An Altman Universe

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The stars lined up when I learned that during the upcoming semester, the university was planning to host a Robert Altman festival, one that would bring all of his movies and a number of the people who had worked on them to Ann Arbor. I signed on to cover it for my school newspaper, The Michigan Daily, and virtually overnight, a fusion of movie love and journalism was sealed in me. I gloried in the films, discovering the haunting McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the more-soulful-than-Harold-and-Maude Brewster McCloud, the lyrically gonzo The Long Goodbye; I also interviewed people like Nashville screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury and critic Andrew Sarris. I didn't meet Altman, not then at least, but I do remember the day of his appearance on the stage of a packed Hill Auditorium, where he introduced a 30-minute teaser from his upcoming film, 3 Women. When he sauntered on stage, very, very late, carrying a large umbrella aloft as though he had just come from a New Orleans parade (a bit of leftover '60s japery), the audience of students erupted. He was a rock star, all right, this middle-aged balding ''maverick'' (the word that was perpetually attached to him) who already looked ike a hipster Santa Claus.

I suppose, and I'm just guessing, that on today's campuses, you could provoke a comparable reaction by getting, say, Peter Jackson to appear. But please indulge my nostlagia when I testify to the unlikely glory of '70s movie culture, when the astonishing reverence that college kids could feel for a culture hero like Robert Altman was very electric and very real. On stage, speaking in his dry, no-nonsense Kansas newscaster twang, Altman didn't say anything especially grand, but he did seem to sense that the audience wanted a summation from him, so he left us with, ''I paint what I see.'' And that was it exactly. As college students in the mid-'70s, too young to have been part of the counterculture but not so young that we didn't have a lingering identification with it, what we revered about Altman was that he so poetically undermined the whole spirit of Hollywood as a dream factory. He made movies in a reality factory, which is one reason that I could watch, and think about, Nashville forever: It was, and is, a human aquarium, the people inside it so quirky and tangible and just plain there that they seemed as actual as life.

I finally did meet Altman about half a dozen years later, after I'd become a film critic for The Boston Phoenix. In 1983, he was in Boston to publicize Streamers, his adaptation of the David Rabe Vietnam play, and I had lunch with him at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. It was a memorable interview: I don't recall a single thing Altman said about the movie, but since he wasn't wearing a tie, he had to harangue his way into the hotel restaurant, and when he sat down he was plenty steamed about it. ''That's a class-action suit worthy of the Supreme Court,'' he said, referring to what he saw as a patently unconstitutional and un-American dress code. After ordering a stiff drink (''Get me a bloody bull!'' he barked at the waiter), he continued to grouse, for more or less the entire lunch, about his initial encounter with the maitre'd. What I glimpsed in his rant, his eyes a-glitter, were four aspects of Robert Altman: the take-no-prisoners fury that had carried him through years in the entertainment business; the highly charged, almost radical sense of personal democracy that allowed him to rage away at the idea of anyone, regardless of how they were dressed, being turned away from a public restaurant; the perhaps contradictory, almost aristocratic resentment over the fact that it was him who was being turned away; and, beyond any of that, the bitterness of the moment he was in, when his career had fallen on hard times and he had lost a bit of his cachet.

Although I got along well enough with him, he let me know that he wasn't all that crazy about critics (he dissed a couple of them by name as scavengers), and I was reminded of his rather scary falling-out with Pauline Kael. Throughout the first half of the '70s, she had been the bard of his genius, producing some of her greatest writing when she reviewed Altman's films. Though the two had become friendly, he broke any pretense of friendship the moment that she dumped on his first movie after Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians: Or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson. Kael had been right — the film was a quasi-dud — but what happened between her and Altman stands as a lesson to any critic who thinks that a friendship with a filmmaker comes without its perils.

Kael penned a lot of memorable lines about Altman, but one that's always held a great deal of resonance, and irony, for me came in her review of Thieves Like Us, when she confessed that ''Robert Altman spoils other directors' films for me.'' Kael was referring to decades of what she called ''Hollywood's paste-up, slammed-together jobs.'' But as a freshman film geek, high on Nashville, I found myself in a peculiar position: Did the mad burble, the juggled storylines, the virtuosic freedom of Robert Altman's aesthetic spoil conventional movies for me before I'd even gotten a chance to enjoy them? For a while, I was a bit resistant to Hollywood mechanics, especially in older flims. I had to grow up a little to appreciate the pleasures of conventional form and symmetry. Where Altman marked me, happily and forever, is in showing me that no movie is more glorious than one that is exuberantly, transcendently real. He created an art that seemed like life, and in doing so made you believe that life was a work of art in progress.