On this day, 53 years ago, Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye" (1973) premiered in Los Angeles, California, USA.
Robert Altman on the disappointing opening of "The Long Goodbye" (1973) & why Elliot Gould was the perfect Marlowe:
"When the picture opened, it was a big, big flop. It opened in Los Angeles and Chicago and a few other cities, and the ad campaign was Elliott with a cat on his shoulder, a smoking .45 and a cigarette in his mouth, with Nina as a slick blonde beside him. And it just failed. I went to David Picker and said, ‘You can’t do this. No wonder the fucking picture is failing. It’s giving the wrong impression. You make it look like a thriller and it’s not, it’s a satire.’ So they pulled the film, and we got Jack Davis from Mad magazine to do a new poster with all the characters, and we opened it in New York and it was a smash hit.
By the time that happened, it was too late for Los Angeles and those other cities. If New York had been our first opening, we would have had a successful film. But the film has stood up over the years, in a strange way. Some British critics didn’t like Elliott Gould playing Philip Marlowe, and I was confused about that, because I had read a lot of the books, and what Chandler wrote was really a bunch of thumbnail sketches or thematic essays, all about Los Angeles, and Marlowe was just a device to unite them, and I felt we were very close to that. Everyone said Elliott’s not Philip Marlowe and I wasn’t being true to the author, but what they were really saying was that Elliott Gould wasn’t Humphrey Bogart. In fact, I believe we were closer to Chandler’s character than any of the other renditions, where they made him a kind of movie superhero."
('Altman on Altman', Edited by David Thompson, 2006)
Across a filmmaking career spanning more than five decades, Frederick Wiseman – who has died at 96 – refined a uniquely austere, quietly radical form of documentary cinema
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