Robert Altman: The Oral Biography
By Mitchell Zuckoff
(Knopf, 592 pp., $35)
Here is your exam question: who is the last American movie director who made thirty-nine films but never won the Oscar for best director? Name the film by that director that cost the most money, and name the film of his that earned the most. Clue: The Departed, which must have been around Martin Scorsese’s thirtieth picture, and did win the directing Oscar, cost $90 million (four times as much as any of this man’s films cost)--so don’t go that way. Background info: Gosford Park cost $15 million; Nashville cost $2.2 million; M.A.S.H. cost about $3.5 million, and earned around $70 million; Popeye cost $20 million (in 1980). Here is your assignment: assess and reconcile these allegations in an essay of approximately 3,000 words. (Note: banish from your mind any insinuation that nowadays a director who makes thirty-nine films has to be given a best director Oscar--though it is not easy to think of many that fecund who don’t have a bronze fetish to nurse at night.)
This morning, I was forwarded a choice e-mail from the American Family Association (AFA) that instructs senior citizens to drop their AARP memberships. The AFA is an influential right-wing evangelical organization that has been accused of promoting homophobia, anti-Semitism, and other prejudices. It has more than 2 million online members and about 180,000 subscribers to its monthly magazine.
While conservatives have raised all kinds of objections to last week's vanilla arms-control agreement, it's interesting that the emotional core of their critique has been an attack on something called the "offense-defense linkage"
April 17: Should I Be Scared? Will Durban II spur the same anti-Israel, anti-Semitic vitriol that plagued Durban I?
April 19: Libya On Trial Libya, an egregious human-rights violator, is the face of this year's conference--oh, the irony!
It's been more than a month since the auto industry came to Washington, begging for a rescue. And, since that time, it's become clear just how dry Detroit's reservoir of goodwill has run. For conservative opponents of bailout legislation, like Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, the U.S. auto industry is an object of scorn--"dinosaurs," he has called them. For the liberals who support a rescue, like Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, Detroit remains an embarrassment.
On a hot spring evening in early May--the kind that elicits nervous global-warming jokes--a crowd of powerful and wealthy people are gathered at a cocktail party in the banquet hall in the Hart Senate Office building on Capitol Hill, sipping wine and talking carbon.
Well before he officially launched his candidacy in mid-September, Wesley Clark was hailed as the Democrats' savior. Party strategists, convinced that the front-running Howard Dean would flame out against George W. Bush, saw in Clark not only a sensible political alternative but, just as important, an electable one. Clark's 34 years in the Army--which included a heroic tour in Vietnam and culminated in four stars--and his public criticism of the Iraq war had made him a darling among centrist liberals who saw a bemedaled general as the perfect antidote to the GOP's national security dominance.
