The Twin Geeks

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Over the course of nearly 50 active years in the film industry, Robert Altman created a total of 35 unique and creative feature films. It has been a long journey to catalog the trajectory of that storied course, but we come now, some four months later, at the end of the road. From an early peak in the mid-1970s, he was churning out an unmatchable string of masterful ensemble contemplations, to a rough era of uncompromised artistic efforts in the '80s, which suffer significantly in spite of his rejection of rigid studio control. The '90s saw a triumphant return for Hollywood's most notorious maverick, with both audiences and backers alike. A revived interest in Altman as a creative force allowed him to finish out his career in splendor, working up 'till his dying days on his latest project of eminent interest. Altman proved with his late-career successes that his creative well never dried, but were his final creations of the same caliber and interest as his greatest masterpieces? Tune in for our final episode discussing the entire career of the late, great, Robert Altman. 

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It's not often, in Hollywood, that our heroes find a second wind. It's true that everyone loves a happy ending, but they love a devastating tragedy just as much, if not more. Some of the industry's most treasured pioneers spent the later halves of their career languishing out in the cold, and after more than a decade of relative isolation from the bigwigs in California, it seemed like that same familiar fate was destined for Robert Altman, too. But in 1992, Altman had his comeback, and in such a way that couldn't have been more perfect for the man who spent his entire time in the sun bucking the profit-driven conventionality of the Hollywood system. The Player was an incisive mockery of Hollywood using the tools of its myriad stars and rote ideas against itself, and it was a resounding success. Because even more than a happy ending or a tragic downfall, Hollywood loves to be cynical about itself.

Throughout his career, Altman had always prioritized an interest in his actors, and that reputation now returned its favor in a career-saving way. Everyone in Hollywood wanted to work with Altman, and so when the time came to enlist a gargantuan cast of Hollywood's most famous names, everyone came on board, solidifying the inside-nature of The Player while also building its audience appeal for an artistic swing that couldn't miss. Altman carried over this clout and size to subsequent projects throughout the '90s, following up his massive hit with an amalgam adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories in Short Cuts (1993) and a comic exposé of the Paris fashion scene in Prêt-à-Porter (1994). He returned to his roots with a jazzed-up gangster flick set in his home town, Kansas City (1996) before trying something completely new by making a conventional no-frills thriller. The Gingerbread Man (1998) was adapted from an incomplete John Grisham novel, and its failure to impress either audiences or critics dampened the high Altman was riding from his nominal comeback, already on the downslide thanks to the middling reception of his previous two films.

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Altman's continued trend of adapting stage plays into feature films proceeded into the end of the '80s with mixed successes. On one hand there were films like Secret Honor (1984), a scaled-back character study of a fictional Richard Nixon contemplating on the missteps and bitter grudges of his tumultuous political career, carried by an astounding one-man performance from Phillip Baker Hall. On the other you have something like Fool for Love (1985), an oddball testimony of toxic relationships that occasionally dips into the surreal and esoteric, with no clear reasoning or well-defined characters to ground its unaccountable departures. He did make at least one studio film between now and his eventual Hollywood comeback, a supposed satire on the burgeoning teen comedy genre called O.C. and Stiggs (1985), based on a beloved National Lampoon article from the time. Altman himself considered it a total failure, and the questionable politics and sensibilities of the story somewhat call into question the sensitive and socially intuitive Altman we thought we knew from a few films back.

And if that doesn't assure you completely of his lack of consideration for marginalized characters, then the unmitigated offenses of Beyond Therapy (1987) will surely remind you that the '80s were a time bereft of needed allies. Fear not, though, as promises of the breakthrough to come manifest in a television mini series he did with Tim Roth and Paul Rhys on the life of Vincent van Gogh that was later truncated and released theatrically, appropriately called Vincent and Theo (1990). There's something about the tragic arc of the famous Dutch artist's failed career that fascinates us cinematically. He's been the subject of so many films, even to this day. It seems only natural that as individual an artist as Altman would take a stab at capturing his life and emotions on celluloid, with greater insight and sensitivity towards his plight than most other hagiographic renderings have lent him.

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The legacy of Robert Altman presides mostly in the '70s, based on the strength of his back-to-back run of multiple masterpieces in the early part of that decade. That trend did not continue for him on into the '80s, as a series of previous flops put him in a precarious scenario of needing a big commercial hit that studio executives were praying would allude him. Peculiar oddities like A Perfect Couple (1979) and HealtH (1980) estranged him from producers in Hollywood, on top of already being something of a pariah for his maverick-like approach to directing his pictures, and they were looking for any reason to box him out for good. After the perceived disaster of his big-budget Popeye adaptation (which was actually a financial success), Altman was booted from Hollywood and forced to take up work on the stage. Subsequently, he adapted Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) and Streamers (1983) into critically successful works that, while no boon with audiences nor studio heads, revived his flagging reputation in the eyes of critics around the world. The '80s was certainly no high point for Altman's directorial career, but it was certainly not a wash either.

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If the central thesis of Altman's directorial bent has always been an investigation of what America means, then Nashville (1975) is his ultimate statement on the matter. This sprawling opus of the country musical capital of the country brings together all the disparate, intersecting elements of our culture into an overlapping menagerie of cultural curios and distinct personalities, clashing and interacting with one another as political tensions broil in the background. Altman produced this film on the eve of American's bicentennial anniversary, and he must have been obsessively aware of the nation's foul spirit of patriotism clogging up the air, because he followed Nashville with another incisive examination of American culture. In Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), Altman turns to the past to discover the roots of America's performative history. The origin of the Wild West show, and its myth-making, is put on blast here, exposing the charlatan Wild Bill as the revisionist and exploitation artist he is, reliving the subjugation and erasure of the Native Americans from their land now through popular entertainment. It's a worthy satire for Altman, but one that may be already apparent from the film's lengthy title alone. 

The origin of 3 Women (1977), Altman always said, came to him in a dream, but he pitched the story to producer Alan Ladd Jr. claiming it was a story he read and wanted to adapt. As ever a master he was at gaming the system as he was at making some of the greatest films of all time, it never ceases to amaze how Altman managed to convince these big studios time and time again to take risks on these odd and esoteric art films, all of which inevitably lost money. 3 Women may be the best of the bunch, with strong themes of identity and thick, surrealist atmosphere to match the dreamlike nature of its conception, Altman delivers an incredible, interior work of art that leaves you with just as many questions as the most enigmatic of dreams often do. While doing publicity for 3 Women Altman was asked what his next movie would be. Glibly, he responded, "a wedding," as amateur recordings of events was a recognized craze. But the more he thought about the off hand remark the more he realized how good an idea it actually was. A grand, centralizing setting with a large cast of characters; a perfect opportunity to create a cacophony of overlapping dialogue and stories; a coming together of two socially distinct sects of society under the umbrella of a religious tradition core to the practices of the American people -- what's more Altman than that?

A Wedding (1978) is all of those things, and more, but for once the outsized nature of Altman's ambitions seems too large for even him to wrangle in. The cast is twice the size of that in Nashville, an intentional challenge on behalf of the film's writer to outdo the grandeur and spectacle captured in masterpiece. But when you're writing characters to hit an arbitrary quota instead of following what the demands of the story call for, it's inevitable that many will fall by the wayside or feel underdeveloped. A Wedding retains all the hallmarks of an Altman epic, losing none of the deftness of his directorial talent in the process, but a certain ineffable elements remains missing all the same. Such is the case as well in Quintet (1979), a bizarre, unknowable effort from Altman in which he is clearly as present as ever behind the camera, but the audience is left out in the cold. As his only true work of fantastical science-fiction, Quintet is at least notable in its total departure from convention for Altman, fixating itself on the quasi-near future in which a new ice age has overtaken the planet and the small clique of surviving humans occupy themselves with the titular game of life and death. It's so erratic and offbeat that it's difficult to even describe, as the setting and nature of the game are never made particularly clear by the film itself. But, Altman seems to understand it all in spite of how he attempts to communicates with us, only failing in the sense that it made no money and both audiences and critics rejected it out of hand. Even today, Quintet is far from a beloved cult classic of Altman's oeuvre -- but who knows, maybe Altman buried some sincerely true revelations within the bedrock of this singularly outlandish art film, and all of us are simply incapable of seeing through the frosted glass of his camera lens to perceive it as the masterpiece it is... but probably not.

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And thus began Altman's unprecedented run of innovative masterworks. One by one, Altman ran the gamut of American genre favorites, upending and undoing every convention and expectation held within their structures as a means of dissecting and interrogating the inherent truths buried beneath their mountains of cliches. Time and time again, contemporaries of Altman have called McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)(a film Altman himself dubbed an "Anti-Western") his greatest film. Not to give away the ending, but we tend to agree. Images (1972) was Altman's sole contribution to the horror genre, and quite expectedly for the maverick director, its unconventional nature sets it apart from comparable contenders and leaves an indelible impact on the mind. His signature iconoclasm is never better represented, however, than in the tearing down of an American literary favorite in the form of an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. With Elliot Gould starring as the ineffectual, yet still effortlessly cool, Phillip Marlowe in a complete subversion of the typically suave and collected Noir private eye. Continuing their collaboration, Altman and Gould pair again for California Split (1974), a buddy comedy with sinister undertones as the specter of addiction looms over the heads of two free-wheeling, luckless gamblers. It was inevitable, then, that Altman would find himself drifting towards the nostalgic trend of reconsidering the romantic vision of the turbulent Great Depression and the lionized gangsters of that time. Thieves Like Us (1975) strips away most of the action and drama to focus on the intimate conflicts of such characters, achieving a kind of tragic serenity that, while quite of a piece with the earlier Altman upheavals, nonetheless retains his signature of deconstructing the American psyche in search of inherent cultural truths nestled in their cores.

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Often recognized as a maverick within the Hollywood system, during a time when everyone was a maverick trying to reinvent the American industry just as it had creatively bottomed out, Robert Altman was truly a filmmaker of his own making. Preceding his New Hollywood contemporaries by about a generation, Altman fought in World War II and made his directorial debut in the '50s, before moving on to hone his craft in television. Over time, Altman would become known for his naturalism as a filmmaker, utilizing a detached camera and improvisational, overlapping dialogue to give his films a sense of realism relatively unknown to the American scene. He had an innate sense for social critique, beginning with his breakout success M*A*S*H in 1970. But you can see this style reveal itself even before this career-defining work, as Altman the director was seemingly born just the year before with That Cold Day in the Park (1969). From the beginning to the end Altman remained an individual talent. Even in his earliest efforts a uniqueness remains potent, despite any efforts to eradicate his voice from the picture. So much so, that by the time of Brewster McCloud (1970), you could confidently say nobody else had neither the skill, nor the gall, to make such a film.

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Bakshi continued his pursuit of avante-garde animation throughout the 1980s. His refinement of rotoscoping as a means of perfecting the fluid translation of human movement continued into the decade, beginning with American Pop (1981): a jukebox journey through America's cultural apogee, starting with the sonic roots of vaudeville and ragtime, building towards an electric rock 'n roll climax through the eyes of four musicals generations. 1982 saw the release of a project Bakshi first began after the production of Cookskin (1975). Hey Good Lookin' was originally envisioned as an animation/live-action hybrid, but was scrapped by Warner Bros. after its initial completion when doubts around its financial prospects festered. Bakshi worked on it off and on between his various other projects, eventually releasing it as a completely animated feature, far from the innovative conceit he initially pursued.

With Fire and Ice (1983), Bakshi collaborated with legendary comic artist Frank Frazetta in order to ride the wave of popular sword and sorcery films kicked off the previous year by Conan the Barbarian. Bakshi returned to the reliable shorthand of rotoscoping in order to effectively convey the requisite amount of action the film's story called for. Despite failing to capitalize on the market's purported success for these kinds of films, Fire and Ice eventually found a cult following in the home video market, maintaining a niche fanbase to this day. After that, Bakshi shifted his priorities back to television, heading a revival for the old Terry Toons creation Might Mouse, coming full circle to the place he began in the industry. It was nearly another decade before Bakshi made another feature film -- his last, in fact, for both the animated medium and the silver screen.

Cool World (1992) was Bakshi's most ambitious and star-studded film, bringing with it a greater wave of scrutiny than any of his previous underground works had ever received. With big names like Brad Pitt and Kim Basinger attached, along with the publicity power of Paramount Pictures in tow, Cool World was positioned to be the most commercially viable film of Bakshi's career. That's probably one of the biggest factors that led to its ultimate failure, alongside studio interference curbing Bakshi's initial vision of hybrid animation/live-action horror film into the more audience-friendly Who Framed Roger Rabbit? riff it finally ended up as. Its wider reach led to greater declamation, and the effective end of his movie-making career. Two years later Bakshi directed a made-for-tv film for Showtime, notable only for its debut of Jared Leto as a leading performer, and for being the only non-animated film of Bakshi's entire catalogue.

There are plenty of ups and downs to be found through Ralph Bakshi's storied career. His works are often crudely uneven, and even controversial in their imagery and messaging. But these uncomfortable elements are what ultimately make him a compelling and pioneering figure in film history. Beyond proving a viability for adult-centric animated films which can talk about sex and politics and institutional racism, Bakshi struck out with a unique sensibility for the form itself, combining any and all techniques available to him in order to further his provocative and creative artistic sensibilities. Whether he was drawing from his own life living in impoverished New York slums, or adapting the works of literary titans, Bakshi brought something wholly unique to the animated scene. And despite the relative retirement he presides in now, having been rejected by the movie-going public too often to continue, his work lives on and speaks for itself. There's a reason Bakshi's legend lives on, as the field of animation increasingly returns to the homogenous, Disney-centric sensibilities he once railed so thoroughly against. Despite consistent flaws, Bakshi's work maintains a uniquely subversive quality which resonates some thirty years past his last theatrical contribution to the medium.

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With the death of the Haye's Code in the late 1960's and a dearth of new movies from the Disney Corporation's homogenous stranglehold over the field of animation, the time was right for new players to take up the field, carving out a unique landscape in cinema which was not only varied in its style and artistic voices, but in its audiences as well. The leader of this pack was a Jewish animator from a historically Black neighborhood in Brooklyn -- two informative elements of Bakshi's past which would inform much of his earliest work in feature film. He cut his teeth in television, working on a variety of serialized cartoons with an emphasis on slapstick and comedy, honing his skills for the eventual day he would aim to apply these sensibilities beyond the limited scope of children's entertainment.

Those ambitions culminated in the first animated film to receive an X Rating: 1972's Fritz the Cat, an adaptation of Robert Crumb's provocative comic strip satire of the same name. It was the first of several X-Rated animated films Bakshi would make, each building off the low-budget, underground, urban aesthetics inherent to the director's innate sensibilities. His art would perpetuate a propensity for lewdness, feature excesses of nudity and violence as a means of not only challenging audiences' preconceptions of what animation could and should be, but also as a means of harkening back to the medium's origins, where titillation and subversion were primary appeals of the animated form. Bakshi would go on to apply his inherently transgressive sensibilities to more conventional animated avenues, brightening up the fantastical worlds of Wizards (1977) and an innovative adaptation of The Lord of the Rings which would impress itself as a vital influence on the later definitive interpretations of Peter Jackson.

While certainly popular in his time, Bakshi always struggled to get his films made. Even in their most broadly appealing form, each were distinctive counter culture works, challenging the viewer to engage with Bakshi's vision on both visual and thematic levels at every turn. They are not always easy works to swallow -- Bakshi's fearlessness when it comes to depicting racial caricatures as a means of uncomfortable satire and cultural reflection has never been unanimously received -- but that willingness to challenge viewers continues to make him a fixture of cinematic interest. Though the craft is often crude, for any number of different reasons, Bakshi's works endure as distinct, innovative cornerstones in the canon of feature animation.

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