Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Bouncing to a TV near you (plus a personal announcement)
At 11 tonight Eastern time on a network I didn't realize even existed, let alone that I had until recently, a new series
Jazz hardly stands as the sole musical genre born in the Crescent City, but as Treme's Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) declared once, New Orleans' music scene tastes and has a recipe much like its gumbo: Lots of ingredients end up in the mix. One of the newer forms to spring forth from its club scene (and a particular favorite of Davis) goes by the name of bounce. Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce (which I haven't seen) promises to take viewers deeper into the culture and origins of that sound with one of its giants, Big Freedia, as our guide. The specific connection to Treme stems from Big Freedia's appearances in two of the second season's best episodes — "Everything I Do Gohn Be Funky" (written by Simon, directed by Tim Robbins) and "Santa Claus, Do You Ever Get the Blues?" (story by Overmyer and Lolis Eric Elie, written by Elie, directed by Alex Zakrzewski). Big Freedia took part in the constant attempts by Davis to enter the music industry, in this case by trying to recruit local artists to contribute tracks for a compilation CD so Davis can showcase his own work. Big Freedia got to take part in the priceless scene where Davis reluctantly takes his delightful Aunt Mimi (Elizabeth Ashley — even more priceless and delightful herself) to a club because she insists on seeing this bounce music for herself before agreeing to help finance her nephew's plan.
Speaking of Treme, my announcement. Provided that my fingers and hands hold up, I'm planning to recap the final episodes of Treme. Don't expect them to be as detailed as they were for season 2, but I'm going to try. I feel I owe it to the show, especially since my health problems prevented me from recapping season three, which turned out to be the series' best season. Keep your fingers crossed for me and hopefully my Treme recaps shall return for five more times in December.
Tweet
Labels: David Simon, E. Ashley, HBO, Music, Overmyer, Television, Tim Robbins, Treme, TV Recap, Zahn
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
What he really wanted to do was be an actor
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of The Sydney Pollack Blogathon occurring through July 22 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
By Edward Copeland
For 40 years, from 1965 to 2005, Sydney Pollack directed 19 feature films. His last directing effort appeared as an installment of PBS' American Masters series on the architect Frank Gehry. Prior to that, he directed lots of episodic television. As Pollack reached the end of his life (and beyond it) he produced projects more than he directed and toward the end he also resumed the artistic endeavor where he started, acting more
and more often. When he ventured into show business, he aimed toward acting. His father hoped that Pollack would pursue a career in dentistry, but after catching the theater bug in high school in South Bend, Ind., he left for New York following graduation and studied with legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner at Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse (The same year he directed the American Masters special on Frank Gehry, he executive produce another episode of the series on Meisner). Eventually, he became an assistant to Meisner and even taught acting to others, though in a 2006 interview with Venice Magazine, Pollack resisted calling the technique he learned and passed on "The Method." "People call a lot of things 'The Method,' but there really isn’t one Method," Pollack said, "but it’s all derived from Stanislavsky. It’s all derived from Stanislavsky, but Stella Adler taught it different than Sandy Meisner and Strasberg taught it differently from both of them, and Harold Clurman taught it differently than the three of them, and Bobby Lewis took it in his own direction, as well. They each took The Moscow Art Theater of Stanislavsky and basic principles, and then developed their own approach. The goal was always the same: to find a way to analyze the construction of truthful behavior within imaginary circumstances."As he acted a lot in television of the 1950s, Pollack's interest turned to directing. While Pollack directed and produced some great and good films (my favorite being 1982's Tootsie, where he took his first substantial acting role since an episodic television appearance on a 1964 episode of the crime drama Brenner starring Edward Binns and James Broderick), after Tootsie, he acted or did voicework in more films and TV shows than his entire filmography. In many ways, I found Pollack more interesting at times as an actor than as a filmmaker, and that's where his career in the arts began, with his single Broadway role in 1955's The Dark Is Light Enough by Christopher Fry and starring Katharine Cornell, Tyrone Power and featuring Christopher Plummer.
Pollack began directing episodic television in 1961 and had ceased television acting in 1964 with that appearance on Brenner. As he jettisoned acting to concentrate on directing, he made a single movie: the 1962 Korean War drama War Hunt. The film starred John Saxon and Charles Aidman, but in addition to Pollack's supporting role, the movie offered appearances by Gavin MacLeod, Tom Skerritt and uncredited work by another future director, Francis Ford Coppola, as an Army truck driver. The biggest name among the ranks (at least he would be eventually) turned out to be a young Robert Redford. Pollack would direct Redford in seven films: This Property Is Condemned, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman, Out of Africa and Havana. Redford served as one of the producers of A Civil Action which featured Pollack in an acting role.
The headline at the top of this piece isn't quite true. Pollack return to acting in 1982's Tootsie (aside from a brief cameo in 1979's The Electric Horseman) proved to be quite a reluctant one. He already had cast Dabney Coleman to play George Fields, agent to prima donna/unemployed actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) but Hoffman pushed Pollack into taking the role himself, seeing the dynamic they had in their disagreements over the script. Pollack didn't want to leave Coleman in the cold so he cast him in the role of movie's fictional soap opera's director instead. Hoffman's instincts didn't fail him or the film as his scenes with Pollack provide many of the movie's comic highlights. You get that in the scene above, in the scene in the Russian Tea Room where Michael surprises George by showing up as his new alter ego Dorothy Michaels and, in perhaps my favorite scene between the two of them, when Michael shows up at George's home late one night to try to explain the romantic complications, including the fact that the father (Charles Durning) of the woman he loves (Jessica Lange) bought Dorothy an engagement ring. Forgetting for a moment what this all means, Pollack's reaction to news of the proposal comes off as priceless.
Following Tootsie, Pollack returned to the directing-producing track for a decade. During this decade he won his two Oscars for Out of Africa, but looking at the projects in that decade on which he worked solely as a producer or executive producer actually look more interesting than most of the movies he directed in that time. Some examples of his producing output from 1982 to 1991: Songwriter, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Presumed Innocent, White Palace, (surprisingly) King Ralph and Dead Again. With Tootsie, Pollack displayed a grounded, realistic comic side, but when 1992 arrived and he began to act up a storm, his range
widened, even if for the most part Pollack got pigeonholed as either a lawyer or a doctor, he played distinct members of each profession. Ten years after Tootsie, he managed roles in three films (and found time to executive produce two movies as well: HBO's A Private Matter and Leaving Normal, which had the misfortune of being too similar to Thelma & Louise and coming out a few months after the other film). The photo at the top of this post shows Pollack in his first 1992 role, Dick Mellon, business lawyer to besieged studio exec Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) in Robert Altman's The Player. As Mellon, Pollack plays a no-nonsense Hollywood figure who has seen it all and never changes his vocal tone, no matter how serious the situation becomes, and doles out truisms such as in this exchange with Mill. "Rumors are always true. You know that," Mellon tells Mill. "I'm always the last to hear about them," Griffin sighs. "No, you're always the last one to believe them," Dick corrects his client. Pollack, as in the case of his casting in Tootsie, hadn't been the first choice of the director. Of course, Pollack had helmed Tootsie and opposed casting himself as George Fields. With The Player, Altman tried to cast as many of the character parts with lesser-known faces because his film contained so many star cameos and he wanted to avoid as much audience
confusion as possible. Initially, Altman sought writer-director Blake Edwards, who also started his career as an actor, though he hadn't appeared on screen since 1948, for the part of Mellon, but it didn't work out and he went with Pollack, who only had that one role in Tootsie in 30 years. While The Player offers darker, satirical laughs than Tootsie did and Pollack doesn't get the laughs out of Dick Mellon that he did out of George Fields, he garnered more laughs in his most dramatic, deepest film role yet as Jack, the divorcing best friend of Gabe Roth (Woody Allen) in Husbands and Wives. I wasn't as crazy about the film as others, but Pollack delivered one of his greatest acting jobs, ranging from the at-ease midlife divorced man finding renewed vigor with a twentysomething aerobics instructor (Lysette Anthony) and then turning downright nasty on her at a party when she doesn't meet his standards for intellectual heft. He literally drags her from the soiree and tosses her toward his car, accusing her of being an "infant." It's a scary side of Pollack that we'll see more of in other roles. His third on-screen role of 1992 didn't receive a credit, but the cameo in Death Becomes Her provides what could be Pollack's funniest moments as an ER doctor examining Meryl Streep. The clip below leaves out his character's final punch line.Until his death from cancer in May 2008, seeing Pollack act became a much more common sight than spotting his directing credit. He turned up in legal entanglements again in films such as A Civil Action, Michael Clayton and Changing Lanes. He guided Tom Cruise into the sexual netherworld of the rich and powerful in Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut. He took roles in the last two films he directed, Random Hearts and The Interpreter. Pollack even provided the voice for the studio executive in The Majestic and the French film Avenue Montaigne. His final film role was in the romantic comedy Made of Honor where he played the father of the male maid of honor (Patrick Dempsey). On television, he did more voice work on comedies such as Frasier and King of the Hill. He also played a doctor on an episode of Mad About You and had a recurring role as Will's father on Will & Grace. He even played himself on an episode of Entourage, his last TV or movie appearance. Of all his late appearances though, the one that stands out to me also came in 2007 and put him in the role of another doctor. In the batch of the last nine episodes of The Sopranos, Pollack played jailed oncologist Warren Feldman, incarcerated with the dying Johnny Sac (Vincent Curatola) in the great episode "Stage 5." This scene I believe gives a great example of how talented Pollack truly could be as an actor.
Tweet
Labels: Altman, Blake Edwards, Coppola, Cruise, Dabney Coleman, Durning, Dustin Hoffman, J. Lange, Kubrick, Plummer, Redford, Streep, Sydney Pollack, The Sopranos, Tim Robbins, Woody
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Friday, April 13, 2012
Pragmatic anarchy
If you started reading here, click this and read the first part of the post before you read this.
When we met Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), he already carried a heavy load of burdens. Rumors swirled that his financially struggling studio would replace him soon, a hot executive at Fox named Larry Levy seemed to be "in his face" all the time and a screenwriter whose calls he never returned kept sending him threatening postcards. Oh, how Griffin longs for those good old days. Now, Pasadena police suspect he killed screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio) — which he did, Levy (Peter Gallagher) has landed at Mill's studio and, perhaps most distressing of all his plights, it turns out that Kahane wasn't the writer threatening him — and those continue. Only one bright spot shines in the dark hole that Griffin dug himself into and she happens to be the intriguing June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), girlfriend to the late David Kahane. Trying to date her would look improper so soon after David's death and it wouldn't be a nice thing for Griffin to do to his girlfriend and executive assistant Bonnie (Cynthia Stevenson), the film's most decent character. My return visit to the Hollywood of Robert Altman's The Player clarified to me the pivotal roles the two women, particularly June, serve in making The Player much more than just a satire or even a thriller.
I never read Michael Tolkin's original novel The Player, but I did read his sequel The Return of The Player. While on the DVD commentary, Tolkin ultimately blamed himself for what changed in the movie from his novel, much of his tone on the disc tasted bitter, including frequent references to how he never wanted the novel turned into a film in the first place (something that sounds particularly odd given that he wrote and produced the movie as well as created and wrote a pilot for a proposed TV series version that never aired). Though Tolkin's name appears alone as the credited screenwriter, based on the sequel novel and what Robert Altman
said on the DVD, I have to believe that the director sparked the transformation of the novel's June into the June of the film. Based on The Return of The Player, June isn't a cypher of a character who says she comes from Iceland (though when asked by Griffin at a later time if she really hails from there, she responds, "Did I say that?") Altman said that he wanted June to be like an alien, almost to the point that you could believe she exists only in Griffin's imagination. I don't think Altman meant anyone to take that literally — June Gudmunsdottir definitely exists — but she does function as the only person in the film who doesn't speak Hollywood. She and Griffin both may communicate in English, but they speak entirely different languages and that's part of the attraction. June paints and creates other types of art, but when Griffin asks where she shows her work, she tells him she doesn't. For a man who greenlights movies for production so they eventually can be seen, this makes no sense to him. He inquires why June doesn't try to display her works in a gallery and she explains that it's because she never finishes them. The reason for their renewed contact after one phone call comes courtesy of David Kahane's funeral, which Griffin feels compelled to attend. When the graveside services end, June approaches him, recognizing immediately that he doesn't look like the other mourners, all writers. When Griffin explains who he is and that they spoke the night of Kahane's death, June remembers, adding, "You're the only person I know here." Griffin offers the standard funeral apology and tells June that David "was a real talent." She looks surprised. "You think so? I always suspected he was uniquely untalented," June declares, free of emotion before begging Griffin to drive her home because she can't deal with what's expected of her from the others. These people.I don't like it here. They're all expecting me to grieve and mourn. I can't talk to them. David's gone and I'm somewhere else already," she tells Griffin, who seems to be showing more genuine regret about Kahane's death than the slain writer's girlfriend.
Cynicism seeps from the pores of all the characters in The Player to some degree, though most would call it a pragmatic and realistic attitude spawned by the industry in which they work. Bonnie Sherow and Griffin Mill speak the same language — that's why they work (and play) well together. Admittedly, Griffin keeps his guard up, even with Bonnie. As they relax in his hot tube one night where she reads him part of a horribly lurid script, Griffin tries to talk to her about the threats he's received, but he phrases it in the form of a movie pitch, making the victim someone who works in advertising. He wants her opinion on how many months of these threats it would take before the sender should be considered dangerous. Thinking he's actually discussing a pitch someone gave him, she responds sourly, "Does he have to be in advertising?" Bonnie can be tough on her assistant Whitney (Gina Gershon) and likewise Griffin can point out when Bonnie makes a social faux pas ("Never bring up script changes at a party"), but, at least at the beginning, nothing comes off as mean-spirited. She also displays a wit as cutting as anyone when the opportunity presents itself. When Larry Levy conducts his exercise in picking newspaper stories to show he can envision movies without needing a writer, Bonnie latches on to the headline, "Further bond losses push Dow down." Before Levy responds, she quickly adds, "I see Connery as Bond." Bonnie's unambiguous sense of right and wrong and her streak of moral clarity distiguish her from the rest of her universe. It almost goes without saying that some sort of doom awaits her.
Altman always had a great eye for casting, even if he did tend to return to his unofficial repertory company time and again, but hiring Cynthia Stevenson to play Bonnie might have been the best choice since, of the performers in The Player's major roles, she was the least-known to most. I had followed her for some time, first noticing her on a very short-lived, quirky and one-of-a-kind show called My Talk Show which was an unusual sitcom where she played a young woman who hosted a Wisconsin talk show from her living room mostly with friends and neighbors as guests, often while she did other things, though celebrities wandered through town sometimes such as William Shatner and, to my joyous surprise, there's a YouTube clip. Altman said that he came close to hiring Julianne Moore for the role of Bonnie, but decided she was "too glamorous" and he wanted someone who didn't look like an actress. He'd seen Stevenson on an episode of Cheers (She appeared twice in the later seasons as Norm's secretary who suffered from extremely low self-esteem.) When Altman informed Stevenson that the role required her to take off her top for the hot tub scene, the actress couldn't believe it. "Why me? No one has ever asked me to take my top off?" Altman said she asked him. "That's the reason," he responded. As he explained, that afforded him another chance to upset expectations and Hollywood conventions. "You never see Greta Scacchi nude," he pointed out. He wanted to use Stevenson's nudity to comment on the beauty in all types of female nudity, not just the usual kind you see in movies, as well as the state of Bonnie and Griffin's relationship.
While Bonnie, like Alan Rudolph's movie pitch, has heart in the right spot, the question of whether a cardiac organ beats within June's chest remains unresolved, despite Kahane telling Griffin sarcastically that Mill and June both were "all heart." The late screenwriter's nicknames for his girlfriend and the movie executive though seem to be honest assessments: June's the Ice Queen, Griffin's The Dead Man. Bonnie gave Griffin a tenuous hold on humanity and, ironically, his killing of Kahane actually brought Mill to life. "Although the novel was very much about Hollywood, I also was really writing about guilt," Tolkin said on the DVD. June's manner, tone shows stays at a constant level no matter what has happened, almost like a flatline on a heart
monitor. When Griffin takes her home after David's burial, she immediately starts working on the art she never finishes or sells. She asks Mill why he met with Kahane that night and Griffin tells her that he planned to share an idea he'd thought of that would improve his script. When she says, "the Japan story," Griffin fears he'll be caught, so he gets vague, suggesting that it needed an "up" ending before asking June what she thought of the ending. "I never read it. I don't like reading," she admits. This woman intrigues Griffin further. She doesn't go to movies/ She doesn't like reading. "Do you like books?" he inquires. "I like words and letters, but I'm not crazy about complete sentences," she tells him. June then asks Griffin to place his face behind this shower curtain so she can photograph it. She plans to put him in one of her paintings, one of an Icelandic hero. "He's a thief and he's made of fire. You might not like that," June says. Griffin asks her why. She figures that given his job, he couldn't see thieves as heroes. "I don't know about that. We have a long tradition of gangsters in movies," Griffin informs her with a smile. The exchange that follows illuminates Griffin's thoughts clearly, but makes June more mysterious.JUNE: Yes, but they always have to suffer for their crimes, don't they?
GRIFFIN: We should pay for our crimes, shouldn't we?
JUNE: I think knowing you've committed a crime is suffering enough. If you don't suffer, maybe it wasn't a crime after all. Anyway — what difference does it make? It has nothing to do with how things really are.
GRIFFIN: Do you really believe that?
JUNE: I don't know what I believe, Mr. Mill. It's just what I feel.
GRIFFIN: You know what you are, June whatever-your-name-is? A pragmatic anarchist.
JUNE: Is that what I am? I never was sure.
Of course, if Griffin succeeds at juggling his women and getting away with murder, he still must contend with the matter of the shaky hold on his job and the stalking screenwriter who lurks somewhere, probably with a fair idea of why David Kahane got killed in a movie
theater parking lot and who did it. (The film never spells out explicitly the identity of the real stalker, though Altman did on the commentary track of the old Criterion laserdisc edition of The Player. I wrote about it in my sidebar Untold Stories of Robert Altman's The Player or Who the Hell is Thereza Ellis? if you haven't read that and would like to know.) While looking at dailies at the studio, he gets a message from a Joe Gillis telling him to meet him at the patio bar of the St. James Club that night alone. Griffin actually has to ask the others in the screening room if they've heard of a Joe Gillis and studio president Levison (Brion James) informs him that Gillis is the name of the character William Holden played in Sunset Blvd. "You know, the screenwriter who gets killed by the movie star." Mill tries to laugh it off, saying the guy called before claiming to be Charles Foster Kane. When he goes to the hotel that night, he runs into the two most over=the-top characters in the film — writer-director Tom Oakley (Richard E. Grant) and Andy Civella (Dean Stockwell). If the movie they corner Griffin into listening to a pitch for weren't so pivotal to one of the biggest laughs in movie history, they might a bit too annoying. Griffin does his best to get rid of them, but he relents and Tom takes over.TOM: We open outside the largest penitentiary in California. It's night. It's raining. A limousine comes through the gate past demonstrators holding a candlelight vigil. The candles under the umbrellas glow like Japanese lanterns.GRIFFIN: That's nice. I haven't seen that before.
TOM: A lone demonstrator, a black woman, steps in front of the limousine. The lights illuminate her like a spirit. Her eyes fix upon those of the sole passenger. The moment is devastating between them.
GRIFFIN: He's the D.A. She's the mother of the person being executed.
ANDY: You're good! I told you he's good.
TOM: The D.A. believes in the death penalty and the execution is a hard case — black and definitely guilty. The greatest democracy in the world, and 42 percent of people on death row are black. Poor, disadvantaged black. He swears the next person he sees to die will be smart, rich and white. Cut from the D.A. To an up-market suburban neighborhood. A couple have a fight. He leaves in a fit, gets in a car. It's the same rainy night. The car spins out and goes into a ravine. The body is swept away. When the police examine the car, they find the brakes have been tampered with. It's murder, and the D.A. decides to go for the big one. He's going to put the wife in the gas chamber. but the D.A. falls in love with the wife.
GRIFFIN: Of course.
TOM: But he puts her in the gas chamber anyway. Then he finds that the husband is alive. That he faked his death. The D.A. breaks into the prison, runs down death row -- but he gets there too late. The gas pellets have been dropped. She's dead. I tell you, there's not a dry eye in the house.
GRIFFIN: She's dead?
TOM: She's dead because that's the reality. The innocent die.
GRIFFIN: Who's the D.A.?
TOM: No stars on this project. We're going out on a limb on this one. This story is too fucking important to risk being overwhelmed by personality. We don't want people coming with any preconceived notions. We want them to see a district attorney.
ANDY: (whispering) Bruce Willis.
TOM: Not Bruce Willis or Kevin Costner. This is an innocent woman fighting for her life.
ANDY: (whiapering) Julia Roberts.
Griffin tells Tom his pitch had more than 25 words. "But it was brilliant. What's the verdict?" Andy asks. Griffin doesn't betray his thoughts one way or the other when a waiter comes by with a postcard he says a man left for him at the front desk. It reads, "I TOLD YOU TO COME ALONE!" Mill gets up, telling Tom and Andy that the person he was waiting to meet isn't coming. Andy pushes again for an answer about a deal and Mill admits it's an intriguing idea and suggests they call him at the studio the next day. Griffin returns to his Range Rover and finds a note on his steering wheel suggesting he look beneath his raincoat, which covers something on the passenger seat's floor. He lifts the coat and finds a metal box that reads, "DO NOT OPEN TIL XMAS." He flips it open anyway and discovers a live, hissing rattlesnake inside. Scared shitless, he drives erratically until he gets to the side of the road, gets an umbrella from the back of the vehicle and beats the snake to death while cursing the mystery writer. In his rage, paranoia and vulnerability, Griffin drives to June's.
The Player remains one of Tim Robbins' best performances and the scene where he arrives disheveled in the middle of the night at June's gives him his finest in the movie. It also provides the most solid evidence of the multiple layers the movie functions on. Altman may have called The Player at one point in his commentary possibly the "most contrived" film he ever made (which, quite frankly, I can't imagine a more ludicrous statement coming from the great filmmaker who had films such as Beyond Therapy, Quintet and Ready to Wear in his filmography), but Robbins gets to a deep core of emotional truth here. His brush with death via snake prompts him to try to confess to June, but it's as if she knows intuitively and doesn't want him to confirm it. He admits that she was all he could think about when he saw the snake and thought it would kill him. "Are you making love to me?" she asks. He says he supposes that he is; he knows he wants to make love to her. "It's too soon. It's so strange how things happen. David was here, then he left. You arrived. Maybe it's just the timing, but I feel like I
would go anywhere with you if you asked, but we mustn't hurry things. We can't hurry things any more than we can stop them," June tells him. Most of the many times I've watched The Player before, it seemed clear to me that Griffin pursued June. This time, it looked more to me as if she was pulling him into her web. Both the DVD and the dear departed laserdisc contain the same deleted scene that I found to be a rarity among deleted scenes. Most of the time, you view them and you see exactly why the scissors snipped them out of the final cut. One of The Player's cut scenes I've always thought to be an exception and I hadn't thought of it in awhile. When Griffin and June finally start dating, they go on a trip to the Two Bunch Palms resort. The film abounds with posters and references to noir and crime movies as it is, why not plant the idea that June could be a most unusual type of femme fatale? Immediately before they leave on the trip and Bonnie learns he's embarking with another woman, Altman shoots a close-up of a movie poster for M. At the resort, Griffin gets greeted as Mr. M. and his reserved seat at dinner has a card with the same shortened name and courtesy title. They stay in the cabin Al Capone used when he visited California. June leaves her purse open on a dresser and Griffin notices that she's packing a gun. She tells him that
Kahane got it for her and, in fact, had it in his satchel the night he got killed. She wondered why David wasn't able to use it. The cut scene set at the resort cast an entirely new aura of mystery about her character. One masterful scene set kept in the film captures the consummation of Griffin and June's relationship. Not only did Altman not use nudity, he filmed their lovenaking entirely from the neck up, but it never gets the notice it deserves when it's competing with eight-minute single takes and 60 celebrity cameos. Regardless, you definitely see with certainty that as the movie progresses and Griffin spends more time with June and less with Bonnie, he becomes a more soulless creature. If June isn't a femme fatale or an alien as Altman suggested, she's some kind of vampire, and on the ethical scale of the film, June doesn't even seem to register, floating above it in an amoral cloud as Bonnie stays on the moral side and Griffin weighs down the immoral one further and further. In the DVD video interview, Altman admits that the scene was the very last one to be taken out and, if he was making The Player when they did that interview, he would probably have kept it in. The tightrope that Altman walked while juggling the various styles and genres in The Player without ending up with a complete mess boggles the mind.
The final subversion of expectations comes with Griffin's ultimate victory on all levels. First, he tricks Levy into selling Levison on producing Tom and Andy's no-stars-woman dies movie (titled Habeas Corpus). Levy sound leery at first, especially about having no name actors playing the leads, but Mill tells him that Levison made his reputation on two hits with nobodies and his motto used to be, "No stars, just talent." Afterward, he confides to his secretary Jan that he just set Levy up with a dog of a script with no second act and a downbeat ending, but Levison will do it because he's hot to make a movie with him and when they both fall on their faces, he'll sweep in and save the day. Poor Bonnie though has been seeing through Griffin for a while.
"Why are you bullshitting me? You never used to bullshit me," she tells him at one point. The Pasadena police appear to be closing in on him, having found a witness, so Griffin faces a lineup. However, the lady with fairly poor eyesight ends up picking the police detective played by Lyle Lovett. "That's him! I swear on my mother's grave," the woman declares. Detective Avery asks the woman if she can be personal and then inquires, "Where the fuck is your mother buried?" As Griffin walks out of the courthouse a free man, his defense attorney states the obvious of how that witness really made his case by picking that cop out of the lineup. A title card appears telling us it's one year later and we see several stars, obviously playing parts before the witness room of a gas chamber. We realize that we're seeing the ending moments of Habeas Corpus. The camera moves down the hall of the execution unit and we see that, yes, Julia Roberts indeed is playing the part of the condemned wife. She's led off to the gas chamber, strapped in and fumes start to rise when suddenly a guard yells into a phone, "WHAT?!" A man comes running down the hallway. Understandably, it's Bruce Willis. He grabs a shotgun, blows out the glass of the gas chamber runs in and whisks Julia to safety. "What took you so long?" she asks. "Traffic was a bitch," he replies. THE END.
Many movies have made me laugh in my lifetime, but few offer moments so funny that just thinking about them — even months later — can cause convulsions of chuckling. Off the top of my head, I recall two. One comes from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut when the Army
general tries to show his plan to his troops, but Windows 98 keeps crashing so he orders men to bring Bill Gates to him. "You told us that Windows 98 would be faster, and more efficient with better access to the Internet!" the general yells at Gates. "It is faster! Over five million — " That's all Gates gets to say before the general blows his head off to the cheers of his troops. I didn't hear the cheers. The theater audience and I were too busy laughing and applauding. Habeas Corpus in The Player takes the prize for the other moment. When I first saw this film in a screening and I saw Julia Roberts, I started to laugh, but then when Bruce Willis barrels in and grabs the shotgun, I literally was on the floor. I had to watch
the movie two or three times until I could concentrate on what took place after the moment. It pushed me into that heavy a fit of hysterical laughter. Eventually, I did see what happened as Bonnie turned to Tom Oakley in the screening room, asking him how he could have sold out. "What about truth? What about reality? she asks the writer-director. What about the way the old ending tested in Canoga Park? Everybody hated it. We reshot it, now everybody loves it. That’s reality," Tom tells her. Bonnie stands her ground, insisting that it didn't have to end this way. Larry Levy shakes his head, tells her it's a hit and that's why they work there before firing her. Bonnie promises to go over his head. As she marches toward the president's office, breaking a heel on the way, Claire
tries to stop her. She begs to see him. "I'm not just me. I'm also the job." Claire informs her, before feeling sorry and going in where Walter and retrieves basketballs that Griffin shoots from his spot in the president's chair. Claire tells him that Bonnie wants to see him. "Did Levy fire her?" he asks. "Looks that way," she replies. Griffin declares he can't talk to her now and gets up to head home. On the way out the door, Jan informs him that Levy is on the phone for him. He tells her to wait a few minutes then transfer it to the car. Bonnie tries
to get Griffin’s attention. "Bonnie, don't worry. I know you'll kind on your feet," Mill tells her as he gets in his car. He takes the Levy call and it's a pitch from a writer, but not just any writer, one who used to sell postcards. He describes a story about a movie executive who is being threatened by a screenwriter so he kills him, only he kills the wrong guy. The twist: He gets away with it. He ends up married to the dead writer's girlfriend and it's a happy ending. Mill asks Levy to get off the line so he can talk to the writer alone. "Can you guarantee that ending?" Griffin asks. "If the price is right, you got it," the writer replies. Griffin tells him that if it's guaranteed, it's a deal and inquires about the title. "The Player," the writer answers. "The Player. I like that," Griffin says as he pulls into his driveway where a very pregnant June waits. "What took you so long?" June asks. "Traffic was a bitch," Griffin replies as he puts his arm around her and leads her into the house. Altman and Tolkin's funhouse mirror has turned back around on itself again for its final, perfect closing moment. What started in flat-out satire, ends in irony with plenty of suspense, truth and reality managing to sneak into the picture along the way. Altman couldn't live forever, but don't we deserve someone close to his daring and talent? (First one to mention Paul Thomas Anderson gets spit on.) I fear a large part of my interest in new movies somehow died the moment he did.
Tweet
Labels: 90s, Altman, Books, Connery, Dean Stockwell, Fiction, Holden, Julianne Moore, Movie Tributes, Shatner, South Park, Television, Tim Robbins
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
"If we can just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here."
"It's just a satire on the way people behave in the movie studios. There was such a fuss started about it. People started saying, 'Oh people are afraid you are going to do this and do this.' So the more afraid they got, the more ideas they gave me. Looking back on this whole picture, it's a pretty tame satire. It's no big indictment. Things are much, much worse than this picture seems to say." — Robert Altman on the DVD commentary for The Player
By Edward Copeland
To begin a post on the 20th anniversary of Robert Altman's film The Player by showing the clip of his fabled eight-minute, one-take opening and then waxing rhapsodic about all manners of ingenuity in that shot puts me at risk of sounding like Fred Ward's character in that sequence, railing about how everything in movies these days is "cut cut cut cut" and teaching Jimmy the bike messenger (Paul Hewitt) about Orson Welles' famous tracking shot that started Touch of Evil (Unlike Ward's studio security head Walter Stuckel though, I would recognize Absolute Beginners when Jimmy brings it up). Despite any negative connotation I may endure for choosing the most obvious part of Altman's 1992 film to launch my tribute to The Player, I stand by my decision and commence my piece discussing those eight glorious minutes, not only because the work that went into creating that sequence still amazes me two decades later, but because that bite-size morsel of cinematic art serves as a microcosm of the entire film. As Altman himself said in a video interview on the DVD, "The film actually is like a snail — it kind of turns in on itself and becomes itself." When Francis Ford Coppola held a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival to tout Apocalypse Now, he famously declared, "My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam." You could say that Altman's film isn't about Hollywood either — it is Hollywood — and who truly can determine on which battleground more blood has been shed. Watching The Player now, you discover (as you find in many Altman films) that wily director had been operating on several planes at the same time during filming and, as funny and dead-on as its humor may be, The Player doesn't exist exclusively as a satire. An audience's boisterous laughter distracts a viewer from noticing Altman's use of some directorial sleight-of-hand. When the humor subsides, a surprised viewer realizes that the film now plumbs much darker depths. That Altman successfully coordinated all these disparate instruments into the orchestral composition we know as The Player remains miraculous. Now, about that opening shot…
Assuming anyone reading this watched the clip or has seen The Player, the actual preparations that Altman, his crew and the actors involved in the sequence took required planning — lots of meticulous planning. Often, you hear people mistakenly
refer to this eight-minute take as a tracking shot when that isn't the case. A camera didn't run on rails as Akira Kurosawa did for The Woodcutter's long walk in Rashomon and isn't exactly equivalent to the move Martin Scorsese loves to do as in Raging Bull and Goodfellas, to name just two of his. Even a casual observer, seeing how the camera moves in those eight minutes, would realize that laying down tracks for all those angles and positions without any being caught on film by the camera as it switched heights and directions would be damn near impossible. No crews could remove or replace tracks that fast. On the DVD commentary track, Altman explains the steps he went through to achieve the scene. The director actually built a scale model of the studio set along with a scale-size crane that allowed him to see where he would be able to travel and reach and where he couldn't go. Using the model, he visualized roughly how the crane would circulate based on which characters and cameo players should appear in what order. "I had to set up the movie studio
and I wanted to set up the characters that we were going to be dealing with and I wanted to get the audience's attention," Altman said. The director went to the real set with the real crane and choreographed the take. While he knew who would be in the scene, Altman hadn't the slightest idea what words would emanate from their mouths as everyone with a speaking part in the opening improvised his or her dialogue. The amount of time on a single reel of film determined the take's total length, so they had to plan how much time to spend at each spot. Altman said everyone rehearsed for a day while the actual filming took half a day, employing 11 microphones and a mere 15 takes. For such a complicated undertaking, while it required intricate preparations, they managed to lock it down rather quickly. It's far from the only time The Player displays a self-reflexive moment — that happens in the film's first image as a hand enters the frame with a clapboard (and if that's an honest clapboard, it means take 10 ended up being used in the film) as you hear offscreen voices asking for quiet on the set, marking the scene and, finally, calling, "Action" so the film can begin — and similar instances occur all the way to its final frame. For his part, Altman emphasized the show in his showpiece. "It's a very conceited thing — this shot with no cuts in it.…It draws attention to it. It's showing off.…It got attention to the picture," he admits. 
What Altman set out to do in that scene — the setting-up-the-characters-and-the-studio part, not the garnering-attention-for-the-film part — he accomplished quite efficiently. We begin with the woman who, truth-be-told, keeps the studio running through who knows how many regimes, the studio president's executive secretary Claire (Dina Merrill) telling the studio president's receptionist Sandy (Leah Ayres) the proper things to say about the boss's whereabouts; we hear the first mention of a name of a rival that will haunt our protagonist, Larry Levy; Speaking of our protagonist, he arrives. One of the top executives, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) pulls on to the lot in his Range Rover and we get an immediate sense of his importance as he gets a movie pitch from real-life writer-director Adam Simon before he's even closed the vehicle's door. Griffin tells Simon to talk to his assistant, Bonnie Sherow; next we see Walter and Jimmy have their tracking shot discussion and pass Griffin's office window where he gets updates from his secretary Jan (Angela Hall) and receives his first official pitch from Buck Henry and we get our first reference to a possible part for Julia Roberts; Adam Simon reappears and we meet Bonnie (Cynthia Stevenson) who begs him to slow down and write it down for her. A shriek is heard and they run over to find that a man driving a golf cart has run over Jimmy on his bicycle, scattering a huge pile of mail. On top of one stack, a postcard with drawings of old movie stars and the words YOUR [SIC] HOLLYWOOD IS DEAD; a young man (Randall Batinkoff) in a sports car pulls up to a young blonde sitting on the hood of a car and purposely mistakes her as Rebecca De Mornay in an attempt to pick her up; a low level exec (Jeremy Piven) sucks up to a group of Japanese visitors touring the studio; studio president Joel Levison (Brion James) arrives, driving to the door of his office and asking Sandy
to park his car for him; three other executives talk about the bank that owns much of the studio "putting the screws" to them and sending the owner's son out from Boston. They talk about how it happens at all studios every few years and rumors that Griffin may be replaced by someone else, maybe even Larry Levy; Griffin hears his second pitch of the day; Director Alan Rudolph asks Jimmy where Griffin's office is and Jimmy tells him and also mistakes him as Martin Scorsese. Rudolph goes in the door as Jan comes out and collects Griffin's mail from Jimmy; Walter now bends Buck Henry's ear, this time going on about Hitchcock's Rope while continuing to gripe about all those cuts. Henry brings up Bernardo Bertolucci's great tracking shot to Debra Winger in The Sheltering Sky. Walter, of course, hasn't seen it; Bonnie chastises her assistant Whitney Gersh (Gina Gershon) for having coffee with Alan Rudolph; Rudolph sees Griffin and gives him his final pitch of the opening scene as well as the film's first mention of Bruce Willis. Mill receives his mail, including that postcard which reads on the other side, "I HATE YOUR GUTS ASSHOLE!" Rudolph hasn't stopped pitching about his cynical political thriller comedy that's "got heart in the right spot" but he gets the last line of that bravura opening, "Of course someone dies in the end. They always do in thrillers." Beyond the technical virtuosity displayed in that opening
take, what an efficient introduction of most of the important characters and plot strands for the film. The single take goes beyond being a clever filmmaking stunt and prepares a viewer for most of what will be coming. If they didn't know what a movie pitch was, now they do. The film establishes the basic hierarchy of the studio's power structure. We know that shaky financial times embroil the studio and that its top development executive, Griffin Mill, could lose his job over it, perhaps to an executive who works elsewhere named Larry Levy. We've learned that someone representing the bank that owns most of the studio will be arriving to look things over. Griffin also has to contend with someone sending him threatening postcards. The movie even has laid the groundwork for the joke that leads to the final punchline. More ominously, as Rudolph says in the context of his movie idea, "Of course someone dies in the end. They always do in thrillers" as Griffin stares out the window after receiving his hate mail, the first scene of The Player doesn't end on a satirical note, but a suspenseful one, indicating the thriller blood flowing through its celluloid veins. Rudolph's description of the movie he wants to make inspires laughter, but it comes damn close to describing The Player as well: a cynical political thriller with its heart in the right spot, only its office politics and while the film does have heart in the right spot, the right spots occur only in isolated moments and not in the film overall.One final paragraph related to the opening, since it affords me the opportunity to share an anecdote from my days long past as a pseudo-professional film critic as well as illustrates that some of the funniest dialogue that just screams satire — well, as animated Springfield mob boss Fat Tony (voiced by Joe Mantegna) once said on The Simpsons, "It's funny 'cause it's true." Altman says in his commentary that the performers improvised all the dialogue in that sequence, including creating their own movie pitches. It shouldn't be surprising then that Buck Henry delivers the funniest one with his idea for a sequel to The Graduate. The other two pitches speak the ridiculous language that most assume has to be exaggerated. In Griffin's second meeting, he listens to writer-directors Patricia Resnick (on left in photo), and
Joan Tewksbury try to sell an idea about a television actress who takes a trip to Africa where a local tribe begins to worship her as an idol. "Kind of like The Gods Must Be Crazy, only instead of a Coke bottle, you have a television actress," Griffin says when he finally catches on to their concept. "It's like Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman," Resnick sums up. When Alan Rudolph spells out the basics of his story concerning a senator who develops the power to see what's inside a person's mind, his pithy summation of the film describes it as "Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate." On Jan. 31, 1992, less than four months before The Player opened, another film finally made it to movie theaters. Originally scheduled as one of its studio's big year-end releases, the studio punted it to the January dumping ground because even they recognized how bad it was. If you review films outside of major markets, studios either contract local agencies to handle publicity and press relations or use regional offices, if they have one in close proximity. (At least, they did this once upon a time. Now, smaller markets get frozen out, if their newspapers haven't axed their film critics first.) In late summer 991, this studio's regional rep drove up to give me and my paper's other reviewer a preview of the studio's fall and winter releases. As he flipped through large photos featuring images from the films, he came to Shining Through starring Melanie Griffith and Michael Douglas. After a brief synopsis, the man described Shining Through in a way that forced me to summon every ounce of strength in my 21-year-old body not to burst into tears of laughter. "It's like Working Girl goes to war," he said with a straight face. Yes Virginia, movie folk do talk this way.
"As a screenwriter, one gets used to sitting in the backseat on a film. One reason the writer is usually banned from the set by directors is so the writer's screams aren't heard on the soundtrack when they listen to all the changes being made," said Michael Tolkin, who wrote the screenplay for The Player, on the DVD commentary. Tolkin wasn't just writing the script for The Player, he was adapting it from his own novel and serving as one of the film's producers as well. Neither Altman nor Tolkin mention a Tolkin ban from The Player set on the DVD (in fact, he appears late in the movie with his brother Stephen as screenwriting siblings trying to make a deal). I guess Michael Mann kicking David Milch off the Luck set wasn't that unusual, but they both held executive producer titles, so how did that work? Oh well — horses under the tarp. While Hollywood at large goes beneath the microscope in The Player, how the film industry treats writers garners the bulk of the feature's focus — somewhat ironic given how often
Altman allows improvisation or creates scenes on the fly. (I just noticed how easily I slip into present tense when I write about what Altman "does." He died more than five years ago, but when you watch his best films again, the man seems so vibrant, vital and alive.) In the sidebar I posted Tuesday called Untold Stories of Robert Altman's The Player or Who the Hell is Thereza Ellis?, I covered many details of this, especially concerning the great scene at the Pasadena police station between the police (Whoopi Goldberg, Lyle Lovett and Susan Emshwiller) and Griffin that Altman acknowledges the actors worked out on their own and that Goldberg should be credited as the scene's writer and director. Despite the fact that Griffin keeps getting threatening notes from a pissed-off screenwriter whose calls he didn't return, his reputation has earned the label of "the writer's executive" in Hollywood. Though Griffin ends up physically killing a screenwriter, the rival executive, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) plays the role of the man who would kill them all symbolically if he could. One fateful night, Griffin drives to Pasadena looking for screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio), the man he believes to be behind the threats. Mill learns he's gone to a movie theater to see The Bicycle Thief from his girlfriend June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), who Griffin shares an odd and
voyeuristic phone call where he watches her through her windows while talking on his unbelievably large 1990s-era cell phone. He asks why she didn't go with David, but June doesn't go to movies. "Why?" Mill truly wants to know. "Life's too short," she answers. Griffin tries to calm Kahane after he locates him, dangling the possibility of deals and apologizing for not calling him back. Kahane won't allow Griffin's belated asskissing — June told Griffin on the phone his nickname for him was The Dead Man. Since Griffin found Kahane at the movie theater, he deduces June told Mill where he went. "Talk to the Ice Queen? You'd like her Mill — she's a lot like you — all heart," Kahane says before walking out on Griffin. Mill gives up and heads toward his Range Rover when Kahane, pissing in a corner, calls to him and taunts him about Larry Levy, who he has heard will make meaningful films again, and the impending loss of Griffin's job. His paranoia drives Griffin to follow Kahane to his parking lot in an attempt to get him not to tell anyone at the studio they spoke and to stop the postcards. "I don't write postcards! I write scripts!" Kahane yells when Griffin grabs his car door and Kahane shoves him, sending him sailing over a railing onto a loading ramp. Kahane checks to see if Griffin is OK, but Mill snaps and starts bashing Kahane's head into the cement, holding it beneath the water until the bubbles stop, quietly sneering, "Keep it to yourself! Keep it to yourself!" As Griffin snaps back into focus, realizing what he did and trying to fake a robbery, dialogue from the next scene, which takes place the following morning, bleeds into the murder cleanup. "Who wrote the new ending to Fatal Attraction?" Larry Levy asks. "The audience did," he responds to his own question.
Levy's conversation turn out to come from his first meeting as a newly hired executive at the studio. It hasn't quite started as Levison waits in his office and Griffin hasn't shown up on the lot. Claire tells Levison that with or without Griffin, they should begin and he agrees, telling Walter, whom we've learned by now runs the studio's security department to "keep our noses clean, Walter." Levy complains to everyone about the high fees paid to writers and how they should make pictures the people want not the type writers want to give them when Griffin shows up. Levy asks everyone when was the last time they paid to see a movie. "Last night. The Bicycle Thief," Griffin replies. "It's an art movie. It doesn't count. We're talking movie movies," Levy says dismissively. As an exercise, Levy passes a newspaper to different executives and tells them to pick a story. Steve Reeves (Jeremy Piven) reads, "Immigrants protest budget cuts in literacy program." "Human spirit overcoming human adversity. Sounds like Horatio Alger in the barrio. Put Jimmy Smits in it and you've got a sexy Stand and Deliver," Levy smiles. It goes on for a while, but a headline that says “Man Found Dead in Theater Parking Lot” distracts Griffin. When
they capture his attention, he focuses enough to zing Levy back at least. "I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we can just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here," Mill suggests sardonically. The frightening thing to me comes from the possibility that with the state of digital effects now, getting rid of the actors could be highly plausible. After the meeting, when Griffin returns to his office where Walter confronts him about David Kahane, he receives a fax with bad news. "SURPRISE!" it reads. Kahane wasn't
the screenwriter sending him the postcards. At another time, Griffin again shows himself to be a bit of a writer's defender when he sends Bonnie to New York to look at the new Tom Wolfe novel and discern if it could be a movie. If it does, he tells her to offer $1 million, which makes Levy choke over the price. "It's Tom Wolfe," Griffin says, as if that's the only explanation needed. There's a catch that comes with Griffin's "writer's executive" reputation. The script still must fall within the proper parameters. He isn't a risk taker. When he becomes involved with June, she asks him what he needs to make a good movie and he rattles off a list of attributes. "Suspense, laughter, violence, hope, heart, nudity, sex, happy endings. Mostly happy endings," he tells her. Damn if Altman — the maverick, the Hollywood outsider — doesn't manage to include every single one of those elements in The Player. "When people ask me, 'How much did Altman change the script into the movie?' I would honestly say if anyone betrayed me, it was me. As the screenwriter, I betrayed the novel much more than the director," Tolkin admits on the DVD. Altman also offers some words on his reputation as an outsider.and the kind of movies that I can make and like to make and make are not the type of films they know how to distribute.
So basically, we aren't in the same business. There's no point in calling me to make a pair of gloves for you when I make shoes."
Labels: 90s, Altman, Buck Henry, Coppola, Debra Winger, Fiction, Hitchcock, Julia Roberts, Kurosawa, Luck, M. Douglas, Michael Mann, Milch, Movie Tributes, Scorsese, The Simpsons, Tim Robbins, Welles, Willis
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Untold Stories of Robert Altman's The Player or Who the Hell is Thereza Ellis?
"When you really get down to who made the difference, who made this thing better instead of just ordinary, I don't think we'll ever find out." — Robert Altman on collaboration in making The Player on its DVD commentary
By Edward Copeland
Not everyone does great commentary tracks for DVDs (or laserdiscs or Blu-rays), but one man you could depend on to provide candid and informative listening experiences was the late great and much-missed Robert Altman. When it came to The Player, Altman either did the exercise twice or the version on the DVD of The Player was edited down to allow room for the comments of producer/screenwriter Michael Tolkin, who also wrote the novel upon which the film was based. I know I recall things from the long-gone Criterion laserdisc edition, I just can't be certain if the DVD commentary contains Altman anecdotes that weren't there before. Damn these ever-changing formats. Ironically, The Player DVD, now a New Line Platinum Series edition, recalls those Paleozoic days of laserdisc players: You have to flip the disc to access the special features. I knew going into the tribute to the 20th anniversary of The Player, that one post wouldn't do, that's why I set aside this one for those extra details about the film.
One instance that I know for certain Altman mentioned on the Criterion laserdisc that can't be found anywhere on the New Line DVD concerns the screenwriter that stalks studio executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) — even after Mill unintentionally kills the wrong writer, David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio), that he believes to be responsible. I remember at the time when I heard it on the laserdisc, it provided another laugh because unless you happened to be a voice recognition expert with a tremendous memory, you likely wouldn't have gleaned
this from the movie itself. Kahane's failed screenwriter buddy Phil (Brian Brophy) eulogizes his dead friend at a graveside service and turns it into a tirade about Hollywood, which he pronounces guilty of "assault with intent to kill" though he blames society for Kahane's actual murder. "And the next time we sell a million dollar script and nail some shitbag producer, we'll say that's another one for David Kahane." At the end of the film, as Griffin drives home, fellow exec Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) tells him he just has to hear this movie pitch. Another voice gets on the speakerphone and reminds Griffin that he used to be in the postcard business. He then pitches the events in Griffin's life (and the movie you've just watched to him) and it's Brian Brophy's voice again as Phil, though the name Phil never comes up. Without Altman mentioning it on that Criterion laserdisc, I wouldn't know that. Since it's not on New Line's version, fewer people will. During Tolkin's portion of the commentary on the New Line DVD, he regrets that "Altman lost the sense of the writer and the police stalking Griffin. You really lost the sense of the writer stalking Griffin. I tried to maintain that in the script, but Altman lost it completely. I think that's a loss because it takes away something that was right about the book." While I agree in the sense that you'd never get that connection on your own, Altman never drops either strand completely. Griffin still gets postcards while attending the benefit dinner and the Lyle Lovett character literally stalks him and you don't know immediately that he's a police detective and the investigation keeps coming back right until the final scene where the witness bungles the lineup and clears him.
While The Player remains as good as it ever was, perhaps deeper even than I remember, watching the non-Criterion DVD of it made me mournful for the laserdisc collection I once owned. Sure, it could be a pain to have to get up a turn a disc over every half-hour or hour in the middle of a movie and purchase prices ran obscenely high, but when DVD came around, studios didn't let Criterion keep all the titles it had on laserdisc. Laserdisc players also had a function that DVD players don't (not having a Blu-ray, I can't speak for that device). Criterion has been able to release another Altman film, Short Cuts on DVD, but it lacks a feature that the laserdisc had that made for interesting viewing experiments. Since you could program the chapters you wanted to play on the laserdisc player, the Criterion Short Cuts laserdisc listed which chapter numbers went with which Raymond Carver story so you could set the machine up to watch a single one straight through. It also included a section of reviews of the film that you could read, including one by a young critic out of Dallas named Matt Zoller Seitz. This didn't just apply to Altman's films either. The Criterion laserdiscs for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Raging Bull both contained superior extras and full Scorsese commentaries. I don't think any of the zillion DVD and Blu-ray versions of Casablanca have yet included the fun Criterion laserdisc treasure of the story treatment for Brazzaville, the proposed sequel.
The major weakness of the New Line DVD of The Player versus the Criterion laserdisc (RIP) resides with their guides to the film's numerous cameo appearances. First, the New Line DVD omits some names listed on the Criterion laserdisc while it includes names that could have been on Criterion's but I have no clue concerning their identities now so they might have been on the laserdisc and I didn't know them almost two decades ago either. Of course, if you attempt to find the answer online, ha! The Inaccurate Movie Database contains a list of people playing themselves that matches neither list, including Patrick Swayze who filmed a cameo but was cut and appears in deleted scenes on both the DVD and the laserdisc alongside David Brown, Seymour Cassel, John Considine, Tim Curry, Joe Dallesandro, Jeff Daniels, Richard Edson, Franco Nero, Martha Plimpton and Lori Singer. Wikipedia provides a list as well, but it doesn't correspond with any of the three lists we have going so far. I decided that the only fair way to count the cameos is to go by the credits on the film itself — those listed as playing themselves. However, the movie actually sort of screws us on that one too because it counts Annie Ross (who plays the boozy torch singer in Short Cuts) as a cameo though when she appears in the opening unbroken shot, she's clearly playing the part of a studio executive discussing the studio's situation with fictional exec Frank Murphy, played by Frank Barhydt, co-screenwriter of Altman's Quintet, HealtH, Short Cuts and Kansas City and an actor in Tanner '88. Altman even says on the commentary that Ross plays an executive, yet the movie's credits call her a cameo. Using that logic,
every single person in the film makes a cameo. Admittedly, my memory could be fuzzy on the mechanics of the cameo guide on the laserdisc, but it seemed to me that if you clicked on a name, it took you directly to the scene and pointed them out somehow, since some of the cameos can be particularly difficult to find. On the New Line version, good luck. You click on the name and it takes you to the scene, but just lets the sequence run. Trying to locate the late Brad Davis would become the DVD equivalent of Where's Waldo? — if New Line had remembered to include him as Criterion and the credits did. Lord help you when you get to the Habeas Corpus climax (the film-within-a-film) trying to sort out the guards. Don't blink or you'll miss Dennis Franz's mustache. In the spirit of helping, I'm going to try to guide readers to the film's officially sanctioned cameos where I can. I've taken care of Annie Ross (though I don't think she should count) so let's try to take care of the other 64 guest appearances. Before I delve into the cameo genealogy, I thought I'd share other details from the DVD commentary.One piece of information I don't remember hearing or reading about Robert Altman and The Player (unless my steel-trap memory finally shows signs of metal fatigue following decades of overloading it) concerns how Altman became involved in the first place. Altman and co-writer Frank Barhydt had completed the screenplay for Short Cuts, Altman's planned movie that would interweave several tales based on short stories by the great Raymond Carver, but financing for the film remained elusive. In a video interview on the reverse side of the
New Line DVD, Altman admits that some of the pointed barbs aimed at anxious writers and directors in The Player applied to him. "You can't do a satire unless it's mostly about yourself, unless you recognize all those things that you hate in yourself," Altman says. "When I was trying to sell Short Cuts, I sounded very much like one of those guys pitching. 'This is very much like Nashville but you've got to think it's more like blah blah blah.'" As Altman waited for money to come his way, someone showed him Tolkin's screenplay for The Player and offered Altman the chance to direct the movie — and Altman grabbed the job. The director's casting for Short Cuts largely had been completed so that explains why so many of that film's performers also appear in The Player. He'd hired Robbins for the other movie first before the character of Griffin Mill entered both of their lives. He'd locked in Annie Ross as well. Altman also had settled on singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett, an acting novice, to play the baker in Short Cuts' take on Carver's story "A Small, Good Thing." In order to give Lovett some on-the-job-training ahead of that film's shoot, Altman created the character of Detective DeLongpre for him. Altman also claims on the commentary track that Vincent D'Onofrio already had secured a part in Short Cuts before selecting him to be doomed writer David Kahane in The Player, but I find no evidence to back that up though I know Altman cut at least one story from Short Cuts.In a film such as The Player filled with so many memorable scenes, one of its standouts exemplifies the brilliance that could result when Robert Altman's preferred way of working came together and flourished. It involved chance, luck, casting and the director's willingness to let his actors collaborate. Altman received a phone call from Whoopi Goldberg, begging to be in the movie. At the time, Altman didn't see any roles for her and told her she could appear as herself but Goldberg thought differently, She wanted to play Susan Avery, the Pasadena police detective who suspects Griffin of murder. Altman originally sought Joan Cusack for the role, but the actress was unavailable so Goldberg got the part. The film ran into a problem when everyone realized it lacked a scene where a completely paranoid Griffin had to travel to the Pasadena police station where the detectives toy with him. They had a set, but not a scene. Goldberg, Robbins and the other actors spent a day bouncing ideas off each other and then came up with this gem involving a fly swatter, off-color personal jokes, cracks about Rodney King, the infamous tampon talk and use as a prop and discussion of the horror classic Freaks. On the DVD commentary, Altman says that in reality, you could say that Goldberg wrote and directed this scene, showed in the YouTube clip below.
We're almost ready to leap into the cameo appearance search, but first I thought we'd stop for a good chuckle. A really good chuckle. I realize that the YouTube clip of the Pasadena police station scene provided quite a few, but this starts with the film and then gets its big
laugh from the real world, which once again proves how truly clueless it can be. As you know, since we're celebrating The Player today, the movie got its release on April 10, 1992. The main character works at a fictional yet unnamed Hollywood movie studio. During filming, director Robert Altman asked his son Stephen, who served as the film's production designer, to try to come up with a slogan for the studio, preferably something as dumb and banal as he could. Stephen Altman came through, branding Griffin Mill's studio with the meaningless phrase "Movies — now more than ever!" Needless to say, he pleased his father, who admits on the DVD that The Player "has more contrivance in it than probably any film I've ever made." Now comes the funny part. Leap forward four years in the future to 1996. It's a presidential election year. NBC News, looking to rebrand itself and apparently having never seen The Player, chooses the slogan — yes, you guessed it — NBC News Now More Than Ever. We're not done. This slogan isn't new either. Click here to see who used that same slogan for a political campaign in 1972. I wouldn't put it past Altman for having known the connection and liking the link, but what the hell was NBC News' excuse, especially in a presidential campaign year? 
First, some sympathy for poor Guy Remsen. "Who is Guy Remsen?" you might ask. His late older brother was the Altman regular repertory player Bert Remsen (I know — Bert Remsen probably isn't ringing bells for many of you either. How about Jack Riley? If the name doesn't cut, his face would or perhaps the name of his most famous character — Mr. Carlin on The Bob Newhart Show. When they get to end and show the climax of the movie within The Player, Habeas Corpus, all three actors make cameo appearances. If you read closely (here's one helpful item the DVD players have that laserdisc players didn't: zooms), you see that in Habeas Corpus, Riley plays "Hap" Harlow, one of the reporters covering the execution; Bert Remsen's name gets listed as executioner, since he's the guard who starts the gas pellets dropping into the chamber; and Guy Remsen portrays The Attorney General. On both the Criterion laserdisc version and the New Line DVD version, they managed to misidentify Guy Remsen in their respective cameo guides. In the Criterion, they just got the Remsen brothers confused. Bad, but I guess we could call that an understandable mistake. In the New Line edition, somehow they swapped Guy Remsen and Jack Riley. So I've included photos of all three to avoid confusion. Bert Remsen throws open the blinds, Guy Remsen stands behind Peter Falk (who has the role of Harry Levin in
Habeas Corpus) and Jack Riley takes notes at the very edge of the chamber window (if the full picture were there, you would see Susan Sarandon to Riley's left in the part of another reporter, Ellen Walsh. I suppose this serves as good as a place as any to point out the three credited cameos I couldn't locate (for certain). The first actor I know very well. He's Richard Anderson, a character since the 1940s whose best-known role probably would be Oscar Goldman on both The Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Where Anderson has hidden in The Player remains a mystery to me. He's not on the New Line DVD and I don't recall him on the Criterion laserdisc either. The mystery actress, whom I couldn't even find a photo for to try to search out her location, is named Maxine John-James. The Inaccurate Movie Database lists three features and one episode of the television series Acapulco H.E.A.T. Personally, I must track down her dual role in the 1997 film Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills. The third incognito cameo belongs to an actress named Jennifer Nash. Unlike Ms. John-James, she cites an extensive list of credits, mostly on television, and photographic proof of her existence can be obtained. In The Player, I couldn't find her unless that's her holding a dog and accompanying Malcolm McDowell in the lobby of The St. James Club. However, no matter how I tried to play with her image, I never succeeded in making it discernible enough to match against other photos of Nash.
Since they count Ross and she appears in the opening eight-minute shot, I'm going to attempt to get through the remainder of the cameos in the order that they appear in the film. Writer-director Adam Simon steps up first, pitching to Griffin as soon as Mill gets out of his Range Rover at the unnamed studio. Griffin pushes Simon off on his D-Girl (and girlfriend) Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson) while he has his secretary Jan (Angela Hall) call security to figure out who let Simon on the lot. His first official pitch comes from Buck Henry who tries to sell him the idea of a sequel to The Graduate. Henry reappears later at a benefit dinner for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's film program. Griffin meets next with two women screenwriters: Patricia Resnick and Joan Tewksbury. Resnick co-wrote Altman's A Wedding and Quintet. Tewksbury wrote Altman's Nashville and co-wrote Thieves Like Us. Alan Rudolph throws out the final pitch of the unbroken shot (after first being mistaken as Martin Scorsese by Jimmy the bike messenger, played by Paul Hewitt) and serves as the segment's final cameo. The writer-director's long relationship Altman includes Altman producing five of the feature films that Rudolph directed. On the DVD, Altman says, "I'm as interested in getting Alan Rudolph's new films going as I am my own."
Most of the film's cameos occur in group situations. I hadn't thought of this before but, in its own way, it mirrors the various settings that keep uniting all the characters in Altman's Nashville, which I still consider his greatest work. Only in The Player, the same characters do not cross paths but instead enter a location stocked with a new group of celebrities. This scene even gets a nice aural to visual segue. Griffin hovers over Claire (Dina Merrill), the studio president's powerful all-knowing executive secretary, trying to learn what she knows about rival movie executive Larry Levy. Claire ducks his queries long enough until the phone rings and she tells whoever is on the line, "No, we
couldn't sign Anjelica Huston for that. She's booked for two years." Her utterance cuts immediately to Huston's face eating lunch on the patio of an outside restaurant with John Cusack and Levy. Soon, we see Griffin walking up the path to the restaurant where he bumps into Joel Grey on the steps. Mill introduces himself and says he knows his daughter Jennifer and is a big fan. Grey notes that the two have similar ties and moves on. Griffin joins the large table across Levy, Cusack and Huston where Bonnie and others who work at the studio await (including Jeremy Piven, who has a small role in the film). At a table for two next to the studio contingent's large round table sits Martin Mull. The remaining cameo in this scene happens to be the hardest to spot as well as the saddest. Actor Brad Davis, best known for the lead role in Midnight Express, eats at a table on the patio on the other side of the eatery's entryway. You don't get a good look at him, but what you can see gives an indication of his illness. Davis was dying of AIDS and succumbed on Sept. 8, 1991, seven months before the movie's release. I've cropped a larger frame so you can see where he sat and then enlarged Davis from that screenshot to give you an idea.
The mixture of celebrities mingling at the pool party of Griffin's attorney, noted entertainment lawyer Dick Mellon (Sydney Pollack), proves quite eclectic, to say the least. When Griffin and Bonnie arrive at Dick's place, they first encounter Marlee Matlin and Bonnie — through Matlin's interpreter — discusses a script that she read and thinks would be great for Matlin. Dick spots Griffin's arrival and excuses himself
from a conversation with Harry Belafonte and his daughter Shari concerning network news figures. Griffin and Mellon's conversation offered more evidence that Pollack might be a better actor than director, this time playing it straight. Griffin starts to tell Mellon about the threatening postcards when his white whale — Larry Levy — crashes the party, arriving as a guest of Jeff Goldblum. Mill complains to Dick that Levy keeps getting in his face. "He's a comer. That's what comers do — they get in
your face. You're a comer, too. You can handle it," Mellon reassures him. "So, the rumors are true," Griffin replies. "Rumors are always true. You know that," Mellon tells him. "I'm always the last to hear about them," Griffin sighs. "No, you're always the last one to believe them," Dick corrects his client. Today, seeing Sydney Pollack play a character in a scene surrounded by celebrity cameos throws you off-kilter, the way some actors do when they appear on Curb Your Enthusiasm and it takes a few minutes to realize that they aren't playing themselves, but Pollack's role in The Player was the director's first acting job since 1982's Tootsie. Later in 1992, he took another part, this time in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, but Pollack didn't start acting regularly until 1998. In fact, in that final decade of his life (he died in 2008), Pollack only directed two films and mostly acted and produced. Pollack's relative anonymity to audiences in 1992 prompted Altman to cast him in the first place, though Altman originally pursued director Blake Edwards for the part of Dick Mellon. In addition to those named so far and the two couples and Sally Kellerman (who appears again later at a gala benefit) pictured in the photograph above, the remaining attendees included Kathy Ireland, Jill St. John and Robert Wagner and last, but certainly not least, Rod Steiger, saying not a word as he holds a plate of food and stares at what appears to be a vertical fish tank, though it might just be bubbling water as I see no fish.
Our next stop on the virtual bus tour of Player cameos takes us another patio restaurant, this time for breakfast the next morning. Larry Levy just completed his meeting with studio head Joel Levison (Brion James), who can be spotted eating alone near the railing between the foreground figures of Burt Reynolds and entertainment columnist and critic Charles Champlin. Altman says he cast James as the studio head specifically because he'd been typecast as a villain in so many films such as Blade Runner, Tango & Cash and Another 48 Hrs. While looking over Brion James' filmography, I may have solved part of the Maxine John-James cameo mystery. Brion James also appeared in
Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills and served as an associate producer of this Troma release. Looking further, Brion and Maxine John-James were married at the time of The Player. I still can't find a photo of her, but there you go. Levy makes a point of apologizing to Reynolds on the way out, hoping there are no hard feelings over some incident that Reynolds apparently doesn't recall since he has to ask Champlin who Levy was. Reynolds' cameo turns out to be one of the funniest once Griffin drops by. He remembers him. After Mill exits, Reynolds mutters to Champlin, "Asshole." The columnist responds, "One of a breed" which launches Reynolds into a monologue that we only hear the start of before they cut away. "No, actually they are a breed, In fact, they're breeding them" Reynolds begins but the sound fades out as we move to Levison's table. Reynolds' bit scored because, like all who appeared for Altman (accepting scale payment or no payment at all), they had no scripted dialogue. In Altman's way of thinking, if the celebrities show up to play themselves, he couldn't very well tell them what they would do in real life. As a result, every line or use of prop by a cameo artist came from that person. They also could choose to say nothing at all, but Altman and his editor Geraldine Peroni got to pick the best ones to use. (Peroni received the film's third Oscar nomination along with Altman's direction and Tolkin's adapted screenplay.) When Griffin threatens to quit over Levy coming to the studio, Levison tells him that he's under contract and he'd sue. Then, the third cameo becomes easier to see as Cathy Lee Crosby sits right behind him. In the wide picture above, Crosby appears as the blonde across from Levison.
That night, Griffin had his fatal encounter with David Kahane in Pasadena, but first the two went to a Japanese karaoke bar where actor Brian Tochi, perhaps best known as Takashi in Revenge of the Nerds or as the voice of Leonardo in the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, performed. The next day at work, Griffin and others watched the dailies from a noirish detective film called The Lonely Room starring Scott Glenn and Lily Tomlin. The purposeful flubs induce enough laughs, but the deleted scenes comes off as being even funnier as Tomlin complains about having to smoke so much when she doesn't and expresses concern about the message being sent. Then, in another cut take, Glenn asks that someone make sure that he gets his per diem when the day's shooting ends. Tomlin whines that she gets penalized because she lives in Los Angeles while Glenn lives in another state, flies in and stays at the Chateau Marmont and receives extra pay for it.
Now comes the moment we've been waiting for since the headline of this post: Who the hell is Thereza Ellis? Thanks to the New Line cameo guide, I know what she looks like and where she appears, but that answers no questions whatsoever. It's later that night when Griffin's stalker,
who has surprised Griffin by not being dead, had told him to meet him alone at The St. James Club. In the hotel lobby, Griffin first encounters Malcolm McDowell (who is accompanied by a young blonde woman with a dog that might be that Jennifer Nash. Who knows?) McDowell smiles as he shakes Mill's hand and then tells the studio executive, "The next time you want to badmouth me, have the courage to do it to my face. You guys are all the same." Griffin looks stunned as the actor leaves (though he'll pop up again at that gala benefit). In a lounge area, Andie MacDowell has been cornered by the film's two most over-the-top characters: screenwriter Tom Oakley (Richard E. Grant) and Andy Civella (Dean Stockwell). Geena Davis originally was going to do this cameo, but some emergency happened so MacDowell flew in from her home in Montana at the last minute to pitch hit. That makes the conversation all the funnier since Oakley and Civella are trying to convince the actress the Montana always ends up being bad luck for people in the movie business, citing as their only evidence Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate. When the hyper pair spot Griffin, they start trying to pitch a movie idea at him and MacDowell takes the opportunity to escape, being led off by *(drumroll please)* THEREZA ELLIS. My search for information on Ellis has taken me to the far corners of the World Wide Web but the only sign that seems to point to the existence of a Thereza Ellis comes from universal agreement that she played herself in The Player. I could find no other credits, no other photographs, no other lines of work. Someone must track down Andie MacDowell. She could be the only person who knows the truth! When the studio holds a black-and-white gala benefit for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the scene overflows with cameos both famous and curious. Buck Henry, Sally Kellerman and Malcolm McDowell put in repeat appearances, though the first cameo exists only as a voice as Leeza Gibbons narrates the arrivals at the event for Entertainment Tonight. Griffin uses the occasion to take the late David Kahane's girlfriend June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi) out on their first public date after having sent Bonnie to New York to check out the new Tom Wolfe novel. Mostly, it's a sea of face in quick glances with the exception of Cher, who comes wearing red at Altman's behest. Later, he learned that Cher never wears red. The remaining attendees in alphabetical order: Karen Black, Gary Busey, James Coburn, Kasia Figura (who apparently has a huge career in Europe), Teri Garr, Elliott Gould, Sally Kirkland, Nick Nolte, Alexandra Powers (who appears to have been stuck sitting next to Fred Ward's Walter Stuckle), Mimi Rogers and Marvin Young, known better by his recording name Young MC of "Bust a Move" fame. Finally, we come to cameo payoff — the star-studded cast of the movie-within-the-movie Habeas Corpus. I already named some earlier, but I'll point them out again as art alone places these actors in order.
ABOVE LEFT: Guard No. 6 (Michael Bowen) stands in the hallway leading to the gas chamber in Habeas Corpus. ABOVE RIGHT: Reporters and other witnesses await the execution in the viewing room outside the gas chamber. (Front row, left to right) Reporters "Hap" Harlow (Jack Riley), Ellen Walsh (Susan Sarandon) and Harry Levin (Peter Falk) take notes for their stories. Standing directly behind Levin wearing a gray suit is The Attorney General (Guy Remsen). BELOW LEFT: Warden Lowe (Paul Dooley) appears at the witness window and taps his watch, indicating the execution should proceed. BELOW RIGHT: Following the warden's orders, Guard No. 3 (Robert Carradine, left) and Guard No. 4 (Steve James) head toward the cell to retrieve the condemned prisoner.
ABOVE LEFT: Condemned murderer Marsha Kent (Julia Roberts) sits on her cot listening to Father Pratt (Ray Walston) read from The Bible. Matron Cole (Louise Fletcher) stands speaking with Dr. Besh (Rene Auberjonois) by the cell door. Marsha gets removed and taken to the gas chamber where they strap her in the chair and drop the gas pellets. (not pictured) ABOVE RIGHT: Assistant D.A. Dave Williams (Bruce Willis) bursts into the unit preparing to execute Marsha, the woman he convicted for murdering her husband and whom he loves, upon learning that Marsha's husband faked his death. Williams passes Guard No. 4 (David Alan Grier) on his way. BELOW LEFT: Williams (Bruce Willis) grabs a shotgun from Guard No. 1 (Dennis Franz). Williams blasts the glass of the gas chamber, releasing fumes everywhere.(not pictured) BELOW RIGHT: Williams (Bruce Willis) carries Marsha (Julia Roberts) to safety while inside the gas chamber (from left to right) Guard No. 4 (Steve James), the Executioner (Bert Remsen) and Guard No. 3 (Robert Carradine) shield their faces from the fumes.
Tweet
Labels: A. Huston, Altman, Blake Edwards, Burt Reynolds, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Dean Stockwell, Fiction, Geena Davis, Lily Tomlin, Malcolm McDowell, Oscars, Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Tim Robbins, Woody
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
