cinememoir | What About Reality? The Peculiarly Personal Parable of The Player

By Steve Wagner

Griffin: It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.
June: What elements?
Griffin: Suspense, laughter, violence, hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.
June: What about reality?
— Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) to June Gudmundsdottir (Great Scacchi) in The Player (1992)

I transitioned from opinionated film buff to suddenly-not-so-smug “professional” film critic in November 1991, ostensibly because I was 1) semi-reliable at delivering copy on time, and 2) willing to accept my compensation in weed. A regional Midwest music magazine to which I was contributing the odd album, concert, or book review had secured advertising from one of the major theater chains (AMC if memory serves) and needed a regular film column to dress up their new client’s page and hopefully keep an eye on the ads. I readily agreed when they asked, not because of the special remuneration (though it was certainly welcome at the time), but because my band had recently broken up and I had no idea what to do next with my life.

For the column title, I borrowed a phrase, “Reel World,” that Marshall McLuhan had coined in his book The Medium is the Message. I contacted the Kansas City ad agency that provided the Hollywood studios with film promotion in the area and started screening soon-to-be-released films every week with the other local critics, most of whom were old pros writing for venerable, well-regarded publications. I was too intimidated to introduce myself to them; once in their midst, I realized that film criticism was, or should be a serious endeavor…and I didn’t feel like a very serious person at the time. I had, after all, spent the previous five years on the road with a rock band, not a line of work that stresses seriousness. Yeah, I’d seen lots of movies, and yeah, I had lots of opinions about them, but when it came to the sharp focus, knowledge of film history, and unique voice required to write about film in a meaningful (or at least, competent) way, I felt like an imposter. I felt like the Ed Wood of film critics.

But you’ve got to start somewhere, and it slowly got better over the next year that I wrote Reel World. And though 1992 wasn’t necessarily a cinematic banner year, there were some remarkable releases for a burgeoning critic to chew on: Reservoir Dogs blasted the indie door completely off its hinges while introducing us to Quentin Tarantino; Spike Lee parlayed his critical cred and ruffled feathers with the ambitious, brave, and timely Malcolm X; Sharon Stone seared an iconic pose into our prurient imaginations in Basic Instinct; and Clint Eastwood summarized his own long on-screen career and redefined the Western with his world-weary but explosive Unforgiven.

These movies and many more I reviewed that first year, occupy an outsized and persistent space in my memory. Even the big stink bombs of 1992 (Shining Through, Article 99, Man Trouble) bring me a feeling of personal nostalgia. I was viewing films with a creative purpose, and this brought a feeling of possibility to my life and a sense that something interesting might be beckoning. And though I was as far down the industry food chain as one could be, I felt a toe in the sand of Hollywood, which was invigorating…and seductive. More, of course, on that later.

When it came time to compile my first best-of-the-year list, my top film was an easy call—Robert Altman’s labyrinthine satire The Player, a masterpiece of cinematic storytelling that has ultimately proven to be its maverick director’s career-defining statement. Adapted by Michael Tolkin from his own novel of the same name, The Player bastes Hollywood with the delectable ingredients of film noir—mystery/suspense, crime drama, and illicit romance—iced top-to-bottom in major movie star glitz. The film features dozens of juicy bit parts and in-the-back-of-the-shot photobombs from Hollywood royalty, who together comprise a human set design of famous faces waltzing through the hallowed VIP domains of studio lots and bungalows, exclusive dinner parties, seductively lit cocktail lounges, and virtue signaling charity galas—the sunny veneer of their million-dollar smiles masking the shady secrets, destructive ambitions, and endlessly shifting ethics of their town and industry.

Let’s just say I might have taken note of this portent.

The Player stars Tim Robbins as Griffin Mill, a high-level Hollywood studio exec who listens to screenwriters' movie pitches before deciding on what films will be made and which will be rejected. The story begins with Griffin in a tight spot. His position at the studio is imperiled by Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), an ambitious rival looking to seize power, while at the same time, he is being inundated by a series of anonymous postcards threatening violence and revenge. Griffin is convinced they are from a disgruntled, unproduced writer whose pitch he ignored, and after some sleuthing through the studio meeting logs, he “identifies” the writer as one David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio) and drives to the man’s Pasadena home to make amends.

Things do not go as planned. By night’s end, Griffin has murdered Kahane and fallen for his girlfriend, June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), a fetching and emotionally detached painter of dreamy, ice-blue collages. As news of the crime hits the papers the following day, the Pasadena police, led by Chief Susan Avery (Whoopi Goldberg in her best screen performance), begin cautiously cornering Hollywood big shot Griffin, who they know was the last person to see Kahane alive. Meanwhile, the studio instinctively circles the wagons around their valued executive, but Griffin knows, as do we, that their fidelity will evaporate instantly if the legal brew begins to boil.

Then, surprise, the menacing missives keep on coming. Griffin has killed the wrong man. The unhinged writer is still out there, watching his every move. Now, he must play cat-and-mouse with nearly everyone—studio competitor Larry Levy, who is gunning for his job; Chief Avery and the Pasadena police, who know a guilty entitled prick when they see one; and a still-anonymous crazed writer, whom we shockingly learn has as a predilection for rattlesnakes as well as postcards. So, what does Griffin do? Romance the hell out of June Gudmundsdottir, of course. The title of this film is The Player, after all.

Tim Robbins as Griffin Mill in *The Player*

Now, in a traditional noir, June would be a very duplicitous character, harboring a hidden agenda that causes our smitten leading man to dig his hole deeper and deeper until he is buried in moral turpitude (and dead or incarcerated), while she skates away with the ill-gotten loot. In The Player, Altman uses these expectations to throw us off track while making a deeper point about modern crimes of the heart. Here, June is content to merely shift her affections away from her deceased boyfriend onto her new paramour, the movie biz bigwig who promises an infinitely more comfortable life. All she needs to do is ignore the inconvenient fact that her new man likely murdered her old man. This femme fatale is no longer looking to manipulate ala Lady Macbeth; now, the sin is in merely looking away.

The Player deftly adheres to classic noir plot structures and casting types while freeing many characters from their time-worn crime drama formulas. For instance, studio security chief Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward, who steals every scene he’s in) fits the endearingly gruff mold of insurance investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) in Double Indemnity (1944) and police detective Oscar Grace (J.A. Preston) in Body Heat (1981), men who are slavishly dedicated to uncovering the truth, even if it points to the guilt of a close friend. But Stuckel is employed by the studio to shield someone like Griffin Mill from the consequences of their actions. He knows Griffin is lying and likely guilty from the beginning of the scandal, but here this stock character, who in another film would doggedly follow the facts through to their truthful if painful conclusion, is specifically charged with ensuring the truth does not prevail.

This upending of conventional approaches affords Altman the freedom to aim his ire at a variety of fresh targets, most obviously the Hollywood studio system with which he famously tussled for years before reviving his career with, ironically, this very film. But The Player’s narrative coup de grace comes courtesy of author/screenwriter Michael Tolkin—the film within the film in this film about film. “Habeas Corpus” is a legal drama pitched to Griffin as a potential Oscar contender featuring “no stars” and a tragic ending. Griffin sees his opportunity to neutralize Larry Levy; he knows the film will flop and decides to saddle Levy with it. Then, when it’s obvious they have a huge bomb on their hands, Griffin will swoop in, cram it with bankable actors and slap on a happy ending, effectively saving the project and reclaiming his status at the studio.

Greta Scacchi as June Gudmundsdottir in *The Player*

His gamble works. Habeas Corpus is recast with movie stars (Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis, and a horde of well-known actors), and the original depressing ending—wherein the Roberts character is executed for a crime she didn’t commit—is replaced by a machine-gun-toting Willis shooting his way through the prison to rescue her at the last possible second. And after the CEO of his studio is fired by the corporation and a witness to Kahane’s murder fails to identify him in a line-up, Griffin is given the keys to the kingdom. He is made head of the studio.

The Player was on my mind when I moved to California in early 1993, and I bought and read the book soon after landing in Los Angeles. I was so enamored that I immediately read it again; however, I was still blissfully detached from the subject matter. “That’s not me,” I thought. “I wouldn’t be like that if I was in his position.” Of course, being in Griffin’s position in any way, shape, or form was unimaginable to me at the time. But it is worth noting that I moved to California armed with my Reel Life clippings, a letter of recommendation from my former editor, and a creatively padded resume, hungry to further my career as a film critic and in the process, dive into the world of Hollywood wherever and however I might find it.

Fred Ward as Walter Stuckel (with Tim Robbins) in *The Player*

I found it. And it wasn’t long before I was frequently asking myself, “What would Griffin Mill do to save his ass in this situation?”

L.A. was difficult for me initially. Every magazine turned me down, most didn’t even respond. I was pitching myself as a writer, and the mid-level editorial Griffin Mills of greater L.A. were ghosting me. Thankfully, a friend in the Bay Area offered me a place to stay and ponder my fate, and the day after I arrived, I wandered into the nearest video store and started talking movies with the guy behind the counter. Several hours later, we decided to produce and host a television show about movies, titled Reel Life.

Dennis Willis was a local cable access television producer, and his family owned the video store in Pacifica where we met. Obviously, the man knew his movies, and I was fascinated with his perspective on the art and business of cinema. Our dialog was spirited and in sync from the start, and given his family business and television experience, producing a TV show about movies was for him almost obligatory. He quickly organized a production crew and even got a regular time slot approved before we shot a frame of footage. He knew how to write a shooting script and was a natural broadcaster with years of on-camera work under his belt. His video store gave us a huge advantage—we could mine the hundreds of VHS tapes for film clips and use the store as a (pre-internet) reference library. We were confident that we could write and deliver interesting content beyond the Siskel & Ebert format, deciding that, along with movie reviews, the show would dissect film industry trends, marketing campaigns, and entertainment news. The weekly, hour-long (with no commercials) show would be shot live to tape, which meant that, in addition to writing the script every week, we would also need to memorize it entirely before every taping.

Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts in *The Player*

You may be intuiting an enormous problem hovering over this list of positives. Besides writing my little movie critiques for a small magazine back in Kansas, I had no experience whatsoever with anything related to this endeavor. And beyond the troubling facts that I was looking at a very steep learning curve as a host and Dennis would have to produce the program with no technical assistance from me whatsoever, a scary black hole of a question loomed before us: Even if we did manage to create something approaching a real broadcast television show, what then? How would we make the leap from non-commercial to network television, with its promise of fortune and fame? Finding answers to this question would be my role. Despite having no knowledge of how to actually do it, and no choice but to make it up as I went along, I became an executive television producer. I became a Player.

I hope you’re laughing, That was a joke on me, I assure you.

Now, you may surmise that the show did experience some success, or else why would I be writing about it now? In fact, we made some good decisions for the first few years and scaled up the commercial television ladder quickly and confidently. In the Spring of 1997, we hit what looked at the time like pay dirt—the show was picked up by KGO 7, the flagship ABC station in San Francisco, slated for Sunday evenings prime-time in the Fall. Now, the word was getting around that we had bridged the gap between access and network television, and I was contacted by dozens of independent TV producers pitching ME on their programs, asking me to represent them, negotiate on their behalf, help them sell sponsors, etc. The move to ABC also boosted our access to major stars; we were considered one of the top outlets in the Bay Area for film promotion and the studios rolled out the red carpet for us. Incredibly, only a couple of years after I wandered into Dennis’s video store, I was sitting in New York with Leonardo DiCaprio discussing Titanic while throngs of his fans chanted for their hero on the street outside the hotel.

My surface parallels with Griffin Mill were compounding. I was critiquing movie plots, working with Hollywood studios, negotiating media deals, being pitched by producers, and regularly interacting with movie stars and directors. Of course, I don’t compare our low-level TV project with the high-stakes game of film production at a major studio, but functionally it was close to the same job, a basic “as above, so below” dynamic. The primary difference was in the number of zeros written on the checks. So, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that my world, like Griffin’s, soon became one of immense pressure, one where people became mere chess pieces to be strategically played for my ambition to be realized, or simply to avoid toppling the house of cards I had constructed around myself.

Dennis Willis (left) and Steve Wagner on set of *Reel Life*, 1995.

But topple it did, and fast. Indeed, the die was cast before the show even aired, due to a last-minute agreement I entered into with KGO that proved disastrous to our future. To say that I got played is an understatement. The deal took the control of sponsors out of my hands, the logic being that as a co-host and writer of the show, and also doing the majority of celebrity interviews, my time would be crunched and therefore the commercial sales effort would be far more successful if the KGO sales team handled it, with the funds then paid to us commission- free. This sounded very good at first—less work, more money! Certainly, I thought their seasoned professionals would be more effective than I had been in terms of commercial sales; how could they not be? But I neglected to understand the true motive behind their “support,” which was to starve us out until we were forced to give them control of show content and, eventually, ownership of the show itself.

Our newly titled Filmtrip premiered on KGO in October 1997 and by Christmas, the ship was barreling towards the iceberg. The irony that Titanic was the talk of the movie world while my grand facade was sinking was not lost on me then. The station was not selling our ads, our production staff was quitting, opportunistic wolves of every coat were circling, and there was no money to make any of these problems go away. And just when I needed to pull it together, be calm, cool, and collected, and become a real player, I regressed, blamed others, and played the victim. I brought out the old, predictable routines: tantrums on the set, screaming during meetings, being dismissive of suggestions, and increasing paranoia about everyone’s motives. In retrospect, it was fortunate that everything fell apart so rapidly; I scarcely had time to develop fully into the controlling, contentious, enfant terrible I was certainly becoming.

I knew our days were numbered before we even shot the first episode of our second season. Even though we continued to improve the show itself, every week brought more issues, more pressure, less money and even less hope. Inevitably, KGO canceled Filmtrip within hours of our final contracted airing. Dennis, who had maintained his integrity and clarity throughout, was dismayed by the entire affair and would only continue if we were picked up by a supportive network and compensated fairly, and that clearly wasn’t going to happen in light of the current wreckage. I felt drenched in flop sweat, and worse, I was financially helpless; as the executive producer, my world was completely tied to the show. The debts were all due, and with them came multiple threats of lawsuits against me personally. I somehow managed to avoid bankruptcy but it would be five sobering, hard-scrabble years before I found meaningful and rewarding work again.

But don’t be dismayed! Like The Player, my story has a happy ending. It should come as no surprise that it is implied in the final scene of the film:

Griffin is driving his convertible through the streets of Burbank when Larry Levy calls with a movie pitch. He puts a screenwriter on the line, and the man reveals himself as the infamous postcard writer before describing his new concept: a film about a movie executive who murders a writer and gets away with it, living happily ever after with the writer’s widow. After receiving the writer’s guarantee of this happy ending, Griffin greenlights the film and asks the writer for the title. The writer replies, “The Player.” Griffin hangs up the car phone and pulls up to his Beverly Hills mansion to meet his new wife, a very pregnant June Gudmundsdottir. Mimicking the final exchange between Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis in Habeas Corpus, June asks, “What took you so long?” Griffin answers, “Traffic was a bitch.”

Altman slaps the same mock happy ending onto every layer of his delicious but poisonous concoction. It is the ending of Habeas Corpus, the film within the film; the ending of the film Griffin agrees to make with the postcard writer; and it ends the film we are watching in real-time, The Player. Both Griffin and Hollywood get away with, and are rewarded for their crimes; the cynical, predictable sell-out Habeas Corpus is a hit, and the scheming, lying, murdering Griffin ascends to the pinnacle of show business. And what’s more, even when the wizard’s curtain is pulled back and their utter lack of substance is revealed, Hollywood and Griffin remain charming and compelling to the end.

But how can that be? Answer: Because that’s what happens in the movies!

In real life? Not so much. Not if you have a conscience.

Tim Robbins and Greta Scacchi in *The Player*

Because while Griffin evades the consequence of his crime, he learns nothing in the process. His work is void of truth, his marriage is built on a lie, and his “success” is illusory—his position brings the perception of power and prestige, but we can see that it is a moral sham.

On the other hand, the character of the writer, though hidden from view for most of the film, grows. Heretofore functioning as the antagonist (and the MacGuffin), he finds a way to channel rejection and disappointment into something approaching redemption and, in the process, becomes the true protagonist of the film. He turns life into art.

And so it is for me. As in The Player, the writer in me existed out of the frame for most of my life but ultimately enabled my growth, my healing, and my redemption. The difference is that I had to extinguish the player in me so the writer could live.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one more thing that Griffin and I share in common. Like him, I am in love with a beautiful painter of dreamy collages and so much more. She wouldn’t have liked the “player” in me, but thankfully, seems to like the writer in me. That is the happiest ending, no, beginning I could ask for. Best of all, unlike June, she can look me in the eye. And unlike Griffin, I am no longer afraid of what she will find.

Steve Wagner was co-host, writer, and executive producer of the Bay Area television programs Reel Life and Filmtrip, reviewing over one thousand films and interviewing over three hundred actors, directors, writers, and musicians. As a director of the San Francisco Art Exchange gallery, he brokered sales of many of the world’s most famous original album cover artworks, including Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. He has ghostwritten or collaborated on several published books, contributed articles on music, film, and popular culture to numerous publications, and is the author of the book All You Need is Myth: The Beatles and Gods of Rock (Waterside, 2019), a study of the 1960s music renaissance through the lens of classical mythology.