A Star Behind the Scenes

The fifth annual Hollywood Film Festival opens Friday at the Paramount Studio Theater with the U.S. premiere of Christopher Monger’s breezy but conventional “Girl From Rio,” which takes too long to get off the ground but has a clever finish. Hugh Laurie plays an ineffectual London banker with a passion for samba who eventually gets caught up in romance and adventure in Rio, where he pursues the girl of his dreams (Vanessa Nunes). The weekend festival, which also unspools across Melrose Avenue at Raleigh Studios and is presenting 42 films, closes Sunday at Paramount at 6 p.m. with Woody Allen’s “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.”

On Saturday at 2 p.m. at Raleigh’s Chaplin Theater, the festival presents Daniel Raim’s Oscar-nominated “The Man on Lincoln’s Nose,” a warm and illuminating 39-minute documentary on veteran production designer Robert Boyle, who will be present afterward for a Q&A; session on his seven-decade career. Now the American Film Institute’s chairman of production design, Boyle will be among honorees at the festival’s Monday-evening awards gala at the Beverly Hilton.

A USC-trained architect, Boyle entered the industry in 1933 as an assistant to Paramount art director Wiard Ihnen and began his long association with Alfred Hitchcock on “Saboteur” (1940). Through clips, and Boyle’s reflections and recollections, Raim reveals the all-important task of the production designer, which Boyle defines as “being responsible for the space in which a film takes place.” Boyle’s contributions to key Hitchcock films are crucial, as they have been to the films of many others, especially those of Norman Jewison, with whom Boyle also has had a long association.

“The Man on Lincoln’s Nose”--which was the original title of “North by Northwest” and which also refers to Boyle’s actual experiences on Mt. Rushmore in preparing the film--is a delightful reminder that not all of Hollywood’s greatest stars are actors. (310) 288-1882.

The American Cinematheque’s second annual Festival of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction begins a 13-day run Friday at the Egyptian at 7 p.m. with the first of its 28 features, a digitally remastered “Superman” (1978), which will be followed at 10:15 with “Sleepless,” the latest from Italian horror-meister Dario Argento, a cinematheque favorite.

No one can work up a fright with quite so much stylish gore as Argento, who is in fine form, opening with a bravura sequence involving a prostitute’s futile flight from a demented killer thought to have been long dead. Coming out of retirement to investigate is sagacious Turin detective Max Von Sydow. “Sleepless” is grisly in typically horrific Argento fashion, but its effect is diminished by wretched dubbed English dialogue; at least Von Sydow dubbed his own voice. (323) 466-FILM.

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“Hula” (1927), at the Silent Movie on Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1 and 4 p.m., is one of Clara Bow’s best. Who but the It Girl could play a character called Hula Houlahan, madcap daughter of a Hawaiian plantation family? Life for Hula’s high-living, widowed father is one big luau, so his daughter has been raised by servants and ranch hands. Hula is an uninhibited innocent when she falls for British dam builder Clive Brook, who won’t end his loveless marriage because it would be “unsporting.”

Under the direction of Victor Fleming, one of the major loves of Bow’s life, Bow projects her usual exuberance and vulnerability; “Hula” also allows her to be shrewd and daring. (323) 655-2520.

The UCLA Film Archive presents, in collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation, “From the Factory: Andy Warhol’s Films,” a selection of works shot on 16 millimeter by Warhol between 1963 and 1968, screening Saturday through Aug. 11 at Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater. Most were shot in Warhol’s famous Factory in his trademark minimalist, improvised style. Key to Warhol’s put-on approach was to hold a shot or an entire scene way past the point of tedium, yet his films were charged with an outrageous camp sensibility that could evoke hilarity or pathos--or both at once.

The series opens with “Haircut (No. 1)” (1963)--followed by “Bike Boy” (1967)--in which Factory regular Billy Name is cutting a friend’s hair in his Lower East Side apartment while a naked young man (Billy Herko) relaxes nearby; nothing happens, yet a sexual tension builds.

When Warhol linked up with Paul Morrissey, it seemed as if they were reinventing cinema, discovering its essence in the process. “Bike Boy” was at once Warhol’s funniest yet saddest film up to that time. In it, footloose biker Joe Spencer encounters, among others, upper-crust dropouts Brigid Polk and Viva. Warhol evokes a sense of anguish while setting a frankly voyeuristic tone.

In early 1966, Warhol joined forces with the Velvet Underground for a landmark multimedia event titled the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which in May of that year hit the Sunset Strip’s the Trip with the impact of the Titanic on that iceberg. “The Velvet Underground and Nico” (Sunday at 7 p.m.) depicts the group in rehearsal and was shot in a highly kinetic style for projection on a triple screen while Lou Reed, singer Nico, et al were performing. “The Velvet Underground and Nico” has an amusing coda; the arrival of a police officer at the Factory because of a noise complaint.

Another split-screen venture, the prophetic “Lupe” (1965), will be screened after “The Velvet Underground and Nico.” Edie Sedgwick is simultaneously seen lolling about in an elegant apartment in the Dakota, applying makeup and chatting with Billy Name, and, in the other scene, appearing beautifully gowned but alone and drinking away her dinner in a formal dining room. Both episodes culminate in conjoining images in which Sedgwick is dead in a bathroom in emulation of the real-life fate of movie star Lupe Velez. The waif-like Sedgwick couldn’t have been more different from the “Mexican Spitfire,” yet she too was to die at an early age. (310) 206-FILM.

The eighth annual World Animation Celebration opens Tuesday with the premiere of “Osmosis Jones.” The six-day festival and market take place at the Egyptian Theater, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and Knitting Factory Hollywood, all near each other on Hollywood Boulevard. (818) 955-5481.

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The American Cinematheque and Rhino Home Video present at 7:30 tonight a restored print of Franc Roddam’s audacious 1979 “Quadrophenia,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the Regent Showcase. (323) 466-FILM.