Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [145]
Sue Barton, director of publicity for Altman’s production company, Lion’s Gate Pictures, remembered Pauline’s visit to the Nashville set and her fascination as she sat with the director, watching the dailies. “Bob was very flattered by how wonderful she thought he was,” recalled Barton. “I would say she was slightly star-struck. She was so important to the filmmakers, and she had so much power. Being able to quote Pauline Kael was probably the best thing you could ever wish for. She was this little person with her little glasses and her little bowl haircut. She was far from beautiful, and this aspect of her personality allowed her to be with beautiful and interesting people and have a lot of clout. And everybody wanted her to be their friend. Bob was a genuine talent and a genuine eccentric, and that was her love for him.”
Nashville’s shooting schedule stretched to a little over seven weeks, and then the extensive editing process began. By early 1975 the picture was still not quite completed, but Altman wanted to show it in New York, and Lion’s Gate issued invitations to a select few, including Pauline. She was stunned by how brilliant Nashville had turned out to be, and throughout the screening, she gasped, clapped her hands together, laughed loudly, and took notes furiously. The next day she telephoned Lion’s Gate to ask if it would be acceptable for her to review the film in advance; she knew what the box-office fate of most of Altman’s pictures had been, and she had dug around enough to get the sense that Nashville’s distributor, Paramount Pictures, wasn’t fully behind the movie. The person who took her call told her, “That’s what the screening was for.” This was the answer Pauline wanted to hear: Nashville was scheduled for a summer release, and unless she leaped into action now, the chance to review it would go to Penelope Gilliatt. And Pauline knew that no matter what Gilliatt wrote, her review couldn’t possibly help the film find its audience.
She talked Shawn into letting her run the review in advance, and it appeared in the March 3, 1975, issue of The New Yorker. It opened with one of her favorite devices, the rhetorical question:
Is there such a thing as an orgy for movie-lovers—but an orgy without excess? At Robert Altman’s new, almost-three-hour film, Nashville, you don’t get drunk on images, you’re not overpowered—you get elated. I’ve never before seen a movie I loved in quite this way: I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness. It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over; you take it with you. In most cases, the studio heads can conjecture what a director’s next picture will be like, and they feel safe that way—it’s like an insurance policy. They can’t with Altman, and after United Artists withdrew its backing from Nashville, the picture had to be produced independently, because none of the other major companies would take it on. U.A.’s decision will probably rack up as a classic boner, because this picture is going to take off into the stratosphere—though it has first got to open. (Paramount has picked up the distribution rights but hasn’t yet announced an opening date.) Nashville is a radical, evolutionary leap.
In that one paragraph, she accomplished several things: She cued the reader that she had given herself over, without reservation, to the film; she heckled the studios for not supporting Altman; and she proclaimed, before its release, that it was going to be a box-office smash. She admitted that “Nashville isn’t in final shape yet, and all I can hope to do is to suggest something of its achievement.” But she found the movie a profound comment on “the great