365 - The Player, United States, 1992. Dir. Robert Altman.

Sunday, December 31, 2017

365 - The Player, United States, 1992.  Dir. Robert Altman.

Movies.  Now more than ever!

Movie producer Griffin Mill explains what he does.

"I listen to stories and decide if they'll make good movies or not.  I get 125 phone calls a day, and if I let that slip to 100, I know I'm not doing my job.  And everyone that calls, they wanna know one thing.  They want me to say Yes to them and make their movie.  If I say Yes to them and make their movie, they think that come New Year's that it's gonna be them and Jack Nicholson on the slopes of Aspen.  That's what they think.  Problem is, I can only say Yes--my Studio can only say Yes--twelve times a year.  And collectively we hear about 50,000 stories a year.  So it's hard.  And I guess sometimes I'm not nice, and I make enemies."

Mill's explanation is clear and reasonable, and, as well as being a good monologue, it also elicits sympathy from the viewer.

We never actually see Mill not being nice to writers.  In fact, as played convincingly by Tim Robbins, Mill seems open, honest, and fair throughout the film.  We see multiple pitch meetings, including three in the famous eight-and-a-half minute one-take opening shot, and in every pitch meeting Mill listens to the writer with attention and respect as he tries to understand him and follow along.  We never see Mill treat a writer with scorn, sarcasm, or superiority.  In fact, there is a running theme where he tells the writer to pitch in twenty-five words or less, the writer uses more than twenty-five words, and Mill lets him.  If anything, he comes across as, if not a nice man, at least a professional man sincerely doing his job.  The only thing that might constitute a hard-ball play is when he gives a pitch to his new rival Larry Levy (played by Peter Gallagher), thinking the movie will bomb and send Levy packing.  Mill does this to protect his job, which, despite the year and a half left on his contract and assurances from his boss Joel Levison (Brion James), Mill rightfully feels is being threatened.

Nevertheless, screenwriter David Kahane (Vinent D'Onofrio) views Mill as an enemy.  What did Mill do to Kahane?  Was he not nice to him?  No.  Did Mill pass on Kahane's pitch?  No.  He simply told Kahane that he would call him back and then did not do so.  Mill did not believe Kahane's story was one of the 12 out of 50,000.  It was lacking elements the studio needs to market a film successfully.  Of course with those odds it is possible for a screenplay to be amazing and still not make the top twelve, but Kahane's story was not amazing.  Even his girlfriend June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi) does not believe he has talent.  In fact, she herself has never read his screenplay.  And when Mill looks up Kahane on his secretary's computer, he sees that Kahane is still an "unproduced" writer.  Despite that, Kahane, like another fellow writer Phil, feels that the universe owes him a picture deal.  That Mill himself owes him a deal.

So when Mill, under the duress of receiving anonymous postcards threatening to kill him, goes to the trouble of tracking down Kahane, apologizes for not following up, and offers him a deal, Kahane still spits in his face.  "F*** you, man.  You're a liar."  Kahane exits the bar where they are meeting.  Mill walks to his car alone.  Kahane then follows Mill back to his car and starts up again.  "It's me, the writer.  Still want to buy my story?"  Despite his insolence, Mill says Yes.  "I told you I'd deal.  Stop by the studio.  We'll work something out."  But Kahane has not come to make a deal with Mill.  He has come to vent on him.  To spew.  "Who will I ask for, Larry Levy?"  Kahane then takes Mill's phone, forcing Mill to follow him around to the back of the movie theater, and pretends to call Levy.  Kahane mock speaks on the phone, showing nothing but contempt for Mill.  He refers to Mill as a "dumb son of a b****."  Mill appeals to him.  "Let's forget this.  Just stop all the postcard s***."  They reach Kahane's car and stand next to it on the passenger side.  Kahane antagonizes him some more.  Mill appeals again.  "I said, Let's forget this."  Kahane shoves open the passenger door, slamming it into Mill, knocking mill backwards over the railing, and down at least a dozen feet to the down-ramp pavement below.  Mill lands flat against the concrete and hits his head.  When Kahane comes down to check on him, Mill reacts and shoves Kahane's face under four inches of water.  There is a moment lasting about two or three seconds when you can see Mill has lost it.  Then he begins to walk away.  Then he begins to realize Kahane is not moving.  Then he checks on him and realizes he is dead.

People imprecisely say that Griffin Mill murders David Kahane, but he does not.  At most, he commits accidental homicide.  He does everything in his power to placate the angry writer, who, to his knowledge, has been sending him a drawer-full of death threats for five months.  He walks away, tries to drive away, tries to drop it, and still after being persistently verbally abused is violently thrown to the concrete from above, where he himself could have died, could have been knocked into a coma, could have lost the use of his limbs, or at least suffered a concussion.  By the time Kahane comes to him he is practicing self-defense.  In those two or three seconds at the end, it may have technically moved past self-defense into momentary rage, but that lasts for only two or three seconds and then subsides. When Mill comes to he believes Kahane is still alive.  Only after does he realize what has happened.

Robert Altman is brilliant in staging the film this way, and Tim Robbins is brilliant in how he plays the character, because they create a satire in which we sympathize with the studio executive protagonist from beginning to end.

Novelist and screenwriter Michael Tolkin himself states that he wanted this.  He says that writers are the ones doing the writing, so they have a tendency to create characters who are writers and who are morally superior.  And they take their frustrations out on publishers or editors or in this case studio executives because it makes them feel better.  Tolkin decided not to do that.  Instead of creating a writer or writers who were morally superior and using them to bash the executive, he flips it.  He makes the writers the immoral antagonists and gives the producer the audience's favor by telling it from his point of view.

Am I saying that Griffin Mill is without fault?  No.  Does the film satirize him?  Yes.  But he is never shown being unkind to writers and he is not shown committing murder.

But going back to Altman's genius, The Player is entertaining.  It does not take itself too seriously.  It does not sermonize.  It is not, as people have said, "scathing," "biting," "acidic," or "bitter."  If it were, it would be hypocritical.  Self-righteous.  But The Player is a loving satire, a film made by Hollywood that is able to make fun of Hollywood and laugh at its own human, all-to-human ways.

The Player openly does everything it makes fun of.  It is a Hollywood movie with almost as many Hollywood stars as any movie ever made, and with a Hollywood ending.

Griffin Mill tells June which elements need to be present to market a film successfully.  They are suspense, laughter, violence, hope, heart, nudity, sex, happy endings.  Mainly happy endings.

This film contains all of them.  And it is wonderful.


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Question:  What do you get when you combine D. W. Griffith (1875-1948) and Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959) and tweak it a little bit to keep it from being obvious?

Answer:  Griffin Mill!

I could write an entire blog entry on the opening 8-1/2 minute shot, but that will have to wait.

With The Player Robert Altman returns to the style and success of his best films of the 1970s.

And while he focuses on a few players and features Tim Robbins as the uncontested star, he has a greater ensemble here than ever before.  You may find yourself watching the film just to see all the cameos.  Just to see Jack Lemmon playing the piano!

Here are the actors who play characters:  Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Gallagher, Brion James, Cynthia Stevenson, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dean Stockwell, Richard E. Grant, Sydney Pollack, Lyle Lovett, Dina Merrill, Jeremy Piven, Gina Gershon, and Peter Koch.

Here are the actors who play themselves:  Steve Allen, Richard Anderson, Rene Auberjonois, Harry Belafonte, Shari Belafonte, Karen Black, Michael Bowen, Gary Busey, Robert Carradine, Charles Champlin, Cher, James Coburn, Cathy Lee Crosby, John Cusack, Brad Davis, Paul Dooley, Thereza Ellis, Peter Falk, Felicia Farr, Kasia Figura, Louis Fletcher, Dennis Franz, Teri Garr, Leeza Gibbons, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Elliott Gould, Joel Gray, David Allen Grier, Buck Henry, Anjelica Huston, Kathy Ireland, Steve James, Sally Kellerman, Sally Kirkland, Jack Lemmon, Marlee Matlin, Andie MacDowell, Malcolm McDowell, Jayne Meadows, Martin Mull, Jennifer Nash, Nick Nolte, Alexandra Powers, Burt Reynolds, Jack Riley, Julia Roberts, Mimi Rogers, Annie Ross, Alan Rudolph, Jill St. John, Susan Sarandon, Rod Steiger, Patrick Swayze, Joan Tewkesberry (Altman's writer on Nashville), Brian Tochi, Lily Tomlin, Robert Wagner, Ray Walston, Bruce Willis, Marvin Young.

Note the scene where Pasadena Police Detective Avery visits Griffin's office and picks up one of his two Oscars.  The role is played by Whoopi Goldberg, and she picks up the Oscar with relish, lifting it, talking about how heavy it is, as though it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see one.  Yet in real life she had one sitting at home.  She had won it the year before filming The Player, for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Oda Mae Brown--with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore--in the Jerry Zucker film Ghost (1991).  She had been nominated five years before that for Best Actress for her dramatic performance as Celie Johnson in Steven Spielberg's film rendition of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple (1986).

We saw the brilliant Richard E. Grant earlier this year in 1987 film debut in Bruce Robinson's Withnail & I.  I intend to work with him one day.
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/10/284-withnail-and-i-united-kingdom-1987.html

The great producer and director Sydney Pollack appears here as Griffin's lawyer Dick Mellen, and how wonderful it is any time you can see him as an actor!  Did you know Pollack wrote the Introduction to Sanford Meisner's acting book, Meisner On Acting?  He was an acting student under Meisner!  You know him for directing Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Way We Were (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Bobby Deerfield (1977), The Electric Horseman (1979), Absence of Malice (1981), Tootsie (1982), Out of Africa (1985), The Firm (1993), Sabrina (1995), Random Hearts with Harrison Ford (1999), and The Interpreter with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn (2005)--not to mention all the films he produced.  (He won an Oscar for producing as well as one for directing.)  But he also acted here, in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives (1992), Steven Zaillian's A Civil Action with John Travolta (1998), Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), his own Random Hearts, Roger Michell's Changing Lanes with Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson (2002), and his own The Interpreter.  Whenever he acted it was delicious.  If only he had acted more!

Vincent D'Onofrio and Greta Scacchi were together during the filming, so when you see her pregnant it is with his baby!

It was on the set of this film that Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts met and later got married.

THE RIALTO

The big incident happens during a screening of Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948), now retitled to the more accurate translation Bicycle Thieves.  The theater is The Rialto in "Pasadena."  In real life The Realto is on Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena, just a few blocks south of Pasadena.

We saw his movie Umberto D (1952).
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/06/160-umberto-d-1952-italy-dir-vittorio.html

We celebrated his acting in the FRENCH film, Max Ophuls' The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953)
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/04/093-earrings-of-madame-de-1953-france.html

I want to remind you that the director of The Bicycle Thief directed 37 films but acted in 157 films!

The Rialto Theater appeared again in the movie La La Land (2016).

This theater is particularly special to me, as I watched quite a few films there when I lived in Pasadena.

It was at The Rialto that I first saw, on the big screen, Federico Fellini's classic film La Dolce Vita (1960), with those openings shots of the helicopters flying through ancient Rome into modern Rome, one of them carrying the statue of the Christ.
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/06/156-la-dolce-vita-1960-italy-dir.html

It was at The Rialto that I saw Wong Kar-wai's Hong Kong film In the Mood for Love (2000).  I do not have it yet, but I do have his other Criterion film Chungking Express (1994), and we saw it earlier this year.
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/01/022-chungking-express-1994-hong-kong.html

https://cinephiliabeyond.org/robert-altmans-player-intelligent-hilarious-hollywood-satire-sharp-knife/