Michael Tolkin

a novel

The player

This follow-up to the classic black comedy about the film industry is “a wicked fever dream of a novel” (San Francisco Chronicle). In The Player, the Hollywood novel that was adapted into the celebrated movie by Robert Altman, film executive Griffin Mill got away with murder. Now Mill is back, down to his last six million dollars, i.e., broke. His second wife wants to leave him. His first wife still loves him. His children hate him. And, believing that the end of the world is happening, he wants to save them all with one last desperate plan: quit the studio and convince an almost-billionaire that he has the road map and the mettle to make them both achieve savage wealth. In The Return of the Player, Tolkin again delivers a brilliant, incisive portrait of power, money, and family in a society out of control with greed and excess. “A powerful dark comedy that transcends the shopworn genre of Hollywood satire.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Both truly outrageous and actually endearing.”—New York Daily News

The Return of the Player

Set in Hollywood, this ultimate Hollywood novel takes readers into the eerie emptiness of Tinseltown and defines the machinery of moviedom. Reissue. Movie tie-in.

The Player

A black comedy set in modern-day L.A. traces the disastrous attempts of an unfaithful husband to make a new start with his family. By the author of The Player. Reprint.

Among the Dead

A Hollywood novel of a very different kind by the author of The Player: A timely and “darkly satirical” dystopian thriller (The San Francisco Chronicle). Michael Tolkin is known as a master chronicler of show business culture. Now, in his new novel, the H LYW OD sign presides over a city devastated by a weaponized microbe that’s been accidentally spread around the globe, deleting human identity. In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot fence surrounds the hills where the rich used to live, but the mansions have been taken over by those with the only power that matters: the power of memory. Life for those inside the Fence, ruled over by the new aristocracy known as the Verified, is a perpetual party. Outside the Fence, downtown, the Verified use an invented mythology to keep control over the mindless and nameless. In deliciously dark prose, Tolkin winds a noose-like plot around a melee of despots, prophets, and rebels as they struggle for command and survival in a town that still manages to exert a magnetic force, even as a ruined husk. “Intricate and cleverly constructed.”—The New Yorker “Tolkin creates memorable images and searing moments and peppers the text with sly, dark humor, all while raising provocative social and political issues…NK3 is nightmare and satire, thriller and warning. Crafted by a master storyteller, it is a haunting parable about civilization marching forward, while forgetting what it leaves behind.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Remind[s] one of how easily people are turned into commodities, how slippery the grip on identity can be, how there’s always someone ready to set themself up as the savior of civilization.”—The San Francisco Chronicle

A Novel

William Nicholson

Ron Hutchinson

William Mastrosimone

The Burning Season

Tolkin M Staff

Michael Tolkin is one of Hollywood's hottest new players, a screenwriter and director who has created films that are intellectually uncompromising, provocative, hilarious, sexy, and brilliantly contemporary. The Player, the award-winning movie sensation about the twisted world of Hollywood, was directed by Robert Altman and starred Tim Robbins and Greta Scacchi. It has been hailed as "a masterpiece! One of the smartest, funniest, most penetrating movies about moviemaking ever made" (Vanity Fair). The Rapture explores the emotionally intense, surreal world of Christian fundamentalism. The Los Angeles Times called it "a nervy, unsettling, edgy piece of work, that most audacious of cinematic ventures, a film of theological ideas, intent on looking into what we believe and why we believe it, determined, even eager, to explore the issues of heaven, hell, and the hereafter." The New Age, a film sure to become an archetype for the post-1980's era, tells the story of a young couple's fall from financial grace and their quest for spirituality in a world defined by materialism. These screenplays not only represent some of the finest and most challenging work being done in Hollywood today but present, collectively, breadth, and feeling to that created by any of our time's most talented artists, whatever the medium.

Three Screenplays

The Player ; The Rapture ; The New Age

Michael Tolkin has garnered acclaim for his classic dark comedies The Player and Among the Dead. His most ambitious novel yet, Under Radar is a tale of guilt and redemption. While vacationing in Jamaica, Tom Levy witnesses a man goading his four-year-old daughter into an act so vulgar that Tom vows he must pay for it with his life. The next day, when they come to grips atop the Dunn's River Falls, Tom kills the man in cold blood. Condemned to prison, Tom faces a world unlike any he has ever known, among the most brutal and hardened men of Jamaica. Does an elusive story hold the key to their salvation, and Tom's own? And once Tom has told it, can he find a way to reenter the hearts of those he has left behind? Under Radar is insightful and haunting, gripplingly wrought with layers of power and meaning.

Under Radar

“An amazing novel” that plunges into the all-too-gray area between the public and private in contemporary American life (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Michael Tolkin’s acclaimed second novel, Among the Dead, is an arresting examination of public and private grief in the wake of unspeakable disaster, a slow-burning tour de force of psychological fiction. When Frank Gale writes a passionate letter to his wife confessing an affair, he hopes all can be forgiven on the warm beaches of Mexico. But the farewell kiss of his girlfriend causes him to miss the flight carrying his wife and daughter, and when he learns that their plane has crashed in a crowded city, his life changes in the course of seconds. Suddenly one man’s struggle to comprehend his loss becomes consumed in a media circus of legal drama, family quarrels, and public scandal. Tolkin is a masterful chronicler of contemporary America, and Among the Dead is “fascinating . . . ingenious . . . brilliantly sustained . . . full of nasty surprises . . . like Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, Tolkin portrays the squalid downside of life very well” (San Francisco Chronicle). “Startlingly original . . . morbidly amusing . . . truly terrifying.” —Allen Barra, Los Angeles Times Book Review

The H LYW OD sign presides over a Los Angeles devastated by a weaponized microbe that has been accidentally spread around the globe, deleting human identity. In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot-tall fence surrounds the hills where the rich used to live, but the mansions have been taken over by those with the only power that matters: the power of memory. Inside the Fence, life for the new aristocracy, a society of the partially rehabilitated who call themselves the Verified, is a perpetual party. Outside the Fence, in downtown Los Angeles, the Verified use an invented mythology to keep control over the mindless Drifters, Shamblers and Bottle Bangers who serve the gift economy until no longer needed. The ruler, Chief, takes his guidance from gigantic effigies of a man and a woman in the heart of the Fence. They warn him of trouble to come, but who is the person to watch: the elusive Eckmann, holed up with the last functioning plane at LAX; Shannon Squier, the chisel-wielding pop superstar from the pre-NK3 world, pulled from the shambling masses; a treacherous member of Chief's inner circle; or Hopper, the uncommon Drifter compelled by an inner voice to search for a wife whose name and face he doesn't know? Each threatens to upset the delicate power balance in this fragile world. In deliciously dark prose, Tolkin winds a noose-like plot around this melee of despots, prophets and rebels as they struggle for command and survival in a town that still manages to exert a magnetic force, even as a ruined husk.

Michael Tolkin

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