How about “Scream 3”?
Or “Get Shorty?”
Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle skewers the movie industry, and Ah-nold Schwartzeneggar’s The Last Action Hero skewers genre movie conventions, and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is about racist preconceptions in television.
So I got nothing. Maybe we can lump these three under “honorable mentions.”
Oh, wait. Lee’s student film, The Answer, posits a black filmmaker chosen to helm the remake of D.W. Griffith’s *Birth of A Nation. *
Not the easiest film to get into, but worth a rental.
Baadasss!, which I watched just last night, thanks to the miracle of Netflix, is about Melvin van Peebles making “Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song” and just about destroying himself in the process. It was made by his son, Mario van Peebles, who plays Melvin. Neat movie.
RKO 281 a made for TV drama about the making of Citizen Kane
The Bad and The Beautiful and The Barefoot Contessa deal with moviemaking, with some scenes involving filming.
[nitpick]
Belgian.
[/nitpick]
Fassbinder’s Warnung vor einer Heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore.)
Living in Oblivion reminded me a lot of this movie.
One of the things that I like about Living in Oblivion:
[spoiler]It’s entirely dream sequences. At no point in the film is anyone actually awake. It’s dream-sequence-within-dream-sequence, much of which involves dreaming about simulating dreaming.
Who’s dream is it? It might be the Red King’s dream, or Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’s.[/spoiler]
Perfect Blue is a nice little Polanski-ish tale about a film production that is marred by serial murders. Sort of.
One of my all time favorites not mentioned yet:
with Clint Eastwood directing and starring as John Wilson (John Houston) and his trip to Africa to film The African Queen where he is more obsessed with hunting elephants tahn making the film.
A Midwinter’s Tale revolves around a bunch of neurotic British Hacktors staging Hamlet in a falling down church.
Not about a movie, but still entirely in that “behind the curtain” vein. One of my all time faves.
Hey! I almost forgot one of my favourite movies ever:
Crime Wave. Not the Sam Raimi movie of the same name which was released the same year, but a tragically under-distributed Canadian indie that is something extremely special.
It’s about a writer/director who’s working on a script for a noirish picture. He’s a peculiar character that has a few quirks. He doesn’t speak much. He rents a makeshift room in a suburban family’s garage, and his schedule is set by the streetlamp outside his window, which produces the only light he can write by. Oh, and he can only write beginnings and endings – he can’t seem to come up with a middle to connect them. (The audience gets to see every iteration of his script as though it had been realized.)
The family’s juvenile daughter is thrilled to have a movie person living in the garage, and does everything in her power to help him with his writer’s block and hook him up with a producer.
What makes the movie especially awesome is the way it looks, though: It’s shot entirely on expired 16mm Kodak colour film, which gives it a supersaturated, hallucinatory feel. The sound mix is excellent, too.