The Player

There's a long history of Hollywood films about Hollywood, and they often evoke the dark side of the film business, from William Wellman's A Star Is Born to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. But I don't know of any film as lacerating about the movie business, but also as funny, as Robert Altman's 1992 film, The Player.

The Player is about studio executives, who are often parodied, but this film really socks it to them, portraying them as people who have short attention spans (pitches should be twenty-five words or less) and care little about art and mostly commerce.  They are also constantly in fear of losing their job--as William Goldman wrote, like baseball managers, they know they will one day be fired.

Tim Robbins plays one such executive, who listens to pitches all day by writers. They often boil their idea to crosses between two other films, such as Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate or Out Of Africa meets Pretty Woman. Robbins points out that the studio only makes twelve films a year, and he hears thousands of pitches over the same time period, so that leaves a lot of disgruntled writers. And now one of them is sending him threatening postcards.

Robbins suspects one writer in particular, and talks to his girlfriend (Greta Scacchi) and learns he is at an arthouse in Pasadena, watching The Bicycle Thief (the kind of film Hollywood would never make). He finds the writer, Vincent D'Onofrio, and tries to make peace, offering a deal. But D'Onofrio will have none of it. In a scuffle in a parking lot, Robbins kills D'Onofrio, and later will seduce Scacchi.

Meanwhile Robbins is paranoid about the hiring of a new executive on the team, Peter Gallagher, who doesn't believe writers are necessary, and that they themselves can come up with ideas from articles in the newspaper. Also, detectives Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett suspect Robbins of the murder, but can't pin anything on him.

This is a different sort of Altman film. It's not as messy as most of his films--no overlapping dialogue. But he does open the film with a nearly eight-minute tracking shot as Robbins arrives at his office. It self-references the opening tracking shot of Orson Welles' Touch Of Evil, and in one of dozens of cameos by people playing themselves, Buck Henry pitches The Graduate 2 (a movie I wish had been made). Other cameos range from Cher to Burt Reynolds, and in a delicious send-up of how Hollywood ultimately sells out and ends films happily and unrealistically, Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis.

The Player is as black as a black comedy can get, but also exists in the sunny realm of California, where nothing feels grim. The artifice of Hollywood films colors the inherent cynicism. The film is cynical, but also bright and cheerful, letting us know that like a Hollywood film, everything will be okay in the end.