Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  * * *

  ROBERT ALTMAN: When we were making M*A*S*H, Twentieth Century Fox had two other wars going on—Patton and Tora! Tora! Tora! Those were big-budget pictures, and we were cheap. I knew that if we stayed under budget and didn’t cause too much trouble, we could sneak through. You could say they were distracted by those other films.

  RICHARD ZANUCK: Whether we were making Tora! Tora! in Japan and Hawaii had nothing to do with anything. He was right under our thumb, but he claimed we were asleep while we were making the picture. That was ridiculous. He was a hundred feet away. I was at the ranch many, many times. I was seeing dailies every day, sending him notes every day—notes of praise. Of course we were busy with Tora! Tora! But what is it he did behind our backs? Nothing. Maybe he smoked pot on the set. He was just an authority resister. If you say “studio” he immediately becomes paranoid.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: What’s that expression about success having many fathers and failure being an orphan? Something like that, right?

  When I got started, the only two people who were already cast were Donald Sutherland and, I think, Elliott Gould, though that might not have been finished. I went up to San Francisco to cast the rest of the film. I don’t know what kind of theater you call it, theater of the absurd, I suppose, but there were like forty people onstage all the time, and it was highly improvisational. And I cast the film right there. If you look at the credits of M*A*S*H, it says, Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould and “Introducing,” and there’s about twenty names. Well, those were all those people from San Francisco.

  BILL BUSHNELL (theater impresario): It was the spring of 1969 when he came to ACT, the American Conservatory Theater, in San Francisco. I got a phone call one Saturday morning from my then-wife, Scotty, who was working with the casting agent. She gave me Bob’s number at the Fairmont Hotel and I went up there and spent the afternoon and the evening drinking and smoking with Bob and took him down to ACT to a party that night where he met John Schuck and René Auberjonois and G. Wood, among others, and that was the beginning of a relationship between Bob and myself and eventually between Bob and Scotty.

  * * *

  JOHN SCHUCK (actor): I thought he was fascinating because I hadn’t met anybody quite like him. There was no artifice about him. He had a way of simplifying the most complex of ideas that at first you weren’t sure if he had much intelligence at all, you know? But that was part of my snobbery. I was used to articulate theater directors who could expound on the literature and history. Bob could have done all that but he wasn’t that kind of a person. He was a great equalizer that way. He had—I don’t want to call it a common touch, but his appeal was much simpler, much more basic.

  He was fourteen or fifteen years older than me, but he had a weariness, like he’d really lived, you know? I don’t want to say he looked beat up—he didn’t—but he was craggy and with a beard and he had lost some of his hair.

  SALLY KELLERMAN (actress and singer): I was going out for the part of Lieutenant Dish, so I thought, “Okay, I better wear some red lipstick.” I never wore red lipstick, because I always hid my mouth because my sister used to say to me, “Shut up, big lips.” But that day I wore bright red lips for Lieutenant Dish, and it was probably Ingo Preminger and the casting director and Bob and maybe my agent. We’re just sitting there talking and suddenly Bob said to me, “I’ll give you the best part in the picture: Hot Lips.” I said, “Really? Oh my god.” I went outside so excited, and I remember standing against the wall, and I quickly thumbed through the script. What a frigging amateur I was, looking for the part. It looked like there were seven lines and I just turned to granite. I was just bitter, thinking, “I’ll never get in the movies.”

  Someone said, “You really should go back and see him, because he’s really talented.” So I read the script again, I went back to meet him, and I was just all puffed up and I was so angry, I mean that’s how desperate I was. I remember saying, “I’m not a WAC, I’m a woman,” and tears are in my eyes. I said, “Why does she have to leave the film so early?” And, “Why couldn’t she do this?” and, “Why couldn’t she do that?” He’s just sitting back, and I was just mad and tearing up. And he goes, “Yeah. Why couldn’t she? Why don’t you take a chance? You could end up with something or nothing.” I was coming from television, and in those days you couldn’t change one line and if you did, the entire suite of suits from Universal had to come down to the set to check it out, you know? And here’s this director saying, “Take a chance.” So, needless to say, I grabbed it.

  TOM SKERRITT: I hadn’t spoken to him in a year or two. I was writing something and having a difficult time with it. I called him one day. He says, “Skerritt. Hang up, I’ll call you back.” The next day I was in M*A*S*H. If I hadn’t called that day I really doubt I would have been in M*A*S*H. The studio was pushing for a bigger name—Burt Reynolds. Bob was pushing back.

  BUD CORT (actor): I got a call asking me to come in for a meeting. It was the middle of winter and I took buses and had to trudge through snow. I remember I was wearing new Army boots, light tan suede with gold buttons on them. I was shown into this room and there were probably five people there. The only one I remembered was Ingo Preminger. I focused on him because I thought, “My God, he’s probably related to Otto Preminger.” This one guy kept focusing on me. “Where’d you get those shoes?” I told him, “Army-Navy store.” Then, “Those glasses real?” I had on little John Lennon glasses. I looked at him and lied and said, “Yes.” He bored through me with these blue eyes and he says, “Yeah, right.” And I ignored him. About a month later, I get a call: “You have an offer to do a movie in California in the summer.”

  They checked me into a little hotel on Pico Boulevard, right there by Twentieth Century Fox. Before we started shooting, we all went there as ourselves to be fitted. I had hair down to my shoulders and I was wearing a beige suede Indian vest with these long beaded tassels that hung like a bird’s feathers almost down to the floor. This guy came up to me and just stared at me and started barking orders. Same guy who gave me a hard time at the audition about my glasses. He says, “I want his hair shaved.” I turned to the guy next to me and I said, “What is with this hairdresser?”

  “No,” he says, “that’s the director. That’s Bob Altman.”

  RENÉ AUBERJONOIS (actor): He told me, “I won’t even give you a script because you wouldn’t think the part was interesting, because he doesn’t do much or say much. If you were going to play a priest, what would you do with it?” I just started talking about a guy I had been in acting class with, a guy who had been a priest. He was a well-meaning guy, but humble. I described this character to him and he said, “Well, that sounds good.”

  I love Dago Red, Father Mulcahy. I thought he was everything I would want a priest to be. I thought of him as this sweet sort of a character. It never occurred to me that the audience would think of it as an insult, or anti-Christian or anything like that. I thought of him as a character full of humanity.

  MALACHY MCCOURT (raconteur/writer/professional Irishman): Bob originally cast me as Father Mulcahy, you know. He wanted a real Irish priest. But the producer, Preminger, what was his first name, the brother? Ingo, yes, Ingo. He didn’t like me. At the time, Bob didn’t have what it took to overrule him, so I was out. There went my acting career. Every time I saw Bob after that, here at Elaine’s, wherever, he always said, “I owe you one, Malachy. I owe you one.” True story.

  RENÉ AUBERJONOIS: I never heard that! But I love it because my son’s beautiful, wonderful actress wife did a little independent movie this summer in Philadelphia called Our Lady of Victory. She told me, “There’s a part of a priest that they’d like you to play.” We had a back-and-forth with the director and producer. They couldn’t even afford to fly me in. In the end, Malachy got to play the priest. So if he thinks I took his part of the priest, he took my part of the priest!

  ELLIOTT GOULD (actor): I was asked by Twentieth Century Fox to meet Robert Altman. He asked me if I wou
ld consider playing the role of Duke, the American Southerner in M*A*S*H. I said, “I’ve never questioned an offer, and I’m really delighted and flattered that you would ask me to work for you. But I’ll drive myself crazy validating me being an American Southerner. I’m sure I can do it, but I mean I’m going to be so intense as far as how it’s going to sound. This guy Trapper John McIntyre, if you haven’t cast him and your mind isn’t set, that’s the guy that I would like to play.” I was blessed that Bob gave me the part.

  * * *

  JOHN SCHUCK: From the minute we started, he was creating this world of insanity with blood and guts and all the horrors of war. You have to realize, at the time, the Vietnamese conflict was still unresolved, really, so he couldn’t make a movie about an anti-Vietnam thing at this point. I don’t think Hollywood would have allowed that, so that’s why putting it in Korea was very smart. It gave it twenty-five years’ distance. But that’s what he did, he created this world that fit his message.

  TOM SKERRITT: The extras were basically this improvisational group that he found in San Francisco. I would go around and tell them that Bob’s got mikes everywhere and he’s floating a camera, and it would be a good idea to pay attention and come up with stuff on your own. And they did that. It made it crisp every day, the idea that you may be on camera.

  I just loved the guy from the first. He made me realize early on that you could do no wrong, as long as you tried. The worst you could do was make an ass out of yourself. And that’s the first thing you have to be willing to do as an actor, is be willing to make an ass out of yourself. Bob gave me that.

  But as we’re going along, I’m aware that Donald and Elliott are not too happy. They didn’t quite allow Bob in. He’s the director and all he’s saying is, “Free yourself up, we’re all in this together. Yeah, I’m the captain of the ship, but we’re all guiding the ship through the fog, and the fog is the movie system.” They did not respond to Bob’s style. I’m thinking, “This is a classic.” I’m saying that to Donald and Elliott, and they’re saying, “We can’t wait to get off this thing.”

  ELLIOTT GOULD: One of the peculiar things was that Donald and I had a problem working with Bob at the beginning. I think you may have either heard or you read that Donald and I had complained about what we thought was his style of direction, or his being lax in terms of what our expectations were.

  One time Bob had the camera on a crane, and the crane had to be moving to come over and shoot each of us. It was a complicated shot and we were fighting time and we weren’t quite coordinating the camera, the crane, with us. Bob was getting a little uptight about it and he was not happy being under the pressure of having to get this shot by a certain time. Then we broke for lunch and I got my lunch on a tray and there were a few people around, and Bob said to me, “Why can’t you be like somebody else?” Which was the worst possible thing he could say to me, you know? I don’t know if he said I was ruining it for him then, but he pointed to Corey Fischer and said, “Why can’t you be more like him?”

  COREY FISCHER (actor): I was playing Captain Bandini. At one point, Bob had me just walk across the compound. I think he was shooting from very far away. He followed me walking out of the surgery tent, by myself, in the rain, trying to light a cigarette. No drama, no subtext, except exhaustion. And he wound up just loving that piece of film. He kept saying, “That was it.” That was the spirit he wanted. Bob wanted actors who were quirky but minimal. He knew that just by doing something ordinary, they would be interesting.

  Discussing a scene with his unhappy stars, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland

  ELLIOTT GOULD: I started…it was the only time when I’ve ever started to shake and it’s the only time I’ve ever thrown up my food before I ingested it. I threw my lunch up in the air and I said, “You fucking prick. I’m not going to stick my neck out for you again. You tell me what you want and that’s what you’ll get. I started out in the theater. I was a chorus boy. I was a tap dancer. I understand all that stuff. You know, you fucking asshole, you telling me to be like somebody else …” And he said, “I think I made a mistake.” And I said, “I think so.” And he said, “I apologize.” And I said, “I accept.”

  Donald and I had the same agent and we spoke to our agent. His name was Richard Shepard, Dick Shepard, at CMA, Creative Management, and we went in and had a meeting with him and we complained.

  Robert Altman, from DVD commentary: The biggest problem I had, about halfway through the film …was that Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould had gone to the studio and tried to get me fired because they said …they were the stars and I wasn’t paying enough attention to them. I was spending too much time with all these extras, background people. And I think had I known that at the time, I would have resigned. I mean, I could not have gone on if I had known they had that attitude. But I didn’t find out until later. And Elliott told me, called me up and said, “We made a terrible mistake because we thought you just didn’t know what you were doing.”

  ELLIOTT GOULD: I think that, in hindsight, Donald and I were two elitist, arrogant actors who really weren’t getting Altman’s genius.

  * * *

  COREY FISCHER: People talk about improvisation in Bob’s movies, but it’s often a misnomer. It wasn’t as if people were improvising on camera. What Bob loved to do was to create a scene that had a lot of density, a lot of levels going on, all these simultaneous conversations and overlaps. He liked having more than one center to a scene or a shot. Take the scene at the beginning where Hawkeye and Duke are arriving in the stolen Jeep. He started with a shot inside the mess hall with me and Danny Goldman and Roger Bowen. I remember he had us create our own little intro to the scene. At one point I’m talking about these two new arrivals. I had my glasses up on my forehead, and one of the other guys flipped them down and said something like, “You don’t even know what you’re looking at.” That’s not in the script, but by the time he actually got to shooting it, it would have been set. He would have made suggestions, tinkered with it, and signed off on it.

  With Bob I have this image of a Renaissance painter, where Michelangelo would be working on the main figures and his helpers would be working on the figures at the edges. I think that’s what Bob wanted and needed, this entourage of actors who were not playing primary characters who would enliven those edges and give the final work a special feel that he became known for.

  RENÉ AUBERJONOIS: For all of us who had never been in a movie before, other than being a day player, it’s almost as if he ruined us for the rest of our lives. We thought that’s the way movies were. That they were that joyous an experience. If you had any kind of career, you quickly saw that most directors don’t really trust actors, don’t really want to see actors acting. That was the difference with Bob Altman. He loved actors and wanted to see acting.

  * * *

  MICHAEL MURPHY: When they started to make M*A*S*H, I thought, “Good. Bob got a little break here. He’ll deliver this film, put a few bucks in his pocket, and get out of debt.” I go out on the set, it was like the third day, and there he is with this picture of the Last Supper in his hand and he’s laughing at it. I’m thinking, “Jesus, now it’s going to be blasphemy and they won’t want to release it.”

  JOHN SCHUCK: So my character, Painless, is some dentist from the Midwest who is physically endowed and has trouble on a sexual level. The interesting thing about that scene at the Last Supper, when he’s decided to commit suicide, is the doctors and all the others could have been mean-spirited how they handled Painless, you know? But it wasn’t. Bob made sure there was an understanding that we are all failing on some human level and would like to get out of it, just go to sleep and not wake up.

  The “Last Supper” scene from M*A*S*H

  Dialogue from M*A*S*H:

  (Captain Walter “Painless Pole” Waldowski, played by John Schuck, is feted by his friends at a “Last Supper” arranged to visually echo the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece.)

  HAWKEYE PIERCE (Played by Do
nald Sutherland): I just—I just wanna say one thing. Uh, nobody ordered Walt to go on this mission. He volunteered for certain death.

  DUKE: That’s true.

  HAWKEYE: That’s what we award our highest medals for.

  DUKE: That’s beautiful.

  JOHN SCHUCK: By using the image of the Last Supper, he was taking on another establishment, of course. Almost anything that was institutionalized was game for him. Didn’t matter whether it was the church or the school of art or the Army or anything. Anything that was organized and was a group, he could be counted on to be cantankerous about. Studios. The Hollywood system was an ongoing battle all the time. Banking, finance, every aspect of it. How you shoot a picture. How you pay actors. It doesn’t matter, he had his own iconoclastic ideas about it.

  I sensed that he was a renegade from day one. He was out gunning for anybody that was hurting the little guy. You see that just in the sheer humanity of his films. He had a great sense of right and wrong, but if I was to use the word “justice,” it would be in a moral sense. And that’s why he didn’t like institutions, because to a certain extent, they dehumanize. And he didn’t like that. He liked human beings, with all their foibles.

  JOHNNY MANDEL (composer): When I got there, the first thing he was going to shoot was the suicide scene. We’re sitting around one night and he says, “This is the first thing I have to do. It’s just dead air with everyone walking around putting Scotch and Playboy in the casket. We need a song. It’s got to be the stupidest song that was ever written.” I said, “Well, we can do stupid.”

  He starts thinking and says five minutes later—we were a bit ripped at the time—he says, “The Painless Pole is going to commit suicide. The name of this song is ‘Suicide Is Painless.’ I used to write songs. I’m going to go home and see if I can come up with something.” The next day, he tells me, “There’s too much stuff in this forty-five-year-old brain of mine. I can’t get anything nearly as stupid as I need. But all is not lost. I have this kid who is a total idiot. He’ll run through this thing like a dose of salts.”