Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Sep 1993The crew, as always, does the hard work, hauling a ton or two of gear down from the road above the hills that overlook the winding Kern River about forty-five minutes outside of Bakersfield. California has been in a six-year drought and the heat is awesome. The surrounding hills are burnt-out, brown and yellow. While the real workers crawl over sun-baked rocks and wade through the clear cold water, building platforms, laying tracks, and setting up cameras and sound equipment, the actors, Fred Ward, Huey Lewis, and, find some shade and get in the mood for some serious fishing. Huey sits on a boulder, blowing some raw country blues on his harmonica while Fred and I exchange some classy reminiscences about long ago adventures in Mexican whorehouses.
A few weeks before, outside a restaurant somewhere in the L.A. suburbs in which we've been shooting a sequence with Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits, Fred and I have spent an hour or so in the parking lot learning how to cast a line under the tutelage of Huey, the one true fisherman among us. It seems to come more easily than I thought it would, so it is a disappointment to learn that, for reasons I do not fully understand, there are no actual fish in this section of the Kern. A disappointment because actors, after all, like to do things while they're acting--hold a gun, tap dance, fly a plane, eat a meal, smoke a (now politically incorrect) cigarette, make love to an absurdly pretty woman. And since I am rarely, if ever, asked to do any of the above--well, I've smoked in a couple of movies--I thought that fishing, real fishing, would add an interesting dimension to my professional resume.
Because actors want to be thought of as interesting. Of course they want to be thought of as talented. And funny. And sexy. And intelligent. And a number of other things. But mostly, I believe, interesting. They want those folks out there to think, hey, that guy can not only laugh and cry and say all those words but he can really play the guitar and catch a football and buck a rivet and make an omelet and catch a fish. That guy is really INTERESTING.
So I have to simulate the special thrill of snatching a big fat live one from the river, a creature that's been carefully attached to my line by a propman with a basketful of slightly comatose fish. (Note to the ASPCA: no fish were actually killed during the making of this picture. Irritated yes, even insulted, but not killed. I believe that, after we were through shooting, the fish were set free in the Kern where, I like to think, newly inspired by their cinematic debut, they swam gratefully away, hoping to be rediscovered further downstream and selected for a role in the sequel to A River Runs Through It.)
We not only have a fish-wrangler working with us. We have a guy whose job description does not appear on most daily call sheets. We refer to him, for want of any accepted official designation, as the corpse-wrangler. He's crafted an all too real naked dead girl out of epoxy and plastic and who knows what else. Her face is modeled on that of a well-known porno actress. And he's been placed in the river near where we--the characters in this segment of Robert Altman's Short Cuts--have made camp and where she will remain for several days, a silent nagging witness to our anglers' passion. We know we should do something about her, but we don't have a phone and we didn't abandon our wives and children and urban anxieties and lug our camp supplies and fishing gear miles into the hills to be distracted by some stranger's misfortune. After all, what's the big deal? She's going to be dead for a long time. And we've only got three days to fish.
It's a creepy situation--like those in the Raymond Carver stories from which Altman and co-writer Frank Barhydt have fashioned their screenplay. It's also like a lot of Altman films in which ordinary decent people commit extraordinary mindless acts and where the banal and the gruesome are constantly bumping into each other.
There are a number of reasons actors like to work for Altman. For one thing, it's fun. "You figure out who the characters are:" Altman says, "and bring me something interesting." There it is again, Interesting. There's not a lot of talk about inner life and motivation. Each one of the actors is in control of a little puzzle inside of them--in this case, a massive puzzle that only Altman has the solution to: twenty-two featured actors are each trying to create a small real life inside the complex pattern of interlocked and overlapping dozen or so stories going on simultaneously.
Altman generally keeps the camera--in some cases, cameras --out of the actors' faces. If, as the saying goes, comedy is in the longshots and tragedy is in the closeups, Altman more often opts for a middle distance, content to observe, rather than inspect, the characters' behavior. It tends to make everyone as important--or unimportant--as everyone else. And it removes the temptation, often succumbed to by many actors who are used to the familiar shooting pattern of master-medium-single, to save their best efforts for the closeups. Altman will frequently shoot a number of takes of a group scene from the same middle distance, each time letting the camera follow a different character. So, in a sense, each actor may be the focus of the master shot when the sequence is edited.
Because all of the actors are miked nearly all of the time, every line, every word, every grunt and groan gets recorded and saved for what must be, for the mixers, a really complicated sound-stew. I am surprised when, after a sequence in which I'm fishing in a particularly noisy part of the river at least a hundred yards from the camera, the script supervisor asks me what the name of the obscure tune is that I was humming under my breath. She makes a note of its title. Everything is of possible use.
And, of course, Altman encourages improvisation-improvised action and improvised dialogue. Improvising dialogue is a tricky business in film, particularly when it's used in conjunction with written dialogue, The speaking style of the actor is often contradictory to that of the writer's idea of the way the character is supposed to talk. And the jagged rhythm of improvised dialogue in many films is often neither like that of conversation either in scripted films or in real life. Unlike memorized dialogue, where the emotional arc of the scene is written in and rehearsed and the actor knows when someone else is going to stop talking and it's his turn, an improvising actor has to make a special effort not to be thinking "what the hell is he talking about?" and "when the hell is he going to stop talking?" and "what the hell am I going to say next?"
It's a struggle, in other words, to be real and not to be interesting.
Altman tries to keep it simple. The main effort is to keep the dialogue anecdotal rather than programmatic. He suggests a word or a phrase to make the improvisation more fluid in the next take. He tries to get it to sound more like life and less like writing, more like behaving and less like acting. When it works it sounds good and it feels good.
I think it works in Short Cuts. I think it's real and it's interesting. But what the hell. I learned how to fish. Sort of.
Buck Henry is an actor, screenwriter, and director, who has contributed his multitalents to such films as The Graduate, Catch-22, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Heaven Can Wait, and Aria.
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