Air-raid sirens wailing, bullets flying, and bombs exploding … young soldiers gasping for life, rushed into primitive military tents for emergency medical attention … gruesome injuries, amputated limbs … blood-spattered sheets, surgical gowns, and operating gloves … doctors downing martinis minutes before performing delicate surgery … a transvestite soldier reporting for duty each day in a lovely dress … married men and women casually cavorting with many partners …
Not the typical ingredients of your average American sitcom.
In his bestselling 1968 novel, M.A.S.H., Dr. Richard Hornberger (writing under the pen name Richard Hooker) turned his experiences as a surgeon at the 8055th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War into the fictional adventures of a trio of medics … which was followed soon after by a savagely witty 1970 feature film scripted by Ring Lardner Jr. and directed by Robert Altman.
Like the book and movie that preceded it, the 1972 TV series M*A*S*H was dark and funny and serious all at once. Eschewing the standard production techniques of most half-hour comedies, the show was lit, filmed, and edited cinematically Shooting with a single camera on the feature film’s studio and exterior sets—which were still standing—ensured that M*A*S*H would look and feel like nothing else on television. Comedic and dramatic storylines were deftly interwoven, creating the template for a new form of TV eventually dubbed the dramedy. As writer/producer Larry Gelbart notes, “M*A*S*H became famous for its ability to deliver a laugh and a cry in the same show.”
Producer/director Gene Reynolds had first toyed with the form a few years earlier on Room 222, a highly regarded, Emmy Award–winning schoolroom comedy/drama hybrid he developed with James L. Brooks that went largely unappreciated by its network, ABC. “When Welcome Back, Kotter came on the air,” Reynolds recalls, “Michael Eisner said, ‘This is what Room 222 should have been!’ I got fired off of Room 222 after the second year, because of what we were doing.”
A few years later, he and collaborator Gelbart perfected the format with M*A*S*H, and created a modern classic.
The show’s setting was South Korea during the conflict of the early 1950s, but with the United States still polarized by the war in Vietnam, its stories and themes resonated deeply with audiences—thirty million each week, on average, at the height of its popularity.
M*A*S*H focused on a group of doctors and nurses charged with treating wounded GIs being rushed in from the front lines by chopper, jeep, or ambulance to the makeshift facility. The men and women of the fictional 4077th M.A.S.H. unit lived and worked in a state of nearly relentless stress, in a compound of drab tents virtually cut off from the rest of the world by stark mountains on all sides. Needing to do whatever they could to alleviate the tension, they’d hop from one army cot to another, consistently flaunt rules and regulations, pilfer, steal, and lie if it served the greater good, flippantly crack wise while performing some of the most delicate (and bloody) surgical procedures, and generally display a total lack of regard for bureaucracy.
As in the film that preceded the TV series, Hawkeye (Alan Alda) enjoys a homemade martini in the Swamp … possibly mere minutes before heading into the O.R. The show did less of this as seasons went on. © CBS Television Network
The unofficial leader of the quirky ensemble was sharp-witted, intellectual Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce (Alan Alda, in his breakout role), through whose eyes and ears we witnessed the senselessness and futility of war during M*A*S*H’s entire run on television. Hawkeye held court in his living quarters—a tent nicknamed “the Swamp”—where he illicitly distilled homemade gin and jawed with his bunkmate, fellow surgeon and sly co-conspirator Captain John McIntyre, also known as Trapper John (Wayne Rogers). Just two other characters went the distance with Hawkeye for the full eleven seasons: prim head nurse Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Loretta Swit) and Father Francis Mulcahy (William Christopher).
Many other faces came and went over the years, including Trapper John, who was eventually replaced by clean cut Captain B.J. Hunnicut (Mike Farrell); impish company clerk Corporal Walter “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff, the only actor to reprise his role from the movie); the supremely arrogant Major Frank Burns (Larry Linville); the unit’s affable but bumbling commanding officer, Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson, whose character was written off by perishing in a downed plane over the Sea of Japan); his wry successor, Colonel Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan); Corporal Maxwell Klinger (Jamie Farr), who cross-dressed daily in the hopes of being discharged as mentally incompetent; stuffy Bostonian Major Charles Winchester (David Ogden Stiers); and literally scores of nurses. The many changes even worked conceptually, in large part thanks to the show’s military setting, where characters transferring in and out was a very natural occurrence.
From the beginning, the developers of M*A*S*H, the TV series, knew they were crafting a project that was different from anything else that had been on before. And everyone, including the network execs at CBS, were just pleased as punch in the early going …
I was out in California, and I got a phone call from Bill Self. Bill was head of Twentieth Century Fox Television, and a really good guy. One of the class acts in television, I thought. And I got a call one day in my office, asking if I had seen the movie. I said yeah, that I thought it was very good.
He said, “Would you want it as a television show?”
And I was absolutely taken aback. It never occurred to me. You’d had Gomer Pyle, Hogan’s Heroes, things that really were farcical. Not a show that took the problems of people who were facing death.
So, I said, “Yes, I’d be interested. What kind of option are you talking about?”
“No option. It’s gotta be firm.”
In those days I had that kind of power. I couldn’t put it on the air … but I could make a pilot. Pilots I could okay.
That was almost unheard of in those days, to give a pilot commitment. You would give ’em a script commitment. It was a big deal to get a pilot commitment.
ABC wanted it very badly; they wanted it desperately. Had it gone to ABC, and they had had their way, it would’ve been a much different show. Look at their taste from Room 222—they didn’t appreciate shows with that kind of a premise. There’s a bunch of guys with enormous responsibility and very little talent at the networks. So, Bill Self had the good judgment to say CBS was the better home for it than ABC.
And then he asked me to do the pilot.
He said, “Here you go,” and so I read the novel. Of course, I had seen the movie a couple of times … I loved it. I thought that Ring Lardner Jr. did a great job, and that Altman did a splendid job. So, I called Ring in New York, and said, “I’m going to do the pilot of M*A*S*H. Can you write it?”
He said, “Well, I’m on a job … but I suggest Ian Hunter, a writer friend of mine. Wonderful writer.”
I said, “Thanks, but I don’t know …”
And so I put down the phone, and the first guy I thought of was the best comedy writer I knew. It was completely reasonable for me to go to Ring first, because he had done such a fine job on the film. However, I realized the guy that I really wanted to get was a friend of mine named Larry Gelbart who was living in England.
In summer of 1970, I was living in London with my wife and family. And, as was always the case, you’re entertaining visiting firemen. American firemen, anyway. And one of them was Gene Reynolds. Gene and I knew each other in Hollywood—we’d never worked together, we just knew each other socially. He always struck me as what he still strikes me as: a pleasant, decent, nice man. Good man. A cut above, really, people who aren’t … or anything above or below.
I’d been living in England almost nine years by then, and he said, “Are you ever coming back?” I said, “I don’t really know. I know I’m not here forever … but if I get sick from this meal, this might have been forever, you know?”
He said, “Well, if I find something that I think you’ll find appealing, would you entertain the notion?”
I said, “Yes, of course.”
Not too many days later, my wife and I went to see the motion picture M*A*S*H, which was playing in Leicester Square, and liked it very much. Another couple of days later, Gene called and said, “Listen, Bill Self has talked to CBS, and they’ve agreed to pay for a pilot script. Would you do it?”
I said, “I’ll do it … we can’t be as bold as the picture, but if we can be as bold as we can be, if we don’t trivialize the war”—because we were still active in Vietnam at that time—“and if we can capture that anarchic flavor, and just the spirit of it, yes. But if they want another Hogan’s Heroes—which was one Hogan’s Heroes too many for me—or McHale’s Navy, then no.” So they did agree to that.
I was drawn to it for a couple of reasons. I always envied Abe Burrows—Jimmy Burrows’ father. Because he got his really huge break when he doctored Guys & Dolls. Guys & Dolls was ideal for Abe, because Abe was so sort of a prototypical New Yorker … and I always thought, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if something came my way that I knew from the inside out a little bit?”
So, when I was offered the opportunity to work on M*A*S*H, two things came to mind: One, I’d been there. And not a lot of comedy writers could say that. I’d been there because I’d worked with Bob Hope, and we toured Korea during the war … and also, prior to that and after that, I’d visited every kind of military installation with Hope as he did his show. So, I kind of knew the life. It wasn’t Guys & Dolls, but it was close to what I thought would be an ideal place to go to work.
I didn’t think the M*A*S*H film was all that condemning of war … I thought it was somewhat fun and games, and doctors are all getting laid, they’re walking up to nurses and opening up their gowns and so forth. It didn’t look like a big condemnation—it looked like a lot of fun! The feature ridicules war, but it doesn’t really say this is detestable … it didn’t go as far as we eventually went. But, of course, we had many more opportunities.
I wasn’t worried about the comparison. I knew the take that I had on it was going to be different than Altman’s, and I should say Ring Lardner Jr.’s, because he gets so little mention when people talk about the motion picture. A brilliant writer, who had also served in Korea.
I saw the film just one more time. What I did do, though, was read the book. Several times. Just to stop and reflect on the characters. Also, you know, searching for story possibilities. And there were many that we took from the book. If nothing else—and it was everything else—it encouraged us to do a lot of research, to talk to a lot of doctors who had been there, a lot of nurses who had been there, pilots who had been there, patients who had been there, so that we really kept that background very much in the foreground. We didn’t want it to just be another half-hour comedy.
I was working on a television show called The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine. Gene flew over, and I was working in a northern suburb called Elstree—we were shooting the shows there—and Gene and I, during off periods over a week, worked out the first storylines. What became the pilot.
Larry was producing the Marty Feldman show, so we met at night. He was tired, so sometimes we’d work for an hour, an hour and a half, and he’d say, “I think I’m run down.” And I’d say, “See you tomorrow.” Larry, of course, is a very bright guy. He sees the possibilities or the lack of possibilities in situations. And so we finally laid it out.
And then I remember we called Alan Wagner and pitched it to him on the phone.
I got a phone call from Larry, saying, “Would a story like this work: A Korean kid is hurt or wounded, or loses his parents, or something like that happens on the battlefield, and Hawkeye and Trapper decide that they’ve gotta help the kid, and they want to send him to the United States on some kind of scholarship, so they need to raise money. How’re they gonna raise money in Korea? Auction off a nurse—a weekend with a nurse. Would you buy that story?”
I thought it was a funny story. He said, “By the way, I’m going to name her Nurse Dish.”
He said, “Sounds great! Go ahead.”
So, Gene went back to America … and I was so involved with Feldman ’cause I was producing it and writing it. Finally, about two months had passed—and I hadn’t done a thing. And he called me. I was in the control booth, shooting one of the Feldman shows.
Gene said, “How’s it going?”
I was out there building sets, and doing a number of the things you’ve gotta do to produce a show. It’s a lot of junk. So I called Larry in London and said, “I’ve gotta see a script.” And Larry says, “I just put it in the mail!”
So, having said that, I was bound to write it and mail it! And because we had been so thorough, and because it had been marinating for so long—this sounds boastful, but I’d been thinking about it—it only took a day and a half. I had it in my head, and I had the craft, and I had the experience so that I could get it down on paper. And you know, it really helped that there had been a motion picture, as opposed to doing speculative writing … I mean, I saw the sets, I saw the costumes, I smelled the camp because I had been in Korea … kimchee was in the air.
Then I did mail it.
Shooting the pilot, I worked my ass off. I had it pretty well worked out in my mind … and it went well. The network got so excited they couldn’t stand it!
M*A*S*H was an unusual show in that it came from a successful movie. And they got very lucky with the cast. Because of Larry Gelbart and the people who were involved, they were able to attract Alan Alda, who at that point was hot as a pistol. He had just come off of The Owl and the Pussycat on Broadway, and everybody in the world wanted him. And we got him and made a perfect pilot, I thought. Probably the best pilot I’ve ever seen. You didn’t have to change a frame of film.
Alan is only one of two actors I ever knew for whom I never wrote a parenthetical, for whom I never wrote a direction: sadly, brightly, melancholy, whatever. It just jumped into his head off the page the way it jumped off mine onto the page. It was very exciting to work with someone like that, who just got it.I had seen Alan only on Broadway in The Owl and the Pussycat. But it was fabulous working with him, just fabulous.
Alan Alda had said, “Can we meet the night before we’re supposed to start rehearsing this thing?”
So, we met in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel coffee shop, Gelbart and I and Alda. What Alda was saying was, “I don’t want to do McHale’s Navy.I don’t want it to be one of these jerkoff things. The pilot is very good, but are you gonna stick with it? What’s it going to be?”
And I said, “Well, the premise of the show, I think, is the wastefulness of war. We have a lot of humor with it, but I think we’ve got to recognize that boys are dying and that war is a goddamn folly.” At any rate, whatever I said, it was the right thing, and he agreed—that was exactly what he wanted.
We had a great time with Alan the whole time. He was a wonderful actor, and a very decent professional guy who’s very considerate of other people. He’s very unusual.
Most of the original M*A*S*H ensemble (l-r): Larry Linville, Loretta Swit, Wayne Rogers, Alan Alda, Gary Burghoff, and McLean Stevenson. © CBS Television Network
First of all, I think Gene cast M*A*S*H brilliantly. I mean, starting with me! I’m talking about people behind the camera, as well as the ones out in front. Gene, and to be fair, Burt Metcalfe. Burt, like Gene, was a former actor. They just had a green thumb. I mean, they just picked wonderful, wonderful people. I was living in London, so I couldn’t physically be there … and anyway, between the two of them, they knew every page of the Player’s Directory, and they’d worked with a lot of people; they had good instincts. Both as former actors, and, in Gene’s case, as a director, as well. They made great choices. We only changed one person from the pilot cast to the permanent cast: the character of Father Mulcahy.
Gene asked me to come help him cast the pilot. When I was in casting, he’d directed episodes that I worked on and he felt very comfortable with me. So, I started as casting director and associate producer of M*A*S*H, and then after four years Larry left, and after five, Gene left … so I gradually worked to the point of taking over, and wrote and directed, as well. It was a nice growth cycle for me.
I would also cast each episode, although there weren’t that many additional characters because we had a large running cast. But as associate producer, I got into some very specific areas, as well: that is, all the post-production. I was very much involved in editing and dubbing. And then I’d sit in on story meetings and try to contribute some there … although I was with Larry and Gene, who were just brilliant at it. But it was enormously helpful to me for later on, so it was really a training ground for me.
Like most of the TV series profiled in this book, all of which broke the mold in their own way, M*A*S*H was subjected to much scrutiny by its network—in this case CBS, which seemed to be quite literally the eye of many hurricanes throughout the early 1970s. Despite their excitement, the executives weren’t always comfortable with what their creators were up to, and in M*A*S*H’s case, some of the early problems were quite basic to the show’s premise. All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show had begun to pave the way for more adult-oriented comedy on TV—but still, the network worried: Would viewers tune in to a weekly “sitcom” that depicted the horrors of war, gritty medical procedures, and so much casual adultery?
They generally did have problems with anything that deviated. To CBS, if it’s a half an hour duck, then it’s a duck, you know? But they were used to having a lot of non-conformity in those days. Perry was a good daddy. He was helpful. Perry was creative, and he didn’t have a three-piece-suit mindset—but there were other shleppers that worked for him that weren’t that endowed or inclined.
The problem we had in the early days was that, if you recall the movie, there’s blood all over. You can’t even look at it if you just had dinner, but that was the whole point. They had to keep laughing during this horrible part of the war. And they would perform operations, and the whole operating tent would be full of blood, and their uniforms … and that became a big deal. How far do you want to go on television now, to adapt that movie with what you saw in terms of blood? That was the main thing, the trouble with the blood.
Well, there were two things: Everybody was fucking everybody in the original script. And they were all married. They said, “Could some of the people not be married?” So, Hawkeye got a divorce on paper … but very few others.
I gave a letter to the Smithsonian Institute—I should’ve kept a copy of it—from Program Practices at CBS, asking that certain things be toned down. Primarily: Did there have to be so much in the O.R.—in the operating room? And I thought inasmuch as this was a show about doctors that we should be in there from time to time.
Paul King, who was their point man, said, “I was in the theater watching M*A*S*H, and when they got into that O.R., two women got up in front of me and walked out.”
I said, “Fourteen million of them stayed!”
And Bill Self was with me—we were at lunch at CBS, and Bill nodded his head. We had to go into the O.R.! That was the dumbest damn thing in the world. Because you have to justify these guys—they’re heroes. In the “Swamp,” they’re frat guys … I mean, they’re crazy, they’re insane, they’re loud, they’re funny, they’re out of their minds. But when the goddamn bell rings, they go in there and they perform valiantly. You’ve gotta justify their zaniness with their seriousness.
That was their position. They really felt that, oh, Jesus, you can’t go in there. Cause they pictured wall-to-wall blood. We were much more discreet with blood than the feature. We would never show an open cavity—we’d drop the camera down, so you’d see blood on the apron of the surgeons and nurses, and on the hands and so on, but we soft-pedaled the trauma.
“Not so much blood please,” and “not so much O.R.” … I wish I had that letter.
What they did not have a problem with—which was the most welcome thing, of course—they did not have any quarrel with the politics. We could say anything we wanted about the futility of war, the wastefulness of war, alternatives to war … the fact that these guys were working on basically healthy people who just happened to have a bullet intrude upon their lives. And they supported us completely.
My contention was that if this network could have Walter Cronkite on the Six o’Clock News being so anti-Vietnam, we could certainly be anti-Korean War at 8:30. And by that time, if you remember in the 1970s, the dramas of the early days of the 1950s were gone. There was no drama on television. It had given way to melodrama. It had given way to whirling blue lights on police cars, to cowboys. And we—a small group of us—probably encouraged by one another, not unconsciously, we formed some kind of a group who dealt with social issues.
This was all really because of the success of All in the Family. Norman Lear was busting barriers every week! So we could always say, “How come they can do that, and we can’t do this?”
You have these liaison guys from the network … first of all, there’s the Head of Programming, but then you’ll have guys who are his disciples—who go out to the individual shows. The ones who specifically watch that you don’t stray too far from the network party line … in this case, the Fred Silverman line.
That first year was rough. We had a very queasy Program Practices person assigned to us … but it got better in the second year, I believe, or the third and the fourth, when we were assigned a young woman. She was so much more contemporary and understanding, that I could hardly get angry at all. The best example of that is, in the first year, they didn’t want us to use the word “circumcision.” And in the third season, we performed one.
Then there was the “Family Hour” thing. It happened during the fourth year of my stay.
In 1974, members of the U.S. Congress decided they’d heard enough outcry about all the violence and sexual content on primetime television, and urged the Federal Communications Commission to do something about it. The FCC in turn leaned on the TV networks, whose corporate heads (particularly the CBS brass) decided to create a nightly “Family Hour”—an early-evening time slot featuring only programming deemed suitable for children and sensitive viewers. Some popular shows found themselves moved to later hours … while others stayed put, attracting a whole new barrage of meddling by their network. Outraged TV producers eventually filed suit against the FCC.
The “Family Hour” … that hit us hard. Rhoda was a show about an adult, married couple. And we wanted to be … not explicit, exactly, but implicit, certainly, that they were having a real sex life. We were on at 8:00, which fell into what became the “Family Hour.” And the rules changed. They kept coming down on us for stuff that we had done the year before.
And we said, “But we were doing this stuff last year!”
They said, “Well, you can’t do it this year, ’cause now you’re in the ‘Family Hour.’”
So, we said, “We never changed the time—the time is still 8:00. Give us some guidelines.”
And I remember their famous quote: “We’ll only know what doesn’t work for us when we see it.”
The case I always cite was one show where Radar was stopped at the compound late at night by a very, very green GI who was on guard duty. The kid was very nervous, and he had a rifle in his hands … he was screwing up and Radar was nervous that he was going to get shot.
The kid said, “Forgive me, sir, I’m a virgin.”
And they wouldn’t let me say the word “virgin.” Because of the “Family Hour” rule.
I said, “You mean, it would be difficult for a family to explain to a youngster what a virgin was?”
And they didn’t want to get into it. You just didn’t talk about it—if they said no, it was no. They were that intransigent. Then, an episode or two after that, I had a busload of wounded soldiers come in … and Radar was on the bus, making notes for the purposes of triage, talking to each one to find out what the problem was. And in doing so, of course, asking their names. He asked this one kid his name, and said, “Where are you from?”
And the kid said, “The Virgin Islands.”
They make you play these silly games.
I was never consulted. That ultimately was done by Arthur Taylor and the people upstairs. I’m not even sure that Bob Wood had anything to do with it. He didn’t want to get involved—why would we wanna move All in the Family? It was the stupidest. I think that ultimately it hurt the network. But, y’know, my voice was not that strong a voice—it’s ultimately why I left to go to ABC. ’Cause I said, “Fuck this! Who the hell is this guy to come in here? It’s taken a long time, and the work of a lot of people, collectively, to finally put a schedule together that was a work of art. And then he’s coming along, and to gain favor in Washington, he’s totally screwing it up!”
Which is basically what he did. ’Cause we had to fill all those 8:00 time periods, and for the most part, filled ’em with a lot of junk.
It was a pretty tough cross to bear. Because Arthur Taylor was the CBS president, and he was determined that we would have a “Family Hour.” And family hours were different at different times in the country … it was kind of a mess.
I was one of the people that sued the networks. Norman Lear was another plaintiff, and I think MTM … and Danny Arnold. I stuck out like a sore thumb because I was the only individual—I was not the owner of anything.
We were the lawsuit. It all started around All in the Family … and it was just plain silly. Just thinking that we were going to protect all those kids in the east and the west … but screw them in the middle of the country, ’cause there it’s going to run an hour earlier. Y’know, if the “Family Hour” meant anything at all, they were left totally unprotected. So, it was silly on the surface. We had to destroy the “Family Hour.” It was a ruse.
Following quite a bit of extensive legal haggling, a U.S. district court judge ruled that the FCC had acted improperly by privately persuading network representatives to impose the new policy without holding public hearings, and the “Family Hour” viewing policy was finally scuttled. But the damage had already been done to some shows, as well as the schedule.
I did not enjoy dealing with the censors, who always bristled when you used that word about them. That was probably the least pleasant part of the job. I did it more than Gene. There was much that Gene did that I didn’t do—I mean, Gene was really responsible for all of the nuts and bolts of production, scheduling, budget, and so forth. Because he had the experience, and God knows, I was busy enough. But that was the least attractive part of the job.
Gene and I were called to lunch one day by some executive … and this was the period before television executives looked like fetuses in three-piece suits, you know? They were mature—anywhere from idiots to terrific guys. He said, “Someday I’m going to tell you two guys how you screwed up M*A*S*H.”
The lascivious nature of Major Frank Burns and Hot Lips Houlihan’s affair irked the show’s conservative network liaison. © CBS Television Network
We had kind of this grab-ass relationship between Hot Lips and Frank Burns, and the guy thought it went too far. He thought it was in poor taste, and wasn’t all that funny. I mean, it didn’t always work with those two, but a lot of the stuff I thought was funny as hell. But I never took him seriously anyway … he was not a heavyweight. Very few people at the network, in my experience, were the kind of people you listen to and say, “This guy really knows what he’s talking about. I’m going to be very careful.” There were a few, but very few.
We did it “wrong”! We didn’t do it the way he would’ve done it. It could only be that we were too … I was going to use the word “serious.” But, you know, the truth to me about what the network thought about the show is reflected in their insistence that we use a laugh track.
We had another long, drawn-out argument with them: They didn’t want a laugh track. We wanted a laugh track. And we had all kinds of proof to show you that it was better … I must say, the evidence of using a laugh track was sort of convincing in those days. And they still do it, y’know. Everything that they said on Friends wasn’t as funny as the laugh track said it was. But they had a laugh track on, full blast.
M*A*S*H without a laugh track—we were afraid maybe the audience wouldn’t tune in to what they were doing. “They didn’t have a laugh track in the movie,” was one of the big arguments. “But if you go into the theater, everybody’s roaring.”
With M*A*S*H, it was a very noisy fight, from day one. Would we have a laugh track on the show or not? And early on, network brass—research, sales, my bosses—insisted on a laugh track. There was no way out. Gotta have a laugh track. Because they always had had laugh tracks. This was so people would distinguish it from a drama. That was what they kept saying: They’re not going to know it’s a comedy unless they’re permitted to laugh. The laugh track is the permission to laugh.
And there’s something to be said psychologically about that … because you’re watching comedy on TV in an isolated environment. You’re not watching with a crowd, where there’s an audience responding jointly, like a communal experience or theatrical occasion. You’re seeing it alone. It’s not as funny that way. I’ve looked at some of the funniest movies ever made—alone—and they’re not as funny as when seeing them with friends, or seeing ’em in a theater. Laughter is absolutely infectious. So, it was not an irrational argument they were making; it was very rational.
We had evidence. We did an experiment on Hogan’s Heroes, where they played it without a laugh track—and it was a horrible failure. Nobody liked it much, and it was kind of weird. We put a laugh track on it, and it just went through the roof! So, there was some evidence that laugh tracks made a difference.
I just believed—and I still believe—when people look at a comedy show, that by and large they want it to feel like it’s a comedy show. And, with very few exceptions—I know Wonder Years was an exception—but I can’t think of another show, other than Wonder Years, correct me if I’m wrong, where it was written for comedy but there were no laughs on it.
But I didn’t ask for a laugh track … I said, “Just put a couple of chuckles in there.”
What we had was a very discreet track. At the end of the second year, some guy wrote me a letter that said, “Well, you finally folded. I’m looking at M*A*S*H the other day, and you put in a laugh track. My God, you really sold out.”
So, I wrote back to him and said we’d had a laugh track since the first day. But it was discreet. We made the damn joke earn the laugh. Some sitcoms, you see ’em and Jesus, that laugh comes in there whappo, whether it earns it or not. We had a very good guy. He was the best guy with the old laugh machine. We said to him, “We want a discreet track. For God’s sake, don’t lean on it.”
Y’know, I worked for George Burns one year. For a whole year, I directed a show that he was in and produced. And he’d say, “I’ll show you how funny that joke is—lay in a big laugh on that!” That we didn’t do.
I fought it till the day I left. There were some exceptions. There were shows where they let us not use a laugh track … and portions of shows. Whenever they were in the O.R. or serious surgery, there was no laugh track.
The laugh track is overused—and I’m guilty of that as much as anybody. I’ve overused it badly, with some pretty core pilots, trying to goose the audience’s response. And the guy who invented that machine, I don’t think he did a very good job. There are some pretty raucous sounds in there—it’s very hard to make it subtle. Hard to get a chuckle track out of that.
I think it’s the thing that’s done the greatest disservice. It eliminated standards. In fact, I’m concerned about it. I think it’s worth investigating—I think people’s understanding of what’s funny has changed radically because of that machine.
Say you’re a discriminating listener, and you have a sense of humor. But now you’re undergoing a Pavlovian experience: You’re hearing laughter … to something that you don’t consider funny. How long does it take before you’re brainwashed? And say, “It must be funny, and I don’t understand it.” Then suddenly, you want to be part of those who respond. You don’t want to be iconoclastic—you’re back to elementary school. You want to be accepted. So you say, “That’s funny.”
With M*A*S*H, we tried to utilize, in effect, the aesthetics that were implicit in the program … utilize the same kind of psychology that Hawkeye would use: It’s okay to drink gin and laugh in the tent, or the “Swamp,” as they called it, but not in the operating room. And that was the demarcation early on: There was no laughter in the woods, there was no laughter anywhere outside the swamp or the mess hall.
It’s all bullshit. In fact, in the last year of my stay, I said at one point, “Why don’t we use a preview house? Show audiences a show with a laugh track, and a show without a laugh track, and ask them which they enjoyed more.”
And we did. Half the people said they missed it, and half the people said they thought it was better without.
So, I said, “Well, there you go.”
And they said, “No, there you go! We’ll go with the 50 percent. Why fool with it?”
So, that’s the way that went.
And we were the people who were forced to cheapen our own show … Gene and Burt and I. We would be present at those sessions, and we would say, “That’s a five. That’s a four. That’s a three. That’s a chuckle … Can you get that hyena lady outta there?”
It was sort of like being forced to disfigure your own child. It was terrible.
On M*A*S*H you had guys who died, or a man who’d just lost his right hand. You can’t deal with matters like that, you can’t deal with bombs exploding, you can’t deal with Radar saying, “Who’d we kill?”, you can’t deal with that in the opening credits, which were, from the outset, the arrival of the helicopter, and that wonderful minor music, and the worried faces taking you into that helicopter—you can’t deal with that with a laugh track.
Twentieth Century Fox has released the show season by season, in DVD form. And the owner of the DVD has the option of watching the show without the laugh track. If you watch the show without the laugh track, you see the show as it was intended. The laugh track trivializes it … the laugh track makes them seem like a bunch of wisecrackers.
I think I won, thirty years later.
“Sometimes You Can Hear the Bullet,” the seventeenth episode of the series, was the first instance when M*A*S*H skillfully integrated its comedy with starkly dramatic situations. The story follows three threads: (1) Hawkeye discovers that a gung-ho teenager (played by Ron Howard) has lied about his age in order to enlist and fight in Korea, and assures the kid that he won’t betray his secret … (2) a brief reunion between Hawkeye and an old friend whom he hasn’t seen in a while, Tommy Gillis (guest star James Callahan), a journalist who’s penning a book about the war while traveling through the front lines … and (3) obnoxious Major Frank Burns suffers a non-war-related back injury while canoodling with his lover, Hot Lips, but quickly applies to be awarded a Purple Heart, having been technically injured at a frontline unit.
Later in the show, the journalist friend reappears—now mortally wounded, on the operating table—where Hawkeye, for all his skill as a surgeon, is helpless to save his pal’s life. Tommy’s death hits Hawkeye hard, leaving him in tears—revealing a side of his character we hadn’t experienced until this point. The traumatic event leads him to go back on his word to the young soldier, and he has the resentful boy sent home—with Frank’s ill-gotten Purple Heart—so that he can hopefully live a long life.
The turning point for M*A*S*H was somewhere in that first year, with “Sometimes You Can Hear the Bullet.” From then on, we recognized that the show had these possibilities.
It pointed out that we could really go much, much further in the dramatic area. Because after a while, you know, however many compliments you get, there was always the fear of trivializing what was going on. So, this was a chance to make sure that didn’t happen … without giving up the ability to laugh in the same episode where, in fact, someone cries, as Hawkeye does.
We see how Hawkeye is affected by a personal death … it’s a famous scene where he and McLean are standing in a doorway, and Hawkeye’s in tears. And he’s saying that so and so is dead, “And I’m a wreck. I’m falling apart. I never cried for all these other kids who died.” I’m just paraphrasing, but McLean Stevenson says, “Well, you didn’t know them. I learned two things in medical school: Young men die and doctors can’t do anything about it.”
Radar O’Reilly and Hawkeye Pierce share a serious moment on a series that set the bar for blending comedy and drama. © CBS Television Network
A writer named Carl Kleinschmitt came to us with the idea of a civilian friend of Hawkeye’s coming through the camp as a writer—exactly as it is in that script—and then coming back as a casualty. And we liked the idea very much, but we wanted the guy’s death to amount to something … we didn’t want it to just be the story as presented, where a guy goes into a war to find out what war’s about, and gets killed. We wanted to make his death count.
So, we invented the character of the fifteen-year-old Marine, played by Ronny Howard, and tied that into the Tommy Gillis story. What we’re forgetting is, we did something that I’m pretty sure had never been done on television before: That guy was real uninhibited … and in putting the script together, we had him kiss Henry Blake right on the lips! Which was, I think, a first.
What we always wanted to do was have plenty of humor in the show … and if it had two curves, if one curve was very serious, to have something that added levity by bringing in another story.
Well, M*A*S*H let you be sad. You know, we were doing M*A*S*H. We didn’t think of it as television, we didn’t think of it as a sitcom. It was certainly not “Hello, honey, I’m not home.” It just was what it was. A show about these people, in that place, and others like them from day one in western civilization. Perry Lafferty coined the word “dramedy.”
The thing that made it so memorable and theatrical was that you could rail against the war—the insanity of war, the futility of it, and the insanity of romanticizing war. The credo was that these doctors went insane in order not to go insane. Their behavior, and the practical jokes, and the fooling around, all the bizarre things that they did—that was in order to not have to deal with the reality of where they were and what they were doing … trying to patch up kids so that they can go out again and get killed! That, really, in essence, is what it was about.
For me it was, you know, a four-year Letter to the Editor. And a freedom. It was about something. We were a generation away from the time when we’d celebrate a show because it was about “nothing.” This was about something … and something very key to people’s lives. That’s what we were doing every week: We were shooting relevance.
Over the years we interviewed a great many doctors, and men who’d been in the military. We’d tape these long telephone conversations—’cause they’d be all over the country—and we would have that put into manuscript form. Then we’d go over them. They were like gold, they were like textbooks that had all the answers … I don’t care how creative writers are, they can sit and stare at a ceiling all day and they’re never gonna come up with some of the stuff that these guys did. Because it happened. Because it was true.
And it became cathartic for the doctors, because it had been years since they thought or talked about any of this.
I think we realized that, after we picked the bones of the Hooker novel fairly clean, we just wanted to go to some authoritative sources. People who’d been there. And it just seemed pretty obvious that that was the way to go. One of the things I gave UCLA, along with my papers, were some very, very thick volumes of transcriptions of conversations with doctors. They were invaluable, because they just kept us in touch with the truth—and once you know the truth, your inventions are likely based on those. You don’t stray too far, if you’re lucky. Which is not to say we didn’t, from time to time … but it just kept reality in the foreground of the series, and in our work process. It’s largely a matter of cooking to taste, you know, after a while.
You would have three or four threads running though, and you would get countless numbers of these from the research, as well as major arcs. It varied, but it was so rich. As a producer, it’s one of the reasons I felt that I never got involved in anything thereafter that could remotely compare in quality or durability to this show. It was because of that singular fact: None of the other projects I was involved in could deal with life, where there is a source that is so rich … in half-hour comedies, there aren’t that many opportunities to do that.
Reality has a way of trumping fiction every time. I recall that when Gene and I came back from our visit to a M.A.S.H. unit in Korea after the second season, it was very hard to manufacture events. Because we had seen the real thing, we’d been in an O.R. We’d seen real blood—not something from the prop department. Not that we were there in a wartime atmosphere, but blood’s blood. What doctors do, and how they do it, and then how they live their lives because of what they do, was just driven home.
I remember one of the first things we saw in visiting a ward. This hospital was in fact the site of the original 8055th, which was the real-life basis for the fictional 4077th … and it was not mobile now, of course, because there was no war. It was in a village called Uijongbu.
And the first thing we saw was a young person who was a multiple amputee. Even that many years after the action in Korea, kids were still going out and retrieving shells—and unexploded shells, as it turned out—to get the brass, to convert into some kind of product that can be sold. And this kid touched a hot one. So, when you’re standing next to someone who’s not an extra, swathed in bandages and going through this really traumatic experience, you’re not so glib when you get back.
We cherished those notes. They were just inspirational, literally. And sometimes they gave us whole episodes, sometimes just a scene. Sometimes, it gave us—probably, for me—the most memorable line in the whole series.
We had seen an episode of that wonderful CBS series that Ed Murrow did called See It Now. It was brilliant. And Ed Murrow did a one-hour show in which he literally went into the foxholes in Korea … he went up to the front, took a primitive camera, and interviewed guys in foxholes, or in their bunks and mess tents.
So, Gene and Larry had this idea: Why don’t we do our version5 of See It Now?
I got a wonderful newscaster here in town named Clete Roberts, and in essence he was Murrow. There was no script. What we did was, in just a matter of hours, Larry wrote down some provocative questions, and some funny questions, and a kind of comedic response for them as in the mouth of an individual actor, be it Hawkeye or whoever … and he gave all those questions to the actors—-just five or six basic questions: “How do you like the army?” “What were you doing when you got the letter?” Whatever.
The men (and woman) of the 4077th, as the war dragged on: Alan Alda, seated. Second row (l-r): Mike Farrell, Harry Morgan, Loretta Swit, David Ogden Stiers. Third Row (l-r): William Christopher and Jamie Farr. © CBS Television Network
And then I did one other thing: I got Clete Roberts aside, and said, “Look, why don’t you make up some of your own questions and ask them? And I’ll get the actors’ responses on camera. They’ll be hearing the questions for the first time, so it will not be so much acting as reacting. That should make for some fresh pieces of film here and there.”
The actors loved it. First of all, they went home and thought about the questions that were posed in advance. By then they all knew their characters so well, and they were all so wonderfully glib and creative and funny themselves, that they could come up with some really good stuff.
And the power of one speech that we assigned to Father Mulcahy … In a very early script, in an O.R. scene in the winter, somebody made a reference to warming themselves over the wound, over the body—this was a written line, this was not research. But the amazing thing was, down the line, one doctor did say that it was so cold that sometimes the doctors would hold their hands over the open wound to warm themselves. So, we adapted it to Mulcahy.
We always point to it as the quintessential M*A*S*H concept. It became the end of the first act of that show, and was a question that was posed to each actor:
“Has being here changed you? How have you changed?”
We went down all the different people … Larry Linville says, “Oh, I haven’t changed at all!” Everybody, in their own way, has a very meaningful response.
But Bill Christopher, from this research, has the one that just knocks everybody for a loop. He says, “When it’s cold here, like it is today,”—and you see the wind blowing on the tent where he is—“and the doctors are operating, they will make an incision and steam rises from the open wound. And the surgeon will warm his hands over the steam of the open wound. How could anyone look upon that and not be changed?”
To this day, I think it’s just so beautifully poetic. I don’t think the guy tossed it off when he told it to us over the phone—but he certainly bowled us over. And that line was in those binders for two or three or four years, I don’t know how long. It’s something I’d look at or go past constantly, never saying, “Boy, some day, some day” … but when the moment came, you just knew this was the spot for it.
We delivered the final cut to CBS for airing … and included was—for the very first time—a script for it. They had no idea what was on that footage, because there was no script. That was a first, probably last, and never-to-be-repeated experience for network television, to have such faith in a group of people putting on a show for you, that you would air it without ever having seen a script!
The totally experimental nature of it … the total freedom to not be hemmed in by plot … the total participation by everybody. It was remarkable—to this day, I’m probably inordinately proud of it.
The research kept things fresh. That, and the cast changes. The cast changes forced you to shake up the chemistry, it changed all the relationships. And it didn’t mean that, y’know, Mike Farrell was better than Wayne Rogers, or Harry Morgan better than McLean. No. It meant they were different. You made the character different, and the actors were different. The last thing in the world you would wanna do—certainly this was apparent very early on—would be to replace a guy with someone who was similar. The whole point was to try and go in another direction.
So, when Larry Linville left as this straw man, this wimpy ignoramus, we thought, “Let’s get a guy who’d be a real formidable adversary. He won’t be as much of a pushover for them. He’ll be a good doctor, and he’ll be a brilliant guy. Winchester.” And then the whole thing about him being very rich and condescending, and the last place in the world he should be in is this cesspool. That became enormously rewarding creatively, because it helped to keep it fresh.
The first year, our ratings were so poor that it looked like we weren’t coming back at all. We were on at 8:00 at night on Sunday, the one day of the week we probably shouldn’t have been on. And legend has it that Babe Paley—Mrs. William S. Paley—loved the show, and that we were saved by some pillow talk! It’s a great story … and if we say it often enough, it will be the truth.
We didn’t have a good lead-in: It was a show that I’d produced for the first thirteen weeks called Anna and the King with Yul Brynner. And we failed with that.
But you see, M*A*S*H began to grow … even from the very beginning, it grew. But gradually. You could see, “Well, it’s doing better this week, now it’s doing even better this week … ” And it got strong enough so that in the second year, they gave us a very good position. That really did it for us … but also, it was a matter of people seeing the show, sampling the show … and showing what happens if you give it a chance.
If something is good, you just have to stay with it. If you honestly believe in your heart that it’s gonna work, then you’ve got to support it. And that was the case with M*A*S*H. At 8:00 on Sunday night, it didn’t work. And that was a half-assed schedule, I remember that. Its lead-in was Anna and the King. Ultimately we moved it to 8:30 Saturday, in back of All in the Family.
We used to get a lot of letters. There were people who felt we had battered and bruised the sacred institution of the U.S. Army, and more specifically the U.S. government, in a very unpatriotic way. It’s that old story of, if you’re not for the policies of this country, I’m questioning your patriotism.
Richard Hornberger, who wrote the original novel, was a violent foe of the show! We didn’t get that many letters from him, but we got a few early on … and he’d write to the networks. We were made aware of his views. Or he’d be quoted in interviews. He was very much against us ’cause we were so totally left wing, that we were so totally anti-government, anti-military, and he was not that left wing at all.
You know, there’s so much talk these days about people being right and being left, I’m so sick of it. But he clearly thought we were far more liberal than he was. And we were. His book was completely devoid of any influence or comparison to the Vietnam experience that was going on, and our series very much included feelings that spilled over, or spilled over backwards into the 1950s … and I think he resented it. I’m not faulting him. He just felt these were not his doctors.
He was also mad as hell that we killed Henry Blake. He had a M*A*S*H book industry going … with a collaborator, he was doing M*A*S*H Goes to Paris, M*A*S*H Goes to Las Vegas, M*A*S*H goes here, M*A*S*H goes there. So, he was making a tidy living with Henry Blake very much alive and kicking—and we had him dead and buried! Or drowned. So I think he was a little pissed off about that.
M*A*S*H changed the landscape of TV. But only for a brief shining moment … because we have the tangible example of how it didn’t do any good in terms of where this country is now with war. The success and the durability of that show was in no small way contributed to by the fact that the country was involved in Vietnam at the time. We were doing Korea … but the resonance was Vietnam, and the meaning of it to many, many people was Vietnam. The context was Vietnam.
We would like to think that perhaps, in some miniscule way, a show like that and what it was talking about could have some meaning and some significance in terms of the way our country then approaches going to war again.
5“The Interview” [February 24, 1976], the fourth season finale. Written and directed by Larry Gelbart, it was his very last episode of M*A*S*H.