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Books

'Player' is back in full glory

Don't let the sequel part scare you. Michael Tolkin's Hollywood satire isn't rooted in the past.

By DAVID WALTON
Published September 8, 2006

On the face of it, The Return of the Player sounds like a bad idea. Michael Tolkin's 1988 Hollywood satire The Player, in which a film producer murders a scriptwriter and gets away with it, was deliciously timely and funny and, with Tolkin's script, made a great Robert Altman film. But satire dates swiftly, and The Player lives in a decade now past.

But not so, it turns out. It's a happy surprise to find that The Return of the Player, with its tiredest of sequel titles, is lively and freshly biting. Here, Tolkin's point of departure is the very failure of Hollywood - which "cracked the story" the same way science cracked the atom - to salve today's loneliness and isolation.

Griffin Mill, now 52, supports an ex-wife, his trophy second wife and three demanding and troublesome children, and is stuck in his groove as a successful, middling rich film executive. Or, as Tolkin puts it in his opening sentence, "Griffin Mill was broke, he was down to his last six million dollars." He is also impotent and allergic to Viagra.

Desperate to get out of his rut, Griffin decides to gamble his last chunk of liquidity - $750,000 - on an attention-getting donation to the exclusive private school attended by his son and the son of Phil Ginsberg, the powerful, semi-openly gay recording-film-media mogul.

Ginsberg is stuck in his own rut, at $750-million, and longs to join the really big money, at $4-billion.

"With that kind of money all the boarders disappear," he tells Griffin, "you never flash a passport, your bags are never searched. There's a beautiful silence around you. Everyone smiles, because they know you have a billion. I've got seven hundred and fifty million dollars."

Ginsberg hires Griffin to sit in a room and come up with a new idea - or rather, entices him to leave his studio job and sit in an empty room with no phone or computer, and no salary, until he comes up with something that will make money.

"Look for an opportunity," says Ginsberg's co-investor, the German Gunther Hitt, who with $10-billion can buy so much privacy that no one has ever heard of him. "You're the man who understands story. The MBAs are useless now, and most of the big ideas have been taken."

The Return of the Player is classic satire, with characters like Rabbi Cyndee and Gregory Peck Swaine, the failure-prone son of a famous director, who will sometimes run a hair dryer near the phone and say he's on a private jet. There's also a pair of "ethical hedonists," references to "the military entertainment complex," and a lengthy drop-in by former President Bill Clinton, who serves as something of a chorus for the novel. And my favorite, the money hug: "solid grip on each other's shoulders, but back arched away so they can look each other in the eye, equality, fraternity, and lots and lots of cash."

Satire is a thing of its time, and of the moment, and The Return of the Player, with its gimlet eye on today's spiritual weariness and cash frenzy, is very much a novel of this time and this moment.

Reviewer David Walton, a writer who lives in Pittsburgh, is a frequent contributor to the St. Petersburg Times' book pages.

[Last modified September 7, 2006, 11:45:02]