Had to make a quick trip downstairs to confirm, but I've read the Stuart book--that and Harlan Lebo's Godfather book were the first making-of books I read.
I think I gleaned the Duvall casting from a Playboy interview Altman did just before Buffalo Bill came out; he said they broke over money.
― clemenza, Friday, 21 May 2021 23:48 (two years ago) link
team clemenza/eric: afaict nashville isn't contemptuous of anyone except geraldine chaplin (idiot) and michael murphy (liar). first runners-up are shelley duvall (selfish), who has flown in from california; and, admittedly, ned beatty (doesn't appreciate kids or being married to 70s lily tomlin).
what i get from it isn't "nashville is fake" but (cornily enough) "where do we go from here". now that the answer is known it has become a grimmer movie, but not a cruel one.
― difficult listening hour, Saturday, 22 May 2021 00:05 (two years ago) link
Duvall is, for me, the least successful, most dated character in the film: she isn't given a single moment that shades her vacuity.
Murphy is a political flunky right out of The Candidate, but I find his dumbstruck attraction to Christina Raines sweet. I don't feel Altman has contempt for Beatty at all. Chaplin, I guess you either hate her or find her amusingly spacey and pretentious.
"team clemenza/eric"--someone just died several thousand deaths.
― clemenza, Saturday, 22 May 2021 00:14 (two years ago) link
Same top 4, albeit in different order: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jun/17/robert-altmans-20-best-films-ranked
― i carry the torch for disco inauthenticity (Eric H.), Thursday, 17 June 2021 13:35 (two years ago) link
That list is borderline insane. The top four is clearly inarguable but...Popeye at seven?! The Company near the bottom!? And The Player not much higher than that?!? GTFO
― Jerome Percival Jesus (Old Lunch), Thursday, 17 June 2021 13:41 (two years ago) link
Yeah but Popeye is great.
― i carry the torch for disco inauthenticity (Eric H.), Thursday, 17 June 2021 13:44 (two years ago) link
Def need to see Kansas City now
― Its big ball chunky time (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Thursday, 17 June 2021 15:54 (two years ago) link
yeah popeye wld be top 10 for me
― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Thursday, 17 June 2021 19:14 (two years ago) link
(tbf i am borderline insane)
― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Thursday, 17 June 2021 19:16 (two years ago) link
extremely weird to do a top 20 list for a guy who directed 35-ish movies. Why not just rank them all as in the clickbait trend these days?
Anyway, this is my confession that I spent the whole time getting increasingly mad that they had ranked Dr. T and the Women so high before realizing it wasn't even on the list at all. Also, Popeye rules.
― Judi Dench's Human Hand (methanietanner), Thursday, 17 June 2021 19:57 (two years ago) link
there are several great Altman films, and a lot of good ones, but I thought Popeye was mediocre.
― Dan S, Friday, 18 June 2021 02:43 (two years ago) link
I haven't seen a lot of what might be regarded as second-string Altman. There's something laborious about watching his movies that means that if they are not actively enjoyable, it's hard for me to step back and take the good with the bad.The odd exception for me is Quintet, usually seen as the bottom-of-the-barrel, which I actually found quite watchable. Literally watchable, because the sets, costumes and cinematography outclass the script so completely.
― Halfway there but for you, Friday, 18 June 2021 02:44 (two years ago) link
Best film not on that Guardian list is Buffalo Bill and the Indians, it is an semi-interesting semi-failure.
― Halfway there but for you, Friday, 18 June 2021 02:49 (two years ago) link
it was a very odd film but I enjoyed it
― Dan S, Friday, 18 June 2021 02:57 (two years ago) link
I hated Popeye and never looked at it a second time; thought Buffalo Bill was pretty good, better than some of the films on that list.
― clemenza, Friday, 18 June 2021 03:20 (two years ago) link
they do these top 20 lists every week, this one is presumably to tie in with the Altman season at the BFI
― burnt hombre (stevie), Friday, 18 June 2021 09:10 (two years ago) link
I saw Popeye at the cinema when I was about 7 and can barely remember anything about it other than it seemed visually quite unusual to me at the time and for some reason I have a much clearer memory of seeing trashy but extremely fun sci-fi b-movies of that era like The Black Hole and Battle Beyond The Stars.
― calzino, Friday, 18 June 2021 09:21 (two years ago) link
I was probably the same age when I saw Popeye and my main memory of it was my dad complaining about it as we were leaving the theater.
― Vin Jawn (PBKR), Friday, 18 June 2021 11:11 (two years ago) link
Bad news for fans with multi-region players:
Some followers of the INDICATOR label may be aware that, some years back, we teased Robert Altman’s CALIFORNIA SPLIT for a future release. Sadly, and despite a great deal of time and effort, legal complications have proven too much of a hurdle and we can now confirm that this release will not be happening. We are, of course, as upset with this news as you are, but hope to make up for it with many exciting releases of other great films to come.
― Max Hamburgers (Eric H.), Thursday, 17 February 2022 14:59 (two years ago) link
For all its raging misogyny, MASH still holds up well.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Thursday, 17 February 2022 15:02 (two years ago) link
XP Some good chat about that with a poster who works with the label over at criterionforum (starts at post #32)
https://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=752664#p752645
TL;DR version is it came down to budgetary reasons that weren't obvious when Indicator initially licensed the title, and they can't fulfill now.
― Precious, Grace, Hill & Beard LTD. (C. Grisso/McCain), Thursday, 17 February 2022 16:15 (two years ago) link
A friend was telling me about Ann Prentiss from California Split (and Paula's younger sister--you'd swear they were identical twins). God, what a story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Prentiss
Prentiss was convicted in a California court of a 1996 assault against her father, and a subsequent threat against members of her family. The district attorney claimed that Prentiss, while incarcerated on the assault charge, had attempted to hire another inmate to kill three people, including her father and actor-director Richard Benjamin, her brother-in-law. On July 23, 1997, the court sentenced her to 19 years in prison.
She was still there when she died in 2010.
― clemenza, Saturday, 6 January 2024 23:59 (three months ago) link
For some reason the second sentence of that wikipedia article is: "Her father was of Sicilian descent." hmmm.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 7 January 2024 02:26 (three months ago) link
It was between the sisters, Aimless. He had nothing to do with it.
― clemenza, Sunday, 7 January 2024 02:45 (three months ago) link
Whoa, that story's a trip. We watched The Out of Towners over the holidays and were like 'why is Paula Prentiss in this tiny little walk-on role?' which is when we learned of the wholly separate existence of Ann Prentiss.
― Great-Tasting Burger Perceptions (Old Lunch), Sunday, 7 January 2024 15:05 (three months ago) link
They have the same voice too, which is freaky
― Josefa, Sunday, 7 January 2024 18:08 (three months ago) link
Very much so. I saw the Out of Towners a few times as a kid--no recollection of her in that (she plays a stewardess).
― clemenza, Sunday, 7 January 2024 19:11 (three months ago) link
Some followers of the INDICATOR label may be aware that, some years back, we teased Robert Altman’s CALIFORNIA SPLIT for a future release. Sadly, and despite a great deal of time and effort, legal complications have proven too much of a hurdle and we can now confirm that this release will not be happening. We are, of course, as upset with this news as you are, but hope to make up for it with many exciting releases of other great films to come.― Max Hamburgers (Eric H.), Thursday, 17 February 2022 14:59 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink
Just noticed last night that Amazon Prime (in the UK) have California Split in the correct aspect ratio and with all music cues intact, no cuts. It's leaving in 30 days. Even by Altman's standards, it's a wonderfully woozy film - sometimes the camera seems to just drift away from the action and there are whole scenes where the main actors are shot virtually out of frame. Laughed at the Aaron Spelling producer credit - he must have been DELIGHTED when he saw the finished film.
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 19 February 2024 13:46 (two months ago) link
Aaron Spelling also has a producing credit on another favourite of mine, Three O’Clock High (1987).
I’m amazed that JAZZ ‘34 want included in the original poll
― beamish13, Tuesday, 20 February 2024 02:55 (two months ago) link
That's a favorite of mine, and I didn't even like Kansas City very much.
― birdistheword, Tuesday, 20 February 2024 03:36 (two months ago) link
Not the best visual quality but here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48gZLCft9ak
― birdistheword, Tuesday, 20 February 2024 03:39 (two months ago) link
Aaron spelling produced house of yes; i had forgotten this due to being enamored w parker
― Its big ball chunky time (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Tuesday, 20 February 2024 21:08 (two months ago) link
Happy birthday, Bob!
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 20 February 2024 21:48 (two months ago) link
The only filmmaker I can think of whose death made me actually tear up, although others made me proudly sad (Nagisa Oshima, Seijun Suzuki, Bigas Luna, Suzan Pitt, etc.)
― beamish13, Wednesday, 21 February 2024 03:16 (two months ago) link
One anecdote about Altman, I was unaware of how much the man loved marijuana. Generally not surprising, but apparently the guy loved to smoke really, REALLY strong weed and more than a few collaborators have recalled others warning them not to smoke anything he offered them because if you do, you wouldn't be able to work or think straight for the rest of the day.
― birdistheword, Wednesday, 21 February 2024 04:31 (two months ago) link
A short that he made in the mid-60’s, POT-AU-FOU, is about his love of reefer
― beamish13, Wednesday, 21 February 2024 05:14 (two months ago) link
Re: California Split & streaming & the cancelled Indicator Blu...This was just posted over at the Criterion Forum by a user who works with many UK labels, including Indicator:
I'm often told that "surely [insert title] must be available because there's clearly an HD master out there" - but that master may have been created primarily for TV/streaming, which means that certain rights won't necessarily have been cleared. A good example being California Split, which exists in two versions: the full version as signed off by Robert Altman, whose theatrical and broadcast rights were cleared at the time but whose home video rights weren't (since this wasn't an issue in 1974), and a shorter version created by Sony in the mid-2000s for DVD release that removed a couple of tracks after they turned out to be too expensive to license the home video rights for retrospectively.It appears that broadcasting rights automatically encompass streaming rights, hence the uncut version of California Split being made available for streaming - but, as Indicator found out the hard way, releasing the full version on home video requires shelling out what turned out to be an unrealistically huge sum (and unrealistically huge for Sony, never mind a small British boutique label). And while they could have released the shorter version, they reckoned - no doubt wholly accurately - that people would loudly protest not only because it was a cut version but also because the uncut version is easy enough to see on other platforms, so surely the label must be full of utter blithering incompetents who don't know what they're doing (and so on for several more ranty paragraphs).And there's no easy way round this, which is why so many wishlists are full of titles that, realistically, are very unlikely ever to be made available on home video.
It appears that broadcasting rights automatically encompass streaming rights, hence the uncut version of California Split being made available for streaming - but, as Indicator found out the hard way, releasing the full version on home video requires shelling out what turned out to be an unrealistically huge sum (and unrealistically huge for Sony, never mind a small British boutique label). And while they could have released the shorter version, they reckoned - no doubt wholly accurately - that people would loudly protest not only because it was a cut version but also because the uncut version is easy enough to see on other platforms, so surely the label must be full of utter blithering incompetents who don't know what they're doing (and so on for several more ranty paragraphs).
And there's no easy way round this, which is why so many wishlists are full of titles that, realistically, are very unlikely ever to be made available on home video.
― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Monday, 26 February 2024 18:25 (two months ago) link
This goes before the first paragraph:
Part of the problem is that people think that sub-licensing is simply a case of the rightsholder handing over a master and wishing the project well - but in fact in order to get that master into a commercially releasable state there may be a ton of legal work involved, especially if the film dates from before the home video era when third-party rights may not have been fully cleared.
― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Monday, 26 February 2024 18:30 (two months ago) link