by Roger Ebert
36 “FIDDLE ON THE CORNER WHERE THE QUARTERS ARE”
IN MAY 1996, Chaz and I had lunch with Robert and Kathryn Altman at the Grand Hotel in Cannes. I was shocked by how frail he looked. Here was a man who had seemed indestructible, and now he was thin and walked with a cane and his voice was weak. He was at the festival for the premiere of Kansas City, his film about the early jazz scene in his hometown.
The film opened that June and received some harsh reviews, especially by Richard Schickel in TIME magazine, who wrote (I’m quoting from memory) that if you seek a definition for unethical, look no farther than Robert Altman.
My phone rang, and it was Harvey Weinstein, who was releasing the film at Miramax.
“Did you see what that fucker Schickel wrote about Bob Altman?” he asked. I said I had. I said Altman had been called many things, but never unethical.
“Roger, you saw him at Cannes. Robert Altman is a dying man. That review may kill him. If he doesn’t get some support for his movie, I’m telling you he will die.”
This was the first (and remains the only) call I received from a distributor asking for a favorable review. I admired Harvey’s spirit in fighting for the film. I didn’t believe for one second he made the call because of financial considerations. He cared more about Bob than box office. I didn’t consider Kansas City one of Altman’s best films, but I found it ambitious and honorable and gave it three stars in the paper, and a degree of praise.
The next time I saw Altman, he had gained weight and wasn’t using a cane; it would turn out he had ten years of films ahead of him. But how poignantly I remembered the night in 2006 when he was given an honorary Oscar and revealed to the Academy that he had received a heart transplant ten years earlier. Now it all made sense. In an industry where rumors of bad health can end careers, it was a statement of unusual courage, typical of Altman. Perhaps he suspected his death was near; he died on November 20, 2006, five months after the release of A Prairie Home Companion, which is, I believe, a knowingly autobiographical film. Along with his previous film, The Company, it is about the way he worked.
The night before the Oscars, there was a little gathering in a room off a restaurant of the Beverly Hills Hotel. This wasn’t a promotional event, and no publicists were attached. It was just Bob and Kathryn and some of their friends and family. I remember Lauren Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Henry Gibson, Virginia Madsen. I talked for a while with Lily Tomlin, who had just finished making A Prairie Home Companion. She looked across the room and said, “I love that man.” Madsen had played a guardian angel in the film and said Altman had wanted her on the set even when she wasn’t needed; perhaps as an angel, perhaps because she floated in the background of many shots, or perhaps simply because with Altman you never knew when an actor might be needed.
Altman was a collaborator. Many directors are private and dictatorial. He involved everyone. He and Kathryn moved in a crowd, and actors became like family. He directed in a conspiratorial style, as if he and the actors were putting something over on absent enemies. I spent an unusual amount of time with him over the years. A lot of people did. His sets were open, and he even invited outsiders to his screenings of daily rushes.
I sat once in his screening room at Lionsgate in Westwood and watched the dailies of a film with maybe twenty others; the sweetness of marijuana floated forward from his chair. He made no attempt to conceal his use of pot. When he was shooting The Company in Chicago, Chaz and I had dinner twice with the Altmans and Mayor Daley and his wife, Maggie. Daley and I arrived at the restaurant early one night and sat at the bar awaiting the others. Bob came in from the winter cold, bringing with him a cloud of marijuana smoke. Daley raised his eyebrows at me and smiled. In 1999, when Altman premiered Cookie’s Fortune, he sat in the middle of the opening night reception and made no attempt to conceal what he was smoking. It occurs to me now that it may have been medical marijuana, obtained by prescription.
There may not have been a director who liked actors more. He had a temper, and I saw him angry with cinematographers, Teamsters, prop men, lighting guys, critics, and people making noise during a shot, but actors were his darlings and they could do no wrong. When he asked for another take, there was the implication that he enjoyed the last one so much he wanted to see the actors do it again simply for his personal pleasure.
I met him properly for the first time in 1974, in Iowa City, where we had both agreed to attend a film festival because we were promised Pauline Kael would be there. There we were, sitting cross-legged on a table in front of a room jammed with students, before a screening of his movie Thieves Like Us. After high praise from Kael and others, the movie had failed at the box office. “I blame United Artists,” he said. “All the ad campaign said is that the movie’s a masterpiece. Would you go to a movie that was hailed as a masterpiece? Already it sounds like hard work.”
He spoke in a cheerful voice, youthful, as if savoring the fun of being a director. I met him again at Cannes in 1977, where he was premiering his masterpiece 3 Women, which won the Best Actress award for Shelley Duvall—a waitress he saw in a Houston diner and made into a star. That day he was sitting on a rented yacht in the Cannes harbor, talking about how in a month he would begin shooting A Wedding in Chicago with forty-eight actors, every one of whom would have their dialogue separately recorded with his pet project, Lionsgate Sound. So much of a democrat was he that he didn’t believe in isolated foreground sound, and starting with McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) key lines were sometimes delivered by supporting actors only vaguely present in the background.
In those days he seemed to engender new films from inspired whims. “I’ll tell you how 3 Women got started,” he said. “I dreamed it. I dreamed of the desert, and these three women, and I remember every once in a while I’d dream that I was waking up and sending out people to scout locations and cast the thing. And when I woke up in the morning, it was like I’d done the picture. What’s more, I liked it. So, what the hell, I decided to do it.”
I asked him about a story I’d heard about how he got the idea for A Wedding.
“Yeah, it’s close. We were shooting 3 Women out in the desert, and it was a really hot day and we were in a hotel room that was like a furnace, and I wasn’t feeling too well on account of having felt too well the night before, and this girl was down from L.A. to do some in-depth gossip and asked me what my next movie was going to be. At that moment, I didn’t even feel like doing this movie, so I told her I was gonna shoot a wedding next. A wedding? Yeah, a wedding.
“So a few moments later my production assistant comes up and she says, ‘Bob, did you hear yourself just then?’ Yeah, I say, I did. ‘That’s not a bad idea, is it?’ she says. Not a bad idea at all, I said, and that night we started on the outline.”
He regarded a crowd of photographers two yachts over. “This place is a zoo,” he said. “The purpose of a yacht is to pull up the gangplank. I had this lady interviewer following me around. She was convinced that life with Altman was a never-ending round of orgies and excess. She was even snooping around in my bathroom, for Christ’s sake, and she found this jar of funny white powder in the medicine cabinet. Aha! she thinks. Cocaine! So she snorts some. Unfortunately, what she didn’t know was that I’m allergic to commercial toothpaste because it makes me break out in a rash. So my wife mixes up baking soda and salt for me, and—Poor girl.”
Two years later, in 1979, I found myself in the Don CeSar Beach Resort in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, where he was filming his little-seen HealtH. He said he wanted me to meet someone. We walked outside to a line of cars and he introduced me to the Teamsters captain on the shoot. “This man,” he said, “is being paid more than anyone else on the film, except for the stars, the cameraman, and me.” The man smiled at him.
At the box office, HealtH and A Wedding were not successes. Popeye, made next, turned a nice profit but was perceived as a flop. The next year, I visited him during rehearsals for a Broadway play, Come Back to the 5 & Dim
e Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, which he was staging with his own money. It starred Cher, Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, and Kathy Bates, among others. He then used the stage set to film it as a feature.
Some directors lie fallow when they can’t find a studio project. Altman was essentially unable to find funding for a studio film for a decade after Popeye but worked unceasingly on ten marginal independent projects, including the TV miniseries Tanner ’88 he made during the 1988 presidential elections. “You fiddle on the corner where the quarters are,” he explained. For him, the actual production of a film or play seemed to be necessary to life, and he was incapable of not working.
37 “I WASN’T POPULAR WHEN PEOPLE THOUGHT I WAS POPULAR”
WOODY ALLEN IS the most open and articulate of directors, but interviews with him involved conditions. There was always the stipulation that the piece be embargoed in New York. During some of the 1980s and 1990s I was syndicated in the New York Daily News or the New York Post, and that meant they couldn’t run the interview, possibly because he was giving an exclusive to the New York Times. I was happy to talk with him at all, especially since our conversations seemed to stray from the movie at hand into the larger realms of life, death, and the meaning of it all. “I don’t care about my lifework for a second,” he told me once. “When I die, I don’t care what they do with it. They can flush it down the toilet. There’s that delusion that it’s going to have some meaning to you when, in fact, you’ll be a nonexistent thing; there’ll be not a trace of consciousness. So it becomes completely irrelevant, what happens after your death. Totally. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
That was in 1994, when he had made Bullets Over Broadway. In 2011, when he was at Cannes with Midnight in Paris, he was still saying he didn’t expect any of his films to be remembered. The first time I spoke with him, in 1971, he told me there wasn’t a day when he didn’t give serious thought to suicide. I asked him again every time I saw him, until 2000, if that was still true. It always was.
To talk with Woody was like catching up with your smart college roommate every time you went to New York, and he reminded you that he had gone ahead and accomplished all the things you had talked about in school. He has averaged a film a year for more than forty years. Some were great, all were intelligent, none were shabby. He compared his work habits to those of Ingmar Bergman, whom he admired above all other directors. Like Bergman, he wrote his own screenplays. Like Bergman, he worked over and again with many of the same collaborators. Like Bergman, he could persuade pretty much any actor to work for him at far below their going rate. Like Bergman, he usually had distribution lined up before shooting even began. And they both worked with small budgets that gave them artistic freedom.
He thought of Bergman as a genius. He told me the American cinema had produced only one genius, Orson Welles. “Godard is supposed to be a genius,” he told me dubiously one day. I told him I had witnessed the table napkin at Cannes upon which the producer Menahem Golan wrote out a contract with Godard, misspelling Godard’s name while promising him a script by Norman Mailer and a cast including Orson Welles as Lear and Woody Allen as the Fool.
“Norman Mailer wrote the screenplay?” Allen asked. “Well, there was no screenplay at all the day Godard shot me. I worked for half a day. I completely put myself into his hands. He shot over in the Brill Building, working very sparsely, just Godard and a cameraman, and he asked me to do foolish things, which I did because it was Godard. It was one of the most foolish experiences I’ve ever had. I’d be amazed if I was anything but consummately insipid.
“He was very elusive about the subject of the film. First he said it was going to be about a Learjet that crashes on an island. Then he said he wanted to interview everyone who had done King Lear, from Kurosawa to the Royal Shakespeare. Then he said I could say whatever I wanted to say. He plays the French intellectual very well, with the five o’clock shadow and a certain vagueness. Meanwhile, when I got there for the shoot, he was wearing pajamas—tops and bottoms—and a bathrobe and slippers, and smoking a big cigar. I had the uncanny feeling that I was being directed by Rufus T. Firefly.
“Do you know how Bergman spends his day, now that he’s in retirement? He wakes up early in the morning, he sits quietly for a time and listens to the ocean, he has breakfast, he works, he has an early lunch, he screens a different movie for himself each and every day, he has an early dinner, and then he reads the newspaper, which would be too depressing for him to read in the morning.”
There were differences between Bergman and Allen. Bergman lived most of the year on the Swedish island of Fårö. Allen has a horror of leaving Manhattan. He told me once about spending the Fourth of July in New York although Mia Farrow had a house in Connecticut. “The country has insects and animals and ominously alarms me,” he said. “I loved having the neighborhood to myself.” Only a New Yorker could think of having New York to himself.
“In my movies in the country, I wanted to portray the country the way I want it to be, with golden vistas, and flowers, animals, moon, stars, a perfect setting to deal with problems of love and romance. I saw it as a chance to get in some of my philosophy, that there’s more to life than meets the eye, that an intellectual rationalist is also an animal who lusts after women and is not above drawing blood in the throes of passion. He can explain the cosmos, and his friend the doctor can play God and watch people die, but all of these men are… wistful. Wistful, because they haven’t met the right woman yet.
“But I hate the country! This Fourth of July weekend, when everybody else has gone out to the country, I worked. I went to see Poltergeist at Eighty-Sixth and Third Avenue and I walked around the empty streets. The country is great as it appears in one’s fantasies, in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, with all the little forest spirits, but when I go to the country to shoot a movie, we have to have a nurse for snakebites and poison ivy. They have gnats and mosquitoes. It’s awful.”
But when you were making A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, I said, you had to put up with the country?
“Not at all. I drove back to New York every night and stayed in my own bed. Oh, I can take a little of the country. Sometimes I reluctantly visit Mia in Connecticut, but I always come back the same day. I would never think of staying overnight.”
In other words, your view of Central Park is about as sylvan as you like to get?
“I like the view just from the window, through glass. I like it best in the winter. I’m not crazy about the green of leaves. At the beginning of our film, when we shot the montage of the leaves and the ponds and the little deer running past, I was hiding behind the camera.”
When you were a kid, you never went to the beach?
“I got sun poisoning. It was terrible. I preferred staying home in Brooklyn and playing baseball in the streets. I was a very good athlete, good at baseball, football, from growing up in the streets, but I didn’t get to like nature that way. I think we all miss the point that when Shakespeare was talking about summer, he was writing from a land where summer was a lot more like spring is here. He didn’t know about dust and ticks. I personally prefer grey, overcast days to sunny ones. That’s one reason I don’t like it in Los Angeles. I really can’t stand the climate.
“Mia’s country house is a real Chekhovian setting: a little cottage, a little lake, very Russian. For a long time I’ve wanted to write a little Russian family drama to set there. I finally did it, but by the time the screenplay was ready the weather had changed, and so we had to build the sets in Astoria Studios here in New York. Hannah and Her Sisters, that was the perfect setup. We shot a lot of it in Mia’s apartment, and all I had to do was cross Central Park every day. Bergman shoots right in his own house, and on his island. I’d shoot in my house, but I live in a co-op apartment, and it’s against the rules.
“Shooting in Mia’s house led to a very strange experience for Mia. She told me she was in bed in her bedroom, looking at Hannah and Her Sisters on the TV set at the end of the bed. She realized she
was looking at a scene in the movie that showed the same bed and the same TV set, in the same room.”
That would have been in the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, it became known that he and Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn were in love. There was a scandal. “The heart has its reasons,” he said, using the words of Pascal. In 1994, I met him in his screening room but avoided mentioning the scandal. There are times when I think I must be a lousy journalist, an anachronism in the age of relentless gossip. I avoid asking interview subjects about their private lives. If they bring up a subject, I’m interested, but I dislike gossip. He brought it up himself.
“I thought the whole business was foolish,” he told me. “I thought it was going to blow over in two days; I never even took it seriously when it first happened. Apart from the horribleness of not being able to see my children, those of us in the inner circle—myself, my sister, my close friends—found it almost amusing.
“But from a total nonevent, a multimillion-dollar industry grew. I mean, magazines all over the world, newspapers, television—lawyers were hired, private detectives were hired, more lawyers were brought in, psychiatrists were brought in. It was incredible. And nothing had happened. I certainly wasn’t going to participate in the craziness. I worked, I never missed an evening with my jazz band, and I conducted my life normally. For me, one thing had nothing to do with the other. The legal battles I’ve been in were basically fought by my lawyers. There was nothing I could do about it.”
I was afraid at the beginning, I told him, that maybe it would turn out like the Fatty Arbuckle case—where whether he was guilty or not, people simply couldn’t find him funny anymore. I wondered if after all the controversy people would never be able to laugh at a Woody Allen picture again.
“Yes, people said to me, ‘Are you worried about this having an impact in your career?’ But from where I sat, it couldn’t have an impact. Am I going to be less popular? I wasn’t popular when people thought I was popular. I never had a big audience to begin with. And it never mattered to me. If people said to me tomorrow that I couldn’t make a movie again because no one would come, it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest.”