The First Virtual I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival begins with a movie about a man who hates himself

I’m assuming that everybody knows that calling this series of discussions the I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival is a joke.  I don’t hate Robert Altman. 

Altman’s one of my favorite directors.

He’s one of my favorite American artists.

I don’t know how I’d have felt about the man.  Probably what George Segal, the star of tonight’s feature, California Split, felt when he was working with Altman.

Our relationship was warm, mutually respectful, and a little distant.  I wasn’t in his rhythms…I guess I was more middle-class than he would have liked.  Different sensibilities.  He was living a seventies lifestyle and I was little bit behind in that area.  He’s Kansas City and living by the seat of your pants and making this totally innovative movie, M*A*S*H, changing the rules, and I’m a rule player.  Elliott [Gould, Segal’s co-star on California Split] was also an antirules guy and a freewheeling guy…I brought an innocence, and he didn’t have time for that.  Risk was not a part of my persona and it was part of his.

That distance Segal felt, Altman used it in the movie.  He made the movie about it.  I think Segal’s wrong about Altman not having time for that innocence.  Maybe he didn’t off the set.  It’s in the movie.  It’s in every close-up of Segal and I’m not going to swear to this but I think there are more close-ups of George Segal in California Split than there are of any other actor in any of Altman’s other great movies from the 1970s, which is to say, the movies he made in his prime.

Altman’s movies were about people in groups, as members of societies.  He worked mainly in long shots and medium shots because he wanted to fit as many people into every shot as clowns want to fit in a circus car.  The difference is that the clowns want you to see them one at a time as the climb out of the car.  If Altman had been a ringmaster he’d have had the car made entirely of glass and not let the clowns out so the audience could see them all crammed in there together and trying to get along or get away.  Every contorted face and body is interesting and important because of the pressures put on the person they belong to by the owners of the other faces and bodies rubbing up against them and for the pressures they put on them.

M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, A Wedding are all about people crammed into small spaces and forced to get along.  The 4077th, the Astrodome, a haphazard collection of buildings hemmed in by wilderness that hardly deserves to be called a town, the tents and performance space of a travelling Wild West show, a single house.  In Nashville, Nashville is a small, company town and in The Long Goodbye Los Angeles might as well be a single street and a short strip of beachfront for all the room the characters have to escape each other’s company and problems.

In California Split the cramped and closed in space is the mental and spiritual one of shared addiction.   The addiction isn’t to gambling.  It’s to expectation.

All the characters, except Segal’s Bill Denny, but including the call girls, Barbara and Susan (Ann Prentice and Gwen Welles), who do not literally gamble, do what they do, take the risks they take with their money, their happiness, their jobs, their lives, for the joyful feeling of being on the edge of something wonderful.

That’s why Segal gets his close-ups.  Close-ups are isolating and Bill is isolated within the community of hope addicts.

Bill’s the literal gambling addict.  At least, he’s the one who knows what he’s doing when he gambling.  He’s past hope.  His addiction has lost whatever thrill it used to give him.  At the point we meet him gambling has cut him off from everything meaningful in his life, from the small, crowded communities he is supposed to be part of, his family, his office.  He is alone, a cramped, closed society of one, and he hates the company.  Even sitting shoulder to shoulder with the people he’s playing poker with, he’s all by himself.  He latches onto Charlie [Gould] because Charlie is involved.   Charlie lives on risk and hope, like all the other gamblers.  But for him gambling is social.  He can’t do it without conversation.  Bill flinches from the people close to him.  Charlie reaches out to them.  He has to bump, nudge, nuzzle, rub up against all around him.  He loves the company.  The attention of other people make him happy, even when the attention comes in the form of a beating or a stick-up.

Not that he’s a good guy, necessarily.  In many ways, he’s a supreme asshole.  He’s as addicted to expectation as the others, but he doesn’t expect happiness as much as he expects excitement, and so he gambles with other people’s emotions.  He rubs shoulders in order to rub people the wrong way.  He wants them to get angry with him because anger makes people unpredictable.   It makes them reckless.  It makes them interesting.

It makes them fun.

Bill wants to be like Charlie.  He wants to be having fun.  He wants to have friends.  He wants to feel like part of the crowd.  He wants to think that what he’s doing at the poker table, at the track, at the casino is something nicer, happier, better than gambling.

The good feelings and good times only come in bursts, and in Charlie’s company, and even with Charlie there Bill can’t always sustain the mood, or the illusion of the mood.  He falls back in on himself.  He shuts himself off and up, and that’s how the camera often finds him.

Charlie is able to enjoy his life because he is corrupt and dishonest.  It isn’t right to call him a rule breaker or an antirules guy because he doesn’t seem to know that there are rules (not counting the rules of the games he plays and bets on) or why there are or need to be rules.

Bill, however, is a rules player.  He even has rules by which he conducts his gambling.  And he’s an innocent.  At any rate, he remembers what it was like to be innocent.  Bill is stuck in the middle of two opposing desires, although both would allow him to join in a society and shake his loneliness.  Either way, he would belong again.  He could give in, give up, and become like Charlie, and at least enjoy his self-destruction.  Or he could give up gambling and go home.  He can’t make up his mind, so he sits and broods and hates himself for both both impulses.

Altman caught that.

Once an actress asked Altman how she would know when the camera was on her in a crowd scene so that she would know when to do her acting.  Altman told her to do her acting when she felt the moment was right, the camera would find her.

One of the many risks Altman ran when he made a movie was that the camera wouldn’t find an actress or an actor at a crucial moment, that it would get there too late or at the wrong angle.  And that probably happened many times.  But those times didn’t matter because of all the other times when Altman had the camera right there.

He trusted that there would lots of those times because he made sure that there was always something for the camera to catch.  If one character in a shot wasn’t doing something worth paying a lot of attention to, not just one other but several others were.  He chose his actors to make sure of this.  And he kept track.

His eyes and ears were open in a way more disciplined, more exacting, more rules playing directors aren’t.  They pay attention to their plans.  Altman paid attention to what was happening and paid so close attention that he could see what was about to happen because of it.  He could get the camera there a beat ahead.

He saw and he heard George Segal.  And he made his movie about what he saw and and heard.

Ok, we’re ready.  Let’s get this discussion underway.  Comment and refresh as needed.

Where should we start?

How about with this.  The 70s sure were ugly, weren’t they?

11:30 PM. Time for me to call it a night.  Graveyard shift’s coming on to keep the comment thread open.  Please feel free to help yourself to the coffee and donuts which have been generously provided by the folks at Sue’s House of Pastry.  All we ask is that you bus your own tables on your way out.

Don’t forget.  Next week.  Thieves Like Us.

Comments

[Lance]

Welcome to the discussion, folks. Who's here? Where do you want to start?

[Lance]

Ok, let's forget how ugly the 70s were for the moment. Let's concentrate on what's pretty in the film. Gwen Welles.

[William Rennie]

Here's a thought.

I had a design teacher that told me that what defined a palette was not the colors that are present, but the color that is missing.

California Split is a gambling film, but something major is missing. What is it?

[Lance]

She never was much of an actress but she was a powerfully affecting screen presence. She was so fragile it was painful to watch her. Like watching fine crystal in the hands of a buttefingered juggler.

[Lance]

Bill, red and black?

[William Rennie]

Think "Cincinnati Kid". Altman even mentions it in the film to reinforce the absence.

[Lance]

Ok, I'm thinking. Been a long time. Btw, screenwriter for California Split hated the Cincinnati Kid.

[Lance]

Also, at one point Steve McQueen was up for the Elliott Gould part.

[William Rennie]

Doen't surprise me. I love Cincinnati kid but it takes place in Oz.

[Lance]

Screenwriter, Joey Walsh, thought it took place in Dodge City. Too much like a western.

[William Rennie]

By the way, in the color palette, its Altman's usual lack of saturated color. As usual, he breaks the rules.

[Lance]

Ok, I'm drawing a blank.

[William Rennie]

No big tense confrontation. No satisfying mano a mano win.

He even hints its going to happen when Slim show up with the wad of cash tall enough to sit on. There is also the scene where he and Gould size up the players. Slim was a real gambler. Some of the audience would have known him. Huge setup, then nothing.

Ties to Segal's "no special feeling" line at the end.

Altman's films were often about the emptiness of american life, and the desparate measures people would go to to fill them. In this film, the hole is still there at the end.

Still can't spell.

[Lance]

Ah yes. That doesn't help the 70s look better.

[Lance]

That's the Dodge City showdown Walsh wanted to avoid. Which Steven Spielberg wanted to put in. Spielberg was set to direct at one point.

[Lance]

Hole's there at the end of most of his movies, isn't it?

[William Rennie]

He even foreshadows a false ending, so Segal's line hits us hard in the back of the neck.

Twice in the film, when they get a big payoff, they are rob. It sets up an expectation for a nice dark noir twist at the end. Instead we get.
"No special feeling"
"Yeah, everybody knows that"
He caps the two main characters, and cuts to music.

I love his work.

The 70's at least had guys looking for something else. We're all Elliot Gould's character now. We look away from the hole and pretend its not there.

[William Rennie]

Spielberg, ouch.

[Lance]

How many of those films ended with a shot of characters staring into nothingness? Thinking specifically of McCabe dying in the snow and Mrs Miller blissed out in the opium den.

[William Rennie]

Altman had a bitter view of life. He knew that most people lived those lives of "quiet desperation" but he had no solution to recommend. This particular film is one of his bleakest. In others, there is at least more humor.

[Lance]

Yep. Speilberg. Hard to remember he and Altman were hot at the same moment. But this would have been made by the Speilberg who'd just directed Duel.

[Lance]

I think of A Wedding as his darkest and most bitter film. But then I'm a romantic.

[William Rennie]

Actually, the McCabe and Miller ending conforms very closely to this one. Whats the sequence of production?

Ah Duel. Speilberg before he discovered money.

[William Rennie]

Never seen "A Wedding". Have to look for it.

Anyone else on here?

[Lance]

Speaking of humor though. There are several scenes in California Split that ought to have been funny or funnier. The orange throwing scene at the track. The second robbery...

[Lance]

The scene in which Bill and Charlie pretend to be vice cops and bust up Susan and Barbara's night out with "Helen."

[William Rennie]

Ok, some humor -- but nothing to compare with the shower scene in MASH.

[Lance]

I'm pretty sure we have lurkers. Hello out there!

[Lance]

Can't decide if those scenes are failures or if Altman deliberately undercut the humor.

[William Rennie]

I wonder why the orange lady never showed up again. A third scene that put some kind of button on the sequence would have been interesting.

A lot of the film is in two's. Two scene's with the first robbery thug. Two robberies. The book says things come in three's. I wonder if he did it to increase tension, or create a sense of unease.

[Lance]

I vote with the sense of unease.

[Lance]

Fits with the idea that the characters are addicted to expectation. Altman makes us expect but doesn't deliver.

[William Rennie]

Actually, I loved the "whorehouse scenes". Writer in a brothel is a common movie cliche. Always a little decadent, a little edgy. What does Altman give us. Fruit Loops, middle aged crossdressers and a constant search for TV guide.

[Lance]

McCabe came first. It was his recovery movie. Brewster McCloud bombed. McCabe made people forget it. Altman was the director of MASH, McCabe, and The Long Goodbye when he made California Split.

[William Rennie]

Addicted to expectation is a concise way of putting it. The only two characters that have the appearance of being happy are the ones that expect nothing. Charlie takes what he gets. He doesn't even have the gambler's drive for more. He's ready to quit at 11k.

[Lance]

He'd also done Thieves Like Us and Images by then. And he did Nashville right after. Man, he worked like a maniac during 70s.

[Lance]

Speaking of the TV Guide, do we ever see Barbara actually watching television?

[William Rennie]

Altman did crank out a body of work. The word driven comes to mind. Wonder what was going on in his life.

[William Rennie]

Never see here. Never see a TV in the house. Now I've got to figure that out.

Speaking of enigma's. Why does the on break go go dancer have no pants, and why is that somehow not erotic.

[Lance]

Well, according to the book, mostly work, a lot of parties, Faye Dunaway, for a short time. Mainly work, though. Remember he was 45 when he did MASH. Awful late in the day for a Hollywood success. He probably wanted to make the most of the chance. But then he'd also been a TV director for most of the time till then. He was used to working a lot and working fast.

[Lance]

Bunches of people have checked in from Facebook. Any of you want to chime in?

[William Rennie]

45 interesting. I wonder if, having spent his life dreaming about directing features, when he finally did, there was a "special feeling" lacking.

Going to have to leave soon. Sorry, but I have an early curtain. I teach Wednesdays.

This interface is driving me crazy. We need to find an empty chatroom somewhere.

[Lance]

The sign outside the club says that the dancers are "semi-nude." But I doubt she dances with that sweater on. The scene isn't erotic because context is all. The dancer's having an argument with her mother who is trying to borrow money so she can go back next door and play more poker. We're not looking at a semi-nude dancer, we're looking at a poor working stiff who has to take care of an irresponsible parent.

[Lance]

I understand, Bill. Morning comes early. I'll stick around for a bit, see if any of my West Coast readers show up. Thanks for joining in.

[William Rennie]

Leave it to Altman to put a complex story in the middle of a mostly expository scene. The level of detail in his work is amazing. Its like reading a russian novel.

Thanks for the invite. See you next week.

[Lance]

There are several short-short stories packed into the movie. My favorite's the scene in the bar where Jack Riley (Mr Carlson from The Bob Newhart Show) is the bartender. John Considine plays a would-be lothario who wants to put the moves on a woman sitting there talking about her divorce. But every time he swoops in to make his move she says something outrageous that causes him to back right off. He has no lines and she never shuts up.

There's another at the police station involving a group of middle-aged suburbanites in their pajamas all of whom are under arrest and all of whom are stoned out of their minds.

[Sarah]

I lurked, but I haven't seen the movie since it came out, so I just listened to you guys. I love the essay, and your Altman insights. I will try to see "Thieves Like Us" before next week.

A couple of months ago, I moved into a new place (after twenty years in one house. I invited my next door neighbor over for a glass of wine. We kept bumping into each other in our mutual driveway, walking our dogs, etc. So the evening she is to come over, I get some snacks, hummus, cheese and crackers, a bottle of wine. We meet out front, walking our dogs, and she begs off. I swear, I felt like Shelley Duvall in Three Women. I don't know why that is the first thing that came to mind; must have been the care I took in buying, and then laying things out, like a good little hostess. I just kept thinking of the elaborate concoctions (cheeze-wiz?)Duvall reads about in her Women's Magazines, and the lengths she goes to in preparing for guests, and how NOBODY EVER COMES! That's what it felt like. The image of this lonely oddball resonated all these years later. What's happened to Shelley Duvall?

[Lance]

Sarah, lots of love for lurkers here at LanceMannion.com. Also affection for alliteration. Glad to hear you'll be back next week. I probably should have included Three Women, but Duvall is so heartbreaking in that one I can hardly bear to watch it. But with Thieves Like Us, Buffalo Bill, and Popeye we'll have time for plenty of Shelley love.