Robert Altman

Tanner ’88

Tanner ’88

In 1988, renegade filmmaker Robert Altman and Pulitzer Prize–winning Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau created a presidential candidate, ran him alongside the other hopefuls during the primary season, and presented their media campaign as a cross between a soap opera and TV news. The result was the groundbreaking Tanner ’88, a piercing satire of media-age American politics, in which actors Michael Murphy (as contender Jack Tanner) and Cynthia Nixon (as his daughter) rub elbows on the campaign trail with real-life political players Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, Bob Dole, Ralph Nader, Kitty Dukakis, and Gloria Steinem, among many others. The Criterion Collection is proud to present the complete eleven-episode television series—more relevant today than ever.

Film Info

  • United States
  • 1988
  • 353 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.33:1
  • English
  • Spine #258

Director-Approved Special Edition Features

  • Episode introductions featuring original cast members created for Sundance Channel’s 2004 broadcast of Tanner ’88
  • New conversation between series creators Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: Essays by film critic Michael Wilmington and culture critic Gary Kornblau

    New cover by Steward Cauley

Purchase Options

Director-Approved Special Edition Features

  • Episode introductions featuring original cast members created for Sundance Channel’s 2004 broadcast of Tanner ’88
  • New conversation between series creators Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: Essays by film critic Michael Wilmington and culture critic Gary Kornblau

    New cover by Steward Cauley
Tanner ’88
Cast
Michael Murphy
Jack Tanner
Pamela Reed
TJ Cavanaugh
Cynthia Nixon
Alex Tanner
Kevin J. O’Connor
Hayes Haggerty
Daniel Jenkins
Stringer Kincaid
Jim Fyfe
Emile Berkoff
Matt Malloy
Deke Connors
Ilana Levine
Andrea Spinelli
Richard Cox
David Seidelman
Veronica Cartwright
Molly Hark
Sandra Bowie
Stevie Chevalier
Wendy Crewson
Joanna Buckley
E.G. Marshall
General John Tanner
Frank Barhydt
Frank Gatling
Credits
Director
Robert Altman
Screenplay
Garry Trudeau
Producer
Scott Bushnell
Cinematography
Jean Lepine
Art direction
Stephen Altman
Art direction
Jerry Fleming
Editing
Sean-Michael Connor
Editing
Alison Ellwood
Editing
Mark Fish
Editing
Ruth Foster
Supervising film editor
Dorian Harris
Line producer
Mark Jaffee
Associate director
Allan Nichols
Associate producer
Matthew Seig
Associate producer
Frank Barhydt
Political consultant
Sydney Blumenthal

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Robert Altman

Director

Robert Altman
Robert Altman

Few directors in recent American film history have gone through as many career ups and downs as Robert Altman did. Following years of television work, the rambunctious midwesterner set out on his own as a feature film director in the late 1950s, but didn’t find his first major success until 1970, with the antiauthoritarian war comedy M*A*S*H. Hoping for another hit just like it, studios hired him in the years that followed, most often receiving difficult, caustic, and subversive revisionist genre films. After the success of 1975’s panoramic American satire Nashville, Altman once again delved into projects that were more challenging, especially the astonishing, complex, Bergman-influenced 3 Women. Thereafter, Altman was out of Hollywood’s good graces, though in the eighties, a decade widely considered his fallow period, he came through with the inventive theater-to-film Nixon monologue Secret Honor and the TV miniseries political satire Tanner ’88. The double punch of The Player and the hugely influential ensemble piece Short Cuts brought him back into the spotlight, and he continued to be prolific in his output into 2006, when his last film, A Prairie Home Companion, was released months before his death at the age of eighty-one.