Barton Fink (1991) on Netflix
In 1941, Broadway playwright Barton Fink moves to Los Angeles to write for Capitol Pictures. At the Hotel Earle he is assigned a wrestling picture by studio head Jack Lipnick.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.6/10136,547 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
Trailer
Plot summary
Barton Fink has made his name on Broadway with a play about people in squalid corners, and he wants a theater of and for ordinary people. His agent sends him to Los Angeles, where Capitol Pictures pays him a thousand dollars a week. Studio president Jack Lipnick wants a wrestling picture, a subject Barton knows nothing about. In his room at the Hotel Earle, whose wallpaper droops and peels, the script stalls after one line. His neighbor, the insurance salesman Charlie Meadows, comes by to apologize for the noise from next door, and Barton tells him about his hopes for the common man. Barton also meets the novelist W. P. Mayhew, and Mayhew's secretary, Audrey Taylor, says she has done some of his writing for him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Barton Fink (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Coens hired Roger Deakins after asking director Roger Spottiswoode about him and hearing that Deakins insisted on operating the camera himself, refused more than one camera and chased naturalistic light. Deakins's own agent advised him against taking the job.
- The burning hotel corridor was real fire. The crew built a duplicate hallway in an abandoned aircraft hangar in Long Beach, fed gas jets behind perforated wallpaper, and a man on an overhead catwalk opened each jet in turn so the flames raced ahead of John Goodman.
- Studio boss Jack Lipnick borrows from real moguls: like Louis B. Mayer he comes from Minsk, like Jack L. Warner he has the wardrobe department run him up a military uniform, and Warner's jibe about writers as schmucks with Underwoods is why Barton types on an Underwood.
