LYCOS RETRIEVER
Robert Altman
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Robert Altman is one of the most inventive, unpredictable, and hotly debated American filmmakers of the past thirty years. His movies include popular hits (M.A.S.H., Nashville), critical successes (Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye, Short Cuts), and outright disasters (Beyond Therapy). Through triumph and tribulation alike, Altman has never lost the experimental spirit that brought him into feature filmmaking after twenty years of refining his talent on industrial movies and TV episodes. He ... has maintained a gregarious, often garrulous nature, rarely missing an opportunity to discuss his work, life, and ambitions with the many critics and scholars who have plied him with questions throughout his career.
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Robert Altman is an internationally acclaimed photographer who studied with Ansel Adams. He is best known today as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone magazine - Cameron Crowe used many of his images in the film Almost Famous. A leader in embracing digital photography, Altmans recent work appeared in numerous publications including Entertainment Weekly, Mojo, New York Times, People, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
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Description: M*A*S*H: With the release of Robert Altman`s M*A*S*H in 1970, a new form of comedy was born, one that would help to forever change the face of cinema. Altman`s audacious film reflected the American counterculture`s growing distrust of religion and government in the late 1960s and early 1970s, resulting in one of the biggest box-office smashes of its time. Introducing the techniques he would employ throughout his storied career--overlapping dialogue, a constantly moving camera with a heavy amount of zooming, and a bold combination of frank subject matter with cynical humor--Altman immediately vaulted himself to Hollywood`s upper ranks. Based on the novel by Richard Hooker, M*A*S*H follows a group of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital officers as they perform surgery and pass the time just miles from the front lines of the Korean conflict. Led by sardonic captains "Hawkeye" Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and "Trapper" John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), the film has the feel of an absurd three-ring circus. Other characters include the uptight nurse "Hot Lips" O`Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), the confused Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), the troubled Captain "Painless" Waldowski (John Shuck), and the simpleminded Captain "Duke" Forrest (Tom Skerritt).
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When Robert Altman entered the world, these stories made the front page of the nation's newspapers: Adolf Hitler quickly reorganizes his German National Socialist Workers Party after being released from prison two months earlier. He promises the German people that he will obtain power of the German government through legal means. Meanwhile, a Communist organization named KPD is established to protect workers against fascism. In the United States, President Coolidge announces that he planned to eliminate inheritance taxes. AT&T completes a deal for cross-country broadcasting with New York radio station WEAF.
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Robert Altman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on February 20, 1925, as the oldest son of a wealthy insurance salesman. At six, the Roman-catholic boy entered St. Peters Catholic school and spent a short time at a Catholic high school before he went to Rockhurst high school where he began to experiment with a tape recorder. Afterwards he went to Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, MO which he attended through Junior College. In 1945, he enlisted in the Air Force and became a copilot of a B-24. At 20, he wrote short stories and screenplay drafts.
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A signature stylist in American filmmaking, Robert Altman is known as an innovator and iconoclast. With the upcoming release of A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION in June, he's ... once again, riding high. Altman's work helped to define the 1970s. He may have slowed down in the 1980s, but he reemerged in the 1990s (more than once) with some of his best work. The hallmarks of Altman's celebrated style - overlapping dialogue, improvisational acting, mobile camera and zooms, subversive humor - have been displayed since the career-making M*A*S*H in 1970. (Ironically, it might have never been: his unorthodox methods so puzzled co-stars Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould that they tried to have him removed from the picture!) Looking back nearly 40 years later, his films have lost none of their vitality.
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