I teased him, naturally, about turning it into a film. He said, “I can’t get something simple off the ground, much less something that requires a thousand-plane raid. Goddammit, if I ever got three or four dollars together I am going to try to make this movie.” The book was published in ’86, so it was probably in early ’87. I kept fantasizing that he would call back after The Player. We never spoke again.
FRANK W. BARHYDT: You couldn’t really drag things out of Bob. If he wanted to talk about something, he’d talk about it, but otherwise you couldn’t really engage him on that subject. The war was like that. He’d never see any of those guys he served with, never went back to meet with them again. But all that he saw and all that he experienced, and how long past the longevity of an average pilot he lived, all that had an effect on him. It had a lot to do with how he lived his life.
ROBERT ALTMAN: If we keep talking about the metaphor of the river, this is the part where a bunch of natives on the edge of the bank are shooting and throwing darts at you. You say, “Well, I’m glad we’re past this part.”
CHAPTER 4
Making Pictures
*
ROBERT ALTMAN: I know where it started, this thing of making pictures, or what eventually led into making pictures.
I think you could walk down the street and see a kid—a seven-or eight-year-old kid—and he’s throwing a baseball. You stop him—you’re a stranger. And you say, “Hey, throw that ball again.” And the kid throws the ball again. You say, “Hey, you could be a major-league pitcher. You’ve got the stuff for it. You really know how to throw the ball.” You leave, and you never see that kid again for the rest of your life. But that kid has a better chance of being a big-league pitcher than if you hadn’t stopped.
I was overseas, and I had a cousin—it was actually my father’s cousin—a woman named Mary Rector. She was the secretary to the guy who was the emcee on the Camel cigarette weekly variety show. I wrote her a letter because I thought that she was a star. I mean, she rubbed shoulders with those people. It was a real funny letter—I mean, I was trying to be funny. And she wrote back, “Oh, you’re a born writer. You should be a writer—your letter was so good.” From that day on I was a writer.
After that I wrote a couple of pages of something. I can remember, almost, the first line: “The scallops of lights on Wilshire Boulevard emptied into the shallow ocean, and a glaring sign blinked on and off. And it said, THE BROKEN DRUM; YOU CAN’T BEAT IT.” That was a restaurant. And then I took this character into the restaurant. I never got to the real character. It was all just atmosphere, and it was always somebody else’s character that I had in mind. But I stuck with that piece of writing a long time.
After the war, looking for what to do next
Untitled work from Robert Altman’s personal files: There was just the hint of dawn in the East, and Wilshire Boulevard was quiet and dark, save the scallops of light that bordered the curbing. A few blocks from where the file of streetlamps emptied into the blackness of shallow ocean, one small building gave evidence of life. Evidence in the form of a blinding neon sign which illuminated in red and white neon the words, THE BROKEN DRUM. Beneath this glowed another neon tube shaped like a drum, and to a tom-tom rhythm the irritating phrase, YOU CAN’T BEAT IT, flashed on and off.
ROBERT ALTMAN: The first film that made the difference in my mind between a movie and a film, if you can use those terms, was Brief Encounter. This was after I got out, after the war. I remember going to the Fairfax in L.A., going over by myself for some reason. I remember thinking, “What is this about?” This girl, Celia Johnson, was not pretty. She wore those sensible shoes. And suddenly I’m in love with her. I walked out of that movie and I went for a long walk. I realized the difference, and from that point on I started looking for those kinds of experiences in films.
* * *
JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: After the war we went back to Kansas City and LaVonne followed him there. There was a terrible car accident. It was a red Buick, and the guy driving was wealthy, rich and wild. He had a bad leg or a limp or something. There were, I think, six people in the car. LaVonne was sitting on Bob’s lap and they hit a Greyhound bus, or the bus hit them. The entire car was gone. LaVonne’s face was pretty broken up—her face was all wired. No one died that I know of, but everyone was injured badly and thrown. Except for Bob. He was fine.
BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: Bob gets out and wanders around. They didn’t even know he was in the wreck.
JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: He married LaVonne as soon as she got out of the hospital. He felt responsible.
CHRISTINE ALTMAN: I imagine that they were going to get married anyway, but she was going to have to stay there at the Altman house when she got out of the hospital. B.C. said, “Son, you should do something about this.”
BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: He married her because she was pregnant, with their daughter, Christine.
Twenty-two-year-old Robert Altman with his first wife, LaVonne, and their daughter, Christine, in 1947
CHRISTINE ALTMAN: Pregnant with me? I don’t know. I was born in ’47, and I don’t know the date that they got married. I’m not sure. The way I got it was they were just married and I came along. If it was before or after I’m not really sure. It was never an issue.
BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: After they got married, here in Kansas City, they came out to California. She looked like a skeleton, she was so thin. Her mouth was still wired. He used that in A Wedding. You know, the bride with braces.
* * *
ROBERT ALTMAN: After the war, I took singing lessons from my aunt Pauline. I had no aptitude for it at all. But I remember I took some singing lessons from her. I didn’t know what I was doing, or going to do.
I got into this Identi-Code thing. I don’t know how I got into this, but I bought this bulldog called Punch. The guy that sold me the dog was a guy named Skimmerhorn.
Dialogue from M*A*S*H:
(Hawkeye and Duke race off in a stolen Jeep.)
MOTOR POOL SERGEANT (Played by Jerry Jones): Skimmerhorn, get that son of a bitch! He just stole my Jeep! [Skimmerhorn runs past, bumps into sergeant, spilling hot coffee on him]
ROBERT ALTMAN: Skimmerhorn was from Detroit, and he had a partner named H. Graham Connar. He was an English guy, and he had introduced indoor polo to America, as I remember. He wore one of those English moustaches. So they told me about this thing they were doing called Identi-Code—tattooing identification on dogs, in case they were lost or stolen. I thought, “That’s a great idea.” I got very enthusiastic about it and somehow I joined them. I became the guy who did the tattooing.
I went down to buy the tattooing machines from a guy in downtown L.A., a guy who had been a tattooed man in a circus. And the wife was the fat lady in the circus, called Dainty Dottie. All around his garage he had designs, drawings of eagles, all that stuff. So the fat lady is typing up the invoice on this portable Royal typewriter and I was trying to be polite to her.
I’d say, “You know, this is really nice. I saw your drawings up there.”
And she’d make a mistake on the invoice and she’d put a new piece of paper in. We did that a few times and I remember he leaned over to me and said, “It’s better if you don’t talk. Dottie can only think of one thing at a time.”
I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, “I’m here with the tattooed man and the fat lady from the circus, and a little Royal typewriter. I bought some tattooing machines and she’s writing up a receipt. Is this my life?”
JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: He went in with Dad on that dog-tattooing thing. That was the first time they worked together—Dad on the financing, I think.
One time Bob went down to the corner grocery store and his bulldog followed him. A German shepherd was coming out of the grocery store and the bulldog grabbed it by the neck. He wouldn’t let go of this dog, and Bob grabbed a broom and stuck it up his ass. That’s how they got him to release his hold on that other dog. But the dog was docile with people, great with people and great with bab
ies. Bob’s daughter, Chrissy, was an infant, not even crawling, and that dog just loved her.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Punch was the first dog I tattooed. We would shave an area on the inside of the right hind leg, up near the groin, shave it with an electric razor. Then we’d put on the oil, which was a lubricant and also antiseptic. Then I would write in these numbers. The number system we set up was that each state had its number, like Alabama was “1” and Arizona was “2” or so on. Then each county in the state had its own number. So Aaron County, Alabama, if there even is one, would be “1-1.” Then there was the dog’s individual number. That was our system.
Then we made a deal with all the sheriffs in America, through the sheriffs’ organization, that they would keep records of all those numbers in each sheriff’s office. We would pay a dollar for each record they’d keep. So all they had to do was stick that in a file someplace and they’d get that dollar. That came out of what we charged for the tattoo, which I think was five dollars or ten dollars. Then we went to Washington and tattooed Harry Truman’s dog.
Through John Walsh, Pauline’s husband, we got through to someone who knew Truman. Truman had this dog he didn’t even care about, a little dog of some kind. They sent it over to us and we tattooed it. That was part of our promotion of Identi-Code. Then we went to the Pure Food and Drug folks to get certification for the oil and the ethyl chloride we used to freeze the area.
Our hope was to sell this whole operation to the National Dog Bureau, which was owned by Purina. We’d sell it to them and come out with a few hundred thousand dollars and walk away. We even got the Hearst papers behind us because we said this was for antivivisection. They were a big antivivisection voice. It was part of their crusade, but for me it was a scam. I mean, although I did this stuff sincerely, it’s like any salesman. You tend to believe in what you’re selling, even though you really don’t know what it is. Was it my goal to safeguard all the dogs in America? No, not at all.
We got to the point where we went to the ASPCA, or whatever it was at the time, and said we had all these funds behind us, seeking their endorsement. But Connar had taken the funds and gone to Ireland—he took, I don’t know, fifteen thousand dollars or so. The indoor polo player went east with our money. It fucked us with the ASPCA, and the whole thing just fell apart. That was it. It almost worked.
I went back to California and declared myself a writer. My dad had a place in Malibu, up in the hills, and in the downstairs of the house lived a guy named George W. George and his wife. George was Rube Goldberg’s son. We met and I said I was a writer. He said he was a director. So we started to work together.
GEORGE W. GEORGE (writer/producer): I had no idea who he was. He was just a guy whose parents lived upstairs who had some ideas for stories for movies and things like that. He seemed like a nice guy. We immediately started talking about stories, and we wrote a crime story for RKO.
Bodyguard (1948; Robert Altman received
story credit, with George W. George)
GEORGE W. GEORGE: Bob was always a good collaborator. Work is a difficult thing to divide. Work is something you do as a personal issue among yourself and your gods. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes you suffer. It’s either professional or it isn’t professional, and Bob was always professional. Sometimes you can’t work with people because they don’t know what you’re working on. They’ve been in the movie business all their lives and they have no idea what a movie is.
I worked once with an agent who told me, “Mr. George, anybody can write the first act of a play. The hard thing to do is a second act of a play.” Think of it as your own life. You lived the first act of your life pretty good because you just did it. You think you know everything about life because you’re young. But you’ve made a pretty good mess of your life so far. That’s the first act. How do you write the second act? Well, very few people can write a successful second act. That’s why it’s such fun. Everybody wishes they could do it over again, do something over again, or at least live a full life. Most of them have no idea what they lived through or how to do a second act. Very few people live a successful second act. Bob knew how.
ROBERT ALTMAN: George had an uncle named Eddie Marin. He was a director at RKO, kind of a B-movie director. We sold Christmas Eve as an original story through his uncle. I wasn’t credited. And then we sold Bodyguard. And they were both made into films.
JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: Bob and George wrote two Hollywood scripts together. I think they made thirty-five thousand dollars.
ROBERT ALTMAN: They wouldn’t let me do what I wanted. I remember, I went to them on Bodyguard and said, “I’ll do the screenplay—let me do the screenplay for free.” And, of course, that really turns them off. I could never even get on a set to learn how these pictures were made.
CHAPTER 5
The Calvin Company
*
RICHARD SARAFIAN (director/actor/former brother-in-law): Bob’s career was delayed for about ten years. When he’d had some success with George, he took it for granted that this was easy money. Then nothing sold. Had he stayed in California he probably would have written another one and found his way. But going back to Kansas City grounded him in terms of learning his craft. He learned to produce and direct documentaries. From that point, he could glue it all together and give it life.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Film schools happened after I was making films. There was no such thing as a film school when I was going to school. There were writing courses you could sign up for, there were script-writing courses, little things like that going on. To make films, I went to Kansas City and got a job with the Calvin Company.
Select Industrial Films Robert Altman Made at the Calvin Company
Modern Football (1951); King Basketball (1952); The Sound of Bells (1952); How to Run a Filling Station (1953); The Last Mile (1953); The Dirty Look (1954); Better Football (1954); The Builders (1955); The Perfect Crime (1955); The Magic Bond (1956).
FRANK W. BARHYDT: My father, Frank G. Barhydt, was in charge of production for the Calvin Company. He hired Bob. They made industrial films, which were really like advertisements for the company but also they were training films for the employees. I’ve heard various versions of how Bob got hired, but one was that Bob sort of limped in there trying to find a battery for his car or something. He was like a lot of starving artists—he didn’t have a lot of money and lived paycheck to paycheck. But he’d been in Hollywood. He’d been in a movie—an extra in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty—and he’d had a screen credit as a writer. He parlayed that into claiming to be a very experienced filmmaker.
The headquarters of the Calvin Company, coincidentally located in the Altman Building, built by Robert Altman’s grandfather
ROGER SNOWDALL (sound engineer): We were the biggest sixteen-millimeter company in the world. At one time Calvin had six hundred fifty employees. We had four buildings.
For Bob, it was his apprenticeship. He managed to stay busy all the time. There never was a time I actually saw Bob not doing something—he was filming a new one or editing the last one. He earned his money while he was here, there’s no doubt.
Robert Altman, center background, playing an extra, “Man at bar,” in the 1947 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, starring Danny Kaye, at right
When we first met I was a helper in the sound department. The atmosphere on Bob’s sets at Calvin was always very professional, but it was casual, too. When we were doing the scene, it was very professional, everything had to be right. He didn’t do a lot of retakes. We rehearsed quite a bit, and we’d almost always take at least two good takes. Bob ended up doing almost all his own editing. When he didn’t he’d hang over the editor’s shoulder and the editor would wish he would do it.
FRANK W. BARHYDT: I think he used to drive Forrest Calvin, who was the owner, crazy at times. He just did things different ways. He had this passion for sound. He was always looking to do sound a different way, different than everybody else.
ROGER SNOWDALL: He was an i
nnovator on sound even then. First of all, his use of the directional microphone. People weren’t using that prior to Bob to any extent. They used omnidirectional microphones, which picked up all directions, and of course with that type of microphone you had ambient noise. Even though the soundstage is quiet you still get ambience. We were able to get closer to the subjects using the mike boom and the directional microphone. That’s what he taught me to do.
He liked sound effects. Sometimes we’d have some artificially generated sound. And we had an ambience track. If we were in a factory he’d have me record five minutes of just ambience, which he could edit in as a background track to go along with whatever dialogue was taking place while the factory was shut down. It was a fixation on sound. He wanted the proper ambience. He wanted it to sound real, not artificial, and he worked toward that end. That’s why his industrial pictures were good, because they had this quality.
With dialogue, he’d cut back and forth. Instead of this guy talks and that guy talks, he’d cut back to the guy listening while the other guy was still talking, which is what you’d do if you were a natural observer of the scene. He did that in industrial films. They’d write a script and A talks, then B talks, then A talks, and the camera is cutting back and forth. Well, he did things differently.
Still, we were pretty straitlaced at Calvin. Bob wanted to do things real. Of course he couldn’t do that completely at Calvin.
ART GOODELL (cameraman): The cinematographers at Calvin considered him innovative, always coming up with something different in the way of camera angles, the way he accomplished shots. For instance, if he had guys sitting around playing poker, in order to get various shots of various players he would have them change chairs so we wouldn’t have to make as many setups.
ROGER SNOWDALL: In all the time I worked with him, he never got upset with me. He might have got upset about the way the scene went, and I might not have done it to suit him. But he never said, “You messed up.” It was, “Let’s do it again, and would you try to do it this way.” He always made it seem as though he blamed himself, as though “I didn’t tell you right.”
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