Despite Stuart's early tendency to canonize Altman's every word (he scrounges for this quote regarding Altman's brush with death as an Air Force squadling in WWII: "I heard from people that when something is inevitable, you kind of giggle and give into it"), what emerges is a balanced portrait of the director, whose voice fades into the chorus as the book progresses. (It is, therefore, uncompromised as a companion piece to the Nashville DVD released by Paramount in 2000, on which Altman delivers a feature-length commentary track.) A bond with Nashville screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury seems to override Stuart's Altmania--The Nashville Chronicles stops romanticizing Altman the second his narrative arrives at a crew party preceding the first day of principal photography: "'There's food and drink,'" he said with a papa bear smile. "Meeting's over. You can throw away your scripts. You won't need them.'" Stuart describes Tewkesbury's heart performing "a back flip" at that moment while everyone else "cooed with delight;" this was not a hackjob script but the culmination of months and months of research, blood, sweat, and tears--mostly on the part of Tewkesbury. As usual, Altman dismisses screenplays as "just a blueprint," as though a blueprint isn't a rigid document that outlines, in painstaking detail, the structure of an edifice.

What you don't get in this book is much insight into Stuart's adoration of the film. He loves it, loves it period, can rattle off every character's name in his sleep, I'll bet, but late in The Nashville Chronicles, when he calls One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest "rabble-rousing but distinctly lesser" (the Jack Nicholson starrer trounced Nashville at the Academy Awards), it's pure sour grapes; he's not a critic, but a fan. (His critical facilities fell further in doubt for me once he termed PT Anderson's Magnolia "Altman-esque," something I sought to, if not disprove, then throw doubt on in my essay comparing Nashville and Magnolia.) On the other hand, his judgment isn't so clouded that he's above gossip--the book shines whilst poking holes in the sacrosanct legend of Altman's rapport with thespians.

Celebrated for shunning auditions and making the cattle-call as casual as possible, Altman's casting process comes across as truly idiotic in The Nashville Chronicles (Glenn is cast after telling "Papa Bear" his favourite for the evening's football game) and lives to bite him in the ass, professionally-speaking, in the cases of Allen Garfield and Barbara Harris, both of whom give Altman nothing but grief throughout filming. So, too, does Ronnee Blakley, but it's a given that Nashville hinges on her somewhat brilliant turn as the doomed Barbara Jean. Altman is also plain cruel to Timothy Brown, who had one of the picture's only speaking parts for a minority in playing a country-western singer modelled after Charley Pride: after seeing that his screen-time has been diminished to almost nothing, Brown confronts Altman and is told abstrusely, "Well, now you know who makes you or breaks you in this business."

The Nashville Chronicles will be of passing interest to Nashville's critical detractors for a terrific discussion of the ethics of breaking studio embargoes. Pauline Kael's notorious rave, based on a viewing of Nashville's rough cut (which ran 171 minutes), was printed in THE NEW YORKER four months prior to the film's theatrical debut. Altman's blessing notwithstanding, Kael was taken to task for the buzz-building essay by her jealous peers: Vincent Canby retorted with a piece that pre-emptively assessed movies that had yet to be shot and Rex Reed reserved some of his most acidic bile for Kael in the press.

Where the story behind Nashville is possibly short-changed is in post-production. The mock political campaign that becomes the picture's major motif--engineered off-camera by the miracle worker Thomas Hal Phillips--is discussed at length, yet of the cutting of Nashville, we learn that plans for duelling, concurrent versions (Nashville Red and Nashville Blue) were scrapped, as well as that editor Sidney Levin was axed for having the temerity to challenge Altman's repeated screenings of rough cuts to audiences recruited for their sycophantic pliability. Over fifteen hours of raw material was generated for what became a two-hour-and-twenty-minute exercise, and how did that work? Even more frustrating, a television miniseries was to be prepared for ABC by reincorporating the deleted footage--what were some of the potential restorations? I guess it doesn't matter when all's said and done, and to Stuart's credit, there are very few other questions you can ask about Nashville that The Nashville Chronicles can't or doesn't answer. I hope the bug to document a cherished film bites Stuart again, soon.-Bill Chambers