DAY FOR NIGHT (1973)
Though cinema originated in America and nearly every film on this list depicts Americans making American movies, celluloid fever is by no means limited to the United States. Yet even in foreign lands, our influence nevertheless pervades the art form: the original French title of François Truffaut’s shaggy dog charmer is La Nuit américaine, a phrase referring to the filmmaking process known here as day-for-night, which literally translates as “American night.” While the main plot of Truffaut’s love letter to his chosen profession involves the offscreen dramas of several above-the-line divas starring in Day For Night’s film within a film, Je Vous Présente Paméla (Meet Pamela), it’s the below-the-line grips, prop men and other crewmembers who are the workaday heart of this naturalistic depiction of the hard work and small victories of any and every film production, an exhilarating, exasperating process where success or failure rests not in the director’s vision or the ultimate quality of the end result, but rather on a zillion unpredictable details like a small cat deciding whether or not to drink milk from a saucer while a dozen otherwise sane adults stand around, clutching heavy equipment, praying to get the shot they need before they lose the light.
HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER'S APOCALYPSE (1991)
This high-water mark of the making-of genre started out with Francis Coppola trying to give his wife, Eleanor, something to do during what turned out to be the years spent working on Apocalypse Now. Eleanor's published journal about the experience, Notes, was published the same year that Apocalypse Now was released, but the sensitive footage she shot would remain unseen until filmmakers George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr took on the task of piecing it together and adding new interviews, narration (by Eleanor Coppola) and such choice outtakes as the infamous "French Plantation sequence", Marlon Brando improvising his way to oblivion, and a broken, drunken Martin Sheen picking a fight with his own reflection and losing. A fascinating story well told, and a better amplification of the original movie than Apocalypse Now Redux.
THE PLAYER (1992)
Robert Altman was never one to shy away from biting the hand that fed him, and this adaptation of Michael Tolkin's scathing Hollywood novel is a prime example. Altman's meta methods reveal themselves right off the bat with a tour-de-force 8-minute tracking shot that gets you thinking about the opening of Touch of Evil just as two onscreen characters start discussing the opening of Touch of Evil. The scores of celebrities appearing as themselves lend an unprecedented verisimilitude to the proceedings, anticipating a huge wave of inside show-biz entertainment to follow, from The Larry Sanders Show to Entourage. In Altman's hands, the satire is never cartoonish, even when a studio exec (Tim Robbins) is realizing every Hollywood suit's fantasy by killing a screenwriter (Vincent D'Onofrio) with his bare hands. Indeed, at times it's barely satire – as in the serious issue film about capital punishment that's transformed by committee into a Bruce Willis action movie with a happy ending. (Three years later, the Demi Moore version of The Scarlet Letter would demonstrate just how far-fetched that plot twist wasn't.) The fact that The Player was the director's biggest hit in decades, making him (at least briefly) a player again is perhaps the most Altmanesque touch of all.
CONTEMPT (1963)
Rarely has a movie so lived up to its title than Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. Godard holds nearly everyone and everything involved with the movie in contempt: its producers, its stars, its characters, its audience, and even itself. He doesn't even spare himself from the bile, using the movie's lead character, Michel Piccoli, as a stand-in representing his own willingness to sacrifice his artistic principles for a shot at a fat paycheck. The movie's plot is the basest and best of romans a clef, so directly mirroring the real-life action behind the scenes that seeing it is practically living it: a crass, commercially-minded American film director (played with loathsome glee by Jack Palance, and meant to be a transparent duplicate of Contempt's actual producer, Joseph Levine) hires an idealistic playwright who takes a scriptwriting job for the paycheck and the three of them – joined by the movie's director and the writer's girlfriend – begin to deeply hate each other throughout the entire course of the film. As if daring the audience not to like the movie, Godard frustrates our expectations at every turn: a violent confrontation fizzles out instead of exploding, an erotic meditation is coldly robbed of its sexuality, and what should be a cathartic emotional confrontation turns into an enervating argument. Incredibly controlled, amazingly well-made, provocative beyond understanding, and one of the most deeply subversive mainstream films ever made, Contempt is brilliant in its portrayal of how movies can be simultaneously bigger and smaller than life.
Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce
