There’s a scene in What Just Happened where a screenwriter (played by Stanley Tucci) tells his friend, a high-powered Hollywood producer (Robert De Niro) that he’s just finished writing his latest script. “It’s about a florist,” he says.“A florist?” Ben replies. “Flowers — onscreen?” He gives one of those little eye-crinkling De Niro grimaces of disapproval. “I don’t know — it’s not a movie.”
When I heard that Robert De Niro was starring in a film adaptation of producer Art Linson’s memoir What Just Happened? (somehow the question mark didn’t survive the adaptation), I cast my mind back a couple of years to when I read Linson’s book, a slim little tell-all that covers the period in the late ’90s when Linson was putting together movies like The Edge, Pushing Tin, Great Expectations, and Fight Club. From what I understood, the film would focus on the 15 pages of the book where Linson talks about his attempts to persuade Alec Baldwin to shave the greying beard he grew while preparing to star opposite Anthony Hopkins in The Edge — except in the movie, the stubbornly hairy actor would be Bruce Willis, playing himself. “A producer trying to get an actor to shave?” I thought to myself. “I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s a movie.”
Still, What Just Happened has one unique thing going for it: it might very well be the only Hollywood satire in which the producer is the hero. Ben’s life — and I assume Linson’s as well — seems to be devoted to massaging the egos of childlike actors and directors, getting his balls busted by studio executives, enduring the insulting responses of audiences at test screenings, and spending hours on the Los Angeles freeway. Even the interior of his luxury car is no refuge — his omnipresent Bluetooth is constantly getting calls from his wife, his assistant, the studio, to whom he constantly lies about his whereabouts, insisting that he’s only two minutes away from meetings that he knows he won’t be showing up to for another hour at least. Are there no compensating factors within this life of stress? Well, that foxy young woman who throws herself at him in the men’s room of a trendy restaurant wouldn’t have wound up in his bed if he were a plumber, would she?
The thing is, in real life, Linson really is kind of a heroic figure among producers, specializing in expensive-looking, prestigious tough-guy movies. (His credits are remarkably free of schlock, and include Melvin and Howard, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Untouchables, Heat, Heist, Spartan, and Into the Wild.) And he’s a guy who obviously likes to surround himself with talent, having cultivated long relationships with the likes of David Mamet, Cameron Crowe, Brian De Palma, and Sean Penn (who blurbed Linson’s book and also appears in the film as himself). Linson has even dabbled in the creative end of moviemaking — he directed Where the Buffalo Roam, starring Bill Murray as Hunter S. Thompson, and contributed to the screenplay of American Hot Wax, the terrific 1978 biopic about rock ’n’ roll DJ Alan Freed.
But for all Linson’s moviemaking experience, What Just Happened never amounts to more than a collection of tepid insider anecdotes. There’s the one about the edgy British director (Michael Wincott) who insists on ending his movie with a scene where the villains shoot the hero’s dog in the head. There’s the one about the agent (John Turturro) with indigestion so bad he can’t get through a phone call without nearly throwing up five times. And the one about the studio exec (Catherine Keener) who deliberately strands the producer at the airport at Cannes after a disastrous première.
It’s mildly interesting, in a gossipy, roman à clef sort of way, but it all kinds of dribbles away by the final few scenes. The ending of the movie Michael Wincott’s character has directed — the one with the dog’s skull spattering the camera lens — is supposed to be the height of unprofessionalism, but at least a great Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazlewood song plays underneath it. What does What Just Happened have going for it?
0 Yorumlar