THE MAKING OF M*A*S*H

The pilot went on the air as the first show in the series in September, 1972. (Pilots are often broadcast separately in the spring; ratings and viewer reaction determine if the show will become a series in the fall.) Time magazine labeled it one of the biggest disappointments of the 1972-73 television season. The Nielsen ratings ranked it forty-sixth out of eighty-four shows; it was not what you’d call a smash hit. The rumor around Stage 9 was that as long as the show broke above 50, Silverman would keep it on the air. Originally, thirteen half-hour episodes were created, then nine more. At the end of the year, the CBS network asked for an additional two shows, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief- the extra order made them believe they would be "picked up" the following year.

From its inception, M*A*S*H was meant to be different. It was the only filmed television show with a rehearsal day. (Traditional sitcoms are done on a soundstage; the cast and crew have four days to prepare and then shoot the episode on videotape in one long day, often in front of an audience.) Reynolds wanted the show to "look classy," so he insisted in film rather than tape and the use of outdoor as well as indoor locations. He also wanted helicopters, trucks, ambulances, and other equipment that were difficult to manage on a soundstage; hence, the cast and crew had to use the old Fox Ranch for exteriors. Even before Alan Alda joined the show, making his now-famous remark that the show must not become Abbott & Costello Go to War, Reynolds and Gelbart were working to make it something quite out of the ordinary. They never considered Abbott & Costello in the first place.

As on most series television shows, the shooting schedule for M*A*S*H was a grueling twelve hours to fourteen hours a day; a half-hour show was meant to be completed in three or four days. Working conditions were difficult, with bad weather at the Fox Ranch, inadequate dressing rooms, insufficient toilets, and bad coffee. Fatigue was one of the biggest enemies of cast and crew; Loretta Swit took to wearing support hose for extra strength and, in later years of the show, stopped wearing her heavy combat boots when they wouldn’t show in a take. (She wore sneakers.) Complete shows and parts of episodes had to be filmed out of sequence for scheduling reasons based on the availability of Fox Ranch because Twentieth Century-Fox had given the property to the State of California, which renamed it Malibu Canyon Creek State Park. The site was not, therefore, completely at the producer’s disposal.

All the while, the network censors were watching. "The network was not anti about our being antiwar. They were antiheavy and antiserious," Larry Gelbart says. "Most of our battles with them stemmed from the fact that we wanted to veer so far from what was considered half-hour comedy. They called us up periodically to have it out with us. While the cast and crew were out at the Fox Ranch fighting the elements, Gene and I fought two of the most unnatural forces in the world- the network and the studio- for the rights to deal with bolder and more serious subjects than they were inclined to allow, like the effects of violence, adultery, amputation, derangement, impotence, homosexuality, transvestism, and interracial marriage. Most of the battles with Army brass on the screen came out of our battles with the network."

Reynolds remembers specifically that censors refused to allow Radar to use the word "breasts." Gelbart was told to take the word "virgin" out of dialogue. "I got it back the next week," a triumphant Gelbart reports. "I introduced a soldier who was from the Virgin Islands." Reynolds also tells about the only story rejected by the CBS network. It was written by Stanley Ralph Ross and dealt with Hawkeye having two love affairs with two different nurses, each on a different shift. They discover his duplicity and then set him up by simultaneously announcing that they are pregnant. "The network said that it implied dalliance and we couldn’t do that. What were Frank and Hot Lips doing?" he asks facetiously. "Chewing on each other’s epaulets?"

Gelbart often made good use of the real news for story ideas. The show Cease-Fire aired the week of the Vietnam cease-fire. A show about "friendly fire" (For the Good of the Outfit) brought tremendous network criticism but was proved a bitter reality on the evening news and later was explored in a best-selling book entitled Friendly Fire. The breakthrough show for M*A*S*H aired midway in the first season. It was Sometimes You Hear the Bullet, in which a friend of Hawkeye’s dies on the operating table, and it was criticized for being too serious. Before it ran, the average M*A*S*H episode dealt with minor, humorous matters- Frank panning for gold (Major Fred C. Dobbs) or Hawkeye sharing a pair of his long johns (The Long John Flap). The network not only told Reynolds that he would lose viewers if he continued with programming like Sometimes You Hear the Bullet but sent henchmen to talk to him over lunch, who said, "Someday I’ll tell you guys how you screwed up M*A*S*H.

CBS was a stickler for correct medical information, so a medical adviser was used; Dr. Walter Dishell was consulted before a script was written, he checked dialogue and medical procedures, and he kept tabs on OR scenes. (Dr. Dishell and Alda even wrote one episode together.) Before M*A*S*H aired, the network made it clear that they did not want any gory operating room scenes, lest they offend viewers. "It didn’t turn off fourteen million people who saw the movie," marvels Reynolds, who advised Gelbart that the OR was OK in moderation.

down, although it later received an Oscar as Best Screenplay of the year. (The film was also nominated for Best Movie.) Robert Altman finally directed for the relatively small sum of $25,000; it was a low budget film.

"The television version of M*A*S*H is the most insidious kind of propaganda," said Altman. "I think it’s terrible. It says- no matter what platitudes they use- that the guys with the slanted eyes are the bad guys. They don’t show the blood, the horror. They don’t make you pay for the laugh. It’s only done for commercial reasons. That isn’t the reason I did the movie; it isn’t the reason the artists involved did it. There was a point to be made, and we made it."

The movie was made and released within two years of the book’s publication- a short interval in moviedom- with the hills of southern California serving as the ridges of South Korea. It was released in the fall of 1970 when anti-Vietnam sentiment was high, and it was one of the first 1970’s style blockbusters that attracted repeat viewers. The film earned $36 milllion at the box ofice and was seen by approximately fourteen million people.

M*A*S*H For Television

It was William Self, then president of Twentieth Century-Fox Studios, who wanted to turn the movie into a television series even while those around him were skeptical. Because the movie set was still standing, Self knew that the cost of a series would be relatively inexpensive. Fox already owned the rights; there was little to lose. Both ABC and CBS were interested in the concept but wanted to be convinced. Said Self, "Fred Silverman (then head of programming at CBS) had a lot of reservations about a project based on a movie that dealt almost entirely in nudity, profanity, blood, and sex. I thought it would be a good television show because the characters, the stor, and the basic situation were all strong." CBS commited to a pilot show before the script was ordered, an unusual step in series making, and as a result beat out ABC for the millions that were to come. The pressure was put on Self to make his dream come true.

Self hired Fox contract producer Gene Reynolds to produce M*A*S*H. .Reynolds, whose credits included The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and who subsequently created Lou Grant, had just been fired by ABC as producer of Room 222 because "the recent episodes hadn’t been funny enough," according to Reynolds. He and Self flew to London to meet with Larry Gelbart, a friend and former colleague of Reynolds’, who had said he would like to work with Reynolds on the right project.

Gelbart was a hotshot comedy writer who began his career writing gags for Danny Thomas while still in high school. He had been a joke writer for Bob Hope- he actually visited Korea with the star in 1951- and was one of the writers of famed Caesar’s Hour. He won a Tony Award for co-writing the Broadway musical hit A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and then moved to London. He was producing a comedy television show with the British actor Marty Feldman and had already been seen, and enjoyed, the movie version of M*A*S*H . He was sent the book and the Lardner screenplay and then spent a week or two working nights with Reynolds and Self to create the basic characters and story line for the pilot. They decided immediately to eliminate one of the three leads- thus Duke Forrest bit the dust- and to expand the role of Frank Burns. Six weeks later, Reynolds called Gelbart from California to see how the pilot script was coming along.

"I just mailed it," Gelbart assured Reynolds. Then he sat down to write it. He dictated for two days- he normally writes in longhand- then shipped the script to Hollywood. He was paid $25,000, the going rate in those days for a pilot by a top-notch writer like Gelbart. (Today’s price is $50,000 to $100,000 for a top writer, though Gelbart earns more.) His pilot script, delivered in November, 1971, was slightly different from the one that aired in the fall of 1972. In it, Hawkeye was portrayed as married but having a girlfriend at the MASH unit named Lieutenant Dish, a character from the movie who was also married. But Frank Burns, also a married man, and Hot Lips Houlihan were having an affair, as they had in the movie, so the network nixed Hawkeye’s situation with a note that it was a show about doctors, not adultery. Thus, while Lieutenant Dish appears in the pilot, though as a single woman, she soon disappeared.

With the pilot script inhand, Reynolds hired his friend, Burt Metcalf, as associate producer and casting director. A former actor, Metcalf was a casting director at another studio but was unhappyenough to take the gamble of leaving a steady job. The basic characters had been decided in London and were cast in Los Angeles by Metcalf. During the first year, there were several character and casting changes as Reynolds and Gelbart shook down the show. (For example, the actor who played Father Mulcahy, George Morgan, was replaced after the pilot; several other characters had to eliminated because there were too many people in the OR; and Corporal Klinger was invented as a one-shot character and became a regular.)

The first actor cast was Gary Burghoff, who had played "Radar" O Rilley in the movie. No other actors from the movie were approached; Reynolds thought they were too well known even to consider his invitation seriously. So Metcalfe put the word out around town that he was looking for two leading men to play Hawkeye and Trapper- what’s know in the industry as an "extensive search ." Approximately seventy- five actors read for the parts, which were considered of equal importance at that time, almost interchangeable.

Metcalfe tested six men for the part of Trapper and ultimately cast Wayne Rogers with CBS’s approval. It was then thought that Trapper would be the lead character, as he had been in the film. Rogers was then a well-known actor who had been a star on the soap opera The Edge of Night. McLean Stevenson was suggested for the role of Lt. Colonel Henry Braymore Blake by CBS. Stevenson actually wanted the role of Hawkeye but was eventually persuaded to play Henry. Larry Linville and Loretta Swit were quickly cast in their roles because Metcalfe remembered them from other performances on stage and television.

About four weeks before the pilot was to be shot, Alan Alda’s agent, Mickey Freiberg, approached Reynolds and Metcalfe on behalf of Alda, whom he felt might be interested in a series although he lived in New Hersey and would have to commute. Alda was a well-known New York stage actor who had done several made-for television movies. Alda’s friends suggested that he not do the show since there was much discussion around the business that there was no way to make a TV version of M*A*S*H successful and that, therefore, anyone involved in it would be hurt. Additionally, Alda was reluctant to commit to a show that, in his opinion, could run as long as five years, but his wife asked him to give it a careful consideration. He loved the pilot script and agreed to meet with Gelbart and Reynolds to discuss the show but only after he finished work on a movie-for-televison, The Glass House, which happened to be the day before M*A*S*H

From TV Guide

May 16-22, 1998

The antics of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital edged out TV’s first hit comedy, I Love Lucy, by a slight margin (33% to 29%). M*A*S*H, says the series’ co-creator and writer Larry Gelbart, "may have been the first half hour television show that allowed an audience to feel, not just laugh." Hawkeye and friends, he says, were "people who acted with grace under pressure, who were actually heroes." Rounding out the favorite comedy category were All in the Family (15%), The Andy Griffith Show (14%) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (9%).

The race for favorite boss was tight, with Sheriff Andy Taylor of The Andy Griffith Show and newsroom boss Lou Grant from The Mary Tyler Moore Show tied for second place at 27% each (Mission: Impossible’s Jim Phelps took 9%, and Alice’s Mel Sharples cooked up 6%). But it was Col. Sherman Potter of M*A*S*H, played by Harry Morgan, who commanded the list, marching to the top with 31% of reader’s votes.

The scalpel-sharp sarcasm of M*A*S*H’s original buddy team has cut its way into viewer’s memories. Played by Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers, the wisecracking Hawkeye and Trapper John won 29% if the vote, edging out such classic teams as Andy and Barney from The Andy Griffith Show (28%), Ralph and Ed from The Honeymooners (21%), Mary and Rhoda from The Mary Tyler Moore Show (13%) and Gilligan and Skipper from Gilligan’s Island (9%). The real-life friendship between Alda and Rogers came through on the show. "There was a subtext of deep respect and affection," Rogers says. "And great humor."

In case of emergency, readers would call M*A*S*H’s Hawkeye Pierce. The Korean War doc, played by Alan Alda, was head of his class with 55% of the votes. Dr. Quinn, the medicine woman, placed second with 21%, followed by Medical Center’s Joe Gannon with 14% and tied at 5%, Picket Fences’ Jill Brock and Chicago Hope’s Kathryn Austin. "Hawkeye combined in one person a number of qualities we all admire," Alda says. "His flaws made him seem more human."