Brilliant Altman Piece by Richard Schickel (Part 1)

Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
October 22, 2009|Richard Schickel
It appears that from the beginning of his career until almost its end (when illness slowed him), Robert Altman never passed an entirely sober day in his life. When he was not drinking heavily, he was smoking dope -- often doing both simultaneously. When he screened dailies on location, he insisted the cast and crew gather to view them in a party atmosphere, with the merriment rolling on into the night.
His ability to ingest industrial-strength quantities of stuff that was bad for him fills one with shock, awe and questions. Yet Mitchell Zuckoff, who interviewed 145 people for the long, insanely admiring "Robert Altman: The Oral Biography," never comes to grips with the effect this had on his films.
Zuckoff basically knows nothing about filmmaking and film history, so he has to take his witnesses at their word: It was so much fun, so different from their other moviemaking experiences, therefore the product had to be better.
Even a casually objective observer has to see that something else was going on here. Altman loathed the studios and executives that financed his work. He represented them to his casts and crews as party poopers, mindlessly insisting that he shoot something at least vaguely resembling the script he had sold them.
This was another sore point with Altman, who didn't like writers, either. He was always telling his actors to say whatever came into their heads. Anyone attempting to hold him to account, whether for budget or story, was his enemy.
He said he was uninterested in the essentials of moviemaking: narrative or character development. What he cared for was behavior, especially of the spur of the moment variety. Since most actors -- especially the bad ones -- prefer to be left to their own devices, this made him wildly popular with them.
To make sure the audience never quite understood what was going on, he overlapped dialogue -- no wait, that's not quite right -- he layered multiple conversations into his dialogue tracks and then turned the volume down, so that much of the time you couldn't hear what anyone was saying.
At first, that seemed a wonderfully radical technique -- especially in Altman's breakthrough movie, "MASH." It was 1970, and the Korean War was distant enough to stand in for the anguish of Vietnam. There was plenty of blood in the movie's operating rooms, plenty of absurdity in the way the doctors and nurses avoided thinking about it in their downtime.
Setting aside, this was a movie in which everyone appeared to be perpetually, mumblingly stoned, and it played shamelessly to the stoner culture that was then ascendant. Oh, how they laughed to see such sport made of institutional squareness. Oh, how we fail to laugh when we return now to this basically witless film. [continued in Part 2]