Made in Hollywood by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

Made in Hollywood by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

In person: Bruce Yonemoto and Patricia Arquette.

Since the mid-1970s, Los Angeles artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto have crafted a crucial body of video work that has remained as relevant and insightful as it is devastatingly funny. Particularly in their work of the 1980s–1990s, they employed the language and tropes of television, advertising, and mass media to construct brightly colored video works that skewer the hypermediation of human experience and its distortion of emotion and identity into farce and spectacle. 
 
One of their most acclaimed and ambitious works, Made in Hollywood, stars a perfectly cast, 22-year-old Patricia Arquette as a starry-eyed new arrival in Hollywood, alongside acting powerhouses Mary Woronov, Ron Vawter, and Michael Lerner. A darkly satirical pastiche of television and dream factory cliches, Made in Hollywood is nearly a definitive summation of the Yonemotos’ ongoing themes and targets. Deconstructing and rebuilding a Tinseltown narrative from scratch, the result is a bitingly funny, effortlessly sophisticated examination of the layers of lurid artifice that confuse the boundaries between reality, fantasy, and desire.  
 
Made in Hollywood will be preceded by the Yonemotos’ short video Vault, a hilarious and exhilaratingly absurd compression of mass media attitudes on love and loss. 
 

Programmed and note by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano.  
 
Both films courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix and Bruce Yonemoto. Special thanks to Molly Madden, Lauren Meltzer, and Eric White. 
 
Total program runtime: 68 min. 
 
Vault 
DIRECTED BY: Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. 1984. 12 min. USA. Color. English. Digital. 
 

Made in Hollywood 
DIRECTED BY: Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. 1990. 56 min. USA. Color. English. Digital. 

Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation. 

Theater accessibility accommodations available upon request. Learn more about our accessibility initiatives.

Back to Main Series