Bow down to Robert Altman...

But he's hip, daddy-o.

http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/archive_detail.html?id1=424

SS: Paul Thomas Anderson was brought on to be your back-up director. Did that work well?

RA: Yes. He was with me all the time. He's a good friend of mine. I'm 80 years old. So they don't insure me. On Gosford Park, which was the first time I did this, Stephen Frears was my stand-in. That's all an insurance issue.

SS: How did you and P.T. Anderson meet?

RA: I've known Paul since he started, and he's always been very generous about the origins of his work. Paul agreed to do it, which surprised and thrilled me. His girlfriend, Maya Rudolph, who was pregnant, was in the film as well. So that made things easier. It worked out well.

Robert Altman's Long Goodbye
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Robert Altman, who turns 81 tomorrow, will receive his very first Oscar in a couple of weeks: an honorary one, of the sort the academy so often employs to ease the bitterness of a veteran nonwinner's declining years. (And, of course, to square historical accounts and deflect the outrage of future generations of movie lovers, who might feel that the failure to honor an important filmmaker reflects sort of poorly on the awards' credibility.) Like King Vidor, who had to hang in for 85 years to cop a thanks-for-the memories statuette, Mr. Altman has five best-director nominations and zero Oscars to show for a long and prolific career, so he pretty emphatically qualifies as overdue. He has been overdue for 30 years.

Hollywood has in fact never known quite what to make of Mr. Altman, who seemed to come out of nowhere with "M*A*S*H" in 1970 and, despite the industry's best efforts to send him back there, wouldn't go away. With the kind of weird, inexplicable gambler's instinct he would explore, hilariously, in "California Split" (1974), Mr. Altman parlayed his winnings from "M*A*S*H" — which remains by far the biggest hit of his career — into an exhilarating half-decade run of high-stakes moviemaking: seven pictures in the next five years, of which five are, like "M*A*S*H," at least arguably masterpieces.

Those great films — "M*A*S*H," "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971), "The Long Goodbye" (1973), "Thieves Like Us" (1974), "California Split" and "Nashville" (1975) — still look like the core of his achievement: to paraphrase Raymond Carver (whose work Mr. Altman adapted in his 1992 film "Short Cuts"), they are what we talk about when we talk about Robert Altman. That's not to say that the two dozen feature films he has managed to direct in the last 30 years are negligible (though there isn't a power on earth, or beyond, that could persuade me to sit through "Quintet," "Health," "Prêt-à-Porter" or "The Company" again), or that Mr. Altman's skill has in any way diminished with age: the silky command of "Gosford Park" (2001) is ample proof that it hasn't.

It's just that in the early 70's the conditions were right for Mr. Altman's loose-jointed, intuitive, risk-courting approach to making movies, and the planets over Hollywood haven't aligned themselves in that way since. The wondrous opportunity those years afforded adventurous filmmakers like him was that studio executives, for once in their ignoble history, actually knew that they had no idea what they were doing: a man who could deliver the elusive, mysterious (to them) youth market, as the 45-year-old director of "M*A*S*H" somehow did, became a mighty valuable commodity.

Mr. Altman, who had spent the previous couple of decades directing industrial films, episodic television ("Bonanza," "Combat") and the odd low-budget picture, seized his moment and set about the task of reimagining, with a little help from his friends, how American movies should look and sound and feel. The anti-authoritarian spirit, the caught-on-the-fly dialogue and the invigoratingly original blend of slapstick and casual naturalism that had made "M*A*S*H" seem so new mutated into something even stranger and headier in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" a year later.

That film, a western of an unusually lyrical kind, puts the controlled-chaos techniques of "M*A*S*H" to entirely different use: in "McCabe," the buzzing vitality of the frontier mining settlement called Presbyterian Church serves as counterpoint to an eccentric American tragedy. It's the only movie I know of in which you can watch a community come into existence, changing and growing before your eyes, and Mr. Altman's camera, seeming to catch the whole complex process unawares, is miraculously alert to both the pleasures and the melancholy ironies of growth.

It's among the greatest movies of its time, up there with Sam Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch" (1969) and the first two "Godfather" pictures (1972 and 1974). And like them it's the product of an era in which the nature of the American democratic experiment was being questioned constantly and, in the best of our films, unconventionally celebrated — celebrated, that is, not for our collective military and economic power but for our individual vigor and orneriness and goofy optimism. This was a cultural moment made for Mr. Altman, whose hopeful approach to making movies has always been to get a bunch of lively, interesting-looking actors together and watch what happens, see if they can make something grow.

Mr. Altman had, in the early 70's, assembled an unofficial repertory company around him, a group of performers he trusted to supply the quick jolts of energy — the funky humor and the wayward poignance — his lightning-in-a-bottle moviemaking required. Elliott Gould, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Bert Remsen, John Schuck, Gwen Welles, Michael Murphy and Henry Gibson were, in shifting combinations, the faces of an Altman movie, people who seemed to exist (or, in the case of Mr. Gould, to exist vividly) only in his fictional world. And he gathered them all, along with a few more of their unpredictable ilk, for his epic "Nashville," a movie whose multiple threads of stray narrative are held together by nothing more than a spirit, a sensibility: the weird buoyancy of Mr. Altman's take-it-as-it-comes fatalism.

What strikes you, in fact, when you watch "Nashville" or its three immediate predecessors, "The Long Goodbye," "Thieves Like Us" and "California Split," is how fundamentally grim Mr. Altman's vision of American life is — and how little that persistent, deep-seated, unshakable disillusion actually affects the tone of the movies. All the characters in those pictures are in one way or another disappointed, but disappointment doesn't appear to be a big deal for Mr. Altman. Maybe because he had to wait so long to fulfill his artistic ambitions, because he arrived so late to the Hollywood party, he seems to know (every one of his movies says it) that disappointment never killed anybody. "It's O.K. with me" is the dopey mantra of Mr. Gould's Phillip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye"; the crowd at the end of "Nashville," shocked by an act of sudden violence, gets over its horror by singing along to a tune called "It Don't Worry Me." And although in both pictures the effect is ironic, in neither case is it wholly ironic. On some level, Mr. Altman shrugs along with his characters.

He would need, as it turned out, every bit of that world-weary insouciance in the years that followed "Nashville," when it gradually became clear that the moment for his sort of exploratory filmmaking was passing, and then simply past. His stock company slowly dispersed, his college-age audience grew up and entered the so-called real world (which proved to be rather like the prosperous, company-run town that in the end no longer needs beautiful dreamers like John McCabe), and the studios became, I think it's fair to say, less tolerant of box-office failure.

You could almost feel the air leaking out of Mr. Altman's balloon in the late 70's. And by the 80's this profoundly American filmmaker had moved to Europe and largely reinvented himself as a less ambitious sort of artist: a master craftsman and a miniaturist, not a fresco painter dangling perilously from cathedral ceilings. He found work directing operas, plays and, television dramas, and for the big screen contented himself with a series of filmed theater pieces, most of which involved just one set and a limited number of characters. (The most memorable of them, 1984's "Secret Honor," is a one-man show about Nixon.)

In a way, the Robert Altman of this period is like one of the aging outlaws of "The Wild Bunch": "It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do." And although his 80's movies are less exciting, their very smallness allows you to appreciate the beauty and resourcefulness of Mr. Altman's technique: the slow zooms, the fluid tracking shots, the elegantly timed cuts (usually on movement), the extraordinary assurance with which he explores the confined spaces and controls the dramatic rhythm, are immensely satisfying even when his material is second-rate.

He kept his instrument in tune, and when a terrific script finally came his way — Julian Mitchell's "Vincent & Theo," about the van Gogh brothers — he was more than ready. The movie he made, which was released in 1990 as an art-house picture (and is now available, in a gorgeous transfer, on DVD), seems to me the best of his post-"Nashville" films: moving, powerful, scary and in love with light. Mr. Altman's direction is somber and almost classical, which may partly explain why the picture is so good: he's often at his sharpest when he's doing something he hasn't done before.

The movie that put him, briefly, back on the Hollywood map, though, was familiar territory — the darkly comic ensemble piece "The Player" (1992), whose setting is Hollywood itself and whose rampaging energy seems to derive from the glee of consummating a long-nursed revenge fantasy. "The Player" is his funniest movie, and, in the end, a prime example of the O.K.-with-me attitude that has enabled Mr. Altman to get by, and occasionally thrive, in the funhouse-mirror culture of studio filmmaking.

He seized that moment, too, to try to recapture a bit of the early-70's exuberance. But he couldn't quite locate it, either in "Short Cuts" (which is brilliant but sour-spirited) or in the 1996 "Kansas City" (in which the cast let him down). What got his juices flowing again, peculiarly enough, was the elaborate English murder-mystery trifle "Gosford Park," which revealed, to his evident delight, that there was a whole new world of Altman actors waiting for him in the old world.

If honorary Oscars are to some degree awards for longevity and brute persistence, then Mr. Altman qualifies on that score, too: he's the unlikeliest imaginable survivor of the Hollywood system. When he steps onto the stage of the Kodak Theater on March 5 as this year's distinguished geezer, he might feel a twinge of is-this-all-there-is? disappointment, but his movies tell us that he'll get over it. He might even reflect that Sam Peckinpah — his junior by one day, and 20 years dead — blew out his heart fighting the studios, and never got his vindication. And Robert Altman, I expect, will accept his statuette with (perhaps slightly mordant) good grace, because it'll do.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

odd that he doesn't mention "Three Women".

"He Needs Me"

"It Don't Worry Me"

"The Long Goodbye" theme (Jack Riley solo piano version)

"Suicide Is Painless (MASH theme)" (seems inevitable, don't it)

"Tapedeck in His Tractor"

that Leonard Cohen tune about some Joseph looking for a manger

xpost

But besides a couple of screenplays, it the closest he's ever come to an Oscar before.

Here Comes The Hotstepper.

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/03/be-like-bob.html

It's taken a long time for ­Robert Altman to win an ­Oscar, but the 81-year-old director scoffs at the notion that he and Hollywood hate each other. "The press cooked this feud up," he tells us. "I've been nominated five times. That's one out of five films. So why should I be pissed off at Hollywood?" What about that time that a demanding studio exec invaded the set of "Nashville." Says Altman: "I did not punch him in the nose. I just pushed him in a pool. Why? I didn't like him. And I was drunk." Altman says he's currently having "the time of my life." His next film, "A Prairie Home Companion," based on Garrison Keillor's radio show, stars Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and Lindsay Lohan, who all toasted him at a ­party hosted by HBO and Picturehouse. Despite her party-girl rep, Altman found Lohan, "wonderful. And she even sings great!"

http://movingimage.us/site/screenings/mainpage/robert_altman.html

Lindsey Lohan gets a laugh in the trailer, tho it may help if you're hermetically sealed enough from pop to have never heard or seen her, like me.

I plan to watch The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice back to back

Fortunately the MoMA print of TLG was excellent; Images had faded, brownishly.

Nashville and 3W both looked wonderful

Also, I learned that the MomA theatergoer is... a very particular type of theatergoer (blech! ptooh!)

They are legendary, you got off easy if no one punched you or was eating plums.

Saw Kansas City for the first time tonight; lovely print. My fave performance was Miranda Richardson's, with some blissfully dazed line readings; J J Leigh was committed but a little shticky, and Belafonte was an appropriately feral Mr Big. Production designed and jazzed up the wazoo, but a little wanting in the drama department.

Hal Willner spoke beforehand, admitting to serving as musical supervisor while totally "loaded -- the end of a 20-year run." He was sitting directly behind me with Altman's widow and Annie Ross.

Steve Buscemi also did an intro, mentioned Bob glowering at him because he was shooting video of him at work.

Annie Ross? Is she in it?

I forgot, she was in Short Cuts. Last time I went to see her at the Metropolitan Room she was in a terrible mood.

ah, i've never seen her live. She was dressed like an 84-year-old jazz star last night though. Colorful ensemble.

committed but schticky is JJL's MO.

Belafonte is v good in that role, idk his acting career v well, anything else of note?

But sometimes it adds up to more, like in Miami Blues. xp

I've only seen HB in about 4 other films, out of which I can recommend the whole package (singing and youthful beauty) in Preminger's Carmen Jones, and the noir he did with Robert Ryan, Odds Against Tomorrow. For laughs I liked his Godfather spoof in Uptown Saturday Night.

Belafonte also good the same year in the horrifying White Man's Burden.

I saw Three Women recently and it was one of the greatest things I've seen, a sort of mystical surrealist horror coming of age buddy movie - how on earth is this the same director who did Gosford Park

well GP was considered an anomaly (really, mostly on the surface). Don't be fooled by period and decor.

Three Women - written by Altman, inspired by Persona
Gosford Park - written by the man who gave us Downton Abbey

also directed by the man who gave us O.C. and Stiggs

3 Women, according to Altman, came to him in a dream. He and his son were sharing a bed while his wife was in the hospital when he said he saw the whole picture in his head, although not Millie's tuna salad recipe, unfortunately.

speaking of sharing a bed: the glimpse of Pinkie's parents (if they are her parents) in a clinch is one of the most unexpected and touching images I've ever seen in a movie.

the scene of them visiting her in hospital actually made me straight up cry

I saw two hourlong TV plays he did for cable in the '80s yesterday: Precious Blood, a two-hander he directed on the stage first, with a dual-narrator/protag format and good performances, one by Alfre Woodard; and a more filmic one with a contrived scenario, The Laundromat, with Carol Burnett and Amy Madigan. Both minor, both worth seeing once.

Finally watched Buffalo Bill. I was 15 when it came out, and I either saw Nashville that year or the next. It was probably in and out of theatres pretty quick. (Seems to have gotten a re-release of sorts in '79, although I'm sure I would have seen it then given the chance.)

Took a while to find its way, but in the end I liked it. Better than A Wedding, I'd say--it's very much in the Bicentennial moment, with lots of carry-over from Nashville in terms of its meditations on celebrity ("'the' show business") and hucksterism and, um, America. (Also some specific echoes: it begins with an American flag, and the one operatic interlude, with the camera taking in the reactions of everyone in the room, reminded me of Nashville's "I'm Easy" scene.) Newman and Lancaster are obviously having a great time, and Joel Grey's malapropisms (or whatever they are) are very inventive. (Among Altman regulars, the only guy who seemed lost was Allan Nicholls.) I've never seen Little Big Man, but Altman's treatment of Sitting Bull's end of the story seemed very empathetic.

Lester Bangs compared Newman's Buffalo Bill to Dylan on the '74 comeback tour w The Band, especially the acoustic set: presenting himself as a battered Americana show biz legend, in "full scraggle"(don't have his books at hand, but that last phrase was in there). Really comes across on Before The Flood's acoustic side, esp. the seedy speedy anxiety over the finish line of "It's Alright Ma".
Quintet, Newman's (only?) other movie with Altman, is worth seeing too: post-climate change community, filmed in Toronto (?) Winter Olympic Village, where an ultimately deadly game of Quintet is proceeding. *Something* of a Philip K. Dick The Man In The High Castle/Cronenberg existenz vibe, though sloggier than either: it is chilly, baby, and too reserved for most 70s viewers, but still worthy seeing for Altheads.

Full scraggle is apt.

I got 20 minutes into Quintet a few years ago, and it's still on the shelf. I've always intended to give it another try, just not sure when.

Newman and Altman were tight bros who apparently just weren't able to get another project together off the ground. In Altman On Altman, Bob mentions "a script about a bear" he had in development with the Weinstein's as a vehicle for Newman and Naomi Watts, but it got stalled because the Weinstein's didn't think Watts was bankable and wanted her off the project (obviously this was pre-Mulholland Drive). Altman wouldn't budge and told them if they wanted her out, they had to tell her themselves.

As I do with everything from the early-mid '70s, I was trying extract some meaning from Buffalo Bill through the prism of Nixon, missing the obvious--like Nashville, it looks towards Carter, the careful construction of folksy personas and myths. (Accidentally so, I would assume--Carter was probably still a blip when it was being filmed.)

When the film ends on the group shot of the entire Buffalo Bill troupe, I'm surprised Altman didn't underscore the film's dim view of American history by doing what one of the characters suggested: doctor the photo so that Sitting Bull and Halsey were moved over with the other "inujuns."

Finally got around to seeing the documentary. It was kinda not great. What a complete waste of access to so many of his collaborators ("Don't, like, tell us anything about actually working with Robert Altman. Just define 'Altmanesque' in five words or fewer and then stare knowingly into the camera for a few seconds."). I'm glad I've seen most of his films since they inexplicably decided to show the endings of so many of his films. The home movie footage and comentary from his wife were the only things that made it at all worthwhile. To the extent that a career-spanning retrospective might function as an enticement to those who might not be familiar with a particular artist, I doubt this thing netted many new Altman fans as it didn't really explore what made him special.

Yeah, that doc was super disappointing.

I kinda wish I'd followed my initial impulse to shut it off in the middle of the minutes-long initially contextless intro of two dudes building a sand castle...

I didn't hate it, but for sure it could have been a lot better. (I posted a somewhat tepid endorsement above.) It seemed like something that should have been in Ron Mann's comfort zone--rogue '60s guy--but it also felt like commissioned work. The one Mann film I like a lot is Dream Tower, about Toronto's Rochdale College.

Was just skimming the annual seniority list put out by the board I work for. We actually have a teacher with the surname McCabe-Miller (she seemingly gets a double listing, with another one under just her birth name above).

Clearly she married solely on the basis of surname.

So Brewster McCloud got a barebones Warner Archive blu-ray release this past week, and being a Houston kid I had to get it... Shelley Duvall is so awesome in it. Nothing but a trailer included, but the transfer is nice and this movie has been otherwise impossible for me to see!

does anyone have the Pret-a-Porter / Ready to Wear DVD? stretched so that the bottom third of the screen is black. authoring problem, issue with newer TVs? is this movie really any good anyway?

Deep Dive on O.C. & Stiggs...which was almost a Stallone or Mike Nichols film.

https://ocandstiggs.tumblr.com/

Just noticed that Netflix has California Split up (in what looks like the theatrical cut--Runtime 108 Minutes)

There was a rights issue with some of the songs, has that been solved?

That's hamstrung most home video releases (the DVD was recut by Altman himself) but apparently doesn't affect streaming, as the theatrical cut has also been available on Prime for a few years.

I haven't streamed it myself, but for whatever reason, Netflix was reportedly able to stream the theatrical version for years going back to 2009. More details here (as well as a list of the changes that had to be made and why):

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReviews21/california_split_dvd_review.htm

A quote from Altman in that link: "The cost of the music track on California Split was so high that Columbia just couldn't put it into video or DVD. That kept it out of circulation for years. Finally, Elliot Gould went in to find out why they weren't releasing it. When they told him it was because of music, he said "Isn't there something we can do about that?" So I made some cuts and took a couple of songs out. We got it into what they considered a reasonable budget. The picture wasn't hurt by it. And that's out now. It doesn't make any difference, the quality of these things. It's as good as anyone sees them..."

FWIW, Indicator (the UK label owned by Powerhouse) was going to do a deluxe Blu-ray edition for it, but they had to cancel the project long after announcing it due to the music rights issues. Basically it came down to the cost of licensing all the music (yet again), and they didn't have the budget for it - it would've been far more expensive than any title they've done and they didn't want to compromise by using the re-cut version that was put on the DVD.

I’m never sure if it’s bad luck or bad planning (or just premature announcement) that Indicator has but it feels like between that and Ishtar they’ve had some of the highest profile titles that just fell apart after a lot of legwork had already been put in

Haven't watched it for a few years, but what music is there in California Split? All I can remember is "Kansas City," done by the singer in Vegas (in flash-forward, I think--and Gould starts singing along with her as he crosses the street).

Fwiw, I c'n'p-d those notes from DVD Beaver upthread here: Bow down to Robert Altman...

Basically the problem is with the publishers of some of the songs Phyllis Shotwell sings, and a to lesser extent the rights holders for Cheech & Chong's "Basketball Jones" song and promo film.

Oddly enough, the latter appears in every edition of Ashby's Being There.

Phyllis Shotwell, right. And I forgot about "Basketball Jones" (off a TV, I think).

Self-xp

The song <and> video in Being There

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok7Ainmmlvg

Of course, that animation is v.problematic.

From wiki:

"Basketball Jones" was originally seen in theaters in late 1973, before showings of Hal Ashby's The Last Detail at select screens. It can be seen during the 1974 film California Split, directed by Robert Altman, although its use in the film prevented California Split from being released on VHS or Laserdisc due to Columbia Pictures' refusal to pay royalties for the song. Altman later removed the song (but not the cartoon) from the film so it could be released on DVD.

Trying to find some record of whether Phyllis Shotwell is still alive. Highly doubtful, but can't find anything that says she isn't.

Detail from the wiki for A Perfect Couple:

The role of Sheila Shea was originally written for Sandy Dennis. Paul Dooley was seriously allergic to cats though, and when cat-lover Dennis would come to the script readings with up to five cats at a time, he was briefly hospitalized.

Dennis was phenomenal in both That Cold Day in the Park and Come Back to the Five and Dime…

She owned several dozen cats at the time of her death

And a joy in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Im thinking The Player might be the best movie about Hollywood. Now that's got a perfect Hollywood ending! Up!

Centennial yesterday.