Films about the Dark Side of Hollywood
Jun 22, 2018 22:25:00 GMT
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Post by petrolino on Jun 22, 2018 22:25:00 GMT
The Dark Side Of Hollywood
"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul."
- Marilyn Monroe
'I Love L.A.' - Starcrawler
A Star Is Born (1937)
"A Star is Born came into being when producer David O. Selznick decided to tell a "true behind-the-scenes" story of Hollywood. The truth, of course, was filtered a bit for box-office purposes, although Selznick and an army of screenwriters based much of their script on actual people and events."
- Hal Erickson, Rovi
Sullivan's Travels (1941)
"In Preston Sturges' classic comedy of Depression-era America, filmmaker John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), fed up with directing profitable comedies like "Ants in Your Plants of 1939," is consumed with the desire to make a serious social statement in his upcoming film, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" Unable to function in the rarefied atmosphere of Hollywood, Sullivan decides to hit the road, disguised as a tramp, and touch base with the "real" people of America. But Sullivan's studio transforms his odyssey into a publicity stunt, providing the would-be nomad with a luxury van, complete with butler (Robert Greig) and valet (Eric Blore). Advised by his servants that the poor resent having the rich intrude upon them, Sullivan escapes his retinue and continues his travels incognito. En route, he meets a down-and-out failed actress (Veronica Lake)."
- Hal Erickson, Rovi
In A Lonely Place (1950)
"Apparently, In a Lonely Place director Nicholas Ray had lived at Villa Primavera upon first moving to Southern California in the 1940s and was so enamored with the place that he decided to build a replica of the entire complex, courtyard and all, on a soundstage at Columbia Studios (now Sunset-Gower Studios) in Hollywood to be used as Humphrey Bogart’s bachelor pad in the flick. At some point during the shoot, Nicholas walked in on his wife, Gloria Grahame, who also starred in the movie, in bed with his 13-year-old son from a previous marriage. Nicholas immediately moved out of the home he shared with Gloria and into the Villa Primavera apartment set, where he ended up living – in what was essentially an exact replica of his former apartment – until filming wrapped. Because the building was so inextricably linked with both In a Lonely Place and the behind-the-scenes turmoil that marked the shoot, I was absolutely dying to see the place in person and dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to do just that a few days later.
Villa Primavera was constructed by legendary husband and wife architecture team Arthur and Nina Zwebell in 1923 and was the couple’s very first Spanish-Revival-style building. The charming complex features red-tile roofs, white adobe walls, and a central courtyard with a large tiled fountain, an outdoor fireplace, lush foliage, and wandering brick pathways. The individual apartment units boast corner fireplaces, exposed wood ceilings, and tile floors. The Zwebells loved the design so much that they eventually moved into the Hacienda-like property for a time and legend has it that James Dean and Katharine Hepburn also once called the place home."
Villa Primavera was constructed by legendary husband and wife architecture team Arthur and Nina Zwebell in 1923 and was the couple’s very first Spanish-Revival-style building. The charming complex features red-tile roofs, white adobe walls, and a central courtyard with a large tiled fountain, an outdoor fireplace, lush foliage, and wandering brick pathways. The individual apartment units boast corner fireplaces, exposed wood ceilings, and tile floors. The Zwebells loved the design so much that they eventually moved into the Hacienda-like property for a time and legend has it that James Dean and Katharine Hepburn also once called the place home."
- Lindsay, 'Villa Primavera – The “In a Lonely Place” Apartment Building'
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
"Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a classic black comedy/drama, and perhaps the most acclaimed, but darkest film-noir story about "behind the scenes" Hollywood, self-deceit, spiritual and spatial emptiness, and the price of fame, greed, narcissism, and ambition. The mood of the film is immediately established as decadent and decaying by the posthumous narrator - a dead man floating face-down in a swimming pool in Beverly Hills.
With caustic, bitter wit in a story that blends both fact and fiction and dream and reality, co-writer/director Billy Wilder realistically exposes (with numerous in-jokes) the corruptive, devastating influences of the new Hollywood and the studio system by showing the decline of old Hollywood legends many years after the coming of sound. The screenplay was based on the story A Can of Beans by Wilder and Brackett - this was the last collaborative film effort of Brackett and Wilder who had worked together on many films since 1938."
With caustic, bitter wit in a story that blends both fact and fiction and dream and reality, co-writer/director Billy Wilder realistically exposes (with numerous in-jokes) the corruptive, devastating influences of the new Hollywood and the studio system by showing the decline of old Hollywood legends many years after the coming of sound. The screenplay was based on the story A Can of Beans by Wilder and Brackett - this was the last collaborative film effort of Brackett and Wilder who had worked together on many films since 1938."
- Tim Dirks, Filmsite
The Bad And The Beautiful (1952)
"In the early 1950s, as the big studio system breathed its last, Hollywood produced a succession of classic Tinseltown fables: Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place, Singin' in the Rain, The Barefoot Contessa, A Star Is Born and, right in the middle, The Bad and the Beautiful, made in 1952 and back in the cinemas to accompany a Minnelli retrospective at the NFT. Though directed with Vincente Minnelli's characteristic delicacy, this is essentially a producer's film, made by John Houseman, one of the great figures of 20th-century American theatre and cinema. Houseman's first Hollywood job was supervising the script of Citizen Kane, his second was working for David O Selznick. In The Bad and the Beautiful, Houseman applies a similar structure, intelligence and suavity to a ruthless Hollywood genius much like Selznick as he brought to Charles Foster Kane."
- Philip French, The Guardian
Singin' In The Rain (1952)
"Singin' in the Rain (1952) is one of the most-loved and celebrated film musicals of all time from MGM, before a mass exodus to filmed adaptations of Broadway plays emerged as a standard pattern. It was made directly for film, and was not a Broadway adaptation. The joyous film, co-directed by Stanley Donen and acrobatic dancer-star-choreographer Gene Kelly, is a charming, up-beat, graceful and thoroughly enjoyable experience with great songs, lots of flashbacks, wonderful dances (including the spectacular Broadway Melody Ballet with leggy guest star Cyd Charisse), casting and story.
This was another extraordinary example of the organic, 'integrated musical' in which the story's characters naturally express their emotions in the midst of their lives. Song and dance replace the dialogue, usually during moments of high spirits or passionate romance. And over half of the film - a 'let's put on a play' type of film, is composed of musical numbers. This superb film, called "MGM's TECHNICOLOR Musical Treasure," was produced during MGM studios' creative pinnacle. From the late 1930s to the early 1960s, producer Arthur Freed produced more than forty musicals for MGM. The creative forces at the studio in the Freed Unit - composed of Freed, Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen, and actor/choreographer Gene Kelly - also collaborated together to produce such gems as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), Best Picture Oscar-winner a year earlier with director Vincente Minnelli - An American in Paris (1951), Royal Wedding (1951), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), and Gigi (1958).
Because the colorful, witty film is set in 1927, it humorously satirizes and parodies the panic surrounding the troubling transitional period from silents to talkies in the dream factory of Hollywood of the late 1920s as the sound revolution swept through. The film's screenplay, suggested by the song Singin' in the Rain that was written by Freed and Brown, was scripted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who also wrote On the Town (1949))."
This was another extraordinary example of the organic, 'integrated musical' in which the story's characters naturally express their emotions in the midst of their lives. Song and dance replace the dialogue, usually during moments of high spirits or passionate romance. And over half of the film - a 'let's put on a play' type of film, is composed of musical numbers. This superb film, called "MGM's TECHNICOLOR Musical Treasure," was produced during MGM studios' creative pinnacle. From the late 1930s to the early 1960s, producer Arthur Freed produced more than forty musicals for MGM. The creative forces at the studio in the Freed Unit - composed of Freed, Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen, and actor/choreographer Gene Kelly - also collaborated together to produce such gems as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), Best Picture Oscar-winner a year earlier with director Vincente Minnelli - An American in Paris (1951), Royal Wedding (1951), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), and Gigi (1958).
Because the colorful, witty film is set in 1927, it humorously satirizes and parodies the panic surrounding the troubling transitional period from silents to talkies in the dream factory of Hollywood of the late 1920s as the sound revolution swept through. The film's screenplay, suggested by the song Singin' in the Rain that was written by Freed and Brown, was scripted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who also wrote On the Town (1949))."
- Tim Dirks, Filmsite
Lord Love A Duck (1966)
"George Axelrod's corrosively satiric Lord Love a Duck is one of the most irreverent and cockeyed films of the 1960s. MGM's new DVD of the film includes a promotional short in which the writer-director describes his film as a black comedy that crosses Dr. Strangelove (1964) with the uber-conventional family drama starring Mickey Rooney, Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938). This gives some sense of Duck's fractured perspective, as do the adjectives "razor-sharp, missile-modern," but all fail to express the film's remarkable veering from juvenile sight gags to bleak domestic drama to bitter denunciations of the cult of personality.
The course of Axelrod's career (1922-2003) traces a similar range. He began as a successful writer of Broadway sex farces, such as The Seven Year Itch, filmed in 1955 by Billy Wilder as a vehicle for Marilyn Monroe. Axelrod's piece for Jayne Mansfield, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1956), achieved equally memorable cinematic transformation by Frank Tashlin, whose over-the-top style clearly influenced Axelrod's own work behind the camera. Turning from originals to adaptations, Axelrod wrote Blake Edwards' Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), drawn from Truman Capote's novella, and John Frankenheimer's vitriolic thriller, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The opportunity to direct came in 1966. He jokes in the promotional short that Lord Love A Duck "may look like a beach picture, but is actually a booby trap."
The course of Axelrod's career (1922-2003) traces a similar range. He began as a successful writer of Broadway sex farces, such as The Seven Year Itch, filmed in 1955 by Billy Wilder as a vehicle for Marilyn Monroe. Axelrod's piece for Jayne Mansfield, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1956), achieved equally memorable cinematic transformation by Frank Tashlin, whose over-the-top style clearly influenced Axelrod's own work behind the camera. Turning from originals to adaptations, Axelrod wrote Blake Edwards' Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), drawn from Truman Capote's novella, and John Frankenheimer's vitriolic thriller, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The opportunity to direct came in 1966. He jokes in the promotional short that Lord Love A Duck "may look like a beach picture, but is actually a booby trap."
- David Sanjek, Pop Matters
The Day Of The Locust (1975)
"The locusts are the little people, faceless and sad, who accumulate on the benches of Los Angeles, waiting for a bus that will never come. They're surrounded by the artificial glitter of Hollywood, which provides dreams that certainly are happier and sometimes seem more real than the America of the 1930s. But one day, the dreams will end and the locusts will swarm and the whole fragile society will come crashing down.
That was the apocalyptic vision of Nathanael West's 1938 novel "The Day of the Locust," and it's a vision elaborated on, sometimes too literally, in John Schlesinger's expensive, daring, epic film. Hollywood is taken as a metaphor for an America that was moving from depression to war, and its fantasies outrun themselves until all that's left is anarchy. The story is seen in terms of a handful of characters that Sherwood Anderson would have described as Grotesques: otherwise mostly normal people with one attribute so out of proportion that the whole personality is disturbed."
That was the apocalyptic vision of Nathanael West's 1938 novel "The Day of the Locust," and it's a vision elaborated on, sometimes too literally, in John Schlesinger's expensive, daring, epic film. Hollywood is taken as a metaphor for an America that was moving from depression to war, and its fantasies outrun themselves until all that's left is anarchy. The story is seen in terms of a handful of characters that Sherwood Anderson would have described as Grotesques: otherwise mostly normal people with one attribute so out of proportion that the whole personality is disturbed."
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
The Last Tycoon (1976)
"In 1976, Elia Kazan was prepared to release his final film, The Last Tycoon. His previous two films, The Arrangement and The Visitors were not well received. Unfortunately, neither was The Last Tycoon. The film was based on a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald of the same title. This was a difficult adaptation as Fitzgerald had died before the novel could be completed. Luckily for any fans the entire plot was mapped out.
Peter Bogdanovich turned down a chance to direct. After that, Mike Nicholas was hired to direct and he intended to hire Dustin Hoffman in the lead role as Monroe Stahr. After Nichols was removed from directing The Last Tycoon, producer Sam Spiegel was left with no option but to track down an old friend who was practically retired. That old friend was Elia Kazan who never expected to be making anymore films."
Peter Bogdanovich turned down a chance to direct. After that, Mike Nicholas was hired to direct and he intended to hire Dustin Hoffman in the lead role as Monroe Stahr. After Nichols was removed from directing The Last Tycoon, producer Sam Spiegel was left with no option but to track down an old friend who was practically retired. That old friend was Elia Kazan who never expected to be making anymore films."
- Wilbert Takken, 'Every Elia Kazan Movie'
'Floating Head' - Wand
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