Award Snub: Though the movie received terrific reviews, and Robert Altman received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director (the script and the editing were also nominated), the film itself did not receive a nomination for Best Picture, nor did Tim Robbins get nominated for Best Actor.
Harsher in Hindsight: The staff meeting scene where Larry Levy basically says that writers aren't really necessary for the filmmaking process, and demonstrates it by coming up with film premises by applying standard plot formulas to random news stories. Three decades later, the unveiling of advanced AI models like ChatGPT immediately led to fears in the writing community that studios would use AI to generate full screenplays doing exactly the same thing Levy was doing. This became one of the major issues at stake in the 2023 Writers' Guild of America strike.
Susan Sarandon has a cameo as a saintly onlooker in the execution scene in Habeas Corpus. Three years later, she won an Oscar as a nun in Dead Man Walking, directed by star Tim Robbins.
Habeas Corpus is presented as a contrived and farfetched story about a character trying to stop an innocent person from getting executed at the last minute. Two later films, True Crime (1999) and The Life of David Gale (2003), would use exactly the same premise unironically.note with spoilers The Life of David Gale has the prisoner get executed, like the original pitch of Habeas Corpus, while True Crime has the prisoner getting saved, like the Focus Group Ending of Habeas Corpus.
In the opening scene, director (and Altman protégé) Alan Rudolph gets mistaken for Martin Scorsese. Scorsese himself ended up in a cameo for Altman's miniseries Tanner on Tanner in 2004.
A man gets killed in a heated moment by a prominent businessman, who tries to carry on normally while he's being investigated by an eccentric police detective and his more personable female partner. Sounds like an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, only in this case, Vincent D'Onofrio plays the victim, not the detective.
Griffin tries to make small-talk with David after watching The Bicycle Thief and says his studio should remake it. David sneers that they'd ruin it (in his opinion) by giving it a happy ending. Since then, there has been a Spiritual Successor (although not an official remake) of The Bicycle Thief with a happy ending.
Jerkass Woobie: David Kahane is a struggling writer who's obviously not in a terribly happy place in his life. He's also an eccentric, self-important hothead who needlessly agitates Griffin during their confrontation. Still, he certainly didn't deserve his ultimate fate.
The 2015 Series
Hilarious in Hindsight: This series revolves around the idea that absurdly wealthy people need a deadly outlet like the Game or else they'd start deadly wars out of boredom. Several years later, Squid Game depicts a similar situation, except those games are much more sadistic.
Moral Event Horizon: He regards the abduction and interrogation of Cassandra to have been an unforgivable action on his part, and blames Alex for putting him in the situation where he went along with it.
Special Effects Failure: The scenes shot in The House feature some truly abysmal green screen effects. Justified in that they're actually hi-def screens meant to keep anyone from knowing what floor of the building it's in without ruining the aesthetic of a high-stakes casino.
