Short Cuts

SHORT CUTS            A-              
USA  (187 mi)  1993  ‘Scope  d:  Robert Altman

I never start with an idea.  I always see something. I start with an image, a cigarette being put out in a jar of mustard, for instance, or the remains, the wreckage of a dinner left on the table.  Pop cans in the fireplace, that sort of thing.  And a feeling goes with that.  And that feeling seems to transport me back to that particular time and place, and the ambiance of the time.  But it is the image, and the emotion that goes with that image — that’s what’s important. 

—Raymond Carver, from John Alton, Conversations with Raymond Carver, 1990

I had a lousy night, couldn’t sing for shit.  It was a lousy crowd.  I just hate LA.  All they do is snort coke and talk.  

—Tess Trainer (Annie Ross)

While Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and certainly Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974) are considered definitive movies about Los Angeles, add this one to the mix, set in the suburban sprawl of contemporary life, a film that offers a frightening view of a soulless town that has lost any trace of its once thriving humanity.  The motif of the film is built around the growing chaos of intermingled lives trapped in the petty comedies and tragedies of the Los Angeles lifestyle, with characters appearing unexpectedly within one another’s stories, as once again, in the manner of choreographing 24 main characters in Nashville (1975) and 48 in A Wedding (1978), this time Altman places 22 characters on an epic journey with many different interwoven stories, inspired by 9 Raymond Carver short stories (and a poem), where common themes death and infidelity, also the difficulties in sustaining relationships intersect.  Removed from the Pacific Northwest of Carver’s stories, Altman outraged Carver cultists much as he had done earlier with Raymond Chandler enthusiasts in The Long Goodbye (1973), even having the audacity to add a new story of his own.  Much of the emotional feel in all these films is broken characters that once broken, are never able to reassemble their broken parts quite like they were before, where in essence they’re never fully healed, where a part of their lives remain shattered by traumatic circumstances.  A town of all surfaces and no depth, a heavy price to pay is an absence of love, where Los Angeles resembles a ghost town of moving spirits incapable of love, where it would take an apocalyptic act of God to shake people out of their instilled complacency.   Southern California never looked so dysfunctional, where modernism is associated with bleakness and desolation, yet this plays out as a satiric black comedy, where the characters are clueless how they each contribute to the overall pollution of such toxically self-absorbed lives that they simply don’t have the capacity to love anymore.  One of his most ambitious projects since Nashville, the film was shot in ten weeks, with each storyline filmed in weekly divisions, Altman’s examination of contemporary life in Los Angeles shows people struggling to connect with each other through phone sex or illicit sexual liaisons, suggesting this all leads to avoidance, where people are incapable of speaking openly and honestly with one another.  Something of a reaction to an 80’s culture that featured special effects blockbusters and mindless television entertainment, shown in neverending scenes with insipid television shows watched by otherwise bored and unattended children, Altman’s view of the modern era suggests an absence of responsibility leads to an infestation of violence that is pervasive in American life, particularly against women, where men continue to display a passive insensitivity that is never punished, but only results in more apathy.   

The film has one of Altman’s strongest and most memorable opening sequences, a neon pink, candy-colored, opening credit sequence with pink helicopters flying in the black of night sweeping over Los Angeles to spray for the medfly infestation, which plays out like a foreign invasion that must be eradicated.  Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell play Howard and Ann Finnegan, a news commentator and his wife who are concerned about the toxic quality of the chemicals, from A Small, Good Thing, yet they allow their 8-year old son Casey (Zane Cassidy) to walk to school alone in what becomes the central thread of the film.  In a beautifully conceived single shot by cinematographer Walt Lloyd, Casey is seen running down the sidewalks before he swings out into the street where he is hit by a car driven by a waitress, Doreen Piggott (Lily Tomlin), who is upset by the excessive drinking of her husband Earl (Tom Waits).  When Casey is able to get up (played by the son of a stunt double), he seems more embarrassed than hurt, refusing her attempts to drive him home, as he was taught not to get into cars with strangers, so instead he walks home, head down in shame, as he dreads having to tell his parents he forget to look before entering the street.  By the time his mother gets home later, as she’s ordered him a special birthday cake at a bakery for the next day, Casey is asleep on the couch.  Rushed off to the hospital, he lapses into a coma where he lingers in extensive care throughout most of the film.  Doreen is completely unaware of the complications, as she drove away believing he was fine, failing to get his name or phone number, and while the accident certainly frightened her, she quickly forgets about him.  Lori Singer is Zoe, an overly sensitive classical cello player whose mother is a widowed jazz vocalist, Annie Ross as Tess, the singer of weird, offbeat songs that are quiet, highly personal and introspective, providing emotional cues throughout the film, where she’s one of the few with her pulse on honesty and authenticity, where the irony is she’s can’t reach or communicate with her own daughter in real life, who’s distant and removed, and misses her opportunity to connect when it matters the most.  These jazz interludes help disseminate the narrative mood and lend credibility to a stark emotional realism, as they reflect moments in life when things haven’t always gone right, where in keeping with Altman movie songs that become anthems for the modern times we live in, she sings “I Don’t Know You” SHORT CUTS annie ross i don't know you - YouTube (47 seconds).

Chris Penn is Jerry, the Finnegan’s pool man, who grows increasingly frustrated throughout the film from the occupation of his wife Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a stay-at-home phone sex operator who adlibs raunchy phone sex talk to paying customers while she’s changing a baby’s diaper, bringing to the forefront a working woman’s everyday predicament, while making fun of the pornography and the sex industry.  While this was not in the Carver story (neither is the jazz vocalist), it is in the spirit of his stories, much like Altman’s version of Raymond Chandler in The Long Goodbye (1973), using Altman’s imagination and his trust in actors to write their own scenes, where the conversations are supposedly verbatim from calls Leigh heard in phone sex parlors while researching the part.  Jerry and Lois are best friends with a financially strapped couple, Bill and Honey Bush (Robert Downey Jr. and Lili Taylor), where Bill does makeup for actors in the movie industry, but they’re also housesitting for their more affluent black neighbors next door, almost always seen in a shot through the purplish prism of a fish tank.  Two other sets of couples are introduced at a concert performed by Zoe, Claire and Stuart Kane (Anne Archer and Fred Ward), where she plays a professional clown, while he remains unemployed, and Dr. Ralph and Marian Wyman (Matthew Modine and Julianne Moore), a young doctor at the hospital (who is taking care of Casey), while his wife is a painter of often grotesque, larger-than-life laughing or screaming figures, where they can be heard talking throughout the performance, gossiping about the presence of Jeopardy’s Alex Trebek in the audience, while also arranging a dinner party together.  And finally two other couples are connected by the bed-jumping habits of the husband, Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins), an LA motorcycle cop that’s not against stopping women just for their phone number, and his wife Sherri (Madeleine Stowe), who suspects her husband is into foul play, as in one scene she literally smells it on his hands, where his latest tryst involves sleeping with Betty Weathers (Frances McDormand), currently separated from her husband Stormy Weathers (Peter Gallagher), one of the nighttime helicopter pilots dropping all the chemicals, a man who refuses to accept the separation, even as Betty can be seen teaching their young son how to repeat the words, “He is a son-of-a-bitch.”  While Robbins takes liberties with his philandering character, seen preening before the mirror in his uniform before heading off to work, he also masters the art of deception by inventing classic lines about the classified nature of his work which prevents him from being able to speak about where he spends all his time away from home.      

While worried about Casey’s medical status, Howard’s long lost father that hasn’t been seen in 30 years suddenly shows up at the hospital, Paul (Jack Lemmon), who uses this opportunity to try to ingratiate himself back into the family, talking to nearly everyone involved on the case, always with a cheerful smile or positive outlook on the day, though one of the scenes of the film is Paul describing to his son that precise moment when his own marriage died, a bewildering descriptive story that couldn’t make his son more uncomfortable, especially considering what he’s going through with his own son, where the results afterwards are positively devastating when the young boy dies, where adding to the heartbreak, Paul can be seen leaving the hospital corridors alone, knowing his attempts at reparations are lost, while the rest of his life will be spent in eternal remorse and anguish.  Making matters worse, when the parents fail to pick up the birthday cake they ordered, both parents are harassed by incessantly insulting phone calls by the baker (Lyle Lovett).  Paralleling this harrowing storyline is the deteriorating relationship between the Kanes where Stuart goes on a three-day fishing trip with two of his buddies, a Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, that was adapted before in Ray Lawrence’s superbly crafted JINDABYNE (2006), where they wander off into isolated territory that takes a grueling hike just to get there, but as they set up tents, one of them discovers the dead body of a naked young girl submerged in the water.  Believing it’s better not to move the body, they continue fishing for the next couple days before finally reporting the incident to the police when they return back home.  The implications of their actions do not reveal themselves until after Stuart returns home and makes love to his wife, telling her about the dead body afterwards, where Claire is horrified and simply can’t handle the blasé notion of leaving a naked woman’s body in the water for days without calling anyone for help, continuing to fish as if nothing had happened, where she actually can’t stand that part of her husband for doing that.  As if to add emphasis, and a recognition of a completely separate female consciousness, the camera zooms in on Claire’s face, expressing her shock and internalized state of anguish in one of the longest shots of the film.  At the same time, Zoe tries to tell her mother about what happened to Casey, the kid next door, and her response, while rehearsing with the band, is offhandedly curt and casual, stepping right back into the song “I Don’t Know You,” where it’s clear her own life has seen so much trouble this hardly even registers, where you just can’t always give a damn.  But for Zoe, it’s a dark and paralyzing moment, becoming even more calamitous when she goes home and commits suicide. 

Meanwhile, after a knock-down-drag-out marital fight between the Wymans about something that happened years ago, one where Marian literally exposes herself in more ways than one, confessing an infidelity to her seethingly angry husband while naked from the waist down, there’s some question whether the truth really changes anything between them, as the division has only widened through the years.  Here resolution remains at a distance as characters vent their frustrations in a moment of hysteria, a kind of primal scream (like her paintings), where a heightened state of melodrama permits them to avoid true emotional connection by making the emotions themselves the object of attention.  The dinner party that both couples were dreading ahead of time turns into this drunken, Fellini-esque spectacle that lasts well into the next day, where neither couple wants to go home, as they once again dread being alone with their partner, where they were having wildly divisive separation issues beforehand.  Altman’s narrative control, as it has done throughout his career, keeps the audience at a similar distance, where the viewer becomes a discriminating observer of these randomly occurring events.  The movie ends with an earthquake, a cataclysm of nature, where the film doesn’t really resolve anything, as life goes on afterwards, much as it did before, with Annie Ross singing over the closing credits, while a camera hovers over a map of Los Angeles, “I’m a Prisoner of Life” Annie Ross and the Low Note Quintet - Prisoner of Life / I'm Gonna Go Fishin' [from Short Cuts] (4:20).  What’s particularly noticeable about Altman’s film is how ordinary the characters are, where they are all meant to be the people next door, where the most ordinary mundane things become the important thread that holds them together, actually becoming the defining tissue in their lives, where economic circumstances play into this, as people behave differently in different economic strata.  Working class people live claustrophobic lives on top of one another, where there is no space, as they rarely get a day off or have a vacation, like a fishing trip that might only happen once a year, while the wealthy couple lives with the entire panorama of Los Angeles visible through the smog out their backyard, where there is an infinite amount of space that literally consumes this couple who are suffocating in a relationship defined by emotional distance.  Coming after the critical and financial success of The Player (1992), a scathing satire on the Hollywood movie itself, this allowed Altman a chance at the kind of film he wanted to make, returning to the level of power directors had in the 70’s, after the fall of the studios, where Altman acknowledges for that string of 8 pictures from MASH (1970) to Nashville (1975), he made exactly the movies he wanted to make with no outside interference.  While the 80’s were spent filming plays by prominent dramatists, these films were intelligent adaptations of literary works, as Altman has once again stamped his own unique vision from contemporary literature, resurrecting his career by masterfully creating order out of chaos, where SHORT CUTS is a brilliantly executed return to form. 

Raymond Carver died all too early, at age 50, of lung cancer in 1988, where the appeal of Carver's stories lies in their raw, spare truthfulness, creating a series of random occurrences not necessarily leading anywhere or culminating in a single event, where there is no ultimate resolution or acts of redemption, as both Altman and Carver have a dark view of the world where the banal becomes horrible and inexplicable.  Not really providing a beginning or end, but just the middle of the stories, this film evokes a ferocity of spirit by creating a symphonic accumulation of small things, where these eventually are the things that matter, small details of life that seem so absurd at times, but they make up bigger parts, where characters have a tragicomic response to it all.  A film that is all about behavior, that can be viewed as a series of betrayals, with people refusing to acknowledge one another as individuals, seen instead as objects that can be abused, often fed by illusions, alcoholism, or self-doubt, leading to a false sense of security, where underneath these isolated characters is an erosion of trust, where relationships are deteriorating from self-interest and personal greed.  According to Altman, “This is more complicated than either Nashville or A Wedding, even though it has less characters than A Wedding because A Wedding was all concerned about the same event, where everyone was really related to someone else.  In this film they don’t necessarily relate to one another.”  The cellist and jazz singer are both Altman inventions, musicians that can only truly express themselves through their artistry, as it’s an extension of who they are, where they personify the artist pouring their heart out through another medium, representing both Carver and Altman.  The Finnegans are the kind of people where bad things don’t happen to them, as they have a good job, a big home, an overprotected child, where they built a kind of life structured around not allowing anything to go wrong, and then their kid gets hit by a car, where they’re looking for answers, bewildered and confused, asking what did they do wrong?  And, of course, there isn’t anything they did wrong, it just happened, leading them to a place where there are no answers.  Jack Lemmon’s personal confession is a 9-minute monologue, where Altman had to figure out a way to make it interesting, to hold the audience, so the camera just holds a close up on his face and lets Jack work the magic, where the real interest is the soul of the character.  You could dress it up and try to make it more visually interesting, but truth can stand on its own and is stronger when stripped down to its bare essentials, beautifully expressed by Annie Ross’s unvarnished pain and anger in “To Hell with Love” annie ross-to hell with love - YouTube (7:10). 

And finally, it has been pointed out by others, namely Robert Kolker in A Cinema of Loneliness, that the characters in SHORT CUTS suggest an influence beyond Raymond Carver, where they seem frozen in time, ingrained with a spirit of human despair, forced to look into the mirror at their own self-inflicted pain, stuck in a kind of prison, much like the visual influence of painter Edward Hopper, where his paintings, most especially Night Hawks (6,000 × 3,274 pixels), portraying people sitting in a downtown diner at night, and one of the most recognizable paintings in American art, have been copied by countless filmmakers, but perhaps no one “but Altman, perhaps unconsciously, has captured, without imitation, the loss and diminishment of personality that so many of Hopper’s paintings connote:  lives negated by depression and loneliness.”  According to the writings of Mark Strand in his book Hopper, 1994:

Within the question of how much the scenes in Hopper are influenced by an imprisoning, or at least a limiting, dark is the issue of our temporal arrangements—what do we do with time and what does time do to us?...Hopper’s people…are like characters whose parts have deserted them and now, trapped in the space of their waiting, must keep themselves company, with no clear place to go, no future.  

[Hopper’s paintings] are short, isolated moments of figuration that suggest the tone of what will follow just as they carry forward the tone of what preceded them.  The tone but not the content.  The implication but not the evidence.  They are saturated with suggestion.  The more theatrical or staged they are, the more they urge us to wonder what will happen next; the more lifelike, the more they urge us to construct a narrative of what came before.  They engage us when the idea of passage cannot be far from our minds…Our time with the painting must include—if we are self-aware—what the painting reveals about the nature of continuousness.  Hopper’s paintings are not vacancies in a rich ongoingness.  They are all that can be gleaned from a vacancy that is shaded not so much by the events of life lived as by the time before life and time after.  The shadow of dark hangs over them, making whatever narratives we construct around them seem sentimental and beside the point. 

The Player

THE PLAYER        A-       
USA  (124 mi)  1992  d:  Robert Altman 

It’s just a satire on the way people behave in the movie studios.  There was such a fuss started about it.  People started saying, ‘Oh people are afraid you are going to do this and do this.’  So the more afraid they got, the more ideas they gave me.  Looking back on this whole picture, it’s a pretty tame satire.  It’s no big indictment.  Things are much, much worse than this picture seems to say. 

— Robert Altman

As if coming out of a long hibernation, Altman’s extremely clever film literally screams Hollywood headlines, making it the most talked about movie in Tinseltown, largely because it’s such a scathing indictment of the brainless and corrupt corporate culture that is the Hollywood movie industry itself.  Altman had largely been out of favor with Hollywood since several critically acclaimed studio films of the 70’s actually lost money or had difficulty finding audiences despite near unanimous praise, such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and The Long Goodbye (1973), made even worse by the critical and financial disaster of POPEYE (1980), the final blow that sent the independent-minded director outside the studios in the late 70’s and 80’s working on stage plays, television adaptations, and his own small-budget projects.  Altman is in fine form here as he relishes the opportunity to satirize, with a sleazy mix of truth and near slander, the same industry that spawned his own career and do it with an insider’s view, as during the 70’s Altman himself was at the epicenter of the movie industry, the darling child who could do no wrong with a string of hits, while in the 80’s, the door was slammed shut and no one would return his calls, as he was reduced to yesterday’s news and exiled to the role of an outsider.  That gave him plenty of autobiographical ammunition to get the subversive tone just right for this Hollywood haymaker, a poisoned pen “fuck you” to the crassness and elitism of the movie industry, which ironically catapulted Altman right back to the top of the A-list directors in Hollywood, where his next film Short Cuts (1993) is a return to director prominence, like in the early 70’s when Altman was able to make exactly the films he wanted to make.  While it’s hard to imagine any other industry but Hollywood turning out a product designed to trash the very industry that provided its existence, what’s perhaps most amazing is the movie itself became the most requested picture for private screenings throughout the year by the very studio executives it lambastes. 

With an extended opening tracking shot that lasts nearly 8 minutes, paying homage to Orson Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), known for its legendary opening shot which is cleverly mentioned during the scene, the film ironically situates the audience right in the heart of a Hollywood studio lot (the former site of Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios) where we hear Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward) as a cinema obsessed security chief tell someone how disgusted he is with the quick MTV edits of today’s movies, “Everything now is cut, cut, cut,” how no one ever attempts to make long tracking shots anymore like the infamous opening of TOUCH OF EVIL that captures the essence of the film in the complexity of the opening shot.  It’s not by accident that Altman chose this film, as it also represented a return to Hollywood filmmaking by Welles after a near 30-year absence, an interesting parallel to Altman’s own triumphant return after a decade-long absence.  The highly complicated and perfectly choreographed crane shot is interesting for how it weaves in and out of various conversations and sequences, eventually eavesdropping on the business at hand by voyeuristically peeping through windows to hear various movie ideas being pitched, each one with a familiar ring, starring Julia Roberts or Bruce Willis, summarized by combining ideas from one hit movie with another.  The funniest, however, is listening to Buck Henry, co-writer of THE GRADUATE (1967), suggest to a young studio executive who wasn’t even born when the infamous film was made, that the time is right for THE GRADUATE II, as all the principles are still alive, where Ben and Elaine (Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross) could be living in Northern California somewhere with an infirmed Mrs. Robinson living in a room upstairs, conjuring up images of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962).  It’s here that high paid business executives get paid mammoth salaries to listen to 50,000 pitches for movies every year, where they have to narrow it down to the ten or twelve that the studio actually makes each year.  Their instincts to make the right choices determine whether or not they will still have jobs afterwards.  It’s a high powered business where someone is always looking out for your office, so like politics, executives like to hold onto their position as it provides them with unfettered power. 

Enter powerbroker Tim Robbins as Griffin Mill, a man in a slick suit who has people at his beck and call, who is constantly in demand, but is too busy for nearly everyone, including his bright attractive subordinate Bonnie (Cynthia Stevenson) that he’s having an affair with, stealing her ideas and body without giving it a second thought.  Someone, however, is sending him death threat post cards (a job Altman performed himself, apparently with relish), a disgruntled writer supposedly upset at being screwed by the studio (imagine that?), as Griffin apparently promised to get back to him and he never did.   So while Griffin is anxiously wondering if someone has already been chosen to replace him, as studio boss Joel Levison (Brion James) has already hired another high-salaried executive, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), with rumors flying fast and furious that Griffin is on his way out, he frantically tries to narrow it down to the most likely candidate, with the problem being he’s pissed off so many writers over the years (probably stealing most of their ideas without ever paying them), that he’s developed a reputation for being a first class sleazebag.  Growing progressively paranoid, reaching a state of panic (and perhaps temporary insanity), he decides to confront the most likely suspect and smooth things over by offering him a deal.  Initially speaking to the girlfriend by phone, June (Greta Scacchi), eying her through the house windows for the duration of the call, where he practically seduces her, before learning screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio) always watches movies at the Rialto Theater in Pasadena, where he’s currently watching BICYCLE THIEVES (1948).  Walking into the theater with less than 5-minutes remaining might seem a little suspicious, where Kahane grows even more angry and contemptuous of Griffin’s motives after sharing drinks at a nearby Japanese karaoke bar (with a portrait of Hitchcock peering out from the wall), finding him the picture of phoniness and insincerity, and then humiliates him on the street, reminding him that he’s on his way out, as it’s in all the Hollywood papers, so why would he be making any deals?  In what may be real, or part of a pitched movie fantasy, Griffin goes berserk and decides to eliminate this distraction with ruthless efficiency, murdering him on the spot, spending the rest of the film covering his tracks, denying culpability, dodging pestering police detectives (including Whoopi Goldberg), keeping Levy at bay, while launching the production of a surefire catastrophe, snatching the most horrible movie idea he could find pitched by agent Dean Stockwell and hack writer Richard E. Grant, like something out of THE PRODUCERS (1967), an execution murder romance gone wrong (insisting upon no name actors! - - for uncompromising authenticity) called Habeas Corpus, handing the project over to Levy as a no-miss blockbuster, hoping the disaster will spell the end his career.  And then, to show the extent of his remorse, he hits on the writer’s girlfriend June at the funeral service. 

Stylistically, the film is a cynical black comedy and is as funny and playfully entertaining as anything Altman ever made throughout his career, making back its money within the first month of release, where he turns the offices of the studio, which had just been used in the Coen’s BARTON FINK (1991), into a museum-like Hollywood studio tour, making exquisite use of old film noir movie posters where the screaming bold print perfectly matches the mood of the film, while there are also delightful cameos throughout from at least 60 Hollywood stars, none of whom were in the script, but includes 12 Oscar winning actors in the cast, more than any other film in history, including Cher, James Coburn, Louise Fletcher, Whoopi Goldberg, Joel Grey, Anjelica Huston, Jack Lemmon, Marlee Matlin, Tim Robbins, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, and Rod Steiger, while also including Oscar winning producer-director Sydney Pollack.  Of course, the irate writer continues to send post cards, as Griffin killed the wrong man—another prominent Hollywood theme.  Outside of the titular character, there is little other character development, as the film centers around the actions and behavior of a single character, who is detestable throughout, without question, not the kind of guy that draws audience sympathy.  With all the cameos, Altman does an excellent job blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, where this is a narcissistic culture that often can’t tell the difference, whose mindset is thriving on surface artificiality, rarely probing under the surface, and yet Robbins is no slouch as Griffin, little more than a con artist, fiercely cold-blooded at one moment, deceitful throughout, where every vulnerable moment where any feelings are exposed feels calculated by a guy that plays all the angles.  Griffin does nothing by accident, as everything is meticulously planned, like a chess match, where his job is to stay in the game using whatever means are available to him.  Part of the film’s interest lies in the way it explores who really runs the movie industry, questioning who is the primary artist, the writer, the director, the actor, or the producer?  Griffin is heard sarcastically muttering “I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process.  If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we’ve got something here.”  It’s a strange culture being dissected, one where screenwriters routinely receive millions for scripts, luring into its lair such famous novelists as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, John Steinbeck, William Goldman, Raymond Chandler, Mario Puzo, Truman Capote, Larry McMurtry, Stephen King, or Cormac McCarthy, among others.  In the late 1920’s, with the movie industry still in its infancy, newspaper columnist, reporter, playwright, and eventual CITIZEN KANE (1941) screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz moved from New York, the center of American literary activity, to Hollywood.  A few months later, he sent this cable to his writer friend Ben Hecht:  “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.  Don’t let this get around.”  Sooner or later, however, it did.  From the beginning, motion pictures offered writers easy money for a few weeks’ work holed up in Hollywood somewhere dashing off a screenplay or rewriting someone’s else’s great American novel. 

Sex, violence, and a happy ending are the Hollywood paradigm that comes under fire, mercilessly satirized by Altman and Tolkin, lurching into American Psycho (2000) territory, where the protagonist of the novel is truly a murderer, but in the film he surreally fantasizes the murders, while here Griffin is an unrepentant murderer in the novel, as he appears throughout most of the film, but this is a director that not only knows movies, but knows how to make movies, as the protagonist kills a writer, screws his woman, and turns blackmail into a Hollywood script that makes millions, where it’s all part of a grand theatrical spectacle.  As part of his master plan of deceit and betrayal, Griffin has his subordinate Bonnie hastily sent out of town while he makes plans for a weekend romance with June in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.  People apparently do things like that in Los Angeles.  The convoluted plot takes a few twists and turns, all of which are made to resemble life “in the movies.”  There must be a hundred movie references in this film, as it’s all anyone ever talks about, where Griffin asks at one point, “Can we talk about something other than Hollywood for a change?  We’re educated people.” Altman loves the idea of creating a fantasy within a fantasy, with everyone basking in the glow of their own self satisfaction, where the happy ending house used near the end with Griffin and a pregnant June, where he rubs her belly exactly as the Robbins character does in his next film, Short Cuts, is Altman’s own.  Griffin indicates the formula for a successful Hollywood movie must include “suspense, laughter, violence, hope, heart, nudity, sex, and happy endings,” where Altman includes them all, mockingly delivered with an ironic twist.  Habeas Corpus finally sees the light of day in a hilarious climax, considerably watered down from the original concept, with Julia Roberts being marched to the gas chamber in one such interlude, before Bruce Willis, guns blazing, rescues her at the instant before her death, where no one apparently recognizes that the story is a rip-off of Susan Hayward starring in Robert Wise’s I WANT TO LIVE! (1958).  This is a wonderful example of a director exploiting one-dimensional characters and an utterly formulaic plot structure where every cliché is milked in order to make an insightful comment on the shallowness of the industry itself.  Someone had a helluva good time making this movie, adapted by the novelist Michael Tolkin (who makes an appearance with his brother Stephen, most likely as pitch men), a sardonic love potion to the industry, joined by a cast of thousands, a hilarious valentine to the business Chaplin built, that has been corrupted by the immense sums of money made to create this illusionary world of ourselves, all in the name of entertainment.  Altman really gets this one right, as it’s thoroughly enjoyable, even as we relish how despicable the entire movie business has become, an industry where you can literally get away with murder, rotten to the core, built on a foundation of lies, yet still an audience will show up in droves to catch the next opening.