--- title: Robert Altman Documentary on EPIX: Review description: An engaging new EPIX doc takes a fond look at the ornery innovator behind MASH, Nashville and Gosford Park canonical: https://time.com/3082788/home-movies-robert-altman-hollywood-renegade/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-08-06T15:55:58.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T05:07:57.048Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Robert Altman Documentary on EPIX: Review og:description: An engaging new EPIX doc takes a fond look at the ornery innovator behind MASH, Nashville and Gosford Park og:url: https://time.com/3082788/home-movies-robert-altman-hollywood-renegade/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt593713f445f19bc8/69869e8d1eebf7fea5372259/img223-4261.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Robert Altman og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Robert Altman Documentary on EPIX: Review twitter:description: An engaging new EPIX doc takes a fond look at the ornery innovator behind MASH, Nashville and Gosford Park twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt593713f445f19bc8/69869e8d1eebf7fea5372259/img223-4261.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Home Movies: Robert Altman, Hollywood Renegade by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Aug 6, 2014 3:55 PM UTC  Robert Altman Robert AltmanCourtesy of Sandcastle 5 by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Aug 6, 2014 3:55 PM UTC At one of Robert Altman’s Paris parties in the mid-’80s, Sally Kellerman says, “Bob, remember that shower scene in _MASH_ where you made me get naked? _You_ get naked.” And he does, the big bear in full rear and side nudity, exposing himself to the camera’s appraising eye with the same eager vulnerability he had demanded of his actors. “Bob loved to throw a party,” Kathryn Reed, the director’s wife of 47 years, says in _Altman_ (no scholarly subtitle), the engaging documentary feature that begins its run on the EPIX pay-movie channel Wednesday. His films were raucous parties, too: he would assemble crowds of actors, give them the hint of a story, encourage them to improvise in Babels of overlapping dialogue and let the canny chaos spill onto the screen. That tactic applied from Altman’s first signature effort, _MASH_ in 1970, when he was already 44, to _A Prairie Home Companion_, released just before his death at 81 in 2006, and with _Nashville_, _Buffalo Bill and the Indians_, _A Wedding_, _HealtH_, _Popeye_, _The Player_, _Short Cuts_, _Prêt-à-Porter_ and _Gosford Park_ in between.  Robert Altman on the set of Gosford Park USA Films Produced and directed by Ron Mann (whose doc résumé includes _Comic Book Confidential_) and written by Len Blum (who worked on the scripts for _Meatballs_, _Stripes_ and the Howard Stern _Private Parts_), the EPIX _Altman_ is a generous take on a complicated personality. Mann convenes an all-star cast — Kellerman, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Bruce Willis, Robin Williams, Julianne Moore, Elliott Gould, James Caan, Keith Carradine, Michael Murphy, Lyle Lovett, Philip Baker Hall — to remember the good times and underline Altman’s unique contributions to a bracingly unruly period in American film. Boasting a trove of rare clips from the director’s early work, his location footage, interviews and home movies (including the naked-Bob scene), Mann’s _Altman_ has qualities rarely found in an Altman film: clarity, cohesion and heart. **(READ: Corliss’s 2006** [**remembrance of Robert Altman**](http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1562162,00.html)**)** Born in Kansas City in 1925, Bob Altman served on bomber crews in World War II and went to Hollywood, where he amassed one story credit on the 1948 B movie _The Bodyguard_. Returning to his home town, he made instructional films (_How to Run a Filling Station_, _Better Football_) and a troubled-teen drama, _The Delinquents_, which got him back to Hollywood directing TV shows. On one of these he met his future wife. As Kathryn recalls, “He looked a little hung over. He didn’t say hello. He said, ‘How are your morals?’ I said, ‘A little shaky, how are yours?’” It was the beginning of a love affair that, at least from her side, still hasn’t ended. Fired off his first Hollywood feature, _Countdown_, after studio chief Jack Warner fumed, “That fool has actors talking at the same time,” Altman found his ticket to independence with Ring Lardner Jr.’s script for _MASH_, to which more than a dozen directors had already said no. A gigantic, surprise hit, the movie earned $81.6 million in 1970, which in today’s dollars, according to Box Office Mojo, would be $437.5 million, or more than the domestic revenue for _Frozen_ or any Marvel movie except _The Avengers_. That box-office cachet enabled Altman to line up smaller, weirder projects — a protean 15 features released between early 1970 and late 1980 — from the signature party movies to claustrophobic fantasies like _Images_, _3 Women_ and _Quintet_. Newbies to the Altman canon should check out _McCabe & Mrs. Miller_, a druggy Western with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, and _Nashville_, an indictment of the country-music ethos as a microcosm of Nixon-driven, assassination-prone America. An ornery renegade like Altman could become a mainstream film force only in the 1970s, when, he says, “the studios turned filmmaking back to the artists. So I got to do a lot of stuff that was not the formula that had existed before.” Some directors took their cues from European masters like Fellini and Bergman, but an Altman film was all-American: teeming and loose-limbed, with a political subtext and a tone that could be called either trenchant or snide. (In a Q&A session from the new doc, Altman deflects charges of his cynicism by saying, “I just try to show what I see. If it’s ugly, that’s what I see.”) In a sense, Altman radically democratized movies, upending the Hollywood hierarchy of star over supporting player, story over atmosphere, emotion over all. Viewers of an Altman movie had to decide what was important by what they could catch from all the milling and chatting; they voted with their eyes and ears. **(READ: Kurt Andersen on** [**the ups and downs of Robert Altman’s career**](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,975309,00.html)**)** The last film of Altman’s golden decade was _Popeye_, which parlayed Robin Williams’ TV éclat into a $50-million domestic gross (about $150 million today), Plagued by bad weather and cost overruns, _Popeye_ left a sour taste in everyone’s mouth and made Altman unemployable in Hollywood. “The films the major companies want to make now are films I don’t want to make, also I can’t make,” he said at the time. “And the films I do want to make, and feel that I can make, they don’t want to make.” In another interview, he put it this way: “I make gloves, and they sell shoes.”  Robin Williams and Paul L. Smith in Popeye Paramount Banished but unbowed, he moved to New York and then Paris, and managed another dozen films in the ’80s, often adaptations of plays, plus the pioneering HBO show _Tanner ’88_, conceived by Garry Trudeau and thrusting fake Presidential candidate Michael Murphy into the real campaigns of other candidates. _The Player_, in 1992, finally brought Altman back to Hollywood with a clever poison-pen letter to the studios that had dumped him. “It’s a very, very mild indictment” of the movie industry, he said. “Things aren’t really like that. They’re much worse.” **(READ: Corliss’s** [**review of** **_The Player_**](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,975309,00.html)**)** The movie goes heavy on the inspiration and innovation (the prowling camera, the radio mikes to record each actor’s dialogue) and light on Altman’s fondness for gambling, dope and booze. In the bio-doc, one TV interviewer asks Altman if he ever bet $10,000 on a football game. “Uh-huh.” And how is your stake? “I’m behind.” In a Los Angeles _Times_ review of an Altman oral history in 2009, TIME’s Richard Schickel wrote: “It appears that from the beginning of his career until almost its end (when illness slowed him), Robert Altman never passed an entirely sober day in his life, “When he was not drinking heavily, he was smoking dope — often doing both simultaneously.” In his seventies, after suffering a ministroke, Altman finally swore off spirits, telling Kathryn, “The only thing I miss about drinking is the alcohol.” **(READ: Richard Schickel on** [**the legacy of Robert Altman**](http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/22/entertainment/et-book22)**)** The filmmaker had his prickly side. He loved actors, while deriding many of the studio bosses who financed his work and dismissing the contributions of his films’ writers. (Please note that some of his most popular or memorable achievements came from distinguished screenwriters: Lardner on _MASH_, Leigh Brackett on _The Long Goodbye_, Jules Feiffer on _Popeye_, Trudeau on _Tanner ’88_, Michael Tolkin on _The Player_ and Julian Fellowes on _Gosford Par_k.) He could also hold venerable grudges against critics who occasionally lapsed in their support for him. More than 20 years after I wrote a mixed-negative review of _MASH_ in the New York _Times_, he corralled TIME show-business reporter Jeff Ressner at Cannes and said of me, “Isn’t he dead yet?” This director of acerbic film statements was quick to take offense — the iron fist encased in thin skin.  Elliot Gould, left, talking with a uniformed officer smoking a cigarette, and Donald Sutherland, right, examining an x-ray in M\*A\*S\*H. Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images How distant those skirmishes seem, in a movie decade when blockbusters rule, critics have no box-office relevance and most indie films are far less adventurous than any of a dozen Altman movies. In retrospect, one is tempted to think as fondly, as benignly, of Robert Altman as Mann’s documentary does. Narrated in large and appealing part by Kathryn and her children, the film is as intimate as it is admiring, for this home movie focuses on Altman the husband and father. While his kids grew up, Dad was often off making movies, as far as possible from studio interference. But later he brought them into his filmmaking clan: Stephen a production designer, Robert Reed a camera operator. And toward the end, Michael Altman recalls, “He became very enamored of his family. … We would have these get-togethers, and I would catch him sitting in the corner just looking at everybody, with that grin on his face. It was like one of his movies — like he became aware he was in his own movie. And he’d loved the cast.” This week, EPIX is throwing another Bob Altman party. The least we can do if offer the crafty old renegade a teetotaler’s toast. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3082788/home-movies-robert-altman-hollywood-renegade/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3082788/home-movies-robert-altman-hollywood-renegade/"},"headline":"Home Movies: Robert Altman, Hollywood Renegade","datePublished":"2014-08-06T15:55:58.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T05:07:57.048Z","description":"An engaging new EPIX doc takes a fond look at the ornery innovator behind MASH, Nashville and Gosford Park","url":"https://time.com/3082788/home-movies-robert-altman-hollywood-renegade/","keywords":["movies","Nashville"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt593713f445f19bc8/69869e8d1eebf7fea5372259/img223-4261.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt593713f445f19bc8/69869e8d1eebf7fea5372259/img223-4261.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Robert Altman","caption":"Robert Altman","creditText":"Courtesy of Sandcastle 5","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/movies/","name":"movies"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3082788/home-movies-robert-altman-hollywood-renegade/","name":"Home Movies: Robert Altman, Hollywood Renegade"}}]}] ```