EVERYBODY HAS HIS PROFESSIONAL UPS and downs, and the ups and downs in show business tend to be extreme. But even by the standards of the movie industry, Robert Altman's ups and downs have been both numerous and extravagant. After making his first feature at 30, Altman slid back into yeoman Hollywood anonymity for a decade, directing episodic TV. Then in 1970 there was M *A *S *H, a commercial blockbuster and generational lodestar. Within a year came the dense, dreamy, elegiac western McCabe and Mrs. Miller, then other sly, quirky dramas (The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split) at a rate of almost one a year -- leading up to Nashville, perhaps the best American movie of the 1970s and among the most influential.
% Then, as if ordained by some law of pop thermodynamics, came a very long rough patch: beginning with Buffalo Bill in 1976, Altman movie after Altman movie failed at the box office and displeased the tastemaking establishment. The director even tried his hand at an expensive high-concept movie -- the $22 million Popeye, starring Robin Williams -- and it seemed only to certify his career death. During the '80s Altman lived mainly in Paris, returning to the States to direct small movies (Streamers, Beyond Therapy) that did little to rekindle the passion of his erstwhile devotees. Not many people saw Tanner '88, Altman and Garry Trudeau's highly original cinema verite series for HBO about the 1988 presidential campaign, but it did get the cultural mandarins buzzing positively again.
So now comes The Player, a dark comedy with heart, a movie about the movie business as thrilling as M *A *S *H, already as beloved by the screening-room cognoscenti as Nashville. Altman agrees with a chuckle that it probably represents his third comeback, and at 67 he is wise enough to know that a fourth or fifth may lie ahead. "Talk to me after my next movie," he says, half-assuming that this latest up means, in short order, the inevitable down. He smiles and gives a que sera shrug.
Of course, equanimity comes easier when you're riding a wave of praise like that The Player is provoking. Even jaded actors feel privileged to be part of the film. Cast members Peter Gallagher, Fred Ward, Malcolm McDowell and Whoopi Goldberg saw The Player together at a private screening. After the final credit roll, Gallagher recalls, "we were sitting with our heads down, looking at our feet and just kind of saying, 'It's so cool to be involved with this movie.' " Yet the huzzahs worry Altman a bit -- he remembers that Nashville "got overhyped by the press." And the gush that greeted M *A *S *H and Nashville, he says, was "nothing like the response to this. This is just . . . weird. I've already got more mail than I had total on all the other films I've ever made." Surely he's heard some quibbles, some intelligent criticism? "No. Or unintelligent."