“We’ll open with lowball rather than high...”
“Oh, so you mean ‘California split’?”
“That’s high-low poker,”
Dialogue between two gamblers overheard by Robert Altman during production of Slide, later re-named California Split.
In the 1970's, Robert Altman was America’s essential film-maker. Critically praised, he exemplified American neo-realism. With one exception, M.A.S.H., his movies weren’t particularly successful at the box-office. But Altman had credibility as an artist and his gangly, loosely structured films seemed wired into the Zeitgeist. His moment in the sun passed quickly enough and, for the last decades in his career, Altman was culturally irrelevant Like D.W. Griffith in the late twenties, people seemed sometimes surprised that he was still alive and, in fact, making movies. To use Kevin Brownlow’s evocative phrase, the “parade had gone by” and Altman was marooned in a corner of the industry that he had once dominated. Steven Spielberg’s crowd-pleasing blockbusters paved the way for a Hollywood in which Altman, always an outsider by inclination, became increasingly marginal,
Altman’s movies, notwithstanding some goofy marijuana-infused episodes, were a mirror to ordinary life. But people don’t go to the movies to see themselves reflected on the big screen. The popular art of movie-making is escapist and Altman’s pictures always impel the viewer to consider the American scene as a social problem, as a specimen of certain forms of corruption, as an enterprise that is self-contradictory and self-defeating. In his last film, the wonderful Prairie Home Companion Show, shot largely in St. Paul, Altman assembles an all-star cast strangely centered around the obtuse fake humility, unassuming demeanor, and, even, inconsequentiality of Minnesota’s own Garrison Keillor. The characters revolve around a kind of non-entity and this is reflected by the pervasive sense of loss and, even, mourning that the film embodies – the movie is about death and has as its subject the demise of the long-running radio show that Keillor hosts. In a real sense, the picture prefigures Garrison Keillor’s own erasure, having outstayed his welcome, a decade or so later. The movie is brilliant, exquisitely shot and acted, but, it is, in the end, slightly disheartening – it stinks, as King Lear said, of mortality. The problems that Altman identifies in his films are integral to American culture and not amenable to any ready resolution.
Altman was raised in Kansas City and spent his apprenticeship far from Hollywood, making industrial movies. He’s a son of the Middle Border, a Midwesterner, and was never particularly comfortable navigating Hollywood. (In some ways, he resembles George Romero, the horror director who invented the modern zombie film with Night of the Living Dead – although Romero worked in Hollywood and, later in his career had substantial budgets, he was most comfortable shooting his movies in his hometown of Pittsburgh – his best movie 1978's The Dawn of the Dead was produced largely in a shopping mall in Pittsburgh’s suburb, Monroeville.) Altman made a lot of movies and most of them flopped at the box-office. He was always on the verge of being ousted from the film industry but reliably came back from the brink time and time again.
Between 1949 and 1957, he worked for the Calvin Company in Kansas City making industrial and promotional films. Almost all of this work has been lost. (One of his Calvin Company pictures called Modern Football was discovered a few years ago and, supposedly, has a complicated soundtrack with overlapping dialogue of the kind that was Altman’s trademark during the period of his critical eminence.) In 1957, Altman shot a low-budget ($60,000) exploitation film called The Delinquents; it made no money and seems to be lost. For the next decade, the director worked in television and reliably produced well-crafted product for the Tube. MASH, Altman’s breakthrough picture, was released in 1970; this was the same year, Altman made another well-received picture, the surrealist Brewster McCloud, his first movie featuring the ethereal Shelley Duvall. (She worked with him on seven pictures.) On the strength of box office returns from MASH made the great (and greatly misunderstood) Western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a film in which the movie’s focus slowly tightens and becomes more clear (in a literal sense) as the movie progresses toward its High Noon-style climax. Audiences didn’t like the movie’s camera style and its intentionally overlapping and half-inaudible dialogue – but the film featured Julie Christie and Warren Beatty in superb performances and, for a time, Altman, notwithstanding his reputation as being difficult and not profitable, had free rein to make movies without much studio interference. (It was around this time that Altman slugged a Hollywood producer at a pool party because the man had written a memo threatening to cut one of his films by six minutes.) Altman’s career tanked for the first time with The Long Goodbye, an idiosyncratic adaptation of a Raymond Chandler crime novel, that the studio marketed as a thriller – languid and rambling: Eliot Gould as Chandler’s hero, Philip Marlowe) spends much of the movie muttering to himself, bemused and obviously stoned, but it’s a great movie. The Long Goodbye disappointed audiences who had paid to see a crime thriller not a satire about LA and lost money to the extent that it looked like Altman was washed-up in Hollywood. (It was during the period immediately after The Long Goodbye that Altman made the equally unconventional California Split, also a money-loser.) But, in 1975, the director came back with Nashville, a complicated, lengthy, and ambitious film about country-western music, and, although the picture didn’t earn much, it was a critical success. Nashville paved the way for a string of pictures that lost money, some of which were poorly reviewed – the director’s improvisatory style was out of fashion and, when he applied his digressive and diffuse approach to a would-be blockbuster Popeye (1980 with Robin Williams), the catastrophe was so extreme that, again, Altman seemed to be on the verge of some sort of exile from the industry. For a time, Altman directed Broadway shows, including Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean with Cher, designed operas (The Rake’s Progress by Stravinsky), directed some off-Broadway work by Sam Shepherd, and, then, resumed directing, a series of undistinguished pictures that were scarcely marketed until The Player was released in 1992. The Player, a mild satire on Hollywood and the film industry, was elaborately staged and, again, featured an all-star cast. When he wanted to play the game by Hollywood rules, Altman could be as effective as most LA regulars and The Player was tightly shot and carefully scripted – the opening Steadi-cam scene is a riff on the famous tracking and crane shot that begins Welles’ Touch of Evil. A critical success that earned a little money, Altman then went on to make his most ambitious picture Short Cuts (1993), a movie that adapts several short stories by Raymond Carver, again showing to good effect an impressive stable of movie stars including Julianne Moore. (Gore Vidal remarked that Short Cuts was “the great American movie”, equivalent he thought to the fabled “great American novel” which, of course, Vidal was convinced that he had written.)
Altman’s next movies remained outside of the mainstream and were viewed as relics of a dope-influenced counter-culture that had ceased to exist. But, just when people had written him off for good, Altman surged back with the completely atypical Gosford Park, a period murder mystery set in a Downton Abbey milieu. Gosford Park was paradoxically considered Altman’s return to form, largely because he abandoned his trademark stylistic quirks and made nice with Hollywood conventions – you can actually hear the dialogue and understand it and the movie is sumptuously shot with a conventional plot with beginning, middle, and end. (I think the movie is unrelievedly tedious.) Altman’s last movie, another critical and box office failure, was A Prairie Home Companion (2006). Altman was, then, over 80 and not in good health. Paul Thomas Anderson, an up-and-coming director, was hired to shadow Altman and be prepared to step in to finish the movie if the old man faltered. Altman didn’t falter and, I think, A Prairie Home Companion, although limited in scope is an emotionally moving and important film, a brooding meditation on loss and mortality. Paul Thomas Anderson’s affection for Altman is visible in some of the scenes in his films made after A Prairie Home Companion, notably There will be Blood dedicated to the older director.
Altman died in November 2006 shortly after completing A Praire Home Companion.
Financing
California Split was based on a script written by Joseph Walsh with Steven Spielberg. (The film was originally entitled Slide.) The script, of course, was merely a framework on which Altman and his actors improvised the film. One of the film’s producers, David Begelman, cast a long and disreputable shadow over the picture. Begelman was a talent agent who ventured into producing films in the early 70's. Begelman raised half the money for California Split and, therefore, had a 50% ownership interest in the picture. Begelman was working with Spielberg to produce Close Encounters of the Third Kind, an expensive movie that promised big box office receipts. To raise cash for the Spielberg picture, Begelman discounted his half-interest in a sale to the Persky-Bright tax shelter enterprise. Persky-Bright was the sort of enterprise celebrated by Mel Brooks in The Producers – the more money the movie lost, the better for its tax-shelter investors. California Split played in limited runs in LA and New York City to considerable acclaim and it was predicted that the movie would make money. (Ultimately, it grossed 4.5 million dollars, considerably less than its cost of production.) The movie opened nationwide to promising receipts but after only one week in the theaters, the movie was yanked to make way for the Jack Nicholson vehicle The Last Detail, a bona fide box office success. As a result, California Split slipped into oblivion and is one of Robert Altman’s least-shown films. Altman himself was pleased with the movie – he said that he could have made the movie in a way that would generated more income, but didn’t think he could have improved on his direction of the film.
David Begelman was a sketchy character. Begelman was indicted for embezzling when a 1099 tax notice provided to the actor Cliff Robertson showed that he had been paid income that he had never actually received. Robertson, unhappy to be assessed income tax on money that he never saw, complained to the IRS. Begelman was a powerful figure in Hollywood at that time and was lionized by the industry – when the feds dropped their charges against Begelman, the producer received standing ovations in several well-known Hollywood restaurants frequented by movers and shakers in the business. Robertson was blacklisted and didn’t work for several years. The situation was so unfair that it caused Tallulah Bankhead, the gossip columnist, to quip: “Who do I have to fuck to get out of this business?” Later, Begelman acquired semi-nude pictures of a drunken Judy Garland and used them to extort money out of the movie star. (This was particularly egregious because earlier he had managed Judy Garland and, apparently, embezzled several hundred thousand dollars from her). Late in his life, Begelman ran a sort of Ponzi scheme involving a bank account with Credit Lyonnais, a catastrophe for movies that he produced using that money – the French bank claimed ownership in several of those pictures and they were tied-up in litigation. Begelman committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in a suite at the Century Plaza Hotel in 1995.
Bad Luck
Bad luck dogged at least two of the players in California Split. Barbara Ruick, a fifties glamor-girl, who plays the tough and perceptive bartender supervising the Reno poker game, died suddenly in her hotel room while the film was being shot. She perished from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm on March 3, 1974. (Ruick was married to the composer John Williams who was, at the time of her death, devising the famous score for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.)
Ann Prentiss, the elder and more cynical call-girl in the film, was born Ann Ragusa in San Antonio. Her elder sister is the movie actress Paula Prentiss (who was married to the actor-director Richard Benjamin). In 1996, Ann Prentiss was convicted of an assault committed on her elderly Sicilian father. While serving time for the assault, Ann Prentiss hired a hit man to kill her father, a brother, and her brother-in-law Richard Benjamin. (The story sounds intriguing enough to be worthy of a film in its own right, but there are very few details publicly available.) The hit man was an informant and Prentiss was sentenced to 19 years in jail. She died in prison in Texas in 2010 at the age of 71.
Technical Notes
At the height of his critical acclaim, actors and well-known film technicians, were enthusiastic about working with Robert Altman. (Altman considered Robert DeNiro for the role played by Elliot Gould). Haskell Wexler, the great American cameraman, offered to shoot California Split. Altman hired Paul Lohmann, a relative neophyte – it was only his second feature-film. Altman said that Wexler was too skilled and that he would shoot the movie in a way that would cause it to be “too pretty” – Altman was interested in conveying the low-rent aspect of most casino gambling.
The movie is shot in wide-screen cinemascope (2:35:1) and is regarded as one of the finest examples of the use of this film ratio. (Lohmann also shot Nashville for Altman in 1975). Altman pioneered the use of 8-track sound, previously employed only on Cinerama productions. This technology allowed Altman to record 8 conversations or layers of sound simultaneously and results in the movie’s celebrated overlapping dialogue and sound design.
As was typical with films shot in the seventies, moviemakers played fast and loose with sound cues and compensation for music rights. As a result, California Split was tied-up in litigation for many years before rights to all music on the soundtrack could be acquired. This has also led to the film being only rarely shown. The picture wasn’t available on DVD until 2004 and, then, was released in a pan-and-scan format that was widely derided – some of the film also had to be cut because of the ongoing dispute over the music. Amazon paid to restore the film in 2020 and it is now featured on that streaming service.
Elliot Gould
Once regarded as America’s most promising young actor, Elliot Gould (born in the Bensonhurst neighborhood in Brooklyn as Elliot Goldstein) ended his career on TV. He spent ten years guest-starring as Jack Geller in the TV show Friends. Most recently, he has been seen in the series Ray Donovan on Showtime (Seasons 1 through 3). He is now 83.
Gould began acting on Broadway in the late fifties and, then, went to Hollywood where he worked, most notably, with Robert Altman on MASH (he was Trapper John), The Long Goodbye, and California Split. (He first became well-known for his role in Paul Mazursky’s sex comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in 1969 – he was nominated for an Oscar for this part.) He was in a number of other successful films and has appeared in all of the reboots of the Oceans Eleven series of movies. Gould’s fame reached across the ocean. He was featured in Ingmar Bergman’s movie The Touch, the famous Swedish director’s English-language debut in 1971. Gould’s fame was such that he was on the cover of Time magazine in 1970. He was married to Barbra Streisand between 1963 and 1971.
Gould has been in many noteworthy movies including Alan Arkin’s 1971 version of Jule Feiffer’s play Little Murders and was a supporting actor in Steven Soderburgh’s Contagion (2011). He hosted Saturday Night Live six times in the late seventies. He is also well-known for his prehensile “trick” penis featured in the one-armed piccolo player skit in California Split.
Gambling
The raw, bleeding edge where human endeavor and intent rubs up against Fortuna is luck. Gambling is play with luck. Every wager is an encounter with luck, a quality on which everything depends. It’s probable that life on this planet exists as a result of innumerable lucky coincidences. Evolution is dependent upon luck or chance operating across eons. Battles have been lost and kingdoms have fallen due to bad luck. A hero is one who converts chance into destiny or fate. For these reasons, the theme of the lucky (and the unlucky) is integral to much art. California Split is a meditation on luck – at the film’s climax, described by Steven Spielberg as a 32 minute orgasm, games of chance progress from those in which some skill is involved (the epic poker game) to pure play with random fortuity: rolling dice and the roulette wheel. A man who is lucky is the darling of the gods. But this happy state can be instantly and irrevocably withdrawn. Furthermore, the man who has benefitted from good luck harbors a dismal sense of his own unworthiness – he has prevailed... but by neither industry nor art of his own. The melancholy that always accompanies great good luck is convincingly portrayed in the film.
The great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, gambled incessantly between 1863 and 1871. He played at the glittering casinos in central Europe, particularly Baden-Baden. Dostoevsky recorded in his diary that he had discovered a method that would make him always successful at games of chance. The method involved never becoming emotionally involved in gaming and, always, assessing every risk by logic and mathematical calculation. If the gambler persevered in this method, he was sure to win. Two days later, Dostoevsky recorded that he had become swept away with passion while gambling in the casino. He lost everything and had to pawn his watch in order to buy a ticket to return to Russia. Deeply in debt, Dostoevsky wrote the short novel The Gambler in order to pay off gambling obligations and finance his next disastrous foray into the casinos. Of course, Dostoevsky’s system is exact, but, also, impossible. One gambles for the thrill of wagering everything on the unknown, the turn of a card or the roll of a dice. But this thrill, the motivation for gambling in the first place, is inimical to the exercise of cold rationality and calculation. Therefore, Dostoevsky’s method must always fail – if one gambles for pleasure, the thrill of the game will necessarily cloud one’s judgement. (Paul Schrader’s recent movie The Card Counter explores the dynamic of “counting cards”, that is applying pure statistical rigor to games of chance – again, an endeavor shown as doomed to failure.) In Dostoevsky’s novel, Alexei Ivanovich, having lost everything vows that he will never gamble again – but, only after one last visit to the casino. Altman staffed his gambling scenes with actual gambling addicts, people treating their compulsion to gamble through Syanon. This seems a ruthless ploy – it can hardly have been therapeutic for gambling addicts to pretend to play cards in Altman’s film.
In 1498, Albrecht Duerer drew the goddess Fortuna standing like a column in a stone niche. The naked figure wears a sort of do-rag wrapped over her hair and has her hands behind her back, thrusting out her belly and pudenda. She casts an insolent glare at the viewer, very much aware that she is being gazed upon. (Duerer has rejected conventional iconography in which Fortuna is shown as blindfolded; here she invites our gaze and encounter with her.) The naked woman stands on a globe representing Fortuna’s authority over all the world – after all, it was only six years earlier that Christopher Columbus had wagered everything on a voyage to the West and discovered the Indies. Fortuna may be pregnant – there is chance involved in conception as well; one in a million sperm makes its way blindly to the egg. Between 1501 - 1502, Duerer engraved his “Nemesis: the Great Fortuna”. In this print, the Fortuna still stands atop the globe, but she has become less lissome and more boldly muscular. The naked goddess presents herself to the eye in profile, a diagram of fortune as revenging fate. Beneath the basketball-sized globe beneath her feet, the clouds have parted to reveal a landscape with river and villages and a church. Nemesis carries a diadem and bridle, reward for the lucky and a harness to restrain the headstrong, and she seems to be pregnant. She has the profile of a Roman emperor of the decadence – Caligula or Nero or Tiberius. A set of plumed wings extrudes from her shoulders so she can take flight and harry us everywhere that we go. (Some iconographers interpret the sphere under her feet as not the world, but Uncertainty, a perch on which it is difficult to balance.) Duerer’s embodiment of Melancholy is also winged and so this giantess reflects the depression and sorrow that attends upon the Great Gambler. Fortune rules the world as Nemesis – that is, chance deified as fate and destiny. She is implacable and inescapable.
In Icelandic, luck is heppinn. Leif, Erik’s son, was lucky (had inn heppn), when he happened upon Vinland. The old word heppinn morphed into “hap”, a word that is preserved in modern English as “happenstance” – this means “luck” or the “luck of the draw.” (“Happy” is etymologically related to having “good hap” or having good fortune.) The origins of “luck” are obscure but the word seems to have originated as a gambling term of art – meaning something like a “draw” of cards or shuffling the deck. In Northern European thought, luck is everything. A man or woman survives only so long as luck holds out. Bad luck means death.
The Great Gambler
Fate turns on fortune or luck. The Navajo Apache knew this when they told the story of the Great Gambler. If you are superstitious don’t read any farther in this note. The story is forbidden and to misappropriate this tale is to risk the sudden and awful misfortune. If you wish to wager, proceed.
An anthropology student working among the Navajo in northwestern New Mexico learned that there was a fatal tale. Not everyone is allowed to know this story. Generation after generation, It is retold only to a select few and, then, under conditions of great secrecy. The story was told so that it could be passed down to posterity as a warning.
In the late 1930's, a woman named Gretchen Chapin did field work for her anthropology degree among the Navajo. She heard rumors of the story of the Great Gambler but no one was willing to tell her the tale. Five elders said they knew the story but only one of them would reveal it to her and, then, with certain omissions intended to safeguard some aspects of the narrative that are invoked in secret Navajo ritual. Ms. Chapin’s informant was a 48 year-old man from the Sour Water Clan. At first, he digressed into a story about the sun-petroglyph on Fajada Butte overlooking the ruins in Chaco Canyon. Ms. Chapin told him she already knew that story and that he should not try to substitute it for the tale of Gambling God. At last, after she paid him some money, the man told her this story:
The Great Gambler whose name is Nohoilpi came down from the sky– the actual spelling of his name has many more vowels, but I will not provide them out of respect for this god. The Gambler descended from heaven bearing the tools of his trade and a basket of turquoise to use for wagering. Nohoilpi (“He wins men”) lived in a pueblo by himself on the plateau overlooking Chaco Canyon. This was before the Great Houses were built in that place, shortly after the world was first made. The Great Gambler taught the people four games: the three-stick game (which is owned by women), the hoop and two-long-stick game, the ball game, and the seven cards in a basket game. (The latter three games are owned by men and forbidden to women.) At that time, the people farmed near the stream beds in the canyon and lived in pit-houses. The Gambler first played with the Rabbit People and defeated all of them. Then, he played with the Animal People and defeated them in games of chance. Then, the women played with the Gambler and lost to him. The women wagered everything, even the food that they had stored. And it was all lost. Next, the Holy People played with the Gambler wagering different colored turquoise and other things that can not be mentioned. They also lost.
The Animal People wanted to win back their wealth but they had nothing with which to wager. So they gambled with themselves as stakes and lost. Soon, the Great Gambler owned all of them. The Gambler’s dice and cards were alive and crept across the stones like tarantulas and scorpions. The sticks used in the three-stick game were bolts of lightning. The Rabbit People and Animal People then wagered their children with the Gambler and, also, lost.
The Gambler sponsored foot-races and the people raced with him and were defeated so that they owed him immense sums that they could never repay. Everyone was enslaved by the Gambler and he made them build the Great Houses that now lie in ruins in Chaco Canyon. The people worked day and night setting stone upon stone to build these structures. The Gambler fed them on seeds that the women ground between rocks.
Desperate to win back their world, the Holy People agreed to play a game with the Gambler involving a covered hoop with a small ball. The Gambler bet the Holy People that they couldn’t pitch the ball through the hoop. Everyone sniffed a certain kind of weed (it is forbidden to identify that plant) and the Holy People went crazy. But they had enlisted Shrew and put the tiny creature in the ball and, when it was pitched at the hoop, Shrew guided it and the ball went through the opening. This was repeated four times and, by that wager, the Holy People won back the Rabbit and Animal People from the Gambler. Sensing that he had been tricked, the Gambler uttered some words in the language spoken by the White people. Then, he went back to Pueblo Alto on the canyon rim, spoke to the Gods, and ascended like a shot into the sky. It is said that he went far away and is the father of the White People.
As the Gambler soared into the sky, an old woman with a little boy appeared in the canyon. She stayed four days with the people living in their villages near the Great Houses that they were forbidden to enter. The people tired of feeding her – the crops had failed in a drought – and drove her out of their villages. With the skinny boy, she climbed up above the largest of the Great Houses, the place now called Pueblo Bonito. To revenge herself on the miserly people, she took an arrowhead and drove it into the edge of the cliff four times so that a great wedge of rock broke free and threatened to tumble down to destroy the Pueblo. Before the rock could fall, the Animal People carried sand from the river bottoms to the cracks in the rock and cemented them so that the huge boulder would not fall. (It is called Threatening Rock.) The people brought four baskets of turquoise covered with corn meal to the old woman and she said that she would stop the rock from falling if they searched the cisterns and caches in Pueblo Bonito and brought her all the turquoise and other gems hidden there. The people accomplished this task, although entering the ruins is taboo, and, it is for this reason, that those digging in the ruins of Pueblo Bonito no longer can find any turquoise or, even, white shell there. Satisfied, the old woman and boy went away and were seen no more.
This story can not be told in the Summer on pain of lightning strike, snake-bite, or bear-attack. Once, someone violated this rule and repeated this story in the summertime. Then, Threatening Rock broke free and toppled onto Pueblo Bonito and crushed many of its walls and towers.
June 26, 2022
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