Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This year would have marked the 100th birthday of American director Robert Altman. Over the course of his four-decade career, Altman directed some cinema classics, from The Long Goodbye to Nashville to The Player to Gosford Park. Known for his use of ensemble casts, overlapping dialogue, and insightful looks into American life and culture, Altman made his mark in Hollywood in the '70s and solidified his legacy with a run of great films in the '90s.

To celebrate Altman's centennial this September, the Criterion Channel is featuring a series of Altman films. That series is curated by Sean Fennessey, co-host of The Ringer podcast, The Big Picture. It features movies from as early as 1969's That Cold Day in the Park, all the way through A Prairie Home Companion from 2006. Altman died November of that year at 81.

Joining me now to discuss the life and career of Robert Altman is curator and Big Picture co-host Sean Fennessey. Hey, Sean.

Sean: Hey, Alison. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well. When I look at a movie, when I listen to a movie, how will I know right away that's Altman?

Sean: Ooh, you'll know pretty quickly because they're a little bit more unusual than the movies that his contemporaries are making or the people who came before him. They will be deeply humanistic, but also quite weird. They will be calm and gentle in some ways and disruptive in others, and they will move. The camera especially will move in ways that we don't expect. If you see an outsider or someone on the periphery of our culture, you're probably watching a Robert Altman movie.

Alison Stewart: I was listening to your podcast. I know you read a lot of books when you were getting ready to curate this sampling of Robert Altman's work. What themes interested Robert Altman the most when you looked at his entire career?

Sean: Well, first and foremost, I think he was interested in people; individual people. He seemed to have a lot of contempt for systems and structure and those who participated in politics and capitalism, at best suspicion of those spaces. He was interested in the people who kind of got trapped between the gears of those spaces a lot of time. He also loved artists and loved people who created and loved people who dreamed big. Throughout his films, you see people trying to break the chains of modern society and do something a little bit different.

Alison Stewart: He liked working with a large ensemble cast. How did he work effectively with large casts of actors?

Sean: It's such a good question. He was extremely generous and open-minded about what actors could bring to movies. You might think, okay, in a star-driven vehicle where there's one person at the center of the frame, let's say a Leonardo DiCaprio movie, he's somebody who has a lot of input on his character and developing how a story is played out. When you're making a movie like Nashville that has over 30 speaking parts, it's really challenging to let everyone have their say, but Altman was incredibly creative when it came to decisions like this.

For example, in Nashville, it's a movie about a number of people converging on the city of Nashville for a music festival during a presidential election year and the centennial. Around all of these events, there are all these performers who were there to perform country western music. Altman asked his actors to write their own songs that their characters would perform in the film. That's an amazing way for an actor to generate not just an emotional relationship, but backstory to that character, and let them make the movie with him, not for him. He has this amazing way to engender respect and decency from his actors and to make them feel like a part of the troupe.

Then inevitably, you feel like everybody is all rowing in the same direction when you're making the movie, and so the film finds a way to spotlight all these individuals in ways that feel very specific and earned.

Alison Stewart: We have a really good example of that from Nashville. Apparently, this was partially improvised. It's Barbara Jean, played by Ronee Blakley. She's about to sing a song to a big audience, and she gets a little bit sidetracked. This is from Nashville.

[Ronee Blakley: Nashville]

I think there's a storm

Seems like it's a-brewin'

That's what my grandaddy used to say all the time before he lost his hearin'

Once he got deaf, he never talked much no more, 'cept sometimes he'd say "Oh, gosh" or "Durn it" or "My word!"

My granny, she'd go around the house and clickin' her teeth to the radio all day

Boy, was she a lot of fun, and cooked always my favorite, roast beef, and she was a sweetheart.

She raised chickens too.

She, um-- In fact, did you ever hear a chicken sound?

You know how chickens go? Buk, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck. Buk, cluck, cluck, cluck. Buk, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck.

Here, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick. Here, chick, chick, chick, chick.

Anyway, I guess we'd better strike up this tune before it's too late. Okay, boys.

Alison Stewart: What does it say about Altman that he allowed actors to improvise?

Sean: I think it's that he had a certain level of trust and respect for them, and for his ability to figure out what it was that was interesting and compelling about them and let them guide. Like Ronee Blakley, that example was so interesting. I mean, she was not an actor before that film really. She was a singer, and she was-- She's extraordinary in Nashville, heartbreaking in many ways, and was nominated for an Academy Award. Acted in a few more movies after that, but did not go on to be a great film actress.

His trust and his desire to give a shot to someone who wasn't necessarily comfortable in that world is fascinating and so unique for its time. He seems to be really interested in people who were not bringing to the presentation of a movie the expected mannerisms and style. He wanted someone who felt a little bit more a part of the real world and not a part of the construction of Hollywood.

Alison Stewart: Sean, his New York Times obit said this: "He was a risk-taker with a tendency towards mischief. Sometimes he was called subversive." What does that mean to you in the context of Altman's work? What was subversive or mischievous about it?

Sean: I'm really drawn to the mischief part. It's interesting that that was located in his obit. It's because, I think, he was kind of thumbing his nose at what was expected of him. There's this famous story about the very first studio film that he made, Countdown, an astronaut drama from the 1960s. It's where he introduced the idea of overlapping dialogue into his movies, where two characters are talking over each other at the same time in the midst of a heated argument or a romantic entanglement or what have you.

That was important to him because that's how we talk. Maybe not here on public radio. We're not talking over each other. We're being very polite. In general, if you were in your home and you were talking to somebody you cared about, you might be talking over each other.

Alison Stewart: Yes. "What are you talking about? I don't know what you're talking about. What do you mean?"

[laughter]

Sean: Well, Alison, let me tell you what I'm talking about. Because of that, that's something that movie studios were not comfortable with and were not familiar with: the "You talk, I talk" style of Hollywood dialogue. Go back and watch a film from 1950. It is very presentational, and we're waiting for everyone to deliver their monologue. Of course, Altman didn't believe in that. Even though he was told not to before the production of Countdown, this Warner Bros. film, he just put the overlapping dialogue in there anyway.

Jack Warner, the head of the studio, was on vacation while he was making the film. He came back and he looked at dailies once he returned from his vacation, and he saw what Altman was doing in post-production, then he fired him. He said, "I told you not to do this, and you did it anyway." That's a huge risk to take for a filmmaker who had been wanting to be a feature filmmaker his entire life. He was already in his late 30s by this point. That's the other thing, is he arrived at this much later than many of his so-called new Hollywood contemporaries.

Even on this big break, he thumbed his nose at the studio head and did exactly what he wanted to do creatively. There was no way to undo it because he'd already shot the footage that was essential to the film, and he got away with it, even though he got pushed off of the film, and he still got to do it in the future. That's a very material way that he looked at authority and said, "I'm going to do what I want to do." You can find that same energy in the text of all of his movies too. In the films and the stories that he was drawn to.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sean Fennessey, co-host of The Big Picture podcast. He's also the curator of the Criterion Channel series, Directed by Robert Altman, in honor of what would have been Robert Altman's 100th birthday. It's streaming now through September.

Listeners, we want to hear from you. What is your favorite Robert Altman movie and why? Give us a call, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can join us on air, or you can text to us at that number, 212-433-9692. We should mention that Robert Altman was a TV director.

Sean: He was, for a long time. He got his start, actually, in Kansas City, making instructional industrial movies. Then he shifted to Hollywood, and he was hired essentially by Alfred Hitchcock to helm an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the late '50s. He spent the next 10 years working on Westerns and Army TV shows and honing his craft, and figuring out how to fit into the system, making a really good living and helping develop new material and building relationships with actors. It took him a very long time to escape that system. That was not a pipeline that was very common either.

Some other directors-- Sam Peckinpah is somebody who made some TV and then eventually got to make films, but that was unusual. To be a guy who spent 10 years in the trenches, literally, of making shows like Combat! and then getting a shot to make movies.

Alison Stewart: He often worked in collaboration with actors over several films. Shelley Duvall was one. He worked with Elliot Gould. First of all, let's start with Shelley Duvall. She was in seven of his films, I believe. Why does that pairing make sense together?

Sean: Well, I mean, just look at Shelley Duvall, right? On the one hand, she's this stunning, striking person. On the other hand, she doesn't really look like anyone else. She doesn't really look like any human that we know. She has a kind of singular, individualistic quality, that beautiful voice. You can see that he just recognized something in her that was like pure cinema. That she is so watchable and so compelling on screen. He, over time, found unique ways to utilize her talents and to make her a participant in the stories that he was trying to tell.

She had this unusual sense of like-- I would say a blind confidence mixed with a vulnerability that is very rare. He found a lot of unique ways to apply her specific energy to his stories.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Nick, who's calling in from Roslyn Heights. Hey, Nick. Thanks for taking the time to call All Of It.

Nick: Oh, thank you so much. Nashville, loved it. Ronee Blakley, Tapedeck in His Tractor. Henry Gibson, "We must be doing something right to last 200 years." Sorry about that. Great, great stuff. I also want to say that I met-- I'll make a long story short. I met Vassar Clements. He had a cameo scene in Nashville, and he told me that he became friends with Robert Altman during the making of that film.

Sean: Well, Nick, thanks for sharing your story. We are talking about the Criterion Channel series, Directed by Robert Altman. It is curated by Sean Fennessey, co-host of The Big Picture Podcast. We want to hear from you. What's your favorite Robert Altman movie and why? Give us a call at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We'll have more of your calls. We'll have more with Sean after a quick break.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Sean Fennessey, co-host of The Big Picture podcast. He's also the curator of the Criterion Channel series, Directed by Robert Altman, in honor of what would have been Robert Altman's 100th birthday. It's streaming now through September.

Altman's first big breakthrough was MASH in the 1970s. That's a film about army medics and rapscallion surgeons in the Korean War. Gould was in it. Donald Sutherland was in it. It was nominated for five Academy Awards. What was different about this film?

Sean: Well, it's incredibly raunchy and incredibly bloody. The truth is that that just was not very common. We know that that's something that you can find at the movies all the time these days, but we didn't really see doctors performing surgery on screen, and the actual viscera that came out of that. Then, on top of that, there was this really bawdy, almost lewd sense of humor that permeates the film that obviously is a big part of what drew Altman to it in the first place. Also, a kind of comfort with getting very close to breaking the fourth wall, of letting viewers in on the joke of the tone of the movie.

This idea that it was actively winking at us to say, one, this is a movie about Korea, but we all know it's really about Vietnam. Two, even though this is the most life-and-death circumstance imaginable, there is something weirdly funny about how this all works. That was very unusual at the time. It was really a trailblazing movie in that respect.

Alison Stewart: This text says, "Alison, please ask your guest why Popeye from 1980 failed at the box office.

Sean: It shouldn't have. We see this all the time, right? The lead-up to a big production, and this was a big production, especially for Altman, can sometimes be defined by the outsized budget and the "catastrophe" of the filmmaking. This is a movie that was engineered by Robert Evans, the famed movie executive, and Dino De Laurentiis, and all of these very powerful men. Altman was not well known for his huge budgets and his outsized films. He definitely had never directed anything quite like Popeye before.

The entire film was shot in Malta. They built the set and designed all the costumes, and the composer, Harry Nilsson, and all of the actors all went to Malta. It seemed like they got up to some trouble while they were making it. Some substances were consumed, and they were letting it rip a little bit. Some of the reporting out of Malta was not positive. Then, the run-up to the movie, it felt like it was going to be this epic disaster. The movie itself is quite charming and sweet, and more or less true to the Popeye cartoon and what Altman was assigned to do, but it got some bad press, and it cost a lot of money to make. It has kind of a funky reputation in his career.

Sean: Let's listen to Robin Williams playing Popeye with I Yam What I Yam.

[Robin Williams: Popeye]

So what am I? I ain't no physicist, but I knows what matters.

What am I? I'm Popeye, the sailor.

And I yam what I yam

What I yam and I yam

What I yam and that's all that I yam

'Cause I yam what I yam

Ah, you got it? I think so, yeah.

And I got a lot of muscle

And I only got one eye

And I never hurt nobody

And I never tell a lie

Top to me bottom

From the bottom to me top

And that's the way it is

Till the day that I drop

What am I?

I yam what I yam!

Ooh, [unintelligible 00:16:05]

I yam what I yam what I yam what I yam

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jay from Bay Ridge. Hey, Jay, thanks for calling All Of It.

Jay: Thank you. I wanted to bring up a forgotten gem that's not really a typical Altman movie. Secret Honor, with Philip Baker Hall, and a one-man production as Richard Nixon. Following Popeye, his career, I guess, was in a bit of a crisis. I was wondering how he came to Secret Honor and why that's kind of forgotten now. I think it's great.

Alison Stewart: Sean?

Sean: Well, after a couple of movies in the '70s didn't perform so well, and Popeye was considered a disaster, he retreated from the idea of making movies for a bit, and he began getting interested in the theater. He would eventually go on to direct a series of plays, as TV movies and as theatrical releases. One of the plays he saw early on was this virtuoso one-man performance by the great Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon in this play called Secret Honor. It takes place entirely in Nixon's study, in one alcohol fueled crazed night, in which he is declaring his innocence and guilt and defining the mania of the American political experience.

It's like a remarkable piece of writing, the play itself. Altman, who is not considered necessarily a master of blocking and staging – he's somebody who usually lets the camera figure out what the story is going to be – very gently decides that he wants to adapt this play. He wants to do it in this very, very meticulous way, this way that is out of sync for him. I love this movie. This is one of my favorite Altman films. It is a real step up for him, technically speaking. He is really applying a lot of what he's learned about movies that he has made on a big stage over this 10-year period in the 1970s, and shrinking everything down to this razor-sharp filmmaking style.

The Hall performance, you know Hall of course plays him in the film as well, not just the play. He is utterly captivating as Nixon. It's a portal movie into that period of time and the way that we thought about our leaders.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to put that on my list. Nancy from Sunset Park is calling us. Hey, Nancy. Thanks for making the time to call All Of It.

Nancy: Oh, I'm so excited to talk about Robert Altman, which I can talk about for a little bit. Just the other day, my son and I were having a conversation, and we were discussing the coldest movie ever made, which is McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I worked at a movie company in the late '70s, and that was when Robert Altman had a string of not-successful pictures. One of them was HealtH with Carol Burnett. I can't remember what opened the New York Film Festival, probably in '79. Do you know what movie that is? Was it A Perfect Couple?

Alison Stewart: I'm not sure.

Nancy: I guess so. These were the times when he was not doing so great. I have to say, as a person, he carried his production company, and that he used the same people over and over again. They loved him and traveled with him. When he went someplace, it was never with two people from the production company. It would be 50 people would come, and everybody was always having a good time. Everyone always had a job, and everyone went on to better jobs when they left Robert Altman.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for weighing in. I want to talk about The Player. The Player is great [chuckles], with Tim Robbins. I almost feel like everybody at the studio should just shout out The Player. They do actually in The Player, if you know. Tim Robbins is a Hollywood studio executive. Why do you think this was the film that revitalized his career?

Sean: Well, Hollywood loves itself, right?

Alison Stewart: Yes. [chuckles]

Sean: The Player is a movie-- It's a murder mystery about a movie executive who is at a critical stage in his career, where he's trying to maneuver his way to the very top of a fictionalized studio. It's based on a Michael Tolkien novel. You're right that the character that Tim Robbins plays, Griffin Mill, gets a nice shout-out, in a way, in The Studio, the new Apple TV show that just dominated the Emmys. It is absolutely one of my favorite Altman movies. It's probably the first Altman movie that I saw. It's the movie that got me connected to Altman because I was such a movie crazy kid in the '90s.

It's a very sharp satire, an intriguing mystery. It is also a real feast for movie fans from that period because lots and lots of real-life characters find their way into the world. Burt Reynolds appears for one minute. Bruce Willis appears for one minute as themselves. This happens many, many times throughout the film.

Alison Stewart: Buck Henry, so funny.

Sean: Buck Henry, hilariously. Joan Tewkesbury, the screenwriter of a bunch of his movies, also famously has a funny scene where she's doing a pitch for Griffin Mill about a new movie she wants to make with Goldie Hawn. Just such a knowing and clever and amusing and kind of embittered movie. A movie made by a guy who's like, "Everybody here is kind of an idiot."

Alison Stewart: This text says, "The Long Goodbye, Altman's rethinking of Philip Marlowe and noir in the 1970s. LA, Malibu is a masterstroke, with Elliott Gould as a bumbling but brilliant Marlowe." For folks who might be hearing this and thinking, "Gosh, I should get into Robert Altman," what are some starter films, Sean?

Sean: It's a good question. We've hit on a couple of them, right? The Long Goodbye, I think, is a very good place to start because if you love cinema, you probably know about the Bogart versions of those stories. You can see the way that he just turns the dial ever so slightly by recasting Elliott Gould into the Marlowe part. I think that's a good place to start. My favorite Altman movie is California Split, which also stars Gould and George Segal as two guys in their 30s who get deep into a spiral of gambling. It is simultaneously very sad and hilarious, and I think really underlines just what can happen when you get a little bit too close to the fire of gambling.

I think a lot of the '90s films in that comeback period are very approachable. The one that is probably the most understandable in our contemporary culture is Gosford Park, which predates Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age, but is from the same writer, Julian Fellowes, who Altman and Bob Balaban hired to write this upstairs-downstairs murder mystery movie with an incredible cast of British actors. Altman had never quite made a film like this in England, and it's just a corker. It's just a good time. If people want to just have a fun [crosstalk]--

Alison Stewart: A corker. I haven't heard that in a long time. [laughter] We've got about a minute left, and I wanted to ask you about Robert Redford, who passed away at 89. What do you think Redford's legacy will be?

Sean: It's an overwhelming question because he is quite literally one of the greatest movie stars in American film history. He's also one of the most impressively sincere activists in modern entertainment history. I think he brought something very real to the table in terms of lifting up other artists and also making sure that people were not getting left behind by our society. He also was a filmmaker himself who directed, and directed Academy Award-winning, Best Picture-winning films. He is on the Mount Rushmore of what Hollywood has produced in the last 100 years.

Alison Stewart: Sean Fennessey is co-host of The Big Picture podcast. He's also the curator of the Criterion series, Directed by Robert Altman, in honor of what would have been Robert Altman's 100th birthday. It's streaming through September. Hey, thanks for your time today.

Sean: Thanks, Alison. Good to see you.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.