Hollywood’s sinister side.

(Open Road Films)

Several new movies wallow in the sleazy underbelly of the movie industry – and these are continuing a long tradition, writes Nicholas Barber.

In one corner of Los Angeles, a hallucinating child star strangles an even younger boy on a film set, leaving it to his incestuous parents to clean up the mess. In another corner, a virtuous private eye is harassed by a depraved policeman who is also an actor in a television cop show. And in another, a psychotic news cameraman is desperate to capture the city’s goriest crimes on video, even if his own colleagues are the victims.

You can see these sequences in three major new films: David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice and Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. But you’ve probably seen Los Angeles’s entertainment industry portrayed in a similar, less-than-flattering light in dozens of films already, from The Bad and the Beautiful to Barton Fink. Hollywood may spend most of its time celebrating itself, with ever more award ceremonies and red-carpet premieres, but it spends a weird amount of its time castigating itself too – depicting itself, over and over again, as a hellish cesspool of corruption, murder and insanity.

Maps to the Stars is one of several recent films that delve into Hollywood's underbelly (Focus World)

“It’s a thread that has been there for as long as Hollywood has been Hollywood,” says Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald, a film historian at the University of Kent. “Marion Davies starred in a 1928 film, Show People, which contains a lot of satire about movie-making. And then, in 1932, the original version of A Star is Born came out: George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? In that film, a waitress played by Constance Bennett becomes an Oscar-winning actress, while the director who gave her her big break spirals towards alcoholism and suicide. It’s a story we’ve seen countless times since.”
In part, this is a straightforward matter of life imitating art. Hollywood has never been short of real-life scandals, and many of them have been transferred directly to the big screen. Lana Turner’s gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, turns up as a character in LA Confidential; the mysterious death in 1924 of a studio mogul, Thomas H Ince, was the subject of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow; and the famous section in The Godfather, in which a producer is menaced into giving a comeback role to the mob’s favourite crooner, is derived from rumours about Frank Sinatra’s casting in From Here To Eternity.
All that glitters…
It’s easy to see why viewers should be drawn to such outrageous narratives. When Hollywood puts out an anti-Hollywood film, it offers us the frisson of peeking through a curtain and into a hidden world of power and decadence. It also allows us to have our cake and eat it. We get to gaze covetously at the luxurious lifestyles enjoyed by Tinseltown’s gods and goddesses, but then when the characters’ fortunes plummet, we can reassure ourselves that we’re lucky not to have their lifestyles after all.

Sunset Boulevard from 1950 is one of Hollywood’s earliest efforts at critiquing itself (Paramount)

What’s harder to explain is why people in the film business should be so keen on these reflections of their own sleaze and violence. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, from 1950, has a delusional former silent-movie queen shooting a screenwriter-turned-gigolo in the back – and yet Hollywood wasn’t exactly offended. The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards. Similarly, Robert Altman’s The Player, from 1992, satirises Hollywood’s sequel-obsessed inanity and revolves around a studio executive who kills a screenwriter (there’s a theme emerging) – but, again, no one was upset. Altman was catapulted back onto the directors’ A-list, and The Player was showered with awards and nominations. To a lesser extent, the same was true of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the Steve Martin-scripted Bowfinger, and Barry Sonnenfeld’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Get Shorty: all of them are critical high points in the careers of their respective creators. It seems, the nastier a film about Hollywood is, the louder the applause becomes from Hollywood itself.

One of David Lynch’s most acclaimed films, 2001’s Mulholland Drive, shows Hollywood dreams turning into nightmares (Universal Pictures)

Dr McDonald suspects that this applause is the sound of the industry’s self-consciousness. “Are people in some way embarrassed,” she asks, “to be making lots of money from dressing-up and emoting?” But there could be more to it than that. It could be that films which purport to show the seedy and scary side of Los Angeles’s movie business are actually improving its image, not tarnishing it.
Movie mythmaking
“A lot of these films ultimately reconfirm the mystique of Hollywood,” argues Dr Peter Kramer, the author of The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars. “Even when they’re showing us what a terrible price you have to pay to make it there, they’re not puncturing the dream – they’re sucking us even further into it.”
In Kramer’s view, Hollywood’s anti-Hollywood films simply stack one kind of glamour onto another. They may promise to reveal the shameful secrets behind the industry’s glittering facade, but those secrets burst with so much intrigue and excitement (gangsters! seduction! death! madness!) that they make the business seem more enchanting, not less. If awards ceremonies and premieres exist to convince us that Hollywood’s successes are more special than ours, its supposedly self-flagellating films are meant to convince us that its scandals are more special than ours too. By presenting the industry’s failures and indiscretions as the stuff of evil schemes and terrible tragedies, they leave Hollywood looking more like a magical realm than ever. “Even people like David Lynch and Robert Altman are in love with Hollywood,” says Dr Kramer. “To make Mulholland Drive or The Player, you have to be deeply invested in it, emotionally and mentally.”

The Player (1992), a jaundiced look at a studio executive, was considered director Robert Altman’s return to form (Fine Line Features)

A genuinely subversive film about the industry, he says, would be a very different proposition. “The message of all these movies is that what goes on behind the scenes is just as thrilling as what you see onscreen. But they never show you what a mind-numbingly boring process it really is to shoot a film. They can’t acknowledge the tediousness of filming the master shot, the reverse shot, the two shot, and so on. All the time spent setting up the lights, all the time spent editing. They might demystify certain aspects of Hollywood, but that demystification is extremely limited, because they leave out that unbelievably boring stuff altogether.”
bbc.