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Making a documentary about the TV artist Bob Ross should, in theory, have been a pleasant meander through the life of a beloved figure – a cross between America’s Mister Rogers and Britain’s Tony Hart. But when Joshua Rofé got to work as director, he plunged into a maze of ugly legal disputes, interviewees too scared to go on the record and bitter wrangling over Ross’s legacy. This is the surprise twist in Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, a Netflix film about the landscape artist who created more than 30,000 paintings and touched millions of lives before his death from lymphoma in 1995 at the age of 52. “In no way did I set out to make a film that was a ‘gotcha!’ film,” Rofé says via Zoom from New York. “I just wanted to make a film that would represent this individual who is in many ways a mystery and yet completely beloved by so many.”