Movie Details
| Title: | Hollywood Boulevard | |
| Director: | Allan Arkush, Joe Dante | |
| Year: | 1976 | |
| Genre: | Movie About Movies | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 11.16.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 11.16.25 | Internet | This Screening is part of event: DVRfest 2025 I semi-regularly listen to the trailers from hell podcast with Josh Olsen and Joe Dante and anecdotes from the making of this movie regularly come up. I'm a pretty big Joe Dante fan so I figured I should check this out, at least to stop confusing it with Hollywood Shuffle. A naive but optimistic actress moves to Los Angeles to become a famous actor and winds up with a group of people making exploitation movies where someone is killing off the actresses one by one. Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel play the lead actress and the director, Jonathan Kaplan plays Scotty - what HAS to be an homage in Boogie Nights - and that guy Dick Miller plays Walter Paisley the agent. In truth, I wasn't expecting much from this. I heard they shot it in 10 days on short ends with the absolute minimum resources, almost like Roger Corman let Joe and Allan do it just to keep them as trailer editors. But I think it's a triumph that they constructed a movie out of this and can see the promise that a bunch of other people probably saw that led to Pirahna and Rock n Roll High School. I had a pretty good time with it. I thought it was a clever idea to make an exploitation movie about making exploitation movies. There are a lot of tits in this movie and some blood and some action and some laughs but it certainly isn't shy around the tits. They probably got to be a little lax about film equipment lying around on set because the sets were supposed to be movie sets, and they have an excuse to do these segments where they shoot films that just happen to look a lot like existing films that had extra b-roll footage. So as you watch you start to notice how much stitching there is, to the point where some reverse angles are from other movies like Mary Woronov offering to feed the dogs. You can also tell, though, that they stretched every second they had to hit that 80 minute running time. There's a montage of freeway signs that just serves to segue between acts, there's a music video for some reason, there's an unedited old commercial from the 50s that I don't think is fake even though it's hilarious. At one point the characters go to the drive-in to watch their own movie and we get to watch the intermission commercials as well as repeated scenes of what they shot presented as them watching it on the big screen. All very clever but you can feel the scrounging... hey, what can we get into this movie? None of it feels tedious at all though which is saying something compared to the number of weird wednesday movies where I sat there watching someone walk through the woods for ten minutes or open the door, come into the room, close the door, cross the room, sit down, then answer the phone so the scene can begin. Nah, this is fun and funny. It's not frantic like a George Romero movie but it is very well edited. And did I mention tits? |
