Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Nina Van Pallandt and Elliott Gould during the filming of The Long Goodbye

  ELLIOTT KASTNER: Mark Rydell surprised me. He worked, too.

  MARK RYDELL (actor and director): Before The Long Goodbye, I found myself in London at a command performance for the queen for the picture The Cowboys. I ran into Bob in a gambling place, and he looked at me and said, “Let’s have dinner.” So Kathryn and Bob and I wound up drinking wine and smoking until we were dopey and went to a restaurant. In the restaurant he did the old movie joke [snaps his fingers, then points his index finger], he went like that to me, “Marty Augustine.” He told me he wanted me to play the villain in his next movie.

  Bob sent me the script. I looked at it and thought, “This part is just not well written.” So I called him and I said, “Bob, what would you think if I rewrote this part and made it two hundred percent better? I have a concept for a character.” He said, “Go ahead.” The character in the book was wishy-washy, really, had no character. I was sharing a house at the beach with Larry Tucker, who is now deceased. Larry Tucker and Paul Mazursky were partners in those days. They did Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, so on and so forth. So Larry Tucker and I decided to make him this Jewish gangster who was insanely brutal, completely capable of any kind of brutality, yet at the same time deeply religious, offended that he wasn’t in shul, where he should have been on this night. At the same time, the challenge was to make it funny. Make it not only cruel and horrendous, but charming and funny. So we did that. And we sent the pages to Bob. He called back in five minutes and said, “That’s it. Throw out everything else, I’m inserting your pages right in the script.” That’s the kind of guy he was. All he wanted was the best from his people.

  One of the first things he used to say on a set was, “I’m interested in everything you have to bring.” So he had that remarkably paternal and constructive quality of nurturing people and giving them permission to be as good as they can be. He rarely directed them in obvious ways. His ways were more subtle. He would encourage you. “What’ve you got in mind?” he would say. “Show me. That’s great, let’s use it.”

  His directorial style was improvisational and permissive. And actors loved him because of it. Because they could bring their skills and their instincts, which he admired and respected, to the moment. If it came from you, he was interested. He didn’t want to give you something and have you execute it because he knew that anything he gives you is by nature less good than what you come up with yourself. He instinctively knew that the way to get relaxed and realistic performances was to encourage the creative spirit of each individual actor, and he cast that way. He cast in an effort to find people who are inventive.

  Sterling Hayden, who played Roger Wade, used to smoke hash all day long. I mean powerful hash—puffing big, billowing hash clouds. I said to him, “Sterling, how can you smoke so much hash and work?” He says, “It keeps me from being a drunk.” He was a drunk before, now he was a hash addict. He was a wonderful guy who suffered with the guilt of having testified in the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he never got over it. He was ashamed of himself, you know? For having protected his career by testifying. So he was a tragic figure and Bob knew that. Bob used him that way, Bob used that element. He’s a tragic figure in that picture. A writer who’s a drunk and who’s lost, and he embodied that. It was perfect casting.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: Elliott Gould and Mark Rydell were at my house in Malibu, and we went to a place to have dinner on the beach. We were constructing that scene when Mark’s character, Marty Augustine, hits the girl with the Coke bottle across the face.

  MARK RYDELL: We were served by this very beautiful girl, Jo Ann Brody. And Bob kept looking at her face, at her nose—she had such a patrician, elegant face. He said, “She would make a very good girlfriend for you to hit.”

  I said, “Let’s see if she’s an actress.”

  So he engaged her in a conversation. “Are you an actress?” No, she had never done anything before. He said, “How would you like to play Mr. Rydell’s girlfriend in this picture?”

  ROBERT ALTMAN: She said, “Oh, you guys are kidding.” Then when it came time to pay the check, nobody had a penny. We had been at the beach. She said, “You guys come in here and talk about giving me a part in a movie, and you say you’ve got no money to pay the check! C’mon.”

  MARK RYDELL: One of his major skills was instilling confidence. He said, “You’d be really fine, and Mark will help you and I’ll help you.” Bob has an eye for that, finding just the right person for the right part and particularly in a part like that where no major acting demands are made. You just need a certain look and an innocence and a kind of, what? She was like a slave. A sexual slave.

  And when we told Jo Ann I was going to have to hit her with the Coke bottle, she was terrified. I said, “We’re not going to hit you. It’s just going to look like we hit you.” But she was absolutely terrified. We set that scene up with a big heavy plate glass that was in front of her, and she never knew when I was going to do it. I kept talking about how sweet she is, how beautiful. “See her face, what a gorgeous face.” Whack! It was such a shocking moment that people literally screamed in the theater.

  Dialogue from The Long Goodbye:

  (Gangster Marty Augustine has just smashed a Coke bottle across the face of his girlfriend, to make a point to Philip Marlowe, played by Elliott Gould.)

  MARTY AUGUSTINE (Played by Mark Rydell): Her, I love. You, I don’t even like.

  MARK RYDELL: I walk on the street nowadays and people will quote that line to me. The picture was done, what, twenty-five years ago? Thirty?

  Jo Ann was so sweet, you know, sitting in the car when we arrive to harass Elliott Gould, and I said, “Turn on the radio. Sit here. Play the radio.” It of course gave us an opportunity to play that song by John Williams, “It’s a Long Goodbye.” I thought that was another brave idea. To make that song the whole score. A million different ways it was played, including with a Mexican funeral band. Doorbells, Muzak, everywhere. I love that idea. See, Bob was always brave. He was audacious. He had a unique, creative spirit that was willing to go anywhere.

  JOHN WILLIAMS: The music was a terrific idea—entirely Bob’s. He said, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was one song, this omnipresent piece, played in all these different ways?” We would go into a dentist’s office or an elevator and there would be this ubiquitous and irritating music playing. It was threaded through, kind of like an unconscious wallpapering technique. I think it’s completely unique. I don’t think anyone has tried it quite the same way before or since.

  PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON (director): Bob loved his music, didn’t he? My God, he loved his music. And he used it so well, as good as anybody. So naturally. Never wrong. I don’t remember any of his movies where the music was wrong. I mean, there might be a thing or two missing in his films, you know, or something that he missed, that he didn’t care about. But the music was always good. The best example is the Leonard Cohen songs in McCabe. But think of The Long Goodbye. People say, “We’re going to use one song as the theme and we’re going to play it in all different versions.” Well, it’s been done. Who did it? Bob.

  Robert Altman with Elliott Gould and Mark Rydell on the set of The Long Goodbye

  I showed him Punch-Drunk Love here at my house. There were two chairs, and he was sitting in one and I was sitting in the other. I was just waiting for “He Needs Me”—the song Olive sings in Popeye—which I used in my film. I didn’t tell him it was in the film, you know? And right when the music starts [laughs], he started conducting [waves his arms]. By the end of it he’s applauding—“Yay!” He and Kathryn came over that night with their granddaughter, Signe. God, we got so drunk afterwards. Such a great time.

  JOHN WILLIAMS: I drifted away from working with him, not through any intentional decision or conscious decision. After Images and The Long Goodbye, I got busy with other directors and other projects. Bob chided me about going Hollywood and getting successful. He
would chide me or tease me or censure me about pursuing overly commercial projects, probably my work with Spielberg. He saw that artistically as a kind of betrayal of some kind of bohemian artistic principles he clung to.

  One of the big contradictions was that he was always fighting with the studios but he sought acceptance. He sought praise of the establishment in his own way as hard or harder than other people did. He craved the approval of the people out here. His bad-boy-naughtiness character not to the contrary. He didn’t want to play the game as he saw it being played. Maybe that has connections to his gambler roots.

  * * *

  ROBERT ALTMAN: David Arkin came and said, “I’ve got this friend, Arnold Strong. He’s a weight lifter. He looks great. Can he be one of the hoods in this thing?” And I said, “Sure, bring him along.” It was Schwarzenegger.

  MARK RYDELL: The governor was my flunky. So Arnold was sitting in the chair when Jo Ann makes her entrance with braces on her face and the brutally broken jaw. I walked her over to Arnold and I said, “Get up! Get up! Give the lady her chair!” It was a terrific moment because it frightened him. Bob threw his head back and laughed. Everybody wanted to please Bob, you know?

  ROBERT ALTMAN: Jo Ann was not an actress. She was about at the same level as that person she played with in that scene—Arnold Schwarzenegger. Neither of them had any acting talent.

  GRAEME CLIFFORD (director): Arnold was so interested in movies and never stopped asking questions. Even though you couldn’t understand his question, and he probably couldn’t understand the answer, he never stopped asking. He was completely captivated with the medium and kept saying, “This is what I’m going to do.” If you told me on The Long Goodbye that he was going to be one of the biggest movie stars in the world and the governor of California, I would have told you, “Fuck off.”

  VILMOS ZSIGMOND: You know the scene with Mark Rydell and Schwarzenegger? Amazing story. We are shooting that scene when everybody takes their clothes off. And the studio the next morning, they say, “Robert, we don’t like that scene, you have to reshoot it.” And Robert is pissed off. He just takes off from the set. And he tells the actors, if anyone is looking for him, he’s not there, he’s not shooting today. He sent the message, “Let me know when you start liking the dailies, and I will be back.” A whole day we didn’t shoot. The whole crew was waiting there for something to happen. Nothing happened. And now the studio got really, really scared. Tried to find him, they could not find him all day. They were sending messages. “Okay, Robert, you won, come back.” He came back the next day and we didn’t reshoot that scene. See, he had balls and he knew how to handle something. He knew what was right, what was wrong, and he didn’t want anybody to interfere.

  * * *

  ROBERT REED ALTMAN: On Long Goodbye the camera never stopped moving. The minute the dolly stopped the camera started zooming. And the end of the zoom it would dolly and then it would zoom again, and it just kept moving. Why did he do it? Just to give the story a feeling, a mood, to keep the audience on an edge. He hated things being master, two shot, over, over, close-up, close-up—cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. He wanted this to be more of an experience than a typical film.

  VILMOS ZSIGMOND: On Images, when we wanted to have something strange going on, because the woman is crazy, we decided to do this thing—zooming and moving sideways. And zooming, and dollying sideways. Or zooming forward. What is missing? Up and down! So we had to be able to go up and down, dolly sideways, back and forth, and zoom in and out. Then we made The Long Goodbye and Robert said, “Remember that scene we shot in Images? Let’s shoot this movie all that way.”

  And I said, “Robert, you are kidding? The people are going to get dizzy, people are not going to like it.” He said, “Don’t worry about it.”

  I got the National Film Critics Award for that, which shows you how much I know about it, you know? I still don’t think it was the right thing to do, but they don’t think so much of what I say.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: The zoom lens got me. I used a lot of zooms in those early pictures and got a lot of criticism for it. It was not uncommon when a film of mine would come out and a critic would say, “Alt-man, with his tiresome zoom lens…” But now I look at these films and television shows, and they’re doing everything that way. If you shot in a conventional way, the “proper” way from 1975, it wouldn’t be acceptable today.

  VILMOS ZSIGMOND: We also flashed the film heavily, even more than we flashed it on McCabe. And the reason was basically because we didn’t have a big budget there for big lights and all that. So we were really very creative about how, with the little amount of equipment what we had, how we are going to do the movie in a professional way. A couple things we invented on that movie—like flashing fifty percent, which is way over the top. But by doing that we didn’t have to hardly use any lights when we go from outside or inside and go outside again. It’s quite interesting, you know, to do something with less equipment and still being creative and good. Bob loved that idea—solve the problem in a creative way. He just wanted to keep everything very simple.

  * * *

  JOAN TEWKESBURY: Some people are extremely rigid about what they want to see when it comes to a film noir, what they want Marlowe to look like. In Bob’s interpretation it just sort of unraveled. And it pissed people off.

  HENRY GIBSON: Charles Champlin, the reviewer for the L.A. Times, destroyed the picture in Los Angeles. Oh, he was just so pedantically literal. He wanted a literary, visual translation of the novel as it was written, which you couldn’t possibly do. And Leigh Brackett did the best she could in the script. Then Altman added all his touches. And it became something totally reinterpreted.

  Charles Champlin, review headlined “A Private Eye’s Honor Blackened,” the Los Angeles Times, March 8, 1973: The problem is that [Altman, Brackett, and Gould’s Marlowe] is an untidy, unshaven, semi-literate dimwit slob who could not locate a missing skyscraper and would be refused service at a hot dog stand. He is not Chandler’s Marlowe, or mine, and I can’t find him interesting, sympathetic or amusing, and I can’t be sure who will.

  ELLIOTT GOULD: There were people who were enraged that we would break the mold, that we would go against the grain, and for it not to be the traditional Philip Marlowe. But people came around. It became a bit of a historic film as to the evolution of the character. Bob and I had talked about the next picture. We thought we’d perhaps make a Raymond Chandler every other year or every third year, but we didn’t.

  ELLIOTT KASTNER: During The Long Goodbye we had a great relationship. I liked Bob so much I gave him another book. You know Tom McGuane’s 92 in the Shade? We had a major train wreck on that. It got physical. It lasted many years. I’ll save that story for my own book, and nobody’s got a better book than me. I have a very bad reputation in Hollywood, if you haven’t heard that already.

  ELAINE KAUFMAN (restaurateur): It was funny. It was back there [she points to the rear of her eponymous restaurant]. Long after the movie. Bob got mad at Elliott and threw a drink on him. But Elliott’s used to that.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: We were on a plane coming back from London, and Elliott came into first class. Bob was reading the paper. He looked up, saw Elliott, and said, “I don’t speak to scum.” And he never spoke to him again.

  DAVID PICKER: Altman? On a personal level I disliked him. He would pretty much do anything to put himself in the best light. I never trusted him. We disagreed on the way he handled certain things and for years we didn’t talk. He is a complex man. You can get fifteen different reactions from fifteen different people. Obviously there are people who swore by him, and there are people who swore at him.

  I found his conduct in relation to us at United Artists and toward me personally incomprehensible. He took credit for something that we did. We’re talking about the entire way the picture was released. I liked that picture a lot and I didn’t like the way our marketing people initially distributed it. I pulled it out of release and did a whole new marketing campaign, a
nd Altman took credit for it. He didn’t have the grace to give us credit for it, and I told him to go fuck himself.

  At one point somewhat later in his career he wished me dead. He said it to a very close friend of mine—wishing me dead. I had a gallbladder operation. I was head of Paramount, and I said no to a project of his. He was a performer. He was his own invention. He probably really didn’t mean it, but it wasn’t something I took lightly. I don’t have any standards for conduct other than you keep your word and you deal honestly and straight, and I felt Bob was only interested in Bob.

  SUE BARTON (publicist): When he was shooting The Long Goodbye they had rented a house out at the Malibu Colony. The fellow who owned it was this real twit, and Bob couldn’t stand him. This guy was petrified that someone was going to break into his house and rob him. So after the film wrapped, Bob kept the clicker for the garage door. Every time he drove by he would click-click and open the door [laughs].

  * * *

  Thieves Like Us (1974)

  Kevin Thomas, review in the Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1974: The rural ’30s gangster movie, with its equal parts nostalgia and social significance, has become so familiar in the seven years since “Bonnie and Clyde” that it’s as if director Robert Altman in doing still another, “Thieves Like Us,” had accepted a dare. The result, happily, is one of his most affecting films…. The people of “Thieves Like Us,” based on an Edward Anderson novel, are not exactly winners. There’s T-Dub (Bert Remsen), an irrepressibly self-deluding optimist, Chicamaw, (John Schuck), a heavy-drinking perpetual hangdog, and Bowie (Keith Carradine), a cleancut youth brighter than the older men but too young not to succumb to T-Dub’s dreams. … They are as pathetic as they are dangerous, especially to themselves, and doomed without realizing it. They haven’t got a chance, we know it; Altman knows it, but won’t let us deny them their humanity.