Fine Line Features | Kansas City Production Notes

Throughout his remarkable career, Robert Altman has painted incisive portraits of a contradictory America: a place of purity and greed, of dogged corruption and heartbreaking idealism. In KANSAS CITY, Altman explores one of the most paradoxical places and times in American history. It is where he grew up.

"Boss Pendergast ran the political machine," recalls the director, who was born in 1925. "He used the same methods as the Italians in their area or the blacks in theirs. They all took care of their people; the system was perfectly corrupt. It was a wide open town where the law didn't apply." The city even ignored Prohibition; the liquor flowed and the signs advertising it never came down.

Kansas City was also a great town for music, with plenty of clubs and a flourishing red light district that paid musicians well. Altman's first exposure to jazz came when he was a child. "I had a black maid, Glendora. In the film, she is the woman greeted by Charlie Parker when he comes home through the back door. When I was eleven, Glendora sat me down in front of the radio and said, 'Now, listen to this. This is the best music there is.' It was Duke Ellington playing "Solitude." I remember every note of it." By the time he was fifteen, Altman was frequenting the city's jazz clubs.

Altman's vivid memories of the music of his youth was crucial to the development of KANSAS CITY. In 1987, while he was filming the Harold Pinter plays The Dumb Waiter and The Room, Altman and co-writer Frank Barhydt began working on a story about two women driving through a city one night. But the project remained unproduced and the script sat idle for a number of years. Then, while he was making Short Cuts, which he co-wrote with Barhydt, Altman pulled out the script about the two traveling women. He and Barhydt, also a native of Kansas City, decided to develop the story further by incorporating their hometown and its jazz scene.

Altman describes the milieu, "The jazz clubs weren't segregated, they sold drinks to anyone anytime. White people could go there, but they didn't very often. Movie theatres were a different story; black people had to sit in the balcony, whereas white people could go anywhere they wanted. In Kansas City, they often boasted about not being segregated, but Missouri was a Southern state like the others. The attitude was paternalistic, something like, 'Here, we treat our Negroes real well.'"

Running the black neighborhoods of KANSAS CITY is gangster Seldom Seen, played by Harry Belafonte. The character is based on a composite of local gangsters. Belafonte did his own research into this cold-blooded killer with an abiding love for jazz. "He was a killer, scum of the earth, but it's important to the piece that people see what he meant to that environment. Kansas City was run by gangsters." Unsentimental, mordant, and cruel, Seldom Seen is the rogue philosopher of KANSAS CITY, a black man in a unique position of power who casts an acute eye on the cultural and social landscape of Kansas City in 1934.

"All of Belafonte's monologues were comments on the times," Altman adds. "For instance, Marcus Garvey, the black politician who wanted to send everyone back to Africa and even started a black shipping line, the Black Star. It was one of the hot topics of the time."

The hot radio program was Amos and Andy, which starred white actors portraying the title characters in blackface. "It swept America," says the director. "It was the most popular radio show of all time. Harry and I had been working on another project about Amos and Andy for some time, so a lot of our conversations and research were incorporated into KANSAS CITY."

Altman took many of the characters of KANSAS CITY from real life. Besides Seldom Seen, there is, of course, the young Charlie Parker and his mother, Addie. Addie Parker did indeed work at Western Union and owned her own home. Her son was a habitué of the jazz clubs, watching the musicians from the balcony. Carolyn Stilton, the laudanum-addicted political wife played by Miranda Richardson, is modeled on the mother of one of Altman's childhood friends. In the film, Carolyn relates to Addie Parker an anecdote about the painter Thomas Hart Benton, who was refused when he asked a black maid to let him paint her in uniform. The story is true.

Fiction, on the other hand, has been the formative influence for the character of Blondie, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. "Blondie learned how to behave by watching Jean Harlow in Platinum Blonde or Bombshell. She probably never had a gun in her hand before, so she was mimicking those characters," Altman emphasizes. "And that is the way Jennifer performed her part. I don't think there's a better actress working today."

Says Leigh of Blondie's outlandish plan to swap the kidnap victims, "She thinks of it as a trade because she really doesn't live in the real world. Her whole life has been informed by the movies. With Blondie, everything is a 'you're with me, you're against me' kind of thing." Altman gives his take on Blondie's devotion to Johnny, "Her fascination for him is almost a sickness."

Carolyn Stilton, however, is stuck in a big house and a lonely marriage and turns to opiates for comfort. "It's her way of tuning out," says Altman of the society matron's ever-present bottle of laudanum. "Because of the drugs, Carolyn is able to meander through a whole spectrum of emotions."

"It was kind of a leap in the deep end," acknowledges Miranda Richardson about her role, "but it felt like here was somebody who had the experience and was prepared to help me feel comfortable. I was getting nervous before working, but as soon as I started, it felt lovely."

The relationship between Blondie and Carolyn (whom Blondie dubs "Red") evolves over two days and a violent election. As Richardson notes, "These two unlikely women go on the road and it feels like they've been together forever, but it's a very short space of time. There are times when we're in sympathy with each other, other times when we're not in sync at all."

Tellingly, Carolyn never tries to escape, not even when Blondie falls asleep at Addie Parker's house. She chooses instead to chat in the parlor with Addie and her friends. Later, Carolyn (who initially thought her kidnapper was a manicurist) helps Blondie bleach her hair in preparation for Johnny's homecoming.

"Carolyn feels compassion for her captor and understands her," Altman says in discussing the women's complicated relationship. The film's images (a canary in a cage) and sounds (the final swells of Ellington's "Solitude") punctuate the story of their almost-friendship. "The whole idea was not to be too specific about it. It runs through feelings, moods, unspoken emotions. It didn't call for a literal interpretation but rather for a sort of ... jazz."

"I tried to write this film like jazz and I tried to shoot it that way. In other words, I have lines and there is a plot with definite suspense. There is a beginning, a middle with stopping points, and an ending, but in between, I let the actors go off on these riffs, just like they do in the music."

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