With the passing of much beloved director Robert Altman, one of the questions on a lot of people’s minds is: What will happen to his next film?
Altman always said he’d stop working when he was dead, and true to his word the director worked right up until the end. After finishing A Prairie Home Companion he started work on a movie based on the 1997 documentary Hands on a Hard Body with Picturehouse Films. The movie was scheduled to go into production in just a few months, and while of course that won’t happen now it sounds like Picturehouse isn’t necessarily ready to call it quits.
Picturehouse exec Bob Berney tells Variety that so far no official decision has been made about the project. “This was conceived as a Robert Altman film, and I'm not sure there can be any other way to do it,” he says.
The documentary on which it’s based was about one of those lame radio contests where listeners compete to win a truck by seeing who can keep their hands on it the longest without a break. Berney says Altman planned to weave real events into his fictional script the way he did with Praire Home Companion.
Sadly, part of the reason he was rushing ahead with Hands on a Hard Body so soon after finishing Prairie Home was a sense of his own imminent death. In a way though, I’m almost glad Prairie Home was his final film instead of this. A lyrical movie about getting older and saying goodbye is a much more fitting final word from one of Hollywood’s most venerable auteurs than the re-staging of a cheesy DJ generated contest..
