Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Inside Hollywood
"Sunset Boulevard" gave a pretty good depiction of the state of Hollywood at the beginning of the '50s. The studio system was in decline, so the big studios weren't producing B movies anymore, which is why Joe couldn't find work. The casting of the film also involved bringing on stars from the silent era who were very similar to the characters they played. To me it really adds to the experience of watching the film, but I knew all of the inside information because I studied the movie in school. I know a lot of you read up on the film after watching it, do you think you have to know all that information beforehand to really appreciate "Sunset Boulevard"? I know I liked "The Player" when I first saw it when it came out, but I didn't realize just how good it was until I was a film student. What to all of you think?
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3 comments:
I don't think you need to know the background information, but it does add something. The movie itself gave a pretty good sense of the history and the current state of things in the movie industry. Knowing about Gloria Swanson's and Erich von Stroheim's film histories was just sort of a neat addition.
I agree. It is a case of layers of richness. It is enough to know what the characters are supposed to have been, but to discover that that the actors own lives were parallel adds remarkable depth particularly since it isn’t flattering in the details.
I think the film, like anything really, benefits from additional knowledge. There's really no such thing as an isolated piece of art. It's more like a piece of art — a film, a painting, a novel — is the center of a human document, and the document is everything that went into it and came out.
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