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Hollywood home truths

Eugene Levy in For Your Consideration
  • Posted at 12:37pm
  • 14 March 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

Ever since the box stole a large chunk of its available audience in the 1950s, Hollywood has been examining the motives behind the TV industry – think Peter Finch in Network and Alan Alda in Crimes and Misdemeanors, or even Divine as vile producer Arvin Hodgepile in Hairspray. But what happens when it holds a mirror up to itself?

Christopher Guest’s 2006 spoof For Your Consideration did for the Oscars season what This Is Spinal Tap did for heavy metal. Satirising the chaos that ensues when a low-budget Jewish drama is tipped online for Oscar glory, the film makes great capital out of insecure actors, mercenary studios and dimwitted PRs.

Although tapping into a surprisingly rich seam of self-mockery, a knowing comedy is always on thin ice, because if audiences are smart enough to know about Hollywood’s foibles, they’re also smart enough to know that Guest and his backers Castle Rock are probably just as insecure and mercenary as those they’re sending up.

The more serious Sunset Blvd, in which fading silent star Gloria Swanson draws writer William Holden into her fantasy world, remains Hollywood’s most celebrated act of self-harm. Although some felt it was an own goal, Billy Wilder’s film received 11 Oscar nominations in 1951 and won three. Two years later, toxic melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful, with Kirk Douglas as a monstrous producer, won five.

Sometimes, as with The Day of the Locust (which ends with a riot) and The Player (where murder intrudes), the dark side of Hollywood becomes truly nightmarish. Writers sell their souls, directors wind up sad and lonely. And even in a brightly coloured biopic like The Aviator, the accent is on failure. Perhaps when film-makers parade the inadequacies of their own industry, it helps to relieve creative and executive guilt.

I’m not complaining. Not when the films for our consideration are as good as Swimming with Sharks, Stardust Memories and, oh yes, Singin’ in the Rain. And inevitably they all end up on TV – it’s the final insult.

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