Word: altmans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Player is both very good and a quintessential Altman movie -- meaning smart, hip, satirical, charming, ironic but not callow, rich with telling offhand incident. "What's unique about The Player," says Trudeau, "is that he brings all this signature observational detail to a picture that Hollywood completely understands. In many ways it's a very traditional Hollywood movie, but he's given up nothing. That's why people are so astonished." It is, in a word, crypto-conventional, self-consciously including all the obligatory elements of commercial moviemaking -- stars, violence, unclothed women, lockstep plotting -- but messing with them. The really...
...film's clean, hard edge and people-playing-themselves verisimilitude come, Altman says, from his collaboration with Trudeau. Without Tanner, Altman says, "I don't think I could have made this film." It probably also helped that he stopped drinking, though Altman bridles at the suggestion. "I stopped drinking for health reasons. I've never jeopardized anything by either the drinking or the gambling" -- he plays poker, backgammon and the horses -- "or the pot smoking. I do smoke pot. I sit on the front porch like a grandpa and try to enjoy the weather...
...satisfying thriller -- and besides, after reading magazines like Vanity Fair and ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY and watching shows like Entertainment Tonight, ordinary moviegoers are surprisingly fluent in the nuts and bolts of show business. Indeed, ET's Leeza Gibbons appears in The Player as her chirpy self, delivering lines written at Altman's behest by a real ET writer. "Why should I try to imitate somebody who does that?" explains the director. "I mean, he writes it as bad as it's going to be written...
...movie makes knowing fun of all sorts of Hollywood types, but the satire never seems heartless. "Everything that's in there that's mean is about me," Altman says. "I mean, I talk like those guys. I get on the phone and I make those pitches the same way. I cannot tell you how many times I've said ((about a proposed film)), 'Well, it's kind of like Nashville, it's a Nashville kind of structure.' The film does not escape its own satire. We didn't let anybody off the hook...
Indeed not. As casting began, Altman knew he needed someone to play a movie star playing a smirky action-adventure hero, somebody else to play a movie star playing a humorless ingenue -- a Bruce Willis type and, say, a Julia Roberts type. He asked Willis and Roberts. "They were the first people we chose. I was going to start going from there -- I never dreamed we'd get both of them." He also got Burt Reynolds, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger, Cher and a horde of other six- and seven-figure actors to play themselves for a few hundred dollars apiece...