Podcasting and independent writing ain’t easy, folks. If you love what we do here, become a subscriber! Just being part of our community means the world to us, and helps this Substack gain traction.
And if you can consider becoming a paid subscriber, that helps to keep the wine and entertainment flowing around these parts. And for only $2/month!
This one’s a doozy, folks. Special guest
(who writes the incredible From the Yard to the Arthouse) wanted to talk to us about Fake Movies Within Movies, and gave us a list of 11 of them!
Why This Topic?
The man known only as Decarceration was a prisoner of the federal government from 2014 to the beginning of 2023. During his time as a “guest” of the State, he often found himself in the SHU (Security Housing Unit aka solitary confinement.) During his time in the SHU - collectively equaling many months - he invented fake movie slates, including titles, concepts, directors, casts, and release dates, for multiple studios.
He was so into this exercise (and, frankly, had so much time to devote to it) that he invented whole calendar release schedules straight through to 2035!
So the idea of these fake movies and fake filmographies within real movies, had him consider: what were these realities like? How did the development and production of these films go? Why were they greenlit? How were they recieved?
And so he wanted to talk at length about these kinds of films, and how they sometimes even tie into the real world cinematic ecosystem.
A Little Background
Theatre is the natural progenitor of cinema, so we first have to mention the play within a play.
Sources say the play within a play dates back to ancient times, though the most contemporary first strikes featured in the works of Shakespeare; like Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Taming of the Shrew. Although other scholars suggest that the first contemporary use of the play within a play concept is from the 1587 play The Spanish Tragey by Thomas Kyd, is apparently known to have also written a play called Ur-Hamlet which some say was inspiration for Shakepeares version.
The first cinematic "film within a film" however comes from the 1916 release entitled A MOVIE STAR which starred Mack Swain - a prolific contemporary of Charlie Chaplin's. Swain starred as a fictitious movie star who attends a screening of his latest movie called BIG HEARTED JACK where he attempts to cajole and influence the audience and a critic into liking the film.
And finally, french cinema, as with many things, has of course given us the lingo to conceptualize this phenomena of the film within a film with the term mise en abyme (miz-ahn-abim) which loosely translates to "a copy wthin itself" and is often referred to as the Russian Nesting Doll concept. But over time the term has come to mean "story within a story" or "film within a film".
The Pairing Concept for This Episode
Faced with a laundry list of fake movies within movies, we had to incorporate it into our podcast by seeking out fake drinks that are also from within movies. At least originally: some have been made in the real world since their fictional imagineering.
We cover the first 4 Pairings in Part 1. The remaining 7 will be featured in next week’s Part 2! (We had to get introductions of our guest, his background, and the concept all out of the way in Part 1, but Part 2 we just dig into the pairings!)
Note: you can find most of these movies-within-movies at NESTFLIX.FUN
You can also listed to this episode on your preferred platform - Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, you name it.
WINE TRIVIA QUESTION OF THE WEEK
This week we're asking our readers/listeners:
**Vote above, then scroll down to the end of this post for the answer!**
The Fake Movie and Fake Drinks of PART 1
Hot Pants College 2 (from Love and Death on Long Island)
-paired with-
Death Comes for the Archbishop (from the British TV show, Blandings)
We covered the movie Love and Death on Long Island a few weeks back
Wine and Movies: LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND (1997)
Paid subscribers can listen to the full episode above. Free subscribers can still listen to the full episode on the podcast platform of their choice!
In the film, Jason Preistly plays a ficticous actor, Ronny Bostock, a young man that the elderly Giles D’Ath becomes smitten with after accidentally watching Hot Pants College 2, a Porkys style sex comedy. Giles travels from Britain to America to persue his crush, and (maybe?) awaken the homoerotic side of Ronny as well.
To pair with this, we chose Death Comes for the Archbishop, a fake drink featured in the British TV show Blandings Season 1, Episode 6 “Tge Problem with Drinks”. The drink is named after the novel by Willa Cather. Composed of equal measures gin, sherry, port, brandy, pudding wine, with a substantial dash bitters, this concoction is guaranteed to "insulate the drinker against the amorous attentions of the female."
23-44 + 2121 + Infinity Jump Streets (from the end credits of 22 Jump Street)
-paired with-
Black Pony Scotch (from the movie Laura)
At the end of 22 Jump Street, directors Lord & Miller showcased the next FOURTEEN sequels + a futuristic 2121 Jump Street + an Infinity Jump Street all to say: sequels are dumb, please stop asking us to make these.1
Each sequel took the lads to another “educational/academic” setting, until there were no more to be milked in any real sequel.
To pair with these nearly never-ending sequels of cops/detectives always solving a mystery, I paired it with Black Pony Scotch from the 1944 movie Laura. In the film, a detective suspects that a deceased Laura has in fact ben murdered, as he find a bottle of the cheap Scotch in her home, and known that a woman as refined as her would never drink such a thing!
This is precisely the kind of clue that Hill and Tatum would uncover - especially Hill, as he was always sleeping with the female characters and would have known their debauched predelictions. And cheap-ass Sctoch is precisely what you should be watching with a send-up of cheap-ass cop shows and their inability to die.
Bonjour, Diamond Jim (from Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie)
-paired with-
Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Bonjour, Diamond Jim is the movie that Tim and Eric from Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie were given a literal billion dollars to make, and they made it with a fake Johnny Depp and only shot 3 minutes worth of footage and yes, they still spent $1 Billion dollars doing it. Cuz drugs.
I had to pair this with the infamous drink from Hitchiker’s Guide called the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, which is decribed as “…a legendary cocktail invented by Zaphod Beeblebrox, based on ‘Old Janx Spirit.’ The effect of drinking it is ‘like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.’”
Tim and Eric plainly smashed their own brains out with a Billion Dollar gold brick.
George Simmons Filmography (from Funny People)
-paired with-
Green Russian (from Archer TV show)
Adam Sadler plays a thinly-veiled version of himself in Judd Apatow’s 3rd feature film. Sandler is “George Simmons”, an ex-stand up comedian who has since made incredibly lackluster family / all-ages movies that are extremely popular but substantively bankrupt. George is divorced, lonely, and when he recieves a medical result that suggest his time on Earth may be limited, he questions the purpose of his fame and career.
The “Green Russian” is a simple mix of Absinthe and Milk.
Those who have tried the concoction in real life have said it tastes like a Good & Plenty. So what better to pair with a filmography that is sad and adult but wrapped in a childish, candy coating than a Green Russian - the drink of sad man-children everywhere.
Black Thunder, White Lightning (from Major League II)
-paired with-
Booty Sweat Energy Drink (from Tropic Thunder)
After Wesley Snipes dropped out of the franchise, Omar Epps took over as the character for the sequel in Major League II. And here the major leaguer is shown to have a burgeoning action movie career, doing his own stunts and pimping his products.
So we had to pair this Black entrepeneur with another, Alpha Chino. The drink, like other products, supports the use of Chino as a parody of other rappers or musicians who become multi-product moguls. Chino has a supply of the beverage throughout the film, and plugs it (anachronistically) during the filming of the Vietnam war film-within-a-film.
Answer to Wine Trivia Quetsion of the Week
And the answer is…
C) BRUT NATURE - “Nature” in French means “plain” or “simple”, so is the term used to mean, essentially, no sugar included in sparkling wine. Interestingly, there has been speculation recently if the French meaning of the word “Nature” inspired the term “Natural Wine”, a sort-of mistranslation of “plain” (nothing added or subtracted) to something closer to the English meaning of the word, which is closer to “organic” or “as nature intended”. Natural Wine is far more about nothing being added, but the push to have it mean more has been the driving controvery for all these decades!
Nevertheless, a year later they came up with a concept that would allow ALL the end credit sequels to be canon, while still making yet another sequel - MiB 23, a Men in Black / Jump Street crossover, where our duo Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have already been through it all, and now they’re Men in Black! Unfortunately, the Sony hack/leak of the mid-2010’s made the public aware of the concept, and then the studio started to worry that they had to deliver a BIG, BLOATED sequel to meet expectations and this little franchise that made fun of sequels and reboot and remakes fell victim to the very mindset it made fun of: studio IP taken far too seriously.
Share this post