Mitchell Zuckoff
ROBERT ALTMAN
The Oral Biography
By Mitchell Zuckoff
Illustrated. 560 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35
It takes more than 150 pages for Mitchell Zuckoff’s oral biography of Robert Altman to get to “M*A*S*H,” the 1970 movie that transformed its director from a workaday toiler into a one-man film movement, gave us the adjective “Altmanesque” and jump-started a career that would encompass 36 more years and 31 more movies — follies, comebacks, muddles and masterworks. In almost any other account of a
But the long windup to Altman’s arrival proves essential to understanding the filmmaker he became, and one of the many accomplishments of this scrupulously intelligent and entertaining biography is that by the time “M*A*S*H” opens, we’ve come to learn a great deal about how the director’s life shaped the art that followed. Many careers behind the camera are ignited by prodigious early successes. Altman’s was something rarer — a great second act after a first act nobody noticed. The résumé that led him to “M*A*S*H” included duty as an Army pilot during World War II; the better part of a decade spent grinding out industrial films in his native Kansas City, Mo.; and close to another 10 years shooting episodic television shows like “Combat!” and “Bonanza.” After his breakthrough — the movie Pauline Kael hyperbolized as “the best American war comedy since sound came in” — Aljean Harmetz captured the contradiction neatly in The New York Times: “At 46, Robert Altman is
Zuckoff, whose previous book was “Ponzi’s Scheme,” has constructed his text almost entirely from interviews with nearly 200 of Altman’s friends and enemies, colleagues and family members, as well as with the man himself. (Altman died at
The result is, appropriately, more likely to restart arguments about Altman than to resolve them, and to send both the director’s admirers and his detractors racing to their DVD shelves to make their cases. For fans — I’m one, and clearly Zuckoff is as well — the best of Altman’s work, from the milestone “Nashville” in 1975 to the Raymond Carver adaptation “Short Cuts” in 1993, is defined by an unsentimental, politically aware epic vision of America, a rigorous lack of bathos (though not of empathy) and an intuitive understanding of how actors work that led many performers to career highs under his loose-handed guidance. Zuckoff’s authoritative accounts of the making of these films and of the 1971 western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (abetted greatly by the cooperation of, among others, Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Julianne Moore, the screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury and Tess Gallagher, Carver’s widow) make a case not only for their artistry, but for the indispensability of the semi-improvisatory, sometimes shambolic approach Altman favored.
Others still argue, however, that his work suffers from knee-jerk cynicism and misanthropy — although it’s hard to imagine a misanthrope who loved the company of other people more than Altman did. More convincingly, they posit that his disdain for the value of screenwriting led to too many films that, according to Michael Tolkin, who wrote the script for “The Player” as well as the novel on which it was based, “are worth watching and watching again, but don’t fully work on the terms on which they could have worked.” In the succinct condemnation of Jules Feiffer, his onetime (and one-time-only) collaborator, on “Popeye,” “He’s not interested in storytelling.”
The charge doesn’t draw much more than a shrug from Altman. “Many writers have hard feelings about what I do to their scripts,” he says, “but my idea is, it’s not their script. Their script is my tool to work with. . . . I don’t owe them an apology.”
Indeed, Altman’s near addiction to defiance, not to mention alcohol and pot, did not seem to yield many “I’m sorry”s — they didn’t suit a man who, Geraldine Chaplin says, “was always at his best when he had his back against the wall with a knife at his throat.” How do you get through an ordinary working day when you always need an enemy on whom to focus your energy? “Every morning I wake up and I’m at the bottom of a very deep hole,” Altman once told the actor Peter Gallagher. “And I scratch and claw all day long, and by the end of the day if I’m lucky I get my eyes above the edge.” Perhaps that explains why, in the words of the director Alan Rudolph, “you were always a guest in his world. He never entered yours.”
The contrition Altman felt in later life was reserved for his third wife, Kathryn, a wise and steadfast companion for 47 years, and his children; the Altman clan’s loving but cleareyed recollections add immeasurable value and verisimilitude to this portrait. But that rue was a long time coming. Soon after “M*A*S*H,” Altman’s son Stephen recalls, his father sat the kids down in the family’s new Malibu mansion and warned them “that if it ever came down to it and he had to choose between all of us and his work, he’d dump us in a second.” The choice was never necessary, but it’s a measure of how fiercely Altman valued the career for which he’d waited so long that decades later, after he stopped drinking and started to develop a warmer relationship with his children, he still said that in retrospect, “I don’t think I’d do anything different. It would be false.”
“Robert Altman” ends on a grace note — almost. Zuckoff lets us witness the ailing director on the final shooting day of his valedictory film, the touching, haunted “Prairie Home Companion.” It’s a movie that one member of his ensemble, Meryl Streep, notes has “a rage underneath it,” and that Altman, in one of his last interviews with Zuckoff, admits is about death: “Everyone is avoiding saying that. But that’s what it’s about.” It would be a lovely close to his story — except that immediately afterward, Altman went to London to direct a disastrous stage production of Arthur Miller’s “Resurrection Blues,” about which various people involved spend part of the penultimate chapter hurling accusations and spitting acid at one another. That’s hardly an ideal fade-out to such a fine and valuable biography. But it is noisy, funny, slightly ill considered, a bit chaotic and wholly believable. In short, Altmanesque.
Mark Harris is a journalist and the author of “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books/review/Harris-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3
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