Companion to Robert Altman

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

• Contributors viii1 “It’s OK with me”: Introducing Robert Altman 1Adrian DanksPart One Zoom in: Becoming Altman 192 Sponsoring the Hollywood Renaissance: Reappraising Altman’s Industrial Films 21Mark Minett3 From Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Tanner on Tanner: The Long Tail of Altman’s Television Career 44Tony Williams4 Just a Station on His Way? Altman’s Transition from Television to Film 68Nick Hall5 Breaking the Rules: Altman, Innovation and the Critics 92David SterrittPart Two “I’ve got Poetry in Me”: Seeing and Hearing Altman 1176 The Porous Frame: Visual Style in Altman’s 1970s Films 119Hamish Ford7 3 Women: Floating Above the Awful Abyss 146Joe McElhaney and In memory of Tom Hopkins8 The Multitrack World of California Split 166Wheeler Winston Dixon9 The Democratic Voice: Altman’s Sound Aesthetics in the 1970s 184Jay Beck10 Creativity and Compromise: California Split’s Original Soundtrack 210Gayle MageePart Three Placing Altman: Space, History and Genre 23111 High Hollywood in The Long Goodbye 233Murray Pomerance12 Altman and the Western, or a Hollywood Director’s History Lesson of the American West 254Stephen Teo13 Altman/Nixon/Reagan: Honorable Secrets, Historical Analogies and the Nexus of Anger 274Rick Armstrong14 LA and Paris: The Construction of Social Space in the Films of Altman 296Robert T. Self15 “The Man I Love,” or Time Regained: Altman, History and Kansas City 321Adrian DanksPart Four Being Altman: Character, Performance and Situation 34716 “One is Both the Same”: Fantasy and Female Psychosis in Images and That Cold Day in the Park 349David Melville17 Nashville: Second City Performance Comes to Hollywood 369Virginia Wright Wexman18 Altman: The Artist in Middle Age 390Christos Tsiolkas19 Lawful Lawyer, Vigilante Father: Altman, Masculinity and The Gingerbread Man 401Tom DoreyPart Five Zoom out: After “Altman” 42320 Staging the “Rebel’s Return”: The Player, Short Cuts and the Precarious Art of the Comeback 425Dimitrios Pavlounis21 The End of the Hollywood Hero: Dr T & the Women and Altman’s Multi]Protagonist Narratives 448María del Mar Azcona22 The Long Reach of Short Cuts 465Robert P. Kolker23 Kicking and Screaming: Altmanesque Cynicism and Energy in the Work of Paul Thomas Anderson and Noah Baumbach 480Claire PerkinsIndex 501