Showboy
Written and directed by co-stars Lindy Heymann and Christian Taylor, Showboy is a comedic mockumentary about a Hollywood writer trying to make it onto the Las Vegas stage. Real-life British filmmaker Heymann takes her documentary crew into Southern California to report on Britons working in Hollywood. She overhears Taylor (a real writer and producer for the HBO series Six Feet Under) getting fired by executive producer Alan Ball. The documentary crew then follows Taylor to Las Vegas, where he proceeds to follow his dreams of making it as a star under the guise of doing research for a movie script. He rooms with veteran chorus member Erich Miller (then the star of the Vegas show +Jubilee) and undergoes a series of dance lessons, auditions, and other humiliations. Features cameo appearances by Adrian Armas, Siegfried and Roy, and Whoopi Goldberg. more..
Director: Christian Taylor
Starring: Christian Taylor,Lindy Heymann, Marilyn Milgram, Joe Daly, Erich Miller
The result is a deliberate conflation of fact and fiction that yields unexpected emotional impact.
Taylor, while perhaps a little small to become a real Vegas showboy, makes for a very charismatic hero, while Joaquin Baca-Asay's cinematography captures all the glitz and slightly tawdry glamour of the Vegas strip.
The lesson of Showboy is how disturbingly easy it is for an audience to trust what it sees when confronted with a film posing as factual documentary.
It's a rich idea for a comedy, even if the filmmakers seem timid about making the pic the full-on satire it might have been.
Unlike such similar efforts as "A Mighty Wind," this would-be satire isn't funny enough to be entertaining, nor is it clever enough to fool us.
Lindy Heymann
British Independent Film Awards (2002)
Christian Taylor
Milan International Film Festival (I) (2002)
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