The Lens Never Lies

Go to the movies these days and you’re apt to see a movie about the movie industry. Point your remote at your TV and you’ll also find shows like Fox’s new comedy “Action” that spoof the very industry producing the spoofs.

Meta-entertainments, scholars call these films and TV shows about the entertainment industry. Timeless movies about movies include “Sunset Boulevard” and “Singin’ in the Rain.” More recently, the industry skillfully skewered itself in such fine meta-movies as “The Player” and the 1989 sleeper “The Big Picture.”

In “Movies About the Movies: Hollywood Reflected,” Christopher Ames writes: “All Hollywood movies are about Hollywood; some just happen to be set there as well.” Contemporary Hollywood is both the theme and setting of two pictures now in theaters--”Bowfinger,” starring and written by Steve Martin, and Albert Brooks’ “The Muse.”

Like most columnists, I believe two related events make a trend, at least for the purposes of my next column. Indeed I recently read a hilarious piece by a New York writer who took the occasion of the recent publication of “ ‘Tis,” the second memoir by “Angela’s Ashes” author Frank McCourt, to argue that soon all memoirs will be by or about the McCourts. Such columns work because commentary is about style, not substance--not the plates, but how you spin them. But enough meta-commentary. Back to meta-entertainment.

Noticing that Hollywood seems to be Hollywood’s favorite subject lately, I asked Valleyites who work in the industry or watch it closely to comment on the recent proliferation of insider movies and TV shows.

Writer Jon Boorstin, who lives in Studio City, points out that, traditionally, movies about Hollywood have been thought to be box-office death. The success of Robert Altman’s 1992 “The Player” helped make the screen safe for meta-cinema, he says. But he suspects that the current crop of industry movies can be traced to the Oscar-winning triumph of John Madden’s “Shakespeare in Love.”

“That’s really about show biz and that’s its charm,” he says of the 1998 Miramax hit in which a boatman rowing Shakespeare across the Thames pitches him a play.

Boorstin thinks the most interesting (not the best) of the recent meta-movies is “The Blair Witch Project.” Like other films about the industry, this cheesily made, wildly successful pseudo-documentary about the disappearance of a group of young filmmakers blurs the distinction between reality and fiction. At least one teenager he knows thought it was a real documentary, says Boorstin, an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker and author of the Hollywood novel “Pay or Play,” due out in paperback this fall.

“Everything’s become so self-referential,” he says. In a culture as media savvy as ours, acknowledging Hollywood’s phoniness may be a prerequisite for suspending disbelief and enjoying a film, he speculates. But even though Boorstin admires such meta-movies as Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” he thinks self-referential cinema is a dead end.

“Unless people give in to the magic, ultimately there’s nothing there.”

Calabasas resident Lee Goldberg is executive producer of the CBS series “Martial Law.” One way Goldberg deals with the craziness of working in TV is by writing his most bizarre experiences into raunchy comic mysteries such as his novels “My Gun Has Bullets” and “Beyond the Beyond.” Among the most quotable men on Earth, Goldberg ratchets up to high dudgeon on the subject of Fox’s new black comedy about the industry, “Action.”

The makers of such shows, he says, “are embarrassed to give viewers what they want. They’d rather celebrate their own arrogance and cynicism.

“I think a lot of people who were raised on TV are coming into power in the industry,” he says. “They’re almost embarrassed by the fact that they watch it and work in it. They want that Dennis Miller aloofness.”

“Action,” whose antihero (played by Jay Mohr) makes Sammy Glick look like a social worker, is too cold, shapeless and full of inside jokes to appeal to a mass audience, Goldberg thinks.

The humor is aimed at “people who subscribe to Daily Variety,” he says. “At minimum there should be jokes that people who subscribe to Entertainment Weekly get.”

Goldberg wonders who the show appeals to--”production assistants? agents? Production assistants who want to be agents?”

“It’s possible to be mean, nasty and cynical and still do genuine storytelling,” he says, pointing to “All in the Family.”

Goldberg finds nothing in “Action” to connect with, and he’s in the business. He predicts that outsiders will be baffled by the show, whose premiere episode featured a maitre d’ who wielded his clout as cruelly as any studio head.

“I think if you talk to Edna and Harry Gump in Armpit, Kansas, they’ll say, ‘What’s so funny about a snotty maitre d’?’ ”

Among favorite meta-movies, Goldberg includes “Sunset Boulevard” and jokes, “I thought Glenn Ford was never better.”

Industry writer Stephanie Liss of Sherman Oaks has a different take on “Action” and the current meta-movies. She sees them as the sort of self-analyses that could lead to much-needed change.

“Underneath the laughter is the truth,” she says. “I see it as a major step in a positive direction. There’s so much reality to these things. Anybody who says there isn’t, is lying.”

Hollywood is worse than ever to writers, she says, a situation she saw reflected brilliantly in “The Muse.” In her view, underage studio executives really do terrorize writers, who too often allow themselves to be defined by their reputations, which routinely plummet as they approach 40.

“We’ve all felt the way he felt--punched in the gut,” she says of Brooks’ writer protagonist. “People in this town overlook the fact that you don’t become a real writer until you’re in your 40s.”

Too many studio executives want scripts slapped together in a few weeks, denying writers time to do first-rate work, Liss says. And when scripts are turned in, their creators are routinely dissed.

“Shame on everybody,” she says.

The worst of it is that Hollywood doesn’t tap its own potential greatness.

“We’re not allowed to be Shakespeare.”