A Hollywood Story – 7

In exploring what’s involved in writing a Hollywood story, for the last two weeks we looked at ‘insider’ Hollywood films—films about newbies facing the Hollywood system and either getting eaten up by it or attempting to fight back. Both The Big Picture [1989] and Swimming with the Sharks [1994] fall very nicely into that category.

But there’s another category of films about Hollywood that’s worth exploring—and that’s the category of films about the making of a movie. The first film I’d like to explore in that category, which didn’t meet with much success, is S.O.B [1981] written by Blake Edwards. Why look at a film that was a failure? Because I think we can learn from it.

S.O.B.’s inspiration was Edwards’ own film Darling Lili [1970] which was a complete flop. The story of S.O.B. is the story of a director who tries to redeem himself by making a film about a guy making a failed film. Sometimes Hollywood can be so incestuous…

The film follows a director who casts his own wife in a film [which Edwards had done in Darling Lili] and proceeds to try and redeem himself by making a film that he assures everyone will be a box office bonanza. The director in the film is manic—he has to prove to Hollywood that he’s still got it, that he knows a hit when he sees it, and that he can totally deliver it.

The director is so manic, he thinks getting his actress wife—who’s known for her modesty—to appear nude will be the clincher. Surely the public will storm the theatres to get a look at the breasts of a star who has never been anything close to nude in a film. In fact, the script being filmed in S.O.B. goes to enormous lengths in order to get her to do that - even including drugging her. I expect if Edwards made this film today he’d be vilified. The problem is, there’s no detachment at all in this script, no sense of irony that could have made it a commentary on the making of movies. It’s wild, over-the-top farce.

Sure, S.O.B. is 38 years old. But it’s kind of amazing to think that in the 1980s a film's storyline is about everyone on set trying to get an actress to go topless. “Anything for the movie” is a common phrase when it comes to filmmaking. When you’re on a set, the movie comes first… and there is no second…it’s all about the movie.

I wish this film could have been more wild and zany instead of crass and shrill. In its own way, this is one of the best films about Hollywood because it’s such a cautionary tale.

Copyright © Diane Lake

21Apr19

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