Film Friday: "They're making a movie...!"

Many movies are themselves about making movies.  Most of them give you what purports to be an inside look at the people who make them.  Some films are celebratory, like Truffaut's Day for Night.  Others are more cynical about the process, like Altman's The Player.   I just want to offer a few remarks about those films that address films that, to varying degrees, examine what happens to local communities when a movie is being made there.

One of the more explicit recent films about this process is David Mamet's satire State and Main, which looks at the efforts of a film crew that, having been booted from one location, must trying finishing the film in another small New England town.   But even this film presents us as much with the interlopers as it does the impact they bring.  

Alan Alda's moderately funny Sweet Liberty (1986) concerns a history professor (played by Alda) whose historical novel is being adapted -- or as he sees it, butchered into the kind of melodramatic adaptations of John Jakes novels from the seventies.   Most of the dramatic tension involves the actors who play the two leads in the movie and their impact on the novelist and his girlfriend, but there are some amusing scenes were the local historical reenactors clash with the filmmakers:

(You might recognize a few faces.)


I recall watching a documentary many years ago about the invasion of a movie production:  Mark Kitchell's short The Godfather Comes to 6th Street was shot by its director, then a film student at NYU, as he wandered his Lower East Side neighborhood on the day that Francis Ford Coppola came to shoot some of the Little Italy scenes for Godfather II.   Paramount tried to stop Kitchell from shooting the film but ultimately Kitchell persevered.  The film was shown on PBS, and is, yes, in the film collection at NYU.  

For my money, and one of these days I'll say more about it, the greatest movie of this type is Vittorio de Sica's After the Fox from 1966.   Written by Neil Simon -- who begged United Artists to get him out of finishing the film, because he thought it was turning out awful as it was being made -- the film stars Peter Sellers as a master thief who  must smuggle gold stolen from Cairo into Europe.   He decides the best way to do it is to pretend to be making a movie about just such an event, and chooses a distant island, called Se Valio,  as a likely port to have the gold smuggled.  The townsfolk become thrilled once they realize "they're making a movie!" but the chief of police almost stops them cold, insisting that the crew produce a permit.   Sellers's director -- "Federico Fabrizi" -- is able to persuade the chief to look the other way.  The first scene is supposed to be the only one shot -- the landing of the gold and the hauling it into a getaway van -- but the ship has engine trouble and does not arrive on time, leaving "FF" to actually shoot a picture.   There the film turns toward satirizing European Arthouse cinema.   By the time the gold scene is shot, the Roman police have arrived, and everyone gets arrested! 

In addition to Sellers' brilliant performance, we have Victor Mature, coming out of his retirement, to play an aging actor trying to stay young.   "Fabrizi" wants to use him in his film, to show the locals of Se Valio that he is a legit film-maker.   But of course that involves snowballing Mature's character, Tony Powell.   And in this scene, we have one of the greatest seductions ever.  

As I said, I could write for hours on this film, a longtime family favorite, but that little hand is on the one, and I've gotta get some shuteye.