Simone
“The idea of Hollywood is the most original idea Hollywood ever had–the only one that it ever made up by itself,” asserts critic Richard Schickel in his 1993 documentary Hollywood on Hollywood. Since at least 1912, when nickelodeon patrons got a glimpse at the filmmaking process in the one-reeler A Vitagraph Romance, Hollywood has reveled in stories about itself, which range from the sweetly nostalgic (Singin’ in the Rain) to the bitterly satiric (The Player). Often the protagonist is a starstruck outsider trying to get to the top (Anchors Aweigh), though just as often he’s a Hollywood veteran down on his luck (Sunset Boulevard). Andrew Niccol’s clever satire Simone combines the two, as Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino), an arty director whose career is spiraling downward, replaces a spoiled star with a computer-generated beauty synthesized from earlier movie stars. “A star is digitized,” declares the director.
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“Movies about the movies cannot be taken as documentaries,” write Rudy Behlmer and Tony Thomas in Hollywood’s Hollywood, yet there must be something to the fact that so many films about Hollywood are steeped in self-loathing. Richard Schickel, writing for Life in 1966, again hit the nail on the head when he pointed to “a kind of anti-myth” in such films: “Hollywood has come to take a perverse pride in its rottenness.” Simone joins numerous other movies in satirizing the dream factory, but it dares not tell us suckers how we fit into the big picture.
