The 25 Best Documentaries About Hollywood, Ranked

Jeffrey Schwarz’s frothy documentary about the larger-than-life producer of “Grease” and Broadway’s “La Cage aux Folles” doesn’t shy away from Carr’s foibles, or love of caftans, while celebrating his flair for promotion and zest for showbiz — even when it didn’t work. Carr’s most notorious flop, one that haunted him for years, was his pairing of Rob Lowe and Snow White at the 1989 Oscars. — Diane Garrett

Tinseltown is so effective at manufacturing its own mythology that it feels subversive to watch the curtain yanked back on stars’ private lives. A hustler who saw it all, Scotty Bowers spills the tea on everyone from Cary Grant to Katharine Hepburn in this gossipy look inside the celluloid closet from director Matt Tyrnauer. — Peter Debruge

Directors Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese examine the artistically rich moviemaking period of the 1970s, drawing upon the insights of filmmakers including Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, and Milos Forman about the creatively fertile time. The doc’s freewheeling spirit suits the era, though it doesn’t dig as deep as some. — D.G.

Activist filmmaker Kirby Dick (“Allen v. Farrow,” “The Invisible War”) investigates the mysterious, draconian, and often random methodologies used to determine the letter-grade movie ratings administered by the Motion Picture Association. The movie itself received an NC-17 because of clips in the film used to illustrate its point. — Kate Aurthur

This study of the deadly combination of sleep deprivation and long hours on the job was a passion project for cinematographer Haskell Wexler after the 1997 death of a camera assistant, who fell asleep at the wheel after a 19-hour workday. The movie examines the specific pressures of working in Hollywood as well as the general trend of work culture stretching well past nine-to-five hours in America. — Cynthia Littleton

This paean to the art of cinematography features the insights of dozens of leading practitioners of the craft, including Oscar winners Conrad Hall and Vilmos Zsigmond, and is fittingly illustrated with scenes from movies spanning from “The Birth of a Nation” to “Do the Right Thing.” — D.G.

Now that Denis Villeneuve has offered yet another vision of Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” it’s instructive to revisit this “what might have been” look at an early, abandoned 1970s version of the film from cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky (“El Topo”), including contributions from Dan O’Bannon and H.R. Giger that clearly went on to influence Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” — P.D.

Using clips from more than 200 films shot in L.A., Thom Andersen draws an insightful picture of how movies have defined the city. From classics like “Blade Runner” and “Double Indemnity” to cult treasures “Exiles” and “Killer of Sheep,” the extensive compilation looks at how the stereotypical Hollywood image is often at odds with the sometimes gritty, sometimes glamorous metropolis. — Pat Saperstein

From “Brazil” to “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” Terry Gilliam’s filmography is sometimes richer for windmills imagined than movies actually completed. This 2002 “unmaking-of” behind-the-scenes doc by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe captures the derailing of Gilliam’s dream project “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” with Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort, where everything that could go wrong on location, did. Undeterred, Gilliam eventually made and released “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” in 2018, debuting it at Cannes. — P.D.

This affectionate look at a true Hollywood eccentric traces Hal Ashby’s unlikely showbiz career, first as an editor and then a director. In the 1970s, he directed seven distinctive movies that helped define the era, including “Harold and Maude,” “Shampoo,” “Coming Home,” and “Being There.” Ashby’s career faded, but he’s not forgotten, as this doc amply shows. — D.G.

Eschewing the usual experts and character witnesses, this study of Brian De Palma assembled by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow allows the famed filmmaker to speak for himself in intimate detail. Accompanied only by clips from his movies, the director of classics like “Carrie” and “Scarface” reveals the surprisingly autobiographical elements of his work, recounts his epic battles with the MPAA, and rebuffs accusations of misogyny that dogged his career. — P.S.

Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson weaves together biographical details with questions of documentary ethics and spellbinding raw outtakes from some of her more harrowing shoots. “Cameraperson” is an eminently nuanced meditation on what the act of photographing does to the person in front of the camera, as well as the person behind it. — Andrew Barker

Steven Yeager’s Sundance-winning celebration of outsider filmmaking helped boost bad-taste auteur John Waters from cult hero to éminence sleaze. The aptly irreverent portrait of the indie pioneer retraces the early days of the Baltimore-based director’s career, up to and including the scatological finale of 1972’s “Pink Flamingos.” — P.D.

Vivian Kubrick, then a teenager, filmed her father, Stanley, directing Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall on the famously volatile set of his horror masterwork “The Shining,” creating an unvarnished look at moviemaking. Vivian banters with Nicholson as he hams it up for her camera and she elicits painfully honest confessions from Duvall. — D.G.

British film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill delivered the definitive history of Hollywood before movies could talk in this more than 11-hour series. Dozens of retrospective interviews were conducted in the nick of time to capture the memories of such legends as Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, George Cukor, and William Wyler. — C.L.

Director Mark Cousins delivers a 14-hour master class, where every example hails from a movie helmed by a woman. The approach is incredibly empowering, underscoring the medium’s possibilities via clips that film schools so often overlook. — P.D.

Morgan Neville uses Orson Welles’ unfinished last movie, “The Other Side of the Wind,” as a chance to explore what became of the “Citizen Kane” director. Welles was the ultimate Hollywood wunderkind and a maverick who battled the system till the bitter end. — P.D.

Barry Avrich’s deeply researched look at one of Hollywood’s most influential leaders of the 20th century neither canonizes nor demonizes its complex subject. Wasserman, whose MCA Inc. was a forerunner of the modern media conglomerate, is brought to life in a warts-and-all portrait that details how his business acumen and vision changed the industry. — C.L.

A bracing look at a production gone horribly wrong, this doc is blunt about the inability of United Artists execs to control “Heaven’s Gate” director Michael Cimino from the start. Now synonymous with artistic folly and Hollywood’s indulgence of enfant terrible directors, the costly Western bankrupted the studio. — D.G.

Kent Jones’ inventive look at Francois Truffaut’s landmark 1960s interviews with Alfred Hitchcock blends reflections from contemporary directors on Hitchcock with Truffaut’s original recordings of his conversations with filmdom’s master of suspense. — C.L.

This taut look at the Hollywood blacklist interweaves footage from congressional hearings in the late 1940s with then-contemporary interviews, including with Dalton Trumbo after he spent 10 months in prison for contempt of Congress. John Huston, a critic of the political witch hunt against anyone suspected of communism, adds propulsive narration to this harsh look at an ugly chapter of American history. — D.G.

Few would accuse Werner Herzog’s 1982 drama, “Fitzcarraldo,” of being dull. But director Les Blank managed to top Herzog’s classic tale of obsession with this jaw-dropping look at that lunatic production, which called for its crew to transport a boat over a mountain in the Amazon. — P.D.

We form our identities around how we see ourselves represented in pop culture: That’s the thesis of this damning film from Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. The doc took the ball from Vito Russo’s revolutionary 1981 book of the same name, about how LGBTQ people are misrepresented in movies, and ran with it. — K.A.

Seductively narrated by Robert Evans, this lush documentary traces his unlikely career from poolside discovery to Paramount executive during the studio’s “Godfather” and “Chinatown” glory days. Alas, the good times — and his marriage to “Love Story” star Ali MacGraw — would not last, but Evans is disarmingly frank about his unconventional life and later career struggles. — D.G.

Francis Ford Coppola himself admits that those involved in making his 1979 masterpiece, “Apocalypse Now,” went insane “little by little.” This documentary uses behind-the-scenes footage shot by Eleanor Coppola, the filmmaker’s wife, that shows in vivid detail the road to madness. Few documentaries have more sensitively explored the fine line between uncompromising artistic vision and unbound megalomania in filmmaking. — A.B.