Three decades ago, a young, up-and-coming movie director named Paul Bartel pulled together a lot of shoestrings to produce this wonderfully resourceful little black comedy (less than 30 minutes long) about Jane, an office secretary who comes to realize that her life is being secretly filmed for a shadowy outfit called The Secret Cinema. Some critics have pointed to what they see as a striking similarity between this film and "The Truman Show." But there's at least one crucial difference: Whereas Truman Burbank's environment is completely fabricated, Jane's life in New York is very real, although it's being manipulated by the filmmakers.
Bartel uses his budgetary and technical limitations to excellent advantage: the cheap-looking black & white photography, the obviously looped dialogue, the stock music and canned sound effects are very much in keeping with this low-budget movie about low-budget moviemaking.
Bartel later remade "The Secret Cinema" as an episode of Steven Spielberg's NBC anthology series "Amazing Stories." The remake starred Penny Peyser as Jane, Griffin Dunne as Dick and Bartel himself as Jane's psychiatrist. The NBC version was, I thought, terrible; it was over-produced, over-written and over-acted, and totally lacking the charm of the original. Worst of all, it failed to adequately convey the story's basic premise that Jane's life was being secretly filmed. (The remake also offers an ending completely different from the darkly humorous resolution of the first film.)
