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The Fox Five
3 Women (1977)
A Wedding (1978)
Quintet (1979)
A Perfect Couple (1979)
HealtH (1980)
ALAN LADD, JR. (producer): At Fox, we did 3 Women, Perfect Couple, Quintet, and A Wedding together. I started HealtH with him, but then I left the studio. I was the only studio head that would hire him at the time. The hypocrisy of this town—so many people took out ads about him when he died, but they wouldn’t hire him. The creative community admired him greatly but studios were afraid of him—because of his outspokenness. On some level they recognized that he was a master. To know Bob was to love Bob—but if you didn’t know him you swallowed all the bullshit about him in town.
I knew Bob as an agent when he was a TV director. Bigger than life—even then he was a man who did what he wanted, wouldn’t compromise with anyone. But he was always on budget—that was all the studio cared about. When I was head of Fox he gave me a call one day with an idea—and he came in and told me the idea of 3 Women, which I found intriguing.
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Jack Kroll, review of 3 Women, headlined “Desert Song,” Newsweek, April 18, 1977: Like any true artist, Robert Altman couldn’t play it safe if he wanted to—which he doesn’t. His movies take chances, and none of them has risked more than 3 Women. In this, his tenth film in seven years and in many ways his most personal work, Altman dares to make something beautiful out of the deepest and most all-encompassing sorrow. Bleak visions of life are a dime a dozen these days, and the only excuse for an artist to have such a vision is to turn that bleakness into something blazing with paradoxical light and heat, something to stir and shock us into the exhilaration of discovery. This is what Altman does in 3 Women. … What makes a wasteland is the absence of love, which Altman embodies in a “rehabilitation” clinic for old people in the Palm Springs desert area of California. … Here in this hygienic limbo of youth and age, Altman’s dream-girls, Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), meet. They are ultimate American waifs, crossing paths in these gypsy jobs that are parodies of caring…. The third is Willie (Janice Rule), who owns the apartments and a decayed Disneyland called Dodge City where the local studs come to shoot targets, ride dirt-track motorcycles and drink. Willie is a silent, sibylline figure who paints every surface—even the bottom of the pool—with grotesque humanoid figures in which a fierce, priapic male terrorizes three females, one of whom is pregnant. … Altman’s dream of three women expresses his sense that human beings have become more vulnerable than ever to pain, loss, betrayal, cruelty and shame. He’s right, but his film has an originality and beauty of form that moves you beyond the force of its insight.
ROBERT ALTMAN: I had done a painting years before. There were about two years that I did paintings. And I did a painting of three women, just three faces, and then I had this dream that I was making this picture in the desert, and it was called 3 Women and it was about personality theft. We were living on the beach in Malibu, and Kathryn had gotten very sick—I had just visited her in the hospital.
Sissy Spacek, as Pinky, and Shelley Duvall, as Millie, in 3 Women
KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: It happened fast. Sunday night we were walking on the beach and I felt like I couldn’t get anything down. I went upstairs and I was just sick all night. I ended up in the emergency room. They finally just had to go in—surgery. … They got in there and found a duodenal ulcer. You know it’s all the psychological thing—ulcers and problems and stress. But this one was buried so deep it took forever to finally find it. That was when he was at home with Matthew. And he had this dream.
ROBERT ALTMAN: During that time when Kathryn was in the hospital, our son Matthew was spending time on the beach and he had been sleeping in my bed. So there was sand in my bed, which might be why I was dreaming about the desert. I would dream a little, I would think about this, and I’d wake up and I’d go to the pad by my bed and I’d make notes. And then I’d wake up and I’d have Bob Eggenweiler and Tommy Thompson in my bedroom. And I’d say, “Now go down to the desert and find a location that’s like this and this and this.” And, of course, none of that happened. Neither of them was there, and I never wrote a dream note in my life, and I had no pad next to my bed, even. So I dreamed about making the picture, and the tenor of what the film was. I called Alan Ladd at Fox and said, “Listen, I read a short story and I want to make a film of it.” I didn’t want to tell him it was a dream. And I kind of made up the story. And he said, “Great. Go ahead and make it.”
ALAN LADD, JR.: He didn’t mention that it was a dream until later, in Cannes.
SISSY SPACEK (actress): I got to know Bob while we were shooting Welcome to L.A. We’d go to Lion’s Gate to watch dailies, and it was really like going to the movies. It was a real festive and relaxed atmosphere at that office. There didn’t seem to be a real hierarchy, like if you were low on the totem pole you never felt like you couldn’t talk to Bob. He made himself accessible to everybody. Granted, he surrounded himself with people he really liked and respected.
I remember he told us about his dream. I did little drawings, little sketches about his dream. Bob would get the seed of an idea and he would let the people he was working with become a part of that. I remember we were doing one scene and I was really upset about how it had gone. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t authentic. He just laughed. He said, “Once you have done it, it becomes real.” Part of his genius was making you feel as though you can do no wrong. He was really an artist. He didn’t run after what was happening at any time. He was not a formula man. He did his own thing and he trusted that everybody he was working with would pull his weight.
He told me everything he knew about my character, Pinky, and then it was like he would give actors a track, a blueprint. “Now work within these parameters and put yourself into it.” He didn’t need to have all the answers. He didn’t have that disease where as a director you have to know everything.
There was a lot of improvisational stuff. He would give us a scene in the morning and then it would grow. It was so freeing working with him after having worked with other directors. The way he works is all very naturalistic. Everything is natural and the sets are happy and relaxed and he seemed to always be the happiest and the most relaxed.
I don’t think I ever knew what the film was about. I remember Bob would say, “Well, if you confuse people enough in the first twenty minutes they’ll give up trying to figure out what it’s about and they’ll just go with it and enjoy it.”
Shelley always said the three women were the id, the ego, and the superego. At that time I had never heard of the id or the superego. She was way ahead of me. I just tried to portray the dream that Bob had. I didn’t think of it in those kinds of terms. To me it was about this girl who was a bit of a blank page. So young she didn’t know who she was yet and she met someone who she was completely enamored with and wanted to be like her. So as young people often do, she emulated her and was playing that part. I wasn’t thinking of the bigger picture of what it’s about.
When I was sixteen or seventeen I was on a bus in New York. It was pouring rain, and all the people ran under this awning. There was a girl a year or two older than me who had gotten off the bus. I looked over at her and was so taken by her and the way she dressed and the way she wore her hair. I remember thinking distinctly, “I want to be her. I want to be just like her.” Already in my life I had experienced something like that. I did become as much like the way she looked as I could.
Shelley was incredible. I remember her always getting her skirt closed in the car door. I think the first time it was an accident, but that was the thing about Bob. He loved accidents. He loved the things that happened that you didn’t plan. Bob would do things over and over hoping that something would happen that was unexpected.
With Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek during the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, at which Duvall shared the Best Actress award for 3 Women
ROBERT ALTMAN: The first time Shelley caught her dress in the door, Tommy Thompson, who was my assistant director, yelled, “Cut!” I loved it. I wanted her to do it again.
SISSY SPACEK: The little boy was very much alive in Bob. Bob was the mischievous kid who would put a plastic turd on the middle of the cake at the wrap party and then would stay nearby. He would get a few of us over to watch as people came. He was just tickled when no one stopped eating the cake, they just ate around it. He took such great delight in playing those kinds of pranks on people.
ROBERT ALTMAN: The reviews were mixed. Pauline Kael said she liked the first half of 3 Women but she didn’t like that last half. I said, “That’s like saying, ‘I like your baby. It has a cute head. But I don’t like her arms and legs.’” I mean, just say you don’t like it. Don’t say how it should have been done.
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Mary Murphy, story headlined “Crisis of a Cult Figure,” New West, May 23, 1977: As Altman awakes in his New York City apartment, the phone rings…. “Don’t you realize you are letting history go down the drain?” Altman is shouting into the phone. He is talking to an executive at Fox about the distribution plan for 3 Women. “I told you this film had to be released slowly. At this rate it will be gone in three months and no one will make a penny.” His mouth moves continuously, his head bobs, his feet pace, perspiration dampens his shirt. He grabs a gold toothpick he wears on a chain around his neck and in rapid strokes picks at his front teeth. “I’m so mad,” he tells Shelley [Duvall], hanging up, “I could punch somebody.”
Within the next two hours a Fox executive calls to inform Altman that 3 Women is a box office failure in the South and the Midwest, new reviews are read to Altman in which he is attacked as a “middle-class artist,” “a megalomaniac,” an imposter who is ripping off Bergman and Fellini, and Shelley Duvall, after a four-minute conversation in the bedroom, has broken her contract and walked out on A Wedding.
Altman twists the cap off the Cutty Sark and rolls a joint.
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JULIANNE MOORE (actress): I was in the theater department at Boston University, and we used to go to the movies in Harvard Square, where they always had revivals. I’d somehow managed to go through high school in the seventies not seeing Nashville. But I didn’t—I lived on Army bases. You just saw whatever movies were around, and for some reason I hadn’t seen that. So I saw 3 Women and up to that point I wanted to be a theater actor. I never had seen anything like it before. And it was the first time in my life that I actually noticed the presence of the director in a movie. I felt it really strongly. And I thought, “I don’t know who this guy is, but that’s what I want to do. I want to do that kind of work.” From then on I’d see his films whenever I could, and he was always my absolute favorite director, for what he said the-matically and emotionally and how he felt about people. Who people are, what they’re capable of—good or bad.
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Betty Jeffries Demby, story headlined “Robert Altman Talks About His Life and Art,” The New York Times, June 19, 1977: Movie buffs may take advantage of this rare opportunity to trace not only Altman’s artistic progress, but to chart his development as a philosopher and commentator on social mores as well. And in these times of raised consciousness, special attention will perhaps be paid to the director’s treatment of women, from the humiliated Hot Lips Houlihan in “M*A*S*H” to the exotically intertwined heroines of “3 Women.”
“Women have been subjugated in our society,” he says. “Consequently, they’ve had to become manipulative. They have more disguises and facets than men. Those are the kinds of things that interest me, where we’re dealing with disguises, where we make assumptions and we’re almost always wrong.”…
“I cannot do ‘Rocky’ or ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and all those films where there’s no question about the way the audience is going to feel at the end. I think sad people laugh, happy people cry, and brave people are frightened. Cowards are brave. There’s total contradiction. The minute you take the surprise away, there’s no art. The minute you plot something and say this is going to be this way because of this, you’re wrong.”
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HENRY GIBSON: As with Fellini, people always wanted to explore the symbolism in his films. And people were constantly after him to interpret this or explain that. I loved what he would say in response. Someone would ask him, “In this particular picture, when we see the color red over here, what does it mean?”
And he very cleverly evolved this response. He said, “Well, what do you think it means?”
The person would say, “Well, I think it means it’s the sunset of that character’s life.”
And he’d say, “You’re right. That’s what it means.”
What he tried to tell people again and again is you get from the feast what you bring to it. There isn’t a rightness and a wrongness of interpretation.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Most of the people who have looked at my work and don’t know me, even the ones who do know me, they analyze it from a certain point of view, which is right and it’s wrong.
Asking me what something’s about will only lead them into misunderstanding. I mean, then you’re talking about some kind of logic that doesn’t really exist. Take Vincent [van Gogh]. His whole life was the epitome of the failed artist. And then suddenly, after his death, actually, for some reason somebody says, “Oh, look at this.”
I don’t think I know the truth. Or if I do, I’ve been disguising it for a long time. I don’t know that I want to give that up, this late in the game. But I don’t think it makes any difference. My answer is going to be no less valid, or no more valid, than the woman in England who wrote a book about five of my films, writing about what this or that film was in my life, and applying it to my life.
What difference does it make? How close do you want to get? By you, I mean your audience. What is it that they want to know? And what value is it for you to tell them?
The minute I say what a movie I’ve made is about, I’ve narrowed everyone else’s view of it. If I say what it means to me, its range to some extent is limited to the viewer from that point on.
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JOHN CONSIDINE (actor and screenwriter): A Wedding had a funny genesis. He was finishing 3 Women in Palm Springs. I had come down there to do some voice-over work. After this one day he was told he had this big interview. He sat down in this living room and these people interviewed him and one of the questions was, “What are you going to do next, Mr. Altman?” He looked down at this coffee table and it had this whole display of wedding magazines. He said, “I think I’m going to do a film on the American wedding industry.” When they left I said, “Really?”
He said, “I just thought of it, but do you want to write it with me?”
So I stayed in a little room in Lion’s Gate and started writing. He said, “First thing, I want there to be a lot of characters.”
Nashville had twenty-four main characters, so I doubled it to forty-eight.
He came in one day and said, “We need to start the screenplay.” He sat down at the typewriter and wrote, “Exterior—Cathedral, day. Church music playing. Limousines and cars parked. A wedding is in progress.” Then he got up and said, “Okay, you take it from here.” I wish I had saved that piece of paper.
He didn’t write much, but some of the biggest turns in A Wedding were Bob’s ideas. Like the day he came in and said that there was going to be this terrible car crash, and everybody thinks the bride and groom are dead. I thought, “My god, where is our comedy going?”
I started a little card for each character and started putting them up on the wall. He came in and said, “I’d like our characters to have secrets, every character to have a secret. It doesn’t necessarily have to come out in the screenplay. But let’s give all of them a secret.”
It’s great for an actor to know something that nobody else knows. I just started expanding these.
He brought in Allan Nicholls and Pat Resnick to help with the scr
ipt. I didn’t love that. We had a little thing about that. That’s just the way it was. I had a lot of anger and I wasn’t able to really express it to him.
He said, “Are you mad at me?” I said, “No, not really.”
I was at a stage of my life where at least with someone like Bob, I couldn’t tell him what I really felt.
One day Bob came in and said, “We have to have a story tomorrow because we’re going over to Fox to get the money.”
I stayed there all night and came up with twelve pages. The car is ready and we’re going and I handed it to him and he said, “I don’t have time to read this.”
I said, “Bob!”
We meet with Alan Ladd, Jr., and the other execs at Fox, and Bob says, “So, tell them the story, John.”
I started telling them; then Bob would get an idea and he would interrupt me. He would finish this and then say, “Tell them what happens next, John.” And we kept going. It was this incredible improv. We get outside and he looked at me with a big smile, and said, “Can you believe those guys gave us the money for that?”
Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley, Mia Farrow, Dennis Christopher, and Amy Stryker as the Brenner family in A Wedding
When we started shooting, Tommy Thompson came in one morning and said, “Fox is really pressuring us. They want to know the schedule. They have to see it, Bob.”
Bob said, “Tommy, look, if they don’t see a schedule, they have no idea how we’re doing. So let’s tell them we’re doing fine.”
CAROL BURNETT (actress): I remember Lily telling me how wonderful he was to work with on Nashville—”Carol, if he ever asks you to work with him, say you’d carry a spear.” That told me how much he was admired.
He had the ability to put a key in everyone’s back and open us up to be brave. He created an atmosphere on the set. I’ve never really enjoyed the process that much because I’m kind of a creature of theater and live television, where you learn it, you rehearse it, you do it, and you go home. Movies take forever. Three hours just to light the scene? For me it’s boring at times because you just sit and wait. That wasn’t the way with Bob. He created this atmosphere that was like recess. You just went in and you knew what the plot was, and you had some lines you were going to do, and the rest was up for grabs.
Robert Altman Page 32