On Altman’s “Angels in America”
Paste Magazine has a new interview with Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, authors of a new book detailing the history of Tony Kushner’s historic play Angels in America, and the various attempts to bring it to the big screen. Of particular interest is the research they uncovered on Altman’s effort to adapt it in the 90s. Relevant portions excerpted below:
Isaac Butler: Yeah, so at some point one of us—I really, genuinely don’t remember who—was like, well, you know, we had always heard, there had always been this sort of rumor floating around that Robert Altman was going to make a movie out of Angels in America, and then it just never happened, you know? It was floating around in the ’90s, I mean. Then we found out that that was not a rumor, that was a real thing. I think Dan found that out when he spoke to Cary, so we asked Tony about it and he of course told us lots of wonderful and hilarious things about his experience with Robert Altman. And then at some point we have the idea that—you know, Robert Altman is a legend. He’s one of the most important, you know, American filmmakers. His papers might be somewhere where we can go read them, and if there were, there might be stuff on Angels. And then we found out that that was true… [T]he University of Michigan Ann Arbor has this amazing collection of film directors’—actually not just directors’, but mostly film directors’—papers. And so I flew out to Michigan to go look through these, you know, the box of info they had on the Angels in America film adaptation, which was incredible. I mean, we found a couple drafts of the screenplays which Tony wrote for Altman, which Dan I know really enjoyed those.
Kois: And Tony had no memory, he said, of what was in those screenplays. He has vague memories of writing that but couldn’t remember what he had put in. And so then finding them was just incredibly useful in thinking about—in figuring out how this movie might have worked, and how Tony tried to adapt his style to what he believed would be like an Altman-esque version of it.
Butler: And the reason why, what makes this so amazing is, you know there’s an interview before Tony and Altman got together that we read where Tony says, “Angels in America is just Nashville.” Like, the structure is Nashville. Nashville is hugely important to this play… [I]t kept overlapping dialog, coincidences. You can sort of imagine the camera panning from one character to another across the street, and those two characters don’t know each other, and then we follow the next person. And then the weirdest thing that happened when I went through those papers is that a friend of mine’s name was in one of them. A person I had worked with in a social justice context was mentioned in one of the documents. And I wrote to her, like, “Hey, are you” — that’s this woman Liz Manne who is interviewed for the book — “Hey, are you this Liz Manne?” and she said “Yeah, I co-founded Fine Line we were going to produce that movie.” And then she was enormously helpful, not only in speaking with us and giving us the whole background of it, but finding us, and vouching for us with, the other people who were involved in that deal.
Paste: That’s really amazing. I know that Robert Altman had a past history to some degree with play adaptation. Kushner mentions that he adapted [Christopher Durang]’s Beyond Therapy.
Butler: He did Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean [Jimmy Dean], he did Secret Honor. There’s a couple others, right Dan?
Kois: Yeah, I think so. He did at least three or four play adaptations. There’s, I mean, a period in—he did Streamers, I think. There’s a period in the ’80s when he was just having trouble getting stuff financed, and he sort of went through a kind of chamber movie period where the stuff he could make work were scripts that he or someone else would adapt, a play script and someone else would adapt them, there were just a couple of characters, and not that many sets, and that was what he could get financed… And Angels would have been an entirely different kind of project, right? That was—you know, that was post- the Altman renaissance, which took place in the early ’90s with first The Player, and then with Short Cuts, which were, you know, two movies that reminded Hollywood that Robert Altman was a genius and that when he set his mind to it he could make something really amazing. And it was in that light that he approached Angels, and Angels was not meant to be a small chamber piece. It was meant to be something extravagant and big. Initially it was going to be two movies that Fine Line was maybe going to release in theaters a couple months apart from each other to maximize the publicity. And then he had you know, “big movie star” in mind for it, the kind of people he had been casting in Short Cuts and The Player. He wanted Robert Downey, Jr. for Louis and he wanted Tim Robbins for Joe, and Pacino was—
Butler: Was always in for Cohn. Yeah. Yeah. And then Spinella was still supposed to play Prior. You know, I found some of the budgeting memos where they were trying to figure out what this thing would cost, which are hilarious documents in and of themselves. We used a quote from one of them in the book: “We renamed the budget the smoldering pit of hell.” You know, this is a movie that was going to cost $30 million. Like, that’s a big deal. What they were shooting for was a big deal in the early ’90s, particularly when you’re adapting a play.
Paste: And having read some of the drafts of Kushner’s original screenplay for Altman, was there anything that still made it to the HBO adaptation?
Kois: Everything that’s in the HBO adaptation reflects I think a real, conscious decision to go back to the text of the play. I don’t think any of those flourishes, any of the added material in that Altman screenplay, ended up in the version that Mike Nichols shot, which is, with very limited exceptions, the play on screen.
Butler: Yeah, I mean, the Nichols version cuts a few things from the play. You know, Roy’s monologue is shorter, “Democracy in America” is shorter, stuff like that. And there’s a little tiny coda for Joe Pitt—the text of which is in our book, in the Nichols version, but I don’t even know that Tony has looked at the screenplay since the Altman version went into turnaround. The sense that I got was that it had been a very long time since he has looked at them.
Kois: Yeah, I don’t think he went back to them when the Nichols deal with HBO finally happened. I think he just started fresh.
