In "Star Maps," directed by Miguel Arteta, a shabby Mexican young man selling star maps is picked up on Sunset Boulevard by a beautiful rich actress who offers him stardom, albeit limited. Perceived by many reviewers as a realistic film, "Star Maps" is largely fable and sexual fantasy. Sunset Boulevard has never been a hustling avenue for map vendors; the director employs the street clearly because of its associations; it was in a Sunset Boulevard pharmacy that, legend insists, Lana Turner was discovered.

     Other elements in Arteta's film abandon verisimilitude. A pimp and his boys make loads of money but the boys continue living on the street. A fight that is a highlight of the film occurs on an actual movie set and is allowed to proceed uninterrupted by any of the various burly grips. Paradoxically, the most "realistic aspect of the film is the dream-hallucination of an dying old Mexican woman being escorted into heaven by Mexican movie star Cantinflas.

     Luis Valdez's "Zoot Suit" is a film whose story bears a strong historical antecedent. In the early 1940's in Los Angeles a climate of anti-Mexican racism resulted in the railroading of a group of zoot-suiters tried on spurious murder charges. Subsequently, squads of marauding sailors, marines, and soldiers raided East Los Angeles in a violent vendetta against "pachucos."

     Valdez's film mythologizes the harsh event. The action is performed--and at times literally choreographed--on an actual set, at times a theater. The actual stylistics of pachucos easily become theatrical representation: the stride--a stalk--slow, rhythmic; the language, a cadenced incantation; the clothes, a complexity of hat, often plumed, pegged pants, wide shoulders, dangling key chains.

     As Wilder did in Sunset Boulevard, Valdez acknowledge the audience, capturing it as it enters the theater. El Pachuco, the quintessential zoot-suiter, freeze-frames the action in order to comment. During an emotional high in the drama, he warns an agitated protagonist: "Don't take the play so serious, mano."

     The film employs the standard props of socially conscious Hollywood movies: the happily grumpy mother, the protesting but supportive father, the suspicious attorney who turns out to have integrity, the left-wing woman blinded by her social commitment. Other ironic reminders of performance are black actors playing prison guards, Mexicans playing cops--in the '40s.

     Although the Pachuco reminds, "Life ain't like that," Valdez flirts with a happy ending, extending three possibilities about what became of the railroaded man, once released: he committed other crimes and died in prison, he was killed in the war, he became a happy family man, despite the racial whirlwind that had sucked him in and was still churning during his release. Like "Sunset Boulevard," like "Zoot Suit," Robert Altman's "The Player"--which will not be shown during this weekend--opens by announcing itself as a performance on the set of Los Angeles. "Action!" a grip calls. There follow several minutes of an uninterrupted tracking shot as two men discuss famous long no-cuts. There are reminders of film as film everywhere: The camera glimpses glamorous Hurrell photos of great stars; there are sequences of movies within the movie--in one of which Julia Roberts as a woman doomed to execution in the gas chamber is saved by Bruce Willis, an ending the screenwriter of the movie-within-movie has dreaded from the first day of his pitch.

     IN THE NAME OF ALL WRITERS, I AM GOING TO MURDER YOU, warns an anonymous letter to a big film executive who had promised to "get back to him" in five weeks that have stretched into five months. We learn from the hunted executive that out of 50,000 yearly collective pitches, only 12 will become films. The wronged writer was not one of the 12, because: "... his script lacked the necessary elements for a successful movie: laughter, violence, hope, heart, nudity, happy ending, mainly happy ending." With zestful irony, Altman provides a deliberately forced happy ending, as the film we just watched turns into the film now to be made.

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Original material by John Rechy appears frequently on these pages.