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.”
Robert Altman Page 18
