Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  I thought that was terrible, I really did. But by then I had had my terrible strokes. That was when I was unconscious. I didn’t know anything about it until later. So Roald said he had to sell it, because he needed money. He said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” I think that was very bad of Roald. I think you stick by people.

  Patricia Neal with John Wayne, filming Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way in Hawaii, where she met Robert Altman

  So they started shooting in Switzerland. It began to snow and snow, and they couldn’t finish it. I think they had three days of shooting at the end of five weeks. Isn’t that something? So that movie was killed, and soon after Bob Altman—boing!—he shot to the top. I think that’s really fun—betrayal and comeuppance. That’s what I like about it. I think, “Ha, ha, ha!” Then, of course, Roald did the same sort of thing to me [laughs softly].

  Patricia Neal with John Wayne, filming Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way in Hawaii, where she met Robert Altman

  GEORGE LITTO: On top of this, we sold Petulia without him, after he had given it to Ray Wagner. I put an ad in the trades that I just returned from London, where I’d made a deal with Julie Christie, who had just done Doctor Zhivago, and Dick Lester, who had directed all the Beatles pictures—the two biggest things in the film world at the time. In the ad I said I’d just made a deal with them to do a picture, and no major studio commitment has been made yet. My phone just rang up like a Christmas tree, and I orchestrated the symphony. I made a fantastic deal for Ray Wagner in the days when one hundred thousand dollars or one hundred fifty thousand dollars would have been top, top deal. I got him four hundred fifty thousand dollars to produce the movie. It was an “oh my God” deal. Of course Bob heard this. Bob called me, but not to say congratulations [laughs].

  He said, “George, you know I have great respect for you and I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. I know you tried hard. But I cannot have an agent that represents me and Ray Wagner.”

  I said, “Bob, I cannot have a client who tells me who I can represent.”

  He said, “Well, I’m sorry, I have to go.”

  I said, “I’m sorry, too.” And we ended it there.

  I kind of lost track of Bob and went on with my other business.

  BARBARA TURNER: He didn’t get to direct it, but Petulia happened because of Bob. He was really good with women. He really liked women. I mean really liked them, and I think his career shows it. He gave women tremendous opportunities, writers and actresses, and he just liked them.

  The movie’s not bad. I was pleasantly surprised when I finally saw it. And I thought Julie Christie was glorious. And so is George C. Scott. However, I would love to have seen what Bob would have done with it. He should have directed it.

  When you were working with Bob, it was always an adventure. Just this huge, wild safari. And you never were sorry for it, no matter how painful. And in an odd way, you kind of always felt he was watching your back. You always felt like he wouldn’t do you in.

  In the meantime, even before Petulia, I had read a story in The New Yorker called “At Lake Lugano,” about a woman who’s a Holocaust survivor. I wrote the screenplay without the rights. When I finished I went to the author’s agent and I said, “I have no money, how much can I get the option for?” I think it was twelve-fifty. And at one point I showed it to Bob. Sometime after that, I found out that Anouk Aimée was interested in making the movie and Bob said he would do it.

  We met Anouk in Paris. I think we were all at the Hotel George V. I don’t know how Bob pulled that off but we were all staying there. We all met in Bob’s room, and it was a very strange meeting because Bob was, like, loaded. He said to her, “I want you to see my movies.” And she said, “I don’t need to see your movies because you could make great movies and if we worked together and it was terrible, we’d make terrible movies. I just feel good rapport with you.” She loved the script—she said that when she came in. That’s why he said, “I think you have to see my movies,” because I think he felt that it couldn’t be just about her loving the script. And she said, “That’s not important.” And I think for Bob it was very important. So he said, “The first thing we have to do is get rid of her.” Meaning me, the writer [laughs]. That sort of started the evening. So one thing led to another and it just got worse and worse and worse. He said, “You know, the person I really wanted for this part was Annie Girardot.” I was like, “What are you doing?!”

  REZA BADIYI: Anouk just came out of her experience with Fellini, and she was talking about the richness of the experiences, and Bob got annoyed. He said, “I’m sick up to here. Let’s talk about me a little bit.” To make matters worse, Brian McKay was with us, and the night before, Bob accused him of stealing something from him. Brian had spent prison time for stealing, so that was sensitive. Brian hit him, and Bob had a huge black eye. It became very obvious that this is not going to work with Anouk.

  BARBARA TURNER: He finally passed out at the table. He sort of went into his plate. It was weird, and at that point the way I rationalized it is that if he did his worst and you were still with him, then he trusted you. She was very cool, actually. I mean she was fine, except later she said to me, “I don’t think I can work with this man.”

  ANOUK AIMéE (actress): Yes, I met him for Lake Lugano. He was very different. He was a little bit more noisy, less sensitive than I could imagine he really was. He was more rough, less delicate. But very brilliant and very funny. More brutal—not physically, but the way he talked.

  I don’t remember the story that Barbara tells. Or Reza. I don’t know where she got that. He never told me he wanted to get rid of Barbara, and he never talked to me about Annie Girardot. Bob wouldn’t tell one actress about another one. I don’t remember him drunk, even. I think I would remember that. I do remember he was like a bomb. He had a strong personality. He was tall, and he had a big voice—“I want this,” and “I want that.” I remember thinking it would be very difficult to work with him, and we didn’t make the film.

  BARBARA TURNER: After, I wrote him a letter saying, “I don’t think you want to make this movie, and it’s very important to me because I love it.” He didn’t forgive me for that, not for a long time. It didn’t get made anyway, because she picked a director who was …it got nowhere. But I think he felt that I didn’t stick by him. Reza and I got married after that, and he did come to the wedding. But it was a big rift.

  REZA BADIYI: Bob needed an audience. Bob was feeding from the admiring eyes of people sitting around him. It was his food, his oxygen. When there was a period that goes by and there wasn’t anything going on, Bob physically feels sick.

  That was one of the reasons he loved to take each movie that he’s making out of town. When he’s staying at the hotel with the cast and his crew, usually always having dinner with them, it’s a continuation of him in the center and everybody’s around him. And the medium, the thing that he created with them, is not broken. He often said, when he works in town, the crew, the cast, at night they go home and they get polluted with their family, with their problems, with the life things, with the delinquent daughter or this and that. But when you are away from it, very little of that gets to them, because they’re still in that atmosphere of location. He could keep them tuned. That was very clever of him.

  With us, the parting came when I wanted to direct. He said, “There are so many directors, but there’s a rare cameraman with your talent.” And he says to me, “You know what, two actors work together, two writers work together, two producers work together, but never two directors work together. So I wish you good luck and adios.”

  Bob had this theory: if you’re my friend, you’re going to stay till the last breath of your life. And the day that you go, you’re gone, you’re on the shit list.

  It hurt, yet at the same time anywhere I did anything, when I looked at it critically, before I jumped in it, I would say, “Let’s see how Bob would like this.” He always stayed in my mind as a critic, as a mentor. Sometimes when I�
��m thinking about him it became almost like a spirituality, to that extent.

  * * *

  DANFORD GREENE (film editor): I met Bob when I was sixteen years old, maybe seventeen. My best friend, Jack Devlin, went with Bob’s sister Joan, who later married Dick Sarafian, and who I used to take out, too. A couple of times we’d double-date with Bob’s younger sister, Barbara. Bob had just come out of the service and I remember being at their parents’ house once and he was in the other room with a piano with another guy collaborating on a song.

  That was the last contact I had with him until I ran into him again when I was a film editor at Universal. He was doing Bonanza, and one of the producers of Bonanza, Bob Blees, came to Universal, and Bob Blees and I became friends. Then Bob Altman came to Universal and we immediately hooked up and I edited his pictures, Louie Lombardo and me. Then we did several Kraft Theater films at Universal, until Bob said that thing about the cheese.

  So Bob left, and he started Westwood Films. He asked me to come with him, and this was a huge jump for me, because I’d been at Universal from the time I was a splicer out of USC. With Bob Blees we made a series of little films called Color-Sonics. They were three minutes long, the length of a song. He did one with Lili St. Cyr, the famous stripper. Then I came with him and we did a thing called The Party. We shot a bunch, all of this at Bob’s house around a pool. Just a big party.

  ROBERT BLEES: They were supposed to go in video jukeboxes, to be put in restaurants. It was MTV thirty years before its time. I do not know why it was not an economic success—the customers were delighted with them.

  DANFORD GREENE: Through his contacts, Bob had development deals with the networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC. He was the leader. He would come up with ideas for series and we would try to get those off the ground. All that time, he would hold court every night, practically. The ice would come out and we’d have cocktails. He loved grass. He was trying to create his own independent studio even back then. He wanted control. He didn’t like to be told what to do and how to do it. I think that cost him a few big pictures and some knocks around the business.

  During that period when we had Westwood Films, he would be really broke. He’d owe money to the liquor store, the camera store, you name it. He’d be offered a job and he wouldn’t take it because he didn’t like it. Didn’t like the script. With my whoring ways, I’m trying to get him to do it. “Oh, it’s a beauty—when do we roll?” But I always admired him for that, that he just stayed with his guns, even broke. He could have used the dough for the mortgage, the whatever. He was really a guy of strong conviction.

  * * *

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Bobby went to kindergarten when Konni went to college—the same week. Bob would never want me to get a job—like my first husband, who was also midwestern. If I took a job it would say something about his inability to provide. We really needed the money. We always needed money. I was offered some part-time things that would have been fun, but he wouldn’t hear of it. So I tried all those volunteer things, the candy-stripe ladies at the hospital, that stuff. We bought a piano because I always wanted to take piano lessons, and I did that. I took tennis lessons because he loved tennis and I never played. But it was just all too dull.

  I couldn’t safely have any more children. It would have been a real risk physically. That was the year they were begging people to adopt. The first year of single adoption—1965. It was Christmas; we were in the car going from party to party. I remember asking what he thought about adoption. I said, “I’m really not through mothering. It’d be great for Bobby”—which it wasn’t. To make a long story longer, he said, “Okay, I’m up for that, but only if we can adopt a hard-to-place child.” I felt the same way.

  We weren’t prepared for a physically or mentally disabled child. So we went for the racial mix. That was the end of December. The day after New Year’s Day, we made the appointment. We had the first orientation meeting in January of 1966, and we had Matthew in July. So to hell with the tennis lessons.

  STEPHEN ALTMAN: Kathryn was always the unifier in the family. She made a real special effort to include Michael and myself into his life as much as she could. She was never, “Oh, Bobby is my actual child, and Matthew is my adopted baby, and Konni…” She was the one who was always the most diplomatic and kept everybody together and doing the loving thing. She’s really a good person.

  CHAPTER 11

  Countdown

  *

  Countdown (1968)

  Howard Thompson review in The New York Times, May 2, 1968: Say one thing for “Countdown,” a limp spaceflight drama that landed at neighborhood theaters yesterday. It makes the moon seem just as dull as Mother Earth. This color package from Warner Brothers-Seven Arts is simply stultifying. The bulk of it is a slack, cliché-ridden prelude to the climactic space ride, as we see the conditioning of three astronauts at a simulated Cape Kennedy. … Finally, one of the men buckles in and roars aloft, thanks to some documentary footage, as the music rumbles ominously and the rest of the cast hang around a winking control board. By then slow death has already set in, since Robert Altman’s direction is almost as listless as the acting of a dreary cast. The space rider is played by a squinting chap named James Caan.

  Robert Altman, to Professor William Parrill, at Southeastern Louisiana University, April 14, 1974: Countdown was a book called The Pilgrim Project that I tried to option, and the Warner brothers got it. They had a low-budget program, and they had called me about doing three or four films, which I had turned down, and I accepted that. We had a very low budget. Jack Warner was still at Warner Brothers, and he saw a television program I had made in Chicago, and it infuriated him, and he said, “You can’t hire that person.” Bill Conrad, who was the producer of that program—he plays Cannon, the fat guy—he was the executive producer on this thing, and he said, well, he was going to hire me.

  Robert Duvall handing a flag to James Caan in Countdown

  LORING MANDEL: Countdown was my first produced screenplay. The first phone call that I received from Bob, he introduced himself as the director and said he had some questions about the script. He asked me about the overlapping dialogue. I had been doing overlapping dialogue in all my shows going back to the mid-1950s. I said, “I’ve been in Houston, I’ve been at the Cape, to the real space program. What’s in there is as close as I can write to the way it was happening.” In those complicated scenes where people are talking at the same time, it gives it a sense of reality. Obviously, he liked it. In later films he took it steps farther than I did, but that’s where it came from.

  Pauline Kael, critic, from unused footage from a Fox Movie Channel documentary, Robert Altman: On His Own Terms: Altman brought some kind of realism and spontaneity into movies, by overlapping the dialogue. It had been done in the theater by McArthur and Hecht in The Front Page. It had been done in almost every good American work, and he simply carried it further. Made it more of a group overlap. And it was wonderful because you heard exactly every line you needed to hear. People who complained weren’t really listening…. They were used to the Broadway sound where you get a line and then a dead space. What Altman did was get rid of the dead spaces.

  MICHAEL MURPHY: Bob figured he could do something interesting with it. It was Jimmy Caan and Bob Duvall and myself. We were three astronauts. The Russians had gone to the moon—you’ve got to remember, we were in the middle of the Cold War at this point—and Bob was already talking about the futility of it all. So Jimmy, being the biggest name, gets to go to the moon. And Duvall wants to go, he’s like the military guy, and I’m a civilian astronaut who says, “I’m not going to go, they’re not ready.”

  ROBERT DUVALL (actor): There are directors who want to control it. I remember one old-time director said, “When I say, ‘Action!’ I expect you to tense up, goddamn it!” Can you imagine what that does to the work? What do you think would happen if a coach told that quarterback up in New England that every time you get hiked the ball, you better tense up?

  It
was always a very relaxed scene with Bob. We shot one of those scenes out at his house at Mandeville Canyon, a party scene, and there was drinking but nobody served food. I ended up eating one of their kids’ lunch. Kathryn never let me forget that.

  MICHAEL MURPHY: What Bob did that was interesting was he focused a lot on the wives. They all drink too much. They all live in their husbands’ shadows. The guys are outside showing each other the engines in their Corvettes, and they’re kind of adolescent in a way. And the women are more mature and half of them are whacked by noon. That’s what interested him. He shifted it off the action of the space shot into the sociological thing of being married to one of those guys. What it does to your soul to live on one of those bases.

  Something happened on Countdown that had a real impact on me. I went out to Hollywood and I thought, “Well, you know, I’ll be Dr. Kildare or somebody like that.” I knew I had a look that they used. Then I got to know Bob. I mean, suddenly I thought, “Whoa, this is interesting. What the hell is going on here? This is great.” So while we’re doing Countdown an offer came in for me to be in some movie with an elephant. They wanted some young guy to go on a safari or something. Bob was laughing about it. He said, “You know, you’ll make some money if you do that kind of stuff. But if you use your head and make good choices, you’ll do interesting work. You’ll never be a movie star, but you’ll lead a more interesting life.” And I went in and turned it down.

  I’m just crazy about the guy. In ways that have nothing to do with the movies, he was probably the biggest influence in my life. Yeah, I really think he was. I was just at the right age, I was interested, I was naïve, I didn’t know much about these things, about politics and how everything works. And he just led me.