HOLLYWOODLAND (***) IS A SWEETLY SEEDY ANECDOTE, a termite rhapsody to gumshoes, cheaters, leavers, and at its center, the first Superman, 1950s television star and ultimate suicide George Reeves.
Ben Affleck plays Reeves, who played Superman on television, becoming a campy kiddy icon for that decade; Diane Lane, his mistress Toni Mannix, married to hot-temperered MGM exec Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), and Robin Tunney the firecracker floozie who comes into Reeves’ life after Toni. That story’s refracted by an investigation that takes place years later, by PI Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) who’s led by Reeves’ mother (Lois Smith) to believe Reeves was murdered. (Like the recreations in Thin Blue Line, we see several variations of how Reeves might have left this life, and Affleck is brave to have enacted so many ways to kill or be killed.)
Reeves embodies a featherweight 1940s glamour; Simo, hair full and oiled like a James Dean wannabe, lives at the start of rock-‘n’-roll, or “the hatless age,” as director Allen Coulter puts it in a conversation at Chicago’s Peninsula Hotel on August 16.
Coulter, a veteran of series like “Rome,” “The Sopranos,’’ ‘‘Six Feet Under’’ and ‘‘The X-Files,” works many small, telling details into the fabric of the multiple storylines. Coulter also speaks with the slightest of twangs, hailing from Texas. “If I’m around someone from Texas, if I have a drink with someone from Texas, you can hear it,” he says.

Affleck does an interesting turn with the material, on one hand, playing a likeable but limited actor, sashaying among glib sophisticates in a world of cheap glamour, straining to glimpse the cut glass of privileged, and on the other, working to capture Reeves’ pat acting style. (He does a surprisingly good job of embodying both.) Wasn’t Affleck born to don the tawdry tights of the 1950s Superman and inquire, “You can’t see my penis, can you?” “Not being Mr. Diplomat here, but Reeves was a better actor than [some people think],” Coulter tells me. “Ben watched the 120 hours [of the “Superman” series] and [Reeves] had a kind of charm, not indicating he’s above the material, but being aware. And then you realize that Superman is acting, too, he’s playing Clark Kent.”
With Brody’s moody Simo, sometimes he’s a private dick with a lick of gum, other times he’s jangling whatever’s in his pocket, sounding like a janitor’s key ring, and one, like a couple silver quarters and a nickel. “Simo has car envy,” Coulter says, ticking off scenes. “Adrien is so conscious of things like this. It’s like the chewing gum. I gave him a flow chart that showed when he could chew gum and he couldn’t chew gum. It’s not about the keys, but there’s one scene where Adrien asked what lens we were using, I said, a 22, a 26, something like that—his mother’s a photographer, Sylvia Plachy—and in the corner of the frame, he’s doing this little thing with his fingers, like this, rubbing them together.” Coulter continues, “You don’t say today, ‘Oh, he’s an Acura man,’ but cars meant something different then, say, if someone said, ‘He drives an old Packard.’” Coulter makes a dismissive face.
There’s another scene where the down-on-his-luck Simo watches a chandelier being wheeled up the drive of the Mannix household. It tinkles gracefully. “It shows what rich people have that he can’t have, that he can’t even understand. But he doesn’t realize that. It’s an homage to a scene in Chinatown where there’s this squeaking sound, and it’s the chauffeur with a chamois on the car. It’s the kind of thing Polanski does so well.”
As did another age of filmmakers. “Yes, the early filmmakers came from radio, from the age of radio, and they used sound in that way. People say that movies became more visual, but it’s not entirely true.”
Throughout, Hollywoodland lightly touches on prior films, and the dialogue in Paul Bernbaum’s script (with an uncredited polish by Howard Korder) is quippily amusing: “Good people to know”; “Not if you know them”; and the classic putdown after Lane’s character has made a scene, “My wife will take another Gibson.”
Lane is an eyeful, having a grand time being period-vampy, even when wearing only a medium-size periwinkle terry towel, even when turning into a Gloria Swanson figure; characters with similarities to figures in Citizen Kane (an older witness in an office) and Chinatown (a possible cuckold crueler than confused Burt Young). But Coulter says he’s careful to keep his eye on the story, and not just play in a cool toy box. “I have directed things like that. Where it’s about the toy box, but that’s when I was hiding the fact there was no story. Here, I think we have a strong story.”
Coulter’s strong with iconography, though: a repeated device involves men with their backs turned to the camera as they face an overexposed window. “That’s interesting,” Coulter says, hesitating for a moment, but now giving in. “I try not to think about things like that, not to be conscious of it.”
It could become mannered? “Yes. But talking about it… I think it makes them into, not an icon, but an enigma. I’ve been told I use a lot of mirrors, but I’m not conscious of that.”
It’s just something you learn to do from being on the floor, the experience and efficiency to do the work intuitively? “Exactly.”

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