🎥🍿 M*A*S*H (1970) Comedy, Drama, War

Director: Robert Altman IMDb RATING 7.4/10 77K

• 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, with payments continuing, from first syndication through the present day, as M*A*S*H (1972) continues in syndication around the world.
• 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 Robert 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.
• The first take of the shot where Hot Lips is revealed in the shower didn't work because Sally Kellerman anticipated the reveal, and was already lying on the floor when the tent flap went up. To distract her, Robert Altman and Gary Burghoff entered the shower tent and dropped their trousers while the shot was rolling outside. While Kellerman was staring at them, the tent flap was raised, resulting in her genuine surprise and shock when she realized what had happened. In the Special Edition double disc DVD, they say that Radar (portrayed by Gary Burghoff) had been standing naked beside the camera, and that's the reason why Sally Kellerman looks so surprised when the flap was raised.
• 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 Elliott Gould confessed the matter to Altman. As a result, he received parts in other Altman pictures, whereas Robert Altman never cast Donald Sutherland again.
• Robert Altman felt that he was able to get away with so much during shooting because the officials at 20th Century Fox were keeping a closer watch on their two massively expensive projects, also war films, although they were both about World War II, Patton (1970) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). All three films turned out to be critical and box office successes.
• Roger Bowen (who portrayed Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake in the movie) died on February 16, 1996. McLean Stevenson, who portrayed the role of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake on M*A*S*H (1972) for the first three seasons, died on February 15, 1996.