As an adolescent Altman was a cutup and hell-raiser -- to the degree that his parents shipped him off to Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Mo., during his junior year of high school. In 1945, he left the academy for the Army Air Force and what remained of World War II.

After training at a base camp in Southern California, Altman shipped out for the island of Morotai in the Dutch East Indies. There he spent the waning days of the war copiloting a B-24 and dropping payloads on Japanese positions. When he wasn't doing that, he was playing poker with his fellow officers or bird-dogging nurses. Also, according to Altman, it's when he began to consider a career in the movies: "The first time I ever thought about film was when I was overseas in the Second World War," he told me. "I started writing radio plays. I was very interested in that. And then I started to write screenplays -- not screenplays so much as stories to make movies from. Since then, it's just been down the same road."

After the war, he headed to Los Angeles and dove into a number of schemes. He tried being an actor briefly, and he even appeared as an extra in the 1947 Danny Kaye classic "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." You can see him grinning past Kaye in a bar scene if you don't blink. But acting didn't work out, and he then got involved in a bizarre business venture -- a national identification system for dogs in which license information would be tattooed inside the canine's right front leg. Altman and his partners even went to the White House and tattooed President Harry Truman's dog before the business went bust. Soon enough, Altman was back in Kansas City, broke and hungry for action.

In those days, there were no film schools, but at the age of 22, Altman hit on the next best thing. He joined Kansas City's Calvin Company, which was then one of the leading makers of industrial short films in America. Altman went on to make 60 films for the company on every subject imaginable -- from football to car crashes. But he kept grasping for more challenging projects. In 1955, he wrote and directed a low-budget teen exploitation movie titled "The Delinquents." That year, he left Kansas City for the last time, ostensibly to edit "The Delinquents" in Los Angeles.

Released in 1957, "The Delinquents" was hardly a runaway success, but it did catch the eye of Alfred Hitchcock who tapped Altman to direct a few episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." Though Altman fell out with Hitchcock pretty quickly, he was on his way as a successful TV director, and went on to work on series such as "Bonanza," "The Millionaire," "Bus Stop," "Route 66," "The Troubleshooters" and "The Whirlybirds," on the set of which he met his third wife, Kathryn Reed; they've been married since April Fools' Day 1959. (Altman has six grown children: Michael, Stephen and Christine from his previous marriages; Matthew [adopted]; Robert, his son with Reed; and Konni, Reed's daughter. He has 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.)

Perhaps his most important TV work was in the early 1960s for the show "Combat" with Vic Morrow, the late father of Jennifer Jason Leigh. The gritty war drama followed a U.S. Army platoon in France after the invasion of Normandy, and it's still considered an influential series by critics and filmmakers. Unlike the hack work he did for the Calvin Company, Altman doesn't disown "Combat," but seems to regard it with pride.

"The Museum of Television and Radio [in Beverly Hills] has most of it," he told me in an interview just before the "Nashville" screening at AMPAS. "I was in Austin [Texas] last September and October for the Austin film festival. They showed 'Nashville.' They also showed two or three [episodes of] 'Combat' I had written and directed. I hadn't seen those for 40 years, and I thought they held up pretty good ... My god, I've done hundreds of hours of television, and I've done about 38 films. I don't think anyone thinks about that at all. They don't add up all those points until you're dead. Then you can't fool 'em and make any more."

After leaving TV and with a few years of fumbling, Altman scored a job directing his first big studio feature -- 1968's forgettable space-race flick "Countdown" starring James Caan and Robert Duvall as rival astronauts. It was a flop, but a step in the right direction. His next project was the far more accomplished psychological thriller "That Cold Day in the Park" (1969), starring Sandy Dennis as a sexually stifled spinster on the verge of a homicidal nervous breakdown. Shot in Vancouver, B.C., it's a gelid, brilliant piece of moviemaking akin to Roman Polanski's early films "Repulsion" and "Knife in the Water."

But Altman was to make his name, if not a lot of money, with his next project -- the phenomenally successful Korean War romp "MASH" (1970). The Ring Lardner Jr. screenplay had been making the rounds for some time, and 15 directors -- including Stanley Kubrick and Sidney Lumet -- had passed on the adaptation of the novel by 'Richard Hooker' (a pseudonym for authors H. Richard Hornberger and William Heinz) by the time Altman got his hands on it and saw his chance. For a flat fee of $75,000 with no percentage of the gross, he signed on to the 20th Century Fox project.

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