Best Movies About Movies and Moviemaking
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Filmmakers have turned the lens on themselves, figuratively and literally, since at least 1928, the year Buster Keaton made his classic comedy The Cameraman. Since then, movies about movies, filmmakers, and filmmaking have come thick and fast, running into the hundreds with no sign of let-up and spanning an exhaustive range of genres, from solipsistic musings on the art itself to broad satirical swipes at the movie business and the Hollywood machine.
Some hit the target, others miss by a mile. A few – Singin’ in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, and Federico Fellini’s 8½ – count as classics in their own right. Find here a tiny and highly personal, sample of cinematic navel-gazing down the ages.
The Player (1992)
Image Credit: Fine Line Features.
After lacerating the country music scene with 1975’s Nashville, director Robert Altman turned his satirical eye on Hollywood with this razor-edged adaptation of Michael Tolkin’s 1988 novel. Tim Robbins shines as a slimeball studio exec who murders a wannabe screenwriter he suspects of sending him death threats. Brilliantly directed by Altman, masterfully edited by Geraldine Peroni, and boasting a superb script by Tolkin himself, The Player works on several levels: a cynical poke at the movie business, certainly, but also a broader comment on the rapacity and materialism of the 1980s, and as a cracking crime thriller.
The slew of celebrity cameos – Burt Reynolds, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, Lily Tomlin, Bruce Willis, Patrick Swayze et al – were all unscripted and shoehorned into the movie by Altman during postproduction.
8½ (1963)
Image Credit: Columbia Pictures.
Fellini’s semi-surreal comic masterpiece, a thinly veiled auto-biopic within a thinly veiled auto-biopic, with Marcello Mastroianni as a celebrated director suffering a paralyzing existential crisis, not only sets the bar for all movies about movies but also ranks among the greatest films ever made about the vagaries of the creative process.
The Day of the Locust (1975)
Image Credit: Paramount Pictures.
With a script by Waldo Salt, based on Nathanael West’s classic novel, director John Schlessinger presents a vision of 1930s Hollywood as an insatiable bonfire of broken dreams, the heedless antithesis of its glitzy public image.
Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
Image Credit: Paramount Pictures.
Writer-director Preston Sturges scales the summit of urbane wit with this whip-smart screwball comedy starring Joel McCrea as a Hollywood filmmaker going undercover as a hobo to research his next picture, and Veronica Lake as the gently sardonic actress who joins him. An effervescent, evergreen joy with a powerful message amid the scrapes and snappy repartee.
The "socially conscious" movie McCrea’s character yearns to make, incidentally, is called O Brother Where Art Thou?, brought to life sixty years later by the Coen Brothers.
Ed Wood (1994)
Image Credit: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution.
Johnny Depp stars as the man generally regarded as the worst film director of all time in Tim Burton’s affectionate biopic. The inept auteur behind such so-bad-they’re-brilliant messterpieces as Bride of the Monster and Plan Nine from Outer Space, Wood was a cross-dressing ex-marine with a burning passion for moviemaking undimmed by his chronic ineptitude. And it’s this that shines through in both Depp’s performance and the film as a whole.
There’s a wonderful scene where Wood, in a moment of self-doubt, finds inspiration in a chance encounter with a similarly contemplative Orson Welles. The meeting almost certainly never happened, but it’s a reminder that even though the two men occupied extreme ends of the talent spectrum, their love of cinema united them.
Depp got top billing, but acting honors went to Martin Landau who won an Oscar for his portrayal of the washed-up, drug-addicted Bela Lugosi, with whom Wood formed a close and supportive friendship during the Dracula legend’s final days. Sometimes, even movies about movies need to scrape the bottom of the showbiz barrel.
Sunset Boulevard (1951)
Image Credit: Paramount Pictures.
Billy Wilder’s classic noir has aged a lot better than its tragic heroine, faded silent star Norma Desmond, played to chilling perfection by Gloria Swanson, herself a movie diva from a bygone age. Co-starring William Holden as Joe Gillis, the down-at-heel screenwriter ensnared in Norma’s delusional web, Wilder’s darkly comic morality play still has much to say about the fickle nature of fame, especially where women are concerned, and the correct protocol for a chimp’s funeral. (Seriously.)
Of all the movies about movies, Sunset Boulevard still has sting more than 50 years after release. Its mix of irony, humor, and jaw-dropping cynicism cuts to the Hollywood bone.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
Image Credit: Sony Pictures Releasing.
Quentin Tarantino roared back to top form with this star-studded, kaleidoscopic tale of Tinseltown in transition, mixing historical fact with audacious fanboy fiction and rewriting the ending of one of Hollywood’s most infamous and horrifying events.
The Cameraman (1928)
Image Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The immortal Buster Keaton tries to pass himself off as a studio cameraman to impress the radiant Marceline Day and ends up embroiled in a Chinatown turf war. Matchless physical comedy abounds, including the famous scene in which Keaton and a fellow bather attempt to change in a cramped cubicle and get hopelessly entangled in each other’s clothes (the gag inspired the equally famous "stateroom scene" in the Marx Brothers’ 1935 comedy A Night at the Opera).
Adaptation (2002)
Image Credit: Sony Pictures Releasing.
Finding it impossible to turn Susan Orlean’s award-winning non-fiction book The Orchid Thief into a dramatic movie, Charlie Kaufman dared to commit the cardinal sin of turning the focus inward. But instead of the usual movies about movies writers-block clichés, the film treats audiences to a darkly comic, surreal journey through the fevered imagination of a uniquely talented screenwriter, with regular stop-offs to poke fun at mainstream Hollywood along the way.
Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Image Credit: Lions Gate Films.
An absolutely inspired movies about movies concept – that the character of Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatuwas a real vampire – enjoys flawless execution by director E. Elias Merhige, writer Steven Katz and a stellar cast lead by John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Orlok, a performance that earned him a well-deserved Oscar nomination. Particularly fascinating is the recreation of Murnau’s filming technique, which required him and his crew to wear white lab coats and tinted protective goggles, lending proceedings a pseudo-scientific air.
Hugo (2012)
Image Credit: Paramount Pictures.
Martin Scorsese’s poetic fantasy-adventure, about a young boy who lives alone in a Paris railway station investigating his father’s death, is also a love letter to the earliest days of cinema and pioneering sci-fi-fantasy filmmaker Georges Méliès, whose career and rather sad life are portrayed with surprising accuracy. Several of Méliès’ wonderful creations, including 1902’s Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) take a starring role.
The Disaster Artist (2017)
Image Credit: Justina Mintz/A24.
Compelling and hilarious biopic of enigmatic weirdo Tommy Wiseau, chronicling the chaos and insanity surrounding the making of his 2003 cult film The Room, a work of such exceptional terribleness it has, in many circles, replaced Plan Nine from Outer Space as the worst movie ever made. James Franco stars as the maniacally clueless Wiseau who, sportingly, makes a cameo appearance in a post-title sequence.
Tropic Thunder (2008)
Image Credit: DreamWorks Pictures.
It may not quite live up to its killer movies about movies premise – a bunch of pampered actors forced to fend for themselves in the Vietnam jungle after filming of a Platoon-style war movie goes horribly awry – but Tropic Thunder certainly has its moments, not least Tom Cruise, unrecognizable in a fat suit and bald wig, as the film’s monstrous producer, and Robert Downey Jr. as a pretentious multi-Oscar-winner so method he undergoes "pigmentation alteration" surgery to play a black character.
Babylon (2023)
Image Credit: Paramount Pictures.
A box office bomb and derided by critics, Damien Chazelle’s undeniably messy and overlong epic nevertheless captures the joyful, Wild West spirit of Hollywood’s pioneer days with vivid energy, juxtaposing them with the industry’s slide into corporate control following the sound revolution. Essentially the dark yin to Singin’ in the Rain’s technicolor yang, the two would make a fascinating, if behind-numbing, double feature.
Hail, Caesar! (2016)
Image Credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/Universal Pictures.
With an all-star cast and backdropped by the McCarthyite witch hunts, the Coen brothers‘ toothsome Hollywood fantasy focuses on real-life studio fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), here investigating the abduction of a hot-shot star (George Clooney) by a group of blacklisted commie screenwriters.
Get Shorty (1995)
Image Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Proof, following much evidence to the contrary, that a terrific movie could be made from an Elmore Leonard novel, Shorty stars a breezy John Travolta as Chili Palmer, a mid-level mafioso using charm and muscle to make it in Hollywood.
Parallels between the mob and the movie biz hang a little heavy, but the dialogue and comic tone are honed to perfection. Danny DeVito has fun sending himself up as an egotistical movie star (the "Shorty" of the title), and Gene Hackman lays it on thick as a seedy B-movie director determined to crack the big time.
Barton Fink (1991)
Image Credit: 20th Century Fox.
Drawing on such divergent influences as Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, the Coen's genre-defying black comedy stars John Turturro as a callow New York playwright lured to Hollywood to write movies only to discover the true horror of Tinseltown (and yes, it’s even worse than the dating scene).
Turturro’s character, loosely based on playwright Clifford Odets, doubles for the great literary figures of the day – William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so on – who similarly sold their souls to the Dream Factory and lived to regret it.
Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (2018)
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures.
The clever, self-referential TV show ramps up the meta for its big-screen debut as the titular Titans attempt to have a movie made about themselves.
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (1997)
Image Credit: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution.
The delicious irony of this Joe Eszterhas-penned movies about movies mockumentary, with Eric Idol as a Hollywood director misfortunately named Alan Smithee (the name traditionally used by filmmakers who wished to disavow a project), is that its director, Arthur Hiller, was so appalled by the final cut he opted for an Alan Smithee credit himself.
The film proved such a fiasco it forced the Directors Guild of America to retire Alan Smithee for good. In 2000, Walter Hill was credited as Thomas Lee after requesting his name be removed from sci-fi thriller Supernova.
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