Altman

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.

Robert Altman looking over a location in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles during the filming of Short Cuts in 1992.

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 film-making, 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.

PREFACE

BY KATHRYN REED ALTMAN

Imet Bob in 1959. At the time, he had three children, and I had one. We married that year and soon had two more together. We started taking pictures of our life, as people do. I think we started with the original Polaroid and moved on to the Instamatics, then right on up to the disposables. Then, of course, came digital cameras and cell phones.

The photos in my albums are mostly family photos and photos given to us by friends. I started making the albums in the mid-sixties. I purposely didn’t want any publicity photos or 8-by-10 glossies! I just wanted a family history. I started putting the photographs into albums because I was determined not to end up with drawers full of undated photos, as so many of my friends had. I covered every year that Bob and I were married.

It was an ongoing project. I was always working on an album no matter where we were, be it Malibu, New York, or on location. I’d pack up all the photos that I had already organized chronologically and ship them to wherever we were going to be living. It really became a sort of hobby. There were times when I’d be years behind in the albums, but I’d always catch up somehow. Bob really enjoyed them, too, but he loved to tease me about cropping the photos at unusual angles. My reply was always the same: If I don’t crop them, we are going to need to add on another room just to house all these photo albums! I actually liked cropping them. I thought it was rather creative, and it didn’t end up looking like your typical photo album.

We lived in Malibu, California, for many years, and that is where the photo albums had a permanent place on the shelf. Wildfires constantly threatened Malibu, and there were a number of times when we were forced to evacuate. We’d have a few minutes to grab what we could and get in the car. No matter which family members were there at the time, the first thing out of their mouths to me was always, Don’t worry, we’ve already put the photo albums in the car! The albums were more important than even the silver, the jewelry, or the keepsakes. They really have become a family heirloom.

Kathryn on the beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1944. She was working as a showgirl at the time and is practicing cleavage during a break. These photos were taken by an acquaintance named Charles Herman.

When I was first approached about this book, I almost had to pinch myself. Never in all the years of laboring over these albums did I ever think that these family photos would one day become part of a book that would grace the world’s libraries and living rooms. As I sat down and started perusing the photographs, especially those from various film locations, I was reminded of all the exciting times when the company—cast and crew—would be settling into their new surroundings. It was always very important to Bob that his actors were comfortable and happy with their accommodations. He would go to great lengths to see to that. We would have lots of get-togethers, from kickoff parties to wrap parties, and would watch dailies together every night to see what had been shot the day before. This, of course, was before the advent of digital cinema, when it became possible to view the footage immediately. Bob encouraged, without insisting, that all of his actors come to dailies. It was always very festive, with lots of food and drink. Everyone was welcome. The actors became comfortable with each other, with Bob, and with their work.

That comfortable feeling permeated our temporary homes and made for an atmosphere of one big happy family. From the beginning, this naturally became my job—setting up camp. And I loved it. It was very much like summer camp—intense, lots of new friends—and then it was over. And each project was so different from the last. Yet the style was the same. Bob had a real style in the way he did everything. He liked to pursue new subjects with each of his projects, subjects he hadn’t previously addressed or investigated. This is what made each new film an exciting event. We met so many different people, be they crew members, cast members, or locals. I tried to capture that in my albums, the sense that our family grew to include so many new friends over the years. Many people came and went; some stayed on for years. It’s interesting to me to see the faces woven throughout the pages.

When Bob died in 2006, that was the end of my project. I had completed thirty-three albums spanning forty-seven years of our life together. I am happy to say that our children are extremely appreciative and really enjoy them. As for this book, I sometimes wonder how Bob would have reacted. Ultimately, I think he would have been very pleased and quite proud. Perhaps he would’ve taken back his cracks about my cropping of the photos!

I’ve had the extreme pleasure of being assisted on this project by a very talented and brilliant young woman. She patiently helped me turn decades of memories into written pages, and written pages into readable ones. I’ve been fortunate to have had her as a collaborator, and I am forever grateful to our granddaughter, Signe Lohmann.

Kathryn Reed Altman met and married Robert Altman in 1959 and was an active participant in his professional life. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

PREFACE

BY GIULIA D’AGNOLO VALLAN

There are so many books about Robert Altman. That was my first thought when I was approached about this one. My second thought was actually an image: a scrapbook. I had not seen Kathryn’s albums at that time, nor even glanced at the 11,500 photos that were part of the Robert Altman Collection at the University of Michigan Library in Ann Arbor. But what immediately appealed to me was the opportunity to work within a more intuitive, nonlinear format than the one offered by a conventional biography.

Having watched Altman’s movies while growing up in Italy, he had always seemed to me a European-style American director. A public intellectual of sorts, fearless in his determination to explore and engage so many different worlds—each of his films like a new, self-contained, occasionally exotic universe. And yet all part of a single, coherent philosophical vision rooted in an almost anthropological attraction to humankind. No matter how diverse they may be, all his films are, as he said, chapters of the same book. The multiple elements, textures, and narratives that are the basis of this volume seem a good way to trace that same book, the vision and the process that lie beyond the individual pictures.

The incredibly vast selection of photos (mostly heretofore unpublished), contact sheets, documents, clippings, and even objects contained in the Ann Arbor collection allowed us to show Altman at work, literally immersed in his process. When given the right materials, I have favored a similar approach in all of my previous books, which were often designed in close collaboration with the filmmakers. Over the years, I had only met Altman a few times, and briefly, for a couple of interviews (the last one to talk about Gosford Park) and when we invited Dr. T and the Women to the Venice Film Festival. But I was sure that a collage-like structure made even more sense for a book about him, as it mirrors the loose architecture of his pictures.

A wide cast of characters seemed also fitting. The choice of asking so many writers to participate was not an accidental one: Altman had the reputation of heavily altering film scripts, when not forgoing them altogether. Yet he engaged with great writers through his entire career and was admired by them.

Both Kathryn and I are very grateful to the people who have contributed to our project. Rarely have I found convincing someone to write or give an interview for a book so easy. This is a testament to the fact that the Altman family existed, and exists, well beyond the confines of the frame. And of his mark on American cinema, as the many up and downs of his long, adventurous, career parallel and reflect/illuminate the evolution of that industry.

A great deal has been written and said about Altman. Yet, while watching and re-watching his films during the past two years, I often found myself discovering threads I had not seen before, dots I had not connected. Some of those ideas have filtered into these pages, and I hope they may offer new insights to his work as a whole.

Scrapbooks are by definition made of fragments. Their nature is intrinsically suggestive, as well as imperfect and incomplete. This volume claims no exception. I apologize in advance for the omissions. My work is indebted to the very generous access Ron Mann gave me to the incredibly extensive and painstaking research made for his film ALTMAN, as well as to the writings of Altman biographers and interviewers, such as Mitchell Zukoff and David Thompson. I would also like to acknowledge Matthew Seig’s invaluable insights and my friend Bill Krohn, whose film writing and feverish passion for cinema are not only deeply inspiring but also great fun.

Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan is a film writer and curator. She has published numerous books on American cinema, including monographs on Robert Aldrich, John Landis, William Friedkin, Clint Eastwood, George Romero, and John Carpenter. She has served as the co-director of the Torino Film Festival and is presently the US Programmer of the Venice Film Festival. She lives in New York City.

Robert Altman, producer–director of Nightwatch, checks an angle, 1964. At this stage of his career, Altman had already produced and directed several episodes and pilots of prominent series for every TV network in the US.

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.

Altman, B-24 copilot, 1945–1946, 307th Bomb Group, 13th Air Force.

Altman and his sisters, from left: Barbara Hodes and Joan Sarafian, c. early 1930s.

Bobby Altman, c. early 1930s.

Altman (front row, kneeling, second from right) with other members of the 307th Bomb Group while stationed in the Pacific.

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,

Brochure for the Calvin Company, c. early 1950s.

Altman during his years with the Calvin Company, c. early 1950s.

Photograph of Altman, likely taken in the U.S. while he trained to be a pilot, c. 1944.

Publicity poster for The James Dean Story, 1957.

Poster for The Delinquents, 1957.

Script for Altman’s first feature film, The Delinquents.

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 of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s series Whirlybirds that aired in 1958–59. It was on one of those that he met his future wife, Kathryn Reed, who had come to the set as an extra. Among the many other series Altman worked on into the sixties are Don Fedderson’s The Millionaire, Warner Bros.’ Hawaiian Eye and The Roaring 20’s, United Artists’ Troubleshooters, Blake Edwards’s Peter Gunn, and the popular westerns Maverick and Bonanza. As a director, he was able to smuggle into most of the episodes unusual visual solutions, interesting performances, and a palpable preoccupation with realism—a remarkable feat considering the tight production schedules and the fact that most were filmed on studio lots.