Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  And then he said, “The Player.”

  And I said, “Is there a script or something?”

  He said, “No. I mean, you could read it if you like. But your part is not in it.”

  So, okay [laughs].

  He said, “I only need you for a very, very short time. But I must tell you I cannot have anyone else but you in this scene and doing this.”

  As he talked, everything became more and more diminished [laughs]. No script, I have no lines, and I’m only needed for an hour. So I said, “Well, Mr. Altman, if it weren’t for the glory of the honor of talking to you, this would be the silliest conversation I’ve ever had with a filmmaker.”

  He said, “Well, I’ve had my moments.”

  I said, “Let me hurry up and tell you that I’m very far away. I don’t live in L.A., where you’re shooting, and I’m not in the United States. That’s a lot of work, expense.”

  So he said, “Well, in this instance, no expense will be too great.”

  It all comes to about eighty bucks [laughs]. So we chatted for a little bit longer. I put aside all the alarms of what I expect to come out of such a thing. I began to pursue the curiosity of it. I said, “Okay, well, I’m down here in the Caribbean. It’s going to be a day to get there, a day to rest, and then a day to shoot and a day to get back.”

  He said, “What’s the day to rest for?” [laughs].

  LILY TOMLIN: During The Player, he called me one night and said, “Can you shoot a little thing?”

  I asked what the setting was and he said it was an old hotel. Scott Glenn and I were supposed to be in the dailies the suits were watching. I just pulled out an old vintage forties robe from my costume room and went onto the set. I would have done that anytime, and with complete trust. I don’t think actors always do that. You have to really have a feeling for who you are going to run yourself over to.

  CHER: One day he called me. “I need you in a red dress for a movie.”

  “All right. Give me a moment and I’ll call you back.”

  It was late. I could have said I don’t wear red. But you would do things you didn’t like because of him. I was crazy about him.

  MICHAEL TOLKIN: Schwarzenegger was the only one who refused, and Bob was really pissed at that. He was really pissed that Arnold had slighted him. He couldn’t even get through to him. It was all managers and agents and lawyers.

  ALLAN NICHOLLS (actor/music director/screenwriter/associate producer/assistant director): In shooting the most important scene in The Player, the execution scene with Bruce Willis, Bob challenged the whole Hollywood system. He shot it in an empty warehouse in Culver City. By shooting it off a studio, he didn’t have to pay Teamsters, which would have been an incredible amount of money. He didn’t have to pay studio charges. He shoots it on Sunday, on a day off. So everyone—all the stars he got to come—would be available. He encourages them to come already dressed for their parts, and they do. He got everybody to donate their salaries. And he was organized enough to shoot it in one day. The whole day was probably six hours long. We didn’t break for lunch; there was no reason to. So nobody went into any kind of overtime.

  Nobody but Bob could’ve pulled that off.

  * * *

  STEPHEN ALTMAN: You know, his improvisation isn’t always pure improvisation each time. It’s hard to tell what was the accident and what was planned. For the beginning of The Player, he wanted to shoot a ten-minute scene and that was it. He was like, “Stevie, build me a model of the set, the exterior, then build me a model of the crane. And I want all the interiors, of where everybody’s going to be.”

  And he just smoked pot and played with this little thing like a kid playing with a Tonka toy. He worked that out in his mind well before we ever built the set or got out there. So that opening scene was practiced. The actors could say whatever they want, basically, but there was very much already in his mind.

  TIM ROBBINS: It wasn’t like he couldn’t deal with writers. He needed to be in the moment. And the filmmaking process had to be a living organism that is constantly evolving. And so that whole first shot—that long tracking shot that opens the picture—that’s completely improvised. I mean, everyone knew where we were going to be, but all the pitch meetings were improvised, all my responses were improvised. All the scenes you see, I don’t think were ever written down. We had a day of rehearsal where we just played around.

  And then there’s the scene where we’re sitting around in a conference room talking about the writers and eliminating the writers. That line came to me at the last minute. It was just like, “Well, if we could just eliminate the actors or the writers, we’d have something there.” It was all in the moment. And this stuff doesn’t happen unless you are free to do it. If you’re in a constrained or restricted environment that is telling you, “You must do the script as it is written,” none of that stuff would have happened.

  BUCK HENRY (writer and actor): For my scene in the famous opening panning shot of The Player he called and said, “Come and pitch a project. You’ll sit with the studio head—Tim Robbins—and pitch something. You’ll be one of three or four.”

  I said, “Pitch what?”

  He said, “Anything you want—it will all be one shot.”

  I was just improvising. I was pitching The Graduate, Part II—as a parody of pitches. In each take I got a little further out. I didn’t want Tim to know what I was going to say. I was looking for the hot laugh, looking for the band to laugh, as we used to do in the old days of television.

  Dialogue from The Player:

  BUCK HENRY (as himself, pitching The Graduate II): Ben and Elaine are married, still. They live in a big, spooky house up in northern California somewhere. And Mrs. Robinson lives with them … her aging mother, who’s had a stroke …so she can’t talk. … It’ll be funny. Dark, weird, and funny. And with a stroke.

  BUCK HENRY: Typical of Bob to begin a film with an impossible shot. Everyone was in on it—the crew coming together for the first time. It gave a sense of camaraderie for everybody, that we were all in on this one big gag. There must have been sixty actors in the take—and everyone had to hide behind a tree or in a car or a house or something. It was not like Rope—a continuous shot for no good reason except Hitchcock’s amusement. This one parodied the long shot, introduced forty or fifty characters, and expressed what the movie was about—the mechanics of filmmaking.

  At the premiere of The Player at the Ziegfeld, a guy comes up to me and says—apropos of my proposal for The Graduate sequel—”I know you were making a joke, but I think we should take it seriously.”

  Robert Altman, from DVD commentary: It’s a very conceited thing, this shot with no cuts in it. … It’s showing off. And it sets the picture up to be the kind of picture it’s going to be and it tells the audience what they’re in for. And I knew it would be commented on.

  * * *

  STEPHEN ALTMAN: Again, when you talk about improvisation, sometimes it’s just Bob taking what’s presented to him. Think about the Greta Scacchi-Tim Robbins love scene. Where it’s focused completely on their faces. Everyone’s like, “It’s oh so marvelous,” and “How did you think of that?”

  How? She wouldn’t show her tits. She was pregnant at the time and so they were forced into that. He had to figure some way out to get this love scene out and then it’s like a work of genius. Actually, it was because we couldn’t do it any other way.

  TIM ROBBINS: We talked about it and Bob was a real gentleman. And you know, I don’t recall him getting pissed off about it. He had envisioned it in a certain way, but he is the kind of filmmaker that as things evolve, they evolve. So he shot that scene in close-up with just the faces. But as he’s telling me about it, he’s totally excited about it. He says, “It’s going to be great. We’re going to make this the sexiest sex scene ever and it’s going to be just on your faces.”

  ROBERT ALTMAN: I put Cynthia Stevenson in the hot tub with Tim because she’s not the girl Hollywood usually asks to take her shirt
off. When he saw the movie, Paul Newman told me, “I get it. You don’t get to see the tits you want to see. You see the ones you don’t want to see.”

  Greta Scacchi, as the amoral artist June Gudmundsdottir, with Tim Robbins, as Griffin Mill, in The Player

  PAUL NEWMAN: Yes, that’s accurate. I don’t have to clarify it. It speaks for itself.

  SUSAN SMITH (spokeswoman for Greta Scacchi): Thank you very much for your interest in interviewing Ms. Scacchi, but unfortunately she is unavailable at the time being. I wish you the best of luck with your book and thank you again.

  PAUL NEWMAN: There was a more important point in that movie about nudity, I thought. Tim Robbins’ character was talking to this young woman on a cell phone and he was watching her while he was talking to her and moving in closer. It was just the most frightening scene in the world, to realize that you could be observed in your most private place. And of course it raises the specter of all those questions of privacy which are now becoming paramount and the technology that we have today. Just a little hint. Yeah, it certainly wasn’t about nudity, it was about how accessible everybody is. It’s spooky.

  * * *

  DAVID LEVY: Tim can corroborate this, but I think that Bob and Tim were, shall we say, relaxing. And they cooked up the ending together.

  TIM ROBBINS: It must have been one of the last days of preproduction. We went all around the block about the ending. I think it was late in the day, the office was still open, there were still people there, but I seem to remember it was late in the afternoon. And he said, “Come on, we’ve got to talk about this ending.”

  And so we smoked a joint. It was like, “Let’s figure this out—only one way to do it: Smoke a joint.”

  So I say to Bob, “I forget, how did M*A*S*H end?”

  And he goes, “Well, Radar comes on the loudspeaker and says, “This is a movie directed by Robert Altman and blah, blah, blah.”

  And that’s what tipped it for me. I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What if the writer pitches to Griffin the story you just saw of the movie?” And that is a totally stoned thought.

  But Bob was like this [stands up, starts pacing around excitedly, waving his arms]. He walked out and he comes back and he goes, “I’m never giving you credit for that!” [Laughs]

  And he comes out and tells everyone, “We’ve got the ending, we’ve got the ending!” But it really was his idea because it was M*A*S*H reinvented.

  I hold those to be some of the best creative moments I’ve had. He didn’t suffer bad ideas. It was like you’d be in the room and someone would say something and he’d say, “No, that’s terrible.” He was honest with you. Something that’s too clever, too thought out, too derivative, he would piss on it in contempt. Not in a mean way but just, “Come on, we’re creative people. Creative people create new things, they don’t try to do what people have done before and repackage it.” That’s what’s wrong with Hollywood. It keeps telling the same stories over and over again with different actors. And very few people are trying to tell the story in a unique way. And that’s the only thing that Bob was able to do. No one told a story like Bob Altman.

  DAVID BROWN: Tolkin had to begrudgingly agree that his book was well served by the film. It’s a remarkable film and Altman deserves a great deal of credit, but so does Tolkin, whose book it was.

  MICHAEL TOLKIN: I can look back and say he changed my life. The Player as it is, as a cultural object, exists because of Altman and what he brought to it. Altman was unquestionably a genius and an important artist. He has a few really great movies and a lot of films that are of great interest and are worth watching and watching again, but don’t fully work on the terms on which they could have worked because of his disdain for story. Which I think is competition with writers, or anxiety that if he didn’t take full credit for the films he was somehow admitting defeat or not being the artist he wanted to be. But the movies are completely collaborative, and that’s the great message of human cooperation that comes out of the movies.

  * * *

  TIM ROBBINS: You know, The Player was a huge hit in Cannes. He won Best Director and I won Best Actor. And you’re sitting there having champagne at your hotel after this fantastic screening. The whole town is abuzz. It’s “Altman’s Return.”

  JOHNNIE PLANCO: At Cannes, he was back on top. During that festival everyone wanted to meet him. We sold Short Cuts, Kansas City, a movie about Mata Hari that didn’t happen.

  There was a French company who really wanted to meet Bob. He’d sold everything, but they really wanted to meet Bob. He said, “I have nothing to give them.”

  I told him just to meet them and be polite. They came in, three guys with weird haircuts. Bob said, “Unfortunately, I have nothing to give you, but thanks for coming.” As he was ushering them to the door, he said, “You know, you guys look like Mo, Larry, and Curly—you should be in The Three Stooges.“

  He closed the door and said, “That went well, didn’t it?”

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: You talk about how the eighties were hard, and then when The Player hit it was a whole other thing. It used to irk him to death when they’d all say, “Yeah, Altman’s making a comeback.” He’d say, “A comeback? I haven’t been anywhere. I’ve been working.”

  Robert Altman to Gavin Smith and Richard T. Jameson, story headlined “The Movie You Saw Is the Movie You’re Going to Make,” Film Comment, May—June 1992: Every goddamn magazine that you could pick up has it as my “comeback.” This is my third comeback; whaddya gonna do on my next one?! … It’s nice, but you know what’s gonna happen next? I’m gonna pay for it. But I know that. I know that these are the rules of the game and I’m okay with that. I’m not “angry with Hollywood.” I’m not a “maverick.” I’m not a person who “ran away in exile.” I fiddle on the corner where they throw the most coins. Where I can get my work done.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: At the Academy Awards in 1993, Bob was nominated as director for The Player. Our chances were absolutely nil, and Bob didn’t want to go, but he was convinced that it was important that he show up. We had no anxiety. We just knew that we had to do this. So I decided I would bake pot brownies or grass cookies—whatever I was doing at that time in my baking career. We crumbled it up to the size of nuts and had it in a little bag.

  The Academy Awards can be the most miserable experience ever because of the anxiety and the fears, and because it takes forever. We left our house at three in the afternoon—Konni was with us—completely made up and dressed up, and it didn’t start until seven. Then they break for commercials, and if anyone gets up they slip a stand-in into their seat. It just goes on and on.

  So there we were in the very front row. I thought we’d get into our brownie bag later. Bob wanted to get into it right away. Well, every award was for Clint Eastwood, for Unforgiven. We’d clap and appreciate, and every time we’d tuck in our legs so he could get by to get his Oscar. The whole time we were munching away on our grass brownies. By the time he got up there to get Best Picture—after he’d gotten all the others, including Best Director—we were all for him [laughs]. We were saying, “Hey Clint! Go for it! Way to go! Hot dog!” [Laughs]

  We went to every party that night—the Governor’s Ball and the Elton John party and Clint Eastwood’s party. He had taken over Nicky Blair’s on the Sunset Strip, and we talked with him and had a drink. We ended up at Swifty Lazar’s party at La Scala—that was the famous party in those days. We got home at three in the morning.

  It’s a great way to lose.

  CHAPTER 26

  Short Cuts

  *

  Bernard Weinraub, story headlined “Robert Altman, Very Much a Player Again,” The New York Times, July 29, 1993: At 68, an age when most of Hollywood’s film makers are retired, ignored or treated like dinosaurs by movie executives and talent agents, Robert Altman has embarked on the most radical and adventurous journey of his career.

  “People here have just come to the conclusion that I’m not going to go away,” he said the oth
er afternoon. “I seem to have become like one of those old standards, in musical terms. Always around. Lauren Bacall said to me, ‘You just don’t quit, do you?’ Guess not. I guess 30-year-olds out here have decided I’m not just an old man living in the past.”

  Hardly. …

  Seated in the garden of a nearly deserted restaurant near the beach in Malibu, Mr. Altman said the success of “The Player,” the scathing satire about Hollywood, has enabled him, finally, to work on the projects that have obsessed him for years but proved elusive because film companies found his work too risky and potentially uncommercial.

  * * *

  Television Directing

  Black and Blue—1993; The Real McTeaque—1993.

  * * *

  Robert Altman and Tess Gallagher, the widow of the writer Raymond Carver, during the filming of Short Cuts

  Short Cuts (1993)

  Kenneth Turan, review in the Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1993: The old lion can still roar. Though tradition holds that there are no second acts in American lives, writer-director Robert Altman, never much of a traditionalist, embarks with “Short Cuts” on the fourth or possibly fifth act of a remarkable career. Both building on what has gone before and extending outward to new boundaries, he has made a rich, unnerving film, as comic as it is astringent, that in its own quiet way works up a considerable emotional charge. … Altman’s co-conspirator this time around is the late Raymond Carver, a groundbreaking short-story writer who called himself a paid-up-in-full member of the working poor and made his considerable reputation with beautifully compressed, unadorned tales of life among the blue-collar classes.

  Though this might seem too narrow and specific a base for Altman’s ambitions, he and co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt understand that the harder you look at even the most ordinary lives, the more you see. Basing their script on nine of Carver’s stories plus a prose poem, they have fashioned a three-hour-plus chamber piece for 22 players, a beautiful and intricate mosaic of character and incident that examines the greatest of all mysteries, that of ordinary reality. … Perhaps the most remarkable thing about “Short Cuts” is how effortless it all seems. Made with the unforced and casual command that often comes to artists late in life, it is close to magical in the way it draws us into its web, in how the whole comes to be considerably more than the individual parts…. If you want to know what the work of a mature American master is like, this is the place to look.