Shadows Over Hollywood

Hollywood was once a magical place where it seemed dreams came true. During the golden age of the studio system from the 1920s to the 1950s, the public was fed a steady diet of glamorous stars and starlets, primped and manicured to perpetuate the myth that making movies was a fantasy lifestyle full of guiltless hedonism.By the end of the 1960s when the studios had lost most of their power and influence due to television and the rising costs of production, filmmakers encouraged by this new independence, ushered in another so-called "golden" era exploring the darker more irreverent aspects of American culture. Inevitably, they turned their attention to Hollywood itself, and the earlier days of an industry that had long disappeared. The lens through which they focused upon "Tinseltown" was much less rose-coloured than their film-making predecessors, but the glamour and excitement still held allure despite the generation gap. The DVDs cited below are a sampling of the films made about Hollywood by those whose distance from this period provides a modern perspective for audiences of the 21st Century.

Sunset (1988)

Born into a film industry family, his grandfather, a silent film director, and his father , a production manager, Blake Edwards was raised in the atmosphere of old Hollywood. After a lackluster stint as an actor in the Forties, he found initial success writing screenplays. By the late Fifties, he had graduated to director where he made a slew of popular comedies, while at the same time creating the influential detective series Peter Gunn for the rival medium of television. Three decades later, after a bumpy career filled with financial flops and feuds with studio executives, Edwards must have been irresistibly attracted to Rod Amateau's story of 1920s Hollywood. This nostalgic tale concerning a fictional mystery solved by the partnership of movie cowboy Tom Mix and legendary lawman Wyatt Earp, afforded Edwards the perfect opportunity to combine some of his favourite genres while enabling him to lift the veil on this largely overlooked era. This was a time when the studio bosses ran Hollywood as their private fiefdom, fiercely protecting their empires from scandal. Not surprisingly these movie moguls were often as debauched as their employees and given their unlimited power within the community they posed a dangerous threat to individual welfare. Lives could be written off with the stroke of a pen, and it is Edward's zeal in exposing this hypocritical abuse of authority that is at the core of this deceptively light film. Completely forgotten since its release, this lost treasure can now be fully appreciated on DVD, where Anthony Richmond's burnished widescreen cinematography is well displayed, as are the charming star performances of Bruce Willis as Mix and James Garner as Earp, a role he originally embodied as a younger more embittered hero in John Sturges' Hour of the Gun (1967).

The Rocketeer (1991)

During the 1930s, the stars, more than the stories were what the public flocked to see at the movies. Handsome leading men like Clark Gable, and Errol Flynn were sold to audiences as the same devil-may care personalities off-screen as well as on, but the true tales of their sordid behavior was always kept under wraps until Flynn's rape trial in the Forties. This fantasy adventure film takes place in 1938 and concerns a young pilot played with earnest heroism by Bill Campbell, who accidentally acquires a rocket pack sought by Timothy Dalton, winkingly cast as a "fictional" mustachioed swashbuckling actor and secret Nazi spy. Flynn himself was once wrongly accused of similar treachery, but despite the truth, rumors have lingered and are cleverly exploited for this tongue-in-cheek portrait of Hollywood. The witty screenplay by Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo adapted from Dave Steven's legendary graphic novel effortlessly recreates the superficiality of an era when the polished veneer of fame could hide the treasonous activities of a saboteur. This non-anamorphic DVD from Disney does little to display the lush elegance of Hiro Narita's cinematography and James D. Bissell's sumptuous production design, and the lack of bonus features for such a high profile release is shocking, even accounting for the film's surprising unpopularity.

Barton Fink (1991)

By the 1940s Hollywood had now established itself as a booming film factory attracting novelists and playwrights with promises of sunny weather and fat paychecks that could sustain these struggling artists during periods of creative inertia. This feature from the film-making team of Joel and Ethan Coen, is a mocking evocation of this time, following the surreal adventures of New York playwright Barton Fink in Los Angeles circa 1941. There he encounters various stock characters including manic studio executives, a washed-up drunken novelist, and a psychopathic insurance salesman. As played by John Turturro, Fink, whose physical appearance resembles socialist writer Clifford Odets, is a pretentious windbag, whose obsession with the "Common Man" is belied by an almost complete lack of interest in anything outside of the self-involved atmosphere of the theatre. The Coen Brothers may be satirizing the artistic ignorance of Hollywood, but their real barbs are reserved for their hapless protagonist, a creator of art whose myopic naivete leaves him easy prey to an industry gorged with avaricious egos. Unfortunately as per the habit of the filmmakers, there are few in the way of bonus features on the DVD. The paltry offerings here amount to a collection of deleted segments that do little to expand one's understanding or enjoyment of the film itself.

White Hunter Black Heart (1990)

After the victorious end of World War II, Hollywood discovered the benefits of overseas locations for their productions. Jungles no longer had to be artificial and with the advancement in air travel, the actors themselves could be transported to these exotic places where the realism of a film could be immeasurably improved. However, profitability of these expensive excursions often depended on the courage and determination of the director. John Huston possessed these qualities in spades, having demonstrated them with his masterful Mexico-shot classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In 1950 he set out for East Africa to film The African Queen, where his larger-than-life approach to film-making created no end of troubles, a unique experience later fictionalized by his co-screenwriter Peter Viertel in the novel White Hunter Black Heart. Filmmaker Clint Eastwood also sees himself as a maverick both on-screen and off, so the character of self-destructive director John Wilson in Viertel's roman a clef must have seemed like a seductive challenge to a actor known more for the size of his gun than the range of his talent. Whereas Huston's verbosity often got him into trouble, Eastwood's silence typically kept him out of it. Therefore in impersonating the loquacious filmmaker, Eastwood under his own direction, successfully performed the most formidable role of his acting life. Fortunately with his loyal crew, careful preparation and quiet tenacity Eastwood also triumphed where Huston failed, by reducing the potential pitfalls of the African locations and delivering the film on schedule and budget. Unfortunately the story of the making of an acknowledged classic can never compete with the art of the original work, nevertheless this dark journey into the troubled soul of a cinematic genius makes for compelling entertainment, and is Eastwood's most overlooked masterpiece.