“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we take a look behind the scenes at self-reflexive movies that offer glimpses of the dark underbelly of the film industry.
We’ll have music from Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), a film that’s been called the greatest movie about Hollywood ever made. Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, a faded silent movie actress who believes she’s still “big; it’s the pictures that got small,” and William Holden is an unsuccessful screenwriter-turned-gigolo. Real life director Erich von Stroheim appears in an interesting role as Desmond’s butler – who was once a director! There are also cameos by Cecile B. DeMille and Hedda Hopper, who play themselves. Franz Waxman wrote the Academy Award winning score.
Vincent Minelli’s “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) stars Kirk Douglas as a ruthless producer, who uses and abuses everyone around him – including Lana Turner, Walter Pigeon, Dick Powell, and Gloria Grahame. Yet everyone’s career seems to blossom from exposure to this S.O.B. The music is by Philadelphia-born David Raksin, who is best-remembered for his theme to the all-time noir classic “Laura.” His theme for “The Bad and the Beautiful” has also become a jazz standard.
Peter O’Toole dominates “The Stunt Man” (1980) as a tyrannical director who blackmails a fugitive from the law into acting as a stunt man in his current film. The line between fantasy and reality begins to blur. Dominic Frontiere wrote the music. It’s probably not what anyone wants to be remembered for, but I always find it amazing that Frontiere served time for scalping tickets to the Super Bowl! Of course he scalped a half-million dollars worth, and his wife owned the Los Angeles Rams.
Finally, director Michel Hazanavicius succeeds brilliantly in his virtuosic homage to classic American cinema, “The Artist” (2011). To my knowledge, if we discount Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie,” from 1976, “The Artist” was the first silent feature to be released since Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” which was already an anachronism in 1936. The film was the recipient of five Academy Awards – half of its ten nominations – including one for Best Picture.
The story deals with “A Star is Born”-type dynamic with a fading actor of the silent era gradually eclipsed by the success of rising young actress. Yet Hazanavcius manages to turn it around to come up with an honest-to-goodness, feel-good movie, a real rarity in contemporary film.
Ludovic Bource’s Oscar-winning score manages to be evocative of time and place, breezy, yet when necessary, poignant, with moments of spectacular action music which could have been written by Alfred Newman or Franz Waxman. This just might be my favorite film of the past decade, maybe two. For a classic movie lover, the first five minutes alone are priceless. And love that Uggie!
I hope you’ll join me for “Behind-the-Scenes Hollywood,” on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6 EDT, with a repeat Saturday morning at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
More about Uggie here.
