Robert Altman’s The Player was, when it was released in 1992, one of the most brilliant, lacerating satires of the Hollywood system that cinema had seen in quite some time. It came at a time when Altman, who was once a Hollywood darling for audacious hits like Nashville, had spent a decade ousted by the very system that had built him. Altman languished throughout the 1980s, stuck with bizarro projects like Popeye, and wasn’t able to capture the public’s imagination in an era of increasingly market-researched blockbusters.
When Altman made The Player, then, he sought to bash the system to the ground. In his film, now available on a great Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection, we see Hollywood from the perspective of a mid-level studio exec named Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) who listens to, by his estimation, 50,000 script pitches a year, and then passes the 11 or 12 good ideas up to his bosses who ensure that it is cast, re-written, and re-molded into something commercial. Art is very, very far from his world. Mill doesn’t really do much in terms of actual production, doesn’t seem to care much about classic films beyond their commercial potential, and speaks about older movies as if they are trivia questions to be answered on a quiz show. The posters on his wall for classic Hollywood noir films from the 1940s seem like totems or icon from a long-forgotten religion that no one follows anymore.
Fine Line Features
Mill is, of course, a cynical and horrid person. He connives and gladhands and badmouths with the best of them. He is a rich yuppie writ large, convinced of his own importance, largely because he is constantly surrounded by recognizable celebrities (there are dozens of well-known actors playing themselves in The Player, from Julia Roberts to Malcolm McDowell to Cher). With this character, Altman was making a sour, salient, cynical, and passionate point about how artistry and edge had been drained from Hollywood. By 1992, the suits were in charge. When passionate screenwriters pitch ideas for downer flicks with no recognizable actors, it will only be a matter of time before the selling out begins.
The story itself is classic noir mixed with cinematic self-satire. Mill has his life threatened by a mysterious off-camera screenwriter who is enraged that Mill’s promise to “get back to you” went unfulfilled. Mill figures that he can find the threat, zeroes in on an embittered Vincent D’Onofrio, accidentally kills him outside of a screening of Bicycle Thieves, and goes about eluding capture, wrestling with cops (Lyle Lovett and Whoopi Goldberg), and romancing his victim’s girlfriend (Greta Scacchi). Oh yes, and generally mistreating the most capable woman in his life, his amazing assistant played by Cynthia Stevenson. Squint, and this is a dark mirror of a Hitchcock movie.
Fine Line Features
For those who lived through the commercialism of the 1980s and the backlash indie boom of the 1990s, one can fall right in line with Altman’s brilliant acid and appreciate what he was skewering with what appears to be a whole-hearted honesty. But, one may be chagrined to hear, The Player is less an ever-significant lesson about the particular evils of Hollywood gone mad and more of a time capsule of where Hollywood was in 1992.
What would Altman have thought of the state of cinema in 2016? We now live in an era when gigantic child-friendly blockbusters are produced in 12-packs, every film seeks to be market researched to within an inch of its life, and general filmgoing audiences (who have no financial stock in the movies at all) follow what studios are up to in terms of signed contracts, box office numbers, casting rumors, script re-writes, and every single little detail of production. In comparison to the current orgy of money and special effects we are wallowing in, The Player seems downright quaint. Of course Hollywood is devoted to money, happy endings, and the grossest form of pandering. It’s what we’ve come to demand as audience members. And why stop? Everyone is eating it up with a ladle.
Fine Line Features
The ultimate point that Altman was trying to make with The Player, though, was that Hollywood didn’t always work this way. There was a time, as far back as the 1970s, when heady downers, thoughtful adult pictures, and artistically daring films could be mainstream hits, and audiences were pleased to be challenged. The Player aches for that time with every fiber of its cynical being. There is, as the old saying goes, an idealist trapped inside the cynicism. By the gauge of The Player, things have only gotten worse. Maybe this small plaintive voice from 24 years ago can still be heard over the noise.
Top Image: Fine Line Features
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
