University of Virginia Library

Ancient Blurbs

All those movies they announced
in the film were old 20th
Century-Fox films. I went down to
the publicity archives and brought
out posters. I had David Arkin read
them through a bull horn in the
recording room — everybody
thought that was ridiculous — but it
worked. Rock-em, sock-em, kisses
you never got. That was real. We
went to the almanac, the marijuana
announcement came out from the
AMA in 1951. And the Korean War
was voted the number one news
story in 1952. We tried to grab the
real thing rather than be clever. In
fact, every time we got clever, I
think we failed. If it depended on
your having a line, or if it depended
on a reading of a line in a certain
way, we would throw it out.

Question: There was over-lapping
of dialogue, could you talk about
that?

Altman: I didn't over dub one
line in that picture. Some people in
New York said to me, this new
sound thing, where you throw away
lines and everybody talks at once,
how did you come up with this. I
told them I had been getting fired
for doing it for the last fifteen
years. I think when you start
dubbing you destroy all that. When
you walk down the street you hear
only fragments and you fill in the
rest. You automatically fill the
thing out. So we allowed the
audience to do that in M*A*S*H
and that's participation. I think the
biggest problem in film is letting
the audience participate. To become
emotionally involved, they
have to furnish parts of their minds
and in most cases film is too
specific. You see and hear and you
become an object to be talked to.
Film-makers have to learn to hide
things, the audience can add.