Altman ’91

From the January-February 1991 Issue

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Altman ’91 By Beverly Walker

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I spotted him immediately, slimmer than photos suggest, moving among his staff in a big, glass-enclosed room overlooking the Pacific. Though we’d never met, conversation began easily. One can imagine what a calm, secure presence he is for actors.

Replicas of van Gogh paintings done for his latest film, Vincent and Theo, lined the wall along with the British poster. The film largely received excellent reviews overseas, and the director admitted that the upcoming American release would be important to him, predicting, “It will do me some good.” He could’ve only meant that Vincent and Theo proves he can make commercially viable pictures again, spelling easier access to financing and distribution.

No American filmmaker of the last 25 years has suffered the wrath of Establishment Hollywood like Robert Altman, a visionary maverick who simply couldn’t play by the rules. From the release of McCabe and Mrs. Miller in 1971 through Popeye in 1980, he was our most controversial director, the center of a schism between critics and serious filmgoers on the one hand, and the purse-holders of the industry on the other.

A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Altman struggled for 15 years on the margins of moviemaking, finally hitting it big in 1970 with M*A *S*H, starring Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould. Though it contained certain innovations which later became trademarks, at bottom the film was a raucous, male-centered comedy set in wartime—a Hollywood staple.

Altman confounded industry bosses with his followup piece, an offbeat comedy called Brewster McCloud. The bosses, who thought that in Altman they’d found a deep vein of gold to be mined for years to come, were dismayed. That dismay would grow more profound: McCabe and Mrs. Miller was just too much of a revisionist Western (and audiovisually radical besides), and didn’t “go through the roof” (which would’ve brought forgiveness). Images (1972), about a psychologically disturbed woman (Susannah York), was dismissed, but hopes perked up with his next few films, particularly The Long Goodbye (1973) and California Split (1974). Though they defied generic conventions, still they were about guys and did business. Nashville, released in 1975 to critical hosannahs, calmed the waters enough to lead to a big budget for Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), starring Paul Newman. But Nashville‘s box office, while respectable, came nowhere near matching its critical success, and Buffalo Bill achieved neither. By the time of 3 Women in 1977, the unease about Altman had reached hurricane proportions.

Box-office performance was not the only issue—maybe not the major one, either. In addition to the director’s stylistic experimentation, there was his propensity to portray women sympathetically, even make them the center of some of his movies. And most of his female characters were real contenders, neither passive victims of some type of male violence nor supportive sidekicks to a man who engineered the action. “I’d rather face a thousand crazy savages than one woman who knows how to shoot,” says the guy in 3 Women (Robert Fortier) who is ultimately done in by the troika.

The way Altman lived and worked, mostly with a coterie of the same people, was also a bone of contention. The press gleefully reported on his freewheeling lifestyle; his oft-stated disdain for unions and studios, not to mention writers (“A script is an embarkation point”); his dreams that inspired the movies. This made him great copy but also a giant-sized target. Worst of all, while other directors swallowed their pride and visions, and buckled under to the rising power of development executives, Altman continued making patently uncommercial films with total autonomy—four in less than three years: A Wedding (1978), A Perfect Couple (1979), Quintet (1979), and Health (1979).

Then Popeye happened.

Rights to the original E.C. Segar comic strip were owned by Paramount, which assigned Robert Evans as producer. Even before Altman came aboard, the project had generated considerable trade babble, which steadily escalated during the film’s production on Malta. As usual, the director was doing things his own way. These included hiring iconoclastic songwriter Harry Nilsson for the music, and Canadian designer Wolf Kroeger to create an ingenious town set. Squabbles with screenwriter Jules Feiffer came and went, though the relationship was ultimately harmonious, but inclement weather and special-effects snafus prolonged shooting. The budget boiled over and with it, gossip. Paramount had been cool to Altman in the first place; now they froze.

When finally unveiled, Popeye proved so original that neither the film media nor marketing mavens quite knew what to do with it. Though it looks like a cartoon, it is, of course, live action; and though the characters don’t look realistic, they feel that way. The movie has a soufflé-like delicacy and lightness that comes from a perfect synthesis of all the elements, including a gurgling baby—Swee’pea—that ought to melt the heart of any mogul. Above all, it is an enchanting love story of Popeye and Olive Oyl, heartbreakingly incarnated by Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, respectively.

Popeye did good business, but not enough to offset a brushfire of hostility toward Altman that caught wind throughout the industry. Too, this was 1980, when boxoffice figures began replacing any other consideration of a film’s worth. Very, very bad timing. Altman was, in essence, blackballed as only the movie business can do it: no one returned his phone calls. In 1982 he sold his production company, Lion’s Gate, and left the West Coast.

During the remainder of the Eighties, while Hollywood atrophied, Robert Altman challenged himself anew. He directed theater and opera in such diverse spots as Lille (France) and Michigan; he adapted plays for the screen, sometimes with great distinction (notably, Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean); when funds were lacking, he went to Super-16mm and television. Not only did he direct a superb production of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1988), starring Brad Davis, but, proving that the boob tube is a noble medium in the right hands, he created Tanner ’88 (on videotape) with Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame.

At about the same time Vincent and Theo was being released in Europe, two of his finest Seventies movies were reissued to great success: McCabe and Mrs. Miller in London and The Long Goodbye in Paris. Commentary from almost every sector of the critical/political spectrum called him “beyond a doubt one of the great creators of American cinema”; one of our “most talented . . . consistently original . . . intelligent” directors; “one of the US. cinema’s few genuine individualists:’ Both EZ-TV in Los Angeles and the Anthology Film Archive in New York screened the Tanner miniseries; an Altman retrospective was mounted by the American Cinematheque (L.A.) and another is planned at the Sundance/United States Film Festival in January. All this for a man who has not made a mainstream, studio-based film in a decade, but who is very much alive and kicking.

Such a rising stir suggests not just belated acknowledgment of a great director, but actual starvation for something of worth in a new decade that dispiritingly suggests a perpetuation of the old: the hi/lo concepts, sequel fever, and ersatz emotion of the Eighties continue unabated. In short, what Robert Altman’s about is in short supply these days. We need him.

So the onetime lion of Lion’s Gate is back, perhaps a little wiser: he’s named his new company Sandcastle Productions, “to signify the impermanence of what we do.” The self-protective posture is well taken because he told me immediately after entering his office that L.A. Shortcuts had been cancelled by Paramount.

Based on some Raymond Carver short stories, the new-film-to-be was meant to start in a couple of weeks; that’s what the people in the room outside were still working on. A large cast had been assembled, whose names Altman ringingly read off from a piece of paper. “I’m afraid I’ll lose them if we don’t get going soon,” he said in a voice so flat you knew he was sitting on a volcano of emotion. Truly, I felt like weeping. From McCabe and Mrs. Miller in 1971, Altman has been my favorite American director. There are others I admire and respect, but his films pierce the soul, their moments indelible: Warren Beatty’s McCabe comforting a young prostitute who has just stabbed a man; Lily Tomlin’s yearning glance at Keith Carradine in Nashville; Shelley Duvall and Robin Williams making goo-goo eyes at each other while she sings, “He’s mine.”

In reseeing many of his films (more than half of the 29 features are not on videocassette), the only one I upgraded was Jimmy Dean, which is far better than I remembered. McCabe, 3 Women, and Popeye seem just about perfect, each mesmerizing in its own way, and Thieves like Us is very fine. I still found M*A*S*H unpleasantly macho and remain at odds with Nashville.

My biases didn’t perturb the director, who said he understands the absence of consensus about his work, even among diehard admirers: “When I make a film, my intention is for each person to see it differently. Really, the film doesn’t tell you anything, it just stimulates something that opens up a channel of perception or feeling; it’s a catalyst. The viewer furnishes the ‘art.'”

Or the anger. Altman’s painterly films with their fractured narratives and wacko characters simply drive some viewers crazy. Plot and heroics are not his bag, and for those who need them, he’s infuriating. For marketing executives who’re looking for a catchy one-line description, he’s maddening. For others like me, his films are extremely satisfying on aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual levels—which is rare.

Preparing to interview and write about him turned out to be unexpectedly vexing, however. Like other charismatic directors who came to prominence in the early 1970s—Coppola, for example—Altman has been thoroughly mythologized. The personal myth is so pervasively intermingled with the work that it is almost impossible to track and separate them. Moreover, unlike directors such as Ingmar Bergman or François Truffaut, there is little empirically based autobiographical evidence (as opposed to conjecture), though his work is unquestionably personal, his signature unmistakable.

To step into Altman’s universe is to confront a complex tapestry wherein aesthetics, philosophical musings, form and content are interwoven intricately with lifestyle and working methodology. It’s hard to know where to begin even if one feels understanding and kinship. Unsurprising that the one major book published about him to date, Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff by Patrick McGilligan, is largely a compendium of complaints and allegations by people who worked with him for years before suffering terminal disappointment. Altman felt such a book was virtually an obituary to his career, and declined to cooperate. He heard the voices calling him to take on the mantle of Orson Welles, but he didn’t heed them. Above all else, he is a man of action, a doer, and he had some plans.

It’s pretty tricky to interview someone with this history and under these circumstances, but he really does convey strength and determination. “Somebody will give us the money” for L.A. Shortcuts, he said; “it’s only twelve million dollars.” Then he sat down, folded his hands, set his jaw firmly, and looked at me—ready for questions.

Right after M*A*S*H in 1970 Altman made a very different picture with a powerful metaphor about, yes, existence. In Brewster McCloud, Earth is a prison whose constraints man endlessly dreams of escaping. Flight will do the trick temporarily, though performing, too, provides perspective and detachment from the hurly-burly. In the movie’s finale, a young man (Bud Cort) puts on homemade wings to fly around the Houston Astrodome during a show, but after a couple of orbits his energy flags and he drops to the ground, dead.

Foolish boy, we might murmur; but that was hardly the sum of Altman’s statement. The spectators think Brewster’s fall is just part of the act and they applaud enthusiastically, while other performers, equally ignorant, come out for bows around the boy’s inert body. It is a chilling and unexpected ending to an otherwise shaggy-dog comedy.

The precarious nature of the artist/performer has been dealt with in other Altman films . His second feature, The James Dean Story, in 1957, was about the most legendary dead actor of our time; Ronee Blakley’s country singing star in Nashville is assassinated; and in Vincent and Theo the artist dies without ever having sold a single painting—a point Altman underlines by opening with the multimillion-dollar Sotheby’s auction of Sunflowers.

In these and other films like Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) or, arguably, McCabe and Mrs. Miller—where McCabe is clearly “putting on an act”—fans, managers, spouses are scathingly depicted. An exception of sorts is the sympathetic portrayal of Theo in the van Gogh film. This character serves as a bridge between the artist on the one hand and parasitic dealers and gallery owners, as well as the buying public, on the other. Conversely, Vincent is an example of the artist-as-devourer because he certainly helped ruin his brother’s life—also underscored by Altman.

I saw Brewster McCloud for the first time while preparing this piece, and it immediately illuminated Altman’s work as well as his life: his near-miraculous ability to stay afloat, not merely to survive but to express himself significantly. His long struggle to become a filmmaker, begun in the mid-Fifties, had left him with an acute sense of what he was up against. M*A *S*H‘s incredible success must’ve struck him as a fluke, gambler’s luck.

It seems to me that from Brewster McCloud on, most of Robert Altman’s films are cautionary tales about people with illusions—though he himself has few, and probably tries to resist the siren call of those.

Since Altman has often been called the most Icarus-like of directors , it’s de rigueur to bring it up. He smiles at the mention of Brewster; it’s one of his personal favorites. But he’s uncomfortable with the analogy, and dances around the subject for a bit before emitting a deep sigh. “Yes,” he nods, “the Brewster story is prophetic. You fly too high, get your wings singed, run out of energy. Brewster was doing just fine and then he simply ran out of steam.

“He overreached, I guess. But overreaching is exciting. ‘Course, it’s also what kills you, but what the hell… I’ve been criticized for not knowing how to do an ending—and I don’t: the only ending I know is death . But I don’t think death is stopping; it just eliminates that particular computer.”

Then he lightens up, chuckling as he recalls another of Brewster‘s scientific theorems which compare men with birds . The scientist, played by René Auberjonois, intones, “If we build enclosures to protect both men and birds, will men allow birds in or put them out?” Altman remembers the words exactly. And: “The importance of song to a bird can be partially determined by how long the bird devotes to it.”

Altman rewrote the screenplay (by Doran William Cannon) upon which Brewster is based, and it is unquestionably as meaningful to him today as in 1970. He points out that, as he was making Brewster, its studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was being dismantled.

Man is like a bird and needs freedom; a movie’s a song; a studio can be a cage. Then there is the extremely pessimistic ending of Brewster, with its juxtaposition of the dead performer and the laughing/clapping audience. Altman raises an eyebrow slightly, as if his meaning were self-evident, and says, “People who watch don’t die.”

People who watch don’t die. There is a trace of real bitterness in that comment. Perhaps it is the quintessential vise of all artists: how to reconcile the ability to make the art with the need for appreciation—from onlookers—which allows the artist to continue. And almost nowhere is this more crucial than in cinema, because of cost. Movies must have paying “watchers.”

I ask Altman how he got the nerve to make films like 3 Women, Quintet, and Health, which have no conventional storyline. He gives all the credit to Alan Ladd Jr., head of Twentieth Century Fox when the films were made. “He had great faith in me; he put his own job on the line.”

A long pause ensues, during which I don’t feel the need to point out that Ladd’s backing of these films did not stand him in good stead within the industry. Then Altman continues: “But I don’t feel guilty because I didn’t have anything else to offer at the time. I’m a collaborative artist; I want to see things I’ve never seen before. Anything that triggers me, if it fits, I wear it.”

So this acrid view of the watcher is also an asset, because it blinds him to certain realities of the marketplace and strengthens his resolve to say things his own way.

Which brings us to Vincent and Theo, a film whose exquisite, voluptuous images intensify a harrowing story of two brothers—one an artist, the other a seller of art. It is Altman’s most searing, overtly despairing film ever, and it has been widely interpreted as his own personal statement.

But on this mild September day, Robert Altman rejects such facile presumptions. “Well, the story happened. Those people existed and the conditions of their lives [were] probably worse than I depicted, since they were not aware of the totality of their lives. We all adjust the past to suit ourselves . . .

“But I am not Vincent van Gogh. I’m the luckiest person I know. I have had many successes, and I’m able to look in the faces of people after they’ve seen my films, faces which glow. One time in Paris a guy came right up to me . . . I thought he might hit me . . . and he started babbling about ‘that movie called 3 Women, when the yellow skirt got caught in the door.’ That is my reward.

“I’ve had my ups and downs, but I’m on the top of a rollercoaster and van Gogh never got off the ground. He overcame so much. He was not a gifted draftsman; he had no imagination, no ideas. But his incredible passion did come through, not to the dealers but to people, eventually, somehow. It’s an astonishing phenomenon and it tells you something about art. Art is not a skill, though that’s part of it. It’s a passion.”

Yes, and that point is made all the way through Vincent and Theo. Art is about emotions, not ideas, and art does not merely replicate reality. Van Gogh is overwhelmed by the field of sunflowers—the frame of the movie itself cannot contain it—and he is able to paint them only when he plucks a handful from the earth and sticks them in a vase.

It’s interesting to note that whereas Kurosawa, in his Dreams, depicts van Gogh as a joyfully mad painter in love with, and at one with, nature, Altman shows us the pain, frustration, and bewilderment.

Altman also rejects the notion of Vincent and Theo being more linear or conventional than his other pictures. “When I saw it in Toronto, I thought it was bizarre, the way the blocks are put together. When I was planning the film I knew the audience would have a lot of information about van Gogh, and for that reason I wouldn’t have to deal with too many linear things, I could pick and choose, show glimpses. I took the position that the movie itself was a show about Vincent and Theo and the paintings, done by me. That’s how I organized it in my mind.”

Altman has long referred to his films as “paintings” and the actors as “living pigment,” so Vincent and Theo provided a unique opportunity for synthesis. The film’s performances—Tim Roth as the painter, Paul Rhys as his brother, and Wladimir Yordanoff as Gauguin—are vivid and unclichéd and, as in most Altman movies, do not secretly beg for our sympathy and understanding. They exist “existentially,” as it were, and command us to take them straight, like a shot of strong whiskey.

The way Altman depicts human beings is his most critical attribute as an artist. Every aspect of filmmaking art is put at the service of his perception of people: the famous use of overlapping sound, his probing closeups, canny cutting. Who else would have given us Shelley Duvall? Many stars, in particular Warren Beatty, Cher, Elliott Gould, show us something of themselves in his films which we never see again.

“When an actor comes in to see me, of course I have an idea of what the character should be. But I want always to see what the actor brings to it. If the vision were just mine, just a single vision, it wouldn’t be any good. It’s the combination of what I have in mind, with who the actor is and then how he adjusts to the character, along with how I adjust, that makes the movie.”

Then the actors really are extremely, urgently important to you, I commented, and he replied, “They are everything.”

Though his printed words don’t show it, Altman’s body language and tone during the interview often revealed discomfort with the questions and resistance to analysis. I apologized for “trying to pin you down when you don’t want to be.”

“I’m telling you all I know!” he laughed. “I open myself up to my work as much as I possibly can, and if I feel an obligation to disguise a thought, I do. But I don’t intellectualize it, not as I’m doing it.”

Utterly uninterested in heroes and heroism, Altman gives us the walking wounded—characters who are scarred, foolish, vain—somehow never quite smart enough. His closeups layout their foibles with the delicacy and precision of a brain surgeon. Yet he does not mock, judge, or romanticize them.

How, I asked, does he finesse all this? A look of pleased astonishment suffused his face and he said, “But that’s my trick, that’s what I strive for. That’s me.” Enough said.

Beverly Walker is an L.A.-based writer and publicist.