The Player and the American Film Industry The Player directed by Robert Altman critiques the business of Hollywood through use of satire. The antihero of the film, a Hollywood studio executive, is dragged through the dark underside of Hollywood and accidentally murders an innocent writer but in the end still remains on top. The director makes some interesting cinematic decisions in this film which adds to a sense of corruption. The opening tracking shot gives us a good introduction to the environment and characters in the film. Through the colorful costumes and sets, Altman displays the glory and wealth involved with being a film executive. The tracking shot switches between characters and foreshadows the major conflict of the film by putting emphasis on a post card delivered to Griffin Mills reading “Your Hollywood is dead!”. The several postcards …show more content…
This is shown by how the fictional film Habeas Corpus is pitched as a movie with no well known American actors and a tragic ending, but when the film is finished it stars Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts and has a typical happy ending. When the character Bonnie talks to the screenwriter who had pitched the film about how it had strayed from his original vision, he responds by saying that the film would sell better this way. So the Hollywood presented in The Player is reflective of Hollywood in the real world, in a sense that film is a unique kind of art that can’t hold integrity because it is something that must be marketed and sold to a massive audience in order to be successful and make it’s creators rich. It is interesting to me that the textbook describes the marketing of The Player as using high concept, describing it as a “kind of a psychic political thriller with a heart”(page 48), to sell the film which is criticizing the promotion and marketing of films in a comedic