- Filmmaker David J Markey interviews people who dress like their favourite movie characters on Hollywood Boulevard.
- A hilarious and oddly moving look at the exploits of celebrity look-a-likes and film character performers on Hollywood boulevard over the span of a year. These characters (they are indeed!) dress up as movie stars and rock stars and forge a living- one dollar at a time, posing for photographs with tourists. The story unfolds through the day to day lives and back-stories of these idiosyncratic Tinsel Town street players. Their very existence on the boulevard seems to temp fate. After all, studio executives drive by daily only to see their copyrighted characters on parade. Yet these reenactors have big dreams of making it in the entertainment business, if they can keep themselves from getting arrested or their hands from each other's necks.
We encounter a large cast of characters literally and figuratively right off of the silver screen. We meet Gerard Christian Zacher, who while portraying Freddy Krueger finds himself wrongfully behind bars due to his realistic metal claws. He also performs a variety of other characters from The Grinch, to James Dean, to Luke Skywalker, to Peter Pan, to Beetlejuice and others. Gerard has always aspired to be a diverse actor, and is a survivor of an abusive childhood.
We meet Christopher L. Dennis, the self appointed authority of the block who bares a passing resemblance to Christopher Reeve. Christopher regularly recruits passers-by to become boulevard characters. Between puffs from a marijuana pipe, he claims to have started this 15 and a half years ago. However, he later stresses this dressing up in costume thing is just a temporary gig, until he is front and center in a major studio production. Christopher rarely has anything nice to say about his fellow denizens, nor they about him. One of his discoveries is J. Maxwell Allen, a George Clooney look-a-like who becomes the boulevards Batman. Max is a likeable enough guy who just seems to have trouble controlling his anger and staying out of jail because of it.
Along the way we cross paths with a motley crew of varying quality portraying Marylin Monroe, Tigger, The Hulk, Shrek, Elmo, Jason, Pinhead, Chucky, Elvis Presley, Gene Simmons, Yoda, Jimi Hendrix, Lucille Ball, Michael Jackson, Darth Vadar, Chewbacca, Al Pacino, and a few we have no idea at all of what it is they are trying to recreate or emulate. Their personal trials seem familiar, drama literally right out of the movies. This makes for a rich pallet of irony.
There are multiple competing characters jocking for a position on the street without any regulation from the city what so ever. As Batman's wife (Sandra Allen) deduces "It's very cutthroat, it's like a "Peyton Place" down there." We meet one of the many boulevard Elvis Foster, Captain Jack Sparrows, Michael A. Luce, a former Hollywood squatter who does in deed look a great deal like Johnny Depp. He meets and falls fast in love with Tienna Marie Johns, a goth fan with a major crush on Johnny Depp. Michael recruits Teinna to the boulevard as a female pirate character, before walking her down the aisle (in a scene right out of a Fellini film, the two are married in a pirate ceremony in front of the Chinese on Valentines Day).
These rag tag rouges are not merely held up for ridicule. We initially see through their desires and delusions, but as the film descends into their world, we come to see the boulevard the way they see it. This is their ticket to the big time, and nothing can stop them! As they shadow the random Hollywood icons' pop culture identities, their personal lives unravel and come together in a unique way. We come to understand these individuals are born of the indigenous psychotropic nature of Hollywood itself. This film brilliantly ends up encapsulating volumes about not only of the Hollywood system, but American culture at large.
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