'The Player' & 'Day For Night'

Two "films within films."

Francois Truffaut's Day for Night follows the filming of a French movie. All the small things that happen from having to pick out a gun to dealing with boyfriends on the set and the very occassional meltdown.

I do admit that this film really opened my eyes as to the grand production that a film is. You've got hundreds of people doing hundreds of jobs and you, as the director, have to trust those people to do it well. To make the right decisions. To not be lazy. To not completely flake out.

That's tough because doing these type of jobs tend to attract flaky people and there's a massive opportunity to flake out. Left to your own devices, there's time and opportunity to fall off and possibly put the production jeopardy. I think this probably happens all the time. Some movies don't happen. Others fall behind. Others forge ahead and get the film done.

The Player is set amongst the movers and shakers of the movie world, directed by Robert Altman and all of his background conversations and noise. Hopefully this is the last Altman film on the list.

It stars Tim Robbins as a studio exec who is getting threatening postcards from a supposed screenwriter he rebuffed. In trying to find out who this person is, he winds up killing the wrong writer and courting that writer's girlfriend. All the while, he's trying to get away with the murder, keep his job and do something with his existing girlfriend.

It's supposedly filled with all this insider crap and I totally think all of this stuff actually happens: Running into Burt Reynolds at breakfast, being kinda blown off by John Cusack, the constant backstabbing, the constant pitches and this internal struggle to make somet hing "important" and something that sells.

Well, Robbins' stalker sticks around. He calls Robbins with a movie pitch about a movie exec who kills a writer, marries his girlfriend, gets away with murder and they do a movie about it.

As I watched this film and saw the constant parade of actual celebrities playing themselves (Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Reynolds, Cusack), I wondered if they realized how this movie exec looked just like their friend Tim Robbins.

In fact, where was Robbins during this whole film. Wouldn't it have been super post-modern had they had Robbin's Griffin Mill get the actor Tim Robbins to be in a film?