“Look I Made This!”

A cold breeze blows through an open window, and a football game silently unfolds on the television screen. The old man sitting on the couch regards the game with mild interest, though not long ago, football was his passion, a way of pocketing a little scratch during those long stretches when Hollywood lost his number. Over the course of the two hours spent with his interviewer in a $675-a-night suite at one of Dallas’ most extravagant hotels, he will glance every now and then at the
mute screen, quietly rooting for his old hometown team, the New York Jets.

“They’re undefeated, and so are the Giants, so that’s kind of neat.” The 75-year-old, clad head-to-toe in rumpled khaki, chuckles softly. In the
next room, his wife, Kathryn, is being tended to by two hairdressers clad
in black leather pants; in a few hours, she and her husband will attend the
Dallas premiere of Dr. T and the Women, in which Altman dresses down
(when not undressing) Dallas’ empty and elite. “But I gotta tell ya, I
enjoyed football more a couple of years ago. I was betting more then. This
year, I can’t tell what to make of the NFL, so I pretty much leave it
alone.”

For a moment, we sit and view the game in complete silence. It’s
like watching a game with your grandfather. It’s hard to believe that not so long ago, Robert Altman was
considered one of the biggest sumbitches in Hollywood–“a pompous,
pretentious asshole,” in the words of the late producer Don Simpson, whom
Altman similarly regarded as a “bad guy, a bum.” Journalists were once
terrified of interviewing him, for fear that his razor-edged mood
swings would lop off their heads. They visited his set and approached his
trailer with not a small amount of trepidation. His myth loomed large: Robert Altman, director of M*A*S*H and Nashville and McCabe
and Mrs. Miller and The Player, was a boozer, gambler, stoner,
womanizer, and all-around prick.

“Nobody wanted to make a movie with Bob Altman,” his old agent, George
Litto, told author Peter Biskind for his 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging
Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock-‘n-Roll Generation Saved
Hollywood. Nobody wanted him, not even after he had a hit. Not
even after he reinvented the movies in his own image, one that merged documentary with fiction until his films looked made up on
the spot (and they so often are). Altman regarded himself as auteur, as
maverick, as genius; he was right. Studio executives and
the occasional actor (namely, McCabe star Warren Beatty)
regarded him as boorish, arrogant, a real fuck-up pain in the ass;
they were right.

“Making pictures is always the same–it’s embarrassingly the same.”

He chuckles. “Before, I was on new ground all the time.
I was aware that I was in territories I hadn’t had experience in. Now,
I’ve had a lot of experience. I’ve done 35 films, God knows how many
television shows–hundreds of ’em. How many hours of film I’ve actually
done, it’s uncountable. But it’s always the same emotionally. If there’s
anything different, I’m less arrogant than I have been, mainly because I
have been arrogant.” He smiles. “I love it.”

He chuckles again, and just like that, Altman dashes to pieces 30 years of
bad press and bad vibes. Perhaps it’s simply easy to forgive an asshole his
faults when he is, in fact, a charming genius willing to talk at great
length about a career marked more by failure than success. Of the 30-plus
movies on Altman’s filmography–discounting his decades of jumping in and
out of television and his years spent shooting industrial films in his
hometown of Kansas City, Missouri–only a handful ever made any money.

Only a handful is known outside the cult. Only a few were celebrated upon
release or will outlive their maker. The rest–such films as
H.E.A.L.T.H., Quintet, O.C. & Stiggs, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, A
Perfect Couple, among so many others–will end up forgotten. Altman
insists he loves all of his “children” equally; time likely will not be so
kind.

It would not be hard to make a case for Altman as a Great Director:
His are the most noble of failures–experiments gone awry (one of his
best films was once among his most reviled, 1973’s laconic adaptation of
Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye starring Elliott Gould as a
disheveled, dispassionate Philip Marlowe). He has never once directed a
film to pay the rent, despite his claims that if he were to stop working
for a year, he would go broke. He talks often of how he turned down “big,
big money” to make a sequel to his 1970 film M*A*S*H, which
made a small fortune for Fox and, later, CBS-TV. He made only $75,000 for
his work on that movie and received no points; when the film took in nearly
$40 million, placing it behind only Love Story and Airport, he
pocketed only lint. A lesser director–one without vision, without
hubris, without balls–might have caved. Altman refused to even discuss
M*A*S*H 2 (years later, he did consider making a sequel to his 1993
film Short Cuts, but that was his idea, and he quickly killed
it).

That is why he pays for his own films, lining up a distributor only
after his completed product is in the can. Indeed, Altman and Richard Gere
put up the cash for Dr. T and the Women, opening Friday, and secured
a deal with Artisan to distribute the film only a few months ago. It’s the
only way the director knows he will retain final cut. The moneylenders will
not corrupt his sacred temple.

“It wouldn’t have been a problem if I had wanted to go out and do
M*A*S*H 2,” Altman says. “I cannot tell you the amount of money I was
offered to do that. They want you to repeat what is the sure success–or
what they think is a sure success, and there is no such thing. There isn’t
anybody who’s ever lived in this business–in this art, whatever it
is–who’s had a better shake than I have. I’ve never been without a film,
I’ve never been without a film of my own choosing, and I’ve never had a
film edited on me. The last time I had final cut on a studio film was when
Alan Ladd was at Fox. I did five films over there, and at that time nobody
bothered with me.

“I make these films for a million and a half, and I didn’t make any
money out of it. If I go a year without working, I’m in trouble. I’m not
gonna starve to death, but I am certainly not a wealthy man, and as someone
who’s done 37 films, I should be better off. But I wouldn’t have it any
other way, because the minute you start taking their money, they have
control. My main thing has always been getting the film made. I staked out
this path, because it’s just the way I wandered through the landscape and
created my own path.I didn’t have any great plan. It just occurred. Now, I
know what it
is. It costs so much money to make these pictures that most people are so
thrilled when somebody says, ‘[Miramax boss] Harvey Weinstein’s gonna put
up the money, but he’s gonna cut your film, and you’re gonna have to use
Gwyneth Paltrow.’ They do that, because it’s a means to an end. But I just
don’t know how to operate that way.”

In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind tries to make the
case that Altman was “a rebel from the word ‘go'”: He was born into a
prominent family (his old man, B.C. Altman, sold insurance when he wasn’t
“gambling, whoring, and drinking,” writes Biskind); and, at the age of 19,
Robert enlisted in the Air Force and served as a copilot flying against
Japan at the tail end of World War II. He married young, moved to Los
Angeles, got divorced, moved back to Kansas City, made industrials for the
Calvin Co., married again in 1954, had two sons, and divorced again in
1957. He made his first films during this period–The Delinquents,
a low-budget rebel-without-a-cause picture, and a 1957 documentary
about the life and death of James Dean–and moved back to L.A., directing
episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
He worked in television for nearly a decade, directing and writing
episodes of The Whirlybirds (where he met his third wife, Kathryn),
Maverick, Peter Gunn, Combat!, U.S. Marshal,
Bonanza, and a single episode of Route 66, among many other
shows.

Unlike such filmmakers as John Frankenheimer and Arthur Penn, who
worked in live television before making the leap to feature filmmaking,
Altman didn’t need liberating from the shackles of the small screen. He
moved to film only after he managed to piss off his bosses at the networks;
Biskind recounts how, in September 1963, he told Variety that the
Kraft Suspense Theater–his employer at the time–was “as bland
as its cheese.” He was only too happy to commit career suicide. The man
craved constant rebirth, and film provided him with that chance.

Nevertheless, Altman would return time and again to television; unlike
many of his peers, he doesn’t find such work beneath him. Indeed, perhaps
his best work was for the small screen: Twelve years ago, Altman and
Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau debuted Tanner ’88, a
fiction-meets-fact miniseries starring Altman-regular Michael Murphy as a
presidential candidate who encountered the likes of Bob Dole and Gary Hart
as they begged for votes along the rutted campaign trail. HBO, which
initially aired the series, has never chosen to rerun it; and it’s not
available on video or DVD–despite the fact that Altman continues to sell
the series to European television (very little of Altman’s work is
available on home video; half his career is missing). In 1998, Trudeau and
Altman would work together again on a jittery, half-brilliant pilot for a
series called Killer App, about an Internet startup desperate for
venture capital. The show wasn’t picked up and has never aired, because “it
was too smart for the room,” as Altman says.

“When I moved to film, I was in the A-level of TV directors, and I was
working all the time,” he says. “I was doing my own thing. I was producing
my own things; and I was really intent on changing the way those things
were done, so I wasn’t just looking to get out. I was smart enough to know
that to go out and do a feature that’s bad isn’t gonna help me at
all. I was looking for a piece of property that had some value. Films
were just a bigger scale, that’s all, and I went back to TV many, many
times. Tanner is as creative a work as I’ve ever done. I don’t know
of anything that’s any better than that. If I hadn’t done Tanner, I
couldn’t have done The Player. The whole idea of mixing fiction and
fact was brand-new.

“People say, ‘[Garry Shandling’s Larry Sanders Show] ripped you off.’
I tell them, ‘Nobody ripped me off. I’m thrilled that that kind of thing
was picked up,that people said they could do it after all.’ If you’re the first
to do
something, you can’t succeed at it. You cannot.”

There is no hiding the fact that Robert Altman, not long ago a provocateur
and pain in the ass, is an old man; the rebel wrinkles, even if he does not
tire. At the end of this month, he will go to London to begin shooting a
film set between World War I and II, using an all-English cast. He mentions
it often, insisting he’s as excited about this project–which is based on
his own story, though he did not write the screenplay–as any in his
career. Altman knows it will be damned hard to sell it to a mainstream
audience. He couldn’t care less.

It’s only within the last few months that his mythology has given way to
the actual work. This summer, loving retrospectives of his 1970s films (“No
one thinks I made a movie in the 1980s,” he says, shrugging) took place in
both Los Angeles and New York. Studios that once despised him offered to
strike fresh prints of his deteriorating classics, at considerable expense
($10,000-$20,000 a pop). In August, Paramount also released a 25th
anniversary DVD of Nashville, complete with Altman commentary–even
though he despises such things, insisting it makes him feel like a
real-estate agent guiding a stranger through a piece of property.

Do not
assume he harbors any bitterness about the way the system treated him in
the 1970s; he bears his own share of the blame. Besides, he continues to
work, and rather likes attending these retrospectives, staying for every
screening. Staying until the very end.

“If I were on a desert island with a great projection system and I could
press a button and see any of my films I wanted at any time, I would never
look at any of them,” he says, grinning. “But if one stray cat walked along
who showed interest, I would run it and watch every minute of it. You’re
looking at it through somebody else’s eyes, which is what you made it for
in the first place. The cartoonist Abner Dean once had this drawing of a
knoll with a dead tree on it, and hanging from the tree was all kind of
junk. Coming around the knoll was this endless line of people trudging
these big boulders behind them. There was this young, lithe, naked man
standing next to the tree, and he’s trying to enlist their attention. He’s
saying, ‘Look! I made this!’ Man, that’s the business I’m in. That’s what
I’m doing.

“Hollywood will want me when I die. Seriously. They will when I die. In the
meantime, somebody has to say, ‘Let’s go with this,’ and the general
consensus is that my films don’t make any money in a mass audience, and
it’s true. They don’t. I have a cult following, and that’s not enough
people to make a minority.”