The Player Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In honor of the striking screenwriters, I wanted to write a list of my favorites, either contemporary or all-time. But I decided that it would be more respectful to not exclude any of them. Even the bad writers need recognition right now. I've tried writing screenplays, and I salute anyone who has had one produced, whether brilliant or not. Even if it weren't difficult to actually write a script, it's certainly tough to deal with the b.s. of Hollywood and the sad truth that your vision will likely not make it to the screen as devised. So, instead of concentrating on real writers, I figured I'd look at screenwriter characters, specifically those portraying the hardships of the job.

"Joe Gillis" from Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder).

I imagine there's nothing scarier for a struggling screenwriter than the thought of ending up like poor Joe Gillis (William Holden). The opening shot of Wilder's classic shows the character floating face down in a swimming pool, and immediately he's labeled "an unsuccessful screenwriter." This sets up a hopelessness for the character, and for writers in general, as the film then flashes back to one of the greatest stories of Hollywood cynicism ever made. Gillis not only represents the difficulty of making it as a screenwriter, he also shares some juicy lines about how writers aren't recognized enough by the public ("Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along."); about drastic alterations to his scripts ("The last one I wrote was about Okies in the dust bowl. You'd never know because when it reached the screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat.") and about the desperation that turns good writers into seemingly hack writers (replying to talk of his once promising talent, he says, "That was last year. This year I'm trying to make a living."). There were screenwriter characters before him, and plenty after, but Gillis will forever be the quintessential example.

I guess fake disaster movies just aren't cool enough anymore. I mean, now that our generation has lived through some whoppers (seriously, though, Americans don't even know what a real disaster looks like), we just aren't settling for volcanoes in Los Angeles. And obviously, combining true stories, which audiences love, with cataclysmic destruction presented with stunning special effects, which audiences love even more, puts dollar signs in the eyes of Hollywood studios. It reminds me of Peter Gallagher in The Player pitching a straight-from-the-headlines movie about a horrible mudslide. "Triumph over tragedy," he explains, simply.

So Billy Ray, the writer-director who co-scripted that volcano in Los Angeles movie (Volcano), is currently focusing on true stories of real disasters. First, he tackled 9/11 by writing a script based on the book 102 Minutes, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn (I'm not sure what the status is on that project). And now he's about to take on Hurricane Katrina for a film he'll write and direct, called Hurricane Season. Based on Franklin Martin's documentary Walking on Dead Fish, the film will follow a Louisiana high school football team in the aftermath of the storm. Universal, the studio involved in the project, must have gold bars in their eyes, since adding a sports element to the true story/disaster combo (though Ray could avoid showing any hurricane action) should attract an even bigger audience.

Recent reports indicate that David Cronenberg will follow up A History of Violence - arguably his most well-received picture to date - by making his first ever film on American turf. The project is called Maps to the Stars, and is being described as "darkly comic drama about Hollywood excess and intrigue." Hold off on that "Boy, that sounds just like..." reaction for a second, though, because Cronenberg is way ahead of you: "It is not," he says, "a satire like The Player." Just so you know.

Since Cronenberg has actually never worked in Hollywood before, he'll be relying heavily on the film's screenplay (by Bruce Wagner, who wrote Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills and I'm Losing You, which Cronenberg executive produced) for "a genuine look at Hollywood culture." Despite taking aim at an incredibly easy target, the director insists that he "won't fall back on some cliches or simplistic sloganeering, because the culture and what it reveals about Western culture and the rest of the world is very complex." Jeez, alright already. The man is clarifying so much before he even gets started that even he's sounding a little worried.

Cronenberg will steel himself for the border crossing and start shooting in LA in the fall.

Along with Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, King Vidor, and Clarence Brown, Robert Altman holds the dubious record for most best director Oscar nominations without a win: all five men have been "just happy to be here" five times. Now, though, Altman, whose nominations have been for MASH, The Player, Nashville, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park, is going to get his well-deserved statuette, even if it is just honorary.

It's hard to overstate what Altman has meant to American movies. Always unconventional, his improvisational techniques, innovative use of sound, long takes, and broad, rambling stories have, over the years, given Hollywood entirely new ways too look at filmmaking. Though they can never like the man enough to just vote for him already, Academy members decided Altman deserves a lifetime award because of his "innovation, his redefinition of genres, his invention of new ways of using the film medium and his reinvigoration of old ones." Amen.

I think it's safe to assume that Altman will not be spending the next two months carefully revising his acceptance speech. Whatever he says, we'll get to hear it on March 5, during the thirteen hour Oscar ceremony.