The Player's industry satire stings, now more than ever
In the wake of The Studio, the film that introduced Griffin Mill feels even more prescient.
Photo: Fine Line Features
The Studio‘s Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) swaggers into the first episode of the Apple TV+ series like a New Hollywood mover and shaker, a Robert Evans caricature defined by his ’70s bravado and turtleneck-with-suit swinger style. The CEO passes the studio head torch to Seth Rogen’s Matt Remick, who embodies yet constantly fails to live up to the idealized “artists first” mentality that defines that mythologized era in filmmaking. This inevitable, repeated, farcical failure—as wrapped up in the hard truths of the business as it is in Remick’s insatiable need to be liked by the directors and movie stars he keeps screwing over—lends the hypermodern industry crisis of The Studio a simple, sweet, slapstick mania. But a primary source for the series, and the direct source for Hollywood asshole Griffin Mill, satirizes moviemaking with a more timeless bitterness: Robert Altman‘s 1992 comedy The Player.
The original Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), The Player himself, is both studio executive and caricature. Like Matt Remick, he traipses around Los Angeles in expensive double-breasted suits, introducing himself over and over again to celebrities making cameos as themselves, all of whom seem to hate him. He orders endless varieties of fancy water, and never sticks around long enough to sip them. He hears vapid pitch after vapid pitch from screenwriters desperate to play the game, and treats them like flies buzzing in his ear. This is the biggest difference between these projects: The Studio follows an executive obsessed with a dying breed of filmmaker, while The Player follows a self-obsessed executive who only cares about filmmakers when one finally threatens to kill him.
These threats, sent in via anonymous postcards, are the only things adding a bit of movie magic to Mill’s studio—a glorified office park overrun by fax machines and wall-mounted toy basketball hoops. More concerned with backstabbing work politics, looking busy, and other signifiers of the increased corporatization of the industry, The Player only begins feeling “like a movie” when the folks that write them snap. This dramatic ploy, which writer Michael Tolkin adapts from his own (darker) novel, fits into all the other self-aware pieces of filmmaking Robert Altman deploys to make Griffin Mill’s sordid story resemble one of the feel-bad noirs whose posters ornament his walls. As Mill falls down the rabbit hole of his own personal crime flick—filled with murder, sex, cops, and schemes—the story of a changed Hollywood starts to look a lot like a story told by old Hollywood.
Altman had spent a decade out of favor with Hollywood after his Popeye adaptation flopped back in 1980. His return was angry, yet run through with the affection for film that The Studio mostly just namechecks. Some of that is simply a matter of tone. Rogen and team’s series uses long tracking shots to instill a panicky energy into its softer, sillier, quote-tweet dunk of the film world. Each episode becomes an extended walk-and-talk nightmare, more in line with workplace comedies than film genres (true even of the voiceover-heavy Chinatown riff “The Missing Reel”). The choice to lean on this showy technique—itself glaringly self-referential in the unbroken-take episode “The Oner”—is a direct reference to the opening eight-minute oner of The Player, which features a character meta-griping about the quick-cut style taking over the industry and lamenting the bygone days of elaborately planned shots like that in Orson Welles’ Touch Of Evil.