Table of Contents
Contributors viii
1 “It’s OK with me”: Introducing Robert Altman 1Adrian Danks
Part One Zoom in: Becoming Altman 19
2 Sponsoring the Hollywood Renaissance: Reappraising Altman’s Industrial Films 21Mark Minett
3 From Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Tanner on Tanner: The Long Tail of Altman’s Television Career 44Tony Williams
4 Just a Station on His Way? Altman’s Transition from Television to Film 68Nick Hall
5 Breaking the Rules: Altman, Innovation and the Critics 92David 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 119Hamish Ford
7 3 Women: Floating Above the Awful Abyss 146Joe McElhaney and In memory of Tom Hopkins
8 The Multitrack World of California Split 166Wheeler Winston Dixon
9 The Democratic Voice: Altman’s Sound Aesthetics in the 1970s 184Jay Beck
10 Creativity and Compromise: California Split’s Original Soundtrack 210Gayle Magee
Part Three Placing Altman: Space, History and Genre 231
11 High Hollywood in The Long Goodbye 233Murray Pomerance
12 Altman and the Western, or a Hollywood Director’s History Lesson of the American West 254Stephen Teo
13 Altman/Nixon/Reagan: Honorable Secrets, Historical Analogies and the Nexus of Anger 274Rick Armstrong
14 LA and Paris: The Construction of Social Space in the Films of Altman 296Robert T. Self
15 “The Man I Love,” or Time Regained: Altman, History and Kansas City 321Adrian 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 349David Melville
17 Nashville: Second City Performance Comes to Hollywood 369Virginia Wright Wexman
18 Altman: The Artist in Middle Age 390Christos Tsiolkas
19 Lawful Lawyer, Vigilante Father: Altman, Masculinity and The Gingerbread Man 401Tom 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 425Dimitrios Pavlounis
21 The End of the Hollywood Hero: Dr T & the Women and Altman’s Multi-Protagonist Narratives 448María del Mar Azcona
22 The Long Reach of Short Cuts 465Robert P. Kolker
23 Kicking and Screaming: Altmanesque Cynicism and Energy in the Work of Paul Thomas Anderson and Noah Baumbach 480Claire Perkins
Index 501