Maps to the Stars and 10 Other Essential Movies about Hollywood Inline
Photo: Courtesy of © MGM1/10Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
Directed and starring Buster Keaton, this classic silent is about a projectionist who falls asleep and enters into the film he’s been projecting. Filled with funny gags, this is one of the earliest (and sharpest) attempts to explore how Hollywood dreams enter our heads.
Photo: Courtesy of © Paramount Pictures2/10Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
In this uproarious Depression-era fantasy, writer-director Preston Sturges examines—and spoofs—Hollywood’s bottomless desire to be taken seriously. Joel McCrea stars as a filmmaker who specializes in fluff—he made Ants in Your Pants of 1940—but decides he should hit the road and make something about the real America called O Brother, Where Art Thou? Man, does he learn a lesson.
Photo: Courtesy of © Columbia Pictures3/10In a Lonely Place (1950)
If any figure in Hollywood movies is inescapable, it’s the disaffected screenwriter. None is world-wearier or nastier than Dixon Steele—played by Humphrey Bogart in his finest performance—whose surface charm masks, um, some issues. Accused of murder, he gets involved with his beautiful neighbor, Laurel Gray (a sensational Gloria Grahame), who quickly learns he’s a real piece of work (“Do you look down on all women,” she asks him, “or just the ones you know?”). Shot through with the industry’s anger and self-hatred, Nicholas Ray’s thriller feels as relevant today as it did 65 years ago.
Photo: Courtesy of © Paramount Pictures4/10Sunset Blvd. (1950)
This is the most iconic of all Hollywood films. Written and directed by that master of cynicism Billy Wilder, it stars faded silent-star Gloria Swanson as faded silent-star Norma Desmond, who lives in a gothic mansion with a desperate screenwriter boy-toy (William Holden), her faithful servant (Erich von Stroheim), and utterly hopeless hopes of regaining her old place in the Hollywood firmament. Very funny and crackling with a sense of the delusion that runs through the film industry.
Photo: Courtesy of © MGM5/10The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
In Vincente Minnelli’s riveting melodrama, Kirk Douglas shines as Jonathan Shields, a ruthlessly hard-climbings producer who uses and alienates a screenwriter (Dick Powell), an actress (Lana Turner), and a director (Barry Sullivan) to make his way to the top. Of course, those on the top in Hollywood tend to be lonely, unhappy, and a little bonkers. Seeing the film in a larger, more metaphorical context, you can trace a line from Shields’s miserable success to that of Don Draper.
Photo: Courtesy of © MGM6/10Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, this exuberant musical is set during the epochal transition from silents to talkies, when some stars rose higher, while others with awkward voices plummeted. Filled with famous numbers—not least Kelly’s umbrella-swinging, foot-splashing rendition of the title song—this is a witty look at the gap between illusion and reality in Hollywood. Oh, yes, it’s also widely considered the greatest musical of all time.
Photo: Courtesy of © Embassy Pictures7/10Contempt (1963)
Of course, the Hollywood mindset can go anywhere, as Jean-Luc Godard makes clear in this French masterpiece about a screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) who earns the contempt of his wife (Brigitte Bardot, famously undressed) by working for a crass vulgarian of an American movie producer (Jack Palance at his most toxic). The movie’s all about the head-on collision between freedom and servitude, art and money, Europe and America.
Photo: Courtesy of © United Artists8/10The Long Goodbye (1973)
Yes, I know Robert Altman made a movie about the film industry, The Player, but it’s not a tenth as sharp as this funny, disillusioned detective movie set in a meta-Hollywood where movies infect everything. Elliot Gould stars as Philip Marlowe, the stubbly, antiheroic seventies offspring of Bogart’s forties version, who gets caught up in a case in which everyone he meets seems to be playing a role, as if the whole city had become filled with people who are acting, either as stars or bit players.
Photo: Courtesy of © New Line Cinema9/10Boogie Nights (1997)
You get Hollywood seen through the looking-glass in **Paul Thomas Anderson’**s portrait of the adult-film industry starring Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, and an ever-bold Julianne Moore. Sure, porn budgets are smaller and the films sleazier, but no movie comes closer to capturing the strange, crazy quilt that is Hollywood—the camaraderie and exploitation, the idealism and greed, the love of stardom and rush to self-destruction, the fear of changing times and the sense of lost souls inventing themselves anew in order to feel less hollow.
Photo: Courtesy of © Universal Pictures/Everett Collection10/10Mulholland Drive (2001)
I can think of no better film this millennium than **David Lynch’**s moody, shape-shifting story about a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young actress (a staggeringly brilliantNaomi Watts) who comes to L.A. to make her name. Instead she gets involved with a beautiful amnesiac car crash victim (Laura Harring) and plunges into a world of nasty film directors, sinister cowboys, and a haunting Mexican singer. Eerie and elusive, the film is in a sense the ultimate Hollywood movie. It’s about the way movies (and the not always nice people who make them) enter our psyches and shape the deepest and most powerful fantasies of our culture.
