Free The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded by David Thomson

fact, Anderson worked in TV and began to direct for the theatre. His first feature, This Sporting Life , was from a novel by David Storey and still smacked of Free Cinema in its flashy use of tenements, pubs, and rugby league. But the dogged boorishness of its subject, epitomized in the inescapable presence of Richard Harris, gave it a sad, plodding feeling in place of the sheer working-class tragedy to which it aspired.
    In the 1960s, Anderson was more heavily involved in the theatre than in films. The White Bus was broken by production problems, and The Singing Lesson showed Anderson’s rather forlorn resort to East Europe as an artistic influence. Indeed, Milos Forman owns up to a large debt to Anderson’s encouragement. If … , in 1968, and for Paramount, was a real film, rooted in a world and feelings that Anderson knew, but alight with ideas and passions that would not have shamed Vigo. Its ending is bleakly and helplessly destructive (as if Anderson now was disenchanted with politics), but If … makes other English school films look halfhearted. It is pungent, sexy, socially accurate, funny, and exciting—what a film for a young man to have made. O Lucky Man! , though, is something an older man hopes to forget.
    Anderson remained his own man: despite the geriatric delicacies of The Whales of August (nothing else had ever shown him as such a softy), Britannia Hospital was a rowdy satire on bureaucracy, while Glory! Glory! tore TV evangelism limb from limb with Swiftian vengeance.
    His death prompted revelations—of gay urgings, his own difficulty and frustration—all wonderfully covered in Gavin Lambert’s biography, Mainly About Lindsay Anderson .
    Paul Thomas Anderson , b. Los Angeles, 1970
1997: Hard Eight . 1998: Boogie Nights . 1999: Magnolia . 2002: Punch-Drunk Love . 2007: There Will Be Blood .
    There were stories when Magnolia opened that Paul Thomas Anderson was upset at the way New Line were advertising his picture. The press ads for the picture were scarcely legible, let alone enticing—so Anderson had a point. Equally, New Line seemed to be so much in awe of their young director that they were ready to accept his suggestions. Yet, truly, how would you do a poster for Magnolia? How would you begin to convey the feeling and form of the picture? Would you bother to ask the question why it is called Magnolia? Would you let yourself ask, are posters the proper way to offer great movies?
    Such awkward questions could accumulate in Hollywood marketing offices, which have so little time or practice with the crosscutting ironies and countervailing doubts that obsess Anderson and are the energy in his films. He was, before reaching thirty, a cult figure, profiled in the New York Times Magazine , and hardly bothered to muffle his youthful arrogance. He knows it all, you can hear some saying, except how to get a hit. And among the things he knows is the serpentine idea of a road that binds a city, and the necessary affront of a surreal accident like the frogs in Magnolia . (At least Robert Altman—one of Anderson’s models—used a plausible earthquake as his device in Short Cuts. ) I like nearly everything about Anderson except the stances he seems bound to take up as self-defense, and the wilful arbitrariness of his work. For wilfulness in Hollywood is sooner or later interpreted as a challenge—no matter that no one his age can create such complex scenes, or build them into such ravishing patterns. I stress the latter because Anderson seems one of the relatively few new directors inspired by ideas in editing.
    It is also the case that anyone as good and smart as Anderson should be more perceptibly self-critical. In fact, Magnolia is his most youthful and indulgent film—and Hard Eight , his best and most austere. But there are poetic mysteries in the first film that come closer to pretension in Magnolia . In other words, Anderson is not handling himself well. He is drawing fire upon his own