FILM 2169: M.A.S.H. (1970)

TRIVIA: The fourteen-year-old son of director Robert Altman, Mike, wrote the lyrics to the theme song "Suicide is Painless". Because of its inclusion in the subsequent television series, he continued to get residuals throughout its run and syndication. His father was paid $75,000 for directing, but his son eventually made about $2 million in song royalties.

Tom Skerritt recalled that the dialogue was about 80% improvised. In order to create a different kind of atmosphere, Robert Altman cast some of the parts from improvisational clubs who had no previous movie experience.

Robert Altman said that during filming, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland together went to the studio and complained that Altman was filming too much of the secondary characters. They requested that he be removed from the film, but the studio refused. After the film was completed and received its accolades, only Gould confessed the matter to Altman. As a result, he received parts in other Altman pictures, whereas Robert never used Sutherland again.

The story goes that when Robert Altman was editing the movie with editor Danford B. Greene, they had nude pinups on the walls of the editing room. The head of post-production came by and tried to stop Altman from using the editing machine, as he wasn't a designated editor, and Altman threw him out of the editing room. The next day, a memo came down from the 20th Century Fox front office stating a new policy that there were to be no pinups on the walls of editing rooms. Altman took the memo to the sound recording studio and added it as one of the loudspeaker announcements during the film.

This film was the 38th movie to be released on home video. In 1977, 20th Century Fox licensed fifty of its titles to a fledgling video duplication company called Magnetic Video Corporation. 20th Century Fox purchased the company in 1978, laying the groundwork for its successful video operation.

Premiere voted this movie as one of "The 50 Greatest Comedies Of All Time" in 2006.

In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #54 Greatest Movie of All Time.

Fourteen other film directors passed on directing this movie before it was offered to Robert Altman. Among those considered were Stanley Kubrick and Mike Nichols.

Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider.

I’m making my way through the book "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider. See my blog post about my copy of the book here…

You can buy an updated version (which I will get after I’ve made my way through this edition) here…

I really hope you can come on this journey with me – if you do I’d love to know which films you’ve enjoyed the most!

Watch this here…