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Its studio execs and screenwriters and movie stars are imperially self-enclosed. “The Player” is an Altman party without the party hats. It’s about how insanely difficult it has become for movie artists to get into the position to make a movie as good as “The Player.”Īltman’s outsider-insider status, buffed and beveled to a fine point through years of Hollywood exile, is the perfect weapon for the job.
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Is it any surprise, then, that “The Player” up-ends the Hollywood movie genre in the process of fulfilling it? It’s the ultimate Hollywood movie because it seems to be about not only Hollywood but itself. Miller” was a Western with a core of poetic longing “The Long Goodbye” was an updated Raymond Chandler private-eye thriller with a forlorn, galumphing Philip Marlowe at its center. “MASH” was a war movie for counterculture hipsters “McCabe and Mrs. If you had to construct the ultimate Hollywood movie, would it include a scene in which a couple of screenwriters pitch a project that’s a cross between “Pretty Woman” and “Out of Africa”? Would your ear be tickled by a lexicon of insider lingo, or a whisper of roman a clef ? Would famous movie celebrities pop up playing themselves as famous celebrities? Would it be about killings-particularly box-office killings?Īll this is in Robert Altman’s “The Player.” In fact, a complete catalogue of Hollywood-movie paraphernalia is on view, complete with movie-colony in-jokes for the “knowing.” (Those “Pretty Woman"/"Out of Africa” pitchsters are played by Patricia Resnick and Joan Tewksbury, both of whom have written movies for Altman.)īut Altman has never been content merely to work within a genre when he could radicalize it instead.