The Screengrab : american movie

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

According to conventional Hollywood wisdom (which, of course, is never wrong), movies about the moviemaking process are bad box office bets, since the subject is far too esoteric for mainstream audiences, too “inside” for Joe Multiplex. Never mind that Americans are obsessed with pop culture, with every other person in the nation either writing a screenplay, uploading their own mini-masterpieces to YouTube and/or tracking box office returns, buzzworthy coming attractions and day-to-day movie star minutiae in every form of media from Entertainment Tonight and our own humble website to CNN and Cigar Aficionado magazine. And never mind the fact that movies about movies are just as likely to succeed (Get Shorty, The Blair Witch Project...yes, The Blair Witch Project! They were making a movie, remember?) or fail (that awful Alec Baldwin/John Cusack movie I rented a few months ago about a fake movie financed by the FBI...ugh) as any other genre.

Naturally, as film geeks, we here at The Screengrab have always had a special place in our black little hearts for stories about the high-powered moguls and desperate hustlers drawn like doomed moths to the lights, cameras and especially action of the Dream Factory (in all its forms).

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be rushing out to see Ben Stiller’s latest comedy (about a group of spoiled actors who start off shooting a war film and wind up in a real shooting war), but the release of Tropic Thunder does give us a chance to reflect on past favorites from our favorite post-modern genre: movies about movies!

AMERICAN MOVIE (1999)

As Spinal Tap is to rock and roll, so American Movie is to the world of low-budget independent filmmaking. Detailing working class Wisconsinite Mark Borchardt's failed attempts to launch production of his dream project Northwestern and subsequent determination to complete the 35-minute horror film Coven, Movie is both hilarious and thoroughly moving. The pitfalls of no-budget filmmaking provide some of the most uproarious moments, such as a Coven scene in which Borchardt's character shoves his support group sponsor's head through a non-breakaway cabinet door, but the film's surprising emotional depth derives from Borchardt's relationships with his family and friends, including gentle burnout Mike Schank and the increasingly decrepit and fatalistic Uncle Bill. Schank's maniacal screeching during a sound effects dubbing session and Uncle Bill's repeated attempts to nail his single line of dialogue leave some doubt as to whether Borchardt will be able to pull off his project, but the finished product reveals flashes of wit and an eye for the sort of harsh, gloomy compositions he professes to admire (as well as some admittedly Ed Wood-level writing and acting). Last time we checked, Borchardt was still hoping to make Northwestern, but even if he never pulls it off, the essence of that dream project informs this documentary, investing it with an indomitable spirit and passion for life.

STATE AND MAIN (2000)

When David Mamet set his poison pen to a Hollywood satire, the result was far from the scathing warts-and-all expose one might expect from the author of Glengarry Glenn Ross. Instead, State and Main is a frothy, good-natured screwball comedy pitting the cast and crew of what appears to be an earnest period melodrama, The Old Mill, against the residents of their filming location, the quintessentially picturesque New England town of Waterford, Vermont. William H. Macy is the exasperated director, Alec Baldwin is the leading man with a weakness for underage girls, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is the screenwriter forced to rewrite his script when it turns out Waterford doesn't have an old mill after all. The usual course of events would have the simple but good-hearted natives teaching the soulless Hollywood invaders a lesson or two about small town values, but that's not what Mamet is up to here. He knows media-saturated America has reached the point where everyone's a show biz insider; thus a scraggly pair of diner denizens chew over Variety's weekend box office figures while the cook ponders the trajectory of Warner Bros. stock since 1985. Locals and La-La-landers alike get their fair share of jabs, but the tone is generally more affectionate than condescending or malicious.

THE STUNT MAN (1980)

Richard Rush's kinetic action comedy -- in which a possibly crazy Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback) on the run from the law takes refuge among the crew on a location film shoot and discovers that, compared to a bunch of Hollywood professionals, he doesn't know from craziness -- features maybe the greatest depiction of a big-time movie director ever caught on film: Peter O'Toole as Eli Cross, a megalomaniac and a madman but not a bad guy. Eli, who's trying to keep the people working under him simultaneously entertained and cowed while doing whatever he can think of to inject some purifying "madness" into the stock World War I movie he's shooting, makes his entrance in a helicopter and is often perched seated on a crane, so that he can dip into the frame from on high; "If God could do the tricks we can do," he cackles, "He'd be a happy man!" As Rush's reward for having made one of the best movies about moviemaking, he got to watch as his picture became semi-legendary for the efforts of the studio to declare it unreleasable despite fawning reviews and solid business when they booked it into a West Coast theater for a weekend just to prove that it would bomb.

THE BIG PICTURE (1989)

This was the first feature film directed by Christopher Guest, but it's not a "mockumentary"; it's a scripted comedy starring Kevin Bacon as an eager, idealistic young director whose award-winning short film gets him snatched up by a big studio, which promises him carte blanche to make his first real movie. He goes straight into the shredder head first. Far superior to Guest's more recent For Your Consideration, it features a stellar rogue's gallery of Hollywood phonies, including J. T. Walsh and Tracy Brooks Swope as revolving-door studio heads, Teri Hatcher as a starlet looking for the right shark to hook onto, Jennifer Jason Leigh as a confused young would-be artist, and most amazing of all, Martin Short as a scumbag agent. With his frizzy 'do and lying eyes, he looks like a Hobbit who found the One Ring and pawned it for a ticket to L.A.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Vanishing Act: The “Greenlight” Gang

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

For three seasons (two on HBO and a final one on Bravo), Project Greenlight attempted to capture the filmmaking drama found in documentaries like American Movie or Overnight. Since Greenlight was a reality show, a certain amount of the drama was contrived: the subjects were contest winners, and despite the stated intentions of producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, their projects were not necessarily selected on the basis of artistic merit.

For the inaugural season in 2002, apple-cheeked neophyte Pete Jones and his family-friendly script Stolen Summer were selected for production, with budget to be provided by Miramax (which also produced the series). Jones directed his own script (an arrangement that would not be repeated in subsequent seasons), and while the series documenting his efforts proved to be quite entertaining, the resulting film was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Still, even though he came off as somewhat oafish and full of himself on the show, the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity held true. Jones made enough of a name for himself to take some meetings in L.A. and pitch a new comedy about a closeted gay man who decides to come out to his family, only to find they don’t believe him. No deal materialized, and eventually Jones and his brothers financed the movie, Outing Riley, themselves. Jones took on the title role and snagged Nathan Fillion and Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin for the supporting cast. The film played some festivals in 2004 and was released on video last year.

Project Greenlight’s second season suffered from sequel-itis. Producer Chris Moore, breakout reality star of the first season, apparently read his reviews and played up his villainous persona to an embarrassing degree. The victims were screenwriter Erica Beeney and co-directors Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle, the mismatched creative team behind The Battle of Shaker Heights. Rankin and Potelle have talent, as evidenced in their wacky short films like Pennyweight, but seemed ill-suited to bring Beeney’s coming-of-age story to life. Nonetheless, Shaker Heights has enjoyed a long afterlife on cable, probably because it stars current It Boy Shia LeBeouf. Beeney has no writing credits since, but Rankin has written and directed the horror-comedy Infestation (with Potelle producing, acting and supervising the special effects), due later this year from Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions.

After the second season, HBO cut ties with Greenlight, which relocated to Bravo. In a desperate attempt to keep the series going – and keep the money flowing from the Weinstein brothers – Moore, Damon and Affleck announced that the third Greenlight movie would be a commercial genre piece. This turned out to be good news for the winning screenwriters, Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, whose horror screenplay Feast led to gigs writing later installments of the Saw series, as well as a remake of Hellraiser. In addition, the DVD release of Feast was successful enough to spawn two sequels, both penned by Dunstan and Melton and directed by John Gulager, Greenlight III’s designated goofus. In this respect, the show’s third season can be regarded as the most successful, but the producers’ hoped-for outcome never materialized, as future installments of the series got the red light. Still, we’ll always have Feast:

Vanishing Act: Mark Borchardt

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

One of the great films of the 1990s was American Movie, Chris Smith’s documentary about working class Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Borchardt and his efforts to complete Coven, a short horror movie about an alcoholic writer. Smith’s film was both a hilarious look at the pitfalls of no-budget filmmaking (as in the signature scene of Borchardt shoving an actor’s head through a non-breakaway cabinet door) and a poignant depiction of economically deprived Middle America. A star was born in the person of Borchardt’s gentle burnout sidekick Mike Schank, who stole every scene in which he appeared.

The American Movie DVD featured the completed Coven, which offered the sort of amateurish performances and unintentional laughs you might expect, but also revealed surprising flashes of wit and an eye for bleak compositions and grim, bare-bones settings. Borchardt’s ostensible reason for making the short was to sell 3000 video copies of it, in order to finance his dream feature film project, Northwestern. He sold at least 5000 via the American Movie website, so it wasn’t out of the question that Northwestern would get made sooner than later.

Nine years later, history seems to be repeating itself. On the one hand, things have certainly improved for Borchardt since his days of delivering newspapers and vacuuming crypts. He has an acting career of sorts; you may have seen him as “Skeeter” in The Godfather of Green Bay or “Al the drunk at the bar” in Zombie Island, and he has four roles lined up for 2008, including one in Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. He’s still hoping to make Northwestern, but in the meantime he’s working on another horror film about an alcoholic writer, this one called Scare Me. And as you may not be surprised to learn, it has been in production for quite some time now.

An entry from Borchardt’s long-since abandoned American Movie diary notes that shooting began in early 2003. An undated Premiere blurb finds Borchardt in the midst of auditions, and reports that “funding is no longer an insurmountable problem. Local businesses have pitched in everything from props to locations, including the Elks Lodge and a former roller-skating rink.” A 2005 release was targeted, according to this profile, but in the interview clip below dated February 2007 he admits, “I don’t know when we last shot it or did anything.” IMDb optimistically claims Scare Me will be released next month; if that happens, we’ll be sure to let you know.