Hollywood by Hollywood

The backstudio picture, or movie about filmmaking, is a genre as old and as recent as commercial filmmaking itself. This genre’s longevity is due to its function in branding filmmaking with the mystique of Hollywood. As the backstudio picture depicts it, Hollywood is simultaneously (1) an actual locale in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, (2) a business dedicated to the standardized production of motion pictures, and (3) an enduring cultural fantasy about fame, leisure, consuming, sexuality, artistry, and modernity. This overlapping of the literal (the locale) onto the material (the business) and the symbolic (the fantasy) has registered the impact of the film industry’s transformations as an institution even when the genre mystifies these changes in story terms. It is also the means by which the genre authenticates while glamorizing the industry’s representation of labor. Although Hollywood by Hollywood roughly follows the four major cycles of the genre’s development from the 1920s through the present day, it also loops back and forth in this chronology. Individual chapters discuss the genre’s self-reflexivity, its representations of Hollywood as a geographically specific yet imaginary place, narratives about movie-struck girls, narratives about has-been female stars, the masculinization of Hollywood through the focus on white male filmmakers, the genre’s recounting of the industry’s history in stories set in 1929, 1951, and 1962, and, finally, how Hollywood’s filmmaking practices have been moved offscreen, whether to break the fourth wall of the virtual world of film or to supply a cover for covert governmental actions.