… was born on this date in 1925.
It was Alfred Hitchcock who noticed Altman’s work early on and hired him to direct episodes of the television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Altman went on to write and direct numerous TV shows, including Bonanza, but he began to experiment with a new way of portraying dialog in movies. He thought it was unrealistic to have only one actor speaking at a time, since in real life groups of people are constantly interrupting each other and talking over each other. So he developed a style in which he would put a microphone and a camera on each of the actors in a scene, and he encouraged them to improvise dialogue and to interrupt each other and talk over each other and to have simultaneous conversations.
Altman finally got his first chance to try out his new style when he chose to direct a movie about a group of military surgeons in the Korean War. The script had been passed over by 14 other directors. It was written as a comedy, but Altman chose to film the surgery scenes like a documentary, with the actors talking over each other and being interrupted by announcements on a loud speaker. And he chose to use lots of fake blood. The studio almost didn’t release the movie because the executives thought the mixture of violence and comedy was morbid and the profanity was too strong. But when it came out at the height of the Vietnam War, M*A*S*H (1970) became the highest-grossing movie of the year.
Altman went on to make a series of movies that are now considered classics, including McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), about a brothel in the Old West; and Nashville (1975), about the country music industry.