Robert Altman(1925-2006)
- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Robert Altman was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri,
to B.C. (an insurance salesman) and Helen Altman. He entered St. Peters
Catholic school at the age six, and spent a short time at a Catholic
high school. From there, he went to Rockhurst High School. It was then
that he started exploring the art of exploring sound with the cheap
tape recorders available at the time. He was then sent to Wentworth
Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri where he attended through
Junior College. In 1945, he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces and became a
copilot of a B-24. After his discharge from the military, he became
fascinated by movies and he and his first wife, LaVonne Elmer, moved to
Hollywood, where Altman tried acting (appearing in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)),
songwriting (he wrote a musical intended for Broadway, "The Rumors are
Flying"), and screen-writing (he co-wrote the screenplay for the film
Bodyguard (1948) and wrote the story (uncredited) for Christmas Eve (1947)), but he could not
get a foot hold in Tinseltown. After a brief fling as publicity
director with a company in the business of tattooing dogs, Altman
finally gave up and returned to his hometown of Kansas City, where he
decided he wanted to do some serious work in filmmaking. An old friend
of his recommended him to a film production company in Kansas City, the
Calvin Co., who hired him in 1950. After a few months of work in
writing scripts and editing films, Altman began directing films at
Calvin. It was here (while working on documentaries, employee training
films, industrial and educational films and advertisements) that he
learned much about film making. All in all, Altman pieced together
sixty to sixty-five short films for Calvin on every subject imaginable,
from football to car crashes, but he kept grasping for more challenging
projects. He wrote the screenplay for the Kansas City-produced feature
film Corn's-A-Poppin' (1955), he produced and directed several television commercials
including one with the Eileen Ford Agency, he co-created and directed the
TV series The Pulse of the City (1953) which ran for one season on the independent Dumont
network, and he even had a formative crack at directing local community
theater. His big-screen directorial debut came while still at Calvin
with The Delinquents (1957) and, by 1956, he left the Calvin Co., and went to
Hollywood to direct Alfred Hitchcock's TV show. From here, he went on to direct
a large number of television shows, until he was offered the script for
M*A*S*H (1970) in 1969. He was hardly the producer's first choice - more than
fifteen other directors had already turned it down. This wasn't his
first movie, but it was his first success. After that, he had his share
of hits and misses, but The Player (1992) and, more recently, Gosford Park (2001) were
particularly well-received.