The Decay of Fiction

The Decay of Fiction is a 2002 American 35mm part color and part blackandwhite experimental film noir project directed by independent filmmaker and artist Pat ONeill. The film, initially conceived as a documentary, was produced by ONeill and Rebecca Hartzell for Lookout Mountain Films. Filming took place in Los Angeles.

The movie was directed by filmmaker Pat ONeill and produced by ONeill and Rebecca Hartzell. ONeill turned the historic Ambassador Hotel of Los Angeles into a haunted mansion full of specters using a mixture of 35mm location shooting and a digital overlay. He worked with 45 actors and took eight years to complete his film. It has been described as the most complicated of ONeills works to that date. ONeill has said that it was a huge bust financially it was made on an estimated US250,000 budget. Pat ONeill mentioned the film as early as 1997 in an interview with David James. It was then referred to as the Ambassador film and called a documentary. While still a work in progress, excerpts were shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Arts Ahmanson Theatre in September 2002.According to ONeill, the film is an intersection of fact and hallucination. It is set inside the decaying halls of the closed Ambassador Hotel, former home to the Cocoanut Grove restaurant and the first Academy Awards ceremonies. The film superimposes reenactments of classic Hollywood films onto shots of the dilapidated establishment, with ghostly gangsters and their gun molls interacting with icy blondes and wisecracking bartenders in carefully deconstructed snatches of dialogue. ONeills timelapse photography lends the film an ethereal effect that serves an intentionally distancing purpose. In this study of the historic Hollywood edifice, there is no discernible plot and there are no recurring characters. The film construction has the appearance of snippets taken from lost films of the 1940s it uses surreal vignettes of nude men and women, stopmotion animated mannequin torsos, flickering film projections and dim light bulbs to create what devolves in a sense of nightmares, giving a result that feels more like an art installation than the expected film. ........

Source: Wikipedia