Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Everyone left and he kept me behind. He said, “Okay, right, Jo is not for you. I think you might be right about Sissy. I think you are right about Sissy.”

  Then he said, “Tell me about some of my films.”

  I think I told him that I enjoyed M*A *S*H—and that I thought he ruined Popeye. I remember that as I did, Scotty Bushnell and a boy that were there just kind of turned around and disappeared. Bob said, “I just can’t believe you.”

  I said okay, and then I left.

  I had no idea what was going to happen. Later he called me and said, “All right. You got it.”

  I went to call my agent because I knew I didn’t have the union card to do plays. I was going to ask what kind of card I needed. So I called my agent and said, “I need to know something about the Robert Altman play. I need to get the card, whatever you need to work on Broadway.”

  He said, “You know, that’s really difficult. He’s only looking at serious actresses and we can’t even get you an audition.”

  I said, “Go fuck yourself,” and I left that agent immediately after.

  That Bob gave me the job is insane. I wouldn’t have given me the job. It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t know what “downstage” was. I had no idea what anything was. I hadn’t even been in a play in school.

  * * *

  We started rehearsing and I realized the first day he was a genius because he had all these personalities and he could talk to each one in the way they needed to be spoken to.

  He made the stage feel like a really fun place. He set a tone for everyone. He wouldn’t get cross—though he could get crabby. We all would know that it was just momentary. That’s something I learned from him—the feeling on the set or on the stage has to be safe. He created a safe environment. You can’t really be great unless you’re prepared to be stupid. He would make it safe for you to fall on your ass and then say, “Okay, that didn’t work. Let’s go on.”

  Oh, and he saved my life. I’m a complete pussy when it comes to swallowing big pills. We were standing on our feet the whole day, and I had this pack of vitamin pills. I told myself, “I have just got to swallow these pills.” There was one gigantic one. Looked like Alka-Seltzer. I swallowed and it wouldn’t go down. I literally could not breathe—it went down sideways. I went from person to person for help, and I fell into Bob. He was the last one I went to. He turned me around and did the Heimlich. That popped it sideways so I could breathe. I went to a little emergency place in Hell’s Kitchen—they were no help at all. “You can breathe, so go to the ear, nose, and throat hospital.” It took forever. I was just getting small little breaths, and it took like half an hour to get there. I started getting out of the car and all of a sudden I swallowed it. But it was him—Robert Altman saved my life.

  * * *

  Then we’re rehearsing and rehearsing and it’s coming together and then he has people come to watch it. Then he said, “We’re going to start doing it without the book. So memorize it.”

  Every night I was going out and dancing at Studio 54 all night long. Then one night he came to me and he was pissed. I was kind of like his pet. He was always sweet to me. I was crazy about him. I just liked to sit in his lap because he was this big bear and he was so fabulous. And then when Kathryn would come, it was wonderful, like, “Oh, now we can stop and gossip.”

  But then one day I didn’t know my lines. He said, “By the end of this night you better know your fucking lines, and I’m not kidding.”

  I didn’t know anything about anything. So, on Broadway you don’t get to do ad-libs. But I started and they were funny and people were laughing. He comes to me another night—apparently Ed Graczyk, who wrote it, was getting mad. Bob came to me and said, “You have to say the fucking script verbatim, understand me?”

  I did it verbatim and he says the same thing again.

  “I did every line exactly!” I told him.

  He says, “Well. Oh. I never read the script all the way through.”

  “Well, I did it.”

  We both started laughing.

  He said, “I don’t know. Do it how you like it.”

  * * *

  We went to Broadway. Sandy and I were really close friends by then. Sudie, Kathy Bates, Sandy, and I were pretty close. Karen and I never got along.

  It was really fun. It was packed like crazy in previews.

  One Wednesday afternoon—blue-hair day—I was really great. Matinées were my favorite—balls to the wall and try something I never tried before. Mike Nichols came. I had gone on an audition for him but he said I couldn’t play this part. What he said was mean, so I can’t say it. I said, “I’m really talented, so one day you’ll be sorry.” So now he comes backstage and says, “I was wrong. You’re right. And how would you like to do a movie with me?”

  “Sure.”

  “How about me and Meryl Streep?”

  “Sure.”

  “Want to know what it is?”

  “Nope.”

  They sent me the script and said, “She’s a lesbian but she’s a lovely lesbian.”

  I said, “Fine.”

  That’s how I got Silkwood.

  Without Bob I would have never had a film career. Everyone told him not to cast me. Everyone. They said, “This is your first time on Broadway. You’re going to put her in your play? This is important to your career.” He didn’t care.

  One time in Vegas, before this, Francis [Ford Coppola] came to see me backstage. “Why aren’t you doing movies?” I started sobbing. I had tried and tried and tried but nobody would give me a break. I am convinced Bob was the only one who was brave enough to do it.

  Then it opened and the reviews came out, and it just was a nightmare. He was so excited and we were so excited and the audiences were unbelievable. I had no idea that in one night everything would change.

  Frank Rich, review headlined “Stage: Robert Altman Directs Cher,” The New York Times, February 19, 1982: Neither the gimmicky plot nor its clichéd participants are credible. … It’s hard to fathom that this is the same director who made such a promising theatrical debut with “Two by South” off Broadway last fall.

  PETER NEWMAN: I went the day after it opened and Bob said, “What are you doing here? Didn’t you read the reviews? Everyone hates it.”

  I said, “The offer [of filming the play for Showtime] stands.” I said I thought it was pretty good, and you could see the wheels start spinning.

  With Cher in the role that launched her film career, as the sassy waitress Sissy in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

  He was not in great shape financially or professionally. The thing about Bob was he was such a fighter. Even when the reviews were bad he was trying to keep the play running, even running a deficit. He would never cut and run. He would support the failures. He would never acknowledge they were artistic failures. He would fight just as hard for the movies that didn’t have a chance.

  CHER: He was so proud and so convinced and so committed that he started putting his own money back into it, so it kept running. The people who came really loved it.

  PETER NEWMAN: Within three or four weeks the show had closed and we had moved the set to somewhere in the mid-forties and we were shooting it as a film. Showtime thought they were getting a videotaped version of the show. Little did they know.

  Bob was driving the momentum and we were going out drinking every night. He went in and said, “I’ve got this great idea. We’re going to shoot it on Super 16 film.” He didn’t want this to be for cable television. If he could shoot this on film and if it turned out the way he thought it would, he could get it released theatrically. Showtime agreed to let him shoot it on Super 16, but they made it clear—it’s for cable. He said he wanted to release it theatrically and they went crazy.

  Bob got Showtime to agree to let him take it to some film festivals. He did everything himself. So we went from Montreal to Venice to Deauville to Toronto, with one unbelievable stop in between. He realized there was a
two-day gap between Montreal and Venice. There was a film festival somewhere in Belgium—Knokke-Heist. He just wanted to keep showing his movie. So we showed it in Montreal and the picture played really beautifully. Then we got on a plane for sixteen hours to Knokke-Heist, Belgium, and did a lot of drinking on the plane. I was sort of carrying him off the plane. The organizer of the film festival was seventeen years old and he was wearing a cape. Bob was barely awake and I was holding him up. The kid comes up and says, “Mr. Altman, I must ask you a question.” Bob thought it would be something like, “How did you get that shot in McCabe & Mrs. Miller?”

  Instead, he asks, “Why would you come to my festival?”

  Bob was totally comfortable. He said, “You’re showing my movie.”

  * * *

  MARTIN SCORSESE: I remember meeting him in New York one night in 1983 and his last picture was Popeye, I think, and prior to that was HealtH with Fox, and mine was with Fox too, it was King of Comedy. And when it opened in 1983, King of Comedy was considered a terrible flop. HealtH was hardly opened. I happened to mention to him that King of Comedy was pretty much dropped from distribution by Fox, and I mentioned the name of the man who did it. And he said, “That’s exactly the same person who dropped HealtH.” In a way, he was sent to the diaspora for ten years, and so was I.

  * * *

  Streamers (1983)

  Vincent Canby, review in The New York Times, October 9, 1983: “Streamers,” Robert Altman’s screen adaptation of David Rabe’s tough, bloody, sorrowful stage play, is a maddening movie. It goes partway toward realizing the full effect of a stage play as a film, then botches the job by the overabundant use of film techniques, which dismember what should be an ensemble performance. … Mr. Rabe’s play, one of the major hits of the 1976–77 New York theater season, is confined to a single set, a bleak room in an Army barracks where five soldiers, under the bleary eyes of two boozy old sergeants, are awaiting assignment to Vietnam.

  * * *

  MATTHEW MODINE: Streamers was my baptism. I had a big monologue—my character, Billy, is talking about going to gay bars with his friends and having guys there buy them drinks, then running off. One day, one of the guys Billy was with, one of his friends from high school, says he’s going to stay at the bar and go with this guy. I wanted to talk to Bob about what it meant, how to interpret what Billy was saying. So I went to Bob and said, “Could I talk to you about that monologue?”

  He said, “Oh shit, are we shooting that today?”

  “No, not today. Friday.”

  “Shit, you scared the hell of out me. Don’t do that, man. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  I went home that night and pored over the monologue. I went to him again and he said, “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  Then the next day and the next day, “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  Thursday night I’m scared shitless. Bob hasn’t talked to me about this monologue. I’m trying to prepare, trying to prepare. We come in Friday and I say, “Can I talk to you?”

  Bob says, “Let’s block this. Where would you be when we shoot this scene?”

  “Uh, I’ll be in my bunk and at the end I’ll lift myself up and get out of the bed.”

  He says, “Great, great.”

  He asks Pierre Mignot, the cinematographer, “How do you want to shoot this?”

  Pierre tells him, and again it’s “Great, great.”

  “Uh, Mr. Altman, can I talk…”

  He says, “I got to make a phone call.”

  He left, came back, and I am fucking shit scared about this situation I’m in. He comes back and right away we start shooting. I think we maybe did three takes, and one was because the camera wasn’t focused. When it’s over, he sits down on the bunk with me and gave me maybe the most important lesson for a young actor.

  He says, “You see, kid, I didn’t want to have that conversation with you. That’s not my job. I hired you to be an actor. There were things about this role that you could interpret, that you could bring to life. If I was interested in my interpretation I would have played the part.” Then he gave me an encouraging pat on the back and left.

  Secret Honor: The Last Testament of Richard M. Nixon (1984)

  Michael Wilmington, from DVD liner notes: Secret Honor is not just a record. It’s an exploration of the play, of [Philip Baker] Hall’s acting virtuosity, and of Altman’s most diabolical bête noire. In portraying Nixon as a tragicomic puppet, Altman is ultimately commenting on the American political system—seemingly democratic and egalitarian on the surface, mercenary and elitist below, and completely tangled up in show business and TV strategies and imagery.

  But Altman isn’t just diving into an imaginary Nixon. He’s exploring himself as well. More than a few critics have pointed up similarities between this Nixon—isolated, cut off, ruminating on past glories, playing with video cameras, manipulating his image—and the “exiled” Altman of 1983, at the recognized low point of his career. Perhaps that’s the film’s darkest, most ruthless irony of all.

  ROBERT HARDERS (theater director): I came across a script called Circe and Bravo, written by Donald Freed. In the course of putting on a reading for Circe and Bravo, I naturally had to meet the writer. We spent some time together and we had begun some kind of working relationship. Sometime after that he called me up and he told me he was very close to finishing another script. He did, and I read it. Not immediately, because it had the name Richard Nixon in the title. I think like everyone I was pretty well saturated with the concept of Richard Nixon at that point in American history. When I did read it, I remember reading it like it was a detective story. The pages whizzing by. I remember being very affected by it. I also remembered an actor that I had worked with on another reading who I thought would probably be really good in the part if he were interested in it—that was Philip Baker Hall. I got the piece to Hall, who had to go through his own thing regarding Richard Nixon in order to be interested in it. We worked on it in Phil’s living room and spent so many hours together just really getting to know one another and talking about everything under the sun and occasionally talking about the script.

  We had a really great time doing it, and the idea was that we were going to do a reading in Donald Freed’s living room and he was going to invite whomever. Phil was, as always, amazing, and I distinctly recall that before the applause had even died down, Bill Bushnell, from the L.A. Actors’ Theater, along with Adam Leipzig, they were up and talking to Donald about obtaining the rights. Then it was a matter of putting it on for real as a play. Phil and I had already established a very good working relationship. It was a matter of transition to the half stage at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. This was a dream come true. This was what I always wanted to do.

  Bushnell is a bit of a schemer, and he had a plan.

  BILL BUSHNELL (theater impresario): The day that Dan Sullivan’s L.A. Times review came out I called Bob and said, “I have a piece of goods here you ought to take a look at.”

  ROBERT HARDERS: Bushnell told us that Bob Altman was coming. My reaction was, “You’re kidding.” He came backstage, said he had seen the piece and really liked it. Bob knew right away what he wanted to do with it.

  PHILIP BAKER HALL (actor): He said right on the spot, “I want to take this to New York, off-Broadway, and I want to make a movie about it. I am already visualizing how to film it. I want to see a little man surrounded by the immensity of the office, the desk and the office stuff and the intensity of public opinion that was marshaled against him.”

  ROBERT HARDERS: When we first went to New York to stage Secret Honor, Bob invited me and Phil to his office in the Delmonico building. Kathryn was there, and Bob says, “Let’s break out the good stuff.” He comes out with this case of wine, two hundred dollars a bottle, and we’re drinking this wine. As the evening goes on, he is reaching in—one bottle after another. We’re looking at each other out of the corner of our eyes, like, “Wow, do you believe this?” Years later, I reminded Kathryn of thi
s, and she said, “You fell for that?”

  Yes, we did! From Bob’s end, he knew we were rubes and we were as green as you could get. And he knew we might actually believe that it was two-hundred-dollar bottles of wine and it would be good for him and it would be good for us too, and it wouldn’t cost him two hundred a bottle. He was making us feel special. He was making us feel he was special. And that’s so much of the key of getting the best work out of people. Oh God, did we laugh when she said that.

  BILL BUSHNELL: From the stage, Bob took it to the University of Michigan and shot a film. And that in and of itself is a unique piece of goods.

  Letter from Frank E. Beaver, chairman, graduate program Telecommunication Arts and Film, University of Michigan, June 1, 1982: Dear Mr. Altman: I was glad to be able to reach you today and to learn that you are willing to accept a Marsh Professorship in the Communication Department. … The prospect of having you discuss representative films of yours in an “Altman Festival-Seminar” is, quite honestly, thrilling. Already students have begun to flock by to ask how they can be a part of this unusual educational experience.

  PHILIP BAKER HALL: He was a visiting professor of film at the University of Michigan, and he knew that if we shot the film there, he could get certain special conditions from the Screen Actors Guild and the crafts guild because he could shoot it as part of his class work, and he could also use the kids. Still, he knew it would cost him a half million dollars.

  He was waiting for a check of something like a million dollars from the sale of Lion’s Gate. Somebody owed him this money and he needed the money to finance the film. He called me one morning—we were in New York, still performing it there—and we had a date to start filming. He said, “I was going to finance the film out of the check. It’s held up. I might not get that check right away. I don’t really at the moment have the money to do this movie. Were you counting on that?”

  I’m thinking, “Nah, I wasn’t counting on being the star of the first one-man movie directed by one of the great directors of the twentieth century.” Yeah, right.