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I've had it-the agencies, the winking, the networks, the ratings. Anyone who thinks TV is an art medium is crazy-it's an advertising medium.

Robert Altman

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Robert Altman
Age: 81 †
Born: 1925
Born: February 20
Died: 2006
Died: November 20
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Librettist
Screenwriter
Theatrical Director
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Television
Agencies
Crazy
Rating
Anyone
Networks
Art
Medium
Thinking
Mediums
Agency
Advertising
Winking
Thinks
Ratings

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If you have a child who is seven feet tall, you don't cut off his head or his legs. You buy him a bigger bed and hope he plays basketball.
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I don't know what Altmanesque means, though I suppose I'm flattered by it.
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The Oscar for the films, it'd be nice. But I don't make those kind of films, and I don't think that will ever happen.
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The minute you have more than one voice, you have more possibilities opening up. You have all the molecules in all of those bodies and their make up interacting.
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I like audiences to crane their necks.
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There was not a lot of dialogue. The titles were just to keep you up. It's the visual stimulation that hits the audience. That's the reason for film. Otherwise, we might as well turn the light out and call it radio.
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If something works for you, you continue to do it. I did a bunch of pictures for 20th Century Fox when Alan Ladd was over there, but I set the budgets so low that they'd approve and I'd deliver the film. They would have no say in it, which is the kind of arrangement I liked.
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Happy endings are absolutely ludicrous, they're not true at all. We see the guy carry the girl across the threshold and everybody lives happily ever after -- that's bullshit. Three weeks later he's beating her up and she's suing for divorce and he's got cancer.
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That wasn't an ending. It was just a stopping point.
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Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.
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We make too much of the good and too much of the bad.
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I'll give you the same advice I give my children: Never take advice from anybody.
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I was a heavy drinker, but the alcohol affected my heart rather than my liver. So I stopped. I smoke grass now. I say that to everybody, because marijuana should be legalized. It's ridiculous that it isn't. If at the end of the day I feel like smoking a joint I do it. It changes the perception of what I've been through all day.
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They'll never give me an Oscar. And I sincerely, honestly don't care. I always turn up when I'm nominated and it would be nice to get one, but to win one would be bad luck. It comes with too much expectation. It would be the end.
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If George W. Bush is elected president, I'm leaving for France.
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Retirement? You're talking about death, right?
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[M*A*S*H] didn't get released by FOX, it escaped.
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What is an ending? There's no such thing. Death is the only ending.
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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.
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You will never see'Altman's Great Film of the Seventies: The Director's Cut' because you have never seen a film of mine that wasn't the director's cut. I have never permitted it.
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