Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  I attribute the whole making of the movie to the art direction with Leon Ericksen and the whole thing to Bob’s approach to work. And what I have called his flexibility. He immediately saw in Julie Christie—who was totally enamored of him—that he had a great thing here. “Let’s make her English and go with the Cockney rhyming slang.” I always felt that one of Bob’s greatest gifts, maybe his greatest gift, was that he knew talent when he saw it, and you can see it throughout his movies.

  That’s the fun part—having the freedom to be loosey-goosey—and so I felt a little bit required to be structural and conventional in the circumstance, which I didn’t mind being. I felt it was very respectful of him to sort of defer to me in that area. And when I say defer to me, I mean welcome my contributions. Together we had a really constructive relationship. I felt he knew how to deal with me in the most constructive way possible, and out of the dialectic in a situation like that comes quite a bit of creativity.

  I couldn’t agree more about Leon Ericksen. It was a brilliant job on the part of Leon and Bob to have built that town the way it was and have it come to fruition the way it did. I think that Bob was an extremely talented man who was really gifted at seeing what actors brought to him. Same with a cinematographer in the case of Vilmos or the other cinematographers he worked with. I thought Bob’s flexibility was wonderful. There were times when that flexibility, I felt, needed to be pinned down a little bit. I thought that the dynamic, the end result, was good. I thought it was very intelligently cast on his part.

  I didn’t control that movie. I participated actively. When they wanted to flash the film, they flashed the negative. I said, “Why flash the negative? You can never retrieve it. Why don’t you do it in the printing?” They said they wanted to flash the negative—okay, do what you want to do. It seems strange to me. You want to get rid of information on the negative that you might someday want?

  Why would I say something to Kathryn Altman, who is just the loveliest thing? Why would I do that? I’m a nice, polite boy, particularly with an innocent bystander.

  That screening was not in Vancouver. It was in Los Angeles. And that’s just not my style. I can’t imagine saying that to Kathryn Altman. Why would I do that to Kathryn Altman? That just seems totally rude. It’s just not possible, and had I done that Julie Christie would have hit me over the head with a hammer. It’s just not possible. What I said was directly to Bob Altman.

  It was at the end of the screening. I remember we were in a balcony and I said, “I can’t hear”—I might have said “a fucking word”—“in the first or second reel.” There were lines, particularly in the beginning, that needed to be clear so people will know what is going on. I didn’t want to really hear the background dialogue over the foreground dialogue. I said, “Is there any way you can change it before it goes into theaters?” He said he didn’t think so but he would check into it. I was very angry with Bob Altman and it’s the only time that I ever did that with him.

  It seemed it was an irretrievable situation and I thought it was—he was a relatively new director. I don’t know that the picture’s financing was dependent on me, but I was an established producer. It was careless. I don’t think that he meant to do that. I think it simply slipped through the cracks. There’s no question he would have remedied it if there had been time. I thought it was complacent to not show it to me or somebody else earlier than he showed it. And I probably overreacted because I was so fond of the picture and we had all worked very hard on the picture. In the long run when you mix the sound in a picture everything you’ve done for a lot of months is dependent on a couple of days.

  If you have dialogue and people can’t hear it, it makes people crazy. If you do that, then you have to let the audience off the hook—put music over it so they know they don’t have to work on it. You couldn’t understand the dialogue in the first two reels, and that’s quite a bit of time, and that’s certainly enough time for the audience to give up on the movie. It wasn’t that you couldn’t hear every word. I thought you couldn’t hear any word. I don’t want to denigrate the job that Bob did. I thought he did a wonderful job. But I thought that the mix was extremely unfortunate because people would quit on the movie after a reel or two or three.

  I pretty much like everything else about the movie. I thought it was a brilliant choice on Bob’s part to have Leonard Cohen’s songs. Bob did all that. Bob was a very, very collaborative filmmaker. He was spectacularly collaborative. That’s why I really enjoyed working with him. I thought he wanted to get the best—he wanted to get it up on the screen. He wanted the result to be as good as it could be. And I felt that truly Bob was asking me to be as active as I could. And I responded. I worked very hard on that movie. I worked at night on that movie.

  I think it’s a very, very good movie. John Huston once said to me he thought it was the best Western he had ever seen.

  * * *

  DAVID FOSTER: The picture’s coming out. We’re in New York at the Regency Hotel. Warren and Julie and Kathryn and Bob and my wife and I, we have a big screening at the Criterion Theater in Times Square—and the sound is a disaster. We reserved a table at the Russian Tea Room. Bob was beside himself. This is going to sound like a joke—he ran out into Fifty-seventh Street and said, “I’m going to get a cab and I’m going to JFK and I’m going home to Kansas City to see my mother.”

  I said, “C’mon, get back in here. We’re having a party, for God-sakes.”

  I must confess, the sound was fucked up. I kept saying, “What did he say? What did he say?” But that’s what Bob wanted.

  ALAN RUDOLPH: When we were doing California Split, Bob said, “Listen, I’ve got a lot of phone calls from Warner Brothers. Warren Beatty wants them to remix, he thinks McCabe should be rereleased, and they want to remix it. I won’t have anything to do with this but I’m going to send you to watch the movie with Warren Beatty and then report back.”

  So I sat in the Warner Brothers screening room with Warren Beatty, the first time I’d ever met him in my life, and that may be the last time, watching McCabe & Mrs. Miller with him. And he kept saying, “I don’t understand that. I can’t hear that. Can you?”

  And I said, “That’s what I like about it.”

  He said, “The footsteps are louder than the dialogue.”

  I said, “Yeah, but that’s kind of good. I don’t know if it’s important to hear what they’re saying.” I was Bob’s party line, you know, and Beatty was all frustrated with me.

  I think Bob would never admit that he wished that the sound quality was better, but what he loved about it was it felt real. It certainly didn’t detract from the heart and soul of that movie except it made it annoying for ears that weren’t in tune to that.

  * * *

  MICHAEL MURPHY: Look at all his pictures, ninety-nine percent of them are American society, Americana, these subtle moments when everybody moves into McCabe’s town and you see like six Indians leaving. It’s all the human condition, I guess. But he was very much like that. Julie at the end of McCabe goes down and gets on the pipe, you know? I think you see it again and again. He always sort of finds that place to go.

  KEITH CARRADINE: Why did Cowboy have to die on the bridge? Well, that was the core of the movie. The movie is really about loss of innocence and the savagery of the natural world, and I think it was a human reflection of the savagery of nature. I mean, wolves go out and kill because they’re hungry. People kill for the same reason, it’s just a different kind of hunger or fear. That moment where my character is an innocent victim of random and arbitrary violence, that was the denouement of the film, really, that’s where the whole film turned.

  VILMOS ZSIGMOND: It’s an incredible movie. If you watch it today, it’s as good today if not better than in the old days. If you really look at it politically, the message is there for all times. Capitalistic society, whoever is the power and buyer of things, is in control. The little people don’t have much chance. McCabe tries to believe they do, to be a hero, bu
t you know how it ends.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: McCabe gave you a different point of view completely of what the American experience was at that time. It was, in other words, very different from the Westerns we had grown up viewing.

  Here you have a movie coming into the American mainstream and the hero winds up dead, killed by a bully and a Western gangster, so to speak. And the heroine of the film, the last time you see her she’s in an opium den and she’s floating away. It’s very moving. We’d never really seen the West that way.

  DAVID FOSTER: Pauline Kael was so insistent on making people aware of this picture. She went on The Dick Cavett Show. He said, “Seen any good movies lately?” She went off for like ten minutes on network television. People were raving about it.

  Peter Schjeldahl, essay headlined “McCabe & Mrs. Miller: A Sneaky-Great Movie,” The New York Times, July 25, 1971: To say that McCabe & Mrs. Miller is no ordinary Western is to put it very mildly. It is no ordinary movie. As a Western, it rather seems to have been made by someone, a sensitive and ambitious artist, who never saw a Western before, who had no idea how such a thing should be done and who thus had to put the genre together from scratch.

  Julie Christie, as Mrs. Miller, in the opium den

  This can be confusing until you get the hang of it, which a lot of critics haven’t. Only Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, of those I’ve read, has zeroed in on Altman’s studied avoidance of convention and has identified it as a key to the film’s wonderful, bemusing power. The result of this audacious strategy is a brilliant work of art about the American past, a work to which “a slightly dazed reaction is,” as Miss Kael concludes, “the appropriate one.”…

  It is a film which seems to have, in addition to sound and image tracks, a kind of “feeling track,” a continuous sequence of fugitive emotional tones that must be laid to the extraordinary sensibility of Altman, whose mind looms in his work like the Creator’s in a sunset.

  * * *

  DAVID FOSTER: It didn’t do much business. It was so disappointing.

  Dialogue from The Player:

  GRIFFIN MILL (Played by Tim Robbins): It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.

  JUNE GUDMUNDSDOTTIR (Played by Greta Scacchi): What elements?

  GRIFFIN MILL: Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.

  JUNE GUDMUNDSDOTTIR: What about reality?

  ROBERT ALTMAN: It was a very unsuccessful movie. The studio was wrong about the marketing when they put it out. The audience had to catch up. It was ahead of its time, as they say. Later it became what they call a cult film. To me, a cult means not enough people to make a minority.

  CHAPTER 15

  Fatherhood I

  *

  JOAN TEWKESBURY: He loved his family. Oh God, he loved them dearly. But to his core he was a filmmaker. One of the things that drew people to Bob was he was a big man physically, so everyone felt protected. He became the umbrella for everyone to stand underneath. Whether you were the cinematographer or the grip or the actor, for the most part everybody was invited to stand under the umbrella. That’s a lot of responsibility. The job came first, so often the family was on the fringe of the umbrella.

  MICHAEL ALTMAN (eldest son): I never questioned where his loyalties lay. He was his work, that’s all there was to it. That’s what defined him and that’s who he was. That was going on back then and it went on until the day he passed away. That never changed.

  As a child, to me he was just this kind of elusive enigma, this god, you know? I was as much in reverence of his work as he was. I didn’t have any kind of feeling like, “Oh gee, I wish I had a dad that would take me to baseball games.” I didn’t want any of that shit. I had no regrets or remorse or feelings of inadequacy on his part or on my part at all. None. I mean it just wasn’t there. I was totally accepting of him as who he was, glad to be around him when I could and fine when I wasn’t. That probably summarizes it as best as I can recall.

  I left when I was sixteen. I didn’t reappear again until I was twenty or twenty-one. I had my first son when I was like nineteen, delivered him up in the mountains in the back of the truck in a snowstorm. I was doing the whole hippie thing and the alternative lifestyle and making moonshine and shit like that. I persisted and pursued it and Bob gave me a chance and I blew it and went away and I came back and he gave me another chance and I blew it. I came back and all right, this time I’m really going to do it right, and I blew it again. He was acting all tough and everything like that. But he would eventually give in. It wasn’t just me—we kids were pretty embarrassing to have around.

  Three generations of Altman men: from left, Matthew, Robert (Bobby), Stephen, Michael, Bob, and B.C.

  I run a studio downtown. I have two screening rooms over there that I maintain and I operate for them and I go into people’s houses and do it. It’s a gravy job. It’s a union job. I’ve got full benefits and I’ve got a retirement and a pension and the whole thing. It’s terrible. I’m a machine operator. And the thing is, the money is so good that it prevents me from doing other stuff.

  STEPHEN ALTMAN (second son): It’s very tough not having a father. I missed having a dad. It was always good for me every time I hung around him. You know, as kids you don’t judge. Things are the way they are and that’s it. I didn’t have any animosity, or “Why am I not with you?” kind of thing. That’s just the way it was.

  We weren’t his priority. His priority was himself and his job. At one point, I think I was around ten, though maybe I was a little older, he had everybody sit down in his Malibu mansion, the movie-star house, and told us all that if it ever came down to it and he had to choose between all of us and his work, he’d dump us in a second. We were like, “Oh, okay.” And we went back to playing. But it was something I remember always. I understood where he was standing for the rest of our lives, and kind of treated it accordingly.

  I don’t know, maybe it was alcohol that made him say it. It’s hard when you’re young to know when people are drunk and belligerent and surly or hungover. Who knows?

  Robert Altman, quoted by Aljean Harmetz in story headlined “The 15th Man Who Was Asked to Direct ‘M*A*S*H’ (and Did) Makes a Peculiar Western,” The New York Times, June 20, 1971: “If they should ever say to me, ‘You’ll never see your sons again or your wife unless you get out of the business of making movies,’ I’d say, ‘Sorry, Michael, Bobby, Matthew, Kathryn. It will hurt me not to see you again. But good-bye.’”

  STEPHEN ALTMAN: I ran away from home at sixteen and went up to be a hippie with Michael, who was a better hippie than me. It was up in Stanwood, Camano Island, up in Washington. There was a little plot of land, kind of a semi-mini commune, and we were all vegetarians and long-haired pot smokers and that kind of thing. I had to get a dentist appointment or something and finally my mom talked me into coming back down and getting that, and she suggested I go visit my dad. He said, “You want to work on my next picture?” And I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea.” Tired of living in a tepee and sleeping in a sleeping bag and eating granola.

  I was a seventeen-year-old kid. I was into having fun. The crew was always a blast. It was a fun deal and I got a salary. Not very much, but I was working with my stepdad before that. He was a brick mason and basically I was making as much money with him in cash as I was starting with Bob. I think I made eight dollars a week more with Bob, a hundred twenty-eight dollars a week. And he would bill me out for a higher price. He did that all the way through my career with him, right up to Fool for Love. I was property master starting on Quintet. I’d make five hundred dollars a week and he would, through his company, pay me the five hundred and bill me out at two thousand and keep the rest. That’s how he made his money. Off us kids and whoever else was stupid enough to go along with it.

  I’m sure he was hustling everybody. It wasn’t a personal thing. It wasn’t because I was his son that he was doing that. Whoever would let him get away with it,
he would get. It still pisses me off. In fact, it maybe pisses me off more now because it’s kind of an advantage taken. Then it was like, “Here’s the deal, you want it?” Better than doing brick masonry. Or so I thought.

  ROBERT REED ALTMAN (third son): My relationship with my dad? You know, he was working so much I don’t really know. For me it was hard. My mom was always right there for me. I’d see my dad, he would come in and then they’d go out to dinner. So there wasn’t a lot of time I spent with him.

  Throughout most of this time he was so busy always working that I knew he was my father, and I had him as a father, but I think it was probably a bit of a problem for me. I remember one time my mom and dad got into some kind of a fight, and I was scared, in Mandeville Canyon, and I hid behind the bed in my room, afraid that he was going to come and yell at me. I would hear him getting mad about some producer, some deal, because when he drank, not that he was a bad guy or anything, but I remember getting scared about how powerful his anger would come out about things. “That motherfucking son of a bitch …” For me, to hear that as a little kid, that was scary.

  Graduation came around grade twelve, and my dad called up and said, “Sorry I can’t make it—we’re about to start shooting A Perfect Couple. But happy graduation and I got you a present. I got you in the union.” And I’m like, “What does that mean? I can work on your films legally now?”

  I’ve always had to work harder to prove myself. Because when I was younger on a set, people were like, “Oh, we know how you got in, your dad got you in. You’re just like all the rest of those producers’ kids and blah, blah, blah.” I got into a habit of not letting them know who I was, and just doing the work. Then they’d find out and go, “Holy shit, your dad is Robert Altman?” But by then I’ve already proved that I can do it. So I think I had to work harder than other people, learn faster and be better than other people.