I just finished watching Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, about a woman who thinks that the movie Fargo is real and obsessively studies it trying to figure out where the lost money is located. Anyone got examples of other movies that center around another (real) movie?
(As I’m typing this, I remembered a Jennifer Aniston movie centering around The Graduate. Really about the book, but there is the movie too, so I’ll count it.)
Of course, there’s no shortage of lists of movies about movies, although not all of them are about making a specific movie, which I think is what the OP is looking for.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned RKO 281, a fictional portrayal about Orson Welles’ difficulties in distributing Citizen Kane due to William Randolph Hearst’s machinations.
Adaptation is primarily about screenwiter Charlie Kaufman trying to adapt Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief into a film under contract but instead ending up writing the (mostly fictional) movie the viewer is watching; it does, however, have a brief segment with a couple of scenes set making Kaufman’s previous screenplay (Being John Malkovich) into a film.
Be Kind, Rewind is about video clerks who accidentally erase all of the VHS tapes in their store and recreate the movies by filming themselves in the role.
There are, of course, a lot of films about the making of fictional movies such as 8-1/2, Bowfinger, The Player, Tropic Thunder, State & Main, *Hail, Caeser!*et cetera. However, my favorite fictional film about the film industry is Barton Fink, which is exactly what it is like to try to write for the entertainment industry. Exactly.
If (and it’s a big if)… IF you grant the fantasy that Tom Stoppard wrote one of his famous works after seeing a Hamlet movie, then the movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a movie (containing a play) of a play about a play about a movie of a play containing a play.
In the movie All That Jazz The character of Joe Gideon is working on thinly veiled productions of Bob Fosse’s real life productions of the movie Lenny and the Broadway play Chicago