Robert Altman
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ALLAN NICHOLLS: After that, some attributed to him godlike characteristics. But I think he knew he wasn’t.
KEITH CARRADINE: In Nashville he was looking at us, he was looking at our culture, he was looking at America. And how prophetic that movie turned out to be. From Jimmy Carter, who came after, to the assassination of John Lennon, which came after, capturing the zeitgeist that was actually ten years hence. Truly extraordinary. The great artists are the ones who see who we are becoming more so than those who see who we are. And Bob was one of those. It’s a better movie now than when we made it. That’s saying something. I think it’s a towering achievement, that movie. Just everybody that was involved in that, Bob tapped into something. He tapped into the American psyche so absolutely directly, and it ain’t pretty.
ALAN RUDOPLH: When he was cutting Nashville, especially, you’d see the same film—well, not the same film, but different versions—ten or fifteen times a week. I think that was Bob’s greatest thrill. It’s the fresh-blood thing. If you’ve seen it you know what’s happening, so he’d throw all of his attention to someone who hadn’t seen it. He knew what he had was like a new language to a lot of people, so to watch them redefine the experience of watching a film and knowing that they would, in some way, never be the same again was a great high for him. That’s how he got energy.
LILY TOMLIN: When we went to the Oscars for Nashville, it was my first Oscars, and so I dressed up as what I thought of as a fifties movie star. I wore a tiara and big faux fur and I was going to have big Harlequin sunglasses. And Lee Grant won for Shampoo. I was going to say, “Some of you will say I’ve gone Hollywood.” That kind of thing just pleased Bob. Anything that’s a bit outside he got a kick out of.
RICHARD BASKIN (composer): There were two sets of reactions. When we were making the movie it was real pleasant and convivial. People I don’t think understood the outsider context of it until they saw the movie. Once they saw the movie, they said, “This isn’t really Nashville.” And it wasn’t Nashville, they were right. The songs were musically correct, but they were character driven. There was a consciousness to them that wasn’t entirely of Nashville. I think people were responding emotionally to what was quite an intellectual film.
JOAN TEWKESBURY: There were a lot of tried-and-true Country-Western people that just hated our guts and hated the movie. Thought it was terrible. Thought that we were making fun of people. But basically no, because it became a microcosm of a kind of change that was happening in the United States.
Robert Altman, from DVD commentary: A few years after Nashville had come out, when John Lennon got assassinated, I got a call immediately from The Washington Post and they said, “Do you feel responsible for this?”
And I said, “What do you mean, ‘responsible’?”
And they said, “Well, you’re the one that predicted that there would be an assassination of a star.”
And I said, “I don’t feel responsible.” But I said, “Don’t you feel responsible for not heeding my warning?”
The statement here is that these people are not assassinated because of their ideas or what they do. They’re assassinated to draw attention to the assassin.
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ROBERT ALTMAN: It didn’t make any money. It wasn’t a mainline movie. But the critics treated it well. It didn’t have any stars in it. Maybe that’s why that picture’s so good. Maybe my reputation comes from just being right about the casting.
Ronee Blakley as doomed singer Barbara Jean
M*A*S*H, of course, changed things the most. But I was perceived differently after Nashville. It just verified in the critics’ minds that I had some sort of value, and that M*A*S*H wasn’t just an aberration.
CHAPTER 19
Diamond Cutter
*
ALLAN NICHOLLS: Whether you like it or not, Bob was always Bob, and Bob was always the Bob he wanted to be. He was never anybody else. He was never anybody’s version of him, either. He was just him.
STEPHEN ALTMAN: There’d be times at Lion’s Gate where all of a sudden the smart people realized, “Oh, he’s got that look in his eye. All right, stay out of his way because he’s going to nail somebody and just lambaste them and rip them to shreds and let’s not be that person.” But once he stopped drinking he pretty much didn’t do that anymore. He didn’t suffer fools, but he didn’t go looking for a fight.
Some people took it personally but hung around anyway. There’s a lot of hanger-on-ers around him and a lot of leeches, and a lot of “What can you do for me?” types. And a lot of times he was right. It’s just, do you have to do it like that? Go up to the crafts-service guy and say, “You’re just a crafts-service guy, that’s all you are.” It’s like, “What did I do? I’m just making coffee.” I think he had a fear of being found out that he was just a normal person and wasn’t a genius.
To me, he was like the typical con man. Like how he would get his movies together and get the people involved. He was like Tom Sawyer painting the picket fence. If the movie was made, and everybody made money, he wasn’t a con man anymore, he was just a great director and leader and salesman, you know? If it all falls apart and everybody loses their money, then he’s a con man. Most of the time he made it work, so that’s why everybody kept hanging around. I mean, if he wasn’t successful, most people wouldn’t be hanging out with him. No, no, no, we wouldn’t be here at all. So that’s the way it goes.
Seeing the world through a lens
JOAN TEWKESBURY: You know how a diamond cutter knows exactly where to cut the rock so that it doesn’t fall apart? He will see a glimmer of something where no one else does. That would be Bob in a crowded room. He could tell you who would fall in love with who, whose marriage was over. He had this uncanny ability to foresee human behavior. That was why it was really difficult when he would have too much to drink and call you a fake. It cut to the core because you had seen him be so spot-on about calling behaviors. So you’d say, “Oh gee, I must be a fake.”
It was a favorite word of his. I came to understand it was part of a projection of himself. He was afraid of not being completely real. Bob was a big guy and he had gone through the war and he had done all this stuff. But deep down inside, as there is in many of us, there’s this voice saying, “I wonder if they’re going to find me out?”
He had dark stuff in there and who knows why. But men of that age didn’t talk about their interior life or their stuff, but his interior stuff would come through.
MICHAEL MURPHY: He could cut you. He could do that look and say one sentence. I saw him reduce an obnoxious but famous publicist to tears that fast in the lobby of a theater one night. She said something or did something he didn’t like, and he turned on her and he said one sentence and she just came unglued. He was a very powerful guy. But I think he had much more of a reputation than anything else. Anybody with half a brain could get along with this guy. He was not a hostile person. He didn’t look for trouble, really. He was certainly ready for it, and as I said before, alcohol was not his best friend in that department. But he had a lot of good times when he was drinking, too. I can’t think of too many people that were the subjects of his wrath that didn’t deserve it. It was always some stupid Hollywood kind of thing that would start it.
JOHN SCHUCK: There’s a real dark side to him. I only saw it personally because it was directed against me at a Christmas party when we were making McCabe & Mrs. Miller. It was a wonderful party, and there’s eighty people there up in Vancouver, and I’d gone to the bathroom. It was fairly late, so the party had been going on five or six hours. I was coming back through this room and Bob was there getting something out of his desk, and he looked up at me and kind of walked up to me very close and said, “I don’t like you very much.” And I said, “Well, that’s your loss.” End of exchange. Never mentioned it again. Never felt any dislike from him again.
He continued to hire me for a couple more films. I don’t think it was directed at me at all, but for a minute there I was hurt by it, of c
ourse. But then I never saw any indication of it. Don’t know what prompted it. I just happened to be in the room at the right time. It could have been the combination of alcohol and whether he was smoking that night, I don’t know. But there was that personality change that often happens with people that are heavy drinkers.
ALAN RUDOLPH: The key to Bob is he and his movies, everything about his movies and everything about him, were completely inseparable.
Another key to Bob is that you were always a guest in his world. He never entered yours. He entered yours but only on his terms, whether it was personal, public, professional, intimate I’m sure, or intentional. Bob would never surrender to anyone else’s world, ever. I don’t think he was capable of that. I think Bob heard his voice and his calling and never varied. He was different, and it’ll take your book to try and define it, and it will be elusive and you’ll never get to the center of it because you shouldn’t be able to.
I don’t care what their title was, who they were, I’ve never been in any room with anybody where Bob wasn’t at least tied for the most powerful force in the room. I’ve been with him with governors and senators. His X-ray vision not only encompassed his ability to react, digest, react, and control a situation, but he also knew where to go inside of any person and what he could tweak. Because he didn’t have any decorum rules, he could challenge people on an emotional, personal, political, creative level. And then be in control of them. The restrictions and restraints that a lot of people put on themselves when they’re in public prohibits them from being so free. But there were never any rules for Bob on any level.
In the Bob world, the biggest mistake—I think it’s the biggest crime maybe committed in humanity—is betrayal. So if you were working on Bob’s behalf and did not bring your own priorities there to overwhelm his priorities, and you were working for the common good and you made a mistake, he may be annoyed by it, it may have to be corrected, but there was no anger. No true anger. If you betrayed the trust of the gift of this human interaction and creative process, then, basically, Bob couldn’t abide that.
He didn’t have to work at being who he was. One of the first things I remember was him quoting Abraham Lincoln, where he says, “You just have to tell the truth and you don’t have to remember anything else.” And that was how he lived. That’s why there was no effort. That’s why Bob could create things lying on the couch and not getting up. And there was no tension. There wasn’t that stress that killed people. What killed him was bad chemistry, you know, bad pharmaceutical chemistry and a life of just diving off the deep end every time. I mean, it’s going to catch up with you if you live to the max.
PETER NEWMAN (producer): The way he ran his life and his business was sheer anarchy. It was a circus with this artistically gifted presence in the center of it. He could be incredibly generous and outrageously cruel. It seemed to me at the heart of it was Bob was very, very, very sensitive. My appraisal was that even though he would make jokes about things, he was very sensitive to the fact that he didn’t get to direct a feature film until his forties, and his first was such a hit and he barely got paid for it. He was also incredibly sensitive that he had been mistreated by the studios. He had a real dislike for business.
I think anyone who worked with Bob went through a period of having great love or great anger toward him. It depends on what point in time you talk to someone about Bob.
I was quoted once saying Bob called me “the Jew with the money.” Bob was totally irreverent. First of all, I didn’t have any money. More important, some people saw an implication that it was anti-Semitic. Nothing could be further from the truth. God knows he wasn’t anti-Semitic. He was just outrageous.
PETER GALLAGHER (actor): He would say, “Every morning I wake up and I’m at the bottom of a very deep hole. And I scratch and claw all day long, and by the end of the day if I’m lucky I get my eyes above the edge and I get a glimpse around before I end up at the bottom of the hole again.” So as gruff and as sort of outsized as Bob can be, there is a tremendous compassion that informs what he does.
MATTHEW MODINE (actor): On the outside he had this confidence and strength and wry sense of humor, but all of that stuff was like the shell of a crab. Inside it’s really soft, sweet meat. To protect that he had to create this strong, I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude. For an artist to succeed as long as he did, he needed a strong shell. Life, let alone the industry, will crush that and make you cynical and make you think about dollars and cents. A filmmaker whose films don’t make money in this business is discarded faster than a used piece of toilet paper. But Bob always found a way to finance his need to tell a story.
Robert Altman, scowling on the set of McCabe & Mrs. Miller
BUCK HENRY (writer and actor): In the back of my head I was always aware that he could turn on a dime if someone said something that really irritated him or had an opinion that didn’t make him laugh. I think he had very strict rules of behavior—I would imagine having something to do with his childhood.
His rage against the establishment was one or two parts bullshit. Everybody kissed Bob’s ass. They realized that he was an important filmmaker—regarded as that around the world. He liked the feeling of being really angry.
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LILY TOMLIN: I had optioned a book in 1971, Maiden, by Cynthia Buchanan. I was crazy about the book, and Jane Wagner, my partner, wrote a screenplay. And as it happened, Bob was looking for something for Joan Tewkesbury to direct, and we had the same agent, Sam Cohn. Bob read that screenplay of Maiden and wanted to produce it and have Joan direct it. So Bob said to me, “You’ll come to Nashville this summer and we’ll do Maiden in the fall.”
He had just finished California Split and that was a Columbia picture. Columbia optioned the book and the screenplay for Maiden and then Jane and Joan had begun working on the shooting script for Maiden. I went to Nashville, and the guys from Columbia, the suits, came to town and wanted Bob to cut six minutes out of California Split. He punched one of them in the nose, and he fell in the pool. Maiden never got made. It’s still sitting on the shelf at Columbia.
JOSEPH WALSH: It was something the way he’d go after studio executives.
I’d say, “Why do you go out of your way to knock them in print? Why are you building up the animosity?”
He said, “The suits know nothing. If you had to deal with those kinds of people you’d understand.”
I really never knew what the psychology was. Maybe he liked the friction, to keep him on edge with his talent. I felt he did a disservice to himself. I’m saying, “Don’t fuck it up, Bob. Don’t do it when you don’t need to. I’m certainly not asking you to kiss anybody’s ass, but do you have to always kick it?”
ROBERT DORNHELM (director): Maybe you have to be playful, dangerously playful, to beat the Hollywood system. He enjoyed making enemies. Offending people was something he had great appetite for. It’s quite American, quite individualistic. I grew up in a totalitarian regime, in Austria, and we are all kind of beaten down by authority. He was kind of the opposing way. He was needling, provoking, questioning. He was what a true artist should be.
He shouldn’t be put in for sainthood. He had a monstrous side to him and he was also a sweetheart. A man of contradictions. Like any creative person, you have to be monstrous in your beauty and in your ego to accomplish it. Yet at the same time I have seen him be very gentle and sweet.
KEITH CARRADINE: Bob could be very tough, you know. I know there are people who had run-ins with him over the years and he could be very, very harsh and tough. He could cut you off. I never had anything like that with Bob, never. Maybe because I never crossed the line? And I know there was a line you could cross with Bob.
I think probably the people that had problems with him at any point were on some level either fools or just assholes. Not that Bob was a saint and not that he was always right. We all know that. And he also gloried in defying authority. But that’s what made his work so brilliant. Even the failures were brilliant.
He definitely had a mean streak. I only got it a couple times. I think a lot of other people got it repeatedly, and that was their relationship. I can give you a million psychological reasons for it, but I think it was never black or white. A lot of times it was out of frustration. He was a man, absolutely, but he was also a boy. He had a real boyish streak. And it was sometimes just out of literal frustration, and so it was whatever was in the way. Or whoever was in the way would get it. And sometimes it was all chemicals. A lot of different chemicals in his body, you know, I mean literally, between the booze and the pot, it was just like whatever was happening chemically. I understand moody. But sometimes it could just be the chemicals. And that’s almost scarier because that means maybe he really doesn’t have control. That would be the frustrating part because you love him and you look up to him and he does play the role of big papa. And for big papa to all of a sudden turn around, it could be very sad. Or hurtful.
He sought out conflict. I think it challenged him, it made him think harder, made him have to. I don’t think this is original to Bob, by the way. I think it is universal for artists of any kind. Painters, writers, actors, directors, production designers. Anyone who is thinking in a creative mind. It’s like your fingers get electric. Everything shoots and fires and it’s like when you wake from a dream because you’ve fallen or you stub your toe and everything goes “Aargh!” That kind of conflict makes that feeling. It’s an endorphin, it’s an adrenaline rush. So sometimes the conflict is very productive and sometimes it’s incredibly counterproductive, and I think Bob had his share of both across the board.