Here’s the Deal: ‘Player’ Plays Games With Films : Producers, Studio Execs Not the Same Animal

Peter Rainer’s appreciation piece on “The Player” (Film Comment, “Here’s the Deal: ‘The Player’ Takes Hollywood Genre One Step Beyond,” Calendar, April 19) is wonderfully perceptive. “It’s the ultimate Hollywood movie because it seems to be about not only Hollywood but itself,” Rainer comments. Perfect.

The main plot line revolves around a character named Griffin Mill, whom Rainer initially--and correctly--refers to as “the studio executive played by Tim Robbins.” Mill is “unnerved when murder complicates his own plot line,” writes Rainer. His paranoia is complete when the studio head brings on yet another executive (Peter Gallagher) whom Mill believes is after his job.

Up to that point, Rainer’s overview is “right on.” Then, suddenly, in almost jump-cut fashion, he incorrectly changes Mill’s profession, i.e.:

“With new-style producers like Mill, the joke is that they have no image, no contours.

“What need is there for a producer with a strong, fully formed personality when he can’t act on his riskiest intuitions? The movies are not really made to satisfy people, they’re made to satisfy a checklist of demographic pre-sale requirements.

“They’ve caught devastatingly well how, in order to score in the new Hollywood, screenwriters have glommed onto the producers’ market-research attitudes while the producers, in their most expansive moments, fancy themselves creators-artists.”

It is almost as if, in the middle of his article, Rainer has “bought into” the very mise-en-scene that Altman has been satirizing! He has made Griffin Mill a producer instead of the studio executive that Altman is lacerating.

There isn’t a producer in town who hasn’t had to take one of those horrendous pitch meetings with the Mills of the world. Indeed, Altman gives us a specific example of this. In a scene wherein the producer (Dean Stockwell) and his writer-director have to pitch, Altman is at his satiric best in tapping into the horror of the pitch meeting.

Further, with visual and aural resonance, he strikes the chord of remembrance for all producers who have gone through this filmic ritual.

Far too many good films are vacated by this mindless game. The terrible irony, in point of fact, is that “The Player” itself apparently went through many sessions of this danse macabre-- before some Griffin Mill said yes.

The producer is the genesis--the fulcrum that charges, initiates most productions. Stanley Kramer (“High Noon” and “Judgment at Nurenberg”) possibly stated it best: “The producer is the man with the dream.”

It should be stated that there are many fine studio executives. But we are not they and they, most assuredly, are not us.