Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  JENNIFER JASON LEIGH: He called me and said, “I have this movie and there’s a couple of roles that might work for you.” And I was really excited. I read it and I liked Lois, the woman who did sex calls from her house. I called and told him, and he said, “Oh good, that’s the only one left.”

  My research? I went to a bunch of those places. He told me, “The script is really a blueprint and I need you to fill it out. I want it to be raunchy and I want it to be real. You figure it out.” One place I went was a factory with cubicles. One was a house in the Valley and this was a guy using a falsetto. He was a straight guy with a picture of Michelle Pfeiffer on the wall. And a woman’s house. She kept files, which was kind of awkward because I knew some of the people. So now I know what they like. I made my script from that.

  Chris Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh, playing pool cleaner Jerry Kaiser and phone sex worker Lois Kaiser, in Short Cuts

  Dialogue from Short Cuts:

  LOIS KAISER (Played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, taking a phone-sex call while changing her daughter’s diaper): Oooh. My panties are getting a little wet.

  JENNIFER JASON LEIGH: The great thing about Bob was he would inspire you out of sheer necessity to come up with stuff that you didn’t know you were capable of, that you didn’t know you had in you. He was so genuinely mischievous and so damn funny.

  He had that much faith and trust. Which is nerve-racking. It could be a free fall, which is what I think acting should be. But you need a master to catch you, which is what you had with Bob. You could make these extravagantly spectacular choices, knowing you had this strong, loving man to catch you.

  * * *

  PETER GALLAGHER: The most amazing thing in the world is that we did The Player and it was a hit, and then everybody and his brother wanted to be in Short Cuts. And Stormy Weathers was a great part and everybody wanted to play it. And Bob said, “No, Gallagher is playing it.” Which is maybe one of the most astounding things I’ve ever heard. That was maybe the only time in my life that somebody with a bigger name wanted a part that I got.

  I remember calling Steve Altman a couple nights before the scene where I destroy the house with the chain saw. I was working on the part and Steve is the art director. I said, “Steve, now, what kind of gag do you have in mind for this couch? I don’t want one of these frantic, slash-and-hack things. I want to slice that fucker like a pound cake.”

  And he said, “We’re giving you a real couch. I’ll just make sure there’s nothing that can snag the chain and fly back and kill you, any springs.”

  Bob said, “I want you to come in here, look there, and then cut the couch up. And we’re going to do that in one take.”

  You just can’t ask for anything more than that. Just to get these great, wonderful, cool things to do.

  LILY TOMLIN: When we did Short Cuts, we weren’t all there together. Each couple shot for about a week. Tom Waits and I were the first couple. I was mad for Tom—I loved him as an artist and a person. He had his own kind of underworld eccentricity and private poetry. He would go home every night after shooting and call me and pretend that he was Earl out driving in the limo. The first night he did it I was so surprised. I should have taped it. He was talking nonstop poetry to me as if I was Doreen. He called me about four nights in a row. He was so involved in it. Bob allowed you to be totally in the moment because there was nothing rigid about Bob, about what he was going to do.

  BUCK HENRY: He made actors believe that they were doing something for him that they couldn’t do anywhere else. I’m not sure that was true—but the belief was true. An Altman set was different because everyone felt they were collaborating—of course they weren’t—between the apparent looseness of the day and the possibility of improvising. He backed off from the actors; there was never the feeling of the camera being in your face. Usually it wasn’t anywhere near you, so it encouraged you to do things you wouldn’t have done if the camera was in your face. And since you were always wearing a mike you weren’t worried about not being heard.

  TESS GALLAGHER: Bob gave one of the characters he invented my name—Tess. Annie Ross’s character. She’s falling out of the seams. She’s kind of a ruined character, kind of a bellicose, pitiable character, so wrapped up in being this singer and her love for her dead husband. She was full of bathos, like somebody out of Chaucer, almost. Offended? No. I thought they had used my name, but I didn’t find myself there. I don’t regard Ray in the way in which she does her husband. I’m not maudlin about Ray, and she is rather maudlin. I thought it was a way for Bob to sneak my name in there. I like the toughness about her. It says you have to be tough for life. Altman’s right. You do have to have a good amount of stamina. You have to have your compassionate nature in hand but there’s a way in which you also have to stand up to life.

  Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits, playing waitress Doreen Piggot and chauffeur Earl Piggot, in Short Cuts

  ANNIE ROSS (singer and actress): I always had the feeling with Bob that I was on a beautiful schooner and the first in charge was Bob, and I knew he would get us into port with no problems. You knew he knew what he was doing. It’s the same way with a pianist—if you have the right pianist, you have a mind thing that goes on. Listening is the most important thing, and that’s what Bob did so well. He listened. And it’s the same way in singing jazz.

  He loved adventure, he loved newness, and he loved that you’ve got to jump out in the deep water. And he lived by that. You have to be brave and you have to take chances, and that’s what he did and that’s what he was. And I think it goes with an artist’s temperament. Because what you’re actually doing is saying, “Come on, crucify me. Here I am.”

  Robert Coles, essay headlined “Compassion from Carver, Male Swagger from Altman,” The New York Times, October 17, 1993: The director gives us a movie full of male swagger, with women always at the edge of things; a movie that lacks Carver’s gentle humor and prompts laughter at people … a movie relentless in its cynical, sardonic assault on anyone and everyone, as if America itself is beyond the pale.

  TESS GALLAGHER: I know that Ray would have laughed at the same things that Altman laughed at in this film. But I don’t think Altman made fun of the characters. I think he was watching those characters, letting them be as bizarre as they could be. I think their motions are larger and they’re stranger in Altman—like the woman who does telephone sex—much more the American grotesque. The things these people are reaching for are not going to satisfy them. The woman who is having one guy after another. The guy who takes a chain saw to the living room. None of their actions are going to move them into a livable space. They’re just good at making disasters. And the chaos of Ray’s characters didn’t make you feel like they didn’t have possibilities. The suffering that they had was wonderfully handled so you could respect the suffering.

  I think Short Cuts is just a classic, and I think it’s one of the classic American films because we really do get a portrait of America and we’re really looking in the mirror.

  Robert Altman to Cathy Horyn, story headlined “Robert Altman Confronts His Critics: ‘Short Cuts’ Has Been Called Misogynistic and Callous; the Director Replies, ‘So What?’” The Washington Post, October 31, 1993: I’m not doing a literal translation of Carver, nor did I ever say I was going to. If anything, the film is a reflection not just of my interpretation, but of those of a hundred other people who worked on it. We were all responding to the material. … But you know, so what? We’re not saying this film is anything other than what it is. So, maybe all I can say in response to [Robert] Coles is, ‘Tsk, tsk, I wish he had got it.’”

  PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON (director): The way the characters dressed, the way they looked, the locations in the film, everything about it—God, that is the city, this is the city that I’ve known, I’ve been near.

  That movie got inside my bones so strongly, and you know, without it I never would have known how to write Magnolia. I knew that I had stories that I wanted to tell but certainly didn’t know h
ow to do it and wouldn’t have known how to do it without that film.

  ROBERT DORNHELM (director): He looked at film on one side as a pure, artistic venue. At the same time he was quite happy if the box office was good. Just getting a few good reviews and no audience wasn’t enough. It consoled him, but he would prefer to have a hit. With Short Cuts, the distributor was begging him: “If you want money, cut a few minutes.” Bob just thought the Antichrist was trying to destroy his art. They were well-meaning people who wanted him to get what he deserved, which was a big commercial hit. But when it came down to the art or the money, he was with the art.

  * * *

  DAVID LEVY (producer): As successful as those films were critically, commercially it was another story.

  Both The Player and Short Cuts were released by Fine Line, a new company. I think The Player was maybe the second picture they ever released. And we’ll never know, but I don’t think there were ever more than four hundred prints in circulation. I really think it was the sort of movie that you could have let out in a more substantial way right from Jump Street, and people would have come, such was the quality of the reviews. But in what is now called the specialty world, there was a conventional wisdom that prevailed at that point in time. It was like, you will open in just a few cities, you will start small, you will build. This is one time, and I’m not talking about going crazy wide with the thing, but I think ultimately twice as many people might have seen it in theaters if the approach to the release was different. Similarly, Short Cuts. I won’t say I feel it had the commercial appeal of The Player, but again, here’s a picture that gets all that acclaim and what did it do? Maybe ten, twelve, thirteen million box office?

  CHAPTER 27

  Heart in a Cooler

  *

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: The deterioration was kind of off and on for many years. The doctors said, “Well, you got a little problem there, an enlarged heart—cardiomyopathy—so you shouldn’t do this or that, and you shouldn’t drink.”

  So he would not drink for a while and somebody would say something else and then he’d start drinking again. He stopped smoking when he was about thirty-six years old because they detected something. So it was always kind of there. And in ‘68, I guess it was, he had to give himself Heparin shots, blood thinner, way back then. It would be off and on and come and go, but it never stopped him from doing anything. He never had a heart attack. But the booze is the worst thing for an enlarged heart, and finally the heart just gave up.

  Anyway, sometimes he would have to go on these extreme diets because you’ve got to lose this weight because of your heart. And in ‘92, before we’d gone to Paris for Prêt-à-Porter, he had kind of a semi-stroke here. I wasn’t here, Konni was.

  KONNI CORRIERE: Mother was in L.A. She couldn’t fly. She had just had a medical procedure or whatever. He took me to one party to meet a bunch of bigwigs. Lauren Bacall was there and he just shuffled me around and introduced me. The next morning I heard him yelling. He’s like, “I think we have a little problem here.”

  So I came downstairs and what had happened, we found out later, is that he had a stroke. He couldn’t remember my name. He was trying to call me and he couldn’t remember my name. I got the phone book and called the doctor and helped him get dressed. I was over him, trying to get him to sit up, so I could do a button or something. And he looks at me and says, “If this is it, it’s been great.”

  Oh, God. It was so sweet and so cute and it was so serious. And it was really terrible.

  I got him into a car with a driver and we went to this first doctor for an echocardiogram. They said, “You have to go immediately to the hospital.”

  I just wanted to keep him engaged and busy. I knew he was scared. I knew I had to seal myself right next to him. I said, “Let’s get you an alias.” So we ended up with my mother’s maiden name as his last name, Reed, and his middle name, Bernard. And he was Bernard Reed for all his medical stuff until he came out at the Oscars.

  I knew he couldn’t stand to be alone. I knew that all the screaming and yelling and partying and socializing—he hates to be, he was afraid to be, alone. That’s what it comes down to, and I knew that, especially at this health moment. So I asked the nurse, “Hey, listen, is there any chance I could sleep here tonight?”

  She said, “Sure.”

  I slept next to him. Later, I went to Paris with him as his assistant. I really was his secret health assistant more than anything else because he couldn’t let anybody know he was sick or had a stroke. In Paris, he told me, “Konni, when I woke up in that hospital that morning I didn’t know where I was. And I was so scared. I rolled over and I saw you sleeping in that little cot next to me. I want you to know I will never forget that. I will never forget it and I will always be there for you.”

  He did lose the vision in the right side of his right eye, and after that whenever you walked in the room, you had to be careful because he wouldn’t see you if you entered on his right side. You’d startle him. He’d get startled a lot. He couldn’t drive after that, either. That was big. But he never complained.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: He was weak, he was thin. He was great, though. He was still fun and funny. He started to lose some weight in August of ‘93 and he looked just great. Then he just did it by design. Then it just started falling off of him and he kept losing. All through Prêt-à-Porter, he was very thin. He wore those beautiful suits, Brioni, Cerruti, all these French and Italian designers were making these gorgeous suits for him. He looked like a million bucks. But he got too thin.

  * * *

  Prêt-à-Porter (aka Ready to Wear; 1994)

  Alexander Walker, review headlined “Ready to Wear? Ready to Walk Out,” The Evening Standard (London), December 14, 1994: As a film, it’s a huge disappointment—an artistic debacle that spoils its chances by wasting a multitude of stars on itsy-bitsy roles and induces the same sense of confusion that ruled when it was shot in the middle of the Paris spring fashion shows earlier this year. But as an expression of what Altman thinks of the couturiers and models … the movie is a gesture of the utmost disdain for everything the rag trade holds dear and profitable. Repeated no fewer than five times … is a moment where someone puts his or her foot firmly—and in close-up—into a pile of dog dirt.

  * * *

  STEPHEN ALTMAN: At the film festivals, when you’ve got something good there, there’s a feeding frenzy. We’d get a signature on a napkin from somebody for the next picture. For making the movie. For all of it. That’s what happened at Cannes. We were there with Short Cuts. That was a big Cannes hit and they were basically beating down the doors. I think that’s how Prêt-à-Porter was made. He hated that script. It was like, “Bob. You don’t have a movie.”

  And he’d say, “Yeah, but this guy is ready to roll. Let’s just do it. We’ll make it up as we go along.”

  JOHNNIE PLANCO (agent): Prêt-à-Porter was very difficult. He hired a journalist who’d never written a screenplay as the screenwriter. No one came up with a shooting script. Lots of people he hadn’t worked with—Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Julia Roberts. Nothing jelled.

  LAUREN BACALL: I was the first person cast in that. We went down to the Tribeca Grill and we had lunch and he said I was going to be this Diana Vreeland character. Of course he convinced me of everything. Like most actors who ever worked with him once. It was a little like actors who worked with John Huston—”Tell me what you want and I’ll be there.” That’s the way Bogie was with John, and Bob had that gift with actors, too.

  With Marcello Mastroianni, as the mysterious tailor Sergei/Sergio, and Sophia Loren, as the fashionable widow Isabella de la Fontaine, in Prêt- à- Porter

  I think the main thing that didn’t work was he was ill. I knew he couldn’t wait to get out of France because he didn’t speak the language and it drove him crazy. There was no room for foreign sound to permeate that Kansas City accent.

  I think that in fairness he didn’t have enough time or didn’t have entrée i
nto what happened in the back rooms of a fashion house. And then what was that with the dog shit? That’s a onetime joke. You can’t base a movie on a guy stepping on dog shit every five minutes.

  Bob had a concept, as he always did, and there was always room for ideas. My part ended up not being what he intended it to be. He got caught up in the little vignettes.

  I don’t think he was well enough to really cope with it.

  Bob and I really got along well except on Prêt-à-Porter. We were not so palsy. There wasn’t any argument, nothing specific. I felt somewhat at a loss because I thought the character was not what he told me it would be. I wasn’t quite sure I was playing the scenes properly. He said, “If you do something wrong I’ll let you know.”

  I was kind of thrown off by it and I don’t think he was so thrilled with it, either. When you’re physically not right, especially with a man like Bob Altman, anything that would hold him back would be really hard for him.

  I walked into his office one day and he was lying on a sofa with a blanket. I said, “How are you?”

  He said, “I’ll be a hell of a lot better when I get out of here.”

  SALLY KELLERMAN: On Prêt-à-Porter he was so ill. Oh my God. I flew to Paris, went to the production office, walked in, said, “Where is Bob, where is Bob?” I was so excited to be there. I walked down the hall to find him. He had his back to me. And I almost … I mean, this is a dramatic way of putting it, but I just thought, “Oh my God, he’s dying.” He just looked so different. And he managed to make that movie with that crew. I don’t know how he did it.

  ANOUK AIMéE: It was thirty years after I met him about Lake Lugano. We got on well right away. There were a lot of women in Prêt-à-Porter, but I couldn’t have had a better friendship and understanding and rapport.

  Robert Altman’s handwritten acceptance speech when he received the Legion of Honor in 1996. “Gilles” is Gilles Jacob, the director of the Cannes Film Festival, who presented the award.