Life as a Hollywood film producer is not a bed of beautiful women, champagne, and cocktail parties. There is another side to it. What Just Happened offers an insider’s view of the crap that Ben (Robert De Niro), a leading producer, takes in his stride at a time when he is beginning to miss his divorced wife.
When a half-crazy pill-popping director refuses to drop a violent scene and the studio boss threatens to pull the film out of Cannes and have it re-cut by an independent editor, Ben smoothen things out. Another financer threatens to sue Ben and pull out if he fails to get his star actor, Bruce Willis (playing himself) to shave. The star actor replies by throwing a tantrum.
This is a peak into the big bad world of, on one side, multi-million dollar financiers who think of filmdom as a pure business investment, and on the other, artists who haven’t a clue about what sells and what doesn’t and frankly also do not care a dang. And the obvious clashes that are sure to occur between these two extreme types of thinkers.
In the center of it all, you have the producer, a trying-to-be-a-diplomat in a two-piece suit and a not-always-suppressed temper who has to balance himself while walking precariously on the rope hanging between these two maniacs. That’s Ben, in this case.
The characters, like the story, are quite amusing. The director in focus, for instance, wears crimson polish on his finger nails and comes across like a junkie waiting for his next fix. When requested firmly to make a certain edit in his film, the heat gets to him, he loses it completely, and breaks down banging his fist down on the table and sobbing like a baby.
Watching the veterans, De Niro and Sean Penn (guest appearance), you wonder if they possibly sleepwalked through the sets without the need for retakes. Willis, bald and with a long beard, and not at all looking like the star image that his financiers paid for, shows us his skill at acting hysteric when he realistically defends his character’s right to “artistic integrity”.
Barry Levinson relies more on style than content, deliberately breaking the basic rules of film grammar at times. His film has a few fine moments, but there have been much better ones made on the “Hollywood producers” theme in the past; ones that are much more humorous and biting.
