Great movie. Bought that one on VHS sight unseen from a local video store that was going under during their liquidation sale. I was a freshman in high school and didn't know much about Altman other than he was the guy who did the movie M.A.S.H. and Short Cuts. I liked those two so I figured the $1.99 was worth it. Holy shit. I watched it 30 times over the next couple of years. It's so rich with content and such an inversion of the typical narrative structure where the main character is the slimiest snake out of a film filled with slimy snakes. Brion James with a great little performance (always nice). I had a huge crush on Cynthia Stevenson which made what happens to her more impactful. Fred ward killing it. D'Onofrio as a Hollywood writer stereotype who can only get a meeting when one of the exec's feels threatened. I'm sure there is A LOT of inside baseball type of commentary going on in this film that I just don't understand, but damn... so much happening in this one. I love it. As you are a guy who has been in the Hollywood trenches for a good while now, I am curious about your thoughts on this film.
It's screamingly inside baseball. A lot of the shit they talk about is still entirely spot on. I also recommend Swimming with Sharks. George Huang, having met Robert Rodriguez on his way up, quit his job as an assistant and put it together. There's a great scene in which Frank Whaley is talking to a bunch of other assistants about meeting with Shelley Winters and asking her to screentest at which point she whips out an Oscar. Then he continues and she whips out another Oscar. One of the assistants says "Who's Shelly Winter?" I know a young producer who was sitting down at a meeting with a bunch of other young producers and one of them was bitching about old, has-been screenwriters that have no place taking meetings, and that he had to meet with this "milly guy" that day. "Milly guy?" "Yeah, jim... joe... milly something." "John Milius?" "Yeah, him."
I love Swimming With Sharks. I like that it goes so far beyond the complaints of a person stuck in an abusive working relationship with their employer. It really gets to the heart of the problem, which is the abuse cycle that is so central to human psychology. And it does it in a fairly even-handed way, considering how much venom Huang seems to have for Joel Silver. It's a much more nuanced take on that kind of thing than most people would be able to produce. Also Huang's commnets about what Benico Del Toro was trying to do with his character and what he eventually did do with his role in The Usual Suspects -- funny shit. "John Milius?" "Yeah, him." Goddamn. That would be hilarious if those people weren't in charge of so much money (it still kind of is in a horrible way). That story reminds me a bit of the young well connected guy in The Player who decided that he wanted to be a producer. So he went to a meeting and spent the whole time flipping through headshots of all the starlets, sorting out the ones he wanted to fuck. Have you read Zeroville?I know a young producer who was sitting down at a meeting with a bunch of other young producers and one of them was bitching about old, has-been screenwriters that have no place taking meetings, and that he had to meet with this "milly guy" that day. "Milly guy?" "Yeah, jim... joe... milly something."