I caught this at MoMA when they did their Altman retrospective a little over a year ago - wonderful film, I didn't realize it had been altered on the DVD release. This may only apply to home video releases, but apparently they had problems clearing a bit of a music.

From Jonathan Rosenbaum's retrospective review:

Me neither! More info on this lost pilot. If you google it, the search turns up old trade articles announcing the pilot's production, etc., so obviously it was a big deal going in to production, but then it just never aired.

Yes, thank you very much. Time to save that sucker to the hard drive before it goes away!

Allegedly, no two prints of McCabe look entirely alike.

In both versions I have seen in theaters, no two reels look quite the same, even.

In case anybody's interested, I noticed someone put up the no-DVD release HealtH online. It's a bad way to see it, and it's cropped, but I'm finally glad to get a chance anyway. (HealtH, Countdown and Beyond Therapy are the only ones of his I haven't seen.)

Well, looks like I've seen 19 Altman films now, which is of course not that much considering how many he made! I recently caught up with the much-maligned Dr. T and the Women and thought it was pretty good, not one of his best but somewhere towards the middle. Gere's performance may well be the best I've seen from him (what he did for Malick was perfect for that film, but it wasn't exactly superb acting), and overall the movie works better than expected given that it's Altman in full-satirical prankster mode making a pic about shallow Dallas-area conservative housewives, basically. But unlike something like O.C. & Stiggs, I thought Altman's mean-spiritedness was pretty minimal here. Aesthetically it's interesting as always, Altman showing an increasing mastery of form from the 90s onward.

But the other flick I saw and the one which was truly outstanding was the inexplicably underrated/overlooked Kansas City. Featuring a dynamite performance from a Jean Harlow-styled Jennifer Jason Leigh (plus Miranda Richardson as a very believable dope addict and Harry Belafonte as one sinister crime lord), the movie is constructed much like the amazing live jazz music that's sprinkled throughout it: like music, like jazz, like a repeating set of dueling notes, with plot beats being mirrored by others, call and response riffs of incident and reaction, everything having a certain musical structural beauty to it. It's both Altmanesque in its shambling roaming-camera style and yet also a bit more refined, its political corruption narrative and attempt to map an entire town during the 30s putting it in the same category as Polanski's Chinatown. Yet while the conclusion here is equally grim, there's the typical Altman irony and light-footed touch there to defuse things a bit. It's a fascinating mixture of Altman's earlier and later styles and a devastating narrative from any viewpoint, and I wish more people had seen it. It's odd -- it's one of those forgotten movies of which there is only a trailer of on YouTube, no clips, despite it being directed by an acclaimed master director and starring a bevy of famous faces. The film is an absolute masterpiece and possibly in the top 5 of his filmography that I've seen, I dare say. It'd also make a good double-bill with another 1996 30s-set gangster drama (also with some political overtones) -- Ferrara's The Funeral.

Anyway, more and more I'm thinking that Short Cuts has just as much claim to the title of Altman's best work as does the wonderful 3 Women, which was always my favorite. I'm just always so astounded by the deft way that Altman interweaves everything together in the former, how beautifully edited the damn thing is in drawing comparisons and contrasts and themes out of each story while never being too didactic or obvious about it. It's a hell of a movie, in length and in quality, yet I always feel like I could watch 10 more hours of it -- I love spending time in that world and with those fucked-up people, maybe because they feel so believably fucked-up. Lili Taylor and RDJ's characters in particular are tantalizingly sketched. That's the great thing -- Altman gives us just enough of each situation and character to be intrigued, to want more, but he doesn't over-do it. We get what we get and then we must exit the cinema (or our living rooms) at the end because it's over and life goes on, for them and for us. True fact: the first time I watched Short Cuts, I watched it three more times again in that week alone. It's positively addictive, and it also feels like a canny precursor to some of the best prestige television of the last 15-20 years in its unique editing rhythms and juggling of so many disparate things. (No surprise that the talented Geraldine Peroni was editor on the film, and other Altman works, as well as The Wire).

If interested, there is a (bootleg?) DVD that consists of extended jam sessions from the filming of "Kansas City." It's pretty cool. Right now, I'm moving, so it's packed up. But if you want any more information about it, let me know.

Forgot, I actually posted about this before:

Soul mates. Short Cuts is my favorite, and 3 Women my close second.

Interesting about Jazz '34. I definitely would like to seek that out, but it indeed looks like the only official release is a VHS, and the copy that's on YouTube is Russian-dubbed (though I suppose the music matters more than the narration). I know that Jonathan Rosenbaum preferred it to the actual Kansas City film.

Another solid later-period Altman is "Cookie's Fortune." It's not earth-shattering, but the ensemble cast is quite good, as one would expect. I haven't seen it in several years, but it's a nice and breezy 2 hours.

I liked that one, too, and would like to see it again; it kind of personifies that certain later Altman feel, where the films have a gentler and more relaxed style to them. By the time you get to The Company (one of my favorites), he's basically making minimalist tone poems so light-on-their-feet and graceful that they risk floating off into the ether. That's a compliment, though.

On the commentary track for Kansas City, Altman said something which I thought was very true and applicable to his films, which is basically that when you see a good movie once you haven't really seen the movie -- that the excuse of "oh, I won't go with you guys to the cinema, because I've already seen that" is silly, to Altman's mind, because if a movie's got anything there then you have to get past the "guessing-game" of the first viewing to really uncover its riches on the second.

StudioCanal released Cookie's Fortune on Blu-Ray in Germany a few weeks ago

Is there a way to watch California Split in its original 108 minutes version (and shown in the right aspect ratio) here in Belgium (where I don't have the luxury of ever hoping to see it on the silver screen for the time being)? Is it currently available on any online streaming service, for instance?

Really good segment on FilmStruck just went up about his apartment in New York City. Very stylish and very him.

I'm coming to the end of reading the Altman oral biography and having an at-home retrospective of (most of) his films, and I finally discovered the reason (or one of the reasons) that Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter) is such a dismal film: Altman had a stroke right before shooting started. And then he had a heart transplant just afterwards. Nearly all of the reminiscences in the book from cast and crew on the film mention how ill he was during the making of the movie.

Production on Kansas City also had to be halted for three days because of recurrent illness, but he refused to let an insurance claim be filed to cover the costs of the shut-down because it would have almost certainly meant the end of his career. As a result, the production ran out of money and the studio dumped the film and refused to run an awards campaign for it.

I absolutely hated Prêt-à-Porter—one of the most memorably awful moviegoing experiences of my life, followed by a New Year's Eve party during which my date vomited all over our hostess' couch—so I passed on Kansas City when it came around. Too bad for me, as it's really good. Easily my favorite of Altman's 1990s "comeback" run (though Vincent & Theo was a really nice surprise as well—it would make a great double-feature with Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch). Jennifer Jason Leigh is her usual frustratingly inconsistent self, one minute brilliant, the next minute annoying as all get-out, Miranda Richardson is her usual note-perfect self, ultimately stealing the movie out from under JJL's grandstanding, and Harry Belafonte plays stunningly against type as a foul-mouthed, violent gangster. He won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best supporting actor that year, and it's not hard to think that he would have been nominated for an Oscar had the studio campaigned him for it.

Tonight it's The Gingerbread Man, a movie I remember admiring for its total subversion of the Grisham source material but not actually liking all that much.

Im pretty much with you on all of that, except that I liked seeing some of Pret-a-Porter cast in their costumes-and of course Marcelo and Sophia.

The rarely-seen miniseries edit of Vincent and Theo is currently streaming on Amazon Prime