Feb. 29th, 2012

ivyfic: (Default)
This weekend I watched two movies about movies. I had a very meta movie weekend.

One was the documentary The Best Worst Movie, which the Netflix algorithm assured me (correctly) that I would like. The little summary says it is about how a bad movie gets made. That is not what it's about. It's about fandom.

This doc would probably make more since if I'd seen Troll 2. But maybe not. )


I also watched Swimming with Sharks, which is a cult movie in Hollywood. It's a pretty much autobiographical story of a producer's assistant at a film company mostly noteworthy for Kevin Spacey chewing scenery. It's also the reason why Benicio Del Toro was in Usual Suspects--he has a five-minute scene in this, on the strength of which Kevin Spacey recommended him to Bryan Singer.

Honestly, though, the behind-the-scenes documentary was more interesting than the film. The film was shot in 18 days. On day one, they forgot to bring film. On day two, the transportation coordinator was run down by one of his own trucks (broke his leg, otherwise fine). On day three, the art truck caught fire. On day four--was the 1994 North Shore earthquake, which destroyed most of their locations.

Kevin Spacey describes filming in the week after the earthquake, when they were still feeling aftershocks. He was tied to a chair in a house with a glass roof, and apparently was convinced he was going to die. There was someone just off camera with an exacto knife to cut him loose if the building started to come down.

In the doc, you also get the saga of how this neophyte screenwriter/director's producing partners completely screwed the distrobution deal in a way that pretty much mirrors the content of the film. It still got huge buzz in Hollywood, though, since it was about Hollywood, and has been a sleeper hit ever since.

So, an entirely different kind of cult film. That I bet doesn't have half so uneasy an interaction between the fans and the creators. (Though they did interview the screenwriter's boss, who Kevin Spacey's character is based on, who said that when he first read the script he was both really angry and reluctantly proud.)

Profile

ivyfic: (Default)
ivyfic

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  1 2345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 5th, 2025 06:55 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios