Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the "Hollywood Renaissance" or "New Hollywood" period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs an historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman's filmmaking history and profile-lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate upon their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman's work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.

This dissertation seeks to provide a more accurate understanding of director Robert Altman's early 1970s films, from M*A*S*H (1970) to Nashville (1975), and in doing so attempts to clarify the disputed relationship between Altman, whose work is often characterized as oppositional art cinema, and the norms of classical Hollywood filmmaking. To address this question the dissertation applies a methodology that requires close analysis of the moment-by-moment details of Altman's films that in places utilizes a quantitative approach. This provides a remedy to scholarship and critical work on Altman's films of the early 1970s that tends to claim too much while describing too little. The dissertation also relies on archival resources to support its account, including production and pre-production documents. This approach is employed within the larger project of historical poetics and in coordination with a problem/solution model of artistic endeavor, in which filmmakers act as rational agents setting goals and pursuing strategies meant to effect definable aims. The dissertation's first four chapters focus on key aspects of Altman's biographical legend: his approach to narrative, his use of the zoom, his employment of overlapping dialogue, and his use, or misuse, of the pre-production script. This reexamination finds that rather than characterizing Altman's filmmaking approach as oppositional art cinema, it is best understood as elaborative and amplificatory, expanding upon classical Hollywood storytelling practices in the service of authorially expressive, realist, and aesthetic motivations. The final chapter re-describes Altman's time in the "training grounds" of industrial filmmaking and filmed television prior to his move to feature filmmaking in the late 1960s. In doing so it employs the methodology of the previous chapters while also finding evidence to support and extend their findings. Altman's early career shows how a binary opposition between institutional norms and radical opposition fails to capture the manner in which maverick auteurs might shift the dominant filmmaking paradigm through the accumulation of more incremental, and perhaps more sustainable, innovations.

In a controversial and tumultuous filmmaking career that spanned nearly fifty years, Robert Altman mocked, subverted, or otherwise refashioned Hollywood narrative and genre conventions. Altman's idiosyncratic vision and propensity for formal experimentation resulted in an uneven body of work: some rank failures and intriguing near-misses, as well as a number of great films that are among the most influential works of New American Cinema. While Altman always professed to have nothing authoritative to say about the state of contemporary society, this volume surveys all of his major films in their sociohistorical context to reposition the director as a trenchant satirist and social critic of postmodern America, depicted as a lonely wasteland of fraudulent spectacle, exploitative social relations, and unfulfilled solitaries in search of elusive community.

Collected interviews with the unpredictable and controversial filmmaker of M.A.S.H., Nashville, and Short Cuts

Few careers in Hollywood can match the highs and lows of Robert Altman's. In the past several years, The Player, and Short Cuts especially have seen the director - who has been written off time and again - emerge as a major creative force. (Critical reception of Ready to Wear, his latest film, also fits the pattern of Altman's career.). O'Brien explores the causes for Altman's rise and fall from critical acclaim, as well as the director's unconventional attitudes to the film-making process, which may have left him better equipped than many to adjust to the bitter realities of the Hollywood film industry. He is a true Hollywood survivor. Altman's comeback in the 1990s, and the accompanying reappraisal of his earlier work, is fully discussed and documented, right up to the present. By exploring a rich and varied career, this book reveals Robert Altman's unique position in American culture and world cinema.

Robert Altman—visionary director, hard-partying hedonist, eccentric family man, Hollywood legend—comes roaring to life in this rollicking oral biography. After an all-American boyhood in Kansas City, a stint flying bombers in World War II, and jobs ranging from dog tattoo entrepreneur to television director, Robert Altman burst onto the scene in 1970 with M*A*S*H. He reinvented American filmmaking, and went on to produce such masterpieces as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. In Robert Altman, Mitchell Zuckoff has woven together Altman’s final interviews; an incredible cast of voices including Meryl Streep, Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, among scores of others; and contemporary reviews and news accounts into a riveting tale of an extraordinary life.

In Altman on Altman, one of American cinema's most incorrigible mavericks reflects on a brilliant career. Robert Altman served a long apprenticeship in movie-making before his great breakthrough, the Korean War comedy M*A*S*H (1969). It became a huge hit and won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, but also established Altman's inimitable use of sound and image, and his gift for handling a repertory company of actors. The 1970s then became Altman's decade, with a string of masterpieces: McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, Nashville . . . In the 1980s Altman struggled to fund his work, but he was restored to prominence in 1992 with The Player, an acerbic take on Hollywood. Short Cuts, an inspired adaptation of Raymond Carver, and the Oscar-winning Gosford Park, underscored his comeback. Now he recalls the highs and lows of his career trajectory to David Thompson in this definitive interview book, part of Faber's widely acclaimed Directors on Directors series. 'Hearing in his own words in Altman on Altman just how much of his films occur spontaneously, as a result of last-minute decisions on set, is fascinating . . . For film lovers, this is just about indispensable.' Ben Sloan, Metro London