“I’m still hopeful,” he said, “but it’s an act of will now..."

Michael Tolkin is the author of the book The Player, a sexy Hollywood satire which he adapted into the screenplay for the Robert Altman film of the same name. His other writing credits include episodes of the sitcom Taxi-pretty great credit as far as I'm concerned-and the thought-provoking The Rapture, which he also directed. And the inexplicably memorable Christian Slater skateboard action-flick, Gleaming the Cube.

Now he's published a book sequel to The Player, and talking up (in the New York Times) his idea that the real Hollywood players are seeing that game over sign...

“I don’t think America’s had a good movie made since Abu Ghraib,” Mr. Tolkin said, before clarifying that he’s talking about big movies, not the minuscule ones that have met the industry’s quotas for unembarrassing award nominees. “I think it showed that a generation that had been raised on those heroic movies was torturing. National myths die, I don’t think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way.”

...Now, as [Tolkin's lead character]Griffin Mill explains, the world has turned off the fantasies that America once fed it: “When the moral lessons of the movies can’t blunt the pain or give you energy because you’re too poor or hungry or scared or trapped — so trapped that the Journey of the Hero is the story of how your oppressors won King of the Hill — you can’t be helped by anything except violence in the real world, but it’s the kind of violence the movies lay off on the villain, mass violence.”

Mr. Tolkin said his book is about “the destructive power of despair and hopelessness.” Which may just deter Hollywood producers from stampeding, as they did with “The Player,” to make the sequel into a movie.

“I’m still hopeful,” he said, “but it’s an act of will now. Reason tells you otherwise.”