Behind-the-scenes footage from Dawn of the Dead is the highlight of this aficionados-only affair, which follows the 1979 satirical zombie horror all the way through to distribution. Director George A Romero, makeup maestro Tom Savini and the occasional zombie actor shoot the breeze in the deserted shopping mall that provides the movie with its incongruous central location. Imagining what might have been if Tim Burton’s Superman Lives had got off the ground, documentary maker Jon Schnepp cosies up on screen with his interviewees and insinuates himself unforgivably into the story.
The material is almost good enough to transcend his vanity: there is test footage of lead actor Nicolas Cage in his Man of Steel duds, plus interviews with Burton, original screenwriter Kevin Smith and producer Jon Peters, who was adamant that Superman should fight polar bears and a giant spider. A group of actors with disabilities form the bulk of the cast of the short western Bulletproof, shot in the California desert courtesy of the inclusive arts project Zeno Mountain Farm. Crucially, Bulletproof itself isn’t about disability, but rather an attempt to highlight the lack of on-screen representation – and plug the gap.
This affectionate documentary tracks the film from preproduction to premiere. Orson Welles spent five years shooting what became his final film, The Other Side of the Wind, with three years elapsing before its star – director and sometime actor John Huston – even stepped in front of the camera. After all that, the footage ended up impounded by the Iranian revolutionary government.
A version eventually premiered in 2018 and is now on Netflix, along with this scattershot documentary, presented by Alan Cumming, which strings together archive footage, new interviews and typically Wellesian stories of on-set bluffs, tomfoolery and procrastination. A half-hour snapshot by Lucas of his new buddy Francis Ford Coppola, who is hard at work on his fourth film, The Rain People, and not too shy to argue with his lead actor, Shirley Knight. Contains one choice detail: in preparation for driving across the country shooting this road movie, all the men on the crew, Coppola included, shave off their beards to look more presentable for any hippy-hating officials they might encounter along the way.
In declining The Exorcist but taking on Exorcist II: The Heretic, John Boorman perhaps displayed a preference for poisoned chalices over champagne flutes. He is candid and good-humoured, if still a little shell-shocked, as he recounts the experience of filming the sequel once derided as “the stupidest major movie ever made”, and the despair that led him to contemplate self-immolation on Hollywood Boulevard. Sand-related illness, a sozzled Richard Burton, locusts and tap-dancing: this has it all.
Filmed in a rat-infested studio on sets recycled from the Jurassic Park rip-off Carnosaur, with special effects entrusted to a local outfit called Mr Film, this cheapo superhero adventure was made in a rush to prevent the rights to The Fantastic Four reverting from producer Bernd Eichinger to Marvel. (“That movie was never supposed to be shown to anybody,” said Stan Lee.) This heartening documentary, which shows the crestfallen cast refusing to let their film die, feels even more pertinent after Warner Bros recently shelved some movies as tax write-offs, including Batgirl and Coyote Vs Acme, the latter rescued only by the skin of its teeth. In trying to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune in the mid-1970s, cinematic shaman Alejandro Jodorowsky (Santa Sangre, El Topo) bit off more than he could chew, just as David Lynch would when his version came to painful fruition in 1984. But Frank Pavich’s documentary proves that Jodorowsky’s intention to make “a film that gives LSD hallucinations without taking LSD” was not too fanciful.
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