The Independent (2000)

(California and Nevada; contemporary)
IMDb

Satire about a Roger Corman type schlock film producer, done largely in a mockumentary format. Jerry Stiller plays the producer, Morty Fineman, a man who has made over 400 films in a 30+ year career, and who is now in danger of losing the rights to those films to a bank whom he owes ten million dollars. In an effort to pay off the bank Morty enlists the aid of his estranged daughter Paloma (Janeane Garofalo) to make a blockbuster film, eventually settling on a musical biography of a famed serial killer. We get a number of opportunity's to see clips from Fineman's massive catalogue of films, all exploitative, and most mildly amusing (particularly Whale of a Cop, with Jerry's son Ben playing the lead). A number of real film makers appear as themselves in the capacity of talking heads in the documentary being made about Fineman, among them are Peter Bogdanovich and Ron Howard. The film climaxes at a retrospective of Fineman's work at the High Desert Film Festival in Chaparral, Nevada, a town whose primary industry is legalized prostitution. The clips from Morty's first production, shown at the end of the movie, an Army VD film done in the style of Ingmar Bergman, pretty much captures the essence of the proceedings. The Independent is watchable, which is probably the biggest praise Morty Fineman could ever have gotten.