I’m catching Ron Mann‘s newish, 90-minute Robert Altman documentary tonight on Epix. Altman was a brilliant, snippy, snarly fuck. I knew him very slightly in the ’90s (“Hey, Bob”), and he was never a day at the beach. Always frowning about something, but that’s what genius types tend to do. In 1992 I was in Cannes for Entertainment Weekly, and I ran into Smilin’ Bob at a black-tie party. When I asked for a quote about the L.A. riots he scowled and said, “That subject is too important to talk about with a publication like yours”….yeaahh! Mann’s talking heads include Elliott Gould (M.A.S.H., The Long Goodbye, California Split), Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Michael Murphy, Sally Kellerman ( M.A.S.H., Meryl Streep (Prairie Home Companion), Robin Williams (star of Altman’s biggest bomb, Popeye), Julianne Moore (Shorts Cuts), etc. The doc reportedly contains rare or heretofore unseen clips of this and that. I just hope Mann doesn’t make too big a deal about Nashville, which I disliked when I re-watched it last December. Nashville is basically about “the banal eccentricities and pretensions of the country-music industry, but for the most part the film is snide and misanthropic,” I wrote on 12.14.13.