Robert Altman

Today would be the 81st birthday of the filmmaker Robert Altman, born in 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri. Altman-whose surname translates to "old man" in German-was a five-time nominee for the Academy Award for Best Director.

Before he began his career in cinema, Altman served in the military as a bomber crewman. He flew over 50 missions in the last years of WWII before being discharged in 1946. Had he reenlisted a few years later as the military had hoped, he would have been sent to combat in the Korean War-the conflict that would later become the setting for his hit 1970 black comedy M*A*S*H.

M*A*S*H was a political parody engendered in the era's widespread cultural opposition to the Vietnam war. In a stroke of luck, Altman was offered the chance to direct it only after 14 other directors had passed on it first. The movie would be his big break, providing him the funds and fame to begin an ambitious career of production-with an average of one movie finished a year. His films include Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Gosford Park, and The Long Goodbye.

Altman's films bucked any single genre or tradition. He dabbled in a bit of everything. Nashville embraced the unusual form of musical satire enormous in scope, while McCabe and Mrs. Miller adapted the traditional western for a modern audience. Altman was also not one for a classic narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end; instead, in creating each movie he sketched only a basic plot-what he called the film's "blueprint"-and encouraged his actors to improvise their lines freely. He had radical ideas about sound and dialogue for the time. He would often arrange for scenes of overlapping chatter, with multiple actors speaking at the same time, because, he said, "it is what we do in life."

Altman said, "I never knew what I wanted, except that it was something I hadn't seen before."