Altman’s Secret: No Shortcuts Allowed

Actor Henry Gibson remembers that the country music community wasn’t thrilled with Robert Altman’s “Nashville.”

“Minnie Pearl was outraged,” recalls Gibson, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role as a pompous country superstar. “I remember on opening night, someone asked her how she would rate the picture and she said, ‘I give it two closed nostrils!’ ”

Despite the misgivings of the denizens of Nashville, the movie is arguably Altman’s masterwork. On Thursday, “Nashville” kicks off an 18-film Altman retrospective with a special 25th-anniversary screening and cast and crew reunion.

“It’s really very nice,” Altman says of the tribute, “Altman’s America: A 30th Anniversary Retrospective,” sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“There isn’t any filmmaker who ever lived who has had a better shake than I did,” says Altman, whose new film, “Dr. T and the Women,” opens in October.

“I am 75 years old and I have never been without a project of my own. I have never been out of work, and the only thing I haven’t made are these big, popular films. I have never wanted to and I never will. I would fail at it. I would be late for work.”

Altman, writer Joan Tewkesbury and such cast members as Gibson, Keith Carradine, Ronee Blakley and Karen Black are scheduled to appear at the “Nashville” reunion, which takes place at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

Beginning Friday, the festival moves to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Among the Altman films scheduled at the Leo S. Bing Theater are “The Player,” “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “California Split,” “Short Cuts,” “Brewster McCloud” and “Thieves Like Us.” The tribute concludes July 22 with a 30th-anniversary screening and cast reunion of “MASH,” the antiwar comedy that was Altman’s first big success.

Or course, Altman can’t look at “Nashville” or “MASH” without becoming wistful. A major studio, says Altman, wouldn’t make either of those today, let alone most of the films produced during the ‘70s--the last great decade of movie-making, he believes.

“They are making these toy films,” Altman laments. “They are appealing to the 13-year-olds straight across. And they don’t even do them well. There is no reason why this recent Tom Cruise film, ‘Mission: Impossible 2,’ can’t be good as well as have all the action they need. I don’t know where these decisions come from. They are making stuff that won’t endure. Nobody will put up the money to make [adult-oriented] films.”

“That era of filmmaking came in on a motorcycle,” adds Tewkesbury, referring to 1969’s “Easy Rider.” “And it walked out in a business suit. It is just shocking.”

“Nashville,” she says, “was a soap opera on a road map. You could not get away with that today. With all the people who have to have their hands in the pie, you couldn’t do it.

“The fun with working with Bob was there was this mutual trust involved--this sort of blind faith that something really weird was going to come in from left field and it always did. That trust is not honored today. The director’s judgment, the writer’s judgment--nobody’s judgment--is honored. Everything is so fear-based. You can’t have that kind of construct anymore.”

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Clocking in at nearly two hours, 40 minutes, “Nashville” revolves around 24 diverse characters living in the capital of country music.

Blakley, who received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress, plays a country music queen on the verge of a breakdown; Lily Tomlin, in her first film, also received an Oscar nomination in the same category as an unhappy gospel singer-housewife with a deaf child; Carradine, who won an Oscar for his song “I’m Easy,” plays a folk singer who likes to sleep around and is having an affair with a singing partner (Cristina Raines); Gwen Welles is a waitress desperate to become a star but lacking the talent to succeed; Geraldine Chaplin is a BBC reporter doing a documentary on the music scene; and Black is Blakley’s archrival in the music industry.

“Nashville” was nominated for a best film Oscar, and Altman picked up his second best director nomination. (He was also nominated for “MASH” and later for “The Player” and “Short Cuts.”)

Altman says he has no set guidelines when he works with a screenwriter. He says that in the case of “MASH” Ring Lardner Jr. had already penned the script when Altman was hired to direct, after the first 14 directors approached to do the comedy turned it down.

“I remember when we walked out of the screening the first time it opened in New York,” Altman recalls with a chuckle, “Ring came out and said, ‘You ruined my script.’ It crushed me. But he got the Academy Award for the script I had ruined. But Ring has been terrific about it.”

Tewkesbury was working with Altman on “Thieves Like Us” in Mississippi when he asked her to go to Nashville and keep a diary of what she saw.

“I went the first time and it was strange because all I got was the tour of all the museums,” she says. “They wanted to show you Patsy Cline’s hairpins and talk about the religious aspects of what good people they all were. I knew damn good and well they were all popping pills and trying to make their next gig on time.”

So she went back again and this time wandered around the city on her own. “I still had no idea what this thing was going to be,” she says. Soon, Tewkesbury began to witness things that would eventually make it into her script, like a talent show in the center of a stock car race. From a group of recording engineers she learned about a hangout called the Exit Inn. When she dropped in one night, she sat in the back writing down on yellow legal pads what she saw.

“There was a girl who was OD-ing on the table in front of me,” Tewkesbury says. “And this black man came, sat down and shoved a joint up my sleeve and said he had just gotten out of jail after 26 years for premeditated murder.”

When she exited the Exit Inn, Tewkesbury realized “that the movie was about all of these things. The movie became this construct of people going after fame simultaneously, and if not fame, everybody was in search of some sort of dream. All of these elements are in any town.”

Tomlin’s character, says Tewkesbury, came out of the life experience of “Thieves Like Us” actress Louise Fletcher, who had deaf parents. “Gwen’s character was really based on someone I had known when I was doing nightclub work in San Francisco. Her character sort of epitomized [that] if you want it badly enough you’ll pretend that you don’t know what the rules are. To me, she’s truly the metaphor of the movie.”

“Nashville” was made for a paltry $1.9 million in seven weeks. “All the actors paid $1,000 a week were the known ones, and the others were paid $750,” Altman says. “Those were the two scales. They were all there, all the time. The only exception was Karen Black. She was there just for a week.”

Altman gathered his cast in Nashville 10 days before filming began. “We had parties and we kind of would do read-throughs, which were fake,” he says. “They were mainly to get everyone comfortable with everyone else. A majority of my films are a result of improvisation. I don’t mean improvisation while we were shooting, but in the rehearsal period.”

“When we got to Nashville, Bob encouraged his cast to think or talk or literally write about what was going on” with their characters, Tewkesbury says.

Gibson remembers that “the shooting script we started with was rather slim. But as the scenes progressed and different actors who were going to appear together in scenes would work together, they would begin with what Joan invented and created and then embellished it. What you did was present this to her and ask if she thought this was in sync with her and Altman’s intent.”

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After he casts a film, Altman says, 85% of his own creative input is done. “I just sort of come in and turn the switch on in the morning. They go to work, and I film what they do. What I want to see is something I have never seen before, so I can’t tell them what that is, because it’s something that is in the unknown.”

Doing “Nashville,” as well as Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” changed Gibson’s life. “It just changed my entire approach to film. It taught me to find pleasure in the entire process. It taught me that once you have agreed to be part of a film, anything else less than total commitment is unfair to the work, the cast, crew and director and, ultimately, it is unfair to oneself.”

Altman is pleased with all the films included in the festival. (New prints have been struck for a majority of the films, including “Nashville.”)

“These films, they become part of your life,” he says. “They are your children. And you tend to love your least successful children the most. There is not a film out there I don’t adore.”

One of his less successful works in the festival is the maligned and rarely seen “Buffalo Bill and the Indians,” which debunked the myths of the Golden West. The drama, which starred Paul Newman, laid a goose egg with audiences and critics in 1976.

“It came out July 4,” Altman recalls. “Nixon had resigned as president [in 1974], so the entire country went into mourning. And it was the 200th anniversary of the United States. Everybody was licking their wounds from this whole political atmosphere. Then I come out and say, ‘Come look at what fools Americans are and how everything is built on lies.’ Nobody liked it.”

Though “MASH” was set during the Korean War, it was a thinly veiled indictment of the Vietnam War.

“We knew exactly what we were doing when we made ‘MASH,’ ” Altman says. “None of the satire was an accident and the crudeness of it and the kind of male chauvinistic attitude about it. We were quite aware of what we were doing. The cruder the joke was I would say, ‘That is what I want, because nothing was more obscene than those operating rooms when they brought in those bodies.’ ”

Despite his distinctive style, which features freewheeling narratives, huge casts, overlapping dialogue, bold soundtracks and innovative images, the director believes he hasn’t really influenced any of today’s more independent filmmakers.

“The only guy who really keeps drawing attention to it is [Paul Thomas] Anderson. He says, ‘I am just ripping Altman off.’ People always ask who influenced me the most, and I think the true answer is that probably all the bad films I have seen by directors whose names I promised not to remember because I would say [to myself]: ‘I’m never going to do that.’ ”

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‘Altman’s America: A 30th Anniversary Retrospective’

Screenings

Thursday: “Nashville” (1975), at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, at 7:30 p.m. Sold out. Information: (310) 247-3600.

All other screenings are at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Leo S. Bing Theater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, at 7:30 p.m.:

Friday: “The Player” (1992). Robert Altman will appear.

Saturday: “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971) and “California Split” (1974).

June 30: “Short Cuts” (1993).

July 1: “The Long Goodbye” (1973) and “Kansas City” (1996).

July 6: “3 Women” (1977) and “Quintet” (1979).

July 7: “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” (1982) and “Secret Honor” (1984).

July 14: “Popeye” (1980) and “Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” (1976).

July 15: “A Wedding” (1978) and “Health” (1979).

July 21: “Brewster McCloud” (1970) and “Thieves Like Us” (1974).

July 22: 30th-anniversary cast and crew reunion and screening of “MASH” (1970).

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Admission to the LACMA events is $5 for museum and AFI members, seniors and students with valid ID, and $7 for general admission. (877) 522-6225.