Julia Phillips' famous autobiography was titled "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again." Barry Levinson and Art Linson will.

If you're going to make a film about Hollywood greed, hypocrisy and lust, you have to be willing to burn your bridges. But there's not a whole lot in "What Just Happened" that would be out of place in a good "Saturday Night Live" skit.

Linson is an A-list producer ("Fight Club," "Into the Wild") who wrote this screenplay based on his memoir, subtitled "Bitter Hollywood Tales From the Front Line." He knows where the bodies are buried and who buried them, but he doesn't dig anybody up or turn anybody in.

"What Just Happened?" stars Robert De Niro as Ben, a powerful Hollywood producer who has two troubled projects on his hands and a messy private life.

He has just had a disastrous preview of his new Sean Penn picture, "Fiercely." The audience recoils at the end, when a dog is shot. (The problem with the footage of "Fiercely," we see, is that it doesn't remotely look like a real movie.) Meantime, Ben is trying to get his next project off the ground. It will star Bruce Willis as an action hero, but inconveniently Willis has put on a lot of weight and grown a beard worthy of the Smith Brothers.

Ben is still in love with Kelly, ex-wife No. 2 (Robin Wright Penn), but they just haven't been able to make it work and are now immersed in something I think is called Break-Up Therapy. Their daughter Zoe (Kristen Stewart) is having anguish of her own, which goes with the territory for a rich kid from a shattered home in 90210. Lou Tarnow (Catherine Keener), Ben's studio chief, is scared to death that "Fiercely" will tank. The film's mad-dog British director (Michael Wincott) defends the dog's death as artistically indispensable. And the writer of the Bruce Willis thriller (Stanley Tucci) is having an affair with Ben's ex-wife No. 2.

This isn't a Hollywood satire -- it's a sitcom.

The flywheels of the plot machine keep it churning around, but it chugs off onto the back lot and doesn't hit anybody in management. Only Penn and Willis are really funny, poking fun not at themselves but at stars they no doubt hate to work with.

- By Roger Ebert / Universal Press Syndicate

What Just Happened

Rating: 2 stars (out of four)

Cast: Robert De Niro, Catherine Keener, Robin Wright Penn, Stanley Tucci, Sean Penn, Bruce Willis, John Turturro.

Running time: 107 minutes.

Rated: R; language, some violent images, sexual content and some drug material.