22 of the Best Movies About Movies
Reading Time: 10 minutesFrom Singin’ in the Rain to Babylon: The greatest films about filmmaking. Cinema about cinema. Flicks about flickerings.
There are few things Hollywood loves more than a movie about the craft of movie-making, which is hardly surprising: Film is rarely a part-time job, and doubtless for many, it feels like the entire world. From the industry’s early days, Hollywood has been something akin to an old-style company town, one in which people live and breathe the job of filmmaking, so of course there are a ton of movies about movies. What’s surprising is that there are so many good ones.
From its inception, the movie industry has been a hotbed of gossip and scandal, but most of these films aren’t about that. They’re more broadly about the creative process, and that’s where we begin to care. They’re sometimes cynical about the true intentions of seemingly gifted artists, or about the ways capitalism constrains art and mutes voices that actually have something to say—concerns hardly limited to the movie industry. Well more than a century on from the birth of films, they’re so much a part of our lives that movies about movies, when done right, wind up feeling like movies about life.
Set during the transition from silent to talking pictures, Singin’ offers up a comedic portrait of the era that’s often hilarious without straying too far from the real challenges its actors and filmmakers faced. A centerpiece scene sees the central fictional movie studio attempt to turn a film intended as a silent into a talkie midstream. Technological problems abound, including actors unfamiliar with playing to a microphone and a lead actress, Jean Hagen’s Lina Lamont, whose grating Brooklyn accent is perfectly ill-suited to the romantic period drama The Dueling Cavalier. Likewise, writers unused to crafting full dialogue struggle to come up with anything better than ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ at the climax, a line that sends test audience into howls of laughter. (That bit is all based, in part, on the real life His Glorious Night, a notoriously bad early talkie that pretty much ended the career of the once-invincible silent screen star John Gilbert, whose simply didn’t seem to work as well in sound pictures.)
Where to stream: HBO Max
Filmmaking has never been just Hollywood, even within the United States. Eddie Murphy gives a career-great performance here as Rudy Ray Moore, the stand-up comedian, entrepreneur, filmmaker, rap pioneer, and hustler who turned an off-color standup routing into a blockbuster of the blaxploitation era about a fist-fighting pimp and his kung fu-fighting prostitutes. It’s a very funny portrait of Moore, and the kind of ego, talent, and style that’s always been required from outsiders looking to make movies in America.
Where to stream: Netflix
Wes Craven returned to the Elm Street franchise following the six movies of the main series to play himself (more or less) alongside the original’s Nancy Thompson herself, Heather Langenkamp, similarly playing a version of herself invited to reprise her role in a new Nightmare movie. In a pre-Scream meta twist, Freddy (credited here as ‘himself’) is a real malevolent force, once contained within the screen but growing in power without a movie audience to ensure that his presence remains tied to fiction. The central idea—that horror movies (and dark storytelling in general) provide an outlet for audiences that keep our own dark sides from spilling out—is a potent one.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Successful director John L. Sullivan has made a fortune for studios with goofball comedy movies like Ants in Your Plants of 1939, but wants to do something different, more meaningful. His new dream is to craft a serious, thoughtful adaptation of the novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? (in case you were wondering what the Coen Brothers were referencing in 2000). In order to research the movie that his studio absolutely does not want him to make, Sullivan disguises himself as a hobo and sets off to see the country, encountering a poor actress in the form of Veronica Lake along the way. It’s a smart, funny movie about poverty tourism, but the ultimate point of the movie is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a little escapist comedy, which is at least as valuable as high-handed attempts by rich filmmakers to tell poor people stories about their own lives.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel
Following the closing of a once venerable film studio, two documentary filmmakers seek out Chiyoko Fujiwara, once a major star, who retired three decades prior to live the life of a recluse. The elderly actress recounts her life story, but her reality blends dreams of the movies in which she starred into something we might call a more subjective but no less real reality. The gorgeous and poignant movie ends up being about more than a single actress, but about the impact the movies have on all of us, and the ways in which they shape our subconscious.
Where to stream: Hoopla, Kanopy
The Coen Brothers would return to the film industry as a topic on several occasions (in 2016’s Hail, Caesar! most explicitly) but Barton Fink finds unique energy in its 1940s Hollywood setting, playing at moments like a comedy and at other like horror. John Turturro plays the title character, roughly based on playwright Clifford Odetts, a celebrated writer who came from New York to the very different world of Hollywood to pen scripts. The film’s Fink finds himself tasked with turning out ‘product’ rather than art, and under deeply unpleasant working conditions, but he’s not entirely a downtrodden hero, as the Coens are also interested in looking at the snobbery inherent in the idea that a ‘highbrow’ play might inherently have more artistic value than a ‘lowbrow’ movie.
Where to stream: Digital rental
As he proved with Blazing Saddles and particular in Young Frankenstein two years earlier, classic-era Mel Brooks wasn’t just a master satirist, but a filmmaker with a deep love of old-timey Hollywood movies. Though less known than those other two, Silent Movie is probably his most specific and loving parody, even if he makes a thorough mockery of movie studios, reminding us that greed has always won out over art. The joke here is that the attempt to create a ‘modern’ silent movie is presented itself in the format of a silent picture, with bits that mimic and mock some of the great classic films of the 1920s. It’s both a goofy homage to that period and a savage satire of the modern movie business of the ’70s.
Where to stream: Nowhere officially, but try some creative googling.
Souls for Sale has everything that popular silent cinema of the 1920s was great at: romance, melodrama, and even murder, with a wonderfully soapy plot that finds ‘Mem’ Steddon (Eleanor Boardman, a mega-star of the time) escaping from her new husband by jumping off a train (good thing, too, as it turns out he has a history of murdering wives for the insurance money) and onto the set of a sexy Sheik movie filming in the California desert. As she’s pursued by two different men (three, if you count the murdering husband), Mem stumbles through the early film industry, eventually winding up with the lead role in a circus picture that becomes the scene of a dramatic showdown. Along the way, she encounters stars like Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, and ZaSu Pitts and walks through the sets of actual films being made at the time (meta before meta). It was produced and directed by Rupert Hughes just three years before had a fateful visit from his nephew, Howard, who would quickly make his own mark on early Hollywood.
Where to stream: YouTube
Vincente Minnelli’s melodrama paints an almost relentlessly dark portrait of the movie industry, even while being a pretty darned entertaining bit of Hollywood product itself. Kirk Douglas plays cut-throat producer Jonathan Shields, who’s perfectly content to cast aside anyone who gets in the way of the success of one of his films. Friendship and love are easily ignored, but, the movie tells us, it’s entirely circular: those whom Shields has betrayed are eager to come crawling back when it benefits them. Real-life filmmakers of the era (David O. Selznick, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Val Lewton, etc.) are subtly parodied, blending fact with fiction.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Director and co-writer Robert Townsend’s early triumph sees him playing Bobby Taylor, a young black actor desperate to make it in Hollywood who finds himself forced to navigate an age-old dilemma for non-white players in Hollywood: does he take broadly stereotypical roles (as in the movie’s Jivetime Jimmy’s Revenge) just to pay the bills? Or does he cling to his principles and risk being forced to surrender his dreams? Townsend was speaking from experience in his comedy, and there’s a strong sense of truth amid the silliness.
Where to stream: Tubi, Pluto, Hoopla
As with the more recent HBO miniseries, Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep sees an actress hired to appear in a remake of the (real-life) silent film serial Les Vampires. Maggie Cheung plays herself (sort of) in the lead role during the troubled production as the movie’s satire takes aim at the French film industry specifically—but also approaches the idea of filmmaking in a way that’s not entirely cynical, or, at least, not as cynical as many of other films-about-films: Irma Vep suggests that movies are almost hopelessly beset by bureaucracy and capitalistic concerns, but are worth the trouble nevertheless.
Where to stream: HBO Max, The Criterion Channel
Robert Altman’s great, and typically meandering, comedy is, on the surface, about a studio exec (Tim Robbins) trying to escape a murder charge, but it’s more a comic take-down of the inner-workings of the movie business. One of Alma’s best, and most darkly funny films in a career filled with them.
Where to stream: HBO Max, The Criterion Channel
I’m not sure that the underrated Bowfinger is wildly insightful when it comes to the movie business, but it does take some smart shots at celebrity culture and deserved jabs at the Church of Scientology and its impact on Hollywood celebrities. Steve Martin plays Bobby Bowfinger, a D-list movie producer who longs to direct, and who manages to wheedle a promise from a major studio that they’ll fund his terrible script if he can secure the talents of star Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), and almost impossible get, especially given Ramsey’s general paranoia. Bowfinger hits on a foolproof plan: he’ll work his way into Ramsey’s life and film the actor guerrilla-style without his knowing he’s in a movie. It’s a frequently hilarious team-up between Martin and Murphy.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Bryan Cranston earned an Oscar nomination playing Dalton Trumbo, which is rich given Hollywood’s treatment of the real Trumbo, who went from the elite among Hollywood’s screenwriters to serving nearly a year in prison for failing to appease the House Un-American Activities Committee during the red scare of the 1950s. If it’s not quite as well-written as some of the real Trumbo’s best, it’s an impressively acted tribute to the power and price of principle, in both Hollywood and America writ large.
Where to stream: HBO Max
Even if it weren’t explicitly about filmmaking, Orson Welles’ long-gestating final project (it began 15 years before his death, and was released more than three decades after) would serve as a last testament from one of the most significant, and troubled filmmakers of the twentieth century, one whose very career paints a picture of Hollywood’s tendency to toy with the idea of art even as it crushes artists. John Huston plays a Wellesian stand-in, a hold-out director from Hollywood’s golden age hoping for a comeback in the form of a new, daringly modern film. He butts up against a hot young director (played by Peter Bogdanovich, who oversaw the movie’s completion in 2018) who represents the more overtly arty filmmakers of the 1970s, as Welles satirizes the old as well as the new…which makes sense coming from a director whose talent was both celebrated and constrained across multiple filmmaking eras.
Where to stream: Netflix
One of our greatest movies, Citizen Kane, has itself inspired a handful of impressive films that deal with its making (RKO 281 is another good one). David Fincher’s Mank gorgeously recreates the early 1940s in Hollywood, but dodges the typical glitz and glamour of golden age portrayals and instead tells the story through the eyes of scathingly cynical, alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), enlisted by Orson Welles to craft the screenplay for his controversial directorial debut. The Zelig-like Mankiewicz crosses paths with some of the most influential figures of the era, from Willian Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) to Upton Sinclair and Charlie Chaplin, and though its fidelity to history is questionable, its devotion to the art of moviemaking is never in doubt.
Where to stream: Netflix
Staying Orson Welles-adjacent for just one more film, his tricky 1973 ‘documentary’ F for Fake began as a side-project for the director about art forger Elmyr de Hory. In the process of developing that project, it was revealed that de Hory’s biographer, Clifford Irving, had himself faked an ‘authorized biography’ of Howard Hughes, the filmmaker, aviator, and business magnate whose life remains shrouded in mystery. The film that results, presented as real except when it isn’t, takes a twisty-turny journey toward a version of the truth, as Welles seems to be making the point that in film, and art in general, fakery is the name of the game. Whether or not we’d admit it, it’s fun to be fooled.
Where to stream: HBO Max, The Criterion Channel
Another fictional(-ish) documentary(-ish) film, Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up was wildly provocative when it was released in 1990, in part because of its nuanced picture of life in Iran at the time, and in larger part because its blend of fact and fiction is deliberately disorienting. It’s presented in documentary style, and about a real-life event: a poor man, obsessed with film, impersonated an influential Iranian filmmaker, securing funding from a middle-class family to make a movie. Director Kiarostami immediately set out to make a film about the event, but almost the entire film is scripted; Kiarostami’s work making the movie even had an impact on the eventual outcome of the case. Aside from being a stylistically impressive bit of filmmaking, it’s an exploration of film as a medium that shapes our reality.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel
It’s not expressly about the act of filmmaking, but it’s very much about the movie business, and decades of sexual abuse and misconduct against actresses (mostly, though not exclusively) distilled into the story of the New York Times investigation that brought to light the many, many crimes of former movie industry executive Harvey Weinstein. Sadly, it’s as much a story of Hollywood history as any behind-the-scenes roman a clef.
Where to stream: Peacock
Tim Burton’s biopic of a man sometimes referred to as the ‘worst director of all time’ isn’t interested in Hollywood glitz and glamour, but in shining a light on one of the no-budget weirdos who parlayed passion into…well, in this case, not much, but Ed Wood’s films are so thoroughly ill-conceived and unhampered by commercial considerations that they can’t be anything other than passion projects. The big-hearted badness of a movie like Plan 9 from Outer Space, the making of which is dramatized here, has given it an outsized place in movie history, and made it far more beloved than many a polished-but-dull bit of Hollywood product. It also brings an empathetic eye to the declining years of Bela Lugosi; the legend is played by Martin Landau, who won his sole Oscar for the role.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Movies about filmmaking, whatever their qualities, can sometimes feel like inside pool: the things that concern people while they’re making movies don’t always translate to audiences. Federico Fellini’s surreal comedy-drama, with Marcello Mastroianni as a stand-in for Fellini, is more about creativity as it is about filmmaking specifically, and celebrates procrastination and daydreams as important of themselves. Mastroianni’s Guido Anselmi is a bored filmmaker, following up a flop with a science fiction movie that he doesn’t care about at all, and finding himself generally stuck: unable to conjure the energy to finish the movie, and unable to overcome writer’s block and come up with something better. In and around all of that, it’s filled with beautiful and striking cinematic images and scenes.
Where to stream: HBO Max, The Criterion Channel, Kanopy
Though hardly critically beloved, and certainly not embraced by mainstream audiences, La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s excessive, orgiastic (no, literally) ode to the Golden Age of Hollywood is definitely one of the movie-est movies about movies ever to, uh, movie. Across three hours, it packs in a whole college course’s worth of cinematic history and context (never mind that much of it is invented), not to mention whiplashing humor and over-the-top melodrama, as it charts the rise and fall (and fall, and fall) of a handful of Hollywood types (played by Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, among others) amid the industry’s transition from silent films to sound in the 1920s and ’30s. It’s a lot—but then, so is Hollywood.
Where to stream: Nowhere yet, but it should appear on Paramount+ soon.
Reference: https://lifehacker.com/22-of-the-best-movies-about-movies-1850006992
Ref: lifehacker
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