Kansas City News Blog

​In Mitchell Zuckoff's Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 560 pages, $29.95), Altman tells the author that his motto is "Giggle and give in." But this thick, frustrating book -- rich in anecdotes and grudges, richer in defenses of its subject, but only intermittently revealing of Altman's technical mastery -- offers little evidence that the iconoclastic director, who died in 2006, did much of either in his long career.

The Boston University journalism professor doesn't explain how he met Altman, but in his introduction he makes no secret of his admiration: "There's no way to replicate in print what Bob accomplished on film and in life, but an oral biography seemed the next best thing. I hope he'd agree."

Whether Altman, by turns a grumpy alcoholic and a gleeful joker, would have admitted liking the book doesn't much matter. With its nearly 200 participants, the book doesn't lack for insight, and Zuckoff has managed to tap into the essence of Altman's films: a cacophony of voices, some raised in disagreement, harmonizing most clearly when the news is dire. It often is, even when Altman should be triumphant. By the time he succeeds, 20 years into his career (more than 150 pages into the book), with M*A*S*H*, the director feels so affronted by the studio process -- the screenings, the executives, the demands, the missing profit points -- that he forever after swears off cooperation with any part of it.

Radio host Garrison Keillor, speaking at a memorial for the director in 2007, says, "He really was a man who believed in his luck. When you've flown fifty missions in a B-24 Liberator bomber over the Pacific, what's the worst they can do to you in the movie business? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. So that was Bob's life."

First, though, Altman's life was a mischievous childhood in Kansas City (as a Cub Scout, he found a way to profit from discovering a view into the Art Institute's nude-drawing studio), jumping from school to school as disciplinary problems mounted. His family was well-connected but not exceptionally wealthy. When he returned here after World War II, convinced that moviemaking was his only vocation, he earned his way into the business by directing for the Calvin Company, a KC maker of safety films and other low-budget industrial shorts.

John Horoschak Jr., a bomber crewmate of Altman's, says, "Bob actually saw himself more as a fighter pilot -- he liked the excitement of a fighter plane. He was not happy about becoming a copilot of a big bomber. In a fighter plane, he's all alone. His personality was more suited to that. But he was a good B-24 pilot, too."

It's a telling glimpse of Altman's character. Though he typically surrounded himself with talent -- large casts, family members pressed into crew service, writers invited to gape as their words disappeared from the movie -- the book never lets the director appear anywhere but at the center of things. Everything good in his movies, Zuckoff's cast generally agrees, stems from Altman's generous, collaborative spirit. Every poor box office take or negative review or wounded party can be blamed on a failure to get Altman, never more heroic than when someone has counted him a goat.

Joseph Walsh, writer of Altman's 1974 gambling comedy California Split -- among the director's best -- explains it this way: "Bob was in love with being surprised. He was like a great big kid in a cinema candy store. And more often than not his actors threw a sweet and wonderful party for him."

That's an apt summary of Altman's approach to moviemaking. Film critic David Thomson delves deeper into the long and divisive mystique around Altman in his own review of the book at The New Republic, but suffice to say that in many of Altman's films, his desire for novelty trumps dramatic tension and narrative thrust.

Actor Peter Gallagher says Altman told him, "Every morning I wake up and I'm at the bottom of a very deep hole. And I scratch and claw all day long, and by the end of the day if I'm lucky I get my eyes above the edge and I get a glimpse around before I end up at the bottom of the hole again." Gallagher concludes, "So as gruff and as sort of outsized as Bob can be, there is a tremendous compassion that informs what he does." That kind of adoration is by far the majority among the onscreen talent Zuckoff has assembled for his book. But a story like that isn't one of compassion revealing itself. It's the desperation of an alcoholic, and it also neatly describes the persecution Altman obviously felt at every stage of his career. Even when he was winning, he seems to have told himself that everyone else wanted him to lose. Whether you identify with Altman's characters or scorn them (and often, you must do both), there aren't many who demonstrate compassion or benefit much from it.

In Zuckoff's book, though, compassion abounds for Altman. His lapses in parenting and marital fidelity are addressed but forgiven by his survivors (and given an unblinking pass by a number of actors). That he made enemies of so many nameless Hollywood suits doesn't just endear him to his employees and fellows -- it makes him, oddly, a figure of towering trust. By the end, you're forced to look again at his movies for signs of that commanding trust being rewarded, moment by moment, by the actors (and set and costume designers and cinematographers) who revered him.

Kathryn Reed Altman (the director's widow), Kansas City co-writer Frank Barhydt and Zuckoff discuss the book and its subject in a panel at 6:30 p.m. Monday, November 16. The free talk, in the Truman Forum of the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library (4801 Main, 816-701-3481), is part of a monthlong Altman program that includes screenings of his movies. Details here.