How To Fail In Movies

By RICHARD CORLISS

Moviemaking--it's all so easy. Actors earn $25 million for a few months' work. Directors talk about the vision thing even when they are making a slasher or snowboarding epic. And producers...well, what do producers do anyway, besides read scripts and do lunch?

Whatever movie people do, they sure do a lot of it--to judge from three new TV documentaries on the business of show. All these alpha males and alpha gals spend 16-hour days and way too much nervous energy making pitches, going on auditions, issuing ultimatums and pleading. In other words, the job of moviemaking is like your life, only interesting. Watching the shows inevitably leads a viewer to these three subtle conclusions:

Actors Are Nuts. Imagine, say, a snuff film, where the star gets killed--really killed--at the end. Somewhere there's an actor who will tell you, "And I was this close to getting that part!"

No wonder actors are such masochists; most of their working lives are spent in auditions, selling themselves and not making the sale. The It Factor (Bravo, Sundays, 9 p.m.) follows 12 young New York thesps, culled from a brutal audition process (3,500 applied). Some were famous years ago: Daisy Eagan won a Tony when she was 11. Some have tried it all: Godfrey Danchimah, a witty charmer, has done films, TV and stand-up. Others have great dimples: we'd cast Latarsha Rose in our next romantic comedy or dinner date.

Heisenberg's principle works overtime here: if you show up at a casting call with your camera crew, doesn't that skew the audition? Our actor of the moment spills his/her guts to you...and in the corner of the frame you spot, for a split second, someone who radiates glamour, beauty, that ineluctable It. Then she's gone, back into anonymity. That's part of show biz too: not just the ones who are trying to make it but also the thousands who got away.

Producers Are Nuts. They used to dictate exhaustive memos; now they pace their feng shui'd offices barking into their headsets. Producers try to explain this odd craft or dodge in the hour-long Hello, He Lied (recently on AMC), a show whose frenetic pace mimics the job description: run fast and get nowhere. And never humiliate anyone so horribly that you can't get a favor from him tomorrow. Producer Lynda Obst, on whose book the series is based, is the host of this hectic how-to--as in "How to Make a Rotten Movie That Grosses $90 Mil." She looks fine, but a quick tip to the other producers: Lose the six-day beards. You're not Keanu Reeves.

The System Is Nuts. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and producer Chris Moore had the cute idea of a contest among amateur filmmakers, with the winner to direct a $1 million movie to be released by Miramax. Project Greenlight (HBO, Sundays, 9:30 p.m.) is the autopsy of a film from start to finish. It's also reality TV at its most instructively sadistic: first you play Survivor, and after you win, they kill you--slowly.

At the start, the execs have a long debate about the three finalists. Of one film they say: "Does everybody hate Stolen Summer?" and "It's too much like an after-school special." Before the script has been greenlighted, they are already writing the critics' pans--and this was the winner, Stolen Summer.

Director Pete Jones, 32, is a cherubic stay-at-home dad with the requisite will of steel but no experience behind the camera. And that was the project's central mistake: believing that the writer of a decent script would also be the director of a decent movie.

The real star is Moore, a Harvard buddy of Damon's and the face of New Hollywood--Satan with a silky voice. Without ever shouting at a line producer who insists things are going O.K., he still surgically unmans the guy. "It's not a school project," he says. "'Not f___ing up that bad' is not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for 'not f___ing up at all.'"

And the movie? It's the one about the Irishman, the rabbi, the kids and the cancer, and it played at Sundance. But the film can be only the palest remnant, the chalk outline, of the adventure of its making. Groveling, backstabbing and exposing yourself to the unforgiving HBO camera--baby, that's show biz.