With a five-day tribute to director Vincente Minnelli’s melodramas starting tonight at Anthology Film Archives, I stayed up late last night to watch The Bad and the Beautiful on TCM On Demand.

The Bad and the Beautiful marked Minnelli’s first real success as a director of “serious”, non-musical pictures. It’s less self-assured than Some Came Running (to my mind, the masterpiece of Minnelli’s melodramas), but seemingly a hell of a lot more personal. Released in 1952, it was the director’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning An American in Paris, and it landed smack dab in the middle of a series of Hollywood elegies to Hollywood.

In both tone and function, The Bad and the Beautiful can be seen as a bridge between Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Star is Born (1954). If Billy Wilder’s Sunset represented Golden Era Hollywood at the height of its self-loathing, and George Cukor’s Star both satirized and condemned Hollywood’s ability to mobilize that self-loathing into reification of its founding myths, Minnelli’s almost naive faith in the sheer value of film as art allowed him to deconstruct that myth-making with sympathy for all involved. It’s industrial critique-as-soap opera, which makes it potentially the most accessible film to come out of this wave of highest Hollywood narcissism.

Kirk Douglas plays Jonathan Shields, a second-generation Hollywood brat who builds an empire out of an unfailing commercial instinct, a knack for finding talent in unlikely places, and a total willingness to screw over his friends. All of the present-day action takes place at Shields’ headquarters, which stands behind a gate bearing a shield, engraved with the name Shields. In case you didn’t get the metaphor of the Shields on the shield on the shield of Shields, Minnelli spends the next two hours making it clear that Jonathan Skields is a difficult man to penetrate.

The great man himself is, in the present day of the film, unseen, but is said to be broke and in Paris. Harry Pebbel, his former boss/long time consigliere (more shades of Sunset Boulevard) has been charged with the task of finding money and collaborators for Shields’ comeback film. He lures an actress, a writer and a director behind the shields, who proceed to take turns explaining in flashback how Shields successively wooed them, used them and discarded them.

The first flashback, narrated by the director, begins around 1934 and seems to extend into the late 30s. At this point, Shields is a struggling B-movie producer, charged by Pebbel to make pictures that “end with a kiss and put black on the books.” Sheilds and his director friend find their first success on something called Attack of the Cat Man, which is clearly modeled after Cat People (1942). Like that film’s director, Jacques Tourner, Shields brilliantly solves the problem of not being able to afford a monster by drowning his picture in darkness.

Bits like this are catnip (pun intended) to the initiated audience, and at the time of its release, Beautiful got a lot of publicity mileage over gossip as to which of the film’s characters were based on which real-life players. This is fairly good round-up of best guesses, but Minnelli also seems to sprinkle references to his own personal history throughout. At the very least, the casting of 30s musical vets Lana Turner and Dick Powell plays like an allusion to Minnelli’s own early career (he choreographed musical numbers for Busby Berkeley before directing his first feature, the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky).

More significantly, there seems to be more than a little of Minnelli’s ex-wife Judy Garland in Turner’s character, a starlet battling alcoholism and a severe lack of self-confidence, who Shields carefully molds into a star and then abandons. Garland and Minnelli met when the latter was hired to direct the former in Meet Me in St. Louis for producer Arthur Freed. Minnelli carefully made Garland over for the role, and Garland, allegedly, fell in love with her director after seeing the film’s dailies. According to Gerald Clarke’s biography of Garland, Minnelli was in the habit of aggressively “educating” his female admirers–he liked to pick out their clothes, tell them which books to read, give them lectures on art, music and etiquette–and Garland, in turn, “longed to be Vincente’s Galatea.” I

In real life, Minnelli lost interest in his wife as a project and, somewhere around the time of their final film together, The Pirate, began to see her more as an element of his product. Minnelli didn’t write the Beautiful screenplay, but there certainly seems to be something about the way the Jonathan Shields character deals with women that speaks to the dissolution of Minnelli’s marriage. In Beautiful, Shields is initially only interested in Turner’s character as a project. When she confesses that she loves him, he at first rejects her with the line, “I don’t need a wife — I need a star.” But Shields quickly thinks better of it, and decides to exploit his star’s feelings for his for the good of his picture. When production is over and shaping of the star is complete, Shields backs out of the relationship as quickly and effortlessly as he stepped in.

Turner’s section of the film is the most compelling, and not just because the former teen star gives her most serious performance (the fact that Gloria Grahame won an Oscar for her one-note supporting role in this film, while Turner wasn’t even nominated, is another on the long list of Academy crimes). Her saga reminds us that sex in Hollywood is not reproductive in the traditional sense; it doesn’t make babies, it makes stars.

For Shields, relationships (sexual or otherwise) are only interesting while the other person is on their way up. Star-making is not just a hobby of the delusional rich, as it is in Sunset; it’s not quite the cosmic structuring myth that it becomes in A Star is Born. It’s sexual fetish, and as such, it’s somehow simultaneously frivolous and primal. By all indications, Minnelli shared this fetish with his protagonist. The Bad and the Beautiful is thus not just Minnelli’s love/hate letter to his profession — it’s personal autobiography.

The Bad and the Beautiful screens tonight at Anthology Film Archives in New York City tonight at 7:00 pm, and Friday at 9:15 PM. For more on their Vincente Minnelli series, check out Anthology’s website.