Smarter Than The Average!

A pretty naturalistic figure

Last Monday (14/7/08) your trusty-yet-slack STTA pals trundled down to the South Bank for the latest instalment in the BFI’s Comic Book Season – Robert Altman’s Popeye (US release date 12/12/80, UK 10/4/81). We’re still arguing whether it can be considered a curate’s egg or otherwise, but there’s absolutely no doubt that it’s an intriguing and fascinating attempt to translate E.C. Segar’s long-beloved comic strip/cartoon character and his assorted attributes into a live-action movie.

Despite a less-than-generous critical reaction, Popeye enjoyed reasonable box-office success on its release (budget estimates vary from $13m to $20m, and lifetime domestic gross alone eventually totalled at $49,823,057) becoming Altman’s second highest-grossing film behind MASH (not the only Altman film to be confusingly titled – his other film of 1980 is actually called HealtH. B-movie actor Ronald “The Gipper” Reagan called it the “worst film ever”). Sadly, this was still not enough for a sequel, or indeed to revive Altman’s flagging career, which would not fully take off into the realms of lionization until the double-whammy of The Player (US release 10/4/92) and Short Cuts (1/10/93).

Perhaps as a result of its perceived flop, Popeye’s chequered production has remained largely forgotten, even in spite of Altman’s reappraisal(s) and passing, the involvement of sundry unusual yet famous names (with Disney perhaps being the least interesting) and the character’s continuing popularity (not only is the original strip still being produced, along with various ill-fated animated revivals – CGI?!? - featuring Billy West’s genuinely fantastic voice work, but last year saw the launches of a comprehensive DVD release of all the cartoons and Fantagraphics Books’ E. C. Segar’s Popeye, a 6 volume collection of Segar’s daily and Sunday strips). A trawl through the archives led us to some excellent contemporary articles and interviews, which illuminate the movie’s genesis, as well as confirming and denying some theories STTA had cooked up over the years.

So now we bring you a number of articles, wherein we discover that Popeye could have been a Mike Nichols film, starring Dustin Hoffman and Gilda Radner, with a score by Leonard Cohen (or even a Beatle); you’ll also see that the only permanent fixtures were playboy producer Robert Evans (who starred in his own animated series Kid Notorious for Comedy Central in 2003) and screenwriter Jules Feiffer (primarily renowned for his satirical comic strips, such as Sick, Sick Sick). Plus, find out why Popeye made a lot less sense to the British.

To start us off, we have an interview with the director himself, first published in the Guardian on 11/4/1981:

Come hit or flop, director Robert Altman goes his own way. Derek Malcolm talks to him about his new films

I yam what I yam

“TO TELL you the truth,” says Robert Altman, engagingly and without arrogance, “I love all my films – I wouldn’t even change the flaws. They’re part of me, like children. And like children, you nurture the weaker ones most.”

Altman, a director admired the world over but deeply suspected by the Hollywood film establishment because he hasn’t made too many box-office successes since M.A.S.H. way back in 1969, seems to go on from one project to another no matter what happens.

Born in Kansas City in 1925, he had a long stint as a television director, yet came out of that flattening process very much his own man. His cinematic children have been many and varied (19 in all), and he has some step-children too, in the shape of films by promising directors he produced under the aegis of Lion’s Gate Films, his own studio operation.

Just at the moment, he is attempting to nurture Health, the film he made for 20^th Century Fox before Popeye which, he says, the company couldn’t care less about. Popeye, which opened this week under the Walt Disney banner, doesn’t seem to need much nurturing. Though it cost a lot more than the average Altman product, it has so far made about $120 million worldwide, and should finally end up as his most successful film since M.A.S.H.

But Health is a problem. A parody of American political conventions, in the guise of a health food conference, it was meant to be shown last year when the actual conventions were held. “You could say that Glenda Jackson plays Adlai Stephenson and that Lauren Bacall is Eisenhower. And we predicted the outcome right in contemporary terms. It’s got a lot of characters, like Nashville and A Wedding. It’s really one of my essay films. That means that it is not exactly an orthodox narrative, which of course is anathema to some.”

The point is that it was made for Fox before the administration changed and Altman now feels that, because of that, it has been swept aside as part of the past. It was, he says, never properly shown not properly reviewed and he’s damned angry that Fox doesn’t seem to want anything to do with it. An English exhibitor wants to show it but there’s not too much hope that she will be allowed to. In France, someone wanted it a lot but was not given it. In America, it is merely being shown here and there on the campus circuit.

Altman says it is not easy fighting the major companies. “In the old days there were people like Louis B. Mayer, who were awful in a way, but who did care about the movies. Nowadays it’s just corporation men. You could at least fight Mayer. But now you can’t find the guy to have the fight with. And that’s worse.”

Popeye passed through several hands before settling in Altman’s. Hal Ashby, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols were among those interested and it was hoped that Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin would play Popeye and Olive Oyl. Altman, however, doesn’t think he could have contemplated it without Robin Williams in the former part, and without being allowed to build the tumbledown Sweethaven set that has so many echoes of McCabe and Mrs Miller.

That set cost $2 million alone and they lost 21 days shooting time in Malta because of the weather, which took its budget to over $20 million. It seemed at risk at first, since there was a lot of bad-mouthing about the film, and the critics were divided (Vincent Candy told New York Times readers that it wouldn’t appeal to children, before recanting, which Altman says is rather like shooting your dog and then saying sorry).

“Everything backfired except the audiences. I must say that it seems to be considered more unorthodox than I consider it. I didn’t want it to be campy or tongue-in-cheek. I approached it, as a matter of fact, as if it were Dickens. We tried to set up a culture that had its own rules, followed its own logic. We took the position that E.C. Segar had come to our Sweethaven, seen what happened and then decided to write a comic strip about it.

“Popeye himself starts off as a pretty naturalistic figure – he’s got his huge forearms and he’s rowing a boat looking for his father. He’s an alien at Sweethaven and they treat him that way. He gets more comic-strip as the film goes on, and he has to fight for what he wants.

“Yes, there are echoes McCabe and Mrs Miller. They weren’t exactly deliberate. They just came naturally. For instance, the guy who plays the town drunk was the town drunk in McCabe and actually wears the same clothes. And the opium den in McCabe is echoed by the bordello in Popeye. I think it’s nice, but it’s not all that important.”

What Altman does consider very important is that children like the film – “they’re ore intelligent than adults, anyway.” On that point, Disney would surely have agreed with him. He adds that he hates to talk too much about his movies because “the minute I answer the questions, my innocence is lost. I don’t want to know too much about what I do. I just want to do it. I just want to say: Come and look through my window. This is what I see. I can only show things that appear to me to be true, and hope like hell that somebody agrees with me.”

He insists that all the talk of improvisation is exaggerated. There were indeed a lot of alterations to the original Jules Feiffer script but Feiffer was there, working on the project with them. Things aren’t so much improvised as changed, and that change is usually a collaborative effort. “Often I like to create an event, and then photograph it like a documentary.”

The next events he’s going to create are a film of Gillian Freeman’s novel Eater Egg Hunt, which is to be published in May and will be made as a movie in Canada; and The Smith County Widow, which already exists as a screenplay and will have Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen, the Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner, in the cast.

What of Lions Gate, his own production company? “Well,” says Altman carefully, “It still exists. But these are difficult times. It’s getting worse. We can’t help any more untried directors just yet. Frankly we need some money – I need some money. The industry’s looking for jackpot movies, not cult pictures. After all, what’s a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority. And they’re not even interested in minorities these days.”

Times were indeed getting worse for Altman; The Smith County Widow never came to fruition, and Easter Egg Hunt – if production ever did commence – never saw the light of day. On a somewhat related note, Altman’s “raunchy teen comedy” O.C. and Stiggs (completed in 1984, shelved until 1987) was based on two characters from a series of National Lampoon stories. The BFI described it as “probably Altman’s least successful film”.

The Turkey Has Landed

Talk About The Passion have launched this week’s theme of comics with a poll of the greatest British comics. The piece is jolly good fun but manages to omit the first relaunch of The Eagle in 1982. From page 48 of City Limits, 26th March to 1st of April 1982:

THE TURKEY HAS LANDED

In the 1950s the Eagle was the boys’ comic. NIGEL FOUNTAIN ruminates on its re-launch.

Born in 1950, under the editorship of the Reverend Marcus Morris, the Eagle boomed in that decade, slumped in the 1960s, and folded in 1969.

A quarter of a century ago the Eagle had class (lower middle, with middle middle tendencies). It had patriotism, with backpage bios on Alfred The Great, Winston Churchill, St Paul (he was more or less Englishanyway). In Dan Dare it had the perfect World War II Biggles figure, transmuted into space hero, with The Mekon as Napoleon, Hitler, Mao (?) rolled into one. Erudition was provided by ‘Special Investigator’ McDonald Hastings (unusually located in the Kalahari surrounded by pygmies), interesting facts, and cut-away plans of ships, flying boats and new (steam) locomotives…

It was a comic with everything that was decent, white and British in it. It was great. And, looking back, it stinks. Full of the myopia and hypocrisy of an era when the war was won, the economy was expanding, and would always expand. An era when one would grow up to buy an Austin Cambridge or a Morris Oxford - the transnational Ruritania of Cortinas and Marinas was a far country then - and marry Muriel Pavlow or Sylvia Sims.

The new Eagle was unveiled at a press launch last week at the Waldorf Hotel. It features ‘Doomlord’ (bringer of death) taking over the physical form of PC Bob Murton of the Cambridge force. Doomlord looks surprisingly like Manchester police chief James Anderton, only thinner. The sneaky thuggishness of ‘Sgt Streetwise’ steps into the void left by PC49 and there are more damn footballers. In the 1950s people went to football, now they read about it, or watch it on TV.

The Mekon is there to provide continuity. I wish he wasn’t. It’s like having Laurence Olivier on ‘Sale of the Century’.

While the Eagle launch featured a pleasing statue of the aging superstar, all it did was underline the difference 30 years make. Around the walls of the Waldorf Hotel suite ‘Missile Command’ video games whistled and crashed. A display of plastic models was topped by Yamaha and Kawasaki replicas; Spitfire and Hurricane kits made it on to the stand (made in France).

Then they doled out the product. Crashing through a screen came Big Daddy, a popular wrestler, dispensing Eagles from atop a Kenning Car Hire mini-van. His arrival was accompanied by a gramaphone rendition of ‘Big Daddy Is Our Leader We Shall Not Be Moved’.

The Reverend Morris wasn’t there. He has something to do with Cosmo these days, I understand.

‘So you were brave enough to come to the Waldorf!’ proclaims The Mekon in the press hand-out. ‘Since I last appeared, you have undoubtedly become less timid.’

I don’t know about that.

(Nigel Fountain is 97. Ed.)

What If The Machine That Repairs The Machine Breaks?

Interesting thing about the two hit animated films of this Summer: both appear to borrow rather a large plot device from the very first issues of MAD, from back when it started as a revolutionary comic book in 1952. Warning: Spoilers ahead…

In Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda the villain Tai Lung escapes from his supposedly secure prison cell with the help of an seemingly innocuous item left by the prison warden. This is similar to the story of Mole! from MAD #2 (written by Harvey Kurtzman and illustrated by Bill Elder) in which the title character escapes from prison each time digging his way out with an increasingly smaller tool left in the cell by the prison warden.

Later in the movie, one character gets Tai Lung to briefly punch himself in the face during one fight sequence - shades of Superduperman doing the same to Captain Marbles in MAD #4’s Superduperman! (written by Harvey Kurtzman and illustrated by Wallace Wood).

Pixar’s Wall-E, meanwhile, displays a larger and more noticeable influence. The final third of the movie is set upon a spaceship holding the last of the human race, rendered lumpen, shapeless and thoughtless due to machines having provided anything they desire. This is highly reminiscent of a story from the first issue of MAD titled Blobs! (written by Harvey Kurtzman and illustrated by Wallace Wood). Although Kurtzman’s version was a satire on the 1909 short story The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, it is the MAD version that has become the more well-known, and it is clearly the MAD version that inspired the world of Wall-E, even down to the transportation chairs, food being delivered as one requires it, robots being in charge of the infants and the claustrophobia-inspiring glass dome ceilings.

It’s safe to say that neither reference is a coincidence - it’s no secret that Hollywood animators are big fans of MAD; Brad Bird even smuggles the first issue into his film Iron Giant - but it’s harder to say which of these are references are intentional and which have been placed there subconsciously. Pixar aren’t known to shy away from directly referencing the classics - Monsters Inc features a shot-for-shot reconstruction of a famous section of Chuck Jones’ 1952 cartoon Feed The Kitty, for instance - but neither is it untrue to say that MAD’s influence is so great that it, like Warner Brothers cartoons, has permeated deep into the psyche of American popular culture.

Either way, one can’t help toying with the idea that this will become a trend, and that all the year’s upcoming blockbusters will include a reference to those early issues of MAD. Imagine it - Maxwell Smart will battle the Ganefs. Mulder and Scully will run from the Gookum. And Bruce Wayne will continually stop the action in The Dark Knight to remind us that “This story is a lampoon!”.

- Zon.