Screenwriter Frank Barhydt goes on the record about his time with Robert Altman’s film Kansas City

Courtesy Missouri Film Office

Robert Altman’s movies like The Long Goodbye, The Player, Short Cuts and, of course, California Split made the director seem like a cynical Los Angeles insider, but the prolific filmmaker was born and raised in Cowtown and never really abandoned his roots.

In fact, after serving as co-pilot in the Pacific campaign during World War II, he began his filmmaking career helming instruction and industrial films for the Calvin Company. His debut was a guide to coaching football. 

Most films of this sort are as sleep-inducing as Chiefs games back before Andy Reid took over. Altman’s movie, Modern Football—unearthed by locally shot Kick Me director Gary Huggins—isn’t.

As a boy, actor-writer Frank Barhydt saw Altman hone his craft. He later became a frequent collaborator working with him on the HBO series Tanner 88, The Player, Quintet and Short Cuts.

He came upon his privileged view because his dad, Frank Barhydt, Sr. was Altman’s boss at Calvin. 

“I felt like I’d known him forever,” Barhydt recalled in July by phone Los Angeles. “He used to come over to the house. My father was in charge of production. He knew Bob from the get go. I’m not sure when Bob started there actually. His first entrepreneurship was dog tattooing. It was the next big thing that turned out not to be.”

That’s right. 

Thanks to a failed pet identification business (Harry Truman, the president who dropped two atom bombs and dissed J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a client), we have great movies like M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Gosford Park.

Altman returned to his hometown—and his Great Depression-era childhood—in his 1996 movie Kansas City. The film recounts the height of our community’s jazz culture and how we produced movie stars like Jean Harlow and wire hanger-hater Joan Crawford. The film also recalls how graft and violence were endemic during the era under Democratic party machine Tom Pendergast. 

Altman’s homecoming graces the Screenland Armour on Sunday, September 17 at 3:30 p.m. Barhydt, historian Chuck Haddix and UMKC professor and filmmaker Mitch Brian will be taking part in a Q&A. Filmmaker Don Maxwell (Civil War Stories) will be moderating.

The story involves a Harlow fan named Blondie (Jennifer Jason Leigh from Short Cuts) who kidnaps the wife (British thespian Miranda Richardson, Dance with a Stranger, Good Omens) of an FDR official (Altman stalwart Michael Murphy) to gain the release of her husband (Dermot Mulroney, About Schmidt) after he foolishly steals from a client of Cowtown’s most powerful Black gangster, real-life criminal Seldom Seen (the late Harry Belafonte). 

Altman’s vision of 1934 Kansas City (the filmmaker was nine at time) might scare off a tourist board with its (often implied) violence and themes of overt corruption, but Barhydt, who shares screenwriting credit with the director, says, “You could sort of make the case that Kansas City during the Depression was better off with somebody like Pendergast helping out the economy. They were certainly not enforcing (Prohibition) like they were in other places,  where they were chopping up barrels of beer and all that sort of stuff.”

This explains why Kansas City had around 100 jazz clubs at the time.

Barhydt adds, “The whole idea for the movie really came from a one-act play (for ABC-TV, where Altman had directed two Harold Pinter adaptations) that we wrote. That’s really where the idea for Blondie came from because she was trying to get her husband back because he was in trouble with the mob. The story we did was supposed to be in the 40s, after Pendergast.”

Kidnappings were sensational crimes during the era. Abductors tried make a quick buck by seizing Nell Donnelly Reed, the creator of Nelly Don dresses and the wife of Senator James A. Reed, and Mary McElroy, the daughter of KC city manger Henry F. McElrory. In situations like these, legitimate and illegitimate authorities showed that some crimes paid badly. 

Blondie (Leigh) follows in their tradition. Her obsession with Harlow, who died young at the height of her career at age 37, as Chadwick Boseman would later, doesn’t bode well.

“Blondie and Johnnie (Mulroney) both act like movie gangsters. They don’t realize the real underworld is a heck of a lot more dangerous place,” Barhydt says. “(Harlow) was Jennifer’s choice.”

Real gangsters appear in the movie, but Altman and Barhydt don’t do much to do draw attention to them or the music legends seen in the film. “All you need to know is Johnny Lazia is somebody who could put an end to this kidnapping and that Pendergast is involved in that, and the governor for one reason or another,” the screenwriter explains. 

“But the kidnapped woman (Richardson) was always supposed to be a loose cannon, be addicted in some way where her behavior was out of control. Somehow, laudanum was chosen. I read somewhere that the Harrison Act (which was passed in 1914 and was strengthened later) was passed because of 300,000 housewives being addicted to laudanum.”

In the director commentary on the Blu-Ray for Kansas City, Altman says he based her on a mysterious older relative. The opiate leads Carolyn (Richardson) to babble about goats and donkeys (Democratic factions in KC), and physicians frequently prescribed it for a whole host of symptoms like, um, “malaise.” According to Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opium Epidemic, more than 25,000 had been charged with violating the act. 

The film is also full of startling revelations. Seldom Seen (a.k.a. Ivory Johnson) got his nickname from running from the cops at age 14. He was arrested nearly 50 times, spent five prison terms, really did carry his cash in a cigar box and, according to communityvoicesks.com, lived to be 102.

He also let Belafonte, who was best known as a singer and civil rights activist, prove that he was as good as his classmates at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop: Tony Curtis and Marlon Brando. Belafonte’s whispered raspy delivery is more menacing than any bellowed order. When one of his underlings faces a grisly end for betraying him, Seldom Seen calmly merely delivers a dirty joke.

“He’s certainly capable of doing any threat that he makes. We know that he’s been to prison three times for murder. That’s what Charlie Parker (played by Albert J. Burnes) says,” Barhydt Recalls. 

“That was all Harry, pretty much. He knew all the parameters of the character. I did spend a lot of time with him, and it was some of the best time I’ve spent in my whole life.” 

If catching Seldom Seen at his most ruthless is a highlight, so is catching the movie’s recreation of the nightlife at his Hey Hey Club. Careful viewers can spot younger performers replicating the licks of Count Basie and Mary Lou Williams while Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins get into an engrossing cutting contest. One person on the Q&A panel helped make sure those scenes work. 

Chuck Haddix wrote Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker (Music in American Life) and hosts KCUR’s The Fish Fry. “He was one of the first people I talked to. He’s an encyclopedia. If you needed to ask if this would have happened or would so and so have been around then, (he) could tell you,” Barhydt recalls. “It was to write, ‘music goes here.’ That was always something you could come back to that would always send you in a different orbit after you did that.”

The movie wouldn’t have felt right without featuring the 18th and Vine jazz district or Union Station. The latter was a major transit hub at the time and was the site of the “Kansas City Massacre” in 1933. Bank robber “Pretty Boy” Floyd was a participant, and the event built the reputation of the once obscure Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Because both areas are going concerns now, it might be surprising to learn that Union Station seemed headed for an appointment for the wrecking ball in the early 90s. 

“Oh, it was a mess. You had to wear hard hats and all that. There was the Western Union section, which is where the Post Office is now. That was considered a safe area. Anything in the main part with the chandeliers and all that was considered unsafe. The camera reduces that. It doesn’t show you what your eyes could see. It’s all trickery, but it works marvelously well. I don’t think Bob would correct me, but it was the thing that made Kansas City, otherwise you could have shot it in Omaha,” says Barhydt. 

Because Barhydt is a KC native and shares the late director’s cynical wit, his own vital contributions to their films can get overlooked, one of their early joint efforts, H.E.A.L.T.H., originated because Barhydt had once worked as a health magazine editor.

“I think it was the health food magazine years. It was like politics. That’s why Bob liked the idea liked the idea so much. He was very interested in politics, and that’s what H.E.A.L.T.H. was about on a different scale. Let’s face it: It’s not like there’s a gospel on high for health because different people have different opinions about what that was,” Barhydt recalls. 

“It was sort of like the Wild West because back then, the government was the enemy, and the whole nation would be a lot healthier if they went to the (health) food stores. Meanwhile, they all drank like fish. I remember these conventions where they spent most of their time at the bar.”