The son of director Oscar Rudolph, Alan Rudolph grew up in the film industry, quitting college to learn about filmmaking by watching studio people at work. He has consistently pointed out that he successfully avoided film school, although he eventually did enter the Director's Guild training program for assistant directors.

By 1970, Rudolph was writing screenplays for low-budget features and had made several short films set to rock-and-roll hits--an early indication of his concern with musical themes and desire to use music as an inspirational element for his screenplays. During a long association with Robert Altman, Rudolph worked as an assistant director on "The Long Goodbye" (1973), "California Split" (1974) and "Nashville" (1975), and wrote the script for "Buffalo Bill and the Indians" (1976). Altman, in turn, produced Rudolph's first "official" feature, "Welcome to L.A." (1976). (His first feature was 1972's pretentious horror flick "Premonition", virtually forgotten until its appearance on home video.) "Welcome to L.A." offered an ironic view of laid-back L.A. hustling, though its dark sensibility was not appreciated in all quarters.

In his second film, "Remember My Name" (1978), Rudolph gave Geraldine Chaplin full rein to create an enigmatic character study of a woman released from prison to haunt the man who has abandoned her; the film's sense of menace was underlined by a soundtrack featuring celebrated blues singer Alberta Hunter. "Roadie" (1980), a look at life on the road for pop performers, abandoned laid-back stylishness for funky, chaotic comedy and marked the beginning of Rudolph's long association with producer Carolyn Pfeiffer. Though it left critics puzzled, Rudolph claims it is his favorite film.

Having been acclaimed very early on as an important new "auteur", Rudolph subsequently lost a certain degree of control when his films continued to have relatively little impact at the box office. "Endangered Species" (1982), a political thriller, was an unhappy experience for Rudolph; he was locked out of the editing room during the film's post-production. Its resulting impersonal quality was echoed in Rudolph's subsequent career moves as hired-gun on "Songwriter" (1984) and "Made in Heaven" (1987).

"Return Engagement" (1983), a documentary of the debates between 1960s guru Dr. Timothy Leary and Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, was provocative and bizarre. Rudolph then enjoyed his first big success with "Choose Me" (1984), a moody musing on the convoluted romantic entanglements of a bar owner and her lovelorn patrons, including a radio talk show hostess called Dr. Love. The film was inspired by soul singer Teddy Pendergrass' song of the same name.

By his next film, "Trouble in Mind" (1985), Rudolph had gathered a following dedicated to his meditations on love and loneliness in peculiar settings, this time a town called Rain City in an unspecified dystopian future. The Rudolph brew had also come to mean cryptic performances by, typically, Chaplin, Keith Carradine and Genevieve Bujold, and a whimsical absurdity that could sometimes sabotage narrative flow. 1990's "Love at Large", starring Tom Berenger, Elizabeth Perkins and Anne Archer, despite its appealing mix of parody and sobriety, suffered from this problem to some extent, while his followup, "Mortal Thoughts" (1991) could have used more of it.

"The Moderns" (1988) marked the realization of a long-cherished project, a story of an American artist in 1920s Paris who witnesses the transformation of "art" into a commodity. The film deftly satirized an era of art history and high culture whose reputation has enjoyed great reverence; it mixes fictional characters with historical figures such as Gertrude Stein, who sums up Rudolph's approach in one line: "I'm not interested in the abnormal; the normal is so much more simply complicated."

Rudolph once again tackled material very close to his heart in "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" (1994), creating a finely tuned tribute to the celebrated writers and artists that comprised the legendary Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s. Noteworthy performances from Jennifer Jason Leigh as celebrated wit Dorothy Parker and Campbell Scott as humorist Robert Benchley elicited some positive buzz. While the film itself received mixed reviews, it did help restore some of the luster to Rudolph's uneven career. "Afterglow" (1997), his look at marriage and infidelity, also received mixed notices but general praise for the central performances of Julie Christie and Lara Flynn Boyle.

Credit: entertainment.lycos.com