Paul Dooley remembers Altman's 'Popeye'

Character actor Paul Dooley played the comic strip icon Wimpy in Robert Altman’s “Popeye” 40 years ago. The film, long perceived as a failure, is being re-evaluated in light of a new release on Blu-ray.
Character actor Paul Dooley played the comic strip icon Wimpy in Robert Altman’s “Popeye” 40 years ago. The film, long perceived as a failure, is being re-evaluated in light of a new release on Blu-ray.

While cartoonist E.C. Segar's Popeye commits superhuman feats, thanks to his performance-enhancing spinach, fellow "Thimble Theater" character J. Wellington Wimpy often steals the show by bumming burgers. Several Sweethaven residents subsidize his habit though it seems increasingly unlikely they'll be paid back on Tuesday.

Segar died in 1938, but his characters have never left pop culture. Popeye was honored with a Google Doodle in December 2009, and you can find statues of the sailor man in a number of spinach-farming towns like Alma.

Popeye also offered Robin Williams his first starring cinematic role in Robert Altman's 1980 movie, which gave Paul Dooley several chances to take over the spotlight as Wimpy. You can see how the two actors brought their cartoon counterparts to life in the new 40th anniversary Blu-ray of "Popeye."

Dooley has 216 acting credits on IMDB, and chances are good you've seen or heard him in "Breaking Away," "The Good Doctor," "Cars," "Strange Brew," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Slap Shot," "Sixteen Candles," "ER" or in several movies that either Altman or Christopher Guest ("Waiting for Guffman") has directed.

While the 92-year-old Dooley is still proud of the film and his work in it, he recalls that becoming the world's most famous hamburger fan didn't seem like a natural fit for him. For one thing, he wouldn't have lasted or worked as long as he has if he followed Wimpy's diet and exercise regimen.

From Wellness to Wimpy

When asked about his onscreen transformation in a telephone conversation, Dooley laughs and adds, "I had no exercise regimen. When Bob (Altman) said he wanted me to do Wimpy, I thought that was great, but I wasn't fat so it was a challenge. I don't have a big, round nose, but I'll take the challenge and do what I can with it.

"They put a fat suit made of quilting under my clothing. It made me look like I was 275 or 300 pounds. I did eat in Malta (where the film was shot), and my cheeks did get a little chubby. They did. I came back from Malta overweight. They shaved off my eyebrows because my eyebrows grow straight across. The makeup men put artificial eyebrows above them, so I looked like I was always questioning, like a little bit surprised. I had a very tiny moustache. They dyed Robin's and my hair a red color. We always had a hat on so you wouldn't' see much of it. In the real (comic) strip, there's no hair. They transformed me, and the costume did most of the work."

While Altman's usually more adult fare like "M*ASH," "Nashville" and "The Player," which featured a Dooley cameo, is famed for memorable ad-libs, the actors in "Popeye" surprisingly stuck by screenwriter Jules Feiffer's ("Carnal Knowledge") text, even though Williams was famous for improvising (see "Aladdin").

"They didn't change any words. Feiffer was a friend of mine, and I was trying to be loyal to what he wrote. Wimpy didn't have very many amusing lines, but I turned it into a physical performance by the way he moved. He moved like a graceful fat man, like Oliver Hardy or Jackie Gleason. Lots of fat comedians were also very graceful, you know," Dooley says.

Where's the Beef?

Asked how Wimpy manages to eat despite his perpetual freeloading, Dooley says, "He's a con man, basically. He sold the baby for a bag of burgers to Bluto (Paul L. Smith). He's not a great guy. He used to say, 'Come to my house for a duck dinner. You bring the duck.'

"I'll tell you something you wouldn't know. I didn't want to eat too many hamburgers because when you're eating in a film, you do several takes. You don't want to keep overeating. The beef they were making the hamburgers out of wasn't from Texas. It was from Germany, and it wasn't very good meat. I made the rule from the first week, not to eat any hamburgers ....

"I asked props to make me a rubber hamburger made of latex. It has sesame seeds, lettuce, tomato. The whole thing looked perfect, and they had built into it a bite. I would begin each take with the 'burger' at my mouth. I would pull it away and begin to chew but only using my tongue. I faked chewing hundreds of hamburgers."

Another challenge for Dooley was playing off of Wesley Ivan Hurt as Popeye's adopted son Swee'pea. Dooley says Wesley, the director's grandson, was an adorable baby with a distinctive tic that made him pass for the spinach-eating sailor's offspring.

"The baby developed Bell's palsy, so one side of his mouth turned out, sort of a half-smile, talking or laughing or crying out of the side of his mouth, which is exactly what Popeye did," Dooley says. "Halfway through the movie the Bell's palsy went away, and it didn't match anymore, but by that time, it was established."

Turning Spinach into Gold

The movie cost a then-pricey sum of $20 million dollars, in part because Altman and producer Robert Evans ("Chinatown") built a large outdoor set in Malta (which has since become a tourist attraction). In the days before green screens, the immersive background helped make Popeye and Wimpy's make-believe world seem more believable.

"We all felt we lived and breathed in Sweethaven," Dooley says. "The set was so magical and real to us shooting 12 hours a day, eating meals together, we bonded that way. We also bonded with the set. It felt like it was really a place. It was not made for a movie. It was a real whaling village, 100 years old."

If the set and the Blu-ray indicate there's still a fondness for Popeye and his world, the movie flopped when it opened. Altman spent more than a decade working outside the Hollywood system despite the fact that his film eventually made back three times its shooting expenses. It's doubtful that Paramount would put out the recently released 40th anniversary Blu-ray with extras if "Popeye" hadn't been in the black for decades. It's also likely to make even more.

"It actually ended up making money," Dolley says. "It was perceived by the studios as a failure. It got a bad name because it went over budget. If you go over budget, the studio gets mad at you, and so they got mad at Bob Evans, so there was an animus between Bob Evans and Paramount and Disney. Going over budget is forbidden, and we went over budget by $7 million. It went from $13 million to $20 million, so they blamed Bob Altman, Feiffer and Bob Evans. There was more than what meets the eye going on. It wasn't just about the movie."

Nonetheless, Dooley still fondly recounts appearing in Altman's "A Wedding," "A Perfect Couple," "Popeye" and "O.C. and Stiggs." Dooley also helped write the script for Altman's "HealtH." He says that Altman and Guest had a way of making actors who were on the set for a day feel like they were part of the family.

"(Altman) did this thing of having as many people around for as long as he could," Dooley says. "I only worked one day on 'The Player,' but ... he always created a situation where you enjoyed being there. I've done movies where I didn't feel part of them at all because I was there only one day, and the movie was eight to 10 weeks. I often didn't meet the stars unless I had a scene with them."

Dooley may have enjoyed yet another chance to collaborate with Altman, but he also had a unique qualification for "Popeye." Like Segar and Feiffer, he has also worked as a cartoonist.

"I did it through high school and college, but when I started becoming an actor, I sort of let it drift away. I get The New Yorker every week, and I read those great cartoons."

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