CHAPTER 32
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Robert Altman, to David Thompson, from Altman on Altman: Every film I’ve ever done I really like. That’s not very modest and not the way you’re supposed to be, but you invest so much in them. I liken them to your children. You might say, “Well, don’t you wish he was taller?” He isn’t. “Don’t you wish she had blonde hair and blue eyes?” But she doesn’t. And you do tend to love your least successful children the most. So I love all my films.
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HARRY BELAFONTE: The Oscar having eluded him for so long, he developed this facade. He’d watch it to see what went on, but act like it was this crock of shit. He turned being a nonwinner into a virtue—his work was above all that.
I said, “Look, Bob, if you don’t like the shit that much, why do you keep dressing up when you’re nominated and go?”
He said, “Well, Belafonte, there’s a whore in all of us. It would mean a lot to anything I do from the box-office point of view. But other than that, I don’t give a shit.”
It wasn’t until the honorary Oscar and the way in which he spoke that I understood the real depth of feeling that he had and what the Oscar meant to him.
ROBERT ALTMAN (Accepting his Oscar for Lifetime Achievement to a thunderous standing ovation, March 5, 2006): Thank you. [To Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin] You gals are great.
Robert Altman with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin at the 78th Academy Awards, where he received his Oscar
[To audience] Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much. I’ve got a lot to say and they’ve got a clock on me. I want to thank everybody for this. The Academy. I was really honored and moved to accept this award. When the news first came to me about it, I was caught kind of off guard. I always thought that this type of award meant that it was over. Then it dawned on me that I’m busy in rehearsals on a play that I’m doing in London. It opened last night, Arthur Miller’s last play, Resurrection Blues. I was doing an interview for my new film that I just finished, A Prairie Home Companion, which will come out in the summer, and I realized that it’s not over.
Of course, I was happy and thrilled to accept this award, and I look at it as a nod to all of my films. Because to me, I’ve just made one long film. And I know some of you have liked some of the sections and others of you … Anyway. All right. And I want to thank all of the people that have worked on all of my pictures so hard. The brilliant actors, the amazing crews. And I can’t name them all, so I’m going to name a doctor that is taking care of me, Jodie Kaplan. So she represents everybody who’ve supported me and made it possible.
I’ve always said that making a film is like making a sand castle at the beach. You invite your friends and you get them down there and you say—you build this beautiful structure, several of you, and then you sit back and you watch the tide come in, have a drink, watch the tide come in, and the ocean just takes it away. And that sand castle remains in your mind. Now, I’ve built about forty of them and I never tire of it. No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have. I’m very fortunate in my career. I’ve never had to direct a film that I didn’t choose or develop. I love filmmaking. It has given me an entrée to the world and to the human condition. And for that, I’m forever grateful.
Finally, I would like to thank my family, which—you’re all right up there, all of ‘em, almost—for their love and support through the years. And most importantly, I want to thank and applaud my wife, Kathryn Reed Altman, without whom I wouldn’t be here today. I love you, Trixie! Thank you.
Oh, one more thing. I’m here, I think, under kind of false pretenses, and I think I have to become straight with you. Ten years ago, eleven years ago, I had a heart transplant. A total heart transplant. I got the heart of, I think, a young woman who was about in her late thirties, and so by that calculation you may be giving me this award too early, because I think I’ve got about forty years left on it, and I intend to use it!
Thank you very much. Thank you.
ROBERT REED ALTMAN: It was the most emotional moment I had. For him to say, “I want my family there in that box, instead of friends and other people,” that meant a lot to me. It wasn’t like him. A lot of other things that happened, we were pretty much left out when it came to his work. But this was this Lifetime Achievement thing, and he really honored the whole family by making us part of it and by pointing us out. We were all on television with him, and what he said to my mom, all that stuff, and seeing him getting that Oscar, was a huge emotional, joyous situation. It was incredible.
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Robert Altman, Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, April 2006:
Q: If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be? A: I’m immortal.
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KEVIN KLINE: We were on a train to Boston, for an event around the opening of Prairie Home Companion. I was getting ready to play King Lear, so I asked Bob, “What’s it like growing old?” He says, “It sucks. Everything hurts.” Just the terseness, the economy of direction. Pure Bob.
ROBERT ALTMAN (October 2006, one month before his death): What have I got? At very best probably five years left. I’m aware of the limitations of things.
I’m not interested in being ninety-five, and that’s not very far away. I’m certainly not interested in being ninety-seven, because I know I’m not going to be making films then. I am mortal. But for a while there in the seventies and eighties I was immortal. I did not see the light at the end of the tunnel. Now I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
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DAVID LEVY (producer): You can fill some multiplexes with all the pictures we didn’t get to do over the years. Too many to name. They fell through for money, personalities, timing, you name the reason. There was the sequel to Nashville, and the sequel to Short Cuts. There was that project that Alan Rudolph adapted from the book A Shortage of Engineers. I feel like that maybe would have been Bob’s first antiwar film since M*A*S*H.
There was the project that became An Unfinished Life, that movie with Redford and J-Lo. He was going to do that with Paul Newman and Naomi Watts. I think he wanted to see where his head would take him in what might be called a fairly conventional family drama. Another movie we didn’t get to do is Paint, set in the contemporary art world of New York. That was a heartbreaker not to get to do. That would have been fun.
WREN ARTHUR: Wild Card was a baseball movie that he was going to do with John Goodman, I think, at one point. Paul Newman, maybe Woody Harrelson. Stephen Altman was in Chicago getting ready, and so was the line producer. Dona Granata was going to do costumes. And then it collapsed.
DAVID LEVY: It’s particularly sad we didn’t get to do The Widow Claire, from the play by Horton Foote. You can look at Prairie and it seems like the work of a guy who’s thinking it could be his last movie, but I think that he was maybe looking at Horton’s picture as that. It would have been the work of two wise old men saying to the world, “Just be careful. Don’t send your boys off to war.” It’s a night before a soldier goes off to war and there’s a tone of melancholy and an inevitability that we all need to question. I think that it’s too bad. It would have been a lovely way to say good-bye.
At the end we were working on Hands on a Hard Body, based on this competition where people try to win a truck by keeping a hand on it longer than anybody else. A documentary had been made about the real event, but this would have been Bob’s take on it. That would have been something, just having a bunch of disparate characters thrown together in an environment in a prescribed period of time and just seeing how it all shook out. It was going to be part revisionist faux documentary but also a commentary on the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Ultimately I think he would have ended up going into the impact of everyone getting their fifteen minutes of fame.
PAM DIXON MICKELSON (casting director): I spoke to him about casting Hands on a Hard Body two days before he passed away. The reason why he lived as long as he did was he always had something great to look forward to, and he always talked about it, which was great. We had Meryl Streep.
MERYL STREEP: I loved the experience of Prairie and found it was just a little too short. I wanted to do Hands for the fun, and to be around him. For the laughs.
PAM DIXON MICKELSON: We had Chris Rock, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, Steve Buscemi, Tommy Lee Jones, Jack White from the White Stripes, Jack Black, Salma Hayek, Billy Bob Thornton, John C. Reilly, Hilary Swank. Others, too. And we weren’t finished.
JULIANNE MOORE: I was talking to him about Hands on a Hard Body just before he died.
PAM DIXON MICKELSON: It would probably have been the best ensemble cast in the history of film. People were doing it because it was Bob.
ALAN LADD JR.: I’d say, “What is Hard Body about?”
He’d say, “It’s a film about a car.”
I’d say, “Yes, but what it’s about?”
He’d say, “I don’t know. I haven’t made it yet.”
WREN ARTHUR: The story that fits inside of Hands on a Hard Body—and what Bob kept going back to—was to watch these people fall apart and what they do when they fall apart. One person turns on another person, one person is an angel. It’s the theme of all his movies, every single one of them. He deals with us at our very basic nature. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
JOSH ASTRACHAN (producer): The way Bob described making Hands on a Hard Body was sly, original, and sprung from the specific possibilities and problems of making that particular film and that particular story. The movie was going to be a three-ring circus—at least three rings. Contests around the car would be the center ring. But there was also the ring around the truck dealership, its owner, the owner’s lieutenant—a woman who ran the contest with an iron hand, to be played by Meryl Streep. There was a ring of journalists to cover the event, the center of which was the embittered alcoholic toiling for a Texas television news crew, played by Billy Bob Thornton. There were boyfriends and girlfriends and wives and angry husbands and a contestant who is mistakenly arrested for murder and hauled off the truck by cops. And there’d be bands playing, hot dogs, cotton candy—Bob’s favorite foods. All these people, over three or four days, would grow almost as tired as the contestants themselves. A perfect Altman film.
ROBERT ALTMAN (November 2006, two weeks before his death): I think I know how to do Hands on a Hard Body. I think I know how to do it like a documentary. What I want to do is set up the event and turn on the switch and let the event happen and film it with several cameras. And then that’s it. Not to try to perfect it. The things that we miss—something that’s a story line or a point—I have to figure out how to insert that. And if I don’t miss anything then I haven’t done this well…. So I have to tell this story. And I really don’t like using the word “story.” The word “story” is something I don’t like at all.
In other words, I can’t control everything. That’s what I’m looking for. ‘Cause that relieves me of the responsibility of being the author. The author that I’m looking for is the event itself.
I’m getting to the point where I’m seeing it as sort of my last thing. I don’t foresee anything beyond that. So now I’m getting to the position where I want it to be really special. And then I think maybe I won’t get to make it at all, which is quite a possibility, too. I’m not running out and taking poison over this. I’m not even depressed by it. I’m aware of the conditions. And I’m—I want to deal with it. I feel I have to deal with it. … You have to keep going down the river [laughs softly].
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KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Thanksgiving of 2003, he got sick. We had a big family thing in California and he got sick to his stomach and had to leave the table. Cancer. They took one of the kidneys.
And he worked right through it. Chemo or no chemo. Dr. David Nanus—I have to give him credit—and the Oncology Department at New York-Presbyterian Hospital helped him. They paced him. They provided the quality of life. They were easy on the chemo. They’d lay off for five months and then he’d gain the weight again. He’d look like a million bucks, take another project, and then go back on chemo. It was a three-year ride like that. He had an assistant, Lowell Dubrinsky, who was so great through it all.
Then, in November of 2006, we were back here in New York and he was in preproduction for Hands on a Hard Body. He just kept working and getting that going and we were making the trip to California because he wanted to shoot it there—he was going to scout locations. So we’d be at home shooting, which was going to be good. Before we left New York, we had two events that he really wanted to go to. He sweat them out. He was not feeling good. He was weak and half sick and we went to a thing Friday night and Saturday night. Sunday we were supposed to leave and he wasn’t up to it, and we delayed it.
We got to California on Tuesday, and Wednesday we went right to the oncologist, who saw that he was completely dehydrated. They tried to hydrate him and sent him home, telling us if he wasn’t any better to come back.
He wasn’t better, so we went back. We were in the hospital and he was starting to fill up again, his body was filling with fluid. He had that a lot, and we’d have to drain and drain and drain. The doctor called me out and said, “Do you have all the papers? Do you have a living will?”
I said, “Yeah, I’ve already told them all that when I checked in.”
Thinking back, I realize he knew how serious this was.
So they finally drained Bob’s stomach, and when he came out of that room he said to Konni and me, “I feel just fine; you girls go on home. I’m just terrific. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He was kidding around—he stuck his tongue out at me and we had jokes and things.
So the next morning he called me before I could even wake up. He said, “God, I feel like a million bucks, I’m having breakfast. I’m having pancakes.”
I said, “Oh, that’s great. Boy, that’s all it took. That’s terrific.”
He said, “I got the paper and the game is coming on. Take your time.”
So I took maybe an extra hour to take care of some things. I was driving down the highway and I called to say I’m on my way. He said, “I’m not feeling very good.”
Such a blow to me, because he’d felt so great an hour and a half before. And when I got in there he just got sicker and sicker. That was Saturday. And I got a special nurse. Michael came and insisted on staying all night. And Bobby kept coming in with the baby, and Stevie came. Sunday morning he went to morphine. He knew me; I could get through to him. I’d say, “Bob?” and he’d respond a bit, and then Michael would say, “He heard you.”
And then when he died, he was just hanging on me. Just lifting himself on my arm. I could hear him go.
Last words? Not really, because of the morphine. He said one thing before he got too heavy into the morphine. I was standing at the window. Must have been Saturday afternoon. It was before he sunk so fast. I was standing looking out the window and he was trying to get comfortable—he was so uncomfortable. And he said, “I’m never getting out of here, I know I’m not.”
And I said, “Oh, that’s bullshit. You’ve said that before.”
He hadn’t said it before. That just killed me. Because he never gave up. He was always so positive and optimistic about everything.
And then after, I closed his eyes and stayed with him awhile. Then I walked out. All the family was standing around the door of the hospital room. That’s when I said, “Th-th-th-that’s all, folks.” I don’t know why I said that.
That’s when our grandson Christian said, “It’s a wrap.”
Then Konni, over on the side of the group, used Bob’s favorite exit line: “See you in the next reel.”
The timing was just … it gives me chills to think about it. It was so Altman. It was such an Altman gathering there. It was like he’d set this scene, you know?
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Rick Lyman, story headlined “Robert Altman, Iconoclastic Director, Dies at 81,” The New York Times, November 21, 2006: Robert Altman, one of the most adventurous and influential American directors of the late 20th century, a filmmaker whose iconoclastic career spanned more than five decades but whose stamp was felt most forcefully in one, the 1970s, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81.
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MARTIN SCORSESE: His legacy? His spirit. His spirit was to make pictures, to say what the hell he wanted to say on film. It may have angered people, it may have unsettled people, but he did it. He made independent pictures in Hollywood, with Hollywood money, ultimately. And he had an individual point of view and a personal statement with every picture. Every one.
On the set of A Prairie Home Companion
Hollywood’s become kind of at peace with the independent film as long as it knows its place, you know? And that means a certain level of money, a certain type of production value. With Altman, it didn’t know its place. That’s the beauty of it.
He’s an inspiration. I don’t think there’s any career like that in the history of Hollywood.
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Tim Robbins, New York memorial for Robert Altman, Majestic Theater, February 20, 2007: There’s a hilarious new movie in preproduction up in heaven. Bob has gotten the financing together for his new film, called “The Memorial.” And we are making the film as we speak. He’s watching the people onstage, yes. But there are other cameras looking around the theater today, at the subplots, the subterfuge, the silliness, the whispered comments, the backstage preening. Kathryn, you have a beautiful close-up and a camera dedicated to you. But everyone else, beware. He’s going to find us out, and God will laugh.
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MATTHEW ALTMAN: It was my mom’s idea to scatter the ashes from the beach to the ocean, and to divide up his personal things between us. Some Popeye memorabilia and clothes and that kind of stuff. She thought it was time. So all the boys and Konni and my mom got together in Malibu in August 2007.
We went out with Dad’s ashes, the four of us boys—Michael, Steve, Bobby, and me. It was definitely an Altmanesque moment—four grown men in their underwear and shirts on the beach with ashes of their dad. We divided up the ashes and walked into the water. We went up to our knees and the waves were breaking and it was a beautiful night. We just let his ashes go, and my mom and Konni were on the deck. Steve had brought some white lilies, and my mom threw those in the water. And we all said good-bye.
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PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: Oh, I didn’t figure on this making me sad. I thought, “Oh great, I get to talk about Bob.” But it’s making me feel like I’m sure everybody feels—they really wish they could call him up. Yeah, fuck! Horrible, sad. He was so indestructible for so long.
SUSAN DAVIS (actress and cousin): It seems like everyone I talk to has dreamed about Bob since he passed. He was that kind of huge presence. I went to Italy in January or February, and the first night I’m there I had this dream. It was as real as sitting here with you. I walked up the stairway, and there was Bob in the room.
I said, “What in the hell are you doing here?”
He said, “What are you doing here?”
I said, “Bob… you’re—”
And he said, “No, I’m not. I’m getting ready to do a film, and I can’t get the money. Will you get it out of their heads that I’m dead? I’m just trying to get the money to make this film.”
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Dialogue from A Prairie Home Companion:
(LUNCH LADY, played by Marylouise Burke, has just found her lover dead in his dressing room. The angel of death, called DANGEROUS WOMAN, played by Virginia Madsen, embraces her.)
DANGEROUS WOMAN: The death of an old man is not a tragedy.
LUNCH LADY (weeping): I—don’t—want him to—go.
DANGEROUS WOMAN: Forgive him his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care. Tell him he will be remembered, and turn away and live your life.
LUNCH LADY (Crying—to her lover’s body): Good-bye, baby. [To Dangerous Woman] You got anything to drink? Like a rum and Coke?
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ROBERT ALTMAN: Things never end. There are no ends. There are stopping places. So, you really choose a stopping place.
“Giggle and give in.”