At the Cannes Film Festival in 1992, Robert Altman was in a typically bad mood. During an outspoken interview with members of the press, the director took a series of verbal shots at the Dutch television producer Ludi Boeken, allegedly calling him a “thief, liar, and pimp.” The two had worked together two years earlier on “Vincent & Theo,” a conventional biopic of the Van Gogh brothers that sparked little critical or commercial interest. A month after his comments showed up in the trade papers, Boeken sued Altman for slander, seeking damages of over $800 million.
It was a fitting burnout to a decade rife with professional disasters for Altman, whose work will be shown in a retrospective at MoMA December 3 through January 17. The director had built up a reputation a decade prior as a challenging personality making equally challenging pictures inside the studio system. Following the critical swelling around “M*A*S*H” (1970) — most of it from the pen of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael — he emerged as a progenitor of the New Hollywood, along with directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, producing a string of idiosyncratic pictures throughout the ’70s that defied a clear unifying logic — the snowy Western “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” the laconic Raymond Chandler adaptation “The Long Goodbye,” the satirical odyssey “Nashville,” and the hypnotically-paced “3 Women” were all made within a few years of each other. He capped the decade with 13 films, which means he essentially never stopped working.
Then “Popeye” (1980) happened. Altman’s musical based on the comic strips of E. C. Segar (as opposed to the subsequent cartoons by Max Fleischer) is certainly one of the more bizarre films in his career and because of that one of his most fascinating. According to the cartoonist and screenwriter Jules Feiffer, as told to Mitchell Zuckoff in his oral biography of Altman, the movie had its origins in a petty grievance. The producer Robert Evans was upset that he lost the rights to make “Annie” into a musical motion picture, so he went looking for another comic strip to adapt, finally realizing that Paramount happened to own the rights to the character of Popeye. Dustin Hoffmann was originally attached to star, and a slew of directors — Hal Ashby, Louis Malle, Jerry Lewis — were considered to take on the film but ultimately passed. Altman, ever the one to defy expectations, signed a contract to make the picture.
According to various reports, the making of the movie was a disaster. Altman insisted on shooting the film in Malta, reportedly to get as far away from the studio heads as possible. There are multiple accounts of an open bar being set up during the viewing of dailies. One of the crew members fell four floors and remarkably survived. The budget moved from $13 million to $20 million. It earned an international total of $60 million, which means it was more financially successful than John Huston’s version of “Annie” (1982), but due to bloated predictions from the business end and the dissemination of backstage drama in the press, the film was deemed a failure. It would take Altman over a decade to recover.
But the lost period of his long career, essentially the span between “Popeye” and the release of “The Player” (1992), deserves more attention. Altman had trouble raising money for a film, and producers didn’t want to work with him because of his increasing petulance and reputation for calling them out in the press when things didn’t work out to his liking. This meant that the filmmaker known for increasing inflation of narrative simply for the sake of it —“A Wedding” (1978) had 48 characters, which was exactly double the 24 characters in “Nashville” — had to scale back.
Altman followed his biggest picture with one of his smallest. “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” was based on a play written by Ed Graczyk, which Altman had directed on Broadway before turning it into a movie. A group of women — played by Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black, Sudie Bond, and Kathy Bates — reconvene in an old Woolworth’s store they used to spend time at as teenagers as members of a James Dean fan club. The entire film takes place in one room, making it essentially not much different than the play. But on screen the intimacy of these characters is more deeply felt outside the distance of the stage.
With little commercial success, Altman focused his attention on plays. Over the next few years he would film David Rabe’s “Streamers” (1983), Donald Freed’s startlingly minimalist “Secret Honor” (1984), Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” (1985), and Christopher Durang’s “Beyond Therapy” (1987). Made for little money, they are often forgotten or completely ignored in critical revaluations. But they contradict a major myth concerning Altman; mainly that he didn’t care about actors. These are films that are all about the performances — there’s often little else on screen — and there seems to be an attempt on Altman’s part to capture the immediacy of the stage combined with the emotional ambiguity of film through camera work. So a scene in a play that’s dramatic intent is bald-faced, often needed in the theater because of its unique relationship with the audience, is complicated by Altman zooming into a small detail in the corner of the frame. It takes the exactitude of theatrical convention, where there is little room for uncertainty, and mucks it up.
With the success of “The Player,” Altman would go back to his early days of voluminous works that often seemed so simply for the sake of it. There are a few interesting pictures during the final part of his career — especially his final film, “A Prairie Home Companion” (2006), more emotional in the wake of his death — but ultimately he had become a legacy director whose new work was praised because of the career that came before it. For a director who is routinely championed for what he brought that was new to the cinema, it’s only correct that we shine a light on the true innovations that are hiding in the shadows.
