MOVIES : Steeped in ‘the Biz,’ Michael Tolkin Emerges as a Player

Perhaps it’s synchronicity. Perhaps it’s fate. But in quick succession, screenwriter-novelist Michael Tolkin, whose previous film and TV credits included little beyond the skateboard thriller, “Gleaming the Cube” and a season as story editor for the “Animal House” TV knockoff “Delta House,” has:

* Co-produced and written the script for an ambitious Robert Altman film from his own 1988 novel, “The Player”;

* Had his own movie directorial debut, “The Rapture,” picked as one of only four new American entries in the New York Film Festival;

* Watched his script, “Deep Cover,” co-written with Henry Bean, go into production, directed by Bill Duke, with leads Larry Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum.

All three projects are diverse--especially the first two. “The Player” is a satirical thriller, set in a real-life Hollywood milieu. “The Rapture” is a moral-philosophical drama about a swinger-turned-born-again Christian whose faith in God is shaken while she awaits the Rapture: the ascension into Heaven after Gabriel’s last trumpet.

Neither film immediately suggests Tolkin’s image or background: He’s a tall, bespectacled collegiate-looking type, who has earned his living by betting at the races and as a free-lance writer for the Village Voice, where his subjects included Buddy Hackett, chicken tycoon Frank Perdue and orgies at Plato’s Retreat.

But Tolkin knows the “business.” His mother was an entertainment lawyer at MGM and Paramount. His father was head writer on the old Sid Caesar TV shows--during the period when they boasted what many feel was TV’s all-time greatest writing staff. Among others, his father’s colleagues included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Lucille Kallen, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner and, toward the end, the young Woody Allen.

“When I was a kid,” Tolkin says, “a lot of them would come over for parties. I used to think all parties were three hours of non-stop hysterical laughter and world-class jokes.”

If Tolkin’s background doesn’t suggest his latest films, his conversation does. It’s a mix of academic rumination and show biz hip, philosophy and wise-cracks racily running from post-modernism, Jerry Lewis, Theodore Adorno’s “Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (“It’s all there; 35-40 years ago, Adorno understood Hollywood better than anybody ever has” to politics and ethics. His taste in movies ranges from ex-Caesar scribe Allen to his all-time favorites, the post-war Italian films of Fellini and Pasolini and the lesser known “Il Sorpasso” (“The Easy Life”) by director Dino Risi and writer Ettore Scola.

Tolkin’s literary favorites include thriller master Patricia Highsmith (the author of “Strangers on a Train,” who contributed a dust-jacket blurb to “The Player”), Willa Cather, Dennis Cooper and Bret Easton Ellis (who also blurbed “The Player” and whose controversial “American Psycho” Tolkin defends as a “great, misunderstood book.”). And, as well, the great Greek playwrights, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. It is Greek tragedy which most influenced “The Rapture.” As a serious American film, it’s primarily concerned with the relationship between man/woman and God.

“This is an age which has a paucity of tragedy,” he says. “It’s not really producing tragedy--or pity and terror. ‘The Rapture’ is a film that’s only about extremes. And I hope, at the least, you feel pity for Sharon and terror for your own fate.”

“I got the idea, by the way, when I was on the freeway and saw a bumper sticker that said: ‘Warning: In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned.”

Just as uniquely, “The Player” is concerned with a world apparently with God or laws: modern Hollywood, where Tolkin has toiled as a largely unproduced screenwriter for a decade. When the novel was published in 1988, producer David Brown read excerpts and picked it up, and eventually produced the Altman film with Tolkin and Nick Weschler. “It got very good reviews,” Tolkin says, “But I was surprised by how few people in Hollywood read it.” (After “The Player’s” sale, Tolkin got his first solo script credit, for 1989’s “Gleaming the Cube”: a movie which he says, “has almost nothing to do with what I wrote.”)

Was Tolkin taking revenge in “The Player” for all his frustrations as a writer by portraying the venality of studio executives, imagining one so villainous that he not only turns down a screenwriter’s project, but also murders him and then seduces his girlfriend?

“Not at all,” he says. “The standard Hollywood novel ennobles the writer, even if he wallows in his own misery and failure--possibly justified failure . . . ennobles his sensitivity and suffering and positions all the executives as incapable of the writer’s refined . . . neuroses. I wanted to invert that.”

In “The Rapture,” Tolkin, who is Jewish, wrote a modern tragedy about Evangelical Christianity and he made “The Player’s” Griffin Mill one of the few apparent Gentile executives in a studio filled with Levinsons and Levys. (“I was bar mitzvahed, I go to Temple on the high holy days and I celebrate Passover.”) But, in neither case was he satirizing the protagonists or their backgrounds. He claims Griffin is a semi-self-portrait and expresses great sympathy for the moral and spiritual concerns that drive Mimi Rogers’ Sharon in “The Rapture.”

“I don’t dismiss the concerns of Evangelical Christians.” Tolkin says. “In fact, I don’t disagree with the fundamentalist diagnosis of society which is that it’s twisted and sick. I may disagree with what they think is wrong, though, and I certainly disagree with what they think is the genesis of the problem.”

His sympathy for how Hollywood makes Christians seem ridiculous illuminates “The Rapture” right up to a harrowing ending which was a direct result of cast and crew input. It was added to the original script when several women in the movie, including the production designer, the editor, two producers and Mimi Rogers, urged a change to strengthen Sharon. “It was not so much a palace revolt as a case of each of the king’s ministers whispering in my ear-- loudly, “ Tolkin says.

What does he think is the cause of the current spiritual malaise?

“I think,” Tolkin says--and then pauses for almost 10 seconds, “it’s . . . a plague of desire that has gotten out of control.

“Nietszche’s got this great line that only an optimistic age can withstand tragedy. And this is not an optimistic age. Great tragedies and great comedies appear at the same time because people can stand to look at themselves, because they have a certain amount of confidence--and, with that confidence, they can look in the mirror and accept all the contradictions and derive strength from that self-knowledge.

“And, in a pessimistic, entropic age such as ours, the movies are just another form of self-delusion.” If that’s so, does he really want to go on writing and directing them? “Of course!” Tolkin insists. “I’m so hungry for a camera right now. . . . I’d be happy to do the insert shots on ‘Major Dad.’ ”