Toning down the party, turning up the emotional intensity

Even at their best, the movies Robert Altman made in the 1970s weren’t conventionally disciplined works of art.  Altman was no formalist.  He didn’t compose scenes, either on the set or through the lens, so much as capture moments of serendipitous composition.  He set his actor loose in a crowd of their co-stars and waited for one or two or more of them to find ways to stand out if only for a second or two and that would be his shot.  He composed by disarranging.  Somewhere in Mitchell Zuckoff’s Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, Altman’s described as being like an action painter, which I take to mean that he lets what looks accidental imply the thought and the movement that created it.

If that does describe his method, then it applies to both how he used the camera and how he directed his actors. 

The distending drips and wild splatters of images, dialog, emotion that appear on the screen seem spontaneous are the result of careful and controlled choices made before the camera started to roll and corrected and revised in midflow as Altman saw where the paint was pooling and where the canvas was being left imposingly and appropriately blank.

This is Nathaniel Rich reviewing The Oral Biography in the New York Review of Books:

The deepest contradiction with Altman lies in this disparity between the spontaneous, anarchic feel of his films and the rigorous planning that produced them. It's certainly true that he encouraged improvisation on set, and had a genius for seizing on fortuitous accidents…

…he gave his actors little by way of specific advice ("I don't direct my actors") and encouraged them to diverge freely from the script. (Altman's screenwriters, incidentally, are about as fond of him as his producers.) He made his actors feel like equal collaborators in the filmmaking process; in interviews he called them his "artists." Yet many speakers in the biography suggest that this was a pose. "Bob's great facility as a director is he would get the actors to do the things he wanted them to do, but they thought they came up with the idea themselves," says the producer of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. "He made actors believe that they were doing something for him that they couldn't do anywhere else," says the writer Buck Henry. "I'm not sure that was true—but the belief was true. An Altman set was different because everyone felt they were collaborating—of course they weren't."…

Altman's use of sound was even more dexterous. He refused to redo dialogue in the studio, preferring live sound, even when actors muffed their lines; he made obsessive use of ambient noise; he had every actor wear a personal microphone so that he could, in editing, modulate the levels of each individual voice; he even invented the first eight-track sound mixer: "I wanted to force the audience into a situation where...they wouldn't necessarily hear everything that was said." The experience of watching his films is not unlike being in a crowded bar, when your ear catches the most salient phrases while ignoring the rest. But if you pay attention you can always tell when Altman is turning his knobs, selecting which voice should dominate and which should fade out. Though the effect seems naturalistic, it is the result of artful contrivance.

An approach like that can look lazy, if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

It can get lazy.

You can look at the movies made after Nashville and find evidence that Altman had suddenly stopped trying.  The techniques are the same, but the control isn’t there or it lapses.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians, A Wedding, and Popeye contain moments and whole scenes as brilliant and exciting as any in his earlier masterpieces but they come across as more accidental.

And O.C. and Stiggs , A Perfect Couple, and HealtH come across as accidents---as in car wrecks.

Something else was going on behind the camera too.

By all accounts, working on an Altman film was a whole lot of fun.  If you take the backstage scenes in Buffalo Bill in the Indians as self-portraiture, with Altman having divided himself into the grand mountebank of Paul Newman’s Bill Cody and the savvy, practical, manipulative producer-genius of Joel Grey’s Nate Salisbury, then life on an Altman set must have been a happy mix of partying and work, with the work often indistinguishable from the play except in its being even more fun.

But it may have been that the party became the point.  Again, you can watch these movies and find reasons to suspect that the movies had become an excuse to throw a party.  The actors are obviously having fun, but with each other and for each other, and they’re not bothering to let the audience in on the joke.  Some scenes appear to have been put on the screen because something had to be filmed that day to justify continuing the party.

Given Altman’s energy and his work habits it’s unlikely that if you were on the set you ever saw him do this, but there are moments where you can sense him mentally sitting back in his chair with his arms folded, just relaxing and enjoying the sight of his friends having a good time.

Here’s Robin Williams talking about Altman and the drugs and drinking and the fights and love affairs on the set of Popeye:

Bob was the ringmaster.  I think he was of watching it, setting it up, kind of taking delight in watching.  I think it was the idea of putting together a three-ring circus as a movie.

What this means, if true, is that Altman had lost interest in the artistic effect of what he was putting on film, or at least wasn’t concentrating on it, and he wasn’t worrying about the audience and what they would see and how they would like it.  In a way, actually, he had an audience of one, himself, and he was a little too easily amused.

And there’s a damning quote from Altman himself in Zukoff’s book:

It’s hard to talk about the audience because I don’t really think of the audience that much.  I really don’t.  I think they have a responsibility to pay attention and appreciate what I do.  It’s like all the Campbell soup cans---that’s the multitude.  They’re all the same they’re stamped and turned out.  On inspection, one is defined by the one next to it.

Plenty of artists have felt this way, but painters and composers and writers and musicians don’t need someone to give them million of dollars in order to begin their next piece of work.

Movie directors do and they get it from people who get their money from audiences who hand it over with the expectation that it will buy them a good time at the movies provided by a director who’d made it his job to provide it.

If what went wrong for Altman in the late 70s was a loss of control, of technique, of his actors, and of self along with a creeping disdain for his audience, then you could argue that the many plays he directed in the 80s for the stage and for film, would have been the perfect cure.  You can’t forget your audience in a theater.  You can’t let your actors wander about a stage willy nilly because the audience won’t know where to look and there’s no camera to do the looking for them.  You have to adhere to the script because that’s all the audience have to tell them what’s happening and what characters thirty or more feet away are thinking. 

And now when you look at the movies Altman made in the 90s and the early 2000s, like Vincent and Theo, The Player, Cookie’s Fortune, Gosford Park, you can see that Altman was exercising greater control than ever before and not only that but enjoying the freedom that comes from having limited oneself, and from that argue that he had learned lessons from directing those plays and operas or at any rate re-taught himself lessons he’d learned back when earning his reputation as one of television’s best directors for his work on Combat and Bonanza.

I haven’t come across anything in The Oral Biography that suggests that Altman thought of the 80s a learning or re-learning experience.  I can’t find anything that suggests he thought he needed to learn or re-learn anything.  He took on the jobs in order to keep working and he needed to work.  It wasn’t like Wordsworth consciously deciding to write nothing but sonnets for a while in order to get back to basics.  People had stopped giving him millions of dollars to make movies.

Still, it is the case that when directing a play Altman was more constrained by the script than he had ever allowed himself to be in the 70s, and when he was given the chance to direct big-budget, big cast movies again he didn’t shake off that restraint.  His style became more conventional or at least more conventionally bound, but Nathaniel Rich thinks that these late-career movies had new virtues the old masterpieces lacked.

Altman in his last decade was no longer the same filmmaker who gave a boy mechanical bird wings or staged the political assassination of a country-and-western singer or cast a shirking, mumbling Elliott Gould in the role of Philip Marlowe. But some of his late films demonstrate a depth of emotion that surpasses his earlier films, which often ended with his characters numbed by trauma or blissfully immune to it. There is nothing in those films like the scene in Short Cuts where a wife learns that her husband, unwilling to leave a fishing trip prematurely, waited three days before reporting his discovery of a woman's corpse in a river; or the final twenty minutes of Gosford Park, in which the lives of aristocrats and their servants, cooped up together for four days in 1932 at an English manor, converge in a powerful emotional crescendo. Altman the gambler may have lowered his bets, but he never left the table.

So that’s where we’ll start tonight, with the development of those new virtues in two of the plays Altman turned into movies, Streamers and Secret Honor.

Rich:

A fascinating distillation of Altman's style can be seen in Secret Honor, his 1984 adaptation of a one-man play about Richard Nixon. Altman, in severe financial difficulty at the time, had accepted a film professorship at the University of Michigan. Down to a cast of one, and forced to finance the film out of his own pocket, he transformed a college dormitory into Nixon's study and shot the film in seven days, with graduate students serving as his crew, and a score performed by the student orchestra. Philip Baker Hall's Nixon is an astonishing portrait of paranoia and bravado, qualities enhanced by Hall's unusual recitation of the script. He digresses, trails off in the middle of sentences, interrupts himself, talks about two different subjects almost simultaneously; he manages, in other words, to recreate the effects of Altman's trademark overlapping dialogue—as a monologue.

Stop the tape here, Roberto, and rewind it to where I talk about Popeye.  We’ll pick it up there next week:  Thanks to Phil and Chris and GregM for carrying on the discussion.  Comment threads on these posts remain open.  Please add your thoughts.

Don’t forget!  Next week we’re wrapping things up with a live-blogging of Popeye.  Mark your calendar.  We’ll be starting earlier, at 9:15 PM Eastern, Thursday, March 18, then update your Netflix queue, visit your local library, or buy the DVD now.

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Comments

[Lance]

Anybody here yet?

[Lance]

Speaking of someone being aware of their audience, this Nixon is playing to a packed house...in his head.

[Lance]

And he's bombing. And he's aware of himself bombing.

[Lance]

Friend of mine loves this Nixon. He says Philip Baker Hall brilliantly captures something essential to the historical Nixon's nature, the giddiness induced by his paranoia.

[Lance]

Of course Nixon knew that people were always watching him. And, as we know, he believed that the people watching him were watching him with a hostility that made them see the worst at all times. But my friend says that Nixon enjoyed that hostility because it confirmed something he suspected about himself.

[Lance]

Nixon enjoyed being despised because he was familiar with it. It was what he grew up with. It was a part of the way his mother showed her love for him.

[Lance]

And in Hall's Nixon we can see Nixon looking for his mother's approval by courting her judgment, by practically begging her to show her contempt for him.

[Lance]

Very Freudian.

[Lance]

But I think we're also seeing a portrait of Nixon as a failed actor.

[Lance]

All politicians have to be actors. Most aren't any good. Doesn't stop them though. Of the ones who are good, very few have the ability to step outside themself and watch their own performance and judge it objectively. I think Nixon had that ability but his objective judgment was that as good an actor as he was he was not good enough.

[Lance]

Nixon knew when his performance was failing with his audience and he knew why. He knew he was too obviously faking it. He wasn't buying what he was selling, why should anyone else?

[Lance]

In Secret Honor I think Altman and Hall have given us a Nixon overcome by flop sweat. He's performing and he can sense the performance is going badly but he has only two choices, to continue with the show as written or get off the stage.

[Chris G.]

For all this talk of watching, it's striking how hard it often is to see Nixon throughout this movie. For much of the movie's running time, we see Nixon as a fuzzy image on his security camera, or with him turned away from the camera, or in one memorable shot facing a window as he recreates one of his speeches. There's one toward the end of the film in which he sits down behind the bank of TV screens in such a way that we can only see his legs and the top of his head. Other scenes linger on objects while Nixon continues his monologue in the background, or in voiceover. The staging captures much of what's so maddening about Nixon -- for all of the watching, for all of the years he spent on the public stage, who was this guy?

And in the context of the movie Nixon, rather than the real Nixon, what are we to make of his conspiracy theory of being offered a third term and basically staging Watergate for the country's good? Think about how staggering that is -- the idea that this man, this disgrace, faked it all for pure motives. Are we supposed to believe it, even within the realm of the movie? Are there other works of fiction that try to offer Nixon some measure of redemption? Offhand, all I can think of is, maybe, the Watchmen movie, whose Nixon is significantly different from the Nixon of the graphic novel.

[Lance]

Hmm. This is getting sad. I feel like Nixon. I'm playing to an audience of ghosts inside my own head. I think I'll call it a night and leave it to Roberto to clean up. Feel free to carry on without me.

[Chris G.]

The flop sweat is a good way to think about it. Consider where Nixon is -- he's utterly alone, talking to portraits and an aide who may or may not even exist. He has no more audience but himself (literally, in one scene where he's addressing his own reflection in a window) -- he's lost not just the presidency but even the post-presidency that most presidents who make it out alive enjoy.

[Chris G.]

The horrible thing that happened to Nixon is the horrible things that he did.

[Lance]

Hey Chris! Glad you could make it.

[Lance]

Re: Faking Watergate. That's his script and he's sticking to it no matter what. It's his only hope for getting through the night.

[Lance]

I like your observation about how often Altman makes it impossible for us to see Nixon. And it's interesting that the shot in which Hall looks most like Nixon is the one of him peeking through the door at the beginning. I even thought for a second that it wasn't Hall but a wax dummy of Nixon. Nixon is most like himself then when he's hiding and spying.

[Lance]

It's also interesting that there is no reason for Nixon to wait outside the door and peek in. It's totally staged moment. In fact, it's a moment that belongs to the stage---in that shot Nixon is like an actor waiting in the wings for his cue to enter.

[GregM]

Secret Honor is one of my favorite Altman films, so much so that it inspired a play I wrote about Bush.

[Chris G.]

There's another great shot when Nixon is sitting down at his piano -- for a second he looks like a "Kliroy Was Here" graffito.

On staging: We first see Nixon getting into costume as he hangs up his suit coat and puts on his dressing gown/smoking jacket. And at the very end of the monologue he takes that off and is finally down to his shirtsleeves -- if we continue the performance metaphor, his final few minutes are a sort of an encore to the main show.

[Phil Nugent]

Donald Freed, the co-author of the play, also wrote one about Bush: Patient #1.

It's an interesting question as to whether we're meant to believe Nixon's self-exculpatory conspiracy theory. I happen to think that the playwrights meant it be taken dead seriously but that Altman thought it was a crock and directed Hall to play it as the ravings of a drunk down to his last desperate arguments. (Freed is an associate of Mark Lane and not only worked with him on the script of Executive Action, a movie that purports to show how JFK was the victim of a right-wing plot, but signed on to defend Jim Jones as the innocent target of a CIA conspiracy.)

Assuming I'm right, I think the warring intentions of the collaborators gives the movie an extra layer of dramatic tension. I don't think Altman meant to give Nixon any kind of redemption, but they did mean to make him sympathetic in a pitiable kind of way, which is a backhanded sort of way to treat a man who so badly wanted to be seen as powerfully in control. On that level, it works a lot better than Oliver Stone's Nixon, which painted Nixon as being at the mercy of powerful forces--what Stone called "the Beast"--that forced him to give in to the dark side against what may have been his true wishes. (I think that in an odd way, Altman's take on Nixon is more respectful, in the way of someone who wants to believe that his arch enemy is worthy of him. Stone's Nixon was a squishy weakling with no way to control the shape of his life; at least, by spinning ridiculous lies to the very end, Altman's Nixon goes down fighting and spitting.) One possible antecedent of this movie's Nixon might be the one in Robert Coover's novel The Public Burning, which also teeters between a human character and a political cartoon come to life.

I love that set, with the video monitors and the pictures of Kissinger and other figures and the handsome furnishings that seem like an attempt to assert that their owner has transcended his natural tackiness--the lair of an uptight ogre with class issues. It's as if all the history associated with Nixon had been compressed into a tight space for him to pace in and shadow box with his ghosts.