Just as Most Writers Are Writers, most film producers are producers, most actors are actors, and so on, so the entertainment industry is a popular setting for works of fiction.
In plots set in the entertainment industry, action takes place on the back side of three-wall sets and in the trendy bars and eateries of Hollywood California, the Big Applesauce, or other artistic havens. This provides a good setting for explaining, lampooning, or critiquing the industry.
Prima Donna Directors, White Dwarf Starlets trying to make a comeback, difficult Former Child Stars trying to get their life together, struggling screenwriters/directors Doing It for the Art, innocent farmgirls trying to become stars, pompous and dramatic stage actors, unscrupulous money-grubbing executives, and imperious or selfish established actresses all populate these settings. It's quite a place.
Usually, these stories are behind the scenes of a Show Within a Show. Occasionally, screwy Metafictional works may Break the Fourth Wall by showing the production of the work itself.
Troubled Production and The Show Must Go Wrong are common sources of drama in these settings. And of course, The Queen Will Be Watching!
Note that this only covers professional productions. For works about amateur performances, see School Play or Amateur Film-Making Plot. Also see Hey, Let's Put on a Show, when amateurs put together a charity benefit performance.
This is a supertrope to The Musical Musical and Making the Masterpiece. See also Work Com.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Animation Runner Kuromi focuses on a small animation studio, and the titular heroine's attempts to get the animators to finish their work on time for production.
- Bakuman。: a manga in Shonen Jump about making a manga for Shonen Jump in hopes to get an anime, that got an anime.
- Behind The Scenes by Bisco Hatori is a seven volume manga about the Art Squad, a group of university students who provide all kinds of behind the scenes work - sets, costumes, special effects makeup, even logistics or pinch-hitting for crew and cast - for a group of on-campus film clubs. Notably, Hatori-sensei got the idea for the manga while on the set for the live tv adaptation of her breakout manga, Ouran High School Host Club, and being impressed by some custom props and the person who made it.
- Black Butler: The third episode of the Season 2 OVA takes a left turn and shows what goes into an episode of the series like it's a Live-Action series with the characters being actors.
- Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!: This is an ecchi Work Com set behind the scenes of Japan's adult entertainment industry, starring an Okinawan gravure idol named Haebaru Misora who is also a national-level karateka. The story deals a lot with the business side of the industry.
- Gimmick is about a genius special effects artist and his stuntman partner, who together run a company called Studio Gimmick! Occasionally, they fight crime using their skills. Features a fictionalized version of the special effects artist who served as a consultant as a recurring character (with his permission).
- Glass Mask: long running manga and two different anime productions about two rivals in an acting troupe.
- Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!: a love letter to the creation of animation, both the artistic endeavour and the very real compromiuses necessary for a commercial product. We follow a trio of animator, animator / director, and producer.
- Life Lessons with Uramichi-Oniisan: A Work Com starring the cast of Together With Maman, a direct Fictional Counterpart of the long-running children's show Okaasan to Issho.
- Oshi no Ko: This is a manga about the inner workings Japanese entertainment industry, with a cast made up of everything from actors to stage crew to Idol Singers to Internet streamers. And it doesn't skimp on the more unsavory aspects of entertainment production: the Series Goal of main viewpoint character Aqua, secretly the illegitimate child of Idol Singer Ai Hoshino from a Teen Pregnancy and an aspiring actor and TV and film producer, is to identify the father of himself and his twin sister Ruby, and figure out what role he played in their mother's murder.
- Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: A couple episodes center on the making of the Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life movie, with many of the characters working on the production in some capacity.
- Shirobako: We watch everything behind the scenes of anime production.
- Skip Beat! follows the life of naive everygirl Kyoko Mogami as she decides to become a superstar to get revenge on the boy who broke her heart. She doesn't start out with the goal of becoming an actor, but she ends up stumbling into the job anyways. Much of the story takes place on the set/ between takes of whatever project she's working on... or at the location shoot of the film her love interest is working on... or the set of the tv series her best friend is in... or the set of the promotional video her mortal enemy is shooting.
Films — Live-Action
- After the Rehearsal: As the title implies, it takes place in a theater when all the actors have gone home after a day of rehearsing, and is about an aging director's relationships with his past and present lead actresses.
- Asteroid City: The Framing Device is a TV documentary about the making of a play called Asteroid City, though whether the play actually exists in-universe or was made up for the purpose of the TV program are not clear. While Asteroid City itself takes up a significant part of the film's screen time, we also see a lot of the background for the play, including the playwright's struggles with writing the play, the casting process, and behind-the-scenes drama, and a number of scenes take place offstage on the set of Asteroid City (the director has taken up living in the theater).
- The Bad and the Beautiful traces the rise and fall of a tough, ambitious Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields, as seen through the eyes of various acquaintances, including a writer James Lee Bartlow, a star Georgia Lorrison and a director Fred Amiel. He is a hard-driving, ambitious man who ruthlessly uses everyone - including the writer, star and director - on the way to becoming one of Hollywood's top movie makers.
- Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is about a washed-out action star trying to make an artistic Broadway play, and almost entirely takes place backstage of the theater.
- A Cock And Bull Story: Director Michael Winterbottom attempts to shoot the adaptation of Laurence Sterne's essentially unfilmable novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman."
- François Truffaut's Day for Night is about a film crew's attempts to film the in-universe work Meet Pamela.
- Dolemite Is My Name is largely about the making of the Dolemite movies. The first half is about Rudy Ray Moore's career trying to make it in show biz (as a musician, then comedian), and the second half focuses specifically on the process of making the movie itself.
- Ed Wood, being based on the life and career of the actual Ed Wood, dedicates several scenes to the troubled, shoe-string budget production and filming of several of his films, most notably the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space.
- Hail, Caesar! is about a 1950's Hollywood fixer who has to juggle the eclectic personalities and antics of numerous actors and directors on the sets of various films.
- Hasta la lluvia (Even the Rain) centers around a Spanish film crew that travels to Bolivia to film a movie about Christopher Columbus. Had they decided to make it in English, the crew would be given as much money as they needed by an American film studio and filmed on location in the Caribbean, but since they wanted to film it in Spanish, they had to find somewhere cheap. Unfortunately, they arrived during the Cochabumba water war, and production had to shut down due to the massive protests.
- Hollywood Ending tells the story of a once-famous film director who suffers hysterical blindness due to the intense pressure of directing.
- I Know That Voice is a documentary that explains the work Voice Actors go through, with much of the film being interviews with well-known voice actors.
- Inland Empire: The framing story is about an actress filming a movie called On High in Blue Tomorrows, and a number of scenes take place on set or rehearsal for the movie. But the main character gets more and more absorbed into her role and ends up literally trapped on the set, and then the Mind Screw really gets going...
- Kiss Me, Kate is a movie (and stage play) about the production of a musical version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.
- La La Land in part follows Mia, an actress trying to make it in Hollywood.
- Late Night (2019) takes place mostly in the writers' room of a fictional late night Talk Show.
- Parts of Miś, because the protagonist needs an Identical Stranger for The Con and happens to know a casting director.
- Mulholland Drive takes place in Hollywood, and the heroine is a young woman who moved to LA to be an actress. A subplot involves a director struggling to get his movie funded, and later on some scenes take place on the set of his movie, a 1950's romantic Period Piece.
- The Spanish movie La niña de tus ojos (The Girl of Your Dreams) revolves around a group of Spanish movie actors in the late 1930's. As the fascists are winning the Spanish Civil War, they are then invited to Nazi Germany to film a localized version of their movie, and they have to deal with the fact that some of their cast and crew are Jewish, and the star of the movie is being pursued by Joseph Goebbels.
- Its sequel, La reina de españa (The Queen of Spain) takes place just over twenty years after the first film, and shows the actors coming together to rescue their old director, who was locked up in a concentration camp at the end of the first film, from a labor camp. The star of the film tells Franco what she really thinks of him at the end of the film.
- The original The Producers, which wasn't a musical, is about two Broadway producers deliberately trying to make a flop. The film was then adapted into a musical, an example of The Musical Musical.
- Saturday Night is a fictionalized depiction filming of the first episode of Saturday Night Live and includes depictions of Writing by the Seat of Your Pants, temperamental actors, Executive Meddling, censorship, and cast members hanging out, all backstage (or in some cases on stage) in the TV studio.
- Scream 3 is about the production of the latest film in the Stab series, the Scream series' in-universe version of itself, getting interrupted by a new Ghostface killer targeting the cast and crew. Along the way, the filmmakers have to contend with a studio anxious about growing public backlash against cinematic violence, as well as an actress complaining about how the latest rewrite of the script seems to have cut her role in the film down to just two scenes and an early death.
- Singin' in the Rain is a Rom Com musical that portrays a time when The Jazz Singer was released and a film studio's response, changing from silent films to "talking pictures". Shows the tools of the trade, sets viewed from off-stage, etc. Moses Supposes
for example, is a dance number about actors undergoing speech training from a dialect coach.
- S.O.B.: A successful movie director makes the most expensive film in his career and it becomes a huge flop. He tries to salvage his career by reshooting the film as an erotic production, where its family-friendly star takes her top off.
- Two Weeks In Another Town depicts the shooting of a romantic costume drama in Rome by a team of decadent Hollywood stars during the Hollywood on the Tiber era.
Literature
- The Disaster Artist, is a recounting of the real-life story behind the production of Tommy Wiseau's The Room (2003) as recounted by actor Greg Sestero. Sestero spends about half of the book detailing the various shenanigans behind the filming of certain infamous scenes, one notable example being Tommy requiring over three hours and 30 takes for a single shot (the "I Did Not Hit Her" rooftop scene). The book later received a film adaptation of the same name, which put more emphasis on said behind-the-scenes shenanigans.
- Girlish Number is a very cynical look at anime production as a money grab.
- The Discworld novel Moving Pictures is about the rise of the Disc's film industry.
- Rockstar Detectives: Murder at the Movies is set in the Fox studios in Sydney.
Live-Action TV
- 30 Rock centres around the writers of a fictional comedy show based on Saturday Night Live.
- The Fox series Action is a dark comedy series about a Hollywood producer named Peter Dragon, who is trying to recover from his last box-office failure.
- The Chair (2014) was a Reality Show take on this, giving two filmmakers of differing creative backgrounds — Shane Dawson and Anna Martemucci (now known professionally as A.M. Lukas) — a pre-existing script, a budget of $600,000 each, and near-total creative control to make a movie, with the show documenting the process. The results were Dawson's Not Cool and Martemucci's Hollidaysburg; while the former ended up winning the popular vote (a Foregone Conclusion given Dawson's popularity at the time), the latter was better-received and ultimately ended up Vindicated by History.
- Chespirito, while not making a proper series set in movies or shows, has made some episodes for his series with such settings:
- A skit from El Doctor Chapatín involves him interrupting the filming of a movie multiple times in order to light his cigarette.
- The El Chapulín Colorado episode "Un Chapulín en Acapulco" involves a film crew trying to make a film about El Chapulín Colorado, but the actor playing the eponymous character quit. The director ends up summoning the titular character and asks him to take part in the film As Himself.
- Classic Albums: This documentary series about the creation of classic music albums shows the viewer a glimpse how the sessions, production and personal history of the songs and the album itself came about.
- The HBO series The Comeback is about an ex A-list celebrity attempts to rekindle the flame of her once prominent acting career with nothing but a camera crew and some determination.
- Dani's House is mainly a Dom Com but when Dani gets a job working on a fictional soap opera, there are several episodes that take place on its set.
- The Dick Van Dyke Show was partly this (Rob worked for a variety show) and partly a domestic sitcom.
- Drop the Dead Donkey is set in the offices of "GlobeLink News", a fictional TV news company. This includes the TV studio, with many episodes featuring the hijinks of the anchors Henry and Sally as they prepare to go to air.
- One episode of Ellery Queen has Ellery and his father on the set of a Hollywood adaptation of one of his novels, when the star is murdered during a filmed murder attempt, and later the star's stunt double. Most of the episode takes place behind the scenes of the movie, and a major clue is that not everyone receives the same script updates.
- The HBO series Entourage concerns an overnight Hollywood sensation and the inexperienced friends he chooses as his manager, advisors, etc., who end up making his professional agent's job much harder than it has to be, especially in the earlier seasons.
- Frontline follows the fortunes of a fictional current affairs show, Frontline. The Frontline office showcases and satirises the machinations of the ruthless producers, the self-obsessed airhead host, and the ambitious, cynical reporters, all of whom resort to any sort of underhanded trick to get ratings and maintain their status
- Made in Canada is set in the meeting rooms of Pyramid Productions, a Canadian film and television production company, and on the sets of the various films and television series they produce. It uses this premise to satirise the corner-cutting, compromising, and executive cynicism that goes on at television production companies.
- The Mary Tyler Moore Show: The main character works as a producer for The Six O'Clock News on fictional TV station WJM; many scenes take place on the set for the aforementioned TV news show.
- Mimpi Metropolitan is mainly a Roommate Com that features various attempts by Bambang, Alan and Prima to earn money. Since Prima primarily works as an extra (and later extras coordinator) and most of the other main characters work in television too, at least a third of the show is set on production of TV show(s).
- The Morning Show is set behind the scenes of, well, a network morning news program, and shows the company culture and personal dramas that affect how the news is told. Its tagline is "The news is only half the story."
- The Muppet Show was as much about the backstage antics as the on-stage performances.
- NewsRadio is a comedy set at (fictional) news radio station WNYX set in the 1990s, in New York City, initially focusing on it's director and later other characters as an ensemble.
- The Newsroom follows a cable news show and uses the setting to commentate on news, politics, and the purpose of television news in contrast to entertainment media.
- The Numbers is about the hassles of producing a live variety show each week, inspired by the actual weekly live variety show the creator did.
- Remember WENN is set at the ficitional Pittsburgh radio station WENN in the 1930s-1940s.
- Sonny with a Chance is a Disney Channel show, although instead of trendy bars and eateries a lot of the action takes place in the studio commissary, complete with Mystery Meat and a school lunch lady clone.
- Sports Night follows the production of a sports news show and the quirks of its cast and crew.
- Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is about the production of a late night variety show in the vein of Saturday Night Live and how hard it is to write comedy.
- Toast of London follows the everyday life of London actor Steven Toast, so many of the show's vignette's involve Toast's various acting jobs, including a universally-reviled play we see him preparing for and various voice acting parts.
- UnREAL (2015) is about the production of a The Bachelor-type show called Everlasting.
- WKRP in Cincinnati is set in the office of a fictional radio station and involves such behind the scenes topics as off-site promotions, interoffice rivalries, the selling of advertisement spots, etc.
Theatre
- Curtains shows the out-of-town tryout of the new musical Robbin' Hood, a Western version of Robin Hood, getting investigated when the star, a movie actress everyone despised, gets murdered on opening night. The detective, Lt. Frank Cioffi, is an amateur actor and theater lover who gets caught up in the creative process, helping the writing team revamp the Eleven O'Clock Number and stepping in as Robbin' Hood when the star gets injured.
- Kiss Me, Kate is a stage play (and a movie) about the production of a musical version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.
- Noises Off shows three different points in the sex farce Nothing On - the final rehearsal before opening night, backstage partway through the run, and when the wheels come completely off toward the end of the run.
Toys
- LEGO Studios: This toyline is based upon the behind-the-scenes making of films, both real and fictional, at a Hollywood studio. Most sets feature film crews including directors with megaphones, cameramen with cameras, grips with boom microphones, trained stuntmen, etc. Giant monsters are merely animatronic props, cityscapes are backdrops and Wrap Around Backgrounds, and the toys' play features are practical special effects. The online game Backlot features the player character touring the studio and helping out the cast and crew during the Troubled Production of a new Johnny Thunder movie, eventually working their way up the ladder to co-director.
Visual Novels
- Naturally the case in Melody (2019), given that the title character is a musician who goes professional, and that the protagonist is her eventual manager.
Western Animation
- BoJack Horseman, with its actor protagonist, has several arcs about the making of media. Most of Season 2 is about production of the Secretariat movie, and a number of flashbacks take place on the set of Horsin' Around, the sitcom that made Bojack famous.
- A few closing host segments of the Quick Draw McGraw show took place on a studio set with cameras a klieg lights about as Quick Draw would see what his co-stars were doing.
- Rocko's Modern Life: The two-parter episode "Wacky Delly" has the main trio making a cartoon, showing them going through the process of designing the characters, boarding the episode and animating it.
- The Simpsons: The episodes The 138th Episode Spectacular and Behind the Laughter play with this trope. It depicts The Simpsons as a show and does this in a Mockumentary style.