Will I love The Player?

Tolkin doesn’t hit you with belly laughs so much as tickle the upper corners of your mind with his knowing take on the mores and follies of the Hollywood of the late 1980s. (Of special interest to me, as that’s the moment I arrived there to begin my own TV and film career.) The trenchant satire is exemplified by the crime at its center: studio exec Griffin Mill, badgered by threats from some anonymous screenwriter he’s mistreated, focuses his attention on a different C-list scribe and winds up strangling him to death. Get it? In a business full of writer-killing… show more.

Screenwriter/director Michael Tolkin writes of a world that he knows very well. His protagonist, a successful and ambitious film studio executive, makes promises he has no intention of keeping. When he does this to a writer who has pitched him a story and to whom he has promised to get back with some sort of answer and doesn’t, the writer threatens his life. Suspenseful, dark, and funny in its own troubling way.