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(Knopf, 576 pages, $35)
By Mitchell Zuckoff
(Ecco, 320 pages, $24.99)
By Werner Herzog
(Focal Press, 416 pages, $39.95)
By Charles Finance and Susan Zwerman
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Sometimes the oral biography format delivers big time. Such is the case with Mitchell Zuckoff’s marvelous, epic, tapestry-like life-scape of Robert Altman. The book itself resembles any number of Altman movies, with enormous casts teeming with talkers of every stripe—chatterboxes, con men, bullshitters and nut jobs. Just as Altman’s complex mic setups allowed us to eavesdrop on the conversations of multiple characters in Nashville, M*A*S*H, Gosford Park, and many others, so Zuckoff corrals dozens of figures from every period of Altman’s long life—including the director himself—and sets them to yakking, yarning, kvetching and carping. One witness makes assertions that the next one deems nonsense; implausibly tall tales rouse the reader’s deepest skepticism, and then are promptly verified by four eyewitnesses. Others tell us we’re about to hear “the greatest Bob Altman pot-smoking story of all time,” and they deliver. Some interviewees are vengeful (moneymen and aggrieved writers), most are laudatory (actors in particular), none are boring.
All of Altman’s surviving siblings take a turn, as do his three surviving wives (the fourth is deceased), many of his lovers, his children, war buddies, and early collaborators on industrial movies in post-war Kansas City. The 45 years before he made M*A*S*H prove incident-packed. There is the mischievous teenage Bob; war hero Bob (50 missions flown); skirt-chasin’ Bob; workaholic Bob (he freely admitted that family came second); boozer-gambler-jazz fan Bob; and the indefatigable Bob, who made several ambitious but unsuccessful moves to Hollywood in the ’50s.
Even from the post-M*A*S*H years, which have been chronicled before, there are new stories. There’s one about the waitress who took Altman’s dinner order and the next day found herself cast as a gun moll brutally beaten with a Coke bottle in The Long Goodbye. There are tales of the freedom he gave his performers—many of them, like Shelley Duvall, his own discovery—often at the expense of writers. More than one actor recalls him saying: “I’ve got this great script, but we’re not gonna film it.” And even in the ’80s, during what was supposedly his long exile and absence, we see how he never stopped working for a minute.
Witness by witness, Zuckoff constructs an exemplary and cautionary American life, and with the funny, tragic and compelling tales they tell, he has made something like a print version of the Last Great Robert Altman movie.
In the long history of troubled movie productions, Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo stands in an honored place alongside Apocalypse Now and Heaven’s Gate. The story of Herzog’s literally Sisyphean determination to push an actual, multi-ton steamboat over a mountain between two rivers—as does the hero of the film (played by Klaus Kinski)—has been told before by documentarian Les Blank in Burden of Dreams. There Herzog appeared in familiar gaunt and monkish guise, cursing the “fascism of nature” and apparently pushing his cast and crew to the brink of insanity. (Kinski, of course, maintained a second home on the brink of insanity.) However, Blank only saw half the story. Conquest of the Useless, now available in a superb translation overseen by Herzog, tells the rest. But it’s not simply the director’s side of the story, it’s also the story of the first, abandoned production a year earlier, with Jason Robards in the title role and a cast that included Mick Jagger and Mario Adorf.
Herzog never makes life easy on himself, repeatedly hurling himself into the most hostile locations—Antarctica, the Sahara, rims of live volcanoes—and dragging his terrified casts and crews along with him. “The powers of heaven are powerless against the jungle,” Herzog writes early on, and his memoir is filled with signs of nature’s cruel surrealism: rivers that rise and fall 30 feet overnight, carrying away half the set; unidentifiable beasts and reptiles, all malevolent; and an adopted monkey nicknamed “Tricky Dick Nixon.” One loses count of the loathsome, life-threatening specimens Herzog shakes out his shoe each morning. And his actors are no better: Robards is dismissed as a hypochondriac, Adorf as an egomaniacal schemer, and Kinski throws one blitzkrieg tantrum after another. Injuries are plentiful, and despite on-set medical improvisation, the climate often prevents them from healing. If that weren’t enough, Indian extras are distracted by attacks by other tribes, and dampness and extreme heat wreak havoc with equipment.
We can debate whether Fitzcarraldo made it all worthwhile, but this book certainly does, capturing as it does Herzog’s Germanically exacting but exquisite use of English, and his lyrically fatalistic worldview, redeemed as always by his immense capacity for wonder and horror.
No working director today today can afford to be ignorant in matters of visual effects. Sooner or later, whether you’re an action director like Michael Bay or an art-house staple like Atom Egoyan (whose film The Sweet Hereafter contained a CGI bus crash), the subject will arise and a lack of knowledge could hurt the production. A director who is not up to date might not know what questions to ask or even what possibilities exist. For filmmakers lacking the time or wherewithal to master the field, this compact and detailed tome offers the nuts and bolts from two professionals (Zwerman is a Guild member) with decades of experience in VFX.
Starting with a pre-history of classic effects, from blue-screen and stop-motion to matte painting, rear-screen projection and forced perspectives, the authors embark on a comprehensive survey of what’s available technic-ally to enrich the palette and generally enhance your movie. The emphasis is on practical, real-world applications, with technical aspects presented in the context of budgeting, scheduling, and staffing. All information takes into account the relationship between what happens on set and what’s added in post.
The arrival of visual effects as a staple of filmmaking has not only added a new dimension to visual possibilities; it’s also changed the director’s central task of project management. Finance and Zwerman have assembled an essential guide for both tyros entering the industry from a literary or theatrical background, and established directors and their teams who want to feel more comfortable working in this brave new world.
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