Robert Altman Symposium

When the Robert Altman collection arrived at the University of Michigan, it really came to the university’s doorsteps in more than a thousand boxes of random artifacts and documentation. It took years to sort and analyze these documents internally before executing a release of the collection to the public. Based on the agreement the school made with Altman’s widow, these documents were meant to be first showcased in a symposium to honor Altman’s work.

This symposium quickly came to the university’s film department. Working with special collection librarians, a few professors worked out the idea of putting the symposium in the hands of students. A class of 17 people were tasked with being the first to explore the collection and create an exhibit that honored Altman, which would be the first in the history of the film department. The content was up for us to discover and all creativity liberties were put in our hands. In short, it was overwhelming.

I immediately pounced on the chance to research Altman’s illustrious music career. His musical scores are as rich and robust as the characters he writes and directs in his films. This was a chance of a lifetime to understand how he created such poignant atmospheres and I was going to be able to learn from the maestro himself.

I spent at least 50 hours sitting in the small collections room on the eighth floor of the school’s library. I took pictures of all the documents I could, read through fantastic first-hand documents by Bob, and discovered insane legal battles over music rights. I pieced together stories from his films—my favorite being the potential physical fist fight he had with Harry Nilsson over the Popeye soundtrack—and created a narrative to describe to others what I had witnessed in the collection.

To the left are the original lyrics of the M*A*S*H theme song, written by Robert Altman’s son. This document, as all these other photos and documents featured, can be found in the Special Collections library at the University of Michigan.

My professor noticed very quickly that my classmates and I started to refer Robert as ‘Bob’ during our discussions. It was an odd thing to call a director by their first name. He asked us, “why do you refer to him so casually?” A teammate of mine replied, “We’ve spent hours with him in the archives. It only makes sense for us to call him Bob—he’s like an uncle or an old friend by this point.”

It was true; I had gotten to know Bob through his writings, his items, his correspondences. The light-hearted words he exchanged with his wife, his crew, and actors spoke to me and created a picture in my head of a man that I wished that I had met.

I proudly stood at the Cinetopia film festival on my 21st birthday. Robert Altman’s widow attended the event, shook my hand, and commended my class on our efforts to represent her husband—and added that we had done an excellent job at capturing his memory. She, Alan Rudolf, and Michael Murphy recited heartwarming stories and memories of Bob during that all-day event that matched up with the documentation I had spent months getting to know.

That exhibit left a profound impact. It was my first time handling archives and I had properly managed to take thousands of overwhelming documents and boil down a concise narrative about Altman in my work. Since that project, I’ve better been able to manage information and have grown a new appreciation for documentation.