good picture, it's a miracle!,” its slogan goes.)

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Most of them are helmed by the haughty Eric Von Leppe (Paul Bartel), best known for such masterpieces as These Raging Loins and Machete Maidens. Most of them also co-star Von Leppe’s swollen-headed muse and Candy’s soon-to-be rival, Mary McQueen (Mary Woronov), who is a vision of full-of-herself divadom. In the course of Hollywood Boulevard, Candy will cut her teeth doing race car-oriented action flicks and sensationalist women-in-prison movies for which Miracle might fly its cast and crew to the Philippines, sans amenities, to save money. The glamorous stardom of Candy’s fantasies immediately clashes with the stardom of her reality. She isn't needed for her magical star quality — it's her photogenicness paired with her willingness to be pushed around that counts most. One running joke in Hollywood Boulevard is that stunt people die all the time: a reminder that bodies are just generally deemed unequivocally commodifiable (like prop guns or muscle cars), especially existing in B-movie land for the purpose of answering a script’s call for a sexy skin flash or something on which to inflict over-the-top violence. “This is not a film about the human condition,” Von Leppe says to McQueen after she angles for clues into her character’s motivations. “This is a movie about tits and ass.”

The narrative in Hollywood Boulevard is loose, and its looseness gives it space to play around. It’s a funny, almost prankish send-up of the B-moviemaking world; it sometimes feels more like a series of skits than a coherent project. Arkush and Dante are taking jabs at what they know, and sometimes the movie radiates the energy you’d expect coming from a film made by a group of people who considered themselves friends. Legend has it that Hollywood Boulevard was made on a bet. New World Pictures head 

Roger Corman and producer Jon Davison wanted to see if it was possible to make the most cost-effective movie in the company's history. Arkush and Dante, whose prior moviemaking experience amounted to stitching together trailers for upcoming New World releases, were made the greenlit experiment’s guinea pigs. 

It’s obvious, just by looking at the movie, how cheap it is. It often suggests that the cast and crew simply showed up at a given location, started rolling, and hoped they wouldn’t get interrupted. But I think the loud-and-proud money-saving is part of the charm, especially when Dante and Arkush humorously repurpose footage from other New World movies to fill in certain narrative requirements. (The film 

most prominently grabs from the studio's 1975 action feature Death Race 2000 — itself a much stronger satirical comedy than Hollywood Boulevard — and 1971’s The Big Doll House.) I’ve always found it endearing, even when the product sucks, when you have a motley crew of filmmakers basically scrounging so that an audience can have a fun evening. Hollywood Boulevard has a good sense of humor about what it is and the conditions under which it was made. 

Shot in 19 days, with just $60,000 available to spend, Hollywood Boulevard is a spirited, if a little scattered, apex for Corman’s penchant for churning out silly, commercial movies so cheaply that they could almost be guaranteed to make their money back. It doesn’t quite come together as a cogent satire; one could argue that it is often just rehashing B-movie tropes. There is gratuitous nudity and violence in spades; many of its professed sexual politics have unsurprisingly aged badly with time. But its scrappy 

pleasures are bountiful, especially for those who consider themselves fans of the mid-century exploitation moviemaking era. Hollywood Boulevard is an appealingly snarky inside-baseball comedy. 

Chief among its delights is Woronov’s amusingly campy performance as a self-important diva with killer ambition. As in all the films in which she starred in her youth (the erstwhile Warhol superstar was a New World staple and frequent working partner to Bartel), Woronov is obviously in on the joke as she’s performing in subpar movies without stumbling into mocking insincerity. “As a star I have a tremendous influence over hundreds of thousands of people nationwide — worldwide,” she says with pitch-perfect highfalutin earnestness at one point. Undergirding so much of the movie’s humor is that the B films of that decade are basically of little value — products to be discarded of almost as quickly as you pay to see them. Hollywood Boulevard isn’t among New World’s best, but it’s sort of touching to find joy in a film that believed from its inception it would come and go some four-plus decades later.