Table of Contents

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 Multi]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

About the Author

Adrian Danks is Director of Higher Degree Research in theSchool of Media and Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute ofTechnology (University). He is also co-curator of the MelbourneCinematheque and co-editor of Senses of Cinema. Hehas published widely on various subjects including found footagecinema, auteurism, cinephilia, rear-projection, the film-on-film,Iranian cinema, Australian cinema, film restoration and home moviesin a range of books and journals.