Watching Barry Lyndon and reading about Stanley Kubrick once again stirred my interest in the directors of the Film School Generation. Truth be told, movies by the filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s are never too far off my radar. I grew up watching the movies of these filmmakers in the local movie theater in my small hometown in Ohio. The movies of Coppola, Lumet, Scorsese, Kubrick, Altman, Ashby, and many others were par for the course during those days. At times, I didn’t quite grasp what these directors were going for in their often challenging films, but they always expanded my understanding of what a popular film could be while still entertaining me. And those Hollywood directors who cropped up in the post-Film-School era of the 1980s, such as Walter Hill, the Scott brothers, John McTiernan, and James Cameron, still made smart, well-crafted genre films that had meaningful subtexts even if their narratives weren’t quite as innovative.

            But, as the barrage of hype for the upcoming summer blockbusters hits me everyday, I cringe at the thought of junk like Terminator Salvation and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen being given the time of day by anyone. (“Revenge of the Fallen”? Could a title be any more banal?) While they are rightly criticized for lack of content and incoherent narratives, I am most disgusted at the complete lack of craftsmanship. That directors such as Michael Bay, Judd Apatow, McG (the fast-food of Hollywood directors), and Zack Snyder could get so far in their careers without understanding or respecting the classic narrative style boggles my mind. The strength of Hollywood films in the past has always been their craftsmanship and the directors’ firm grasp of the classic narrative style and its techniques, even if the films’ stories were formulaic or simplistic. While the directors of the Film School Generation often experimented with or subverted the classic narrative style to great effect, they respected the artistry of the style’s basic techniques and understood the impact of their experimentations on the audience. Little of that is true for today’s directors who are the darlings of the corporate-driven behemoths that still call themselves “movie studios.” For many reasons, I find the flops, misfires, and missteps of the Film School Generation better viewing experiences than the best that today’s studio hacks have to offer.

            In the early summer of 1982, my summer-movie viewing included Health, Robert Altman’s not-so-famous comedy flop. Altman, one of America’s most original and creative filmmakers, cowrote and directed Health (aka  H.E.A.L.T.H.) in 1979-80. He intended this loose-flowing political satire to be released in the spring of 1980 to coincide with the primaries for that year’s presidential election. Unfortunately, studio executives devised another plan for marketing and distributing the film that relegated it to obscurity.  

CAROL BURNETT, LAUREN BACALL, GLENDA JACKSON, AND ALTMAN IN ONE OF THE FILM'S FEW PROMOTION PHOTOS

            Rarely seen and never available for home viewing on video or DVD, Health is something of a misfire, though it is not nearly as bad as some have described it. Its reputation as a critical and financial flop stemmed from 20th Century Fox’s decision to shelve the film for over a year after it was completed. Typically, when the press hears rumors of a studio’s dissatisfaction with a film, the assumption is that it is an artistic flop. When Health was finally released, it was a case of far too little, far too late. Its theatrical run consisted of two weeks at a theater in New York and two weeks at a theater in Los Angeles in April 1982. (I believe I saw it at a special screening at my university just before the semester ended for the summer.) By that time, the presidential election was long over, and the movie’s effectiveness as a satire on the political process was diminished.

THE ENSEMBLE CAST INCLUDED DICK CAVETT (CENTER)

            Health features a large ensemble cast in an episodic narrative that unfolds in one primary setting — all hallmarks of Altman’s signature style. The story centers around the national convention of a fitness organization called H.E.A.L.T.H. (that is, Happiness, Energy, and Longevity Through Health) at a grand hotel overlooking the Gulf of Mexico and Boca Ciega Bay in St. Petersburg, Florida. The delegates have convened to elect a new president from a field of two — Esther Brill and Isabella Garnell. Lauren Bacall, who was in her mid-50s at the time, stars as 83-year-old Esther, who declares that her good health and great looks are the result of her virginity. According to clean-living Esther, every orgasm takes 28 days off a woman’s life. Glenda Jackson costars as Esther’s rival, a cigar-smoking, no-nonsense health advocate who habitually tapes her conversations.

GARNER (TOP), JACKSON (MIDDLE), AND NEWCOMER WOODWARD (BOTTOM)

            The ensemble cast also includes Carol Burnett, who plays an advisor to the President of the United States and wants to curry favor with the members of this large, grass-roots organization. James Garner appears as Brill’s weary campaign manager, and Alfre Woodward makes her big-screen debut as the manager of the grand hotel (actually the famous pink hotel called the Don Cesar) where the convention takes place. Altman favorite Henry Gibson plays Bobby Hammer, a dirty trickster for the health food set, who eavesdrops around the hotel while dressed in drag to collect inflammatory information on the candidates.

            References to the political events and scandals of the era are clearly recognizable throughout the film. Isabella’s humorless demeanor and obsession with taping conversations recalls Richard Nixon, while Gibson’s dirty trickster is certainly a reference to Nixon’s tactics. Esther, the vigorous virgin who nonetheless dozes off when tired or bored, seems a jab at Ronald Reagan, though some of her platitudes vaguely recall the words of Jimmy Carter. The political referencing in a fictional format prefigures Altman’s ground-breaking television series called Tanner ’88. The series followed a fictional candidate for president through the actual 1988 primary season, often with Michael Murphy as the fictional Jack Tanner interacting with real-life candidates, pundits, and journalists. (Now, that was a reality show!)

            Health‘s story unfolds loosely in a series of scenes often improvised by the impressive ensemble of actors, a favored technique of Altman’s. For this director, the joy of filmmaking was in the process the actors engaged in as they improvised and exchanged ideas as well as the collaboration between him and his actors as they worked out the blocking of key scenes. Other techniques favored by Altman worked well with the improvisational approach, such as the use of overlapping dialogue in which the actors spoke on top of each other’s lines. He also liked the zoom lens and a wandering, unmotivated camera to capture both the interactions that were essential to understand the story and those that merely added a bit of texture to the film. In Health, for example, the hotel is crawling with strange guests, including people dressed in vegetable costumes, health-food nuts who want autographs from the candidates, and clueless television crews. When a person in a huge tomato costume jumps in the pool to save someone from drowning and then proceeds to sink to the bottom of the pool, the bit is funny but not a central part of the scene. Altman’s moving camera objectively takes in everything — the comic set pieces, the key conversations, the throwaway lines, and the bits of business — to paint a milieu at once recognizable and bizarre.

THE DON CESAR IN ST. PETERSBURG, ALSO A STAR IN THE FILM

            Altman’s methods have created such masterpieces as M.A.S.H. and Nashville, but his filmmaking techniques don’t always come together so successfully. While Health is not the artistic disaster assumed by the press, the film does reveal the weaknesses of Altman’s style, including scenes that meander because they lack traditional pacing. Even supporters of the film observed that Altman had gotten carried away with his process, resulting in, according to one reviewer, “a glorious mess.”

            However, even a lesser film by a master director has much to offer, and the question remains as to why the studio did not support the film. Fox experienced a change of command during preproduction of the film when Altman supporter Alan Ladd, Jr. was replaced by a new studio boss, Sherry Lansing. Despite Lansing’s high-ranking position, she apparently carried less authority than Ladd had. Instead, Norman Levy, a sales executive in the distribution and marketing department, gained power within the studio when he became head of distribution. Levy was not an Altman admirer and he disliked Health, so it was shelved. Levy and his sales background became an example of things to come for the film industry.

            The timing of Health and the studio politics at Fox is significant for many reasons, because 1980 was the year of one of Hollywood’s costliest flops, Heaven’s Gate, which ran way over budget largely due to director Michael Cimino’s hubris. His expenditures and on-the-set whims were chronicled throughout the film’s production and painted as the actions of an out-of-control ego-maniac by the press, who seemed eager for him to fail. His lengthy version of the film was edited down by the studio and released to scathing reviews. The experience served as a wake-up call to all the studios to regain control over the production of films, ending a decade of studio deference to the directors of the Film School Generation. Members of this group of directors — including Altman — used commercial film as a medium of personal expression during the late 1960s and 1970s and were less inclined to care about the business of budgets and box office. The Heaven’s Gate fiasco might have accounted, at least in part, for 20th Century Fox’s decision not to release a quirky film such as Health. The background story behind the film certainly represented the new direction for the industry in which studio producers and executives took a firmer hand in the production of films, quickly returning the industry to more commercial fare. As the 1980s progressed, more and more of those executives came from business and marketing backgrounds.

            It is likely that Health was a casualty of this turning point in the history of American cinema; and, the end result of the fallout between the directors and the studios is the dismal state of the Hollywood industry today, at least in part.  Happy summer viewing, and enjoy those Terminators and Transformers. You’re likely to see more of them in the future.