Throughout the entire month, we’ve looked at various filmmakers behind the camera. From just some clerks from the local video store, to an ambitious one discovering a giant ape. Then there’s Tommy Wiseau, you get the idea that these directors are varying in their talent. Although, there’s hardly ever a film that show’s what happens in the studio lot. If its any case in Robert Altman’s The Player, a whole lot of bureaucracy and paranoia occurs with one producer. SPOILERS will appear.
1. Griffin Mills
Played by Tim Robbins, Griffin is our eyes and ears with what happens in a Hollywood studio. He’s a studio executive that hears story pitches, he only picks 12 out of 50,000 in a year. One day, he gets a series of letters that have vague threats written on them. He manages to find one of the writers who was offended by Mill’s denial. The disgruntled writer David KaHane played by Vincent D’Onofrio, gets mad at him for rejecting his script.
Becoming frustrated by KaHane’s arguments towards him and joking that he’ll lose his position in his job, Mills drowns the writer in a puddle of water. You would think that the letters would stop and Griffin has to now worry about a rival exec who wants to take over his position. It gets worse for Mills, as more letters pop up and faxed in. Soon, we see the sleazy exec becoming paranoid and attempting to steer clear from any reasonable doubt that he killed David.
Griffin is an interesting character, obviously different from the ambitious directors and Tommy Wiseau. There’s something about him where his sleaziness is his character, but he knows what works for a movie to succeed. He’s just part of the system that won’t take something that’s risky but knows how to make it pleasing for the other execs who want it to succeed for them. To put it bluntly, he’s full of shit. He talks about how they need to make movies be the art that it is, by citing famous director Orson Welles. Then in another moment, completely butcher an ambitious movie to keep it safe for the audience.
2. Satirizing Hollywood
The first minute is a one take shot and represents how the inside of Hollywood works. With overlapping dialogue and the camera moving from one meeting to another, this is the view that not many people see. There’s some real Hollywood cameos that’s littered in that opening shot and in the rest of the film to keep it real, well for Hollywood standards. There is one part that perfectly sums up Hollywood at its worst but makes sense when anyone is in such power like Griffin.
He goes to one of the restaurants expecting to meet the mysterious writer but is hounded by two writers who pitch him an interesting story. His script is called Habeas Corpus, the irony is deafening. One of the writers Tom is insistent that they don’t alter the ending, which he describes as depressing and real life. Much later in the film, everyone in the studio see the new cut of the film with a happier ending than the one that was originally pitched. Tom explains to Griffin’s girlfriend that the audience hated it. And they changed it, which is real life. Much of that shows just how everyone can be a hypocrite in Hollywood. Since he now embraces selling out just to have his movie become possible.
Other than that, most of the film can be interpreted that Robert Altman has seen some stuff while he was a director when he was alive. Looking him up on Wikipedia, most of his work is mostly Anti-Hollywood, and this film fits that idea like a glove. Perhaps, he saw just how awful the institution was and maybe wanted to make a satirizing take that’s slightly less agonizing to work with.
3. Overall
This is a great film that is mostly an acquired taste. I feel that it’s a perfect bookend to this month to wrap it up where most of the decisions come from. One who follows the ins and outs of Hollywood as a satirizing comedy, for the regular Joe, it’s a view that is a weird perspective into one side of Hollywood no one wants to sell their soul to work in.
The Player gets a four out of five.
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