The World of Robert Altman

[In honor of the 50th anniversary of Nashville]

HOLLYWOOD
“What we show in The Player is a very, very soft indictment of Hollywood, an unrealistic look at that arena. It’s really more of a farce, because although we did lift up a few rocks, Hollywood is much crueler and uglier and more calculating than you see on film. It’s all about greed, really, the biggest malady of our civilization, and it was Hollywood as a metaphor for society…the truth is much, much worse…”
—Robert Altman

MOROTAI
During World War II, filmmaker Robert Altman, stationed in what is now Indonesia, flew over forty bombing missions on a B-24. While overseas, Bob wrote to Myron Selznick, brother of David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind, whose secretary was a second cousin to Bob’s father. Altman took her response, that the letter was funny, and that Bob should be a writer, to heart. And so, he started writing.

THE SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS
“The original book [M*A*S*H* by Ring Lardner] was terrible, racist, and filled with jokes for the sake of jokes...He said I’d destroyed his script and that I’d double-crossed him, and he was very upset about it. But when he won the Academy Award, he didn’t say anything about me.”
—Robert Altman

NASHVILLE
Shot in the summer of ’74. Nashville isn’t a film about family, or found-family, so much as forced-family: musicians, bookers, politicians, the power-hungry and image-obsessed of the city, all coming together in shared pursuit of American fame, fractured subjectivities beholden to the symbolic order of hillbilly heartache, booze, and songs of domestic ambivalence, a story of yet another subculture monetized and eaten alive—hollowed-out signifiers of increasing kitsch-factor, from the rhinestone jacket to the American flag. In the end (spoilers), Barbara Jean, played by Ronnee Blakley, is carted off stage, wounded of a gunshot, only for a new Barbara Jean to emerge from the wings.

MONACO
In the late 1970s, after the successes of both M*A*S*H* and Nashville, Altman pursed more experimental (i.e., not as commercial) fare, like the hypnotizing 3 Women, the criminally underrated A Wedding, and the far-out Quintet, starring Paul Newman.

Luckily, Altman had a powerful ally, and fan, over at 20th Century Fox: Alan Ladd Jr., “Laddie” to Bob. Ladd Jr., whose father, Alan Ladd, the noted actor who portrayed the titular role in Shane, loved Bob’s work. Whatever the project, be it a political satire about a health and wellness convention (but also the 1956 presidential campaign between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, the latter for whom Bob helped campaign) (Health, 1980), or a dystopian sci-fi about a card game, starring Paul Newman (Quintet), Bob knew he could get the green-light over at Fox. “Laddie liked me and stuck his neck out for me, and even lost his job because of me,” according to Bob. In his own words:

“Just after Quintet, there was a stockholders’ meeting in Monaco. Princess Grace [the former Grace Kelly] was on the board of directors, and she said to him, ‘How could you let Altman make that awful, awful film with my friend Paul Newman?’ And Laddie got up and said, ‘Oh, fuck you,’ and he quit. Maybe he knew he was going to lose his job anyway, but that’s the story.”

MALTA
For Popeye, an elaborate set of the town of Sweethaven was built on the island nation of Malta. Bob was well-known (and well-liked) for his post-wrap (and pre-wrap, and post-shoot day, and post-weekday) parties, all crew and cast welcome; Malta was a whole other world. Tales from the set include copious amounts of drug use, a makeshift recording studio fashioned out of a Quonset hut for the film’s composer Harry Nillson, and a visit from Colonel Gaddafi, accompanied by a fleet of “thousands of ships,” according to Bob.

It was also, like all of Altman’s work, a family affair. Although the studio wanted SNL star Gilda Radner in the role of Olive Oyl, Bob fought hard for his old collaborator Shelley Duvall, who, in his words, “was Olive Oyl.” According to Robert Reed Altman, the cast and crew would hold weekly talent shows, and Duvall even took it upon herself to print up a very, very local newspaper, detailing the various on-set gossip. One of Bob’s grandsons, who played the part of Swee’pea, even learned to walk during the six-month shoot.

TEXAS
1982’s Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, shot in a Manhattan studio in seventeen days, concerns the reunion of a James Dean fan club in the fictional town of McCarthy, Texas. The found-family, once full hope, dreams, and visions of a better future, reunite changed, fractured, different. Using simple techniques, like Mylar mirrors to affect a shift in time periods, Altman captures the metamorphoses that are not only as part of the human experience as anything else, but may very well define it.

WASHINGTON, D.C.
In 1988, Bob ran a fake presidential candidate, Jack Tanner, played by Michael Murphy, for an HBO series. In Tanner ’88, as well as the follow-up, 2004’s Tanner on Tanner, Robert Altman blended fiction and reality, make-believe characters “living” alongside the news, a quasi-historical record on video, scripted, improvised, real performances of fake people, in search of deeper truths in, of all places, the nation’s capital. Murphy and Cynthia Nixon, who played his daughter, Alex Tanner, were so convincing that, while walking the floor of the Democratic National Convention, they were treated just like any other political family.

ST. PAUL, MN
Robert Altman’s final film, A Prairie Home Companion, represents a bold step in a new direction from a filmmaker, in his 70’s and on his second heart, still exploring new places in novel ways, unafraid to dig into the nuance of unfamiliar worlds; unfortunately, it was to be his last. “The death of an old man is not a tragedy,” says one character in the film. I disagree.

“The only ending I know for sure is death…There are ambivalent endings, but to me it’s just a stopping place, not a real ending. People’s lives go on. If wedding bells are ringing, and they run down the aisle and they’re happy, well, four weeks later they find out they’re sexually incompatible or they have a terrible fight or they’re divorced or she murders him. To me, it’s just a stop on the curve. The river keeps going.”
—Robert Altman