Beneath Mulholland1997

Beneath Mulholland is rich in its understanding of Hollywood, laced with irony, thoroughly provocative and brilliantly creative. There is also a steady fascination with love, sex, death, voyeurism, money and glory, all the preoccupations of Los Angeles - or of that movie L.A. whose initials, Thomson says, stand for Lies Allowed. He writes about James Stewart in Vertigo, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, Cary Grant ("Having fun, perched somewhere between skill and exhilaration, Grant is both the deft director of the circus and a kid in love with the show"), Greta Garbo ("She knows that she is a latent force that works in the minds of audiences she will never meet") and about stardom in general: "The star is adored but not liked: that is the consequence of a religious respect that enjoys no ordinary relations with the object of its desire." Entering another dimension, we meet James Dean at age 50 - he survived the car crash - and discover how his career developed (and how it affected Paul Newman's). We see what happened to Tony Manero (John Travolta) after Saturday Night Fever ended and how Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer) moved on when The Fabulous Baker Boys was over. We are given a rollicking but instructive version of how Sony learned to live and die Hollywood. We learn the 20 Things People Like to Forget About Hollywood ("All People in Hollywood Are Dysfunctional" is the first). And there is insight into How People Die in Movies - "the empire of bang bang."