Altman (Text-Only Edition)

By Kathryn Reed Altman

This intimate and critical biography of the pioneering director explores his life, work, and creative process—with contributions by fellow filmmakers.

For decades, Robert Altman fascinated audiences with films such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, Gosford Park, and many others. He won critical acclaim by combining technical innovation with subversive, satirical humor and impassioned political engage­ment. His ability to explore so many different worlds with a single vision changed the landscape of cinema forever. This signature "Altmanesque" style is, in the words of Martin Scorsese: "as recognizable and familiar as Renoir's brushstrokes or Debussy's orchestrations."

Now, the Altman estate opens its archive to celebrate his extraordinary life and career in this authorized biography. Written by Altman’s widow Kathryn Reed Altman and film critic Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, this volume brims with personal recollections of the director. Alongside the intimate story of his life is a complete historical and critical narrative of Altman’s films and his process.

To honor the Altman trademark of using a wide cast of characters, Altman also features contributions from his collaborators and contemporaries including Frank Barhydt, E. L. Doctorow, Roger Ebert, Jules Feiffer, Julian Fellowes, James Franco, Tess Gallagher, Pauline Kael, Garrison Keillor, Michael Murphy, Martin Scorsese, Lily Tomlin, Alan Rudolph, Michael Tolkin, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Release date: Oct 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781683351917

Book preview

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Martin Scorsese

1 THE EARLY YEARS Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan

Kansas City Bob Frank Barhydt

Something Akin to Love Michael Murphy

2 THE SEVENTIES (PT. I) Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan

Review: McCabe & Mrs. Miller Roger Ebert

Review: Love and Coca Cola Pauline Kael

3 NASHVILLE Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan

Nashville: A Shadow Play of What We Have Become and Where We Might Look for Wisdom Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Review: Coming: Nashville Pauline Kael

An Interview with Lily Tomlin Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan

4 THE SEVENTIES (PT. II) Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan.

Remarks at the Robert Altman Memorial Tribute E. L. Doctorow

Altman After Hours Alan Rudolph

5 THE EIGHTIES Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan

An Interview with Jules Feiffer Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan

Some Thoughts About Tanner ’88 Michael Murphy

6 THE NINETIES Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan

Greener Pastures Michael Tolkin

Robert Altman & Frank Barhydt Tess Gallagher

7 THE AUGHTS Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan

An Interview with Julian Fellowes Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan

Altman James Franco

Bob Garrison Keillor

FILMOGRAPHY

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

BY MARTIN SCORSESE

Robert Altman and I crossed paths fairly often over the years, but I felt like I got to know him intimately through his films. His signature. His human imprint as an artist, as recognizable and familiar as Renoir’s brushstrokes and Debussy’s orchestrations. It seems increasingly precious as the years go by, particularly now, when individual expression in movie-making is so precarious.

I suppose that my first Altman film was M*A*S*H—it was for many people. It took us all by surprise. The irreverence, the freedom, the mixture of comedy and carnage, the Korean renditions of American hits and the voice over the loudspeaker as running commentary or counterpoint, the creative use of the zoom lens and the long lens, the multiple voices on the soundtrack—he was like a great jazz musician, taking us all along on a grand artistic journey.

He changed the way we looked at people and places and listened to voices, and he really changed our understanding of exactly what a scene was. Bob made so many wonderful pictures, but finally it’s all the work taken together that is such a source of wonder.

Bob and I would cross paths from time to time every few years or so, and it was always memorable. He was there at the New York Film Festival in 1973 when Mean Streets was shown, which was a big event for me in so many ways. We met, and I remember that he was so gracious, so reassuring, and entirely complimentary. He really went out of his way for me. It was inspiring, and it meant the world to me.

Ten years later, we ran into each other at an official function on a yacht. We struck up a conversation, and we discovered that we both had pictures, made at the same studio, that had been pulled—The King of Comedy for me, HealtH for him. There we were, both at a crossroads. Given the way things were going in the industry, neither of us could get a picture funded. We were marked men. For a while, at least.

Bob’s solution to the problem was very simple: He just kept working. He persevered. Mind you, this is when he was almost sixty, a time of life when many other people would have given up. He was just getting his second wind—or was it his third? Or maybe his fourth? Bob started in the world of industrial filmmaking, then moved into television with episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Whirlybirds, Peter Gunn, Bonanza, and Combat!, among others. He was able to shift to features in the late sixties, which led to M*A*S*H and that amazing period in the seventies when he made one remarkable picture after another. Then he went into the period I was discussing before, what I guess he might have called his journeyman years in the eighties.

This was inspiring to me, and it should be a model to all young film-makers. He probably figured, Look: This is the business we’re in, this is the way it is—you gamble, and sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose—but you keep playing with whatever you have. He just plowed ahead, working under all kinds of conditions. He shot adaptations of plays by David Rabe and Sam Shepard and Christopher Durang—some on Super 16, like the beautiful Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean by Ed Graczyk. He did television—some one-act plays by Pinter, a tremendous adaptation of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. He did some wonderful work in Europe, including Vincent & Theo. And it seemed that his years in the wilderness only increased his motivation to steal his way back into the system. Which he did in the nineties, with The Player. Imagine breaking back into Hollywood, like a guerrilla fighter, with a picture that cast as tough and sharp and cynical an eye on the movie business as Sunset Boulevard had forty years earlier—and perhaps even less forgivingly than Billy Wilder’s classic. The Player was made with the energy of a young man and the wisdom of an older one.

No matter what the circumstances, Bob’s films remained his and his alone. I never cease to be amazed by the sheer range of his work, and the apparent ease of it. It seemed like he could take on absolutely any kind of material, from The Long Goodbye to The Gingerbread Man, from Thieves Like Us to Gosford Park, from Kansas City to Vincent & Theo, and pull off two things at once: do justice to the material and incorporate the film into his own universe. He did it with apparent ease, and with such evident grace. I was astonished by Gosford Park, the way that he simply went off to England and confidently made this movie, with all these characters coming alive, the movement so fluid, the drama among the people so exact, the sense of place and weather so sharp. (Bob made extraordinary use of weather in picture after picture—the snow in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the desert heat in 3 Women, the falling rain in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, to name just a few examples.) And there are all those little moments, grace notes that finally aren’t so little, and that are the heart of Bob’s pictures—for instance, Alan Bates as the butler, standing around a corner, listening secretly to Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam) playing the piano and tapping his foot to the rhythm.

There are so many of Bob’s pictures that I cherish: Nashville, of course—there’s no other picture like it, a true American epic; Thieves Like Us and California Split, two remarkable pictures that must have been made almost back-to-back; Cookie’s Fortune, of his wonderful group movies, and The Gingerbread Man, an unusual thriller in which the atmosphere is the star; Kansas City, a truly great musical film; and, of course, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, probably one of the most beautiful American films ever made. It’s a favorite of mine, for many reasons. First of all, there’s the sense of authenticity—there’s such a powerfully evocative sense of life on the frontier, of the little town in the process of being built, and you feel like you’re really living with the characters. And then there’s Warren Beatty’s McCabe, like no other character I know of in movies: a dreamer who’s talked himself into believing that he’s some kind of tough guy but who isn’t at all; and Julie Christie’s Mrs. Miller, who is much harder than McCabe but who softens herself for him, to protect his sense of masculinity. And it’s still remarkable to me that Bob was able to pull off that ending: the quiet, the falling snow, the fire and the people running to put it out, and, in the end, two souls fading into oblivion.

We always stayed in touch. I asked Bob to join the board of the Film Foundation in 1998, and I was extremely pleased when he accepted. And I’m proud to say that he asked me to work with him on Tanner on Tanner. It was quite an experience. The atmosphere was so relaxed and convivial—I remember just showing up, sitting down to have a drink at a table, and suddenly I was in an episode, improvising with Steve Buscemi. There was absolutely no separation between art and life: I didn’t know when we were shooting and when we weren’t, what was part of the picture and what wasn’t. After Steve and I did our improv a couple of times, we thought it had gone pretty well, so we asked Bob what he thought. Gentlemen, he said, that . . . was . . . . . . adequate. It was all very relaxed, but he was absolutely clear. So we worked at it, we got it to the point where he was happy, we talked it through, and then we shot it. I have such warm memories of the whole experience. We shot for the entire day, and when I got back to my hotel I didn’t feel exhausted or drained—I felt like I had spent a good day in the company of friends. That was the last time Bob and I saw each other.

I had so much admiration for Bob Altman—I still do. This man who came out of the system and developed his own individual voice along the way, his own vision, unique and true—it was there at the beginning and it was there at the very end, in the beautiful Prairie Home Companion. Bob represented the real spirit of independence and freedom in moviemaking. He had the audacity to treat cinema as an art form. From time to time I find myself remembering Bob, thinking about his pictures . . . and realizing just how lucky we were to have him.

Martin Scorsese is the director of more than twenty-five films, including Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). He has been nominated for twelve Academy Awards® and won for Best Director in 2006 for The Departed.

1 THE EARLY YEARS

BY GIULIA D’AGNOLO VALLAN

Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful. And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them. It was the truths that made the people grotesques. —Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Robert Altman was born on February 20, 1925, in Kansas City, Missouri, to a prominent, upper-middle-class family of German origins. In some of his early interviews, Altman recalled his regular childhood visits to the local Plaza Theater, where he and his friends would buy a single ticket so that one of them could go in and sneak the rest of the group through the rear entrance, or crawl through pipes and corridors that led right into the men’s room. King Kong, Viva Villa!, and Gunga Din are films he vividly remembered from those years. But at that time movies were just fun. It was only after World War II that Altman started looking at films in a different way—as a means of expression that he might like to explore himself. David Lean’s Brief Encounter and John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as well as early works by Bergman and Fellini, very much impacted that perception.

After attending the Catholic St. Peter’s School and the Jesuit-run Rockhurst High School, Altman enrolled at the Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, and in 1943 enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. Trained in Missouri and California, he was stationed on the island of Morotai in the East Indies (now Indonesia), near the Pacific front, where he copiloted a B-24 on dozens of bombing missions. It was during that period, in his letters to a cousin of his father who worked for the Hollywood agent Myron Selznick, that Altman started talking about becoming a writer. Once the war was over and he returned to the United States, he moved to Los Angeles.

There, with new friend George W. George, he wrote the story treatments for Edwin L. Marin’s crime melodrama Christmas Eve (1947) and Richard Fleischer’s tough noir Bodyguard (1948), his first official screen credit. But making it in Hollywood (which included a tiny appearance in Danny Kaye’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) did not prove easy, and Altman thought he would have a better chance to pursue his writing career through the stage, in New York. He was on his way there when, during a stop in Kansas City to visit his family, he learned of the existence of the Calvin Company, which was looking for directors. Despite his almost complete lack of experience, he was hired for $250 a month.

At that time one of the biggest industrial film companies in the United States, Calvin was Altman’s film school—professionally speaking, his most formative experience. It was there that he learned to write, cast, do production design, shoot, edit, and even score his films. They were short or medium-length films, mostly 16 mm, commissioned by a variety of businesses such as DuPont, Goodyear, and the International Harvester tractor company, for which Altman thought up a very funny story involving a mailman, his young apprentice, and a man who keeps postponing his honeymoon to Niagara Falls because he is spending all his money on Harvester agricultural machines. Under head of production Frank Barhydt (whose son Frank Jr. would become one of Altman’s screenwriters), he made about sixty of those films in about six years. Daring camera movements, overlapping sound, a taste for formal experimentation, a passion for documentary, and a desire to subvert linear storytelling—all trademarks of Altman’s later work—were developed at Calvin. In order to further explore his handling of actors, the young director volunteered at the Resident Theatre, the Kansas City Jewish Community Center’s amateur theater program.

Between the end of the forties and the mid-fifties, Altman went back to Los Angeles a few times looking for work in the local entertainment industry, to no avail. So he kept returning to Kansas City. It was there that he also found the opportunity to take his first steps in the world of television drama, as a producer of the series Pulse of the City, and as a director of The Delinquents. Shot in a gritty, realistic style, over a two-week period for a budget of about $60,000, this was Altman’s oblique take on the fifties teen craze reflected in a lively slew of drive-in exploitation films as well as mainstream Hollywood successes such as Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. United Artists released The Delinquents in 1957. The same year, Warner Bros. would release Altman’s second feature, The James Dean Story, a documentary about Dean’s life and death told through interviews interwoven with a rather experimental use of dramatic reenactments and still photographs.

Through these films, Altman finally found the Hollywood break he had been looking for, although his Midwestern roots and his long training far from the entertainment industry’s official enclaves of New York and Los Angeles definitely heightened his natural antiestablishment instincts and his determination to pursue a wholly original creative path. An avid, curious reader, Altman kept a special place in his heart for Sherwood Anderson’s modernist masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio, hinting in several of his films at its great gallery of peculiar characters and small-town setting. Even once he established himself in Los Angeles and started working there, he would keep and cultivate that outsider, off-center perspective.

A thirty-something professional, skilled in most aspects of the filmmaking process, Altman was better suited to penetrating the heart of the entertainment business through the more structured world of dramatic television than the wild jungle of low-budget independent productions of the time. Ten years would pass before he would get to do another feature, but even within the rules and constraints imposed by the grid of mainstream TV production he somehow managed to leave his artistic mark, while at the same time honing his craft by collaborating with some top studio technicians. Television also gave him the opportunity to meet actors he would eventually use in his film career, such as Michael Murphy, Robert Fortier, and John Considine.

His first TV directing credits in Los Angeles were for two episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Young One and Together. He also directed nineteen episodes