Movies about making movies, novels about writing novels

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Can this genre ever be good?

― thing of thing, Thursday, 22 April 2004 08:44 (twenty-two years ago)

I give you At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brian.

― caitlin (caitlin), Thursday, 22 April 2004 08:47 (twenty-two years ago)

Quite apart from Living in Oblivion / half of all shit modern literature, is there a written version of documentaries about films making, (eg Heart of Darkness, Lost in La Mancha)? I suppose a whole book would be strange, but are there any classic magazine articles about a third person's writer's block?

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 22 April 2004 08:53 (twenty-two years ago)

adaptation?

― the surface noise (electricsound), Thursday, 22 April 2004 09:21 (twenty-two years ago)

What about Misery? Technically it's about writing a novel. As well as other things, of course. And Throw Mamma From the Train, a most enjoyable film about writer's block.

The night was... sultry.

― accentmonkey (accentmonkey), Thursday, 22 April 2004 11:13 (twenty-two years ago)

Oh, and Sunset Boulevard, which is about writing films. And there was that almost good film about making Nosferatu, which I can't remember the name of.

― accentmonkey (accentmonkey), Thursday, 22 April 2004 11:16 (twenty-two years ago)

Shadow of the Vampire. "Almost good" is a perfect assessment.

― m.e.a. (m.e.a.), Thursday, 22 April 2004 12:04 (twenty-two years ago)

Mamet's State and Main. Probably not one of his better films, but I don't remember actually hating it.

― Will (will), Thursday, 22 April 2004 12:44 (twenty-two years ago)

The episodes of Seinfeld about making the sitcom were pretty great.

― The Huckle-Buck (Horace Mann), Thursday, 22 April 2004 14:28 (twenty-two years ago)

Richard Hell's novel I liked.

Nickelodeon, I dug.

"Ed Wood" was fine.

"The Boyfriend" a musical about a musical.

What was that Britt Ekland one with Norman Wisdom, Can-can etcet?

― mark grout (mark grout), Thursday, 22 April 2004 14:32 (twenty-two years ago)

"Singin' In the Rain" - Supra CLASSIC!

― Dadaismus (Dada), Thursday, 22 April 2004 14:33 (twenty-two years ago)

Can this genre ever be good?

Why, yes. Bowfinger, The Wizard of Speed and Time, Barton Fink (well, "movies about writing screenplays" - like Adaptation), The Player ("Get Jimmy Smits and make it a sexy Stand and Deliver"), The Blair Witch Project...oh yeah, Singin' in the Rain.

American Movie deserves some mention, even though it is non-fiction.

― Ernest P. (ernestp), Thursday, 22 April 2004 14:35 (twenty-two years ago)

"Ed Wood" was fine.

In my pantheon, FAAAAAAAAAAAABULOUS. (It really is my favorite movie of the nineties and the fact that the DVD release was indefinitely postponed a WEEK before it was supposed to come out pisses the hell out of me.)

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 22 April 2004 14:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Yeah, there should have been an exclamation point at the end of my sentence back there. soz.

― mark grout (mark grout), Thursday, 22 April 2004 14:39 (twenty-two years ago)

i love movie movies! day for night! 8 1/2! everything else mentioned!

― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 22 April 2004 14:54 (twenty-two years ago)

(don't like shadow of the vampire (well the funny bits i like) or state & main tho)

― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 22 April 2004 14:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Blair Witch was a big fat ass on a screen. Ed Wood is genius.

I remember liking My Life is in Turnaround (which was the film Eric Schaeffer did before If Lucy Fell, and it's about making a film), but it's been a long time since I saw it.

In some ways, Reality Bites is about Winona's character making her documentary about her friends.

― martin m. (mushrush), Thursday, 22 April 2004 16:08 (twenty-two years ago)

I would like to cite much of John Barth's career and some of Borges and various other PoMo metafictions, please.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Thursday, 22 April 2004 16:46 (twenty-two years ago)

Ed Wood is great, by far the best thing Tim Burton has ever done.

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:04 (twenty-two years ago)

The Player is in some ways my fav. altman film. Funny it took metafiction to make him so damn FOCUSED.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:10 (twenty-two years ago)

Ed Wood is easily the best Tim Burton film I've seen. It never came out on DVD? Where's Criterion when you need them.

That said, Glen Or Glenda? is a better movie than Ed Wood.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:24 (twenty-two years ago)

All of the devices work magnificently if they're pull off and crash miserably if they aren't.

I have read enough poems about poems to last me a lifetime, however.

Songs about songs, though, there aren't enough good ones -- "This Song's Just Six Words Long" only scratches the surface.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:26 (twenty-two years ago)

s1ocki OTM on two of the greatest movies ever made.

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:27 (twenty-two years ago)

The Pixies "Trompe Le Monde" is about itself.

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:29 (twenty-two years ago)

Ed Wood is easily the best Tim Burton film I've seen. It never came out on DVD? Where's Criterion when you need them.

It's the only one not to have been released on DVD yet. You can get Planet of the Apes but not that. Argh...

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:32 (twenty-two years ago)

OMG 8.5 BME WTF!!!

― ModJ (ModJ), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:36 (twenty-two years ago)

I too remember enjoying My Life's in Turnaround and then completely confusing Donal Lardner Ward with Donal Logue forever after (even though the latter is inexplicably sexxee, whereas the former is not)

― Donna Brown (Donna Brown), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:50 (twenty-two years ago)

"close up" from iranian director abbas kiarostami

― todd swiss (eliti), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:52 (twenty-two years ago)

Best song about songs is Pulp's Something Changed, which manages to be a touching love song and great pop tune as well as saying some dizzying meta things along the way. There's also some great stuff in the Yachts' Suffice To Say.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Thursday, 22 April 2004 20:55 (twenty-two years ago)

Nah, all the genre is crap, and anything that transcends (not humors) it does so by means of a element not at all related to the meta-ness itself...and arguably would work better without the meta element.

That all being said, meta ironically is seen as the most Johnny-Come-Lately ultra outre technique, whereas a careful examination of literature shows that actually one of the first motifs in storytelling is storytelling that references the act of storytelling. Hence frame stories. Barth at least pays tribute to this.

Even failing the above argument, almost nothing has made any progress past Tristram Shandy in the realm of creative meta, so total dud. And don't even let me start to flog the dead horse of Adaptation.

― Girolamo Savonarola, Thursday, 22 April 2004 21:53 (twenty-two years ago)

What about novels? No one discussed novels? Sigh.

God, what was the name of that novel? My Little Black Dress? My Old Blue Dress? Something like that.

― Super-Kate (kate), Friday, 23 April 2004 07:12 (twenty-two years ago)

Would Don Quixote count? What about Tristram Shandy?

― Prude (Prude), Friday, 23 April 2004 07:29 (twenty-two years ago)

They're not about novels as such, but they reflect upon their own composition and the process of writing/storytelling in general.

― Prude (Prude), Friday, 23 April 2004 07:30 (twenty-two years ago)

I give you At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brian.

-- caitlin (wpsal...), April 22nd, 2004.

― Dadaismus (Dada), Friday, 23 April 2004 08:55 (twenty-two years ago)

Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters! (les faux monneyeurs, I think).
Loved it when I read it but lots has faded from my memory now.

― cuspidorian (cuspidorian), Friday, 23 April 2004 10:50 (twenty-two years ago)

'The World and the Book' by Gabriel Josipovici is a great book suggesting (simplifying for speed, here) how modernist self-reflexivity is in fact a return to medieval thought and the idea of writer as obsessed 'craftsman' after Romanticism; using Dante and Chaucer as examples of 'metafiction' before anybody ever called it 'metafiction'. Surely the novelist is continually making decisions about how to express something; implicitly, anyway, so writing itself has self-reflexivity built into it?

― Will Mckenzie, Friday, 23 April 2004 17:48 (twenty-two years ago)

Why I Have Not Written Any Of My Books by I believe Marcel Benabou is not a novel but it is fantastic and something every writer who is never going to write anything should read.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 24 April 2004 10:16 (twenty-two years ago)

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