The way he chooses his language and his descriptive phrases is amazingly perceptive and helpful. And if you don't listen very carefully, you might miss it. Bob directs using active verbs. You can play an active verb. You can't play an inactive one. I don't remember what the specifics of the scene were, but Altman beckoned me over. He thought for a minute - I was playing a scene with another actor - and he said, "Crowd him." It was so clear and so defined and so unmistakable what he wanted from that scene and from that character that he made it easy to play. -- Paul Newman
I'm in love again, and it's Mitchell Zuckoff's fault. His Robert Altman: The Oral Biography is so compulsively readable, such a great marriage of substance and style, that I'm upset - coming into the home stretch of over 500 pages - to know it'll soon be over. I can't think of the last time I so hungrily devoured a book on the movies (no, wait, I can, but at any rate...).
How else to do the definitive book on this great American auteur than to have his story told by a vast chorus of voices, including the director's own? It's the perfect complement to Altman's style - he, the king of multi-character ensemble pieces, often distinguished by overlapping dialogue and a restless camera that seemed to shrewdly rove in and around a given scene like a vastly perceptive invisible guest at an amazing party. The book is like having the congenial what-was-that? soundtrack muddle in the first reel of McCabe and Mrs. Miller suddenly rendered crystalline: Altman himself as a classic newly restored.
This approach, perhaps best popularized in the literary bio field by Jean Stein's Edie a few decades ago, has long been utilized in fictional films (it was the guiding strategy in a little pic called Citizen Kane) and documentaries (e.g. This is Spinal Tap). Here, the use of it is freakin' perfect. Zuckoff, a finalist for the Pulitzer when he was a journalist, has so masterfully organized his material that the book reads like a great story about a great character - told, Rashomon-style, by all the key players who worked and/or lived with him, from wife Kathryn to actors, writers and cinematographers, et al.
What emerges is a cubist portrait of contradiction and collusion. It's the story of an indomitable individualist of outsize talent, terribly flawed but endearingly human, who rendered Fitzgerald's old saw ("There are no second acts in American history") ridiculous. The media pronounced Altman's career dead innumerable times after M.A.S.H. (1970) and after Nashville (1975); then came The Player (1992), after which he was supposedly finished again; then came the Oscar-winning Gosford Park (2001). Altman hung in there - working, no matter what - and in the end, he won the game, by doing it his way and nobody else's.
What's especially neat about the Oral Biography is that it steps past the trite and true - everyone knows "Altman was great with actors" - to deliver the detailed goods, as that Paul Newman quote above demonstrates, so you can learn why and how he was an actor's director, among other things. The facts, sometimes emerging between the lines, make sense of what had been mysterious in his oeuvre (you'll understand why certain of his films felt unfinished, and comprehend the logic - whether you liked a given film or not - behind the choices he made). And finally, the elusive mystery that's at the heart of any great human remains, unapologetic, to be savored.
I'd recommend dipping in at any chapter that intrigues you (I started with The Player, which had revelations so intriguing and quotes so funny that I nearly plotzed), and I'd suggest the same approach for another recently released book on an American auteur: Sammy Wasson's charmingly erudite A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards.
Splurch is a movie lover's book of another kind. Though Wasson extensively interviewed Edwards and peppers his text with quotes, this is a traditional cine-academic's approach to filmography. The book explores a long, uneven career through the prism of one unusually astute and enthusiastic cineaste's point of view. Here pleasures come from the writer's perception. The chapter on The Pink Panther (the first) is a primer on film comedy craft that's likely to send you Netflix-ing to re-view it, armed with Wasson's keen, droll observations:
The very moment Jacques Clouseau is introduced, the clash between Edwards' rigid formalism and [Peter] Sellers' silliness takes hold of the film's comic mechanism. Rising from his desk (authority), he crosses to a globe (knowledge), spins it purposelessly (pretension) and, leaning upon it, loses his balance and crashes to the floor. One might expect the camera to pan down with his fall or to cut in for his reaction, but Edwards does neither. Instead, the lens remains constant, frozen stiff like a stubborn mother waiting on her child.
Great writing, period. The text's academic bent does sometimes veer into excess, but it's 20-something Wasson's first book (his next is on Edwards' Breakfast at Tiffany's) so we'll blame it on his youth. When not stuck having to make something of A Fine Mess and free to fly with Blake at his best (e.g. the 10 and S.O.B. chapters), the book sings.
Edwards in his own idiosyncratic way represents a tale of perseverance, having created iconic images early on (Tiffany's, The Days of Wine and Roses) and late (Switch). The guy kept working and left a distinctive imprint; his unevenness, in contrast to Altman's, stems from his willingness to sell out (e.g. those countless, pointless late Panther sequels).
Altman, his voice quietly weaving its way through Zuckoff's narrative, sounds wryly self-aware and impressively accepting of what ills he may have brought upon himself professionally. He uses a telling defense in speaking of his work: "I resent in art the definitive explanation for people's behavior--there isn't any."
Maybe not. But what fascinating behavior can be read of here, in both real life and the reels.
I second that emotion! To have Splurch up there next to Zuckoff's book (which I JUST finished today and loved), and to be on one of my favorite blogs no less, well, that's just about as cool as a Sunday can get. Thanks, Mernitman! I'm glad you enjoyed. And you make a damn good point about Edwards and Altman. "His unevenness, in contrast to Altman's, stems from his willingness to sell out..." A really fascinating comparison.
Posted by: Sam Wasson | January 24, 2010 at 07:05 PM
Wow, how timely. I'm beginning my journey into visual vocabulary now. I love that 3D gives you lots more ways of expressing things through motion.
The guys way back had it hard. They couldn't just have someone easily draw out backgrounds, etc or fly a helicopter over the location.
I don't notice a lot of vocabulary in movies nowadays, except of course from the Camerons and Scorseses. Most directors just do shot\reverse shot and think montage always has music.
Posted by: Christian H | January 25, 2010 at 09:54 AM
Sammy: You are welcome, sir.
Christian: Altman's extended takes alone would be a great study - his visual vocabulary was complex.
Posted by: mernitman | January 30, 2010 at 02:55 PM