ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 16, 1996 TAG: 9608160023
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: MICHAEL WARREN ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Robert Altman moves around his Park Avenue office with all the mischievous glee and detachment of a gambler at a craps table, knowing the odds are stacked against him but relishing the game.
At the moment, he's talking up his latest film, ``Kansas City,'' and working on two others, a state of affairs that keeps several assistants fluttering around in high anxiety.
``In many ways I think it's the best movie I've made,'' he says, already anticipating a hostile reception in Hollywood.
``The problem is the people who aren't sure if they liked the movie or not. There's a lot of those,'' he says. ``They never think they've missed something. They'll never admit to that.''
Altman, whose silver goatee and arching eyebrows give him the look of a subversive even at 71, leans back behind the wide glass table he uses for a desk. Behind him buzzes a huge neon ``5 and Dime'' sign from his 1982 play, ``Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.'' Arranged before him are two well-thumbed decks of playing cards and a box of tarot cards he uses for solitaire.
``It's an addiction,'' he explains. ``Quite a puzzle.''
In his four decades as a film and television director, Altman has demanded to play his own game, sometimes infuriating executives who wanted more conventional product. His maverick approach has produced some remarkable achievements - ``M*A*S*H,'' ``Nashville,'' ``The Player'' ``Short Cuts'' and ``Vincent & Theo'' - along with some duds, such as ``Popeye'' and ``Beyond Therapy.''
For his independence, Altman has had to make do with tight budgets, paying top actors much less than they're used to and hoping his creations survive without huge marketing campaigns. He also lives relatively simply, keeping apartments in New York and Los Angeles.
``I'm not wildly rich,'' he says. ``When you want control, you have to give up something, and it's money.''
But actors remain loyal, clamoring for even small roles in his films.
``The actors love to work for him, because he's always doing these interesting movies, and yet he pays them no money. So he gets the best of both worlds,'' says Harry Belafonte, a fellow poker fiend who plays the fearsome gangster Seldom Seen in ``Kansas City'' and had cameo roles in ``Ready to Wear'' and ``The Player.''
``What makes the fight very interesting is, he's always protecting his child; he's never trying to fatten his bank balance,'' Belafonte adds. ``That's why actors are willing to go so far for him and work for so little.''
Altman sees it differently.
``The reason I have a good reputation with actors is because I insist that they do what they got into the business to do in the first place, and that is to be creative. I don't view actors as mannequins.''
While other directors prohibit actors from seeing their works-in-progress, Altman encourages everyone involved in the set to see the ``dailies'' at the end of the day.
``You come back in and sit down with your companions and say, `Hey, this is what we did!' and everybody gets a little drunk or certainly they're allowed to,'' Altman says. ``It's amazing what it does. It bonds people and gets them rooting for other actors.''
For Jennifer Jason Leigh, who played a phone-sex worker in Altman's ``Short Cuts'' and starred as Dorothy Parker in a film Altman produced in 1994, being in an Altman film means working without boundaries.
``Everything's always alive, there's so much spontaneity. And he wants everything you have to give. Not only wants it but requires it. It's great.''
Altman deliberately fostered an improvisational approach to ``Kansas City,'' turning a simple crime story into a sort of jazz metaphor.
The film focuses on Blondie (Leigh as a homely bottle-blonde with a Jean Harlow fixation), who kidnaps Caroline (Miranda Richardson as the wife of an adviser to President Roosevelt) in hopes of arranging a prisoner exchange with her captured husband on the eve of the 1934 election. Dermot Mulroney plays the husband, a small-time thief who had the audacity to rob one of Seldom Seen's gambling customers, and even worse, to do it in blackface.
Altman interweaves the plot with cutting contests by some of today's hottest jazz musicians, re-enacting the performances of legends such as Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, all of whom came to prominence in the clubs Altman frequented as a teen-ager, when Kansas City flourished as a center for jazz music.
The film is based on many real-life characters from the time, and ``riffs'' on everything from Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa movement to the possibility that Roosevelt bought the election. But Altman says he intentionally left the connections unresolved, much like the final notes in a jazz melody.
``I don't show you the machinations ... and that's probably where the criticism will come,'' Altman says, hedging his bets.
``I don't think it will be a roaring success, either critically or commercially. But I think the day it has finished playing it will pick up,'' he says. ``I think it will have a rich, strong, long afterlife.''
Posters of many of Altman's 31 films decorate his walls, and the bookshelves are filled with trophies, including a lifetime achievement award the French government gave him this year. Conspicuously absent is an Academy Award, despite four nominations for best director.
``Oh, I don't think I'll ever have an Oscar,'' he says. ``That's a club. They're very tight, and they want to make pictures in a certain way. That's all that is, just 6,000 people who vote....
``You've got to realize who this Oscar group is. Ever see those fold-out magazines with all the little postage stamp pictures of guys who work for some insurance company or tire dealer? Well if you saw all of the academy members like that you'd realize what an insignificant group of people these people are. And they all have their own axes.''
But new blood is coming in, Altman says, brightening. ``A lot of people who have held the votes are dying. There's a lot of old ladies and old men who are part of the academy, a lot of them are older than I am, which is hard to believe.''
Altman, who is producing Alan Rudolph's film, ``Afterglow,'' and hopes to start shooting this month on his own next project, ``Wild Card,'' shows no signs of mellowing.
And although he and his wife, Kathryn, have, as he says, ``probably nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren,'' he's having far too much fun to retire.
``I just don't know anybody who's had a better shake than I have,'' Altman says. ``All the films I've made I've wanted to make, I've made them the way I wanted to make them. And I've never been without a job.''
LENGTH: Long : 120 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Director Robert Altman, now 71, says he's having tooby CNBmuch fun to retire. color.