Movies about movies

A Star is Born

A movie star helps a young singer/actress find fame, even as age and alcoholism send his own career into a downward spiral.

Sunset Blvd.

A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent-film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.

The Purple Rose of Cairo

Cecilia is a waitress in New Jersey during the Depression and is searching for an escape from her dreary life. Tom Baxter is a dashing young archaeologist in the film "The Purple Rose of Cairo." After losing her job Cecilia goes to see the film in hopes of raising her spirits. Much to her surprise Tom Baxter walks off the screen and into her life.

The Player

A studio executive is being blackmailed by a writer whose script he rejected but which one? Loaded with Hollywood insider jokes.

The Bad and the Beautiful

An actress, a director, and a writer are asked to help revive the career of ruthless Hollywood studio bigwig Jonathan Shields. However, all three are reluctant because they have all been used and betrayed by him in the past.

Cinema Paradiso

A filmmaker recalls his childhood, when he fell in love with the movies at his village's theater and formed a deep friendship with the theater's projectionist.

Stardust Memories

While attending a retrospect of his work, a filmmaker recalls his life and his loves: the inspirations for his films.

Day for Night

A committed film director struggles to complete his movie while coping with a myriad of crises, personal and professional, among the cast and crew.

8½

A harried movie director retreats into his memories and fantasies.

A silent film production company and cast make a difficult transition to sound.

Boogie Nights

The story of a young man's adventures in the Californian pornography industry of the 1970s and 1980s.

Tropic Thunder

Through a series of freak occurrences, a group of actors shooting a big-budget war movie are forced to become the soldiers they are portraying.

Chaplin

A film about the troubled and controversial life of the master comedy filmmaker.

The Artist

Silent movie star George Valentin bemoans the coming era of talking pictures and fades into oblivion and self-destruction, but finds sparks with Peppy Miller, a young dancer lighting up talkies like no one else.

Adaptation

A lovelorn screenwriter turns to his less talented twin brother for help when his efforts to adapt a non-fiction book go nowhere.

Ed Wood

The mostly true story of the legendary director of awful movies and his strange group of friends and actors.

Barton Fink

Set in 1941, a newly successful New York playwright accepts an offer to write movie scripts in LA, and finds himself with writer's block when required to do a B-movie wrestling script, the only relief coming from a traveling salesman living next door.

Mulholland Dr.

After a car wreck on the winding Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesic, she and a perky Hollywood-hopeful search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality.

Hollywood Ending

A director is forced to work with his ex-wife, who left him for the boss of the studio bankrolling his new film. But the night before the first day of shooting, he develops a case of psychosomatic blindness.

Silent Movie

A film director and his strange friends struggle to produce the first major silent feature film in forty years.

Director/choreographer Bob Fosse tells his own life story as he details the sordid life of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a womanizing, drug-using dancer.

Has-been director Harry Dawes gets a new lease on his career when independently wealthy Kirk Edwards hires him to write and direct a film.

Hollywoodland

Struggling private investigator Louis Simo treats his work more as a means to make a living than a want to do right by what few clients he has. Through connections with the investigation firm for which he used to work, Simo is hired by Helen Bessolo to investigate the death of her son, actor George Reeves.