Heather Hendershot

How does Altman’s distinctive style compare with that of other directors of the same time, such as Scorsese?

Martin Scorsese comes up in the book, along with Peter Bogdanovich, Sidney Lumet, and other important directors of the 70s. I contrast Altman to a number of them, including Scorsese, because those other directors have genre commitments that Altman doesn't have. He doesn't care if his films can’t be neatly labelled. Nashville is not a comedy, and it's not a musical, even though it has musical elements and comic elements. It's beyond that.

But this doesn't help you much in the marketplace. People like to know exactly what a movie is. At one point, Altman said, the biggest problem with this film is that it doesn't have a shark in it. Jaws came out the same week as Nashville. It was not going to compete with Jaws, but it came out of the gate with pretty good ticket sales, and then it failed when it moved from big cities to wider distribution, because it wasn't Jaws. It wasn't that kind of movie.

Scorsese’s films are very clear in their genre commitments. Early Scorsese is making gangster movies, and so is middle and later Scorsese. Of course, he also gets into different kinds of filmmaking. At a certain point, he switches from the Italian to the Irish Mafia for Gangs of New York.  Age of Innocence is clearly not a gangster movie, and Killers of the Flower Moon is a true crime story. Regardless, his genre commitments are generally pretty clear. He is very interested in the connections, mostly between men, of loyalty, or in what friendship could be. In Mean Streets, you have a loser character who's just always going to make poor choices, and another character who is a devout Catholic and feels that he should help others. So he thinks maybe he can help his friend or even save him, and it's obviously not going to work out. But it is almost always about the relationship between men. The Irishman is about decades-long relationships, and how those relationships are maintained or fall apart. Those characters deliver for each other more often than characters in a lot of Altman movies.

In Altman films, people have more trouble communicating and connecting. Further, sometimes women have relationships with other women, which is not a thread running through Scorsese's work. We see this in Nashville, and obviously in Three Women. That said, M*A*S*H has quite a bit of misogyny in it. Some people say it is anti-war. I would say it's actually more anti-authoritarian than anti-war, and it's obviously not thoughtful about gender issues.

One reason that gender is sometimes smartly thought through in Altman movies is because he hires strong, powerful, brilliant women to perform in them, and he allows quite a bit of improvisation. He worked with Joan Tewkesbury on two films, Thieves Like Us and Nashville, and she leaned into writing interesting female characters. They are not always strong; you don't have to be strong to be interesting. Sueleen Gay in Nashville is a weak person who is exploited by others. (In 1975, critics were generally not sympathetic to Sueleen, and I purposefully sought to treat her more kindly and thoughtfully in my book.) That element of really compelling female characters is in a number of Altman movies, and that makes his work quite different from Scorsese’s.

How does the improvisation technique play out in Altman's films?

We often say that Altman saw scripts more as blueprints than Bibles. He would lay out the sketch of what was going to happen. That doesn’t mean there was no dialogue written for his films. In fact, Tewkesbury wrote very good dialogue, but there was always an on-set element of let's figure out who the characters are, what their relationships are, how all the pieces of the film fit together. Still, he knows what the beginning, middle, and end are. It's not chaos in the way that, say, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is. Altman works out a structure, and within that structure, there is room for improvisation. As the actors build their characters, they confer with Altman. ‘What are my characters' motivations? What am I doing here? What's happening?’ And they have improv moments where their conversations sound like real conversations, because they are real conversations.

There is a key moment and a more minor moment in Nashville where he allowed the actresses to script scenes themselves. The more minor moment, I would say, is with Lady Pearl, a sad woman, heavy drinker, in a bar, and she is really obsessed with the Kennedy boys, Bobby and Jack. She is a Catholic, and she's lamenting the “dummies,” Southern Baptists who won't vote for a Catholic. The actress Barbara Baxley scripted a pretty long monologue for the film, and they shot the whole thing. In the final version, it's intercut with other scenes or other moments in the same space. But the original monologue itself is quite long. They even had an idea to recycle the monologue and other unused material into a TV version of the film, in two parts, Nashville Red and Nashville Blue, which would have shown different points of view and more fully unpacked character relationships. That might have happened if the picture hadn't tanked financially.

The other key scene of dialogue crafted by a performer is with Barbara Jean. She has a breakdown on stage, and it's absolutely brilliant and wrenching. Some audiences, I think, laughed at parts of it at the time, but it was probably a more uncomfortable laughter than anything else, because it is such a strange performance of a complete mental collapse happening in front of you. The actress Ronee Blakley said she'd write it, and Altman was like, ‘great, do it!’ The audience watching her within the film is stunned, wondering ‘what is going on?’ They all look like real people, because Altman had cast non-professional extras.

Tewkesbury has explained that there’s one scene in Nashville that is played almost exactly as scripted, with great precision. It is a very difficult-to-watch striptease scene, where Sueleen Gay is forced to perform. It is a grueling scene of cruelty, and Sueleen expresses no eroticism whatsoever in her performance. This is underscored when she pulls sweat socks out of her bra and throws them at the audience. She has very conventional ideas about what will make her attractive, and having large breasts seems like a good thing, so she stuffs her bra, and the socks are the first thing to go when she starts stripping, which was not in the script. Everything else in the scene sticks to Tewkesbury’s directions.

In certain ways, the socks moment is what makes the scene, because it points strongly to the cruelty and de-eroticization of the striptease. And there's another little gesture—as someone who's seen the film an innumerable number of times, I pick up on little moments that are very easy to miss—where Sueleen gets her dress caught on the heel of her shoe for a quick moment. It’s probably just a mistake on the set, but it makes the scene more poignant.

Improv is a recurring thing in most of Altman's work, and it was a key part of why he really enjoyed making movies. Once they were done he wasn't all that concerned about ticket sales, which was not the greatest way to make a career in Hollywood. He enjoyed hanging out and doing the work, and then, his attitude was ‘the movies are out in the world, and it's great if people go watch and enjoy them, especially if they go a few times’. But the pleasure for him was in making the movie. So I think, the improv was part of his feeling that we're all just hanging out and doing this fun thing together. After work, there's a lot of drinking, a lot of pot, it's a kind of party scene. Occasionally, actors didn't know what they were getting into. Take Allen Garfield, who plays Barbara Jean's husband Barnett. He is a recurring character actor throughout the New Hollywood of the 70s, in a lot of movies. He was very professional, and learned all his lines before they started shooting Nashville, because that's what you're supposed to do. And he gets there, and they're like, ‘oh yeah, we're not gonna really use those lines’. He was furious. He didn't like that style. He didn't like not following the script. He didn't like that the director was drunk and stoned quite a bit of the time. That was unprofessional to him.

But rigid “professionalism” was exactly what Altman wanted to move away from. Having spent a substantial chunk of his career directing TV, where he faced rigidly standardized production and postproduction practices, improvisation was key to bringing a more flexible and human element to the set. That human element shines through on the screen in his best films, especially Nashville.