The Best Movies About Making Movies Have One Thing In Common

I had somehow never seen Frank Oz’s hilarious Hollywood satire “Bowfinger” until last night, and it was only just now, as I write this, that I realized the movie celebrated its 25th anniversary yesterday. Weird timing! Anyway, “Bowfinger” is fantastic, with comedic masters Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy both operating at an incredibly high level throughout. Murphy, in particular, is amazing in dual roles; he plays a paranoid superstar actor named Kit Ramsey, as well as a goofy, lovable loser named Jiff (yes, really), and the two performances could not be more different.

The film is about a schlocky B-movie filmmaker named Bobby Bowfinger (Martin), who tries to surreptitiously direct a movie starring a cast of nobodies alongside one of the world’s biggest actors (Murphy) without the star ever finding out he’s in their movie. (Jiff, who’s a dead ringer for Kit, is hired to be a body double for shots where the crew can’t catch up with Kit out in public.) It’s a terrific premise, and it got me thinking about other films that focus on making movies, and something immediately crystallized for me: All of my favorite movies about filmmaking share one thing in common.

If you’ve ever been on a film set, you know how technical, how un-glamorous, and frankly how boring it can be. Actors spend a lot of time standing around or in their trailers while crew members re-position cameras, lighting equipment, and dolly tracks, so it’s easy for career professionals to get a bit jaded after a while. That jadedness can also happen to folks like me, who have spent nearly the past 20 years reading the trades and writing about the entertainment industry all day. But the best movies about movies focus on the opposite end of the spectrum.

In films like “Bowfinger,” Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” James Franco’s “The Disaster Artist,” the spectacular cult classic Japanese film “One Cut of the Dead,” Michel Gondry’s “Be Kind Rewind,” Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” and even Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” there’s a scene where a ragtag bunch of characters express a sense of genuine earnestness and love for making movies. (There are probably dozens of other examples of movies where this happens.) These people are thrilled by the camaraderie of coming together to achieve a shared goal; by the sense of having a found family, however temporary it may be; by the very act of making movies — even (and sometimes especially) if their final product ends up being laughably bad. 

There’s an infectious charm to that outlook, an aw-shucks, gee-whiz earnestness that almost always works on me. When these characters inevitably accomplish their goal and look with wide-eyed wonder as their work is displayed on a big screen, or in the case of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in “Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood,” experience a transcendent moment on a set about the power of acting? To quote Nicole Kidman in the AMC ad, that’s magic.

I spoke a little about “Bowfinger” on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which you can listen to below:

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