Movies are made on emotion, but Hollywood consumes only a cannibalistic diet of its own hatred. Any love in the mix, comes up only as a vomit of bile. 

Slammed between two bright musical comedy masterpieces; “American in Paris” and “Band Wagon,” Vincente Minnelli created “The Bad and the Beautiful,” one of the most vitriolic and self-loathing films ever made about filmmaking. 

“Bad” is tale told in three part flashback; the account of Kirk Douglas as an ambitious producer who destroyed three relationships along with three lives, of the three people he once held most dear. 

Douglas, ever at his best when he is playing the worst of humanity, is also at his most frustratingly manipulative in the part of…

"Don't worry. Some of the best movies are made by people working together who hate each other's guts."

A big studio exec calls a writer, a director, and an actor into his office to pitch them a gig with a big producer they all hate. The director had his pet project, his cinematic baby, stolen out from under him; the actor was negged into a romance with him, after which he cheated on her; the writer's wife died on his watch, and he had his Hollywood breakout script overtaken and driven into the ground. "But, no!" the exec tells them. "Look closer! Can't you see how all these awful experiences brought you to where you are today?"

The thesis here…

"don’t worry. i’ll make you a star.”

My current gateway into Vincente Minnelli’s films. I liked it far more than I expected, almost caught off guard by how drawn in I was. Which is actually very fitting. It feels like being seduced by Hollywood while slowly watching the cold, predatory hunger for greatness behind it reveal itself, an elegantly staged meta-commentary on the cannibalistic nature of the industry itself.

At the center stands Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) himself, a magnetic producer whose ambition and vision pull everyone into his gravitational field. The film lets you feel the thrill of that force even as it reveals the damage it leaves behind. The story opens in the present with three people sitting…

Hollywood, while it was at its pinnacle, gets an uncomplimentary portrayal in this Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film which Vincente Minnelli directs with natural exquisiteness. Kirk Douglas displays his charismatic charm as well as his range as in actor in his role as independent film producer Jonathan Shields, who possesses an antagonistic necessity for external sources in nourishing his self-esteem arising from a toxic narcissism for his deceased father, a notorious former head of a movie studio. Shields ultimately pushes away those around him and the drama unravels through a series of flashbacks after a screenwriter, director and movie star, who all feel emotionally wounded by Shields, are collected together in the office of a movie producer to talk on the phone to…

few things bother me more personally than the schizophrenic relationship i have with hollywood -- it's awful, terrible, glorious, genius, i love it, i hate it, it's given me everything, it's made my life impossible without it, an aesthetic drug that you just can't quit. the devil you know... and minnelli's manic-depressive approach to filmmaking is the perfect avenue to walk down after setting out from sunset boulevard. the highs are high, the lows are low, tinsel town looks that much brighter from the depths of the gutter.

kirk douglas is magnificent in this, a kane-esque cipher for all the successes and failures of america's movie business, the exciting passion and the soul-crushing cynicism, how a man victimizes others even…

67/100

Now that's how you begin a movie! Couldn't wait to find out how Douglas' big-time producer had alienated these three people, and while the broad strokes aren't hard to guess—disloyalty, corrosive ambition, seduced and abandoned, etc.—there's plenty to savor in the ugly details. Terrific dialogue, too, full of trenchant and widely applicable lines like "I'm flattered you want me and bitter you've got me." For some reason, the roman à clef aspect mostly escaped me, so I wasn't distracted by wondering whether Shields is meant to be Selznick (didn't even know about David O.'s dad, to be honest), or whether we're meant to perceive Georgia Lorrison as Minnelli's thinly veiled portrait of Judy Garland. Just played like a wholly…