![]() ![]() While Forman would rebound a couple of years later with a second Oscar-winning hit in Amadeus (1984), Ragtime would more or less slip through the cracks, notable only for being the final film appearance by the legendary James Cagney, coaxed out of retirement to play the small-but-showy role of real-life New York Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo. As a result, while the film would earn largely respectful reviews and garner eight Oscar nominations, it flopped at the box office and won no awards. Then, once the film was finally produced in 1981, it wound up being acquired for distribution by Paramount, whose own hugely expensive in-house historical epic, Warren Beatty’s Reds, would be coming out at roughly the same time and with far more time and money spent publicizing it. Further controversy emerged among fans of the book when it was reported that the film would eschew most of the book’s multiple storylines in order to concentrate most of the narrative on just one. But many thought the Czech emigrant to be an odd choice for a project so thoroughly seeped in American history and culture. Having just swept the Oscars the year prior with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Forman was clearly a hot commodity at the time. He would eventually be replaced by Miloš Forman. When Altman suggested the best way to capture Doctorow’s large-canvas narrative was to tell it over the course of two three-hour epics, that (along with the critical and commercial failure of Buffalo Bill and the Indians that summer), inspired De Laurentiis to fire Altman altogether. ![]() That dream project soon turned into a nightmare the very next year, when Altman began feuding with producer Dino De Laurentiis during the post-production of what was to be their collaboration, the Ragtime-esque Buffalo Bill and the Indians. Additionally, with its sprawling cast of characters, multiple storylines, and cheeky mixture of fact and fiction, Nashville now seems like an experiment to test out potential approaches for tackling that book. After all, not only was he one of the most inventive American filmmakers of the era, he seemed uniquely qualified to bring the book to the screen. Doctorow’s sprawling novel Ragtime, it almost seemed too good to be true. When it was announced in 1975 that Robert Altman, then riding high on the success of his groundbreaking epic Nashville, had been hired to direct the film version of E.L. ![]()
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