that idea.

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.

The Best Movies About Movies (part 3 of 5)

So far on this wearying series we've covered Boogie Nights, the definitive story of the porn business, and Adaptation, the definitive story of a socially inept writer putting a fictionalized version himself in his screenplay and ending it with an ironic deus ex machina (this is a pretty short list).

With this entry, however, it's time to change it up again. Instead of actors and writers, we'll focus on on a movie about that most loathsome Hollywood character -- the Producer.

The Bad and the Beautiful (1953)

Like this, only in Hollywood. (Ok ok, it's nothing like this. Except sort of)

Based on the lives of a number of real Hollywood people (but especially David O. Selznick), The Bad and the Beautiful is the story of Jonathan Shields, an asshole producer played by Kirk Douglas, tracking his rise to fame as the son of a director who'd been such a prick Douglas had to hire extras to come to his funeral.

Determined to dominate Hollywood, Shields starts by manipulating a low budget producer (Walter Pidgeon) into letting him and a director friend, Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), work for him. They work on a number of weird low budget movies (one of which mimmicking the real life Cat People) After a while -- and a few hits -- Amiel decides he's ready to direct his dream project, and Shields goes off to make a deal.

Which he does -- with a big studio and a big budget. The only catch? Shields allows Amiel to be replaced with a more experienced director as long as he still gets to produce.

Urban dictionary: Dick Move.

Next, Shields comes across the alcoholic daughter of an actor he admired, Georgia Lorrison (played by Lana Turner). Shields realizes she has talent, builds up her confidence, and shoehorns her into a movie over everyone's objections. He even lets her fall in love with him because he believes it'll help her performance. But after the movie's a hit she finds Shields with another woman. When she confronts him, he rejects her, telling her he doesn't want anyone having the kind of control a true romance would mean over him.

Next, Shields finds a novel he wants to make into a movie that's been written by James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell). The only problem? Bartlow's pea-brained high-maintenance Southern Belle wife (Gloria Grahame, who won an Oscar), who constantly distracts Bartlow from his work.

His douchebag instinct kicking in, Shields sends a well known movie star seducer after Bartlow's wife. Once she's gone (Bartlow thinks on vacation), Bartlow finishes his script easily, but when she and the movie star try to run away together, they die in a plane crash. Bartlow is distraught, and in a moment of weakness, Shields confesses his involvement. Bartlow punches Shields out and leaves (leaving behind the script, which turns into a hit).

Anyhow, the movie begins with these three: Amiel, Lorrison, and Bartlow, now at the top of their professions (the movie is told in flashback), while Shields has become bankrupt after directing a movie that ended up a monumental piece of shit and he refused to release it.

Shields wants to make a movie with them. Will they help?

In each case they're asked to reflect on the fact that, though Shields definitely screwed them over, he also made their careers. Without Shields, Amiel would have never gotten a break as a director. Shields brought Lorrison out of alcoholism and into movie stardom. And now that his wife isn't around, Bartlow is producing hit novel after hit novel (his first had taken seven years).

And that's the handle, I think, and what makes it a great movie about the movies. Sure, people get screwed over in Hollywood. And yeah, there are a lot of examples of amoral shit-kicking world-beaters who roll over mere mortals in their path like bugs. But these people have to ask themselves: are they really worse off because Shields was a part of their lives?

After the Pidgeon character makes his final pitch, the three characters sit there and think about it. And their collective answers, and what happens after -- which I won't reveal -- says a lot about that fine balance between business and the personal that the movie business seems to test at all times.

In addition to all that, The Bad and the Beautiful is one of the great portrayals of the kind of personality you need to be a successful producer. Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, upon whom Shields is partly based, was widely regarded as -- even more than stars like Spencer Tracy and Greta Garbo -- the best actor at MGM. He cajoled, screamed, cried and fainted -- sometimes in the same conversation -- if that's what it took to get what he wanted.

One famous example involved actor Robert Taylor, who came into Mayer's office early in his career to get a raise. Instead of saying "yes," or even "no," Mayer told Taylor to work hard, respect his elders, and in due time he'd get everything he deserved. Then Mayer hugged Taylor, cried, and showed him to the door. Asked afterwards whether he'd gotten his raise, Taylor said, "no, but I found a father," and proceeded to spend the next 25 years as one of the most underpaid actors on the MGM lot.

The Bad and the Beautiful touches on all of that. Shields takes people into the sphere of his magnetic personality and for as long as he needs them, he's as good and dynamic a friend as you could ask for.

But when he's done with you, he's done. And in that he personifies all of Hollywood. Ask an actress approaching 40 what happens to offers. Ask a director who makes a flop. It's the name of the game.

The Bad and the Beautiful (terrible title and all) is the warning.

The Best Movies About Movies (part 2 of 5)

In my last entry in this series (see below), I discussed Boogie Nights, the story of a porn star's rise and fall.

For entry number 2 (making it, confusingly, fourth place in the rankings), we have something completely different: a movie about the fucked-up process of writing a movie, rather than about what that fucked-up process does to your personality over the long term.

Adaptation

Talking about the plot of Adaptation and the story of how Adaptation got made is sort of a strange exercise, since it's, you know, exactly the same story.

For example:

Adaptation (the story) begins when Charlie Kaufman (the screenwriter) gets a commission to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief into a movie. He struggles neurotically for a while, going through intense periods of self loathing, before finally figuring out how to end it.

Adaptation (the movie) begins when Charlie Kaufman gets a commission to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief into a movie. He struggles neurotically for a while, going through....

You get the idea. The plot of the movie isn't just like the story of it's making. It is the story of it's making. Kaufman received the commission to write the screenplay in 1994 and struggled for years to adapt it into a movie (the movie was finally released in 2002).

He tried at first to write a straight adaptation, but eventually he realized he had failed (in his defense, stealing orchids is a fairly fucking boring idea for a movie), so he decided to write a movie about a guy named Charlie Kaufman trying to adapt a book about stealing orchids into a movie.

Kaufman's explanation?

"I thought it was interesting because that's what I was thinking about. I find I write best when I write what I'm thinking about. What I was thinking about was that I was completely unable to write this script."

Uh, okay.

Now if it sounds like I'm being pithy about the movie, well, that's because this is as loony an idea for a movie as has ever been attempted (including this, which is saying something).

All of this makes it even more remarkable that Adaptation is even watchable, much less a great movie. I mean, can you imagine a less cinematic image than of a man staring at a computer (or typewriter), wracked with self-loathing and indecision?

We can't either.

But somehow Adaptation makes it work, and it's an interesting exercise itself to try and figure out how it does that.

Part of it, I think, is that we respond to the sheer audacity of the concept. Adaptation is one of a kind, and watching it navigating the minefield of it's own making has a kind of thrill. We sort of keep expecting it to go awry, and then finally at the end, when it does (on purpose!), there's a kind of delight in it.

Second is that the movie is just so goddamn well written. Kaufman writes a version of himself who tries so hard but is yet so pitiful and socially inept as to come completely around and be likeable again.

VALERIE (movie producer): Laroche is a fun character, isn't he?

Kaufman nods, flipping through the book, stalling. There's a smiling author photo of Susan Orlean on the inside back cover.

KAUFMAN: And Orlean makes orchids so fascinating. Plus her musings on Florida, orchid hunting. Great, sprawling New Yorker stuff. I'd want to remain true to that, let the movie exist rather than be artificially plot driven.

VALERIE: Okay, great, great. I guess I'm not exactly sure what that means.

KAUFMAN: Oh. Well... I'm not sure exactly yet either. So... y'know, it's...

VALERIE: Oh. Okay. Great. So, um, what --

KAUFMAN: It's just, I don't want to compromise by making it a Hollywood product. An orchid heist movie. Or changing the orchids into poppies and turning it into a movie about drug running. Y'know?

VALERIE: Oh, of course. We agree. Definitely.

KAUFMAN: Or cramming in sex, or car chases, or guns. Or characters learning profound life lessons. Or characters growing or characters changing or characters learning to like each other or characters overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end. Y'know? Movie shit.

Kaufman is sweating like crazy now. Valerie is quiet for a moment.

VALERIE: See, we thought maybe Susan Orlean and Laroche could fall in love during the course of --

KAUFMAN: Alienated journalist writes about passionate backwoods guy and he teaches her to love. I mean, it didn't happen. It wouldn't happen. It's Hollywood.

When you watch the movie again you end up laughing at this scene, because of course all of the "Hollywood shit" Kaufman hates in this scene ends up in the movie.

The question you end up asking yourself after you've seen the movie a few times is this:

Is the character of Donald Kaufman (Charlie's invented by-the-numbers screenwriter brother) and the intentionally cliched ending intended completely as a commentary on trumped up action and cliched endings in general, or did the real Kaufman just find he was completely unable to make a watchable movie out of the material, and designed the meta-movie device and the ending because there was no actual way to end the movie?

I mean, there's a bit of difference between that ending being a thought out, intentional critique of the movie business, and Kaufman coming to the conclusion there's no other goddamn way to end the movie, so here's something that might knock down a few buildings.

Frankly, I've seen the movie a few times, and I still don't know. While writing this blog entry, I did some reading to try and find out, but I could never find a statement that cleared it up. All Kaufman seems willing to say is that he tried adapting the book straight and what became the final draft evolved from months and years of writers block about how to do it.

But despite not having a clear answer, just the fact that Adaptation poses the question is enough to rank it with the best movies about movies ever made. I mean, how many movies give you the opportunity to consider such a freaky thing... or any of the other fascinating questions the movie poses (for instance: is Robert McKee -- featured in the scene below -- really that big of an asshole?)

Probably.

And beyond all of that, when you're sitting there watching it, the movie just works, despite being strung together out of what seems to be little bits of duct tape, laughing and shrugging all the way down to the last frame.

What a movie!

The Best Movies About Movies (part 1 of 5)

I'm not sure exactly where it was along the evolutionary trip that humans developed a powerful attraction to lists, but if I had to guess I'd place it somewhere during our reptilian phase, since it is the reptilian brain where the truly reflexive and involuntary aspects of human behavior are born.

I mean, everybody loves lists.

You. Me. Them. Everybody. Everybody.

The only thing better than a list of things, it seems, is a list of things that's divisible by five (for instance: five things). In the List Making Guidebook, it strongly advocates doing this, even if, say, you're trying to rank the Seven Dwarves (seven is not divisible by five. I think).

Another tenant of the List Making Guidebook? The only downside to making lists -- which is that no one (and we do mean fucking no one) will entirely agree with your picks. And they will (and we do mean fucking will) let you know about it.

So it is with this in mind that I devised this clever little five (!) part series, to be published (if you can really call it that), over the next 10 days.

And what's to be listed, you ask patiently?

Ah, yes. A favorite/speciality of mine: Movies about movies (or meta-movies, if you want to get all douchey about it). This is a fairly unusual genre but one (as a lover of movies) I really, uh... love. I make a point to watch these kinds of movies whenever I can and have watched enough of them I feel qualified enough (or maybe just douchey enough) to attempt a list.

To trim the list into a workable five I had to be sort of stringent about what constituted a movie about the movies (which is why, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit didn't make the cut, since it uses the movie business principally as a setting rather than a subject). I also had to leave out a couple of pretty good movies that fit my guidelines -- the subject of an "Honorable Mention" post I'll do at the end.

Anyhow, my methodology should be fairly self evident as I go along. And if it isn't, we recommend you direct your complaints to the proper place.

Movie about Movies #5:

Boogie Nights

If you only knew how many captions I've written for this picture.

The story of a fucked up kid blessed with "one special thing" (his wang), Boogie Nights tracks the rise and fall (get it?) of his entry (get it?) into the "golden age of porn" of the 70s.

Starring Mark Wahlberg as Eddie Adams (who eventually changes his name to Dirk Diggler), Boogie Nights is, essentially, a classic tragic story, featuring a rise to fame, the corruption of fame leading to a fall on hard (get it?) times, and a redemptive ending where lessons are learned and relationships mended.

That story -- of a meteoric rise and fall -- is common to movies about movies for reasons that are actually sort of obvious: it's the story of Hollywood.

A few years ago, after all, Diablo Cody won an Oscar for writing Juno. This year, her movie Jennifer's Body took a huge dump at the box office, placing sixth (out of four).

For me, the chief attribute of Boogie Nights is in it's details: the direction, characters, acting, sets and tone are all brilliant. And then there's this sequence -- as hilarious, terrifying and awesome a scene as I've seen in a movie.

The main difference between Boogie Nights' story arc and the normal rise and fall Hollywood story is that Boogie Nights actually ends sort of happily. After nearly getting killed in the above scene, Wahlberg returns to his porn "family," begs for forgiveness and is accepted.

As we'll see by some of the upcoming movies on this list, that's actually somewhat unusual. Movies about movies usually end on a downer for their protagonists. And that's, you know, probably appropriate, since if William Faulkner wasn't exactly right in saying that the problem with American lives is they have no second acts, he's almost entirely right if you confine it strictly to Hollywood.

After all, John Holmes (upon whom the Wahlberg character was based) fell into drug addiction and died of AIDS. He didn't make a comeback. Neither did John Belushi or Chris Farley. We'll see about Diablo Cody (though as a former stripper she'll probably land on her feet. Or her tits).

The redemption of a guy like Robert Downey, Jr. (or, to a less talented extent, Charlie Sheen) is notable in part because it's so unusual. It's so hard to get there getting there in the first place getting back must seem even harder than, uh... even harder than avoiding making dick jokes has been in this post.

But it works in Boogie Night because the characters are drawn so well and so precisely that by the end they're just kind of a fucked up family, loving and protective of each other. When Wahlberg's character "returns," it isn't to glory, but to his adopted family. It's where he belongs. And in it's own twisted way, it seems right.