Parents' Guide to The Offer

Hollywood in the late-1960s/early-1970s was in a period of great transition, as the popularity of reliable genres like Westerns, epics, and musicals waned and American auteurs began to tell simpler stories of peoples' day-to-day lives. Most of the fun of The Offer is watching huge, notorious personalities like producer Bob Evans and director Francis Ford Coppola navigate those changes alongside stars like Robert Redford, Frank Sinatra, and Al Pacino. Unfortunately, the story that holds The Offer together is essentially a by-the-numbers biopic, with Paramount itself cast as the hero. The aggrandizement of the studio and the producers to puts the series at a consistent disadvantage. The making of The Godfather might not even be the third most-compelling production of Coppola's career. (Hearts of Darkness, about the disastrous making of Apocalypse Now is one of the all-time great documentaries; and Coppola's films sent at least a couple of studios, including his own, into financial ruin.) Series creator Michael Tolkin, who wrote the alpha and omega of movie business takedowns in 1992's The Player, somehow manages to turn The Offer into a cavalcade of magic-of-Hollywood cliches.