CHAPTER 26
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Bernard Weinraub, story headlined “Robert Altman, Very Much a Player Again,” The New York Times, July 29, 1993: At 68, an age when most of Hollywood’s film makers are retired, ignored or treated like dinosaurs by movie executives and talent agents, Robert Altman has embarked on the most radical and adventurous journey of his career.
“People here have just come to the conclusion that I’m not going to go away,” he said the other afternoon. “I seem to have become like one of those old standards, in musical terms. Always around. Lauren Bacall said to me, ‘You just don’t quit, do you?’ Guess not. I guess 30-year-olds out here have decided I’m not just an old man living in the past.”
Hardly. …
Seated in the garden of a nearly deserted restaurant near the beach in Malibu, Mr. Altman said the success of “The Player,” the scathing satire about Hollywood, has enabled him, finally, to work on the projects that have obsessed him for years but proved elusive because film companies found his work too risky and potentially uncommercial.
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Television Directing
Black and Blue—1993; The Real McTeaque—1993.
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Robert Altman and Tess Gallagher, the widow of the writer Raymond Carver, during the filming of Short Cuts
Short Cuts (1993)
Kenneth Turan, review in the Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1993: The old lion can still roar. Though tradition holds that there are no second acts in American lives, writer-director Robert Altman, never much of a traditionalist, embarks with “Short Cuts” on the fourth or possibly fifth act of a remarkable career. Both building on what has gone before and extending outward to new boundaries, he has made a rich, unnerving film, as comic as it is astringent, that in its own quiet way works up a considerable emotional charge. … Altman’s co-conspirator this time around is the late Raymond Carver, a groundbreaking short-story writer who called himself a paid-up-in-full member of the working poor and made his considerable reputation with beautifully compressed, unadorned tales of life among the blue-collar classes.
Though this might seem too narrow and specific a base for Altman’s ambitions, he and co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt understand that the harder you look at even the most ordinary lives, the more you see. Basing their script on nine of Carver’s stories plus a prose poem, they have fashioned a three-hour-plus chamber piece for 22 players, a beautiful and intricate mosaic of character and incident that examines the greatest of all mysteries, that of ordinary reality. … Perhaps the most remarkable thing about “Short Cuts” is how effortless it all seems. Made with the unforced and casual command that often comes to artists late in life, it is close to magical in the way it draws us into its web, in how the whole comes to be considerably more than the individual parts…. If you want to know what the work of a mature American master is like, this is the place to look.
Rita Kempley, review in The Washington Post, October 22, 1993: “Short Cuts” is a cynical, sexist and shallow work from cinema’s premier misanthrope, Robert Altman, who here shows neither compassion for—nor insight into—the human condition. This long, sour and ultimately pointless film allows Altman, the debunker of Hollywood and Nashville, to put the screws to the common folk of Southern California. … Basically, Altman’s here to tell us that life stinks and there’s not a damn thing to be done about it.
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Robert Altman, from his introduction to a collection of Raymond Carver’s stories published in 1993: Raymond Carver made poetry out of the prosaic. One critic wrote that “he revealed the strangeness concealed behind the banal,” but what he really did was capture the wonderful idiosyncrasies of human behavior, the idiosyncrasies that exist amid the randomness of life’s experiences. And human behavior, filled with all its mystery and inspiration, has always fascinated me. … Raymond Carver’s view of the world, and probably my own, may be termed dark by some. We’re connected by similar attitudes about the arbitrary nature of luck in the scheme of things—the child being hit by the car in “A Small Good Thing;” the marriage upheaval resulting from a body being discovered during a fishing trip in “So Much Water So Close to Home.” Somebody wins a lottery. The same day, that person’s sister gets killed by a brick falling off a building in Seattle. Those are the same thing. The lottery was won both ways. … When I first spoke to the poet Tess Gallagher, Ray’s widow, about wanting to make this film, I told her I wasn’t going to be pristine in my approach to Carver and that the stories were going to be scrambled. She instinctively recognized and encouraged this, and said Ray was an admirer of Nashville, that he liked the helplessness of those characters and their ability to manage nevertheless. She also knew that artists in different fields must use their own skills and vision to do their work.
TESS GALLAGHER (poet and widow of Raymond Carver): I’d always admired his work and so had Ray. He began to look more closely at the stories and to try to see what was available. It turned out that a filmmaker named Jill Godmilow—she’s done some small films—she had optioned a good number of stories. Bob had to choose from what was left. There were a lot of complaints about Bob having chosen the darker stories. The reason he hadn’t chosen others was they weren’t available. It wasn’t Bob saying, “I’m going to choose the toughest, meanest stories Carver wrote.”
I had seen Nashville with Ray. I found it so affecting the way that the characters were willing to chance everything. They so wanted to follow that dream, even if they were not terribly talented, that they would put themselves in untenable situations. They were so fragile, yet they were so invested in the dream of what their life can be, that they didn’t see themselves. We saw them, we felt them, we cringed when they tried to sing and couldn’t sing. I think that we feel something similar for Ray’s characters, how fragile they are, how unprotected, how out there, how they don’t know how to do it right, so they cause themselves more harm and they can’t figure out how to get out of their snarl. But we stay with them because we’ve been there. You don’t get through life with everything going the way you think it will or you want it to. Life gets away from you. Like the baker in “A Small, Good Thing.” You wake up and find yourself a brutish character who is making those terrible phone calls. That’s not who he set out to be. But you would never have found the tenderness in that scene without Carver. Carver was in there. Carver was working on Altman. People say Altman was working on Carver. Well, it worked the other way around, too.
I think Bob and Ray really connected on the basis that in Carver’s stories every moment is fragile. … You will be on safe ground with somebody and then a word or a notion or something from the past will be brought up and everything is changed. Suddenly the ground has dropped out from under you. We go along as if we know how the people around us are going to behave and we think we know their motivations, but we don’t. We don’t always know what is going to be brought to bear, what the possibilities for that person really are. Altman thinks everything comes out of who the character is, and I think so does Ray. The characters are maybe less set in Ray. I think they are even more unpredictable in Ray’s work.
ALAN RUDOLPH (director): When Chris Penn’s character hit that girl with the rock and she went down, that was one of the most brutal things I’d seen in my life. I remember the first time I saw the screening of it—it was a rough cut.
Bob said, “What’s wrong?”
I said, “Man, I wish there was a way you could do that without showing it.”
He said, “Oh, you’ve got to show it.”
I saw someone bolder than I could ever be. Because I would have wanted to be overtly liked more than that. Bob just didn’t care if you liked it as long as you had to deal with it, because out of having to deal with it on his terms comes respect. And out of respect you can change people.
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Peter Travers, review in Rolling Stone, October 1993: Stuart Kane (Fred Ward) … and his pals Gordon (Buck Henry) and Vern (Huey Lewis) had just walked four hours to their favorite fishing spot when Vern, pissing in the stream, found his urine trickling on the beautiful and dead body of a girl. It’s only after Stuart comes home and makes love to his wife Claire (a never-better Anne Archer) that he tells her how he and his friends made the decision to leave the body in the water for another day and keep fishing. She was dead, wasn’t she? Claire is shattered; she attends the funeral of the girl but can’t salve her conscience.
ANNE ARCHER (actress): I loved playing that part because it had a tragic poignancy. I instinctively knew who she was. She was this woman who felt immediately victimized by what he did because she saw herself as everyone. So this woman lying in the river could have been her, this woman who was treated as a piece of meat. It took all the love out of the relationship because it could never be undone. It showed such a lack of care of the things that would make you want to be in a relationship with a man. It was a very sad, tragic feeling that I felt as that character. It throws her world into disarray.
Yet that’s also the fun about Bob. Just as you start to moralize he won’t let you do that. That’s why he creates such interesting, complex characters. You don’t dislike Fred Ward’s character. He’s not an evil person. He did a thoughtless thing. It’s just that the woman he’s married to is a very sensitive person and takes it very personally.
TESS GALLAGHER: Altman likes taking the opposite view from Ray. He was really in a dialogue with Ray. When Ray is pointing all the emphasis on the woman in “So Much Water So Close to Home,” Bob is saying, “I’m going to focus on the guy.” I talked to him about that. Ray really did this from the point of view of the wife. But Bob didn’t want us to think that it was all the guy’s fault, the husband who continues to fish after finding the body of a dead girl. He wanted to move the two of them closer together so we cannot rest in a pat judgment about what the guy did. When you bring the poles closer together the friction is very moving. It’s very unsettling. And you can’t tell who is going to come out of it right as easily as you thought you could. Of course, those readers who were very fond of the woman’s view weren’t happy about having to consider that this fellow, this seemingly good fellow, makes a bad judgment and is really in trouble.
When you have the moment when the guy is pissing onto the body, this was horrible. I instinctively thought, “Oh, God, he’s way over the line.” But he wouldn’t give that up. Not that I asked him to, but I think Kathryn did. He was looking for the image that could show the carelessness, the despicable carelessness of the American male in that situation—where they’re all out there, men being men together, and the body of the woman suffers a desecration. He doesn’t come on and say this body has suffered a desecration, he leaves that for you to feel. Bob had him do that because he knows what everybody’s going to feel. He didn’t do that to be a smart-ass.
Robert Altman, to Peter Travers, review headlined “A Robert Altman S*M*A*S*H,” Rolling Stone, October 1993: “I don’t think the husband did a bad thing,” says Altman. “People say to me, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t do that.’ I say, ‘I would do that.’” The movie allows for both points of view, which is Altman’s purpose: “It is not my business—nor was it Carver’s business—to moralize about these things. I resent in art the definitive explanation for people’s behavior—there isn’t any.”
ANNE ARCHER: I think Bob is right in that sense. He doesn’t like it when you make things morally right and wrong. He loved the foibles and the charm of different characters. He didn’t create these dark characters that depressed you. He created these flawed characters that amuse you. He could create a flawed character that would somehow mix it up just enough so you would have to get off your moral soapbox and sort of go, “Well, there’s a little bit of that in me.” You sort of have to forgive them.
Bob was nonjudgmental. Actors are always being judged. They’re being watched, they’re being looked at, everybody has an opinion, everybody judges the width and breadth of their talents, or lack thereof. Everybody is always judging artists and it’s the worst thing you can do to an artist. It’s the thing that kills them. There’s an active plot to get the artists. Bob doesn’t do that. Bob loves actors, and all artists, whether it’s the set designer or the lead or the cinematographer.
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Dialogue from Short Cuts:
(While getting ready for a dinner party, Ralph Wyman, played by Matthew Modine, confronts his wife, Marian, played by Julianne Moore, about an incident at a party three years earlier.)
RALPH: Your lipstick was smeared when you came back.
MARIAN: How would you know? You were drunk. [Marian spills wine on her skirt]
MARIAN: Goddammit, I wanted to wear this. Shit. [She removes her skirt and rinses it under the faucet. She is naked from the waist down]
JULIANNE MOORE: Unfortunately, the way Bob asked me to be in Short Cuts, I literally got a cold call. I got a call at home—I was standing in my kitchen—and he was like, “Hello, Julianne. This is Bob Altman. Do you know who I am?”
Which is crazy. I assumed that it was somebody making fun of me. I thought it was a friend of mine making fun of me because they knew what a huge fan I was of his. And I said, “Oh, come on. This isn’t Bob.”
He goes, “No, no. It’s Bob Altman.”
Julianne Moore, as Marian Wyman, in Short Cuts
And just, I was shattered. I just didn’t—I said first, “How did you get my number?” And I just couldn’t believe he was calling me at home.
And he said, “Well, I have this movie and I have this part I want you to do.”
And I said, “Yes. Yes.”
He said, “No, no, no. You really—you have to read it first.” He said, “Because there’s something—there’s some nudity and it’s not negotiable.”
And I said, “Yes, yes. I don’t care. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”
And he said, “Well, sweetheart, really, just think about it. But I’m glad that you’re enthusiastic.” So he said the nudity, you know, the part, it’s bottomless.
And I said, “That’s fine. I’ll do it.”
Bob claims that after this—I don’t remember saying this; this is the unfortunate part—I may have said, in my excitement, “Guess what, I’m a real redhead.”
I don’t remember saying that. But Bob never forgot it. And then the story got bigger. It morphed into—”And then she said, ‘I have a bonus for you, I’m a real redhead!” This is at the very, very beginning of my film career when I’m desperate to be taken seriously.
So basically, I would do a movie and they would call people you worked with and the first person they would call would be Bob. And Bob would say, “Listen to this story. … She said, ‘I have a bonus for you. …’“
And I’d be like, “Oh, my God!” So this story was in The New York Times, the L.A. Times, Rolling Stone, Premiere magazine. Basically, anybody who’d talk to Bob, he’d tell that story.
So I didn’t know what to do because then people would say to me, “Can we call Bob and ask him for a quote?” And I’d go, “Please don’t call Bob, please don’t call Bob.”
And I thought, “This is ridiculous. I can’t, I can’t go on like this. I love him. And he means more than anything to me.” And I thought, “Just get your courage up, Julie.”
And I called Bob. And I felt like such an ass. And I said, “You know, Bob, about that thing that you always say about my being a real red—”
He said, “Oh, yeah, about how you said, ‘I have a bonus for you.’“
I said, “Well, Bob, I know it’s funny. But I’m kinda sensitive about it, and maybe—maybe you could stop talking to the press about it.”
And he said—and in the most gentle, humane, you know, way possible—he said, “Of course, honey, whatever you want.”
It was so moving because that’s who Bob was. You know, whatever you wanted was great. Whoever you were was great. You never made a mistake with Bob. Bob made you feel that everything you were doing was perfect. He made you feel, once he had cast you, you were what he wanted. He made the decision in the casting and therefore nothing you did on set was going to be wrong because you were bringing your whole thing to it. He didn’t want anything different than what you decided to do. So you felt insanely comforted by that because he was so gentle. You know, all this talk about Bob being this kind of irascible, difficult kind of person? Well, he was never that way with an actor or with a creative person that I saw. Never, never, never. He saved all that for the money people.
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I remember being really nervous doing that stuff in Short Cuts. I said, “Do you want me to do it again? Is there anything else you want me to try?”
He said, “No, you’re doing absolutely everything you need to do. You’re doing it perfectly.” He was so reassuring. But the funny thing was, after I finished, I’d done the big scene, we were in a place called Baldwin Hills, and it was way, way high up in these mountains, so they were counting on all this light coming in. I did all the stuff and it was all emotional and everything and Bob had this tradition that everybody went to dailies. Whoever was working with him that day usually went with him in his car, which was incredibly sweet.
He said to me and Matthew Modine, “Come on, you guys, let’s go. Let’s get in the car.” He said, “I’ve got some news for you. We have to reshoot that. We lost the light.” I was like, “What?”
He said, “Don’t worry, you can do it again.”
I mean, I was like… I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the fact that I had to do it all again the next day in the morning after spending the entire day doing the most emotional part at the end of the day. And Bob was completely calm about it and completely certain that it would happen again. He always gave you an enormous amount of freedom. So much freedom within a boundary. Which is the best situation you can be in. People always assumed with Bob there was all this free-for-all, that there was endless improv and people did whatever they want. I mean, that was only true up to a point. You improvised, but then you’d need to hone it. You were free, but it was Bob’s set. He never lost sight of the movie he was making and what your place was within it. It was that sort of thing. You don’t want rules that restrict you, you want rules that aid you, that guide you. That’s what he was able to do because he knew what movie he was making. Always.
MATTHEW MODINE: The scene is about so much more than Julianne having her pants off. You just know these characters have had this conversation a few times before. You can feel it in the text. Tonight he’s going to make his cocktail and sit down in his chair and ask her to tell him what happened. That’s what’s going to be so unnerving—he’s not going to be chasing her around, berating her.
JULIANNE MOORE: So many people asked me about doing that scene.
MATTHEW MODINE: I felt so embarrassed for her when we did press for the movie. The reporters reminded me of President Bush. He always looks like a guy who just heard a really dirty joke and he wishes he could share it with you. So reporters would be sitting there with Julianne and they had this stupid smirk on their faces and they’re like, “So, you’re a real redhead.” And Julianne would handle it, just say, “Well, yeah.”
I only wish I had my pants off, so they would have talked about my pubic hair as much as they talked about Julianne being a real redhead.
JULIANNE MOORE: When you read a piece of literature it’s a very internal experience. You can talk about the characters’ feelings and whatever. But when you’re trying to translate that into a dramatic experience, you have to find a way to translate that kind of intimacy and that thought process. So the feeling of being incredibly intimate and knowing somebody, knowing their body, of a marriage, he was able to communicate that in that scene that way, and it was shocking to people. And really, really upsetting because he communicated that in a flash.
So, anyway, it might not have been the last time I had dinner with Bob and Kathryn, but it was after we’d had this conversation about my bush. And we were sitting at the table: my husband, me, another couple, and Bob and Kathryn. And somebody was asking me how Bob and I had met, and how I had ended up in Short Cuts and what had happened.
And then Kathryn said—I will never believe what she said—”And I have a bonus for ya!”
And Bob said, “Kathryn, we’re not supposed to talk about her pussy anymore.”
But you know what? I’m really glad he did. I loved him.
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JENNIFER JASON LEIGH: He called me and said, “I have this movie and there’s a couple of roles that might work for you.” And I was really excited. I read it and I liked Lois, the woman who did sex calls from her house. I called and told him, and he said, “Oh good, that’s the only one left.”
My research? I went to a bunch of those places. He told me, “The script is really a blueprint and I need you to fill it out. I want it to be raunchy and I want it to be real. You figure it out.” One place I went was a factory with cubicles. One was a house in the Valley and this was a guy using a falsetto. He was a straight guy with a picture of Michelle Pfeiffer on the wall. And a woman’s house. She kept files, which was kind of awkward because I knew some of the people. So now I know what they like. I made my script from that.
Chris Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh, playing pool cleaner Jerry Kaiser and phone sex worker Lois Kaiser, in Short Cuts
Dialogue from Short Cuts:
LOIS KAISER (Played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, taking a phone-sex call while changing her daughter’s diaper): Oooh. My panties are getting a little wet.
JENNIFER JASON LEIGH: The great thing about Bob was he would inspire you out of sheer necessity to come up with stuff that you didn’t know you were capable of, that you didn’t know you had in you. He was so genuinely mischievous and so damn funny.
He had that much faith and trust. Which is nerve-racking. It could be a free fall, which is what I think acting should be. But you need a master to catch you, which is what you had with Bob. You could make these extravagantly spectacular choices, knowing you had this strong, loving man to catch you.
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PETER GALLAGHER: The most amazing thing in the world is that we did The Player and it was a hit, and then everybody and his brother wanted to be in Short Cuts. And Stormy Weathers was a great part and everybody wanted to play it. And Bob said, “No, Gallagher is playing it.” Which is maybe one of the most astounding things I’ve ever heard. That was maybe the only time in my life that somebody with a bigger name wanted a part that I got.
I remember calling Steve Altman a couple nights before the scene where I destroy the house with the chain saw. I was working on the part and Steve is the art director. I said, “Steve, now, what kind of gag do you have in mind for this couch? I don’t want one of these frantic, slash-and-hack things. I want to slice that fucker like a pound cake.”
And he said, “We’re giving you a real couch. I’ll just make sure there’s nothing that can snag the chain and fly back and kill you, any springs.”
Bob said, “I want you to come in here, look there, and then cut the couch up. And we’re going to do that in one take.”
You just can’t ask for anything more than that. Just to get these great, wonderful, cool things to do.
LILY TOMLIN: When we did Short Cuts, we weren’t all there together. Each couple shot for about a week. Tom Waits and I were the first couple. I was mad for Tom—I loved him as an artist and a person. He had his own kind of underworld eccentricity and private poetry. He would go home every night after shooting and call me and pretend that he was Earl out driving in the limo. The first night he did it I was so surprised. I should have taped it. He was talking nonstop poetry to me as if I was Doreen. He called me about four nights in a row. He was so involved in it. Bob allowed you to be totally in the moment because there was nothing rigid about Bob, about what he was going to do.
BUCK HENRY: He made actors believe that they were doing something for him that they couldn’t do anywhere else. 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—between the apparent looseness of the day and the possibility of improvising. He backed off from the actors; there was never the feeling of the camera being in your face. Usually it wasn’t anywhere near you, so it encouraged you to do things you wouldn’t have done if the camera was in your face. And since you were always wearing a mike you weren’t worried about not being heard.
TESS GALLAGHER: Bob gave one of the characters he invented my name—Tess. Annie Ross’s character. She’s falling out of the seams. She’s kind of a ruined character, kind of a bellicose, pitiable character, so wrapped up in being this singer and her love for her dead husband. She was full of bathos, like somebody out of Chaucer, almost. Offended? No. I thought they had used my name, but I didn’t find myself there. I don’t regard Ray in the way in which she does her husband. I’m not maudlin about Ray, and she is rather maudlin. I thought it was a way for Bob to sneak my name in there. I like the toughness about her. It says you have to be tough for life. Altman’s right. You do have to have a good amount of stamina. You have to have your compassionate nature in hand but there’s a way in which you also have to stand up to life.
Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits, playing waitress Doreen Piggot and chauffeur Earl Piggot, in Short Cuts
ANNIE ROSS (singer and actress): I always had the feeling with Bob that I was on a beautiful schooner and the first in charge was Bob, and I knew he would get us into port with no problems. You knew he knew what he was doing. It’s the same way with a pianist—if you have the right pianist, you have a mind thing that goes on. Listening is the most important thing, and that’s what Bob did so well. He listened. And it’s the same way in singing jazz.
He loved adventure, he loved newness, and he loved that you’ve got to jump out in the deep water. And he lived by that. You have to be brave and you have to take chances, and that’s what he did and that’s what he was. And I think it goes with an artist’s temperament. Because what you’re actually doing is saying, “Come on, crucify me. Here I am.”
Robert Coles, essay headlined “Compassion from Carver, Male Swagger from Altman,” The New York Times, October 17, 1993: The director gives us a movie full of male swagger, with women always at the edge of things; a movie that lacks Carver’s gentle humor and prompts laughter at people … a movie relentless in its cynical, sardonic assault on anyone and everyone, as if America itself is beyond the pale.
TESS GALLAGHER: I know that Ray would have laughed at the same things that Altman laughed at in this film. But I don’t think Altman made fun of the characters. I think he was watching those characters, letting them be as bizarre as they could be. I think their motions are larger and they’re stranger in Altman—like the woman who does telephone sex—much more the American grotesque. The things these people are reaching for are not going to satisfy them. The woman who is having one guy after another. The guy who takes a chain saw to the living room. None of their actions are going to move them into a livable space. They’re just good at making disasters. And the chaos of Ray’s characters didn’t make you feel like they didn’t have possibilities. The suffering that they had was wonderfully handled so you could respect the suffering.
I think Short Cuts is just a classic, and I think it’s one of the classic American films because we really do get a portrait of America and we’re really looking in the mirror.
Robert Altman to Cathy Horyn, story headlined “Robert Altman Confronts His Critics: ‘Short Cuts’ Has Been Called Misogynistic and Callous; the Director Replies, ‘So What?’” The Washington Post, October 31, 1993: I’m not doing a literal translation of Carver, nor did I ever say I was going to. If anything, the film is a reflection not just of my interpretation, but of those of a hundred other people who worked on it. We were all responding to the material. … But you know, so what? We’re not saying this film is anything other than what it is. So, maybe all I can say in response to [Robert] Coles is, ‘Tsk, tsk, I wish he had got it.’”
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON (director): The way the characters dressed, the way they looked, the locations in the film, everything about it—God, that is the city, this is the city that I’ve known, I’ve been near.
That movie got inside my bones so strongly, and you know, without it I never would have known how to write Magnolia. I knew that I had stories that I wanted to tell but certainly didn’t know how to do it and wouldn’t have known how to do it without that film.
ROBERT DORNHELM (director): He looked at film on one side as a pure, artistic venue. At the same time he was quite happy if the box office was good. Just getting a few good reviews and no audience wasn’t enough. It consoled him, but he would prefer to have a hit. With Short Cuts, the distributor was begging him: “If you want money, cut a few minutes.” Bob just thought the Antichrist was trying to destroy his art. They were well-meaning people who wanted him to get what he deserved, which was a big commercial hit. But when it came down to the art or the money, he was with the art.
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DAVID LEVY (producer): As successful as those films were critically, commercially it was another story.
Both The Player and Short Cuts were released by Fine Line, a new company. I think The Player was maybe the second picture they ever released. And we’ll never know, but I don’t think there were ever more than four hundred prints in circulation. I really think it was the sort of movie that you could have let out in a more substantial way right from Jump Street, and people would have come, such was the quality of the reviews. But in what is now called the specialty world, there was a conventional wisdom that prevailed at that point in time. It was like, you will open in just a few cities, you will start small, you will build. This is one time, and I’m not talking about going crazy wide with the thing, but I think ultimately twice as many people might have seen it in theaters if the approach to the release was different. Similarly, Short Cuts. I won’t say I feel it had the commercial appeal of The Player, but again, here’s a picture that gets all that acclaim and what did it do? Maybe ten, twelve, thirteen million box office?