Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  PAUL DOOLEY: The budget went from thirteen million to twenty million. The studio never quite believed it was the weather. They’re half a world away, and they figured the director had screwed up several days or was drunk or something or ruined the dailies. He would say it was bad weather, you know? But it really was terrible weather.

  ROBIN WILLIAMS: The toughest part was, as we went along the weather didn’t play along. … And the studio basically pulled the plug at the wrong time, right when we needed the money to finish, and for special effects. They had none. I remember we had a meeting with Robert Evans. I think he was sitting there a bit tweaked, and I said, “How are we going to end this?”

  “I don’t know. How?”

  And then I said, “I could walk on water, like Jesus.” I was joking.

  “That’s great, let’s do it!”

  It was like, “Wait a minute. No, Bob, no, no.” I mean, the cartoon Popeye could run on the water, but at that point we didn’t have the special effects. In the cartoons his feet would turn into a propeller and he could go flying through the water. But we had three Maltese guys and me on a winch underwater being pulled very quickly.

  And they left Shelley in the water with an octopus that couldn’t be run. And it was that Ed Wood moment where she’s going, “Oh help!” But we kept going and Bob said, “Just shoot it. We got it.”

  ROBERT EVANS: From the costuming to the casting to the postproduction, I loved the film. I think it was possibly his most ambitious undertaking. Because it was so different but not obscure. It’s terribly entertaining. I think Bob was twenty years ahead of his time. I think the picture is terrific. I think he did a wonderful job on it that no one else could have done.

  All of the problems you could ever have on a film, we had. From the country not wanting us there, to the weather not wanting us there, to the studio not liking our budget. It was twenty million, and it made money. I defended Bob against the studio, which felt he was too extravagant about things, which he was not. Anybody else would have made the picture, it would have cost twice as much. The picture was a success financially, and I really thought this was going to be the best thing I was ever associated with.

  I think they should rerelease it today. I think the picture is a work of genius. And I’ve watched it recently. If you can see a film and sit there for two hours and laugh and cry during that two hours, and be entertained, I think you have a hit. But I was wrong. It was one of the biggest disappointments of my career. I think it was Bob’s best work.

  JULES FEIFFER: I only found out five years later, maybe ten years later, that it was one of the top ten moneymakers that year, because Paramount was circulating rumors, calling it Evansgate. It seems to me the combination of Evans, who they hated by this time, and Altman, who they probably hated always, made them want this movie to fail. And whatever I didn’t like about the movie, people liked the movie. Kids loved the movie.

  I got a call about it a few days after its release, from Chicago, from a woman who introduced herself on the phone as Segar’s daughter. She said she had heard me on one or two radio interviews talk about her father, and how I was trying to make this movie a testament to him. She thought this was absolute nonsense and didn’t believe it because she had heard people talk this way before and it never, ever amounted to anything. But she’d just come from the screening and she said it was her father up there on the screen, and she wanted to thank me. I thanked her and I hung up the phone and I wept.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: You should watch Popeye with a kid. Kids love that movie. They get it.

  ROBIN WILLIAMS: It’s a beautiful film, man. It’s done with the same love he made every other film with. He told me later on, “Don’t always go with a critical response. Go with, ‘What did you do there?’” Yeah, we did do some really great stuff. I think it was just because it was my first movie, it was like the illusion—”I want the studio to make money.”

  At one point I think he got kind of pissed that I was making fun of it. But I said, “Listen, I’m a comic, I have to kind of do that.” I said, “You run it backwards and it has a happy ending.”

  He said a great thing. He said, “A lot of people in the business are making shoes. I’m in the business of making gloves.” I look back on the experience and I go, “Goddamn, man, it was an honor.” I think you come away working on an Altman movie going, “Well, that was something.” You don’t come away blasé, you learn a lot about being gutsy, about putting your ass on the line, trying something. Hey, dude, put it out there.

  I think for the first one out of the gate, that’s a pretty amazing experience. It’s kind of like Apocalypse Now without the death…. For your first movie to get the shit kicked out of it, it toughened me up. It’s kind of, in a weird way, a gift. It was like, “Hey, now you go off and you work. You’re no longer a virgin. You’ve been in your first battle. It wasn’t a total victory but we didn’t get slaughtered. So keep going.”

  STEPHEN ALTMAN: It only made sixty million, and of course it cost twenty million to make. So how that translates into bomb, I have no idea. Still, it wasn’t the huge success that everybody thought it was going to be.

  DAVID LEVY: Popeye got a bum rap.

  * * *

  JULES FEIFFER: Bob must have spent so many years simmering [laughs] and building up rage at what he had to put up with to get work from these assholes that when he finally got in a position to do Altman work—and as he discovered how to do Altman work—he was not going to back off for anybody. And he got into endless fights over it and he lost opportunities, I’m sure, and he got fired from things, but he just didn’t know how to behave any other way. I mean, maybe he felt that once he starts down that road again it won’t stop. I think he was kind of a grown-up Huck Finn.

  He was destined to go into the wilderness. If anything, he willed himself into the wilderness. This was his fate, that he had to butt heads, he had to fight the establishment, and he also was a genius and there’s only a little of genius that’s allowed in American movies. And then we want to go back to doing what we do best, which is Star Wars 42.

  ACT III

  1981–2006

  Robert Altman abandons—and is abandoned by—Hollywood, sells his studio, sells his Malibu movie-star house, films plays, films operas, moves to Paris, becomes a “Player” again, gets a new heart, loses a kidney, collects his Oscar, embraces his family, and goes out with his boots on.

  *

  CHAPTER 23

  The Wilderness

  *

  ROBERT ALTMAN: It’s hard to take the idea that maybe you’re not that different from everyone else when you’ve spent all your life trying to convince other people that you are different. And consequently, you’re trying to convince yourself that you are different. You’re trying to live up to the myth, and before that, you’re creating a myth. I created this myth and now I have to live up to this myth.

  * * *

  STEPHEN ALTMAN: After Popeye, it got very rough. He was right at the top. Popeye spiraled him down to nothing. Nobody wanted to deal with him. I don’t know if I would have been able to deal with that.

  JERRY WALSH (friend/lawyer/executor): He went through a period where he had a hard time raising money to do anything. He didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, really, but I just knew there were times when he wasn’t working on something, he wanted to work on something. He couldn’t because there was no money, and people would not answer his phone calls. That’s the thing he complained about the most. He always wanted to be in touch. He always answered his phone calls. You called Bob Altman in the middle of a film or when he was juggling fifteen balls at once, and by the end of the day you had a return call—and I wasn’t alone in that. He just never ended a day without responding to everybody trying to reach him unless he just didn’t want to speak to the person, but it wasn’t because he was too busy. He would always make time. And it drove him crazy that Sam Cohn wouldn’t answer his phone calls. He forgave Sam for it, but he used to say, “It’s just a sicknes
s. I don’t understand it.”

  Directing one of his Stage Productions in the 1980S

  As he said: “I’m a very extreme personality. I always have been. It’s just the way I am.” Think about the difficulties he had in the forties and fifties getting started, followed by the tremendous success of M*A*S*H and the big contract that let him do four or five big movies. The relief from the frustration and failures of the sixties, released by M*A*S*H and those other things, into the seventies where he was the king of the world—buying the studio and going to get into the music business, and the big house in Malibu—the ego was probably just over the top. Then to get into the late seventies and hit the wall, which he did, was probably very hard for him, I think.

  SAM COHN (agent): I saw Bob really angry lots of times. It didn’t last long, and never on the set. It was primarily at the suits.

  One of his precepts was that he was going to create this group of people who would be together—and the demands on him financially were substantial. He thought that was the way movies were supposed to be made—the same guys doing it over and over again. In some instances he had to use his own money to pay them. Bob and his actors always remained good friends—even if the movie was a dog.

  He was very important in my life—because of his guts and heart.

  MARK RYDELL (actor and director): He wasn’t the flavor of the month at that time. But Bob had a remarkable elasticity; his ability to come back was brilliant, it was incomparable. Very few people could survive a series of bad pictures, you know? You make two bad pictures in a row and you’re out of the business. It’s not so much bad pictures—they may be wonderful. Pictures that don’t work commercially and financially. But Bob never let the industry beat him. He created his own initiative. He went out and got the money to make his pictures. He rejected the status quo and wouldn’t be deterred. If he wanted to make a picture he would see that it got made. He would fucking get the money somewhere. I admired that immensely.

  When jobs were tough to come by, he’d say, “There’s no need to worry. I know there’ll always be someone to come along and hire me, just to add a little class to their life.” You’ve got to laugh, you’ve got to love him.

  DAVID LEVY (producer): Right when Popeye was released we were preparing a film called Lone Star based on the stage play by Jim McClure. And that project was put in turnaround, which meant death. Literally the week of the Popeye release, or within a week. It didn’t live up to the expectations of certain people. Expectations count for a lot, and Bob didn’t help his own cause. You know, I remember him around this time, I don’t know if you can find this stuff, but he gave an interview or two and referred to Diller and Eisner in uncomplimentary terms. That couldn’t have helped matters at all. I think certain powers that be in this town just decided it wasn’t worth it to them. It’s like, “Fine, I’ll take a risk, but I don’t need to be called names in the press on top of it.” So we had a project put in turnaround right away at that time. And it was very much a time in the wilderness.

  After Popeye there was that eight-year period where he was grabbing a lot of different kinds of work ranging from operas to television plays to what have you. He would do what he could do, basically. Eighty-one, eighty-two were very painful times. He sold the facility, Lion’s Gate. Basically he felt he had to—I still maintain there was a way that maybe it didn’t have to happen. I wished that weren’t necessary, but he felt it was.

  Physically, at Lion’s Gate you had three levels going on. In the basement—this seems so funny now—you had wardrobe and a prop shop which was basically chock-full of stuff from movies past that could maybe work again in the future or who knows, be rented or sold or what have you. In the final days of Lion’s Gate we literally were taking it out to swap meets in Pasadena. The last months in that building, I turned from his executive assistant to a moving man along with a couple other guys. We put stuff in Scotty’s house until the other shoe dropped and he figured out where he was going to be. On the lower level, it was a combination of editorial suites and the dubbing stage. A good one. A place where you could do all the final work on any kind of picture. We certainly did on Popeye and others of his, but it was also used by other movies. I know Alan Pakula did Starting Over there. So that was the street level, the ground-floor level. And then upstairs was primarily what might be called executive offices, ranging from Bob’s and mine, Scotty’s, that sort of thing. Bob had his own publicity operation there. He had, in a way, his own distribution entity, although that was starting to go away by early ‘79, when I got on board. Again, it was supposed to be a studio. A development team, an art department for titles and graphics, accounting department, all this was on the second floor. So the idea being you could walk an idea into the building and it could come out the other side a finished film.

  LEONARD COHEN (singer and songwriter): He either told me this or I saw this: While he was sitting with some of his scriptwriters and production people working on one of the next films—this would have been a few years after we met—the creditors were coming and removing furniture. I think that actually happened and he had this wonderful kind of gleeful sense of abandon that things couldn’t get much worse.

  DAVID LEVY: I think things had gotten to a point where to maintain the status quo was just too hard. At its peak, that place had over fifty employees. The idea was to pay them a salary fifty-two weeks a year. So it wasn’t just about, “Oh, you get a check on a project or checks on a project and then you go fallow for six months.” So, a lot of overhead. He was a bit of a micromanager. He got too involved in the business aspect of things. He was too—I won’t exactly say hands-on—but too interested. Instead of getting experts and letting them do their thing and letting them try and market the thing, it was too much about it being his toy or serving his individual needs. And his career was at a point where that wasn’t enough to sustain a facility and a payroll like that. It just wasn’t. So it got too hard. It was too grand. When he was going in that building and building that company to another level, he was producing a Robert Benton movie, he had a Bob Young movie, he had an Alan Rudolph picture. It wasn’t just about him, but then when those movies don’t perform and the thing couldn’t grow, it really only had one direction to go because he wasn’t interested in just having a building and machines that other people would use. It was never just about, “We’ll serve the film community.” It was never just about, “Let’s turn a profit with this thing.” It was about serving him and the artists and the projects that he wanted to do, and they just weren’t sustainable from an economic standpoint.

  That’s sobering, to know that you’re turning stuff out and the marketplace is not receiving it, and your reps are not able to make deals on your behalf that are going to enable you to continue bankrolling a business of that magnitude. It was supposed to be a mini-studio where he and the anointed could thrive, do their thing, and create. And he had to turn his back on that notion.

  I still remember the day he made the decision. He got on the phone with Kathryn—this would have been, I guess, in ‘81. He said, “The way I see it, we’ve got twenty good years left.” Well, I’m pleased he was wrong about that—he at least had twenty-five and she’s still with us. “And this is what we’re going to do. We’ll base out of New York and sell the place in Malibu Cove.” God, I loved that place. He just had to regroup.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: We didn’t sell Malibu for money. We were leasing it to Diana Ross while we were in Paris. While she was there, Dyan Cannon married this wealthy guy, and she wanted to know if there was any way she could buy it. They came up with a big offer. We never put it on the market. We just sold it.

  DAVID LEVY: I think he was under a lot of pressure and I think he wanted to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. He always had a tremendous belief in himself. Other people might disagree, but he was terribly shrewd about money. I remember he used to say to me, “You never want to be more than this much above water”—holding his hand up to his nose. In other words, he fe
lt the money was there to be used, whether it was in life or in the work or what have you. He wasn’t interested very much in this idea of security or nest eggs or anything like that. But I daresay that at the time he sold, the water wasn’t up to his nose, it was well over his head.

  FRANK SOUTH (playwright): It wasn’t an easy time. He and Kathryn and I were in his apartment in New York and he had just gotten off the phone. And he said, “I’ve got to sell everything.” There was a hardback chair right up against the wall, and he just sat down in it. He was going over things in his head and he had hit a point of having to make a decision. He said, “I just can’t believe it.” He looked at me and said, “I’ve even got to sell my car.” I said, “That was a great car.” It was a brand-new brown BMW, and he had loaned it to me when we were in Malibu to drive to visit my great-aunt. He said, “Yeah, it was.” Then he said, “I’ve got to sell the house. I’ll get a couple million for that.”