SLAVES OF HOLLYWOOD review in the Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
(Getting your first reviews for an indie feature is stress personified. By the time our Los Angeles theatrical release for Slaves of Hollywood rolled around in October 1999, we had already gotten a few good ones and few bad ones. Our festival screenings, which had put us on a globetrotting tour for a year, were sometimes great, sometimes very mediocre. In other words, this could go either way. We had gotten a lousy review from Ernest Hardy of the L.A. Weekly on Wednesday night, prior to our L.A. opening on that Friday in October 1999. That could have been it for us. Would have been a real depressing ending to the story of this film. But we got word from our distributor, Filmopolis Pictures, that Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times liked the film and was asking for a still from the film for his review. This was in the days before reviews appeared immediately on the internet. I didn't have a L.A. Times subscription but my apartment neighbor did. It would arrive every morning with a thud that would often wake me up, thrown by the delivery person. Unable to sleep, I got up at 4 am on Thursday morning, and the paper thudded around 5. I ran outside, took the binder off the paper, quickly read this good review from Kevin Thomas, put the binder back on the paper, placed it back on the ground outside my neighbors apartment, went back in my apartment, and wa-hooed! loud enough to probably merit eviction. I appreciate Kevin Thomas to this day, as this filmmaker might have walked into traffic without that review in October 1999. It was nice that Kevin Thomas also used a still of our actor Nicholas Worth, who you will recognize as a "that guy"-type character actor, but who rarely got a role worthy of his prodigious talents. I hope we wrote him one here. Around 60 years old at the time, Nicholas was in tears when he saw the review. The good kind of tears. It's a tough, tough town, and it is sure nice to be recognized for your decades of work.)
'SLAVES' TO SHOW BIZ
First-time filmmakers create an insiders' satire that's talky but full of promise
by Kevin Thomas
Michael Wechsler and Terry Keefe's "Slaves of Hollywood," which opens a one-week run Friday at the Monica 4-Plex, is too talky for its own good, but this first-time feature gathers steam and manages to hold interest because Wechsler and Keefe have had firsthand experience as film industry assistants.
They cast Katherine Morgan, poised and lovely, as the daughter of a studio mogul (Nicholas Worth, in a ferocious portrayal) who has grown lethally paranoid over the years. An aspiring filmmaker herself, the daughter decides to document the lives of five assistants as a way of showing how the movie business turns people into monsters if it doesn't destroy them. "Slaves" is a bleak satire that is often funny, very knowing, and totally uncompromising.
"Slaves" is a bleak satire that is often funny, very knowing, and totally uncompromising, which may explain why the picture bears a 1996 copyright. No matter, Wechsler and Keefe have genuine talent and imagination.
Thomas (Howard Scott) is the film's innocent, newly arrived in the mail room of a top talent agency, where he is swiftly targeted for exploitation by Roman (Rob Hyland), the blithely unscrupulous assistant to the agency head; Roman is a refuge from a Neil LaBute movie. Fisher (Hill Harper), who dreams of discovering "the next Madonna," has become the assistant of an exuberantly decadent music video producer; he ends up carrying his boss around on his shoulders. Hefty vulnerable George (Elliot Markman) is stuck in a mail room with a studio head's crazed heavy-metal-freak son, who may well succeed in driving him out of his mind. Already out of a job is aspiring filmmaker Dean (Andre Barron), fired by his apoplectic boss because he one day forgot to make him a lunch reservation at Spago.
As "Slaves of Hollywood" grows darker, it grows funnier, and it is a fine showcase for its actors. Harper has already begun to make his mark, and Hyland, rugged and forceful, and Markman, a character actor of considerable resources, are especially impressive.
