The Big Picture | Christopher Guest | For Your Consideration | Director

You know what you're getting with a Christopher Guest film. And yet, you also don't. By Zac Crain

As a filmmaker, you know you've made it when an audience will come along for the ride simply because you're in the driver's seat. Plot, characters, cast - none of it matters as much as the director and his attendant consistent vision. Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and, lately, Wes Anderson all command that kind of trust. The same goes for Christopher Guest. It's highly likely that people would come out to see his latest, For Your Consideration, even if the film's poster simply listed the title and Guest's name. They wouldn't necessarily need to know it was yet another of his patented faux documentaries, this time tracking what happens when Oscar buzz suddenly (and somewhat inexplicably) descends upon the cast of Home for Purim, a rather stilted period drama.

With For Your Consideration hitting theaters soon, it's the perfect time to take a look back and see how Guest earned his audience's faith.

The Big Picture (1989)

Guest's first feature, The Big Picture, is closest in subject matter to For Your Consideration, though it doesn't really hint at the style he would later develop. The film, starring Kevin Bacon as fresh-from-film-school director Nick Chapman, skewers the ridiculousness of Hollywood and its motley crew of blowhard studio execs, vapid wannabe actresses, and clueless agents. If you've read Down and Dirty Pictures, Peter Biskind's great book about independent film in the 1990s and its eventual seduction by the big studios, you'll recognize that Guest's take on Hollywood was scarily prescient; Bacon's Chapman could be a stand-in for Steven Soderbergh post-Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Though satirical to the point of absurdity at times, The Big Picture has a heart that Guest's subsequent films lack, thanks, in part, to a surprisingly warm performance by Guest's longtime running buddy, Michael McKean. It also features, at the other end of the spectrum, a bravura turn by the late, great J.T. Walsh (you know him, even if you don't think you do) as borderline insane studio chief Allen Habel. Unfortunately, The Big Picture was only a big deal on HBO; the number of times I saw it is in the low triple digits.