Michael's next big screen character hilarious and well praised by critics.

Drugged out crash-bang film director . . .

Jeremy Brunell from What Just Happened?

Click Here to view a clip from the NYC premiere. Michael's interview is adorable. He seemed nervous and excited. (Footage by WireImage Video/GettyImages) www.gettyimages.com

Below is my review.

Also below are some reviews that I liked because they liked Michael.

What Just Happened to making movies for the story and the art?

A review by Laura Dean November 9, 2008 [revised November 14 thanks to some wise advice]

I’ve found the answer to what has gone wrong with Hollywood. . .Brain damage from overuse of cell phones. It’s amazing that any film gets completed and distributed when you think about it. The two major stumbling blocks are EGO and MONEY.

What Just Happened directed by Barry Levinson brings this to light rather clearly. Despite the slightly nauseating lack of a steady-cam for way too many half body and head shots, which, I am sure was intentional to make you feel how out of control everything is in the business of movies, I really liked it. However, in a way it made me dislike all things connected to movies. Maybe that’s what Art Linson was trying to do with his story of a couple of weeks in the life of an A-list producer.

Robert DeNiro as Ben, the over-extended and under-loved producer, is great as usual. The patience it must take to be a Hollywood film producer is astounding. DeNiro conveys this well. It’s all about the money. What Just Happened makes this clearer than ever before. In fact, only a couple of times does anyone refer to the artistry of filmmaking. One of those is English director, Jeremy Brunnell, played with vivid fervor and careful skill by Michael Wincott.

Jeremy writes and directs a dark and gruesome film which stars Sean Penn. [Normally I like Sean, but found him completely unnecessary to this film. He barely speaks/mumbles, and I thought he was simply inserted as name-drop fodder for the selling of the movie. Which is actually like a left jab at the film industry within one. JMO.] Well the ending of Brunnell’s flick, Fiercely, doesn’t go over so well with the stuff shirts and studio bitches. He is asked/ordered to change his art to suit the sales pitch. The film shows the graphic shooting of a dog during a preview screening. It is really horrendous, but what I found odd was the audience didn’t seem to care about the hero (Sean Penn) being shot. I took this as a statement about audiences getting more and more numb to graphic violence. Maybe the goal really was to shock people into feeling something. [That being said, as someone with three dogs, I say BOOOO!]

Michael’s cockney accent and demeanor were, to quote his Dad, William, “Dead on.” I felt like he’s known a bloke like that at some point in his career. Wardrobe was great, no doubt overseen by Michael himself, and he conveyed the artist’s desire to create freely. When the studio’s chief bitch Lou (Catherine Keener) tells him to re-cut his film or she would do it for him, Jeremy throws the appropriate misunderstood director temper tantrum, saying “You’re asking me to eviscerate my film so that you can lose a little less money?” That sort of says a lot about Hollywood…it is all about money and egos.

Ben’s ex-wife is sleeping with a hack screenwriter, Solomon, (Stanley Tucci) whose latest pitch is for a thriller about a florist. He claims Brad Pitt is solidly in. More proof that the marketing machines can turn any crap into a blockbuster by hiring an under talented, over paid actor and manipulating the trailers into making people want to see a movie about a florist. Case in point is Ben’s other pressing problem. Fat bearded Bruce Willis. [I adore Bruce, always have since Moonlighting.] The film Bruce is slated to begin shooting in a couple of days does not call for his “Grizzly Adams” beard or beer gut. Another coldhearted studio chief tells Ben to get him to shape up and shave or the movie is off and they’ll sue everyone for damages. Bruce won’t have it and throws a way over the top tantrum. His agent, Dick, (John Turturro) is too afraid of his own client to help out. Hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars ride on the star’s decision to shave or not to shave. Sad isn’t it?

Back to Jeremy. With medicinal help and some lovely feathers in his adorable spike hair, he edits the film into a more suitable ending where Sean Penn is shot, but the dog lives to loyally lick his face as the credits roll. All is well with the world of greed, until the Cannes film festival where Fiercely is to open. Brunell addresses the audience in the traditional French, [yummy] and it is evident he has sobered up and returned to his previous state of strong will. The crowd cheers his audacity and tenacity. As the film is shown, Jeremy puts on his dark glasses and let’s a gentle smirk cross his face. Art, albeit misdirected and sometimes tasteless, trumps money and power.

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[My theatre was ¾ full today. It was a mixed audience of seniors, young couples and a few teens. They all seemed to like the movie and grasped the concept. The women particularly liked Michael’s character. [Am I allowed to say “Duh” on internet?] He was the funniest. I chatted up people as we exited. Of the 20 or so I talked to, half had seen Michael before, but felt like they didn’t recognize him in this movie. One lady said, “I guess that’s what actors are supposed to be like.” A positive review by all. I asked them to tell their friends.

[What? I don’t think Michael would object to a little free marketing. I am a professional you know.]

Cannes '08: It's over, but what just happened?

By Pete Hammond May 27, 2008

In the end, it was entirely appropriate that "What Just Happened" got the last flicker of light from the projector at this year's Festival de Cannes. It's about a troubled movie, starring Sean Penn, that plays to a rainy Cannes within a real-life troubled movie that closes a rainy Cannes. This in a year when the fake film's star (Penn) served as president of the official selection jury, and the real film's star, Robert De Niro, presented the Palme d'Or -- all during the wettest Cannes in years.

It's art imitating life imitating art and so on. For the film, which was recut after failing to sell at Sundance (in retrospect a big mistake taking it to the wrong festival in the first place), it was a re-premiere on the closing night in Cannes, and its several-minute standing ovation must have been sweet for the filmmakers, director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Art Linson, who based the film on his own autobiographical book of life in the producing trenches.

Even though movies about Hollywood are often considered too inside for mainstream success, this one has lots of knowing laughs and some terrific performances, including De Niro in the Linson-like role and especially Canadian actor Michael Wincott as a tantrum-throwing auteurist director. Should this film find decent distribution and a release before the end of the year, Wincott's performance is the kind of comic gem that could draw awards attention on its own.

So even on its final night, Cannes '08 continued to provide some intriguing possibilities as we move forward.

Owen Gleiberman from Sundance

Teaming up with screenwriter Art Linson, these two have delivered a send-up of moviemaking in the age of corporatization that earns its feisty, acrid glee. De Niro plays a big-shot producer dealing with all the pesky bureaucratic ''creative'' niggles that comprise his job. A bad thriller, directed by a pretentious twit (the delectable overactor Michael Wincott), has scored abysmally at a test screening thanks to a climax in which not only the hero gets blown away, but the hero's dog gets blown away. On top of that, a production that is nervously approaching its start date has one key stumbling block: Its star, Bruce Willis, has grown a hilariously grotesque Paul Bunyan beard that he arrogantly refuses to shave. (He wants to be loved for his talent.)

Sundance Review: What Just Happened?

Posted Jan 21st 2008 10:32AM by Scott Weinberg

The massive cast yields a few high-end standouts: As the ever-whining auteur director, Michael Wincott is undeniably hilarious (and has the flick's best line.)

Based on producer Art Linson's book What Just Happened? Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line, the film version tells the story of one very successful Hollywood producer, and the ways in which he juggles multiple professional crises, as well as some prickly domestic issues at the same time. Robert De Niro is our movie producer, doing his best "sly" comedic work since (probably) Wag the Dog. John Turturro is the archetypal agent: skittish, shifty, and packing a nasty ulcer. Stanley Tucci is the writer who needs our protagonist for professional reasons, but pursues his ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn) for other activities. Michael Wincott is the drug-infested director whose ultra-edgy film is being mangled by horrifying studio boss Catherine Keener. Toss in some supremely amusing "self-mocking" performances from movie stars Bruce Willis and Sean Penn, and you've got the makings of a flick best described as "movie geek heaven."

Reviewed by

Elliot V. Kotek
(from the 2008 AFI Dallas International Film Festival)

It's easy to see why, given its Hollywood insider subject matter, critics have bent backwards to contrast What Just Happened? to Robert Altman's masterpiece, The Player. The reason it's probably an unfair comparison is that it seems Levinson's pic, based on two weeks in the life of film producer Art Linson, strives to hit laugh marks rather than satirical subtleties. And, while there are more than a few laugh-out-loud moments in this film - thanks not only to De Niro, Keener and Stanley Tucci but also (as always) to John Turturro, to Bruce Willis in a hirsute cameo, and to the mightily missed Michael Wincott in a rare and wickedly funny performance - the film as a whole kind of sort of feels like four episodes of "Entourage" back to back.

By TODD MCCARTHY (Variety)

Jan. 22, 2008

Hollywood is skewered, but with a degree of benevolent indulgence, in "What Just Happened?" This is scarcely the first time prominent industry insiders have turned their lenses on their own kind to hold them up to public scrutiny, even ridicule, and in the annals of pictures about the film capital, writer-producer Art Linson and director Barry Levinson's rates somewhere in the midrange, both in quality and viciousness. A story very much by, about and for middle-aged men, and with the commercial limitations that implies, this intermittently amusing outing is graced by one of Robert De Niro's more engaging performances of recent vintage.

Based on Linson's 2002 book about the vicissitudes of producing pictures in contempo Tinseltown, his script offers none-too-thinly disguised versions of real-life people and incidents, more than one of which are linked to Linson's David Mamet-penned thriller "The Edge," starring Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins and directed by Lee Tamahori.

Behavior on view here is treacherous, immoral, usurious, insincere, backstabbing, childish, preposterous and silly -- in other words, business as usual. Some of it is genuinely funny, some rather labored, and a portion not really credible. While injecting fun wherever he can, Levinson regards it all with benign bemusement, to the extent that one of the film's main shortcomings is a lack of point of view.

Preston Sturges' and Vincente Minnelli's great films about Hollywood, for instance, "Sullivan's Travels" and "The Bad and the Beautiful," respectively, never shied away from spotlighting the industry's foibles or the manipulative means people employed to get their way. But the conclusion in both cases was that the ends justified the means because the pictures, and/or the people who made them, were so compelling.

At the other end of the spectrum, Robert Altman in "The Player" implied that members of the community were so venal they would resort to anything, even murder, to prevail in the business. In "What Just Happened?" all that's at stake is keeping the machine running in order to ensure survival at the high end of the economic food chain.

When an audience test-screening of "Fiercely," an arty actioner starring Sean Penn, bombs -- the film breaks a cardinal Hollywood rule by killing a dog in the final scene -- studio chief Lou Tarnow (Catherine Keener) mandates re-cutting, beginning with the dog. It's up to old pro producer Ben (De Niro) to get wild man director Jeremy Brunell (Michael Wincott, doing a hilarious loutish Brit act in Keith Richards garb) to make the changes in time for the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, where the pic is due to unspool on opening night.

But that's just one of Ben's problems. He's still quite fond of his second ex-wife Kelly (Robin Wright Penn) and tries to engineer a reconciliation, even as he deduces she's sleeping with a screenwriter acquaintance (Stanley Tucci). Then there's his cute high-school-age daughter Zoe (Kristen Stewart), who's probably doing stuff Ben would rather not know about.

Professionally, he faces a vexing hassle with the temperamental star (Bruce Willis) of a big film due to begin shooting within the week. The actor adamantly refuses to shave off the mangy beard he's been growing for six months despite the requirements of the leading role; if the beard stays, the studio walks, a position that forces Ben to deal with the thesp's neurotic agent Dick Bell (John Turturro), a cringing wimp with a severe stomach disorder who's terrified of his own client.

Ben is always on the move, trying to put out fires all over town. But he's been around long enough to handle things with relative cool and usually, if not always, steer things his way. Pic's most consistent pleasure rests in watching De Niro, who looks good and pretty fit, wade neck-deep into every situation, take the temperature of the room and deal with it (one negotiation he can't win is for better position in a Vanity Fair group photo of Hollywood producers).

Along the way, there are constant phone calls, a bit of sex, plenty of arguments, little of what seems like actual work as most people know it, and a Hollywood funeral for an agent who committed suicide, in which Willis, sporting his rabbinical-sized beard, eulogizes the deceased with immortal words very close to those Bill Murray reportedly once intoned under similar circumstances: "I see so many people here today I'd rather be eulogizing instead of Jack."

As if at the end of a high-stakes poker game, all the players are forced to show their hand at the Cannes premiere, with interesting results. The problem is that "Fiercely," from the looks of it a mediocre Eurotrashy actioner, does not feel like a Cannes sort of film (unless you grant that opening-night films are often bad), nor the sort of thing Penn would make, much less stand up for as a work of artistic integrity.

Penn flits in and out, at one point reminding the studio chief he'll need the G5 for Cannes so he can smoke on the flight, and Willis gets extra points for his willingness to so extravagantly mock his own image as well as those of every star who's ever been reputed to throw their weight around. Keener sharply catches the big boss' shrewdness and agreeable social face, while Wright Penn vacillates with impunity as the ex still not entirely sure what she wants.

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Professional inquiries may email me at: laura@michaelwincott.org and I will forward them to the most recent business contact on file.