Does Hollywood Hate Genius? : ROBERT ALTMAN Jumping Off the Cliff <i> by Patrick McGilligan (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 480 pp.) </i> : CITIZEN WELLES <i> by Frank Brady (Scribner’s: $24.95; 655 pp.) </i>

There is a vignette in Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Robert Altman in which Altman, at a low point in his career, is stumbling along a Paris street with a pal. Ahead of them they see the massive, caped figure of Orson Welles, on whom the young Altman once vowed to model his own film making. Altman starts to hurry to catch up with the great man, then thinks better of it. They’ve got nothing to compare notes on except failure and rejection, Altman explains bitterly.

It is a historical moment so symbolically perfect as to be apocryphal (although it apparently isn’t). No film makers of comparable achievement--not even Francis Coppola, who comes close--have failed quite so noisily to fit into the Hollywood system and been condemned, as Welles was in his lifetime and as Altman apparently still is, to scrabble in exile for the money to go on making movies.

The two men, as revealed in two new biographies, are in some ways similar: in their charismatic charm, which commanded the fierce loyalty of men and women alike, their maverick and often self-destructive resistance to authority, their impatient and innovative zest for the making of films, and their protean appetites for all experience (also dangerous, again bordering on the self-destructive).

But, aside from common geographical origins in the Midwest, Welles and Altman are otherwise as unlike, in style and density, as the biographies themselves. Welles had great and varied gifts as actor, writer and director for stage, screen and radio. Altman is a film maker, neither pure nor simple, with excursions to stage and opera.

Frank Brady, the author of “Citizen Welles,” is a tenured professor of film and writing at St. John’s University in Brooklyn. His biography, which can fairly be called monumental, authoritative and exhaustive, has been since 1977 in the making. If it is not definitive, it is probably because Welles may not ultimately be definable.

Brady’s detailing of Welles’ life is amazingly full, and it was an amazing life. Proceeding on a combination of bravado, physical size, a prematurely stentorian voice and uncommon intelligence and talent, Welles talked himself into a job with Michael MacLiammoir at the Gate Theatre in Dublin when he was only 16, occasionally playing old men.

In his researches, Brady found RKO time-sheets that indicated Welles had logged 111 hours working on the “Kane” script. In the Welles v. Herman Mankiewicz dispute, Brady is firmly on Welles’ side as the film’s principal creator, although he also has no doubt that the shared script credit is fair and accurate.

Brady’s accounts of the making of the various films are ample and knowing. The turmoil surrounding the completion of “The Magnificent Ambersons” is described in considerable depth, for example, and so is the furor that greeted “Kane” in and out of the Hearst press.

The author reproduces some of Welles’ cut-by-cut notes to his various editors. From a standing start, when he compared film making to a boy’s joy in an electric train, Welles had become a meticulous and very well-informed craftsman.

The facts of Welles’ melancholy last years, when he held court at Ma Maison while film projects appeared and vanished like apparitions, are all too eloquent. There was talk of a “Lear,” which could have been Welles’ last, great triumph but was never done. Sir John Gielgud located money for Welles to do “The Tempest” but Welles knew he was too old to play Caliban and too infirm to handle the project.

In a late interview with William Scobie of London’s Observer, Welles said, “I’ve always pretended to love Hollywood. Sour grapes are not my dish. But when the day of judgment comes and the executives and the moguls are placed in the balance against writers and directors, they will be found wanting.”

It will do for an epitaph.

Patrick McGilligan, a young film maker and film historian who lives in Wisconsin, is an unabashed Robert Altman admirer. You are tempted to say that with such an admirer, the subject has no need of detractors. This is to say that McGilligan’s book gives new dimensions to unsparing candor.

His portrait of the private Altman--the younger Altman at least--is grungy, bordering on the scabrous: a chronicle of incessant infidelities, chronic abuse of alcohol and drugs, the casting aside of loyal friends and co-workers, the poisoning of his relationships with most of the major studios in Hollywood.

“The biographer crosses the finish line with a sigh of relief,” McGilligan writes in a small gem of understatement. “Much has been found out--but I am happy to say that Altman, like any great subject, remains mysterious for me, and that his best work remains a joy and a revelation. No matter the ungainly strands of his life, his stature has not been diminished for me. Indeed, Woody Allen seems to be the only other artist who could give him a run for his money as the great American director of our time.”

Welles, Francis Coppola, Stanley Kubrick and a few others could be alternate nominees for that eminence, but a willful myopia is part of the biographer’s necessary equipment.

What is true, as McGilligan is saying, is that the work must stand on its own. The private life, pristine or prurient, is of interest only as it is reflected in the work or as it appears to have got in the way of the work.

It seems fairly clear that Altman’s creative frustrations played a role in the untidy life style he acquired. “His was a tormented debauchery,” McGilligan says loyally, “a searching for love and reinforcement.”

Despite the frenzied playing, Altman learned his craft well. His films have seemed the equivalent of gestural paintings, with a feeling of spontaneity and improvisation, of a loose and quite personal immediacy, that is markedly different from the ingenious technical invention of the most startling of Welles’ works.

McGilligan is a sharp and attentive appreciator of Altman’s films. In some of them the viewer senses that Altman has lost interest somewhat before the last reel; the author does not deny that this is so, or that the meaning of some of the films is as obscure to Altman as to the audience.

Yet Altman’s most significant contribution to film making in the ‘60s and ‘70s has been the kicking aside of the constraints and inhibitions of the so-called well-made film, with its technical perfection and its acts all but defined by curtains.

Altman’s overlapped and sometimes indecipherable sound has infuriated audiences accustomed to clarity and coherence, but it has created an emotional force that makes the viewer feel the scene even if he or she cannot quite be sure what it means.

The majority of movies remain collective and collaborative, seldom bearing, like Altman’s, a personal signature recognizable in the content as well as the form. The occasional state-of-the-private-psyche films that do emerge, like David Byrne’s “Blue Velvet,” owe something to Altman’s damn-the-traditions approach.

Several of his own films are now solidly in the classic repertory: “Nashville,” “Brewster McCloud,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” among them.

Lately, in his own self-determined exile from Hollywood, Altman has been making low-budget independent films, always interesting if not always successful. One of his proteges, Alan Rudolph, says, “Bob is like a huge furnace that will burn forever.” McGilligan says, “Robert Altman keeps a-goin’.”

McGilligan’s own researches, leaning heavily on interviews with Altman’s present and former friends and relatives, all of whom spoke with few reticences, are extensive and central to the portrait.

His writing style is free, to say the least, as when he notes that the early Altman had “an office where he was fronting a dog-tattooing business with some broad as his supposed secretary.”

It is a very far stretch from Brady’s circumspect prose, also entertainingly readable and congruent with the subject’s free-form life style (now, one suspects, down-cooled considerably). But so breezy a style has the negative effect of undercutting the seriousness and weight of McGilligan’s positioning of Altman in film history.