The Player (Avenue Pictures, Spelling Entertainment, Addis Wechsler Pictures, Guild Film Distribution, Daro Film Distribution, Fine Line Cinema, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, June 13) I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, written by Michael Tolkin based on a previously published novel of his. It’s a grim Hollywood tale of a production executive named Griffin “Griff” Mill (Tim Robbins), who starts receiving mysterious death threats from an anonymous writer accusing him of personally destroying the movie industry and threatening his life. Griff is worried for his job – the studio head, Joel Levinson (Brion James), has just hired a young man named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) from a rival company and appears to be grooming him to take over Griff’s job – and he also is having a desultory affair with his assistant, Bonnie Sherrow (Cynthia Stevenson), though she takes it considerably more seriously than he does. We find out what Larry Levy is after from the get-go when he asks Griff for the private phone number of Meg Ryan so he can date her, and when Griff tells Larry that Meg Ryan is married he then asks for the phone number of Winona Ryder. Griff thinks the anonymous death threats and other insulting postcards and faxes are coming from David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), an unsuccessful screenwriter who managed to get a meeting with Griff a few months earlier to talk up a movie idea about his year abroad as an exchange student in Japan. He traces Kahane to his home, where he’s gone out but his live-in girlfriend, June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), is home alone. Griff spies on her through the window and ultimately knocks on her door to find out where David is. He’s at the Rialto, a small art cinema in Pasadena where he’d gone to see a screening of Vittorio de Sica’s classic The Bicycle Thieves (mistakenly listed as The Bicycle Thief, singular, on the marquee).

Griff arrives five minutes before the movie ends and tries to find David in the crowd; his first guess is wrong but his second guess is right. Griff says he’s interested in buying the remake rights to Bicycle Thieves and wants to hire David to write it, but David sees through his game. The two go to a local Japanese-themed bar and David angrily turns down the job offer; later the two get into an altercation outside the bar and Griff loses it completely and drowns David in a pool of red water, killing him. This happens about a third of the way through the movie, and while it’s a pity we lose the story’s potentially most interesting character that early, things get quirkier as the story takes a Last Tycoon-ish turn. Griff’s anxieties over both having killed someone and at least potentially taking the fall for it and the possibility of losing his cushy studio job take their toll on his work performance. He latches on to a scheme to defang the threat from Larry Levy by assigning Levy to produce a project called Habeas Corpus, which the studio has been pitched by a writer-director-producer team including a British filmmaker. It’s a grim tale about how a district attorney, on the night his latest African-American prosecutee is about to be executed, is confronted by the defendant’s mother, who challenges him to be as tough on a white defendant the next time he has one who’s accused of a capital crime. He seizes on a wealthy woman who’s accused of the murder of her husband, and determines to prosecute her and get her convicted and executed even though he’s also fallen in love with her. The plot of Habeas Corpus ends with the D.A. learning – too late – that the husband is still alive and faked his own death, but he only finds this out after the lethal gas pellets have dropped into the San Quentin gas chamber and killed his lover/defendant.

The British director insists on making this movie with no stars and keeping the unhappy ending, and Griff figures that if Larry Levy is executive producer of this movie, it will inevitably bomb and then Griff will come in, reshoot the ending so the D.A. learns the truth in time and he and the woman get together at the end, and he’ll get credit for saving the project from Larry’s flop ending. Meanwhile, it doesn’t take long for Griff to realize that he killed the wrong man; though David Kahane is dead (and Griff makes an appearance at his funeral), the insulting notes, faxes and postcards keep coming. What’s more, Griff becomes obsessed with June and courts her aggressively despite having killed her previous partner. The two end up in Desert Hot Springs, where they have sex for the first time (inside a hot tub since Greta Scacchi refused to do the nude scene Altman wanted – good for her!) and end up in mud baths. Only Griff is rudely dragged from the mud bath by his attorney, who tells him the Pasadena police have a witness to David’s murder and want him to come in for a lineup. Altman’s gift for quirky casting is evident in the actors playing the Pasadena police detectives who are assigned to the case: Whoopi Goldberg as Susan Avery (Altman concealed her usual locks under a big Afro wig, though her voice was unmistakable) and Lyle Lovett (who was dating actress Julia Roberts at the time; they married in 1993 but divorced in 1995) as Paul DeLongpre. Lovett’s character becomes a red herring because he’s seen constantly hanging around the movie studio and we initially think he’s the obsessive writer who’s stalking Griff and sending him the postcards and faxes, but he turns out to be a police detective – and in an even more ironic twist, when the witness turns up and does the lineup, she keeps picking Lovett out as the killer. With the sole witness having identified the police detective as the murderer, Griff is home scot-free, and there’s a Lifetime-esque “One Year Later” title in which one year later Griff and June are a couple (and she’s visibly pregnant with his child), the film Habeas Corpus got made but with Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts as the stars (remember it wasn’t supposed to have big stars?), and Griff saved the film after a disastrous preview in Canoga Park by reshooting the ending so the Willis character stages a last-minute rescue of the hapless woman he’s convicted and literally saves her from the gas chamber.

The Player was made at a low ebb in Robert Altman’s career during which he was reduced to making either small independent films or movies for television, and according to TCM host Alicia Malone it was a major comeback for him and gave him the money and the clout to put together a personal project, Short Cuts, an anthology film based on several stories by Raymond Carver. I have mixed feelings about Robert Altman; he was obviously a major talent as a filmmaker, but at the same time I suspect he has a lot to do with one of the most regrettable recent trends in moviemaking, the cynical detachment with which all too many filmmakers these days approach their central characters, as if they’re lab rats and we’re supposed to watch them with a sense of lordly distance. Though Alicia Malone quoted Altman as saying he’d pulled his punches and the real Hollywood was even nastier and crueler than he’d depicted it (and Malone also noted that the changes in the movie business in the 31 years since this film was made make the early 1990’s seem like a Golden Age by comparison!), The Player remains a great film even though an awfully disheartening one. Altman’s films for me have run the gamut from masterpieces like Nashville (which used a similar multi-character structure to this film and whose knowing deconstruction of both country music and independent politics made for an enduring classic) to disasters like The Long Goodbye (his wanton attack on Raymond Chandler’s mythos in which he took a great book that could have made a great movie and turned it into garbage). I’d put The Player about midway through his output, with some great aspects like casting Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett as the police detectives and a final “twist” ending in which two writers – one of whom turns out to be Griff’s actual harasser – pitch him a film called The Player which is the story we’ve just seen of how a film executive literally gets away with murder and ends up married to the victim’s girlfriend. There are also lots of celebrities playing themselves in cameo appearances, a characteristic of Altman’s movies, and the ending strikes me as appropriately cynical but also horribly depressing. One wishes Altman and Michael Tolkin could have given us at least one character (with the arguable exception of David Kahane, who exits one-third of the way through) who had some nobility and conviction!