Word: altmans
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...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...
...fondness of actors for Altman is legendary. Unlike directors who treat performers like two-year-olds -- bothersome, silly, not entirely rational -- Altman genuinely encourages them to help invent the film, not just do as he says. "I collaborate with everybody," Altman says, "but mostly the actors. You could point out any really good thing that happened in any of my films ((and ask)), 'Whose idea is that?' ((and)) it is almost invariably somebody else's. And I don't even know whose...
...course, writers tend not to share Altman's easy, fungible attitude toward dialogue. And as in almost all things, he remains blithely impolitic in his regard for the screenwriting craft. "I get a lot of flack from writers. But I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing -- I mean, I think it's blueprinting." On Tanner, fortunately, because the story zigged and zagged according to actual events and incorporated real political figures, the writing was necessarily quick, sketchy, Altmanesque. "What Bob makes is a kind of visual jazz," says Trudeau, "and I thought of myself as providing...