The Player

By Michael Tolkin

Book Overview

"Just as Griffin suspected, there was a meeting in Levison's office without him." With this opening, we are taken into the mind and life of Griffin Mill, senior vice president of production at a major Hollywood studio. It is a mind full of paranoia, duplicity, and guile--and a life full of money, power, and fame. It is the movie business.

Griffin Mill is ruthlessly ambitious, driven to control the levers of America's dream-making machinery. Griffin listens to writers pitch him stories all day, sitting in judgment on their fantasies, their lives. But now one writer to whose pitch he responded so glibly is sending him postcards: "You said you'd get back to me. You didn't. And now in the name of all writers who get pushed around by studio executives I'm going to kill you."

Squeezed between the threat to his life and the threat to his job, Griffin's deliberate and horrifying response spins him into a nightmare. Then he meets the sad and beautiful June Mercator and his obsession for her threatens to destroy them both.

With a compulsively readable narrative that offers a devastating portrait of contemporary Hollywood--the studio execs, the deal-making, the politics, the pitches--The Player is the smartest book.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802135137
• ISBN13: 9780802135131
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 193 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

News flash -- sometimes the bad guys win and don't even feel bad about it

This is the book on which the Altman movie is based, and it has quite the Patricia Highsmith feel: News flash -- sometimes the bad guys win and don't even feel bad about it. Griffin, a movie executive, is being sent vaguely threatening postcards, apparently by a disappointed and disgruntled screenwriter. To atone -- sort of -- he picks a screenwriter at random whom he met with and goes to see him at a screening of The Bicycle Thief. He figures if he makes a big effort to placate one guy, in some karmic way he will placate the postcard writer, too. This makes weird sense in the book. Anyway, for no reason (shades of The Stranger) beyond imitation and because he can -- he ends up committing a murder. The main character is curiously amoral, and seems not to consider the effects of his actions on others. At the same time, he is a heck of an observer, not only of others but of himself, of the little games and mood shifts, the political one upsmanship, that to some extent defines daily life. It seems that games and observations on the most superficial level are all there are for him.

i thought everybody read this book...

why has no one else reviewed this book..? a modern-day "double indemnity" is what it is... perfect...