By now, anyone with even a passing interest in film history knows that Jaws and Star Wars were watershed films in terms of distribution, promotion, and especially merchandising. Spielberg and Lucas’ films made hundreds of millions of dollars, and so did their toys. The Exorcist and The Godfather may have popularized the wide, national release, but neither had anything to sell on the side except the books that they were based on, which the studios didn’t own. You could probably get a bootleg vomiting Linda Blair, or an assortment of Michael Corleone’s thinking, plotting, and telling his dumb bitch wife off. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, Manhattanites cheered when the door closed on Diane Keaton at the end of the first Godfather; within a few years, simpler thrills were on offer in the form of a killer shark and something called the Death Star. The mass audience wasn’t any more sophisticated in 1972 than it is today; Paul Schrader was right when he said that today, the audience is the problem.
“What there was in the 1970s was better audiences.” Just going off the box office, it’s hard to argue: All the President’s Men, The French Connection, Network, Chinatown, Shampoo, The Last Picture Show, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Manhattan, and Cabaret were hits, to say nothing of blockbusters like The Exorcist and The Godfather. But even then, Robert Altman’s Nashville made only $10 million against a $2.2 million budget; more than any other New Hollywood director, Altman was carried by the press and the intelligentsia, and it was the success of 1970’s MASH that allowed him to make a movie or two every year for the rest of his life. Nashville was a bigger story than it was a successful movie, and once the heady days of serious moviegoing were over (on or around Bill Clinton’s reelection), Altman had no presence or place in the culture because most people never saw a frame of his work.
Most people, at a certain time, knew about MASH because of the schmaltzy Alan Alda-led TV show, which Altman despised (mostly because he received no money from it). But there isn’t a single moment, quote, or image from one of his films that’s imprinted itself on the pop cultural subconscious. Stanley Kubrick, whose films always disappointed critics and audiences at first before becoming “classics” seven years after their release, left the world with a dozen indelible images, characters, even sequences; Altman, who made many more movies than Kubrick, never achieved that level of influence, but in 1978, he made a go at it with Quintet.
The year before Popeye “bombed” (it didn’t, it made money, “just not Superman numbers,” according to Altman; this was enough to get him gray-listed in Hollywood for the rest of the 1980s like many of his New Hollywood peers), Altman lost what few friends he had in the press with Quintet, a movie whose title quickly became a punchline, but whose failure was still low-key enough that it didn’t enter the lexicon as a byword for spectacular box office failure, i.e. Waterworld and Ishtar. Altman wasn’t particularly fixated on working in the snow or in sci-fi, nor the international all-star cast he assembled (Paul Newman, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey, Vittorio Gassman, Nina van Pallandt)—he was fixated on the board game that would be based on the movie. “Quinteto” did come out in Brazil, but the rest of the world was denied this board game that Altman barely considered himself.
Patricia Resnick is something of a forgotten figure in Altmanland. She appeared as a security guard in 1978’s A Wedding, which she also wrote; a couple of years later, she had her biggest hit with the screenplay for 9 to 5, and never worked with Altman again. It’s surprising she lasted as long as she did: 3 Women, widely considered Altman’s best original screenplay, was in fact written by Resnick. Altman had that dream about Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall in the desert, but he didn’t write it.
From Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff, Patrick McGilligan’s long out-of-print doorstopper biography from 1989: “Resnick was dismayed; and, at first, there was talk of grievance filing and of retaining a lawyer. Ultimately, after discussing it with friends and considering the alternatives, she decided she was not an important enough personage to buck Robert Altman. ‘I was disappointed because I felt that if it got financed on [the treatment] and it went to screenplay, there was a tacit understanding I would do the screenplay with him, and then that would be my entree to this world I wanted to get into. When I was laid off, I was upset, but I also had no contacts in the business outside of Bob. I didn’t know what else I was going to do because Bob’s world was so enclosed.’”
Indeed: Altman distinguished himself from his New Hollywood peers as an avowed anti-cinephile, a filmmaker who never saw anyone else’s movies, and couldn’t remember what his favorites were growing up. Asked in 1975 who his favorite “up and comers” were, he mentioned Martin Scorsese and Bergman… he’s young…” Even if he never saw Jaws or Star Wars, he saw their toys, and was semi-determined to make Quintet his most unlikely moneymaker. Resnick eventually came back for a walk-on role in 3 Women, and was still in Altman’s orbit when he needed a “middle writer” for Quintet. Like so many of Altman’s writing “partners,” Lionel Chetwynd’s script was torn apart and thrown away; Resnick came in and cleaned up some essentials—like the actual rules of the game Quintet—but she was fired again when she refused to go to Vancouver for filming (“I’m from Florida”). Frank Barhydt was the third and final writer on Quintet.
Set on a post-apocalyptic ice planet that may or may not be Earth, Paul Newman and his wife Brigitte Fossey are first seen trudging through the tundra looking for shelter; they’re looking for Newman’s brother (Thomas Hill), who’s quickly killed by a gangster along with Fossey. More nonplussed than devastated, Newman realizes that his relatives were names on a list, and he dives into the milky abyss that’s the plot of this movie. I’ve seen Quintet four times and had no idea Fossey was killed so early on. It’s a remarkable failure of a movie, one you can put on in the background for the rest of your life and still not understand or absorb completely. Altman alternates between high wire pretension (“Hope is an obsolete word”) and a fixation on this made-up game that no one ever really explains to the audience.
Altman didn’t know how to play Quintet himself. “Altman seemed as excited about merchandising the possible game—which he believed was going to be another Monopoly—as he was about the film story.” Chetwynd’s script and novella were no use, so Altman told Resnick, “Figure out what’s wrong with the damn board game. That’s the key.” The problem was that Altman couldn’t perform basic arithmetic: Resnick “started thinking about the fact that if [in the game] we have five people and they each have a list of five people, that’s six people, unless their own name is on their own list—which sounds simple, but nobody had ever figured it out. That was basically my contribution to the movie. I went to Bob and said, ‘Bob, you know, there’s got to be a sixth person, and this is why you can’t make this board game work. The sixth man [is] the person who runs the thing.’ So Bob decided that if I was brilliant enough to figure that out, I deserved a crack at it […] As I was writing, it was very grim to write, and there were things that just didn’t make any sense, and I would basically say that to Bob. I gave it my best shot and handed it in.”
Longtime Altman AD and confidante Tommy Thompson told McGilligan, “Everyone got caught up in Quintet… We were charmed into it by the whole magic of what was going to happen.” What happened was Altman lost his steadfast supporters on the coasts: McGilligan writes, “Quintet was the real turning point for critics and audiences. Every failure up to now could be rationalized. This one was Altman’s.” Even Mitchell Zuckoff’s legend-burnishing 2010 oral history Robert Altman: The Oral Biography confirms Quintet as the nadir of Altman’s career. His father was dying, his films were failing, and he couldn’t make enemies and lose friends fast enough. Would the board game have taken off in the early 1970s? I still don’t understand it, but you never know; a safer bet would’ve been some sort of MASH-themed Operation! rip-off. Charades with the cast of Nashville? McCabe & Mrs. Potato Head? Well, he’d soon get his chance at toys and “collectibles” with Popeye, but that was Paramount-generated, and I’m sure Altman saw absolutely ZERO dollars from the sale of any of that merchandise. However misguided and kooky, Altman saw Quintet as his way out of cinematic penury; after going through three writers and pissing off just about everyone involved, he lost his own game.
It would be plays and shelved features for the rest of the 1980s. When asked in 1982 if he felt doing theater was “a step down” from filmmaking, Altman paused, clearly miffed, and replied, “I think it’s a step up.” Maybe he learned to count by then.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith