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Chris

Here is a sad bit of news... I am not sure if anyone ever watched MASH or not but I was a big fan as a kid. Even today I still watch episodes if I run accross an old re-run.

"MASH" director Robert Altman, who revolutionized Hollywood filmmaking with a chaotic, irreverent style that critics hailed as "American Art Cinema," has died at age 81, his production company said on Tuesday.

The director of dozens of films and TV dramas, Altman changed the vocabulary of American filmmaking starting with "MASH," a black comedy about a madcap medical unit in the Korean war that came out in 1970 and became a lightening rod for anger many Americans felt toward officials over the Vietnam war.

Many of Altman's other films were hailed by critics, including 1975's "Nashville," which along with "MASH" and the 1971 western "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" are considered among the best films of the 1970s. Other notable films included "The Player" (1992) and "Gosford Park" (2001).

He also made his share of flops, including the financial disaster "Popeye" (1980) and "Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson" (1976).

"What I am looking for is occurrence, truthful human behavior. We've got a kind of road map and we are making it up as we travel along," Altman once said.

His filmmaking style deliberately looked incoherent -- actors would talk over each other and cameras would zoom in and out. Often what someone was saying did not correspond to what a viewer was seeing and always his characters were anything but black and white.

Film historian David Thomson said, "Altman's place in American cinema is very high. He is the only real American independent director who sustained a career for the best part of 40 years. He always made films his way and scorned the money sources he used to make films. He made them feel lucky that he was taking their money to make his film."

For the rest of this story here is the link
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-11-21T211213Z_01_N21395311_RTRUKOC_0_US-ALTMAN.xml&src=rss&rpc=22