Word: altmans
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...Born in 1925, Altman came out of Kansas City, breeding ground of such fertile creators and benders of American popular art as Walt Disney and Charlie Parker. (He paid tribute to his hometown's jazz heritage in the 1996 Kansas City.) It was there young Bob fell in love with pop cinema in all its apparent spontaneity. " Those movies just seemed to happen - nobody made them, you know?" he told John C. Tibbetts for a 1992 profile in the Salisbury State University Literature Film Quarterly, "And I guess that's the way I still see movies - I want them...
...Altman's grandfather had been a boss at the Calvin Film Company, which over the decades produced more than 3,000 educational and industrial films; and young Bob got his start directing some 60 shorts for companies like General Motors and DuPont. He had tried Hollywood right after his war service (during which he co-piloted B-24 bombers), but his only official work was an uncredited story gig on the 1947 Christmas Eve. "I'd go to California and try to write scripts," he told Tibbetts, "but then return, broke, to Calvin. Each time they'd drop me another...
...Hollywood was hardly more eager to recognize Altman's talents. A quarter century passed between his first trip west and his breakout film, MASH in 1970, when he turned 45. In between, he directed hundreds of TV dramas and a few promising, thoughtful feature films. His first, the science-fiction drama Countdown, got him fired off the film and banned from the Warner Bros. lot. Studio boss Jack Warner, Altman recalled, "had looked at the dailies and he said, 'That fool has everybody talking at the same time...
...Altman certainly didn't invent overlapping dialogue; that goes back to the earliest days of talking pictures, when such directors as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks and Lewis Milestone picked up the technique popularized a few years earlier in the stage production of The Front Page. But he practically trademarked it in MASH. And he kept using it as a way of suggesting that life wasn't as neat as most movie stories. It was a messy thing - chaos, only vaguely organized - and it offered few straightforward resolutions or consolations. To the movie moguls, that was a call to anarchy...
...kept surfacing in the overdog comedy of National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live and David Letterman and Spy magazine, in the stoned bravado of Bill and Ted and Beavis and Butt-head. (The Bill Murray persona, of blithe sarcasm and weary soldiering-on, could have been invented by Altman; it's a shame the two men never made a film together.) Amid the triage of Korea - read: Vietnam - Altman's super-cool medics found fraternity in cool, cruel...