The Player

(1992)

One of the most successful examples of world-building on film is not about creating a coherent fictional universe, as you might suspect, but rendering an existing reality in the fullest fashion possible. Robert Altman populates each frame of THE PLAYER with the real-world equivalent of what he is representing and does it with well-known onscreen talent only rather than non-descript executives and producers so that the audience is not left out of one long in-joke but rather shares in the metatextuality with their favorite film stars. A neo-noir update of the Hollywood murder mystery, which was a notable sub-category of the original mid-century movement, it looks like anything but. Instead, Altman runs the gamut of commercial and art cinema style to bookend the film, opening with a self-aware version of an auteur long-take tracking shot while namechecking Welles and Bertolucci and ending with a pitch-perfect pastiche of post- test screening reshoot of a final scene in a studio movie starring Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis, followed by a fade to credits in the exact same aesthetic. In between, notions of art and commerce in cinema fight it out to the death in a storyline involving the manslaughter of a screenwriter by a movie executive. The executive’s daily activities are tracked against a moving backdrop of Hollywood actors, singers, and hosts as we tune in and out to their conversations and shift focus between their actions. The tradition of the cameo is inverted by filming film stars inconspicuously like supporting artists.