In Which Altman Moves On To Something Else

Altman's Revenge

by PETER BISKIND

In 1954 Robert Altman met and married his second wife, Lotus Corelli, a former model. This marriage lasted three years, and the Altmans had two boys, Michael and Stephen. A year later, he made a low-budget feature, The Delinquents, that was financed by a small Midwest exhibitor.

He was determined to edit the picture in L.A. The exhibitor refused to pay his airfare, so in the last week of August 1956 he dumped the dailies into a '56 Thunderbird that he had finessed from the production, and headed west, accompanied by an Iranian friend, Reza Badiyi. Altman turned his back on Kansas City for good, leaving behind two marriages, a couple of kids, his parents, and his sister. During the trip they listened to the Republican convention, which nominated Eisenhower and Nixon. Altman was a Democrat, supported Adlai Stevenson.

The following year he landed a job working for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. This would be the beginning of a decade's worth of television work, which repeatedly saw him make his mark with innovative methods. He would antagonize whoever there was to antagonize, and in high dudgeon, move on to something else.

Along the way, like a snowball rolling down a hill, he picked up people who would become part of his creative team. Among them was Tommy Thompson, whose claim to fame was that he had, in 1946 while working for the Armed Forces Radio Services in Tokyo, reported that Japan had been invaded by a Godzilla-like sea monster. This prank was something Altman could appreciate, and the two men became fast friends.

Thompson began working regularly for Altman as his first assistant director. He used to pick him up from his apartment in a grand old building on the northwest corner of Fountain and La Cienega in West Hollywood, to take him to work. Often he'd knock on the door, no answer. He'd walk in and find Bob, passed out, an unfinished drink by his side.

"He was like the big Pillsbury Dough Boy," Thompson recalls. "I'd get him in the shower, dressed, down to the car, and we'd get out on the location. He sat in the high director's chair while I stood behind him. As they'd rehearse he'd nod off and I'd kind of poke him, and he'd wake up and say, "How was it?" I'd say, "Run it again," and he said, "All right, let's run it again." And he'd go back to sleep. I'd punch him, "Say 'Cut'!" "Cut! How was it?" "Tell 'em to go faster." "Speed it up a little, guys." We'd run through the whole day like that."

***

One day, when Altman was hanging out in George Litto's office, the agent handed him a screenplay, saying, "This is written in a style that might appeal to you. Read it?" It was M*A*S*H. The writer, Ring Lardner Jr., was just emerging from the shadow of the blacklist.

Litto saw a similarity between the feel of the piece and the material Altman liked to do. Altman called a day or so later and said, "This is great. Can you get me the job?" Litto replied, "I don't know. Probably not." Fox was an old-line studio that still liked to work with producers. Ingo Preminger had a deal there, and Richard Zanuck had given him the green light on M*A*S*H. Lots of directors, including Friedkin, had turned it down. Litto showed Preminger some of Altman's work. Preminger liked what he saw, and decided to take a flier on the director. Litto negotiated the deal, $125,000, and 5 percent of the picture. But when Fox heard that Preminger wanted to hire Altman, they went through the roof.

He was still infamous for a TV show he did nearly a decade earlier that had gotten the studio into hot water. One of the Fox executive expressed the feeling at the studio: "You're making a deal with trouble!"

Owen McLean, Zanuck's business affairs guy, was a tough nut. McLean called Litto, said, "George, I have a memo here that Ingo, without authorization, made a deal with you for Bob Altman. We cannot stand behind this because Ingo was not—"

"All I know is I made the deal, Owen. I'm just a humble agent. Just tell me what you have to say and I'll transmit your proposal to my client."

"You're full of shit, George, but here's the deal. $75,000 cash, take it or leave it. Don't come back and try to negotiate with me. That's what he gets if he wants to do the picture."

Litto called Preminger, said, "McLean is trying to provoke me. he doesn't want Bob to do the picture."

"What are you going to do, George?"

"I'm going to make the deal, and if the picture's great, I'm depending on you to fix it later." Litto called Altman, told him the terms. Altman was furious. Litto said, "Bob, you really want to fuck 'em?"

"I'd love to fuck 'em."

"Okay, take the deal. You'll make a great picture. I'll make you rich on the next one, all right?" The director acquiesced. Litto never did make Altman rich. But he came close, and would have succeeded had Altman not indulged in his propensity to shoot himself in the foot.

Peter Biskind is the author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, from which this excerpt is taken. You can purchase the book here.

"Lucky Jim" — Mclusky (mp3)

"Without MSG I Am Nothing" — Mclusky (mp3)

"She Will Only Bring You Happiness" — Mclusky (mp3)

In Which Robert Altman Week This Way Comes

Don't contain your excitement:

In Which We Drive So We Can Get Laid

Summer Romance

by LAUREN BANS

Adventureland
dir. Greg Mottola
107 min

Apparently it was impossible to fall in love in the late ‘80s without a car. Imagine if Lloyd Dobler had never driven Diane Court home after she ignored him all night at the party. They would have never gotten to intimately share their jejune angst with each other, he would have never taught her how to drive stick shift, and they would have never parked by the ocean and stick shifted in the backseat. Essentially the genre of Boring People Have Summer Romance wouldn’t exist without motorized vehicles.

The romance between Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart in Adventureland is similar, if less boring. Set in 1987, they fall in love driving to Velvet Underground songs, parking under bridges, and giving each other rides home.

The amusement park helps too. It’s trashy and gross — the butt of some really funny jokes — but the general idiocy of the place also serves to make Em (Stewart), a NYU student on summer break, and James (Eisenberg), a prospective Columbia grad student, stand out to each other.

It’s like going to Forever 21 and getting tricked into loving the least offensive thing in the store mostly because it’s not an elastic tube top with a sequined portrait of Fergie. Oh hello, fellow carnie with a close-to-Ivy-league education! Obviously you’re the one I should date around here.

That’s not to say the main characters aren’t likable. James, a Comp Lit major who takes a job at Adventureland to raise money for grad school in the fall, has a sweetness to him that usually doesn’t exist in males with such nicely contoured cheekbones who major in the literary arts.

He gets away with saying things like “I read poetry for fun” and “I want to be a travel writer, but not like the Dickens kind” because he’s soft-spoken and still a virgin. He also has a huge Adam’s Apple that just kind of hangs heavy on screen at all times and reminded me of a testicle. But that’s neither here nor there.

Em, his coworker, is cooler. We know this mostly because she’s had sex, lots of it, and because she wears oversized Husker Du t-shirts, likes drugs, and goes to NYU. She works at Adventureland not out of financial necessity like James and everyone else there, but to escape being home. Her Mom died two years ago, and her Dad has remarried a woman who seems pretty inoffensive considering the amount of vitriol and wrath she inspires in Stewart.

At points it seems like Stewart’s family distress is only there to give her otherwise subdued character some depth and personality. Oh, and also so she can participate in an affair with the married maintenance guy, because, you know, women with Daddy issues do stuff like that.

It felt like the film tried to, but ultimately didn’t know how to care about her character, except as the object of puppy dog luv. The camera is perfect for this—it mimics James’s eyes searching her face during car rides in a way that almost made me understand what having an emopenis is like. But by way of dialogue, Em never says much beyond how she’s “going through a lot of shit right now” and James doesn’t even ask her what her college major/life goals are in return, which was annoying.

To be fair, Em is supposed to be one of those reticent low key girls — but when James messes up and his friend scolds him for taking Em for granted, there’s not much evidence to support his claim that she’s “the coolest”, except that she has really good taste in music and she’s Jewish. It’s a given that Jewish girls are the best.

Then again, there’s not much to James either, it’s only that he gets home team advantage by being the subject of the bildungsroman story arc. Adventureland is funny thanks to Kristen Wiig and Martin Starr, and Stewart and Eisenberg make the romance satisfyingly sweet, but you have to wonder: what are these kids actually going to talk about once this Cure montage is over?

Lauren Bans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She blogs here, and tumbls here.

"Close to Me (demo)" — The Cure (mp3)

"A Man Inside My Mouth (demo)" — The Cure (mp3)

"Stop Dead (demo)" — The Cure (mp3)