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Post by petrolino on May 26, 2018 22:58:31 GMT
The musical 'Nashville' takes a satirical look at the music scene in Nashville, Tennessee, with a passing nod to Memphis. Populist politician and presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker (Thomas Hal Phillips) of The Replacement Party is running his campaign and drumming up support. Aspiring singer-songwriters perform at local clubs and bars, keen to secure record deals. The climax is a concert gala fundraiser at the Parthenon in Centennial Park.
"They're gonna kill you. They're gonna tear your heart out if you keep on. They're gonna walk on your soul, girl."
Principal Players
David Arkin - Norman
Barbara Baxley - Lady Pearl
Ned Beatty - Delbert Reese
Karen Black - Connie White
Ronee Blakley - Barbara Jean
Timothy Brown - Tommy Brown
Keith Carradine - Tom Frank
Geraldine Chaplin - Opal
Robert DoQui - Wade
Shelley Duvall - L.A. Joan
Allen Garfield - Barnett
Henry Gibson - Haven Hamilton
Scott Glenn - Pfc. Glenn Kelly
Jeff Goldblum - Tricycle man
Barbara Harris - Albuquerque
David Hayward - Kenny Fraiser
Michael Murphy - John Triplette
Allan Nicholls - Bill
Dave Peel - Bud Hamilton
Cristina Raines - Mary
Bert Remsen - Star
Lily Tomlin - Linnea Reese
Gwen Welles - Sueleen Gay
Keenan Wynn - Mr. Green
Thomas Hal Phillips - Hal Phillip Walker
'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels' - Kitty Wells : The Queen of Country (born August 30, 1919 in Nashville, Tennessee)
The filmmaker Robert Altman was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, a state with its own rich musical history. His epic drama 'Nashville' opens with an inviting title sequence designed by Dan Perri that introduces the story's principals through album covers and injects some country flavour. Among Altman's major multi-character pieces such as 'A Wedding' (1978), 'H.E.A.L.T.H.' (1980), 'The Player' (1992) and 'Short Cuts' (1993), 'Nashville' bears close relation to the fashion industry satire 'Ready To Wear' (1994). The country music industry is big business in America and has been for a long time. From Marty Robbins' 'Gunfighter' albums to Carrie Underwood's 'American Idol' blockbuster streams, country & western's diverse playing field has been an important source of income and remained resolutely commercial.
Patsy Cline's signature song 'Crazy' was written by Texan songwriter Willie Nelson who this century helped Carla Bozulich rework his seminal album 'Red Headed Stranger' (released May, 1975) to create 'Red Headed Stranger' (2003). As the original record swept across America, 'Nashville' was being prepared for a June, 1975 release. Some commentators say the country music community closed ranks and reacted angrily towards Altman's satire, which may be true in some cases. There's a strong sense of solidarity among country musicians who view themselves as fellow highwaymen travelling down the same well-worn road, upholding traditions while interpreting and reinterpreting local legends. But though many of the great country stars of the past were bound by certain commonalities, it was their diversity of thought that gave them collective strength. As Jim Ridley recalled for 'Nashville Scene' : "Back in Nashville, however, the locals were getting nervous. According to some critics, among them Robert Mazzocco in The New York Review of Books, the movie ('Nashville', 1975) portrayed Nashvillians as gullible rubes at best and heartless automatons at worst. Others, including syndicated reviewer Rex Reed, agreed, but declared that Nashvillians deserved what they got. “[The film] floats like navel lint into the vulgar Vegas of country and western music, that plunking, planking citadel of bad taste called Nashville, Tenn.,” wrote the former star of Myra Breckinridge. Even the most positive advance reviews carried an implicit — and sometimes explicit — condescension toward Music City in general and country music in particular. “Country-and-western basically dresses up folk music in rhinestones and spangles, making hay out of Americana,” Jay Cocks wrote in Time. Despite an unequivocal rave from The Tennessean’s Eugene Wyatt, who declared himself “a Nashvillian who loves his city and wishes it well,” word still filtered back that the movie was anti-American, anti-country and anti-Nashville." From Nashville to Memphis, music bleeds from the roots in Tennessee. In the United States of America, country group Florida Georgia Line recently polled better from state to state than any other mainstream musical act, Taylor Swift is currently ranked as one of the top 3 global recording artists (with Ed Sheeran and Drake) and Miranda Lambert's recent run of albums has seen her topping countless "album of the year" polls. The soundtrack to the film 'Nashville' includes live folk, gospel, bluegrass and western swing.
"Nashville is Robert Altman's brilliant mosaic of American life as seen through 24 characters involved in Nashville political rally: full of cogent character studies, comic and poignant vignettes, done in seemingly free-form style."
- Leonard Maltin, '100 Must-See Films Of The 20th Century'
“Coming: ‘Nashville.’ ” This is another of Kael’s raves, for one of her favorite directors, Robert Altman. “It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over,” she wrote. (The second person was a Kael signature.) This bliss-out style of praise was often lampooned, and became especially controversial in this review, which Kael wrote after seeing an early cut of the movie. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby protested: “If one can review a film on the basis of an approximately three-hour rough cut, why not review it on the basis of a five-hour rough cut? A ten-hour one? On the basis of a screenplay? The original material if first printed as a book?” Kael’s “Nashville” review also shows her trying to fit movies into the canon of modern art. Throughout the piece, she compares Altman’s efforts to Joyce’s in “Ulysses.”
- Nathan Heller, 'Five Classic Pauline Kael Reviews'
"‘A dialectic collage of unreality,’ remarked pop singer Brenda Lee, emerging from the Nashville premiere in August. After a summer full of humourless rhetoric in the American press about ‘the true lesson of ‘Watergate’, ‘the failure of our civilization,’ ‘the long nauseating terror of a fall through the existential void,’ and equally grave matters — most of it implying that a movie has to be about ‘everything’ (i.e., the State of the Union) before it can be about anything – it was refreshing to discover that someone, at long last, had finally got it right. Even if Lee’s comment was intended as a slam, it deserves to be resurrected as a tribute. For if Nashville is conceivably the most exciting commercial American movie in years, this is first of all because of what it constructs, not what it exposes.
From the moment we begin with an ad for the film itself — a blaring overload of multi-media confusion — and pass to a political campaign van spouting banalities, then to a recording studio where country music star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) is cutting a hilariously glib Bicentennial anthem, Nashville registers as a double-fisted satire of its chosen terrain, and it would be wrong to suggest that its targets of derision are beside the point, even if the angle of vision subsequently widens to take in more than just foolishness. But a rich ‘dialectic collage’ of contradictory attitudes and diverse realities is what brings the film so vibrantly to life, and to launch moralistic rockets on such a shifting base is to miss its achievement entirely. In point of fact, the film celebrates as much as it ridicules — often doing both at the same time — while giving both its brilliant cast and its audience too much elbow room to allow for any overriding thesis."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sight And Sound
"Taking down Pauline Kael's 1976 collection 'Reeling' to re-read her famous review of "Nashville," I find a yellow legal sheet marking the page: my notes for a class I taught on the film. "What is this story about?" I wrote. The film may be great because you can't really answer that question. It is a musical; Robert Altman observes in his commentary on the new DVD re-release that it contains more than an hour of music. It is a docudrama about the Nashville scene. It is a political parable, written and directed in the immediate aftermath of Watergate (the scenes in the Grand Ole Opry were shot on the day Richard M. Nixon resigned). It tells interlocking stories of love and sex, of hearts broken and mended. And it is a wicked satire of American smarminess ("Welcome to Nashville and to my lovely home," a country star gushes to Elliott Gould). But more than anything else, it is a tender poem to the wounded and the sad."
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
Karen Black
Clip from 'The Nashville Sound' (1970)
'I'm Not Worth The Tears' - Dolly Parton (born January 19, 1946 in Sevier County, Tennessee)
Robert Altman used multiple camera set-ups when filming the elegiac western 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' (1971) which showcased songs by Leonard Cohen. This generally became his favoured method of shooting. In 'Nashville', he employs carefully timed focus pulls and zoom shots, deep-focus compositions and tracking shots. These technical aspects aid Altman in putting different characters in the frame during complicated set-ups. Altman shot most of the footage (and performances) using live sound, attaching microphones and radios to his central players, even if they were on the periphery of the scene. He also used tape machines and some basic laboratory processes to help preserve a documentary feel.
"Picture a movie that runs nearly three hours, has no conventional plotline and 24 different major characters and you have 'Nashville'. Robert Altman’s masterpiece may be the most ambitious movie ever made and it’s one that’s admittedly hard to “get,” and intentionally made that way. First viewings may bring calls of “rambling,” “pointless” or “boring,” mirroring quite accurately the initial reactions of many in 1975. 'Nashville' was not a box office success by any means, making a measly $9 million, and even the most distinguished of critics admitted to falling asleep during it on the first go-round.
But the film always had its fighters — Siskel and Ebert both called it the best film of 1975 — and over the years Nashville‘s reputation has grown thanks to the admiration of such supporters. Most telling is the film’s rise from no spot on the AFI’s original Top 100 in 1997, all the way to #59 in 2007. A similar phenomenon can be said about Altman himself, who did not receive a single Oscar until his Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Together, Altman and 'Nashville' are made for eachother, by eachother, both initially off-putting, unashamedly maverick, and gradually more appreciated the more they are studied. Few films capture their era better, and even fewer have had the power to ring true over the years.
Sandwiched between the social activism of the ’60s and the patriotic furvor of the Reagan ’80s, Altman geniously sets his story during America’s 1976 bicentennial celebration, pointing out the paradox of celebrating a nation that had just met its match with the Vietcong and whose Watergate president had just been ousted from office (the Grand Ole Opry scenes were shot on the day Nixon resigned). Even more poignant is the film’s setting in the American heartland, in the heart of country music, Nashville, where politics and showbiz collide, both presented as equally cut-throat industires, one commenting heavily on the functionality of the other. Spanning just five days, the story follows a whole hoard of characters, each involved in either the city’s ongoing political campaign or its upcoming country music festival, both of which share the stage of Nashville’s Parthenon for a bicentennial event in the film’s shocking conclusion."
- Jason Fraley, Film Spectrum
"Four decades before becoming one of America's "it" cities, Nashville was the subject of a sprawling, 24-character study that was simultaneously hailed by critics as a cinematic masterpiece and vilified by country artists offended by what they saw as a slam against their industry — or, even worse, a series of caricatures that perhaps cut a little too closely to real life. Directed by Robert Altman, the big-screen 'Nashville' opened in New York City on June 11th, 1975, although the movie didn't host its actual Music City premiere until two months later.
Five years after exploring the bloody realism of the Korean War with 'M*A*S*H', which delighted audiences and critics with its decidedly dark humor, Altman trained his experimental style on what was supposed to be a satirical take on the Nashville recording industry. It was a music-filled film with inter-connected characters and plot, featuring a political campaign rally at its explosive, chaotic climax. Those who "got" the joke (which seemed to be mostly those outside the country music community) praised Nashville for its unconventional storytelling and an absence of slickness in the musical numbers throughout.
At a time when country music was beginning to routinely cross over into pop territory (just ahead of another big-screen phenomenon, the Urban Cowboy boom), the city of Nashville was, understandably, protective of its industry and image. Just as the characters from a similarly-named ABC TV series, 'Nashville', invited comparisons to real-life country stars when the show first debuted in 2012, the principals in Altman's film were dissected for the traits that were, perhaps, meant to mirror those of such country icons as Porter Wagoner, Hank Snow, Charley Pride and Loretta Lynn."
- Stephen L. Betts, Rolling Stone
"Little in 'Nashville' is stated explicitly. Characters’ personalities are expanded on through the visual shorthand of costume and production design."
- Andreas Stoehr, The Dissolve
Henry Gibson & Michael Murphy
'You Can't Tell The Difference After Dark' - Alberta Hunter (born April 1, Memphis, Tennessee)
'Nashville' and Sidney Lumet's 'Dog Day Afternoon' (1975) pushed editing and sound editing techniques to new heights in 1975, becoming benchmarks in the evolution of cutting room process. Both Altman and Lumet admired editor Walter Murch's work on Francis Coppola's sound experiment 'The Conversation' (1974). Allen Garfield was cast in 'Nashville' by Altman after he'd met up with Coppola at the Cannes Film Festival which was screening 'The Conversation'. Actor John Cazale co-stars in 'The Conversation' and 'Dog Day Afternoon'.
"Robert Altman redefined the landscape of cinema. Those huge tracking shots, multiple narratives, improvised scenes full of ums and ahs, and hopelessly unformed sentences. He turned the viewer from audience into eavesdroppers, voyeurs. He had a hard time in the 80s when nobody wanted to make his movies, but in the past 10 years has come back with film after film - occasionally great ('Short Cuts'), often ropy ('Pret-a-Porter'), always interesting. I want to tell him he's a hero of mine, prostrate myself in front of him, ask him how he's done it. But it would be unprofessional wouldn't it? So I play it cool and tell him I admire his work.
While sex may have driven him towards the movies (even his third wife talks about his history of womanising), his priority soon became art. He was already in his 40s when he began making those sprawling epics of American life such as 'Nashville', 'The Long Goodbye' and 'McCabe and Mrs Miller'. They were often movies without beginning, end and plotline - cinema's equivalent to freeform jazz. When I ask him what he considers his movies to be about, the best he can come up with is the truth. "I think artists tend to be fairly truthful. What else is there to deal with but the truth?" He explains that an artist produces original work, and compares it to journalism. "If you're working for a mandate like yourself, if you have an assignment to do an interview with a person, you can be artistic about it, but it's difficult to be an artist." Altman has always loved pricking our little vanities. Don't worry about hurting my pride, I say to him with a smile. "Oh, I'm not worried about that," he says, with his poker face."
- Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian
"Robert Altman staged a quiet revolution inside American cinema. He has his evident heirs who knew him and were directly associated with his projects (Alan Rudolph, Paul Thomas Anderson), but his influence is much vaster and more diffuse. Altman created his own form of narrative action, and his own conception of character psychology or behaviour. The stylistic tics for which he is most famous - overlapping voices (the live recording system uses, Lion's Gate 8 Track Sound, gets an up-front credit), zoom lens, wandering camera, ensemble acting within an open frame - are important in themselves, but they are especially significant for the ways they help sculpt these new forms of action and character."
- Adrian Martin, 'Anywhere But Home'
"Again, it was always the actors that are doing it. I wanted to see something that I hadn’t seen before. That was my main mandate. I don’t like talking to actors much about what we’re doing. If an actor comes up to me during a shoot and says, ‘How do you want me to play this scene?’ I don’t want to get into that conversation. Because as soon as I say, ‘I want you to play it da-da-da’, I’ve narrowed this 360 degree possibility down to a little piece of pie. The performance and the film is not successful and the actor says, ‘Well I just did what he told me to do.’ I want to see something that I’ve never seen before, so how can I tell that actor what that is? I’m not trying to construct a document or situation that is what I want, because what I want is something new to me."
- Robert Altman, The British Film Institute
Shelley Duvall
'Goin' To Memphis' - Carl Perkins : The King of Rockabilly (born April 9, 1932 in Tiptonville, Tennessee)
'Nashville' is an ambitious, beautifully composed mosaic of American life that gleefully takes shots at the collision between counterculture hippies, folk revivalists and soul stirrers struggling to impress a deeply embedded country & western hierarchy. It's easy to see why it ruffled a few feathers in 1975 but I think it's all in good humour. Many of the cast members are accomplished singers and musicians. Keith Carradine picked up the Best Song Oscar for his composition 'I'm Easy' and released his album 'I'm Easy' (1976) the following year.
"In the flesh, Steve Buscemi looks much as he does in the movies - Bela Lugosi meets Stan Laurel. He wears the bewildered expression of a cartoon character who has just been flattened. His face is remarkable - the bags underneath his eyes have their own bags; the sockets their own shade of red, and his teeth are stacked like tins on a supermarket shelf. He is skinny and wiry, and, dressed all in black, resembles an animated shoelace. A strangely attractive shoelace. Steve Buscemi is not the stuff of leading men. Yet, occasionally, he does lead, and he is just about the best support or cameo player in the business.
As a kid, he used to watch a huge amount of television, especially movies, and he set his heart on acting. He loved his extended family set-up in New York, but dreamed of Hollywood. After all, his father's close friend, Peter Miller, had managed the same successful transition, and had even starred in Robert Altman's first film, 'The Delinquents' (1957) {Buscemi would work with Altman on 'Kansas City' (1996) and 'Tanner On Tanner' for television}. Occasionally, Uncle Peter would return to New York and Buscemi would question him about the business. "So in the back of my mind it was possible. Here was someone from my background and neighbourhood who did become an actor. But he didn't have connections to help me." In fact, Uncle Peter ended up as an investment banker.
At school he hung with the hard boys, and made them laugh with his clowning. He was strong, but not tough. Buscemi wrestled for the school and says he was far more successful as a team wrestler - knowing that the team relied on him for a win spurred him on. Was he a hit with the ladies? "No. I never had a girlfriend." He stops to correct himself. "I had a girlfriend for two weeks in ninth grade when I was 13, and then in high school I had another girlfriend for another two weeks. And that was it." The first time he had a proper girlfriend, he says, was in 1978 when he was 21 years old."
- Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian
"I think Robert Altman could see things in me that I didn't know I possessed, which is really exciting. He also instilled a tremendous amount of confidence, because he would say things like, "These are the bare bones, but I want you to go fill it out. You find the character. You bring it to me. You write whatever you want." And if you had an idea, he wouldn't want to hear about it. He'd want you to show it to him. So there's so much confidence and freedom that comes from that way of doing things. And he and Rudolph make the set the place to be. It's fun. It's a kind of creative freedom that's really inspiring. Altman loved actors so much. Everyone came to dailies — this is when dailies used to be projected — and there would be food and wine. You had to come. It was like required reading or something. If you didn't come, you were in trouble. But it was so much fun. They could be endlessly long, the dailies, but you know. He was a great mentor for me, really."
- Jennifer Jason Leigh, The A.V. Club
"The story of meeting Mark Isham is as coincidental as any one of my films. When 'Trouble in Mind' (1985) came around, I said I needed to have the music first, before we even scouted for locations, so I decided to go to Tower Records and I looked through all of the albums until my hands were black. I was looking for someone who plays all the instruments, because I figured that would be affordable. I was hoping to get a trumpet or a sax lead, but I would take anything that sounded good. When I got to Mark’s records, I saw that he played everything and his lead instrument was the trumpet so I bought all his tapes and I drove around listening to them for a couple of hours. I drove back to my producer’s office and I said that this is the guy. The phone rang and it was some agent representing a composer who had a few directors in mind he wanted to work with—and I was one of them. The composer was Mark Isham! A week later, I drove up to San Francisco and met Mark. We went to his house and in his dungeon basement he had all of these gigantic refrigerator-sized synthesizers that were brand-new at the time. He played trumpet and asked what I was looking for. I said, I want something with an emotional pull, but I don’t want it to be traditional in any way. We were only there for a day, but we went through a dozen ideas before the movie was shot. I’d say we wrote 80 percent of the score in that dungeon.
Probably the most important film music for me, and it was late in the game, had to do with Robert Altman. His office called me to be an assistant director and I said I don’t want to do that anymore, but they said I had to come meet him. I did and of course it changed my life. My little film dreams were just specks and Altman’s were skyscrapers. Bob reinvented it all, and I was right there at the time. He was very imposing, with piercing eyes. There was some X-ray vision about him, he was so smart and sharp and immediate, kind of caustic and wicked and wonderful. Anyway, I decided to work for him after I saw 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' (1971), because it was exactly what I was searching for on my own but didn’t know it. I’d never seen music and film and mood and tone and story and everything come together in a way that was complete. I know there have been other movies since, but I think he defined our musical perception of film."
- Alan Rudolph, Film Comment
"At that point, Robert Altman still had the Lionsgate offices, which was the company that he established, and the offices were in Westwood. It was a little office complex with a courtyard. And I knocked on the door, and he said, “Come in!” And I opened the door, and it was an apartment that he had up there!
But he was standing there… And he had a T-shirt on and a bathrobe, and he was unwrapping a brown paper-wrapped package, and he says, “Yeah, I just got back from Colombia!” I’m seeing him unwrap this package, and I’m thinking, “He’s got a pound of dope here!” But, in fact, it was some pre-Colombian art that he had bought when he had gone down there for the Cartagena Film Festival. And that was how the interview was conducted: with him standing there in this bathrobe.
He looked at me and he said, “So we’re going to do this movie.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Did you read it?” I said, “Yeah.” “So you saw the part?” “Yeah.” “You want to play it?” “Yeah!” That was my audition! But that’s Bob. That’s what he did. I mean, he perceived an essence pretty quickly, and he realized right off that the kid standing there inside his door had the right kind of innocence that would serve the role in the film 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' (1971). Because, you know, this is a kid who comes to town and gets shot, really, in cold blood. And it’s the dénouement of the film, and it was his way of really showing the savage, random violence that existed and was so much a part of life in that time and place."
- Keith Carradine, The A.V. Club
Keith Carradine
The Cast of 'Nashville'
'Picture' - Kid Rock's Sweet Southern Sugar featuring Sheryl Crow (born February 11, 1962 in Kennett, Missouri - now living in Nashville, Tennessee)
In 1992, 'Nashville' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The song "I'm Easy" was ranked 81st in a list of the '100 Best Songs Of All Time' by the American Film Institute. |
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Post by OldAussie on May 26, 2018 23:04:04 GMT
From a "personal taste" point of view, I'm not the biggest fan of Nashville but I admire it a lot. A tremendous achievement from an exceptionally talented director. It's one of those movies I wish I loved more.
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Post by petrolino on May 27, 2018 0:47:03 GMT
From a "personal taste" point of view, I'm not the biggest fan of Nashville but I admire it a lot. A tremendous achievement from an exceptionally talented director. It's one of those movies I wish I loved more. 'Nashville' kind of washes over me if I allow my mind to wander. It's challenging cinema but also funny at times.
Have you seen 'Ready To Wear', Robert Altman's film about the fashion industry? I saw that at the cinema but I didn't like it. I should probably watch it again one of these days as I've not seen it since. |
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Post by OldAussie on May 27, 2018 0:53:46 GMT
Watched Ready To Wear once on dvd - not really interesting to me. But I love much of Altman's work.....if I ever made a top 100 list he would have a few on it and several others just outside. Some of my favourites -
Short Cuts
Long Goodbye
California Split
The Player
Gosford Park
....and I could go on.
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Post by petrolino on May 27, 2018 0:58:05 GMT
Watched Ready To Wear once on dvd - not really interesting to me. But I love much of Altman's work.....if I ever made a top 100 list he would have a few on it and several others just outside. Some of my favourites - Short Cuts Long Goodbye California Split The Player Gosford Park ....and I could go on. I'm with you all the way on 'Short Cuts', 'The Player' and 'The Long Goodbye'. Think I'll give 'California Split' another look. |
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Post by hi224 on May 27, 2018 1:50:25 GMT
The musical 'Nashville' takes a satirical look at the music scene in Nashville, Tennessee, with a passing nod to Memphis. Populist politician and presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker (Thomas Hal Phillips) of The Replacement Party is running his campaign and drumming up support. Aspiring singer-songwriters perform at local clubs and bars, keen to secure record deals. The climax is a concert gala fundraiser at the Parthenon in Centennial Park.
"They're gonna kill you. They're gonna tear your heart out if you keep on. They're gonna walk on your soul, girl."
Principal Players
David Arkin - Norman
Barbara Baxley - Lady Pearl
Ned Beatty - Delbert Reese
Karen Black - Connie White
Ronee Blakley - Barbara Jean
Timothy Brown - Tommy Brown
Keith Carradine - Tom Frank
Geraldine Chaplin - Opal
Robert DoQui - Wade
Shelley Duvall - L.A. Joan
Allen Garfield - Barnett
Henry Gibson - Haven Hamilton
Scott Glenn - Pfc. Glenn Kelly
Jeff Goldblum - Tricycle man
Barbara Harris - Albuquerque
David Hayward - Kenny Fraiser
Michael Murphy - John Triplette
Allan Nicholls - Bill
Dave Peel - Bud Hamilton
Cristina Raines - Mary
Bert Remsen - Star
Lily Tomlin - Linnea Reese
Gwen Welles - Sueleen Gay
Keenan Wynn - Mr. Green
Thomas Hal Phillips - Hal Phillip Walker
'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels' - Kitty Wells : The Queen of Country (born August 30, 1919 in Nashville, Tennessee)
The filmmaker Robert Altman was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, a state with its own rich musical history. His epic drama 'Nashville' opens with an inviting title sequence designed by Dan Perri that introduces the story's principals through album covers and injects some country flavour. Among Altman's major multi-character pieces such as 'A Wedding' (1978), 'H.E.A.L.T.H.' (1980), 'The Player' (1992) and 'Short Cuts' (1993), 'Nashville' bears close relation to the fashion industry satire 'Ready To Wear' (1994). The country music industry is big business in America and has been for a long time. From Marty Robbins' 'Gunfighter' albums to Carrie Underwood's 'American Idol' blockbuster streams, country & western's diverse playing field has been an important source of income and remained resolutely commercial.
Patsy Cline's signature song 'Crazy' was written by Texan songwriter Willie Nelson who this century helped Carla Bozulich rework his seminal album 'Red Headed Stranger' (released May, 1975) to create 'Red Headed Stranger' (2003). As the original record swept across America, 'Nashville' was being prepared for a June, 1975 release. Some commentators say the country music community closed ranks and reacted angrily towards Altman's satire, which may be true in some cases. There's a strong sense of solidarity among country musicians who view themselves as fellow highwaymen travelling down the same well-worn road, upholding traditions while interpreting and reinterpreting local legends. But though many of the great country stars of the past were bound by certain commonalities, it was their diversity of thought that gave them collective strength. As Jim Ridley recalled for 'Nashville Scene' : "Back in Nashville, however, the locals were getting nervous. According to some critics, among them Robert Mazzocco in The New York Review of Books, the movie ('Nashville', 1975) portrayed Nashvillians as gullible rubes at best and heartless automatons at worst. Others, including syndicated reviewer Rex Reed, agreed, but declared that Nashvillians deserved what they got. “[The film] floats like navel lint into the vulgar Vegas of country and western music, that plunking, planking citadel of bad taste called Nashville, Tenn.,” wrote the former star of Myra Breckinridge. Even the most positive advance reviews carried an implicit — and sometimes explicit — condescension toward Music City in general and country music in particular. “Country-and-western basically dresses up folk music in rhinestones and spangles, making hay out of Americana,” Jay Cocks wrote in Time. Despite an unequivocal rave from The Tennessean’s Eugene Wyatt, who declared himself “a Nashvillian who loves his city and wishes it well,” word still filtered back that the movie was anti-American, anti-country and anti-Nashville." From Nashville to Memphis, music bleeds from the roots in Tennessee. In the United States of America, country group Florida Georgia Line recently polled better from state to state than any other mainstream musical act, Taylor Swift is currently ranked as one of the top 3 global recording artists (with Ed Sheeran and Drake) and Miranda Lambert's recent run of albums has seen her topping countless "album of the year" polls. The soundtrack to the film 'Nashville' includes live folk, gospel, bluegrass and western swing.
"Nashville is Robert Altman's brilliant mosaic of American life as seen through 24 characters involved in Nashville political rally: full of cogent character studies, comic and poignant vignettes, done in seemingly free-form style."
- Leonard Maltin, '100 Must-See Films Of The 20th Century'
“Coming: ‘Nashville.’ ” This is another of Kael’s raves, for one of her favorite directors, Robert Altman. “It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over,” she wrote. (The second person was a Kael signature.) This bliss-out style of praise was often lampooned, and became especially controversial in this review, which Kael wrote after seeing an early cut of the movie. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby protested: “If one can review a film on the basis of an approximately three-hour rough cut, why not review it on the basis of a five-hour rough cut? A ten-hour one? On the basis of a screenplay? The original material if first printed as a book?” Kael’s “Nashville” review also shows her trying to fit movies into the canon of modern art. Throughout the piece, she compares Altman’s efforts to Joyce’s in “Ulysses.”
- Nathan Heller, 'Five Classic Pauline Kael Reviews'
"‘A dialectic collage of unreality,’ remarked pop singer Brenda Lee, emerging from the Nashville premiere in August. After a summer full of humourless rhetoric in the American press about ‘the true lesson of ‘Watergate’, ‘the failure of our civilization,’ ‘the long nauseating terror of a fall through the existential void,’ and equally grave matters — most of it implying that a movie has to be about ‘everything’ (i.e., the State of the Union) before it can be about anything – it was refreshing to discover that someone, at long last, had finally got it right. Even if Lee’s comment was intended as a slam, it deserves to be resurrected as a tribute. For if Nashville is conceivably the most exciting commercial American movie in years, this is first of all because of what it constructs, not what it exposes.
From the moment we begin with an ad for the film itself — a blaring overload of multi-media confusion — and pass to a political campaign van spouting banalities, then to a recording studio where country music star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) is cutting a hilariously glib Bicentennial anthem, Nashville registers as a double-fisted satire of its chosen terrain, and it would be wrong to suggest that its targets of derision are beside the point, even if the angle of vision subsequently widens to take in more than just foolishness. But a rich ‘dialectic collage’ of contradictory attitudes and diverse realities is what brings the film so vibrantly to life, and to launch moralistic rockets on such a shifting base is to miss its achievement entirely. In point of fact, the film celebrates as much as it ridicules — often doing both at the same time — while giving both its brilliant cast and its audience too much elbow room to allow for any overriding thesis."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sight And Sound
"Taking down Pauline Kael's 1976 collection 'Reeling' to re-read her famous review of "Nashville," I find a yellow legal sheet marking the page: my notes for a class I taught on the film. "What is this story about?" I wrote. The film may be great because you can't really answer that question. It is a musical; Robert Altman observes in his commentary on the new DVD re-release that it contains more than an hour of music. It is a docudrama about the Nashville scene. It is a political parable, written and directed in the immediate aftermath of Watergate (the scenes in the Grand Ole Opry were shot on the day Richard M. Nixon resigned). It tells interlocking stories of love and sex, of hearts broken and mended. And it is a wicked satire of American smarminess ("Welcome to Nashville and to my lovely home," a country star gushes to Elliott Gould). But more than anything else, it is a tender poem to the wounded and the sad."
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
Karen Black
Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda & Lily Tomlin
Clip from 'The Nashville Sound' (1970)
'I'm Not Worth The Tears' - Dolly Parton (born January 19, 1946 in Sevier County, Tennessee)
Robert Altman used multiple camera set-ups when filming the elegiac western 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' (1971) which showcased songs by Leonard Cohen. This generally became his favoured method of shooting. In 'Nashville', he employs carefully timed focus pulls and zoom shots, deep-focus compositions and tracking shots. These technical aspects aid Altman in putting different characters in the frame during complicated set-ups. Altman shot most of the footage (and performances) using live sound, attaching microphones and radios to his central players, even if they were on the periphery of the scene. He also used tape machines and some basic laboratory processes to help preserve a documentary feel.
"Picture a movie that runs nearly three hours, has no conventional plotline and 24 different major characters and you have 'Nashville'. Robert Altman’s masterpiece may be the most ambitious movie ever made and it’s one that’s admittedly hard to “get,” and intentionally made that way. First viewings may bring calls of “rambling,” “pointless” or “boring,” mirroring quite accurately the initial reactions of many in 1975. 'Nashville' was not a box office success by any means, making a measly $9 million, and even the most distinguished of critics admitted to falling asleep during it on the first go-round.
But the film always had its fighters — Siskel and Ebert both called it the best film of 1975 — and over the years Nashville‘s reputation has grown thanks to the admiration of such supporters. Most telling is the film’s rise from no spot on the AFI’s original Top 100 in 1997, all the way to #59 in 2007. A similar phenomenon can be said about Altman himself, who did not receive a single Oscar until his Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Together, Altman and 'Nashville' are made for eachother, by eachother, both initially off-putting, unashamedly maverick, and gradually more appreciated the more they are studied. Few films capture their era better, and even fewer have had the power to ring true over the years.
Sandwiched between the social activism of the ’60s and the patriotic furvor of the Reagan ’80s, Altman geniously sets his story during America’s 1976 bicentennial celebration, pointing out the paradox of celebrating a nation that had just met its match with the Vietcong and whose Watergate president had just been ousted from office (the Grand Ole Opry scenes were shot on the day Nixon resigned). Even more poignant is the film’s setting in the American heartland, in the heart of country music, Nashville, where politics and showbiz collide, both presented as equally cut-throat industires, one commenting heavily on the functionality of the other. Spanning just five days, the story follows a whole hoard of characters, each involved in either the city’s ongoing political campaign or its upcoming country music festival, both of which share the stage of Nashville’s Parthenon for a bicentennial event in the film’s shocking conclusion."
- Jason Fraley, Film Spectrum
"Four decades before becoming one of America's "it" cities, Nashville was the subject of a sprawling, 24-character study that was simultaneously hailed by critics as a cinematic masterpiece and vilified by country artists offended by what they saw as a slam against their industry — or, even worse, a series of caricatures that perhaps cut a little too closely to real life. Directed by Robert Altman, the big-screen 'Nashville' opened in New York City on June 11th, 1975, although the movie didn't host its actual Music City premiere until two months later.
Five years after exploring the bloody realism of the Korean War with 'M*A*S*H', which delighted audiences and critics with its decidedly dark humor, Altman trained his experimental style on what was supposed to be a satirical take on the Nashville recording industry. It was a music-filled film with inter-connected characters and plot, featuring a political campaign rally at its explosive, chaotic climax. Those who "got" the joke (which seemed to be mostly those outside the country music community) praised Nashville for its unconventional storytelling and an absence of slickness in the musical numbers throughout.
At a time when country music was beginning to routinely cross over into pop territory (just ahead of another big-screen phenomenon, the Urban Cowboy boom), the city of Nashville was, understandably, protective of its industry and image. Just as the characters from a similarly-named ABC TV series, 'Nashville', invited comparisons to real-life country stars when the show first debuted in 2012, the principals in Altman's film were dissected for the traits that were, perhaps, meant to mirror those of such country icons as Porter Wagoner, Hank Snow, Charley Pride and Loretta Lynn."
- Stephen L. Betts, Rolling Stone
"Little in 'Nashville' is stated explicitly. Characters’ personalities are expanded on through the visual shorthand of costume and production design."
- Andreas Stoehr, The Dissolve
Henry Gibson & Michael Murphy
'You Can't Tell The Difference After Dark' - Alberta Hunter (born April 1, Memphis, Tennessee)
'Nashville' and Sidney Lumet's 'Dog Day Afternoon' (1975) pushed editing and sound editing techniques to new heights in 1975, becoming benchmarks in the evolution of cutting room process. Both Altman and Lumet admired editor Walter Murch's work on Francis Coppola's sound experiment 'The Conversation' (1974). Allen Garfield was cast in 'Nashville' by Altman after he'd met up with Coppola at the Cannes Film Festival which was screening 'The Conversation'. Actor John Cazale co-stars in 'The Conversation' and 'Dog Day Afternoon'.
"Robert Altman redefined the landscape of cinema. Those huge tracking shots, multiple narratives, improvised scenes full of ums and ahs, and hopelessly unformed sentences. He turned the viewer from audience into eavesdroppers, voyeurs. He had a hard time in the 80s when nobody wanted to make his movies, but in the past 10 years has come back with film after film - occasionally great ('Short Cuts'), often ropy ('Pret-a-Porter'), always interesting. I want to tell him he's a hero of mine, prostrate myself in front of him, ask him how he's done it. But it would be unprofessional wouldn't it? So I play it cool and tell him I admire his work.
While sex may have driven him towards the movies (even his third wife talks about his history of womanising), his priority soon became art. He was already in his 40s when he began making those sprawling epics of American life such as 'Nashville', 'The Long Goodbye' and 'McCabe and Mrs Miller'. They were often movies without beginning, end and plotline - cinema's equivalent to freeform jazz. When I ask him what he considers his movies to be about, the best he can come up with is the truth. "I think artists tend to be fairly truthful. What else is there to deal with but the truth?" He explains that an artist produces original work, and compares it to journalism. "If you're working for a mandate like yourself, if you have an assignment to do an interview with a person, you can be artistic about it, but it's difficult to be an artist." Altman has always loved pricking our little vanities. Don't worry about hurting my pride, I say to him with a smile. "Oh, I'm not worried about that," he says, with his poker face."
- Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian
"Robert Altman staged a quiet revolution inside American cinema. He has his evident heirs who knew him and were directly associated with his projects (Alan Rudolph, Paul Thomas Anderson), but his influence is much vaster and more diffuse. Altman created his own form of narrative action, and his own conception of character psychology or behaviour. The stylistic tics for which he is most famous - overlapping voices (the live recording system uses, Lion's Gate 8 Track Sound, gets an up-front credit), zoom lens, wandering camera, ensemble acting within an open frame - are important in themselves, but they are especially significant for the ways they help sculpt these new forms of action and character."
- Adrian Martin, 'Anywhere But Home'
"Again, it was always the actors that are doing it. I wanted to see something that I hadn’t seen before. That was my main mandate. I don’t like talking to actors much about what we’re doing. If an actor comes up to me during a shoot and says, ‘How do you want me to play this scene?’ I don’t want to get into that conversation. Because as soon as I say, ‘I want you to play it da-da-da’, I’ve narrowed this 360 degree possibility down to a little piece of pie. The performance and the film is not successful and the actor says, ‘Well I just did what he told me to do.’ I want to see something that I’ve never seen before, so how can I tell that actor what that is? I’m not trying to construct a document or situation that is what I want, because what I want is something new to me."
- Robert Altman, The British Film Institute
Shelley Duvall
'Goin' To Memphis' - Carl Perkins : The King of Rockabilly (born April 9, 1932 in Tiptonville, Tennessee)
'Nashville' is an ambitious, beautifully composed mosaic of American life that gleefully takes shots at the collision between counterculture hippies, folk revivalists and soul stirrers struggling to impress a deeply embedded country & western hierarchy. It's easy to see why it ruffled a few feathers in 1975 but I think it's all in good humour. Many of the cast members are accomplished singers and musicians. Keith Carradine picked up the Best Song Oscar for his composition 'I'm Easy' and released his album 'I'm Easy' (1976) the following year.
"In the flesh, Steve Buscemi looks much as he does in the movies - Bela Lugosi meets Stan Laurel. He wears the bewildered expression of a cartoon character who has just been flattened. His face is remarkable - the bags underneath his eyes have their own bags; the sockets their own shade of red, and his teeth are stacked like tins on a supermarket shelf. He is skinny and wiry, and, dressed all in black, resembles an animated shoelace. A strangely attractive shoelace. Steve Buscemi is not the stuff of leading men. Yet, occasionally, he does lead, and he is just about the best support or cameo player in the business.
As a kid, he used to watch a huge amount of television, especially movies, and he set his heart on acting. He loved his extended family set-up in New York, but dreamed of Hollywood. After all, his father's close friend, Peter Miller, had managed the same successful transition, and had even starred in Robert Altman's first film, 'The Delinquents' (1957) {Buscemi would work with Altman on 'Kansas City' (1996) and 'Tanner On Tanner' for television}. Occasionally, Uncle Peter would return to New York and Buscemi would question him about the business. "So in the back of my mind it was possible. Here was someone from my background and neighbourhood who did become an actor. But he didn't have connections to help me." In fact, Uncle Peter ended up as an investment banker.
At school he hung with the hard boys, and made them laugh with his clowning. He was strong, but not tough. Buscemi wrestled for the school and says he was far more successful as a team wrestler - knowing that the team relied on him for a win spurred him on. Was he a hit with the ladies? "No. I never had a girlfriend." He stops to correct himself. "I had a girlfriend for two weeks in ninth grade when I was 13, and then in high school I had another girlfriend for another two weeks. And that was it." The first time he had a proper girlfriend, he says, was in 1978 when he was 21 years old."
- Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian
"I think Robert Altman could see things in me that I didn't know I possessed, which is really exciting. He also instilled a tremendous amount of confidence, because he would say things like, "These are the bare bones, but I want you to go fill it out. You find the character. You bring it to me. You write whatever you want." And if you had an idea, he wouldn't want to hear about it. He'd want you to show it to him. So there's so much confidence and freedom that comes from that way of doing things. And he and Rudolph make the set the place to be. It's fun. It's a kind of creative freedom that's really inspiring. Altman loved actors so much. Everyone came to dailies — this is when dailies used to be projected — and there would be food and wine. You had to come. It was like required reading or something. If you didn't come, you were in trouble. But it was so much fun. They could be endlessly long, the dailies, but you know. He was a great mentor for me, really."
- Jennifer Jason Leigh, The A.V. Club
"The story of meeting Mark Isham is as coincidental as any one of my films. When 'Trouble in Mind' (1985) came around, I said I needed to have the music first, before we even scouted for locations, so I decided to go to Tower Records and I looked through all of the albums until my hands were black. I was looking for someone who plays all the instruments, because I figured that would be affordable. I was hoping to get a trumpet or a sax lead, but I would take anything that sounded good. When I got to Mark’s records, I saw that he played everything and his lead instrument was the trumpet so I bought all his tapes and I drove around listening to them for a couple of hours. I drove back to my producer’s office and I said that this is the guy. The phone rang and it was some agent representing a composer who had a few directors in mind he wanted to work with—and I was one of them. The composer was Mark Isham! A week later, I drove up to San Francisco and met Mark. We went to his house and in his dungeon basement he had all of these gigantic refrigerator-sized synthesizers that were brand-new at the time. He played trumpet and asked what I was looking for. I said, I want something with an emotional pull, but I don’t want it to be traditional in any way. We were only there for a day, but we went through a dozen ideas before the movie was shot. I’d say we wrote 80 percent of the score in that dungeon.
Probably the most important film music for me, and it was late in the game, had to do with Robert Altman. His office called me to be an assistant director and I said I don’t want to do that anymore, but they said I had to come meet him. I did and of course it changed my life. My little film dreams were just specks and Altman’s were skyscrapers. Bob reinvented it all, and I was right there at the time. He was very imposing, with piercing eyes. There was some X-ray vision about him, he was so smart and sharp and immediate, kind of caustic and wicked and wonderful. Anyway, I decided to work for him after I saw 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' (1971), because it was exactly what I was searching for on my own but didn’t know it. I’d never seen music and film and mood and tone and story and everything come together in a way that was complete. I know there have been other movies since, but I think he defined our musical perception of film."
- Alan Rudolph, Film Comment
"At that point, Robert Altman still had the Lionsgate offices, which was the company that he established, and the offices were in Westwood. It was a little office complex with a courtyard. And I knocked on the door, and he said, “Come in!” And I opened the door, and it was an apartment that he had up there!
But he was standing there… And he had a T-shirt on and a bathrobe, and he was unwrapping a brown paper-wrapped package, and he says, “Yeah, I just got back from Colombia!” I’m seeing him unwrap this package, and I’m thinking, “He’s got a pound of dope here!” But, in fact, it was some pre-Colombian art that he had bought when he had gone down there for the Cartagena Film Festival. And that was how the interview was conducted: with him standing there in this bathrobe.
He looked at me and he said, “So we’re going to do this movie.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Did you read it?” I said, “Yeah.” “So you saw the part?” “Yeah.” “You want to play it?” “Yeah!” That was my audition! But that’s Bob. That’s what he did. I mean, he perceived an essence pretty quickly, and he realized right off that the kid standing there inside his door had the right kind of innocence that would serve the role in the film 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' (1971). Because, you know, this is a kid who comes to town and gets shot, really, in cold blood. And it’s the dénouement of the film, and it was his way of really showing the savage, random violence that existed and was so much a part of life in that time and place."
- Keith Carradine, The A.V. Club
Keith Carradine
The Cast of 'Nashville'
'Picture' - Kid Rock's Sweet Southern Sugar featuring Sheryl Crow (born February 11, 1962 in Kennett, Missouri - now living in Nashville, Tennessee)
In 1992, 'Nashville' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The song "I'm Easy" was ranked 81st in a list of the '100 Best Songs Of All Time' by the American Film Institute. Possibly my number 26 all time favorite film. I have it above Mccabe and Mrs Miller and Gosford Park. I feel embarrassed I've never seen the Long Goodbye looks down in shame, I did see Marlowe Starring James Garner though. |
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Post by petrolino on May 27, 2018 1:54:50 GMT
Possibly my number 26 all time favorite film. I have it above Mccabe and Mrs Miller and Gosford Park. I feel embarrassed I've never seen the Long Goodbye looks down in shame, I did see Marlowe Starring James Garner though. I've not seen 'Marlowe'. |
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Post by hi224 on May 27, 2018 1:57:11 GMT
Possibly my number 26 all time favorite film. I have it above Mccabe and Mrs Miller and Gosford Park. I feel embarrassed I've never seen the Long Goodbye looks down in shame, I did see Marlowe Starring James Garner though. I've not seen 'Marlowe'. I couldn't get behind Garner as Marlowe, too charming and smooth, not enough turmoil or cynicism in his iteration. |
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Post by hi224 on May 27, 2018 2:09:02 GMT
Possibly my number 26 all time favorite film. I have it above Mccabe and Mrs Miller and Gosford Park. I feel embarrassed I've never seen the Long Goodbye looks down in shame, I did see Marlowe Starring James Garner though. I've not seen 'Marlowe'. this is getting the thread off track, but do you have a favorite Marlowe at all?. |
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Post by petrolino on May 27, 2018 2:10:45 GMT
this is getting the thread off track, but do you have a favorite Marlowe at all?. I do - Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe in 'Murder, My Sweet' (1944). How about you? |
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Post by hi224 on May 27, 2018 2:16:55 GMT
this is getting the thread off track, but do you have a favorite Marlowe at all?. I do - Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe in 'Murder, My Sweet' (1944). How about you? Bogart, But Mitchum was pretty solid too. |
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Post by petrolino on May 27, 2018 2:30:11 GMT
I do - Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe in 'Murder, My Sweet' (1944). How about you? Bogart, But Mitchum was pretty solid too. Yes, I do like 'The Big Sleep' (1946) and 'Farewell, My Lovely' (1975). |
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Post by Fox in the Snow on May 27, 2018 7:41:48 GMT
Great film. As far as Altman goes I'd put McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Player and Short Cuts above it though.
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Post by hi224 on Jul 23, 2020 6:45:46 GMT
The musical 'Nashville' takes a satirical look at the music scene in Nashville, Tennessee, with a passing nod to Memphis. Populist politician and presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker (Thomas Hal Phillips) of The Replacement Party is running his campaign and drumming up support. Aspiring singer-songwriters perform at local clubs and bars, keen to secure record deals. The climax is a concert gala fundraiser at the Parthenon in Centennial Park.
"They're gonna kill you. They're gonna tear your heart out if you keep on. They're gonna walk on your soul, girl."
Principal Players
David Arkin - Norman
Barbara Baxley - Lady Pearl
Ned Beatty - Delbert Reese
Karen Black - Connie White
Ronee Blakley - Barbara Jean
Timothy Brown - Tommy Brown
Keith Carradine - Tom Frank
Geraldine Chaplin - Opal
Robert DoQui - Wade
Shelley Duvall - L.A. Joan
Allen Garfield - Barnett
Henry Gibson - Haven Hamilton
Scott Glenn - Pfc. Glenn Kelly
Jeff Goldblum - Tricycle man
Barbara Harris - Albuquerque
David Hayward - Kenny Fraiser
Michael Murphy - John Triplette
Allan Nicholls - Bill
Dave Peel - Bud Hamilton
Cristina Raines - Mary
Bert Remsen - Star
Lily Tomlin - Linnea Reese
Gwen Welles - Sueleen Gay
Keenan Wynn - Mr. Green
Thomas Hal Phillips - Hal Phillip Walker
'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels' - Kitty Wells : The Queen of Country (born August 30, 1919 in Nashville, Tennessee)
The filmmaker Robert Altman was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, a state with its own rich musical history. His epic drama 'Nashville' opens with an inviting title sequence designed by Dan Perri that introduces the story's principals through album covers and injects some country flavour. Among Altman's major multi-character pieces such as 'A Wedding' (1978), 'H.E.A.L.T.H.' (1980), 'The Player' (1992) and 'Short Cuts' (1993), 'Nashville' bears close relation to the fashion industry satire 'Ready To Wear' (1994). The country music industry is big business in America and has been for a long time. From Marty Robbins' 'Gunfighter' albums to Carrie Underwood's 'American Idol' blockbuster streams, country & western's diverse playing field has been an important source of income and remained resolutely commercial.
Patsy Cline's signature song 'Crazy' was written by Texan songwriter Willie Nelson who this century helped Carla Bozulich rework his seminal album 'Red Headed Stranger' (released May, 1975) to create 'Red Headed Stranger' (2003). As the original record swept across America, 'Nashville' was being prepared for a June, 1975 release. Some commentators say the country music community closed ranks and reacted angrily towards Altman's satire, which may be true in some cases. There's a strong sense of solidarity among country musicians who view themselves as fellow highwaymen travelling down the same well-worn road, upholding traditions while interpreting and reinterpreting local legends. But though many of the great country stars of the past were bound by certain commonalities, it was their diversity of thought that gave them collective strength. As Jim Ridley recalled for 'Nashville Scene' : "Back in Nashville, however, the locals were getting nervous. According to some critics, among them Robert Mazzocco in The New York Review of Books, the movie ('Nashville', 1975) portrayed Nashvillians as gullible rubes at best and heartless automatons at worst. Others, including syndicated reviewer Rex Reed, agreed, but declared that Nashvillians deserved what they got. “[The film] floats like navel lint into the vulgar Vegas of country and western music, that plunking, planking citadel of bad taste called Nashville, Tenn.,” wrote the former star of Myra Breckinridge. Even the most positive advance reviews carried an implicit — and sometimes explicit — condescension toward Music City in general and country music in particular. “Country-and-western basically dresses up folk music in rhinestones and spangles, making hay out of Americana,” Jay Cocks wrote in Time. Despite an unequivocal rave from The Tennessean’s Eugene Wyatt, who declared himself “a Nashvillian who loves his city and wishes it well,” word still filtered back that the movie was anti-American, anti-country and anti-Nashville." From Nashville to Memphis, music bleeds from the roots in Tennessee. In the United States of America, country group Florida Georgia Line recently polled better from state to state than any other mainstream musical act, Taylor Swift is currently ranked as one of the top 3 global recording artists (with Ed Sheeran and Drake) and Miranda Lambert's recent run of albums has seen her topping countless "album of the year" polls. The soundtrack to the film 'Nashville' includes live folk, gospel, bluegrass and western swing.
"Nashville is Robert Altman's brilliant mosaic of American life as seen through 24 characters involved in Nashville political rally: full of cogent character studies, comic and poignant vignettes, done in seemingly free-form style."
- Leonard Maltin, '100 Must-See Films Of The 20th Century'
“Coming: ‘Nashville.’ ” This is another of Kael’s raves, for one of her favorite directors, Robert Altman. “It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over,” she wrote. (The second person was a Kael signature.) This bliss-out style of praise was often lampooned, and became especially controversial in this review, which Kael wrote after seeing an early cut of the movie. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby protested: “If one can review a film on the basis of an approximately three-hour rough cut, why not review it on the basis of a five-hour rough cut? A ten-hour one? On the basis of a screenplay? The original material if first printed as a book?” Kael’s “Nashville” review also shows her trying to fit movies into the canon of modern art. Throughout the piece, she compares Altman’s efforts to Joyce’s in “Ulysses.”
- Nathan Heller, 'Five Classic Pauline Kael Reviews'
"‘A dialectic collage of unreality,’ remarked pop singer Brenda Lee, emerging from the Nashville premiere in August. After a summer full of humourless rhetoric in the American press about ‘the true lesson of ‘Watergate’, ‘the failure of our civilization,’ ‘the long nauseating terror of a fall through the existential void,’ and equally grave matters — most of it implying that a movie has to be about ‘everything’ (i.e., the State of the Union) before it can be about anything – it was refreshing to discover that someone, at long last, had finally got it right. Even if Lee’s comment was intended as a slam, it deserves to be resurrected as a tribute. For if Nashville is conceivably the most exciting commercial American movie in years, this is first of all because of what it constructs, not what it exposes.
From the moment we begin with an ad for the film itself — a blaring overload of multi-media confusion — and pass to a political campaign van spouting banalities, then to a recording studio where country music star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) is cutting a hilariously glib Bicentennial anthem, Nashville registers as a double-fisted satire of its chosen terrain, and it would be wrong to suggest that its targets of derision are beside the point, even if the angle of vision subsequently widens to take in more than just foolishness. But a rich ‘dialectic collage’ of contradictory attitudes and diverse realities is what brings the film so vibrantly to life, and to launch moralistic rockets on such a shifting base is to miss its achievement entirely. In point of fact, the film celebrates as much as it ridicules — often doing both at the same time — while giving both its brilliant cast and its audience too much elbow room to allow for any overriding thesis."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sight And Sound
"Taking down Pauline Kael's 1976 collection 'Reeling' to re-read her famous review of "Nashville," I find a yellow legal sheet marking the page: my notes for a class I taught on the film. "What is this story about?" I wrote. The film may be great because you can't really answer that question. It is a musical; Robert Altman observes in his commentary on the new DVD re-release that it contains more than an hour of music. It is a docudrama about the Nashville scene. It is a political parable, written and directed in the immediate aftermath of Watergate (the scenes in the Grand Ole Opry were shot on the day Richard M. Nixon resigned). It tells interlocking stories of love and sex, of hearts broken and mended. And it is a wicked satire of American smarminess ("Welcome to Nashville and to my lovely home," a country star gushes to Elliott Gould). But more than anything else, it is a tender poem to the wounded and the sad."
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
Karen Black
Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda & Lily Tomlin
Clip from 'The Nashville Sound' (1970)
'I'm Not Worth The Tears' - Dolly Parton (born January 19, 1946 in Sevier County, Tennessee)
Robert Altman used multiple camera set-ups when filming the elegiac western 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' (1971) which showcased songs by Leonard Cohen. This generally became his favoured method of shooting. In 'Nashville', he employs carefully timed focus pulls and zoom shots, deep-focus compositions and tracking shots. These technical aspects aid Altman in putting different characters in the frame during complicated set-ups. Altman shot most of the footage (and performances) using live sound, attaching microphones and radios to his central players, even if they were on the periphery of the scene. He also used tape machines and some basic laboratory processes to help preserve a documentary feel.
"Picture a movie that runs nearly three hours, has no conventional plotline and 24 different major characters and you have 'Nashville'. Robert Altman’s masterpiece may be the most ambitious movie ever made and it’s one that’s admittedly hard to “get,” and intentionally made that way. First viewings may bring calls of “rambling,” “pointless” or “boring,” mirroring quite accurately the initial reactions of many in 1975. 'Nashville' was not a box office success by any means, making a measly $9 million, and even the most distinguished of critics admitted to falling asleep during it on the first go-round.
But the film always had its fighters — Siskel and Ebert both called it the best film of 1975 — and over the years Nashville‘s reputation has grown thanks to the admiration of such supporters. Most telling is the film’s rise from no spot on the AFI’s original Top 100 in 1997, all the way to #59 in 2007. A similar phenomenon can be said about Altman himself, who did not receive a single Oscar until his Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Together, Altman and 'Nashville' are made for eachother, by eachother, both initially off-putting, unashamedly maverick, and gradually more appreciated the more they are studied. Few films capture their era better, and even fewer have had the power to ring true over the years.
Sandwiched between the social activism of the ’60s and the patriotic furvor of the Reagan ’80s, Altman geniously sets his story during America’s 1976 bicentennial celebration, pointing out the paradox of celebrating a nation that had just met its match with the Vietcong and whose Watergate president had just been ousted from office (the Grand Ole Opry scenes were shot on the day Nixon resigned). Even more poignant is the film’s setting in the American heartland, in the heart of country music, Nashville, where politics and showbiz collide, both presented as equally cut-throat industires, one commenting heavily on the functionality of the other. Spanning just five days, the story follows a whole hoard of characters, each involved in either the city’s ongoing political campaign or its upcoming country music festival, both of which share the stage of Nashville’s Parthenon for a bicentennial event in the film’s shocking conclusion."
- Jason Fraley, Film Spectrum
"Four decades before becoming one of America's "it" cities, Nashville was the subject of a sprawling, 24-character study that was simultaneously hailed by critics as a cinematic masterpiece and vilified by country artists offended by what they saw as a slam against their industry — or, even worse, a series of caricatures that perhaps cut a little too closely to real life. Directed by Robert Altman, the big-screen 'Nashville' opened in New York City on June 11th, 1975, although the movie didn't host its actual Music City premiere until two months later.
Five years after exploring the bloody realism of the Korean War with 'M*A*S*H', which delighted audiences and critics with its decidedly dark humor, Altman trained his experimental style on what was supposed to be a satirical take on the Nashville recording industry. It was a music-filled film with inter-connected characters and plot, featuring a political campaign rally at its explosive, chaotic climax. Those who "got" the joke (which seemed to be mostly those outside the country music community) praised Nashville for its unconventional storytelling and an absence of slickness in the musical numbers throughout.
At a time when country music was beginning to routinely cross over into pop territory (just ahead of another big-screen phenomenon, the Urban Cowboy boom), the city of Nashville was, understandably, protective of its industry and image. Just as the characters from a similarly-named ABC TV series, 'Nashville', invited comparisons to real-life country stars when the show first debuted in 2012, the principals in Altman's film were dissected for the traits that were, perhaps, meant to mirror those of such country icons as Porter Wagoner, Hank Snow, Charley Pride and Loretta Lynn."
- Stephen L. Betts, Rolling Stone
"Little in 'Nashville' is stated explicitly. Characters’ personalities are expanded on through the visual shorthand of costume and production design."
- Andreas Stoehr, The Dissolve
Henry Gibson & Michael Murphy
'You Can't Tell The Difference After Dark' - Alberta Hunter (born April 1, Memphis, Tennessee)
'Nashville' and Sidney Lumet's 'Dog Day Afternoon' (1975) pushed editing and sound editing techniques to new heights in 1975, becoming benchmarks in the evolution of cutting room process. Both Altman and Lumet admired editor Walter Murch's work on Francis Coppola's sound experiment 'The Conversation' (1974). Allen Garfield was cast in 'Nashville' by Altman after he'd met up with Coppola at the Cannes Film Festival which was screening 'The Conversation'. Actor John Cazale co-stars in 'The Conversation' and 'Dog Day Afternoon'.
"Robert Altman redefined the landscape of cinema. Those huge tracking shots, multiple narratives, improvised scenes full of ums and ahs, and hopelessly unformed sentences. He turned the viewer from audience into eavesdroppers, voyeurs. He had a hard time in the 80s when nobody wanted to make his movies, but in the past 10 years has come back with film after film - occasionally great ('Short Cuts'), often ropy ('Pret-a-Porter'), always interesting. I want to tell him he's a hero of mine, prostrate myself in front of him, ask him how he's done it. But it would be unprofessional wouldn't it? So I play it cool and tell him I admire his work.
While sex may have driven him towards the movies (even his third wife talks about his history of womanising), his priority soon became art. He was already in his 40s when he began making those sprawling epics of American life such as 'Nashville', 'The Long Goodbye' and 'McCabe and Mrs Miller'. They were often movies without beginning, end and plotline - cinema's equivalent to freeform jazz. When I ask him what he considers his movies to be about, the best he can come up with is the truth. "I think artists tend to be fairly truthful. What else is there to deal with but the truth?" He explains that an artist produces original work, and compares it to journalism. "If you're working for a mandate like yourself, if you have an assignment to do an interview with a person, you can be artistic about it, but it's difficult to be an artist." Altman has always loved pricking our little vanities. Don't worry about hurting my pride, I say to him with a smile. "Oh, I'm not worried about that," he says, with his poker face."
- Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian
"Robert Altman staged a quiet revolution inside American cinema. He has his evident heirs who knew him and were directly associated with his projects (Alan Rudolph, Paul Thomas Anderson), but his influence is much vaster and more diffuse. Altman created his own form of narrative action, and his own conception of character psychology or behaviour. The stylistic tics for which he is most famous - overlapping voices (the live recording system uses, Lion's Gate 8 Track Sound, gets an up-front credit), zoom lens, wandering camera, ensemble acting within an open frame - are important in themselves, but they are especially significant for the ways they help sculpt these new forms of action and character."
- Adrian Martin, 'Anywhere But Home'
"Again, it was always the actors that are doing it. I wanted to see something that I hadn’t seen before. That was my main mandate. I don’t like talking to actors much about what we’re doing. If an actor comes up to me during a shoot and says, ‘How do you want me to play this scene?’ I don’t want to get into that conversation. Because as soon as I say, ‘I want you to play it da-da-da’, I’ve narrowed this 360 degree possibility down to a little piece of pie. The performance and the film is not successful and the actor says, ‘Well I just did what he told me to do.’ I want to see something that I’ve never seen before, so how can I tell that actor what that is? I’m not trying to construct a document or situation that is what I want, because what I want is something new to me."
- Robert Altman, The British Film Institute
Shelley Duvall
'Goin' To Memphis' - Carl Perkins : The King of Rockabilly (born April 9, 1932 in Tiptonville, Tennessee)
'Nashville' is an ambitious, beautifully composed mosaic of American life that gleefully takes shots at the collision between counterculture hippies, folk revivalists and soul stirrers struggling to impress a deeply embedded country & western hierarchy. It's easy to see why it ruffled a few feathers in 1975 but I think it's all in good humour. Many of the cast members are accomplished singers and musicians. Keith Carradine picked up the Best Song Oscar for his composition 'I'm Easy' and released his album 'I'm Easy' (1976) the following year.
"In the flesh, Steve Buscemi looks much as he does in the movies - Bela Lugosi meets Stan Laurel. He wears the bewildered expression of a cartoon character who has just been flattened. His face is remarkable - the bags underneath his eyes have their own bags; the sockets their own shade of red, and his teeth are stacked like tins on a supermarket shelf. He is skinny and wiry, and, dressed all in black, resembles an animated shoelace. A strangely attractive shoelace. Steve Buscemi is not the stuff of leading men. Yet, occasionally, he does lead, and he is just about the best support or cameo player in the business.
As a kid, he used to watch a huge amount of television, especially movies, and he set his heart on acting. He loved his extended family set-up in New York, but dreamed of Hollywood. After all, his father's close friend, Peter Miller, had managed the same successful transition, and had even starred in Robert Altman's first film, 'The Delinquents' (1957) {Buscemi would work with Altman on 'Kansas City' (1996) and 'Tanner On Tanner' for television}. Occasionally, Uncle Peter would return to New York and Buscemi would question him about the business. "So in the back of my mind it was possible. Here was someone from my background and neighbourhood who did become an actor. But he didn't have connections to help me." In fact, Uncle Peter ended up as an investment banker.
At school he hung with the hard boys, and made them laugh with his clowning. He was strong, but not tough. Buscemi wrestled for the school and says he was far more successful as a team wrestler - knowing that the team relied on him for a win spurred him on. Was he a hit with the ladies? "No. I never had a girlfriend." He stops to correct himself. "I had a girlfriend for two weeks in ninth grade when I was 13, and then in high school I had another girlfriend for another two weeks. And that was it." The first time he had a proper girlfriend, he says, was in 1978 when he was 21 years old."
- Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian
"I think Robert Altman could see things in me that I didn't know I possessed, which is really exciting. He also instilled a tremendous amount of confidence, because he would say things like, "These are the bare bones, but I want you to go fill it out. You find the character. You bring it to me. You write whatever you want." And if you had an idea, he wouldn't want to hear about it. He'd want you to show it to him. So there's so much confidence and freedom that comes from that way of doing things. And he and Rudolph make the set the place to be. It's fun. It's a kind of creative freedom that's really inspiring. Altman loved actors so much. Everyone came to dailies — this is when dailies used to be projected — and there would be food and wine. You had to come. It was like required reading or something. If you didn't come, you were in trouble. But it was so much fun. They could be endlessly long, the dailies, but you know. He was a great mentor for me, really."
- Jennifer Jason Leigh, The A.V. Club
"The story of meeting Mark Isham is as coincidental as any one of my films. When 'Trouble in Mind' (1985) came around, I said I needed to have the music first, before we even scouted for locations, so I decided to go to Tower Records and I looked through all of the albums until my hands were black. I was looking for someone who plays all the instruments, because I figured that would be affordable. I was hoping to get a trumpet or a sax lead, but I would take anything that sounded good. When I got to Mark’s records, I saw that he played everything and his lead instrument was the trumpet so I bought all his tapes and I drove around listening to them for a couple of hours. I drove back to my producer’s office and I said that this is the guy. The phone rang and it was some agent representing a composer who had a few directors in mind he wanted to work with—and I was one of them. The composer was Mark Isham! A week later, I drove up to San Francisco and met Mark. We went to his house and in his dungeon basement he had all of these gigantic refrigerator-sized synthesizers that were brand-new at the time. He played trumpet and asked what I was looking for. I said, I want something with an emotional pull, but I don’t want it to be traditional in any way. We were only there for a day, but we went through a dozen ideas before the movie was shot. I’d say we wrote 80 percent of the score in that dungeon.
Probably the most important film music for me, and it was late in the game, had to do with Robert Altman. His office called me to be an assistant director and I said I don’t want to do that anymore, but they said I had to come meet him. I did and of course it changed my life. My little film dreams were just specks and Altman’s were skyscrapers. Bob reinvented it all, and I was right there at the time. He was very imposing, with piercing eyes. There was some X-ray vision about him, he was so smart and sharp and immediate, kind of caustic and wicked and wonderful. Anyway, I decided to work for him after I saw 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' (1971), because it was exactly what I was searching for on my own but didn’t know it. I’d never seen music and film and mood and tone and story and everything come together in a way that was complete. I know there have been other movies since, but I think he defined our musical perception of film."
- Alan Rudolph, Film Comment
"At that point, Robert Altman still had the Lionsgate offices, which was the company that he established, and the offices were in Westwood. It was a little office complex with a courtyard. And I knocked on the door, and he said, “Come in!” And I opened the door, and it was an apartment that he had up there!
But he was standing there… And he had a T-shirt on and a bathrobe, and he was unwrapping a brown paper-wrapped package, and he says, “Yeah, I just got back from Colombia!” I’m seeing him unwrap this package, and I’m thinking, “He’s got a pound of dope here!” But, in fact, it was some pre-Colombian art that he had bought when he had gone down there for the Cartagena Film Festival. And that was how the interview was conducted: with him standing there in this bathrobe.
He looked at me and he said, “So we’re going to do this movie.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Did you read it?” I said, “Yeah.” “So you saw the part?” “Yeah.” “You want to play it?” “Yeah!” That was my audition! But that’s Bob. That’s what he did. I mean, he perceived an essence pretty quickly, and he realized right off that the kid standing there inside his door had the right kind of innocence that would serve the role in the film 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' (1971). Because, you know, this is a kid who comes to town and gets shot, really, in cold blood. And it’s the dénouement of the film, and it was his way of really showing the savage, random violence that existed and was so much a part of life in that time and place."
- Keith Carradine, The A.V. Club
Keith Carradine
The Cast of 'Nashville'
'Picture' - Kid Rock's Sweet Southern Sugar featuring Sheryl Crow (born February 11, 1962 in Kennett, Missouri - now living in Nashville, Tennessee)
In 1992, 'Nashville' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The song "I'm Easy" was ranked 81st in a list of the '100 Best Songs Of All Time' by the American Film Institute. who do you nom?. |
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Post by petrolino on Jul 23, 2020 8:00:47 GMT
In 1992, 'Nashville' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The song "I'm Easy" was ranked 81st in a list of the '100 Best Songs Of All Time' by the American Film Institute. who do you nom?. Best Director - Robert Altman Best - Keith Carradine
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Post by Captain Spencer on Jul 23, 2020 14:52:30 GMT
To be completely honest, I was never really fond of Nashville. I found it to be way too long and rather dull. But then again, maybe I wasn't in the right mood when I first saw it. Perhaps I'll give it another try sometime, and I might have a change of opinion.
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Post by mortsahlfan on Jul 23, 2020 15:53:40 GMT
I've rated 2,500 movies, and this is my #3 of all-time..... LOVE it.. An American microcosm.
I love "Ms. Can't Get Enough"'s face at the end, when she finally gains some self-awareness and probably thinks, "Fuck, I don't wanna be Barbara Jean".
Notice how cynical "The Queen of Nashville" (Henry Gibson's wife) she is... "Except for the Kennedy boys, but they were different".
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Post by petrolino on Jul 24, 2020 23:42:05 GMT
I've rated 2,500 movies, and this is my #3 of all-time..... LOVE it.. An American microcosm. I love "Ms. Can't Get Enough"'s face at the end, when she finally gains some self-awareness and probably thinks, "Fuck, I don't wanna be Barbara Jean". Notice how cynical "The Queen of Nashville" (Henry Gibson's wife) she is... "Except for the Kennedy boys, but they were different".
I was thinking a lot about the music in Robert Altman's mosaic films, following the death of Annie Ross. I'm not a healthy decider so I tend to steer clear - I like 'Dog Day Afternoon' as much as 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'.
'To Hell With Love' - Annie Ross & The Low Note Quintet
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Post by mortsahlfan on Jul 25, 2020 12:42:50 GMT
I've rated 2,500 movies, and this is my #3 of all-time..... LOVE it.. An American microcosm. I love "Ms. Can't Get Enough"'s face at the end, when she finally gains some self-awareness and probably thinks, "Fuck, I don't wanna be Barbara Jean". Notice how cynical "The Queen of Nashville" (Henry Gibson's wife) she is... "Except for the Kennedy boys, but they were different".
I was thinking a lot about the music in Robert Altman's mosaic films, following the death of Annie Ross. I'm not a healthy decider so I tend to steer clear - I like 'Dog Day Afternoon' as much as 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'.
'To Hell With Love' - Annie Ross & The Low Note Quintet
I like "Dog Day Afternoon", but "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" is in my Top 5 all-time.... John Cassavetes was going to direct it, but he insisted on Seymour Cassell (Jack Nicholson was perfect for the part, and James Caan couldn't do it because of his cocaine problem). I can't even imagine how he'd do, but then again, he did do "A Child is Waiting", but that Kramer fired him, and THEN edited the movie, but its still a great one, but it was the last time he worked in the studio system.
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