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Snakes in Movies   The Player (1992)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is an award-winning crime thriller directed by the great Robert Altman, with lots and lots of star cameos and big stars in small roles. It feels like every actor in Hollywood in 1992 wanted to be a part of this dark satirical comedy about the Hollywood movie business. (The hilarious movie within the movie stars Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis, two of the biggest names in Hollywood at the time.) But I'm going to degrade this masterpiece by discussing only the scenes with snakes, because that's what I do. Tim Robbins stars as a sleazy but not unlikeable movie studio executive named Griffin Mill who gets away with murder. He has been receiving life-threatening postcards from a disgruntled writer, which he probably deserves. While sitting at a restaurant, Griffin receives another postcard that shows a red-diamond rattlesnake. After Griffin gets into his SUV and starts driving, he receives a car fax that tells him to look under his raincoat which he just put on the floor or seat next to him. (Everybody had a car fax machine in the 90s, didn't they?) Under the raincoat he finds a fancy box with another postcard telling him not to open it. When he lifts the lid, he sees a Red-diamond Rattlesnake inside the box, rattling like crazy. Needless to say, he's terrified. The snake crawls onto the floor of the SUV, so Mill pulls over, grabs an umbrella, tears off his shirt, then whacks the snake over and over again with the umbrella, all the time cursing at the writer. He pulls the snake out using the umbrella handle as a snake hook and throws its carcass on the pavement. Then he goes to the home of the girlfriend of the screenwriter he murdered and, trying to seduce her, he tells her he just came close to dying but all he could think about was her. This works. He also tells her that snakes scare the s**t out of him. Later when Mill is driving to a hot springs resort in the desert near Palm Springs to hide from the Pasadena police, we see another red diamond rattlesnake curled up on a rock above the road his SUV is driving on. Respect to the movie for its consistancy in using the right species of rattlesnake for the area. However, Red Diamond Rattlesnakes are not found anywhere near Death Valley. I don't know if the production designers made the Death Valley postcard themselves or if they used a real postcard. Either way, it's a minor goof.