Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  * * *

  GEORGE LITTO: Bob did a brilliant job casting and directing the movie. Another thing Bob did that was brilliant was he solved the problem of an episodic script. Since the story and the characters and the plot didn’t propel you, he used sound and music as the motor for the transitions between scenes and characters. He created that whole other voice of the loudspeakers on tent poles. All the way down to the end.

  JOHNNY MANDEL: When I first started seeing blood spurting all around the hospital, I said, “God, how in the world are we going to handle that? I certainly don’t want to write score to that.” I remembered around 1949 I heard something that just about made you soil your pants—Japanese dance bands trying to play jazz. I said, “Shit! That’s it!”

  I had a Japanese friend take me to Little Tokyo to look in the Japanese records stores, and I went back to Altman and played this stuff. He said, “Great, but how do we use it?” I said, “Why don’t you have it coming over the loudspeakers, from Radio Tokyo.” His brain starts working, and it became the greatest cutting device he ever had. It allowed him to get from one scene to another. He was open to everything, but only Bob had the imagination to pull it off.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: I knew I could use those loudspeakers, and I went around and shot them. For a while, I didn’t know what was going to come out of them. But I knew I had to have connective tissue, and that worked.

  Dialogue from the last scene of M*A*S*H:

  P.A. ANNOUNCER (Voiced by David Arkin): Attention. Tonight’s movie has been M*A*S*H. Follow the zany antics of our combat surgeons as they cut and stitch their way along the front lines, operating as bombs—[laughs]—operating as bombs and bullets burst around them; snatching laughs and love between amputations and penicillin.

  STAFF SERGEANT GORMAN (Played by Bobby Troup): Goddamn army.

  P.A. ANNOUNCER: That is all. [A gong sounds and the screen goes black]

  * * *

  GEORGE LITTO: Dick Zanuck, he’s going to hate you for this, but fuck him. He and David Brown and all the guys at Fox first saw the movie and they gave Bob, I don’t know, ten pages of notes for cuts and changes they wanted made. I said, “Ingo, you got to get in there and get a preview or something. You got to do something.” He got them to agree to a preview in San Francisco. We all went up there. And I’m sitting right behind Dick Zanuck.

  The picture goes on, and you know one of the other controversial things is Bob was showing lots of blood, right? I mean it’s all outrageous and people are walking out. I’m saying to my wife, “Oh my God, the pains are coming back. They’re going down my chest.” And then there’s the scene where Don Sutherland steals the jeep. And then the audience applauds, and then the audience is screaming. Next thing you know it’s a standing ovation, and Dick Zanuck turns around and he says, “Hey, George, we got a hit. Tell Bob to forget about my notes.”

  RICHARD ZANUCK: The marketing people at Twentieth Century Fox were scared. Some people were really shocked by it because it was so stark, so bloody. They thought audiences would get up, throw up, and leave. They had always been very skeptical about the picture. They first challenged the title—“What is this? Mash potatoes? We can’t sell this.” But it was a massive hit at that preview. They got the humor. It was very reaffirming.

  It was great fun for me seeing the picture come to life in his hands. He added a much more cynical spirit to it than was ever in the script and a liveliness to it that neither the book nor the script had.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: I always said M*A*S*H didn’t get released. It escaped.

  RENÉ AUBERJONOIS: You know the famous story about the executive from Twentieth Century Fox coming up to Pauline Kael and saying, “What do we do with this film?” And she said, “You release it! What are you, crazy? You release it.”

  * * *

  GEORGE LITTO: Remember we were talking about what Bob said about Kraft cheese? He did it again. After M*A*S*H came out, I’m negotiating with Dick Zanuck and Ingo Preminger to get Bob back his five percent. While this is going on, Bob gave an interview and he said something like, “Fox is going broke, and I’m glad.”

  Linda Stein, story headlined “Altman Is Determined to Make Pix Own Way,” in Film/TV Daily, March 3, 1970: “All studios are going broke …and I love it,” stated Robert Altman, the director of Twentieth-Fox’s M*A*S*H. “The studios waste their money. When they go on location it costs them a fortune. When I go on location I know my costs even before I begin to shoot. It’s the independent guy that makes the money.”

  GEORGE LITTO: I don’t know how much that cost Bob. It cost me a million dollars, I figured [laughs]. Dick Zanuck sends me a copy of the interview. He says, “George, you can forget our negotiation.” I thought back to the Kraft cheese and said to myself, “This is where I came in.”

  RICHARD ZANUCK: I threw him up into the big time but he never looked at it that way. I don’t say this in an unkind way. I always liked Bob. I liked the fact that he was so independent. I don’t think it was a good trait that he was always pissed off.

  He was a lucky guy in that he got the full backing. I fought for that picture—I fought the board of directors. My father, who was chairman of the company, thought it was insane. I fought for it, and he never appreciated it. Never once did I ever hear either personally or in print any appreciation whatsoever or any recognition of it. That’s what really launched his career. I don’t blame him. I know that kind of personality. I wasn’t singled out. He didn’t want to be any part of a system. But it fed him. He seemed to piss on all of that. But, all in all, he was a huge talent. I forgive him for some of his surly behavior.

  GEORGE LITTO: Now we’re showing the picture in New York and the old man comes in, Darryl Zanuck. They run the movie, and he loves the picture. He says, “We’re going to put this in the Cannes Film Festival.” Now, comedies never won, and we looked at each other. I said to Ingo, “A comedy at the film festival?” Ingo says, “Hey, he’s the boss.”

  DENISE BRETON (publicist): I was head of publicity for Europe for Twentieth Century Fox, and when Bob flew here to France I was told to meet him at the airport. When he arrived I just looked at him. I was so surprised. I said, “I thought you’d be much younger” [laughs]. I couldn’t believe a man his age had made a film like M*A*S*H. He was much happier with me when I told him we had gotten M*A*S*H into Cannes.

  GEORGE LITTO: I’m on my belated honeymoon at the Hôtel du Cap in Cap d’Antibes. A friend of mine has got a villa a couple of doors down, we’re having a nice lunch in the garden. And my friend says, “I just got a phone call for you, George, to give you a message—M*A*S*H won the Golden Palm.” That’s the whole story arc.

  * * *

  JERRY WALSH (friend/lawyer/executor): The film M*A*S*H came out and was a big success. I said, “Well, B.C., what’s it like having a famous son? Look at this—I read all about him in The New York Times and everything.” And B.C. said, “Well, the biggest difference I’ve noticed is I got a check from him for ten thousand dollars that I thought I’d never see again.”

  REZA BADIYI (director): I had an appointment in New York and I ran into Bob in the lobby of the hotel. He says, “Come on, let’s go.” We got in a taxi and went to this theater. They’re showing M*A*S*H, and there’s a line going around the block. And he says, “I wish Dick Sarafian could see this!” [Laughs]

  * * *

  MARTIN SCORSESE (director): I remember seeing M*A*S*H at a Time magazine movie screening, in the old Fox building in New York. It had an Egyptian theme and the screening room was beautiful and the screen was enormous and the nature of the film was something completely foreign to me and new to me. I hadn’t experienced anything like that before. And I liked it. My take on the world was rather different, so I couldn’t quite get into the rhythm of it and the nature of the characters, but I really enjoyed it. I’m not a sports fan or a person who understands sports, but that’s the only football game I ever understood.

  GARRY TRUDEAU (cartoonist and writer): I saw M*A*S*H as an undergr
aduate at a sneak preview in a suburban theater outside New Haven. I must have seen something in the press about it that drew me to go see it. But there is that moment that anyone who saw the film experienced, when all the principal characters converge on the mess tent—Colonel Blake and Radar and Hawkeye—and they’ve just shown up and they’re trying to get information and everybody starts talking at once. And I had this sense that something had gone terribly wrong in the projector booth. You think about it later on and it was real life, but you don’t expect to see real life on the screen. That’s not why we have movies. The idea that everybody could finish each other’s sentences or talk over one another, or that they would get just the amount of information they needed before they would begin talking, that was revolutionary in film.

  The way he gave you the freedom to listen to whatever it was you wanted to listen to, and to track which conversations you wanted to, it was very liberating. And of course, perfect for the times, the cacophony of American culture at that time was being brilliantly reproduced on a screen. And he did it with such artistry. Kind of jazz-like—even if you didn’t listen to the individual through lines, the individual melodies, there was a beauty to the jazz of those voices coming in and out.

  It made me think about dialogue and what it could be. It had a lot of impact on me. Just the use of black humor and satire, and that has been a continuous thread through my work. The idea that black humor is a kind of last resort, and it’s a way to keep the madness at bay and to survive.

  GEORGE W. GEORGE (writer and producer): When I worked with him, in the forties and fifties, was I aware he was someone with talent who could make it there in Hollywood? No. Later I found that out—when I went to a screening of M*A*S*H. That was the biggest revolutionary experience I ever had. I went into the theater expecting nothing and I came out expecting everything. What that did was prove to me a theory that I had had for a long time. The reason most people can’t compete successfully is they are born at the wrong time or the wrong century or the wrong moment for what they’re doing. If you get lucky, you are born into a period where you get the most opportunity to do the work you want to do. In the movie business, Bob Altman was born at the exact right time.

  CHAPTER 13

  After M*A*S*H

  *

  ROBERT ALTMAN: The problem with so many artists today is if a guy succeeds at something in an art form, he feels he is obligated to repeat it. I can’t tell you the amount of money I was offered to make another M*A*S*H or another picture like it. I wouldn’t even mess around with that television series. I mean, I’ve never seen one of those episodes all the way through—never seen a whole one. I don’t like it and I don’t like any of those people. And it’s jealousy, too, that drives me to have those opinions. It’s, “How dare they walk into my studio and look at my easel?” Or, if you’re a baker and someone down the street comes up with a bigger sign and is making more money doing what you did first. “What the fuck are they doing? They took my idea! I made cream puffs!”

  It’s also my attitude that M*A*S*H, this movie, was about foreign wars. And then, every fucking week on a Sunday night, to have a drama about that, in which they had these platitudes about liberalism and whatever the current issue is. It’s still bringing a foreign war into your home every week for twelve years, and even though the bad guys in the script were from your own military hierarchy, you’re really presenting the bad guys as the brown people with the slanted eyes who you’re fighting. I don’t get the joke, and I don’t like the joke.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: I never dreamed—though he probably did—that a picture like M*A*S*H was going to change our lives completely. Turn him into a star and set up all kinds of problems [laughs]. Well, not so much problems but situations that we hadn’t dreamed of dealing with. Or I hadn’t.

  GEORGE LITTO: In this business, before you’re somebody they’re always taking things away from you. And now you finally get recognized.

  Now you don’t want to give anything up. He won the award at Cannes and he became almost like an international legend overnight. For us, though, it was the start of the end. Suddenly, you know, he got so serious. He wasn’t the same, you know?

  Bob was contrary. He could be perverse, he could be charming, he could be brilliant, he could be funny. He was all those things. Some days you didn’t know what you were going to get. We used to rent yachts, we’d go fishing, go off of Catalina, go swimming in the ocean. I would cook breakfast and everything, he would skin the fish, and we’d cook and we’d eat, we’d drink, and he’d do card tricks, he’d tell stories, he’d do pantomime, he was hysterically funny. He was great to be with. We all had so much fun. Until he started reading his reviews [laughs]. Then he became the great filmmaker.

  Part of why I invested myself in Bob was because I thought he was this brilliant talent. I never made a lot of money with Bob because he took up so much fucking time. But I did it because we had this—what shall we call it—this adventure. We had this sense of adventure together. It was all a challenge. I liked the challenge because I thought he’d do great things. And I was all for his becoming a great filmmaker, but part of how you endured all this stuff is you had a lot of fun in between. And suddenly it got a little bit too stuffy for me.

  COREY FISCHER (actor): There’s always the shadow, in Jungian terms. Someone that big, who lives that big and publicly, it’s not all sweetness and light. The more someone like him has to maintain a strength and power to see these enormous projects through, there is going to be dark stuff happening. If one is super-enlightened, or really self-aware or incredibly mature, maybe one can deal with that shadow without acting out. But for most of us, it can catch us unawares. And we wind up doing things that, politically, much later we will say, “I was young and irresponsible.”

  I think film and the industry and the medium, because it involves so many issues of power, the complexity of film, the expense of it, the size of the undertaking, when you are able to pull that off, make a film and make a film like M*A*S*H that becomes a cultural artifact, you’re vulnerable to inflation, to believing your own legend.

  ROBERT REED ALTMAN: The minute M*A*S*H was made we moved out of Mandeville Canyon and started renting beach houses down here in Malibu. Then they built their big Malibu house, the one my mother called “the movie-star house.” Everything did get very chaotic and different.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Big offers were coming in. He wanted to move to Canada—he was mad at America. He wanted to become a landed immigrant in Canada. He had already gotten the documents and I was trying to sell the house. I was ready for an adventure. We ended up not doing that.

  We built what I laughingly call “the movie-star house” in Malibu. By that I meant it had the tower, the gallery, the swimming pool, the gym, the sauna, the hundred feet of beachfront, blah, blah, blah. All in cedar and glass and ferns, up on pilings. It was gorgeous, a great party house, and there were great parties there.

  MICHAEL MURPHY: M*A*S*H catapulted him into the stratosphere. The guy became the hottest director in the world. And this leads to the next remarkable thing about Bob Altman. A lot of directors—I could name a few, but I won’t—would be thinking, “Let me be careful about my next film and who is in it and who can help me remain successful. Let me get Clark Gable in this thing.” You know, they want somebody, a big star, that can share the burden. That’s what all these guys do. Instead, Bob’s next picture is Brewster McCloud, with me and Sally Kellerman and Bud Cort. He was just, “Yeah, let’s make this.”

  Brewster McCloud (1970)

  Vincent Canby, review in The New York Times, December 24, 1970: Robert Altman’s “Brewster McCloud,” the director’s first film since “M*A*S*H,” attempts to be a kind of all-American, slapstick “Orpheus Ascending,” a timeless myth about innocence and corruption told in the sort of outrageous and vulgar terms that Brian De Palma and Robert Downey do much better.

  Brewster McCloud (Don “Bud” Cort), a virginal young man who is protected by the gods (but o
nly up to a point), lives hidden inside Houston’s Astrodome, that extraordinary enclosed-environment-within-an-enclosed-environment, where he secretly prepares to fly with his own man-made wings. Terrible people, however, keep getting into Brewster’s way. … Wherever Brewster goes, he is followed by a mother-protector named Louise (Sally Kellerman), who has once had her own wings (there are scars on her back to prove it), and her crow, which flies overhead to excrete on the people who would put an end to Brewster’s dream, just before they are mysteriously strangled. “Brewster McCloud” has more characters and incidents than a comic strip, but never enough wit to sustain more than a few isolated sequences. … Even so, I must admit that I laughed out loud at “Brewster McCloud”… largely because Mr. Altman has a gift for occasionally stuffing the screen and the soundtrack with all sorts of crazy and contradictory details, some of which are most attractive and quite dirty.

  Bud Cort flying around the Astrodome in Brewster McCloud

  LOU ADLER (producer): I was basically in the music business, but I had done the Monterey Pop documentary. Whatever success I had in the music business prompted some agent to send me the script. I sent it to Bob and he liked it. Then we met at MGM and they agreed to go ahead and make the picture. I think anybody would have made a film of his choosing coming off the success of M*A*S*H.

  He was exciting. He was full of enthusiasm but with a confidence about him. I liked him immediately as a person and he seemed to like me also. I don’t think he would have worked with me at that point if he didn’t. He was taking a chance with me as a producer. He actually made me a producer. He allowed me to solve the crises—be it dailies that went wrong or something that had to be delivered immediately from L.A. He didn’t step in and have somebody handle it—he allowed me to become a producer.

  BUD CORT: Once M*A*S*H was over I went to New York to audition for a play. I went in and auditioned for David Merrick. I killed. They went with someone else. Bob called and said, “I heard you didn’t get the part. That’s great because I got an idea for you. Just hang tough.” I did some episodic television and Bob said, “Don’t do television. You’re a movie star. Trust me.” I said, “I trust you.”