The Return of the Player
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This follow-up to the classic black comedy about the film industry is "a wicked fever dream of a novel" (San Francisco Chronicle).
In The Player, the Hollywood novel that was adapted into the celebrated movie by Robert Altman, film executive Griffin Mill got away with murder. Now Mill is back, down to his last six million dollars, i.e., broke. His second wife wants to leave him. His first wife still loves him. His children hate him. And, believing that the end of the world is happening, he wants to save them all with one last desperate plan: quit the studio and convince an almost-billionaire that he has the road map and the mettle to make them both achieve savage wealth. In The Return of the Player, Tolkin again delivers a brilliant, incisive portrait of power, money, and family in a society out of control with greed and excess.
"A powerful dark comedy that transcends the shopworn genre of Hollywood satire."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Both truly outrageous and actually endearing."—New York Daily News
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
More than a decade has passed since Griffin Mill's murderous ascent to Hollywood power in The Player. Now, with his career stalled and only $6 million in the bank, he is, by Hollywood standards, broke. The 12-year-old daughter he sired with his then mistress (now discontented wife), Lisa, is a brat who reverts to noxious baby talk when she doesn't get her way. His two older children hold him in cold contempt. He suffers from erectile dysfunction (his allergy to Viagra a wicked double whammy) and lusts after his ex-wife, June. In Griffin's mind, all of Western civilization is in decline, and his fantasies feature a Pacific atoll stocked with food and weapons. Step one in his plan to gain control hinges on leveraging the politics of elite Los Angeles private schools. (He commits manslaughter in the process.) Griffin's ploy snags the attention of a voracious entertainment magnate who plucks Mill from his stagnation and taunts him into concocting a multibillion-dollar idea. Mill's antiheroic effort to wring love and meaning from a loveless and meaningless life is heartfelt and cynical, resulting in a powerful dark comedy that transcends the shopworn genre of Hollywood satire.
