In the Latest Fractured Mirror Entry I Look Back at Burden of Dreams, Ed Wood, Full Frontal, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Postcards from the Edge

For the last year or so much of my time and energy has been devoted to working on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the movie business. I’ve posted much longer versions of some of the pieces that I’ve written for the book on this website but the vast majority I only shared with people who pre-ordered the book through Kickstarter and Backerkit or who donate to this site’s Patreon page. 

I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done on the book, as well as the kooky assortment of movies I’ve covered so I figured that every month I would share a handful of pieces I’ve written for The Fractured Mirror with y’all. I’ve written up 317 movies so far and will cover 365 in total so I am very open to recommendations on movies to write about. 

In conclusion, please donate to my site’s Patreon page or pre-order The Fractured Mirror over at Backerkit. I desperately need the income and I’d love to share these new pieces with as many people as possible. 

Burden of Dreams (1982) FM

Werner Herzog was already an accomplished filmmaker when he famously went mad filming 1982’s Fitzcarraldo,. But Burden of Dreams, the documentary Les Blank made about the film’s making, in many ways represents the birth of Herzog as one of film’s most colorful and eccentric characters. A gloriously verbose monologue the writer-director delivers late in the film about the essence of life in the jungle being “the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder” epitomizes Herzog’s curious standing as international cinema’s preeminent poets of despair. When Blank’s cameras started following him Herzog was already an auteur; Burden of Dreams turned him into a personality.

Burden of Dreams chronicles, with great beauty and horror, the German filmmaker’s Herculean attempts to make a movie about a Western opera lover’s impossible quest to bring culture to the jungle by constructing an opera house in the wilds of South America.

Jason Robards signed on to play the lead character and Mick Jagger his sidekick but this initial conception of the film had to be abandoned when Robards got desperately sick, Jagger had to leave to fulfill the demands of being one of the world’s biggest rock stars and, for good measure, indigenous people burned down the film’s set in 1979.

A saner soul might view that as a clear-cut sign from the universe to abandon the project but no one has ever accused Herzog of being sane. So he doubled down with Klaus Kinski, his leading man of choice as well as the bane of his existence, in the lead role and set about realizing his audacious creative vision in the face of a seemingly endless series of insurmountable obstacles.

In making Fitzcarraldo over a period of years Herzog essentially became the character. He went upriver the same way Francis Ford Coppola did making Apocalypse Now in pursuit of a greatness only possible through madness.

Herzog is so intense and so serious in Burden of Dreams that he is absolutely hilarious. The camera loves him and he seems to love the camera nearly as much as he hates it. Herzog is a man of obsessions and extremes and so is Burden of Dreams. It’s an unforgettable and deeply moving tribute to a man who seemingly wouldn’t stop pursuing his impossible dreams even in the face of death, destruction and agonizing failure.

Ed Wood (1994) FM

Writer, director, actor and all-around creative visionary Edward Wood Jr. attained posthumous notoriety as the fabled “Worst Film of All Time” in the influential 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards and the subject of the 1994 biopic Ed Wood, which depicted the trash auteur as the benevolent king of the freaks. In Tim Burton’s gorgeously designed cult classic he’s en endlessly enthusiastic ringmaster who collects the kind of outsized human cartoon characters who are laughed at, considered monsters or both: mush mouthed wrestlers, sham psychics, busty gothic TV horror hosts, cross-dressers and, most notably, drug-addicted horror legend Bela Lugosi. Wood, whose cross-dressing inspired his 1953 film Glen or Glenda identified with outsiders who were strange and unusual because, to paraphrase Beetlejuice, he himself was strange and unusual.

An angel-faced Johnny Depp is all sweetness and light as the titular icon, a World War II veteran who comes to Hollywood to make movies but fails to impress the big studios due to an egregious lack of talent. In an Academy Award winning performance of great power and aching sadness, Martin Landau is all darkness and despair as a down on his luck Bela Lugosi, the legendary star of Dracula and Wood’s friend, collaborator and muse on projects like Glen and Glenda, Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space, which Lugosi somehow managed to appear in despite being dead.

Together these misfits find a home for themselves and like-minded kooks like colorful charlatan The Amazing Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), lumbering grappler Tor Johnson (George "The Animal" Steele) and melancholy drag queen Bunny Breckridge (Bill Murray) in a series of low-budget horror and science fiction shockers as distinctive as they are wildly inept.

Wood and Lugosi’s friendship forms the film’s heartbreaking emotional core. They’re iconoclasts who find in each other something that makes them feel like artists with a purpose rather abject failures at the bottom of the show business hierarchy.

Ed Wood goes to grim places in its depiction of Lugosi’s addiction and suicidal depression. A scene of Lugosi crying out in agony as he undergoes the torment of withdrawal has a decidedly darker tone than the rest of this black and white tribute to dreamers but lends the character, and the film, a surprising emotional depth.

Ed Wood established the sturdy template for biopics about the makers of legendary bad movies like The Disaster Artist and Dolemite is My Name (which was also written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski) with its empathetic treatment of its subject and loving recreations of some of the most transcendently terrible scenes ever filmed but set the bar impossibly high.

Full Frontal (2002) 

After the back to back to back mainstream commercial triumphs of Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven Steven Soderbergh got artsy, independent, experimental and insufferable with his 2002 show-business comedy Full Frontal. The critically maligned flop explores a cross-section of shallow show-business types as they prepare for the birthday party of Gus (David Duchovny) a Harvey Weinstein-like pig obsessed with getting off and pushing the limits sexually with any attractive women he encounters. Weinstein lookalike Jeff Garlin somewhat confusingly also very briefly plays a Harvey Weinstein figure named Harvey in this Miramax production.

Soderbergh gave his star-studded cast a series of Dogme 95-like rules encouraging improvisation and forbidding many of the perks of studio filmmaking, such as trailers, drivers, make-up artists, craft service and costumers. Unfortunately forcing Julia Roberts to pick up McDonald’s on the way to shooting did not result in a masterpiece or even a particularly good film

The result is a movie filled with famous faces like Catherine Keener, Blair Underwood, David Hyde Pierce, Julia Roberts, David Fincher, January Jones, Terence Stamp, Rainn Wilson and Brad Pitt that combines the worst elements of mumblecore and Dogme 95.

Full Frontal is shot largely in digital video by Soderbergh himself under the name Peter Andrews. The playful and misguided filmmaker seems perversely intent on making the ugliest, cheapest, most amateurishly filmed movie possible.

Like a true auteur Soderbergh gave himself and his cast the time, space and freedom to get hopelessly lost and venture into wildly self-indulgent, deeply uninteresting places.

Int. Leather Bar (2013) 

James Franco and Travis Matthews’ experimental 2013 film Interior. Leather Bar is all about the blurring on lines. It purposefully questions and crosses the lines separating reality from fiction, narrative from documentary, scripted from unscripted and gay from straight. Interior. Leather Bar is a deeply self-involved meditation on the ethics of sex scenes and onscreen sexuality. So the revelation that Franco had transgressed any number of ethical lines involving sex in his own films casts a dark shadow over an already dodgy endeavor.

Interior. Leather Bar imagines what the forty minutes minutes of footage that were cut from William Friedkin’s controversial 1980 gay sadomasochism-themed psychodrama Cruising to prevent it from getting an X-rating might have looked and felt like. To that end he cast his heterosexual friend and collaborator Val Lauren, who previously played gay actor Sal Mineo for him in Sal, in the Al Pacino role of a straight cop forced to examine his sexuality when he goes undercover in the world of leather bars to investigate a serial killer.

The filmmakers are less concerned with being true to Cruising than in exploring the boundaries of how far its straight actors will go in pursuit of creative truth or at least pleasing the big movie star in one of the director chairs.

As always Franco finds the inner lives of actors infinitely more compelling and entertaining than they actually are. As a prominent onscreen presence Franco comes off as an insufferable caricature of a self-important artiste.

Interior. Leather was previous just pointless and irritatingly self-indulgent. Franco’s career cratering thanks to issues similar to those in the film makes it pointless, irritatingly self-indulgent and uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons.

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) FM

Tim Burton’s 1985 feature film directorial debut Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is an unusual movie about the film industry in that nothing in its first hour even remotely suggests that it will be about movie-making. It is only in its glorious climax that the Warner Brothers motion picture Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure becomes a meta movie world satire about the inspiration for a Warner Brothers movie-within-a-movie also entitled Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure with an ostentatious supporting role from our hero but not as himself.

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is unique as well in that it’s not about a writer, movie star or director but rather a prop, a bike so amazing that it falls backwards into Hollywood stardom after being stolen from the titular pop icon.

Before it sets its sights on the film business, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure chronicles Pee-Wee Herman’s (Paul Reubens) heroic quest to retrieve his stolen bike that leaps deliriously from high to high and one iconic set-piece and quotable line to another.

Then Pee-Wee discovers that his bike somehow made it to Hollywood to figure prominently in the kind of hopelessly old-fashioned Catholic orphanage drama they haven’t made since the heyday of Bing Crosby and Mickey Rooney.

Pee-Wee sneaks onto the Warner Brothers set by pretending to be part of Milton Berle’s entourage and steals back his bike and takes it on a surreal tour through a Warner Brothers lot that could exist only in the filmmakers’ fertile imagination.

The movie's kiddie fantasy world version of Warner Brothers is a time-warped acid trip where beach flicks are filmed alongside Godzilla cheapies, Twisted Sister music videos, Christmas schlock and all manner of chintzy b-movie spectacle.

Burton’s dazzling live-action cartoon radiates pure joy as it roars triumphantly to a close with a chase through Hollywood overflowing with ideas and imagination and then the screening of the bizarro world Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure at a drive-in that ends a perfect movie perfectly.

The script by Reubens, the great Phil Hartman (who only had one screenplay credit but boy is it a doozy!) and Michael Varhol is full of hilarious details that reward repeat viewing, like an obnoxious child star played by Jason Hervey calling “action” before a bullied director can and Pee-Wee’s transcendently terrible acting in his role as a bellhop in the closing film-within-a-film.

Burton would return to this subject matter with 1994’s Ed Wood, another loving celebration of an unforgettable man-child running amok in Hollywood.

Burton was only twenty-six when he made one of the all-time great debuts but he was nevertheless in complete control of his craft and his precocious artistry.

Postcards from the Edge (1990) FM

With her autobiographical 1987 novel Postcards from the Edge Carrie Fisher recreated herself as a legendary wit, Dorothy Parker if she had a curious history as an outer space Princess in a gold slave bikini. With Postcards from the Edge Fisher drew upon the absurdity and dark comedy of her tabloid existence as Hollywood royalty who is troubled even by the very lenient standards of the breed. As a second generation movie star Fisher understood the bleak cosmic joke that is the entertainment business as well as anyone and chronicled her life and her trade with biting, self-deprecating wit and keen insight.

In an extraordinary, Academy Award-nominated performance, Meryl Streep stars as Suzanne Vale, a Fisher surrogate who ends up in rehab after a drug overdose. The weary survivor with a genius for sarcasm wants to work but the studio insists that, for insurance purposes, she lives with her mother Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine), an old school movie star with a colossal ego and reluctance to share the spotlight with anyone, particularly her daughter.

Postcards from the Edge is a beautifully realized comedy-drama of recovery that chronicles, with great humor and empathy, its savvy but self-destructive heroine’s spiritual and professional journey as she tries to rebuild her life and career without the crutches that allowed her to just barely tolerate Hollywood’s rampant cruelty.

Carrie Fisher's mother Debbie Reynolds reportedly was eager to play a show business icon based on her. Who is better qualified to play a Debbie Reynolds type than Debbie Reynolds herself?

Director Mike Nichols instead chose Shirley MacLaine, who delivers a dazzling star turn as a maternal monster of id and ego who must learn to relate to her daughter as a profoundly flawed human being rather a movie star or a reflection of her.

The relationship between a woman in the scary early stages of sobriety and a mother unwilling to confront her own alcoholism and the role she played in her daughter’s dysfunction is the film’s warm, beating heart. Despite memorable supporting performances from Dennis Quaid as a cocky stud, Richard Dreyfuss as a warm doctor who pumps Suzanne’s stomach, Gene Hackman as a tough but supportive director and Annette Benning as savvy sexpot, this is largely a two hander for two legendary, perfectly cast actresses with potent chemistry.

Like the book it’s based upon, Postcards from the Edge is funny, sad and wise, a gift from its author to a universe that adored her but could never quite understand her idiosyncratic genius.

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