Taglines: Are you ready to play?
The Game movie storyline. Nicholas Van Orton, a wealthy investment banker, is estranged from both his ex-wife and his younger brother, Conrad. He remains haunted from having seen his father commit suicide on the latter’s 48th birthday. For Nicholas’s own 48th birthday, Conrad presents Nicholas with an unusual gift—a voucher for a “game” offered by a company called Consumer Recreation Services (CRS). Conrad promises that it will change his brother’s life.
Nicholas has doubts about CRS, but he meets fellow bankers who enjoyed the game. He goes to CRS’s offices to apply and is irritated by the lengthy and time-consuming series of psychological and physical examinations required. He is later informed that his application has been rejected. Soon Nicholas begins to believe that his business, reputation, finances, and safety are at risk. He encounters a waitress, Christine, who appears to have been endangered by the game. Nicholas contacts the police to investigate CRS, but they find the offices abandoned.
Eventually, Conrad appears to Nicholas and apologizes, claiming that he, too, has come under attack by CRS. With no one else to turn to, Nicholas finds Christine’s home. He soon discovers that she is a CRS employee and that her apartment was staged. Christine tells Nicholas that they are being watched. Nicholas attacks a camera, and armed CRS troops begin to swarm the house and fire upon them. Nicholas and Christine are forced to flee.
Christine tells Nicholas that CRS has drained his financial accounts by using the psychological tests to guess his passwords. In a panic, Nicholas calls his bank and gives a verification code to check his account balance—zero. Just as he begins to trust Christine, he realizes she has drugged him. As he loses consciousness, she admits that she is actually part of the scam and that he made a fatal mistake by giving up his verification code.
The Game is a 1997 American mystery thriller film directed by David Fincher, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, and produced by Propaganda Films and PolyGram Filmed Entertainment. It tells the story of a wealthy investment banker who is given a mysterious gift: participation in a game that integrates in strange ways with his everyday life. As the lines between the banker’s real life and the game become more uncertain, hints of a large conspiracy become apparent.
About the Filming
Principal photography began on location in San Francisco, despite studio pressure to shoot in Los Angeles which was cheaper. Fincher also considered shooting the film in Chicago and Seattle, but the former had no mansions that were close by and the latter did not have an adequate financial district. The script had been written with San Francisco in mind and he liked the financial district’s “old money, Wall Street vibe”.
However, that area of the city was very busy and hard to move around in. The production shot on weekends in order to have more control. Fincher utilized old stone buildings, small streets and the city’s hills to represent the class system pictorially. To convey the old money world, he set many scenes in restaurants with hardwood paneling and red leather. Some of the locations used in the film included Golden Gate Park, the Presidio of San Francisco, and the historic Filoli Mansion, 25 miles south of San Francisco in Woodside, California, which stood in for the Van Orton mansion.[8]
For the visual look of Nicholas’ wealthy lifestyle, Fincher and the film’s cinematographer Harris Savides wanted a “rich and supple” feel and took references from films like The Godfather which featured visually appealing locations with ominous intentions lurking under the surface. According to Fincher, once Nicholas left his protective world, he and Savides would let fluorescents, neon signs and other lights in the background be overexposed to let “things get a bit wilder out in the real world”.
For The Game, Fincher employed a Technicolor printing process known as ENR which lent a smoother look to the night sequences. The challenge for him was how much deception could the audience take and “will they go for 45 minutes of red herrings?” To this end, he tried to stage scenes as simply as possible and use a single camera because “with multiple cameras, you run the risk of boring people with coverage”.
The scene where Nicholas’ taxi drives into the San Francisco Bay was shot near the Embarcadero, with the close-up of Douglas trapped in the back seat filmed on a soundstage at Sony Pictures studio in a large tank of water. The actor was in a small compartment that was designed to resemble the backseat of a taxi with three cameras capturing the action. Principal photography lasted 100 days with a lot of shooting done at night utilizing numerous locations.
The Game (1997)
Directed by: David Fincher
Starring: Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, James Rebhorn, Deborah Kara Unger, Peter Donat, Carroll Baker, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Anna Katarina, Caroline Barclay
Screenplay by: John Brancato, Michael Ferris
Production Design by: Jeffrey Beecroft
Cinematography by: Harris Savides
Film Editing by: James Haygood
Costume Design by: Michael Kaplan
Set Decoration by: Jackie Carr
Art Direction by: James J. Murakami, Steve Saklad
Music by: Howard Shore
MPAA Rating: R for language, and for some violence and sexuality.
Distributed by: PolyGram Filmed Entertainment
Release Date: September 12, 1997
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