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                                                                                PROFILE, Page 78

A Player Once Again


With a new movie as witty and thrilling as M*A*S*H and Nashville,
director ROBERT ATLMAN makes a provocative comeback

By KURT ANDERSEN


    Everybody has his professional ups and downs, and the ups
and downs in show business tend to be extreme. But even by the
standards of the movie industry, Robert Altman's ups and downs
have been both numerous and extravagant. After making his first
feature at 30, Altman slid back into yeoman Hollywood anonymity
for a decade, directing episodic TV. Then in 1970 there was M *A
*S *H, a commercial blockbuster and generational lodestar.
Within a year came the dense, dreamy, elegiac western McCabe and
Mrs. Miller, then other sly, quirky dramas (The Long Goodbye,
Thieves Like Us, California Split) at a rate of almost one a
year -- leading up to Nashville, perhaps the best American
movie of the 1970s and among the most influential.

    Then, as if ordained by some law of pop thermodynamics,
came a very long rough patch: beginning with Buffalo Bill in
1976, Altman movie after Altman movie failed at the box office
and displeased the tastemaking establishment. The director even
tried his hand at an expensive high-concept movie -- the $22
million Popeye, starring Robin Williams -- and it seemed only to
certify his career death. During the '80s Altman lived mainly in
Paris, returning to the States to direct small movies
(Streamers, Beyond Therapy) that did little to rekindle the
passion of his erstwhile devotees. Not many people saw Tanner
'88, Altman and Garry Trudeau's highly original cinema verite
series for HBO about the 1988 presidential campaign, but it did
get the cultural mandarins buzzing positively again.

    So now comes The Player, a dark comedy with heart, a movie
about the movie business as thrilling as M *A *S *H, already as
beloved by the screening-room cognoscenti as Nashville. Altman
agrees with a chuckle that it probably represents his third
comeback, and at 67 he is wise enough to know that a fourth or
fifth may lie ahead. "Talk to me after my next movie," he says,
half-assuming that this latest up means, in short order, the
inevitable down. He smiles and gives a que sera shrug.

    Of course, equanimity comes easier when you're riding a
wave of praise like that The Player is provoking. Even jaded
actors feel privileged to be part of the film. Cast members
Peter Gallagher, Fred Ward, Malcolm McDowell and Whoopi Goldberg
saw The Player together at a private screening. After the final
credit roll, Gallagher recalls, "we were sitting with our heads
down, looking at our feet and just kind of saying, `It's so cool
to be involved with this movie.' " Yet the huzzahs worry Altman
a bit -- he remembers that Nashville "got overhyped by the
press." And the gush that greeted M *A *S *H and Nashville, he
says, was "nothing like the response to this. This is just . .
. weird. I've already got more mail than I had total on all the
other films I've ever made." Surely he's heard some quibbles,
some intelligent criticism? "No. Or unintelligent."

    The Player is both very good and a quintessential Altman
movie -- meaning smart, hip, satirical, charming, ironic but not
callow, rich with telling offhand incident. "What's unique about
The Player," says Trudeau, "is that he brings all this
signature observational detail to a picture that Hollywood
completely understands. In many ways it's a very traditional
Hollywood movie, but he's given up nothing. That's why people
are so astonished." It is, in a word, crypto-conventional,
self-consciously including all the obligatory elements of
commercial moviemaking -- stars, violence, unclothed women,
lockstep plotting -- but messing with them. The really big stars
parody themselves; the sex is not very sexy.

    The film's clean, hard edge and people-playing-themselves
verisimilitude come, Altman says, from his collaboration with
Trudeau. Without Tanner, Altsays, "I don't think I could have
made this film." It probably also helped that he stopped
drinking, though Altman bridles at the suggestion. "I stopped
drinking for health reasons. I've never jeopardized anything by
either the drinking or the gambling" -- he plays poker,
backgammon and the horses -- "or the pot smoking. I do smoke
pot. I sit on the front porch like a grandpa and try to enjoy
the weather."

    The reflexive knock against The Player is that its satire
is too inside. In the opening scene, for instance, the studio
executive played by Tim Robbins sits listening to a series of
real-life screenwriters pitching plausibly dopey movie ideas --
among them Buck Henry, who co-wrote The Graduate, proposing a
ridiculous Graduate sequel. Michael Tolkin, who wrote the
screenplay and the 1988 novel on which The Player is based, also
appears in the film as a screenwriter. But all the in-jokes are
a secondary pleasure, not the essence. Even if you don't know
what turnaround means, The Player is a satisfying thriller --
and besides, after reading magazines like Vanity Fair and
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY and watching shows like Entertainment
Tonight, ordinary moviegoers are surprisingly fluent in the nuts
and bolts of show business. Indeed, ET's Leeza Gibbons appears
in The Player as her chirpy self, delivering lines written at
Altman's behest by a real ET writer. "Why should I try to
imitate somebody who does that?" explains the director. "I mean,
he writes it as bad as it's going to be written."

    The movie makes knowing fun of all sorts of Hollywood
types, but the satire never seems heartless. "Everything that's
in there that's mean is about me," Altman says. "I mean, I talk
like those guys. I get on the phone and I make those pitches the
same way. I cannot tell you how many times I've said [about a
proposed film], `Well, it's kind of like Nashville, it's a
Nashville kind of structure.' The film does not escape its own
satire. We didn't let anybody off the hook."

    Indeed not. As casting began, Altman knew he needed
someone to play a movie star playing a smirky action-adventure
hero, somebody else to play a movie star playing a humorless
ingenue -- a Bruce Willis type and, say, a Julia Roberts type.
He asked Willis and Roberts. "They were the first people we
chose. I was going to start going from there -- I never dreamed
we'd get both of them." He also got Burt Reynolds, Jack Lemmon,
Rod Steiger, Cher and a horde of other six- and seven-figure
actors to play themselves for a few hundred dollars apiece.
"None of them were paranoid," Altman says. "None of them came
wanting to read the script, none of them."

    None of them read the script?

    "No -- none of them. I'd say, `I'm doing this film about
a studio executive who murders a writer.' And they'd laugh and
say, `O.K.' "

    The fondness of actors for Altman is legendary. Unlike
directors who treat performers like two-year-olds -- bothersome,
silly, not entirely rational -- Altman genuinely encourages them
to help invent the film, not just do as he says. "I collaborate
with everybody," Altman says, "but mostly the actors. You could
point out any really good thing that happened in any of my
films [and ask], `Whose idea is that?' [and] it is almost
invariably somebody else's. And I don't even know whose."

    Of course, writers tend not to share Altman's easy,
fungible attitude toward dialogue. And as in almost all things,
he remains blithely impolitic in his regard for the
screenwriting craft. "I get a lot of flack from writers. But I
don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing -- I mean,
I think it's blueprinting." On Tanner, fortunately, because the
story zigged and zagged according to actual events and
incorporated real political figures, the writing was necessarily
quick, sketchy, Altmanesque. "What Bob makes is a kind of visual
jazz," says Trudeau, "and I thought of myself as providing scat
lyrics for him. They were always just a departure point."

    Altman may be a genius, but linear analytical rigor is not
his thing. He lives and works amid a genial hurly-burly, with
room for all kinds of stray inspirations and serendipitous
touches to worm their way into his movies. What Altman pursues
is not looseness for its own sake, but surprise -- both for
himself and for moviegoers: he didn't know beforehand the tics
and shadings performers like Lyle Lovett and Whoopi Goldberg
(who play police officers) would bring to their characters, for
instance, and the movie-within-a-movie surprise he gives the
audience near the end of The Player is profoundly pleasurable.

    When it works, his seat-of-the-pants filmmaking is grand.
Yet it carries great risks. As disciplined and carefully
plotted as The Player is, it's still an Altman movie. The end
of the movie seems a bit contrived, he is told, not quite
consistent tonally with the rest of the film -- and he freely
admits, "We had no ending to the picture when we went into it.
We had no way to end it that anybody liked."

    While Altman is a big-hearted, risk-taking, pot-smoking,
actor-loving paterfamilias (he has five children by three wives,
including two by Kathryn Altman, whom he married 32 years ago),
he is not always Mr. Mellow. When he thinks a crew member has
screwed up or an executive has done him wrong, his anger can be
ferocious. Volcanic is the word that two former colleagues use
to describe his temper. "It's something to behold," says
Trudeau.

    Given that he depends on the Hollywood establishment to
help make and sell his movies, his undisguised contempt for
certain Hollywood big shots is also something to behold. Earlier
this year, when The Player was being shown to prospective
distributors, Altman got in a public spat with two top studio
executives over what he considered their disrespectful attitude.
Ask Altman innocently about his 1985 movie that Sam Shepard
wrote and starred in, and he cannot stop himself. "Fool for Love
. . . I mean, I can't abide Sam Shepard." As an actor? "As a
person. I just had it up to here with him. But I think that's
a really good film -- a really good film."

    Altman says that beginning last winter, "about the time
all the studios saw [The Player]," he started being courted
by the unlikeliest of people. "Even Disney wants to do
something with me," he marvels. Of course, being Robert Altman,
he only wants to make the not-obviously-commercial films that
interest him. For most of the past decade, he tried and failed
to develop a script about the Paris haute couture scene, and now
"I'll probably get it done next year -- I imagine directly as
a result of the heat on The Player." He is negotiating a
development deal for a movie about Mata Hari, and he also wants
to film the life of Jean Seberg. L.A. Shortcuts, a script he
co-wrote from a set of Raymond Carver short stories, seems to
be the project about which he's most enthusiastic.

    One recent afternoon in New York City the director,
dressed all in black, sat at his desk in his all-black
production office, hustling deals. It is a Robert Altman sort
of place. Just behind him is the neon onstage logo from his
production of Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy
Dean, giving him a perfect glitzy-tacky roadhouse penumbra. An
old cheese and some scraps of baguette sit on the coffee table,
and beyond the table sits his William Morris agent, listening
in on a phone extension as Altman assures someone else's agents
that he really is quite committed to directing A Death in
Ireland, a script by the actor Tom Berenger. He hangs up. "These
are all projects that interest me," he says of the various
movies he's trying to get made. "They say, `The [movie
principals] will think you're not doing it for art, but just
for the gig.' " Altman's not really angry, just a tad . . .
frustrated that at this late date he is obliged to convince
agents of his artistic integrity.

    Still, better to be accused of being a sellout than a
has-been. And while Altman gleefully nurses some particular
grudges -- against certain producers, certain executives,
certain critics, Sam Shepard -- he seems free of general
bitterness. Sure, he feels a little gypped out of M*A*S*H money
("I never got paid anything [from the TV series] --
anything"), but for all his visceral mistrust of Hollywood, he
doesn't seem sour about his decade of reputation shrinkage and
quasi-exile. After all, every few years he has been lucky enough
to turn out something great. So what's to be bitter about?
"There's not a film I've got made that I don't like," he says.
"As far as my life and career go, and comebacks and all that --
I mean, I've had a great roll. I mean, please -- I've got no
complaints anywhere."