Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H was released in the United States on 25 January 1970, and became remarkable for a number of reasons:
- making a shitload of cash (over $80m against a budget of $3m)
- bagging five Oscar nominations (including one for best adapted screenplay for Ring Lardner Jr, even though there was so much improvisation that he apparently told Altman, “You’ve ruined my film,” and said not a single word of his was left in it.
- spawning a sitcom also set in a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War which featured such dialogue as:
Frank Burns (examining his boot, which Hawkeye has tampered with): Why is someone’s appendix in this boot?
Hawkeye: Because the other one is full of tonsils.
(The TV show is remarkable for continuing to find humour — albeit not as dark as the movie’s — in warfare, and for running for 11 years, eight more than the war it satirised. Both movie and show, though, happened while America was still embroiled in Vietnam, which was their real target. That lasted nine more years than the show.)
M*A*S*H the movie is also memorable for (apart from being, according to its director, the first major studio picture in which someone says ‘fuck’) the fact that Robert Altman was paid $70,000 to direct it, but his 14-year-old son worked on the movie for an estimated five minutes and made around $1m.
Altman had asked Johnny Mandel to compose some music for the film — and specifically a song for a scene in which one character apparently took his own life. It had, he insisted, to be called Suicide is Painless, and be the “stupidest song ever written”. He was going to help by writing the lyrics himself. According to Mandel, though, he came back a couple of days later and said, “I’m sorry but there’s just too much stuff in this 45-year-old brain. I can’t write anything nearly as stupid as what we need.” Thankfully, he added, “All is not lost. I’ve got a 15-year-old kid who’s a total idiot.”
Mike Altman duly took pencil and paper and started scrawling brainfarts. The finished product includes such verses as
The sword of time will pierce our skins
It doesn’t hurt when it begins
But as it works its way on in
The pain grows stronger, watch it grin
and
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?”
…and you may, if you wish, enjoy it here:
Not only was it released as a single, providing one American teenager with enough royalties not to have to worry about his college fund (and more besides), it’s been covered numerous times since.
Once, in 1992, by the Manic Street Preachers as a… um, charity single.
No, really. It was a double-A side in aid of disability charity Scope with another band covering Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do, begging the question: which of these songs was it that “a 15-year-old kid who’s a total idiot” wrote?
