29

Altman

ONE DAY I GOT ON the downtown B train at 96th and Broadway in Manhattan across the aisle from a young Black woman in a gray herringbone pantsuit, who, I noticed, was reading Love Me. I sat, watching her, trying not to stare. Young Black professional women are not supposed to be reading old white male humorists. She was way out of her demographic. She didn’t laugh, but she kept reading, turning the pages through Times Square and 34th Street and 14th Street, past my stop, and I watched her. And then she smiled. And she laughed, quietly. An invisible thread connected us. I dearly wanted her to like me. I had worked two years on that book, and for fifteen minutes, it was all up to her, she held my heart in her hands. I don’t care if the Times thinks it is immature, I wanted her to laugh. New York women keep a serious face on the subway, the equivalent of a Do Not Disturb sign, but I made her laugh. I almost walked over and said, “That’s my book” but she might’ve said, “Hell it is, I bought it, back off, mister.”

My career peaked with the publication of Love Me, but I didn’t know it and I kept marching. I wrote a Lake Wobegon screenplay and Tony Judge called George Sheanshang, who was Robert Altman’s attorney, and we learned that Mrs. Altman, Kathryn, was a regular listener to the show. Aha! Connections! It pays to know the right people. So a meeting was arranged, and I went to Altman’s office in New York with his movie posters on the wall, M*A*S*H, Nashville, Popeye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. He was 78, moving slowly, gruff, speaking in short sentences. He said his wife liked the show, that he often sat in the next room watching basketball on TV and heard her laugh and came into her room to find out what she was laughing at. He did not say that he laughed along with her and I doubted that he had. I don’t think small-town Minnesota was his territory.

The screenplay I offered him was about John Tollefson returning to Lake Wobegon for the funeral of his father, Byron, who died of a heart attack coming up from the basement with a bag of frozen peas. John had been fired from his TV weatherman job in Boston for having said, while forecasting a thunderstorm, the limerick about lightning coming out of the ass of the young man of Madras as he clangs his brass balls together and plays “Stormy Weather.” He comes home in disgrace for his dad’s funeral and falls in love with his old high school sweetheart and they marry. There was a lesbian couple who fight like cats and a drunken wake and a pissing contest. The story takes place in January. That is what killed it for Mr. Altman. He said, “I don’t know if you’ve ever done location shooting in winter, but I have, and I don’t plan to do it again. It’s an interesting story except for one thing. The death of an old man is not a tragedy. So I don’t get the point.” He said he wanted to make a movie, though he was being treated for cancer and he would consider making a movie about a radio show and shoot it entirely at the Fitzgerald Theater. So I wrote him a new script in about a week, urged on by his illness.

He appeared quite frail when I saw him a month later; he walked gingerly across the Fitzgerald stage, as if on a tightrope, an assistant walking close behind him. I said, “Are you sure you really want to do this?” He was sure. “I want to go out with my boots on,” he said. “I don’t want to sit around and wait for it. I want to be missing in action.” The producers had secured a relief director, Paul Thomas Anderson, who stood at Altman’s elbow and was prepared to come in from the bullpen if needed. But the going out with my boots on made me wonder if bravery had overcome his good judgment—had I given him an amateur contraption of a screenplay and the man was desperate for work to take his mind off his mortality? I wondered about that for the next year: was it good enough? Being a Minnesotan, my answer was: no.

I mentioned to Jim Harrison that Altman was on the case and Jim, a great poet who’d worked on six movies in the Nineties, wrote me a letter.

Screenwriting is a visual, not a verbal, talent. You have to “see” everything you write and avoid the fandangos of words that we love. You go directly from the image to the word, never vice versa. Movies have to move. Don’t worry about getting people in and out of doors. Audiences have a greater visual intelligence than any other kind. Reading books about it doesn’t work. It’s helpful to watch your five favorite movies and figure out how the writer constructed the narrative. Write the kind of movie you yourself love to watch. You can’t do better than that because you’re not a hack. Despite your Christian background you should have at least one 4-H girl bent over a bale of hay. Take all your money up front. A writer’s percentage points are as valuable as gum wrappers.

Good advice, but I had no time to study five movies. I cranked out a screenplay about two singing sisters, Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, and Mr. Altman said, “I think you’ve got something there.” He lined up Kevin Kline to play Guy Noir and Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly to be Lefty and Dusty. (“Casting is nine-tenths of what I do,” he said.) He talked Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin into playing the sisters. “Meryl is a terrific singer,” he said. “And Lily will learn.” I read an interview with Lindsay Lohan in which she said she was going to be in the movie playing Meryl’s daughter, so I created the daughter. I wrote in the angel of death. “Okay to put a supernatural being in?” I emailed Mr. Altman. “Okay, but no special lighting effects,” he said. He cast Virginia Madsen in the part, and when shooting began, he took a great deal of time fussing with the lighting as the angel walked unseen in the balcony. She was a radiant blond angel, and he loved directing her as she descended the balcony aisle, glowing in the dark.

I kept rewriting as Mr. Altman and his crew moved into the St. Paul Hotel in June, and truckloads of camera and lighting gear got unloaded in the alley behind the Fitz. I wrote a wheelchair version of the script after Meryl Streep had knee surgery and then she called to say she was ready to dance, so I rewrote the rewrite to un-handicap her, and then Mr. Altman saw Mickey’s, a classic railcar diner around the corner and wanted to shoot a noirish scene there, so I wrote two, one for the open and one for an epilogue, and meanwhile the crew was laying down tracks for the dolly cameras and getting ready to start shooting. Mr. Altman did not flinch when I told him that I still had revisions in mind. He was an improviser himself. He kept encouraging his actors to toss in bits of business. John C. Reilly improvised a cowboy fart, and Altman approved with enthusiasm.

I met Meryl and Lily at the Fitz the Sunday night before shooting started. They had been rehearsing songs, and they wanted me to hear them. Meryl wore a red skirt and poofy white blouse, and Lily was in jeans and denim jacket. They claimed to be nervous and flounced around and got all girlish and then launched in. Meryl sang lead, Lily alto, and the harmonies were perfect, sweet and sisterly, pitch perfect. It made me want to rewrite the whole script and make it about them and send everyone else home.

Altman and I went to lunch and I got him to talk about World War II, which Kathryn said he never did. I asked him if it was true, as I’d read, that he lied about his age to enlist and he said it was. “A lot of young men did,” he said. “It was a very different time. We believed in good and evil.” He got into the Army Air Forces and became a very young bomber pilot, flying B-17s against Japanese installations in the South Pacific. It was a roaring loud plane, freezing cold at high altitudes, no fun to fly, but he survived, and it occurred to me that maybe that was what made him a fearless independent. When you’ve wrestled with the controls of a roaring machine, freezing your ass off, as people below are shooting at you, why would you worry about last-minute rewrites and improvisation?

I reported for work in the morning. A trailer for makeup was parked on Exchange Street, and a commissary wagon where you could order an omelet and pour yourself a cup of coffee. And there, eating breakfast, were a dozen old pals from the early days who’d been signed up as extras, the Powdermilk Biscuit Band, the Brandy Snifters, Peter Ostroushko, Butch Thompson, about to make their Hollywood debuts. I walked into the theater and the lobby was a warehouse of lighting gear and props. Young production assistants were buzzing around, and one of them handed me three pages of script, the day’s shoot, and there was my name. As an actor. I got to sing a duet with Meryl, which I saw later on video playback—she is luminous, startling, gives off waves of feeling, and I look like the liability guy from State Farm. I did a scene with Lindsay in which she walked over, her eyes brimming with tears, and accused me of being a heartless jerk. I had written her lines but nonetheless she made them sting. We did the scene six times, and each time her eyes brimmed and the lines stung.

I did a scene with Virginia Madsen in which I chewed an apple. Kevin Kline said my chewing was evocative. And almost every day, I reported to the theater with rewritten scenes in hand. “Are those for today?” a producer said, turning pale. “The actors already memorized the pages from yesterday.” “Bob said it’d be okay,” I said, which was a lie, but the changes got put in. In between scenes, Kevin sat and played the piano, so I wrote him a scene in which Guy Noir sits and noodles and sings a few lines from Robert Herrick, with a bust of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the piano. Why not? I wasn’t going to make a career of this, so I might as well have a good time.

One day Lindsay handed me the shooting script for the next day and said, “You aren’t going to make me say all that, are you?” She was right: I’d stuck her with a whole page of exposition, a big doughy lump of speech. So I rewrote it into a scene. They shot it. It went well. It was interesting to see that Miss Lohan, a hot item in gossip columns at the time, was so intelligent about her line of work. She knew crappy writing when she saw it and she said so.

Altman loved his work, loved being on the set in the hubbub with the crew, the extras, the people with headsets and clipboards—he’d yell, “What am I waiting for? Let’s boogie!” He could bark at cameramen and producers, but he was tender with the talent. He studied Meryl and Lily on the set, sitting before a long mirror, Lindsay reclining on a couch—Meryl and Lily are the Johnson sisters, reminiscing about their glory days on the road, and Lindsay is Meryl’s daughter, writing a poem about suicide—a gorgeous dressing-room set, all lamps and mirrors, festooned with photos and souvenirs, bejeweled gewgaws, jars of cosmetics, posters, showbiz memorabilia, which the designer Dina Goldman created in a bare basement. Altman sat in his high canvas chair in the shadows, having instructed his son Bobby on the timing of the dolly shot, and he says, “Let’s do one.” A distant warning buzzer. Vebe Borge, the assistant director, calls out, “Quiet on the set.” Mr. Altman leans in and peers at his monitor, and here we go again. The scene ends, and he says, “That was beautiful. Let’s do it again.” It was a good scene. I wanted to redo the whole story, make it a three-character dressing-room movie, no radio show, but the shoot was in its fifth week. Dang it. On the last night, after Meryl did her last shot and was officially released—at 2 a.m., standing in the intersection of 7th and St. Peter in downtown St. Paul—she hugged everybody and grinned and said, “Don’t have any fun without me.” A true benediction. A bunch of us stood around that night watching Altman shoot his last scene, at Mickey’s Diner, its interior like the Hopper painting Nighthawks, two patrons at the counter, a counterman in white, and then Kevin Kline as Guy Noir emerging, lighting a smoke, and crossing the rain-soaked street. There were six takes. Altman conferred with him after each take, discussing the angle of the scratch of the match alongside the door, the gesture of lighting, the exhalation, the path across the street. Both of them seemed completely absorbed in this simple wordless action.

And that was the end of it. Bob edited the movie that fall, and it opened at the Fitzgerald the following May. Meanwhile he had directed an Arthur Miller play and started production on a new movie. He died in action in November before shooting could start. A great man, and his last scene was the one he shot in St. Paul, about 5 a.m. He wanted to keep going, but the sun was coming up and you can’t stop the sun. I went to his memorial service in LA and heard a number of standard eulogies (How This Great Man Enabled Me to Become the Artist I Am) and instead of that, I told about his war service, the teenager at the controls of a monster plane, freezing cold, anti-aircraft fire coming his way, on a bombing run in the South Pacific. It’s good to have fresh material. People listened.

I truly wish I thought it was a good movie, but I don’t. Some critics liked it, and I was thrilled unreasonably when Rolling Stone liked it. It’s their obligation, in behalf of their Midwestern readership, to kick me in the shins.

Prairie goes down so easy that you probably won’t notice at first how artfully it’s done. . . . I don’t know how this movie works, only that it does. For those, me included, who used to think of Keillor’s radio program as tepid, self-indulgent, repetitive and flat, you might even call it a revelation. Take a swig of this moonshine. There’s magic in it.

I didn’t mind the “tepid, self-indulgent, repetitive and flat” at all—I’d thought the same myself often enough—and I wish I agreed with the word “artfully” but don’t. I saw the final cut twice, and that was more than enough: I could feel all the last-minute rewrites, the jumpy edits, the lines that made my head hurt. It made me admire J. D. Salinger for refusing to let anyone make a movie of Catcher in the Rye or Franny & Zooey. Salinger loved movies, and he also felt that some things belong on the printed page and nowhere else. It was fun working with Altman. I wish I’d given him something better.

A couple years later, I was having lunch at the Cafe Luxembourg in New York and Meryl Streep walked over and kissed me on the cheek.

Jenny Lind Nilsson and GK at the movies, New York, 2006.

Miss Streep is a radiant being who emits light, and all eyes are on her most of the time. She said, “I love long slow elegiac movies in which not much happens, and you wrote a good one,” and planted two smackers on me. The café was full of show people and their agents and attorneys, and all of them saw it and I was momentarily very, very famous even if some people couldn’t remember my name.