There’s nothing Hollywood loves more than making movies about Hollywood, except possibly adapting books into movies (and here you thought the game industry was the only one eager to milk existing properties). A book about Hollywood? Sure money, especially when, like 1976’s The Last Tycoon, you’ve got F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel to start from, Harold Pinter writing the screenplay, Elia Kazan directing, and Robert De Niro starring (along with a raft of other stars). I rented it because I had heard references to it in class and in the Guardian within days of each other, and coincidences like that are too much for my NetFlix queue to handle.
The main plot — a Depression-era producer (based on Irving Thalberg) unravels after he falls in love with the only beautiful woman in Hollywood who’s not an aspiring actress — takes forever to get anywhere. The real treats in the film are, as with every Hollywood movie, in the way it shows off the magic of the medium. At one point, De Niro teaches a stuffy novelist how movies work by pantomiming a scene for him in his office; as he goes through the motions, the viewer is as hypnotized as the novelist, completely sucked into De Niro’s illusion, fully immersed into a setting made up of thin air and words. Various clips of movies in the editing process are shown (in black-and-white, natch), and they do a perfect job of subtly leading the viewer to the same conclusions as the producer/critic: one scene drags just a bit, another needs a couple of cuts changed to tighten the action, a single awkward line throws a wrench in an otherwise perfect exchange.
What The Last Tycoon shows you is not just how Hollywood works as an industry, but how cinema works as a form; not just the technical jargon and boardroom wrangling that drives the business, but the delicate art of putting a movie together. It’s like a quick tutorial on how to make and watch movies, and it’s very cool.