Robert Altman: 1925-2006
This entry first appeared on my Movie Mania blog in November 2006. If you haven't seen a Robert Altman movie recently - or God forbid, never seen an Altman film - do yourself a favour, hire one tonight and settle back to watch one of the great American directors in action.
Robert Altman, the wonderful satirist behind M*A*S*H, Nashville and The Player, died on the night of Monday, November 20, 2006. Altman, who was 81, had been battling cancer for the past 18 months.
Altman had been nominated five times for an Academy Award as best director, most recently for 2001's Gosford Park, non of which he won (although Altman did receive the best-director prize for Gosford Park at the Golden Globes). He was finally awarded an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2006.
"No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have," Altman said while accepting the award.
"I'm very fortunate in my career. I've never had to direct a film I didn't choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition."
Altman often employed huge ensemble casts, encouraged improvisation and overlapping dialogue and filmed scenes in long tracking shots that would flit from character to character.
His anti-war black comedy M*A*S*H established his reputation in 1970, but he would go for years at a time directing obscure movies before roaring back with a hit. After a string of commercial duds including The Gingerbread Man in 1998, Cookie's Fortune in 1999 and Dr. T & the Women in 2000, Altman took his all-American cynicism to Britain for 2001's Gosford Park. A combination murder-mystery and class-war satire set among snobbish socialites and their servants on an English estate in the 1930s, Gosford Park was Altman's biggest box-office success since M*A*S*H.
Elliott Gould, who initially rebelled against what he saw as Altman's anarchic approach to the script when making M*A*S*H, called him "the last great American director in the tradition of John Ford, "I'll always be grateful to him for the experience and opportunities he gave me."
Altman was offered M*A*S*H by Fox after at least 15 other directors had turned it down. In his hands, it became the definitive anti-Vietnam War film, despite the studio's insistence on setting it in Korea, full of the farcical humour and coruscating rage at his own country's excesses that were to characterise many of his best films.
He detested the television spin-off series, which he said stripped the story of its anti-war stance, rendering it meaningless.
Altman's other best-director Oscar nominations came for the country-music saga Nashville from 1975, the movie-business satire The Player from 1992 and the ensemble character study Short Cuts from 1993. He also earned a best-picture nomination as producer of Nashville.
In May, Altman brought out A Prairie Home Companion, with Garrison Keillor starring as the announcer of a folksy musical show - with the same name as Keillor's own long-running show - about to be shut down by new owners. Among those in the cast were Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson and Tommy Lee Jones.
Already two decades older than Scorsese, Spielberg and Coppola when the New Hollywood movement took off, Altman settled into a role as cantankerous old troublemaker.
Altman's long-awaited Oscar came last year — just in time — in the form of a lifetime achievement award. Long regarded as "a crazy old uncle", as The New York Times put it, he was finally on the pedestal he deserved.
Altman had been nominated five times for an Academy Award as best director, most recently for 2001's Gosford Park, non of which he won (although Altman did receive the best-director prize for Gosford Park at the Golden Globes). He was finally awarded an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2006.
"No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have," Altman said while accepting the award.
"I'm very fortunate in my career. I've never had to direct a film I didn't choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition."
Altman often employed huge ensemble casts, encouraged improvisation and overlapping dialogue and filmed scenes in long tracking shots that would flit from character to character.
His anti-war black comedy M*A*S*H established his reputation in 1970, but he would go for years at a time directing obscure movies before roaring back with a hit. After a string of commercial duds including The Gingerbread Man in 1998, Cookie's Fortune in 1999 and Dr. T & the Women in 2000, Altman took his all-American cynicism to Britain for 2001's Gosford Park. A combination murder-mystery and class-war satire set among snobbish socialites and their servants on an English estate in the 1930s, Gosford Park was Altman's biggest box-office success since M*A*S*H.
Elliott Gould, who initially rebelled against what he saw as Altman's anarchic approach to the script when making M*A*S*H, called him "the last great American director in the tradition of John Ford, "I'll always be grateful to him for the experience and opportunities he gave me."
Altman was offered M*A*S*H by Fox after at least 15 other directors had turned it down. In his hands, it became the definitive anti-Vietnam War film, despite the studio's insistence on setting it in Korea, full of the farcical humour and coruscating rage at his own country's excesses that were to characterise many of his best films.
He detested the television spin-off series, which he said stripped the story of its anti-war stance, rendering it meaningless.
Altman's other best-director Oscar nominations came for the country-music saga Nashville from 1975, the movie-business satire The Player from 1992 and the ensemble character study Short Cuts from 1993. He also earned a best-picture nomination as producer of Nashville.
In May, Altman brought out A Prairie Home Companion, with Garrison Keillor starring as the announcer of a folksy musical show - with the same name as Keillor's own long-running show - about to be shut down by new owners. Among those in the cast were Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson and Tommy Lee Jones.
Already two decades older than Scorsese, Spielberg and Coppola when the New Hollywood movement took off, Altman settled into a role as cantankerous old troublemaker.
Altman's long-awaited Oscar came last year — just in time — in the form of a lifetime achievement award. Long regarded as "a crazy old uncle", as The New York Times put it, he was finally on the pedestal he deserved.
posted by Jim Lesses at
10:06 PM
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