For Your Consideration: Bruce Willis As A Tantrum-Throwin Alec Baldwin In ‘What Just Happened?’

Having stared into the vacant black eyes of The Beast more times than he’d care to remember, veteran movie producer Art Linson (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Fight Club, and Into the Wild, to name just a few) had amassed so many “That’s Hollywood, baby!” stories over the years, he strung them together into a memoir—What Just Happened? Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line—and then a screenplay. And surprise! The project found a producer, who convinced Barry Levinson to direct, and Robert DeNiro to take the lead.Happened? screened at Sundance and Cannes, where the movie was met by a mixed reaction spanning everything from mild bemusement to complete indifference—ultimately necessitating a release by Magnolia Pictures, backer Mark Cuban’s distribution arm. And what kinds of backroom wheeler-dealing goodies await us? LAT’s The Big Picture describes one scene that recreates “the time Alec Baldwin, about to star in the David Mamet-written The Edge, reported to work with a Moses-style beard, prompting a production crisis.” The scene is above, with Bruce Willis playing himself but channeling the tantrum-throwing Baldwin, using the banner of artistic integrity to justify his right to retain his bearish facial outcropping. We like to picture Baldwin reacting to the scene with an equally choleric meta-rant, which Willis would ably recreate in the film’s unlikely sequel, and so on and so forth, until our brains dribble out of our nostrils.

• Patrick Goldstein on the collision of entertainment, media and pop culture [LAT]