Review by Janet Maslin
ROBERT ALTMAN
The Oral Biography
By Mitchell Zuckoff
Illustrated. 560 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
Robert Altman once engaged in a jokey contest to create fake country-music song titles. He made up one that perfectly encapsulated his career: “I’m Swimming Through the Ashes of All the Bridges I’ve Burned.”
Those words reflect his withering humor, combative outlook and, above all, tireless forward motion. They convey how Altman, who started out making industrial training films like “How to Run a Filling Station,” persevered through nearly six rambunctious decades of immortal filmmaking that ended with the June 2006 release of his tenderly elegiac “Prairie Home Companion.” When the great man died in November of that year, an Altman grandson expressed the unthinkable: “It’s a wrap.”
Very late in his life the irascible yet cannily reputation-burnishing Altman began cooperating on a biography with Mitchell Zuckoff, now a journalism professor at
Above all, this book is fair. And surely Mr. Zuckoff has done a lot of careful shaping and wrangling to make it that way, since the assessments in these pages range widely. Some speakers deify Altman; some recall his mean streak; some attest to his endless ability to confound conventional
“Robert Altman: The Oral Biography” is a book that dispels fog. It begins with a slow but insightful tour through Altman’s formative years. He was born in 1925, so was much older than the boy wonders with whom he shared the limelight in 1970s
He was a bomber pilot in World War II. He tattooed Harry S. Truman’s dog. And, until he sabotaged his television career by declaring Kraft’s dramatic programs as cheesy as its cheese, he directed some of the best-loved television shows of the late 1950s and early ’60s. If you grew up watching “Bonanza,” “Maverick,” “Route
By the time his heyday began, Altman had well-established personal and professional habits. He butted heads with other alpha males. He trampled on screenplays. He charmed women, to the point that his long third marriage to Kathryn Reed Altman (who is heard throughout the book) sounds like something of a miracle. He surrounded himself with a coterie of admirers, and if he could spirit the whole slew of them off to an isolated set and commandeer their full attention, so much the better.
The actor Michael Murphy, whose keen observation of Altman began in the television years, makes a particularly good source for Mr. Zuckoff. “Bob would make the best bloody mary I’ve ever tasted,” Mr. Murphy says of his hard-drinking friend. “Then he would stand up and make a speech, pretty much the same speech every night.” The essence of the speech: “No one in this room knows what this movie is about except me.”
As the oral testimony in “Altman” makes painfully clear, there was a high price for this constant camaraderie. Mr. Altman said very publicly that if given a choice between his family and his work, he would abandon his family forever; his six children heard that loud and clear. Late in his life, sobered by a heart transplant as well as by forced sobriety, he realized that none of his children had gone to college, become self-supporting, avoided substance abuse problems or stayed married. He not only infantilized them but also tricked them out of wages when they worked on his movies.
All this may offer some sense of the gargantuan challenges that faced Mr. Zuckoff as he organized this sprawling, many-faceted story. Yet how he arranges his material can be interesting in its own right. For instance the way he has assembled his account of the making of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” Mr. Zuckoff gives the alpha treatment to Warren Beatty, the man who gave Altman the most headaches. Mr. Beatty is allowed to speak last and thus rebut what the other speakers have had to say about him.
Throughout this book there is a distinction between speakers who describe Altman in the present tense and those who, like Mr. Beatty, seem to have been interviewed after the director’s death. There’s also an awkward split between those who speak naturally and those who sound as if they have responded to queries via letter or e-mail.
“Whether you like it or not, Bob was always Bob, and Bob was the Bob he wanted to be,” says a live-sounding Allan Nicholls, who acted in many Altman films — and he goes on from there. By contrast there is this from Kenneth Branagh vis-à-vis “The Gingerbread Man,” a late-life Altman fiasco: “His sensibility was a poetic one that tried to embrace within a passion for cinema the American tradition of moviemaking and to infuse that with the poetic, sometimes anarchic deconstruction of the traditional architecture of genre films.” The most welcome speakers in this star-studded book are those who can be as sharp as the director Paul Thomas Anderson, who delivered the perfect epitaph: “He was so indestructible for so long.”
Alan Rudolph, another of the many directors whose work reflects Altman’s sensibility, assured Mr. Zuckoff that his book would never capture the Altman magic. “It will be elusive and you’ll never get to the center of it,” Mr. Rudolph pointed out, “because you shouldn’t be able to.” But “Altman” fully grasps that paradox. If this book presumed to know all about Altman, it wouldn’t know him at all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/books/15maslin.html
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