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19 SPRING 2015 / CINEMONTAGE compromises and humiliations rendered by and upon them all. It is also a musical with almost 30 songs performed on camera. Altman said that he "learned the rules of the game from The Rules of the Game," Jean Renoir's 1939 perspective on French society just before World War II. It influenced the director's films like A Wedding (1978) and Gosford Park (2001), but only Nashville comes close to Renoir's scope and continuing timeliness. Drawing from documentaries, neo-realism and improvisation, Altman created his own nuanced, multi-layered social environment. Paul Lohmann's cinematography captured it with long shots setting characters in multiple planes of action, while the sound crew broke new ground in recording and mixing to bring the same rich texture to the movie's music and dialogue. The idea for the picture arose in 1973 after United Artists released Altman's adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. While the US Senate was voting to investigate the Watergate break-in, UA asked Altman to direct its script of The Great American Southern Amusement Company, a novel set in Nashville. He agreed to make a Nashville movie if they would finance Thieves Like Us (1974) — the Edward Anderson novel that Nicholas Ray filmed as They Live By Night in 1948. On location in Jackson, Mississippi, Altman asked Thieves' screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury to go to Nashville, scout the city and the music industry, and keep a diary of her experiences. He threw away UA's script and, while filming Thieves, he and Tewkesbury began to devise an original story and characters using her notes to establish the Nashville setting. The filmmaker said he wanted to build on "very simple, basic stuff and put it into a panorama which reflected America and its politics." The political dimension grew as the Watergate hearings attracted more TV coverage and Altman asked Mississippi novelist Thomas Hal Phillips to create Replacement Party candidate, Hal Phillip Walker, for Nashville. Phillips wrote a 30-minute political platform which became Walker's speeches, voiced by the writer over the loudspeakers in the movie. After Thieves was done, Altman submitted Tewkesbury's 140-page script and UA rejected it. Already unhappy with UA's treatment of his last two pictures, the director took the project to producer Jerry Weintraub at ABC Pictures. With Weintraub's backing, Nashville became what the director called "the first film I really had total control over." Thieves Like Us had given Louise Fletcher her first feature role after years away from acting. The actress' relationship to her deaf parents intrigued the filmmaker. During that shoot, she and Altman together developed the character of Linnea Reese, a woman with deaf children, for Nashville. However, to avoid working again with Fletcher's husband, Jerry Bick, a producer on Thieves and Long Goodbye, he offered the part of Linnea to Lily Tomlin. This was Tomlin's first movie and it brought her an Academy nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Meanwhile, the spurned Fletcher played Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which won her the Best Actress Oscar. Tomlin had earlier turned down that role. Before Nashville, the director made yet another movie, California Split (1974) with Elliot Gould and George Segal. In it, he experimented with the overlapping dialogue he would use extensively in Nashville. Altman's use of the technique was sparked by Howard Hawks' movies, but not being able to clearly separate two or more voices recorded on one track frustrated him. Split's production mixer Jim Webb, CAS, told CineMontage that engineer and producers assistant Jack Cashin told Altman that to get what he wanted, he should record multi-track. Webb had worked with radio mics at CBS and NBC and did multi-track sound for rock concerts and music documentaries; he suggested radio mics for the film's multi-track set up. Webb said, "We needed the multi-track system so we didn't have to stage a shot for the microphone with booms and wires. With wireless mics, we could just lay down the separate tracks and watch the meters. All I needed to know was who Bob wanted to listen to." Webb and Cashin assembled the system, permitting them to restrict each track to a single input from each character's voice. "We used eight tracks — seven for the actors and one to run sync Drawing from documentaries, neo-realism and improvisation, Altman created his own nuanced, multi-layered social environment in Nashville.