The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Altman · a film · 1992 · 124 minutes · written by Michael Tolkin from his novel · Fine Line Features
Mode
Hollywood satire built on a murder thriller; a film about a studio that is shaped as one of its products
Mythos
The crime unpunished; the pursuer never seen who proposes a bargain, not justice; the story that ends by pitching itself; the neorealist ideal set beside the industry that cannot use it
Phase
One line in four movements: the postcards and the hunt for the writer; the killing in Pasadena and its aftermath; the police, June, Habeas Corpus and Larry Levy; the coda a year on, the pitch and the happy ending
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 124 minutes, one theatrical cut; an opening continuous take of about eight minutes; overlapping sound; stars by the dozen appearing as themselves; score by Thomas Newman
Register
Cool, quick and amused; dread once, in a parking lot at night; parody in the coda, pitched to curdle
Scale
One studio, one executive, one killing, and an industry seen from inside one class
Governing Proposition
A studio executive who hears pitches for a living receives threatening postcards from a writer he never called back, kills the wrong writer in a parking lot, and is never punished: he is promoted, marries the dead man’s girlfriend, and in the last minutes is pitched his own story by the man who sent the postcards, which he buys on condition of a happy ending. The wager of the film is that an industry whose product is story replaces morality with the requirements of the product, and that the film can show it by becoming the product, given the ending it indicts.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens with one continuous take of about eight minutes, roving through a working studio lot. It passes pitches in offices, gossip on the walkways, and a conversation about the long opening shots of other films, held while the camera makes one. Nothing in it is a plot point and everything in it is the world the plot will run through: a place where stories are bought and sold in passing, under other conversations. The take announces the film’s method from its first minute. The frame comments on itself, and the commentary is part of the entertainment.
Fine Line Features released the film in the United States in April 1992; in May it played in competition at Cannes, where Robert Altman won Best Director and Tim Robbins Best Actor. Michael Tolkin wrote the screenplay from his own novel of 1988, and it drew three Academy Award nominations, for direction, adapted screenplay and editing. David Brown, Michael Tolkin and Nick Wechsler produced; Jean Lépine photographed it, Geraldine Peroni edited it, Stephen Altman designed it, and Thomas Newman wrote the score. It was Altman’s return to the studio world after a decade on small and theatrical projects, made on a modest budget, as a satire of the people he needed.
Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a studio executive whose work is to hear pitches and turn most of them down. He has begun to receive postcards, unsigned and threatening, from a writer he never called back. The postcards are the engine: they send Mill looking for the writer, and he guesses at David Kahane, played by Vincent D’Onofrio. At the studio another fear is gathering. Larry Levy, played by Peter Gallagher, has arrived as a rival, and Mill feels the next executive behind him. The industry’s own anxiety, the fear of being replaced, is set beside the fear of a stranger with a pen.
Movement II
Mill finds Kahane at a screening of Bicycle Thieves in Pasadena. They go to a bar and talk. In the parking lot afterwards there is a scuffle, and Mill kills him: the struggle ends with Kahane face down in a few inches of water, drowned. The scene is played at night, without the film’s usual quickness, and Peroni cuts it as a graceless struggle. It is the one moment of real terror in the film, and its clumsiness is what makes it frightening: a man who deals in stories does a murder badly.
The setting is chosen. Behind the parking lot a cinema has been showing De Sica’s film, the neorealist ideal of what cinema might be, and in front of it a man from the industry that cannot use that ideal kills a writer. The film does not press the point; it lets the two stand beside each other. Mill goes back to his life. The figure the film is building is the old story of crime and punishment turned over: he has killed, he will be suspected, and instead of confession he will be given promotion, a wife and a child.
Then a postcard arrives. The writer was never Kahane. The killing was pointless, and Mill’s guilt is unarguable, since he killed a man who had done nothing to him. This is the hinge of the film, and it changes what the pursuit is. The pursuer is now a voice and a stack of cards, never seen, who knows what Mill has done. Mill takes up with June Gudmundsdottir, played by Greta Scacchi, a painter and Kahane’s girlfriend, and the romance, held at a distance, begins in the shadow of the man he killed.
Movement III
Two detectives take the case: Avery, played by Whoopi Goldberg, and DeLongpre, played by Lyle Lovett. They suspect Mill and play with him, and the station-house scenes run broad, with jokes that belong to a looser comedy than the rest of the film. A witness is brought to a lineup to identify the man seen in Pasadena, and cannot pick him out. The law is present, it suspects the right man, and it is powerless; the film lets its inquiry trail away rather than close. These scenes, like the detectives’ banter, run past their point, and the film would lose little without some of them.
Around the inquiry the studio carries on. Lunches and a benefit fill with stars appearing as themselves, several dozen of them, and their presence is the satire’s fabric: the industry walks through its own fiction as its own chorus, and lends the story its reality. Altman’s overlapping sound keeps pitches and gossip running under every scene, so that the murder becomes one more conversation in a field of half-heard deals. Many of the cameos are interchangeable, and the pleasure of recognising faces is part of what the film offers; it is also part of what dates it.
Mill takes June to a desert resort, with mud baths and a pool at night, and the film briefly grows cold and sensuous. Her paintings set art beside the commerce of his world, as the screening in Pasadena set De Sica beside the studio’s slate. The romance runs on a seriousness the satire elsewhere refuses, and the film does not fully absorb it; Scacchi has to supply a mystery the script withholds. Meanwhile Newman’s score keeps a low hum of unease under the comedy, the reminder that the thriller is still running beneath the satire.
Movement IV
Two men pitch Mill a film called Habeas Corpus: Tom Oakley, a writer played by Richard E. Grant, and Andy Civella, played by Dean Stockwell. It is a grim courtroom story, with no stars, about an innocent woman sent to the gas chamber. Mill sees a use for it. He sets Levy up to champion the script, expecting it to fail and take his rival with it. The pitch is a parody exact enough to be plausible, and the scheme is the industry’s ordinary politics: a story chosen not for what it says but for whom it will ruin.
Bonnie Sherow, the story editor, played by Cynthia Stevenson, is the one person in the film who says what the film knows. She has two scenes in the studio lot, and on return they rhyme. In the coda she objects to what has been done to Habeas Corpus, and she is fired. The industry keeps the one voice of conscience only as long as it says nothing, and the film makes her the measure of what everyone else has accepted.
A year on, Habeas Corpus has been recut with stars and is released with its ending reversed: Bruce Willis bursts into the execution chamber and saves Julia Roberts from the gas. The grim, starless script has become what the market wanted. The film shows its whole argument in miniature here, and shows it to the viewer before it is done to Mill: an innocent woman’s execution turned into a rescue by the requirements of the product. The parody is broad, and it is the key to everything that follows.
Movement V
Mill now runs the studio. He takes a telephone call from the man who sent the postcards, who pitches him a story: an executive murders a writer and gets away with it, and the story is called The Player. Mill buys it, on condition that it has a happy ending. The pursuer has come to the end of his pursuit and proposes not justice but a deal, and the deal is the film the audience has just watched. Mill drives home to June, pregnant, among roses, and the embrace is pitched to curdle. The film has given its hero exactly the reversed ending that Habeas Corpus received.
Thirty-four years on, the film survives whole in its one theatrical cut and has been seen continuously, in repertory, on television, on every home format and in the study of its director. It opened Altman’s late renewal, from Short Cuts (8.2) to Gosford Park (2001), and remains the reference point for Hollywood satire in film and television. Its surface is fixed to its moment: the stars of the early 1990s, the car phones and fax machines, the studio politics of the year it was made. Its structure, an industry absorbing a crime into a product, has not aged. The questions it leaves stay open: whether it is satire or a demonstration of its own complicity, made inside the industry with that industry’s consent.
The film stands in Tier III, and what holds it there is plain. Its register refuses height, and its few summits are command or dread; its world is one industry and one class; its archetypes are handled with irony more than inhabited; its truth was told by Hollywood before it, in Sunset Boulevard (8.5) above all; and its swerve delivers the pleasures it mocks. Beside Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (8.5) and Nashville (8.5) it is the colder and narrower film. Against that stand a form that is the pitch it ends on, one law of conversion from farce to murder, and a making that bears weight from the first take to the last call.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and on Michael Tolkin’s script, and the spine resists subtraction. The postcards are required to send Griffin Mill to David Kahane, and their continuing after the killing is the hinge that makes the murder pointless and the guilt unarguable. Habeas Corpus is required twice, as Mill’s weapon against Larry Levy and as the coda’s proof that the industry reverses any ending. Bonnie Sherow is required as the one person who says what the film knows, and is fired for it; the last pitch closes the loop. What gives is texture: many cameos at lunch and at the benefit are interchangeable, the detectives’ scenes run past their point, and the desert resort is extended for atmosphere. The accretion is permitted more often than compelled.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in an industry whose product is story, morality is replaced by the requirements of the product, so that a murder by an executive is absorbed by the same machinery that turns an innocent woman’s execution into a rescue, and the audience that wants the happy ending is the market for the crime’s reward. The film shows this through form as well as statement: the coda gives Mill the same reversed ending that Habeas Corpus receives, so that the truth is done to the story the viewer is watching. Beside it stand smaller truths of a working world: the writer as the despised and necessary term, the executive’s fear of the next executive. What holds the figure: Hollywood films had told this truth before, and the film’s cynicism is partly a mood it enjoys.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Elevation is not the film’s register, which is cool, quick and amused; when it rises it rises as dread or as virtuosity. The opening take, roving through the studio lot past pitches and gossip, is a lift of pure command. The killing in the Pasadena parking lot at night, a struggle that ends face down in a few inches of water, is the one scene of real terror, and its clumsiness is what frightens. The desert resort, its mud baths and night pool, gives a brief cold sensuousness, and Thomas Newman’s score keeps a low hum of unease under the comedy. What holds the axis among the lowest is frequency: the middle of the film is procedure and lunch, and much of what lifts is admiration of the making rather than feeling.
Score: 6.8 / 10
The patterns are built into the plot, not only named. The old story of crime and punishment is turned over: Mill kills, is suspected, and instead of confession receives promotion, a wife and a child. The pursuer who is never seen, a voice and a stack of postcards, is a nemesis who at the end proposes not justice but a deal, and the deal is the film: a devil’s bargain struck by telephone. The story that ends by pitching itself is load-bearing in the coda, and the killing behind a screening of Bicycle Thieves sets the neorealist ideal of cinema beside an industry that cannot use it. What holds the figure: the archetypes are handled with irony more than inhabited, Mill stays a type, and the frame of Hollywood as Babylon is inherited and drawn in quick strokes.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The inheritance is the Hollywood film about Hollywood, from Sunset Boulevard (1950) through The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) to The Last Tycoon (1976), and Altman’s own practice of taking a genre apart from inside, The Long Goodbye (1973) above all, with the overlapping sound and roving camera he had used since M*A*S*H (1970). The turns are real: a thriller whose machinery is bought and sold inside its own story, so that its happy ending is at once delivered and indicted; stars by the dozen as themselves, the industry made its own chorus; an opening shot that discusses the opening shots it quotes. The stake was real, a return to the studio world after a decade of small and theatrical projects, on a modest budget. What holds it: reflexive genre play was in the air of its decade, and the film delivers the pleasures it mocks.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses its central knowledge, that the industry’s form swallows any content, this film’s story included. The film is shaped as the thing it describes: it is the pitch it ends on, a story about an executive who kills a writer and gets away with it, given the happy ending he demands. Habeas Corpus is the same demonstration in small, and its reversal tells the viewer what is being done to Mill’s story as it happens. The opening take, talking about long takes while being one, makes the frame a commentary on itself from the first minute, and the overlapping sound turns the studio into a field of half-heard deals in which a murder is one more conversation. What holds it: the thriller of the middle hour runs on conventional grammar, filled rather than turned.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Thirty-four years of evidence, and the questions have stayed open: whether the film is a satire of Hollywood or a demonstration of its own complicity, since Altman’s return was made inside the industry it mocks and with that industry’s stars; whether the closing loop condemns Mill, the audience or the film itself; how far the cameos are critique and how far a party. It is read beside the late career it opened. On return the half-heard talk and the background of the long take reward attention, and the rhymes tighten: the pitch at the start and the pitch at the end, Bonnie’s two scenes in the lot. What holds it: the satire’s point is legible at once, the critical literature is smaller than for Altman’s greatest films, and much of the return is to texture and to faces.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the film showed that a reflexive satire of the industry, built on a genre spine and a cast of stars playing themselves, could be a popular film, and it made the long opening take a declared signature that later films answered. It perfected a mode more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes in 1992; three Academy Award nominations, for direction, adapted screenplay and editing; a commercial success modest in figures and large for its kind; the start of Altman’s late renewal, from Short Cuts (8.2) to Gosford Park (2001); and a lasting place as the reference point for Hollywood satire in film and television. The redirection is real within its subject and narrow beyond it.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty-four years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: one theatrical cut, nothing lost, and restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous and steady, in repertory, on television and on every home format, in teaching and in the study of its director, though it is not the widest a film can have. The surface is charged, and this is the satire’s cost: the film is fixed to Hollywood at the start of the 1990s, its stars, its executives’ cars and car phones, its fax machines and the studio politics of the moment, and the first audience’s pleasure in recognising faces thins as those faces pass. The structure beneath, an industry absorbing a crime into a product, has not aged.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. The opening take is choreographed through a working lot with a dozen speaking parts and exact timing; Altman’s overlapping sound keeps pitches and gossip running under the plot; Jean Lépine’s camera zooms and drifts; Geraldine Peroni’s cutting lets the killing play as a graceless struggle and the coda snap. Tolkin’s dialogue is dry and quick, the pitches parodies exact enough to be plausible. Tim Robbins holds the film as Mill, charming, blank and frightened by turns, without a single confession, and Richard E. Grant, Dean Stockwell, Peter Gallagher, Fred Ward and Cynthia Stevenson are exact in small roles. What holds it: June is underwritten and Greta Scacchi must supply the mystery, the detectives are played broad, and some cameo traffic is clutter.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the rescue in Habeas Corpus, Bruce Willis bursting in to save Julia Roberts from the gas chamber, a broad parody of the happy ending; and the killing in the Pasadena lot, a man drowned in a puddle. One law governs both: every event in this world is material for a story, and the story will be given the ending the market wants. The killing becomes a pitch; the execution becomes a rescue; the lunch, the lineup, the benefit and the hot tub obey the same law of conversion, across a range from farce to murder. What holds it: the detectives’ comedy belongs to a broader film, and the romance with June runs on a seriousness the satire does not otherwise permit and does not fully absorb.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged on what a film of 124 minutes holds. The industry is held whole: executives, writers, story editors, security, stars, the pitch, the test screening and the recut. Consciousness is Mill’s, seen from outside but steadily, in fear and calculation. The law enters as the police and a lineup; love and sex in June, held at a distance; art against commerce in her paintings and in Bicycle Thieves against the studio’s slate. They are integrated, murder, career and romance in one movement. What holds the axis lowest: everything is held inside one industry and one class; labour beyond the studio, the city beyond the hills, history, the natural order and the sacred barely enter; and June’s and Kahane’s inner lives are withheld. A narrow world, held tightly.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.4, then The Made at 8.2 and The Living Form at 8.1. A film whole in its one theatrical cut and continuously seen for thirty-four years, its structure unaged under a dated surface; a making that bears weight, in the opening take, the overlapping sound, the cutting of the killing and Robbins’s Mill; and a form that is the pitch it ends on, so that the story is given the happy ending it indicts.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the industry held whole and integrated with murder and romance, but one industry and one class, with labour beyond the studio, the city, history, the natural order and the sacred barely entering. Then The Sublime at 6.8, a cool and amused register whose heights, the opening take and the killing, are few by design and admired more than felt; and The Archetypal Deep at 7.5, the crime unpunished and the faceless nemesis turned dealmaker built into the plot but handled with irony more than inhabited.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.1, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 7.8, Pressure on Tradition at 7.7, The Swerve at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.5 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 6.8, below 7.5; The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, from a sum of 91.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Player as released by Fine Line Features in the United States in April 1992: the one theatrical cut, 124 minutes, in colour; no other cut is known, and restorations are repair. Directed by Robert Altman; written by Michael Tolkin from his novel The Player (1988); produced by David Brown, Michael Tolkin and Nick Wechsler; photographed by Jean Lépine; edited by Geraldine Peroni; production design by Stephen Altman; music by Thomas Newman. With Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Gallagher, Lyle Lovett, Dean Stockwell, Richard E. Grant, Cynthia Stevenson and Vincent D’Onofrio, and stars appearing as themselves, among them Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts. Tolkin’s novel is not part of the work, and nothing from it is imported. No print or script was consulted, and no line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted. The exact length of the opening take is given only approximately. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the production company behind the producers, the exact number of stars who appear as themselves, the placing of individual cameos, the timing of scenes, how the novel’s ending differs from the film’s, and which later films took up the long opening take.