URI Students Inspire Professor’s New Book About Director Robert Altman

A quote that’s been on the mind of Justin Wyatt is “life is many things at once.” A professor and author who’s also worked as a qualitative market researcher and served as a department chair, his most recent book is the BFI Film Classics’ 3 Women, about Robert Altman’s dream-like 1977 film of the same name starring Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek. The quote in question comes from Altman’s honorary Oscar ceremony, celebrating a decades-long career that Wyatt first encountered as an 11-year-old boy living in Canada.

It was 1975, and the encounter was with Altman’s film Nashville, a sprawling but personal epic that examines the titular country music capital of the world, and the lives (and conversations) that overlap there. “I went to see it by myself and it sort of changed my life. That seems like a cliche, but it is actually true in this case,” remembers Wyatt. “It was very much about what America is at a certain time – the pluses, the minuses, the craziness, the fun, the violence – all the stuff that’s still going on 50 years later. I became fascinated with America, and I became fascinated with this filmmaker whose vision could come across that way.”

This fascination with the foreign world next door, and the medium that delivered it, set Wyatt on a path of film studies that landed him a job teaching at the University of North Texas at only 26 years old. It was while serving as a professor there that he collided with a film that would once again change his life, Todd Haynes’s Poison, a transgressive triptych of stories inspired by the writings of French playwright Jean Genet. The film’s opening quote – “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness” – became a call to action for Wyatt, and he keeps it close, written down and within reach at his desk over 30 years later.

“At a time when people were telling me ‘stay in the closet, don’t tell people you’re gay,’ I was like… I’ve got to, because I think an out professor in Texas in the ‘90s when people were dying of AIDS was important. It was important to represent,” says Wyatt. So moved was he by the film’s nuanced depiction of marginalization that he wrote a letter to Haynes describing its emotional impact. “I expected nothing,” admits Wyatt. Two weeks later, he received a call from Haynes, and the writer-director soon flew to Texas to talk to Wyatt’s students.

It’s this constant openness to the impact of art and a never-ending drive for his students that not only makes Wyatt a star professor, but also inspires his new book. After a period of working in marketing, Wyatt returned to teaching at the University of Rhode Island (URI), where he’s a department chair and associate professor of communication studies and film. His classes have included studies on film authorship featuring the films of Nicolas Roeg, Sofia Coppola, and of course, Robert Altman, allowing him to introduce Nashville to a new generation. “Students have been kind to Nashville,” Wyatt says of the film-turned-origin-story’s reception, “but I wouldn’t say they necessarily embraced it. The one film that they embraced was 3 Women. Semester after semester, I would have students talk about how meaningful 3 Women was to them as a film, and I started to think about the film again in a different way.”

This response from his URI students pushed him to write his new book, actually listing two of them in the acknowledgements: Isobel McCullough and Sunny Davis. Wyatt says he watched the film upwards of 15 times while writing the book, noticing something new each time. Readers and re-readers of his book will likely have a similar experience – from the comedic anecdotes in the footnotes to the inspired decision regarding the cover’s color – yellow, the main character’s favorite. Insights within the book include how actor Duvall’s handling of a cigarette signals her character’s inner life, and how the film’s three locations mold the character’s actions. Perhaps the same is true for the three locations in Wyatt’s life: the changes brought on by seeing Nashville in 1970s Canada, Poison as a teacher in 1990s Texas, and 3 Women with his students in 2010s Rhode Island. Once again, life is many things at once.