Bill Macy, Meg Ryan, Elliot Gould, and LL Cool J star in "The Deal" from 2008, directed by Steven Schachter and written by Macy and Schacter.

Macy plays another loser, this time Charlie Berns, who has a couple of producer credits on his resume, but they're not recent, and he can't get arrested. His nephew (Jason Ritter) gives him his script about Benjamin Disraeli to read. He's not interested in it but then he sees an article about a major star in adventure films, Bobby Mason (LL Cool J) who has converted to Judaism and wants to do a film with a Jewish theme for his next project.

Charlie manages to convince a studio that he has Bobby Mason's next kick your butt film and a studio executive, Deidre (Meg Ryan) is assigned to make it happen. Soon "Bill & Ben" is being filmed, with Berns' heartbroken nephew screaming, "There's not one word of my script in this." Then Bobby Mason is kidnapped and held for ransom, and the studio doesn't want to pay. But Deidre has an idea.

We've seen these behind the scenes getting a movie made before, and this is absurd but quite good. And how absurd is it? Probably not far off. Macy is excellent as Berns, who has been around the block a few times and knows how to talk his way into and out of trouble. This movie took a while to get made, so there's no doubt Macy knew what he was talking about when he wrote the script - I'm sure it wasn't a new experience for him.

Ryan's role could have been played by anyone, but at 47 and once the ingénue du jour (as Rene Zwelleger, Reese Witherspoon, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, and Sally Field once were),she has a problem. While leading men are leading men from the time they're in their twenties until death, pert, pretty young actresses have a limited shelf life, and the transition to lead woman not only is difficult, it's often not even worth it since that doesn't last long either. Today things are much better -- at least 30 is no longer the cut-off like it was in Bette Davis' day -- but the fact remains, unless your name is Meryl Streep, you'll be in character roles by the time you're 55. If you have a job. So I can't blame her for doing this role.

Good, enjoyable movie, especially if you're a writer and know what happens to scripts in Hollywood.

Every once in a while another movie about movies comes out -- metamovies. Truffaut's "Day For Night" was pretty good. "Bowfinger" had its moments. "The Deal" ought to be the comedy that it strives so hard to be but doesn't quite make it.

Producers William Macy and Meg Ryan hire an Israeli director to make an action movie that was originally written as a biography of Benjamin Disraeli. The picture is to be shot in South Africa. There are myriad subsidiary characters I won't bother to name or describe.

The action hero, a kind of black, Jewish Rambo, is kidnapped by an extremist political group and the studio tells Macy and Ryan to "shut it down and salvage what you can." They take this to mean they can move to Prague, where the studio has some frozen money, and revert to the original script about Disraeli.

Granted it doesn't sound too funny and it's not. That's a shame in a way because they've got some talent in front of the camera, and not just high-end stars like Macy and Ryan.

But the script, by Macy and Schachter, is weak, in that it's deficient in laughs, or smiles even, and there aren't any characters to particularly care about.

The direction and editing need some seasoning. There are too many cutaway shots to spectators gaping open-mouthed at the goings on. Some gags depend on the viewer's knowledge of the rudiments of Judaism. A book is entitled "The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Talmud." I don't know that, even today, the casual viewer in America's Heartland is going to get a joke like that, or like the director's insistence that everyone on the set wear a yarmulkah. They'll go over well on the Coasts.

I got the gags but didn't find them too amusing. The film simply ambles along with characters making shocking statements or doing outrageous things mostly in deadpan. It's confusing too. When the film within the film finally wrapped, it came as a surprise to me because I didn't know the production was that far along.

It's not an insulting movie in any way, it's just not what it was intended to be. Too bad. "State and Main" is funnier.

Before watching The Deal I read some positive reviews from over excited people, thought I was going to be in for a treat, certainly with William H. Macy and Meg Ryan in the cast, two actors that I appreciate, but in the end it was just disappointing. The acting was good though, but the story is just a bit boring. And it's not the couple comedy scenes that were going to save this picture. I wished I liked it more but I didn't, I was actually glad when I saw the end credits appear, felt like a three hour movie instead of half that time.