A recent article I wrote for the Irish Times...
Spoof movies: You couldn't make it up. Or could you?
HARRISON FORD has just jumped out of a plane, but he doesn’t have time to enjoy the view. Instead, he calmly takes aim and fires his machine gun back at the plane he just leapt from. That’s a scene from “Firestorm”, a non-existent action movie that formed a running gag in Seinfeld .
From “The Dancing Cavalier” (in Singin’ in the Rain ) to “Mer-Man” (in Funny People ), fake films are nothing new. But increasingly, many of these punchlines are breaking the fourth wall and becoming real films.
Machete , opening soon, is a major studio film starring (among others) Robert de Niro, Jessica Alba and Mexican character actor Danny Trejo. What’s remarkable is that it began life as a jokey trailer for a non-existent movie, one of a number of spoof trailers that appeared within Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 double-bill Grindhouse . What’s even stranger is that Machete isn’t the only film to start off as a knowing joke. Indeed, Grindhouse might eventually spawn as many as three other films from its fake trailers: slasher movie “Thanksgiving”, retro horror “Don’t” and the self-explanatory “Werewolf Women of the SS”.
In the opening of Robert Altman’s Tinseltown spoof, The Player , screenwriter Buck Henry is shown trying to cash in on his biggest hit by pitching “The Graduate . . . part II”. It’s a fun exaggeration of the lows that Hollywood would sink to, or it would be if a semi-sequel didn’t subsequently exist. Rumor Has It starred Jennifer Aniston as a young woman who discovers her family were the inspiration for The Graduate .
Dustin Hoffman was even offered a chance to reprise his iconic role but turned it down.
Another fake film within The Player , “Habeas Corpus”, was shown as an example of how a sincere script about capital punishment could be re-tooled as a crass love story with distracting movie stars (in this case, Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts). Flash forward a few short years, and film-makers have churned out a similar women-on-death-row drama with a superfluous movie star (Sharon Stone this time).
In more recent years, the comedy series Entourage , loosely based on the experience of actor and producer Mark Wahlberg, followed the shaky rise of young movie star Vinnie Chase (played by Adrian Grenier). In the show, Chase’s major breakthrough was superhero flick “Aquaman”. Certainly it’s no more ridiculous an idea than Batman once was, and indeed, rumours persist that Warner Bros have long-term plans to bring the amphibious superhero to the big screen. Another Vinnie Chase fake film, “Medillin”, was a Pablo Escobar biopic and in the real world (you’re way ahead of me) writer/director Joe Carnahan ( The A-Team ) plans to make his own Escobar film.
The fake movie phenomenon has also been a handy tool for rising film-makers: Black Dynamite , an affectionate spoof of 1970s blaxploitation movies, began life as a trailer for a nonexistent film. Before financing had even been secured, the trailer (featuring star Michael Jamal White and some old stock footage) had accumulated thousands of hits on YouTube. It showed potential financiers that there was an audience for the film, what the tone of the film would be and even how to market it.
It also showed how film-makers can create their own happy ending by exploiting a trend – a fitting end to a story about Hollywood.
1 comments:
Interesting post. Let's hope it's a phenomenon that we can keep from becoming too widespread (though it's hard not to get a bit excited about Machete)!
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