Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He was a five-time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Director and is considered an enduring figure from the New Hollywood era. Photo by Bernard Gotfryd Altman's style of filmmaking covered many genres, but usually with a "subversive" twist which typically relied on satire and humor to express his personal views. Altman developed a reputation for being "anti-Hollywood" and non-conformist in both his themes and directing style. Actors especially enjoyed working under his dire


In 1969, Altman was offered the script for M*A*S*H, an adaptation of a little-known Korean War-era novel satirizing life in the armed services; more than a dozen other filmmakers had passed on it. Altman had been hesitant to take the production, and the shoot was so tumultuous that Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland tried to have Altman fired over his unorthodox filming methods. Nevertheless, M*A*S*H was widely hailed as a classic upon its 1970 release. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival and netted five Academy Award nominations. It was Altman's highest-grossing film, released during a time of increasing anti-war sentiment in the United States. The Academy Film Archive preserved M*A*S*H in 2000.[13] Now recognized as a major talent, Altman notched critical successes with McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), a revisionist Western in which the mordant songs of Leonard Cohen underscore a gritty vision of the American frontier; Images, his single, Bergman-inspired attempt at making a horror film, The Long Goodbye (1973), a controversial adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel (scripted by Leigh Brackett) now ranked as a seminal influence on the neo-noir subgenre; Thieves Like Us (1974), an adaptation of the Edward Anderson novel previously filmed by Nicholas Ray as They Live by Night (1949); California Split (1974), a gambling comedy-drama shot partially on location in Reno, Nevada; and Nashville (1975), which had a strong political theme set against the world of country music. The stars of the film wrote their own songs; Keith Carradine won an Academy Award for the song "I'm Easy". Altman's next film, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, won the Golden Bear at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival. Although his films were often met with divisive notices, and some, like A Perfect Couple and Quintet were widely panned, many of the prominent film critics of the era (including Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert).


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