There’s no such thing as an overnight success. And those who’ve had overnight success are usually the first ones to tell you they don’t exist. They take years of toiling around in the margins, keeping your ear to the ground and putting in hard labour. If you’re a starving artist, it means you’re hungry.
The trick is to stay hungry.
Kevin Bacon is Nick Chapman, a film school grad with an overactive imagination and a head full of movie tropes. Whenever reality gets uncomfortable, he slips into these cute little fantasy sequences that help reframe the moment, usually for the audience’s benefit as a way of squeezing more meaning into a scene. It’s a shorthand device that would show up everywhere by the mid-90s, from Ally McBeal to Student Bodies (remember that show?), that quick cut into a character’s internal process. But it’s usually reserved for characters who are creative, dreamers, visionaries, or maybe just live in their own headspace. More often than not, it’s code for: Neurotic. Here, Nick is that guy: an imaginative twenty-six year old who understands the world through screen language. He’s a hardcore cinephile who’s absorbed enough cinema that it’s become a kind of emotional vocabulary and a way of processing experiences.
Sound familiar? Yeah, me too.
Christopher Guest had probably been that guy once, too. By 1989 he’d spent nearly two decades bouncing around Hollywood with guest parts (no pun intended, I swear) and a stint on SNL. His ostensible overnight success was a little movie you might have heard of: Spinal Tap. So suffice it to say, Christopher had a thing or two to say about the Hollywood machine. When he got the chance to pick up the director’s reins himself, he went full irony mode and made a movie about becoming a director.
And he brought Michael McKean with him.
The two had been collaborating since the late 60s, when they met at college in New York, and casting McKean as Nick’s creative partner gives the film its real emotional stakes. There’s the dutiful girlfriend who stands by Nick through thick and thin and helps give him the encouragement and support he needs to get his award-winning student film off the ground, but she quickly gets lost to a subplot about a sexy Hollywood starlet (Teri Hatcher) catching his eye. That’s the expected casualty. To quote Silent Bob: “There’s a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don’t all bring you lasagna at work.” But the friendship Nick nearly destroys trying to play Hollywood Russian roulette? That struck me as the wound Guest actually cared about. You get the sense he learned that lesson personally. The biggest heartwarmer is the bromance.
Columbia had no idea what to do with a satiric coming-of-age story that also doubled as a cautionary tale against the studio system. And of course, life is always keen to imitate art. The project initially developed at Paramount before it went into turnaround, then got finished at Columbia under David Puttnam, who was ousted two weeks into production. When the new regime of execs watched the finished film, they tried to sell the distribution rights. Eighteen firms apparently screened it, and none made an offer. Maybe the John Peters type played by J.T. Walsh, who’s essentially framed as the devil by the end, hit a little too close to home. Between bumps of cola in the executive bathroom. It got a limited release, made under $120,000, and was dumped on video and cable.
Those lucky enough to catch it there probably had an easier time playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
1989 is one of my favourite years. Probably because I was 16 and everything seemed momentous and important. We had one of the greatest blockbuster summers in movie history, the Wall came down, the yuppie decade was burning out, and there was this almost audible cultural exhale happening. The world, it felt, was waking up from History. Thank you, Jesus Jones.
But a deconstructive Hollywood skewering? In 1989? I don’t think anyone in a corner office was willing to admit the 80s party was winding down yet. The Player didn’t arrive until ’92, Swimming with Sharks was ’94, Living in Oblivion in ’95, and those are among the definitive “we’re finally ready to be cynical about the Hollywood machine” films. The Big Picture is trying to do this while everyone’s still coming down from one of the biggest blockbuster seasons in history. Clearly everything was working and any opinion to the contrary was wrong.
This was just how the game was played, and it’s up to aspiring filmmakers to figure it out. The end. Fade out.
Hollywood’s been satirizing itself since Sunset Boulevard, knowing potshots like this are nothing new. Even S.O.B. is Blake Edwards working through some genuine rage against the system. But most criticisms of Hollywood tend to land in one of two places: either the protagonist gets chewed up and spat out (cautionary tale), or they beat the system somehow and get their vision made (fantasy of integrity rewarded). A Hollywood ending about not wanting a Hollywood ending. But The Big Picture goes for the third option. Nick doesn’t win the Hollywood game, and he doesn’t lose everything. He just goes off and pays his dues. Then he gets the big Hollywood ending.
The Big Picture ends the way these things have to end, with Nick making his movie surrounded by everyone who matters, the Hollywood ending delivered with a knowing wink after ninety minutes of showing you how the sausage gets made. Also, Martin Short should have received some sort of Oscar for what he did there.
This movie feels like a piece of advice Christopher Guest is sharing with his fellow neurotic dreamers. It kind of matches his actual career trajectory, doesn’t it? He didn’t keep trying to make studio films. He went off and made these tiny indie mockumentaries with his friends, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show – he made something real in the outskirts. The Big Picture might be him working out that philosophy.
That cozy bartender wisdom is what keeps this from being preachy. The film isn’t saying “Hollywood bad, indie good” per se, it’s cautioning the dreamers, the ones with movie-soaked brains and optimism. Stick to the edges before you find your center, because the game requires a kind of cynicism you don’t want, and maybe shouldn’t develop.
It admits the dream factory runs on creative fumes and compromise.
Ultimately it feels like a 90s indie coming-of-age tale about not selling out and finding your way in the margins when there’s just no room for you in the real world. By the end of the decade, the whole Gen X ethos would crystallize around the indie ideal: selling out isn’t worth the cost, and the overnight success story is a myth told by people who’ve already made it to people still trying.
-Pop