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Robert Altman: Nashville Red
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Robert Altman, the caustic and irreverent satirist behind “M-A-S-H,” “Nashville” and “The Player” who made a career out of bucking Hollywood management and story conventions, died at a Los Angeles Hospital, his Sandcastle 5 Productions Company said Tuesday. He was 81.
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Altman continued to churn out movies in the late 1970s, but none matched the success of M*A*S*H or Nashville. His follow-up was 1976's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, about Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. Though the film starred Paul Newman, it was a flop and closed within two weeks of its release. Subsequent films ... failed at the box office. A Wedding (1978), which featured 40 characters, was not successful. Altman continued to push the boundaries of genres with movies like Quintet (1979), a science fiction murder mystery, but it also did not catch on. With H.E.A.L.T.H.
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The feeling Altman's actors have for him is a mix of what one might feel for a father and a lover. Granted, this feeling sometimes tends to develop more in hindsight. (Folks forget there was a bit of rebellion on the set of "Nashville" when Barbara Harris demanded some back pay due to all.) Altman has butted heads with many of his stronger-willed actors, like Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland on the set of "MASH" or Warren Beatty on the set of "McCabe." Like any great American father figure, from FDR to Billy Graham, Altman is a dictator, albeit one with a gentle hand. It's his way or the highway.
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With Nashville (1975) Altman had his biggest popular success after M*A*S*H. A witty and often biting pastiche of life in the country-music capital, it deftly juggled a plethora of plots and more than 20 characters. Most of the songs were written by the actors and actresses who performed them. Altman used the same format for A Wedding (1978), which had 42 characters, and to less effect, in HealtH (1980), which charted the progress of a health food convention.
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Altman's work in the decades after Nashville was erratic, as he leaped from intimate dramas to enormous ensemble films. His interlocking epic Short Cuts perfected that narrative style long before films such as Crash. His Hollywood-mocking comedy The Player opens with a tracking shot that's both a joke and a tour de force. And if it sometimes seemed that he followed every successful film with one that was simply strange, he was, as he told NPR's Jacki Lyden six years ago, philosophical about how his films were "received."
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This is material Altman knows from the inside and the outside. He owned Hollywood in the 1970s, when his films like M*A*S*H," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and "Nashville" were the most audacious work in town. Hollywood cast him into the outer darkness in the 1980s, when his eclectic vision didn't fit with movies made by marketing studies. Now he is back in glorious vengeance, with a movie that is not simply about Hollywood, but about the way we live now, in which the top executives of many industries are cut off from the real work of their employees, and exist in a rarefied atmosphere of greedy competition with one another.
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