Shot in three weeks in a one-room set, John Byrum's low-budget British production about low-budget Hollywood productions in the Thirties - an X-rated, “nostalgic look at Hollywood's pornographic film industry” (UA) - has attained a substantial cult following but little box-office success, despite the starring role of Richard Dreyfuss. The Hollywood Babylonian focus of Inserts is the decline of a once-successful film director, Boy Wonder (Dreyfuss), now an alcoholic has-been at the old age of 30. Boy Wonder funds his semi-retirement making porno films at home. His producer is an ex-bootlegger, his heroine is an addict, and his hero is a moonlighting gay gravedigger. When the starlet rudely overdoses before her contract is up, Boy Wonder concentrates his dissipated energy on finding an understudy for some all-important “inserts” with which to complete the picture, while opportunity, in the person of a young Clark Gable looking for a director (satirical fantasy), knocks unheeded at his door.
Blatantly gossip-referential and thematically (but not stylistically) derivative of the “Abandon all hope...” brand of Hollywood-on-Hollywood cynicism (The Big Knife, etc.), Inserts portrays all Hollywood risings as fallings: “We're told that Hollywood really...made its gravediggers into idols and its idols into corpses....” (Soho Weekly News). (JB)