The Boy Wonder of silent movies has been reduced to directing stag films downstairs in his own home, while the sounds of freeway construction, off in the distance, threaten imminent destruction. Some of the feelings for Hollywood's Golden Age and for the dilemma of the commercial artist, sullied but still striving for a state of grace, appear to be genuine; but the circumstances employed to bring out those feelings are infinitely trashy. Writer-director John Byrum's taste for namedropping, muckraking, and rumormongering is insatiable: "The day Wally Reid died I was having lunch with Griffith, Gish, and Hays," the Boy Wonder reminisces; a moneybags character called Big Mac dreams of constructing a chain of hamburger stands along the new freeways; and so forth. The movie has some unusual points, to be sure: it is done in continuous-time sequence, and it is done entirely in one set, very professionally decorated inside a London film studio. These things need not have made the movie seem as stagy as it does. What makes it seem so is the manneredness of the acting and the writing (Byrum's pet idea is to have the actors repeat whole chunks of dialogue word for word: "Clark Gable, that new kid at Pathe" is a phrase that comes out of everyone's mouth at one time or another). With Richard Dreyfuss, Jessica Harper, Angela Cartwright. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.