Robert Altman Wallpapers

Robert Altman - American film director, biography - photo wallpapers (Megawallpapers): Robert Bernard Altman (born February 20, 1925) is an American film director known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his work with an honorary Academy Award, commonly known as an Oscar. His films M*A*S*H and Nashville have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Altman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of wealthy, insurance man/gambler Bernard Clement Altman (who came from an upper-class German-American family) and Helen Mathews, a Mayflower descendant of English and Scottish ancestry. His family was devoutly Catholic. Altman attended Rockhurst High School and Southwest High School in Kansas City, and was then shipped off to Wentworth Military Academy in nearby Lexington, Missouri, where he attended through junior college. In 1945, at the age of 20, Altman enlisted in the Army Air Forces and was a pilot of a B-24, dropping bombs over enemy territory, for the remainder of World War II. It had been while training for the Air Force in California that Altman had first seen the bright lights of Hollywood and became enamored of the movieland. Upon his discharge in 1946, Altman began living in Los Angeles and tried out a number of schemes to position his foot firmly in Hollywood's door. Altman tried acting briefly, appearing in a nightclub scene as an extra in the Danny Kaye vehicle The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. He then wrote a vague storyline (uncredited) for the United Artists picture Christmas Eve, and sold to RKO the script for the 1948 motion picture Bodyguard, which he co-wrote with Richard Fleischer. This sudden success encouraged Altman to move to the New York area and forge a career as a writer. There, Altman found a collaborator in George W. George, with whom he wrote numerous published and unpublished screenplays, musicals, novels, and magazine articles. Altman was not as successful this trip, but back in Hollywood, he tried out one more big money-making scheme. He invented a strange dog-tattooing system for canine identification and invested a lot of his and his friends' money into a company called "Identi-Code." As one of their publicity stunts, Altman and his associates even tattooed President Harry Truman's dog, while Truman was still in the White House. However, the company soon went bankrupt, and in 1950 Altman returned to his friends and family in Kansas City, Missouri, broke and hungry for action, and itching for a second chance to get into movies. In 1950 there were no film schools, but at the age of 25, Altman hit upon the next best thing. He joined the Calvin Company, the world's largest industrial film production company and 16mm film laboratory, headquartered in Kansas City. Altman, fascinated by the company and their equipment, started as a film writer (even though the writing he had done was with collaborators who did most of the real work), and within a few months began to direct films. This led to his employment at the Calvin Company as a film director for almost six years. Until 1955, Altman directed 60 to 65 industrial short films, usually made to promote a business, a service, or a government function, earning $250 a week while simultaneously getting the necessary training and experience that he would need for a successful career in filmmaking. The ability to shoot rapidly, on-schedule, and work within the confines of both big and low budgets would serve him quite well later in his career. On the technical side, he learned all about "the tools of filmmaking": the camera, the boom mike, the lights, etc. Although the Calvin Company never intended themselves to be a substitute film school, evidently they were, not only for Altman, but for a great number of other young filmmakers in the area. However, Altman soon tired of the industrial film format, and kept grasping for more challenging projects. He would occasionally leave for Hollywood and try to write scripts, but then return months later, broke, to the Calvin Company. According to Altman, each time the Calvin people would drop him another notch in salary. The third time, the Calvin people declared at a staff meeting that if he left and came back one more time, they were not going to keep him. In 1955, Altman left the Calvin Company, not ever intending to return. He was soon hired by Elmer Rhoden Jr., a local Kansas City movie theater exhibitor, to write and direct a low-budget exploitation film on juvenile crime, titled The Delinquents, which would become the first feature film ever to be directed by Robert Altman. Altman wrote the script in one week and filmed it with a budget of $63,000 on location in Kansas City in two weeks. Rhoden Jr. wanted the film to kick-start his career as a film producer. Altman wanted the film to be his ticket into the elusive Hollywood circles. The cast was made up of the local actors and actresses from community theater who also appeared in Calvin Company films, Altman family members, and three imported actors from Hollywood, including the future Billy Jack, Tom Laughlin. The crew was made up of Altman's former Calvin cohorts and the local friends with whom Altman planned to make his grand "Kansas City escape." In 1956, Altman and his assistant director Reza Badiyi left Kansas City for good to edit The Delinquents in Hollywood. The film was picked up for distribution for $150,000 by United Artists, who released it in 1957, grossing nearly $1,000,000 with it. The Delinquents was no runaway success, but it did catch the eye of Alfred Hitchcock, who was impressed and called up Altman to direct a few episodes of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series. From 1958 to 1964, Altman directed numerous episodes of numerous TV series including Combat, Bonanza, and Route 66. [br] [br]

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