BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN (Hollywood) Starring: Ryan O'Neal, Richard Jeni, Eric Idle. Screenplay: Joe Eszterhas. Producer: Ben Myron. Director: Alan Smithee. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes, sexual situations) Running Time: 84 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I'm guessing -- and from the available evidence, it's not a great guess -- that BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN began life as an insider satire of Hollywood excess, stupidity, ego and power-mongering. If so, the film that ended up on the screen ranks as one of the most spectacularly ironic unintentional jokes in film history. It has already been well-documented that the original title, AN ALAN SMITHEE FILM, became a problem when miserable test screenings forced re-cuts against the will of director Arthur Hiller, prompting Hiller himself to opt for the Directors' Guild-mandated pseudonym of Alan Smithee. That left a film satire in the hands of writer Joe Eszterhas, as humorless a hack as ever put finger to word processor. And you could just smell the disaster brewing.
If you're unfortunate enough to sit through BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN, you'll still be smelling that disaster long after the lights come up. Ostensibly, it's a pseudo-documentary account of a director named Alan Smithee (Eric Idle) who loses control of a big-budget action film called TRIO starring Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg and Jackie Chan (all of whom appear as themselves). When the only recourse available to him is abandoning the project to be called "An Alan Smithee Film" -- which, of course, it already is -- Smithee steals the negative of the film and threatens to destroy it. Among the parties interviewed are the film's producer James Edmunds (Ryan O'Neal) and studio boss Jerry Glover (Richard Jeni), who spend virtually the entire film narrating the story while painfully unfunny things go on around them.
It's bad enough that BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN has -- literally -- not a single laugh for its entire, blissfully brief 84 minutes. What makes it even worse is Eszterhas' insistence upon telling every bad joke not once, but twice or even three times. Michael Ovitz references, SHOWGIRLS references, oral sex references, Whoopi Goldberg/Ted Danson references -- all show up multiple times with all the subtlety that is Eszterhas' stock-in-trade. The reduncancy even manages to turn actively offensive with some frequency, notably with the hilarious use of the word "feminist" as an identifying caption for every single female character in the film. By the time Coolio and Chuck D show up as black independent film-makers the Brothers Brothers (cleverly identified as "bad a--" and "badder a--", among other unprintable things), you may be ready to walk out of the theater with your coat over your head to avoid being identified.
Those documentary captions, for all their leaden obviousness, allow the best insight into what's so hideously wrong with BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN. Not content to stick any Hollywood type with only one jab from his rapier wit, Eszterhas fills the screen with bullet points every time a new character appears. The producer is a "liar" who "slept in the White House;" the media are "maggots" and "leeches" working for publications like "The New York Slimes" and "Newsleak" (with the camera zooming in on the altered title to make sure you don't miss the joke). It doesn't even matter that Eszterhas tags "penile implant" after his own name when he makes a cameo, because it seems like such a desperate attempt to feign self-deprecation. This is a petulant schoolboy's idea of satire -- pictures of Hollywood insiders to which Eszterhas has taken a pen to draw little moustaches and black out the teeth.
The last stomach-churning straw comes when BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN closes with out-takes over the closing credits, the kind that show the audience how much fun everyone was having making the film that just sucked an hour and a half of your life away. Perhaps it was just a final, desperate attempt by Eszterhas to convince himself there was some purpose behind the film, or to convince everyone involved that a few blown lines warranted threatening to blow their whole career. Pity everyone involved with this excessive, ego-driven "satire" of excess and ego. It's too bad that only directors can remove their names from noxious material like this. Otherwise, you might have seen credits for BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN overflowing with Alan Smithees.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 slow BURNs: 0.
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