My favorite all-time Robert Altman film is California Split, closely followed by McCabe, The Long Goodbye and The Player. I haven’t seen Nashville in eons, and I’ve seen M*A*S*H* too often. My all-time favorite improvised line in an Altman film (which may have been written by Leigh Brackett for all I know): Elliot Gould‘s Phillip Marlowe is asking a small-town Mexican official about the alleged death of his amoral, sleazy friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton), and the Mexican gentleman refers to Lennox as “the deceased” but it sounds like another English term. And Gould goes, “The diseased…yeah, right.” Side note: In the mid ’80s I rented an apartment on Hightower Drive (off Camrose, not far from the Hollywood Bowl) partly because Gould’s Marlowe lived in an amazing, high-up, elevator-access deco complex on Hightower in The Long Goodbye, and I thought it would be cool to live right down the street from this.