You keep rooting for this Hollywood sendup to make it, even as the bad ideas start gaining on the good. What a concept: Create a comedy about a student filmmaker (Kevin Bacon) who wins a chance to develop a movie at a major studio and along the way compromises his talent, betrays his best friend, takes up with a conniving starlet, loses his sweetie and ends up in squalor until he catches on that success comes only when you stay true to yourself.

Director Christopher Guest (an actor making his debut on the other side of the camera) and co-writers Michael McKean and Michael Varhol can't make the last part wash. Their sappy optimism plays like the kind of box-office compromise the film correctly excoriates. Guest and McKean, who coscripted and costarred in Rob Reiner's hilarious rock satire, This Is Spinal Tap, are much better with the nasty stuff. Venom becomes them.

The same goes for the actors. It's the creeps who get to party. J.T. Walsh is a howl as the studio chief with a knack for turning the most intellectual script into a beach-party flick. And Martin Short's frazzled fruitcake of an agent is one for the comedy time capsule. Watching Short work a restaurant ("I'll have a thimble of the almond torte"), a car phone ("I'm killing myself") or a client powwow ("Take the TV deal") is to witness the gaucheries and hypocrisies of Hollywood laid bare. When Short is onscreen, a movie that provides only fitful laughter bubbles over into bliss.

“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.