BOB GARFIELD: While pirates roll their cameras on movies they don't own, moviemakers have a long tradition of training their lenses on themselves. WNYC's Sara Fishko looks back at an Academy Award-winning look in the mirror three decades ago. [SOUND CLIP FROM FILM DAY FOR NIGHT]

MAN: Ready.

WOMAN: Camera roll 33, take one. [STICKS]

MAN: [SHOUTING] Lights out.

SARA FISHKO: It is just 30 years since the Francois Truffaut film Day for Night won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. [MUSIC FROM DAY FOR NIGHT UP AND UNDER] Day for Night took us along on a fictional film shoot as an average, somewhat sentimental feature was created by its cast, crew and director, played by Truffaut himself.

MAN: Give me a five kilowatt on the fireplace.

SARA FISHKO: Day for Night is a love letter to the filmmaking process.

MAN: Now put a screen in front of the five kilowatt or we won't see the fire.

SARA FISHKO: And also to the family that forms around a picture and then disbands.

MAN: [OVER LOUDSPEAKER] Camera crew wanted in the projection room.

MAN: There they are! [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE: GREETINGS, LAUGHTER]

SARA FISHKO: It adores the chemistry of actors with one another, and the sorcery performed on the set and in the editing room.

MAN: Start the rain-- less rain--

SARA FISHKO: There hasn't been such a positive, loving portrait of the process since-- well ever. You only have to go back a couple of decades before Truffaut and [SOUND FROM THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL UP/UNDER] change the location to Hollywood to see the politics and pain filmmakers chose to show us in movies about their own business. In The Bad and the Beautiful, there are some early heady days of filmmaking--

BARRY SULLIVAN: Suppose, suppose we never do show the Cat Man?

KIRK DOUGLAS: Is that what you're thinking?

BARRY SULLIVAN: Exactly.

KIRK DOUGLAS: No Cat Man.

SARA FISHKO: -- Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan throwing it together on a shoestring.

KIRK DOUGLAS: Now what'll we put on the screen that'll make the backs of their necks crawl?

SARA FISHKO: But it doesn't take long before the producer is taking credit for the director's work.

KIRK DOUGLAS: I'd rather hurt you now than kill you off forever.

SARA FISHKO: Cutting him out of the deal.

KIRK DOUGLAS: You're just not ready to direct a million dollar picture.

SARA FISHKO: Filmmaking becomes a more sinister process with more at stake.

BARRY SULLIVAN: You're stealing my picture. It was my idea. I gave it to you.

SARA FISHKO: In the movies about movies, it is the producers who are larger than life, larger than movies, even.

KIRK DOUGLAS: Without me, it would have stayed an idea.

SARA FISHKO: They are, after all, the ones with all the power. And power seems to be what it is all about, even more than money, and certainly more than art. And working in the movies is all about being trapped. [MUSIC FROM THE BIG KNIFE UP & UNDER In Clifford Odet's play and later film of the late '50s, The Big Knife, it is very much about the power struggle between a movie star--

JACK PALANCE: I'll promise you anything you want, if you'll just let me go.

SARA FISHKO: -- and a tyrannical producer--

ROD STEIGER: [SHOUTING] A boy like you? Who are you?!

SARA FISHKO: -- played to the hilt by Rod Steiger.

ROD STEIGER: [SHOUTING] I built the studio. I! I, with my brain! And my hand, I ripped it out of the world -- and who are you?

SARA FISHKO: In this one, process doesn't enter into it. Ninety percent of The Big Knife takes place in one Bel-Air living room, which I guess is itself part of the trap. The poor guy can't get out of that palatial room or his contract, and that's what it's about.

NORMA DESMOND: You there-- Why are you so late?

SARA FISHKO: So is Sunset Boulevard, when you think about it. [MUSIC FROM SUNSET BOULEVARD UP & UNDER]

NORMA DESMOND: Why have you kept me waiting so long?

SARA FISHKO: In that classic, everybody pays a price for the glamorous haze that is the movie world, and everybody's trapped.

NORMA DESMOND: We didn't need dialogue - we had faces.

SARA FISHKO: Norma Desmond, trapped in a big old mansion, looking at the image of herself as she once was.

NORMA DESMOND: I'll show them! I'll be up there again, so help me!

SARA FISHKO: Eric Von Stroheim, as a former director trapped as her butler...

ERIC VON STROHEIM: She was the greatest of them all. You wouldn't know. You're too young.

SARA FISHKO: A struggling writer, having brushed up against all this, under the oddest possible circumstances--

MAN: Well, I sure turned into an interesting driveway.

SARA FISHKO: -- finding himself trapped--

WOMAN: I'll get your things together, and let's get out of here.

SARA FISHKO: -- unable to give it up.

MAN: All my things? All my 18 suits and all my custom made shoes and the six dozen shirts and the cuff links and the platinum key chains and the cigarette cases?

SARA FISHKO: Decades later, in the film Inside Daisy Clover, Daisy, Natalie Wood, pays every imaginable price.

MAN: Incredible as it may seem, I'm going to make something out of you.

SARA FISHKO: Her mother is locked up in an institution to leave young Daisy free for stardom.

MAN: There's a certain mixture of orphan and clown that always packs 'em in.

SARA FISHKO: The matinee idol she marries takes off on their wedding night, and finally her very sanity is the price she pays.

MAN: Will you give us a level, please, Daisy?

DAISY CLOVER: 1, 2, 3, 4.

MAN: Fine.

SARA FISHKO: As she plays a full-blown mad scene in the dubbing studio. [SOUND OF ON SCREEN AND OFF SCREEN SCREAMS]

SARA FISHKO: The producer, of course, is unmoved.

MAN: Now look here, if she's sane, cure her. If she's mad, certify her. I want her cured so I can finish my picture or certified so I can collect insurance.

SARA FISHKO: And Daisy is trapped by her own success. [MUSIC FROM STATE AND MAIN]

SARA FISHKO: In State and Main, a movie shoot takes over a small town where they are all trapped in endless pre-production.

WOMAN: Claire has a problem.

MAN: Wally, if I have some moment of your time, look at this, this shot -- I cannot do this shot you want.

MAN: Why not?

SARA FISHKO: With rewrites and tantrums and machinations.

WOMAN: I don't want to take my shirt off and I got --what are these things they're asking of me? What-- why - I, I try to be good--

SARA FISHKO: Long before anyone says Action.

MAN: Roll camera--

MAN: Speed.

MAN: The Fires of Home, Scene one, Take one.

MAN: Marker.

SARA FISHKO: In The Player--

TIM ROBBINS: Lunching with the enemy. [LAUGHTER]

SARA FISHKO: -- they're even trapped at lunch.

TIM ROBBINS: Can we talk about something other than Hollywood for a change?

MAN: Yeah.

WOMAN: Yes.

TIM ROBBINS: We're educated people. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

WOMAN: Yeah!

MAN: Sure.

WOMAN: Sure, [...?...].

SARA FISHKO: Life is in development hell. [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE IN THE PLAYER]

MAN: You know, I, I like Goldie. I like Goldie.

WOMAN: Goldie, great. Cause we have a relationship and, and that would be great.

MAN: Great.

WOMAN: Goldie Goes to Africa.

WOMAN: Goldie Goes to Africa.

MAN: Goldie Goes to Africa.

SARA FISHKO: Writers circle around the studio.

TIM ROBBINS: Find out from Studio Security how Adam Simon got on the lot. I want to know.

WOMAN: Okay. Adam Simon? Okay.

SARA FISHKO: A murder is committed.

MAN: [SHOUTING] Keep it to yourself!

SARA FISHKO: It is, after all, the only way out of the trap of being rich, successful and in power in the dream factory. [SOUND EFFECTS FROM FILM THE OSCAR]

SARA FISHKO: There's even a film called The Oscar--

MAN: Here's a fellow who needs no introduction-- [SCREAMING CROWD OF WOMEN] Frankie Fain, one of the five nominees for this year's...

SARA FISHKO: -- which can be found in the cult films section of a certain downtown video store listed under Midnight Movies.

MAN: This is a chancey business, Frankie. You never know you're on the way out till you suddenly realize it would take a ticket to get back in.

SARA FISHKO: It tells the story of a movie star who is, yes, trapped, by the glamour and success he's been able to achieve as he begins a slide downward. [CROWD AMBIENCE]

MAN: [MAN ON TELEPHONE] You've just been nominated for an Oscar!

MAN: What? I can't hear you?

MAN: I'm at the Academy, and they just released the Oscar nominations.

SARA FISHKO: Only the prospect of an Academy Award gives him renewed credibility and clout, so he can once again, if you'll pardon the expression, call the shots.

MAN: Hey, Frankie -- Congratulations!

SARA FISHKO: And what about Day for Night? What's truly amazing is that 30 years ago the late great Francois Truffaut did manage to make that entertaining, upbeat, charming film about the same dirty business that almost every other director has dumped on mercilessly before and since. Could he have made that movie now, knowing all we know now? Between the E Channel, Project Greenlight, Peter Biskind's new book Down and Dirty Pictures, backstage documentaries and unauthorized biographies, camcorders, desktop editing, Inside the Actor's Studio -- with all that, who needs fiction? Maybe audiences know it all too well. MUSIC FROM DAY FOR NIGHT UP & UNDER] But Truffaut knew the secret -- that the beauty of it is on the set and in the cutting room, in the actual act of making the thing, in burying your head in the question of which vase will work better on which table, which angle will flatter, which cut will surprise the viewer? Whether it's great art or just ordinary entertainment, you still have to make those decisions. You still have to sweat. To him, the fun is in the sweating. For an audience, the fun is in the watching, and that includes even a good, trashy movie about making movies, even if most of them are not about making movies at all.

MAN: Cut!

SARA FISHKO: For On the Media, I'm Sara Fishko.

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