Show Business: Creation in Chaos

The main lesson of his first 15 years in Hollywood, says Director Robert Altman, 45, was to "get comfortable in my own failure." A bit too unorthodox for those orthodox days, he had been fired by Jack Warner and tangled with a lot of lesser producers. Richard Zanuck, chief of 20th Century-Fox, says that he would never have hired Altman for his last picture if he had known that Altman had previously made That Cold Day in the Park. Elliott Gould compared Altman to General Custer: "He always seemed on the verge of some...

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