Griffin Mill

Hollywood insider Michael Tolkin perfectly skewers the movie-making business through the mind of Griffin Mill, senior vice president of production at a major Hollywood studio. Ruthlessly ambitious, Mill is driven to control the levers of America's dream-making machinery. He listens to writers pitch him stories all day, sitting in judgment of their fantasies, their lives. But now one writer whose pitch he responded to so glibly is sending him mortally threatening postcards. Squeezed between the threat to his life and the threat to his job, Mill'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.

This follow-up to the classic black comedy about the film industry. 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.