"In celebration of what would have been his hundredth birthday, the Criterion Channel is currently featuring an extensive series of films by maverick auteur Robert Altman, who became so renowned in the 1970s that the term “Altmanesque” got bandied about regularly among critics and cinephiles. According to The Big Picture’s Sean Fennessey, whose video essay on Altman accompanies the Criterion series, “Altmanesque” refers to “the subversion of all expected modes in narrative storytelling — in genre, in filmmaking style, in performance.”
And for a director with a tendency toward “the undoing of everything we expect from a Hollywood movie,” Altman had an incredibly robust Hollywood career. His idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking treated the script as a “diagram” that provided loose guidelines but need not be adhered to while going through the process of “actors finding character and story finding itself.” In keeping with an approach that was virtually designed to oppose classical Hollywood production practices and drive producers and studio executives crazy, he favored intensive collaboration with actors.
Altman loved actors, and they almost uniformly adored him. He not only recruited great talent for film, such as Shelley Duvall, Lily Tomlin, and almost the entire supporting cast of M*A*S*H, whom he drafted from the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco, but also guided such favorites as Duvall and Elliott Gould to repeated flights of idiosyncratic brilliance."
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/robert-altman-criterion-film-hollywood
