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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Celebrating 100 Years of Robert Altman
00:24:12
100 years ago this year, celebrated director Robert Altman was born.
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Alison Stewart
You'Re listening to all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This year would have marked the 100th birthday of American director Robert Altman. Over the course of his four decade career, Altman directed some cinema classics, from the Long Goodbye to Nashville to the Player to Gosford Park. Known for his use of ensemble casts, overlapping dialogue and insightful looks into American life and culture, Altman made his mark in Hollywood in the 70s and solidified his legacy with a run of great films in the 90s. To celebrate Altman's centennial this September, the Criterion Channel is featuring a series of Altman films. That series is curated by Sean Fennessy, co host of the Ringer podcast the Big Picture. It features movies from as early as 1969's that all the way through A Prairie home companion from 2006. Altman died November of that year at 81. Joining me now to discuss the life and career of Robert Altman is curator and Big Picture co host Shawn Fennesee. Hey, Shawn.
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Sean Fennessy
Hey, Alison. How are you?
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Alison Stewart
I'm doing well. When I look at a movie, when I listen to a movie, how will I know right away? That's Altman.
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Sean Fennessy
Ooh, you'll know pretty quickly because they're a little bit more unusual than the movies that his contemporaries are making or the people who came before him. They will be deeply humanistic, but also quite weird. They will be calm and gentle in some ways and disruptive in others. And they will move. The camera especially will move in ways that we don't expect. And if you see an outsider or someone on the periphery of our culture, you're probably watching a Robert Altman movie.
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Alison Stewart
I was listening to your podcast. I know you read a lot of books. When you were getting ready to curate this sampling of Robert Altman's work, what themes interested Robert Altman the most when you looked at his entire career?
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Sean Fennessy
Well, first and foremost, I think he was interested in people, individual people. He seemed to have a lot of contempt for systems and structure and those who participated in politics and capitalism, at best, suspicion of those spaces. And he was interested in the people who kind of got trapped between the gears of those spaces. A lot of time he also loved artists and loved people who created and loved people who dreamed big. And so throughout his films, you see people trying to kind of break the chains of modern society and do something a little bit different.
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Alison Stewart
He liked working with a large ensemble cast. How did he work effectively with large casts of actors?
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Sean Fennessy
It's such a good question. He was extremely generous and open minded about what actors could bring to movies. And you might think, okay, in a star driven vehicle where there's one person at the center of the frame, let's say a Leonardo DiCaprio movie, he's somebody who has a lot of input on his character and developing how a story is played out. When you're making a movie like Nashville that has over 30 speaking parts, it's really challenging to let everyone have their say. But Altman was incredibly creative when it came to decisions like this. For example, in Nashville, it's a movie about a number of people converging on the city of Nashville for a music festival during a presidential election year and the centennial. And around all of these events, there are all these performers who were there to perform country western music. And Altman asked his actors to write their own songs that their characters would perform in the film. And that's an amazing way to. For an actor to generate not just an emotional relationship, but backstory to that character and let them make the movie with him, not for him. And he has this amazing way to engender respect and decency from his actors and to make them feel like a part of the troupe. And then inevitably you feel like everybody is all rowing in the same direction when you're making the movie. And so the film finds a way to spotlight all these individuals in ways that feel very specific and earned.
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Alison Stewart
We have a really good example of that from Nashville. Apparently this was partially improvised. It's Barbara Jean, played by Ronnie Blakely, and she's about to sing a song to a big audience and she gets a little bit sidetracked. This is from Nashville.
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Ronnie Blakely (as Barbara Jean in Nashville)
I think there's a storm. Seems like it's a Bruin. That's what my granddaddy used to say all the time before he lost his hearing. Once he got deaf, he never talked much no more, except he'd. Sometimes he'd say, oh gosh or oh Dernit or my word, my granny. She'd go around the house and clicking her teeth to the radio all day. Boy, was she a lot of fun and cooked. Always my favorite roast beef. She was a sweetheart. She raised chickens, too. She. In fact, did you ever hear chicken Sound, you know how chickens go. Anyway, I guess we better strike up this tune before it's too late. Okay, boys.
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Alison Stewart
What does it say about Altman that he allowed actors to improvise?
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Sean Fennessy
I think it's that he had a certain level of trust and respect for them and for his ability to figure out what it was that was interesting and compelling about them and let them guide. Like Ronnie Blakely, that example is so interesting. I mean, she was not an actor before that film, really. She was a singer and she was. She's extraordinary in Nashville, heartbreaking in many ways. And was nominated for an Academy Award and, you know, acted in a few more movies after that, but did not go on to be a great film actress. And his trust and his desire to give a shot to someone who wasn't necessarily comfortable in that world is fascinating and so unique for its time. And he seems to be really interested in people who are not bringing to the presentation of a movie the expected mannerisms and style. He wanted someone who felt a little bit more a part of the real world and not a part of the construction of Hollywood.
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Alison Stewart
Sean, as New York Times obit said this, he was a risk taker with a tendency towards mischief. Sometimes he was called subversive. What does that mean to you in the context of Altman's work? What was subversive or mischievous about it?
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Sean Fennessy
I'm really drawn to the mischief part. So it's interesting that that was located in his obit. It's because I think he was kind of thumbing his nose at what was expected of him. There's this famous story about the very first studio film that he made, Countdown and an astronaut drama from the 1960s. And it's where he introduced the idea of overlapping dialogue into his movies, where two characters are talking over each other at the same time in the midst of a heated argument or a romantic entanglement or what have you. And that was important to him because that's how we talk. Maybe not here on public radio. We're not talking over each other. We're being very polite. But in general, if you were in your home and you were talking to somebody you cared about, you might be.
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Alison Stewart
What are you talking about? I don't know what you're talking about. What do you mean?
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Sean Fennessy
Well, Alison, let me tell you what I'm talking about. And so because of that, that's something that movie studios were not comfortable with and we're not familiar with, you know, the U talk, I talk style of Hollywood dialogue. Go back and watch a film from 1950. It is very presentational and we're waiting for everyone to deliver their monologue. Of course, Altman didn't believe in that. And so even though he was told not to before the production of Countdown, this Warner Brothers film, he just put the overlapping dialogue in there anyway. And Jack Warner, the head of the studio, was on vacation while he was making the film, and he came back and he looked at dailies as once he returned from his vacation and he saw what Altman was doing in post production, then he fired him. And he said, I told you not to do this and you did it anyway. And that's a huge risk to take for a filmmaker who had been wanting to be a feature filmmaker his entire life. He was already in his late 30s by this point. And that's the other thing, is he arrived at this much later than many of his so called new Hollywood contemporaries. And even on this big break, he thumbed his nose at the studio head and did exactly what he wanted to do creatively. There was no way to undo it because he'd already shot the footage that was essential to the film. And he got away with it, even though he got pushed off of the film and he still got to do it in the future. So, you know, that's a very material way that he kind of looked at authority and said, I'm gonna do what I wanna do. And you can find that same energy in the text of all of his movies too, and the films and the stories that he was drawn to.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is Sean Fennesee, co host of the Big Picture Podcast. He's also the curator of the Criterion Channel series directed by Robert Alt, honor of what would have been Robert Altman's 100th birthday. It's streaming now through September. Listeners, we want to hear from you. What is your favorite Robert Altman movie and why? Give us a call. 212-433-969-2212, wnyc. You can join us on air or you can text to us at that number. 212-433-9692. We should mention that Robert Allman was, was a TV director.
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Sean Fennessy
He was for a long time. He got his start actually in Kansas City making instructional industrial movies. And then he shifted to Hollywood and he was hired essentially by Alfred Hitchcock to helm an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the late 50s. And he spent the next 10 years working on Westerns and Army TV shows and honing his craft and figuring out how to fit into the system and, you know, making a really good Living and helping develop new material and building relationships with actors. And it took him a very long time to escape that system. And that was not a pipeline that was very common either. Some other directors, you know, Sam Peckinpah, somebody who made some, you know, TV and then eventually got to make films. But that was unusual to be a guy who spent 10 years in the trenches, literally, of making shows like Combat and then getting a shot to make movies.
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Alison Stewart
He often worked in collaboration with actors over several films. Shelley Duvall was one. He worked with Elliott Gould. First of all, let's start with Shelley Duvall. She was in seven of his films, I believe. Why does that pairing make sense together?
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Sean Fennessy
Well, I mean, just look at Shelley Duvall, right? On the one hand, she's this, like, stunning, striking person. On the other hand, she doesn't really look like anyone else. She doesn't really look like any human that we know. You know, she has a kind of sing individualistic quality, that beautiful voice. And you can see that he just recognized something in her that was like kind of pure cinema, you know, that she is so watchable and so compelling on screen. And he, over time, found unique ways to utilize her talents and to make her a participant in the stories that he was trying to tell. But she had this unusual sense of, like, I would say, a blind confidence mixed with a vulnerability that is very rare. And he found a lot of unique ways to apply her specific energy to his stories.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Nick, who's calling in from Rosalind Heights. Hey, Nick, thanks for taking the time to call, all of it.
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Nick (Caller)
Oh, thank you so much. Nashville. Loved it. Ronnie Blakely tape deck in his tractor. Henry Gibson. We must be doing something right to last 200 years. Sorry about that. Great, great stuff. I also want to say that I met. I'll make a long story short. I met Vassar Clements. He had a cameo scene in Nashville, and he told me that he became friends with Robert Altman after. After the make, during the making of that film.
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Alison Stewart
Well, Nick, thanks for sharing your story. We are talking about the Criterion Channel series directed by Robert Altman. It is curated by Sean Fennesee, co host of the Big Picture Podcast. We want to hear from you. What's your favorite Robert Altman movie and why? Give us a call at 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. We'll have more of your calls. We'll have more with Sean after a quick break. You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Sean Fennessy, co host of the Big Picture Podcast. He is also the curator of the Criterion Channel series directed by Robert Altman in of what would have been Robert Altman's 100th birthday. It's streaming now through September. Altman's first sort of big breakthrough was MASH in the 1970s. That's a film about army medics and. And rapscallion surgeons in the Korean War. Gould was in it. Donald Sutherland was in it. It was nominated for five Academy Awards. What was different about this film?
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Sean Fennessy
Well, it's incredibly raunchy and incredibly bloody, and the truth is that that just was not very common. We know that that's something that you can find at the movies all the time these days, but we didn't really see doctors performing surgery on screen and the actual viscera that came out of that. And then on top of that, there was this really bawdy, almost lewd sense of humor that permeates the film. That obviously is a big part of what drew Altman to it in the first place. And also a kind of comfort with getting very close to breaking the fourth wall of letting viewers in on the joke of the tone of the movie. This idea that it was actively winking at us to say, one, this is a movie about Korea, but we all know it's really about Vietnam. And two, even though this is the most life and death circumstance imaginable, there is something weirdly funny about how this all works. And that was very unusual at the time. I mean, it's really a trailblazing movie in that respect.
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Alison Stewart
This text says, alison, please ask your guest why Popeye from 1980 failed at the box office.
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Sean Fennessy
Well, it shouldn't have. We see this all the time, right? The lead up to a big production, and this was a big production, especially for Altman, can sometimes be defined by the outsized budget and the quote, unquote, catastrophe of the filmmaking. And this is a movie that was engineered by Robert Evans, the famed movie executive, and Dino De Laurentiis and all of these very powerful men. And Altman was not well known for his huge budgets and his outsized films. He definitely had never directed anything quite like Popeye before. And the entire film was shot in Malta. And they built the set and designed all the costumes and the composer Harry Nilsson and all the actors all went to Malta. And it seemed like they got up to some trouble while they were making it. You know, some substances were consumed and they were letting it rip a little bit. And so some of the reporting out of Malta was not positive. And so then the run up to the movie, it felt like it was going to be this epic disaster. The movie itself is quite charming and sweet and more or less true to the Popeye cartoon and what Altman was assigned to do. But it got some bad press and it cost a lot of money to make. And so it has a kind of a funky reputation in his career.
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Alison Stewart
Let's listen to Robin Williams playing Popeye with I am what I Am.
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Robin Williams (as Popeye)
What am I? I ain't no physicist but I knows what matters what am I? I'm Popeye the sailor and I am what I am what I am and I am what I am and that's all that I am. Cause I am what I am. You got it? I think so, yeah. And I've got a lot of musc and I only got one eye and I never hurt nobodies and I'll never tell a lie. Top to me Bottoms from the bottoms to me top that's the way it is Till the day that I drop what am I? I am what I am.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Jay from Bay Ridge. Hey, Jay, thanks for calling, all of it.
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Nick (Caller)
Thank you. I wanted to bring up kind of a forgotten gem that's not really a typical Altman movie. Secret Honor with Philip Baker hall and a one man production as Richard Nixon. And following Popeye, his career, I guess, was in a bit of a crisis. So I was wondering how he came to Secret Honor and why that's kind of forgotten now. I think it's great, Sean.
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Sean Fennessy
Well, after a couple of movies in the 70s didn't perform so well and Popeye was considered a disaster, he kind of retreated from the idea of making movies for a bit and he began getting interested in the theater. And he would eventually go on to direct a series of plays, as TV movies and as theatrical releases. But one of the plays he saw early on was this virtuoso one man performance by the great Philip Baker hall as Richard Nixon in this play called Secret Honor, in which it takes place entirely in Nixon's study in one alcohol fueled crazed night, in which he is declaring his innocence and guilt and defining the mania of the American political experience. It's like a remarkable piece of writing. The play itself. And Altman, who is not considered necessarily a master of blocking and staging, he's somebody who usually lets the camera figure out what the story is going to be. Very gently decides that he wants to adapt this play and he wants to do it in this very, very meticulous way, this way that is out of sync for him. And I love this movie. This is one of my favorite Altman films and it is a real step up for him, technically speaking. And he is really applying a lot of what he's learned about movies that he has made on a big stage over this 10 year period in the 1970s and shrinking everything down to this razor sharp filmmaking style and the hall performance. You know, hall, he of course plays him in the film as well. Is not just the play and he is utterly captivating as Nixon. And it's a real, it's a portal movie into that period of time and the way that we thought about our leaders.
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Alison Stewart
Gonna put that on my list. Nancy from Sunset park is calling us. Hey Nancy, thanks for making the time to call all of it.
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Nancy (Caller)
Oh, I'm so excited to talk about Robert Altman, which I can talk about for a little bit. And just the other day my son and I were having a conversation and we were discussing the coldest movie ever made, which is McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But I worked at movie company in the late 70s and that was when Robert Altman had a string of not successful pictures. One of them was Health with Carol Burnett. I can't remember what opened the film festival, the New York Film festival, probably in 79. Do you remember? Do you know what movie that is? Is that. Was it A Perfect Couple?
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Alison Stewart
Not sure. I'm not sure.
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Nancy (Caller)
I guess so. These, these were the times when he was not doing so great. But I have to say as a, as a person, he carried his production company and that he used the same people over and over again and they loved him and traveled with him. And when you went someplace, it was never with two people from the product, it would be with 50 people would come and everybody was always having a good time and everyone always had a job and everyone sort of went on to better jobs when they left.
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Alison Stewart
Robert Altman, thank you so much for weighing in. I want to talk about the Player. The Player is great with Tim Robbins. I almost feel like everybody at the studio should just shout out the Player. They do actually in the Player, if you know it starred Tim Robbins as a Hollywood studio executive. Why do you think this was the film that rev his career?
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Sean Fennessy
Well, Hollywood loves itself, right? The Player is a movie. It's a murder mystery about a movie executive who is at a critical stage in his career where he's trying to maneuver his way to the very top of a fictionalized studio. It's based on a Michael Tolkien novel and you're Right. That the character that Tim Robbins plays, Griffin Mill, gets a nice shout out, in a way, in the studio, the new Apple TV show that just dominated the Emmys. And it is absolutely one of my favorite Altman movies. It's probably the first Altman movie that I saw. It's the movie that got me connected to Altman because I was such a movie crazy kid in the 90s. And it's a very sharp satire, an intriguing mystery. It is also a real feast for movie fans from that period because lots and lots of real life characters find their way into the world. Burt Reynolds appears for one minute. Bruce Willis appears for one minute as themselves. This happens many, many times throughout the film.
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Alison Stewart
Buck Henry, so funny.
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Sean Fennessy
Buck Henry, hilariously. You know, Joan Tewksbury, the screenwriter of a bunch of his movies, also famously has a funny scene where she's doing a pitch for Griffin Mill about a new movie she wants to make with Goldie Hall. So just such a knowing and clever and amusing and kind of embittered movie. A movie made by a guy who's like, everybody here is kind of an idiot.
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Alison Stewart
This text says the Long Goodbye. Altman's rethinking of Philip Marlowe and Noir in the 1970s, L.A. malibu, is a masterstroke with Elliott Gould as a bumbling but brilliant Marlowe. For folks who might be hearing this and thinking, gosh, I should get into. I should get into Robert Altman. What are some starter films, Sean?
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Sean Fennessy
It's a good question. We've hit on a couple of them, Right. The Long Goodbye, I think, is a very good place to start, because if you love cinema, you probably know about the Bogart versions of those stories. And you can see the way that he just turns the dial ever so slightly by recasting Elliott Gould into the Marlowe part. I think that's a good place to start. My favorite Altman movie is California Split, which also stars Gould and George Siegel as two guys in their 30s who get deep into a spiral of gambling. And it is simultaneously very sad and hilarious and I think really underlines just what can happen when you get a little bit too close to the fire of gambling. And I think a lot of the 90s films in that comeback period are very approachable. But the one that is probably the most understandable in our contemporary culture is Gossip park, which predates Downton Abbey and the Gilded Age. But it's from the same writer, Julian Fellowes, who Altman and Bob Balaban hired to write this sort of Upstairs Downstairs murder mystery movie with an incredible cast of British actors. Altman had never quite made a film like this in England. And it's just a corker, you know, it's just a good time. So if people want to.
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Alison Stewart
A corker. Haven't heard that in a long time. I want to ask you about a minute left and I wanted to ask you about Robert Redford, who passed away at 89. What do you think of Redford's legacy will be?
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Sean Fennessy
It's an overwhelming question because he is quite literally one of the greatest movie stars in American film history. He's also one of the most impressively sincere activists in modern entertainment history. And I think he brought something very real to the table in terms of lifting up other artists and also making sure that people were not getting left behind by our society. And he also was a filmmaker himself who directed and directed Academy Award winning best picture winning films. So he is, he is on the Mount Rushmore of what Hollywood has produced in the last 100 years.
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Alison Stewart
Sean Fennesee is co host of the Big Picture Podcast. He's also the curator of the Criterion series directed by Robert Altman. In honor of what would have been Robert Altman's 100th birthday. It's streaming through September. Hey, thanks for your time today.
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Sean Fennessy
Thanks, Alison. Good to see you.
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Alison Stewart
And that is all of it for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.
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