It took them roughly three weeks to write it. Originally taken up as a distraction when the brothers hit a stumbling block in the process of hashing out the script for Miller’s Crossing, and purposefully designed to be a project that would involve John Turturro, John Goodman and a hotel full of ghosts, this acid-dipped valentine to the film industry remains a high point in the siblings’ ongoing ( hopefully?) careers. Both Joel and Ethan claimed they had no real axe to grind with Hollywood - “Our professional life has been particularly easy,” the former said, “which I’m sure is very unusual and very unfair” - yet they managed to come up with a particularly vicious, nightmarish take on the Dream Factory. Thirty years ago today, Barton Fink hit theaters, coming off a triple-win at Cannes and confirming that the Coen brothers were not just formalist genre-film brats but bona fide geniuses. They are bellhops, and elevator operators, and insurance salesman, and cops. And as for the second one? Like his agent says, there might even be a few common men out in the City of Angels. The answer to the first question is that Tinseltown can’t turn Barton into a phony, because he was already a fake long before he stepped on to California soil. Still, Barton doth protest too much: Won’t being out there in La La Land turn him into a phony? Won’t it cut him off from his subject, the average Joe longing to be given a voice by artists like him? The movies need people who understand “the poetry of the streets.” Millions are to be grabbed out here. No sooner has Fink, bard of the common man and the misguided hero of Joel and Ethan Coen’s venomous 1991 masterpiece, scored great opening night reviews for his social-realist melodrama Bare Ruined Choirs than Capital Pictures extends an invite to come west, young man. Such compromises usually come with a price, of course - just ask Barton Fink. This promise of easy money does, eventually, get around. Hecht goes on to become one of the greatest screenwriters of Hollywood’s golden age. Don’t let this get around.” The siren’s call is heeded. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. All expenses paid,” asks the future cowriter of Citizen Kane, before conspiratorially letting Hecht in on the Grand Scam. “Will you accept $300 per week to work for Paramount Pictures. The famed journalist, novelist and playwright was toiling away in New York when he received a missive straight from Babylon, courtesy of his fellow scribe Herman J. But its recipient Ben Hecht quotes it in his memoir, A Child of the Century. It’s an apocryphal Hollywood story, with the actual letter lost to time. “Madman” MundtĮveryone knows about the telegram. “I’ll show you a life of the mind!”-Charlie Meadows, a.k.a. “It’s strange, but some movies present themselves almost entirely in your head.”- Joel Coen
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