Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the 9th film from Quentin Tarantino looks to be the famously movie-obsessed director’s ultimate tribute to the art form that shaped him, as well as his stomping grounds of Hollywood. Because it’s a Tarantino film, we can also expect a heavy focus on his other great obsession—crime. In this case, that comes in the form of true-life notoriety, namely the brutal 1969 Hollywood Hills murders committed by the followers of cult leader Charles Manson.
Tarantino is far from the first director to set a crime film at the heart of the dream factory; indeed, there is a long tradition of Hollywood—and specifically, movie industry—noir.
In anticipation of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, here are 10 great crime films that take place on and around movie studio backlots, soundstages, audition rooms, trailers, bungalows, boardrooms and other such Hollywood haunts.
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
One of, if not the most iconic movie about movies ever made, Billy Wilder’s pitch-black satire, about Norma Desmond, an aging silent-era star attempting a comeback with the help of a bitter and desperate young screenwriter is also the epitome of film noir.
While most of its story takes place within Norma Desmond’s decrepit mansion, there are a handful of scenes set at Paramount Studios, including a one in which the deluded former starlet confronts Cecil B. DeMille (one of several industry icons who show up in the film, alongside the likes of Eric von Stroheim and Buster Keaton) on the set of the iconic director’s latest epic.
Groundbreaking in the way it broke the fourth wall and ruthless in its self-examination, Sunset Boulevard is the standard against which all other Hollywood noirs must be held.
In a Lonely Place (1950)
Sunset Boulevard was not the only noir to center a doomed relationship against the backdrop of the capricious studio system of its day.
Nicolas Ray’s loose adaptation of Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 novel In a Lonely Place, which stars Humphrey Bogart as a troubled screenwriter and Gloria Grahame as the woman who falls in love with him even as she suspects he may be a murderer, came out the same year, and though it received less notice and acclaim that Wilder’s film, it’s an equally devastating depiction of industry’s ability to crush people’s dreams and drive them to the edge of their sanity.
Some noir fans—myself included—would even argue it’s the superior movie of the two, thanks in no small part to Bogart and Grahame turning in career-best performances.
The Day of the Locust (1975)
This adaptation of Nathaniel West’s ultra-bleak novella depicts Hollywood of the 1930s not so much as a golden age as one yellowed from jaundice.
At its center is Tod Hackett (William Atherton), a young artist fresh out of Yale who moves to Los Angeles in order to make a career in pictures. Hired on as a studio set designer and backdrop painter, Hackett traverses a surreal and grotesque landscape alongside by a coterie of dreamers and losers, including a deluded would-be actress he’s simultaneously attracted to and repelled by, her washed-up and alcoholic vaudevillian father, and a lovelorn, increasingly unhinged accountant named Homer Simpson.
While most of the film plays more as off-kilter dramedy than noir, the final act veers into apocalyptic territory and features one of the most disturbing acts of violence in all American film.
The Stunt Man (1980)
The Stunt Man is a hard film to nail down, given as it is to sudden tonal shifts that swing from tense psychodrama, to madcap comedy, to gauzy romance—often within the same scene. Regardless of how one chooses to categorize it, it’s a go-for-broke piece of bravura filmmaking that encapsulates the madness that it sometimes takes to make a movie.
Peter O’Toole plays an obsessive and possibly insane movie director shooting a WWI epic on location in a beachside community somewhere in California. After an accident for which he is largely responsible leaves his lead actor’s stunt double dead, he crosses paths with a wanted fugitive (Steve Railsback) and convinces him stand in for the dead man in order that they might both evade the authorities.
Of all the films on this list, The Stunt Man may prove the best companion piece to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood—serving as it does a melancholic bookend to the New Hollywood era of the 1970’s, just as Tarantino’s film looks to do for the crumbling 60’s studio system that preceded it. Add to that their shared focus on stunt men, as well as Railsback being best known for his portrayal of Charles Manson in the 70’s television miniseries Helter Skelter.
Body Double (1984)
Brian De Palma’s thrilling, unabashedly erotic spin on Hitchcock (most notably Hitch’s voyeuristic masterpieces Rear Window and Vertigo) follows a claustrophobic actor tasked with housesitting his friend’s ultra-modern bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills (De Palma and his production crew make brilliant use of California’s iconic Chemosphere). When he spies a beautiful neighbor across the way doing a nightly striptease, he begins obsessively spying on her. He soon discovers he’s not only one watching, and before he knows it, he’s involved in a cat-and-mouse game with a frenzied killer that takes him down the rabbit hole and into him the pornographic underworld of Los Angeles.
Much of Body Double’s takes place on the sets of trashy Z-grade horror and X-rated skin flicks, making it the perfect representative for the less reputable—or, at least more openly skeezy—side of the film industry.
Barton Fink (1991)
When Joel and Ethan Coen hit a wall during the writing of their 1990 gangster drama Miller’s Crossing, they managed to climb over it by first penning an entirely different script, this one about a pretentious New York playwright named Barton Fink (John Turturro) who comes to Hollywood in 1941 to take what he assumes will be an easy paycheck writing a B-movie about a wrestler (“Wallace Beery. Wrestling Picture. What do you need, a roadmap?”), only to be quickly disabused of his foolish notion when he suffers an onset of—what else?—writer’s block.
The studio system of old Hollywood as brought to life by the Coen Brothers is a Kafkaesque nightmare from the get-go, but things takes an abrupt turn about halfway in, leading the viewer into a full-on surrealist nightmare, the final result of which remains the Coens’ most mysterious and beguiling film.
The brothers’ melancholy-but-madcap Hollywood satire from 2016, Hail, Caeser!, is also set along the backlots of a Hollywood studio during the same era, and deserves recognition here.
The Player (1992)
Robert Altman The Player, which follows a hotshot studio executive (Tim Robbins) forced to cover up his accidental murder of a screenwriter while also scheming to climb the corporate ladder, is probably the most well-known example of meta-noir outside of Sunset Boulevard.
This savaging of the modern movie industry—which has turned into a faceless corporate culture where everything, including murder, is simply a matter of business—served as Altman’s big comeback, which makes sense, given that it features some of his best work (most notably, the epic opening tracking shot wherein a character holds court on the epic opening tracking shot from Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.)
Get Shorty (1995)
This pitch-perfect crowd-pleaser—part gangland thriller, part comedy of errors about an ultra-suave, movie-obsessed Miami mobster who comes to Hollywood to track down some stolen cash and gets involved in the producing game—is a more low-key, but still sharp send up of Hollywood, which in terms of avarice, double-dealing and backstabbing puts organized crime to shame.
It also kicked off the great trilogy of Elmore Leonard adaptation during the late 90s, which included Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight. While the latter films are superior on an artistic level, Get Shorty may be the most eminently rewatchable of the three.
The Woman Chaser (1999)
Robison Devor’s adaptation of Charles Willeford’s 1960 black comic novel, about Richard Hudson (Patrick Warburton), a hulking conman who hustles and bullies his way into a directing gig upon his return to his hometown Los Angeles, is certainly the most obscure entry in this list, which is a shame, as it deserves to be recognized as a cult classic, as well as one of the best films of the late 90s.
Warburton is revelatory as the film’s amoral anti-hero, transforming his brawny everyman charm transformed into something both sinister and pathetic. He cuts a Mephistophelian figure and yet seems utterly devoid of inner life. He makes up for that with an endless supply of disdain for his fellow man, and part of the movie’s dark charm comes from watching him cut down or barrel through everyone that stands in his way.
This may be the best of the three Willeford adaptations so far, no small feat considering the other two are Cockfighter (1974), Miami Blues (1990). Together with The Woman Chaser, they form a triptych of perfect dirty little masterpieces.
Mulholland Drive (2001) / Inland Empire (2006)
You can draw a straight line—or, perhaps more appropriately, a jagged crack—from the gothic tragedy of Sunset Boulevard to the dark, Americana-based surrealism found throughout the films of David Lynch. The lineage is particularly evident in the last two features from Lynch, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, both of which follow the fugue-like odyssey of psychologically and spiritually unmoored actresses across a Hollywood hellscape that runs of pure nightmare logic.
It wouldn’t be fair to choose one film over the other for the purposes of this list (even if Mulholland Drive is widely regarded as the better of the two films by all but the most obsessive and deranged Lynch fans—a sorry lot among which I count myself). That said, while everyone remembers Betty Elms’s (or is it Diane Selwyn’s?) breathtaking audition and “This is the girl…”, the scene in Inland Empire wherein a reluctant movie director character reveals to his leads actors the disturbing history behind their film—the very essence of which appears to be haunted or cursed—is as engrossing and unsettling a set-piece as any to be found through Lynch’s body of work, and a perfect encapsulation of the dark shadow that has always been cast by the bright light of Hollywood and the movies.
