Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

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  JERRY WALSH (friend/lawyer/executor): When he first went to work on The Player he hadn’t done anything that produced any money for some time. I guess Vincent & Theo was probably the last thing, and there wasn’t a lot of money in that. He got some substantial money in 1989 or 1990 from a project that fell through—about the Italian opera composer Rossini, called Rossini! Rossini! Then through ‘91 or so there had to be two or three years there that were very fallow. Because of the success of The Player, Bob got to make Short Cuts and then he also got to make Prêt-à-Porter and Kansas City. All those things brought substantial money. But after that he kept saying, “I can’t understand why I don’t have more money.”

  I said, “You’d been building up that debt that we never paid off.”

  He sold the big Malibu house and he got out of debt, that was in the eighties. And then he started borrowing against the Malibu condominium, and he borrowed against his apartment here in New York, and he had a line of credit with a bank that finally cut that off at some point. And so when we finally did get the money, of course there were substantial taxes to pay on it, and then there was substantial debt to pay off. And he really got pretty comfortable by the middle nineties, but I don’t think he ever had more than maybe two million in the bank that he hadn’t committed to something. But then, making the next picture was always more important than his bank account.

  MATTHEW SEIG: Bob was never a New York independent filmmaker. A lot of people thought of him that way. That’s totally ridiculous. He was completely Hollywood. He had big appetites, he liked to spend a lot of money. He liked to gamble. New York filmmakers don’t gamble. New York filmmakers don’t spend money. Bob would be broke and he’d say, “We’re going to Cannes and we’re going to rent a yacht.”

  And he would have no money and yet we would have to come up with some way to rent a twenty-five-thousand-dollar yacht for a weekend, so he could go there and be Robert Altman. That’s the way Robert Altman was. You didn’t go and sleep on somebody’s couch. You went there and put on a party, because you were Robert Altman. And that was part of how he was going to get the next picture, by never admitting that he didn’t have any money.

  JERRY WALSH: I said to him once, “You know, Bob, I think your ambition is to spend the last nickel you’ve got on the day before you die.”

  He said, “Jerry, I’m much more ambitious than that. I want to find somebody to lend me a lot of money and spend that before I die” [laughs].

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  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: After the surgery, he was recuperating, January, February of ‘96, and that whole year was learning how to live with this and handle possible rejections and medications and a whole regime.

  By the end of ‘96 he had formed a little half-assed company and signed up to produce this TV anthology called Gun. He directed the first one between Christmas and New Year’s of ‘96 and we came here to New York for ‘96 New Year’s Eve. It was really exciting, he looked like a million bucks, he was really back with it, in perfect health, and then ‘97 his first picture started in January, The Gingerbread Man.

  The Gingerbread Man (1998)

  Christopher Tookey, review headlined “Branagh’s Pursuit of a Hit Is Gone With the Wind,” Daily Mail (London), July 24, 1998: Director Robert Altman and star Kenneth Branagh have had up-and-down careers, and The Gingerbread Man, based on a short story by John Grisham, is a low point. It’s a would-be thriller about (surprise, surprise) a thrusting young Southern attorney (played by Branagh). … He becomes carnally, legally and foolishly involved with a mysterious woman (Embeth Davidtz) who wants him to ensure that her deranged husband and seemingly dangerous father (Robert Duvall) is commited to the loony bin. Does she have an ulterior motive? … Why is Branagh’s character being set up? Is he going to end, like other Grisham heroes, taking the law into his own hands and turning vigilante? The answers are stupefyingly obvious from the first half-hour. Altman’s direction is half-hearted hackwork, terribly lacking in suspense and excitement. It’s clear that he is using the picture to finance some movie he really wants to make.

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  KENNETH BRANAGH: He assumed a certain kind of cynicism about the business and yet he sort of was an embodiment of the phrase “This terrible business has been very good to me.” One of the ways in which Bob protected himself from the excesses of his own enthusiasm and vulnerable-making passion was to be robustly practical about it. He might have told himself he was, but he wasn’t really capable of being a mercenary gun for hire. What attracted him was the sort of creative partnership of what he naughtily hoped might be the creative collision between him and John Grisham.

  It was a script that had been around for a little while that had some notoriety and sort of acclaim because it was by Grisham. And yet I think it was an early screenplay of Grisham’s, so some people felt maybe it needed some work. I said, “Come back when you’ve found someone—a director.” They said to my great surprise that Robert Altman was interested in it. It seemed to me to be a very interesting combination. When I spoke to Robert for the first time by telephone, he seemed to believe—in Altman terms—the Grisham structure was terrifically helpful. It was much more structured than Bob might normally allow and he was excited by that.

  When I came to work on it, I found that with Bob there were very appealing contradictions. In the work, a man who clearly prepared and worried a great deal about what any particular day or scene would bring. But at the same time, he would leave a massive gap between his preparation and the mood and feeling and atmosphere in the scene. He would leave an enormous amount unplanned, so there was a spirit of creative anarchy. So you were never really sure how much Bob had set up and how much was happening before your very eyes.

  He had the paint ready, the palette ready, the colors and the canvas ready, but he wouldn’t plan the picture until we were all there.

  An example is one short scene in a pet shop with two children. When I arrived on the unit base, they said Bob was down by the river, where a couple of hundred yards of festival was planned, a carnival. Bob says, “I want you to start here, Branagh. I want you to move toward the camera and on the way I want you to make stuff up.”

  I am in the cliché—I am working with animals and children. And I’m in a foreign accent. And it’s not what I’ve planned for. He said, “That’s good for you British actors to experience.”

  I asked, “Anything set up?”

  “Yeah. The phone might ring.”

  And it did. When he said that, I knew he loved me and I knew it would be fine.

  DAVID LEVY: With Gingerbread Man, just before it came out, he kind of went to war with Polygram, the financier/distributor of that picture. And it was so unnecessary. … After the fourth screening, they took the picture away from him, and they had some hack—I’m sorry, experienced, but a hack—recut the thing. And it was dreadful. And they tested that. And that screening’s numbers were worse than the first one we ever did before we started making changes. So, faced with that reality, they gave the picture back to him, but they buried it. I want to say there were never more than seventeen prints in circulation, I think.

  KENNETH BRANAGH: I think he was trying to create happenings in the film, to try and capture life in an unexpected way that at the same time worked inside familiar genres. He wanted to work in and subvert those genres. He was not a man who talked much about the first act or third act or the story-arc stuff. He didn’t want knowable, tangible coherence. His sensibility was a poetic one that tried to embrace within a passion for cinema the American tradition of moviemaking and to infuse that with the poetic, sometimes anarchic deconstruction of the traditional architecture of genre films.

  To have acted with Robert Altman, under his direction, was to have tasted a certain kind of freedom, sometimes a certain kind of fear, knowing that an invisible hand is holding yours through that process.

  DAVID LEVY: That was just a horrible, horrible exercise, and he really got upset over it. He got sick ove
r it and he went to the hospital. He was depleted. I don’t know what the medical aspects of it were, but he was so depressed and bummed about that whole situation, which was still ongoing when he was in the hospital. He was saying things to me—I don’t think I’ve ever told Kathryn this—that he was so utterly fatalistic. It was really worrisome. He’s sitting there. “I’ve had a good ride, it’s her I’m worried about.” All this kind of stuff.

  That is when Steve Altman and I got on a plane, took ourselves to Mississippi, scouted the state up and down, seventeen cities and towns, to find the place to shoot Cookie’s Fortune. We came back to that hospital room, we put a map up, we put the video in, and we had all kinds of pictures, and we put on a dog and pony show for him in the hospital, and he got juiced. He got really excited about making a movie again. I looked at that as a turning point, where he was able to put Gingerbread behind him and look forward to the next project. It’s a cliché, but the work seemed literally like lifeblood in that instance.

  CHAPTER 28

  Mr. A and the Women

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  Cookie’s Fortune (1999)

  Janet Maslin, review headlined “From Altman, a Salome Story with Southern Sugar and Spite,” The New York Times, April 2, 1999: The sweet assurance and guerrilla wit of Robert Altman’s vintage ensemble films make a serenely captivating return with “Cookie’s Fortune.” In this seamlessly copacetic treat, Mr. Altman once again dreams up a well-rounded community of symbiotic oddballs, then effortlessly lures the viewer into their world. With a fine cast working on a single, nicely eccentric wavelength, he and the screenwriter Anne Rapp turn picturesque Holly Springs, Miss., into a hotbed of grudges, power struggles, family secrets and historical footnotes, all presented with the same rueful overview.

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  ANNE RAPP (screenwriter): My ex-husband used to work with Bob Altman on his movies. He was an assistant director. They both loved the ponies and went to the racetrack a lot. Somehow that’s how our relationship started. I had been working as a script supervisor for fifteen years, but I never held script for Bob.

  A short story that I wrote was published. It was a one-page story—most of the fiction in Gordon Lish’s publication was short fiction. I was script supervising on a movie in New York. Bob was cutting Kansas City in L.A. His editor at the time was Geri Peroni, and I was able to sublease her apartment in New York because she was in L.A. with Bob. So we were conversing once a week about her mail. That was my very first published short story—so it was a very exciting time for me. I sent her one with her mail one week. I guess Bob picked it up and read it. He called me and said, “I love the story and I love the way you write.” We had a conversation about how movies are much more like short stories than novels. I sent him a few more and he loved them.

  Liv Tyler and Charles Dutton in Cookie’s Fortune

  I said, “Give me some time and let me write some more.”

  He said, “No, I need to read some more now.”

  I spent all weekend working on a bunch of stories I had written in Mississippi. Bob was on a plane to the Berlin or Venice film festival with Kansas City and he read them on the plane and he called me from France.

  He said, “I loved the stories and I want to put you under contract to write for me.”

  When Bob first hired me I was in the middle of this short story about an old woman on her way out who misses her husband and is lonely and is starting to struggle up the stairs. She makes the conscious decision that she is ready to join her husband in heaven. She’s estranged from her family, but her nieces who discover her body are ashamed—and they cover up the suicide and it backfires.

  He said, “How does it backfire?”

  I had it one way, but Bob’s the one who said, “Here’s how you make it cinematic.”

  I abandoned the short story and wrote the movie.

  The making of that movie, from script to finish, was the best time of my life. I’ve never had as much fulfillment in my heart about something I’ve done and created.

  PATRICIA NEAL: The years pass and Roald is gone. If I have the story correctly, my daughter Lucy sees Bob Altman at Cannes. And he was so happy to see her—he knows her immediately. It was fantastic. They became good friends.

  He told Lucy everybody was cast except my part, as Cookie. And she said, “My mommy is perfect for it.”

  She had a party and she invited him to look at me, and he decided then that Lucy was right. I had a great time doing it. I really did. He was a very good man. He just let you do what’s natural. Had I ever played a suicide before? Oh God, I think I’ve killed myself lots of times.

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  Dr. T & the Women (2000)

  Andrew Sarris, review headlined “When a Man Loves Too Many Women,” The New York Observer, November 19, 2000: Robert Altman’s Dr. T & the Women, from a screenplay by Anne Rapp, reunites the team responsible for Cookie’s Fortune (1999), which I did not like very much. Hence my delay in catching up with Dr. T, since I do not enjoy bashing a director as admirable as Mr. Altman. To my surprise, Dr. T is quite wonderful, and not the least of its delights is the much-abused Richard Gere, in the seriocomic role of a Dallas gynecologist who finds himself engulfed in the world of womanhood until he can no longer think straight. … Dr. T does get a break of sorts by going out hunting with the guys, but these interruptions in Dr. T’s woman-dominated routines are even more ridiculous and frustrating than the rest of Dr. T’s chaotic life. Some critics have complained that Dr. T & the Women is misogynistic, but I think it is no more so than Buster Keaton’s brilliant Seven Chances (1925). Mr. Altman is never condescending to the women, only somewhat fearful of their amazing power and persistence.

  ANNE RAPP: I never had any sense that Bob was a misogynist in life or in his work. I know Bob loved women and wanted to be around women. He was more comfortable in the world of women than in the world of men. He would be the first to tell you that. I think what happened was when Bob wrote the scene with Hot Lips in M*A*S*H, it was something that no one had done before. It was a shocking thing and no one ever let go of that. I think critics look for a place to call Bob misogynistic. They look for that with Bob because of that one scene. He did the same thing with Julianne Moore with Short Cuts—all Bob did was something that nobody had done before. How many scenes have you seen with women naked on top? Another director would have had her spill wine on her top and have a sexy scene with her topless or in a lacy bra. Bob did something different.

  At the Toronto Film Festival, before we even started, before anyone even asked a question, Bob said, “I just want to say one thing. If anybody in this room has a question about misogyny, I want to just point out that this film was written by a woman.” Everyone in the room laughed. He just set the tone right there.

  Announcement headlined “Women in Film to Present ‘Mentor Award,’ to Robert Altman,” November 15, 2001: From Altman’s first project to his upcoming release of Gosford Park, he has mentored hundreds of women—from producers, to writers, to costume designers. Altman has also directed numerous celebrated actresses in such films as M*A*S*H, Images, 3 Women, A Wedding, Nashville, Short Cuts, The Player and Prêt-à-Porter. “It is especially fitting for Women in Film to honor Robert Altman with the 2001 Mentor Award since he has been at the forefront of discovering, nurturing and showcasing some of the most important women working in entertainment for more than five decades,” said WIF president Hollace Davids.

  ROBERT BENTON: Altman was a very complicated person. Altman’s history with people is like this. When they did the first picture together, Cookie’s Fortune, he loved Anne Rapp. She did a great job. The second picture, Dr. T & the Women, everything she did he changed. It was as though he couldn’t stand that everybody loved the script of Cookie’s Fortune. He was not going to let that happen again.

  He is like the scorpion in the story of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion says, “I can’t get to the other side of the river. Will you carry me across on your back?” The frog says, “What? I ca
n’t do that, you’ll just sting me.” The scorpion says, “Why would I sting you? We’d both drown.” The frog says, “Okay.” Suddenly, in the middle of the river, the scorpion stings the frog. As he’s drowning, as he’s going down, he says to the scorpion, “Why?” The scorpion says, “I can’t help it. It’s my nature.”

  ANNE RAPP: Bob has a reputation as being difficult on writers. You won’t hear that from me. I would show him something, and if I did nine things horribly and there was one little seed, one little character, one line that worked, his eyes would light up and he’d say, “That’s it, you hit the nail right there! Now take that and go write that.”

  I would walk out of his office and feel like I kicked ass. Any other Hollywood meeting I was in, they’d rake you over the coals about those nine things you did wrong. Bob had that ability to make you walk out of his office and feel like running back to your computer. He had an amazing way of dealing with artists in vulnerable positions.

  Everyone thinks Bob goes in there and purposely changes it and lets the actors do something different. What he does is tell the actors, “You can do whatever you want in the scene. If you love the script, do it.” Luckily enough, on Cookie the actors liked the script enough that they could do the script.

  I was making less money than I was making as a script supervisor. But look at what I was getting to do: He gave me something that was priceless, to get two movies made in three years. Screenwriters write their whole life and don’t get anything made. He started an entire career for me. He gave me the chance. There’s a part of me that would have done it for nothing. The reason Bob didn’t pay people very well was he often had to scrape to get his movies made. He went the total independent route for the better part of his career. He was making movies on a shoestring, so everybody is going to get shoestring wages. A lot of people bitch and complain a bit because you can get paid in this industry very well. I would hear grumbling and complaining, but it was never an issue for me. He knew that in the movie business, everyone is going to change you and exploit you to the best of their ability. But he never did. He never took advantage of me.