Curiosity, November 8, 2026. Quotes translated from English; links to the exact wording are at the end.
By 1984, Hollywood had shown Robert Altman the door. After the double flop of 1980 — Popeye and Health — the studios’ box-office logic could no longer tolerate his touchy originality, and the director of MASH and Nashville, a man nearing sixty, had to leave for New York to stage plays, then later open a production company in Paris. In the LA Times in 1985, he called Los Angeles “a creatively dead zone,” a place he returned to only to discuss screen adaptations of his theatrical work.
It was in exile, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he landed a job as a visiting professor in the communications department, that Altman pulled off the most audacious deal of his career. Vulture lays out the mechanics with chilly precision: cut off from studio budgets, he made a film where he could get both cheap, nonunion student labor and a building to shoot in. The financing was his own money, through Sandcastle 5 Productions. The best film about Nixon did not cost the studios a cent — because they would never have paid for it.
The play on which the film was based was not written by Nixon himself, but by a duo with something to say about the machinery of power: Donald Freed, author of political plays, and Arnold M. Stone — a lawyer with experience at the Justice Department and the NSA. Their one-man drama ran at the LA Actors’ Theatre; it was there, according to the Guardian obituary, that Altman saw Hall and made up his mind. Through his production company, the play moved to New York’s Provincetown Playhouse, where it ran from November 8 through December 18, 1983, under a changed title — Secret Honor: The Last Testament of Richard M. Nixon.
The furnishings of the plot: an office in a mansion, a loaded revolver, a bottle of Scotch, a running tape recorder, and walls of closed-circuit television monitors. The fallen president is preparing an address to a tribunal that will never exist in reality — he is answering to the judgment of history. The film’s first ten minutes are spent on choice profanity: he cannot get the fucking tape recorder running (Ebert appreciates this small joke). Then the portrait of Henry Kissinger gets it — Please Kill Me calls the tirade one of the greatest runs of curses in cinema history, culminating in “whore master.” And all around, beyond the mansion’s empty corridors, cameras are watching, the only living sign of the outside world their flicker: PKM describes the hero’s condition without mincing words — a spider at the center of a web of sinister memories.
Criterion frankly calls the plot itself a “counter-myth,” kin to Oliver Stone’s JFK. In this version, a naïve Quaker boy answers an ad in the late forties for “a young man who wants to run for Congress,” and is taken to Bohemian Grove, where the “Committee of 100” hands him a “life plan”: California as a political proving ground, the Vietnam War to continue for another four years at any cost, Asia’s heroin operation under cover. Then the Committee writes off its protégé when he gets out of control. Watergate, meanwhile, turns out to be the “secret honor” — by this logic, Nixon staged the scandal himself, setting himself up for minor charges so investigators would not get to the real ones: treason and the looting of the country. PKM sums it up: he was forced to fall on the sword called Watergate in order to cover for the pigs who had engineered his career.
The ending is, without question, one of the most powerful in American cinema of the eighties. “They wanted me to kill myself. Well, the hell with that. If they want my body, let them come and get it,” — and a decisive fist freezes at the top of its arc, while the final words of the monologue loop across every monitor, offset and overlapping, beneath the rising chant of “Four more years!” — until the image dissolves into static.
The AFI Catalog documents the production mechanics with an accountant’s dryness, and that dryness contains the best part. Altman and Paul Boyle, dean of the University of Michigan’s music school, conceived the project as hands-on practice for students: around thirty graduate students on set served as crew or observers. As part of the program, students were required to attend the play, which Altman staged at the university for five performances before shooting began — that is one way to introduce people to filmmaking: first live through the theater five times, then lug cameras around.
Sources break down the budget differently: $350,000 according to the NY Times of June 14, 1985; “approximately $500,000” according to Variety in 1984. Shooting — seven days in February 1984, on 16mm film, in the University of Michigan’s Martha Cook Building dormitory — more precisely, in its Red Room, as Wikipedia notes. In the credits beside Altman is his loyal team: cinematographer Pierre Mignot, editor Juliet Weber, production designer Stephen Altman, the director’s son. And one utterly magnificent line: “Filmed at the University of Michigan, Martha Cook Building; Rosalie Moore, Director” — the director of the student dorm received an individual credit as the location director. The score was written by Professor George Burt and performed by the student Contemporary Directions Ensemble.
But the real cinematic joke here is institutional. Altman had always been a director of crowds: two dozen storylines in Nashville, a chorus of voices in Short Cuts. Here his signature instinct turned inside out: four video monitors on which Nixon, in eerie unison, plays himself against himself. Altman’s community of many, compressed into one man and his reflections.
The most valuable documentary testimony about those seven days is not film-scholar essays but Hall’s 1988 LA Times interview, in which he remembers the shoot from the inside:
“Altman would do a take. Then he’d say, ‘Okay. You want to do another one?’ I’d say, ‘I’m kind of tired.’ He’d say, ‘Okay, let’s do one more.’ And they were long takes — 15, 18 minutes, which is unbelievable in movies. I usually weigh about 160 pounds. During ‘Nixon,’ I went down to 127.”
Thirty-three pounds over a shooting marathon — this is not some anecdotal “acting method,” it is the physiology of exhaustion, captured directly on film. Vulture put that insight right in its headline: Hall plays Nixon like a wounded animal. The whole anatomy of American power in a single frame: an actor gone gray with fatigue berating invisible puppeteers for wringing everything out of him.
Hall initially turned down the role, incidentally: the monologue struck him as so dense and unwieldy that “no actor could play it — or would want to.” Then, in his words, “one night I saw how it could be done,” and he called Bob Harders, the production’s director. Hall played Nixon onstage in Los Angeles, then in New York, Boston, and Washington (and earned a Drama Desk nomination) — and was not afraid to repeat himself before Altman’s camera. There was zero physical resemblance, incidentally: lighter hair, not a hint of stubble. But Please Kill Me compares the effect to Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln: after a few minutes, you stop seeing the actor and see the president.
The release strategy was clever to the point of cynicism: May 1984 — a preview at the Seattle Film Festival as part of an Altman tribute; then the Cannery Theater in San Francisco, specially booked for one week; the premiere on July 6 — neatly timed for the Democratic National Convention. No further comment needed. Mid-eighties audiences did not line up for ninety minutes of monologue by a disgraced president, and the film quietly slipped into limited release, then onto cable television.
The critics, though, did their work like conspirators who had reserved their seats in advance. Roger Ebert gave it four stars out of four, called it “one of the most searing, cutting and brilliant films of 1984,” and ranked it sixth on his year-end list. Gene Siskel — four stars as well. Vincent Canby in the NY Times described the result as “something of a cinematic tour de force” and singled out Hall’s performance: a complete, bravura piece of work, not “an impersonation in the Saturday Night Live vein.” But the formula of a “cult masterpiece without an audience” proved durable: for two decades, the film lived as a VHS relic and an argument in debates over the underrated, until it entered the Criterion Collection, where Altman’s own director’s commentary can still be heard.
The most valuable thing in the film’s critical legacy is Ebert’s qualification. He knew he was looking at fiction and was not searching for “the truth about Nixon” — but admitted that the artistic truth worked flawlessly: after the credits, he felt more sympathy for Richard Nixon than he had at any point in his life. A rare breed of cinema — a truth that does not require a referendum — and Ebert recognized it on the first viewing.
And Wikipedia adds a detail that makes film buffs’ jaws clench: with Hall’s death in June 2022, Secret Honor became “the most recent film in which every actor appearing in it is dead” — on screen, essentially, there is only one performer. Cinema-phantom in its purest form: an outcast director, an actor at the limits of his physiology, a student crew working without pay, a conspiratorial version of history that its own authors did not believe in, and one great critic walking out of the theater with an impossible sympathy for Nixon.
And now the best part — the part that turned a student experiment into the nerve center of an entire filmmaking career.
Hall’s dazzling performance in Altman’s play and film lifted his income, in the actor’s own joke, “above the poverty level” — but by the early nineties, he was still a character actor without a face on the poster. Then, in 1993, a young Paul Thomas Anderson was working as a production assistant on the PBS anthology Campus Culture Wars: Five Stories About PC, in one episode of which Hall appeared. Between takes, Anderson sat down beside him with a script for a twenty-minute short, saying, as the actor recalled to the LA Times in 1998: “I’m your biggest fan.”
The short was called Cigarettes and Coffee. It made its way through Sundance, won Anderson a place in the 1994 Filmmakers Workshop, grew there into Sydney, and Sydney became Hard Eight — his feature debut, in which Hall, despite the producers’ “get us Gene Hackman and John Cusack,” remained the lead. Then came Jimmy Gator in Magnolia, and Anderson’s own statement, fit for marble: “I look at Philip Baker Hall and just fall in love with the actor. No one else has a face like that or a voice like that.”
The Guardian, in its obituary, called Anderson “Altman’s great disciple” — and here the circle of irony closes: Altman, defeated by Hollywood in the eighties, passed on to him, through a student project with graduate students, the actor who would make Boogie Nights. The chain “play → Altman → Hall → Anderson” can be stretched across entire swaths of the nineties film map. And the cherry on top is an anecdote from Altman’s director’s commentary, retold by Vulture. When The Player came out, a New York Observer reviewer tore into the director for his satire of the corrupted studio system. The reviewer turned out to be David Kissinger — Henry’s son. Altman wrote him a letter apologizing that he had not liked the film, and offering this advice: take a look at my earlier film. Guess which one. Passive aggression is a genre too, and it has its masterpieces.
And so this phantom lies there on the Criterion Channel: ninety minutes, one actor, not a single extra person in the frame — and a commentary by its maker in which Altman calls his method “truthful, not factual.” The seven shooting days of February 1984 turned out to be longer than the entire Hollywood career for which they had been undertaken. At the same time, half a million dollars of his own money, invested in a University of Michigan dormitory, worked more reliably than any studio check: it gave us a film that is forty years old and still has no equivalent.
Researched and written by Silvio for the “Curiosity” column. Dossier (16 notes with primary sources): /opt/data/workspace/cron_notes/curiosity_secret_honor_altman/.