CHAPTER 22
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Popeye (1980)
David Ansen, review headlined “Popeye Without Spinach,” Newsweek, December 22, 1980: Strange bedfellows make strange movies. Take Popeye as a case in point. To bring E. C. Segar’s venerable comicstrip hero to the screen, proto-Hollywood producer Robert Evans, ironic New York humorist Jules Feiffer and laid-back iconoclastic director Robert Altman joined forces. They employed the services of Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall to play Popeye and Olive Oyl, enlisted Harry Nilsson to write musical numbers and constructed an elaborate rendition of Sweethaven, the cartoon shantytown, on the unlikely Mediterranean island of Malta.
This is high-risk chemistry, and the results are bizarre. The bulging forearms and corncob pipe are in place, but this Popeye hates spinach. The plot hinges on his Oedipal search for his Pappy (Ray Walston), the songs and minimal dances are designed for singers who can’t sing and dancers who can’t dance, and this gruff icon of pugnacious, all-American goodness has been set adrift on an abstract isle that can perhaps best be described as backlot Ionesco. Popeye‘s air of alienated whimsy makes for an odd “family movie” indeed.
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DAVID LEVY (producer): The Fox pictures were all, I think it’s fair to say, budgeted in the high ones, like one-point-eight million, one-point-nine million, to maybe four million. Popeye was obviously going to be a very different kind of project, a very different kind of picture. I don’t think Bob ever looked at things in these terms, really, but you talked about him being on top of the world a few years earlier. Well, if the five-picture Fox deal left his career in a place where it was on the precipice, this project would be one that would either put him back on top or he’d be falling over into the abyss.
Robin Williams, As Popeye, And Shelley Duvall, As Olive Oyl, With Altman’s Grandson Wesley Ivan Hurt, As Swee’pea
JULES FEIFFER (writer and cartoonist): Maybe it’s best to give you the background on Popeye. Bob Evans wanted to do Annie—I don’t know if he told you that—and John Huston had gotten Annie at United Artists or Columbia or something. Evans was stuck on the idea of doing a musical of some comic strip and he realized that Popeye had been owned by Paramount, where he had just left as head of production and now had a freelance agreement with, and he was working with Bridget Sylbert. [Her husband] Dick Sylbert was a friend of mine—he also was the production designer on Carnal Knowledge. And Bob Evans asked Dick who might write the screenplay for Popeye, and Dick said I was the only one who could make sense of these characters and put them on screen. So Evans called me and he said, “Would you like to write Popeye?”
I said, “It depends on which Popeye, because there’s E. C. Segar’s Popeye, the original Popeye, which is a work of genius, and there’s Max Fleischer’s animated Popeye, which I’m not crazy about.” I might have been stronger. I didn’t like it at all.
And he said, and this is virtually a direct quote, “I want to do whatever Popeye you want to do.” Essentially his attitude remained like that throughout. He was an amazing, important producer for Hollywood or any other place.
ROBERT EVANS (producer): I wanted Dustin [Hoffman] at first very badly, but there were problems between Dustin and Jules Feiffer. What happened? Remember, this was thirty years ago—there are three sides to every story.
JULES FEIFFER: I was writing it for Dustin. Dustin and Bob Evans were the best of friends, were very close. I had told Evans after repeated treatments that he kept rejecting that there was not going to be any treatment in the sky that he was going to like. I asked him to give me some money and I’d write fifty pages of script where he would see the relationship between Popeye and Olive Oyl and he would know whether there was a movie there or whether I was the right writer or not. And he agreed immediately, and I wrote those fifty pages. Dustin loved them. Dustin drove me to Evans’ house for a meeting, and on the way he kept comparing my script to The Graduate, to Samuel Beckett, to Kafka; I mean, he was just going on and on and on. Of course, by the time I submitted the first draft, which was a finished first draft, which Evans and Sylbert loved, Dustin wanted me fired and another writer put on.
Any other producer would have fired me to keep his star. Not Evans. He said, “You know, I’m the producer, Jules is the writer, I’d love you involved but you’re not going to … this is the script we’re going with.” Just amazing.
We finally had a script and we threw around names of directors. We got a lot of turndowns. He offered it to Hal Ashby. He also offered it to Louis Malle, and I was afraid Louis, being French, would not get it. I thought we needed someone quintessentially American. At one point Jerry Lewis wanted to do it. And I said, “I’d rather kill myself.”
He brought up Altman and I knew two things immediately. I knew that he would put the characters on screen in the most imaginative and vital way possible, and I knew I’d be lucky if I got a word of mine from the script on the screen. But I figured if I got fifty percent I’d be doing very well. And we’re out of choices anyhow, and I thought we might just get lucky.
ROBERT EVANS: Bob didn’t want to do it at first. He thought it wasn’t his kind of picture. He is not a studio filmmaker. He was his own man. A total original. But we got together. The critics were after Bob at that time, I don’t know why. He hadn’t had a good run right before that, either. And that’s why I wanted to get him because I love getting a filmmaker whose last pictures haven’t done well. They are usually more collaborative. We got along great, because I only had half a suit on. I was always on his side against the studio.
JULES FEIFFER: Bob Altman and I had met at Elaine’s originally. Elaine’s at that time was not a glitzy place. It was where a lot of writers hung out, and journalists, and increasingly some theater and movie people. My early impressions? Only one impression: jovial and sardonic at the same time. Bearish character—I mean, he seemed bigger than he really was and he gave this impression of size. He was charismatic and highly opinionated and often full of shit, but you couldn’t really challenge him because he wouldn’t hear it. And you basically accepted him for what he was because it was worth it. He was just good company; he was the real thing in a business where there is so much that is not the real thing. I thought that, while we were friends, it would be insane to ever work with him because he trashed writers. He didn’t really believe in words, he believed in images, and his images were often extraordinary.
Producer Robert Evans looking over Robert Altman’s shoulder, on the set of Popeye in Malta
I didn’t go into it with any illusions. And when Evans told me that Altman signed a contract where he can’t change a word of dialogue I just laughed [laughs].
If you’re a writer on a movie, the price you pay for working with Altman is that if there’s not constant vigilance to make sure that the script is being followed—Altman with all his gifts, and maybe it’s because he’s carrying out these gifts, these gifts don’t include storytelling. He’s not interested in storytelling. His gifts don’t include building character. These are just not interests of his. He’s kind of a painter on film and he’s giving you impressions and visual impressions. He’s a little like an action painter. And when it works, it’s remarkable, but if you’re interested in motivation of character, forget about it.
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ROBERT EVANS: I saw Robin Williams on television in Mork & Mindy and I said, “He looks like Popeye.” They were afraid to put a television actor in a picture this big. Using a television star in those days to play a lead role in a movie was not au courant. That’s changed today. But nobody could have played it better than Robin.
ROBIN WILLIAMS (actor and comedian): Evans told me he got Bob. I was excited because he’s a great name. All of a sudden I went like, “You’re serious.”
JULES FEIFFER: I had been thinking of Shelley Duvall even before Altman was involved, because Shelley I knew personally because when she was in New York she’d hang out with Bob and Kathryn. And I loved her in all of the Altman films I’d seen her in and I thought, “My God, she’s the perfect Olive Oyl.” But they had had a falling-out…. I don’t remember the reasons for it, but I do know he was down on her and he wanted anybody but Shelley. And, you know, Bob gets petulant about things like this, and his feelings were hurt. I think he felt that kind of a father-daughter relationship and he felt like King Lear. He felt that Cordelia had spurned him and chosen someone else.
Shelley Duvall, to Lawrence Eisenberg, story headlined “Filmdom’s Most Unlikely Star,” Cosmopolitan, August 1981: God, as a child I was so embarrassed when the kids would call me Olive Oyl because it meant you were skinny as a rail, you had sparrow legs and an Adam’s apple. I mean, who wants to admit she was born to play Olive Oyl?
JULES FEIFFER: When you see the movie again she’s the best thing in it. Finally he agreed. He also got Paul Dooley, whom Bob had given some of his best movie roles, as Wimpy. Then Bob Altman found the Pickle Family Circus, which included Bill Irwin at the time.
And for some insane reason, he wanted to shoot it in Malta—I think just simply to get rid of the studio. Malta has no indigenous wood. It’s a rock, and we had to import every piece of wood from the West Coast. You know, I’ve said that if he could have figured out a way of shooting it on the moon, he would have deemed that the perfect location. Just to get away from [Michael] Eisner and [Barry] Diller, who ran the studio at the time.
So all of these young unknowns assembled in Malta—Bill Irwin, Dennis Franz, all terrific talent. It was a family. We set up in this not particularly great but okay hotel, and this guy named Wolf Kroeger created an extraordinary set, the town of Sweethaven. Not the least of which was the score by Harry Nilsson, which was absolutely wonderful. Harry and I worked closely together, and he got Van Dyke Parks to arrange the music and they built a music studio in Malta and they did the recording there. What’s great about Altman shooting a movie was it brought to mind all of those MGM musicals I loved as a kid. They were all like Mickey and Judy putting on a show.
ROBERT EVANS: Malta. They told us it never rained between November and May. It rained every day.
When we got to Malta, we were met by all kinds of officials from the Maltese film commission, and they brought Miss Malta along with them. On a scale of one to ten, she was a two. By the time I left Malta, she was an eleven. It was a terribly difficult experience.
STEPHEN ALTMAN: What was the scene like on Popeye? It was nuts. I considered it at that time and probably still today as the hardest, roughest time. Nine months on the rock, you know? Gates closed and you’re stuck there. It was really bad. Everybody went through changes, everybody had huge changes of life, and people got divorced and married, and very few people were left sane on that island.
KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Everybody was very loaded. A lot of tantrums and fights and tantrums. A lot of drinking. Bob? He went right with it—he created it. We had one or two kids born, a couple of divorces, a lot of wife-cheating.
ROBIN WILLIAMS: Bob was the ringmaster. I think he was kind 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. And I think he loved the metaphor for that, and that the town was full of kind of, you know, strange people, survivors. They’re all shipwreck survivors in Sweethaven. I think that was another metaphor he liked. They’re isolated and they have their own kind of ways and I come in a stranger, you know?
DAVID LEVY: It’s no secret that Bob inhaled. And just because we were in Malta, nearly halfway around the world, life should still go on. And so arrangements were made. This at the time fell on my shoulders to make sure the people over on these shores got something together and put it inside these items that we really did need for the film. We put it inside people-sized dummies. It was a different world then. The Lockerbie flight went through Malta; the explosive device found its way onto the plane in Malta, as I recall. Those were not these times. And we were talking about a situation where we were so ensconced on that island and the authorities were so okay with us that Steve Altman could basically go behind the counter at customs and just sling these things over his shoulder and take them away. A very, very different world.
ROBIN WILLIAMS: When we were on Malta, we were on everything but skates. And then they sent the skates in and it got interesting. The open bar at dailies? I think anything, everything was going on. People smoking a joint or whatever, and then later on when the magic dust appeared in the radios, dailies got more interesting, too. But I think if you’re going to watch two hours of a boat rowing, you have to have a little help.
ROBERT EVANS: We couldn’t fix Popeye’s arms. That was the last thing that worked with the picture. We started the picture without the arms being right. We had a saying: “We’re bringing arms to Malta!”
ROBIN WILLIAMS: The initial makeup guy made the arms and they looked kind of like two hazmat gloves filled with putty. They wrinkled all over. It was like I was wearing two long gloves that you use to clean the toilet. Flesh colored but still bad. They had a series of tests and they kept doing things and they just never worked. Finally he let those guys go, I forget who they were. And then they brought in this Italian makeup crew that was amazing. I remember a little old lady punching hair into the arms, kind of like doing it the old-fashioned way, but they made almost da Vinci-type models with arms, with the muscles underneath and then they put the rubber over the top and it worked much better.
Working on Robin Williams’s bulging Popeye forearms
ROBERT EVANS: There were many, many fights on it. But there are many fights on all pictures. The more irreverent you are in a film, the more possibility of turning a bit of magic. We were irreverent, and we thought we turned a bit of magic.
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DAVID LEVY: We were in Malta on Christmas Eve. A group of us were in the prop shop on the set, and suddenly Bob and Kathryn started dancing around the shop like teenagers. The champagne had been flowing. Soon they started twirling each other around, and finally they fell to the floor, with Bob on his back and Kathryn on top of him. They stayed there laughing hysterically, face-to-face, with their arms around each other. We stood there watching.
KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: I don’t remember it quite the way David tells it. But yes, there had been a lot of champagne.
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JULES FEIFFER: Bob seemed to be shooting what I wrote, more or less, but since he didn’t believe in directing the actors—as he told me—he let them say whatever they wanted to. Particularly with Robin. When Robin meets Olive Oyl, after they meet for the first time but when they first come together … this was supposed to be a sweet scene that begins with great hostility and then evolves into the beginnings of a relationship.
ROBIN WILLIAMS: Shelley was brilliant. I think one mumble I had [in Popeye’s voice]: “Oh God, I’ve seen better lumps in oatmeal. Together they make one big one.”
JULES FEIFFER: Bob let Robin fuck with the dialogue and turn it into a Robin Williams stand-up moment, all of which Bob and everyone else thought terribly funny except me, because it trashed the moment and trashed the scene. And this was the first of our fights.
I went to him after the day’s shooting. What happened every night is we had screenings of the dailies. And everybody always loved everybody. And as everybody was loving everybody and laughing hysterically, I was recoiling in horror. Then after, I went to his room and told him what I thought. I told him, “It’s no good. It undermines the credibility of the characters. This is where we are set up to believe these characters and go with these characters for the rest of the movie. Instead it’s just Robin doing stand-up, and you’ve got to reshoot it and direct him.”
And he said, “I don’t direct my actors. I don’t believe in directing them.”
And so it got rather hostile and angry and I left really bereft and depressed. I remember walking to the set down the hill and just wandering around this empty set, and feeling rather lost.
The next morning at the commissary, there was this big outdoor place where everybody ate, and it was a mob of people, and I sat down next to a member of the crew—I was friendly with everybody—who moved away from me. I started to talk to some others and nobody was talking to me. And I realized in about a minute and a half that I was in Coventry, and I didn’t know who put the word out or how the word got out, but [laughs]—I had been disappeared.
So I went back to my room and I simmered all day long, and then after we saw the dailies that day I went to Bob’s room and I said, “I’m going back to New York. I’m quitting.”
And he said, “You can’t quit.”
And I said, “Well, I can’t take this kind of treatment.” And he did not know anything about it, and he said he didn’t tell anybody about it.
I said, “Well, there were only three of us in the room”—him, me, and his producer, Scotty. And I guess Scotty was the one.
He said, “I can’t have you go back”—he was very sweet—”because you’re the only man who’s not afraid to tell me what’s really going on.” And he said, “What do I have to do to keep you here?”
I said, “Let’s recut the scene.” And by that I meant that we all go into a cutting room and put back the dialogue as it was. Because interspersed throughout Robin’s gags were some of my lines. Enough of my lines.
Finally we reshaped the scene that’s in the movie now as a relationship. Bob saw it and said, “That’s good, let’s keep it.” I was just astonished. And I no longer wanted to leave and also felt terribly moved by this generosity of spirit. The guy was nuts but he was also a brilliant and generous-hearted man.
ROBIN WILLIAMS: We had the Italian stuntmen. That alone was worth the price of admission. There’d be three of them warming up in back and one would just kind of fall in the water. [Italian accent] “Okay, he’s a-ready. One moment. He’s a-ready. Splash [pause]. He’s okay! He’s okay!”
We would always make fun of that because it was not like they were Italian war heroes.
And at that point, we had a couple of bad accidents. Doug Dillard, the banjo player, had fallen four floors and survived, amazingly. He even survived the Maltese hospital and the care he got.
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JULES FEIFFER: Finally I think I just got worn down. I felt increasingly isolated, and about five weeks before the end of shooting I just went back to New York. And by that time he was ready to have me go back. And by that time it was clear that because of the budget, he was not going to be able to shoot the end of the film. I had written a series of sequences at sea. And the fight Popeye was having with Bluto, there simply wasn’t going to be the money to do. I had a scene I loved where Popeye and Bluto on shipboard rip apart pieces of the ship to battle each other, like jousting with each other, and so each one tears off a mast and they’re dueling with these masts, and slowly, because they’ve taken apart the ship, the ship sinks under them. Well, that would have cost zillions. So instead he decided to put it all underwater. The further he got into the movie, the more it moved away from Segar and more toward Max Fleischer. And when I left town, Segar left with me and Fleischer took over, because that was basically more Bob’s sense of humor anyway. More slapsticky.
PAUL DOOLEY: The budget went from thirteen million to twenty million. The studio never quite believed it was the weather. They’re half a world away, and they figured the director had screwed up several days or was drunk or something or ruined the dailies. He would say it was bad weather, you know? But it really was terrible weather.
ROBIN WILLIAMS: The toughest part was, as we went along the weather didn’t play along. … And the studio basically pulled the plug at the wrong time, right when we needed the money to finish, and for special effects. They had none. I remember we had a meeting with Robert Evans. I think he was sitting there a bit tweaked, and I said, “How are we going to end this?”
“I don’t know. How?”
And then I said, “I could walk on water, like Jesus.” I was joking.
“That’s great, let’s do it!”
It was like, “Wait a minute. No, Bob, no, no.” I mean, the cartoon Popeye could run on the water, but at that point we didn’t have the special effects. In the cartoons his feet would turn into a propeller and he could go flying through the water. But we had three Maltese guys and me on a winch underwater being pulled very quickly.
And they left Shelley in the water with an octopus that couldn’t be run. And it was that Ed Wood moment where she’s going, “Oh help!” But we kept going and Bob said, “Just shoot it. We got it.”
ROBERT EVANS: From the costuming to the casting to the postproduction, I loved the film. I think it was possibly his most ambitious undertaking. Because it was so different but not obscure. It’s terribly entertaining. I think Bob was twenty years ahead of his time. I think the picture is terrific. I think he did a wonderful job on it that no one else could have done.
All of the problems you could ever have on a film, we had. From the country not wanting us there, to the weather not wanting us there, to the studio not liking our budget. It was twenty million, and it made money. I defended Bob against the studio, which felt he was too extravagant about things, which he was not. Anybody else would have made the picture, it would have cost twice as much. The picture was a success financially, and I really thought this was going to be the best thing I was ever associated with.
I think they should rerelease it today. I think the picture is a work of genius. And I’ve watched it recently. If you can see a film and sit there for two hours and laugh and cry during that two hours, and be entertained, I think you have a hit. But I was wrong. It was one of the biggest disappointments of my career. I think it was Bob’s best work.
JULES FEIFFER: I only found out five years later, maybe ten years later, that it was one of the top ten moneymakers that year, because Paramount was circulating rumors, calling it Evansgate. It seems to me the combination of Evans, who they hated by this time, and Altman, who they probably hated always, made them want this movie to fail. And whatever I didn’t like about the movie, people liked the movie. Kids loved the movie.
I got a call about it a few days after its release, from Chicago, from a woman who introduced herself on the phone as Segar’s daughter. She said she had heard me on one or two radio interviews talk about her father, and how I was trying to make this movie a testament to him. She thought this was absolute nonsense and didn’t believe it because she had heard people talk this way before and it never, ever amounted to anything. But she’d just come from the screening and she said it was her father up there on the screen, and she wanted to thank me. I thanked her and I hung up the phone and I wept.
ROBERT ALTMAN: You should watch Popeye with a kid. Kids love that movie. They get it.
ROBIN WILLIAMS: It’s a beautiful film, man. It’s done with the same love he made every other film with. He told me later on, “Don’t always go with a critical response. Go with, ‘What did you do there?’” Yeah, we did do some really great stuff. I think it was just because it was my first movie, it was like the illusion—”I want the studio to make money.”
At one point I think he got kind of pissed that I was making fun of it. But I said, “Listen, I’m a comic, I have to kind of do that.” I said, “You run it backwards and it has a happy ending.”
He said a great thing. He said, “A lot of people in the business are making shoes. I’m in the business of making gloves.” I look back on the experience and I go, “Goddamn, man, it was an honor.” I think you come away working on an Altman movie going, “Well, that was something.” You don’t come away blasé, you learn a lot about being gutsy, about putting your ass on the line, trying something. Hey, dude, put it out there.
I think for the first one out of the gate, that’s a pretty amazing experience. It’s kind of like Apocalypse Now without the death…. For your first movie to get the shit kicked out of it, it toughened me up. It’s kind of, in a weird way, a gift. It was like, “Hey, now you go off and you work. You’re no longer a virgin. You’ve been in your first battle. It wasn’t a total victory but we didn’t get slaughtered. So keep going.”
STEPHEN ALTMAN: It only made sixty million, and of course it cost twenty million to make. So how that translates into bomb, I have no idea. Still, it wasn’t the huge success that everybody thought it was going to be.
DAVID LEVY: Popeye got a bum rap.
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JULES FEIFFER: Bob must have spent so many years simmering [laughs] and building up rage at what he had to put up with to get work from these assholes that when he finally got in a position to do Altman work—and as he discovered how to do Altman work—he was not going to back off for anybody. And he got into endless fights over it and he lost opportunities, I’m sure, and he got fired from things, but he just didn’t know how to behave any other way. I mean, maybe he felt that once he starts down that road again it won’t stop. I think he was kind of a grown-up Huck Finn.
He was destined to go into the wilderness. If anything, he willed himself into the wilderness. This was his fate, that he had to butt heads, he had to fight the establishment, and he also was a genius and there’s only a little of genius that’s allowed in American movies. And then we want to go back to doing what we do best, which is Star Wars 42.