Movies About Movies

There are at least three feature-length documentaries made about films with troubled productions:

• Burden of Dreams about Herzog's Fitzcarraldo
  
• Hearts of Darkness about Coppola's Apocalypse Now
  
• Lost Soul about Richard Stanley's The Island of Doctor Moreau

Can you think of any others?

The only one of those I have seen is Hearts of Darkness. I can't recall how I wound up with it, as I have no interest in movies about movies. Even the fictional movies made about movie making I find banal.

Different strokes. 8-1/2 is my favorite film ever.

I don't think that 8-1/2 really falls under the movies-about-movies category. It's about a director's travails, true, but the movie is just part of the background, as I see it. Just as Mel Brooks' The Producers is not really about the production of a Broadway play; the play is just the scenery.

I was thinking of things like The Player or Saving Mr. Banks.

On cable, they've been showing The death of "Superman Lives". I haven't bothered to watch it, but I suppose I might if they persist.

I did own copies of all of the movies, except for Dr. Moreau and Lost Soul.. So of course I had to get them.

Luckily, as a well-known Hollywood disaster Moreau was cheap.  Widely regarded as one of the WORST movies ever made, it certainly lives down to its reputation.  Despite the great Stan Winston designing the creatures, and a competent director in Frankenheimer - extra points for irony - the plot never approaches believability or logic.  The acting is mostly hard to gauge behind Winton's masks & makeup, but what is visible is risible.  Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer - the two "name actors" who appear as themselves - are so bad it's hard to believe they took the project seriously.

Maybe they didn't.  Brando (this was I believe his last film) famously shut down the production halfway through to try to rewrite the entire script.

And Kilmer was so difficult that Frankenheimer famously said, if he was filming "The Val Kilmer Story," he wouldn't hire Kilmer to play himself.

Moreau is famous as a titanic movie flop because Richard Stanley, who wrote and produced it over a period of many years and was contracted to direct it, was famously fired after only two days of filming. He didn't want Brando, he didn't want Kilmer, at various times several other actors were attached to the project (including James Woods, Bruce Willis and Jurgen Prochnow) and other directors (Polanski).  The sets were destroyed more than once by hurricanes.

After having his project taken away from him by the suits, Stanley snuck back onto the film camp site and appears, masked, as one of the animals.

Tangential to Burden of Dreams, I just bought My Best Fiend which is Werner Herzog's meditation of his working relationship with Klaus Kinski. Kinski was probably bipolar, and would occasionally lapse into these incredible fits of hysteria where he would scream at people for hours at a time -- yet having relieved the pressure, be gentle and sweet-natured afterward.  Of course Kinski, who died in 1991, isn't around to defend himself so all we get is Herzog's version.... but from the evidence of Burden of Dreams and the comments of Kinski's three daughters, he seems to have been a right royal handful.