Synopsis
Tracking across a movie studio lot, several stories unfold. Executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) takes a pitch from screenwriter Buck Henry for The Graduate Part 2. On his way out, Henry chats with chief of security Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward) about the greatest single takes of all time (“Touch of Evil, that was a good one”). While hearing a pitch from director Alan Rudolph for a political thriller, Mill receives a threatening postcard in the mail. Development executive Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson) dresses down her assistant (Gina Gershon) for having coffee with Rudolph, while Griffin circles the office of the studio chief (Brion James) upon hearing rumors Mill might be on his way out of a job.

Instead of spending quality time with his girlfriend Bonnie, Mill takes her to a party at the house of his attorney (Sydney Pollack). Mill confides that he’s been receiving ominous postcards from “some writer I must have brushed off.” He arrives on a suspect, and after visiting the home of the writer’s girlfriend, an icy artist (Greta Scacchi), Mill tracks down the tempestuous David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio) to a theater in Pasadena showing The Bicycle Thief. Mill tries to buy Kahane off with a deal, but the writer sees through him. When a scuffle breaks out in the parking lot, Mill kills Kahane. He stages the scene to make it look like a mugging.

Walter preps Mill for his interview with a police detective (Whoopi Goldberg). Her suspicion of the exec intensifies when her kooky partner (Lyle Lovett) tails Mill and discovers that he’s romancing Kahane’s ex-girlfriend. The police are unable to tie him to the murder. Mill is much more concerned that a young executive named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) is after his job. He hatches a Machiavellian scheme to buy a pitch called Habeas Corpus from a hack director (Richard E. Grant) and his annoying producer (Dean Stockwell). Their insistence on no stars and no Hollywood ending makes Mill certain the film will be a disaster and backfire on Levy.

Production history
Michael Tolkin had show business in his blood. His father was an Emmy Award winning writer for Your Show of Shows, and his mother was senior VP of legal affairs at Paramount. Their son had only moderate success as a writer, starting with Delta House - a short lived TV spin-off of Animal House - in 1979. It took a decade for Tolkin to even get credit on a feature. Tolkin recalls, “I must have been in a couple of meetings when I was looking at producers or the executives of producers and I saw how bored they were with me. And I realized that they had hard jobs, that they had to listen to a lot of bad ideas … And they were desperate for good ideas, because they couldn’t advance if they didn’t have them.”

The morals - or lack thereof - of a studio executive became the basis of a novel Tolkin started writing in 1984. Finished three years later, Atlantic Monthly Press purchased the manuscript. Manhattan Ink magazine ran an excerpt, which producer David Brown came across. “I had read many stories, spent decades in Hollywood and felt that this was the real stuff. Unfortunately, I felt it was impossible to make because of all the internal monologue of the characters. I hadn’t given it any further thought until I had lunch with a publisher at Time Books who said, ‘We are publishing a little book that might interest you called The Player.”

Brown – producer of Jaws, The Verdict and Cocoon – read the book and still didn’t think it would translate into a movie. No one else in Hollywood did either and Brown was able to option the screen rights for $2,500. Tolkin was brought on board as producer and commissioned to adapt a screenplay in the fall of 1989, after which, Brown recalls, “Tolkin and I had a series of humiliating meets at studios with people one-third my age. They said, ‘We don’t do stories about Hollywood. You’ve got a totally unsympathetic character here, a man who gets away with murder.’ I said, ‘Doesn’t everyone?’’”

Sidney Lumet spent several weeks attached as director, but wanted more money – for the budget and his salary – than Brown could afford. Around the time that Avenue Pictures and producer Cary Brokaw stepped up to finance The Player, director Robert Altman was sent the script. “I’d written Short Cuts, based on Raymond Carver short stories, and I was trying to get that picture financed. That’s what I was really working on; I just couldn’t quite get the financing to make the film. The Player was offered to me as a picture they were gonna make. I was a director for hire. I needed the job. I saw it as an easy shoot and I kind of liked the idea of it, so I did it.”

Within a month, Altman came back with Tim Robbins to star. Shooting commenced June 1991 in Los Angeles on a budget of $8 million. Altman – the acclaimed director of M*A*S*H and Nashville - had gone sixteen years between hits and his career was in limbo. He felt that instead of fabricating stars, it would be much more realistic to populate The Player with the real deal. “I began calling movie stars. Calling and saying, ‘I’m doing a film about a movie executive who murders a writer and gets away with it.’ They laughed when I said it was a happy ending. They said, ‘You’re going after Hollywood?’ and I said, ‘No, but I’m certainly going to give Hollywood the opportunity to go after itself.’ They said, ‘I’m in.’”

To play the screen couple in the climactic movie within a movie, the first stars Altman contacted were Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis. To his surprise, without asking to read a script, both said yes. At least sixty-four more celebrities joined the production. Some - like Cher - appeared only as faces in the party scenes, while others - Angelica Huston & John Cusack, Jeff Goldblum, Andie MacDowell, Lily Tomlin & Scott Glenn, Burt Reynolds – had speaking parts as themselves, which they were left free to improvise. Each received scale wages for a day’s work, and each donated their salary to charity. Most of the stars showed up to support Altman.

Almost every studio put in a bid to distribute the film. New Line won out and when released in April 1992, The Player won universal acclaim from critics. The adulation stunned Altman. “Looking back on this whole picture, it’s a pretty tame satire. I don’t think there are any big indictments; things are much, much worse than this picture seems to say.” While the praise culminated in three Academy Award nominations – including Best Director for Altman – audiences mostly ignored the film. The Player did get the attention of the industry and enabled the 67-year-old director to make nine more features – including Short Cuts – before his death in 2006.

Opinion
While a rejected TV pilot it inspired in 1997 – with Patrick Dempsey as Griffin Mill – never made it on the air, The Larry Sanders Show, Entourage, Extras and Curb Your Enthusiasm all applied the formula of stars spoofing themselves and the entertainment industry to great success. The Player may not be as funny as some of the HBO it inspired, but it does achieve classic status because of how masterfully it assails the greed and the callousness of corporate Hollywood, while often in the same scene, celebrating the illusionary and redemptive power of the movies. It’s both cynical and optimistic, but it’s neither overly optimistic nor cynical.

Like the great satires, the premise of Michael Tolkin’s droll script and the loose, observational style Robert Altman shot the film with have an incredible amount of realism under them. Film geeks will revel at the technical audacity of the seven minute, forty seven second long camera shot that opens the picture, as well as the star studded, immensely clever footage from Habeas Corpus that concludes the film, but the verisimilitude of the scenes in between are what make The Player work as great as it does. This is a world where reality just doesn’t score very well with test audiences, fertile ground for a cold blooded killer to get away with murder.

Raphael Pour-Hashemi at DVD Times writes, “The Player is so clever it borders on being too clever for its own good … Here is a film about filmmaking, in which the cultured industry men such as David Kahane or Walter Stuckel talk about Ladri di biciclette or the opening tracking shot of Touch Of Evil, and yet the uncultured money men such as Griffin and Levy talk about test audiences, star casts and gratuitous sex scenes. The Player is clearly feeding us with the opinion that the former attitude is the healthiest for filmmaking, and yet the film clearly places itself with the latter opinion.”

“This is the film for movie buffs. It makes you stop and think about what speeds in front of your face at 24 frames a second. It states things about the industry in a uniquely detached manner, where people talk about all the dark things of the industry as if they were drinking cappuccinos … It is brilliant. It is one that you have to own. It is the movie to watch,” writes James Brundage at Filmcritic.com.

Chris Damitio at Terror Suspect writes, “The Player is perhaps, itself, the ultimate expression of Altman’s cynical sense of humor in regards to self referential plotting and paying tribute to an industry that has alternately embraced and rejected him as a genius. Altman does not pull any punches by playing to the lowest common denominator as evidenced by his opening shot that exceeds two extremely long opening shots that are referenced in Altman’s longer opening shot. The Player is filled with this kind of inside aficionado information.”

© Joe Valdez