When Entourage hit HBO in 2004, there was a bit of a sigh of relief, and not just by those who have a particular taste for pay-cable nudity. The idea of a show actually depicting and, by extension, analyzing the behind-closed-doors dealings that popular, up-and-coming actors face when their buzz peaks is immediately fascinating and for a moment, it seemed that Entourage might have been that show. This coupled with Vince and E’s business partnership made all the bro-dog bullshit borderline palatable for the first three seasons or so of the series, before the frat-boy mentality, nudity, and increasingly unconvincing plot turns took over.

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Image via Antiteater-X-Film

Still, the storylines that actually focused on the film industry in Entourage – the Aquaman roll-out, the Escobar-movie fiasco, the dealings with Warner Bros., etc. – resonate because they offered a view of the working industry rather than all the glitzy benefits of a glamorous lifestyle. Even if Entourage wasn’t the long-form insider glimpse it once looked to be, there’ve been plenty of works that have offered rousing insight into the process. There’s an irresistible allure to films about filmmaking because they seem to be immediately reflexive, a peek into how the work you’re watching got made or how those who made it got where they are. At their best, these sorts of films lend expressive force to the art and craft of making moving pictures while simultaneously deconstructing the luck and endless toil that went into creating these images.

So, in honor of what Entourage might have been, I decided to go through 10 of the very best films focused on the business of making movies, touching on a variety of angles explored in a vast array of artists who have seasoned perspectives on the impossible, demanding work of making what audiences are happy enough to refer to as “movie magic.”

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Image via Cineriz

 

Burden of Dreams

In which the inventive documentarian Les Blank follows German master Werner Herzog into the forests surrounding the Peru-Ecuador border to catch the filmmaker’s forge to make Fitzcarraldo, one of his most celebrated works of mad ambition. Herzog’s film depicts the moving of a three-story ship on dry land between two tributaries by a wealthy opera fan (Klaus Kinski), in the hopes of bringing the work of Enrico Caruso to indigenous tribes. The character is obsessed with this odd and oddly moving dream, a reflection of Herzog’s own crazed creative spirit. Blank catches Herzog lost in his own dream of realizing the seemingly impossible, balanced by a fanatical interest in the real dangers and unstable political reverberations of Herzog’s most outlandish and ultimately outstanding undertaking.

Day for Night

The sobered-up doppelganger to R.W. Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (see below), Francois Truffaut’s sublime look at a major studio production is one of the great works of filmic deconstruction. If Fassbinder got caught up in the intoxicants and personal squabbles that bog down the filmmaking process, Truffaut saw the financial hopscotch, personal passions, and technical mistakes that dog the set as far more interesting than the tremendously labored-over falseness of the constructed narrative itself. Unlike his buddy, Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut bought into the linear storytelling apparatus that powers Hollywood, only to then subvert that apparatus through his wise, clever screenplays and imagistic intellect; Godard, in comparison, radicalized the form itself and undermined storytelling through deadpan performances, blatantly political screenplays, and the most forward-thinking editing style ever conceived. Godard’s films are knotty, chaotic, and impossible to describe in most cases, whereas Day for Night is understandable as a story but alludes to a variety of confrontational notions about film viewership and direction roiling underneath its gorgeous, active veneer.

The Player

The caustic tone of Robert Altman’s inside-Hollywood masterwork suggests bitterness towards the business of modern moviemaking, but there’s joyousness to the constant dramatic invention and endless filmic references of The Player that very simply outweighs the more astringent exchanges. The key to this strange and resonant film is that any nostalgia for the old studio system is muzzled in favor of a total immersion into the dog-eat-dog world of 1990-era studio production, which Altman complicates with a noir-tinged plot that revolves around a self-entitled producer (Tim Robbins) murdering an angry screenwriter and idolizer of black-and-white studio fair. Years before Adaptation, Altman interwove a dark, brittle view of those who hold the ultimate power in his profession with an antic and absurd narrative that indulges the joyful, safe stupidity that modern studios depend on for box office returns while also not-so-quietly criticizing that very empty-headedness.

8 1/2

The inability to separate the imagined from the real is the infliction that powers Federico Fellini’s superb 8 ½, which is itself a creative self-diagnosis of sorts. Marcello Mastroianni offers up one of his most iconic performances, as Guido Anselmi, a famed and increasingly stressed filmmaker, as a fictional view of Fellini, and the man behind Amarcord and La Dolce Vita sets his star in a world where memories, fantasies, and the occasional pinch of real-life drama are stirred up into an intoxicating, feverish dream of the life of an artist. Amongst the sensuous and decadent detours involving sex, inebriants, and the empty splendors of wealth, however, Fellini finds a throbbing pulse of pain and regret, an unshakeable sense of the emptiness of this profession and the meaninglessness of a life without struggle. Death can be spotted often among the imaginative debris of Anselmi’s dream-world, and the final, carnival-esque images of the film suggest an acceptance of mortality and a divine refusal to allow such certainties to hamper the imagination or, for that matter, life itself.

The Bad and the Beautiful

Vincente Minnelli is largely known as a musical man (An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, etc.) but his melodramas were as wild, personal, and delightfully unhinged as any of the song-and-dance numbers that litter his oeuvre. And none of those melodramas is as seething and challenging as The Bad and the Beautiful, in which Minnelli casts Kirk Douglas as the hotly ambitious producer Jonathan Shields, who uses and discards friends and collaborators until he’s run out of good faith. Unlike many modern films, Minnelli isn’t quick to fawn over the role of the producer, offering instead a complex view of the work of a producer in the studio system. Shields wants to be the great man to overturn the toxic stigma his father, also a major producer, gave their name, but he doesn’t see how his rampant ambition alienates him from others, especially when he uses this drive to excuse personal slights. As creative as he is, Shields is self-satisfied and self-interested to the bone, casting away colleagues without thought, and yet at the end, as his friends finally turn their back on him, they can’t help but want to hear what he has to say, echoing the power of great producers.

Singin' in the Rain

I shouldn’t have to explain this one to you, and you’ve almost certainly already seen Stanley Donen’s wonderful musical. Still, it’s important to remember just how explosive this film feels when you first come across it, and just how bold this story of Hollywood in transition was when it was released in theaters. Donen’s film is marked by Gene Kelly’s fancy footwork but the underlying philosophy embedded in the script here is cautionary. The film world does not tolerate those who cannot change with the times, or those who have no interest in broadening their talents, and no matter how studios may want to resist change, great artists will simply find a way to undermine that resistance. In a time where big studios are banking on repeating not only story structures but also imagery to ensure continued profits for…more unoriginal dreck, there’s solace to be found in the fact that no trend has survived for all that long in Hollywood. Sooner or later, change comes and makes desperate fools out of those who can’t keep up

Contempt

Often considered one of JLG’s most straightforward works, Contempt is, like The Player, simultaneously an indulgence and a critical manifesto. A screenwriter, played by Michel Piccoli, is summoned to the screening room and finally the home of a power-hungry American studio head (Jack Palance), who goes on to steal away his wife and leave him in the dust when the writer dares to challenge his view. In many ways, it’s a supposition, a take on what might have happened if Godard had gone mainstream or, at the very least, taken more meetings with executives who wanted him to give in to commercialism completely. This isn’t to say, however, that Godard takes it easy on himself, as Piccoli’s character is portrayed as a womanizer and more than a bit of a snob as he roams the more bucolic environs of Naples. At the center of the film is the power and seduction of money, which Godard portrays as inarguably necessary to such artistic endeavors but also intrinsically crass and corrosive to the unbound spirit of personal expression.

American Movie

In the age of nickel-and-dime horror films that are stocked in the back catalogs of Netflix’s servers, American Movie takes on an even more moving and relatable tone than it did at the end of the 1990s when it saw limited release. The no-budget horror production at the center of Chris Smith’s hilarious and heartfelt documentary is a reflection of all independent film productions, not unlike those Smith himself has been working on or helming over the last few decades. What he captures here is the small-scale hardships and financial scrambling that goes into even the most miniature and forgettable of films, to say nothing of the good-humored humanity and riotous chatter that helps these productions get off the ground and, fingers crossed, finished. Mike Borchardt’s struggle to make Coven finally serves as a stark reminder that filmmaking, even in its most rudimentary form, is thankless, hard work that requires passion and drive that many of those who cackle and poke fun at such low-tier fare very simply don’t have, and likely never will.

The Father of My Children

Speaking of producers, here’s another effective portrait of movie production, though this one sports a far more modern perspective on the producer’s place in filmmaking. Mia Hansen-Løve’s melancholic drama gives us most filmmakers’ dream: a well-watched movie producer who loves film and wants to help artists get their movies made. His love is also his fatal downfall, as his total ignorance of the fiscal implications and fall-out of even the most major of art films leads to his company, Moon Films, going bankrupt. The film quietly argues that you need people who understand money and audience interest in filmmaking, as much, if not more, than those who love the form and its possibilities. It’s a challenging perspective that the skilled Hansen-Løve embeds in a story of familial woe and recovery, one that delineates the difference between passion and reason, and how both are required to create a successful film, no matter what your definition of “success” may be.