Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  On A Wedding he got all of us in a room. He explained the plot to us and then he said, “Please, if you have an idea for a scene, come to me with it. I want to hear it. Some of the best scenes in my movies have come from the actors’ ideas.” You never hear a director say that. That was truly an astonishing thing.

  The food was fabulous. He brought a wonderful chef. Everybody got the same salary and nobody got a lot. He made it up to everybody with these fabulous lunches. Everybody got along because everybody was happy.

  Pat McCormick and I had this story line that he was married to the character Dina Merrill played, and I’m called Tulip and I’m married to Paul Dooley, who’s called Snooks, and we’re rich Southern trash. They’re to the manor born, but they don’t have any cash. Our daughter is marrying into that family, to the son played by Desi Arnaz, Jr. So there was a plot point where Pat’s character is smitten by Tulip, and she doesn’t know this and they’re dancing at the reception. He comes over and asks her to dance. He’s supposed to reveal his love for her on the dance floor. There were some lines, but neither Pat nor I felt that it was right. We went to Bob and said, “Can we play with this?” He said, “Sure.” We went back and found a room and came up with the idea that during the dance he’s in a reverie and never opens his mouth and she makes small talk and the more she talks the more uncomfortable she is. He finally presses her into a corner and professes his love.

  Bob said, “Great, let’s shoot it.”

  I’ve improvised a lot with television but this is the first time I’ve ever done a film where you can do that.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Paul Dooley, in A Wedding, was the only casting I ever did for Bob.

  PAUL DOOLEY (actor): Sam Cohn is his agent, and Sam’s wife and Bob’s wife became friends. Sam’s wife ran the American Place Theater and I was doing Hold Me! there. So Kathryn sees me and she likes me and she knew Bob was looking for someone, a character man for A Wedding. So she said, “You’ve got to come see this guy, I think he’ll be right for that movie.”… He came downstairs and there were four of us and we were more or less in the same dressing room. Anyway, endearing me to all my fellow cast members, he showed tremendous interest in me. “Would you come and see me tomorrow at my office?” The rest of them are looking at me like, “Who the fuck are you?”

  On the third visit he says, “Well, I found your daughter.” And he says to me, “Who’s your agent?” I said, “I don’t have an agent. I’m between agents.” He says it doesn’t matter anyway, it’s going to be the same amount of money. And nobody ever does this. He says, “Vittorio Gassman is getting fifty grand, Carol Burnett is getting fifty grand, everybody else is getting twenty-five grand. Then there’s a group of people that get ten grand, and that’s you.” They never do that in the business. He didn’t like bullshit. He didn’t like games, he didn’t like playing around.

  Bob likes to do what some artists call working with found objects. An actor does something that’s unexpected, and Bob, in some cases, you may not like it, but if he likes it, you know, he puts it right in the movie. But he loves these happy accidents. And I was one of his found objects. He just found me somewhere and put me in these movies.

  CAROL BURNETT: Occasionally he would show us one of his movies if we wanted to stay after the dailies. I had not seen 3 Women. I was fascinated by it. I went to sleep and I dreamed about 3 Women. It was a funny dream. I went back the next day and I said, “I dreamed that Janice Rule was in the pool painting these murals. I dreamed she was there and there was a tarp and we couldn’t see what she was doing. Then she pulled a string and the tarp was raised and it was all Disney characters—Mickey and Donald and the whole gang.” He roared.

  He said, “Well, if that’s what it did for you, that’s what it was supposed to do.”

  ALLAN NICHOLLS (actor/music director/screenwriter/associate producer/assistant director): If anything, A Wedding was about gossip and how gossip spreads and how gossip hurts, and how gossip helps and how gossip kills and how gossip kills the right guy sometimes.

  ALAN LADD, JR.: I was concerned about the kids dying at the end of A Wedding. He got his way. I guess he wanted the end to make a statement, his way of saying, “These things happen.”

  BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: That wreck in A Wedding, and the bride in braces? Well, you know, Bob just took that from his own life, from what happened before he married LaVonne. And the groom’s family’s name? Corelli, right? Well, his second wife was Lotus Corelli.

  Margaret Ladd, actress, from a diary she kept during A Wedding: Today they’re shooting the car crash. The car, in which the bride and groom are supposedly driving away, crashes into a gasoline truck and burns up. … Yesterday they had to show the car careening dangerously, at a very high speed, away from the house. It had to almost hit the stone pillar in front of the house. It was a very scary shot. Well, guess who was driving the car for the stunt shot? You guessed it: Altman. He scared the shit out of everyone. He really almost hit the post, missed it by about two inches at a very high speed. The cameramen almost stopped shooting they got so scared. … He got out, very cool, and said calmly to the cameramen: “Did you get that OK?” But there was a little smile on his face that he couldn’t quite hide, just creeping up in one corner.

  * * *

  Aljean Harmetz, story headlined “Altman Pledges Profits to Rights Plan,” The New York Times, June 12, 1978: The latest in a series of Hollywood parties for the proposed Equal Rights Amendment raised $57,000 yesterday—and a promise of as much as $2 million from Robert Altman, the producer and director of “Nashville.”

  Mr. Altman impulsively offered all his profits, up to $2 million, of his new movie, “A Wedding,” which is scheduled to open in New York in September. Later, he said he had “felt moved” by the speech of Carol Burnett, one of the stars of “A Wedding.”

  CAROL BURNETT: I think I did my speech in character as Eunice talking to Momma, trying to explain what the ERA was. She said she had been learning what it was, and it was nonthreatening, it was just a cry for equality in the workplace. I thought it might be fun to do it as a character who just learned about it, trying to get through to her dense mother what it was all about.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Yeah, he pledged all his profits from A Wedding to the ERA. There were no profits from A Wedding.

  Robert Altman addresses the Equal Rights Amendment countdown party in Beverly Hills, June 11, 1978. Actress Susan Blakely is at left, and Gloria Steinem is at right.

  * * *

  FRANK W. BARHYDT (screenwriter): When he first told me about Quintet he didn’t say it’s this apocalyptic thing. It really had to do with adrenaline and people’s middle-class lives. They go to college, they get out of college, they get married, they have children, they buy a home, they have these very comfortable and very boring lives. And gambling was an adrenaline that people need, that risk. He equated that with the feeling after a storm, a violent storm, people feel invigorated because they escaped death, they cheated death. So that was the premise. These people really had nothing other than death looking at them, and in order to experience life they had to gamble their lives.

  WOLF KROEGER (art director): Quintet was an absolute bore, really.

  PAUL NEWMAN: I think Quintet was a valid supposition, but I think the details just got away from us. There weren’t enough details piled on top of each other to support that as a dramatic supposition. It’s a complicated supposition, you understand. It’s the end of the world, and if you’re going to go out you might as well go out with some excitement. So the excitement is that you have to track down the guy in front of you and kill him. But you also know that there’s a guy in back of you who’s trying to kill you. You might have gotten that on the second viewing, but most people only get a first. You have to be looking straight ahead but you have to be looking in back of you, too.

  I don’t think you have to go out to kill for excitement to keep feeling alive, though Bob may have felt that way about the critics.

  Vincent
Canby story headlined “Robert Altman’s Talent Falters,” The Looking exhausted on the set of Quintet New York Times, February 18, 1979: The other day while watching Robert Altman’s new film, the end-of-the-world fantasy called “Quintet,” I could feel the blood rushing to my feet and my heart wanting to follow. The movie was both leaving me cold and giving me the sweats.

  Looking exhausted on the set of Quintet

  “Quintet” may be the most aggressively self-indulgent motion picture made in the last 20 years by a major American director.

  As “Quintet” droned on in settings of surreal, frozen beauty, and as the characters, the last survivors on earth, play a mysterious kind of backgammon called quintet, or slink around the ruins cutting each other’s throats, or talk about life, death, hope (“an obsolete word”) and the mystical meaning of the numeral five, I was reminded of all the terrible little-theater plays I’d seen in my youth.

  Robert Altman to David Thompson, from Altman on Altman: My father died from cancer just before we left for Montreal. My mother had died two years before. I’m sure that influenced the tone of Quintet.

  * * *

  ALLAN NICHOLLS: For A Perfect Couple, we came up with the story idea first about two people meeting from very different walks of life. And yet two people firmly involved in family. One of them, the family was a band. For the other, the family was their heritage.

  PAUL DOOLEY: I had already made A Wedding. Bob’s not saying anything to me, like he likes my work, because he had a gruff side, too. So about three months later a friend of mine says, “Buy Variety.”

  “Why?

  “Just get the new Variety. Page sixty.”

  So I just went to a newsstand and looked at it and here’s an ad with me and Marta Heflin, “Robert Altman announces his next film. A romance. Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin, coming to theaters next year.” But he never said a word to me about this.

  I called him up. I said, “Who’s this Paul Dooley that’s going to do

  that film?”

  He says, “I knew I could get you.” Then he said, “I wanted Shelley Duvall to do it, but she’s got some other stupid job.”

  He didn’t like it that much when his “family,” if you will, started going out and working in the other side of the business, because he really invented Shelley. Shelley wasn’t available or something, so he was naturally pissed off about that. But he saw Marta Heflin as another girl. He wanted to do a film about people who weren’t conventionally pretty people or the right age or just the way Hollywood would do it. He does most of what he did to say “Fuck you” to Hollywood. He didn’t like conventional, formulaic movies, and none of us do, really. Sometimes you put the right hero and heroine together and it’s a formula movie, but you know it’s George Clooney and someone else and it’s still a good movie. But they still spend the last five minutes going back to the girl and embracing her and kissing her. Even if Arnold Schwarzenegger is an alien, he’ll do something nice for a girl at the end, especially if she’s in a very short skirt. It hasn’t changed all that much. Anyway, he didn’t use the phrase, but it’s almost as if he wanted to show that an ugly duckling has the right to fall in love and be happy.

  He was cynical about the idea he was supposed to do things a certain way. It might be antiauthoritarianism or something. “Don’t tell me how to make my movies.” Well, I got news for you. In fifty years, when people have forgotten many of the current directors who made a lot of money, they might still remember Bob Altman, ‘cause there’s a body of work you can look at. And there’s no one like him, first of all. If a guy makes hit movie after hit movie after hit movie, he’s probably doing a formula. Anybody who’s an artist wants to do something slightly different next time, whether you’re a writer, or artist, or whatever it is. Bob was an individual, an adventurer, and a gambler. And he was willing to gamble other people’s money and even his reputation on a hunch, on an idea he had. But I thank God for it because he saw me in certain situations that other people didn’t.

  ALLAN NICHOLLS: We screened Perfect Couple at Lion’s Gate for Mick Jagger. It was a fun night. And after that screening Bob and I looked at each other and thought, “We’re going to make some money on this one.” We didn’t. The marketing and distribution failed us. I want to get back at them one day. And the way I want to get back at them, I’ve been talking to Kathryn and Bob’s legal people about doing A Perfect Couple as a musical. It is a musical and it should be a Broadway musical. But it takes some time to get that going. Everything else is a musical on Broadway. So why not Bob, who loved Broadway so much, why not his legacy there? It would be cleverly ironic too, if one of his most unsuccessful films becomes a Broadway hit.

  * * *

  FRANK W. BARHYDT: He had just gotten back from shooting A Wedding, and I had written this script, for HealtH. It was about an election for the president of a health-food convention, and I didn’t really know the form. I knew description and dialogue. I didn’t know how it really should look. So I just sort of did my own version of it and my parents were out visiting and I asked my father to read this and he found it funny. So I asked Bob if he would read it. He said yeah. Bob has always had a fascination with politics and power. So all political things are interesting to him, and I just happened to tap into that. Four days later he said he was going to make it.

  CAROL BURNETT: He was liberal, definitely a liberal. You saw that in HealtH. The idea was a convention of health nuts, but HealtH was of course really about Eisenhower and Stevenson—Betty Bacall was Eisenhower and Glenda Jackson was Stevenson, down to the part where she crossed her leg and you see the hole in her shoe.

  LAUREN BACALL (actress): I didn’t really get to know him until he called me one day to have lunch with him and tell me about this movie that he wanted to make, called HealtH. Of course he was filled with ideas, and it all sounded very funny to me, which indeed it was. I loved my character, Esther Brill. She was this eighty-something-year-old virgin who says every orgasm takes twenty-eight days off a woman’s life! It was a wonderful movie. I loved the movie. Everyone who saw that movie adored it. He used to carry it from festival to festival.

  With Lauren Bacall on the set of HealtH

  He made movies in his very own original way. If you wanted to try something, go ahead and try it. If you weren’t precise about every word, fine. He lived up to his reputation of being this incredibly gifted, original man who was wonderful with actors and who just had a knack for making unusual movies.

  WOLF KROEGER: HealtH? Absolutely a piece of garbage. There was nothing there. He just made it up. But he must have had something nobody else had, because he always attracted great actors.

  DAVID LEVY (producer): With the late-seventies stuff and the Fox deal, there was a certain fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants quality. He really liked both on-set and off when the unplanned happened; he always celebrated that. And he trusted that. Another person would say that’s hubris. A lot of people aren’t comfortable in what might be called that unplanned state. He was very much okay with operating in that space. I remember on HealtH, Laddie, Alan Ladd, Jr., would be asking, “Could we get a real script on this? Could we get a whole script?” And it was never really forthcoming. It was always a work in progress. That was a thirty-five-day shoot, but after twenty-nine days he basically felt, “I got what I got and I’m okay with it and I don’t need to kick this around anymore.”

  So it was a very free-flowing, controlled chaos. But that was by design, his design, you know? And here again, this was another film that didn’t perform. I want to say that the theatrical release for the most part lasted all of a week, maybe two. It played in such a limited way and the studio felt that no matter what they did to get behind it, it wasn’t going to reach an audience. So it died a painful but very quick death.

  CHAPTER 21

  Scotty

  *

  ROBERT ALTMAN: In all the pictures from Thieves Like Us to Kansas City, Scotty Bushnell was very, very involved. She was like a producer, a confidante
. She did the casting, she did the wardrobe. And, uh, she was a big support. She died not long ago.

  * * *

  JOHN SCHUCK: We went to Denison University together in Granville, Ohio. Scotty was in costume in the theater department. She was a bit of a renegade. Outspoken, I guess, at times insecure. Different. She had large eyes and huge shadows under them and she was a very heavy smoker. She usually looked unkempt. She wasn’t heavy, but she didn’t wear tight-fitting stuff. She always looked like she was still in the beatnik age. A lot of black. She was a huge collector of stuff. When you went into her apartment it was filled with interesting things, old washing machines [laughs]. She wasn’t eccentric in that way, at least I never thought of her as being that way, but maybe she was. She married a man by the name of Bill Bushnell.

  BILL BUSHNELL (theater impresario): One night around 1973 I was in Westwood coming out of a movie theater and I ran into Leon Ericksen, one of Bob’s designers. He said, “I had a fight with Bob and I’m not going to do Thieves Like Us.” I called Bob and asked him if he was looking for designers. I said, “I want you to meet a young designer, Jackson De Govia.” In the meantime I called Jack and said, “Here’s the deal. I can set you up with Bob Altman, but if you get the gig you have to hire Scotty as costume designer.” Jack said fine. He got the gig and he hired Scotty to do the clothes on Thieves Like Us.

  Producer Scotty Bushnell, with Robert Altman and Elliott Gould, on the set of California Split

  Jackson’s relationship with Bob was like oil and water, but Scotty’s was like water and water. She went from there to do the clothes for Nashville. Next thing you know we were getting a divorce and she was working with Bob and becoming indispensable to his operation.