Robert Altman
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“If You Know the Song, and Your Mother Knows the Song, You Can’t Afford the Song”: Music Supervisor Susan Jacobs Demystifies the Profession
Over her two-decade-long career, music supervisor and self-confessed music nerd Susan Jacobs has worked with directors such as Robert Altman, Jean-Marc Vallée and Spike Lee. She has worked on notable TV series and films such as I, Tonya, American Hustle, and Little Miss Sunshine. She won the first ever Emmy award for music supervision for her work on Vallée’s Big Little Lies, where she worked without a composer, handpicking specific sounds and musical artists for each character in an attempt to mirror the intricacies of their personal lives. On another Vallée project, Sharp Objects, Jacobs exhibited this aptitude again, building […]
by Arrow Peretz on Dec 19, 2023 -
Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations: Explorers, Fool for Love, 12 Monkeys
One of director Joe Dante’s most interesting and underrated films gets the Blu-ray treatment it deserves with the Shout Factory release of Explorers, Dante’s 1985 follow-up to Gremlins that walks a similarly unconventional line between Spielbergian sentiment and Tashlinesque pop satire, with an undercurrent of unsettling melancholy thrown in for good measure. There’s genuine warmth and wonder to spare in the first half of the film as friends Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix, and Jason Presson build their own spaceship; when they actually manage to rendezvous with the aliens who have been communicating with them, the movie shifts gears to become […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 24, 2021 -
Ulysses, La Strada and Popeye: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations, Holiday Edition
One of the more interesting periods in the history of Italian cinema is the era of international co-productions that followed neorealism; kicked off by the massive success of MGM’s 1951 extravaganza Quo Vadis, the Italian film industry entered a boom age in which the location shooting, social consciousness, and limited resources of neorealism gave way to spectacular sets, glamorous Hollywood stars, and lavish budgets thanks to the country’s abundance of breathtaking scenery and attractive production incentives. One of the most expensive and entertaining of the 1950s historical epics was Ulysses (1954), a gorgeously photographed and cleverly written adaptation of Homer’s […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 25, 2020 -
Watch: Olivier Assayas Discusses Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Absurdly Important’ Persona
Olivier Assayas speaks eloquently about his own work, able to talk about them both abstractly and practically. No surprise, then, that he’s as sharp when talking about other filmmakers’ films. A new video from TIFF finds the acclaimed French filmmaker — most recently of Non Fiction, Personal Shopper and Clouds of Sils Maria, and whose 1994 classic Cold Water was reissued earlier this year — talking Ingmar Bergman. Specifically he discusses Persona, the Swedish legend’s game-changing 1966 whatzit, about a caretaker (Bibi Andersson) tending to a damaged actress (Liv Ullmann). Bergman, according to Assayas, showed “that you could be both […]
by Matt Prigge on Nov 16, 2018 -
Looking Backwards To Look Forward
Lately, it seems that events are conspiring to make me look backwards. First of all, about two years ago, I was invited to donate my personal archives to the University of Michigan’s Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers Collection. It was an incredible honor to be joined with such illustrious company as Orson Welles, Robert Altman, John Sayles, Alan Rudolph, Nancy Savoca and, most recently, Jonathan Demme. But it was also a bit nerve-wracking to think that total strangers would be rummaging through my proverbial attic—a hoarder’s collection of film posters, correspondence (actual hardcopy letters, memos and mimeographs!), grosses and marketing […]
by Ira Deutchman on Sep 17, 2018 -
Watch: Steve James on How and Why Nashville Influenced his Filmmaking
Here’s a great video from Criterion in which documentary filmmaker Steve James (The Keeper, Stevie, Hoop Dreams) discusses how he was influenced by Robert Altman’s Nashville. He begins by noting that your most influential films are the ones you see when you’re young and falling in love with cinema, and he then goes on to say that he wasn’t interested in documentary filmmaking when he encountered Altman’s work. But there were aspects of Nashville that impressed him — including, yes, the zooms! — as well as notions of structure that wound up rippling into films like The Interruptors.
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 6, 2017 -
The Delinquents, Peyton Place and The Wanderers: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
Robert Altman was making a living as an industrial filmmaker in Kansas City, Missouri when an opportunity arose that would change his life — and the history of American movies — forever. It was the mid-1950s and juvenile delinquent movies like The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause were burning up the box office, so the son of a movie theater chain owner approached Altman with idea of producing his own teen film. Altman banged out a script in three or four days, and on a budget of $60,000 shot his first feature, The Delinquents, in two weeks with […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 31, 2017 -
Blood in the Snow
Blood Bath “Wait, what happened?” asks Sid Haig at the end of the entertaining but nonsensical 1966 AIP flick Blood Bath, and one can’t help but wonder if it’s intended as a wry bit of self-critique on the part of screenwriter-director Jack Hill. Hill was neither the first nor the last filmmaker to work on Blood Bath, which had a tortured production history even by producer Roger Corman’s standards — and that is really saying something given Corman’s predilection for reshoots, extensive dubbing, and retitling to transform and resell his pictures. Blood Bath began life as Operation Titian, a lackluster […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 25, 2016 -
Watch: Robert Altman Directs Martin Scorsese and Steve Buscemi for Tanner on Tanner
No idea where this footage surfaced from, but here’s Robert Altman on the set of the 2004 series Tanner on Tanner directing Martin Scorsese and Steve Buscemi as themselves. Scorsese has dialogue input and Altman doesn’t know how to pronounce Buscemi’s name.
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 10, 2015 -
“I Don’t Ever Want to Cheat on a Woman Again”: Actor Michael Murphy on An Unmarried Woman, Altman and The American Experience
Actor Michael Murphy is perhaps best-known for his collaborations with Robert Altman, which practically spanned the director’s entire career. But, for a brief moment, he wasn’t known primarily for his turn as a political organizer in Nashville or other Altman roles, but for playing an adulterer. In two consecutive films — An Unmarried Woman and Manhattan — Murphy was the archetypal heel of the moment. That time has passed; Murphy is now often called upon to playspoliticians, judges and ambassadors, parts which take advantage of his patrician/WASP-esque appearance: he looks like someone to the establishment manor born. Woman‘s place in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 22, 2015
