This Hollywood satire was based on a 1922 play by Paul Dickey and Mann Page called Lights Out, which was adapted into a 1923 film of the same name directed by Alfred Santell. For this remake, RKO assigned Lew Landers, one of Hollywood's most prolific directors. In fact, Crashing Hollywood was the first of eight movies he directed for release in 1938 alone. It's also smartly cast, with enjoyable character actors like Richard Lane, George Irving and Lee Patrick joining Tracy, Guilfoyle and Joan Woodbury to make for a snappy time. Lee Tracy's first film, incidentally, had been one of the very first talkies with a Hollywood subject matter: Big Time (1929).
Movies about Hollywood are as old as movies themselves, and audiences always seem to be fascinated by them, whether they are A-level classics like The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) or cheap quickies like Crashing Hollywood. Oftentimes the less glittery films are the more revealing. As film scholar William K. Everson has written, "Crashing Hollywood contains a lot more honesty about day-to-day Hollywood than many of the much more ambitious pictures that were always striving for effect, carefully dropping a name here or a pseudo-documentary 'fact' there. The B's had no time for that -- they just got on with their story-telling, using undisguised studio sets and offices for their background. Crashing Hollywood is a particularly slick little picture, combining an amusing story-premise with good action and fast-paced dialogue, the Lee Tracy personality keeping everything hanging together rather nicely."
By Jeremy Arnold
