The 1994 film Ready to Wear (Pret-a-Porter)<\/em> is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing Robert Altman ever did \u2013 and, yes, I have seen Popeye<\/em>. (Actually, Popeye<\/em> was the first Altman I ever saw, but we\u2019ll save that story for another time.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, the maverick director behind such subversive \u201870s masterworks as MASH<\/em>, Nashville<\/em>, McCabe & Mrs. Miller<\/em> and The Long Goodbye<\/em> was having a nice career resurgence. His savage, savvy 1992 adaptation of Michael Tolkin\u2019s novel The Player<\/em>, where he got Tim Robbins and a bunch of movie stars to join him in taking the piss outta Hollywood, was a much-buzzed-about hit, eventually receiving several Oscar nods, including Best Director. He followed that up a year later with Short Cuts<\/em>, an acclaimed, all-star ensemble piece inspired by several Raymond Carver short stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Cuts<\/em> successfully played at Cannes, he hooked up with Harvey Weinstein and Miramax for his next project, which would be set in the fashion industry. It was an idea he toyed with ever since he and his wife caught a Paris fashion show while promoting his 1984 film Streamers<\/em>. \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe what I saw,\u201d he said in a 1994 interview. \u201cIt was such a circus. It was just too theatrical not to want to film.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n With an estimated $18 million budget, Altman rounded up another A-list cast: Julia Roberts, Sophia Loren, Kim Basinger, Lauren Bacall, Anouk Aimee, Tim Robbins, Marcello Mastroianni, Stephen Rea, Forest Whitaker, Rupert Everett. Altman and his cast would head to Paris, while various fashion designers showed off their spring collections. They all infiltrated the runway shows, with the cast playing characters intermingling with real designers, models, and other celebrities. Think Medium Cool<\/em> \u2013 but with stylish clothes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The shoot was unsurprisingly a grueling, guerilla affair. Altman was both quite ill and quite frustrated about not being able to understand these French folks. And although he and journalist-turned-screenwriter Barbara Shulgasser flew to Paris during its 1992 Fashion Week to come up with a story, there wasn\u2019t a shooting script. Not only that, Danny Aiello, who played a cross-dressing department-store buyer, was pissing off everyone, mostly getting into it with Bacall and Everett. (However, he was quite sycophantic with Mastroianni.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, the fashion industry was worried, fearing they would get dragged the same way the film industry did in Player<\/em>. Karl Lagerfeld, Anna Wintour and Women\u2019s Wear Daily<\/em> publisher John Fairchild were some of the powerful people who snubbed the production. (\u201cThese people are just paranoid,\u201d Altman told the Los Angeles Times<\/em> in 1994.) More controversy awaited in the weeks leading up to its Christmas Day release (when it would play 1,000 screens \u2013 the widest release for an Altman film at the time). Miramax, which previously changed the film\u2019s title to Ready to Wear<\/em> since the original Pret-a-Porter<\/em> was deemed too French for U.S. audiences, went back and forth with the MPAA. They were threatening to revoke Ready<\/em>\u2019s R rating if film-related advertising featuring a semi-nude Helena Christensen would continue to be used. (The threat was later withdrawn when Miramax won MPAA approval for a revised ad.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n While the industry wasn\u2019t completely eviscerated in Ready<\/em>, it was portrayed as a business filled with horny, petulant assholes. More of a screwball, bedroom farce than a cutthroat satire, Ready <\/em>has a gallery of characters either getting into trouble or someone\u2019s pants in the City of Light. Mastroianni plays a mysterious figure who comes to town, hoping to win back an old flame (Loren), but goes on the lam after his flame\u2019s husband (Jean-Pierre Cassel) accidentally dies in his presence. (This whole subplot seemed to be an excuse for Altman to not only work with Italian screen legends Loren and Mastroianni, but to recreate<\/a> the iconic striptease scene from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow<\/em><\/a>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Elsewhere in this universe, Roberts and Robbins play two ugly-American journalists who spend most of the time fighting and boffing in a hotel room; Rea is a rock-star photographer who continually humiliates a trio of rival fashion editors (Linda Hunt, Sally Kellerman, Tracey Ullman) all angling to work with him; Aimee is an aging designer with a scheming, philandering son (Everett), who\u2019s secretly conspiring with a bootmaking pair (Bacall, Lyle Lovett); and Whitaker is a gay designer wrapped up in a wild love quadrangle with another designer (Richard E. Grant) and their significant others. All the while, Basinger\u2019s airhead TV reporter is around trying to get on-the-spot interviews with everyone. (Chiara Mastroianni, Marcello\u2019s daughter, plays her long-suffering assistant.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n It got scathing reviews from critics in both the film and fashion worlds after its release. USA Today <\/em>fashion reporter Elizabeth Snead said it was a “mix of misogynist, sexist, Francophobic and homophobic barbs with no humorous insight into the industry,\u201d while Time<\/em> film critic Richard Corliss called it \u201ca hate letter\u201d to the industry. Although Altman has said that Ready<\/em> is a valentine to fashion, even the most style-ignorant person (like the person currently writing this) can see how Altman paints the fashion world in broad, condescending strokes. From his perspective, it\u2019s less about clothes and more about chaos. By the time he reaches the grand finale, a predictably pretentious nod to The Emperor\u2019s New Clothes<\/em> where Aimee\u2019s fed-up fashionista puts on an all-nude fashion show that everybody in the crowd eats up, it\u2019s quite clear that Altman views all of this as trivial, very expensive, very decadent nonsense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Ready<\/em>, Altman (who died in 2006) went back to making films on a smaller, less extravagant scale. (Weinstein and Paul Newman once hollered at him about making a movie \u201cabout a bear,\u201d but left the project when they wanted to take the film to Canada to save $2 million.) Since it\u2019s been recently reported<\/a> that Ready<\/em> will be one of several Miramax titles that might get remade as a TV show, there\u2019s a strong possibility that there will be some Hollywood stars in Paris soon, once again starting some silly, snooty, sophisticated shit for the cameras.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ready to Wear (Pret-a-Porter) is streaming on <\/em>Kanopy<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>Pluto TV<\/em><\/a>. It\u2019s also available to <\/em>rent or buy<\/em><\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once upon a time, Robert Altman and a gaggle of movie stars went to Paris to wreak havoc on the fashion industry \u2013 on Harvey Weinstein\u2019s dime! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":18859,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1498,1422],"class_list":["post-18857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-harveys-hellhole","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18857"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21873,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18857\/revisions\/21873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/pret-a-porter2-1024x672.jpg\")
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