There are few things Hollywood loves more than a movie about the craft of movie-making, which is hardly surprising: Film is rarely a part-time job, and doubtless for many, it feels like the entire world. From the industry’s early days, Hollywood has been something akin to an old-style company town, one in which people live and breathe the job of filmmaking, so of course there are a ton of movies about movies. What’s surprising is that there are so many good ones.
From its inception, the movie industry has been a hotbed of gossip and scandal, but most of these films aren’t about that. They’re more broadly about the creative process, and that’s where we begin to care. They’re sometimes cynical about the true intentions of seemingly gifted artists, or about the ways capitalism constrains art and mutes voices that actually have something to say—concerns hardly limited to the movie industry. Well more than a century on from the birth of films, they’re so much a part of our lives that movies about movies, when done right, wind up feeling like movies about life.