Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  I felt like a good writer for the three years when I was with Bob. I have had nothing but doubts since.

  * * *

  Obituary in the Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2000: Tommy Thompson, veteran producer of television’s “The Lucy Show” who also worked extensively on the films of Robert Altman, has died of a heart attack. He was 73. Thompson died Friday during location shooting of the Altman film that he was co-producing, “Dr. T and the Women,” starring Richard Gere.

  * * *

  Robert Altman, from DVD commentary on Dr. T and the Women: It’s so expensive to make these films that if you don’t have success you’re suddenly going to be in a position where you can’t make ‘em. You’re not going to be able to raise the money to make the films. That would be a disaster in my life, because that’s all I do, it’s all I care to do, it’s all I desire. It’s where I get my kicks. It’s where I exercise my mind. To suddenly find out that you can’t do that anymore, because people don’t like what you do, can be quite dreadful.

  DAVID LEVY: His time in the wilderness, if you will, was maybe a bit humbling, and while he remained very, very true to his principles, he wasn’t interested in going back to the wilderness, okay? He wanted to keep working and keep making pictures. I can cite you a number of times in the last fifteen years when he walked away from projects he could have had because he didn’t like the direction they were going or the way things were smelling. But by the same token, he wanted to keep working, because for him work was play and he wanted to stay in the game. I think he was maybe more observant, maybe more considerate of the other elements in what I’ll call the business process of things than he had been earlier. Because the world was his oyster and then that went away, I think he was just a bit more considerate of the money and the suits, because one must be if you’re going to continue to get to do this.

  ANNE RAPP: Bob made a movie every year. Every time he had one ready to go, all he was doing was talking up the next one. He didn’t linger on the past, on successes or failures. I always told Bob he’s like a farmer. When it’s the season you plant and you water and you harvest. If you have a great crop it doesn’t mean you don’t plant the next season. And if you get hailed out one year you don’t spend the next year licking your wounds over it. You get back out there and plant the next year’s crop. A good farmer and a good artist just keep turning out the work. I’m not one of these people who revere the Salingers who disappear for twenty years. And then everybody’s like, “Oh my God—the artist is back!” Bob never went into the cave.

  David Thompson, story headlined “Robert Altman’s Decade of Astonishments,” The New York Times, June 11, 2000: “Short Cuts” (1993) may be his last major work, and we may not have much reason to expect more from a man his age. But old man Altman is about as easily classifiable as the Luis Buñuel of his own 70’s. In other words, watch out, and remember that he has been written off too many times for critics to feel secure.

  CHAPTER 29

  Home Stretch

  *

  Amy Barrett, Q&A headlined “Questions for Robert Altman; Arrogance Is Bliss,” The New York Times, December 16, 2001:

  Q: You’ve made some of America’s most celebrated films. But your last couple have had a markedly different reception. Do you have any sense of how your latest, “Gosford Park,” might fare?

  A: I think every one is going to be the greatest thing since hash.

  Q: Since hash or since “M*A*S*H”?

  A: Hash, I said.

  Q: Right, hash.

  * * *

  Dialogue from Gosford Park:

  CONSTANCE TRENTHAM (Played by Maggie Smith): Tell me, how much longer are you going to go on …making films?

  IVOR NOVELLO (Played by Jeremy Northam): I suppose that rather depends on how much longer the public want to see me in them.

  Gosford Park (2001)

  Stephen Holden, review in The New York Times, December 21, 2001: Robert Altman’s film “Gosford Park”… is a virtuoso ensemble piece to rival the director’s “Nashville” and “Short Cuts” in its masterly interweaving of multiple characters and subplots. The film, set in November 1932, takes place on a grand country estate where well over a dozen aristocrats and their servants gather for a weekend shooting party during which their host, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon), is murdered. … Hatreds and rivalries abound both upstairs and below, and sexual shenanigans cross class boundaries. … What makes the achievement of “Gosford Park” all the more remarkable is that Mr. Altman is 76. If the movie’s cool assessment of the human condition implies the dispassionate overview of a man who has seen it all, the energy that crackles from the screen suggests the clear-sighted joie de vivre of an artist still deeply engaged in the world.

  Bob Balaban, as movie producer Morris Weissman, and to his left Jeremy Northam, as actor Ivor Novello, in Gosford Park. Behind them are Natasha Wightman and Tom Hollander.

  * * *

  BOB BALABAN (actor/producer/director): I met Bob at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel when he was casting Brewster McCloud. I was just one of a number of young men who might have been right for the part of the boy who flies in the Houston Astrodome. We got to be friendly over the years, twenty-five or thirty years, because of my cousin Judy, whose father used to be the president of Paramount, Barney Balaban. Judy knew everybody in Hollywood. Over the years we just got friendlier, ‘cause he was so friendly and Kathryn was so outgoing and adorable.

  I had produced and directed some movies myself and developed some things for television, and I was sitting around one day, going, “What wonderful director do I know who if I came to them with a movie, a movie might actually get made?” And I thought, “Well, there’s Robert Altman. I know him, he does brilliant things, he’s very outside the box, so he won’t mind that I’m not really a producer, exactly.”

  I thought it would be really, really interesting to put Robert Altman in a very traditional circumstance, which would mean England. And I came in with only the basic germ of the idea, which is funny because my character—this movie producer—says basically the same thing in Gosford Park. They say, “What’s the movie about?” And basically I just say what I said to Bob the first time we talked about this. You know, a bunch of rich people get together at a country house for the weekend, around 1930. I didn’t say this in the movie, but I told Bob it should have as many earmarks of a traditional Agatha Christie plot as we could muster. Somebody gets killed and they think it’s one of the party guests, but of course it didn’t have to be. And when I said that, Bob was intrigued.

  He said, “The only thing is, I don’t really like the upper class too much. How about we just have this take place with all the servants?”

  And I said, “Well, obviously you should do anything you want, but if you like this idea, I think you’re going to enjoy being bound by some of the conventions of this traditional murder mystery, ‘cause then you can press against it and destroy the convention if you want. But I think you’re going to enjoy the tension that that creates.”

  One of the things Robert loved to do that I thought just worked especially well in this movie was having two worlds going on at the same time. He loved intercutting back and forth. There was such a great energy and a feeling of life when you have two series of lives going on together.

  When we got organized to do Gosford Park, there came the point when we needed a writer, and I suggested to Robert that Julian Fellowes would probably be a wonderful choice. So Bob talked to him on the phone. Julian was really aware that this was possibly going to be his big break in show business, which it was. And not everybody is like this, but Julian’s ears perked up immediately. “Okay, I’ll be there tomorrow, I’ll write everything.” He was so accommodating. He wrote a two-page treatment, which immediately meant he knew more than we possibly would know. Because you had to know what happened in a British house in the country when you had these parties there. We didn’t know. We never would have known. Julian came from that world. He knew.

&n
bsp; JULIAN FELLOWES (actor and screenwriter): I was a complete unknown. I had a couple of children’s TV scripts made. I thought, “Obviously, this isn’t going to happen.” It’s like something out of a Hollywood musical—a completely unknown actor is invited to write a script and the script gets made and it’s a hit.

  BOB BALABAN: We thought we had financing lined up. It was enough to get Bob over to London, and we began to spend our own money—Bob and I financed the screenplay, we financed the preproduction, and it was all very frightening. And he was over there in London. Mary Selway, our casting director, a brilliant, wonderful woman, was calling actors, and everybody wanted to meet with Bob. He would have tea in his hotel and actors would come by and he’d just charm them to death. And they would commit to being in the movie without dates or a contract or anything else.

  And it fell apart. And in between it falling apart and coming back together, we tried everything. One of Bob’s old investors said that if Bob would rewrite the last thirty pages and make it be much more satisfying of a murder mystery, he would give us like eighteen million dollars. Well, that’s a lot of money. We could have had salaries. You know, not that it was an uncomfortable shoot, but it would have been nice to have made money. And Bob was like, “No, this is the movie. I’m not rewriting the movie for you.”

  So then the investor said, “Well, okay, I’ll give you twelve million.”

  At that point Bob said, “We’ll get it somewhere else. I’m not going to make the movie with somebody who tells me how to rewrite my movie.”

  And you know, he was right, actually. So we did end up with about eleven or something like that. But in between it was terrifying. I’d be calling Bob all the time. We’d have our lists—you call this one, I’ll call this one. Nobody wanted to invest in it. They didn’t like the script, basically.

  JULIAN FELLOWES: For the people putting up the money, it was all terribly frightening. Here was this film about this very arcane world that nobody knew the rules about. For one thing, the servants took their employers’ names downstairs—it was quirky. The executives couldn’t understand it. They said, “Bob, this film already has more characters than the Second World War and now they all have the same name!”

  BOB BALABAN: The first thing that struck us, both of us, about the screenplay was the fact that all of the servants are referred to by the name of the person who’s their master. They didn’t have identities, even. And you didn’t even have to comment on it, you know what I mean, it was just like, “Oh, Jesus Christ, these people aren’t even important enough to have a name. They’re just named for the guy upstairs.” That said more about Robert’s take on the world than anything else you could have had in the movie.

  What you couldn’t tell when you read the script was the way that Bob would develop these nasty petty little people who lived upstairs, the rich people. Bob was a painter and all of these characters were blips and dabs that all came together, but you couldn’t see it until you stood back and looked at the canvas, really. So people who read it didn’t like it. There were too many characters, and it wasn’t a murder mystery at all. At one point during preproduction Bob laughingly, but seriously, said, “Let’s not solve the murder at all.”

  So Julian and I were like, “Um, maybe it would be a good idea to solve the murder.”

  And in fact I think it frightened people, the investors, to see Robert Altman directing a movie that you’re used to seeing from Merchant Ivory because it had to be respectful and Bob is not respectful.

  JULIAN FELLOWES: Every time they wanted to replace me—”Maybe someone could come in to do a little fixing, a little polish”—Bob just wouldn’t let it happen. You have to be very unafraid. There is something about the film industry that is very castrating. There’s so much money involved, and they’re talking to you, and your whole brain becomes this negotiation party. Bob was stronger than all that. I have absolutely no hesitation to saying that—not just keeping me on as sole writer, but also holding on to the details of this obscure way of life, of this class that had been forgotten, in this country that is tiny—that is one hundred percent due to him.

  BOB BALABAN: Everything that frightened people about the movie was the thing that Bob loved about the movie. Bob liked large noisy groups of people. And that’s how he liked to live. And he liked them in his movies. I know people have said this, but in a way Bob’s movies were all one long movie. And it was in some ways like his life. They didn’t come to a lot of conclusions at the end. Sometimes it was very hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys—there’s not a lot of black and white clashing around. It’s all pretty complicated. And he loved large groups of people.

  It was fine in the beginning. As we got closer to production and as there was less financing and he was in London and I was here in New York and we were desperately looking for money, the peaks and the valleys were enormous. He could be very quixotic and he could be very temperamental, but it wasn’t without cause. And it was certainly understandable. But in a way, you could say he had two different natures. The nature that kept everything in his head and worried and worried and worried, and he was thinking about making the movie and also holding in his mind the possibility that this thing that he had now fallen in love with might not happen. And there he was in England and practically mortgaging his house, as we were all thinking of doing, and so the strain financially was horrendous.

  But you must think of movies as childbirth for Bob, which they were, and they were all his children. There were no stepchildren among them. It didn’t matter what anybody else thought about the movie, they were all equally beautiful and blonde and blue-eyed, all of them. There was that terrifying period when his child might not get born, and he was in love already and it was the thing he lived for. So he was very irascible when it was shaky.

  When we were doing Gosford Park I was aware that there were a number of other movies he was also trying to work on. I didn’t want them to fall apart but I wasn’t unhappy when I realized that the laws of attrition were saying Gosford Park is going to be the one that we’re going to have to make. And in fact, he had to make the movie. Nobody in their right mind would go sit in London and meet Maggie Smith and Clive Owen and Helen Mirren and a thousand other people. It didn’t make sense. Why would you go and do that before your financing was set? How could you do that? And yet, he knew that everything was going to help it move forward. So, as scary as it was, as the tightrope walk was getting more and more dangerous, it was imperative that he be acting as if the movie were going to get made because that would help it get made.

  DAVID LEVY: We got to London, three of us, Bob and Steve Altman and I, and I believe it was Halloween night of 2000. We went out with this Sri Lankan guy who was allegedly going to finance the picture. We got back from dinner, the three of us, and it was, “Well, this is going to work out, isn’t it?” And I said no. I said, “I don’t care how many times the guy’s banker called him during dinner, this isn’t going to happen with this guy.” Sure enough. So we spent a couple of months in a very tough place while all the casting was going on and key crew was being recruited.

  Directing Emily Watson, as maid/lover Elsie, in Gosford Park

  STEPHEN ALTMAN: David Levy, myself, and Bob went and lived in a little apartment in London, and he just started reeling in the fish. He had a script and no money and the investors were all fakes or not to be trusted. And it’s, “Hello, Maggie Smith? Do you want to be in this movie?” “Is anybody else in it?” “Well, I’m seeing Michael Gambon tonight.” As soon as those two say yes, everyone is like, “Oh sure, Bob, anything. If you get a movie we’d love to work with you.” Pretty soon he’s got thirty-five superstars, all working on his picture. We would put the actors’ pictures up on the walls when the investors came over. I made a model of the set, which I actually used for the movie. But it was all dog and pony con show. We were doing The Sting. But for a good reason. We wanted to make some money [laughs]. We wanted the picture to go, no matter what it was.

 
; BOB BALABAN: The minute we started really getting close to shooting, it was as if somebody had given him a hundred tranquilizers. He was just enormously happy in a way that spread everywhere he went on the set. You could hear it in his headset. Everybody on the set was happy. Everybody who worked on the set was thrilled to see him—the makeup people, the hair people, anybody working on the set actively. He was just gloriously happy. But he was really a mess before we started.

  * * *

  JULIAN FELLOWES: Bob realized it was kind of a minefield, this whole class thing. He knew that if you were doing some world, if you got all the details right, even people who didn’t know this world would accept its accuracy. It would smell right. He wanted it to be specific—not BBC servant acting, wandering around with a tray. Part of that was he asked me if I would be on the set for the whole shoot. With Bob this was unusual. He and I said my job was to stop him from making a mistake by accident. Of course, a director says that, but then they want everything they want to do not to be a mistake.

  He wanted Mary to be in the dining room. There’s no reason for a lady’s maid to be in a dining room. We’d have these spats. What amazes me now was in the whole time we worked together he never once pulled rank. He never said or even implied, “I am a world-famous director with a million films behind me, and who are you?” We were just these two fat men fighting. That is a paradigm of the man. He was never afraid to fight for what he wanted, but by the same token he never felt he had to use unfair weapons. And I really love him for that.

  The role of the writer in film is an odd one. You are the one part of the creative team that everyone wants to forget exists. The audience wants to think their favorite actor said and did all these wonderful things, and the director wants to think it all came from his mind. And the writer is the one member of the creative team that can be fired up to the last day. We’re like plastic surgeons. Hollywood couldn’t exist without them but nobody wants to know our names.