Shot in Astrodome 50 years ago, strange film still has wings
The Astrodome opened in 1965, a monument to Houston as Space City. Astronauts threw out the first pitch and female ushers were called Spacettes.
So it’s fitting that the first movie filmed in the dome was obsessed with manned flight, if not rocket science.
“Brewster Mccloud,” directed by Robert Altman and released in 1970, stars Bud Cort as the title character, a seemingly meek young man who lives in a fallout shelter deep in the Astrodome (in reality, a set built inside the Astrohall), where he’s constructing a pair of wings so he can fly away. Who he is, where he came from and where he hopes to go are questions the movie never bothers to answer. What’s important is the single-mindedness of his goal.
“Brewster Mccloud” is also a murder mystery: Someone is strangling Houston socialites. And it’s a satire of both hippie dreams and the corrupt establishment, with allusions to the politics and pop culture of the day.
If “M*A*S*H,” Altman’s other, much better known 1970 movie, has aged pretty badly, “Brewster Mccloud” is as strange now as it was the year it opened.
The movie was shot from May to July, about the same time that a 19-year-old rookie named César Cedeño was called up to play for
the Houston Astros. The Astros don’t appear in the movie except, perhaps, for a brief glimpse at the National League standings on the stadium’s scoreboard. But there is a lot of local flavor.
There’s a trip to Astroworld, the amusement park that opened in 1968, for a ride on a river boat. The script includes mentions of the city’s upscale River Oaks neighborhood and its worldfamous heart surgeons. KILT radio’s morning show hosts Hudson and Harrigan offer updates on the city’s ongoing crime wave.
Like Cort, many of “Brewster Mccloud’s” cast members had appeared in “M*A*S*H.” Sally
Kellerman, who played Hot Lips O’houlihan in the earlier film, is Brewster’s mysterious benefactor and protector. Michael Murphy, who was Hawkeye’s friend Capt. Marston, plays a turtleneckwearing cop from San Francisco, a goof on Steve Mcqueen’s “Bullit.”and René Auberjonois, “M*A*S*H’S” Father Mulcahy, is an odd duck giving an extended lecture on ornithology.
There was one notable newcomer. Houston resident Shelley Duvall, a sometime model who worked behind a counter a Foley’s, was cast as an Alamodome tour guide after some crew members met her at a party and liked her style. She would make six more movies with Altman, including “3 Women” and “Popeye.”
Almost 24,000 people attended the premiere of “Brewster Mccloud” on Dec. 5, 1970, at the
dome, including most of the cast. Essentially re-creating the opening scene of the movie, the Yates High School band played the national anthem, followed by a performance of “Life Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black national anthem, by Merry Clayton, who sings the song on the movie’s soundtrack.
Who knows what the crowd thought of the movie. According to reports, the dialogue was inaudible in much of the cavernous dome.
For those who could hear, it was defiantly unconventional from start — the MGM Lion fails to roar, confessing that it has forgotten its line — to the end, when Brewster makes his glorious but tragically short maiden flight inside the Astrodome. And throughout, omnipresent birds poop on the proceedings.
In an interview with the Houston
Chronicle, Altman called the movie “an R-rated children’s picture.” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael dismissed the movie as “schoolboy humor.” Andrew Sarris, her sometime nemesis at the Village Voice, called it “the first American film to apply an appropriate tone and style to the absurdist follies of our time.”
After “*M*A*S*H,” hopes were high for “Brewster Mccloud,” but like its namesake, it crashed.
“Nobody came to see it,” Michael Murphy says in Mitchell Zuckoff ’s book “Robert Altman: An Oral Biography.” “It was a flop. Floperama.”
The movie may not have had legs, but it had wings. More than 50 years later, in defiance of the laws of time and gravity, they still keep Altman’s wild contraption aloft.