After I interviewed the director Robert Altman (MASH, Nashville, The Player, Gosford Park) for The SF Examiner, he invited me to write a screenplay about the world of French fashion. He was busy shooting Short Cuts when I wrote the script and, without reading it, sent it to Miramax, then a distribution company seeking a first project to produce. When they greenlighted my script, Altman had still not read it. Once he did, we attended Paris shows and rewrote together according to his specifications, jettisoning many plot points and most of the dialogue. During the Paris shoot, which I covered for Vanity Fair, he tasked his uneasy actors with improvising dialogue. At a pre-release private screening I hosted in San Francisco, I introduced the film by noting that before making Ready-to-Wear, I'd always wondered how a movie with a great director and a great cast could turn out to be less than wonderful, and now I knew.