Short Cuts

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography

By Mitchell Zuckoff

(Knopf, 592 pp., $35)

Here is your exam question: who is the last American movie director who made thirty-nine films but never won the Oscar for best director? Name the film by that director that cost the most money, and name the film of his that earned the most. Clue: The Departed, which must have been around Martin Scorsese’s thirtieth picture, and did win the directing Oscar, cost $90 million (four times as much as any of this man’s films cost)--so don’t go that way. Background info: Gosford Park cost $15 million; Nashville cost $2.2 million; M.A.S.H. cost about $3.5 million, and earned around $70 million; Popeye cost $20 million (in 1980). Here is your assignment: assess and reconcile these allegations in an essay of approximately 3,000 words. (Note: banish from your mind any insinuation that nowadays a director who makes thirty-nine films has to be given a best director Oscar--though it is not easy to think of many that fecund who don’t have a bronze fetish to nurse at night.)

So while you have something useful to do, let’s consider Mitchell Zuckoff’s book on Robert Altman. In the recent history of rather stale or perfunctory books about movie directors, Zuckoff has done something quite special. Although the author is not known as a writer on film, he shows an unusual sense of the collaborations and the conflicts in a group process. Also, he grasps the way in which Altman was always inclined to make a battleground of his own projects--the earnest but passionate misunderstandings between Altman and Warren Beatty on McCabe & Mrs. Miller are so beautifully rendered that we begin to see how the actor’s notion of John McCabe and the director’s had to be at odds for that film to be so funny and so poignant. This is a smart, amusing, lively book, full of anecdotes and a generous step toward perceiving the glorious and perverse ways of Altman himself. I hope the book prospers, because that will assist the enjoyment of some complex films, and because Zuckoff’s achievement is preparation for a full appreciation of what Patrick McGilligan delivered in his book Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff, which appeared twenty years ago. (Zuckoff falls short of the obligation of "biography" by not even mentioning the earlier book.)

Today Altman is regarded with automatic respect. As a film-maker, he worked past the age of seventy-five (despite a heart transplant). He eventually won an honorary Oscar from the Academy for a career "that has repeatedly reinvented the art form." And, compared with the outlaw celebrated by McGilligan, we know Altman as the director of The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park, major works in the estimate of most critics and all coming after 1989. Let us remember that when McGilligan jumped off the cliff of taste, his subject’s most recent works had been HealtH; Popeye; Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Streamers; Secret Honor; Fool for Love; Beyond Therapy; and O.C. and Stiggs. There is something to be said for some of those films--Secret Honor, Jimmy Dean, even Popeye--but the greatest Altman enthusiasts would admit that this was the period of his doldrums. Yes, he kept working under adverse financial conditions, and nearly everything he did was "unexpected," but in general the gap between Nashville and The Player, 1975 to 1991, is one in which Altman seems adrift, or more than uncommonly out of love with himself and the world. It is a period that has to be accounted for in any analysis of his greatness as an artist.

Altman was eighty-one when he died, in 2006, which places him in the generation of American directors shaped by World War II and the remarkable place of cinema in the testing days of the 1930s and 1940s. He was born and brought up in Kansas City, and he was a pilot at the tag end of the Pacific war, a member of a crew, and someone who survived great peril in flimsy aircraft. It made a gambler out of him--or someone who declined to be as responsible as others. He was a big handsome kid who ran through a couple of early marriages as he took up documentary film-making at the Calvin company in Kansas City, a Midwest business for industrial films--but no fiction. This was rare training, and every biographical account testifies to how far some early ties lasted for decades in Altman’s life. But it is striking that he did not really "go" Hollywood. Calvin was a robust, independent company in the non-fiction field, and a place where Altman learned everything he needed about the techniques of film.

Where do film directors come from? When you ask that question, you begin to grasp Altman’s maverick nature. Directors came from good schools--Joseph Losey and Bob Rafelson were Dartmouth; Elia Kazan was Williams College; Howard Hawks was Cornell. There were some from the military--William Wellman, Henry Hathaway, Sam Fuller. There were kids who somewhere or other immersed themselves in show business from the earliest age, learning everything--Hitchcock, Minnelli, Ford. Some were refugees--Wyler, Zinnemann, Wilder. There even came a time, in the 1960s, when would-be directors strolled in and out of film school--Bogdanovich, Coppola, Lucas--as if bypassing life. There were also people who came out of the theater--radical, experimental, wayward souls such as Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, or Preston Sturges. And in America there had always been the tradition of the adventurer who had tried a bit of everything, who had written or acted on stage, who boxed, rode horses, gambled and searched for gold--John Huston is the champion of that school, and it followed that Huston seldom agreed with, say, Hitchcock that making movies was the only possible occupation in the world.

Robert Altman fit none of these molds, just as he never managed to conform to the image of a Hollywood director. At school he was not much taken with anything except pranks and mischief. He liked to have a good time and he enjoyed the facilities of that philosophy--a little booze, some girls, late nights, and spare time. He had an instinct for moviemaking, proved on training films at Calvin, and occasionally he decided that he really ought to try Hollywood. But several visits in the post war years came to nothing. He was busy and well-intentioned, but sort of aimless--is it possible that he never took himself that seriously? A few years later, he admitted that "I started in the film business not too long ago, right here on this soundstage. It was a stormy beginning, and as I remember, I was in such a hurry to ‘make it’ that I often forgot to stand still long enough to do what it was I was trying to do. I’m not sure--even today--that I knew what it was I was trying to do, but I do know that I tried very, very hard, and ran around and around my goal until either I or it became like tigers turning into a circle of melted butter. And never once stopping to wonder what it was I was chasing--or was it, by then, chasing me."