MADness—the Blog

People talk about great developments in film history—sound, color, widescreen, 3D.  I think it’s hard to overstate the value of the DVD audio commentary.  Hard to believe we ever lived without it.  I’m not interested in a lot of the special features the studios throw in, but the audio commentary—especially when a good director is doing it—is invaluable.  You can watch a film and get a film school education at the same time.

Anytime you have a chance to listen to Robert Altman, you should.  The man had a wealth of knowledge, insight, and wisdom.  Here are some comments he made for the DVD of Kansas City, his 1996 film about gangsters, jazz, and a kidnapping gone bad.  People in the business generally don’t say these kinds of things, in deference to the powers that be.  Altman didn’t pull his punches.

Altman, on film preservation, money, and art:

Ten, twelve years ago, I would say most of my films were lost.  The films I made in the ’60 and the ’70s—they were using a really cheap kind of stock then, Kodak stock, and the film didn’t last.  It deteriorated.  The color went.  It’s very expensive to remaster those films.  That’s what Scorsese, and myself, and many of us have with this film program of saving these films.

It’s kind of a silly thing, when you think about it, that we go out and raise the money—a lot of money—in order to save the assets of a company that won’t spend that money themselves.  We do it for them, and it’s amazing how much people will do for art.  And that’s why I don’t even get angry with people—people who are in the money part of this business:  they’re of no interest to me whatsoever.  I use them and their money to make my films, cause that’s all I’m concerned about.  A hundred years from now, whether they were very successful or not is not going to have any bearing on anybody, anywhere, anytime.

But the fact that our culture has come to such a point that the people who have the money won’t be responsible for the material they deal with—I find it obscene.  They should be doing that.  They should say, “God, how do we pay back what they’ve given us?”  These people all drive more cars than they can afford garages for, they build up these mass fortunes, and they don’t really mean anything.  But that’s the way it is, that’s the way it’s always been, and I think that’s the way it always will be.  Until we can get to a gentler place.

I think that America has become very, very mean-spirited in the last 20 years or so, 20, 30 years.  It used to be that art had an importance.  We found an audience—because there is an audience out there for it—you just have to deliver it to that audience.  And now we have an audience that’s built up of mainly 14-year-old males.  They come to all these multiplexes.  They have a whole social life there.  So we just want to keep feeding stuff in that serves that purpose.