MAKING M*A*S*H
The commercial and critical success of Robert Altman’s 1970 movie M*A*S*H made a TV series based on the film something of a pretested proposition. Fox assigned the show’s production to Gene Reynolds, a former child actor and television director who had recently transitioned into producing with his pathbreaking ABC show about an integrated Los Angeles high school. Room 222.
Thoughtful and meticulous, Reynolds made two critical decisions that allowed M*A*S*H to blend comedy and drama to greater effect than any television show before it (or, for that matter, almost any since). The first was in selecting a writer. Reynolds’s first choice was Ring Lardner Jr., a member of the formerly blacklisted Hollywood Ten, who wrote the movie’s screenplay. When Lardner passed on the project, Reynolds remembered an old friend, Larry Gelbart. At that point, Gelbart was not an obvious choice: He had not worked in American television or even lived in the U.S. for nearly a decade, but in the fraternity of television comedy writers, he was revered; Norman Lear, for one, considered him the wittiest of all.
“We always fought for the right to make the show not less funny, but more serious, even while perhaps becoming funnier.”
Born in Chicago in 1928, Gelbart was a true prodigy: He was writing regularly for network radio programs while still in high school and was hired as a gag writer for Bob Hope before he turned 21. From Hope, Gelbart jumped to the legendary television writing staff for Sid Caesar, and after a relatively short stint there, he devoted much of the late 1950s to writing his play , with won the Tony in 1962 for Best Musical, Gelbart, burned out by the television business, moved to London to help supervise a 1963 production of the show there. He stayed the next nine years, keeping busy by writing and producing a show for the frantic British comedian Marty Feldman. But when Reynolds approached him with . Gelbart was ready for something meatier. Familiar with the networks’ succession of antiseptic war comedies during the 1960s (), he had only one concern: While America was still fighting in Vietnam, he didn’t want to work on a show that would “trivialize that effort by simply doing another gang comedy set in an army background.” Reynolds assured him he felt the same way.
