Trivia / Robert Altman

• Acclaimed Flop: Several of his most well-regarded films (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Short Cuts) did poorly at the box office, thanks in part to getting Screwed by the Studio.
• Attention Deficit Creator Disorder: Despite starting earlier than the so-called "movie brats", and being older, Robert Altman was the most prolific of the New Hollywood generation, making 17 films in 12 years and 15 films between 1970-1980 (that's a rate of a new film every 8 months!).
• Black Sheep Hit: Altman directed The Player mainly to get himself back into Hollywood's good graces so Short Cuts could be greenlighted, and his comments in later years showed that he didn't really think The Player was anything too special compared to his other work.
• Career Resurrection: He spent The '80s working on smaller films (including several filmed plays) and TV after Popeye's disappointing reception. But the one-two punch of The Player and Short Cuts brought him back to prominence in The '90s, along with a positive reappraisal of his past work and even his unusual work in The '80s (such as Secret Honor and Tanner '88).
• Creator Backlash: He generally didn't like to discuss his pre-M*A*S*H work.
• Creator's Oddball:
  • Even taking into consideration Altman's fondness for Genre Roulette and Genre-Busting, a family musical (Popeye) and a rowdy teen comedy (O.C. & Stiggs) were strange projects for him to have taken on.
  • His two attempts at Science Fiction—Countdown, a drama about a NASA moon mission (released a year before Apollo 11), and the After the End saga Quintet.
• The Danza: His films often have one or two characters named after the actors who portray them. Played with in Images, where every major cast member plays a character with the same first name as another major cast member.
• Died During Production: He was doing pre-production work on a narrative film adaptation of the documentary Hands on a Hard Body at the time of his death.
• Disowned Adaptation: Christopher Durang hated Altman's 1987 film version of Beyond Therapy. It's still the only Durang play to ever make it to the big screen.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Altman said that Short Cuts and Tanner '88 were the most creative and original works he had ever made, though he also said that in general, he liked nearly all his post M*A*S*H films.
• Production Posse: Given his long, prolific career, it's more like Production Army. Literally dozens of actors appeared in multiple Altman films, with Michael Murphy, Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen, Robert Fortier and Paul Dooley appearing in the most films. Among the crew his frequent collaborators were associate producers Robert Eggenweiler and Scott Bushnell; assistant directors Tommy Thompson and Alan Rudolph; cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond, Paul Lohmann, Pierre Mignot and Jean Lepine; editors Danford Greene, Lou Lombardo, Dennis Hill, Tony Lombardo (Lou's son) and Geraldine Peroni; production designers Leon Ericksen, Wolf Kroeger and Stephen Altman (his son); writers Brian McKay, Joan Tewkesbury, Patricia Resnick, Frank Barhydt and Anne Rapp; and composers Johnny Mandel, John Williams, Richard Baskin, George Burt and Mark Isham. Then there's Allan Nicholls, whose work with Altman spanned two decades, as an actor, composer, writer, producer and assistant director.
• Real-Life Relative: His first film, 1957's The Delinquents, featured his then-wife Lotus Corelli and his young daughter Christine in the cast. 23 years later, Christine's son Wesley Ivan Hurt played Swee'Pea in Popeye.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment:
  • The political satire HealtH, featuring an All-Star Cast (Lauren Bacall, Carol Burnett, Glenda Jackson, James Garner), was filmed in early 1979 and was scheduled to hit the screen in December of that year, but a regime change at Fox and some poor test screenings led to the release being pushed back, then scrapped completely. Over the next few years it got some individual screenings at theaters and festivals^note and even got screened for Ronald Reagan at Camp David. He hated it, but never received a full theatrical release. An edited version aired in prime time on CBS in 1983, and the full film eventually made its way to cable TV, with some showings on Starz and Encore in The '90s and the Fox Movie Channel in the early 2000s.
  • A Perfect Couple was similarly never given a full release by Fox.
  • O.C. & Stiggs was filmed in 1984, but didn't get released until 1987.
• Similarly Named Works: The TV shows Nashville and The Player have nothing to do with the Altman films of the same names.