Not a whole lot, really

It was Glinda, the good witch of Oz, who left us with one of the more durably relevant descriptions of the personal characteristics required for survival, not to mention success, in Hollywood. Well, not Glinda, exactly, but Billie Burke, the veteran actress and widow of famed Broadway showman Flo Ziegfeld, who played Glinda in MGM’s 1939 movie version of L. Frank Baum’s fantasy novel. Burke, who survived quite nicely out there for decades, remarked that survival needed “…the ambition of a Latin American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor and the physical stamina of a cow pony.”

Judging by the nasty shenanigans and trench warfare that apparently marked such movie industry events as the Weinstein brothers’ acrimonious departure from the House of Disney and the high-profile corporate power conflict between Michael Ovitz and Jeffrey Katzenberg, also at Disney, her words seem relevant 70 years later. And more trenchant than Barry Levinson’s spoofy comedy about everyday movieland madness, What Just Happened, a movie that’s never quite as droll or witty as it thinks it is.

It’s not as if the filmmakers were really loathe to score off the uniquely strange intersections of commerce, personal power-seeking, and the often overweening self-involvement of prominent figures in this uniquely strange industry. But they haven’t brought any notably sharp or illuminating comic vision to the project. Their movie mostly relies on a modest one-joke theme, and a central character who’s not particularly well drawn, but who is our self-appointed guide to his weird workaday world.

Ben (Robert De Niro), is a late-middle-aged, battle-scarred producer whom we tag along with over the course of a week as he tries to negotiate the twisty and booby-trapped byways that he hopes will lead to successful completion of two of his movie projects. On one, he has to deal with a histrionically self-regarding Brit director (Michael Wincott) whose new film has failed miserably at a test screening because the audience hated the blood-splattered ending, in which both the star (Sean Penn, playing himself, sort of) and his dog are killed by the baddies. “The dog must die!” screams this soi-disant artiste, as Ben tries to maneuver him into changing the ending to prevent the studio boss (Catherine Keener) from shelving the movie.

This turns out to be just another example of What Just Happened’s limited ambit of wit. Ben’s other ongoing challenge during this week is the refusal of a crazily out-of-control Bruce Willis (in the flesh) to get rid of a Chassidic-class beard despite the imminent start of filming on one of his big studio vehicles. Then there is the deep reluctance of Willis’ hypochondriacally ineffectual agent (John Turturro) to confront his client about this. Again, the project is in jeopardy and again Ben must prod and cajole, bob and weave. Levinson and company establish a motif that underscores the raging narcissism in the movie industry’s higher echelons, but the treatment is flat and repetitive, and the movie never really goes anywhere.

On the side, Ben is half-heartedly trying to prolong his tangled lingering relationship with his ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn), a process which entails their joint attendance at amicable separation counseling sessions. This is one of the movie’s very few sharp inventions, although for all I know, it hews closely to an actual practice among the industry’s grotesquely overprivileged movers and shakers.

This in turn suggests a basic flaw in the filmmakers’ concept. Their movie’s script, by old-hand producer Art Linson and based on his memoir of the same title (originally there was a question mark at the end), often feels like it’s made up of heavily reworked real-life (if I can use that term in reference to Hollywood) incidents that have been uprooted and vetted, material that doesn’t really work now.

Linson and Levinson seem to be telling us that in the midst of rampaging vanity and self-aggrandizement, a poor, passive-aggressive, and occasionally honest producer has to make out the best he can. This is a subtly flattering implication, and they don’t really do much with it. The satire is slack.

De Niro is adept at honing what he’s been given to work with into something more amusing, but eventually, he’s stymied by the thinness of the writing. What Just Happened wants to emit vibes that communicate it’s letting those of us out in the hinterlands in on some insider jokes at the expense of the filmmakers’ peers, but instead it comes across as obliquely winking at and signalling those same insiders.