Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s satirical comedy-drama series The Studio, which premiered on Apple TV+ in March, contains a character who’ll be familiar to fans of Robert Altman’s collaborations with Tim Robbins in the early 1990s. In Rogen’s TV show, his character is ultimately beholden to a mustachioed, money-obsessed CEO played by Bryan Cranston, who explains to him that they’re not in the business of making art. “We don’t make films, we make movies,” he says, paraphrasing Quentin Tarantino’s famous differentiation between the two. “Movies that people wanna pay to see.”
Cranston’s profit-hungry studio tycoon just happens to have the same name as another fictional movie executive from decades gone by. In fact, it’s no coincidence that this character from The Studio is called Griffin Mill, the name of the protagonist in Robert Altman’s savage 1992 satirical film about Hollywood studio heads, The Player. The movie version of Mill, played by Robbins, could quite easily be a younger version of the Cranston plays, with the main difference being that 30 years later, he’s climbed right to the top of the Hollywood food chain.
The Player Is Perfect For Fans Of Seth Rogen’s The Studio
Both Works Are Unapologetic Satires Of The Movie Business Featuring All-Star Cameos
If Seth Rogen’s comedy series The Studio takes a fairly gentle if condemnatory swipe at the franchise-dominated, profit-driven monopolization of Hollywood by the Big Five major movie studios, then Robert Altman’s movie The Player comes out swinging from start to finish. Michael Tolkin’s screenplay for the film is unflinching and unforgiving of the industry he works within, while Robbins plays his lead character with the kind of moral indifference that must have made even the studio bosses backing the movie cringe.
“The Studio might seem [to be] about a film-loving exec’s desire for quality being crushed by the Hollywood system and its corporate overlords. But Matt is not really that guy. His true instincts are self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.” – Alex Harrison – ScreenRant’s review of The Studio
What’s more, just like the all-star cameos that have helped The Studio achieve its great reviews, The Player peppers its story with various appearances from real movie stars playing themselves. It has Cher wearing a red dress for a red carpet premiere, while Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis team up for a mock action flick. In total, the film includes cameos from 21 different Hollywood A-listers as themselves, in arguably the single biggest send-up of the movie business ever made.
How Bryan Cranston’s Character In The Studio Was Inspired By The Player
Griffin Mill In The Player Could Easily Have Become Cranston’s CEO In Later Life
More specifically, it’s easy to see how Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were inspired by The Player to create Bryan Cranston’s character in The Studio, beyond simply the name they gave him. Tim Robbins’ Griffin Mill knows full well that his existence as a studio executive directly depends on the bottom line of his business, and so his approach to filmmaking is as cynical as it gets.
Robbins’ Mill also schemes against a rival executive at the studio named Larry Levy by setting up a movie project that Levy is leading to fail. In this sense, he goes even further than any character in The Studio, by risking the profits of his business to sabotage a colleague.
We’ve only seen Bryan Cranston’s Griffin Mill during The Studio’s first episode so far, precisely because he’s made it to the very top of the show’s fictional Continental Studios, and thus doesn’t even need to be involved in the oversight of movie projects. All we hear Mill talk about in the series is how much money is being spent, since this topic is the full extent of his involvement in the business.
It would have taken a cynical schemer who measures everything by the bottom line to get from the position of Tim Robbins’ lower executive in The Player to Cranston’s CEO role in The Studio. It’s as though the movie provides the backstory for a character that Rogen and Goldberg are simply reviving for their show. This connection between the two works helps place The Studio in the wider context of Hollywood-themed satires, of which Robert Altman’s The Player is the ultimate example to aspire to.
