Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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Nobody Knows Anything (2003)
Legendary Chicago improviser David Pasquesi wrote and stars in the 2003 show-business comedy Nobody Knows Anything. It’s an unusual lead role in that the only time the writer-actor’s character Jimmy— a go-nowhere fuck-up who stumbles backwards into a life of crime—appears it’s as a primary figure in a real-life story aspiring director Sarah (Alanna Ubach) is pitching producers. Thankfully that story takes up about half of Nobody Knows Anything’s modest runtimeand provides a winning showcase for Pasquesi’s gifts as a virtuoso long-form improviser.
Ubach stars in Nobody Knows Anything as a recent film school graduate who moves to Los Angeles with an eye towards making it in the movie business with the help of her existentially exhausted screenwriter uncle Lou (Michael Lerner).
Lou gives his spunky, ambitious niece the contact information for backers who might be interested in her film idea about her cousin Jimmy’s descent into criminality. We then follow Sarah, and by extension Jimmy, as she makes the rounds, with each new/old pitch further continuing the tale of how her unassuming cousin became a bank robber.
Nobody Knows Anything is an almost perversely small movie. The stakes are low and it’s largely devoid of conflict and tension. Yet the sprawling cast is filled with actors and actresses of note, including Mike Myers, Margaret Cho, Paul Dooley, Robert Englund, Janeane Garofalo, Kristin Johnston, Richard Kind, Ed Lauter, Virginia Madsen, Fred Willard, Ben Stiller, Tim Meadows and Scott Thompson. The ringers in the cast mine this overly familiar material for a few modest chuckles but Nobody Knows Anything is notable primarily as a rare film vehicle for a towering giant of live improvisation and TV fixture. As a first time screenwriter Pasquesi frustratingly can’t resist the lazy cliches of movie world comedies but as an actor and an improviser he remains a true artist.
What Just Happened (2008) FM
In What Just Happened, Barry Levinson’s wry 2008 adaptation of veteran producer Art Linson’s 2002 memoir of the same name a producer’s job is the art of persuasion. He must bend the people around him to his will while convincing them that he’s altruistically acting in everybody’s best interest. Producers are pragmatists by nature with the guile and calculation to succeed in a dirty, rigged game.
In an uncharacteristically committed and engaging late period performance, Robert De Niro, who also produced, plays Ben, Linson’s surrogate and a veteran producer in the midst of a hellacious personal and professional funk. An edgy thriller he’s made with Sean Penn is tanking with test audiences and studio bosses because it climactically commits the ultimate cinematic crime: killing a dog. Ben’s ex-wife is shtupping a writer played by Stanley Tucci and an upcoming big-budget Bruce Willis vehicle is imperiled by its star showing up for work bearded, belligerent and burly, which in Hollywood means that he’s maybe ten pounds beyond his ideal weight.
In Linson’s self-deprecating memoir the arrogant actor who sorely tests the hero’s patience is The Edge star Alec Baldwin. Casting Willis as himself turned out to be a master stroke. In a revelatory supporting turn, Willis engages in bold, brazen and hilarious self-parody, portraying himself as a perpetually apoplectic, profane and violent monster feared and despised by people unfortunate enough to have to work with him.
Willis is clearly having a ball playing the worst, most toxic version of himself. It’s wonderful seeing the Die Hard icon and the Taxi Driver star so engaged and engaging at this late stage of their career. Linson’s darkly comic character study of a hustler trying to survive a crucible of challenges similarly brings out the best in Levinson, rousing him from an extended professional funk.
The hero of What Just Happened has too much money, too much success and too many beautiful women interested in him sexually. Ben’s problems are deeply non-relatable but Levinson’s funny and insightful exploration of show-business desperation lets us feel his pain all the same.
Silver Bullets (2011) FM
Joe Swanberg’s Silver Bullets is a Mumblecore werewolf movie. For better or worse, that does not mean that it’s about an artsy lycanthrope in his twenties with ambitions to work in the arts and a complicated, messy romantic life. Rather, it is about the making of a werewolf film of the title and how it affects the sex lives of the filmmakers and actresses involved.
The luminous Kate Lyn Sheil exudes a potent combination of vulnerability and sexiness as Claire, a magnetic young actress cast as a werewolf in a horror movie directed by hotshot horror filmmaker Ben (Ti West, doing a very convincing job as the Ti West character). Claire finds herself attracted to the confident auteur just as Claire’s boyfriend Ethan (Swanberg) gets amorous ideas about Charlie (Amy Seimetz), an actress he just cast as his girlfriend in his new movie.
For 69 appropriately erotic minutes Silver Bullets switches gears between the low-key naturalism and earnest relationship drama Mumblecore audiences have grown to know and tolerate and arty hyper-stylized psychodrama whose pummeling, oddball intensity comes largely from Orange Mighty Trio’s cello-heavy chamber music score.
There’s a sinister undercurrent to Swanberg’s performance that sets it apart from his usual autobiographical turns, an obsessive fascination with the women in his films and in his life that becomes more disturbing as the film proceeds. Silver Bullets’ best moments deviate wildly from the crunchy, well-worn Mumblecore template, making it a cut above the usual fare and definitely one of the best of the SIX movies Swanberg put out as a writer-director in 2011.
The Comic (1969) FM
Director, co-writer and supporting player Carl Reiner and virtuoso lead Dick Van Dyke, the creator and star of The Dick Van Dyke Show, respectively flopped hard at the box-office with their deeply personal 1969 labor of love The Comic. The darkly comic character study of a vaudevillian monster of id and ego and his lost world was inspired by Van Dyke’s reverence for his hero Stan Laurel and a fascination with a silent era full of tragicomic giants who made the world laugh and suffered through tragicomic lives of alcoholism, failed marriages and professional self-destruction.
As volatile silent screen star Billy Bright, Van Dyke narrates the proceedings posthumously from a place of bitterness and resentment as he surveys his own sad, sparsely attended funeral and looks back at an eventful existence full of highs and lows but mainly lows.
Billy begins in vaudeville but heads west to make his fortune in silent pictures. His talent and ambition open doors for the brash newcomer that his personality promptly shuts. He’s incapable of sobriety as well as fidelity, a real piece of work even by Hollywood standards.
Van Dyke clearly relishes the chance to play a consummate lout and libertine. The legendary physical comedian’s rubber face and elastic limbs get quite the workout in The Comic’s many slapstick short films-within-the-film, particularly in its superior first two acts. Reiner’s uneven but bitterly compelling comedy-drama is just as inspired as a vehicle for Van Dyke’s overlooked gifts as a dramatic actor. The Comic challenged Van Dyke equally as a funnyman and a tragedian in addition to giving Mickey Rooney a juicy role as the anti-hero’s onscreen and offscreen foil Martin "Cockeye" Van Buren. Despite Van Dyke’s distracting combover and some dodgy old man make-up The Comic is an unsparing and insightful exploration of the psychic costs of stardom in an industry that catapults flawed souls to great heights so they can suffer even greater falls.