BEHIND THE LENS: FILMS ON FILMMAKING: For as long as humanity has been making movies, we have also been making movies about how movies are made. This meta-cinema gives filmmakers–famously very humble people–the ability to mythologize their own struggles, from battling with finicky actors to funding nightmares, all while showing audiences exactly how the sausage is made. It’s an excuse to air industry dirty laundry under the guise of art and a love letter to the chaos of creation. As we ring in the new year, the Roxy Theater celebrates the art of filmmaking with a lineup of the best films ever made about making films.


THE PLAYER: A Hollywood studio executive with a shaky moral compass (Tim Robbins) finds himself caught up in a criminal situation that would be right at home in one of his movie projects, in this biting industry satire from Robert Altman. Mixing elements of film noir with sly insider comedy, The Player, based on a novel by Michael Tolkin, functions as both a nifty stylish murder story and a commentary on its own making, and it is stocked with a heroic supporting cast (Peter Gallagher, Whoopi Goldberg, Greta Scacchi, Dean Stockwell, Fred Ward) and a lineup of star cameos that make for an astonishing Hollywood who’s who. This complexly woven grand entertainment (which kicks off with one of American cinema’s most audacious and acclaimed opening shots) was the film that marked Altman’s triumphant commercial comeback in the early 1990s.