ACT II
Robert Altman directs a creative and commercial blockbuster, becomes an international star, builds a dream house, is a darling to critics, is a disappointment to critics, threatens his marriage, comes to his senses, creates his own studio, brings arms to Malta, and gets written off.
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CHAPTER 12
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M*A*S*H (1970)
Pauline Kael, review in The New Yorker, January 24, 1970: M*A*S*H is a marvelously unstable comedy, a tough, funny, and sophisticated burlesque of military attitudes that is at the same time a tale of chivalry. It’s a sick joke, but it’s also generous and romantic—an erratic episodic film, full of the pleasures of the unexpected. … It’s a modern kid’s dream of glory: Holden Caulfield would, I think, approve of [the heroes played by Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould]. They’re great surgeons, athletes, dashing men of the world, sexy, full of noblesse oblige, but ruthless to those with pretensions and lethal to hypocrites….I think M*A*S*H is the best American war comedy since sound came in, and the sanest American movie of recent years.
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From the M*A*S*H theme song, “Suicide Is Painless,” lyrics by Michael Altman:
A brave man once requested me,
to answer questions that are key.
Is it to be or not to be?
And I replied, “Oh, why ask me?”
[Refrain] Suicide is painless. It brings on many changes,
and I can take or leave it if I please.
A poster for M*A*S*H with the iconic peace- sign- on- legs image
Memo titled “Synopsis of M*A*S*H” from James Denton, director of publicity, Twentieth Century Fox, July 16, 1969: Soon after Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland), Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt) and Trapper John McIntyre (Elliott Gould) join the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH), Col. Henry Blake (Roger Bowen) ruefully realizes how placid his Korean War command had been before. The three surgeons have two things in common: They are the best in the Far East and they are hell-raising lunatics who make a shambles of army bureaucracy.
MICHAEL MURPHY: George Litto was an unsung hero of this movie. As brilliant as Bob was, studios worried about him because he was really an artist and he was rebellious and he wouldn’t do it the way they wanted it. That’s where George came in.
GEORGE LITTO: The way it started was my client, Ring Lardner, Jr., was asked to review the book M*A*S*H for The New York Times. You know Ring’s story? He was one of the blacklisted guys from the Hollywood 10, a brave guy who went to jail not to name names. I’m not a Communist. If anything I’m a capitalist—if anything I’m a royalist [laughs]. But I was very sympathetic to the fact that the blacklist was unfair. People have the right to disagree, they didn’t do anything in my mind illegal; you know, believing in something that’s not popular is not a crime. They have their First Amendment right. And they were treated terribly.
Anyway, he called me and said, “George, I think it would make a terrific movie.” Well, Ingo Preminger was Ring’s agent before me, and we were very friendly, and he was moving into producing. So I called up Ingo, and I said, “Ingo, your ex-client just sent me a terrific book. I read the book and I think it would make a wonderful movie. But one condition: If you like it and you buy it, you’ve got to hire Ring to write it.” He said, “No problem.”
RICHARD ZANUCK (studio executive and producer): Ingo Preminger came into my office one day—he had a big literary agency—and he came in and he said, “I’ve read a book I’d like you to read over the weekend. If you like it I’ll sell the agency if you let me produce it.” I said, “Jesus, Ingo.” He had substantial clients. It was a thriving agency. Ingo was much more civil than his brother Otto, who was an arrogant prick. Well, I read it, and I called him up and I said, “I have your office ready.”
GEORGE LITTO: I had a house in Benedict Canyon. We had a poker game there on Sundays with a lot of people in the industry—writers, directors, producers—and Bob came to the poker game, and at the end of the poker game he said, “George, I read M*A*S*H. I think it’s great. Do you think you can get me this movie?” I said, “I don’t really think so, but I’m going to try.”
So Ingo and Ring wanted to have a meeting. “George, who should direct this movie?” And I said, “Stanley Kubrick.” They say, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” So I say, “How could you get him? You can’t. Or, Bob Altman.” And Ring said, “Who’s Bob Altman?” Ingo said, “George, we can never get Bob Altman this job.” I said, “I’m telling you right now, you want to know who can direct this movie? Stanley Kubrick or Bob Altman. That’s all I got to say. You know everybody in town, Ingo. But I’m telling you who can make this a terrific movie.” Ingo says, “George, I can’t get him the job.” So, dissolve.
Ingo and Ring called me up some days later. They said, “George, we got a problem. Practically every meaningful director in Hollywood has turned down the script.” Fifteen, sixteen top directors turned it down. I learned later that many directors turned down M*A*S*H because it had a group of characters, but it was a series of vignettes, and they were used to the traditional beginning, middle, and end. You have to have a motor to get you to the middle and a motor to get you to the end. And this series of vignettes didn’t seem to have a motor. The way Bob fixed that was brilliant, but that comes later.
So Ingo said, “George, if we go to Fox with another turndown, they’re going to cancel this project. We need a director who won’t turn us down.” I said, “Well, you know Kubrick probably will turn you down.” He said, “George, stop being a smartass.” I said, “But Bob Altman won’t turn you down.” That was the only lie I ever told Ingo. Because, you know, he did turn it down [laughs].
Ingo Preminger, from “Remembering M*A*S*H: The 30th Anniversary Cast and Crew Reunion”: To get rid of George Litto, I went and met his client Robert Altman. And at that time he played a little film for me that dealt with the smoking of pot. It was short, it was sweet, and I loved it. I called Richard Zanuck and said, “We found the guy.” He said, “You’re crazy.”
RICHARD ZANUCK: Ingo said, “Look, this guy has done some talented work. Not much, but good work.” That’s when we ran the picture That Cold Day in the Park and something like fifteen episodes of Combat! He came in and we talked about his concept and how he would shoot it and all the rest. It was a gamble ’cause he really hadn’t done anything quite like this.
DAVID BROWN (producer): We were absolutely bowled over by the book, but not by Altman. Ingo convinced us to go with Altman. Well, we weren’t convinced, but we supported the producer.
GEORGE LITTO: So I call up Bob, I tell him, “You won’t believe this, but I got an offer from Ingo Preminger for you to direct M*A*S*H.” It was like a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars and five percent of the picture profits, but Ingo had two other options for more pictures. So that was the deal I made with him. Ingo was a good, smart guy. So Bob agrees and great, fine, I make the deal. Dissolve.
A few days go by. I get a call from Owen McLean, who was head of business affairs for Fox. He said, “George, we got a problem.” He said, “Ingo did not have the authority to make a deal with you for Bob Altman. We’re canceling that deal unless you agree to our terms.” He said seventy-five thousand, flat, no profits. That’s it, take it or leave it. I said, “You know, you’re a big shit, Owen.” He said, “George, are you leaving it? I guess you’re leaving it.” And you wonder why Bob had such an attitude about studios? I said, “Hey, Owen, I’m just a humble agent. I can only deliver your message. I cannot accept or reject your proposal” [laughs]. He said, “There’s not a fucking thing that’s humble about you” [laughs].
RICHARD ZANUCK: When I made Jaws with Spielberg, he didn’t have points and he had done a lot more work. He got no points and that was much later than Bob. In those days points weren’t thrown around unless you were Bob Wise or Willie Wyler or somebody like that.
GEORGE LITTO: So I called Bob and every profane word you can think of he uttered through the telephone about Owen and Fox, because he had a bad experience there. I don’t know if you know this. He was doing a television show with a singer from Philadelphia, Fabian. Yeah, the Bus Stop thing.
So I said, “Bob, do you really want to fuck them?” He said, “Yeah, I’d love to fuck them.” I said, “Take the deal.” He said, “What?” I said, “Take the deal. You think it’ll be a great movie. If it’s a great movie, after that I’ll get you anything you want. Any picture you want to make. I’ll get you the biggest salary in Hollywood. Just take the deal.” So I called Owen and I said, “Owen, I got bad news for you. Bob’s taking the deal.”
RICHARD ZANUCK: When he was gearing up he came in and said, “I want to go scout Korea.” I said, “Why? We’re not going to Korea. We’re going to the studio ranch in Malibu.” He said, “This is ridiculous.” I said, “Go out and look. I’ll show you pictures of mountains in Korea. They match perfectly with what’s out at the studio ranch.” It was probably more Korea than had we gone to Korea. Nobody knows what Korea looks like, anyway. That’s what I said to him and he got very angry.
He said, “We’re going to shoot that golf scene in Tokyo.” I said, “No we’re not. We’re going across the street to Rancho Park. There’s a golf course. All you have to do is get a couple of Japanese girls and dress them up and they’re caddies.” One golf course looks like another. Why would we ever do that?
During the filming of M*A*S*H
In those exchanges, Bob was a guy who didn’t like authority. He was a real rebel. I always felt that underneath that anger there was kind of a playboy. I would see the way he would dress, in the Paris airport, with the hat, the flashy white suit. I think there was a rogue element about that.
GEORGE LITTO: Now he’s doing the picture. He’s working with Ingo and Ring. They’re doing the rewrite. They’re planning the movie and talking to the production department. There’s a guy by the name of Doc Berman that’s like their executive in charge of physical production. Bob calls me up one day. He says, “I fucking hate Doc Berman. I’m planning a shot and they said, ‘Well, you can cut it off here and you don’t have to finish it now, you can finish it next week.’ They’re telling me how to make the movie. I’m sick of this shit. I don’t want this shit. I don’t want to do the picture.” I said, “Come on, Bob. I’ll have Ingo talk to Doc Berman. It’ll be okay.” Ingo talks to Bob, to Doc. Dissolve.
I think everything is okay. My phone rings about six o’clock in the morning. It’s Kathryn. She says, “George, I’m very upset. Bob couldn’t sleep all night. He’s on his way to see you. He’s not going to do the picture. He’s going to walk out on the picture.” I said, “Don’t worry about it.” She said, “What do you mean, don’t worry?” I said, “Don’t worry about it. You’ve told me he’s going to walk out of the picture, you’ve told me he’s on his way. I am up, I will have the coffee on, I will talk to him, and he’ll do the picture.” She said, “Why are you so sure?” I said, “Because he owes me so much fucking money” [laughs].
So Bob comes in, he said, “George, we got to talk. I don’t want to do this movie.” I said, “You want some coffee?” He said, “George, I’m serious.” “I know you’re serious, Bob, but come on, you like those eggs I make with sausages? You want some eggs and sausages?” “George, stop fucking with me. I’m telling you, I don’t want to do it.” I said, “I hear you. Can we have a little breakfast? I got to eat alone? Just take it easy. You’re not going to do the movie. If you got good reasons, I won’t be able to change your mind.” We eat.
I say, “Okay, now tell me the reasons you don’t want to do this picture.” And he gives me a whole thing about, “I can’t pick my own editor, I can’t pick my own cameraman. …” He gives me a whole list. I said, “Okay, here’s what I think. I think you’re right. You should be able to pick these people. They shouldn’t be telling you what to do. I’m going to call Ingo Preminger, and I’m going to tell him that you have problems about making this movie and you’re very upset about it, and he has to resolve it for you to continue with this picture. And I’m going to ask him if he could see you this morning and you can go right from my house to his house”—which was in Brentwood.
So I call up Ingo and I said, “Ingo, you got a pencil and paper?” And I read him the list. He said, “George, I got to get all this?” I said, “What the fuck is the difference? Just go get it for him. Somebody’s got to make the decisions. Say it was your decision.” Bob went to see him, they worked it out.
ROBERT REED ALTMAN: My mom’s desk had a piece of glass on it, and under the glass was a little piece of paper with my dad’s writing on it. I said, “What’s this?” And she said, “That’s from when your dad decided that he would make the movie M*A*S*H.” The note said, “Oh fuck it, I’ll do it.”
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ROBERT ALTMAN: When we were making M*A*S*H, Twentieth Century Fox had two other wars going on—Patton and Tora! Tora! Tora! Those were big-budget pictures, and we were cheap. I knew that if we stayed under budget and didn’t cause too much trouble, we could sneak through. You could say they were distracted by those other films.
RICHARD ZANUCK: Whether we were making Tora! Tora! in Japan and Hawaii had nothing to do with anything. He was right under our thumb, but he claimed we were asleep while we were making the picture. That was ridiculous. He was a hundred feet away. I was at the ranch many, many times. I was seeing dailies every day, sending him notes every day—notes of praise. Of course we were busy with Tora! Tora! But what is it he did behind our backs? Nothing. Maybe he smoked pot on the set. He was just an authority resister. If you say “studio” he immediately becomes paranoid.
ROBERT ALTMAN: What’s that expression about success having many fathers and failure being an orphan? Something like that, right?
When I got started, the only two people who were already cast were Donald Sutherland and, I think, Elliott Gould, though that might not have been finished. I went up to San Francisco to cast the rest of the film. I don’t know what kind of theater you call it, theater of the absurd, I suppose, but there were like forty people onstage all the time, and it was highly improvisational. And I cast the film right there. If you look at the credits of M*A*S*H, it says, Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould and “Introducing,” and there’s about twenty names. Well, those were all those people from San Francisco.
BILL BUSHNELL (theater impresario): It was the spring of 1969 when he came to ACT, the American Conservatory Theater, in San Francisco. I got a phone call one Saturday morning from my then-wife, Scotty, who was working with the casting agent. She gave me Bob’s number at the Fairmont Hotel and I went up there and spent the afternoon and the evening drinking and smoking with Bob and took him down to ACT to a party that night where he met John Schuck and René Auberjonois and G. Wood, among others, and that was the beginning of a relationship between Bob and myself and eventually between Bob and Scotty.
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JOHN SCHUCK (actor): I thought he was fascinating because I hadn’t met anybody quite like him. There was no artifice about him. He had a way of simplifying the most complex of ideas that at first you weren’t sure if he had much intelligence at all, you know? But that was part of my snobbery. I was used to articulate theater directors who could expound on the literature and history. Bob could have done all that but he wasn’t that kind of a person. He was a great equalizer that way. He had—I don’t want to call it a common touch, but his appeal was much simpler, much more basic.
He was fourteen or fifteen years older than me, but he had a weariness, like he’d really lived, you know? I don’t want to say he looked beat up—he didn’t—but he was craggy and with a beard and he had lost some of his hair.
SALLY KELLERMAN (actress and singer): I was going out for the part of Lieutenant Dish, so I thought, “Okay, I better wear some red lipstick.” I never wore red lipstick, because I always hid my mouth because my sister used to say to me, “Shut up, big lips.” But that day I wore bright red lips for Lieutenant Dish, and it was probably Ingo Preminger and the casting director and Bob and maybe my agent. We’re just sitting there talking and suddenly Bob said to me, “I’ll give you the best part in the picture: Hot Lips.” I said, “Really? Oh my god.” I went outside so excited, and I remember standing against the wall, and I quickly thumbed through the script. What a frigging amateur I was, looking for the part. It looked like there were seven lines and I just turned to granite. I was just bitter, thinking, “I’ll never get in the movies.”
Someone said, “You really should go back and see him, because he’s really talented.” So I read the script again, I went back to meet him, and I was just all puffed up and I was so angry, I mean that’s how desperate I was. I remember saying, “I’m not a WAC, I’m a woman,” and tears are in my eyes. I said, “Why does she have to leave the film so early?” And, “Why couldn’t she do this?” and, “Why couldn’t she do that?” He’s just sitting back, and I was just mad and tearing up. And he goes, “Yeah. Why couldn’t she? Why don’t you take a chance? You could end up with something or nothing.” I was coming from television, and in those days you couldn’t change one line and if you did, the entire suite of suits from Universal had to come down to the set to check it out, you know? And here’s this director saying, “Take a chance.” So, needless to say, I grabbed it.
TOM SKERRITT: I hadn’t spoken to him in a year or two. I was writing something and having a difficult time with it. I called him one day. He says, “Skerritt. Hang up, I’ll call you back.” The next day I was in M*A*S*H. If I hadn’t called that day I really doubt I would have been in M*A*S*H. The studio was pushing for a bigger name—Burt Reynolds. Bob was pushing back.
BUD CORT (actor): I got a call asking me to come in for a meeting. It was the middle of winter and I took buses and had to trudge through snow. I remember I was wearing new Army boots, light tan suede with gold buttons on them. I was shown into this room and there were probably five people there. The only one I remembered was Ingo Preminger. I focused on him because I thought, “My God, he’s probably related to Otto Preminger.” This one guy kept focusing on me. “Where’d you get those shoes?” I told him, “Army-Navy store.” Then, “Those glasses real?” I had on little John Lennon glasses. I looked at him and lied and said, “Yes.” He bored through me with these blue eyes and he says, “Yeah, right.” And I ignored him. About a month later, I get a call: “You have an offer to do a movie in California in the summer.”
They checked me into a little hotel on Pico Boulevard, right there by Twentieth Century Fox. Before we started shooting, we all went there as ourselves to be fitted. I had hair down to my shoulders and I was wearing a beige suede Indian vest with these long beaded tassels that hung like a bird’s feathers almost down to the floor. This guy came up to me and just stared at me and started barking orders. Same guy who gave me a hard time at the audition about my glasses. He says, “I want his hair shaved.” I turned to the guy next to me and I said, “What is with this hairdresser?”
“No,” he says, “that’s the director. That’s Bob Altman.”
RENÉ AUBERJONOIS (actor): He told me, “I won’t even give you a script because you wouldn’t think the part was interesting, because he doesn’t do much or say much. If you were going to play a priest, what would you do with it?” I just started talking about a guy I had been in acting class with, a guy who had been a priest. He was a well-meaning guy, but humble. I described this character to him and he said, “Well, that sounds good.”
I love Dago Red, Father Mulcahy. I thought he was everything I would want a priest to be. I thought of him as this sweet sort of a character. It never occurred to me that the audience would think of it as an insult, or anti-Christian or anything like that. I thought of him as a character full of humanity.
MALACHY MCCOURT (raconteur/writer/professional Irishman): Bob originally cast me as Father Mulcahy, you know. He wanted a real Irish priest. But the producer, Preminger, what was his first name, the brother? Ingo, yes, Ingo. He didn’t like me. At the time, Bob didn’t have what it took to overrule him, so I was out. There went my acting career. Every time I saw Bob after that, here at Elaine’s, wherever, he always said, “I owe you one, Malachy. I owe you one.” True story.
RENÉ AUBERJONOIS: I never heard that! But I love it because my son’s beautiful, wonderful actress wife did a little independent movie this summer in Philadelphia called Our Lady of Victory. She told me, “There’s a part of a priest that they’d like you to play.” We had a back-and-forth with the director and producer. They couldn’t even afford to fly me in. In the end, Malachy got to play the priest. So if he thinks I took his part of the priest, he took my part of the priest!
ELLIOTT GOULD (actor): I was asked by Twentieth Century Fox to meet Robert Altman. He asked me if I would consider playing the role of Duke, the American Southerner in M*A*S*H. I said, “I’ve never questioned an offer, and I’m really delighted and flattered that you would ask me to work for you. But I’ll drive myself crazy validating me being an American Southerner. I’m sure I can do it, but I mean I’m going to be so intense as far as how it’s going to sound. This guy Trapper John McIntyre, if you haven’t cast him and your mind isn’t set, that’s the guy that I would like to play.” I was blessed that Bob gave me the part.
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JOHN SCHUCK: From the minute we started, he was creating this world of insanity with blood and guts and all the horrors of war. You have to realize, at the time, the Vietnamese conflict was still unresolved, really, so he couldn’t make a movie about an anti-Vietnam thing at this point. I don’t think Hollywood would have allowed that, so that’s why putting it in Korea was very smart. It gave it twenty-five years’ distance. But that’s what he did, he created this world that fit his message.
TOM SKERRITT: The extras were basically this improvisational group that he found in San Francisco. I would go around and tell them that Bob’s got mikes everywhere and he’s floating a camera, and it would be a good idea to pay attention and come up with stuff on your own. And they did that. It made it crisp every day, the idea that you may be on camera.
I just loved the guy from the first. He made me realize early on that you could do no wrong, as long as you tried. The worst you could do was make an ass out of yourself. And that’s the first thing you have to be willing to do as an actor, is be willing to make an ass out of yourself. Bob gave me that.
But as we’re going along, I’m aware that Donald and Elliott are not too happy. They didn’t quite allow Bob in. He’s the director and all he’s saying is, “Free yourself up, we’re all in this together. Yeah, I’m the captain of the ship, but we’re all guiding the ship through the fog, and the fog is the movie system.” They did not respond to Bob’s style. I’m thinking, “This is a classic.” I’m saying that to Donald and Elliott, and they’re saying, “We can’t wait to get off this thing.”
ELLIOTT GOULD: One of the peculiar things was that Donald and I had a problem working with Bob at the beginning. I think you may have either heard or you read that Donald and I had complained about what we thought was his style of direction, or his being lax in terms of what our expectations were.
One time Bob had the camera on a crane, and the crane had to be moving to come over and shoot each of us. It was a complicated shot and we were fighting time and we weren’t quite coordinating the camera, the crane, with us. Bob was getting a little uptight about it and he was not happy being under the pressure of having to get this shot by a certain time. Then we broke for lunch and I got my lunch on a tray and there were a few people around, and Bob said to me, “Why can’t you be like somebody else?” Which was the worst possible thing he could say to me, you know? I don’t know if he said I was ruining it for him then, but he pointed to Corey Fischer and said, “Why can’t you be more like him?”
COREY FISCHER (actor): I was playing Captain Bandini. At one point, Bob had me just walk across the compound. I think he was shooting from very far away. He followed me walking out of the surgery tent, by myself, in the rain, trying to light a cigarette. No drama, no subtext, except exhaustion. And he wound up just loving that piece of film. He kept saying, “That was it.” That was the spirit he wanted. Bob wanted actors who were quirky but minimal. He knew that just by doing something ordinary, they would be interesting.
Discussing a scene with his unhappy stars, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland
ELLIOTT GOULD: I started…it was the only time when I’ve ever started to shake and it’s the only time I’ve ever thrown up my food before I ingested it. I threw my lunch up in the air and I said, “You fucking prick. I’m not going to stick my neck out for you again. You tell me what you want and that’s what you’ll get. I started out in the theater. I was a chorus boy. I was a tap dancer. I understand all that stuff. You know, you fucking asshole, you telling me to be like somebody else …” And he said, “I think I made a mistake.” And I said, “I think so.” And he said, “I apologize.” And I said, “I accept.”
Donald and I had the same agent and we spoke to our agent. His name was Richard Shepard, Dick Shepard, at CMA, Creative Management, and we went in and had a meeting with him and we complained.
Robert Altman, from DVD commentary: The biggest problem I had, about halfway through the film …was that Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould had gone to the studio and tried to get me fired because they said …they were the stars and I wasn’t paying enough attention to them. I was spending too much time with all these extras, background people. And I think had I known that at the time, I would have resigned. I mean, I could not have gone on if I had known they had that attitude. But I didn’t find out until later. And Elliott told me, called me up and said, “We made a terrible mistake because we thought you just didn’t know what you were doing.”
ELLIOTT GOULD: I think that, in hindsight, Donald and I were two elitist, arrogant actors who really weren’t getting Altman’s genius.
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COREY FISCHER: People talk about improvisation in Bob’s movies, but it’s often a misnomer. It wasn’t as if people were improvising on camera. What Bob loved to do was to create a scene that had a lot of density, a lot of levels going on, all these simultaneous conversations and overlaps. He liked having more than one center to a scene or a shot. Take the scene at the beginning where Hawkeye and Duke are arriving in the stolen Jeep. He started with a shot inside the mess hall with me and Danny Goldman and Roger Bowen. I remember he had us create our own little intro to the scene. At one point I’m talking about these two new arrivals. I had my glasses up on my forehead, and one of the other guys flipped them down and said something like, “You don’t even know what you’re looking at.” That’s not in the script, but by the time he actually got to shooting it, it would have been set. He would have made suggestions, tinkered with it, and signed off on it.
With Bob I have this image of a Renaissance painter, where Michelangelo would be working on the main figures and his helpers would be working on the figures at the edges. I think that’s what Bob wanted and needed, this entourage of actors who were not playing primary characters who would enliven those edges and give the final work a special feel that he became known for.
RENÉ AUBERJONOIS: For all of us who had never been in a movie before, other than being a day player, it’s almost as if he ruined us for the rest of our lives. We thought that’s the way movies were. That they were that joyous an experience. If you had any kind of career, you quickly saw that most directors don’t really trust actors, don’t really want to see actors acting. That was the difference with Bob Altman. He loved actors and wanted to see acting.
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MICHAEL MURPHY: When they started to make M*A*S*H, I thought, “Good. Bob got a little break here. He’ll deliver this film, put a few bucks in his pocket, and get out of debt.” I go out on the set, it was like the third day, and there he is with this picture of the Last Supper in his hand and he’s laughing at it. I’m thinking, “Jesus, now it’s going to be blasphemy and they won’t want to release it.”
JOHN SCHUCK: So my character, Painless, is some dentist from the Midwest who is physically endowed and has trouble on a sexual level. The interesting thing about that scene at the Last Supper, when he’s decided to commit suicide, is the doctors and all the others could have been mean-spirited how they handled Painless, you know? But it wasn’t. Bob made sure there was an understanding that we are all failing on some human level and would like to get out of it, just go to sleep and not wake up.
The “Last Supper” scene from M*A*S*H
Dialogue from M*A*S*H:
(Captain Walter “Painless Pole” Waldowski, played by John Schuck, is feted by his friends at a “Last Supper” arranged to visually echo the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece.)
HAWKEYE PIERCE (Played by Donald Sutherland): I just—I just wanna say one thing. Uh, nobody ordered Walt to go on this mission. He volunteered for certain death.
DUKE: That’s true.
HAWKEYE: That’s what we award our highest medals for.
DUKE: That’s beautiful.
JOHN SCHUCK: By using the image of the Last Supper, he was taking on another establishment, of course. Almost anything that was institutionalized was game for him. Didn’t matter whether it was the church or the school of art or the Army or anything. Anything that was organized and was a group, he could be counted on to be cantankerous about. Studios. The Hollywood system was an ongoing battle all the time. Banking, finance, every aspect of it. How you shoot a picture. How you pay actors. It doesn’t matter, he had his own iconoclastic ideas about it.
I sensed that he was a renegade from day one. He was out gunning for anybody that was hurting the little guy. You see that just in the sheer humanity of his films. He had a great sense of right and wrong, but if I was to use the word “justice,” it would be in a moral sense. And that’s why he didn’t like institutions, because to a certain extent, they dehumanize. And he didn’t like that. He liked human beings, with all their foibles.
JOHNNY MANDEL (composer): When I got there, the first thing he was going to shoot was the suicide scene. We’re sitting around one night and he says, “This is the first thing I have to do. It’s just dead air with everyone walking around putting Scotch and Playboyin the casket. We need a song. It’s got to be the stupidest song that was ever written.” I said, “Well, we can do stupid.”
He starts thinking and says five minutes later—we were a bit ripped at the time—he says, “The Painless Pole is going to commit suicide. The name of this song is ‘Suicide Is Painless.’ I used to write songs. I’m going to go home and see if I can come up with something.” The next day, he tells me, “There’s too much stuff in this forty-five-year-old brain of mine. I can’t get anything nearly as stupid as I need. But all is not lost. I have this kid who is a total idiot. He’ll run through this thing like a dose of salts.”
MICHAEL ALTMAN: I was writing a lot of poetry at the time. I was really heavily influenced by Bob Dylan, Donovan, Leonard Cohen. And I was really into the music scene. My stepsister Konni was a classic poster flower child, lived on Speedway in Venice, and I just idolized her. It was 1968–69, Summer of Love. I had a psychedelic guitar. Well, I bought the guitar for ten bucks and I painted it all up with Day-Glo paint and had the Nehru jackets and I was all about that shit. I was writing tons of poetry, and it was all pretty basic, four-four, even-steven stuff, very typical, classic kind of folk poetry.
I came into the living room one night and my father was sitting there with Mr. Preminger and they were having their Scotch and smoking dope and talking about their thing. And I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” And he goes, “No, come here, what do you want?” And I went, “I was just going to show you some stuff that I’d written.” So I showed him some silly poetry and stuff that I was writing and he goes, “We were just sitting here talking about this scene for the movie, and we need a song. Why don’t you write it?”
And I went, “Oh. Well, I probably can’t do that.” And he goes, “I’ll tell you what it is. We got the name of it, it’s called ‘Suicide Is Painless’ and blah, blah, blah.” He describes the scene. He says, “You go write it. If it works we’ll use it.”
The next day I left and went to my grandmother’s. I was staying with her ’cause nobody else would have me. And I wrote like a hundred and twelve verses. Just the most atrocious crap you’ve ever heard in your life. It was just awful, I mean, “I hear the sound of gunfire from over the hill. Come on, boys, let’s kill, kill, kill.” You know, just terrible shit. I tore it all up and threw it away and called him up and I said, “I can’t do this. Forget it, I tried, there’s nothing that I’m willing to give you.”
So the following week I went back to Bob’s and I’m in the backyard and I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the whole thing in about ten minutes. Just boom, wrote it out like that and I walked in and handed it to him. I go, “This’ll work.” He goes, “Oh, okay. Put some music to it.” So I grabbed my guitar and I do this C-F-G, you know, Bob Dylan chords. I did a little A-minor. Maybe C. Just real basic crap. So they got one of those crappy little cassette recorders, you know, where you hold both the buttons down, and I recorded the thing. They took the tape and shipped it to Johnny Mandel and he threw some sevenths on it and put a bridge in it and there it is.
JOHNNY MANDEL: It’s the only song I ever wrote dead drunk. I only wrote sober, but this particular song I couldn’t get together. I had to get loose enough to come up with that. Finally, out of desperation, I got bombed and wrote it. I don’t recommend that.
I didn’t have to make any changes—verse, chorus, verse, chorus construction. Threw in a couple of odd bars to make it sound homemade. He wrote a very good lyric for what it was. When we were done, they liked it so much they started putting it in over the main titles. With the helicopters. I said, “That doesn’t belong.” They said they liked it. I said, “That’s the stupidest answer I ever heard.” They said, “Well, we like it.” I said, “I’m not going to be part of this stupid conversation.” I’m glad they didn’t listen. It became my biggest copyright.
MICHAEL ALTMAN: They paid me five hundred bucks and gave me fifty percent of the song. I went and took that five-hundred-dollar check and bought myself a big, beautiful twelve-string guitar. Fucking gorgeous, man; it was amazing. That was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. And then a couple of years later, after the TV show came out, it went into syndication. You know Bob hated the TV series, right?
Anyway, after the series came out, I got another check for, like, twenty-six bucks. And then the second check was like a hundred thirty dollars. And I’m going, “Oh, this is nice.” And the next check was like twenty-six thousand dollars. And then it started, the whole thing started with the royalties. I think I ended up making close to two million dollars. And Bob had gotten paid seventy-five thousand dollars to direct the movie and no points, right? And it made Fox Studios what it is, right? It was their biggest hit ever, you know. Then the TV show and stuff like that. And Bob’s just been livid about that for years.
Ingo Preminger, from “Remembering M*A*S*H: The 30th Anniversary Cast and Crew Reunion”: The amusing thing is that Michael Altman made more money out of this picture than his father.
Robert Altman, from “Remembering M*A*S*H: The 30th Anniversary Cast and Crew Reunion”: Oh, by a long shot. I’m cool about it all, because what I got out of it was better than money.
MICHAEL ALTMAN: I squandered the money away. All of it.
Here’s what happened. After I got out of school and got this paper signed saying that I was responsible for myself, they released the money to me and I bought a big camper thing, a big hippie van. You know, like the Magic Bus. It was a converted bread truck. I cut the back of it off and put a loft in it and put a ship’s wheel on the front and a couple of two-man saws on the side. Just painted it all up and hopped in the thing and traveled for several years and just caravanned around the country. And every three months we’d get a check for about twenty-five, thirty grand at a pop, which was a lot of money back then. And I just partied it away. It was tragic really, the whole thing was really too bad. There was no telling me what to do and so they just stopped trying and basically let me go. It was a great retirement plan, which I would love to have now, in retrospect. So anyway, I had never paid taxes; they just used to send me checks. They did for years. And then like ten years later I was up in Washington state and I went down to a car lot and I decided that I was going to buy a car. I go, “I’ll pay cash.” And the guy goes, “Just bring in your income-tax returns and we’ll use that to get you a loan.” And I go, “I don’t have any income-tax returns.” I started thinking, “Hmm, I wonder who’s been doing that all this time for me.” So I call up the IRS and they go, “Well, all right, with the penalties and interest you owe a quarter-million dollars.” And so I disappeared for another ten years and didn’t bring it up again. And then I tried to get it straightened out and by that time it was like close to half a million dollars.
It took years to straighten it out. I went to Bob for help. He got some of his lawyers and his army of guys on it. And they made this deal. So I did a bankruptcy. Bob bought the song from the trust-deed guy for thirty thousand dollars. He bought the rights to it, or bought the royalties off. So he finally ended up getting the royalties, and he still has them, or his estate does, I guess.
Sally Kellerman as “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the famous, or infamous, shower scene
I was irresponsible and unbalanced to begin with. The money certainly flavored it and shaded it, but it wasn’t the cause. I take responsibility for who I was. I don’t blame it on Bob or on my mom or on the business or on anything. That’s bullshit. I might have done that a few years ago, had I not tried to get involved in a program where you take responsibility for your own actions and become accountable. But I don’t believe any of that anymore.
Have I published any other songs? No, nothing that’s gone out. I’ve put together quite a few. I’ve got a ton of stuff. I’ve worked with a few other songwriters and put some stuff together. And quite honestly, by my personal standards, I never liked the suicide song. I wasn’t that impressed with it at all.
* * *
Dialogue from M*A*S*H:
HAWKEYE PIERCE (Played by Donald Sutherland): I knew it. I knew you had a—had an attraction for Hot Lips Houlihan.
TRAPPER JOHN MCINTYRE (Played by Elliott Gould): Hear, hear.
DUKE FORREST (Played by Tom Skerritt): Go to hell, Captain Pierce. You know I damn near puke every time I look at her. ’Sides, I’ll bet she’s not a real blonde.
SALLY KELLERMAN: So now I’ve committed to doing this part, and I’m absolutely horrified and humiliated that I’m going to have to do this shower scene. I knew there was no getting out of it—it was one of the central things that moved the fun and the story along. I was horrified because I was always ashamed, you know, because I was fat as a kid, about thirty pounds more than now. And people would say, “You’re not fat, you’re just big.” And that was even worse, you know? So I went to my shrink and I don’t know what I said. I was hating myself so much. I went to my shrink and I dropped my pants and I said, “There.” And he said, “So?” And that was it. That was my preparation for doing the naked shower scene.
Robert Altman, from DVD commentary: Sally was very nervous about this. I don’t think she’d ever been naked in a film before or publicly, and she said, “I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know how to do this.” And I said, “Listen, you just go in there and take your shower and when the curtain flies up, protect yourself at all times and it’s no big deal.”
Well, the first shot we made, the tent thing went up—Sally looked at us and she hit the ground in the tent so fast that we couldn’t even tell what she was doing. She was on the ground before the flap came up.
SALLY KELLERMAN: When I looked up, there was Gary Burghoff stark naked standing in front of me. The next take, he had Tamara Horrocks, she was the more amply endowed nurse, without her shirt on. So I already had a penis in my mind, from Gary, and now I thought I was looking at a hermaphrodite. So I attribute my Academy Award nomination to the people who made my mouth hang open when I hit the deck.
RENÉ AUBERJONOIS: When they drop the tent and she’s naked, my character covers the face of the houseboy. In that sequence, it’s like a Mad magazine cover, in which everyone does something that illuminates their character. It’s worth looking at that shot because it shows the gift that Bob gives actors.
SALLY KELLERMAN: He kept the camera rolling, by the way. Nobody said anything, no cut. And my character goes into the colonel’s tent, and I suddenly realized that she was losing everything.
Dialogue from M*A*S*H:
MAJOR MARGARET “HOT LIPS” HOULIHAN (to Colonel Henry Blake, played by Roger Bowen, in bed with Lieutenant Leslie, played by Indus Arthur): Put them under arrest! See what a court-martial thinks of their drunken hooliganism! First they all call me “Hot Lips,” and you let them get away with it! You let them get away with everything! If you don’t turn them over to the MPs this minute, I’m—I’m gonna resign my commission!
COLONEL BLAKE: Goddammit, Hot Lips, resign your goddamn commission!
* * *
SALLY KELLERMAN: And I said, “My commission …my commission.” I broke down, and I backed out of the tent.
Robert Altman, from DVD commentary: Sally’s such a great actress, and this scene of her anger is, I think, one of the high points of the film.
SALLY KELLERMAN: After I did the shower scene, Bob ran around the tent and said, “I had no idea you were going to do it like that. You can stay in the film now—you’ve changed, you’re vulnerable.” She giggles and gives in—that was one of the things Bob taught me. And she gets to be a cheerleader, to play poker with the boys, to sleep with all kinds of cute guys, which she never could before. Well, I mean except for Rob Duvall, who played Frank Burns, who was as uptight as she was.
ROBERT DUVALL: M*A*S*H was a lot of fun. The only problem I had with military films was the higher the rank of the character, the more buffoonery set in. People don’t understand the military. But since it was a spoof…
BUD CORT: I kind of never emotionally had a father, and that’s where my hookup with Bob really had resonance. I would look at Bob and say, “That’s my father. He picked me out of nothing and put me in a movie.” It became my focus to make him crazy with my acting. He got every single thing that I did, and when it was time to do my big scene with Robert Duvall—my one line in the movie—I was psychotic with fear. My big scene was where I cried because Frank Burns—Duvall’s character—says that I killed a guy due to my incompetence, and Elliott’s character sees the whole thing happening and calls Frank out and punches him as hard as he can.
Apparently, before the scene Bob said to Duvall, “Fuck with Bud a little bit.” Duvall just grabbed me and called me every word in the book. I went completely pale and we did the scene in one take. That’s what Bob wanted—me frozen with fear. Once that was under my belt, I experienced a freedom and an elation in the work that I had never experienced before. It was bonding, like actually a family.
* * *
Robert Altman, from DVD commentary: I remember speaking at a college, oh, over in an auditorium of over five thousand people in Wisconsin or someplace, and somebody got up and said, “Why do you treat women the way that you do? You’re a misogynist.” And I said, “Well, I don’t treat women that way, I’m showing you the way I observed that women were treated.” And that was the way women were treated and still are treated, especially when you get into these Army situations where you’ve got so many males with egos, with fourteen-year-old development. I think the whole point of this film was to show those attitudes toward women.
MATTHEW MODINE (actor): People got it backward. He appreciated women, he showed their character and strength. It’s the men who are so fucked up, not the women in his films. The men pull back the curtain on Hot Lips. It’s the asinine ridiculousness, the prank of men acting like Boy Scouts jerking off in a pup tent. He’s exposing something about men, not about women.
SALLY KELLERMAN: The question of misogyny, right? People have written about “the humiliation of Hot Lips.” I didn’t get that at all. The shower changed Hot Lips. And me, I couldn’t have felt more loved and more appreciated as a woman and as an actress.
* * *
Robert Altman, from “Remembering M*A*S*H: The 30th Anniversary Cast and Crew Reunion”: This is the first time that the word “fuck” was used in an R-rated film. That was John Schuck in the football game, and I don’t even know where that came from. I mean it certainly wasn’t written and I certainly didn’t tell him to do it.
Dialogue from M*A*S*H:
(The 4077th M*A*S*H unit is playing football against its rival, the 325th Evacuation Hospital.)
CAPTAIN WALTER “PAINLESS POLE” WALDOWSKI (Played by John Schuck): All right, bub, your fucking head is coming right off!
JOHN SCHUCK: Yes, Schuck says “fuck.” We were in Griffith Park shooting stuff, second-unit stuff for the football game that Andy Sidaris was in charge of. I had never played football. I was a soccer player. So you find yourself lining up against Buck Buchanan and all these pro football players. So Andy says to me, “Now just go up and say something really nasty about his mother or what you’re going to do to him or whatever.” And so that’s what I did.
He just knocked me for a loop. Came up, he’s saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s instant reflex, anybody says that to me.” So that’s how that came about. I thought, “That will never be in the movie.”
DANFORD GREENE (film editor): Oh yeah, I couldn’t wait to cut that in. I knew it would get a laugh at the dailies.
GEORGE LITTO: I heard that at a screening, and I turned to Bob and said, “It’s too bad you can’t use that in the movie.” And he said, “Why not?” Being as contrary as he was [laughs]. If I wasn’t sitting there saying he can’t use it, he might have taken it out.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Because of that, my father told his sister not to see M*A*S*H. He told her, “Bobby made a dirty movie.”
* * *
DANFORD GREENE: When we ran the film for Ring Lardner, Jr., the lights go on and we walked out. I was walking in front of Bob and Ring, and Ring said, “It’s not my script.”
ELLIOTT GOULD: Ring Lardner, Jr., came out and walked up to me and said, “How could you do this to me? There’s not a word that I wrote on screen.”
DANFORD GREENE: I remember before we went to the Academy Awards—M*A*S*H was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Supporting Actress for Sally Kellerman, and Best Adapted Screenplay. I remember Bob said, “I don’t think any of us will win except Ring Lardner, and he didn’t even like the movie.” And he was right. Ring was the only one who won anything.
Ring Lardner, Jr., letter to the editor headlined, “On Improving a M*A*S*H Script,” The New York Times, June 15, 1997: Jesse Kornbluth quotes Robert Altman as saying: “When Ring Lardner read my draft of M*A*S*H*,’ he said: ‘You’ve ruined my script! There’s not a word of mine in it.’ Then he won the Academy Award for best screenplay and didn’t thank anyone.” I have always regarded Bob as an imaginative fellow, but this goes beyond his previous efforts. I not only never said anything remotely like that; I couldn’t have, because there never was an Altman draft to read. As for the Academy Award, I was almost certain that later in the evening Bob would be given the directorial award he deserved. Had I known that was not going to happen, I would have thanked him despite my distaste for the standard acceptance speech made up of one thank you after another, which had already become a cliché. However, I have frequently spoken publicly and written about his many improvements and much smaller number of negative contributions.
Editing M*A*S*H with Danford Greene
Ring Lardner, Jr., three years later, shortly before his death in November 2000. From unused footage from Fox Movie Channel Documentary, Robert Altman: On His Own Terms: I think Bob should have gotten some kind of cowriting credit since he did add so much, but he didn’t ask for it… I think after all these years my greatest regret … (is) not giving Bob Altman enough credit for the contribution, the writing contribution.
Ring Lardner, Jr., accepting the only Academy Award given for M*A*S*H
BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: When Bob was up for the Oscar for M*A*S*H, I was so excited. When he didn’t win, I was so disappointed. I called Bob and I said, “Oh honey, you should have won.” He said, “Oh, I’m thrilled to death. Honey, if you’re on top, which I would have been, it’s awful hard to stay up there. You’ve got to come down.”
* * *
GEORGE LITTO: Bob did a brilliant job casting and directing the movie. Another thing Bob did that was brilliant was he solved the problem of an episodic script. Since the story and the characters and the plot didn’t propel you, he used sound and music as the motor for the transitions between scenes and characters. He created that whole other voice of the loudspeakers on tent poles. All the way down to the end.
JOHNNY MANDEL: When I first started seeing blood spurting all around the hospital, I said, “God, how in the world are we going to handle that? I certainly don’t want to write score to that.” I remembered around 1949 I heard something that just about made you soil your pants—Japanese dance bands trying to play jazz. I said, “Shit! That’s it!”
I had a Japanese friend take me to Little Tokyo to look in the Japanese records stores, and I went back to Altman and played this stuff. He said, “Great, but how do we use it?” I said, “Why don’t you have it coming over the loudspeakers, from Radio Tokyo.” His brain starts working, and it became the greatest cutting device he ever had. It allowed him to get from one scene to another. He was open to everything, but only Bob had the imagination to pull it off.
ROBERT ALTMAN: I knew I could use those loudspeakers, and I went around and shot them. For a while, I didn’t know what was going to come out of them. But I knew I had to have connective tissue, and that worked.
Dialogue from the last scene of M*A*S*H:
P.A. ANNOUNCER (Voiced by David Arkin): Attention. Tonight’s movie has been M*A*S*H. Follow the zany antics of our combat surgeons as they cut and stitch their way along the front lines, operating as bombs—[laughs]—operating as bombs and bullets burst around them; snatching laughs and love between amputations and penicillin.
STAFF SERGEANT GORMAN (Played by Bobby Troup): Goddamn army.
P.A. ANNOUNCER: That is all. [A gong sounds and the screen goes black]
* * *
GEORGE LITTO: Dick Zanuck, he’s going to hate you for this, but fuck him. He and David Brown and all the guys at Fox first saw the movie and they gave Bob, I don’t know, ten pages of notes for cuts and changes they wanted made. I said, “Ingo, you got to get in there and get a preview or something. You got to do something.” He got them to agree to a preview in San Francisco. We all went up there. And I’m sitting right behind Dick Zanuck.
The picture goes on, and you know one of the other controversial things is Bob was showing lots of blood, right? I mean it’s all outrageous and people are walking out. I’m saying to my wife, “Oh my God, the pains are coming back. They’re going down my chest.” And then there’s the scene where Don Sutherland steals the jeep. And then the audience applauds, and then the audience is screaming. Next thing you know it’s a standing ovation, and Dick Zanuck turns around and he says, “Hey, George, we got a hit. Tell Bob to forget about my notes.”
RICHARD ZANUCK: The marketing people at Twentieth Century Fox were scared. Some people were really shocked by it because it was so stark, so bloody. They thought audiences would get up, throw up, and leave. They had always been very skeptical about the picture. They first challenged the title—“What is this? Mash potatoes? We can’t sell this.” But it was a massive hit at that preview. They got the humor. It was very reaffirming.
It was great fun for me seeing the picture come to life in his hands. He added a much more cynical spirit to it than was ever in the script and a liveliness to it that neither the book nor the script had.
ROBERT ALTMAN: I always said M*A*S*H didn’t get released. It escaped.
RENÉ AUBERJONOIS: You know the famous story about the executive from Twentieth Century Fox coming up to Pauline Kael and saying, “What do we do with this film?” And she said, “You release it! What are you, crazy? You release it.”
* * *
GEORGE LITTO: Remember we were talking about what Bob said about Kraft cheese? He did it again. After M*A*S*H came out, I’m negotiating with Dick Zanuck and Ingo Preminger to get Bob back his five percent. While this is going on, Bob gave an interview and he said something like, “Fox is going broke, and I’m glad.”
Linda Stein, story headlined “Altman Is Determined to Make Pix Own Way,” in Film/TV Daily, March 3, 1970: “All studios are going broke …and I love it,” stated Robert Altman, the director of Twentieth-Fox’s M*A*S*H. “The studios waste their money. When they go on location it costs them a fortune. When I go on location I know my costs even before I begin to shoot. It’s the independent guy that makes the money.”
GEORGE LITTO: I don’t know how much that cost Bob. It cost me a million dollars, I figured [laughs]. Dick Zanuck sends me a copy of the interview. He says, “George, you can forget our negotiation.” I thought back to the Kraft cheese and said to myself, “This is where I came in.”
RICHARD ZANUCK: I threw him up into the big time but he never looked at it that way. I don’t say this in an unkind way. I always liked Bob. I liked the fact that he was so independent. I don’t think it was a good trait that he was always pissed off.
He was a lucky guy in that he got the full backing. I fought for that picture—I fought the board of directors. My father, who was chairman of the company, thought it was insane. I fought for it, and he never appreciated it. Never once did I ever hear either personally or in print any appreciation whatsoever or any recognition of it. That’s what really launched his career. I don’t blame him. I know that kind of personality. I wasn’t singled out. He didn’t want to be any part of a system. But it fed him. He seemed to piss on all of that. But, all in all, he was a huge talent. I forgive him for some of his surly behavior.
GEORGE LITTO: Now we’re showing the picture in New York and the old man comes in, Darryl Zanuck. They run the movie, and he loves the picture. He says, “We’re going to put this in the Cannes Film Festival.” Now, comedies never won, and we looked at each other. I said to Ingo, “A comedy at the film festival?” Ingo says, “Hey, he’s the boss.”
DENISE BRETON (publicist): I was head of publicity for Europe for Twentieth Century Fox, and when Bob flew here to France I was told to meet him at the airport. When he arrived I just looked at him. I was so surprised. I said, “I thought you’d be much younger” [laughs]. I couldn’t believe a man his age had made a film like M*A*S*H. He was much happier with me when I told him we had gotten M*A*S*H into Cannes.
GEORGE LITTO: I’m on my belated honeymoon at the Hôtel du Cap in Cap d’Antibes. A friend of mine has got a villa a couple of doors down, we’re having a nice lunch in the garden. And my friend says, “I just got a phone call for you, George, to give you a message—M*A*S*H won the Golden Palm.” That’s the whole story arc.
* * *
JERRY WALSH (friend/lawyer/executor): The film M*A*S*H came out and was a big success. I said, “Well, B.C., what’s it like having a famous son? Look at this—I read all about him in The New York Times and everything.” And B.C. said, “Well, the biggest difference I’ve noticed is I got a check from him for ten thousand dollars that I thought I’d never see again.”
REZA BADIYI (director): I had an appointment in New York and I ran into Bob in the lobby of the hotel. He says, “Come on, let’s go.” We got in a taxi and went to this theater. They’re showing M*A*S*H, and there’s a line going around the block. And he says, “I wish Dick Sarafian could see this!” [Laughs]
* * *
MARTIN SCORSESE (director): I remember seeing M*A*S*H at a Time magazine movie screening, in the old Fox building in New York. It had an Egyptian theme and the screening room was beautiful and the screen was enormous and the nature of the film was something completely foreign to me and new to me. I hadn’t experienced anything like that before. And I liked it. My take on the world was rather different, so I couldn’t quite get into the rhythm of it and the nature of the characters, but I really enjoyed it. I’m not a sports fan or a person who understands sports, but that’s the only football game I ever understood.
GARRY TRUDEAU (cartoonist and writer): I saw M*A*S*H as an undergraduate at a sneak preview in a suburban theater outside New Haven. I must have seen something in the press about it that drew me to go see it. But there is that moment that anyone who saw the film experienced, when all the principal characters converge on the mess tent—Colonel Blake and Radar and Hawkeye—and they’ve just shown up and they’re trying to get information and everybody starts talking at once. And I had this sense that something had gone terribly wrong in the projector booth. You think about it later on and it was real life, but you don’t expect to see real life on the screen. That’s not why we have movies. The idea that everybody could finish each other’s sentences or talk over one another, or that they would get just the amount of information they needed before they would begin talking, that was revolutionary in film.
The way he gave you the freedom to listen to whatever it was you wanted to listen to, and to track which conversations you wanted to, it was very liberating. And of course, perfect for the times, the cacophony of American culture at that time was being brilliantly reproduced on a screen. And he did it with such artistry. Kind of jazz-like—even if you didn’t listen to the individual through lines, the individual melodies, there was a beauty to the jazz of those voices coming in and out.
It made me think about dialogue and what it could be. It had a lot of impact on me. Just the use of black humor and satire, and that has been a continuous thread through my work. The idea that black humor is a kind of last resort, and it’s a way to keep the madness at bay and to survive.
GEORGE W. GEORGE (writer and producer): When I worked with him, in the forties and fifties, was I aware he was someone with talent who could make it there in Hollywood? No. Later I found that out—when I went to a screening of M*A*S*H. That was the biggest revolutionary experience I ever had. I went into the theater expecting nothing and I came out expecting everything. What that did was prove to me a theory that I had had for a long time. The reason most people can’t compete successfully is they are born at the wrong time or the wrong century or the wrong moment for what they’re doing. If you get lucky, you are born into a period where you get the most opportunity to do the work you want to do. In the movie business, Bob Altman was born at the exact right time.