Esterhasz’s venture aspires to join the proud generic history of lampooning the back-stabbing greed and crassness of the Hollywood film industry, classics such as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and Robert Altman’s The Player. These filmmakers, and others who have managed to draw a steely bead on the soullessness of Tinsel Town, have been in, but not of, the industry; although unsanctimonious and even capable of wry self-deprecation, they have sustained a bemused perspective from positions of carefully guarded craftsmanship on the margins of the tawdry spectacle. What gets in the way of Esterhasz’s objectivity, a fundamental ingredient for effective satire, is that he is too close to his subject. He may be uncomfortably close; that may not be, however, enough to liberate him, and it most certainly is not reason enough for us to pay to watch him foul his own nest with the bitter and uninteresting crudity of Burn! Hollywood! It is difficult to wax witty or insightful – much less make something approximating even implicit moral criticism – when the megalomania of your own loudly self-advertised, cutthroat dealmaking and your own last three or four egregiously tacky films offer compounding evidence of your own greed and crassness.

Joe Esterhasz comes a lot closer to deserving his recent consignment to Hollywood pariahdom, a turn of events which Burn! vapidly attempts to excoriate, than he ever did to earning the multimillion-dollar contract for giving the world Showgirls (which sum was awarded, by the culture that bred him, for having given the world Basic Instinct, a movie so cold and enervating that it is primarily remembered for a signature Esterhasz scene in which the writer shares his view that all we need to know about the history of feminism may be summarized in an off-camera crotch shot).

Burn! Hollywood! Burn! uses a film-within-a-film to cobble together its sophomoric, skit-like scenes, very few of which have anything even resembling a comic pay-off. Eric Idle plays a director named Alan Smithee, who has a film wrested away from him by his producers and re-cut into an abomination certain to be a blockbuster. Smithee has no recourse but to remove his name from the picture, a situation which, historically in the business, is addressed by the director being listed in the credits as Alan Smithee. Hence, the Idle character’s dilemma eventually drives him to stealing and hiding the only print of the film and to a heavily guarded behavioral health facility where he narrates the story in flashbacks. Whoopi Goldberg, Sylvester Stallone, and Jackie Chan star as themselves in the ill-fated action epic; they don’t get much to play in the way of amusing scenes, just heavy-handed bits that have the appearance of slumming.