The following is my entry in the Movies about Movies Blogathon over at Goatdog’s Blog. Thank you, Michael W. Phillips Jr.

Going at least as far back as Sunset Boulevard, there’s a pervasive feeling out in the ether that something is rotten is Hollywood; it’s not the jasmine scented streets and it’s not even the movies. It’s the people.

When Blake Edwards’ S.O.B. (”Standard Operational Bullshit”) came out in 1981, it was not greeted kindly by a lot critics — at least the ones I was reading. It grossed an amount that wasn’t horrible by 1981 standards, but the film left a sour taste with most viewers. Financially, it seems to have been a big disappointment given the hoopla around one crucial wardrobe non-malfunction and the all-star comedy was significantly outperformed by such fare as Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams and The Great Muppet Caper. 

The biggest names in the cast included two sixty-three year olds — William Holden and Robert Preston — and Julie Andrews — a youngster at a near ageless 45. Today, S.O.B. would probably be lucky to get a theatrical release — except, of course, that it featured the briefly naked breasts of Ms. Andrews, the cinematic embodiment of all that was virtuous. Today, nothing short of a Hustler photospread featuring Laura Bush would arouse the same level of shock and interest. Anticipation and dread were rife.

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“I am going to show my boobies. Are you here to see my boobies”

Julie Andrew’s million dollar chest aside, the late-teenage me loved S.O.B. I thought it a righteous attack on New Age Hollywood mendacity, with its lack of respect for storytelling and storytellers. On the other hand, I avoided seeing it for a second time until just two nights ago, out of the growing sense that the more grown-up me was bound to have a different reaction. Twenty four years later, it’s still a bleakly entertaining movie — but it’s comedy seems a lot less funny and much more bitter than black or genuinely satiric.

Underlining this tone of near despair, we have the most succinct of S.O.B’s many subplots. Near the opening, a man falls down with a heart attack somewhere in Malibu and literally dies of oblivious indifference, while the very large and very self-involved cast goes about it’s business. As the film progress, the dog remains with the man, becoming increasingly bedraggled and also the only character with any dignity.

“If you want a friend in Hollywood….”

S.O.B. is an oddly ambitious film and it times it feels like Blake Edwards attempt at his own Nashville, but the story is actually fairly simple for a Hollywood exposé. A new film starring the very Julie Andrews-like Sally Miles fails miserably with both audiences and critics. The venemous Robert Evans-ish David Blackman (Robert Vaughn doing what he does best) is howling for blood and the Blake Edwards-like Felix Farmer (Robert Mulligan) has gone around the bend, his star and wife is leaving, and he seems committed to suicide.

After several attempts, however, he has a moment of revelation when he drops in to a Holllywood orgy. Farmer comes partially back to his senses and decides that he can turn his wholesome flop into an X or R-rated Last Tango in Paris-style hit if he re-shoots certain key scenes, and if he can get his estranged wife to cooperate in this cinematic sexathon and shock the public by destroying her virginal image but good.

This plot description does very little to tell you about the movie. Farmer is a one of the least developed characters. Robert Mulligan mainly indulges in a variation on the eccentric mugging which temporarily made him on a television star on ABC’s Soap, and Andrews’ sympathetic Sally Miles is really just a pawn in the game of various insiders, including Shelly Winters as an untrustworthy agent (is there any other kind?), and Stuart Margolin  as an even less trustworthy gay personal assistant.

Edwards’ hamfisted handling of this mendacious character more than borders on homophobia, and it get worse when Margolin is pared in a couple of scenes with Benson Fong as a stereotypical Chinese cook. The fact that the Sacramento-born Fong really was of Asian descent aside, it’s still shades of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffanys. Shelly Winters’ agent also turns out to be a lesbian in a moment that plays out, whatever Edwards might have intended, as yet another homophobic slap against Hollywood decadence.

In a way, S.O.B. is a complaint not only about greed and callous behavior, but also about the death of old Hollywood, and there’s a whiff of moldy fig about it. Edwards seems almost unaware that Last Tango had been released nearly a decade prior and the vogue for onscreen nudity and rebellion had peaked almost a decade before. More recent, far more profitable blockbusters like 1977’s Star Wars and 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark were actually harking back to classic Hollywood and were often all but sexless. Edwards, however, is basically refighting his battles from his G-rated 1970 Julie Andrews megaflop, Darling Lili.

The film’s open digs at Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in particular make it clear that Edwards’ scorn is directed at least to some degree at the supposedly decadent and sex-obsessed Hollywood of the “Easy Riders and Raging Bulls” era. Like many older American filmmakers, Edwards seems to be mystified or perhap even angered by auteurism, the still lingering impact of the European New Wave, and all the rest. I declare my allegiance to reactionary aesthetics above my banner, but in this context it feels like too much of the kind of oldster-whining that was once common on celebrity talk shows. “These kids today, with their jumpcuts, their improvisation, their sex, and their symbolism….”

Nevertheless, Blake Edwards did eventually remake Francois Truffuat’s thoroughly unrevolutionary The Man Who Loved Women, and S.O.B.’s true wrath is primarly aimed at a guys in their fifties and sixties, all of whom are trying like hell to ape younger men. Certainly, the film’s open-shirted be-blinged costuming of Robert Preston’s Dr. Irving Finegarten and Robert Webber’s Herb Maskowitz (”Alter Cocker’s Gone Wild”) looked horrific even at the time — and they are two of the film’s more sympathetic characters. Among the males onscreen, only William Holden’s Tim Cully is allowed to dress like an adult, even if he was recently ensconced somewhere with a “sixteen year old and a case of Jack Daniels.”

Also, there are no stand-in’s at all on hand for flagrant auteurs like Robert Altman, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, or even Steven Speilberg. Perhaps because, whatever else was true, Edwards must have respected their level of craft enough to perhaps even imitate them to some degree.

S.O.B. only finds moments of redemption in respect of the joy that both the fictional and real Julie Andrews seems to feel in her onscreen liberation, if not necessarily the actual nudity, from the confines of the past (her performance is the best thing about the movie), and, later, in respect of the dead. Nevertheless, Edwards lived on, stopped complaining, and then redeemed himself in more ways than one with his next film, 1982’s stylistically retro yet aggressively pro-gay masterpiece, Victor/Victoria. A semi-musical farce that embodied both reactionary aesthetics and at least small-l liberal politics in the best way possible. The darkness of Hollywood mendacity was never going to change, but Edwards lit a candle where he could.