Blogcritics: Comments on Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Comes To TV

Comment by Rodney Welch

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 16:00:11 EDT

Ed, I hope to see the film sometime. I read the Biskind book when it came out and more or less liked it -- it had lots of great, great information, and I got to the point where I was reading it aloud to my film buddies. So many great stories -- like that one where Warren Beatty wanted another take for some scene on McCabe, and a flustered Altman eventually went to bed and left Beatty there with a cameraman to do as many takes as he wanted. And -- another story -- it certainly deflated the myth of Spielberg the wunderkind a bit, given the editing work of Verna Fields on Jaws. One complaint about the book, though, was that it was too gossipy, in a kind of ugly way -- there were personal details about the people involved that I really didn't care to know.

Comment by Ed Driscoll

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 13:49:01 EDT

Rodney, You're absolutely right--arguably, Altman did his best work in the 1970s. The Easy Riders book had plenty of details about him, but there were less in the film (although they mentioned MASH, McCabe and Nashville, perhaps because they couldn't secure an interview with him, unlike some of his contemporaries. Ed

Comment by Rodney Welch

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 08:51:10 EDT

Interestingly, when people talk about the 1970s, it always tends to focus on those young renegades Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and Scorsese. No question they are important, but any survey of big 1970s auteur names is incomplete without Robert Altman. He was older, of course, but from about 1970 to 1975 he made a string of masterpieces that were fresher and as interesting -- if not more so -- as those of his contemporaries. MASH, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville and several others near-successes in-between -- it amounts to a near incomparable winning streak, artistically if not always commercially. And he continues to turn out great work, albeit very much in what Pauline Kael termed a "one-off, one-on" way.