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It doesn’t fit.’ You have these army medic helicopters flying in a war zone with this soft melody playing. When asked what he thought of that decision, Mandel recalled, “I said, ‘You guys are crazy. The filmmaker loved his son’s words and Mandel’s music so much, he ended up putting “Suicide Is Painless” over the opening credits. In a 2008 interview with JazzWax’s Marc Myers, Mandel recalled Altman’s unique instructions for one particular song: “It’s got to be the stupidest song ever written.” While Mandel said he was confident he could “do stupid,” Altman took a stab at the lyrics himself, didn’t like the results and passed along the project to his teenage son, Michael. In 1969, Mandel worked with filmmaker Robert Altman for the first time on That Cold Day in the Park, and soon after Altman tapped him again to write the music for M*A*S*H, his satire about medical personnel during the Korean War. Near the end of the Fifties, Mandel relocated to Los Angeles, where he would spend the next four decades writing music for a remarkable mix of projects, from noir mysteries like Harper to family flicks like Freaky Friday to comedies like Caddyshack and legal dramas like The Verdict. As he embarked on a career of his own, Mandel would write and arrange songs for the likes of Basie, Chet Baker, Woody Herman and Stan Getz, while he also plied his trade as an arranger on Sid Caesar’s variety series, Your Show of Shows. He was trained at the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard, studied arranging with bandleader Van Alexander and played in the swing bands of Count Basie, Jimmy Dorsey and Buddy Rich. Born in New York City, Mandel’s musical education began with the trumpet, although he would also play the trombone.