Entertainment :: Movies
They Shoot Movies, Don’t They? ...The Making of Mirage by Howie Green
EDGE ContributorFriday Mar 10, 2006 Hollywood is very good at blurring the line between reality and fantasy: art often imitates life, so one never knows what to believe or who to trust. The new DVD release of They Shoot Movies Don’t They: The Making of Mirage take all this sort of thing one step further with interesting, if somewhat confusing results.
The movie, shot in 2000, is billed as a true story based on a lie. It is a mockumentary about what happens when Tom Paulson, a successful film executive, leaves his cushy but unfulfilling job to produce and direct his own independent production. Shot in Beta-video the film follows how Tom completes his film (called Mirage) and go into post production.
He runs out of money and spends the rest of documentary begging, stealing and borrowing from everyone he can in order to complete the project. In the process, he loses his wife -- and everything else -- and heads to Vegas for one last shot, loses and kills himself in a hotel room.
Don’t worry: the movie is all just a hoax; and is all fun, even if it’s nothing too original: we’ve seen this sort of behind-the-scenes Hollywood scenario many times before from Robert Altman’s The Player to Sunset Boulevard; all the way back to the Janet Gaynor version of A Star is Born. There is nothing new here, but stay tuned because it gets very interesting. The DVD extras are what make this project a unique and worthwhile venture. What happens their fake documentary when the filmmakers attempt to get it distributed is a new lesson in Hollywood absurdity.
The DVD contains two voiceover commentary tracks: the first is standard commentary by one of the principals -- the usual kind of stuff. But the second “secret” audio commentary is worth the price of admission. On it the creative team discuss their attempts at finding a distributor for their little joke of a movie. After a long, thorough search, they ended up in the office of Harry Klein, the man who did all the promotion and publicity for The Blair Witch Project, another great hoax of a film.
They assumed that he understood their movie was also a hoax, but soon realized that Mr. Klein had embraced their movie because he thought it was real. So there they are between a rock and a hard place. Do they blow their potential deal by telling Klein that their movie isn’t real, or do they continue on with the whole hoax and risk everything? What an odd dilemma for them to be in. So what do they do? Well when cornered by Klein they say their movie is "…as real as it gets…" - whatever that means. And then things go downhill from there. You’ll have to listen to the track to get the full details but rest assured it gets crazier by the minute.
Anyone who ever thought or dreamt of producing or directing a movie on their own should be forced to watch this DVD as required research about how crazy things in Hollywood can get. They Shoot Movies Don’t They completely erases the line between what’s real and what’s not and will have you scratching your head and wondering who’s fooling who.
- Audio commentary tracks
- Deleted scenes
- Setup options
Howie Green is a Boston-based artist and painter whose portrait of rapper Biggie Smalls appears on the 2007 compliation album "Incredible". He was winner of Absolut Vodka’s 25th Anniversary art competition and he painted 3 of the cows in the Jimmy Fund’s Cow Parade 2006. He recently painted a series of Pop Art Murals at the Dimock Center in Boston, MA and completed a large art and mural instllation in Delray Beach and Jacksonville, FL. He is also a multi-media designer and author of several books including "Jazz Fish Zen: Adventures in Mamboland" - and he once sang back-up for the opening act at a Shaun Cassidy concert in Madison Square Garden.
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