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Griffin Mill #2
The Return of the Player
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 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
260 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 8, 2006
10 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
About the author
Michael Tolkin
15 books40 followersMichael Tolkin is an American filmmaker and novelist. He has written numerous screenplays, including The Player (1992), which he adapted from his 1988 book by the same name, and for which he received the 1993 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. A follow-up book, Return of the Player, was published in 2006.
Tolkin was born in New York City, New York, the son of Edith, a studio executive, and the late comedy writer Mel Tolkin. Tolkin lives in Los Angeles with his wife Wendy Mogel (parenting expert and author of bestseller The Blessing of a Skinned Knee).
Tolkin was born in New York City, New York, the son of Edith, a studio executive, and the late comedy writer Mel Tolkin. Tolkin lives in Los Angeles with his wife Wendy Mogel (parenting expert and author of bestseller The Blessing of a Skinned Knee).
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
July 27, 2021
It’s a sequel
It’s imaginative, insightful, Hollywood-knowledgeable, a bit long-winded, but I’m glad to have read it. I wish there had been more drive to the plot, and less blogging. Oh well.
It’s imaginative, insightful, Hollywood-knowledgeable, a bit long-winded, but I’m glad to have read it. I wish there had been more drive to the plot, and less blogging. Oh well.
December 28, 2010
Man, what a disappointment. I had some trepidation about the notion of a sequel to The Player. The first 25 or so pages of this book were enjoyable. Then it just sunk down the toilet from there.
At times it was a rushed sloppy mess that I think Tolkin had envisioned more as a sequel before every plotting out the story fully.
At times it was a rushed sloppy mess that I think Tolkin had envisioned more as a sequel before every plotting out the story fully.
August 1, 2007
One of the worst books I have read in a long, long time. Poor characterization, stupid dialog, dumb story, cheesy ending. Wow, is this bad.
November 6, 2022
This review is a twofer: Michael Tolkin’s Player and its eventual sequel Return of the Player, and the rating is of the pair.
Player started so boringly that I almost quit - it looked like it was about office squabbling and/or money-maneuvering, neither of which gets much traction in my mind. But I’m glad I hung in there, because the book is very funny, albeit somewhat weird. It’s “about” a lot of things, and the one I’m particularly interested in is the question of how it happens that despite having all the money and power in a given domain a person still screws it up and produces a wretched product (see the U S Senate, for example). Player’s domain is movie-making, and even though I don’t watch them, for some reason I find information about the inner workings of the movie-making machine fascinating. It’s simultaneously funny and horrifying and disgusting to watch as random small events and petty jealousies and above all, the urge to retain power, determine the nature of the output. Of course this applies to all human institutions, from the UN to the local school board, and perhaps it is part of Tolkin’s purpose to it to illustrate that. If so, he’s done a good job.
Return of the Player is a different story, and a less intelligible one. As is often the case with satire, you have to understand its object to appreciate (or even “get”) the joke, and I don’t. It’s less about movie making and more about Jewish people, very rich people and people who live in isolated mansions off Mulholland. Return has some of the original book’s main players; a significant element is a ménage à trois of three of them. There’s detailed sexual behavior between just about every combination of two characters in the book. Once they get their clothes back on many are also fixated on what they believe to be the imminent end of the world (by which I think they mean Beverly Hills and Bel Air). There are, however, some very good lines. For instance, describing a wealthy area’s crumbling schools, he says the residents had abandoned them to “... Persians, Russians, and Asians, hard-working immigrants like most of their own grandparents, whose offense was to remind them of their own immutable vulgarity." And of the main character, musing on how he feels left out of the highest echelons in Hollywood, "He didn’t know much about Judaism, but neither did most of the Jews of Hollywood, and half of them were married to Christians or called themselves Buddhist"
Player started so boringly that I almost quit - it looked like it was about office squabbling and/or money-maneuvering, neither of which gets much traction in my mind. But I’m glad I hung in there, because the book is very funny, albeit somewhat weird. It’s “about” a lot of things, and the one I’m particularly interested in is the question of how it happens that despite having all the money and power in a given domain a person still screws it up and produces a wretched product (see the U S Senate, for example). Player’s domain is movie-making, and even though I don’t watch them, for some reason I find information about the inner workings of the movie-making machine fascinating. It’s simultaneously funny and horrifying and disgusting to watch as random small events and petty jealousies and above all, the urge to retain power, determine the nature of the output. Of course this applies to all human institutions, from the UN to the local school board, and perhaps it is part of Tolkin’s purpose to it to illustrate that. If so, he’s done a good job.
Return of the Player is a different story, and a less intelligible one. As is often the case with satire, you have to understand its object to appreciate (or even “get”) the joke, and I don’t. It’s less about movie making and more about Jewish people, very rich people and people who live in isolated mansions off Mulholland. Return has some of the original book’s main players; a significant element is a ménage à trois of three of them. There’s detailed sexual behavior between just about every combination of two characters in the book. Once they get their clothes back on many are also fixated on what they believe to be the imminent end of the world (by which I think they mean Beverly Hills and Bel Air). There are, however, some very good lines. For instance, describing a wealthy area’s crumbling schools, he says the residents had abandoned them to “... Persians, Russians, and Asians, hard-working immigrants like most of their own grandparents, whose offense was to remind them of their own immutable vulgarity." And of the main character, musing on how he feels left out of the highest echelons in Hollywood, "He didn’t know much about Judaism, but neither did most of the Jews of Hollywood, and half of them were married to Christians or called themselves Buddhist"
April 25, 2018
If you like the movie The Player you'll hate this book. It's poorly written from the first page with a meandering plot that includes a long, long unnecessary section on a rich kid's bar mitzvah, a preachy portion on why homosexuality is actually not condemned in the Bible, a lead character who decides to live and have sex with both his first and second wives, and an incredibly out-of-place finale with President Bill Clinton preaching about how wise homosexuals understand the difference between love and sex in a way that straight people don't! (Did the author forget that Bill and Hillary Clinton were anti-gay marriage for decades? Or is this an attempt to redeem a horrible man, claiming he was one of the great presidents and overlooking his impeachment).
Add to that a wife that abuses a small child but is allowed to get away with it due to a billionaire's connections to the police, the porn industry, and rants about religions (such as asking the question is it better to be Jewish or gay in Hollywood!) and you have one of the dumbest books ever written. It is filled with long rambling conversations, often a full page of just quotes with no attributions of who is talking. And it appears no editor ever looked at it because much of the book makes no sense. It's just one rant after another, often with little in the way of a plot. It barely ties in to the original Player, and certainly will never be made into a movie of its own! The author must think he has to use his pages to push a pro-gay, anti-Republican agenda, while spinning Clinton to be a hero for cheating on his wife. Bizarre. Really, really bizarre. You've been warned--this is a zero star book and the author should be barred from ever writing again.
Add to that a wife that abuses a small child but is allowed to get away with it due to a billionaire's connections to the police, the porn industry, and rants about religions (such as asking the question is it better to be Jewish or gay in Hollywood!) and you have one of the dumbest books ever written. It is filled with long rambling conversations, often a full page of just quotes with no attributions of who is talking. And it appears no editor ever looked at it because much of the book makes no sense. It's just one rant after another, often with little in the way of a plot. It barely ties in to the original Player, and certainly will never be made into a movie of its own! The author must think he has to use his pages to push a pro-gay, anti-Republican agenda, while spinning Clinton to be a hero for cheating on his wife. Bizarre. Really, really bizarre. You've been warned--this is a zero star book and the author should be barred from ever writing again.
August 11, 2022
Owad’s Micro-Review #24
The sequel to the 1988 novel that became the famous Robert Altman film. Studio exec Griffin Mill is back, and he’s still Gordon Gekko with an introspective streak. For him, greed is not only good; it’s the yardstick by which all good things are measured. This is a guy who will literally kill to keep his kid in private school—and he’ll justify it as part of the larger game.
You’ll like this book only if you’re into chaotic interior monologue, half-page sentences, and words like “ensorcelled.” The strained metaphor-making is enough to wear down even a patient reader, but the immodest cleverness plays into the story’s satirical ethos. Free-range self-importance may be gross to look at, but then so is everything else in the world—unless it’s brightened up by the presence of a whole lot of money. Dec. 3, 2020
The sequel to the 1988 novel that became the famous Robert Altman film. Studio exec Griffin Mill is back, and he’s still Gordon Gekko with an introspective streak. For him, greed is not only good; it’s the yardstick by which all good things are measured. This is a guy who will literally kill to keep his kid in private school—and he’ll justify it as part of the larger game.
You’ll like this book only if you’re into chaotic interior monologue, half-page sentences, and words like “ensorcelled.” The strained metaphor-making is enough to wear down even a patient reader, but the immodest cleverness plays into the story’s satirical ethos. Free-range self-importance may be gross to look at, but then so is everything else in the world—unless it’s brightened up by the presence of a whole lot of money. Dec. 3, 2020
July 1, 2019
Hollywood executive Griffin Mill has made some bad investments and yeards to have more than the paltry $6M he has managed to keep. He manipulates his way into the employ of the nearly billionaire Phil Ginsberg and is set on the path to clawing his way to wealth and false authenticity.
The characters in Tolkin's acid presentation of the clawing and greed soaked world of wealth again deliver. The clever path that Mill embarks upon is offset by his very complicated family situation. Some classic moments that are very enjoyable, the story jumps to the end very quickly at the end and cut the development of the story short.
Recommend
For full review: https://litfontaine.com/2019/07/01/th...
The characters in Tolkin's acid presentation of the clawing and greed soaked world of wealth again deliver. The clever path that Mill embarks upon is offset by his very complicated family situation. Some classic moments that are very enjoyable, the story jumps to the end very quickly at the end and cut the development of the story short.
Recommend
For full review: https://litfontaine.com/2019/07/01/th...
August 1, 2025
Defying all odds, Tolkin's sequel exceeds The Player by digging deeper into the existential lunacy of wealth, Hollywood, modern morality, and our supposedly doomed planet. Far more meaty, intelligent, and FUNNY than other parodies of the super-rich, Tolkin humanizes a morally-compromised millionaire who sees himself as bankrupt (he bemoans that his down to his last 6 million in the book's opening sentence) with a hero's journey that simultaneously skewers the efficacy of hero myths -- and the relevance of myth, story, and religion today. Tolkin takes a seat next to Don DeLillo as a wickedly sharp literary satirist of postmodernity.
September 23, 2019
So, this is the end of a real Griffin Mill deep dive. After re-watching the movie, I reread the book and now this for the first time. I thought this came out fairly recently so I was shocked to learn it was 2006. It was fascinating seeing how Griffin ended up all these years later and I genuinely had no clue where this was going. June gets a lot of empathy and attention here but I wonder if her ending is problematic in 2019 or even 2006. I guess I liked this a little less than The Player because it rambles in the home stretch but it’s still well worth checking out.
February 10, 2023
I'm struggling to get over just how bad this book was. I'd absolutely loved The Player with its tight focus and sharp observations, it was an excellent satire/thriller set in Hollywood. This, by comparison, is bland, bloated and banal. Some of the dialogue is excruciating and I just couldn't connect with any of the shallow characters or remotely care what happened to them. Had to give up after 110 pages and skip to the end. Perhaps too much time passed between the first and second book and Tolkin couldn't conceive of a compelling way to resurrect Griffin Mill and write an interesting story?
April 18, 2021
The story just didn't go anywhere. Meandering conversations that were sometimes interesting but read more like a stream of consciousness. Maybe that was the whole point and I just missed it. Either way it was a struggle to finish.
February 22, 2023
I don't know why but the author took a really disappointing move to make the second book full of filth and perversion. It's a pity. There are parts of the first book I enjoyed and just turn for the worst really took me by surprise.
August 18, 2017
Couldn't get into it, but I didn't read the original.
December 21, 2021
As caustic and morally bankrupt and deliciously insightful as you could expect a sequel to the player to be.
That's another one for David Kahane!
That's another one for David Kahane!
May 2, 2024
michael tolkin is literally either the most brilliant person ever or the most brilliant person ever in a completely different way
September 15, 2007
June wants to resist Griffin’s gloomy expectations of a collapsed world, but the parents she knows are worn out from the burden of children, and she believes that the death of purpose, the death of the family as a unit of physical survival in a nature that yields food only by the work of a group, is the omen of global death, because the parents feel the uselessness of their efforts. No matter how much they tried, the children were awful, even the sweetest. They graduated from high school with the strength of a potato chip, fried and fragile. The narrow desperate ambition for their children to get into Brown and Stanford was proof to June that Griffin was right: The panic about the saving power of a degree from the Ivy League was the canary in the mine shaft, the best evidence of the human species’ deep sensitivity to impending extinction. The parents in other countries who raise their children for suicide martyrdom express the same alert recognition. Better for a child to die immediately in the name of a cause than waste away slowly in a world without safe water. Blowing yourself up on a bus on Ben Yehuda Street is an early acceptance to Princeton.
Wedding Crashers made June laugh, but with the perfect construction of the story, building toward two inevitable weddings and the clarification of everyone’s lives, the weight of each piece of that assembly pressed too hard on her, made her suffer for her social condition, aging divorcée defined by the comedy as the essence of incomplete. She started to cry, and then, as the credits rolled, she heard herself screaming at the crowd, “I saw the world straight and didn’t betray myself. Why am I here alone tonight? Why is my husband with his second wife, at a party, dancing? I am not the whorish wife of the stuffy politician, I am not the obnoxious widowed crone! But they are throwing me away like a useless embarrassing hag!”
Griffin wished he had no children, so he could go to another city, get drunk in the lobby bar of an airport hotel, cry in front of strangers, take a cab to a biker bar in the ugly part of town, tell a Hells Angel to fuck his mother, and be stomped to death, quickly.
Wedding Crashers made June laugh, but with the perfect construction of the story, building toward two inevitable weddings and the clarification of everyone’s lives, the weight of each piece of that assembly pressed too hard on her, made her suffer for her social condition, aging divorcée defined by the comedy as the essence of incomplete. She started to cry, and then, as the credits rolled, she heard herself screaming at the crowd, “I saw the world straight and didn’t betray myself. Why am I here alone tonight? Why is my husband with his second wife, at a party, dancing? I am not the whorish wife of the stuffy politician, I am not the obnoxious widowed crone! But they are throwing me away like a useless embarrassing hag!”
Griffin wished he had no children, so he could go to another city, get drunk in the lobby bar of an airport hotel, cry in front of strangers, take a cab to a biker bar in the ugly part of town, tell a Hells Angel to fuck his mother, and be stomped to death, quickly.
May 9, 2010
I would give this book a 2.5
The Return of the Player satirizes Hollywood and shows consumerism at its worst. The characters in the book seem insatiable in their wants. They are materially rich but morally poor. A Hollywood character who is both sincere and down-to-earth as well as materially rich is really a rare find. The question remains can one have both?
I think it is sad that Griffin Mill leaves June for Lisa. It seems to me that June is his real soul mate someone who wants both companionship of a best friend that one can only get in true marriage and she has an insatiable sex drive too, whereas Lisa seems to me to be a gold-digger who is more interested in how much her husband makes and not in him as a person.
In the end, June figures that it is human nature to connect and since guys like more than one women it is better for men to marry whomever they want and have the kids living in the same house too instead of divorce and destroying the connection that two people have in order to marry a new person. Interesting concept, polygamy. Christians today condemn polygamy but the people in the old testament had more than one wife. The most glaring example of course is King David and Solomon with his multiple wives and concubines. If God was so against a man having more than one women then why was David still his chosen one after he so many wives and concubines?
That just goes to show that if all the parties involve agree to it then it must not be a sin (swingers or polyamorous couples). It is only a sin if you cheat on your wife because it is dishonest and thus you are breaking a bond of trust between you and your wife.
The Return of the Player satirizes Hollywood and shows consumerism at its worst. The characters in the book seem insatiable in their wants. They are materially rich but morally poor. A Hollywood character who is both sincere and down-to-earth as well as materially rich is really a rare find. The question remains can one have both?
I think it is sad that Griffin Mill leaves June for Lisa. It seems to me that June is his real soul mate someone who wants both companionship of a best friend that one can only get in true marriage and she has an insatiable sex drive too, whereas Lisa seems to me to be a gold-digger who is more interested in how much her husband makes and not in him as a person.
In the end, June figures that it is human nature to connect and since guys like more than one women it is better for men to marry whomever they want and have the kids living in the same house too instead of divorce and destroying the connection that two people have in order to marry a new person. Interesting concept, polygamy. Christians today condemn polygamy but the people in the old testament had more than one wife. The most glaring example of course is King David and Solomon with his multiple wives and concubines. If God was so against a man having more than one women then why was David still his chosen one after he so many wives and concubines?
That just goes to show that if all the parties involve agree to it then it must not be a sin (swingers or polyamorous couples). It is only a sin if you cheat on your wife because it is dishonest and thus you are breaking a bond of trust between you and your wife.
February 10, 2015
So, even though it is obviously set in L.A./Hollywood, the school, family, insane wealth dynamics all felt like they could easily be on the North Shore here... Might be the only book ever that made me think, maybe, being an investment banker wouldn't guarantee that I'd end up happy.
Then again [deleted spoiler about the very end goes here....]. So, you know, hard to tell.
All in all, a fun read. I don't remember what I thought when I read The Player originally, though obviously always loved the movie... and so, I'll say, at the very least a worthy sequel, and really, since I remembered the original not at all, I can confidentally say, very fine/fun read all on its own.
Then again [deleted spoiler about the very end goes here....]. So, you know, hard to tell.
All in all, a fun read. I don't remember what I thought when I read The Player originally, though obviously always loved the movie... and so, I'll say, at the very least a worthy sequel, and really, since I remembered the original not at all, I can confidentally say, very fine/fun read all on its own.
Read
September 24, 2011Yes, Griffin gets out of jail and gives rise to a sequel! I got this for a dollar in the bargain bin at Kepler's, and it was a fine value at that price -- a snarky Hollywood tale that lightly entertains with no particular literary effect on me. Fans of Big Love might find special interest here. Let me know if you want it and it's yours.
February 6, 2008
A great read! The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that it's not as good as The Road or God of Small Things, but it is a really good book and I highly recommend it. It's funny and has a VERY CREATIVE ending that I loved.
February 8, 2009
I'm not sure how I stumbled upon this book, I often buy books at the public library used book sales for 10 cents to a dollar. This one was probably worth the 10 cents. I seldom don't finish a book I've started, and although I enjoyed this one, my time could have been better spent.
December 6, 2009
This book is a send up of the Hollywood and associated New Rich. There are some very funny insights and scenes, but the book is not nearly so profound as the author thinks. His views, alas, are often quite tiresome.
January 11, 2010
I like Tolkin's brand of satire. At least I hope it's satire.
Plot construction and character development was a bit porous.
Plot construction and character development was a bit porous.
June 2, 2011
Not as tightly plotted or as spot on satire as the first but very enjoyable and more heart-felt. If only Griffin Mill was running the show
September 28, 2013
What a waste. Hollywood built this story up too much
August 22, 2008
sadly robert altman can't do the adaptation
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews