Author: Mitchell Zuckoff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307273350
Size: 66.16 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Docs
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 576
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Book Description: 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. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Author: Robert Altman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578061877
Size: 31.51 MB
Format: PDF, ePub
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description: 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 also 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. The lively interviews in this book, drawn from a wide variety of sources, range from a colorful talk with Altman as he prepared an early foray into the western genre (McCabe and Mrs. Miller) to a mid-1990s conversation about the challenges of blending jazz and cinema in Kansas City. The interviews probe the many corners of Altman's work, including his epic battles with Hollywood studios and producers, his deep commitment to independent production, his creative views on video and stage-to-screen adaptation (a major facet of his career), and his insistence that he is more an audiovisual artist than a storytelling entertainer. Altman's conversations cast light on his idiosyncratic personality, revealing his taste for intoxicating experiences both on and off the screen and suggesting links between his risk-taking behaviors at the gambling table and the motion-picture set. This collection of interviews is a first-person portrait of a true American maverick whose freewheeling career has waged a decades-long campaign against Hollywood complacency and served as inspiration for new generations of independent screen artists. David Sterritt has been film critic for The Christian Science Monitor since 1968. He is an associate professor of film at Long Island University and the editor of Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi).

Author: Robert T. Self
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816637904
Size: 71.10 MB
Format: PDF
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 332
View: 1329

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Book Description: With his complex and unconventional films, Robert Altman often draws an impassioned response from critics but bafflement and indifference from the general public. Some audiences have dismissed his movies as insignificant, unsatisfying, and unreadable. Ironically, Altman might agree: he makes films in order to challenge filmgoers' expectations of straightforward narratives and easily understood endings. In Robert Altman's Subliminal Reality, Robert T. Self sheds light on Altman's work and provides the most comprehensive analysis of his films to date. With close readings of classics like MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Nashville, as well as the more recent films The Player, Short Cuts, and Cookie's Fortune, Self asserts the value of Altman's work not only to film theory and the entertainment industry but to American culture. Book jacket.

Author: Rick Armstrong
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078648604X
Size: 76.52 MB
Format: PDF, Mobi
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 205
View: 1959

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Book Description: The life and work of motion picture director Robert Altman (1925–2006) are interpreted from a variety of perspectives in this collection of essays. Actors, historians, film scholars, and cultural theorists reflect on Altman and his five-decade career and discuss the significance of music, history and genre in his films. Two actors who have appeared in some of the filmmaker’s most important works are prominently represented, with a statement from Elliot Gould (MASH, The Long Goodbye, California Split) and an essay by Michael Murphy (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, Tanner ’88). The collection ends with an essay on the importance of death in the director’s final productions The Company (2003) and Prairie Home Companion (2006) by noted Altman scholar Robert T. Self.

Author: Gayle Sherwood Magee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190205334
Size: 13.86 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Mobi
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description: American director Robert Altman (1925-2006) first came to national attention with the surprise blockbuster M*A*S*H (1970), and he directed more than thirty feature films in the subsequent decades. Critics and scholars have noted that music is central to Altman's films, and in addition to his feature films, Altman worked in theater, opera, and the emerging field of cable television. His treatment of sound is a hallmark of his films, alongside overlapping dialogue, improvisation, and large ensemble casts. Several of his best-known films integrate musical performances into the central plot, including Nashville (1975), Popeye (1980), Short Cuts (1993), Kansas City (1996), The Company (2003) and A Prairie Home Companion (2006), his final film. Even such non-musicals as McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) have been described as, in fellow director and protégé Paul Thomas Anderson's evocative phrase, as "musicals without people singing." Robert Altman's Soundtracks considers Altman's celebrated, innovative uses of music and sound in several of his most acclaimed and lesser-known works. In so doing, these case studies serve as a window not only into Altman's considerable and varied output, but also the changing film industry over nearly four decades, from the heyday of the New Hollywood in the late 1960s through the "Indiewood" boom of the 1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. As its frame, the book considers the continuing attractions of auteurism inside and outside of scholarly discourse, by considering Altman's career in terms of the director's own self-promotion as a visionary and artist; the film industry's promotion of Altman the auteur; the emphasis on Altman's individual style, including his use of music, by the director, critics, scholars, and within the industry; and the processes, tensions, and boundaries of collaboration.

Author: Robert Niemi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231850867
Size: 23.19 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Docs
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 216
View: 141

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Book Description: 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.

Author: Chair Department of Communications Helene Keyssar
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Size: 39.42 MB
Format: PDF, ePub
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description: Robert Altman is the most quintessentially American of contemporary directors. His films cut across virtually all genres, and though few have met with huge commercial success (apart from the blockbuster M*A*S*H), Altman's unique vision of our society, his distinctive directorial signature, and his defiance of conventional film "language" have all helped reinvent the way we look at America. Keyssar shows why it is time for us to consider this unusual auteur among the pantheon of great directors. She identifies the peculiarities of the Altman style, discusses his films from both a feminist and political perspective, and offers a chapter-length discussion of one of his most important films, Nashville (1975), a "gleeful vision of an American landscape perpetually exploding upon itself."--Publisher description.

Author: Virginia Wright Wexman
Publisher: G K Hall
ISBN:
Size: 79.66 MB
Format: PDF, Mobi
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 243
View: 6541

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Book Description:

Author: Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Americanos. Congreso
Publisher: Univ Santiago de Compostela
ISBN: 9788497502573
Size: 78.83 MB
Format: PDF, Mobi
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 894
View: 4324

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Book Description:

Author: Roger Ebert
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 9780740755385
Size: 61.57 MB
Format: PDF, ePub
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 960
View: 6130

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Book Description: Presents detailed descriptions and reviews of virtually every movie that has opened nationally over the past year, reports from the major film festivals, interviews with important movie figures, and essays on the movie world.