Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Watching the two of them deal with this without any embarrassment was really something. Kathryn didn’t say, “Bob, not in front of guests,” or “Let’s not talk about that now.” I can’t remember exactly what she said at the time, but it was along the lines of, “It doesn’t matter. Just things. Doesn’t matter.” She was so real. When Bob was at his lowest, she was there. Just a positive force. Just wouldn’t ever let him be down on himself or blame himself. He would get kind of lost in the “Oh God, oh God.” She was always ready to say, “So what? We’ll do something else. We’ll be fine.” Bob didn’t like to be vulnerable very long. He was down and then he said, “Okay, we’ll do something else.”

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: There were a lot of those periods and they always scared the hell out of me. But he always bounced back. I don’t remember dwelling on that particular one that Frank mentioned, but I’m sure it happened. And then Bob made things happen. But I have no memory of things staying down. I’m sure they did. And I’m sure I said, “Well, where should I cut back or what should I do?” And he never dwelled on it and he never talked about it that much. And it never stayed down. I never had to skimp and say, “We’ve only got this much money to do this or that.” We always seemed to keep on trucking and flying and, you know, doing all the stuff.

  FRANK SOUTH: During that time he was really pasting it together and risking a lot. But he walked away from L.A. during this time and I remember him sitting in that chair and realizing that he was going to sell it all. He had managed to beat the odds and thumb his nose at pretension and money-centered nonartist ways of thinking in Hollywood for a good long period of time. But he had to walk away from there.

  Aljean Harmetz, story headlined “Robert Altman Sells Studio for $2.3 Million,” The New York Times, July 11, 1981: Robert Altman’s Lion’s Gate Films has been sold for $2.3 million to a group headed by Jonathan Taplin, producer of “Mean Streets” and “The Last Waltz.” Mr. Altman—the prolific and controversial director whose movies include “M*A*S*H,” “Popeye” and “Nashville”—has recently retreated from film making in the wake of a number of commercially unsuccessful movies, including “Quintet,” “A Perfect Couple” and “HealtH.”

  “Suddenly, no one answered my phone calls,” Mr. Altman said in a telephone interview from Montreal. “I had no place to turn.” The maverick director whose greatest commercial success was “M*A*S*H,” 11 years ago, put his company on the block last winter in the wake of financial claims and counterclaims with Paramount Pictures over the budget of “Popeye” and the collapse of his next project, “Lone Star,” at United Artists.

  “I feel my time has run out,” he said today. “Every studio wants ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ The movies I want to make are movies the studios don’t want. What they want to make, I don’t.”

  STEPHEN ALTMAN: He got offered to do M*A*S*H II for five million dollars. That was more than anything he’d ever made. He was like, “No fucking way. I’m not doing that. M*A*S*H is not my movie anymore. There’s a TV series. Everybody took it away from me.” He wouldn’t do anything like that. He would never get involved in those paydays. He said, “They won’t hire me for anything else except stuff they have control of.” He needed final cut. He needed it to be his picture. He needed it to be his way, so you know, you only get so much money for working off of your name.

  Was he different? No, he was the same all the time. When he was down and out he was still the king and when he was the king he was the king. It was just, he could afford better offices. He lived the same. Everything was always the same for him. That was one of the things about “the genius” and “the failure.” I don’t think he ever believed any of that. “The award, yes, I want the award. But it doesn’t mean anything.” He did really believe that. “I don’t care what you think about my movie, I’m doing this for me. You know, it would be nice to make some money, but first I’m making the film.” I mean, he could always have made the payday. And kept working and segue into a TV series and been fat and rich. But the importance to him was doing what he wanted to do as he wanted to do it, and being in charge.

  MICHAEL MURPHY: He’s never defeated. Nobody could defeat this guy. He suffered a lot of slings and arrows, but he was never defeated.

  Robert Altman, unused footage from Fox Movie Channel Documentary Robert Altman: On His Own Terms: In the eighties people would say, “Oh, gee, it’s a shame that you’re, you know, you haven’t done anything for so long.” I’d say, “I do two pictures a year.” I have constantly got a project.

  * * *

  2 by South—Rattlesnake in a Cooler and Precious Blood (1982; First presented at Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre and St. Clement’s Theatre, New York)

  David Sterritt, story headlined “Robert Altman’s Sudden—and Auspicious—Stage Venture,” The Christian Science Monitor, October 27, 1981: A few months ago Robert Altman sold his production company—Lion’s Gate Films—and hightailed it out of the movie business. This distressed the fans who have cheered such pictures as “M*A*S*H,” “Three Women,” “Nashville,” and “A Wedding,” and who regarded Altman as one of the few independent voices in Hollywood.

  But it turns out Altman hasn’t retired, just altered his course. Hoping to continue his career in the cable-TV and home-video markets, he has meanwhile set his sights on the stage. “2 by South,” presented recently at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater, has now arrived Off Broadway, marking Altman’s New York stage-directing debut. It is an auspicious occasion.

  The evening consists of two one-act dramas by a new playwright named Frank South. Both are cautionary tales, tracing the path of seemingly reasonable men to eruptions of violence. Perhaps more to the point, both provide ideal working material for Altman, who thrives less on plot than on dense characterization and unconventional structure. In this regard, he and author South are kindred spirits.

  FRANK SOUTH: I was a writer-slash-waiter-slash-performance artist in New York and we had a space on lower Broadway and we would do our own pieces down there. I was working at Windows on the World as a waiter. One show I did was a one-man show called Rattlesnake in a Cooler. Some divine luck stepped in and a woman came in—she saw a review in the SoHo News—and she told some friends at an agency. So a bunch of agents came to this little tiny space. They had a client, Leo Burmester, and he was working on Lone Star with Bob. The agents showed the script to Leo and said, “This is perfect for you.” Leo optioned it, gave me something like five hundred dollars. Lone Star fell through and he took it to Bob and they started messing around.

  Bob didn’t know what he was going to do, but he enjoyed the piece. Leo was rehearsing it at Bob’s office. Leo said he put holes in the walls—tore the place up—Bob didn’t care. He said, “That’s great, that’s great.” At one point after they were messing with it for a while. Bob said, “I’ve got to meet this guy, I guess.”

  I got a call from my agent and he said Bob Altman wanted to talk with me. I said, “Bob Altman, who?” I couldn’t believe it was Robert Altman. It was a shock to me because back in my Missouri days where I went to high school and did my knock-around times, I saw all of his stuff, especially McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which I had gone to see like five times.

  My agent said, “This is a very important meeting.” He was really worried. He was an uptown guy and I wasn’t at all. He said, “For God’s sake, Frank, whatever you do, Frank, don’t drink. This is a rare, rare meeting. Keep your head about you.”

  So I went to Delmonico’s, where Bob had an office-slash-apartment, and I knocked on the door—straightening my shirt—and he’s in his robe, his hair all over the place. He’s on the phone and he’s going, “Fuck, fuck. Well, I don’t know, I don’t know. It was a cabdriver. I don’t know how I gave him two hundred bucks!”

  He says, “You the writer? Come in, come in.” He closes the door. This is around one o’clock in the afternoon.

  He says, “I was at Elaine’s. Can you believe this guy? This cab-driver? I thought I gave him two tens. And it
was two hundreds!” He’s mumbling around and he goes over to the bar—”Want a drink? I don’t trust anybody who doesn’t drink.”

  We started talking and drinking and he told me he’d been rehearsing the play with Leo and he liked it very much and he asked me if I had any more. It turned out that I had written another play called Precious Blood. He says, “So let me read it. Anything else?” I had a short story. He says, “Let me see that, too.”

  It was not like any kind of job interview. It was more someone sitting down and wanting to know who you were. And not by asking directly. After a while we got into this thing where we were quizzing each other back and forth. There were times he would say, “I don’t want to talk about that.” We talked about everything that afternoon and we kept having drinks. And there was a pasta maker that came out somewhere mid-afternoon. And he wanted to know where I came from—family, all that stuff. About writing, about performing.

  He asked if I had read Barry Hannah. I said yeah, and he said, “You remind me of him.” I spent twenty-something years in Hollywood after that, and people rarely read. Scotty one time said he didn’t like to read that much, but I didn’t find that to be true. He knew what he was talking about, about writers. He knew viscerally on a real deep level what Rattlesnake was about. He wanted to know if this was an accident or there was a genuine human being-slash-writer he could get along with.

  He told me about his kids. We talked about football, just all kinds of things, just one of those rambling kinds of conversations. I figured this is going to be a half hour or so. Now it’s like four o’clock and I’m through messing with the pasta machine. Then he pulled out a joint or two and we talked some more, and I am completely loaded. Then he started talking about music and what kind of music would go with this. Then he would ask me—he wanted to know more and more about Precious Blood.

  He asked me what movies of his I had seen and he wanted to know what I thought. I said they were wonderful. And he said, “That’s bullshit. What did you think!” And I would say what I thought and there were some that I loved and some I really didn’t understand. We talked about Hitchcock and he told me about working on Combat!, and now it’s around five or so, and some guys show up and they play some music and we eat something else. And Bob says, “Let’s go back to the scene of the crime. Let’s go to Elaine’s.”

  I’m a waiter, playwright, performance artist, and now it’s seven or eight o’clock at night and we’re traipsing off to Elaine’s and I’m completely sick. I don’t know if it’s the nerves or the pot or the drink or the bad pasta, and I’m throwing up in the bathroom. This is the worst thing. He’s banging on the door—”You alive in there? Come on. We’ve got to go!”

  He starts laughing and I say, “That’s about the worst thing I could ever do.”

  He says, “Ah, I’ve done worse.”

  He’s telling the other guys, “Do you believe this kid? He comes to meet a big shot and he throws up in the bathroom!”

  And then he mumbles to me, “Oh, you’ve got some on your shirt.”

  We go to Elaine’s, and those guys peel off and then it’s just him and me at Elaine’s. We’re sitting there and we’re talking and he starts playing backgammon with some other guys. I’m looking up at the waiter at Elaine’s and saying, “I’m a waiter, too,” in this drunk voice.

  He’s putting down the veal in front of me and saying, “Uh-huh.” Bob’s looking at me and he says, “He doesn’t care.”

  He liked to make observations about people and he was always honest to a fault. And he says, “You’re one of those people, right? You want to please people. You want to make them like you.” He was basically saying, “You should stop that.” It was funny because my whole persona at that time was the leather jacket and the jeans, and when I wasn’t a waiter I was a downtown rebel artist.

  The night goes on and at this point I’m just watching and he’s getting involved in the backgammon game. It’s like one in the morning, and I said, “I gotta go.”

  He says, “Okay, get me the stuff. Send it over, and we’ll talk.”

  I stumbled out of Elaine’s, got to the nearest pay phone, and called my friends and woke them up. And I didn’t know what to say. “He wants to do this, but I’m not sure what he wants to do.”

  That’s how it started.

  * * *

  So I’m still a service captain up at Windows on the World—the businessmen’s club at the World Trade Center. I get a call from him and he says, “We’re in rehearsals and I’d really love for you to be out here. We’re going to be opening soon.” I had what, a hundred and fifty dollars, and I put it in my pocket and they sent me a ticket and I took off for Los Angeles.

  I’m broke but I’m not saying anything. I don’t know what I’m going to do about a bed, even, that evening. I went out and got myself a couple of cheeseburgers at McDonald’s and a Budweiser from a store and sat in the back of the theater and watched rehearsals. Afterward, he said, “So, where are you staying?”

  “Um, I haven’t really figured…”

  “Why don’t you come home with me?”

  We drove out to Malibu Cove Colony—he hadn’t sold it yet—and I spent the next two weeks living there, in a room that faced the ocean. He and Kathryn were so loving and so generous to me. It was a stunning experience. You don’t see much of that in life. And it was just who they were.

  This was not a time when he was doing well in Hollywood. One time we were driving past Paramount on the way to rehearsal and he makes like he’s throwing a hand grenade as we’re driving by. And he says, “I hope that Katzenberg is dead. Little prick.” [South makes sound effects of a bomb exploding.]

  Throughout all this, there was a guy who didn’t have a phony bone in his body. He was so hard honest in my relationship with him, and that’s what he demanded of me. That’s the only thing he really asked.

  * * *

  Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)

  Sheila Benson, review in the Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1982: No wonder “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” didn’t work on the New York stage. It was a film all the time, a rich, funny, touching, insightful film. It needed to blend and move, to fade forward and back, to hold one character in the foreground, then shift our focus to another…. Robert Altman has fused his extraordinary cast—Cher, Karen Black, Sandy Dennis, Sudie Bond, Kathy Bates, Marta Helfin and Mark Patton—into one of the finest ensembles I can recall in an American film. But then the high-water marks before this were also Altman films.

  * * *

  PETER NEWMAN (producer): In the early 1980s I didn’t know what my career was, but I had managed to get some financial backing—relatively minimal—from Mark Goodson, the game-show guy. Cable television was just in its infancy, especially pay television. Goodson said he would stake me to a little bit of money to create some programming for cable. I got an office in Times Square and I had no idea what I was talking about. I had no background in film and so I would go home at night and watch what the pay channels were showing.

  On the set of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, when Robert Altman’s mutual estrangement from Hollywood led him to create “filmed plays”

  Showtime had a “Showtime on Broadway” series. Come Back to the Five and Dime was in previews on Broadway. It was especially a big deal because it was going to have Cher in it. I talked my way backstage and I walked up to Bob, and I said, “You don’t know me …” I pitched him on the idea of filming it for Showtime.

  He looked at me and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. This show is going to open on Broadway in three weeks.” He didn’t say, “Get lost,” but he kind of turned and walked away. I think Bob always believed that the next thing was going to be a smash.

  CHER (actress and singer): My mom was friends with Kathryn a million years ago; they were like crazy girls together when they were young. My mom knew I was doing an audition for Joe Papp and so she called—she thought s
he was calling me to ask how it went. But somehow she called Kathryn and Bob. Bob was asleep, taking a nap. Bob being Bob, he was all pissed off.

  Bob said, “Hello?”

  My mother said, “Is Cher there?”

  Bob said, “Why the fuck would Cher be here? … Georgia, is that you?”

  “Yeah. Who’s that?”

  “It’s Bob. You have Kathryn and my number in the wrong place.”

  My mom told him I was in New York doing an audition for Joe Papp. I come out of the audition and there’s one of those memo things—I wish I saved it—”Call Bob Altman.”

  I called and said, “What are you doing?”

  He said, “I’m doing this play. How would you like to read the script?” “Sure.”

  The day he was sending it over was the Puerto Rican Day Parade. They couldn’t get it over—it arrived late that night. I thought he was just blowing me off.

  I read it and I said to myself, “I don’t want to do the part he’s going to offer me.” I knew he wanted me to be Joanne [who’d had a sex-change operation].

  He said, “I want you to come over. We’re going to have a group of women over to do a reading.”

  I said, “I am dyslexic. I can act or read but I can’t do both.” I don’t know where I got these balls because no one was offering me anything.

  So I go over to Bob’s, and I had on a hat and scarf and a leather motorcycle jacket and boots, and I’m on the elevator with Sudie Bond. She doesn’t know who I am. She thinks I’m going to mug her in the elevator. She gets out on Bob’s floor and I get out and I’m following her up the hall. Now she’s sure I’m going to mug her. We get to Bob’s door and I take off my scarf and she realizes it’s me, and I’m probably not going to mug her.

  Sandy Dennis is there, and I think Karen Black is there, too. So first I read Joanne, and I really wanted to read Sissy. Sandy told me later it was the worst reading she had ever heard. She was fascinated it was so bad. We got to be so close—we were just such good friends.