Altman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Helen (née Matthews), a Mayflower descendant from Nebraska, and Bernard Clement Altman, a wealthy insurance salesman and amateur gambler, who came from an upper-class family. Altman's ancestry was German, English and Irish;[1][2] his paternal grandfather, Frank Altman, Sr., anglicized the spelling of the family name from "Altmann" to "Altman".[2] Altman had a Catholic upbringing,[3] but he did not continue to practice as a Catholic as an adult,[4] although he has been referred to as "a sort of Catholic" and a Catholic director.[3][5] He was educated at Jesuit schools, including Rockhurst High School, in Kansas City.[6] He graduated from Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri in 1943.
Upon his discharge in 1946, Altman moved to California. He worked in publicity for a company that had invented a tattooing machine to identify dogs. He entered filmmaking on a whim, selling a script to RKO for the 1948 picture Bodyguard, which he co-wrote with George W. George. Altman's immediate success encouraged him to move to New York City, where he attempted to forge a career as a writer. Having enjoyed little success, in 1949 he returned to Kansas City, where he accepted a job as a director and writer of industrial films for the Calvin Company. He began to work with film technology and actors. In February 2012, an early film directed by Altman, Modern Football (1951), was found by filmmaker Gary Huggins.[8][9]
Altman directed some 65 industrial films and documentaries before being hired by a local businessman in 1956 to write and direct a feature film in Kansas City on juvenile delinquency. The film, titled The Delinquents, made for $60,000, was purchased by United Artists for $150,000, and released in 1957. While primitive, this teen exploitation film contained the foundations of Altman's later work in its use of casual, naturalistic dialogue. With its success, Altman moved from Kansas City to California for the last time. He co-directed The James Dean Story (1957), a documentary rushed into theaters to capitalize on the actor's recent death and marketed to his emerging cult following.
Television work
Alfred Hitchcock noticed Altman's first two features and hired him as a director for his CBS anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. After just two episodes, Altman resigned due to differences with a producer. The exposure enabled him to begin a successful TV career; he directed series including Bonanza, Combat!, and the Kraft Television Theater. He also was a director of the DuMont drama series Pulse of the City (1953–1954).
Through this early work on industrial films and TV series, Altman experimented with narrative technique and developed his characteristic use of overlapping dialogue. He also learned to work quickly and efficiently on a limited budget. During his TV period, though frequently fired for refusing to conform to network mandates, as well as insisting on expressing political subtexts and antiwar sentiments during the Vietnam years, Altman always was able to gain assignments. In 1964, the producers decided to expand one of his episodes for the Kraft Television Theatre for commercial release under the name, Nightmare in Chicago.
Two years later, Altman was hired to direct the low-budget space travel feature Countdown, but was fired within days of the project's conclusion because he had refused to edit the film to a manageable length. He did not direct another film until That Cold Day in the Park (1969), which was a critical and box-office disaster.
Mainstream success
In 1969 Altman was offered the script for MASH, an adaptation of a little-known Korean War-era novel satirizing life in the armed services; more than a dozen other filmmakers had passed on it. The 1953 film "Battle Circus," starring Humphrey Bogart, may have influenced the novel and/or Altman's version of MASH. (Battle Circus' original title, "MASH" was rejected by the studio; it was felt that the public might think the film was about potatoes!) Production was sometimes so tumultuous that the leads Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland tried to have Altman fired over his unorthodox filming methods, but MASH was widely hailed as an immediate classic upon its 1970 release. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival and netted six Academy Award nominations. It was Altman's highest-grossing film, released during a time of increasing anti-war sentiment in the United States.
Now recognized as a major talent, Altman had critical breakthroughs with McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), known for its gritty portrayal of the American frontier; The Long Goodbye (1973), a remake of a Raymond Chandler novel; Thieves Like Us (1974), and Nashville (1975). These made his distinctive, experimental, "Altman style" more well known.
Altman favored stories expressing the interrelationships among several characters; he stated that he was more interested in character motivation than in intricate plots. He tended to sketch out only a basic plot for the film, referring to the screenplay as a "blueprint" for action. He allowed his actors to improvise dialogue and was known as an "actor's director," a reputation that attracted many notable actors to work in his large casts.
To convey a naturalistic effect, he recorded the characters talking over each other, allowing the audience to hear only scraps of dialogue. He noted on the DVD commentary of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) that he uses this technique, together with leaving elements of the plot for the audience to infer, because he wants people to pay attention and become engaged in the film. During the filming, he wore a headset to ensure that important dialogue could be heard, without emphasizing it. He wanted his films to be rated R (by the MPAA rating system) to keep children out of his audiences; he did not believe they had the patience and attention for his films. Movie studios wanted the films rated for the largest possible audiences to gain increased revenues.
Altman made films that no other filmmaker and/or studio would. He had been reluctant to make the Korean War comedy MASH (1970), but it became a critical success. It inspired the long-running TV series of the same name. In 1975, Altman made Nashville, which had a strong political theme set against the world of country music. The stars of the film wrote their own songs; Keith Carradine won an Academy Award for the song "I'm Easy".
Audiences took some time to appreciate his films, and he did not want to have to satisfy studio officials. In 1970, following the release of MASH, he founded Lion's Gate Films to have independent production freedom. (It has no relation to today's Canada/U.S.-based entertainment company Lionsgate).[10] The films he made through his company included Brewster McCloud, A Wedding, 3 Women, and Quintet.
Later career and renaissance
In 1980, he directed the musical Popeye, based on the comic strip/cartoon of the same name, which starred the comedian Robin Williams in his big-screen debut. Though some critics thought it a failure, the film made money, and was the second highest-grossing film Altman had directed to that point. (Gosford Park is now the second highest).
During the 1980s, Altman did a series of films, some well-received (Secret Honor, Streamers), and some critically panned (O.C. & Stiggs). He also garnered a good deal of acclaim for his TV "mockumentary" Tanner '88, based on a presidential campaign, for which he earned an Emmy Award and regained critical favor. Still, widespread popularity with audiences continued to elude him.
In 1981, finding Hollywood increasingly uninterested in funding and distributing the films he wanted to make, Altman sold his Lion's Gate studio and production facility to producer Jonathan Taplin. He revitalized his career with The Player (1992), a satire of Hollywood, which was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Director. While he did not win the Oscar, he was awarded Best Director by the Cannes Film Festival, BAFTA, and the New York Film Critics Circle.
Altman directed Short Cuts (1993), an ambitious adaptation of several short stories by Raymond Carver, which portrayed the lives of various citizens of Los Angeles over the course of several days. The film's large cast and intertwining of many different storylines were similar to his large-cast films of the 1970s; he won the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice International Film Festival and another Oscar nomination for Best Director. In 1996, Altman directed Kansas City, expressing his love of 1930s jazz through a complicated kidnapping story. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999.[11]
Altman directed Gosford Park (2001), and his portrayal of a large-cast, British country house mystery was included on many critics' lists of the ten best films of that year. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (Julian Fellowes) plus six more nominations, including two for Altman, as Best Director and Best Picture.
Working with independent studios such as the now-shuttered Fine Line, Artisan (which was absorbed into today's Lionsgate), and USA Films (now Focus Features), gave Altman the edge in making the kinds of films he has always wanted to make without studio interference. A film version of Garrison Keillor's public radio series A Prairie Home Companion was released in June 2006. Altman was still developing new projects up until his death, including a film based on Hands on a Hard Body: The Documentary (1997).[12]
In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Altman an Academy Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement. During his acceptance speech, he revealed that he had received a heart transplant approximately ten or eleven years earlier. The director then quipped that perhaps the Academy had acted prematurely in recognizing the body of his work, as he felt like he might have four more decades of life ahead of him.
Personal life
In the 1960s, Altman lived for nine years with his second wife in Mandeville Canyon in Brentwood, California.[13] He moved to Malibu but in 1981 sold that home and the Lion's Gate production company. "I had no choice", he told the New York Times. "Nobody was answering the phone" after the flop of Popeye." He moved his family and business headquarters to New York, but eventually moved back to Malibu, where he lived until his death.
In November 2000, he claimed that he would move to Paris if George W. Bush were elected, but joked that he had meant Paris, Texas when it came to pass. He noted that "the state would be better off if he (Bush) is out of it."[14] Altman was an outspoken marijuana user, and served as a member of the NORML advisory board. He was one of numerous notable public figures, including the linguist Noam Chomsky and the actress Susan Sarandon, who signed the "Not In My Name" declaration opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[15][16][17]
Death
Altman died on November 20, 2006, at age 81 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. According to his production company in New York, Sandcastle 5 Productions, he died of complications from leukemia.
Altman is survived by his wife, Kathryn Reed Altman; six children, Christine Westphal, Michael Altman, Stephen Altman (his production designer of choice for many films), Connie Corriere, Robert Reed Altman, and Matthew Altman; 12 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.[18][19]
The film director Paul Thomas Anderson dedicated his 2007 film There Will Be Blood to Altman.[20] Anderson had worked as a standby director on A Prairie Home Companion for insurance purposes, and in the event the ailing 80-year-old Altman was unable to finish shooting.
In 2009 the University of Michigan made the winning bid for the Altman archives: approximately 900 boxes of personal papers, scripts, legal, business and financial records, photographs, props and related material; the total collection measures over 1,000 linear feet. Altman had filmed Secret Honor at the university, as well as directed several operas there.[21]
Basements (1987) – two one-act plays by Harold Pinter: The Dumb Waiter and The Room (the former was released to video as its own feature by Prism Entertainment)
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"Sometimes I feel like Little Eva, running across the ice .. with the dogs yapping at my ass. Maybe the reason I'm doing all this is so I can get a lot done before they catch up with me." – 1976[24]
Rafal Syska, Keep the Distance. Film World of Robert Altman, Rabid, Cracow 2008. ISBN 978-83-60236-36-9
Additional resources
The director's commentary on the McCabe & Mrs. Miller DVD, while focusing on that film, also to some degree covers Altman's general methodology as a director.
Judith M. Kass. Robert Altman: American Innovator early (1978) assessment of the director's work and his interest in gambling. Part of Leonard Maltin's Popular Library filmmaker series.
The English band Maxïmo Park have a song named "Robert Altman", a b-side to their single "Our Velocity"
The Criterion Collection has released several of Altman's films on DVD (Short Cuts, 3 Women, Tanner '88, Secret Honor) which include audio commentary and video interviews with him that shed light on his directing style.
Charles Warren, "Cavell, Altman and Cassavetes" in the Stanley Cavell special issue, Jeffey Crouse (ed.), Film International, Issue 22, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2006, pp. 14–20.
Rick Armstrong, "Robert Altman: Critical Essays" Actors, historians, film scholars, and cultural theorists reflect on Altman and his five-decade career...(McFarland, February 18, 2011)
Mitchell Zuckoff, Robert Altman: The Oral Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. ISBN 9780307267689
References
^Lemons, Stephen. "Robert Altman". Salon.com. p. 2. Retrieved November 22, 2006.
^Butler, Robert W. (March 5, 2006). "Finally, An Attitude Adjustment: Hollywood's Establishment Now Embraces Rebel Director Altman". The Kansas City Star. p. 5. ((cite news)): |access-date= requires |url= (help)
^Smith, Ian Haydn, ed. (2008). International Film Guide: The Definitive Annual Review of World Cinema. London: Wallflower Press. p. 316. ISBN978-1-905674-61-9. ((cite book)): |access-date= requires |url= (help)
Cook, David A. (2000). Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press). ISBN 0-520-23265-8
