A Hollywood Story – 5

Hopefully you’ve been thinking about some of the Hollywood films we’ve looked at and you’re contemplating the Hollywood story that you want to write. One of the categories of Hollywood films has to be the insider send-up. That’s a film that explores Hollywood from the inside and it often takes knowledge of the workings of Hollywood to write it. In fact, if you’re a film student or working in Hollywood as an assistant, for example, this may be a category worth exploring.

I want to look at a couple of films in this category—this week, it’s The Big Picture [1989] co-written by Michael Varhol, Christopher Guest and Michael McKean. This film follows a film school grad, Nick, who is idealistic to the max and when he starts getting wooed by the Hollywood system you think, “Great… a good guy’s going to make it.” But guess what? Nick is so hungry to be successful in the business, that he sacrifices almost everything for that potential success. His idealism? Goes right out the window when he’s offered a carrot he can’t refuse. And his loyalty? He swore to his friend/cinematographer that they’d work together on his feature if Hollywood came calling. But when Hollywood wants to pair him up with a cinematographer of their choice? He falls right in line and tells his friend he can’t use him.

One of the particularly interesting things for a writer when looking at this film, is to notice how some of the characters are drawn—they’re pure stereotypes. There’s an agent who is SO smarmy he makes your skin crawl—he’s totally over the top. And after I’ve been encouraging you to write 3-dimensional characters, you might wonder how I could praise some of the stereotypical characterizations in this film.

So when are stereotypes OK? In a film like this—in a satire, a send-up. Because the point of this comedic genre is to push those stereotypes to the max to make a point about what you’re satirizing. And when a young, idealistic guy is faced with this corrupt, unfeeling Hollywood machine, the film wants to show how almost impossible it is for him not to get caught up in it. But it goes further in saying that maybe success isn’t the thing to strive for in all circumstances. Maybe you have to draw the line at sacrificing your own integrity… because if you’re successful and you’ve lost that integrity, well, then, you’ve lost what’s really important.

And talk about irony. The studio head who greenlit this film was ousted just a few weeks after production began. The new execs who took over, when screening the film, were not happy with how the film business was so negatively portrayed, so guess what? They gave it a super small release, thus ensuring it wouldn’t find much of an audience, and sent it very quickly to home video. Life imitating art…

Copyright © Diane Lake

07Apr19

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