Whilst Hollywood has often garlanded particularly slick and soft depictions of the movies with Oscars galore, our selection of Hollywood on Hollywood films spotlights the most bitingly satirical, truly interesting, or blissfully entertaining examples from the industry’s undying focus on itself.
Hollywood has documented, celebrated, and satirised itself since its foundation in the mid-1910s. A frustrated film director repeatedly pushes Chaplin’s Little Tramp out of his shot in Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914). Paramount advertised the new California dream factory in an early documentary, A Trip to Paramountown (1922), and the success stories of those drawn West seeking stardom were celebrated in silent comedies from major studios such as MGM and Paramount itself.
The impulse to stage the filmmaking process, the glitz of stardom, and the cutthroat nature of the industry, has prevailed over the last century. Our season begins in the 1950s and 60s, where celebrations of Hollywood history and movie-magic such as Singin’ in the Rain and A Star is Born sit side-by-side with savage depictions of stars discarded by the system in Sunset Boulevard and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. In the New Hollywood period and beyond, the studios’ collusion with McCarthy’s communist witch hunts is condemned in The Front, David Mamet skewers the on-set experience with razor sharp wit in State and Main, and Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman provided perhaps the best image of Hollywood in the metafictional Adaptation: a snake eating its own tail. Finally we present the most unclassifiable vision of Hollywood, David Lynch’s nightmarish and seductive Mulholland Drive.
