In new book, dozens tell tales of brilliant, stubborn Robert Altman

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Robert Altman's films never told us what to think or feel.

The Kansas City-born director — of classics like "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "M*A*S*H," "The Player" and "Nashville" — gave us characters in collision. He provided dramatic conflict and expected audiences to draw their own conclusions.

That approach came in handy when Mitchell Zuckoff was putting together "Robert Altman: The Oral Biography," which will be published this month by Alfred A. Knopf.

The 592-page book is a mashup of voices revealing a funny, infuriating, stubbornly independent and deeply gifted man. Like an Altman film, the book doesn't moralize. It gives us the impressions of dozens of Altman admirers (and a few whose views were less rosy) and asks us to make up our own minds.

"I originally was going to help Bob write a memoir about the art and craft of directing," the 47-year-old Zuckoff, a journalism professor at Boston University, said in a recent phone interview from his home.

"We shared a literary editor who thought we'd get along, so he put us in a room together. And basically Bob did what he'd done all his life — he cast me. He went to his gut and felt I was right for the role of writer."

When Altman liked you, Zuckoff said, he could be seductive and enthusiastic (if occasionally caustic). The writer immediately felt he'd made a new friend and began visiting the filmmaker at his homes in Malibu and Manhattan and in the offices of Altman's production company.

"It was going great," he said. "I felt close to him — a really great affection."

And then in November 2006, Altman died at age 81 after an unpublicized fight with cancer.

Along with the ache of losing a new friend, Zuckoff was hit with the uncomfortable realization that he'd gotten in over his head.

"I was a cautionary tale of what not to do in publishing," he said. "When Bob died, I still didn't have a book contract. I'd been spending my own money to follow him around because I liked him so much. My enthusiasm got ahead of my common sense. I was an idiot, basically."

Zuckoff wrote off the experience as a wonderful phase of his life that would never end in a professional or financial payday.

And then, "people started talking," he said. "Once the immediate sadness passed, people — like my agent — said to me, 'Wait a minute. There's a book here.'"

Zuckoff decided that instead of a standard biography rehashing facts Altman fans already knew by heart, he needed to take a different approach. He already had the transcripts of his conversations with the filmmaker.