The Primary Instinct

Stephen Tobolowsky has acted in more than two hundred television shows and films over forty years. This film is not about the parts he has played but about the stories he tells. Tobolowsky stands on a stage as himself and talks. What he tells concerns his life, love and the years in Hollywood. The film rests almost entirely on the voice of a single narrator. The question it really asks is this: why do people tell stories. The work handles that question not as a thesis but as the thing being done. Nobody appears in the film apart from Tobolowsky. David Chen’s American production of 2015 runs seventy three minutes.