10 Movies About Movies5

By Chris Littler, Apr 14, 2011 in Pop Culture

10 Movies About Movies

Fledgling producers be warned: making movies is hard. Not only do you have to deal with obnoxious on-screen talent, unforeseeable forces of nature, and surly, exhausted, sweaty crews, you have to do it under the stress of someone else’s money. That’s the kind of stressful quandary the young filmmakers in the series Low Budget find themselves in. They’ve got their hands on some money from the producer of a Canadian travel show and are compelled to use it to make their magnum opus – an alien invasion story. Pleasing your financier, making a good piece of cinema, avoiding bill collectors – it’s just a typical day in the movie business.

If you are aware of all the pitfalls of the business and still want to jump into the shark-infested waters, maybe you should check out a couple of movies about movies before packing your bags and heading towards the bright lights.

Low Budget – Creative Financing

1. State & Main

David Mamet’s comedy about what happens to a small town when a bumbling film crew set up shop never gets the credit it deserves. Sure, it’s not as powerful as Glengarry or as scathing as Wag the Dog, but it’s an enjoyable reflection on how Mamet sees the business as a whole. With an all-star cast that includes Mamet staples William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, you know you’re in for a treat. And you can’t beat the romance between Hoffman’s nebbishy screenwriter and Rebecca Pidgeon’s straight-laced local. It makes you wonder if Mamet missed his calling as a writer of fluffy Owen Wilson rom-coms.

2. Singin’ in the Rain

We think Singin’ in the Rain would still be a classic if those five minutes of rain dancing were left on the cutting room floor. Sacrilege?! So what? Doesn’t make it any less true! After all, Singin’ in the Rain is a movie about making movies. It’s a film carried not by Kelly’s dancing or Reynolds’s charm, but by a great story about an industry in the midst of a catastrophic shake-up – the arrival of the dreaded “talkies.” A lot of other musicals of the time have similarly great singing and dancing, but Singin’ in the Rain is lifted by being a brilliant satire at its core.

3. Living in Oblivion

The world of independent feature filmmaking is lampooned in Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion. In this 1995 Sundance winner, Steve Buscemi plays Nick Reve, a director trying his damndest to get something committed to celluloid. But boy, just about everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Boom in the shot, actor going up on lines, the focus goes fuzzy. And that’s all before lunch — which the crew can see has gone spoiled by careless craft services. You think the guy would finally catch a break, this being the land of dreams and all that. No such luck. Things only get worse from there for poor Nick, who just wants the goddamn smoke-machine to work so he can show the world his vision of a dwarf feeding a woman an apple. The pain we suffer today is the high art of tomorrow, people!

4. 8 ½

8 ½ gets its name from its creator, Federico Fellini, who had up to that point created “7 ½” films. So 8 ½ quite literally is just Federico’s number for his film. Clever, huh? That kind of a self-reflectiveness fits perfectly in this film, (and probably nowhere else) which is about a director going through “director’s block.” Unsurprisingly, it’s something Fellini was supposedly going through at the time, as well. The result is a film a little more about the creative process and the problems of industrialization, than it is about the process of actual movie-making.

5. The Player

For what is described as a “very mild satire” by its director, Robert Altman, The Player definitely takes some pot shots at the movie business. In this classic Hollywood tale, Tim Robbins plays a movie producer who receives a death threat from a writer claiming Robbins stole his idea. But that’s not nearly as important as what’s going on in the interim: a good idea is being completely demolished by the corporate studio system. It’s a delight and a horror to watch unfold. We see the screenwriters come in with what could feasibly be a good movie, and by the end, it is pure schlock. In a movie about lies, deceit, and murder, it’s creativity that gets the axe first.

6. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Tristram Shandy is one of the world’s first post-modern novels. It also seems near-impossible to turn into a movie. But that didn’t stop Steve Coogan and friends from translating the tale of the young nobleman. In fact, very little of the novel has to do with Shandy’s actual life, despite the title. It’s just him going on and on about other things. He’s an author perpetually off-target. The same is true of this delightful little film, which delves into the makings of a failed adaptation.

7. Ed Wood

Long before Troll 2 and The Room made bad movies high art, there was Ed Wood. Wood was considered to be the worst filmmaker of all time. In this story of Wood’s life, Johnny Depp portrays the horror auteur with his typical panache. Wood’s first film in the biopic, I Changed My Sex!, is thankfully changed to Glen or Glenda, but, surprisingly, the stink doesn’t wash away. It sets the mood for the rest of Wood’s struggle – a man whose “unique voice” refuses to be silenced. The real fun of the film comes from watching Wood make his “masterpiece,” Plan 9 From Outer Space, and his interactions with Martin Landau as the scenery-chewing Bela Lugosi.

8. Bowfinger

“Ever seen Chubby Rain?” That’s our go-to pick-up line when we see someone we want to hit on at a bar. If they get it, it means, at the very least, they’ve seen Bowfinger, Steve Martin’s satire of the Hollywood industry. Or is it? It’s more of a satire of people like Bowfinger – producers who will do anything to make their opus, even if it means lying to everyone they know. Eddie Murphy does a great turn as big time Hollywood actor, Kitt Ramsey, who has no idea that he’s in the film, as well as Kitt’s soft-in-the-head brother. Paired with Martin’s usual “man they’re terrible, but I can’t help rooting for them!” gang of rascals, Bowfinger is a solid little win in the comedy department. It definitely holds up well against other comedies of its decade.

9. Shadow of the Vampire

What if the guy who played the Nosferatu in Nosferatu was actually a nosferatu? That’s the premise behind Shadow of a Vampire, a great horror film from back in 2000. Willem Dafoe does a pitch-perfect impersonation of Max Schreck, the “character actor” who will only show up to the shoot “in full costume.” The film is a vampire movie in itself, but also a movie about a guy who will do anything to get his vampire movie made. It plays on the conventions in fun ways – for example, using title cards to explain situations, much like the title cards of the silent era.

10. Adaptation

Charlie Kaufman is a screenwriter’s champion. Not only does he write great screenplays that are interesting and funny, he makes screenwriters the heroes. Adaptation chronicles his attempts to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into a film – and largely failing. The only way he can do it is by making a movie about adapting The Orchid Thief… and down the rabbit hole we go! There’s a lot of interesting stuff about how Kaufman runs into interference along the way. It’s a toss-up who the most dangerous predator in the film is: his eerily placated agent (played by Ron Livingston) or the alligators that tear John LaRoche apart.

Low Budget – Pre-Production

Low Budget – Action

Watch more episodes of Low Budget

Chris Littler lives in Hollywood. He has a degree in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, one of the most prestigious writing programs in America, which he totally plans to hang on the wall when he has a Study. Chris currently covers video games at UGO.com when he’s not performing improv at iO, and is currently writing a one-hour TV pilot with his friend Wes. Like everyone else you know, he has an album available to purchase on iTunes and has lots of things to say on his blog: chrislittler[dot]com.