Eric Bogosian
In Memoriam: Robert Altman
January 27, 2007.
I worked with Bob Altman on the TV movie version of "The Caine Mutiny Court Marshall" in the fall of 1987. I played Lieutenant Greenberg alongside Jeff Daniels, Peter Gallagher, Michael Murphy and the late Brad Davis. I had just come off a four month run as Barry Champlain in "Talk Radio" at the Public Theater and soon would be making the film, although I didn’t know that at the time.
Bob was a tremendous presence with whom to work. My previous experience had been with Larry Cohen on a low budget film called "Special Effects". Larry was known for his previous films "It’s Alive!" and "Q" and others which he had written and directed. This was a few years before the "independent film" movement arrived in full force. Larry would script the films (he’s a successful screenwriter in Hollywood), throw in about four hundred thousand of his own money and direct and distribute on his own. This was a totally non-union film with very long hours and a dangerous set and a very unorthodox director. Larry would expect us to work as long as 23 hours straight, expect me to do my own stunts. Larry was fun in his insane way but when we finished shooting I signed up with SAG ASAP. No more stuntwork for me.
With that experience under my belt, I was invited to star as Lt. Barney Greenberg in "Caine Mutiny". Working with Robert Altman meant I would be working with one of my film heroes. I was pretty green when I got to set in Port Townsend, Washington (on the Puget Sound). Fortunately Jeff Daniels and Peter Gallagher took me under their wing. They also kicked my ass. I was very full of myself at the time, thought I needed to give everyone "notes" on what they were doing. They set me straight.
Bob was only interested in one thing from his actors: truth. He wanted us to do what felt right. In that way he was a behavioristic director, always encouraging the actors to inhabit the role. He didn’t want anything to get in the way. He didn’t want marks on the floor, he didn’t want pre-set blocking. He told his camera team it was their job to capture what we were doing.
Bob said one thing to me at the time and I live by his words: "Life is too short to make anything I don’t want to make." At the time, Bob was reaping the rewards of doing what he loved but in a bad way. He was shooting television movies because he had been essentially black-balled out of the film business. He had been black-balled for screwing with the studios, particularly on "Buffalo Bill and the Indians". Following that film with an extremely self-indulgent "Three Women" and the non-starter "Popeye" assured his exile to movie Siberia.
Now that he’s dead, everyone pays lip service to how much he was respected and revered, but by the mid-nineteen-eighties, Bob was not having an easy time finding work. Perhaps he never did. The story goes that they tried to fire him off the M.A.S.H. set. But a few years after we did "Caine Mutiny" he directed "The Player" and "Short Cuts" and he was back in the game. He was a gambler from way back.
When Bob died, the pundits wrote their requisite articles summing up his life. They discussed his "successes" and "failures" but of course for Bob Altman, all his films were successes, because he was not looking at his work from a critic’s perspective, he was not looking at his work from the "outside in." Once he was in the swing of making films, he made films from the inside out. His signature style was a function of the process of his method, his playfulness, he wove his curiosity into the very fabric of his films.
Altman may have been ornery, but he took risks. Taking risks takes guts and it takes faith. Work made from a vantage of fear results in conservative work. Fascists are fearful, they depend on shock and awe to make an impression. They cannot make courageous work because they have no faith in what they’re doing. Bob was a revolutionary. Unlike controlling (anal) artists, a revolutionary steps into fear. Bob was thrilled by the unknown. He didn’t worry about the results, (although he had faith that he would always end up with something worth watching), because he was facinated by the process.
Critics have a fascist curve in their spine because they view and comment on art from an outside perspective. They tend to disregard process as a valid part of artmaking because they have to focus on box office and numbers. (If they don’t, they will soon be standing in the unemployment line.) (Did you just utter the name "Pauline Kael"? That was a long time ago.) "Numbers" are intrinsically fascist because they reduce art to quantity.
At best, critics recognize a successful art gesture because it reminds them of something that was successful in the past. That’s why most of the things critics laud have a very short shelf life. The work is not actually original, it just looks like something else that was original. Once.
The critics need to annoint artists like Altman "geniuses" because they can’t understand them or their process. By labeling something a work of "genius", the critic, as a spokesperson for the status quo, can undercut the communal nature of the art enterprise. The idea of "genius" is decadent because it is romantic. Capitalist society reveres the notion of genius because it is the greatest manifestation of the "individual." Art for centuries and centuries was a communal enterprise. Now we are meant to be on the look-out for "genius." But true genius cannot be seen (from outside) it can only be experienced. To label Altman a genius is to try to circumvent his active collecting of actors and writers and camera people.
The only people Bob didn’t like were the producers. He had no time for them. He told me that he employed the moving camera/contiuous shots so that once he had the take he liked it would be uneditable by the powers-that-be. (Standard master/close-up edits can always be re-edited by the producer. Long takes pretty much can’t be.)
A group enterprise, this was the Altman game. On location. he showed dailies to his cast and crew every day. He and his wife Kat threw a party at least once a week to bring the cast and crew together, so we could eat and enjoy one another’s company. I visited him when he was editing "Short Cuts". This was still in the old Steenbeck days, when cutting film meant physically cutting film. He had three Steenbeck’s running simultaneously and played the edits with his editors like Bach at a cathedral organ.
Of course had Robert Altman’s films never made money, the critics who are attempting a post-mortem dissection would have no use for him now. But they did. And they extended beyond that. They provided a window into the working method of a true revolutionary.
As it turns out, though Bob said "life is too short", his life was long. His last words to me, two years ago, were "Being old sucks." He made that statement at a premiere for his latest work. He never stopped working, because he wasn’t trying to prove anything. He was simply living the best way he knew how.
