Word: director
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LATE sixties, a novel based on the Korean wartime experiences of its pseudonymous doctor-author, Richard Hooker, had been kicking around Hollywood for several years. Fourteen directors had been offered the property; all turned it down. Director number 15 was Robert Altman, a television refugee with one major picture (That Cold Day in the Park) to his credit. Altman decided to make the film, hired blacklisted writer Ring Lardner, Jr. to do the screenplay, and produced a brilliant black comedy that was a tremendous critical and popular success. M*A*S*H* took the Grand Prize at the 1970 Cannes...
...although nominally set in Korea, a Vietnam War movie. Prior to M*A*S*H*, Hollywood's only acknowledgment of the war had been the 1968 release The Green Berets. This obscenely chauvinistic, simpleminded film, which starred movie war veteran John Wayne (who also served as co-director), tried to cast Vietnam in the heroic mold of the old World War II movies. It didn't work, of course, because Vietnam simply was not World War II, the Duke's exhortations notwithstanding. Altman recognized this, and M*A*S*H*, with its loose, irreverent style, reflects this new vision...
Altman certainly is not the first director to make films that mock the fraudulent elements of his culture. One thinks immediately, for example, of Luis Bunuel, whose films consistently expose the sham and hypocrisy of latin bourgeois culture. Bunuel's attitude towards his subjects is different from Altman's, however, and the difference says something about the directors themselves, and about the societies that have produced them...
...This whole dispute has made no sense at all," said J.D. Pollack, director of public relations for the Orson Welles Cinema, which has shown midnight movies for seven years. "I do not see how the board members could have been unaware of the fact that movies are shown at midnight in Cambridge and every other major city in the United States...
Over the summer, William S. Friedman '79, a CHUL member who worked in University Hall this summer, and Mack I. Davis, director of advanced standing, interviewed House Masters and senior tutors to determine the feasibility of such a program...