Joe Dante and Allan Arkush's 1976 Show Business Satire Hollywood Boulevard is a Hoot and a Half!
Joe Dante and Allan Arkush’s 1976 directorial debut Hollywood Boulevard is one of the funniest and most inventive comedies ever to roll out of the Roger Corman schlock factory. But in keeping with the cheapskate legend of Roger Corman, legendary cheapskate, the story behind the movie may be better than the film itself.
According to b-movie legend, Hollywood Boulevard was the product of a wager between Roger Corman and Jon Davison where the hungry young producer bet Corman that he could make the studio’s cheapest movie. Davison decided that he could make a movie for $60,000 in a mere ten days. To aid him in his quest for quality filmmaking at a bargain-basement price (then again, this is Corman we’re talking about, so “quality” isn’t too important), Davison recruited the talents of two of the many talented, hungry and hard-working young filmmakers in Corman’s stable: Joe Dante, a hot-shot editor learning his trade as a prolific editor of trailers for Corman, of both the high-art and low-trash variety, and Allan Arkush, who would end the decade a high note as the director of Rock N Roll High School, a Corman production Dante also worked on.
To make the most of their tiny budget, these enterprising youngsters decided to “borrow” existing footage from a plethora of action-heavy titles from the Corman library. In creating the genius mutation that is Hollywood Boulevard, the filmmakers used DNA from everything from The Big Bird Cage to Night Of The Cobra Woman, Night Call Nurses to Unholly Rollers to Big Bad Mama to Crazy Mama (yes, they’re two different films, in one the mama is crazy, the other big and bad) to Death Race 2000 to create something ostensibly new but more accurately newish.
There’s a rock-solid method to the filmmakers’ madness. Why go through the bother and expense of shooting a sky-diving scene when there’s a perfectly good one in the film library? The genius of Hollywood Boulevard is that it looks like it has the production values of ten movies because it straight-up stole those production values from the films themselves.
The film’s ramshackle plot involves aspiring starlet Candy Wednesday’s (the appealing Candice Rialson) attempts to make it in the rough and tumble and sexual-assault-filled world of low-budget, sleazy, Roger Corman-style b-movies after getting off the bus to Los Angeles from the heartland. To aid her in her descent into this shadowy world of low-budget genre filmmaking, Candy recruits the services of sleazy, bottom-feeding agent Walter Paisley (Dick Miller).
In the world of b-movies, there is no surer bet than Dick Miller in a Joe Dante movie. Miller isn’t just funny in Dante’s movies: he absolutely destroys. He’s a star. Miller is inveterately hilarious and even at the beginning of their fruitful and long-standing partnership, the magic was there. Hollywood Boulevard benefits tremendously from the manic participation of other beloved members of Corman’s repertory company, most notably Paul Bartel, typecast to perfection as a pompous director who wants to be Eric Van Stroheim on a Rudy Ray Moore budget, and Bartel’s frequent collaborator Mary Woronov as Mary, a cold-blooded diva willing to do anything to succeed.
Woronov is characteristically funny and sexy and cool and badass here, but her presence undercuts the film’s central mystery somewhat. If something sketchy and sleazy is happening behind the scenes in a movie with Woronov in the cast, then you know damn well that she’s the guilty party. That’s the downside to being so good at playing villains; you’re forever held in suspicion, and rightly so.
Candy hooks up with Miracle Pictures, where, as their motto unforgettably brags, “If it’s a good picture, it’s a Miracle” and is dispatched to the Philippines for one of those “babes in bondage” movies that defined much of Corman’s 1970s. Candy’s fellow actresses begin dying around her and her quest to make it in show-business becomes a desperate bid for survival.
Hollywood Boulevard isn’t just a comedy, although it’s one of the funniest and hippest movies Corman has ever been associated with. In part because it steals from so many movies from so many other genres, it’s kind of every genre simultaneously. It’s a comedy, first and foremost, and a satirical one at its best. But it’s also a mystery, a sexploitation movie, a musical of sorts thanks to an out-of-nowhere cameo from musical guests Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airman, an action extravaganza of several different stripes and even a horror movie at times.
With Hollywood Boulevard, Dante made the big leap to directing with a film that’s edited as much as it is directed. Hollywood Boulevard feels like the cinematic equivalent of a mix-tape, only instead of combining old beats with new freestyles, it alchemizes the best parts of a bunch of otherwise forgettable and forgotten b-movies to create something that feels at once radically, refreshingly new and cozily familiar.
Hollywood Boulevard anticipates the cut-and-paste, mix-and-match aesthetic of hip hop. Corman gave Dante and Arkush very little, and in the best punk rock, hip hop tradition, they took that almost-nothing and made something special out of it. In its own way, Hollywood Boulevard is as punk rock as Rock N Roll High School. Yet Hollywood Boulevard is also closely aligned with the post-modern, proudly meta comedy of the 1990s, perfected by movies like Dante’s own Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
Hollywood Boulevard is a product of its era in both positive and negative ways. Hollywood Boulevard is the work of ferociously talented, hungry young men who made up in energy, audacity and personality what they lacked in polish, experience and money. It’s a young movie for young audiences, overflowing with violence and T&A and irreverent humor. Yet because it’s a product of the 1970s and the sleazy, sordid drive-in world, it’s also overflowing with an unfortunate abundance of sexual-assault-based humor.
In keeping with the movie’s hip, wised-up attitude, the gratuitous rape scenes in Hollywood Boulevard are fundamentally meta. They’re a way of commenting on the seedy excess of sexual assaults that littered film in the 1970s, especially in the drive-in arena. Like pretty much all of 1970s cinema, Hollywood Boulevard would benefit from roughly 100 percent less sexual assault.
Hollywood Boulevard can get pretty dirty and sleazy, but there’s a fundamental innocence to it rooted in the filmmaker’s love of movies in general and their particular subset of the cinematic world in particular. A scene where Paisley, our heroine and her boyfriend enjoy a drive-in movie, with commentary, predicts the audience-as-hecklers vibe of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Because it spoofs so many genres, Hollywood Boulevard feels like a MAD Magazine-style parody of not just specific (and Corman-specific) genres like nursesploitation movies and roller derby cheapies but of movies in general, and the ethically-challenged lunatics who make them. Hollywood Boulevard is a giddy, endlessly inventive love letter to movies full of gratuitous violence and naked boobs. Roger Corman wouldn’t have had it any other way.
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