A Companion to Robert Altman (Hardcover)

Contributors viii

1 “It’s OK with me”: Introducing Robert Altman 1
Adrian Danks

Part One Zoom in: Becoming Altman 19

2 Sponsoring the Hollywood Renaissance: Reappraising Altman’s Industrial Films 21
Mark Minett

3 From Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Tanner on Tanner: The Long Tail of Altman’s Television Career 44
Tony Williams

4 Just a Station on His Way? Altman’s Transition from Television to Film 68
Nick Hall

5 Breaking the Rules: Altman, Innovation and the Critics 92
David Sterritt

Part Two “I’ve got Poetry in Me”: Seeing and Hearing Altman 117

6 The Porous Frame: Visual Style in Altman’s 1970s Films 119
Hamish Ford

7 3 Women: Floating Above the Awful Abyss 146
Joe McElhaney and In memory of Tom Hopkins

8 The Multitrack World of California Split 166
Wheeler Winston Dixon

9 The Democratic Voice: Altman’s Sound Aesthetics in the 1970s 184
Jay Beck

10 Creativity and Compromise: California Split’s Original Soundtrack 210
Gayle Magee

Part Three Placing Altman: Space, History and Genre 231

11 High Hollywood in The Long Goodbye 233
Murray Pomerance

12 Altman and the Western, or a Hollywood Director’s History Lesson of the American West 254
Stephen Teo

13 Altman/Nixon/Reagan: Honorable Secrets, Historical Analogies and the Nexus of Anger 274
Rick Armstrong

14 LA and Paris: The Construction of Social Space in the Films of Altman 296
Robert T. Self

15 “The Man I Love,” or Time Regained: Altman, History and Kansas City 321
Adrian Danks

Part Four Being Altman: Character, Performance and Situation 347

16 “One is Both the Same”: Fantasy and Female Psychosis in Images and That Cold Day in the Park 349
David Melville

17 Nashville: Second City Performance Comes to Hollywood 369
Virginia Wright Wexman

18 Altman: The Artist in Middle Age 390
Christos Tsiolkas

19 Lawful Lawyer, Vigilante Father: Altman, Masculinity and The Gingerbread Man 401
Tom Dorey

Part Five Zoom out: After “Altman” 423

20 Staging the “Rebel’s Return”: The Player, Short Cuts and the Precarious Art of the Comeback 425
Dimitrios Pavlounis

21 The End of the Hollywood Hero: Dr T & the Women and Altman’s Multii¿½]Protagonist Narratives 448
María del Mar Azcona

22 The Long Reach of Short Cuts 465
Robert P. Kolker

23 Kicking and Screaming: Altmanesque Cynicism and Energy in the Work of Paul Thomas Anderson and Noah Baumbach 480
Claire Perkins

Index 501