On Location: ‘Nashville’ (1975)
Although journalism used to be used pejoratively to dismiss works of fiction that supplement the imaginary with the repertorial — as if any story earned on errand could never shimmer with the shine of true aesthetic achievement — we’re fortunately well past that thinking now, as a culture, thanks in part to Tom Wolfe in the 1980s extolling and emulating the fictional feats of such observers as Zola, Dickens, and Dreiser. Before Wolfe, however, there was Robert Altman and Nashville.
There was also Joan Tewkesbury. She should be mentioned before anyone, because she’s the one who went down there with a notepad and a tape recorder, sitting in the back of the clubs and journalistically observing, documenting. “She arrived at Nashville Airport amid chaos,” writes Jan Stuart in his tender-hearted and comprehensive book about the film.
Everyone was jockeying to catch a sighting of some unidentified visiting celebrity arriving in a private airplane. The airport was a hub of travelers and their welcome wagons, news hounds, and music fans. Tewkesbury finally rescued her bags and extracted herself from the crush, only to become ensnared in a traffic jam that backed up the freeway from the scene of an automobile accident.
This was actually Tewkesbury’s second scouting trip to Nashville; her first had been arranged through industry connections, but all she got out of that visit was a tourist’s junket. “It was bullshit,” she’d remember decades later. “We went to see ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers]. Like who cares? To the country-western museum, where Patsy Cline’s hairpins are displayed. And of course the Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman Auditorium. Every time you’d ask a question that was outside the party line — where do they play rock ’n’ roll? — they would get you back to Patsy Cline’s hairpins.”
That second visit, though — with the starstruck oglers, the accident, the traffic jam — bore fruit that would help make the movie, which of course opens amidst a hectic airport and soon finds us stuck in traffic with all the main characters. (In life, the traffic jam was caused by a couch, not a boat, that had fallen off of someone’s vehicle, demonstrating as ever that cinema is just plain more cinematic.)
She made notes on that trip of everything she observed. She attended recording sessions and chatted up Nashville’s eccentric native musicians, just like Geraldine Chaplin’s character Opal, the self-professed BBC reporter whose observations bring so much humor and outsider commentary to Nashville. “Your movie is in here somewhere,” Tewkesury assured Altman by phone. “I’m not certain how it’s going to translate. But I have a way to do this. It’s a single story, without telling a single story.”
She would later explain to Altman about the city’s literal circularity and how, because of this physical layout, the same people often encountered one another throughout a day. This was all Altman needed to hear, for he had long dreamed of a movie wherein a literal revolving door would serve as a nexus for cycling characters into and out of the story.
When she finally sat down to write, Tewkesbury made a list of the characters, after which she
constructed a large graph, with the days of the week and the time of day written on the vertical edge and the characters’ names written along the horizontal. Taping the graph to the wall, she systematically plotted out where each character would be, whom they would be with, when they would be there, and what they would be doing. She then supplemented her graph with separate yellow pieces of paper for each character, which she could move around like flags on a war map.
The whole thing would be shot in Nashville, with real Nashvilleans filling up the background. They came with their own props — their own Instamatics and open beer cans — as well as their own unfaked enthusiasm at being able to see one spectacle while participating in another. Populating Nashville with natives would give the film an ageless authenticity that endures still, as does the scrupulous attention to set design. Says Altman on the disc’s commentary track: “We cast these cars as carefully as we did the people who drove them.”
When Altman put his Nashville up on the screen, he saw it as America up there, microcosmic and specific. Not everyone would see it that way. “One night as we were watching the dailies,” remembered Lily Tomlin, “I said to him, ‘I hope we get out of town before they see this movie!’ Southerners can have very thin skin, especially at that time.”
The debate persists as to whether Nashville is disrespectful of country-music culture, and since disrespect — real disrespect — cannot exist outside of one’s intentions, maybe we should turn to what the filmmakers did intend.
“I wasn’t looking for good music,” Altman said later in explaining the matter. “….I was trying to get a cross-section of songs, very bad songs, which is what most of that music in Nashville is.”
If further testimony is needed, let’s go to the film’s musical director, Richard Baskin, who said, “Much of country-western music is a parody of itself. The truly great music, if you go back [to the 1970s], is kind of saccharine and trite. I wasn’t trying to make fun of it. I had fun with it.”
Making-fun-of versus having-fun-with — when it’s an outsider having the fun, this is a distinction without a difference.
Altman seems to have been genuinely blindsided by the city’s negative reaction. “Everybody in Nashville was just wonderful — they were very, very helpful and cooperative,” he remembered of the time spent preparing and shooting the movie. “It was only when we finished the film and we took it down there to show it, and it was the country-western singers and writers, the people whose territory we were stepping on….they didn’t like it at all. I remember Minnie Pearl and all of those guys, Hank Snow, that were all the kind of top people then — they did not like this picture. And Nashville, generally, didn’t like it.”
When this sentiment was just emerging, Altman gave an interview to the local Tennessean in which he complained that “They’ll do a Walking Tall, which treats Southerners like a bunch of damned cretins. Then this picture comes along and somebody thinks somebody might be offended. I just can’t believe it. People are smarter than that.”
Well, sayin’ it don’t make it so. Nashville’s musicians, in particular, were upset not only because of how their musical form and its culture were portrayed, but because they weren’t invited to be the ones portraying it. Altman had an explanation for that, too: “Everybody’s going, Oh, my song will cost you this and this and I want so and so! I just didn’t want to deal with any of that. I didn’t want the agents walking around telling me what to do, mainly what the fucking songs would be.”
What the songs ultimately became should have been enough to redeem the movie. Or some of them should have been. “It Don’t Worry Me” so impressed Kurt Vonnegut that he prophesied in Vogue, “We will all be hearing and singing ‘It Don’t Worry Me’ for a little while. The song is one of our sweetest new inventions.” An even sweeter new invention, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy,” an exquisitely soulful acoustic number that’ll break your heart every single time.
The same can’t be said for the bicentennial-celebratin’ “200 Years” (incredibly impressed that the country has lasted two-and-a-half human lifetimes) or “Tapedeck in HIs Tractor” (self-explanatory). Nor can it be said for “For the Sake of the Children,” whose unctuous insincerity (We can’t continue this affair, because my kids must grow up in an unbroken home) is enough to toss your stomach.
And even though Carradine had written “I’m Easy” with earnest intentions — for the mother of his child — by the time he got to performing it in Nashville, its use had been inverted to deceive three different female characters in the bar’s audience. In other words, it had taken the perfectly wholesome and sincere, and made it into something as sickening as “For the Sake of the Children.”
Consider all this and you have to wonder if Nashville’s recording royalty just might have been justified in their ire.
The film opens cold with a mock-commercial, patterned after those frantic offers that used to run on late-night television encouraging you to act now for this very special musical compilation at a very low price. It’s a good gag, originally created as the movie’s trailer but wisely replaced for that purpose by a trailer both more ingenious and more straightforward. This trailer, too, makes an asset rather than a liability of the large ensemble cast, promising to tell the story of
five days in the lives of twenty-four unforgettable people. That’s a lot of characters, so listen closely. Lily Tomlin is a gospel singer who strays just a bit when she has a one-night stand with Keith Carradine, a hot young rock singer. Ned Beatty is her husband, who doesn’t suspect a thing.
This all comes from a folksy-friendly male voice, abruptly replaced by a similar female voice:
Henry Gibson is the number-one country-and-western singer, and is being tempted to run for governor. His sidekick, Barbara Baxley, drinks a bit and talks a lot, and his son, Dave Peel, is sort of attracted to Geraldine Chaplin, who plays a starstruck reporter from BBC TV.
The male voice again:
Ronnee Blakely is the adored singing star on the verge of a breakdown. Allen Garfield is the husband trying to save her life, and her career. Scott Glenn is the quiet soldier who worships her from afar. Karen Black is the rival singer who dresses like a sweet little prom queen — but don’t let that fool you.
Female voice:
Michael Murphy is the campaign manager, who’ll promise anything, especially to Gwen Welles, the waitress who dreams of being in the spotlight, and may have to do a lot of things she never dreamed of to get there.
It goes on like this, until all 24 have been introduced along with clips of them in action. Finally, the female voice puts a button on things by enthusing, “Nashville is about a lot of things and a lot of people. See all twenty-four of them and the things they do in Robert Altman’s Nashville!”
You’ve gotta salute the spirit of this salesmanship that strives to convince the public that what it needs is a sprawling, haphazard vérité ensemble about country-fried city folk — a tough sell even in the vaunted cultural climate of the 1970s. In hindsight, this is an all-star cast, but at the time it would have been more accurately described as, simply, a cast.
It was Lily Tomlin’s first movie. She’d already had Laugh-In success but as a dramatic actress she was unproven, most of all to herself. When she filmed her now-famous scene of silent sexual smoldering, sitting in the club as Tom (Carradine) sings the torchsong “I’m Easy,” Tomlin as Linnea looks on with love and longing for this lothario whom she believes is singing for her and her alone. “I was looking for a place for myself internally,” she remembered of this performance. “I thought I was putting out so much. This kind of conflicted yearning. I was counting on my eyes being so expressive. And the next night, when we saw the dailies, my eyes seemed to be mostly in shadows. I left the screening early, because I was just in tears.”
The Academy acknowledged her performance with a supporting-actor nomination, one of two such acknowledgments for this loaded cast. The other was for Ronee Blakely, who’d delivered her dissociated, detouring, delirious monologue from the Parthenon stage fastened to a soaring fever propelled by sleeplessness and self-starvation. (Blakely had been trying for months to keep her weight down.) That song she was pretending to forget, “Tapedeck in His Tractor,” which she’d written herself just weeks earlier — she didn’t really have to pretend.
Why resort to pretend when you had actors who could give you the real? That was Altman’s philosophy, or part of it. Tomlin remembered asking him why Karen Black, anointed superstar Connie White in the world of the film, had better accommodations and a better working schedule than the rest of them. His reason: “You’re not supposed to like her.”
Altman had a case full of such techniques for dealing with actors, a case Tomlin has always enjoyed inventorying. She particularly likes to tell the story of castmembers coming up and asking him what he was looking for in a scene. “I don’t know,” he’d often respond. “Why don’t you surprise me?” — a decidedly atypical response from a high-level auteur.
Legendary is the partylike atmosphere of his sets — beginning, pretty much, with this movie — and in Nashville the party was actually incorporated into the filmed product. Elliott Gould, late of three Altman films, was in town to promote the most recent, California Split (1974), which involved a fair amount of partying with the Nashville cast. They took the party around to the other side of the camera for a country-style barbecue, at which Gould drops in as himself, the big-shot Hollywood actor making the scene — though he was good sport enough to let himself be referred to, by a member of the party, as that guy “who was married to Barbra Streisand.”
“There was no set per se…,” Tomlin remembered. “It was all over the place. There were so many actors milling around, townspeople. I used to call Bob the benign patriarch, because he was absolutely in charge but in no way did you feel intimidated. You knew he was expecting something special from you, but he was never autocratic or imposing. He was just this comforting, solid, anchored presence. He was so unflappable and generous.”
Paul Thomas Anderson, long an Altman admirer and acolyte, found in Nashville a template for what became Boogie Nights (1998): a loosely affiliated band of show-biz outcasts and outlaws who comprise a surrogate dysfunctional family. But what I failed to notice until now is how Nashville must have worked its way deep into the crevices of some of Boogie Nights’ quirky characters.
You’ve got Jeff Goldblum, wasted on a silent part but who can blame Altman for that? The world didn’t yet know Goldblum as one of talking’s all-time greats. Even Goldblum himself didn’t know it. Actor David Hayward remembered Goldblum coming up to him one day all confused, unable to understand why Shelley Duvall wasn’t reciprocating his advances: “I look at Shelley, and I look at her fetchingly, and she doesn’t seem to respond.” Goldblum plays a hack magician, more annoying than entertaining to those on whom he inflicts his cheap-jack tricks. Maybe it didn’t occur to you on your first ten viewings of either movie that in Boogie Nights John C. Reilly plays a (far-from-silent) magician of similar caliber.
Speaking of Duvall: why is her character, L.A. Joan, always in highrise footwear listening to music on earphones? It never comes up for discussion, anymore than Rollergirl’s similar propensity ever comes up in Boogie Nights.
On the Boogie Nights commentary track, Anderson talks of what a remarkable job Julianne Moore does of acting poorly in a movie within the movie — how this is one of the hardest things any professional actor can do. Altman apparently agreed with the general sentiment, because in his own director’s commentary, for Nashville, he says that “it’s very hard to take someone who can sing and say, ‘Okay, now sing badly,’ because they can’t do it — I mean they don’t know how to do it.” When he tried to teach Gwen Welles — Sueleen Gay in the film — to sing well, but with no apparent luck, Altman knew he was stuck with a bad singer. But was “stuck” the right word? What Wells gave Altman, as an incorrigibly bad singer, proved every bit the gift that Moore’s bad actress would be for Anderson and Boogie Nights.
Much of the best acting in Nashville was like this, coming as it did from traits in the actors that didn’t have to be — and, what’s more, simply couldn’t be — faked.
Keith Carradine believes Altman “took a perverse pleasure in putting me into that role [of Tom], knowing how uncomfortable it would make me to play that kind of a guy.” Carradine simply “didn’t like the guy,” and “was young enough and immature enough to have a problem with having to play someone I didn’t like.” Naivete also compelled Carradine to approach Altman with his discomfort, which of course only confirmed for the director that he’d made the right decision. “He knew exactly what he was doing. And what you see, in the film — the end result — is this actor who doesn’t like the character he’s playing; what the audience gets is a guy who doesn’t like himself. So smart.”
Just as smart, or nearly so: When Altman wanted a clueless BBC reporter to drop into town and make faux-profound outsider observations — kind of a pretentious, overly talkative version of Joan Tewkesbury — he cast Geraldine Chaplin and dressed her up like a Mother Jones reporter he’d witnessed on the set of a previous movie: “She looked like Omar Shariff [in Lawrence of Arabia] riding across the desert. She just appeared in this ridiculous outfit. And so that’s how the Geraldine character was born.”
Touring the city with tape-recorder, she waxes pseudo-profound into the attached microphone, her British sensibilities imbuing insignificant Americana with pretentious poetry and portent. In a lot full of parked empty schoolbuses, she intones, “The buses! The buses are empty, and look almost menacing, threatening, as so many yellow dragons watching me with their hollow, vacant eyes. I wonder how many little black and white children have yellow nightmares, their own special brand of fear for the yellow peril….”
Altman’s instructions to Chaplin for writing these monologues were characteristically counterintuitive. He’d tell her, “Write them as though you were really serious. Really try and write poetry. Then it’ll be really crappy.”
As with Gwen Wells and Keith Carradine, Altman was asking Chaplin to strive for her very best, knowing it was the only way we could see her at her worst.
All these various and varied performances — and the public emphasis on Altman’s improvisatory method — made it inevitable that history would all but forget about Joan Tewkesbury, even though she’d created the ecosystem in which they could all survive and thrive. There were other innovations, too, never-tried techniques that only further contributed to the muted recognition Tewkesbury received then and receives still.
There was the overlapping dialogue, facilitated by technology that had come into use only very recently, brought to impressive refinement by an engineer named Jim Webb, who’d figured out a way to separate and select the sound picked up by separate microphones attached to individual actors. This overlapping dialogue, so close in texture and tone to real conversation — indeed indistinguishable from it — remains one of Altman’s signature techniques, though regrettably unimitated. And it all started here, on Nashville.
Meanwhile, Altman (metaphorically) danced Astaire-like through the shoot and its difficulties. Maybe that’s how it occurred to Pauline Kael, in her famous review, to opine that “Altman’s art, like Fred Astaire’s, is the great American art of making the impossible look easy.”
He made it look easy on the day they filmed the movie’s big finale, an outdoor concert at the Parthenon to which all of Nashville must have been invited, a scene with so many moving parts — with so much going on besides the actual music — that just hoping for success seemed an act of hubris. This was, remembered producing partner Allan Nichols, “the first time I’d ever seen Bob nervous. He does get nervous with big crowds….And when it rained, everyone was nervous we might have to put it off another day.
The rain went away; the chaos, thankfully, remained. All those folks who comprised the crowd were not professional extras, so when David Hayward — as the assassin Kenny Fraiser — had to make his way through the crowd to get near Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakely), “I was bumpin’ people hard comin’ through. And a couple of guys threw elbows at me, which was great.”
When Barbara Jean took her shots from the assassin, Ronee Blakely really sold the fall, flying backward at full force, dislocating her shoulder and making Altman rue his decision to not get coverage in closeup.
The concert at which Barbara Jean is killed is a gala event held in support of Hal Phillip Walker, the populist third-party presidential candidate whose campaign acts as a kind of presiding spirit for the movie, with a campaign van snaking its way through Nashville’s locales blaring the Replacement Party message from its megaphone. Altman never was shy in pointing out that, with Nashville, he was really making a movie about America, in the broadest sense. He was also never shy in pointing out that he was making a movie about Hollywood, too, metaphored and microcosmed. More specifically, it’s a movie about what Altman called “the Hollywood syndrome,” kids getting off the bus from all over with their instrument cases and their inchoate dreams of Making It.
Two such kids are Kenny Fraiser and Winifred (Barbara Harris), meeting not-so-cute when they’re left stranded by the traffic jam and forced to walk their way into town. In his violin case, Kenny carries a Colt .38 Special; Winifred, in her head and heart, carries dreams of Making It.
Their respective cargos reconvene at the climax, when Kenny opens his case and ends the life of country music’s reigning queen. And when he does so, who gets to take the stage and put the crowd at ease? Why, Winifred, of course, seizing her Main Chance at last, picking up the microphone and, with her substandard voice, leading the crowd through an all-together-now rendition of “It Don’t Worry Me.”
A Nashville dream by way of Hollywood. Which is another way of calling it an American dream. Which is another way of calling it the American Dream.
