I’m not that familiar with Bob at this point. I’ve seen some movies I like, some movies I don’t like. I certainly knew he was a big talent. Bob and I hit it off great—we both gambled; he loved the price, he loved the odds. But he says to me, “I am supposed to be your enemy. You know that?”
“My enemy? What do you mean?”
He says, “Writers, they don’t like me.”
I say, “I don’t know you. Why?”
Bob says, “I tend to not want to keep to what they’ve written.” I said, “We can work with that.”
It became one of those situations where Bob would come up with something abstract—“Here’s a scene. I think we’ll have twelve midgets come in and do this.”
I’d say, “What? Twelve midgets? Why in the world would you do a move like that? If you do that, they would laugh you out of the theater. Bob, it took me literally two months to find the right motivation for that scene. You can’t throw that out in one second.”
He would just look at me and storm out and slam his own door. I knew he had to be back. It was his office. He would simmer down and be back in about two minutes and he would harrumph around and say, “Okay, we’ll try it that way.”
In retrospect I knew that Bob was a great talent because he had the talent not to impose himself on the process. His trust factor was his greatest strength. Bob was in love with being surprised. He was like a great big kid in a cinema candy store. And more often than not his actors threw a sweet and wonderful party for him.
ELLIOTT GOULD: You know California Split is semiautobiographical about me and Joey Walsh, right? After Donald Sutherland and I had done S.P.Y.S., the last picture we did together, we went to see Bob, because Bob always had an idea to do a pirate movie about two guys who could take over any ship. I thought that’s way on the back burner or in a closet, but I just wanted Bob to see Donald and I were back together. We went to see him as Bob was starting to prepare California Split, and he was in the office with this old friend of mine, Joseph Walsh. Bob said, “There’s nothing in this picture for you.” And I was so hurt and embarrassed ‘cause I thought, “I’m not coming in for this picture.”
They were thinking about Robert De Niro. Then it was going to be Steve McQueen and George Segal. McQueen wanted writing that didn’t exist and he then withdrew from the project. Bob called me in Munich and asked me if I would consider playing the part we thought Steve McQueen was going to play. I said, “I’ll do it, of course, so long as it’s okay with Walsh.”
GEORGE SEGAL (actor): California Split? I couldn’t make heads or tails of the script. It didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t know from gambling. I didn’t quite get it, but Guy McElwaine was so persuasive. And I loved Altman’s films. As a matter of fact, when I was on the film Altman said to me, “You don’t know this but you walked out of one of the first M*A*S*H screenings and you said, ‘That’s one of the best films I ever saw.’” That got back to him.
Our relationship was warm, mutually respectful, and a little distant. I wasn’t in his rhythms. Gambling, I don’t know. I guess I was more middle-class than he would have liked. Different sensibilities. He was living a seventies lifestyle and I was a little bit behind in that area. He’s Kansas City and living by the seat of your pants and making this totally innovative movie, M*A*S*H, changing the rules, and I’m a rule player. Elliott was also an antirules guy and a freewheeling guy, or that was at least his persona. That was Bob’s persona too, and I was always a kid from Great Neck. I brought an innocence, and he didn’t have time for that. Risk was not a part of my persona and it was a part of his.
Elliott and Bob barely talked. He talked much more with me. They barely talked because they were already inside each other’s heads.
If you would look at him while his actors were acting, he had kind of an ecstatic look on his face. He was thrilled that these actors were fulfilling his dreams. That was a childlike thing he brought, and it was infectious. It was without guile.
* * *
ALAN RUDOLPH (director): Jack Cashin, the sound man, somehow was associated with this organization called Synanon. They had this big building down in Santa Monica. The people there were all ex-junkies, gambling addicts, or whatever. Bob says, “That’s where we’ll get our extras.” He would never hire Hollywood extras. We sort of broke the mold on that. He wanted real people and he didn’t want to pay them extra rates. So he said to me, “You’ll go down there and you’ll convince the people at Synanon to be extras in the movie. We’ll give a ten-thousand-dollar donation or whatever to the organization and they’ll supply us with however many people we’ll need every day.”
So I went down there one night with Tommy Thompson and it really was like one of those homeless missions. Here are all these people, and I didn’t know what to say. We had to eat dinner with all these people—and I’ll never forget what they served there: white bread and brown gravy. I then said, “Here’s your chance to be all the things you know about—but for fun. The only addiction you’re gonna get is getting hooked on movies, being in movies, and you’ll have the best time.” Well, they just lapped it up. So throughout that movie all the extras, they’re all Synanon addicts—well, most of them, anyway. Real people with real stories to tell that were just fantastic, and Bob just loved it.
JOSEPH WALSH: He didn’t film the ending I wrote. In the beginning of this movie, Tommy Thompson, Bob’s longtime friend and assistant director, told me that Bob had this kind of strange idiosyncrasy. When his movies got close to the end he had a tendency to rush them to get them over. That’s what happened.
Dinner in Las Vegas in 1974: from left, Bob Eggenweiler, Kathryn, Bob, Leon Ericksen, Tommy Thompson, and Joey Walsh
They’re talking to each other at the end and Elliott finally says, “You’re going home? Oh yeah, where the fuck do you live?” I didn’t write that. I’m sitting there and thinking, “What happened to his character?” George Segal stares at him and gets up and says, “Charlie, I got to go,” and walks out. Cut.
Elliott bolts over to me and says, “I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from.” George says, “Bob, this is it! You must end this movie right here. I never understood it until now!”
GEORGE SEGAL: That was the point. My character won, but there was no special feeling. Now he gets it.
JOSEPH WALSH: And Bob said, “You’re right. That’s the wrap.”
Not many movies pull the movie out from under you. Audiences didn’t know how to feel about it when they walked out of the theater. Columbia said we cost them ten million dollars right there. Later on, Steven [Spielberg] said to me, “I could have made millions of dollars with the movie.” Steven would have built the climax different than Bob built it. He said, “I would have built it up to the greatest orgasm in town. The foreplay would have been so unbelievable that when the orgasm came the audience would have been on the edge of its seat.” It would have been a totally different movie. Elliott apologizes to me every year for that.
HENRY GIBSON: Joey is still telling that story, seventy years later, about how Bob changed his ending. But see, there’s only one answer to that. “That isn’t what was filmed, Joey. I love you and I know all the processes you went through—selling it, rewriting it, hanging on to it. People wanted to rip it away from you. But that’s not what Bob made, okay?”
CHAPTER 18
Nashville
*
Nashville (1975)
Pauline Kael, review in The New Yorker, March 3, 1975 (based on a rough cut of the film, before most other reviewers had seen it): Is there such a thing as an orgy for movie-lovers—but an orgy without excess? At Robert Altman’s new, almost-three-hour film, Nashville, you don’t get drunk on images. You’re not overpowered—you get elated. I’ve never before seen a movie I loved in quite this way: I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness. It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over; you take it with you. Nashville is a radical, revolutionary leap…. The funniest epi
c vision of America ever to reach the screen. Robert Altman’s movie is at once a Grand Hotel-style narrative, with twenty-four linked characters; a country-and-western musical; a documentary essay on Nashville and American life; a mediation on the love affair between performers and audiences; and an Altman party. … The picture says, This is what America is, and I’m part of it. Nashville arrives at a time when America is congratulating itself for having got rid of the guys who were pulling the wool over people’s eyes. The movie says it isn’t only the politicians who live the big lie—the big lie is something we’re all capable of trying for.
* * *
ROBERT ALTMAN: While we were making Thieves Like Us I said to Joan Tewkesbury, “Go to Nashville.” I had never been to Nashville in my life. My idea when they said Country-Western music was hillbilly music. I said, “Go to Nashville and keep a diary. Just from the day you get off the plane start writing down what happens to you. And somewhere we’ll find a movie.”
Henry Gibson, as Haven Hamilton, onstage at the Grand Ole Opry
JOAN TEWKESBURY: So I went to Nashville with Bill and Taffy Danoff, who were singing with John Denver. We went to a museum and saw Patsy Cline’s hairpins and we went to the Bible printing museum. Bill and Taffy were terrific—but I said, “This isn’t the real deal.” So when we were shooting in Mississippi, I said to Bob, “I need to go there by myself and figure out what’s going on.”
Everything you see in the movie is what I saw. I was sort of like Opal. I just went there with a yellow pad of paper and wrote everything down. I rented a car and got on the freeway and there was a big accident and everything stopped. It became the opening of the picture—this great place for everything to converge on the highway, a jumping-off point for all these characters to begin bumping into each other and having near misses. I walked up and down the street and saw that a lot of older couples rented rooms to people who wanted to be singer/songwriters.
The most help I got was from a group of technicians. They were the ones who told me about the club, the Exit/In. I went there on their recommendation, and there was a radio station at the Exit/In that was broadcasting everything out onto the airwaves. There was a girl OD’ing on something on the next table. This black guy shoved a joint up my sleeve and said he had just gotten out of jail for premeditated murder. He was an interesting guy. He had gotten himself out of prison by going to the library. I don’t know if he was guilty or not, but he had a great appreciation for music and he told me a lot of bands to go to see. There were several people I had seen throughout the day. The city is built in a circle, so if I saw you in the morning and didn’t know who you were, I’d see you at least two times before the end of the day.
I walked outside after a couple of hours in this joint and I looked up and there was a full moon. I said, “Shit, everything runs in circles in this town.” I said, “Fuck, this is it. It’s all about overlaps and connective tissue.”
M*A*S*H was one of Bob’s greatest movies in terms of that kind of construct. You can pull all of these people together, there can be a very firm mathematical structure, like music. As long as you pulled them together at the end, you could do anything you wanted in the middle. Which was a perfect structure for him.
I came back and said, “I got it. It was a poem, for God’s sake. Your movie’s in there.” He said, “Well, swell.”
I turned in the first draft with eighteen characters, and Tommy Thompson read it first and then Bob Eggenweiler said it was terrific. Bob said, “I don’t know about this.” I thought, “That’s odd.” So, we rumbled around and he then talked about how somehow it had to be larger than music and Nashville. M*A*S*H has got a big event, war. So this would not be just another movie, a wannabe musical, about a place where people wanted to be musicians. The further that this went on, the more and more we talked about how ridiculous were the politics of the country. He started talking about a political line—“It can’t be about a girl killing herself at the end of the movie.”
POLLY PLATT: After the incident at the hotel in New York, he approached me to do Nashville. Joan wrote it for him and I thought it was great, and I figured he’d moved on and it would be okay, and it was okay. He never made any passes at me on the preproduction of Nashville.
I went to Nashville with Joan and the two of us were searching out locations, and he was with us. It was during the Watergate hearings and we could not get him out of the hotel to look at locations. It was infuriating at the time, but in the light of the pictures he later made, I thought, “Oh, I see why.” He was really fascinated with dirty politics.
JOAN TEWKESBURY: Bob and I were walking down Madison Avenue. There had been a horrendous storm, the night that Nixon was elected, you know, and all these umbrellas were turned inside out. And Bob said, “It’s a sign. You know, we’ve elected the wrong guy.” Bob was looking for an extreme, an explosive ending, in a way. And it sort of came out of that walk down Madison Avenue. And the discussion was about the fact that no one had assassinated a woman. And that people tended to stay away from entertainers.
ROBERT ALTMAN: We had a designer named Polly Platt. And she was the most renowned person at that time in our group. Polly Platt was better known than I was, or equally well, anyway. At a certain point I called Joan and Polly into my office and said, “Listen, I know what’s wrong with this. We’ve got to assassinate the wrong person.” And Polly hit the ceiling. Joan came in with her—they came to quit. And I said, “Well, quit. Because I think this is the strongest thing I got here.” Joan kinda changed and she stayed and worked with it. Polly quit.
POLLY PLATT: I fought him on it because the original script didn’t have the assassination. He added that, and I felt that it ruined the script. I still think it ruins the picture. I just think that it was a beautiful, delicate story of many lives intertwining. Everybody arriving at Nashville, and then this assassination—which obviously comes from his political fascination. It’s like a sledgehammer on this delicate, filigreed story of these people arriving in Nashville. I talked to Joan and she agreed with me, but she was afraid of him. She had a chance to get her script made, so you can see why she stayed.
JOAN TEWKESBURY: I disagreed at first, but I stuck around because I got it.
Bob decided that since everything else had happened to this woman, Barbara Jean, she should die at the end. I said, “So who do you want to do it?” Bob said, “I don’t care who kills her; she’s going to get shot.” At the time Kenny was the nicest character, so I simply made Kenny a little crazy.
On the set of Nashville with screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury in front of Nashville’s Parthenon, location of the film’s climactic shooting
ROBERT ALTMAN: I started casting it, and people would come in. I’d say, “Okay.” Then somebody else would come in—I don’t specifically know who—and I’d say, “God, we need a part for them. They want to be in the movie and they’re good.” So we would make up a part.
JOAN TEWKESBURY: It increased from eighteen characters to twenty-four, and I figured that the audience would be the twenty-fifth character. With every addition a little more sophistication, you know, a little more of the outside world would encroach into Nashville, which was exactly what was happening to Nashville at the time.
ROBERT ALTMAN: It gets back to poetry. What we’re all doing is basically haiku. You’re trying to make a short poem and get everything in. In the first place, in making a film, I have to figure out—I have to deal with the minds and the information that the audience already has. If the audience can’t keep track of all those characters, they give up and your picture’s over. So, I’ve got to get it down to size, to where they can embrace it. I think of all of these things like dinner parties. I go to a dinner party with twelve people and Kathryn and I leave and we’re going home, I’ll say, “Who was that blonde girl that was sitting next to so-and-so?” I may have met one more person, or two that I didn’t know before. But basically I walk away and I don’t even know the people I’ve had dinner with. I think a film is prett
y much the same way. There’s that problem in Nashville. But because of being able to stop and see them sing, you learn who that person is because you’ve got that camera on them for a long time. And that singing is sort of a confession for them. It tells you a lot about that individual.
KEITH CARRADINE: Bob had one of his weekend parties and we were all gathered up there. It was a sunny day, and I had my guitar and I was playing songs. Joan was already researching Nashville. In the midst of her doing that, while we were shooting Thieves Like Us, Bob heard my music and Joan heard the music and they basically just incorporated it into the film.
I wasn’t even supposed to be Tom originally. I was going to be Bill, who was played by Allan Nicholls. They wanted Gary Busey to play Tom, which was much more on the money in terms of Gary’s energy and his personality. It would have made much more sense on first blush. Then Gary passed on the movie because he took a pilot called The Texas Wheelers with Jack Elam. When that happened I brought Allan out and Bob moved me into the role of Tom, with which I was never comfortable. I never felt right. I didn’t like him. And that’s Bob’s genius. When we were doing the Exit/In scene, where all these women wonder who he’s singing to, I walked out and I said to Bob, “I’m really uncomfortable. I don’t feel confident about what I’m doing.” And he wouldn’t even talk to me about it. He just said, “Oh, you’re fine, you’re doing fine,” and walked away.
The genius of what he had done was he put me into that skin, and what you see in the movie is a guy who doesn’t like himself. It’s brilliant. It’s the truth. So I wish I could say I was such a good actor. It had nothing to do with acting. It was the genius of Bob putting me in a circumstance that made me really uncomfortable to have to fulfill the obligations of that character, and then you see that guy who is really creeped out by himself.
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