Nashville: putting on the show: or, paradoxes of the "instant" and the "moment"

Robert Altman's career can stand as the epitome of the direction the American Cinema in the 1970s might have taken — but did not. After an especially "long march" from industrial filmmaking in Kansas City to Bonanza-type television work, a break on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and a worthy but unappreciated attempt at making an "outside the box" Hollywood film (That Cold Day in the Park, 1969), the enormous success of M*A*S*H (1970) promised Altman a degree of control that until then was barely thinkable within the American film industry. It seemed to predestine him to play a leading role in transforming the moribund studio system into a leaner, more dynamic and more responsive "New Hollywood" for the post-Vietnam era and generation.