Behind the Scenes: M*A*S*H (Altman, 1970) with Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould

Oh, I'm sorry, Colonel. What the hell's the matter with you? I'm tired of you guys trying to run this outfit. This time, there's going to be disciplinary action. Frank, how long has this show gone? It gets longer all the time. Amen. This film didn't get released from Fox, it escaped. But there were two other wars going on at the same time over there. There was Tora Tora Tora, which was the Japanese war. And then there was Patton, which was the European war. And then here we were with this low-budget kind of thing. And I knew that these other two films were big, big films for the studio. And everybody had their eyes on them, and we were really a drive-in commodity. We were taking a chance on the whole project. Untried producer, second-time director. A subject about a war that had long been forgotten. Most likely have unknown, relatively unknown cast. So the whole thing was chancy. This picture was about three and a half million dollars. And I said, we can't draw attention to ourselves. We can't go over, I can't go over budget. I can't do anything that's going to bring a button. So somebody up on these higher echelons is going to look at us. So we kind of hid out on the back lot of Fox. Our cover were these other two Fox pictures that were big war pictures. So that's what everybody looked at, the dailies. I looked forward every day to when the mass dailies would come up. Because there were a lot of surprises. And I've got to hand it to Altman, who embellished the screenplay to a great degree. And added a lot more zing and kick and outrageous behavior to it. A friend of mine, Ring Ladner Jr., who is a screenwriter, read a book in galley form before it was published. That book was MASH. And after reading it, and nobody had seen it before, because he read it to give the book a recommendation, either in the papers or right on the cover. So he called me and says, you've got to read this. Ingo suggested Ring. And then, you know, I read some of Ring's recent work. And I, of course, knew of him and of his talent. And the fact that he had been blacklisted, didn't even enter into it, it never dawned upon me, actually. I was only interested in getting somebody whose frame of mind could see the possibilities of this kind of delicious, mad, insane world that the book did. Ingo and Anne Altman both came to New York for conferences. And Bob told me several things he thought could be improved in the script. And I agreed with him. And so I did rewrite in accordance with his views. And I thought that had completed the job, more or less, because I thought he had said everything he had to say. And I didn't like it very much, the script as it was. But I had been working for about four years on a project called Chicken and the Hawk, which was about World War I flyers. And I knew I was never going to get that done. It was very expensive, and I had no real credentials. I wasn't known very well. And I thought, if I can do the same kind of thing in this MASH project that I wanted to do, that I had been working so long on, in Chicken and the Hawk. And so I agreed to do it. I had a director who was not able to give me any conditions, because he was the one whom I hired, and he was like a pussycat. I'm sure he'll never again be as nice and pliable as he was with me, especially in the casting. I was told that a fellow named Ingo Preminger wanted me to play a role in a film called MASH. They sent me the script. I had no career. I had nothing. I couldn't afford a cup of coffee. They offered me the job and the money. There was no director. There were no other actors. When Bob Altman was hired, first and foremost, he tried to get me fired, because I was not the actor that he wanted to work with, and he was not successful with that. Then he tried to get my billing changed, because he wanted the picture to headline Elliott. Bob Altman offered me the part of Duke, the Tom Skerritt role. And I thought that I would drive myself nuts validating me in my own ear as an American Southerner. And I said I'd never questioned an offer, but that this role of Trapper John McIntyre, that I felt I had the energy and the spirit for it, if Bob could see me in it. And so he cast me as Trapper John, and that's how I got that part. Yeah, I had called Bob Altman. I knew him through the 60s. He had been my mentor and encouraged me to write. So I was in the midst of a screenplay and having some difficulty with it. I gave him a call. I said, Bob, I'm in the middle of the screenplay. He says, Skerritt, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me get back to you, and he hung up. This is in the afternoon, I think it was like a Thursday afternoon. The next morning they were negotiating for me to be in MASH. Robert Altman said I was down on the floor chewing on his pant leg when I got the part. Actually, I just wore lipstick for the first time in my life. He was always hiding my lips, and I wore red lips. And I went in to a meeting, and it was a room full of people. And before I left, he said, I'll give you the best part in the movie. And she actually came in for the other part. She came in, I remember Ed Fox, I remember the first day I saw her. I'd never met her. And she came in to see about Lieutenant Dish. And after I talked to her, I said, listen, you should be playing hot lips. Well, getting into the movies was totally unexpected. And Bob Altman had come up to San Francisco, as we later found out, to raid the city of all of its acting talent. We knew that he was there. He, I believe, had come to American Conservatory Theater, where I was working. And that was my first meeting with him. I didn't have to read at all. I did have to go to Los Angeles and meet with Ingo. And one of the reasons we went for him, he played a dentist in the movie, as you know. He had very bad teeth. Well, I do have an underbite. So for Ingo to say I didn't have perfect teeth, they were perfect at one time, after nine years of orthodontia. But something in my genes made the lower jaw continue to grow forward. So there is this sort of malocclusion. And I didn't know that was probably the criteria that I got the part for. I had thought it was more that without being conceited about my abilities, I do know that I exude a certain warmth. And since Painless was largely a sexual joke, I'm a fairy, that it was necessary to try and put some meat on the bones. And I think that's why I was hired and my protruding jaw. There wasn't much of a role in the original script. And Bob Altman said to me, well, there's a priest. And if you were going to play a priest in a mash unit, and we talked about what that was, how would you imagine a character like that, that you would play a character like that? And I had the inspiration of remembering sort of a childhood friend of mine who had gone into the seminary and thought he was going to become a priest. Eventually he didn't. But he was a very sweet, shy, bumbling kind of guy. And I described that person to Bob. And he said, that sounds good. And I said, well, you know, I'm about to open in a Broadway show. And he said, well, I hope it flops. And it did. I think it's an interesting story, and it's amazing how things happen in this industry. God doesn't give you what you want when you want it. He gives you what you need when you need it. I was playing Charlie Brown, and you're a good man, Charlie Brown, in New York, and this little theater off Broadway. And lo and behold, one of the people who came to see me one night was Otto Preminger, the famous movie director. A year later, I was doing Charlie Brown in Los Angeles, and I get a call from my agent at that time who said, Ingo Preminger would like to see you out at 20th Century Fox. They're doing a new film called MASH. I thought it was about potatoes. I had no idea what it was about. I walked in the office. He took one look at me, smiled, and said, go home. You got the part. I didn't audition. I didn't read. I didn't do anything. And it was several years later that it dawned on me, dumb as I was then at 25 years old, that it was Otto Preminger who recommended me to his brother Ingo. I think I'm maybe the only person, or one of the very few people who had worked with Bob before MASH who was in this picture. And I started with him in television on combat. So I'd been in these Army films with him before. And he was doing this sort of anti-war stuff. And of course the network hated it, and they fired him from that show. And here he's doing it all over again. So because I had this history with him, he called me up and said he was going to do this film and wanted me to be in it. I was in the part where the Japanese section, which was a separate section, really. We shot it at the end of the picture. They'd finished in the camp. It was almost a little bit anticlimactic. For a long time, I don't think it's anybody's favorite part of the movie, least of all Bob's. For a long time, he'd say, Oh, you're in the movie. No, you're not in the movie. You're out of the movie. No, you're in the movie. No, you're out of the movie. And then finally, it wound up in the picture, as the myth goes. Because when the boys get back to Korea, they get off a helicopter and they step over these bodies, these casualties, in their golfing togs. And he loved that shot. And so for the sake of that, he incorporated that Japanese section. But for a long time, it wasn't going to be in the picture. You've got to hand it to Bob Altman, who really dug up those personalities and cast the picture, you know, meticulously and perfectly. The shooting began, and I was again very lucky because both Dan Sutherland and Elliot Gould are two very intelligent guys, not only good actors. A lot of good actors are not that intelligent. And they were able to give the picture a certain tone, very often by improvisation. In the nature of Robert Altman's work, he gives you just about as much room as you can fill. So he gave me so much room to express myself in this character that it was a real breakthrough for me in terms of uninhibited expression. We were trying to be as true as we could be as actors. And together, I felt that Elliot and I captured something about a relationship that was about the relationship of two men. And it's hard for me to have relationships with men. I thought that we were able to capture something that was evocative of the spirit of fellows in service. Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould, about somewhere through the film, I don't know what, they became very tight. We didn't ever say the same words twice. When you had a medium shot, we'd say one thing. When you had a close-up, we'd say something else. It was difficult for me because I came from a very disciplined, theatrical place, and I was not as loose as Bob and his team were. Everything was fine for Bob. That was the most important thing. But it wasn't so fine for Donald and me. And we were somewhat taken back by it, and we complained about Robert Altman. And we even went to see our agent to say, this guy is impossible, and we don't know how we're going. We were just so, so arrogant and such snobs, me and Donald. It was just for the good of the film. We thought that Bob should probably be committed to an institution for the mentally unbalanced, because he was obviously nuts what he was doing. It was wonderful. But we were serious. We thought he was crazy. Had I known that, had something been said to me about it, I'm quite sure I would have quit. I wouldn't have gone ahead with the, I mean, in the middle of it. I mean, I was, it really amazed me. You know, it hurts your feelings. 80% of it, I would say, offhand was improvised. I remember reading the script twice before we started shooting, and I don't think I ever picked it up after that. I could maybe glance at it and say, does this have any, does what we're doing, does that have anything to do with what was written? Invariably no. There were areas that sort of we were in a scene that was written, but whether we were saying the same thing, invariably we were not. There's a sequence in MASH where Donald Sutherland and Tom Skerritt are leaving the MASH unit near the end of the film, and they're getting in the jeep, and everybody gathers around to say goodbye. And while we were setting it up, I had a little prayer book, and I looked in it, and I found a blessing for a chariot or other vehicle, and all you had to do was replace the name of the vehicle. And so I went up to Bob and I said, this is pretty hard to resist, and I showed him a blessing for a jeep. And so I come in, and I'm blessing the jeep. Attain to everlasting joy through Christ our Lord. Amen. And it's a very sweet aspect of that character, and that's just one example of improvisation in the sense that it wasn't in the script, and we improvised and put it into the scene. I remember Bob coming over to Roger Bowen, who played Colonel Blake, and myself, and he said, okay, here's the way I'd like this to work. He says, I want you to give, he's talking to Roger now, he said, I want you to give a list of things that you want Radar to do. And Gary, I want you, at the same time he's saying that, just a hair before he says it, I want you to be saying the same thing that you're going to be doing. Radar! Yes, sir! I guess I'd better call Major Burns and tell him we're going to have to hold a couple of surgeons over from the day shift out of the night shift. I'm putting a call in to General Hammond and Saul, I hope he sends us those two new surgeons, we're sure going to need them. Attention, may I have the camp's attention, this week's movie will be MASH. The loudspeaker came in, that was David Arkin, who was played Volmer, but the loudspeaker came in when we were editing, and we just didn't have enough transitions from scene to scene. Bob wrote some additional speeches or announcements, which were read by Sergeant Volmer, and so they became kind of a laugh, and they also became a transitional device. Everything that would happen, we would send Arkin down to the sound department, and we'd record this stuff. The head of post-production at Fox sent a memo to all the editors in the editing department, asking them to please take down their pin-up pictures of naked women, etc., and so that our rooms could remain clean and neat. And Engel Preminger saw that memo on my desk, and said, where did this come from? I told him, this is just perfect material for Sergeant Volmer. The following memo has just come through. Please remove all pictures, postcards, nude calendars, etc., from the walls so that our rooms may look clean and orderly. That is all. I thought that we needed more speakers, more inserts of speakers, so Bob said, fine, go shoot them. One wonderful thing that I don't think anyone knows about is that our astronauts were on the moon. They had just hit the moon, I think the day before. I've got a couple of those in the shots of the speakers with our astronauts on the moon in the background. Bob came to a tent that we were playing poker in during a break, and he said, listen, this is Sally Kellerman's first nude scene. It's that scene where the shower curtain comes down. He said, I want everybody to stay here because she's kind of uptight about it and a little nervous about it, so I've got a skeleton crew to shoot it. So I said, well, if she's that uptight about it, why don't we all stand there off camera naked ourselves so that she knows she's not alone? Now you think, I meant it as a joke. Yes, it was a little levity in my shower scene. It was a close set. I'd asked Bob if I could. I really didn't want to have to be naked, but it was like the whole joke of the film, the whole premise of a certain aspect of the film. And so I said, well, Bob, could I at least look really pretty? And he said, yeah, you could stand there and we'll have the entire crew light you for an hour, and you can stand there stark naked or as fast as you hit the deck, that's what we'll see. So I asked him if I could wash my hair so I wouldn't just be staring at the curtain, and I hit that deck fast, but when I looked up, there was Gary Burghoff stark naked. So when the curtain went down, I was standing stark naked next to the camera. And she, of course, is looking at the camera, the point of view of the people who were supposed to be, you know, applauding her, who set this whole thing up in terms of the cast. And what does she see? She sees a naked Gary Burghoff standing there with my little fuzzy hat on. Hawke, I really must, I should check with the military vicar's office. You see, I cannot give absolution to a man who is about to commit suicide. It's a mortal sin. Look, Thago, he is not committing suicide. He is only intending to commit suicide. So you're not dealing with an act, you're dealing with an intention. And if it works, if what we're doing works, then he will not commit suicide, so therefore you are preventing a mortal sin, okay? Well, I, uh, I should check. Well, you check on it. And I went on the set one day, I'll never forget this one, and I was just out hanging out, we were going to have lunch or something. We used to show up just whether you were working or not, you know, because it was fun to be around. And he's walking around laughing, he's got a painting, a photograph of a painting of The Last Supper, you know, and I thought, oh, bad boy Bob's starting up again here. Painless will be in the center, and put Don next to him and Elliot next to him so he can lean over to the start with the finger thing. And this should be Merhart, I guess. Yeah, Merhart, Radar, Boone, and Hojohn. All right, where are we at now? Y'all, uh, come here to pay your final farewells to Painless here, good old Walt. But you know, it occurs to me that maybe it's not so final after all. I think that maybe Walt's going on ahead of us in the unknown to do a little recon work for us all. My memory of it is, is that we had a talk about the scene. It wasn't scheduled for that day. And I don't remember whose idea it was, but I do remember him saying to somebody, go to research and get a picture of that da Vinci painting. And we all went off to lunch. And when we came back from lunch, the set was there. I mean, the table was there. And we all took a look at it. And we sort of just very, very loosely rehearsed how we would get into it. And at the last minute, I guess, I, as the Christ figure, had to have my hands out and turn my head. It was presented so theatrically. It was not presented as realism. It was presented as truth. You know, it wasn't a realistic scene. It's almost like a stage scene when you see it. There's sort of ground fog and you're looking at the whole tent and it's the last supper. It was a glorious day because there wasn't anything that was written. We just, by this time, were all so in sync with each other that it was very, very easy to duplicate the picture. We understood exactly what was happening, enjoyed the satire of it, and that's all there was to that scene, really, until I get into the coffin. Ring Lardner, arguably, more than anyone, deserved that Academy Award. And when I say arguably, because some people say, well, but you ad-libbed so much of the dialogue. Bob liked that. He liked the feeling of that feeling of actuality. But we could not... See, there's no freedom. Creative freedom without discipline. We could not have done that ad-libbing if the structure of the scenes weren't so artfully written. I only went on the set once to all of the pictures being made. Then Bob went through a big act of shouting, hey, somebody find the script, here comes the writer. You know, I treated this as just a joke, but the fact is he was changing a great deal, going much beyond the suggestions he had made. But like the suggestions he had made that I incorporated into the script, almost everything that he added to it was in the same spirit as the script. Well, it was an ensemble film. I thought it should be... We should be in the middle of all this stuff. It shouldn't be a clean, precise, dialogued film. And I was looking for as much improvisation as I could get. It isn't the improvisation that makes the picture. It's the storyline and the interpretation, which the director is part of. Robert Altman did a very, very fine job, and I appreciate it even today. He certainly deserves a lot of credit, but I cannot take away the credit from the actors and from the script. Had it not been for the script, I certainly wouldn't have done it, because it had... Ring had in his script all these very heavy operating scenes. I think I told him, listen, Bob, these guys have their... are up to their elbows in blood. That was something that I immediately wanted. And when we got into the operating room, I put rubber gloves, balloons, strange pieces of fruit, all in the people's guts. We had our blood and guts. We had little objects for the surgeons to discover, like a fruit pit, and throw it in the pan. I just gave them things to look for, and it kept the thing rolling. There was a talk at the end of the editing that all those operating scenes will have to come out by the studio, and I you know, I prepared for battle then, because I felt what gave that film credence. In the final editing, it balanced out perfectly, and Bob was absolutely right. I thought that it might turn off audiences, so that it would become so grim that it would be hard to laugh through that, or to recover from it. But he found just the right balance. Daryl Zanuck, who was still president of the company, although he was living in France, and had left his son in charge of the immediate work, Daryl Zanuck also saw the picture for the first time. And immediately after the showing, he called everybody connected with it to the back of the projection room, and he said, we're going to have a meeting at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning. We've got to reshoot a great deal of this. You cannot combine those operating room scenes, and all the blood, and so on, with that kind of broad humor. Daryl had been in Europe all the time we were making this, and he came back with these two young French girls, or continentals, and we were in the room, and this editor guy turned around and said, well, all those operating scenes has to come out. The public can't handle that. And Daryl says, right. And these girls said, are you kidding? That's what makes this thing good. And right there it was settled. Yes, you mean he's going to live? How's the blood count? Fine. Do you have another spongebob? He's going to be around tomorrow morning. He wakes up, and he hasn't got anything between his legs anymore. He may have long fingers. The cruder the joke, the better chance it had about making the film. Because the more obscene the joke, the better, because nothing was as obscene as these guys being blown apart and sent into this place to be patched up and sent back again. I mean, it was, to me, that was the obscenity. And those operating scenes gave validity to the film and to the situation. And hopefully the audience would understand that this levity that these guys went through was for a reason. It was so they could survive. What this picture is about, and it keeps getting more clear to me all the time, is the insanity. It was the first picture that ever used the word insanity. We were playing the San Francisco Giants. I opted out of that after the first day because I got crushed. But John Shuck has to look at this guy and say, I'm going to knock your block off. And then the guy runs over him, and John said, just for the rushes, just for a laugh, let me say I'm going to knock your block off. And I said it to Ben Davidson, six, seven foot of muscle, who did not know I was going to say it. And when you see me fly out of the screen, I still have a bit of a headache. I've never been hit so hard in my life. The Hays office, which doesn't exist, I think, anymore, said they won't give the picture an R. In those days, you could appeal that rating by going to the various presidents who would meet at a body and see the picture, and you could make it a personal appeal there because an X was really a condemnation of the picture. I said I couldn't do less than an R. And I refused to accept, A, the cutting out of that four-letter word, and B, accepting an R. I said to Richard Dunham, we have to stand on our rights, and they will give in, and they gave in. When we showed the picture to Ring Lardner Jr., and I really didn't know how great a guy he was, because I didn't know very much about the Hollywood Ten, and that he, I think, was one of the last living writers, and somebody who didn't testify. And the picture was being screened by Bob at 20th Century Fox for Ring Lardner Jr. And Ring Lardner Jr. came outside. I'd seen the picture, and I, you know, wasn't crazy about it. It took me a long time to recognize what Bob had accomplished and what he had done for all of us. But Ring Lardner came over to me, and I didn't know why he was coming over to me, and he said, how could you do this to me? That's not a word that I wrote on screen. And then, of course, Ring Lardner Jr. went on to win the Academy Award for the best screenplay. See, when I went up to receive the Academy Award, there was more applause than there usually is for a writer's award, and I felt properly that this was a recognition of the end of the blacklist. I was getting this as one of the Hollywood Ten, and you know, he'd gone to prison for contempt of Congress, and people in the Academy were showing how much things had changed in Hollywood by the fact that they were applauding this. Anyway, I regretted afterwards that I hadn't spoken more about Altman, because obviously his was a great contribution. I think the younger audience that sees this picture is going to think it's Vietnam. I mean, most people don't even remember the Korean War. We have to have someplace in time to set it, but it has no... I'm talking about a non-place. The whole point of the film, as far as I was concerned, and most of the people that, my collaborators, was that this was quite an... it was to be obscene. It was really quite an anti-war statement. And interestingly, you had soldiers who appreciated it, and you had protesters who appreciated it. You know, everybody got into this film, for different reasons, I suppose. I mean, the timing couldn't have been more exquisite. In fact, the Pentagon, as I understand it, banned it when it first came out. The service guys were going AWOL to go see it. And Allman made a statement to the press, we intended MASH to be an anti-war film. We can't understand why the Pentagon banned it. We always thought the Pentagon was anti-war. And boy, it was lifted real fast, the ban. It really helped to give my career a thrust to help me to get to a place where I could finally see for myself. That's why I have to wear my sunglasses, because it's so bright, it's blinding out there. My memory of it, of making it, of making that movie, is very warm and pleasant. The response it had, particularly with soldiers, with GIs who were on R&R from Vietnam, was terrific. They felt that they had a voice, you know. The film is a feather in everybody's cap. It shows that Bob Altman is a genius. I still think that it's the best thing that he's ever done. It was fresh, audacious, it was dramatic as well as funny, it had something to say, and it was bold, and it didn't cost very much, so, and it was a gusher. Comparatively, it made more money than big blockbusters today. The big blockbusters today make it because they're big in cost and big in grosses, but comparatively, Nash, I think, was held his own against any of these people. I think if those operating scenes had been taken out of that film, we certainly wouldn't be sitting here talking about it. I mean, it would have been what I think they thought it was going to be, just a frivolous comedy, which the book was. I don't know if you ever read that book, but I mean it's that it came from. And that was all from Ring Lardner. Those were written in his script, and had they not been in his script, I wouldn't have done it anyway. And the way they turned out, I felt that they gave the that was the pain I mean, you have to pay for your laps, you know.