Out of Focus

Four Years Gone: Stephen Mark Dobbs (June 5, 1943-October 25, 2016)

Four years ago today, in the wee hours of the morning, my dad died. Considering how little time I’ve spent in this tiny speck the Interwebs, the fact that I've actually mentioned his passing once is notable. It was nearly 17 months ago, on what would have been his 76th birthday, and before I clicked “Publish” on that post (just a couple entries back), I wrote several thousand other words that ultimately I decided did not fit that moment, for me, on his birthday, at that time. So, I saved them in the digital bowels of my computer.

And now, I’ve done it again: Thousands of more words about him, his life through my eyes, my life in relation to his, and of course, the peaks and valleys of our never-estranged but always complicated relationship.

None of those words exist in this post, but for some reason, this year more than any before—including when he died in 2016—commemorating my dad today, on the anniversary of his death, became imperative. For years now, if I missed a self-imposed deadline to post on this silent website, I would move on. My “Drafts” folder is enormous, and included therein are those thousands of words about Stephen Dobbs.

So on this fourth anniversary of his death, and with the full intent of publishing many (if not all) of those other still-not-ready-for-prime-time thoughts, I decided to memorialize him in the most straightforward way I could while still utilizing my own words.

When my family needed to submit an obituary to the Bay Area publications most central to his life—specifically the San Francisco Chronicle, Marin Independent Journal, and the J Weekly—I volunteered to give it a first pass. After some edits by my stepmother and one of my brothers, the final published version was not so different.

However, what I wrote initially, I wrote for myself and my dad almost more than for anyone else. I wrote it in a manner and containing elements that I believed he would have appreciated; little personal touches that likely possessed more meaning for me than others. My draft needed trimming for length, and therefore, many of those bits of color fell to the cutting room floor.

I’m not sure why I didn’t post my version here in 2016 when I wrote it. In fact, I never considered doing so until this morning when I realized that I would not finish the piece I was writing about him today.

One final note: My dad was a control freak, so of course, he had prepared his own obituary years earlier. It served as useful background for listing the various organizations with which he was involved. He also selected the photo he wanted to use, which offers an unfortunate, but accurate, example of his fashion sense and (I suppose) expresses the reality of his vanity since—as that tie illustrates—this is a photo from the last century. Nevertheless, it fits.

Therefore, with that preamble behind us and several minimal edits since I first wrote it two days after he died, I offer my Final Cut: The (mostly) unabridged version of the obituary of Stephen Mark Dobbs.

(Wishing I could wish) Happy birthday Dad: An overdue memorial, first in a series?

Seventy-six years ago today, Stephen Mark Dobbs was born in San Francisco. I write “Stephen Mark Dobbs” because my dad was a fan of using full names. If he mailed something to me, he inevitably addressed the envelope to “Aaron Marc Dobbs.” (Let’s not discuss the weird middle name thing right now, OK?)

My dad turning 76 makes no sense to me. How could it? I still haven’t fully absorbed that ...

In under four months, I will be 48.

OR ... by the time my dad celebrated his 48th birthday, I was 20 and completing (in a manner of speaking) my third year at UCLA, while he and my stepmother had converted me from an only child into the eldest (by far!) of his four sons.

OR ... that my two grandmothers (born just six months apart in 1922) were 49 when I was born.

OR ... my grandfather was only 75 in 1994 when he lost his battle with leukemia. How could my dad be older than his father?

OR ... that I no longer have a living father.

My dad didn’t make it to 74, much less 76, because on Oct. 25, 2016, he lost his own health battle. His never surpassing nor even reaching my grandfather's age does nothing to lessen this confusion.

I often describe my 1996 move to New York as something that took a long time to happen very quickly, and 20 years later, almost to the day, that also depicted my dad’s decline. Today, over 2 1/2 years later, I still struggle with his death, even more than I did when my youngest brother called to say he had died. The iconic opening of “A Tale of Two Cities” described my 2016 perfectly, with the presidential election only landing at number three on my personal tragedy chart. Just four months before my dad died, my wife’s aunt Evelyn--simply the kindest, most selfless and generous person you could ever meet--had lost her battle with cancer and also passed away.

Fortunately, those two heartbreaking events bookended the arrival of my son Elijah (named for Evelyn).

I miss my dad terribly. Or, I miss having a dad terribly. I still vacillate between the two, wondering if they are one and the same or, in fact, quite different. I suppose both are accurate, but on any given day, one feels stronger than the other.

Watching Elijah transform from newborn to infant to toddler to the crazy, wonderful, curious, hysterical almost-three-year-old (consistently ignoring my pleas to stop jumping on the couch) makes me miss my dad even more. My five-year-old daughter Ruby provides as much wonderment and awe as Elijah, but I did not identify with my dad observing her at 2 1/2 as I do now watching this little boy.

When I was 2 1/2, my father was a few months shy of 31. It’s hard to imagine myself at 31 with a baby, so I see myself in Elijah, sometimes even more than picturing a shared experience with my father. And yet, I want to connect with him about those moments, when I was entering into actual personhood, and he couldn’t have known what he was doing, even when he thought he did.

I had a complicated relationship with my dad, which certainly doesn’t make me unique, but the confusion over missing him versus an idea of him certainly extends from this dynamic. Beginning with my teen years and for most of the following three decades, our relationship ebbed and flowed. Sometimes, I wouldn’t speak to him for a few months. I practiced an enormous amount of subconscious (and ultimately self-sabotaging) rebellion against him

And so my struggle most often translates to one of guilt: Do I have the right to miss my father? When I so frequently pushed against him for so long? Who am I to wallow in sadness and loss when I failed to foster a closer adult relationship. If anything, I did the opposite. Hell, 400+ miles to Los Angeles wasn’t far enough, so I moved to the east coast!

And yet, years of therapy have taught me that it’s not that simple. So ... I struggle. And whenever I get frustrated at Elijah, I feel like I’m being hazed for all the times I caused my parents such agita. And whenever I’m holding him trying to get him to fall asleep, I wonder what my dad would think during similar nights with me, as he stared at his perfect little boy, dreaming and hoping for a magnificent life in front of him. I doubt my dad would ever have thought to himself, “I hope I don’t fuck him up!” like I frequently do. Yet, not since at least my pre-teen years do I recall feeling a closer connection to him than I do in those moments, even though he’s no longer here. I shouldn’t be surprised that the inability to discuss it with him feels like such an enormous loss. And still ...

I wrote four other versions of this post before settling on this one, just starting over each time and pulling a little piece here and there from before. Those different drafts, each with its own focus ... maybe I’ll save for tomorrow, next week, next month ... or never. I don’t know. One day at a time and all that, right?

I miss my dad. I miss having a dad. I miss being a kid. I miss my 20s and my 30s and even, in some cases, the first half of my 40s. I feel like this life in 2019 can’t possibly be the same one I remember from San Francisco in the 1970s and ‘80s; or Los Angeles in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s; or moving to a pre-9/11 New York in 1996; or any number of highs and lows in the 23 years since.

I know my struggle with the remnants of our relationship is not my dad’s fault, per se. Our relationship was as it was, and I live with this ongoing seesawing confusion because of and in response to the environment of his own upbringing and development. I try hard to honor and celebrate the good memories, acknowledge the bad ones, and be grateful for all that I learned having Stephen Mark Dobbs as my father for the first 45 years of my life.

An Appreciation for Susan Smith

"Aaron," yelled my boss. This was not unusual. Her dark, wood-paneled, windowless office was about 20 feet down the hall from my little nook that looked out onto San Vicente Blvd.

"Yes, Susan?" I called back.

"Come here, please." Also, not unusual. But once I got there, pad in hand: "Get your dad on the phone for me."

"Excuse me?" fumbled out of my mouth.

"I want you to get your dad on the phone for me now," she answered.

"Uhm … why?" Granted, I was only 23 years old, and I had never held a job as someone's assistant before, but I was still pretty sure such a request was at least a little unorthodox.

"I want to tell him something. Just get him for me," she said before taking a sip from the warm Diet Coke that had likely been sitting next to the large bottle of Advil for several hours.

I turned and walked back to my desk, passing Susan's other assistant who asked, "What did she want?"

As I sat and dialed, I uttered in disbelief, "She wants to talk to my dad."

Unfortunately, my father answered the phone, I explained to him that my boss wanted to speak with him for reasons unknown, and then I let Susan know he was on the line.

"Mr. Dobbs?" (Susan was nothing if not mannered with strangers.)

"Yes. Call me Stephen," I heard my father say as I gripped the phone tightly, covering the mouthpiece while I listened.

"Well, Stephen," she said, "I'm Susan Smith, and you know, your son Aaron has worked for me for the past year, and I just want you to know that I think he's extraordinary. He's so smart, and I just know he's going to be very important in this industry one day."

Susan Smith passed away on Saturday. As anyone who worked for her can tell you, she was not always the easiest person to answer to, but as dozens of Tweets and comments on this Deadline story show, lots of people admire and love her.

I had a complicated relationship with her precisely because of such conflicting feelings. I learned a lot from her and other times she drove me nuts. She went through assistants rapidly. During my 26-plus months as her senior assistant, I had nine junior assistants come and go. Their tenures spanned from six months to six hours, figures that are neither hyperbole nor poetic license. (The first person to work in Susan's office with me, was Julie Plec, who left for and continued to go on to much bigger and better things, becoming a very successful television writer and showrunner.)

Susan believed in and supported me probably more than any other person in my career, and certainly more than any other boss. Her faith in me, even when unhappy with something I may have done (key word: "may") always seemed to remain unblemished and unconditional. She knew I never had the desire to be an agent, and she repeatedly wrote glowing recommendations for me as I searched for new jobs in production or development.

R.I.P. HEATH

I was sitting in a programming meeting today. It was around 4:45 or so, and two of my colleagues at the other end of the table was showing his blackberry to someone else. A few minutes passed, and she showed hers back to him, and one of them said, "Heath Ledger was just found dead." It took everyone in the room by surprise ... nothing unique there. When we got back to our main office later, apparently everyone there had been doing nothing but refreshing TMC and The New York Times and wherever else they could read the latest gossip.

Who knows what happened to Ledger. His family in Australia now seems to say that he had been suffering from pneumonia for the past couple weeks. A friend of mine sent me a passage from a newspaper story a couple months ago in which Ledger discussed the emotional difficulties he encountered from playing The Joker in Christopher Nolan's Batman sequel The Dark Knight, which opens this summer. Apparently this version of the character is so disturbed and demented that it played a part in Ledger having trouble sleeping, and so he would find himself taking a sleeping pill or two just in an attempt to get more than one or two hours sleep in a night. There have been other reports that he took his recent break-up from Michelle Williams especially hard.

I would ask "who cares?" if I didn't know that in our society everyone does. I don't ask that question to be crass or insensitive because I don't ask it in terms of "Who cares about Heath Ledger?" Rather, I mean, "Who cares how he died?"

Obviously ... still everyone. But at the end of the day, Ledger's death -- like so many other talented people before him, including Brad Renfro just last week -- whether purposefully self-destructive or completely accidental is just one thing: sad. Was it suicide? Did he accidentally take too many sleeping pills because he just wanted to sleep? Was he using any other drugs again recently? All these questions will likely be answered one way or another in the next few days, but that doesn't stop 100 rumors from being thrown out to the world before being retracted (or not) simply because people find some sort of joy even in some form of sadness. Ledger got to lead the high life -- and now, he flew too close to the sun. Or ... he didn't. He just made an accidental and fatal mistake.

Ledger had, at least to my mind, come a long way over the last decade of his consistently growing stardom. Even in something silly like 10 Things I Hate About You, he had a compelling screen presence. That grew into a significant acting talent, exposed beautifully in Brokeback Mountain, and, if one could base such a thing on a trailer (which one can't, but I'm going to anyway), his looks and posture and facial expressions alone make his Joker look like it's going to be something special. As an enormous Batman Begins fan -- a film which I still consider to be the best of 2005 -- I eagerly anticipate Nolan's sequel, and Ledger is one of the main reasons why.

It's just sad, in all definitions and connotations. And yet, whenever something like this happens, I wonder, "Why and how him?" Not because I'm wishing it was someone else instead, but simply because of the curiousity and seeming randomness of it all.

I always flash back to that night in 1993 when I was driving down Sunset Blvd on my way home, noticing a crowd of people on the sidewalk in front of The Viper Room. An ambulance coming from the other direction turned through the intersection in front of me. I had no idea what had happened, and continued driving home. The next morning, I was at a press junket when a friend came up and told me that River Phoenix had died, and putting two-and-two together, I suppose I drove by as he lay dying.

Two years earlier, at the same hotel, in the same ballroom, I was at a different press junket for the film Soapdish. Robert Downey Jr. was there. Robert Downey Jr. was running around the room. Robert Downey Jr.'s eyes were bugging out of his head. Robert Downey Jr. was definitely on something. Robert Downey Jr., 17 years and multiple rehabs and court trials later is still here with us and starring in what should be one of the bigger films of this summer, Iron Man. And I'm happy for that. High or not, he was a really nice guy that day, and he's an incredibly tired actor. But ... how? How has he, and others with similar substance abuse problems, managed to turn back just before reaching the sun.

And really ... other than providing cautionary tales to all of those who don't pay attention to the warnings anyway, does it matter? The film world lost a talented member of its club today. More importantly, his two year old daughter lost a father. It doesn't matter whether he committed suicide or overdosed on recreational drugs or accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills, because at the end of the day, he's gone without being able to use his talent to contribute anything further, and any way you look at that, it's just sad.

R.I.P. MICHELANGELO (CAN WE TAKE A BREAK, PLEASE?)

This is a bit terrifying. Let's leave aside Bill Walsh, Tom Snyder and Michel Serrault. I don't even want to think about what the news will be tomorrow, especially considering the number of French New Wave directors are still alive. Sunday, it was the Swedish Ingmar Bergman and now I wake up today to read that another of the world's most important filmmakers who had a direct influence on just about every film considered "art house" today passed yesterday. Sure, the great Michelangelo Antonioni at 94 was even older than Bergman, so again, it maybe shouldn't be a surprise and many probably thought he died years ago. Nevertheless, news of his death was a very unwelcome surprise this morning.

Antonioni was one of the first filmmakers to truly explore loneliness, solitude and alienation -- qualities that too many pretentious but not as talented directors try to present these days -- on film. He was also responsible -- along with Federico Fellini -- for changing the direction of the entire Italian film industry, moving away from the post-War Neorealism of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica towards a more modernist -- and abstract -- form of storytelling. Like Bergman (and Fellini, for that matter), Antonioni cast such a great shadow over the rest of cinema that his last name became a fully descriptive adjective simply by adding an -esque to the end.

Antonioni was the first of the great Italian directors I ever paid attention to. I remember first hearing his name in high school. It was because of the musical Hair, which was my Sophomore year's Spring production. In the song "Manchester England" which introduces the character Claude to the audience, there's a line which goes: "Claude Hooper Bukowski, Who finds that it's groovy to hide in a movie/Pretends he's Fellini and Antonioni...."

Then, the summer after my first year of college, I started getting really into film, particularly that group of American directors who came of age in the late '60s and '70s -- especially Martin Scorsese and (at the time) Brian De Palma. I read lots of books about both, and all the De Palma ones discussed how Antonioni was this huge influence on him. Sure De Palma obviously idolized Hitchcock more than anyone, but his Blow Out is an obvious pseudo-remake of the Italian master's brilliant Blow-Up. I also was a huge Pink Floyd fan at the time, and as the band had written all the music for the bizarre and difficult but somewhat fascinating Zabriskie Point.

Blow-Up was the first film I watched of Antonioni's, and the first I fell in love with. Last year, BAMcinématek ran a series called The Vision That Changed Cinema: Michelangelo Antonioni, a three-week retrospective in which they screened most of the filmmakers work. It gave me an opportunity to see one of his earlier films -- Chronicle of a Love, an interesting mixture of Neorealism and American noir. The film is particularly interesting as an artifact of Antonioni's artistic development, showing the glimmers of many of his later themes within the more standard story structure one might expect from a younger filmmaker.

His greatest achievement, however, is arguably his alienation & relationship trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse. Some may argue more for Blow-Up, Red Desert or The Passenger, but these first three films are the ones that truly launched Antonioni as an international sensation and established that "-esque." And they're each brilliant in their own way, changing the very method of utilizing narrative -- when else does one see a main character disappear only to be totally forgotten and have it all work like in L'Avventura or ending a film with the succession of images and lack of resolution yet multitudes of emotion and meaning as in L'Eclisse -- and expressing human interaction and emotion.

Unlike Bergman, Antonioni hadn't worked consistently for most of the past 30 years. His last masterpiece was The Passenger, and that was in 1975. His last film was a segment of the omnibus Eros in 2004.

But also like Bergman, Antonioni's work lives on. (Unlike Bergman, Criterion only has two of his films in its catalog: L'Avventura and L'Eclisse, but both DVD editions are phenomenal, and most of his films are available on video.) And even if he had not worked for years, it's always sad (and reflective) when someone of such importance is lost and the knowledge of the physicality of his mortal and earthly presence is gone.

It must be hard to be Italian and carry a name like Michelangelo. It presents a tremendous height to which one might aspire, especially should that person enter a field of artistry and creativity. Antonioni arguably succeeded in his challenge, making films that -- like the statue of "David" -- will forever be considered among the greatest and most important in the history of cinema.

R.I.P. Michelangelo. You will be missed.

I WROTE THE PREVIOUS POST TOO SOON: R.I.P. BILL

Wow. And now, just after finishing that post below, I read the news about Bill Walsh dying at 75, also after a long battle with Leukemia. For those of you non-sports fans, out of all these men who've passed away in the last 48 hours, Walsh, actually, probably had the biggest impact on me for in 1982 when the Dwight Clark made "The Catch" and Joe Montana led the San Francisco 49ers over the Cincinnati Bengals to win Super Bowl XVI and launch a football dynasty, it was because of the man who soon became known as "The Genius" -- coach Bill Walsh. I was 10 years old and a San Francisco sports fanatic in January 1982. I had suffered my early years as a sports fan (let's say, the previous 3-4, since I remember going to my first baseball game at 6) with a pretty bad Giants team and an even worse 49er team. But throughout my teens and college years, the Niners made up for all of that, winning five super bowls over the next 14 years. And even though Walsh was directly responsible for only three of them (although, many might argue four). he was the reason that the 49ers became a team with a winning tradition. (Yes, fine: he and the then-owner Eddie Debartolo who was free-spending in a football era that didn't really know as much of free-spending.)

Walsh drafted Montana in the third round when everyone else had passed him over. Walsh drafted Jerry Rice by trading up for the 16th pick in the 1985 draft, taking him from a tiny, nobody-pays-attention-to-it college, and making one of the best picks in NFL history. Walsh started a secondary in 1981 with three rookies -- Ronnie Lott, Eric Wright and Carlton Williamson -- that still managed to be one of the strongest defensive backfields in the league and was directly responsible for that 13-3 season and first Super Bowl win. He traded for quarterback Steve Young when he was becoming nothing more than a USFL and Tampa Bay cast-off, only to help turn him into the Super Bowl MVP and Hall-of-Famer he later became. Walsh's legacy spread throughout the NFL as many of his assistant coaches went on to become Super Bowl winning coaches themselves and his creation of the "West Coast Offense" featuring short dropbacks, quick dump-offs, multiple options and a set number of repeated plays with multiple variations.

Oh sure, Walsh was often granted with hosannas filled with hyperbole. "The Genius" alone was a bit much of a nickname. But as much as Montana or Rice or any number of other 49er players through history, every head coach from the early-'90s on has been compared -- and usually lost out in said comparisons -- to Walsh.

Yeah, some people are often surprised when I suddenly start talking sports, but the Giants and 49ers have been important and major parts of my life since I was a little boy. They both give me a sense of always being linked to San Francisco: I watch Giants games on my computer and I often go to sports bars to catch the Niners, even during these past several crappy losing seasons.

Bill Walsh is a football icon who was directly responsible for giving me some of my happiest childhood and teenage memories filled with freezing nights at the 'Stick, tailgating on warm days in the parking lot, and knowing that almost any game I went to, the Niners were going to win. (Of course, with that said, my record of attending playoff games was not a positive one for my team. I was at a devastating ass-whooping courtesy of the Vikings one year.)

Thanks Bill. I met you once when I was a little boy, but I never knew you. But thanks. And R.I.P.

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DIED TODAY ...

Yeah, you probably do. If you read GreenCine, you've certainly read about the passing of French actor Michel Serrault. But also dying, losing his battle with Leukemia was former talk-show host Tom Snyder. I had always had big problems with Snyder as an interviewer, however his influence and impact on the chat-show format and concept is indisputable. For one thing, without his 1970s The Tomorrow Show, who knows what late night would have become? The 12:30 hour became one that networks found profitable with programming that wasn't simply reruns. His show, in many ways, specifically opened the door for David Letterman to create Late Night after Tomorrow was canceled but NBC didn't want to give-up owning that time period. And, as importantly for at least a brief period of time, it allowed for the existence of Later With Bob Costas, one of the most entertaining, interesting, informative and well-researched half-hours of talk-show television in my memory. (The Later franchise was totally bastardized post-Costas, turning into just another late night comedy/talk-show, only to find a small semblance of integrity when Carson Daly took over and tried to resume the two-easy-chair conversation set-piece with Last Call. But then Daly proved to be unable to actually sustain a long interview in interesting fashion, and the show became too entertainment oriented, added a desk and a bad-joke monologue, moved to LA, and became the tripe it is now. But I digress ....)

My problem with Snyder was always hard to put my finger on, but in a way, I think it was that he always tried so hard to appear genuine that to my eyes, he never was. His huge guffaw and simple desire to appear like he and his guest were long-time friends having a simple conversation, all mixed with consistently softball questions often presented with an aggressiveness to make them seem not so, just rubbed me slightly wrong. I never saw him during the Tomorrow days (canceled in 1982, I was not 11, and so was my bedtime probably), but I did watch his post-Letterman CBS The Late Late Show from time-to-time depending on his guest.

But I'm not really interested in focusing on what I didn't like about Snyder because as an avid TV viewer, fan and student, I totally recognize that a huge part of the television landscape -- and more importantly, the nature of interviews and interviewing -- comes straight from the work he did. In fact, in my own way, I probably was influenced by and learned a lot from Snyder's style when doing interviews myself: preparing with as much knowledge as possible about the subject but without questions or a script and trying to simply start that rolling conversation ... seeing where it takes you. He also was never afraid to interview anyone, and, unlike say ... oh, I don't know ... Larry King, for example ... he was very rarely unprepared or uninterested. He would also very rarely follow-up an interesting point by completely changing the subject.

So R.I.P. Tom (and Michel). What does it mean that you and Bergman passed at roughly the same time? I don't know ... but maybe that this was a Sunday where some of the last remnants of the innovations of the cinema and television broadcasting both faded away.

R.I.P. INGMAR

Waking up this morning to learn that Swedish master Ingmar Bergman had passed away was a bit of a shock. Why? He was 89 years old, and I'm sure lots of people didn't even realize he was still alive. But in fact, Bergman was not only alive, but still recently working: his Saraband played the New York Film Festival in 2004 and received a US release the year after. Bergman was the kind of iconic figure and name who people recognize even when they don't know why. Non-cinephiles likely have heard of Bergman even if they somehow think that the woman from Casablanca directed a seminal foreign film about death. Bergman's name is like Kleenex or Q-Tips ... brand names that are even more recognizable than the actual product itself; things that influenced followers and imitators -- both positively and probably negatively, through no fault of his own -- in ways that plenty of the audience may not realize or recognize.

Everybody who blogs and is even a casual film fanatic will likely be writing about Bergman today. Every major media outlet will certainly include something, and all of them will review his career, the myriad of films which can be considered classics and near perfect studies of the human condition. I'm not nearly enough of a Bergman expert -- even as a fan -- to adequately provide my own study/obit or repeat everything that can be found through the best summaries at places like GreenCine Daily. But I know that for myself, in addition to having even better reason to watch my Eclipse Series 1: Early Bergman set, it will be time for me to revisit my favorite Bergman-influence -- Woody Allen's Love and Death with its final Seventh Seal-influenced scene of Allen skipping off alongside the Grim Reaper. Poignant and silly at the same time, a tribute to an artist whose work will live on always at the forefront of the history of cinema.

For one of the few times in history, there is a bit of darkness in Sweden during this mid-summer.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, the great TCM has moved quickly to air a brief Bergman tribute, albeit at a time when most of us would need to DiVo it rather than watch "live." It's not reflected on their website yet, but apparently tomorrow night they will be showing an episode of The Dick Cavett Show with Bergman airing at 2:15 AM and 5:00 AM, and at 3:15 AM they're showing The Seventh Seal.

R.I.P. ROBERT

Wow. Robert Altman has died. The man was 81 years old, and yet I was quite shocked to read this news. Maybe it's because in the last several years, Altman continued to be a vibrant and relatively prolific filmmaker, never really showing his age.

Altman has always been a fascinating director to me. He's one of the few filmmakers to work in the last half-century who truly epitomized the idea of independent filmmaking and could honestly be called a maverick. I say this not because every film he made was a masterpiece -- far from it. In fact, in more recent years, I started to think of him as Alternating Altman. If I liked a film, I often thought his next one was terrible, but if the last one was awful, chances were good I'd love the following. His last three films may not perfectly prove this theory, but it comes close. I thought Gosford Park was fantastic, but The Company made me want to shoot everyone on screen. Prairie Home Companion, on the other hand, left me on the fence, but there were plenty of positive things I liked about it.

OK, so maybe he didn't alternate perfectly: I thought The Player rivaled Unforgiven as best films of 1992, and while Short Cuts never quite reaches Nashville status, it was still excellent. However, that was then followed by the utterly drab Pre-a-Porter and the relatively dull Kansas City.

Yet Altman's reputation stands alone simply based on his work from the '70s, a series of titles that arguably earns him the title of that decade's greatest filmmaker: MASH, Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, 3 Women, A Wedding -- 11 films in nine years that alone illustrate why cinephiles have such great nostalgia for '70s filmmaking. And as other greats from the '70s have stopped working or find themselves far less or significantly more popular, making their films on different scales but in primarily the same styles and genres, Altman continued to always do things his way -- for better or worse. He managed to film life: sometimes exciting, sometimes not. He managed to weave multiple stories and characters together in a manner that many others have tried, and most have failed -- including sometimes him. He managed to take simple situations and make them extraordinary and transform extraordinary situations into simple ones. And again, always on his own terms.

The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park aside, Altman's filmmaking certainly peaked over a quarter-century ago. But as those films (as well as his weaker more recent efforts) proved, he always pushed himself to find that certain twist -- to create that slightly askew perspective even on the most familiar topic. And he just kept working. No more new Robert Altman films: I suppose that's the shock. His passing at the age of 81 -- that's just sad.

UPDATE: I just received a press release mentioning that Altman died from "complications due to cancer." I was unaware of this, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention. Apparently, he's been battling the disease for the last year-and-a-half, making A Prairie Home Companion even after being diagnosed. Apparently, he was also in pre-production on his next film, which was scheduled to start shooting in February.

UPDATE-THE RETURN: Eugene Hernandez has a magnificent tribute to Altman up over at indieWIRE.