‘The Pickle’

Paul Mazursky’s 1993 movie is about the raw pain of making a big, dopey crowd-pleaser for a major studio. It’s too scattered to succeed fully, but there are funny, sexy things in it. The movie’s anti-hero (Danny Aiello, pictured with Clotilde Courau) is a maverick expatriate American filmmaker who takes on a project he loathes in order to satisfy his huge tax and alimony bill--and to break a string of box office flops. Mazursky suggests that the whole process of making grotesquely infantile movies--in this case a musical sci-fi epic about farm kids from Kansas blasting into space on a gigantic pickle-shaped spaceship--can rot a director’s soul and drive him to near-suicide. With a starry supporting cast, including Dyan Cannon as Aiello’s ex-wife (HBO Monday at 4:45 a.m.).