Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert by Roger Ebert Page B

white who came on quiet shoes to fill the glasses when it was necessary.
    Altman wore a knit sport shirt with the legend of the Chicago Bears over the left pocket: a souvenir, no doubt, from his trips to Chicago to scout locations for A Wedding. He was in a benign mood, and it was a day to savor. The night before, his film 3 Women had played as an official entry in the Cannes festival, and had received a genuinely warm standing ovation, the most enthusiastic of the festival.
    Because his M*A*S*H had won the Palme d'Or in 1970, Altman could have shown this film out of competition. But he wasn't having any: "If you don't want to be in competition," he was saying, "that means you're either too arrogant, or too scared. So you might lose? I've lost before; there's nothing wrong with losing."
    He was, as it turned out, only being halfway prophetic: three days later the jury would award the Palme d'Or to an Italian film, giving 3 Women the best actress award for Shelley Duvall's performance. But on this afternoon it was still possible to speculate about the grand prize, with the boat rocking gently and nothing on the immediate horizon except, of course, the necessity to be in Chicago in June to begin a $4 million movie with fortyeight actors, most of whom would be on the set every day for two months.
    "I'd be back supervising the preparation," Altman said, "except I'm lazy. Also, my staff knows what I want better than I do. If I'm there, they feel like they have to check with me, and that only slows them down."
    Lauren Hutton drifted down from the upper deck. She'll play a wedding photographer making a sixteen-millimeter documentary film-withina-film in A Wedding, and Altman's counting on her character to help keep the other characters straight. "With forty-eight people at the wedding party, we have to be sure the audience can tell them apart. The bridesmaids will all be dressed the same, for example. So Lauren will be armed with a book of Polaroids of everybody, as a guide for herself, and we can fall back on her confusion when we think the audience might be confused."

    Fresh drinks arrived. Altman sipped his and found it good. His wife, Kathryn, returning from a tour of the yacht harbor, walked up the gangplank and said she had some calls to make. Altman sipped again.
    "It's lovely sitting on this yacht," he said after a moment. "Beats any hotel in town."
    The boat is called Pakcha? I asked.
    "Yeah," said Altman. "Outta South Hampton. It's been around the world twice. Got its name in one of those South Sea Islands. Pakcha is a Pacific dialect word for `traveling white businessman."'
    He shrugged, as if to say, how can I deny it? He sipped his drink again, and I asked if that story was really true about how he got the idea for A Wedding.
    "Yeah, that's how it came about, all right. We were shooting 3 Women out in the desert, and it was a really hot day and we were in a hotel room that was like a furnace, and I wasn't feeling too well on account of having felt too well the night before, and this girl was down from L.A. to do some in-depth gossip and asked me what my next movie was going to be. At that moment, I didn't even feel like doing this movie, so I told her I was gonna shoot a wedding next. A wedding? Yeah, a wedding.
    "So a few moments later my production assistant comes up and she says, `Bob, did you hear yourself just then?' Yeah, I say, I did. `That's not a bad idea, is it?' She says. Not a bad idea at all, I say; and that night we started on the outline."
    3 Women itself had an equally unlikely genesis, Altman recalled: "I dreamed it. I dreamed of the desert, and these three women, and I remember every once in a while I'd dream that I was waking up and sending out people to scout locations and cast the thing. And when I woke up in the morning, it was like I'd done the picture. What's more, I liked it. So, what the hell, I decided to do it."
    The movie is about ... well, it's about whatever you think it's about. Two of